by Robert Moss
The shock of the explosion threw the major off his chair. He picked himself up, minus the monocle, and rushed to the window.
The Beast was a pile of junk metal. The headless trunk in the front seat was recognizable as human only because of the arm that dangled over the side of the car. The other arm was gone. The bystanders were scattered across the pavement like fallen leaves. A security guard was doubled up against a lamppost, heaving his guts out.
“They p-put a bomb in your car,” the major stammered.
Maitland was picking splinters of glass out of his hair. He could feel a trickle of blood down the back of his neck.
They could have done it with a timer, he thought. They must have planted it somewhere else. It was too public here, and besides, he’d only been in the building half an hour. Unless they had simply lobbed the thing from a passing car. He would have to talk to the people outside. Either way, he was being followed by someone who meant to stop him.
He experienced the odd sense of calm that comes at the heart of a crisis.
“I don’t think you’ll have any trouble stopping people from parking outside,” he remarked to Major Mackenzie, who stared at him as if he had gone utterly insane.
7
They had Johnny swinging on an iron bar. It ran inside his knees, biting into the flesh. They had his wrists and his ankles tied together behind his back, so that if he relaxed his grip, he spun round like a top until his head ached.
He tried to think of anything except the questions they repeated over and over.
Where was the girl known as Sigrid or Firelei?
Where were Prestes and his woman?
What were his relations with Harry Maitland?
He tried to imagine himself on the Wannsee with Sigrid in the time before his world blew up in his face.
He was dimly aware that they had brought him a visitor. “Very colourful,” the man remarked to the police captain. “How are you, Johnny?” he addressed the prisoner in perfect German, with a trace of a Silesian accent. “How do you like the parrot’s perch?”
Johnny’s leg muscles relaxed for an instant, and he saw Wolfgang Trott leering at him upside down.
“We have devised certain refinements that may be of use to you,” Trott remarked to Honorio Schmidt.
He took something from his pocket; Johnny couldn’t make out what it was.
“Would you have such a thing as a hammer?”
Schmidt went to the door and called out an order. An athletic young man stripped to the waist came in with the hammer. Honorio and his guest both looked fondly at his pectorals.
“Cut him down and I’ll show you,” Trott said.
Honorio nodded. Tarzan untied Johnny’s bonds and let him fall onto the concrete.
“Now you see—” Trott held up a small convex disk of black plastic. “You fit the cap over the pupil, like so.” He jammed his thumb and forefinger into the socket of Johnny’s right eye, forcing the lids apart. He inserted the cap, and the light died.
“You must do this very tenderly. Like an act of love,” Trott continued his lecture. “Otherwise you will blind the suspect and very quickly drive him out of his wits.”
He tapped very gently, and it seemed to Johnny that a red-hot poker was being driven through the eyeball into his brain.
“Now we’ll test the results,” Trott said. “Which question is at the top of your list?”
Honorio was on the point of replying when there was a rap on the door, and a sergeant in a red cap came in and saluted.
“I ordered no interruptions!” Honorio screamed.
“I’m sorry, sir, but—”
“Get out!”
A dapper figure in a wide-brimmed panama hat tripped around the sergeant, preceded by a white cloud of cigar smoke.
“I wouldn’t dream of interrupting your sport, my dear Honorio, but could you possibly spare me a minute?”
“This is not your department.” Schmidt glowered at Colonel Plinio.
“That’s precisely what I wish to discuss. Preferably among Brazilians.” He cocked an eyebrow at Wolfgang Trott. “We are still on Brazilian territory, aren’t we?”
Trott, red-faced, seemed to be looking for a place to hide the hammer.
“Graf von Trott is here in an advisory capacity,” Schmidt said woodenly.
“Quite so, quite so. But you will forgive us, I trust, Herr Trott?”
Trott clicked his heels. “Let me know when it is convenient,” he mumbled to Honorio Schmidt.
“You mean, to take delivery of your property?”
Trott’s embarrassment increased. He rushed out of the interrogation room.
Blood was running out of Johnny’s eye.
“Get that seen to straight away, will you?” Plinio ordered
Schmidt’s half-naked assistant, who led the prisoner out once his boss gave the nod.
“So you found out about the deportation order,” Honorio said when the two of them were alone. Plinio was perched delicately on the edge of a straight-backed chair, his hands folded over the ivory knob of his cane, his trousers hitched up a fraction to preserve their immaculate crease.
“You were in rather a hurry, weren’t you?”
“I have the chief’s approval, and the justice minister’s signature. It’s out of your province.”
“But my dear fellow, it was never in my province. That’s where you made a big mistake. You’ve overstepped your authority. Political information is my bailiwick. Your people are merely mechanics, employed to assist in extracting it. This prisoner — this Gruber — belongs to me.”
“It’s my operation from start to finish. If you don’t like it, you can go and talk to the chief.”
It was no secret in Rio that the chief of police was much closer, personally and politically, to Captain Honorio Schmidt than to the colonel. The chief was a frequent dinner guest at the German Embassy.
“I must congratulate you,” Plinio said urbanely. “I beg your pardon?”
