Carnival of Spies

by Robert Moss

  “Might I make one suggestion?”

  “Well?”

  “If you do talk to Vargas, you might tell him our information comes from sources in Europe — a wireless intercept, something of that kind.”

  “What are you suggesting? That the president can’t keep a secret?”

  “He is bound to discuss the matter with his cabinet and his police chiefs. We can’t tell which of them may have been compromised. In any event, you know the Brazilians. They’re a talkative lot.”

  Sir Evelyn did not dissent from this.

  He was in a markedly better humour when he rose from his desk to indicate that the interview was over.

  “I know your family,” he said to Harry. “I can’t imagine how you got in so deep with Bailey and his gang of eavesdroppers.”

  “I’m afraid I was always the black sheep.”

  President Vargas agreed to see His Majesty’s Ambassador on the morning of June 20. Sir Evelyn put on his morning coat and his full decorations and drove to the Palace of Guanabara in the embassy Rolls. The Union Jack stood up stiff and correct on its little mast above the fender. The ambassador was welcomed by an honour guard in white uniforms and helmets with horsehair plumes. The uniforms were in need of pressing, Sir Evelyn noted with a jaundiced eye, and the headgear could have done with more than a touch of brass polish. The honour guard presented arms in a fashion that would have made a British drill sergeant swoon.

  Sir Evelyn was received by the president in the grand salon. For part of the time, the president’s daughter, a lively, pretty young thing whom he called Alzarinha, was present. She seemed to have almost as much influence in the palace as Lady Maude exercised at the British Embassy, though Sir Evelyn would not have welcomed the analogy.

  Vargas smiled and listened and smoked his long cheroots. He was small and dumpy and would have gone totally unremarked in any crowd but for the fact that his portrait hung on the wall of every school and post office and government office in the country, always smiling. The Brazilians said he had the ability to be silent in twelve different languages. He was an anomaly in a continent of shouting, swaggering caudillos. He had come to power through a revolution made by politicians and military men against the old oligarchy of the Sao Paulo coffee barons. He had held on to power not by force of arms but by a balancing act. His supporters ranged from Greenshirt sympathizers and regional bosses to near Socialists like Doctor Alcibiades and tenentes who had marched with the Prestes Column. Getulio Vargas himself seemed to defy definition. Perhaps that was why he had survived numerous plots and an armed revolt by the Paulistas. Certainly he was avoiding showing himself in this interview. His inscrutability was such, Sir Evelyn thought, that he might be practicing to be a Chinaman.

  The president’s manner changed abruptly when the ambassador mentioned that Prestes was in Brazil.

  “How is it possible?” Vargas said, puffing faster on his cheroot. “We have proof that Prestes is in Moscow. Here—” he scrabbled around among the papers on his desk and produced a newspaper. The characters were Cyrillic, Sir Evelyn noticed; it was a Russian paper. It was folded to an inside page.

  Vargas showed Sir Evelyn the blurred photograph. Prestes was clearly recognizable among other foreign Communists, and there was no doubt about the locale. They were posing in front of Lenin’s tomb.

  “This newspaper appeared less than a week ago,” Vargas commented. “One of our diplomats arranged to send this copy on the Graf Zeppelin. How is it possible that Prestes could arrive here before the airship?”

  “I don’t know,” Sir Evelyn replied. “Perhaps the photo-graph is a hoax. We have positive information from sources in Europe that Prestes has been here for more than a month.”

  From that moment Vargas was all attention. To Sir Evelyn’s satisfaction, he put off an appointment with the German Ambassador to prolong the conversation.

  “We will take the most energetic action,” Vargas announced.

  “If I may say so, Senhor Presidente, the appropriate course would seem to be energetic watching.”

  Sir Evelyn was rather proud of this formulation.

  At the end of the audience the president invited the ambassador and his wife to join the First Family in their box for a performance at the Teatro Municipal. Lady Maude would be pleased.

