by Robert Moss
Strange flowers blazed like jewels among the rocks; the gravata plants were torches, tongues of yellow fire above the vivid orange stalks. Johnny wondered what Sigrid would make of this carnival of colour. He could see her now, her eyes bright, her lips pursed, capturing with her brush the things he couldn’t name. With the image came the hollow pain of absence, so that the rockslide on the road to Petrôpolis was almost a welcome diversion.
As a driver, Helene lacked experience, not confidence. Johnny gripped the doorframe to steady himself as she hurled the Baby Ford round a succession of hairpin bends, claiming the whole road as her property.
“Easy!” Johnny cautioned her after she flung the car back into her own lane to avoid a collision with an oncoming bus. The bus driver leaned out his window, shaking his fist.
Helene was flushed and happy, her hair mussed by the wind. His nervousness only seemed to heighten her pleasure. She slammed her foot down on the gas pedal again.
They screeched around a blind corner. On Johnny’s right was a jagged wall of rock. To the left, beyond the narrow shoulder, the land fell away abruptly. Thousands of feet below, he could see the silver tracery of a stream at the foot of the gorge. He thought, We’re traveling on the rim of a glass.
He heard the sound — like a distant drumroll — before either of them saw the first boulder that came tumbling across the road.
Helene hit the brakes, too hard. The Ford went into a skid. She clutched at the wheel, wrenching it the wrong way. They missed the fallen rock and went lurching straight for the cliff. Johnny grabbed the wheel, fighting for control of the car. By the time he had brought it shuddering to a halt, the left front wheel was suspended over the gorge.
“Get in the back,” he ordered Helene.
“You’re heavier,” she snapped back, determined not to show fear at the vertiginous drop below her. “You get in the back.”
It was not the place to argue. Gingerly, he hoisted himself over the back of his seat and maneuvered into the space behind. With the weight in the car more dispersed, Helene tried to start the engine.
On the first two attempts, it sputtered and died. She had the choke full out, and was pumping the accelerator. “You’re flooding the carburetor,” he warned her.
Quietly but firmly, he told her what to do.
She let him drive the rest of the way to the summer capital. The smell from the high grass on the outskirts of Petrôpolis was pleasurable and oddly familiar to him. It brought back something of his boyhood. It was like the smell inside the tea chests he had used for games of hide-and-seek.
He said, “If we take that road again, you’d better bring your parachute. And one for me, too.”
Helene laughed. She was proud of the fact that she was one of the handful of foreign women who had completed parachute training with the Soviet Air Force.
They parked just off the main square, by the canal that divided the avenue in front of the summer palace of the last emperor of Brazil. Johnny could glimpse its pink facade through the exuberant foliage of a tropical garden.
They walked to the café. There was an L-shaped counter in the front section where stand-up customers chose pastries and hot dishes from a large selection under glass. Sit-down customers were served in the back, where every wall presented a reassuring view of the range of alcohol on offer; backed by mirrors, the bottles on display were multiplied into infinity.
At that hour of the morning the back room was deserted, except for the flies and a young man drinking coffee. Johnny recognized him; he had attended one of the bomb-making courses at the beach. In the underground, they called him Escoteiro, or Boy Scout. He was very dark, with lustrous, curly hair, most of which was hidden by the broad-brimmed straw hat he had jammed down over his forehead.
Boy Scout smiled at Johnny and made a thumbs-up sign. “They’re all in there,” he said, pointing to a door with a handwritten sign that read Privado.
Boy Scout did not get up. As they passed him, Johnny saw the snout of the sawn-off shotgun under the table.
Six men and a woman were already assembled in the private room. Emil jumped up to greet the last arrivals. His face was bright with sweat, although he had torn off his jacket and tie. Under the great bulge of his forehead, his eyes shone with excitement.
“It’s on the boil!” Emil exclaimed happily. “There’s no stopping it, absolutely no stopping it!”
