The Fall Guy

by Ritchie Perry

  Joao laughed unpleasantly.

  ‘There’s no sense in feeding dead men,’ he told me. ‘Just keep quiet and save your strength. You’ll need it when the boss gets here.’

  Still chuckling, he went back along the corridor, cheered on his way by the choice obscenities I shouted after him. Although Joao was the kind of person everyone should hurl abuse at there was no particular malice behind the words. I hadn’t expected him to provide me with a seven-course meal, or even with bread and water. I’d just wanted him to pay his visit at my convenience, not while I was busy breaking through the ceiling.

  Unless the house had three stories, which seemed unlikely, my room should be directly underneath the loft. Or attic, as the case might be. Semantics apart, this was an important distinction. Where I came from the loft was the bit left over at the top of a house, the gap between the roof and the ceilings of the top floor rooms. An attic was a room utilising this space and, in common with most rooms it had a floor. Shifting floorboards in the time available was beyond me so I had to hope for a loft with nothing but lath boards and plaster between the beams. If not I’d have to think again.

  Standing on the low bed alone was no go, this wasn’t high enough for my purposes. The mattress made a far from stable base and the table was rickety in its own right but after three abortive attempts I found I could more or less balance on it in a kneeling position. Satisfied, I clambered down and turned my attention to the chair. This was a marginally sturdier piece of furniture than the table, far better suited to being knelt on, but even with plaster and lath board I wasn’t going to shout Shazaan and stick my fist through. Instead I broke off one of the legs, minimizing noise as much as possible. The nails sticking out at the end made it ideal for working on the ceiling and, as a second string, I fancied the prospect of batting Joao around with it.

  Although the ceiling didn’t prove to be much of a barrier my precarious perch didn’t help matters a great deal. Nor did my dented skull, battered face, and cigarette-burned, semi-skinned torso, not to mention the bullet graze on my thigh and the fact I hadn’t eaten for an eternity. Luckily I had all the heroic qualities and a little discomfort wasn’t going to stop me, especially when I thought of what was likely to happen if I was still a prisoner after Gordinho decided my fate. Ignoring the shooting pains in my kidneys I chipped steadily at the plaster, careful not to allow any of the bits and pieces to clatter to the floor. Once the first small hole had been made it was easy work and in no time at all I had opened a gap between the beams large enough to pull myself through.

  So far, so good. I sat on one of the beams, my legs dangling through the hole, and worked out where I would have built the trap if I’d been the architect. My eyes were no use to me because it was almost pitch dark in the loft, with only a chink of light here and there to indicate a loose tile, and the fetid smell arising from generations of accumulated rodent’s crap didn’t encourage me to linger long. Moving cautiously from beam to beam I made for where the trap ought to be, keeping the rats and mice at bay with muttered imprecations whenever a stray splinter dug into my knees or hands. As a navigator I was absolutely brilliant, finding the trap exactly where I’d expected to — above the small landing at the head of the stairs.

  Of course the bloody thing had to be locked, secured by a bolt or padlock on the other side. If I’d had the time I would have pushed out a few tiles and exited via the roof but this wasn’t on. Someone had just started up the stairs, Joao unless his two friends had returned without me hearing them, and although he could be going anywhere on the upper floor I couldn’t take the risk of him paying a visit to my ex-cell. The trap looked flimsy enough and I was sufficiently battered already for a little more suffering not to make much difference so I closed my eyes and jumped.

  It was rather like being hung without a rope but I couldn’t have timed my leap better with a NASA type countdown. An unsuspecting Joao was two steps from the top of the stairs when I materialized through the ceiling in a storm of splinters and the shock must have been so great it was a wonder he didn’t die on the spot of a heart failure. To even things up I landed off-balance, jarring my already damaged kidneys, something which spoiled my aim with the chair leg, only catching Joao a glancing blow before we both fell backwards.