  Two days later, President Vargas held a cabinet meeting at which he discussed the plan for a Communist revolution in Brazil. Secret Comintern documents supplied by the British Embassy were passed around the table. The conservative defence minister expressed the view that it was necessary to “break the backs” of the plotters without delay. The National Liberation Alliance should be banned immediately. Others preferred a waiting game.

  Four days after that, on the morning of June 26, O Globo ran a scream headline on its front page: THE COMMUNIST PLAN FOR BRAZIL. What followed was a bloodcurdling report drawing extensively on an unidentified Communist document. It contained directives for a “preparatory phase” in which nationalism would be made the “spinal cord of the movement”; any hint of “internationalism” would be “eliminated.” At the given time, a swift and furious coup d’etat would be launched simultaneously in the north, in the vital Rio — São Paulo — Belo Horizonte triangle, the country’s economic hub, and in the south. Trained cells would seize the electricity centres, the telegraph stations and the radio transmitters. Anti-Communist officers would be shot without mercy, “preferably at their own doors or inside their houses,” and special forces would range the streets in trucks, using machine guns to cow any attempted resistance.

  Harry Maitland read the newspaper over breakfast and flung it down in fury. Someone inside the government had cooked up his own version of the Zinoviev Letter. The “Communist document” cited in the newspaper was a forgery, but a forgery based on the facts. Whole paragraphs had been lifted from the Comintern documents Harry had been ordered to supply to the embassy. O Globo’s account conformed very closely to Johnny’s description of the plan Emil Brandt was trying to execute. Emil and the others in the South American bureau were bound to suspect a leak.

  He arrived at the office in a black mood, which was not relieved by the spectacle of Desmond Wild lolling behind his desk. Wild, with his unerring nose for a liquor source, had found the bottle of scotch Harry kept in a desk drawer and had helped himself to a double. He had also helped himself to one of Harry’s favourite cigars, the private stock he had had shipped direct from Havana.

  “Make yourself at home, why don’t you?”

  “Now, don’t be a prune, old boy. I come bearing gifts.”

  “I’m surprised they let you up here. Have you paid your light bill recently?”

  Wild treated this as beneath his dignity. Harry noticed he had acquired a monocle, which hung uselessly from a silk cord around his neck.

  “I thought you might like a scoop,” Wild pursued. “One of my native bearers moonlights as a typesetter for the Commie paper.”

  “A Manhā?”

  “And the same to you.”

  “So?”

  “Well, he tells me they’re all rather het up about this stuff in O Globo. The Reds are going to put out a counterblast, a special edition. They’ve got a front-page story that claims that old Getulio was fed a lot of info on the Reds by none other than our intrepid ambassador. Perfidious Albion meddling again, trying to squash the glorious workers’ movement. That kind of thing.”

  “It’s a red herring,” Harry said flatly. “The usual propaganda lies. Would it inconvenience you terribly if I used my desk?”

  “I think there’s more to it.” Wild moved languidly in the direction of the sofa, whisky in hand. “My chappie says the other lot have really got the wind up. You wouldn’t know anything about it, I suppose?”

  “Why should I?”

  “Well, you really ought to, my dear. Aren’t the Bolshies supposed to be planning to black out Rio Light so they can cut our throats in the dark?”

  “You should ask Sir Evelyn.”
>
  “I tried. He won’t take my calls. I expect he’s still hopping mad about that horse in the second. I tried Summerhayes, too, actually collared him on his way to the embassy. He scuttled off like a frightened rabbit.”

  A messenger tapped on the door and entered immediately with a note for Maitland. He recognized Johnny’s handwriting on the envelope. He glanced at the contents quickly and tucked the note away in his pocket.

  The fact that Johnny had taken the risk of sending a message to him here — even though the language was suitably camouflaged — confirmed Maitland’s worst fears. His man was in danger.

  “You’ll have to excuse me,” he said to the journalist.

  He met Johnny at noon in the little museum of mechanical toys on top of the Sugarloaf, fifty yards from where the cable cars stopped.

