by Robert Moss
Johnny thought, he’s playing with me.
“Have you seen your pet Nazi lately?” Max asked,
“I saw Hossbach two days ago. We had a few drinks.”
“What happened to the Gestapo man you said they were sending to catch — how did you describe it? — a certain kike from Antwerp?”
“He’s here,” Johnny reported. “But I haven’t met him. Hossbach said the plan has been changed.”
Even boozy Hossbach has become careful of me, Johnny reflected.
“But he showed you the photograph, at least?”
“Oh, yes. He showed me the photograph. It was you, all right. Hossbach told me to keep my eyes open.”
“I would very much like to meet this friend of Hossbach’s who carries my picture around in his wallet,” Max said thoughtfully. “Do you suppose you could arrange a meeting?”
“I could try.”
He watched Max take his drink from Sigrid. In Johnny’s eyes, Max’s words and movements were offensively possessive. Max said, “There’s a good girl,” as if he were petting a domestic animal. What infuriated Johnny most was that Sigrid seemed unconscious of any slight.
At that instant a grisly scene flashed through Johnny’s mind: the scene of a shoot-out between Max and the Gestapo, leaving all of them dead.
Why not? he thought. Nobody would be able to blame him — and Sigrid’s tether would be broken.
But Max would never let himself be caught so easily.
“I could try,” he repeated, more assertively. “Of course, we would have to find the right bait.”
“We’ll think of something.”
The recorded voices of the Anabaptists rose to a crescendo and Max abandoned the conversation to join in the chorus:
Suivez-nous, amis! Dieu le veut,
Dieu le veut! C’est le grand jour!
Two nights later, Johnny kept a rendezvous with Hossbach at the Babylõnia Club. The doorman greeted him with a grinning salaam, and a couple of the bar girls blew kisses. He was becoming a regular.
“Hello there, Johnny. Better get that down you quick, before the ice melts.”
Johnny took the cocktail that was waiting for him.
“Look at the bouncers on that one.” Hossbach smacked his chops, eyeing the new girl, who was attempting to sing “Night and Day.” He snapped his fingers for the waiter. “Give the lady a glass of champagne,” he instructed. “Tell her to come over here when she’s finished the set.”
“Very good, sir.”
“Well, then.” He turned back to Johnny. “What’s up? You said on the phone you had something interesting for me.”
“Are you still interested in that kike from Antwerp?”
“Natürlich. Did you hear something about him?”
“Better. I saw him today.”
“How is that possible?” Hossbach narrowed his eyes until the whites were invisible between the folds of flesh. The effect reminded Johnny of Wollweber, the Comintern boss in Copenhagen.
“I was in a jewellery store around the corner from the Copacabana Palace, looking for something to impress a little lady I discovered. Your man walked in and asked for the manager. I saw him go into the back room. I’d bet he, was trying to peddle some of those rocks you mentioned.”
“You’re sure it’s the same man?”
“Pretty sure. I never forget a face. He was a few years older than the man in your photo, but I’d swear it’s the same one. He had Jew written all over him, and he was dead scared.”
“What did you do?”
“I waited till he got outside. He looked ready to run when I approached him, but I spoke to him in English, as if he was an American tourist. I told him the people in the store were thieves and that I’d get him a good price if he had any more stones to sell.”
“Did he buy it?” Hossbach’s face was damp with excitement
“He said he’d call me.”
“Wait here.” Hossbach hauled his weight off the chair and went to use the telephone in the hall.
If they’re hungry enough, Max had said, they’ll bite.
Hossbach was gone at least fifteen minutes. When he came back, he had a lot of notes scrawled on the back of an envelope. He used them to fire off a series of questions his boss had obviously just dictated, taking more notes as Johnny gave his replies. What were his father’s and mother’s Christian names? Where had he gone to school in Vienna? Military service?
“It sounds like your boss is a careful man,” Johnny remarked, hoping that the cover story of Franz Gruber the Austrian whose identity he had assumed — was strong enough to withstand a Gestapo investigation in Vienna, at least until this operation was over and he could vanish from Engineer Hossbach’s life.
