by Robert Moss
2
In the early hours of Sunday morning, a man on a motor cycle sped through the sprawling industrial zone that lay between Recife and the big new army barracks at Socorro, out near the railyards. The road was almost deserted. Rounding a bend, the courier saw the rear end of a truck pulled up a quarter of a mile ahead. He had almost caught up to it when the driver pulled out into the middle of the road without bothering to signal. The driver was a real road hog; when the motorcyclist tried to pass, he swung his wheel viciously, blocking off the left lane. The courier sounded his horn and tried to get round the other side. He was almost abreast of the driver’s cabin when the truck lurched over to the right, forcing him off the road. His front wheel hit a ditch, and he flew out of his saddle, landing a dozen feet away in a heap of broken bones.
The truck screeched to a halt. A trim man in a pearl grey suit jumped out of the passenger side and made straight for the leather pouch that hung from the saddle of the motorbike. He found what he wanted immediately: a letter in a plain manila envelope. He scanned the contents under his flashlight, refolded the letter and tucked it away inside his breast pocket. He produced a second letter from his other inside pocket and placed it in the messenger’s pouch. Several men who had been concealed in the back of the truck stood around, waiting for him to complete this operation. One of them, a huge mulatto dressed like a stevedore, was holding a Thompson submachine gun. In his hands it looked like a toy.
“Give me that,” the man in grey ordered. He took the Thompson and gestured towards the motorbike. “See if it still works.”
The black man tried to kick life into the motorcycle. The engine spluttered and died.
“Enough,” the man in charge said impatiently. “Take my car. They won’t know the difference. Ask for Lieutenant Lamartino. You’ve got that?”
“Yes, sir. Lieutenant Lamartino. What if someone else is on duty?”
“Say you’ve got a message from your sister.”
The mulatto smiled broadly.
“There won’t be any problems,” the man in grey assured him. “Most of their officers are in town getting drunk.”
There was a big guitar festival in Recife that night, and the officers of the garrison had hired a special bus. They were not likely to hurry back before they had made a thorough inspection of the cantinas and the bawdy houses.
Besides, the regional army commander had been summoned to Rio to attend some meeting at the War Ministry.
“Put the motorcycle in the back of the truck,” the man in grey ordered his other men.
“What about him?” one of them asked, pointing to the motionless courier.
“Get rid of it.”
“Yes, Colonel Falcāo.”
At eight that Sunday morning, the duty officer at the Socorro barracks, Captain Mindelo, looked out his window at battalion headquarters and saw a crowd of soldiers with their caps back to front. He recognized some of the usual loudmouths, sergeants and corporals who had been bitching since word got around that they were going to be dumped when their five-year terms expired next month. He had been keeping an eye on them since that incident on the railroad. A week or two before, a platoon had been sent from the barracks to clear the track around the Crab’s Bend. The Communists had called another strike and produced horde of women and children to sit along the railbed an stop the trains from getting through. The platoon commander, Lieutenant Santa Rosa, wasn’t going to stand for any nonsense. He ordered the civilians to clear the track This inspired a volley of catcalls and obscene gestures. So he told his men to fire into the air. Shots rang out, and one of them dropped Santa Rosa. He got a bullet between his shoulder blades and died on his way to hospital. The Reds put it around that he was killed by one of his own men. Captain Mindelo didn’t know whether to believe this or not — the c.o. had told him in confidence that the fatal bullet was from a pistol, not a rifle — but it did not help anybody nerves. He had received an anonymous letter warning him that any officer who stood against the people would shame the fate of Santa Rosa. Some of his own company sergeants played deaf when he issued commands, so that he had to repeat them in a louder voice, trying not to show rage — or fear. Now the time had come to draw the line.
“What the hell is going on?” he yelled out the window.
“Everardo!” The shout came from one of his friend Lieutenant Lamartino. They had served together in São Paulo. “Você e dos nossos! You’re one of us! Join the people! We’re counting on you!”