“Hear, hear,” said Nilo, in his plummiest BBC voice. His rival, Miranda, pumped Johnny’s hand and kissed Helene on both cheeks.
The proximate cause of Emil’s elation was sitting on a humpbacked sofa under a swooning portrait of the Virgin Mary, the kind that was sold outside churches. This con-junction made Prestes look distinctly like a seminarist, Johnny thought, even though the Communist chief was dressed like any modestly successful shopkeeper, in a white suit with black shoes. Dangling from the sofa, his feet barely touched the ground.
“Welcome home,” Johnny said to the man Stalin had picked to lend a face to the revolt. “When did you arrive?”
“Not long ago,” Prestes said evasively. “We had some passport difficulties. Nothing serious.”
Johnny was intrigued by the woman sitting next to Prestes. She looked a real Amazon, tall and big-boned. Her head was curiously elongated, ending in a massive, square-cut jaw. She seemed the least likely person in the room to be doing crochet. At the sight of Helene, she dropped her crochet hook and swept her into a powerful embrace.
“This is Olga,” Prestes introduced her to Johnny. Her grip was as strong as his own. “My bride of the Comintern. That’s what we used to call the ladies in Moscow, isn’t it?”
I don’t remember that you ever had much time for the ladies, Johnny addressed him mentally. Except for your mother, whom you worshiped.
“Helene, you’re enchanting, as always,” Prestes turned to her. “I can see that you and my Olga are old friends.”
“We jumped out of a few planes together in Russia,” Helene remarked.
“Parachute training,” Olga amplified this. “We’re like sisters.”
That might be very true, Johnny thought. What was this strapping girl to Prestes? A surrogate mother? A baby-sitter from Max’s organization? Johnny was certain that there were deadlier weapons in Olga’s satchel-sized handbag than a crochet hook.
“Olga goes with me everywhere,” Prestes said, patting her back. “Our friends in the Big House think I need looking after.”
They made an odd couple, standing side by side. Olga was a foot taller than Prestes and at least sixty pounds heavier. Johnny could not help speculating about what might happen if she rolled on top of him in bed. Olga was attractive in her way, and he sensed a raw sexuality close to the surface. She returned his visual inspection boldly, with a smile on her lips, and he had the distinct sensation that she was mentally undressing him from top to bottom.
Prestes made the last introductions.
“You know Verdi, of course.”
Johnny was genuinely glad to see the voluble Argentinian, who made a great fuss over kissing Helene’s hand, while his shaggy grey hair tumbled down over his eyes.
The last man in the room was introduced as Tatu, which meant “Armadillo.” It seemed to fit. Tatu was one of the regional organizers from the north. His face was cracked and blackened like worn-out saddle leather. Every excess ounce had been stripped from his frame under the northern sun.
Johnny took a chair by the wall and glanced around the circle of faces, some eager or elated, others watchful and appraising.
The high command of the Brazilian revolution was assembled, for the first time, on Brazilian soil.
Emil banged his fist on the coffee table. “We begin!”
The revolution Stalin had planned for Brazil was sup-posed to move along two parallel tracks.
Track one was a front operation, of the kind Willi Münzenberg was constantly promoting in Europe. The guiding principle was simple: thousands, perhaps millions, of people who would never knowi
ngly support the Communists could easily be recruited to a front organization secretly controlled by the party that campaigned in the name of such admirable causes as world peace, social justice and anti-Fascism. Lenin had called the people who were duped in this way “useful idiots”; Johnny had heard them described by his superiors in Moscow as “shit-eaters.”
The creation of the National Liberation Alliance — the ANL for short — was announced before an excited crowd at the Joao Caetano Theatre on March 30, 1935. The guiding slogan was “Bread, Land and Liberty!” The speakers called for the seizure and breakup of the big estates, for the repudiation of foreign debts and the expropriation of the foreign-owned monopolies. The ANL’s executive included three retired naval officers; this was calculated to enlist navy support for a revolt. Only one of these ex-mariners, Roberto Sisson, had any clear conception of the strategy behind the new movement. The audience was swelled by trade unionists from the Federation of Seamen and the National Federation of Railwaymen, both of which — Johnny learned — were largely controlled by the party. The taxi drivers’, bank clerks’ and textile workers’ unions were also represented in force.
