by Robert Moss
“One at a time!” Johnny shouted. “Zé! You go first! The rest of you — on your bellies!”
Vasco had not finished translating when Zé hurled his bomb, which brought down a royal palm and left a smoking crater where it had stood.
When the Spaniard’s turn came, he whooped, “That’s the Special Police barracks!” and flung his bomb at a conical rock fifty feet away. The bomb fell short and rolled on its side. The only sound was the crash of the breakers.
“Coño,” Vasco swore in Spanish. He started loping along the beach towards the unexploded bomb.
“Vasco!” Johnny yelled, propping himself up on his elbows. “Don’t touch it!”
It was too late. Vasco already had his fingers round the can. The moment he lifted it off the sand, the bomb went off.
Vasco howled. His face was blackened, and most of his moustache had been burned off. He was squeezing his hands. From between the fingers, blood spurted high into the air in narrow jets.
Johnny ran to him and prised his hands apart. The right one was normal. On the left hand, the thumb was intact. But above the knuckles, there was only a charred, bloody stump.
Johnny started tearing strips off his shirt, to make a tourniquet.
“Zé! Get your car!” he shouted to the young mulatto, who worked as a taxi driver and acted as chauffeur to the group.
Vasco was sobbing and mumbling incoherently. Something about a wedding ring. Johnny scoured around in the burned grass and found it, a simple gold band with two sets of initials inside. Gently, he pushed it onto the third finger of the Spaniard’s right hand.
Johnny had memorized the address of a doctor, one of the ones who would not report a gunshot wound — or bomb damage — to the police. He ran a clinic on the Rua Chile that Johnny had used for secret meetings with Nilo. On their way there in Zé’s taxi, Johnny said, in an effort to buck Vasco up, “You’re bloody lucky to be alive. And it wasn’t your right hand. You’ll still be able to paint.”
“I’m left-handed,” the Spaniard said, and spat out a broken tooth.
Johnny and Helene had disembarked in Rio three weeks before, the advance guard of the South American bureau. Their landing was choppier than Bailey’s. They had to fight their way through a crush of Sicilian and Neapolitan peasants who were being bullied by petty officials. The customs inspectors behaved as if they had all week to examine each bag, until Johnny slipped one of them a handsome tip. Instantly a dozen small boys sprang into action, and they saw their suitcases being hustled away in different directions. Johnny went racing after the one that contained the books he needed to encipher and decode messages — innocuous-seeming editions of Victor Hugo and a guide for commercial travellers.
Outside the customs hall Johnny paid off the unwanted porters and deposited their bags in a locker. They walked to the contact address they had been given, a hole in the wall off the Praca Maua. It was full of sailors. Whores of every shape, age and colour leaned over the gallery above, cooing to attract the men. There was a mulatta in a yellow dress, beautiful except for the gap in her front teeth, who was munching on roasted peanuts. She tossed some of the shells at Johnny and called down in a voice that ended in a screech, like a parrot’s.
“I think she said I’m too old for you.” Helene winked at him.
They found a table by the wall, half inside, half out. They sipped sweet, strong cafezinhos and waited. The scene in the street was a riot of colour, almost a carnival. Strolling musicians stopped to serenade them. A shifty-eyed man sidled up and thrust out a forearm festooned with a half-dozen watches. When Johnny turned away, he uncurled his fist and showed Helene a palm full of dull reddish stones that might have been rubies. The women moved by on dancing hips.
A boy wandered along with a cart, selling hot roasted peanuts in little twists of paper. He had made a brazier out of a rusty can; the coals were glowing at the bottom. He tossed a few nuts onto each of the cafe tables, then retraced his steps, trying to make a sale.
Absentmindedly, Helene started cracking the shells and popping the nuts into her mouth.
“They’re good,” she said to Johnny when the boy came back. “Let’s buy two bags.”
The smallest Brazilian banknote Johnny had on him was worth more than the boy’s entire stock.
The boy plucked it from his hand and started trotting off round the corner.
“Hey!” Johnny called after him. “Where’s my change?” The boy looked back over his shoulder, grinned, and crooked his finger.