“I was thinking that your spiritual sessions with Gruber must have been stunningly successful, if you’re ready to turn him over to our German friends so quickly. May I see the interrogation reports?”
They went to Honorio’s office. Half an hour later, several long, closely typed pages were produced.
“During the subversive events that lately deflagrated in this capital,” the document opened in the recorder’s rotund style, “the subject claimed to be a merchant of tobaccos, living in sybaritic luxury in the Southern Zone.”
“There’s nothing here,” Plinio pronounced after a quick glance. “He’s told you nothing.”
“Our investigation is still at a preliminary stage—”
“And you’re putting him on a boat to Hamburg on Thursday!”
“You’re well informed.”
Colonel Plinio saw no reason to disclose that his source was the muscular young man whom he had sent out of the interrogation room. One of Plinio’s detectives had caught him engaging in acts of public lewdness with other men among the dunes at the Leme end of Copacabana beach. The colonel had spared the young Special Police athlete any embarrassment in return for occasional scraps of information.
“What I’d like to know,” Plinio pursued, “is what Herr Trott promised you. A death’s head tiepin? An audience with Himmler? Or is it a matter of something you both wish to hide?”
“You’re being childishly offensive.” Honorio’s jug ears, never his best feature, had turned bright pink. “You can read the deportation order for yourself.” He pushed it across the desk. “It is a perfectly straightforward matter. Lentz, alias Gruber, alias Pedro and other names, entered Brazil illegally, using forged papers, and is being deported to his native country, where he is wanted for murder.”
“I see.” Plinio found the deportation order more informative than the interrogation report. It seemed the Gestapo had quite a dossier on the man Harry Maitland had described as his friend. He was wanted on several counts of murder. “I’ll tel
l you what we’ll do,” the colonel went on. “We will settle this like civilized men. You let me have the prisoner for a few days, and I’ll see if he wants to sing to me. Then you and Trott can play with him as long as you wish. Agreed?”
“I told you, I have special authority—”
“I have a few friends of my own, Honorio. Shall we call one of them?”
He scrawled a telephone number over Schmidt’s pristine blotter. The captain studied it. It was one of the direct lines to the palace.
Honorio accepted that for the moment he was outgunned.
They strolled out into the courtyard. As his escorts took delivery of the prisoner, Colonel Plinio spotted Honorio’s athletic assistant, still shirtless, hurrying towards the garage.
“Do you really think you should let your playmates run around during working hours without their clothes?” Plinio asked pleasantly.
That evening, Colonel Plinio received Maitland at home. The house was out beyond the golf club, modest but newly painted and full of happy children, who were shooed out of the sitting room but peeked in through the crack in the door at the tall, sandy-haired stranger.
The colonel proposed champagne or cognac.
“I drink nothing else at home,” he declared. “Life has taught me to know my blood group.”
The brandy, a very superior Hine, arrived chilled to the point where it had lost all bouquet. Harry was surprised by the colonel’s lapse. His taste in all other respects was impeccable.
“You’ll find it rides easier in this heat,” Plinio remarked, reading his guest’s expression. “It would be a crime to dilute it, don’t you agree?”
Harry suppressed his misgivings. The cognac slipped down smoothly, all right, but he thought the flavour was barely distinguishable from that of Coca-Cola. It might, of course, have been his palate that was at fault; he was hardly in the mood for a wine tasting.
“I found your friend Gruber,” Plinio suddenly announced. “He actually asked for you by name.”
“Where is he?”
“At this precise moment, he’s on his back in the infirmary. I’m afraid Honorio didn’t lose any time before putting him on the grill.”
“Is he badly hurt?”
“He’ll live. At least, as long as he’s in Brazil.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Gestapo wants him sent to Germany. The justice minister has actually signed the deportation order. I saw it myself.”
Harry froze. Deportation to Germany was a death sentence.
“We’ve got to stop it,” he said. “We’ll go to the president if we have to. Dammit, Johnny just saved your government. You ought to be giving him a medal.”
“That wouldn’t make him very popular with his Communist friends,” Plinio observed, pleased that Maitland had admitted what he had guessed from the first phone call — that this Gruber was the agent Harry had refused to identify.
“Plinio, I want him out of jail tonight. It’s not much to ask.”
“It may be more than you think. I doubt if he’s fit to travel. But in any event, my hands are tied. My chief gave me a direct order this afternoon. I am to deliver your friend into the custody of Herr Trott on Friday.”
“Then call the palace. Go to the president. Explain the situation to him.”
“The president is in Porto Alegre. And if I bypass my chief, he’ll have me thrown out of my office.”
Harry bit his lip. It was obvious why the Gestapo wanted Johnny back in Germany: they wanted to pay him back in their own sweet time for what he had done to Willi Rausch and milk him for whatever he had to yield on comrades who were still at large. Why Plinio’s superiors were so accommodating was rather more of a mystery. The most likely explanation was that money had changed hands. But it was also possible that someone high up was scared that Johnny knew something that could destroy him, something about the plot to kill the president.
