by Robert Moss
4
The boulevard press, as Emil liked to call it, ran horror stones every week about the Red plot to destroy Brazil. There were broad hints planted by the government that old-time politicians — even some who were tied to the coffee barons of Sao Paulo — were secretly involved.
In the wealthy beach suburbs of the southern zone, Emil and his general staff fired communiqués back and forth, far less troubled by the police than by the uncomforting presence of Max Fabrikant. Emil’s reports to Moscow, transmitted by radio via the Soviet Mission in Montevideo, were uniformly optimistic. They inspired Wang Ming, the Chinaman who spoke on behalf of South America at the Congress of the Comintern in Moscow, to declare that an anti-imperialist revolution was at hand in Brazil.
These rival accounts, however exaggerated, were not without foundation. The country’s political history had been a chronicle of coups and countercoups, mutinies and regional revolts. There was a floating population of veteran intriguers who were willing to gamble on any new rising against the central government: out-of-work governors who wanted their places back, local dynasts who wanted to stop Rio meddling in their private fiefdoms, restless tenentes (some generals or interventores, virtual dictators of remote states) who were bored with inaction. For some of them, especially those who had marched with Prestes a decade before and still revered his name, the ultimate aims of the conspiracy were of secondary interest; at any rate, as long as the conspirators didn’t go around banging their drum too loudly. It was the promise of change — sheer movement, not direction — that made them eager to join up.
For the vast majority of the Brazilian people, who could neither read the newspapers nor place Russia, or perhaps even Rio, on a map, expectations of an impending revolution took exotic forms. Myth travelled further and faster than the speeches of politicians. In the marshy slums of Recife, Father Badό heard a curious rumour that Princess Isabel, who had freed the slaves, had been resurrected to rescue their descendants from the yoke of the landowners and the shopkeepers. In a garrison in the pampas country of the Rio Grande do Sul, which had produced both Vargas and Prestes, a young lieutenant told his comrades that the government had insulted the honour of the army and urged them to throw in their lot with a new movement of the patriotic officers that was preparing to claim satisfaction. In Salvador da Bahia, a baker who attended a clandestine gathering of the ANL volunteered to inject a powerful laxative into the bread he supplied to the local barracks, maintaining that this would immobilize the government’s soldiers on the day of the revolt. He announced that he was ready to do this to avenge police harassment of spiritists and practitioners of candomblé.
Emil sat in his apartment on Rua Paulo Redfern with his fan and his spiked pineapple juice, writing directives in English or German for others to translate. Harry Maitland saw him by chance one morning, taking a stroll along the beach at Ipanema with his taciturn, kinky-haired wife, Lenka. Emil was wearing a felt hat and a baggy suit without a tie. Lenka wore a dress of shapeless brown stuff that trailed to her ankles and a scarf over her lusterless hair. They might have been on the beach at Odessa. They were as utterly remote from the country they had been sent to revolutionize, Harry thought, as visitors from another galaxy.
Yet, as he sifted through the information he gleaned from Johnny and matched it against other, less confidential sources, he worried that Emil might have stumbled on a winning formula. It is generally easier to recruit people against an existing state of affairs than for some proposed remedy. When the National Liberation Alliance had been banned, attention had been focused on government repression, not the Communist element in its program, and liberals who had previously spurned it took up the cudgels on its behalf. The conspirators did not advertise their objectives. They were willing to latch on to any group that had a grudge against the government, promising money and advancement.
The fact that there was a double agent inside the Comintern team was no guarantee that the revolution would fail. The tsarist secret police had had highly placed agents inside all the opposition groups, including the Bolsheviks; they had also been powerless to stop either of the revolutions of 1917. Colin Bailey had seen fit to remind Harry of this comforting analogy in a recent letter. There were questions Johnny could not answer. Which of the generals at the Defence Ministry had promised to support a coup? Nilo had made a tantalizing reference to one who could be counted on. What was the new source of funds for the South American bureau that its agents were spending so lavishly? Was Doctor Alcibiades committed to the plot?
If the decision to launch a coup were taken tonight, would Johnny know about it?
This last question worried Johnny as well as his control. Since Max had arrived in Rio, security around Emil and his colleagues had been tightened considerably. Max had gone to ground somewhere; Johnny had been unable to discover his address. Sigrid had a place of her own, a room in a boarding house in Copacabana, where Johnny sometimes stayed overnight. But he knew that she also stayed with Max and at other safe houses dotted around the city. Helene no longer brought documents home. She was more careful than before about what she said to Johnny about her own activities. The Brazilian leaders, including Prestes, had been ordered to change their lodgings. Johnny had been asked to bobby-trap a safe for one of them — he had little doubt it was for Prestes himself — but did not know where the safe was being conveyed. For fear of police infiltration, regional leaders, especially Cato’s group in the north, had been given much greater autonomy.
Worst of all, it had to be assumed that Johnny was under suspicion. Maitland’s meetings with him had become more furtive and less frequent. Since the incident with Hossbach, the two. men no longer used the Necrôpolis. They used cemeteries a good deal, the graveyard of the rich at Botafogo as well as more anonymous plots up on the hillsides.
