by Robert Moss
He had been made to stand in the middle of that vertical tomb with its shiny walls, rocking lightly from side to side, wishing that he were a horse that could sleep on its feet without falling. It was the second day; he could tell that from the light outside. He was not completely alone, be-cause he could hear the clatter of the wooden clogs — the tamancos — of other prisoners in the exercise yard, and at night his neighbours would tap on the wall in a simple, interminable alphabet code. Three taps for the letter C, then sixteen for O, and he had to memorize each number, swaying on his aching legs, in order to work out that someone who believed in him just because he was here was spelling out COURAGE.
The furnishings of the cell consisted of a canvas ham-mock with the ropes removed in case the prisoner thought of hanging himself and a stinking, open latrine in the concrete floor, which he had been permitted to use only once, before the first interrogation. He had flung the useless hammock over the hole; it did not relieve the stench.
He rocked on his heels like a pendulum, back and forth, back and forth, each time closer to the wall, till his shoulder was scraping it, till he let his weight relax against it, till he was sliding down onto the floor. The clammy concrete under his backside felt better than a feather bed. He did not hear the clack of boots along the corridor, the jangle of keys against the lock; he was lost to all that.
“On your feet!” the warder screamed.
They were beating him again on his feet, his buttocks. They slapped him across the face repeatedly because he still wouldn’t wake up, and he tasted salt. They got him by his armpits and hauled him up, but when they let go, he fell down again. They kicked him in the balls, not hard enough to make him black out completely, just hard enough to make him yell and get his eyelids open.
“That’s enough!” another voice called out. “The captain’s ready for him!”
Somebody thrust some clothes into his arms — not his own but a pair of filthy pyjamas several sizes too small and tamancos that chafed his toes. They pushed him out the door, along the hallway, down the flight of metal steps that rang under their heels. Through the gaps Johnny could see the creature they kept in a cage under the stairs. There was a bald patch on the top of his head, pink and round like a monk’s tonsure, from which the matted strands of hair stuck out like straw; he had his hands over his ears, trying to shut out the clash of metal. When Johnny and his escorts reached the foot of the steps, the creature crouched against the bars of his cage, a big man whose force was spent. He stuck his palm out between the bars, begging for food or cigarettes, and the guards jeered at him.
“Emil?” Johnny croaked, not quite believing.
“Know this one, do you?” One of the guards moved to the cage, thrust his fist under Emil’s chin, and forced the head up so that Johnny could see his eyes. They rolled in their sockets, milky and unfocused as marbles.
“Come on then,” the guard taunted the man in the cage. “Say something to your friend.”
“Oh, God—” Johnny stared at the hand, still held out in supplication, at the rigid, hooked fingers, at the blackened, suppurating scabs where two of the nails had been pulled out. “I never meant this,” he mumbled in a low voice, in German. Emil Brandt gave no sign of recognition. One of the jailers spat into his cupped palm. As they shunted Johnny away, he craned his head back and saw Emil dab a finger into the spittle and sample it with his tongue. His face was full of wonder.
The interrogation room was like any other. Indifferent to day and night, windowless, the harsh blue-white glare of a high-wattage bulb stabbing at the prisoner’s eyes.
They made him stand in front of the table, and the same thin-faced policeman who had taken down his answers the first day droned through the same set of questions.
“Name?”
“Franz Gruber.”
“Birthplace?”
“Vienna, Austria.”
“Family?”
“An estranged wife. Erna Gruber.”
“Occupation?”
“Importer.”
“Religion?”
This is where they bogged down before.
“I have no religion,” Johnny said, as he had said the first time.
“That is not an answer. I am not permitted to leave any of the spaces blank.”
“Put down seeker, then,” Johnny said, remembering what he had told the cachaça priest in Recife and wondering whether Father Badό, had ended up any better than Emil.
“Pesquisador?” the thin man looked up from his paper. His face in the shadow was that of a hungry carp butting the glass of an aquarium. “Que espécie de culto é?”
“Just put it down.”
“I’ll put down Pentecostal,” the carp said brightly. “They’ve heard of that.”
The next instant he was on his feet.
“Leave us,” Honorio Schmidt said curtly, flicking a riding crop across the palm of his idle hand.
Thoughtfully the chief of the Special Police tilted the lamp away so it was no longer shining directly in Johnny’s face. He picked up a straight-backed chair and set it in front of the table.
“Sit,” he instructed Johnny, taking his own place on the other side of the table. “I believe you smoke.” He offered his leather cigar case. “Whisky?”
Johnny refused none of these offers. He suspected none of them would be repeated.
Captain Honorio pushed a tumbler of scotch across the table. Johnny took one gulp, then another. It was stupid to drink on an empty stomach, but he didn’t care. He wanted to blot out the image of Emil reduced to a dribbling idiot in a cage. His fatigue was not enough to overcome it. His hatred for Emil and what he represented was not personal enough to justify it. So he sucked at his glass and puffed at his cheroot as if he expected them to be snatched away at any moment.
