by Robert Moss
“I’ll take care of that,” Maitland said as he lit his cigar.
6
In a modest house on the Rua Sá Ferreira, Helene concentrated on the chessboard. Max seemed distracted. He smoked and stared idly out the window while he waited for her to make her move. She realized that in moving his bishop he had carelessly exposed his queen. She leaped to attack.
“Sorry, Max.” She removed his black queen from the board, leaving him with only two major pieces, a rook and the bishop. His mind obviously was elsewhere. He did not even bother to inspect the damage.
“Do you want to concede?” she prodded him.
“Not quite yet.”
Barely glancing at the board, he drove the bishop forward, capturing a pawn and placing her in check.
Max got up and stretched his legs, leaving her to work the rest out for herself. She started to move her king to capture the bishop, then realized it was covered by the rook. Her king was hemmed in by her own pieces. It had nowhere to run. In her eagerness to seize the enemy queen, she had neglected the danger.
“The whole secret of chess,” Max remarked, “is in the art of sacrifice.”
“You knew I couldn’t resist the queen.”
“Not the first time.”
He watched her study his end game before she replaced the chessmen in their original places. She was quick. She wouldn’t fall for the same trick twice.
“I want to ask you something,” she announced.
“I’m listening.”
“Why did you bring Sigrid to Rio?”
“She’s useful. Do you object?”
“It complicates things.”
“I assume you are referring to Johnny. Are you jealous?”
“Don’t be absurd! We haven’t got time for these romantic follies, that’s all. People make mistakes. It increases the risk to everyone.”
“When the wick is lit, the brain goes out,” Max recited. “So why did you give her back to him?”
Of course she is jealous, Max thought. You can throw something away and still want it back when you see someone else using it. This was a weakness he might be able to use.
“I showed you the answer,” he said to Helene.
She stared at Max, then at the chessboard. Watching her, he saw that she understood. Max was playing against Johnny, and Sigrid was the queen he had carelessly left exposed.
“What makes you sure that Johnny is a traitor?” Helene challenged him.
“If I were sure, I wouldn’t need to test him.”
“If you’re worried about the Hossbach business—”
“I’m not worried about Herr Hossbach,” Max said dismissively. “Not even his masters. But there’s a mystery about Johnny. I don’t like mysteries unless I create them.”
Max had to admit to himself that he had been weak in relation to Johnny. He had begun to suspect him when Heinz Kordt had made his surprising escape from Hamburg, leaving the corpses of two professional killers behind. Yet Max had always been willing to thrust his suspicions aside. He knew he had given Johnny several reasons to hate him. Yet he felt a curious fondness for the younger man. This emotion was so out of character that it was hard for him to account for it. His vocation required him to doubt every man’s motives and convictions; yet he had taken Johnny’s on trust. Perhaps he had been vulnerable precisely because, in his world of shadows, he needed to believe in someone.
But it was less easy for him now to suppress his doubts about Johnny. British Intelligence had shown its hand in both Copenhagen and Rio. Johnny had been in both places; he was the obvious link. He had warned Max about a Gestapo plot against his life. But that could not clear Johnny of suspicion of a link with the British; there were more than two sides playing this game.
Even now, Max wanted to be proved wrong. He was watching all the leaders of the South American bureau, setting traps. Helene and the Romanian who rented the safe house on Rua Sá Ferreira — a man whose face was unknown to the other Comintern agents — were his eyes and ears. If Johnny was a spy for the British, Max felt sure that one of the two sisters would finally deliver him up: Helene because of jealousy, or Sigrid because lovers grow careless of their own safety.
The Romanian was bored and felt frayed around the edges. He had spent a whole week tailing various members of Emil’s team around the city and had precious little to report to Max. The least interesting of all was the American, Harvey Prince. He stayed shut up in his apartment most of the time. He usually ate lunch alone at a little seafood place round the corner. He seemed to have no contacts outside the bureau. The fuzz on his upper lip indicated he had started to grow a moustache.
Now the Romanian was halfway through a wasted Saturday morning, dozing over a cafezinho at a sidewalk café diagonally across the street from the American’s flat. Ragged brown-skinned boys buzzed around the tables like flies, holding out their palms for money or scraps. A pavement artist set up his easel and offered to produce an instant portrait. The Romanian waved him away. A few tables away, a lanky man in a navy blue blazer lingered over his breakfast rolls, distancing himself from the commotion in the street behind a copy of the London Times. He had been there when the Romanian had arrived. The Romanian did not pay him much attention.
When Harvey Prince came out of his building, evidently on his way to lunch, the Englishman folded his paper neatly, settled his bill, and set off across the street. On the far side he quickened his stride to overtake Harvey Prince. His walk was erratic; he appeared to bump into the American. He said something — perhaps an apology — and moved on briskly. Prince had stopped short. He was turning something over in his hands. It was a letter or a small packet. He peered around nervously, stuck it in his pocket and then hurried round the corner into his usual restaurant.
It was nearly three the next morning when Harvey Prince was roused by a violent drumming on his door. He rolled out of bed naked and put on a light cotton robe. He had a raging thirst and the beginnings of a sore throat.