Brazilians gave graveyards a wide berth at night, when demons and spirits were abroad.
Often Johnny seemed nervous and hypersensitive behind a jocular veneer. He had been in contact with Hossbach again and had been ordered to await instructions for a meeting with the Gestapo man who was arriving from Berlin. If anything came of it, it might serve to divert Max’s attention for a bit longer.
But Harry thought he had hit on a more useful way to relieve some of the pressure on Johnny.
5
Harvey Prince, the radio man for the South American bureau, interested Maitland. Johnny had lost contact with the young Californian since their traumatic visit to the northeast. He had heard talk that Harvey was going to be sent home; then that he had insisted on finishing the job he had been sent to do. Johnny thought that Prince must be living in the Southern Zone, because of the speed with which messages were sent and delivered from Emil’s apartment. But Johnny did not know the address. The only lead was that Helene had made a disparaging remark about Prince’s car. Harvey Prince was posing as an idle American playboy and drove a yellow custom-made convertible. There could not be many cars like it in Rio.
Maitland was on his way to the beach on a quiet Saturday morning when he spotted the car quite by chance in front of a pharmacy on the corner of Copacabana Avenue and the Rua Chile. He parked the Beast in the next block, got out and made a show of inspecting a jeweller’s display window. He did not have long to wait. The fair-haired young man who came out of the drugstore wearing sunglasses and a white leisure suit matched Johnny’s description.
A car buff could hardly fail to notice the Beast; Harry left it in the parking space and hailed a taxi. The driver had turned his dashboard into an altar with religious medallions and plaster images of the saints.
“Follow that yellow car,” Maitland instructed him. “But don’t get too close.” He remembered Johnny’s caution about the number of taxi drivers who had been to the bomb school and added, with a grin, “It’s for a bet.”
The cabbie smiled back.
Wherever Harvey Prince was going, it wasn’t home. They went through the tunnel, out of the Southern Zone and along the breezy emba
nkment. Soon they were heading downtown. The yellow convertible parked near the main post office. Harry told his driver to stop, gave his driver a large bank note and showed him a second.
“Wait for me,” he said.
The cabbie nodded happily.
Most of the counters inside the main hall of the post office were already closed. Maitland got into line behind the American; a plump brown woman with four squalling children had taken the place in between.
He could not hear what Prince said to the man behind the counter through the squeals of the children.
But thanks to the tendency of all Brazilian officialdom to reverse English first names and surnames, Prince was having some difficulty making himself understood.
“There’s nothing for you, Senhor Gordon,” the clerk reported.
“My name isn’t Gordon,” the Californian said, with some irritation. “It’s Wood. Gordon Wood.”
The clerk rummaged among his pigeonholes again and produced two airmail letters.
“Obrigado,” Prince said curtly, thrusting them into his pocket.
“De nada, Senhor Gordon.”
Maitland had intended to purchase some stamps in case the American was watching his back, but the woman ahead of him embarked on a marathon complaint that had something to do with a change of address. So he slipped out of the post office in time to see the yellow convertible sailing away up the Avenida Rio Branco.
“We follow?” his cab driver grinned, turning on a little wire fan for his customer’s benefit.
“We follow.”
The yellow convertible led them straight back to Copacabana, to a small apartment building on a shady street only a few blocks from the corner pharmacy where Harry had first caught sight of Harvey Prince. The American was neglecting even the most elementary precautions; perhaps he was in a hurry to read his mail. Harry saw the yellow car swing into a narrow lane beside the apartment house that presumably led to a parking area behind.
“Keep on,” he instructed the taxi driver.
“Did we win the bet?” the driver asked when he dropped Maitland off a few blocks further on, in front of a botânico that sold herbal remedies and religious articles.
“I certainly hope so.”
He passed a few minutes in the botânico, inspecting potions guaranteed to bring back an errant lover or eliminate a rival and ugly black statuettes of Exti, the devil, with a lolling red tongue and pointy teeth. Then he strolled down to the beach and spent an hour enjoying the spectacle of the most sensuous women in the world parading in various states of near nudity while he contemplated his next moves.
He felt sure that the letters from the United States were personal. Colin Bailey had managed to run a background check on the radio man. Harvey Prince was an orphan. His father, a first-generation immigrant from Galicia, had been active in the Wobblies but had ended his life by blowing his brains out after long years of unemployment and the strain of living with an alcoholic wife who had died, not long after, of cirrhosis. As a teenager, Harvey had been adopted by a wealthy San Francisco art collector who flirted with the local Communist Party; there were strong indications that their relationship had been something other than filial.
He’s perfect, Harry thought. A family history of psychological instability, homosexual tendencies that were probably frustrated by the rules he was required to observe in Rio, the recent trauma in the sertao — enough to tip any man’s balance.
Harry waited until Monday before he revisited Prince’s apartment house. As he turned the corner, he saw Helene come out of the building in a hurry. He drove on. He called at his bank before he went to the central post office.
“Anything for Senhor Wood?” he asked a different clerk.
“No, Senhor. Nothing.”