“Come on,” Johnny said to Helene. He threw some money on the table and hurried after the boy.
There was a taxi double-parked in the next street, with its engine idling.
A man with slicked-down hair leaned out the back and said, in the voice of an announcer on the World Service of the BBC, “I do hope you had a good trip.”
This was Johnny’s first introduction to the man who was known in the underground as Nilo.
Nilo was the head of the Communist network in Rio and number two in the party’s national organization. Like Prestes, he owed his advancement to the Russians. Guralsky had picked him up in Buenos Aires, years before. Nilo had little else in common with Prestes — or any of his other comrades in the Brazilian Communist Party.
Behind Nilo’s back, Johnny learned, they joked about him as O Milionario, The Millionaire, because he received a handsome annuity from his mother. While he was still in short pants, she had taken him to Europe to do the Grand Tour and left him at boarding school in England — and not just any boarding school. Nilo was the first Communist of Johnny’s acquaintance who had gone to Eton. In his present milieu, that made him as exotic as a stuffed toucan in a cage might have seemed in a London drawing room.
Nilo became Johnny’s constant companion in those first weeks. As he studied the Brazilian, Johnny wondered whether his conversion to the revolutionary cause was bound up with the playing fields of Eton, with some slight he had resented and remembered. Though he talked like an English toff and affected English tailoring, Nilo had a settled hatred for the masters of the Raj. Beyond this, it was hard for Johnny to fathom his motivation. Nilo was widely read and would shoot off ideas — usually lifted from French and English literary reviews — like fireworks displays. But there seemed to be no fixed anchorage for his beliefs. Certainly he did not allow them to interfere with his pleasures, and he felt no obligation to share his annuity for the sake of the brotherhood of man. Perhaps he was in it simply for the game, playing at revolution the way he had played at other things — at being an army officer (he had been discharged after getting his commandant’s daughter pregnant and declining to marry her) or an entrepreneur (he had tried to make a fortune selling orange juice to the Americans, but the bottom had fallen out of the market).
Johnny discovered another side of Nilo the night Colin Bailey was dining with Doctor Alcibiades.
On previous days, when Johnny was not busy with the training sessions on the beach, Nilo had helped him to scout out the enemy dispositions in the capital. They had inspected the guard posts around the Catete and Guanabara palaces, the layout of the Special Police barracks on the hill of San Antonio, the airfields and the military garrisons. Johnny had found a gap several hundred yards long in the security fence around the main air base. He had made sketch maps showing where the roads and the railway lines must be cut to prevent government reinforcements from reaching the capital. Using information from Nilo and other contacts in the party, he had started making lists of which military units in the capital district could be counted on to join the revolt, which would stay neutral, which would have to be beaten into submission.
That night, Nilo picked him up at the clinic on the Rua Chile, where the doctor was stitching up Vasco’s wounds.
“You’ve been working too hard,” Nilo announced. “I’m going to take you out on the town.”
“Then I’ll fetch Helene. I told her I’d meet her for dinner.”
“Leave her at home tonight.” Nilo winked. �
��I want to show you the city’s other weak points.”
Johnny nearly cried off. But on the other hand, why not accept Nilo’s invitation? The man was too self-indulgent to be threatening. It wouldn’t hurt to get drunk with him, if that was what Nilo had in mind. In a few weeks more, when Emil and Prestes and other members of the bureau arrived, Johnny knew that his life would be far more taxing, much more closely confined.
Besides, he did not particularly relish the prospect of another long evening alone with Helene. A frost had crept into their relationship since Copenhagen. He felt, once again, that she was watching him. He had no proof that Bailey was right — that she had played the role of a provocateur for Max — but there were times when he thought she was acting as if she felt guilty. They had not talked about Sigrid since Denmark, and the fact that Helene did not ask about the decision he had made deepened his suspicions. On the steamy nights when he couldn’t sleep, Johnny would walk the beach and stare across the ocean that divided him from Sigrid. Back in his room, he bared his soul to her in long, impassioned letters. He had written one about Trotsky and the crime Stalin had done him, and the greater crime that might already have been committed — though there was no news of that in the papers. He wrote a twelve-page confession, a desperate plea for understanding and forgiveness. He mailed none of these letters. Night after night, with the ink still wet on the last sheet, he would hold a candle to the pages and watch them turn yellow, then black.