He squinted through the peephole and saw the girl courier, the hard-assed bitch they called Erna, with a man he didn’t know. The man looked tough. Prince didn’t like his eyes. They seemed to reach out, even through the peephole, to catch him by the throat.
“Jeez, Erna,” he complained as he released the bolt. “Don’t you people ever sleep?”
He was swinging the door open when it was hurled back so suddenly that it hit him in the face.
A second blow, from the man’s gloved fist, brought down on his chest like a hammer, knocked him to the floor. “Holy shit—”
A swift kick aimed at the kidneys silenced his protest. His dressing gown flapped open. His body was very pale.
Max Fabrikant inspected it with that same brutal stare.
“Look,” he said to Helene. “It’s pointed, like a dog’s.”
Harvey brought up his knees and wrapped his arms around them. He seemed to be trying to roll himself into a ball. He was shaking and making little whimpering sounds.
Max sat down on the edge of the bed and started fiddling with a short length of pipe. It dawned on Harvey Prince that it was a silencer.
“I don’t believe in lengthy introductions,” Max announced. “I’m sure you’re not a fool. You will spare yourself — and me — a great deal of unnecessary exertion if you cooperate.”
“I don’t understand—”
“We’ll start with the letter you received this morning. The letter from Mr. Summerhayes.”
“I don’t know anyone called Summerhayes!”
Max sighed. “You were seen together, outside your apartment.”
“But I never saw that man before in my life!”
“You’re lying. Is he your boyfriend?”
“What do you think I am?” Prince screamed.
“We both know what you are. I am here to find out what you have done. Where is the letter?” Max had finished screwing the silencer on to the barrel of his pistol.
“I don’t know what you’re talking abo
ut.”
Helene looked at Max. “Let me try,” she said. He nodded.
She took the burning cigarette from his lips and went over to Harvey Prince. The American was sweating heavily. He did not want to know what she intended to do with the cigarette.
“In the desk,” he said hastily. “The top drawer.” Helene found an airmail envelope addressed to Gordon
Wood. “From the United States,” she reported to Max. “Let me see that.”
Max scanned the letter — four pages scrawled in a large hand, with exaggerated loops. He scowled over the explicit passages.
“What is this?” he demanded. “Pornography — or a code?”
Harvey’s cheeks were scarlet. “It’s from an old friend in San Francisco.”
“And delivered by Summerhayes of the British Embassy? What is this? The Homintern?”
“I don’t know how he came by the letter. It must be a mistake. Or a provocation. My friend writes to me care of the post office.”
“All right. You’ve already confessed to a serious violation of party discipline. Now show me the letter Mr. Summerhayes gave you.”
“That’s it! I already told you—” his voice rose to a shrill as Helene pressed the burning stump of the cigarette under his scrotum, pinning him with her knee and her free arm so he couldn’t wiggle away.
“We’re wasting time,” Max interjected. “Search the apartment.”
Helene looked disappointed. “What about him?”
“I would advise you to stay exactly where you are,” Max said to Prince. “The female of the species—”
They found a collection of nude photographs, copies of several secret messages that should have been destroyed, a bundle of love letters from San Francisco, a key and a thousand dollars in U.S. currency.
“Why did you keep these?” Max demanded, shoving the documents under his nose. “To send to your little pen pal in California?”
“I don’t know. It must have been an oversight.”
“How about the money?”
“I don’t know where it came from. I haven’t been paid since last month.”
Max snorted.
“And this?” he held up the key. “I suppose this is the key to your gas tank.”
“I never saw it before.”
Helene had lit a fresh cheroot. She nudged Harvey lovingly with it, on the calves and the soles of his feet. He screamed in pain, and somebody in a neighbouring flat started to bang on the wall.
“What is it?” Max pushed him. “A safe deposit box?” He glanced at the letter again. “Or a mailbox?”
“I don’t have a mailbox.” Prince was sobbing. “Oh, Jeez. My mother raised me for this?”
At a more respectable hour of the morning, Max left Helene with the American and went to the post office.
“Excuse me,” he said to a clerk. “I found this in my box.” He showed the clerk one of the letters to Gordon Wood, carefully resealed. “It’s happened before. But I suppose it’s understandable. Mister Wood’s box is next to mine, isn’t it? Three-four-seven?”
The clerk checked his records and shook his head disparagingly.
“No, Senhor. It’s five-two-one. I regret the inconvenience.”
“That’s perfectly all right. Glad to be of assistance.”
Half an hour later, Max retrieved both the boomerang letter and a plain envelope, containing an enigmatic post-card and two hundred pounds sterling.
Got him, Max thought. But he wasn’t happy. It was all too easy, too amateurish. And why, after all, would Harvey Prince rat on his comrades for money? His adopted father in California was loaded with it. Perhaps he had simply snapped after his ordeal in the north and wanted to take it out on everyone he held responsible. Or else he had been set up.
The Romanian intercepted him on his way back to Harvey Prince’s apartment.
“We’ve got to get away,” he said urgently. “The police are all over the place.”
“What happened?” Max thought of the irate neighbour, beating on the wall.
