Carnival of Spies

by Robert Moss

  “Johnny!”

  The call came from a taxi with its light off and the engine running.

  Harry Maitland opened the back door and helped him inside.

  “Here. Put this on.”

  Harry handed him a coat and hat. Johnny felt the weight of a gun or a bottle in the pocket. There were a hundred questions he needed to ask.

  “Sigrid—”

  “She’s safe. I promise.” Then Harry put a finger to his lips and they rode in silence to the Pedro II station.

  The night train for Sao Paulo was actually on time; the vintage engine had a splendid copper-bound smokestack, enormous driving wheels and an old-fashioned cowcatcher in front.

  An official whose uniform would not have shamed a field marshal inspected their tickets at the gate. He cast his eye over Johnny’s attire.

  “I profoundly regret that the Senhor is not permitted to board the train.”

  Johnny tensed and thrust a hand into his pocket.

  “Is there some problem?” Maitland asked calmly.

  “It is a company regulation. Gentlemen passengers must be correctly dressed.” He looked pointedly at Johnny’s bare neck.

  “Muito boa,” Harry rose to the occasion.

  He finished in his holdall and produced a Winchester tie. It looked rather loud to Johnny with its bold stripes of red, brown and blue. But Harry winked at him, and he knotted it hastily around his neck.

  The station official smiled his approval and ushered them through.

  “I knew there must be a reason I’ve held on to that thing,” Harry said when they were comfortably ensconced in a Pullman.

  “I don’t imagine I look much like someone who went to an English public school,” Johnny remarked, pulling the tie away from his throat.

  “Perhaps not,” Harry smiled. “But I have the feeling we’re classmates just the same.”

  12 – Manhunt

  Like a woman, a horse does not

  like the weak; still less does it

  respect them.

  -ALVISI.

  Aphorisms

  1

  From among the flowering trees above the house, a sound rang out like the clang of a blacksmith’s hammer striking the anvil. The hammer fell again, and Puck, the roly-poly tomcat who had adopted Harry and Luisa, jumped off the pillow and bellied underneath the bed for cover, the way he did during thunderstorms.

  Luisa laughed at his timidity but got out of bed to check, for the third or fourth time, that all the doors were locked. The call of the ferreiro, the blacksmith bird, was an evil omen; it presaged violence, the clash of metal. And Ivan had warned that the greatest danger to both of them would come in this season, in the darkening of the moon.

  She hated to be alone in the big, echoing house. Her whole family could have fitted into the kitchen wing, at the back, where she slept in a little room whose window overlooked her herbal garden. Harry had called from the office to say he was going to be away for a few days to look at horses at his ranch in the south. She had never set eyes on this estate, but he had once showed her photographs of a cluster of neat, whitewashed bungalows and himself in a funny round cap and white breeches, drinking a stirrup cup in a circle of horsemen dressed in the same outlandish style. In one of the pictures was a gate and a painted sign that displayed a bushy-tailed animal she had never seen. It was a red fox, he explained. One of his partners had been a Master of the Hunt in Somerset, which was somewhere in his own country, on the other side of the ocean, where it was the custom for gentlemen to pursue these small, clever animals on horseback.

  Luisa asked, “Do you eat them?”

  “Of course not,” Harry said, in high indignation.

  “Then it’s a despacho. A sacrifice.”

  Harry chuckled and gave up trying to explain, leaving her puzzled and somewhat frightened, because these Englishmen were obviously homesick for their own country, which meant that one day, inevitably, Harry would leave her for the strange place beyond the waters where men wore red coats and called them pink.

  Dudley, Harry’s German shepherd, was lying in the coolest spot he could find, at the end of the hall. He gave a tremendous yawn as she padded out of the bedroom but dragged himself to his feet and came puffing along behind her. Dudley belonged in a different climate. The heat sapped all of his strength, and every time he went outside, she had to spend twenty minutes picking the ticks out of his coat. Still, his presence was comforting, especially tonight.

  She checked the bolts on the front door and peeped out the bay window. The neighbours’ lights were out, and the sky hung down like a black shroud. She could not see as far as the low stone wall at the end of the lawn. Behind her, Dudley staggered around in narrowing circles, ready to flop down.

  She told herself not to be such a child, scared to be alone in the dark. She switched off the light and called the dog from the hallway.

  “Come, Dudley. You can sleep with me.”

  But Dudley did not obey. He stiffened. A low rumble came from his throat. Then he started barking, a deep-chested, serious bark guaranteed to deter all but the most determined visitors. He woke up the curupião in its cage on the verandah, and it tried to mimic him.

  “Dudley?”