Nilo’s tour started off with dinner in the Rua Ouvidor, washed down with quantities of whisky and soda and a superior red wine — a Macul — from Chile. Nilo gossiped about other members of the party leadership. He joked about Miranda, the party’s secretary-general, and his illiterate mistress, making them sound like a pair of country bumpkins.
Nilo’s a snob, Johnny thought. And he wants Miranda’s job. He’s a fool to show me his hand after a couple of drinks.
Nilo and Miranda were polar opposites. Miranda was a bantam rooster, cocky, dedicated and energetic. Johnny liked him immediately. Unlike Nilo, Miranda actually belonged to the working class in whose name the revolution was being waged, the first man in his family to go to school. His strength came from his roots. When he talked about class oppression, you could tell that he knew what he was talking about from the calluses on his hands. His woman — the one Nilo poked fun at because she couldn’t read — was a slender beauty from Bahia who had been raped at the age of ten by the owner of the great villa where her mother scrubbed floors.
Miranda is worth twenty of you, Johnny thought, watching his guide. If there were more like Miranda in other countries, I might still belong to the party.
After the meal Nilo lit up a cigar and proposed a stroll before the digestivos. They rambled down into Cinelandia. Along both sides of the boulevard men and women were strolling with their own sex, in twos and threes. Some of the girls were escorted by older women. They were all dressed to the nines. They exchanged languorous looks and blown kisses. From time to time one of the boys would let out a complicated wolf whistle that reminded Johnny of an animal in pain.
“Romantic love,” Nilo said mockingly. “In Brazil, if you find that your bride is not a virgin, you can call the police and have the marriage annulled on the spot. So if you’re courting a girl from a bourgeois family and she’s willing, she’ll probably tell you to use the back door. Some of our native duchesses develop rather a taste for that.”
He smirked at Johnny, who tried to conceal his mounting contempt.
“If she’s not willing,” Nilo went on, “when you’re finished with mooning about down here, relief is just a few blocks away.”
He led Johnny into the winding streets of the Lapa district. They moved in a river of pastel lights. Girls called down to them from the balconies. Johnny saw the pink sign of a club, the Babylõnia.
“I have a fondness for this area,” Nilo announced. “One of my father’s friends brought me here, at his request. To make me a man, as he put it. That’s still the way with the old families. I’ll be eternally grateful. It made me one up on those buggers at Eton.”
“Would you describe that as a socialist attitude?” Johnny sniped at him.
“Oh, I don’t know. It’s certainly fraternal, wouldn’t you say? I know that it goes on in Moscow. They sent me a couple of little numbers who did wonders for my socialist orientation.”
Yes, Johnny thought. They would have.
A girl came out of the Babylõnia Club wearing a strapless red dress. Her skin was wild honey. The tight satin of her dress defined the rhythmic lilt of her hips. She was followed by an American with a panama hat tilted back on his head and a linen suit in need of pressing. A doorman in a turban rushed to help them into a taxi.
“She’ll squeeze him for five dollars,” Nilo commented. The going rate in the shuttered houses along the streets of Lapa was ten or twenty milreis, the equivalent of fifty cents or a dollar.
“What about the police?” Johnny asked.
“The police are paid off. We’re safer from the police here than in any other part of the city.”
They stopped for a drink at a street café and instantly drew a small crowd. Street hawkers offered beads and curios, even a live parrot. A musician serenaded them on a strange, echoing instrument that resembled a zither. Another twanged at a long, single-stringed berimboim. Urchins rushed up, palms outstretched, fingers slyly groping at Johnny’s trouser pockets. The waiter shooed them away, flapping his napkin.
“Para manjar,” one of them pleaded.