“You spoke to your friend, Herr Brandt,” the policeman said softly. “What did you say to him?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“When he came to us, he was very arrogant. Like you. I put a few questions to him, and do you know what he said? He said, ‘I know but I shall not tell.’ He said he had experienced every kind of torture in many countries. Even the Chinese method. He defied me to do better. You see the result. He underrated us. I hope you do not make the same mistake. Have some more whisky.”
Johnny drank it, though his head was starting to swirl.
“I want you to know that I respect you. Not your exalted political convictions but you, the man. Others have identified you. Your little Spanish friend, the one you taught to make bombs, talks about you like a lost lover. We have documents — heaps of them — that mention a certain Pedro. We know that is one of the names you use. We even know the name you were born with, Herr Lentz.”
Johnny kept his lips glued to the glass. It was a long time since he had heard anyone address him by his family name. It hardly belonged to him now.
“I am going to ask very little of you,” Captain Honorio pursued. “A capable stenographer is waiting to take down your confession. In case you are tired, I have prepared an abbreviated version for you—” He held up the document. “All it requires is your signature. Here.” He handed over several closely typed pages.
“This is absurd,” Johnny said after several minutes. “I’ve never heard of most these people.” His prepared confession named various prominent Brazilians as members of the conspiracy. Some of the names were strange to him; others were simply bizarre. Among the alleged plotters was Colonel Plinio Nogueira, the head of the political police. Honorio Schmidt was playing some game of his own. The really puzzling thing was that the document referred to various crimes Johnny had supposedly committed in Germany.
“It’s a joke,” Johnny went on. “Even if I sign, who would believe any of it?”
“We don’t need to fuss with all of that. Here, use my pen. Then you can get some sleep between real sheets.”
Johnny struggled to reason through the fog of exhaustion and cheap whisky. What harm w
ould it do to sign? Sigrid was safe — well she must be, mustn’t she? Or else Schmidt would have mentioned her. Harry Maitland would see her through. Harry was the man he needed now. Harry would sort it all out with the government and put this cocky mock-German back in his box.
Why wasn’t Harry here?
Was it possible he didn’t know what had happened?
“You’re making a mistake,” Johnny said to his interrogator. “It’s clearly a case of mistaken identity. I’m a simple businessman. There is—”
He did not finish the sentence because Captain Honorio erupted from behind the table and kicked his chair from under him. His cheek came to rest in a puddle of whisky.
“Someone — will vouch—” Johnny groaned.
“Yes.”
“There’s someone — who will vouch—”
“For you?” Captain Honorio was engaged in polishing the toes of his boots on his prisoner’s buttocks. This appeared to give him considerable satisfaction. “Who is this simpleton? Well? I’m waiting!”
There was no response from the captive, who was lying on his belly, making a noise between a moan and a snore from which it was no longer possible to segregate syllables.
The policeman cracked his riding crop across the prisoner’s face. It drew blood but no clearer message.
“It would have been easier to sign,” Honorio said to an audience of one. He strode back to the table and pressed the buzzer.
His assistant came in and ventured a floppy salute. “Has His Excellency arrived?”
“Yes, Captain.”
“Then please show him in.”
Wolfgang Trott, who had taken to styling himself Graf von Trott in the company of Brazilians of German stock, came into the chamber at a brisk march and greeted Honorio with a floppy version of the Hitler salute.
He inspected the large body laid out on the floor and remarked, “He looks ready for shipment. Are you finished with him?”
“Not quite. He hasn’t signed yet.”
“Perhaps I might be of some slight assistance.” Captain Honorio inclined his head.
“We don’t have a great deal of time,” Trott went on. “My superiors are very anxious to spend some time with your friend. There is a German ship leaving for Hamburg on Thursday.”
“There are some formalities that must be concluded—”
“I do trust there will be no unnecessary delays.”
6
Maitland allowed himself several hours before he called Colonel Plinio.
He started with the safe house in Flamengo. It had been swept clean. You would never have guessed that the flat had been ransacked from top to bottom, unless you were looking for the telltale signs: the slight indentation in the rug where a heavy wardrobe had been moved, the floorboard that had been nailed down too firmly, so you could see the fresh impress of the hammer.
He went to the church. He dropped a few cruzeiros in the slot, took a spill from the box and lit it with a match. As he placed the burning candle in the tray beside the others, he probed the narrow crack at the back of the marble ledge. He found a sticky wad of chewing gum. Nothing for him.
He tried their other mailboxes, including the niche behind the wounded lion in the Cemetery of John the Baptist. Nothing.
He called home. Luisa sounded flustered but relieved to hear him. Some strangers had been to the house. Something to do with fixing the electric meter. That didn’t sound right. He wasn’t aware of any fault in the meter.
“What did they look like?”
“Like cops. They didn’t take anything. I never let them out of my sight.”
He drove out to Copacabana, to Hossbach’s boarding house, not sure what he hoped to accomplish. He was rewarded with a glimpse of the German sitting on the verandah with his landlady, eating sandwiches and drinking beer. This reminded Harry that it was lunchtime and that he was supposed to be helping to entertain some visiting Canadians in the private dining room at Rio Light.
When he whipped into a no-parking space on the Avenida Marechal Floriano, in front of the company building, it was past 2:00 P.M.