One of the youngest speakers was a fiery orator called Carlos Lacerda. Just before he took the rostrum, he was approached by Major Costa Leite, a veteran of the Prestes Column and a member of Prestes’ intimate circle.
“We think it would be a good idea,” said Costa Leite, “if you nominate Luis Carlos Prestes as honorary president of the ANL.”
The tone was that of a military command.
When Lacerda mentioned Prestes’ name on the platform, he was received with a resounding ovation. Huge banners bearing Prestes’ name that had been smuggled into the hall by party members were instantly unfurled.
Soon hundreds of voices were raised in the new marching song of the ANL, sung to the tune of the national anthem:
Crimson are our Brazilian souls, Erect, brave and handsome youth Of clear minds and strong physique We fight for bread, land and liberty.
It was no competition for the Internationale, Johnny thought, when he heard this ballad for the first time. Still, the ANL rapidly gained strength, attracting swarms of new adherents every time its activists clashed with the police or the Fascist Greenshirts. In Rio, ANL organizers backed demonstrations by workers and bank clerks demanding an eight-hour day and a minimum wage. In Minas, they helped tenant farmers fight eviction by the rapacious landlords. Through two dozen newspapers and bulletins, they appealed to liberals to join them as the first line of defence against fascism. The name of Prestes was a magnet, just as the Brazilian leader had promised. To most of those who rallied to his name, Prestes was seen not as a Moscow-line Communist, but as the Cavalier of Hope, the idealistic hero of a revolt that still evoked saudade — romantic yearning — because its objectives had never been clearly defined.
The ANL did not flaunt the red star or the hammer and sickle. The fact that it was under the fist of the Communist party — and therefore the South American bureau — was carefully concealed. What was the point of having a front if everybody knew what was in the back room?
Track two was the secret effort to trigger an armed insurrection. The Comintern vested its hopes in Prestes’ old comrades, some of whom were now colonels and state governors and police captains, and in the underground work of spreading sedition and training military cells in which Johnny was playing a leading role. At Johnny’s suggestion, party and ANL sympathizers in the various garrisons organized new social clubs where soldiers who came along to play Ping-Pong or enjoy a few beers could be drawn into social discussion. In his lectures to his five-man. cells, Johnny stressed the need to focus on issues of immediate concern to the sergeants and corporals — living conditions, terms of service, the behaviour of unpopular officers, the use of troops to suppress strikes by workers who came from the same social background.
Only a handful of men in the Brazilian Communist Party were told the true nature of the plot. Only Nilo and Miranda knew about the deadline set in Moscow: the revolution was supposed to be unleashed no later than January 1936.
It soon became clear to Johnny that the Brazilian party was riddled with jealousy and suspicion. Veteran party members resented the fact that Prestes — once denounced by the Communists as a “petit bourgeois adventurer” — had been parachuted in by Moscow as their new leader. At the same time Emil and his team were wary of anarchist and Trotskyite heresies among the party faithful, and perhaps with some reason, since in its original incarnation the Brazilian Communist party had been in large part a creation of anarchists.
It was plain to Johnny, at that first gathering of the general staff in Petrôpolis, that jealousy and suspicion reigned even within the South American bureau. It was a matter of temperament as well as tactics. Nilo and Miranda vied with each other in offering more and more optimistic accounts of the progress that had been made.
“Five thousand officers have joined the ANL!”
“The governors of Ceara and Amazonas have sworn to join us!”
“Great news from Recife — they’re ready to set up a soviet republic in the interior!”
