by Robert Moss
“Mine wasn’t the only voice,” Johnny said quietly. “The Brazilians took the same line.”
“They’re victims of passion.” The Argentinian swept his hair off his forehead. “Nilo, Prestes — they can’t always help themselves. But you — you’re a professional. You’ve been with Emil, you’ve seen him make the same mistakes in China. Then he nearly got you killed in the north. That’s why I can’t fathom you.”
“Put a sock in it,” Helene cut in rudely. “The decision was made. There’s an end of it. If you want to do postmortems, go and work for a coroner.”
“Sometimes I think I do—” the Argentinian began daringly, but Helene silenced him with a look.
He knows what I know, Johnny thought, feeling a closer sympathy for Verdi, who looked and smelled as if he had started drinking even earlier than usual that day.
He’s heard the screams too.
Helene was steering the Ford with one hand, nursing one of her baby cheroots in the other. She spotted a gap in the traffic and whipped over to the left.
“This is close enough,” she announced, pulling up in front of a bank. The Pan Air office was just round the corner.
“Will you wait for me?” Verdi said. “I won’t be two minutes.”
Helene shrugged and glanced at Johnny.
“Two minutes,” Johnny said.
They watched the Argentinian circumnavigate the little crowd that had gathered round a bicheiro, to bet on the elephant or the rooster.
“I’m surprised he didn’t ask one of us to come in and hold his hand,” Helene said with quiet contempt. She glanced at her reflection in the plate glass windows of the bank. “We look like bank robbers in a getaway car.”
Verdi came back, visibly agitated.
“They say I must get an exit visa from the police,” he reported. “The Pan Air agent says he will go with me to the station. Do you think it’s safe?”
He appealed to Helene with moist spaniel eyes. He met that ice-blue stare. “It’s your decision,” she said curtly. “You can swim to Buenos Aires, if you’d rather.”
Verdi looked miserable.
“I’m sure it will be all right,” Johnny tried to encourage him. “There’s nothing wrong with your passport, is there?”
“We can’t sit here all day,” Helene announced, revving the engine.
“All right. I’m going.”
Helene rammed the Ford into gear and left Verdi standing on the sidewalk.
“You were a bit brutal with him, weren’t you?” Johnny said.
“He’s just another Hamlet. We can’t afford them. He ought to be sitting at home writing clever little philosophical essays that nobody reads. Emil is right to send him away.”
Verdi had been instructed to go to Buenos Aires to meet the leaders of the other South American Communist parties and report on their attitudes. Emil had not forgiven the Argentinian for comparing him to a Chinese warlord.
“It is also possible that Verdi is right,” Johnny remarked. “That wasn’t what you said at the meeting.”
“A man is allowed to change his mind.”
“Not about some things, Johnny.” The unexpected choice of phrase, and the savage wrench at the wheel that sent the car hurtling towards a group of passengers alighting from a streetcar made Johnny wonder if he had pushed his luck too far.
A week before Sir Evelyn had called on the president, Johnny and Helene had moved from the boarding house to a small apartment in Botafogo. The front windows overlooked the cemetery of John the Baptist. This was a graveyard for the rich. The marble busts were stern images of bourgeois rectitude, complete with pince-nez, wing collars and imperials. Sculpted maidens wept over them soundlessly, their Grecian robes in calculated disarray. In the foreground, just inside the cemetery wall, a wounded lion with an arrow sticking out of its back howled its last from the top of a marble plinth.
It was almost nightfall when Verdi appeared on Johnny’s doorstep together with a small suitcase and a wife to match, a nervous, dark-eyed girl called Rosario.
“You must help us,” said Verdi breathlessly. “We have nowhere to go—”
“Come in, come in.” Johnny took his arm and half pulled him into the sitting room, which opened directly off the landing. Rosario perched on a corner of the sofa, her hands folded in her lap.
“Who is it?” Helene called from the bathroom.
“It’s okay!” Johnny shouted back.