“Listen, it’s nothing personal,” Hossbach said clumsily. “In my business, we can’t be too bloody careful. Here’s what we want you to do. If Dorfman gets in touch—” Dorfman was one of Max’s many aliases “—tell him to meet you at the Alpino, and make sure you give us at least three hours’ notice.”
Johnny shook his head. The Alpino had a largely German clientele.
“I told you, the Jew is scared,” he pointed out. “He’ll want to pick his own time and place.”
Hossbach considered this and said, “Okay. But make sure to give us enough warning, so we can set it up right.”
“I don’t think he’ll call,” Johnny played the sceptic. “If he’s as important in the Communist party as you say, why would he take the risk?”
This little twist helped a lot, because Hossbach became the one defending the whole implausible proposition.
“I know these sons of bitches,” the Nazi said. “They like to feather their nests. My guess is he’s doing a little business on the side with Uncle Joe’s money.”
“Speaking of which—”
“You don’t need to worry.” Hossbach pulled out his wallet and flicked several large banknotes across the table. “I know how to look after my pals. There’ll be plenty more if this comes off.”
Johnny dabbed holy water on his forehead and made the sign of the cross. He bent his knee before the high altar before slipping behind the pews and along the left side of the church toward the confessionals. Light filtered through stained glass made a batik pattern of blues and greens on the stone floor.
He entered the second confessional and leaned his head close to the grille.
“Bless me, Father,” he intoned. He added quickly, “I was followed, but I gave them the slip in Cinelandia.”
“Max’s people or Hossbach’s?” Harry Maitland whispered from the priest’s side of the confessional.
“Max’s, I think.” He recounted what Sigrid had said about the cemetery. “Max probably wants to see which way I’ll run.”
Johnny described Max’s plan to deal with Hossbach’s employers.
“You can’t go through with it,” Harry told him. “It’s a lunatic scheme. If the thing misfires, you’ll get yourself killed.”
“That may be one of the attractions for Max.”
“I don’t understand why Max would be willing to risk the whole Rio operation merely to bag a few Nazi thugs.”
“He’s not risking the operation,” Johnny pointed out, “he’s risking me. Besides, the Gestapo has got his scent and he doesn’t like that.”
“Don’t go,” Harry urged him.
“I have to go. It’s a direct order. I think it’s also a test. If I do the job right, it may be a bit easier for me to find out what the hell is going on.”
“Then at least let me give you some backup.”
“What backup? The police? They’d probably arrest me instead of Hossbach’s friends. Besides, it wouldn’t be very easy to explain.”
“I was thinking of myself.”
“Thanks for the thought, Harry. But you’d better stay out of this. I don’t know where Max will be, but he’ll be watching. You can bet on that.”
From behind the screen Maitland heard Johnny rising to leave.
“Three Hail
Marys,” Harry called after him. “And all the luck on God’s earth.”
In the street market under the old aqueduct, the cacophony was immense. It sounded as if all the Furies had been loosed at once. It took a minute or two for Johnny to distinguish the separate elements in the storm of sounds: the shouts of the porters as they shouldered their way through the crowded passages, their wares stacked high on top of their heads or swaying from poles across their shoulders; the shriek of caged parrots and macaws; the rattle and creak of pushcarts; the dull thud of the butchers’ meat axes; the clack of cheap wooden clogs; the insistent babble of hawkers arguing over a price; the braying of tethered goats; the squall of a lost child.
Max’s instructions had been precise. Johnny was to telephone Hossbach thirty minutes before the meet, thus denying the Nazis time to set up an elaborate ambush. The rendezvous would be on the harbour side of the market, near the wharves where they hauled up freshly caught fish. The long, low building that housed the fish market itself had half a dozen exits.
“Don’t carry a gun,” Max had warned Johnny. “They may become suspicious and search you. A gun would be hard to explain.”