I could try to mobilize Sir Evelyn and the embassy, Harry thought. Cable Colin and ask him to get the Foreign Office to make a fuss. It would all involve time and bluster and the inevitable leaks — which would pretty much guarantee that Johnny’s cover would be blown for good.
No, there was only one satisfactory solution.
He explained it to Plinio, who professed to be scandalized. After another brandy and two glasses of champagne, however, the colonel allowed that he might be swayed by the prospect of a handsome contribution to his personal insurance plan.
“With all this buzz and ferment,” he conceded, “a man in my position can never tell where he’s going to be next week. I sometimes think there would be worse places to come to roost than a cottage in one of the sunnier home counties. But of course, England is so expensive—”
They shook hands on it.
“I don’t suppose you found out who wrecked my car,” Harry said before they parted company.
“I am afraid that for once, the city is mute. It is a most unusual thing.” But he confided that he had assigned detectives to keep a discreet watch on both Herr Trott and Engineer Hossbach.
8
At night, in the infirmary, he woke screaming from a nightmare in which they were trying to gouge out his eyes and screamed again when he realized that his sight was gone. The orderly came running to quiet him.
“There,” he murmured, loosening the bandage, so that Johnny could see a stripe of light under his left eye. “There.” The right eye was heavily padded.
He lay back in the dank sheets and listened. He heard a train whistle and the thrum of pistons from somewhere nearby and, from nearer still, what sounded like amateurs’ night on the radio. Except that they would never sing “The Hymn of the Poor Brazilian” on the government radio. That was marginally less popular with the regime than the Internationale.
The singing stopped, and a rotund, humorous voice rang out across the exercise yard the prisoners had dubbed Red Square.
“Tonight, dear friends and comrades, Radio Libertadora will instruct you in the high metaphysical Theory of the Two Suppositions, according to which everything must turn out for the best. If you will only learn this theory, you will understand that there is no reason at all to be apprehensive. None whatsoever. We will either, primo, be released, or segundo, remain in jail. If the first, well and good. If the second, we will be tried and either primo, be acquitted or segundo, be condemned. If the second—”
Johnny’s attention wandered. He wondered why the guards did not interrupt the prisoners’ entertainment. Security at this prison was obviously rather more relaxed than in the barracks of the Special Police. They called the place the Pavilhao dos Primarios, which made it sound like a primary school.
The absurd-sounding name deepened the black irony of his situation. The same men who were driving Emil insane were planning to hand him over to the Gestapo, trussed and basted like a chicken. Yet they would have been the ones in the cells — as prisoners, not jailers — if he had not ensured the failure of the revolution. He knew he could not afford to dwell on this. He thought of Harry with his freckled, open face, so boyish and so brave.
Whatever lies they had told him in the interrogation room, Sigrid must be safe. Harry had promised that. Harry would keep his word.
He told himself, Harry will get me out of this.
“—if we are executed,” the rotund voice was rounding up, “we will either primo, go to Heaven, or segundo, to the other place. If the first, well and good. If the second, we will meet all our friends. It could happen to anyone.”
There was laughter and heckling from the windows across the yard. It darkened Johnny’s mood; this solidarity did not include him.
In the morning he persuaded the orderly to change the bandage so he could see out of one eye, at least. The coffee they brought him for breakfast was sickly sweet, probably heavily laced with bromides. He tossed it back all the same. But he couldn’t swallow the bread. He tried to divert himself by moulding a set of tiny chessmen out of the crumbs. A wave of fatigue rose up and engulfe
d him before he had finished. When he rose out of it, he found a swarm of cockroaches devouring the last of his pieces.
From the window of the infirmary he could see the coppery glint of water under palms and recognized the Mangue canal, which he had first explored with Nilo on his tour of the city’s low life. Nilo, the millionaire terrorist, had survived the wreckage better than he.
He dozed off again and was roused by the clatter of wooden clogs, to find one of the faxinas — common criminals whom the guards allowed to perform services for tips — hovering at the foot of his bed.
“These are for you.” He thrust a brown paper bag into Johnny’s arms.
Johnny looked inside and found two packs of cigarettes, a clean shirt, a loose pair of cotton trousers and a pair of canvas shoes.
“I don’t have any money—”
“It’s taken care of,” the trustie winked at him. The lumps on his bald cranium would have made a phrenologist’s day. “Harry says you’re to meet him outside at ten tonight.”
“I don’t understand—”
The faxina winked again and gestured towards the double doors that led to the prison pharmacy. “Through there.”
Johnny still did not understand, and hardly dared to hope. He slapped a hand to his wrist, to check the watch that was no longer there.
“Wait,” he said helplessly. “How will I know when it’s ten?”
“It’s when the radio starts, isn’t it?” The trustie shrugged and shuffled off in advance of an orderly.
He was alone in the infirmary when a shrill whistle from across the exercise yard, followed by rhythmic clapping, announced that Radio Libertadora was on the air.
He eased himself out of bed, put on his new shoes and hobbled over to the double doors. The pharmacy was deserted, too. The outside door was secured, but the key had been left in the lock.
It was raining outside. The guard who should have been stationed in front of the building was probably inside, keeping dry.