Before he had finished pouring Verdi’s brandy, she came padding out, still dripping from the bath and swathed in a huge apricot towel. Helene could subsist on a handful of rice, but not without perfumed soap and soft towels.
“Shit.” She glowered at Verdi. “What do you think you’re doing here?”
“I’m sorry,” the Argentinian apologized, not daring to meet her eyes. “I had to get Rosario away. I think the police are onto me.”
Johnny handed him his drink. “Tell us everything that happened. Take it slowly.”
“I went to the police station,” Verdi began. They had insisted on taking his fingerprints and told him they would have to retain his passport for a few hours, to complete the necessary formalities. He had been instructed to come back at the end of the day.
“I sensed something was wrong,” Verdi continued. “So I paid the Pan Air man a few dollars to go back for my passport. The police wouldn’t give it to him. They claimed it was a forgery. They said they had checked my fingerprints and believed I was a dangerous man, a man on the run. They told him to tell me I was required to call for my travel documents in person. The man in the airline office is muy simpático, no friend of the police. But you know what he said to me? He said, ‘Are you really a dynamiter?’ What would you have done in my place? Naturally, I got away as fast as I could.”
“So you led the cops here,” Helene commented, peering around the edge of the curtains.
“I wasn’t followed!” Verdi jumped up, his voice rising to a falsetto. “I swear it!”
Johnny went to the window. “There’s no one,” he pronounced.
Verdi crumpled into the sofa.
“What are we going to do with them?” Helene demanded. In her anger she had let the towel ride up to the tops of her thighs. Verdi was watching as if this, too, were part of his ordeal. His wife blushed and stared at the floor.
“Why don’t you get dressed and get us all something to eat?” Johnny suggested calmly. “I’ll go and alert the others.”
“Johnny—” she followed him into the bedroom. She watched him from behind as he checked the magazine of his pistol and slipped it back into the shoulder holster under his jacket.
“Johnny—” her lower lip trembled.
He saw this in the mirror as he combed his hair. The instant of weakness — was it fear or suppressed fury? — softened her, as did the nakedness of her shoulders, rosy and moist from the bath.
“Yes?”
As he turned to her, her lips made a little bow, and he thought she was going to kiss him.
Instead she said, “Those two are dead weight. It’s stupid to risk ourselves for them.”
“Maybe. But take care of them, all the same.”
“I worry about you, Johnny.” She traced the line of his jaw with her finger. She smelled of sandalwood.
“You needn’t.”
“But I do. You’re too patient with the bleeding hearts. You never used to be this way.”
“Are you trying to tell me something?”
“Just take care they don’t start bleeding over our floor.”
The threat was not specific, but it was there in her tone and in the cool indifference with which she swung out to the bathroom and pulled off the towel. Naked, with the door open, she proceeded to shave her armpits, as if he had ceased to exist. Her long, firm body was as white as one of those statues in the cemetery.
Verdi did not leave for Buenos Aires, but he got his passport back. Prestes, whom Johnny found dining with Emil at the German’s luxurious apartment in Ipane
ma, undertook to fix everything. Even Emil seemed nervous about the method he proposed.
“Don’t worry about it,” the Brazilian reassured him. “I know my people?’
Prestes wrote a letter to the police, asking them to return the travel papers of a special friend, and signed it with his own name. The letter was hand carried to the central station by a reserve army officer wearing his captain’s uniform.
The next morning, Johnny waited for the messenger on a bench in the Praca Maua, next to a stand where they sold watermelons and sweet caqui fruit, which looked like fat, overripe tomatoes. He did not expect his man to arrive.
When the captain appeared, beaming from ear to ear, Johnny got up and strolled about, affecting not to see him. He also unbuttoned his jacket, so he could get at his gun quickly.
The captain took the cue. He breezed past Johnny and paused to inspect a mound of papayas. As Johnny came abreast of him, he slipped Verdi’s passport into his hand.
He could not refrain from whispering, “Piece of cake.”