Nilo threw him a coin. He sat there, the tip of his tongue flicking the side of his mouth, like a lizard’s, as the girls sauntered by, and Johnny wondered why he had been brought on this outing. If Nilo were interested in hired sex, why take a witness? More probably, Nilo was trying to elicit his own weakness. Beneath the Old Etonian veneer, this unlikely Brazilian was evidently that crude, and that stupid.
“This is the middle circle,” Nilo announced. “You must see the others too.”
The tour of the zonas took them past elegant townhouses in Santa Teresa, where the most recondite sexual passions were catered for discreetly behind the wrought iron filigree, to a corner of Leme where pederasts congregated, and finally to the roughest, most colourful of the red-light districts, the Mangue. It was near the docks and reminded Johnny of furtive boyhood visits to the Reeperbahn, except that here the girls in the bright-lit windows were darker and the busy streets opened off an avenue lined with royal palms. There was a canal beside the palms. Under soft moonlight, the scene looked as timeless and beautiful as a vision of ancient Egypt. The smell spoiled the illusion; the canal was an open sewer. The whores of the Mangue were of all ages and stages of decay. In front of a swaggering group of sailors — Johnny saw from their hatbands that they were off an Italian ship — a huge, toothless mulata hoisted her skirts up above her waist and danced a little jig.
Johnny felt faintly queasy. Nilo laughed and steered him in a different direction.
“I have another confession to make,” Nilo announced. “I have a weakness for working-class girls. There is nothing more erotic to me than the sight of a well-endowed woman on her hands and knees, scrubbing the floor. Do you believe me? It’s also a matter of breeding. We had a house-maid on the plantation, quite a pretty one. My father didn’t need to send me to Lapa. So you see, my instincts are truly with the people.”
He laughed at his remark and clapped Johnny on the shoulder.
“I picked up a girl here once,” he went on. “Coffee coloured, wonderful teeth, hips made for child bearing. I paid her well. You know, you can buy it here for the price of a bottle of soda. But you know what she most wanted? She wanted to sit in a bathtub, a real bathtub. She had never used one. Of course, that was all before I saw the light.”
Johnny decided then that if anything unpleasant should happen to this Brazilian because of him, he wouldn’t lose much sleep over it. Nilo seemed as self-serving, as indifferent to the plight of individuals, as any co
ffee baron, any backlands coronel. Johnny’s mission in Rio would be easier — he thought — if the men he met under assumed names were all cynical adventurers like Nilo or toadies and fabricators like Emil. That would have made Johnny’s task of betrayal a positive pleasure. The hard thing was, there were real revolutionaries too, men and women in whom he recognized something of himself. There was Miranda, and Prestes, and Verdi, the romantic Argentine, and Livia, the stunning Communist poetess who had become Helene’s special friend in Rio. There was Helene. Lost soldiers, all of them, as Heinz had said — whether they knew it or not.
8
Johnny and Helene were living in a white frame building a rifle shot away from Colin Bailey’s hotel, facing the beach at Copacabana. The establishment styled itself the Valhalla Guest House. As this improbable name implied, the pension — run by a bosomy widow from the state of Parana called Hildegard Kapp — catered almost exclusively to visitors with Teutonic bloodlines.
The Valhalla was one of Nilo’s discoveries. He insisted that Johnny and Helene would attract less attention at a place where everyone spoke German. Frau Kapp, for her part, was delighted with her new guests, rapturous after Johnny expressed a fervent admiration for the Führer. She plied them with tortes and implored them not to spend too much time on the beach, because the sun’s rays were ruinous for the kidneys. The better class of Brazilians, according to Frau Kapp, went bathing before breakfast and were never seen on the beach after eight in the morning.
While Johnny trained saboteurs and scouted government defences, Helene was fully employed in preparing the ground for the senior members of the South American bureau who would soon be arriving in Rio. She scoured the classified pages, looking for apartments for rent, and found a luxurious flat for Emil in Ipanema, on the Rua Paulo Redfern. She took a lease on a more modest apartment, a few blocks away, that would be convenient for meetings. She bought a Baby Ford with operational funds — she would act as Emil’s driver and bodyguard when he arrived — and drove it into the Rio traffic as if she were opening a billiard game.