“Don’t you want to take them while you have the chance?” Johnny had asked/
“Not immediately.”
It seemed that Max’s plan was to identify the enemy and have him tailed to his lair. To a counterintelligence mind, Johnny knew, it made sense to leave an identified enemy in place. An identified agent could be monitored. He might be used as a channel for false information. If his weaknesses were learned, he might even be turned against his own masters. If they killed the Gestapo man from Berlin, he would be replaced by an unknown successor, and their advantage would be lost.
But the plan left Johnny highly exposed. It would be up to him to satisfy the Germans, when Max failed to arrive, that he had not been laying a trap. Hossbach swore copiously over the telephone when Johnny told him the arrangements for the meeting. When Johnny set down the receiver, he hesitated for a few minutes before he took the Mauser out of his belt.
I’ll be naked without it, he thought, turning the big gun over in his hands. Damn Max’s orders. I’m not going into this unarmed.
He tucked the Mauser back into place.
The stink of raw fish was hard to take on an empty stomach. Slim, dark-skinned men were pulling wriggling eels out of a boat and tossing them into buckets. Outside the blotchy facade of the market building, women squatted behind panniers of bright parrot fish, squid and cuttlefish.
Johnny looked at his watch. He had been waiting nearly twenty minutes.
I’ll give it five minutes more, he told himself.
A hawker came up with two buckets of fish slung from a pole. He swung one of the buckets under Johnny’s nose. The fish had been dead for a very long time.
“Four for one milreis,” he intoned.
Johnny shook his head.
“Five?” the hawker proposed hopefully.
“I’m not interested.”
“The fish are fresher inside,” the hawker said confidentially. “The fat man told me to tell you.”
Johnny toyed with his pipe for a bit — the beauty of a pipe was that it always gave you an excuse for delay — before he strolled into the fish market. The stench inside was overpowering. He blew out clouds of smoke to drive it away. A girl in a maid’s cap and apron watched as one of the vendors gutted a large, fatty fish.
Hossbach loomed up out of the shadows. There was a second man with him, nicely turned out in a crisp linen suit and a panama hat.
He looks like a meat porter all the same, Johnny thought. “This is Dr. Zeller,” Hossbach said.
As the stranger came closer, Johnny tried not to stare. There was something horribly familiar about that coarse, bulging face.
I know you, he thought.
“What happened to your pal?” Zeller challenged him. “Maybe he spotted you,” Johnny suggested. “Maybe he just got scared.”
“That’s two maybes too many.” Zeller’s tone was less than friendly. “I hope you’re not pissing around with me, Gruber.”
The way he blustered and pushed himself up too close made Johnny sure. Take away forty pounds and about half as many years and he was looking at Willi Rausch, the schoolyard bully who had killed his father. Willi Rausch, the model Aryan, who had grown up to find there was a seller’s market for his talents.
Suddenly Johnny’s desire for revenge was all-consuming. His hand crawled towards his back, flirting with the butt of the Mauser.
I could take him now, Johnny told himself. Hossbach too. But there must be others. A coward like Rausch wouldn’t risk himself without plenty of backup.
Rausch was squinting at him.
“Haven’t we met somewhere?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I never forget a man,” said Rausch. “Weren’t you in Hamburg?”
“I’ve never been in Hamburg:”
There’s no more time, Johnny realized. I have to do it now.
A flash of movement beyond the archway that led to the loading area caught his eye. There was a chance — just a chance — of narrowing the odds.
“There he goes!” Johnny yelled.
“What? Are you sure?”
“It’s Dorfman!” he called over his shoulder. He was off and running between the trestle tables, and the Germans went crashing along after him — two, no, there were four of them now. He had flushed the others from cover.
“Go round the other way and cut him off!” Johnny shouted to Hossbach. “He’ll try to get away round the side!”