Tatu, the northerner, would sit silent through most of this, scratching his nose. Verdi, the Argentinian, was openly sceptical, harping on inconvenient facts: the party was small, the class struggle in Brazil was at a primitive stage, President Vargas was popular even on the left. At one of the meetings, when tempers flared, Verdi accused Nilo of being a “victim of passion.”
Emil was desperate for success but wary of being deceived again, as he had deceived himself in China. Sometimes, when the others had vented their opinions, he would turn to Johnny for advice, as if Johnny were some kind of referee. Johnny distrusted this excess of deference. Whenever he was obliged to give his views, he sided with Nilo, who was positively baying for blood, or with Prestes, who talked as if he wanted to launch the revolution the next day.
Let’s hurry it along, Johnny told himself. The sooner it blows up, the sooner I’ll be out of here.
This proved to be almost a terminal miscalculation.
2
It was a soft day in early June, and the sky hung down between the mountaintops like a sodden towel. Harry Maitland was waiting for Johnny at the very centre of the Jardim Botánico, at the end of an avenue of royal palms. A rococo fountain bubbled gaily where the paths crossed, but it was overshadowed by an enormous silk-cotton tree beyond. The massive trunk reared up for a hundred feet before dividing into branches, crooked like the brackets of ritual candelabra. There was a sense of brooding power about that solitary giant, made ominous by the dark of the sky and the pendulous deformity of one of the limbs. What hung from the tree might have been a wasp’s nest, but it was hard for Johnny to conceive of a wasp’s nest twice the length of a man. Everything in nature seemed exaggerated in Brazil, and anything would grow. Perhaps that was why the botanical gardens were so often deserted. They were silent now, except for the low thrum of the insects in the tract that had been turned into a corner of the Amazon Jungle.
The two men broke their walk at a curious stone table, set on a hummock in front of a gazebo. In one direction the eye fell to a yellow lagoon, almost completely covered by giant Victoria Regina lilies; in the other, it rose above waves of green foliage to the slopes of Corcovado. The Redeemer was lost in the mists.
“I’ve got some messages for you from Colin,” Maitland reported. “He wonders if you can verify an address in Paris.”
“What is it?”
“74, Rue du Rocher.”
“That’s easy. It’s an OMS apartment, rented in the name of a Portuguese who is a secret party member. Alfonso Figueiredo. I was given his name once in case I needed help with travel documents and visas.”
“Thank you. I think that will be very helpful.” Since their first meeting, Harry Maitland had been impressed by Johnny’s exact memory for dates, cover names and addresses, even after downing a litre of brandy in a late-night drinking session. But there was somethi
ng that fascinated Harry for more than the mnemonic skill or the boozing capacity; it was the sense that he was in the presence of a man who had taken the world on his shoulders. More often than not, there had been tension between them. When Johnny’s judgment was questioned — sometimes simply in order to elucidate a point — he would flare up, ready to lacerate Harry as a rank amateur, fumbling under the weight of the preconceptions of an amateur of his social class. Maitland had to practice being patient. It was an unfamiliar exercise, but he was helped along by the sense that he was learning all the time, not merely as Colin Bailey’s proxy in Rio, but as a man.
Johnny said, “What else?”
“The other bit’s personal, I think. Colin asked me to let you know that Max and Sigrid are in Paris.”
“I see. Thank you.”
So they didn’t get Trotsky. Not this time. At least Sigi was safe, and in a place that she loved. But still Max’s captive. Perhaps his willing captive...No. Johnny tried to shut off the jeering rush of thoughts and images. He could not allow himself to dwell on any of that.
He reported to Harry, “They’re sending me to the north.”
“Where?”
“Bahia. Recife. Then the backlands.”
“To train the party underground?”
“To assess our military capacities,” Johnny specified. “But there’s something more. Emil has made me his ambassador to Lampião.” He saw the surprise in the young Englishman’s face and added with a grin, “I’m afraid I talked myself into it.”