A spinsterish secretary followed him into his office. “You look like something the cat threw up,” she said with evident satisfaction.
“Any messages, dear?”
“The major called down three times. He didn’t sound very happy.”
Harry could hear the voice. When Major Mackenzie gave vent to emotion, his teeth rattled. It made him sound as if he were crunching ice cubes.
The pink message slips and the envelopes on the desk were all routine. The long face of Olga, Prestes’ companion, peered mournfully out of a newspaper photograph. “Have You Seen This Woman?” He wondered who had given them the picture.
He got rid of the secretary and tried Colonel Plinio’s direct number. The colonel was not in his office. Like half of Rio’s population, he was probably at home, giving up work for the beginning of Lent.
He hesitated before dialling Plinio’s home number.
If the police were holding Johnny, then the colonel must know about it — and should have called Harry. With the wave of arrests, Johnny was more and more vulnerable. Any one of his comrades might betray him under interrogation. One recourse might have been to confide completely in Colonel Plinio, who had been sniffing after Harry’s source. But Colin Bailey had ruled this out on the grounds of the lack of security inside the Brazilian police, and Harry, remembering the ambiguous role that Captain Honorio had played on the night of the coup, thoroughly agreed with him.
He had instructed Johnny that, if he were ever captured by the police, he should ask for Colonel Plinio Nogueira by name and tell him that Maitland would vouch for him as a legitimate businessman.
The fact that Plinio had not been in touch suggested either that Johnny had not been arrested or that the policeman was trying to dredge as much as he could out of him through his own delicate devices.
I’m declaring an interest and probably not gaining a bloody thing, Harry told himself.
But what choice did he have? If the Gestapo — or Max’s boys — had Johnny hidden somewhere in the city, he was going to need help to find him. And if he wasted too much time, he risked finding his man too late to save him.
Plinio answered his home telephone in person. He sounded pleasurably dozy.
“My dear Harry. Why aren’t you sleeping it off, like everyone else?”
“I’m afraid my employer doesn’t recognize hangovers.”
“Oh, yes. Your galloping major. What can I do for you?”
“I was wondering if you made any interesting arrests last night.”
“None that I heard about. The usual crop of drunks. Have you got any particular reason for asking?”
“A chum of mine seems to have turned up missing. I thought he might have had a few too many.”
“Not quite my parish. But of course I’d be happy to make inquiries. What is the name of your friend?”
“Gruber. Franz Gruber.”
“He’s German, then?”
“Austrian, actually. He’s rather good on cigars.”
“It will be a pleasure to make his acquaintance. Can you give me a description, just in case?”
Harry did his best to oblige, not leaving out the priest’s disguise, which seemed to appeal to the colonel’s sense of humour. He wondered, as he talked, whether Plinio was toying with him. He had just hung up when Major Mackenzie barrelled into his office.
“Jolly nice of you to grace us with your presence, Maitland!”
“I’m sorry about the lunch—”
“I think we ought to have a chat about your future with this company.” The major jammed his monocle into his face.
Harry got up from his desk. “Certainly, sir. Perhaps at a more convenient time—”
“It’s convenient now, thank you very much! Two buses damaged beyond repair by your Brazilians,” he snarled, “and no sign of compensation!”
Harry didn’t dare look at him for fear of burs
ting out laughing. He looked out the window instead — and saw several men in uniform engaged in trying to hook up the Beast to a tow truck.
“Bloody cheek!”
“Are you talking to me, Maitland?”
“No, sir. Some idiots are trying to tow my car away.”
“I gave strict instructions that the street in front of the building is to be kept clear,” the Major said primly. “Since the bomb scare, you know.”
Which would have been a damn sight more than a scare if I hadn’t scotched it, Harry thought.
“But that’s my car!”
“We all live by the same rules here,” Mackenzie said, with pure malice. “But if you’re worried about your paintwork, I dare say someone will drive it to the lot for you.”
“I’ll do it myself.” Harry was rapidly losing his sense of humour.
“No, you won’t. We have a few larger things to settle. Agatha!”
The spinster secretary tripped in.
“Mr. Maitland is going to give you his car keys. There we are. Be a good girl and take them down to Jaime, won’t you? Tell him Mr. Maitland will pay the fine when he comes down.”
The secretary smirked.
“What fine?” Harry was ready to explode.
“Company policy. If you spent any time at all in the office, you might have heard about it.”
Maitland sighed and slumped back into his chair.
God, I’m tired, and I’ve got a slab of pig iron jouncing up and down above my eyes, and I’ve lost Johnny, and I have to listen to this idiot preach about company manners.
I wonder if Jaime can even drive.
He craned his head round so he could see down into the street, two floors below. The company detective, all smiles, was climbing into the Beast. He made a little bow to the passers-by.
“Maitland. I say, Maitland! Are you listening to me?”
“Oh, yes, sir. Every word.”
“You could show a bit more—”
The next word was no doubt “respect,” since the major’s style was nothing if not predictable, but it was choked off by a roll of thunder that blew out the window behind Harry’s head and set the desk shaking.