Johnny fully expected detectives to seize him at any moment. He spent more than three hours before he satisfied himself that he was not under surveillance, even taking a ride out into the harbour with a boatload of sightseers.
When Prestes was told what had happened, he was jubilant.
“You see,” he enthused, “the revolution has allies everywhere! We even have friends in the police!”
When Harry Maitland heard the story, two days later, he found himself trapped in a state between sleeping and waking for much of the night, as his mind groped for a satisfactory explanation. The easiest to accept was that Colonel Plinio’s men were more subtle than Johnny had counted on and had succeeded in staying out of sight when they tailed Prestes’ messenger. For why would the police release the passport of a known subversive let alone a courier from the most wanted man in the country — if not in the hope of following them to bigger game? No doubt there were a few Communist sympathizers in the police, but it would be madness for them to risk exposing themselves in such an obvious way. Anyway, the orders must have come from high up, perhaps from Colonel Plinio himself.
Harry pictured the faint smile on Colonel Plinio’s face as he had watched the duel between the viper and the boa in the mayor’s snake house. What game was he playing now? Was he confident to the point of carelessness because he had a spy of his own inside the conspiracy? Did he want the conspiracy to run its course so as to crush it more completely — or because he wanted it to succeed?
“Piece of cake,” Prestes’ courier had murmured to Johnny.
Colin Bailey had said something, similar to Harry when he had asked him to work for the Secret Service.
The memory of the Christmas pudding he had been made to eat at home, as a boy, rose up out of Harry’s subconscious — a pudding so heavy they used to joke that if they dropped it, it would make a crater in the floor. He had been induced to eat it only by the promise of silver threepenny bits hidden among the raisins. He remembered the sense of being cheated when he worked his way through a whole piece and found no threepenny bits.
2
Johnny met Maitland at the Necrôpolis. It was a simple brush contact by the roulette table. Johnny put his chips on red, and then, as everyone watched the ball, he slipped his report into the pocket of Harry’s dinner jacket. The ball landed on a red number. He did not forget to pick up his winnings.
He was standing in line in front of the cashier’s grille when a thick, rather guttural voice called out, “Gruber! Johnny Gruber!”
Johnny stiffened as if someone had poked a gun between his shoulder blades.
Very slowly, he turned and saw a large Germanic figure barrelling at him through the crush of players.
“You fuckhead!” Engineer Hossbach greeted him. “Did you think you’d given me the slip? Where’ve you been hiding? Where’s that cold-assed sister of yours?”
Hossbach had a hand on his shoulder and wouldn’t hear of parting company until they had inspected some of his favourite night spots and killed a bottle or two. Johnny was so relieved Hossbach had failed to notice Maitland that he went along with the German’s proposals.
It proved to be quite a productive evening. Hossbach was in a talkative mood, boasting that he had been promised a big job in Berlin and dropping the names of connections at the German Embassy as well as the anatomical details of various women he claimed had enjoyed his favours.
“It was a stroke of luck, running into you like that,” Hossbach said. He leaned his face nearer to Johnny’s. “I might have a job for you. The money’s good. Enough to pay for every floozie in this dump.” He waved his arms expansively over the crowded floor of the Babylõnia Club.
“Tell me more.”
“One of our best men is coming from Germany. He’ll be needing some local help. Nothing to do with the embassy, mind. I’ve been told to find a few men who can keep their mouths shut.”
That would rule you out, Johnny thought.
He said, “What’s it about?”
“It’s a spot of debt collecting, that’s the size of it.”
“What sort of debt?”
“The kind you have to pay.” Hossbach smirked. “A blood debt. We got a tip that a big Red is coming to Rio. He killed some of our boys in Germany. The idea is to settle the account.”
Johnny thought, he could be talking about me. “How will you find this Red?”
“Our man is bringing a photograph. And we know the kike started in Antwerp, so he’s probably got diamonds to hock. That’s how those bastards pay their way,” he added with assumed authority. “So we’ve got lots to play with.”