  Joao had the whole flight of stairs to tumble down, finding it just as uncomfortable a process as I had the previous night, and I was hobbling down after him, the chair leg gripped firmly in both hands, while he was still on the floor. Joao’s mistake was to bank on the knife in his pocket instead of trying to retrieve the gun he’d left on the kitchen table. His greatest asset, my relative lack of mobility, was wasted while he fumbled in his pocket, enabling me to reach the bottom step as the knife came free. It was no use to him at all. I swung the chair leg baseball fashion, the whole weight of my body behind the blow, and the crack when I connected was so loud I thought it had broken in two. Joao’s heartfelt screech of pain, plus the drunken way his right hand dangled at the end of his arm, told me otherwise. What I did then wasn’t pretty or gentlemanly and it wasn’t intended to be. By the time I’d finished one end of the chair leg was sticky with blood, the geography of Joao’s face substantially altered, and I’d enjoyed administering the beating. Philis was beginning to strike back.

  *

  Before I broke the glad news to Lydia there were several other matters to attend to, notably the two men who were likely to return at any moment. I could have tried to take Lydia to safety before their arrival but this would have entailed striking across country on foot and I preferred to drive away in the Kombi. Until the Kombi was in my undisputed possession Lydia was far safer locked in her room. Also it would be silly to raise her hopes and then get myself killed.

  Although Joao wasn’t likely to be very active for an hour or so he was far too dear to me to take chances with. Dragging him by his greasy hair I hauled him through into the kitchen, a fitting setting for what might well follow. What with Otto, myself and now Joao there’d soon be a mock-up of the place in the Chamber of Horrors. The gun I was looking for, a lousy Nacional, was lying on the table and this went into my pocket, Joao taking its place. The blood-stiffened rope which had bound me the previous night was in a comer of the room and I made good use of it, strapping Joao in a modified crucifix position across the table top. I also went through his pockets. His wallet was no treasure trove, yielding three blurred photographs, an inconsequential letter and the cruzeiro equivalent of five pounds, a disappointingly small amount. Morale wise the most important discovery was a couple of packets of Continental, Brazil’s most popular cigarette.

  With a cigarette drooping sluttishly from one comer of my mouth and the Nacional in my hand I went out of the kitchen, not into the hall but outside into the early afternoon sun. Down in Porto Alegre or Rio Grande it would have been blazing hot, a powerful inducement to stay indoors with a long, iced drink close to hand, up in the hills the edge was gone from the temperature. Normally I was no nature lover, restricting my rural rambles to short hikes from one open air bar to another. Now, after the hours cooped up in the farmhouse, it was a genuine pleasure to be outside gulping carbon monoxide free air into my lungs, listening to the chirruping of cicadas or whatever and surrounded by trees I couldn’t identify.

  The house and outbuildings were situated at the end of a small valley. On three sides they were bordered by gently sloping, wooded hills while on the fourth a rutted track led, presumably, to civilisation. The pain in my back precluded the climb up one of the slopes for a more general survey so I contented myself with a superficial examination of the two outbuildings.

  One of them, probably built at the same time as the farmhouse, was a wooden affair, its earth-covered roof sagging dangerously. Originally it must have been a stable or cow shed but, over the years, it had deteriorated into a playground for rats, lizards and whatever other creepy crawlies infested the area.

  The second, a brick construction, was far more modern, only two o
r three years old at the outside. Its interior was far more interesting as well, confirming something which, to my mind, had always been on the cards. Reece, God rest his soul, had definitely been conning me about the forging. Unless banknotes could be made from coca leaves, that is.

  *

  Although I’d always steered clear of drug peddling myself there wasn’t a great deal I didn’t know about the Brazilian market. Two great, cash drug crops grew wild in Brazil. The most widely spread was cannabis sativa which sprouted up like a weed all over the place, quite apart from the farms where it was carefully cultivated. In Santos hash was dirt cheap and a packet of reefers cost little more than ordinary cigarettes in England. They were smoked quite openly in the streets and bars, with little fear of prosecution, and the number of users in the country as a whole probably ran into hundreds of thousands. This took care of the soft drug market.