The Romanian ran a finger across his throat. “He jumped. Broke his neck.”
Harvey Prince’s flat was on the third floor. In Max’s experience, unless you were six floors up, instant death could not be guaranteed. He supposed they were lucky the American had not lived to explain his reasons to the police.
“What about the woman?”
“She got safe away.”
“And the radio?”
“That, too.”
Max felt sure that Helene had thought to take the compromising documents with her. They had done a thorough job in ransacking Harvey Prince’s apartment. The police would find nothing to tie him to the conspiracy.
The American had killed himself because he had been found out. That seemed to put Johnny and the others in the clear.
Yet Max’s mood as he retraced his steps to the safe house on the Rua Sá Ferreira was sombre. It had ended so quickly and so neatly. He distrusted neat conclusions. Life, as he had observed it, was extremely untidy.
9 - Eyes of the King
To measure up to all that is
demanded of him, a man must overestimate his capacities.
—GOETHE
1
The place was an hour’s drive from Maitland’s house, in a rough neighbourhood on the way to Caxias. Off the main road, the streets soon deteriorated into dried-up creekbeds, meandering strips of baked mud rutted and cratered by the last rains. The car jounced from one pothole to the next. It was like driving on the face of the moon.
The road forked ahead. There was a street lamp at the corner, and a band of young men were clustered under the light, playing pool at an improvised table. They hooted and whistled at the handsome, unfamiliar car.
This was the end of the town. Beyond the pool players, there were no more streetlights. The darkness was complete, save for the occasional glow of a kerosene lamp or candle behind the window of one of the low houses — some little better than mud huts — that fanned out at widening intervals into the tropical forest. Rio Light was not doing much business in these parts.
“Keep left,” Luisa instructed him.
She waved at the boys around the pool table as the Beast crawled by, and the whistles multiplied. She had her party dress on her lap, wrapped up in a piece of crepe paper, but she had put on her special beads, blue and white for Yemanja, the goddess of the waters.
“Are you sure this is the way?” Harry demanded after a jolt that travelled all the way up his spine.
“We’re nearly there,” Luisa smiled.
Harry was not reassured. She had said this three times since a police patrol had stopped them at the top of the hill. The sergeant had made out he just wanted to give them a friendly warning.
“This is not a healthy neighbourhood for a gentleman of your class, Senhor,” he had informed Harry. “Not so late in the evening.”
He had stared boldly at Luisa, at the beads and amulets at her neck, the fine lace garments that poked out of their wrapping, and demanded in overly familiar terms to know who she was and where she was going.
Luisa had pursed her lips, ready to give the policeman a piece of her mind, but Maitland had interceded.
“We are visiting relatives,” he had said smoothly. “And we are running late. Now may we proceed?”
The sergeant had not dared to stop a wealthy foreigner in a Hispano-Suiza. He shrugged and said, “I wouldn’t go in there myself, Senhor,” and jabbed a finger under his eye to emphasize his point.
“I wonder what that was all about,” Harry said as they drove on.
“The police do it all the time,” Luisa replied casually. “It is because Ivan’s terreiro is so famous.”
“Do they arrest people for going to the ceremonies?”
“No. Except for the dark side.”
“You mean black magic?”
“The Quimbanda. Yes. If a man dies because of a spell, then the police come. But they also come to frighten us away.”
>
“Why?”
“Because they’re frightened of what they can’t see. Because some of their big bosses want a Brazil of white men, nothing of Africa, nothing primitive, everything from countries of snow and ice. Some of them even want to ban Carnival!”
“I can promise you that’s something that will never happen.”
Harry was mulling over this exchange when a dog lurched out into the glare of his headlights. He jammed his foot down on the brake pedal and came to a stop only a few paces short of the animal, which proceeded to squat down in the middle of the road. It was a bitch and astonishingly ugly. Its splotched yellow-white hide might have been cobbled together from several unmatched pelts. Its swollen teats hung out from its belly like a cow’s. Harry honked his horn experimentally. The dog blinked at them and yawned without stirring. It was either dazed by the lights or utterly unaccustomed to cars. He honked again, repeatedly, until the dog raised itself up and hobbled directly across their path. Luisa gasped and clutched at the talisman at her throat when she saw it had only three legs. It disappeared into the deeper shadows at the side of the road.
“It’s a bad omen,” she whispered as Harry moved the gearshift.
“It wasn’t a pretty thing, I’ll grant you that.”
“It’s a message. I don’t know if it’s for you or for me, or for both of us. We must tell Ivan. He will know what to do.”
“Now hold on. I agreed to sit in on your cousin’s confirmation. That’s all. I have no intention of getting mixed up with any witch doctor.”
“He’s not—”
“I know, I know. He’s the Father of the Saint, and all that. Even if he does call himself Ivan.”
“He’s a babalāo,” she said seriously. “A man of great power and respect.”
“Then you tell him your problems. I’m just the chauffeur.”
“There’s no need to be afraid.”
“My dear, I am not in the least afraid.” His tone was patronizing, but he was gripping the steering wheel too tightly. There was a terrible smell in the air, compounded of dried excrement and putrefying flesh.