  “You might have warned me,” Johnny said.

  “I didn’t know it would be blown up all over the press,” Harry responded lamely.

  “I only heard about it last night,” Johnny pursued. “Emit received a full report from someone who has access at the highest level of the government. He has seen copies of all the papers your ambassador gave to Vargas. You should never have trusted these people.”

  “And?”

  “Emil told me he thinks the Secret Service got its information in Europe, by deciphering radio signals or intercepting the mail to one of the letter drops in Paris. He may have been testing me.”

  “Have you been watched?”

  “With Helene in town, I’m always under surveillance,” Johnny said grimly. “But it will get worse. I’m sure they’ll send an investigator from Moscow.”

  “What can I do to help?”

  “Stage a diversion.”

  Maitland thought for a moment. Johnny had supplied the addresses of several safe houses in Paris that were used for Comintern traffic from South America.

  “I could ask Bailey to fix something in Paris,” he suggested. If the Russians knew that one of their letter drops had been blown, that might deflect suspicion from Johnny.

  “Better to do it here,” Johnny said.

  Maitland understood. If the Comintern was looking for a traitor, it was his task to deliver one.

  8

  “We go forward!” Emil boomed over the hubbub around the Spaniard’s dining room table. “Then all these nervous Nellies will have to choose. They either shit or get off the pot.”

  The sensational press coverage of the Communist plot had not resulted in any damage to the underground. The police had attacked left-wing speakers in the Praca Maua with their truncheons and beaten up a few union leaders, but that was nothing out of the ordinary. However, inside the National Liberation Alliance and even the Communist party itself, the publicity had sparked off a heated debate. Some people said the leadership was forcing the pace, moving before it had created a solid base of support. The old charge levelled at Prestes by the Communists before Moscow had taken the Cavalier of Hope under its wing was being revived: that Prestes and those around him were romantic militarists, closer in spirit to Blanqui and Bonaparte than to Marx and Lenin. There were doubters even within the ranks of the South American bureau itself. In his cups, Verdi, the Argentinian, was heard to describe Emil as a “comical Chinese warlord, surrounded by sleepwalkers.” Emil demanded — and received — a formal apology for the remark.

  Emil decided to shunt the sceptics out of the way by packing them off to the north to make speeches. Seven chiefs of the National Liberation Alliance were shoved on board a steamer headed up the coast. The fact that they were accompanied by twice as many police agents was of no consequence to the chief of the South American bureau.

  Emil was a man in a fever dream. With the critics neutralized, he was free to rush ahead with the next stage of the operation. Johnny encouraged him. Johnny even helped to draft the new manifesto that Emil insisted must be issued in the name of the ANL.

  The ANL had a big rally planned for July 5, the anniversary of previous armed risings. There was quite a turnout. The crowd did not look very revolutionary; the men all wore hats and their best Sunday suits, as if they were going to church.

  A nervous young man in a bow tie was on the platform, looking over his notes. Carlos was a fine orator, but prone to stage fright. Before leaving his home, he had played “The March of the Toreadors” over and over on his Victrola, to prime himself for his performance. On his way into the theatre, a squad of Integralistas in their green shirts and their stupid Sigma armbands had jeered at him and threatened to rough him up. He knew their leader; they had been at law school together. It anguished him to think that more of the intellectuals of his own generation were gravitating to the Fascists than to the left. Even at the Academy of Letters, the country’s literary establishment applauded politely when the leading anti-Semitic ideologue of the Greenshirt movement delivered long harangues, decked out in a pith helmet and his full regalia. Of course, it was the lure of action, strongest of all for men who lived sedentary lives filled with abstractions.

  The band struck up a tune; the meeting was under way. Carlos was scheduled to speak second. He hardly listened to the opening address, delivered by a former navy officer who was hopelessly adrift in his own syntax. Another military figure appeared from the wings and glided swiftly behind the speaker’s podium. Carlos knew the man. He was a former army captain who had marched with Prestes and held a vague position on the organizing committee of the ANL.