  Hackles raised, the dog was nudging and pawing the front door. Luisa turned on the porch light and went back to the window. Beyond the pale circle of light, the darkness was impenetrable.

  The dog would not be quieted.

  It’s an animal, she told herself, resolved to be sensible. A squirrel or a stray cat. Or even an armadillo. She had nearly tripped on one of them once, tending her garden.

  Dudley’s growls alternated with whimpers of frustration. He butted at the door so hard that the glass in the panels shook.

  “All right.” She unlatched the door. “Go seek.”

  He barged past her and charged off into the night, his hackles so high he seemed to have sprouted a hump. The air was full of invisible midges. She brushed her arm across her face and retreated inside the screen door.

  The dog was barking and snarling. He was going to wake people up.

  “Dudley!”

  The barking ended with a yelp, followed by a ragged, high-pitched whimper. Then nothing. The stillness that descended was unnerving. She listened carefully and could hear only the whine of mosquitoes, the feathery thud of the moths assaulting the lamp on the porch, the murmur of the wind among the leaves.

  “Dudley?”

  Nothing. Her hand was trembling as she locked the door. I have to look for him, all the same.

  He might have got stuck in the storm drain, chasing a smaller animal. Or in a trap. The people in the house on the north side had threatened to put out traps after something had killed two of their chickens. What would Harry say if the dog had been hurt badly and she let him lie out there until morning?

  She found a flashlight in the kitchen and put on the white silk robe Harry had given her for her birthday.

  The heat rose up out of the wet grass. She followed the wavering thread of light into the copse on the northern side of the property, where Dudley’s barks had been coming from.

  She moved among the trees. Suddenly, she stopped short, biting her lip so as not to cry out.

  There was a man standing on the far side of the trees, a burly man with a weapon, a rifle or a shotgun, cradled in his arms.

  He must have seen the flashlight. Should I run?

  “What the hell is going on?” the man shouted out rudely. “Don’t you Ingleses ever go to bed?”

  It was only Porcão, the neighbour.

  “Have you seen our dog?”

  “If I see that mutt near my chickens, I’ll send him home full of holes.”

  Luisa was too relieved to care what Porcão said. More confidently, she went back into the copse, jabbing at the undergrowth with her flashlight.

  Something glinted white in the arc of the flashlight. She hunted for the spot, found it. And dropped the flashlight.

  For an instan
t she had seen Dudley’s face, the jaws partly opened over his shiny alligator teeth, the swollen tongue lolling out at the side. She had also seen the black hollow at his throat, the jagged vent that ran down to the belly, the entrails that spilled out like writhing eels.

  She opened her mouth to scream, but the sound was suffocated by a strong hand that was clamped over her lips, while a muscular arm tightened around her waist, hoisting her sideways and upwards till her feet were off the ground. Helpless, gagging, she saw the awkward shape of Porcao shambling back towards his house.

  A long, bony face pushed up close to hers. It looked like a death’s head.

  “Where’s the Ingles?” the skull whispered in Portuguese. “In the house?”

  She shook her head.

  “Bring her inside,” Skull ordered his companions. She could see two more rising up out of the bushes. Plus the man who had her pinioned.

  When they got her inside, she saw that one, at least, was a foreigner. His face was pink and sweaty. He had close-cropped blonde hair and no earlobes to speak of. The man who had grabbed her was a huge mulatto, darker than she.

  The bony one, who seemed to be in charge, flashed some kind of pass in front of her face.

  “Special Police,” he breathed. “If you don’t want trouble, you’ll tell me what I want to know.”

  “She’s just the maid,” someone else said. “What can she tell us?”

  “I wouldn’t mind a maid like that,” the mulatto chipped in, with a coarse laugh.

  “Where is Senhor Maitland?” Skull demanded.

  “He’s gone away for a few days.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Have you seen this man?”

  They showed her a photograph with a police identification number across the bottom.

  She shook her head.

  “Why did you kill the dog?” she said to them, between tears and rage.

  For an answer, their leader hooked a finger over the neck of her silk robe and tore it from her shoulders. Her dark nipples were clearly visible under the nightie. The mulatto stuck his lips out obscenely and blew her a wet kiss.

  “You want her, Jaime? Have her! It may loosen her tongue.”

  He ripped the nightie away from her body. She tried to cover herself with her hands, and Skull laughed at her.

  The mulatto hesitated. He was staring at the guias, the ritual beads — blue and white for Yemanja — around her throat.

  “What’s the matter? You don’t like her anymore?”

  Luisa cowered before them, her eyes shut tight, invoking Yemanja and the other orixás. Lady of the waters, take this from me. Carry me away in the foaming tresses of your hair.