“Have you taken leave of your senses?” the captain shouted back. He was making some quick calculations. He had ten or twelve men in the HQ, including a couple of officers he could rely on. So long as they could hold out, he controlled the arsenal. He ordered his people to load their weapons and cover all sides of the building.
Then he strolled out onto the steps with a swagger stick in the crook of his elbow.
“You’re hung over,” he said to his friend the lieutenant. “Or still drunk. Go and sleep it off.”
A private soldier drove his rifle butt into Mindelo’s stomach, and the captain rolled in the dust.
The soldier took aim.
“No!” Lamartino intervened. “Isso não se faz assim! It’s not done that way!”
Captain Mindelo got to his feet, brushing the dirt from his tunic.
“Kill him like Santa Rosa!” the rebel private urged. “Then the rest will surrender.”
“You belong with us,” Lamartino appealed to the captain. “The government has fallen. Haven’t you heard? Why fight for a lost cause?”
“Go fuck yourself.”
Captain Mindelo backed into the headquarters building and was actually inside the door before the shooting started.
He tried the telephone. To his amazement it worked. There was a list of emergency numbers, and he worked through them in sequence. There was no answer from army HQ or the governor’s office. Of course, the general was in Rio, and the governor was traveling in Europe. But you would expect someone to pick up their phones. Perhaps Lamartino was not lying. Perhaps the revolution had already triumphed. Nervous and frustrated, Captain Mindelo tried the third number on the list. It belonged to the secretary for public safety.
To Mindelo’s relief, his call was answered on the very first ring. The secretary himself was on the other end of the line.
“Falcão.”
“Colonel — Your Excellency — this is Captain Mindelo. I am the duty officer at Socorro.”
“Well?”
“I’m sorry to disturb you, but there is a revolt in progress.”
“How long can you hold out?”
“How long—”
“Give me your exact dispositions,” Falcão snapped.
“It’s hard to be exact. We are surrounded. Except for the arsenal and the headquarters itself, the barracks is in their hands.”
“You will soon receive reinforcements. You will hold on for two hours. You hear me?”
“Yes, Colonel Falcão. Two hours. And then?”
“Then give them whatever they want.”
Colonel Falcão, the secretary for public safety of the staff of Pernambuco, was no stranger to revolt. As a young army cadet, he had taken part in the rising in Rio in 1922. Two years later, he had been in Sao Paulo, in the thick of another insurrection. He had joined the revolution that brought Vargas to power and played guerrilla saboteur, cutting telephone lines to stop the loyalists from calling in reinforcements. Twice a loser, once a winner. Thanks to helpful tip from his friend Plinio Nogueira in Rio, confirmed by news of the mutiny in Natal, Falcão was confident that this time he would even the score — and win bigger than before.
As soon as he received the first telephone call from Captain Mindelo, he rushed around to the home of the acting governor, who came to the door in person in his freshly starched pyjamas as if this were the most ordinary Sunday of the year.
Falcão informed the acting governor that a revolution was being attempted and demanded to know what measures
he meant to take.
The poor man hesitated and blinked through his thick lenses and burbled something about how there must be no shooting.
“You’re under arrest,” Colonel Falcão told him.
Within the hour he had locked up two other members of the state cabinet — the secretaries of justice and finance, old adversaries of the colonel — on the grounds that they were secret Communist sympathizers.
He talked to Mindelo every half hour. Amazingly, the rebels had still not cut the telephone lines. Shortly before 11:00 A.M., the colonel learned from Mindelo that the mutineers, several hundred of them, were on their way to the city, accompanied by some of the strikers from the railroad.