  For the hard stuff you had the shrub Erythroxylon Coca, now rarely found in its wild state but intensively cultivated in the foothills of the Andes, near to the Peruvian border. By all accounts the indigenous Indian population had been using the stuff since time immemorial, simply chewing the leaves. For sophisticated palates this wasn’t good enough, especially as the average addict wouldn’t appreciate a trip to the headwaters of the Amazon whenever he needed a fresh fix. Compared with what had to be done to convert raw opium into heroin, processing the leaves into cocaine was relatively simple. Once you had your coca leaves all you needed was hot water, lead acetate, soda, ether, hydrochloric acid, plus a couple of other ingredients I couldn’t remember, and you were in the cocaine business. Not that it could be made in the bath. Some rudimentary laboratory equipment was needed, but not a lot as I could see for myself. At a rough guess Biddencourt only performed the end process in his laboratory, having the cocaine roughly crystallized in the north to make for easier shipment.

  I was still rooting around in the laboratory when I heard the sound of a car engine in the distance, either indicating one of the neighbours was making a social call or that Joao’s two friends were about to return. Once the laboratory was closed behind me I ran hastily to the farmhouse, only to find Joao was still dead to the world and in no condition to shout out a warning. Satisfied on this score I leaned against the wall behind the angle of the kitchen door, waiting for his friends to arrive.

  If the two men had been sensible and both come into the farmhouse together they might have lived, for while I was now playing by Gordinho and Biddencourt’s rules I bore neither of them any particular ill will. Their connection with Biddencourt and the knock on my head one of them had administered I was prepared to overlook, their escape in the Kombi was something I couldn’t possibly allow.

  The reason for their little expedition had apparently been to pick up some supplies and this was also the reason they didn’t arrive together in the kitchen. The man in the passenger seat had gathered up his share of the packages and was on his way towards me, whistling tunelessly as he approached, while the driver was still rummaging in the back of the van. I allowed him two paces into the kitchen before I stepped out from behind the door, the gun jammed into his ribs and one finger to my lips. He hesitated for a second, his arms full of packages, his eyes switching nervously from me to Joao’s battered body on the table, then he mistakenly decided to be a hero.

  ‘Look out, Roberto,’ he shouted, turning to run.

  These were the last words he ever spoke. A fraction of a second before he shouted I’d realized what he intended to do and had tried to transfer the Nacional from his ribs to the back of his head in time to prevent him warning the other man. This was a mistake, on a par with allowing Joao to escape from my hotel room in Rio Grande. I was not only far too slow but I hit him far too hard, the nasty crunch as the gun smashed against his skull telling me I might just as well have shot him in the first place.

  He went down with dreadful finality, landing in a mess of broken eggs and milk, and I hurdled his body on the way outside, yet again not moving quite fast enough. The second man, Roberto, had already dropped his parcels and was frantically scrabbling at the door handle of the Kombi but the bullet I fired at his back changed his mind, sending him scurrying round to the far side of the van for cover. Having left the protection of the farmhouse I had no choice but to keep on running, the fifty yards separating me from the Kombi seeming like as many miles.

  Roberto didn’t waste much time once he had the bulk of the van between us. The first shot came when I’d covered little more than half the distance, the second and third following close on its heels, all of them near enough to indicate the law of averages was in Roberto’s favour, especially as the range was rapidly decreasing. This realization prompted me to cover the last few yards in a desperate, sliding dive which ended when I smacked into the side of the van, leaving me at ground level with a beautiful view of Roberto’s feet and shins less than ten feet away. Without hesitation I pumped a bullet into the nearest shin, before there was any opportunity for the limb to be moved. There was an anguished scream, then the rest of Roberto’s body joined his feet on the ground and I put a second bullet through the top of his head. He might already have been crippled for life but he’d still had a gun in his hand and I was taking no more chances.