Johnny realized he had impersonated a Nazi lover too well in his previous conversations with Hossbach. There was no chance of backing out easily now the German had put this many cards on the table.
“Why don’t you go to the police?” he suggested.
“The Brazilians are soft.” Hossbach curled his lip. “We know how to take care of these things. Well, are you in?”
“You know you can count on me.” Johnny agreed. “But I don’t know much about guns.”
“No need to start pissing on the floor!” Hossbach guffawed. “We’ll handle the serious business. You’re a salesman, aren’t you? We’ll find out where the Yid is hiding out, and you can make him an offer he won’t be able to resist.”
A whore Hossbach couldn’t resist, in a dress slit to the waist, saved Johnny from spending the rest of the evening at the Babylõnia Club. He even managed to slip away without giving an address.
“I’ve got a girl waiting for me, too,” he announced, as the whore jiggled her bust under Hossbach’s nose. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
On the streetcar back to Botafogo, he went over the conversation in his mind. There was no longer any doubt who Hossbach worked for — or that the Gestapo had a source close to the Comintern operation in Europe. The kike...was the Gestapo on the trail of Emil, or somebody else?
I’ll talk about it with Helene, he decided. It struck him that he had just been handed a chance to do something highly pleasurable — to give the Gestapo a kick in the balls — and improve his standing with the South American bureau at the same time.
He was in excellent spirits as he turned into the street near the cemetery. There was a light on in their apartment. Helene must have finished earlier than expected or brought some of the typing home. She did that sometimes, and he was then able to steal a look at the secret directives Emil was sending out.
Johnny turned his key in the door. There was an odour of tobacco from light Virginia cigarettes, like the Argentinian smoked. But Verdi and his wife had left several days before, and Helene still favoured her black cigarillos.
Johnny reached for his gun as he swung the door open. He saw the battered soles of the man’s shoes, stretched out across the ottoman. A record was playing on the Victrola, one he did not recognize. It sounded like a funeral dirge. He ducked down and burst into the room behind the gun.<
br />
“I see you’ve started the revolution already,” said the man who was lolling in the armchair, smoking American cigarettes. There was a big revolver in front of him, on the coffee table. He made no move for it. Instead he turned up the volume on the victrola. The voices were reaching a crescendo.
Dies irae, dies illa
Solvet saeclum in favilla
Teste David cum Sybilla.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” said the man in the chair. He began to translate: “On that day of wrath, the world dissolves into ashes...”
Johnny put his gun away. He shut the door and stood beside it as if waiting for permission to sit down.
“What is the music?” he asked.
“Verdi’s Requiem. Do you suppose our Argentinian deserves one?”
Johnny slumped onto the sofa without responding.
“Not much of a welcome, Johnny,” said Max Fabrikant. “Are you so sorry to see me?”
“Surprised, that’s all. Nobody told me you were coming, Max.”
“Leon. You have to call me Leon. I’m supposed to be a Belgian.”
“What are you doing here?”
“What do you suppose? Land reclamation.” Max added with seeming anger, “You’re living in a swamp! All of you! I wouldn’t expect too much from some of the others, least of all from your Brazilian half-breeds, who can’t tell black from white. But you, Johnny! You disappoint me.”
“What have I done?”
“Come closer to me.” Max patted the edge of the sofa closest to his chair. “I want to look into your eyes so I can tell when you’re lying. Then you can explain to me why.”
Johnny experienced the same sense of panic he had felt at school, when the headmaster had summoned all the boys to assembly and announced that he knew that one of them had been smoking in the toilets. The headmaster had called for the guilty boy to step forward. Johnny had had to wrestle with himself not to confess. In the end it was an innocent boy, a boy who had started shaking and burst into tears, who had been held responsible and suspended from school. That was the way it went. Johnny was no more — and no less — frightened now than then. But he looked steadily into the inquisitor’s eyes.