Commending himself on his sense of irony, he decided to meet them in the Largo da Paz — Peace Plaza — a large and leafy public square that lay athwart the main road from the barracks to the city centre. Falcão had mustered a hybrid force consisting of a couple of companies of loyalist troops from the old Soledad barracks downtown, uniformed policemen and plainclothes detectives, officers of the merchant marine, firemen and streetcar drivers, and a few sporting gentlemen from the Planters’ Club. Falcão’s men were outnumbered by the rebels and their armed hangers-on. But the colonel knew, as the rebels did not, that thousands of government troops with howitzers and heavy machine guns were already approaching the outskirts of Recife. They came from garrisons in the interior and from as far away as Paraiba and Maceo and João Pessoa. The. colonel had wired for help as soon as he received confirmation of the rising in Natal.
In the Largo da Paz a police captain shouted at the rebels through a loudhailer, offering terms of surrender. The police had set up barricades, blocking off the exits that led to the city centre. The mutineers responded with bullets. Rebel troops ran into the church on a corner of the square and climbed up inside the bell tower to take potshots at. Falcão’s men behind their barricades. Others set to digging, trenches across the middle of Peace Plaza.
“Shoot to kill,” Falcão ordered his men.
He withdrew to a modest hotel nearby to draft a radio message. This was part of his bargain with Colonel Plinio Nogueira, who had supplied such gratifyingly accurate information on the Communist underground in Recife right down to the location of the secret radio transmitter hidden in the church of the activist priest the locals had dubbed Father Badό.
“The vast majority of the suffering masses of Recife have risen as one man,” he scribbled. “Don’t fail us now!” He crossed out the second sentence as too plaintive, and substituted, “The hour of victory is at hand!”
He added a few lines and signed the message with the code name of the chief of the regional directorate of the Communist party: “Cato.” Cato had left his lodgings in the middle of the night, but Falcão’s detectives had kept him under constant surveillance. The colonel was confident the Communist leader would be silenced before he could send a contradictory signal.
Father Badό could hardly object. At that moment, he was enjoying the hospitality of a cell in the House of Detention that the other prisoners described, with reason, as the Matchbox.
3
In Rio it was a perfect Sunday morning. There were sailboats out in the bay. They looked like flying fish beside the gleaming white bulk of the yacht Slidell, where the Yankee millionaire Courtland Bull gave parties that had filled the gossip columns for more than a week. By the pool at the Copacabana Palace Hotel, a circle of habitués honed their appetites on seasoned Scotch whisky. The president was at the golf club, in excellent spirits despite the fact that he had managed to land his ball in a sand trap for the third time in as many holes. Roberto Sisson, navy captain (retired) and honorary president of the illegal National Liberation Alliance, was in a less ebullient mood at the House of Detention. Together with a hundred and fifty other suspected “subversives,” he had been arrested in a dawn raid by the police. The raid had not stirred a ripple on the placid surface of Carioca life. Many families were still abed, sleeping off Saturday’s feijoada. The men of the house went to the door in their freshly pressed pyjamas to take in the newspapers. The headlines were devoted to new attacks on the mayor by the local version of the League for Decency, which was demanding a halt to casino gambling, and to Mussolini’s exploits in darkest Abyssinia. News of the remarkable happenings in the north would not reach the populace at large until late in the day.
Johnny was down at the marina waiting for Sigrid. He had hired a skiff and was checking the rigging. He had a day planned for them that would match the weather, a day of lolling about among the islands, a picnic lunch with some cold white wine, another chance to revisit that afternoon on the Wannsee that first brought them together as man and woman.
There she was now, pushing back her windblown hair with the palm of her hand, casually turned out in a cream cotton jersey and a navy skirt, padding along in rubber-soled shoes. She stood on the edge of the jetty looking down at him, her expression unreadable behind her dark glasses.
“Did you forget our lunch?” he shouted up at her. “I brought the wine!”
“We’re not going!” she called back.
He grabbed hold of the capstan and swung himself up onto the pier.
“What’s the matter?”
“Haven’t you heard?” That little vertical line like an exclamation point, appeared between her eyebrows. “It’s begun.”
“Where?”