  *

  Once I’d checked to make sure the Kombi was undamaged and had dragged Roberto into the kitchen I trudged upstairs, wondering how Lydia would greet me. On the last occasion I’d seen her I’d sat apparently unmoved while a cigarette had been stubbed out on her and had cheerfully informed everyone present that she was a whore. I hoped I’d be able to explain the necessity for this to her but, after what she must have been through, I could hardly expect to find her at her most reasonable. Even so I was totally unprepared for her reaction. From her earlier screams I knew approximately where her room should be and the first door I tried proved to be the correct one. As I unlocked the door with a key from the bunch which had been in Joao’s possession Lydia began whimpering inside, a horrible, inhuman sound like a dog anticipating a beating.

  Tt’s all right, Lydia,’ I said reassuringly as I went in. ‘You’re safe now.’

  The whimpering continued unabated. She was crouched naked on the bed, her back pressed against the wall as though she hoped to force her way through the bricks, but physically she didn’t appear to have suffered further external injury. The cigarette burn on her shoulder flushed angrily and her bruised cheek was badly swollen, otherwise she seemed unmarked. Nevertheless she remained huddled on the bed, wide open eyes staring at me with horror and loathing.

  ‘It’s me, Philis,’ I said gently. ‘No one is going to hurt you.’

  To go with the reassurance I’d taken a step towards the bed and this time I got through to her, the whimpering ceasing although she made no move towards me. She allowed me to sit on the bed beside her without objection, but even so her condition worried me. Lydia had aged overnight, her face a pallid, shrunken mask and her eyes seemed to have sunk back into her head, the pupils dilated. The hand I held was cold and clammy to the touch, her breathing was shallow and slow and when I took her pulse it was very, very weak. I didn’t need a medical diploma to realize she was in a state of extreme shock.

  Chapter 7

  When I went downstairs again I was in a nasty mood. So far Biddencourt and company had had plenty of opportunity to show how rough they could play, now I intended to prove that anything they did I could do better. For the moment, however, Lydia was my primary concern. I’d left her on the bed, wrapped in every blanket I’d been able to lay hands on, and I intended to do what little else I could for her before I had my heart to heart chat with Joao.

  Evidently I must have hit him a lot harder than I’d thought because he was still unconscious when I returned to the kitchen, his breathing as healthy as could be expected from someone with a broken nose. Once I’d brewed a pot of coffee I returned to Lydia and managed to force three heavily sweetened cups of this down her throat, the limit of my medic
al usefulness. Whether or not the coffee did her any good was a moot point but when I left her Lydia was asleep and her breathing seemed to be easier.

  In the kitchen Joao was showing no immediate signs of waking up so, to fill in time, I set about patching myself up, making the best use I could of a rudimentary medicine chest I found in one of the cupboards. There wasn’t a great deal I could do for my face beyond dabbing disinfectant on the various cuts and bruises, a treatment which did little to improve my appearance. My lips remained distinctly negroid, my nose stayed three times larger than usual and my features retained the general appearance of belonging to someone who’d just boxed thirty rounds with Cassius Clay. The bums were a different matter and I plastered the best part of a jar of Vaseline over them before winding a couple of miles of bandages round my trunk. This didn’t do much to improve the way I was feeling but at least it was a step in die right direction.

  *

  Joao came round while I was consuming a king-sized ham sandwich although he still didn’t look particularly healthy, something I could bear with total equanimity. Provided he answered my questions he was at perfect liberty to peg out at any time he felt like it. After I’d washed down the sandwich with the last of the coffee I pulled my chair over to the table.

  ‘Let’s have a little chat,’ I suggested.

  To give him his due Joao was no coward for, although he was in considerable pain, he did try to make the gesture of spitting in my face. His mouth was too dry for him to succeed but I thumped him in the face to teach him some manners.

  ‘I’ll try again,’ I told him. ‘How long will it be before Biddencourt and Gordinho return?’

  Joao said something extremely unpleasant so I punched him again, harder this time, then poked the barrel of the Nacional into his right ear.

  ‘Much as I admire loyalty I don’t intend to waste time persuading you to be co-operative. You have exactly ten seconds to answer my question. After that I’m going to clean the wax out of your ears with a bullet. Think it over.’