“I’d like to rent a mailbox.”
He received the expected response: nothing was available. The tactful display of a few banknotes rectified this. He was offered a box almost big enough to hold a body.
“Haven’t you got something smaller?”
He signed the form “Gordon Wood” and added the address of the Copacabana apartment house. The rental charge was a fraction of the tip that he left. He received two keys.
He returned in the afternoon to check the box and deposited a plain envelope addressed to “G. Wood.” The next steps would require help.
Maitland was still thinking about them when he got home. The curupitio barked at him from its cage on the verandah. He responded with a wolf whistle, which it mimicked to perfection. There was a smell of palm oil from the kitchen, but it had to contend with a stronger, fouler odour that made him cough as he entered the living room.
“Luisa!” he called out. “Is something burning?”
Luisa rushed out of the kitchen in her apron, blushing and apologetic.
“I’ll take it away,” she said. “No problem.”
She reached for a little incense burner she had slung from the inside door.
“Luisa? What is that stuff’?”
“Nothing. It makes the house clean.”
“Clean? I thought we were on fire. Let me see that thing.” He inspected the contents of the incense burner, a heap of blackened crystals. He sniffed again. “Garlic?”
She nodded.
“Coffee?”
She nodded again.
“What else?”
“A little brown sugar.”
“No, there’s something more pungent.”
“You don’t want to know.” She smiled, showing all her teeth. Somehow, when she smiled like that, it was quite impossible to be angry with her.
She swirled out to the kitchen.
“Luisa. It’s one of your spells, isn’t it?”
“It guards the house.”
“Against the evil eye, or something like that?”
“Something like that.”
“Listen, I’ve told you before. I don’t mind what you do outside this house, but I won’t have that mumbo jumbo in here.”
“But it’s for you, Senhor Harry,” she said seriously.
He did not pursue it. He assumed she had been to see her voodoo priestess again — the Mother of the Saint, Luisa called her. You couldn’t fight the old religion in Brazil. The Holy Inquisition had tried and lost, and it was unlikely that any of its latter-day competitors would do better. It was a living faith; the images and the rituals, older than those of the Christians, revived by the struggle to preserve them during the brutal exodus from Africa and the harsh centuries of slavery, had not grown tired and worn with hollow repetition. To believers, the orixás, the spirit kings who were mediators between men and an unseen, inaccessible god, were present at every turning in life, to protect or to punish. They were also jealous lords who demanded constant propitiation. Hence the chicken or the goat Harry would sometimes find tethered discreetly behind the barn at the back of his house and the rows of candles glimmering under the trees.
They sat together at dinner. The scene would have shocked the crinolined ladies of the English colony but would probably have startled few Brazilians. Here and in the bedroom they were simply man and woman. Harry wished at times that there could be, in the outside world, some greater equality between them, but Luisa herself would have been the last to demand, or accept, it. In their moments of passion she called him “meu principe.” He would have been hard put to explain the depth of his feeling for her. It went beyond lust, beyond loyalty and affection, but he would never have dared to call it love. Yet he found it quite impossible to imagine being without her.
Looking at her, he thought of a possible solution to one of his problems.
“That friend of yours — Teresa—” he began. “Didn’t you tell me her boyfriend was in trouble with the police?”
“They caught him breaking into an apartment. He told them he was making a delivery and found the door open. He’s very clever with locks.”
“Did they put him in jail?”
“No. They just gave him a beating, so they could
rob the apartment themselves.”
“Where is he now?”
“He’s got a job as a doorman at one of those places in Lapa.” She made a face. “You know the ones.”
“I’d like to meet him.”
“Why?”
“I’d just like to meet him. Will you arrange it for me with Teresa?”
The next step required help from a very different quarter. Summerhayes, from the embassy, was flattered to be asked to lunch at A Rotisserie, on the Rua Ouvidor. The restaurant was widely regarded as the city’s finest, with prices to match.
Summerhayes wiped his mouth daintily with his napkin after polishing off a desert of crepes doused in Grand Marnier and said, “Your expense allowance from the light company must be a damn sight more generous than HMG’s. Or do we have Colin Bailey to thank?”
Maitland eluded the question.
“Actually,” he said, “I’ve got a slight favour to ask.”
He explained what he had in mind, and for a moment Summerhayes looked ready to disgorge his excellent lunch.
“Sir Evelyn would have apoplexy!” he protested. “I can hear him now.”
“The British Mission does not engage in shady business,” Harry volunteered, in a reasonable impression of the ambassador’s voice.
Summerhayes stared at Harry in amazement.
“But we owe it to our chap, don’t you think?” Harry went on. “After all, we did rather land him in the soup.” He added, more confidentially, “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you get a mention in the Birthday Honours List when we pull this off.”
“Really?” Summerhayes started to perk up again.
“Sir Evelyn won’t know,” Harry promised. “I give you my word. We’ll even keep Lady Maude in the dark.” Summerhayes began to giggle.
After two glasses of port he said, “There’s one thing that still bothers me, Harry. Can we be sure I can meet this chappie without any of his friends spotting me?”