“In the north. In Recife. There was a radio message.”
“And?”
“You really don’t know?”
Harry might have warned me, he thought. No, he corrected himself, Harry was right. It was better that his surprise was real. Harry had hinted that he was going to take steps to “move things along.” Johnny could make a fairly good guess at what those steps had been. A word with a government minister, or more likely a friend in the police. An agent provocateur in the north sending false signals in the name of Prestes or Emil...the revolution had started according to Colin Bailey’s timetable, not Moscow’s.
“The police are out in force all over the city,” Sigrid reported. “They say the president is going to declare a state of siege. Many people have been arrested.”
“Emil? Prestes?”
“No. The leadership is intact. There’s going to be an emergency council. They told me to get you.”
The high command of the revolution assembled that night in a doctor’s house on Rua Correia de Oliveira. Emil and Nilo were late and Prestes passed the time while the others were waiting for them hunched over a rosewood secretary, scribbling notes to old friends. Johnny glimpsed the contents of one of these messages, addressed to Andre Trifino Correia, the adjutant of a battalion in Minas Gerais: “We are about to have the revolution. Here we cannot wait longer than two or three days. I am counting on you.”
Miranda paced up and down, slapping a balled fist into the palm of his other hand, while Verdi lolled on the sofa, working his way through a bottle of vinho tinto. They looked as if they had been up all night.
There was a whistle from the lookout in the street, and a few seconds later Sigrid came through the door. She had tied a scarf around her head and wore a man’s loose jacket and culottes.
“Where’s Emil?” she asked Johnny.
“Still not here.”
Verdi rolled off the sofa. “Is there word from Moscow?” he asked her eagerly.
“The message is for Emil,” she said crisply.
So she had come from the radio man. Johnny could picture the scene: a wireless buried under the floorboards somewhere in a house on a hill, carried upstairs at night when they wanted to transmit. It wouldn’t be powerful enough to reach Moscow Centre. They would try to get messages through via Youamtorg in Montevideo. They must have been signalling frantically since the first news had come through from the north.
“You can give it to me.” Verdi smiled at Sigrid, holding out his hand.
She looked at Johnny, over the Argentinian’s shoulder. Johnny said, “What difference can it
make?”
“As you like.” She took out a folded sheet of paper. Verdi pounced on it.
Johnny followed her out into the hall. “What about Max?” he whispered. “Is he going to cancel the operation?”
She looked at him so sharply he wished he had not asked the question. “What makes you think Max would tell me?” she countered. “Besides, it’s not his decision.”
“Of course,” he agreed. “Are you coming back tonight?”
“I can’t say.”
He suddenly feared for her, racing back and forth in the new car — the Opel — between the doctor’s house and the radio man and Max’s bolthole, with the police out in droves.
He said, “For God’s sake, be careful.”
There was the hint of a smile when she replied, “You’re a fine one to talk.”
Their lips brushed. Then she was gone into the night.
“You see?” Verdi’s voice rose shrilly from the living room. “They’ve got their heads screwed on right in Moscow! They don’t want this thing to go off at half cock!”
He read the contents of the message out loud. It struck Johnny as the reverse of a clear directive. The centre requested more detailed information on the progress of the revolt in the north and recommended that Emil or his nominee should return to Moscow as quickly as possible to review the situation. Yet the message allowed Emil plenty of rope to hang himself if he chose. “We have full confidence in the judgment of the South American bureau,” it concluded.
There were a couple of low whistles from the lookout, and then Emil came barrelling in with Nilo at his heels. It struck Johnny that they were both in suspiciously good spirits.
“Sorry we’re late,” Emil said briskly. “Let’s get to it!”
The revolt was spreading like wildfire in the north, he reported. He had been in radio contact with Cato, in Recife, and Bangu, in Bahia. It would take the government days to mobilize sufficient troops to retake the coastal cities. If the conspirators struck in Rio now, those reinforcements would never be sent.