He heard Rausch and Hossbach barking at each other. He hopscotched over some baskets of crabs and barely escaped a collision with a majestic black woman in the white headdress and voluminous skirts of Bahia. He lurched into one of the tables, producing shrill cries of fear and alarm. His hand closed over something before he careered on. As he neared the archway, he risked a look back. Rausch was stumbling along after him, breathing hard, and a second German had nearly caught up. The others must have gone out the front. The odds were improving.
“He’s in there,” Johnny announced to Rausch, pointing to a mound of crates that rose to the height of a man’s head.
Rausch peered about, clutching a Luger. The porters milling about outside goggled at him.
“Raus!” he snarled at them, brandishing the gun. “Get out!”
The alleyway emptied at once.
“I don’t see anything,” Rausch said warily. “Kurt—” he motioned to his bodyguard. “You go take a look.”
He watched Kurt go zigzagging towards the crates. “There’s something about you I don’t like,” he said, turning to Johnny. “If you’re pissing with me—”
He broke off because for a fleeting moment he saw the glint of light on metal. His scream died in his throat as Johnny drove the point of a fish knife into his neck behind the windpipe. The last sounds he uttered were like those of a cat trying to spit out a hairball.
It was doubtful whether he heard Johnny breathe, “That’s for my father.”
Johnny dropped to the ground.
Where was Kurt? The bodyguard had vanished behind the crates. There was a truck parked a few yards away, to the left. On his belly, with his Mauser out, Johnny wormed his way towards it.
A shadow fell across his path. He tried to bring the gun up but failed, because at the same moment he felt a shooting pain in his right arm, and his hand went numb.
“Klugsheisser,” Kurt swore. He must have seen what had happened and crept around behind the back of the truck. He had stamped his foot down hard across Johnny’s wrist.
Johnny lashed out with his good hand, trying to pull the German down, but Kurt jumped away, kicking the Mauser out of reach.
Kurt was evidently undecided whether to shoot Johnny on the spot or wait for Hossbach, who couldn’t be far away. Johnny rose onto his haunches.
“Down!” Kurt jabbed the gun at him. “Get down!”
If this
is the end, Johnny thought, I’m not going to meet it on my belly.
In his painful squatting position, he steeled himself for a desperate leap. Kurt was only a few feet away, holding the gun out in front of him like a duellist.
If I can just move fast enough...
At the instant he propelled himself forward off his aching calves, the shot rang out. It did not stop Johnny’s forward momentum. His head butted into the German’s chest, toppling him backwards. He clawed for the throat. The two men rolled together, and Johnny was half blinded by the blood that gushed over his forehead.
With a kind of wonderment, he realized that the blood was not his.
Kurt’s face was very white, paler than fish-belly white, around the red crater where one of his eyes had been.
Johnny released the body and retrieved his Mauser. When he peered over the side of the truck, a bullet zinged past his ear, punching a hole in the stucco wall of the fish market behind. The sniper must be in the window of one of the buildings across the alley. He must have a rifle, to be firing at that range. When he stuck his head out again, he was driven back by a second shot.
“Get your ass out of there, you bloody fool!” Hossbach called from somewhere away to his left. “Can’t you see it’s an ambush?”
Johnny squeezed off a couple of rounds in the general direction of the sniper. Before he made his run for safety through the archway into the market, he risked one more look. He was rewarded with a glimpse of two men at a window. One was squat and swarthy. The other was aquiline, almost elegant as he puffed his cigarette. Max Fabrikant.
As Johnny hurled himself through the doorway, a bullet kicked up the dust where his feet had just been.
“Were you trying to kill me?” Johnny challenged Max afterwards.
“The better question is, were you asking to be killed?” Max responded calmly. “Nobody told you to play fishwife with the man from Berlin.”
“He recognized me,” Johnny pointed out. “It was him or me. In any event, I had a score to settle.”
“We all have scores to settle. Some of them have to wait.”
“Why didn’t you kill Hossbach, too?”
“I didn’t come to Brazil to hunt Nazis. Nor did you. Actually, I went one better than killing Hossbach. I gave you an alibi.”