  “You’re to read this,” the captain whispered in his ear, thrusting a script into his hands.

  “I don’t understand. I’ve already prepared my speech.”

  Carlos glanced at the first lines. They read like a cannon roll, like a barrage from the old guns at the Copacabana Fort. Never having met Johnny, Carlos could hardly know that some of the most inflammatory sentences had come from his pen. The whole thing amounted to an open declaration of war on the government.

  “I can’t read this,” the young Brazilian protested. “Look at the signature.”

  Carlos turned to the last page. The manifesto was signed by Prestes. It ended with a battle cry: “All power to the ANL!” It was an open appeal for the overthrow of the government.

  “This is madness.” Carlos began to shake violently. “You’ll get us all arrested.”

  “The orders come from the top. Do as you’re told, or I’ll read it myself and denounce you as a coward.”

  The opening speaker had reached his final peroration. The applause was punctuated by catcalls from the Greenshirt supporters and undercover cops in the crowd.

  Carlos was being introduced.

  “It’s suicide,” he said unhappily.

  “Stop pissing in your pants and get up there.”

  A few days later, Harry Maitland joined the crowd that had gathered outside the ANL headquarters. Most of the windows on the upper floors had been smashed. Policemen were engaged in throwing file cabinets, furniture and typewriters down onto the pavement below. Thousands of copies of A Manhā and other left-wing publications were blowing along the street.

  The government had answered Prestes’ declaration of war — edited and inspired by Emil and Johnny — by banning the ANL and ordering a roundup of leftist union organizers. The Communists had thrown away their legal facade.

  Their critics on the left — especially the anarchists and Trotskyites — denounced the party’s tactics and claimed that its followers had been deceived by police spies and agents provocateurs. Harry wondered if they realized how much substance there was to their charges. In the decisive meeting of the Communist leaders before the big rally, Johnny had helped to fuel Emil’s passion. Verdi predicted that the government might shut down the ANL if its spokesmen made an open appeal for revolt. Johnny countered that the government probably wouldn’t dare go so far but that, if it did, it would be doing the revolution a favour. The country would become polarized; the president’s reformist pose would be exploded; liberals would move to the left. Above all, many more people would recogni
ze that an armed uprising was the only way forward and be drawn into the party underground. This was the argument that won out.

  As Harry watched the police completing their demolition job at the ANL building, Colonel Plinio strolled out the front door, his panama hat tilted rakishly across his forehead.

  He greeted Harry in high good spirits.

  “They shot themselves in the foot this time, didn’t they? Let’s have a drink to celebrate.”

  They went to the Confiteiria Colombo, where a string quartet was playing among the potted palms in the depths of a bustling hall lined with mirrors and mahogany. Above Plinio’s head, painted schooners under full sail plowed a sea of glass.

  His day’s hunting over, the colonel was in a philosophical mood.

  “We are a gentle people,” he remarked, surveying the powdered ladies in white gloves who were sampling the Colombo’s famous pastries and “Petrõpolis bread,” toast prepared with butter and Parmesan cheese. “We are also too much addicted to the French and their endless talk about liberte. Voltaire, Victor Hugo, Romain Rolland. They — and the anarchists, of course — are far more seductive to us than Marx. But what is freedom? In the real world, freedom can be comprehended only by the boundaries that contain it.” He sipped his drink. “Like pure alcohol,” he went on, “liberty can be enjoyed only in dilution, and there are few men with the stomach — or the table manners — to withstand the higher proofs.”

  8 - Prince of Shadows

  Faust:

  When you will introduce us at

  this revel,

  Will you appear as sorcerer—or devil?

  Mephistopheles:

  I generally travel without showing

  my station,

  But on a gala day one shows one’s decoration.

  -GOETHE

  1

  “There are times I don’t know you at all,” Verdi remarked to Johnny. “You’re an intelligent man. You know that Emil is wrong. Yet you go along with him. You even encourage him.”