  This is not my body, she told herself. Nothing they do can touch me. I will feel nothing.

  But she felt a violent hand tear at the guias, breaking the strings so that the sacred beads went rolling away in all directions.

  Other hands were laid on her, probing and defiling.

  “Go on, Hossbach!” Skull cried out merrily. “I can see you want to!”

  But they stabbed at her secret places with something sharper than human flesh, with metal or glass, until she could no longer see the colours that could not be named or withstand the calvary of a body that was undeniably hers and was reduced to blurting out everything she knew or could imagine about Harry. They were particularly interested in the hollow inside the chimneypiece where they found his private papers and the mention of a fazenda in the south, on the borders of São Paulo and Parana, with the carved face of a red fox on a sign.

  2

  “Formé!” the wrangler shouted. He flicked his whip for the benefit of the persistent black flies rather than the horses.

  The horses knew just what was expected of them. They formed up in a rough circle inside the corral, their tails brushing the rails, their heads pointing to the centre. “Now,” the wrangler called to Harry, “do you want to see if he still knows you?”

  Maitland dropped from his perch on the rail, whipped his straw sombrero from his head and advanced, with the hat outstretched, toward a handsome grey gelding. He was big for a Brazilian horse, fifteen hands at least, with a broad chest and good quarters and a silver-black mane, left shaggy to keep off the flies. He cocked his ears forward and pawed at the red dirt with his neat black hooves as Harry approached.

  “Hello, Winston,” Harry called to him, holding his hat upside down by the brim. The horse danced forward and nuzzled inside the hat.

  “You cheated!” the wrangler reproached him with a grin.

  Winston, disappointed at finding nothing inside the hat, was trying to graze inside Harry’s shirt. Maitland brought a lump of rapadura — raw brown sugar — out of his trouser pocket and let the horse eat it out of his hand.

  Johnny came over. He had gained strength these past days at the ranch, but he still wore a patch over one eye. It gave him a piratical look.

  “What is he?” Johnny asked. “A thoroughbred?”

  Inocencio laughed. The wrangler was a frontiersman, a mixture of Brazilian, Spaniard and Guarani Indian, lithe and quick, with a scrubby beard and skin like saddle leather.

  “He’s a mongrel, like me,” Inocencio said. “Creole, mostly. Some racing blood on the father’s side. He’s fast, and he’s a stayer. But he hasn’t been ridden for a couple of months,” he added for Harry’s benefit. “You’d better watch him.”

  “Have you still got my saddle?”

  “We might be able to find it. What about your friend?” Maitland turned to Johnny. “Do you feel up to a ride?”

  “I’m not in your league.”

  “You could try Hilde,” the wrangler suggested, leading out a stocky little bay mare.

  “But she’s too small for me.”

  “She’s stronger than you might think,” Maitland interjected. “She’s a coralera. They breed them in Mato Grosso. Best horse you could want for cross-country hacking in these parts. And a lovely temperament to go with it.”

  The little mare was snuffling and licking Johnny’s hand. He said, “I’ll give it a try.”

  Inocencio produced a Texas saddle with the tree cut down and strapped it on over a soft, loose-woven blanket.

  “Don’t jerk,” the wrangler cautioned. “She’s got a mouth like velvet. You only have to think what you want her to do.”

  Maitland was already out of the corral, pressing his knees against Winston’s flanks. The horse suddenly leaped into the air and jackknifed till its back legs and forelegs almost met. It was the best Harry could do to stay on, clinging to the mane.

  Winston bucked sideways, and Harry hugged his neck, muttering old endearments and trying to get his left foot back into the stirrup.

  Johnny trotted past on the coralera mare, looking as if he had been born in the saddle.

  “Need any help?” he called back to Maitland, who smiled through his gritted teeth.

  He clapped at Winston’s sides with his ankles, and they galloped out across a sea of grass, where a herd of hump-backed zebu cattle, oddly Asiatic, were grazing placidly. They did not stop till they reached the bank of a shallow stream. Harry drove his mount on through the muddy water and over a lazy sandbank to the steep, slippery clay on the far side, hanging on to its tail with his left hand and looking out for caimans. When they raced back to the fazenda, they were driven by a single will.

  Johnny trotted up on the little mare from the opposite direction and swung smoothly down from the saddle.

  They took whisky and sodas on the verandah, and Harry said, “I must say, you do seem to have made a remarkable recovery. What would you say to a spot of shooting tomorrow? Inocencio says he saw a ten-point stag in the swamps.”

  “I can’t waste any more time,” Johnny responded quietly. “I have to get to Buenos Aires. Have you heard anything about Sigrid? Is she all right?”

  He had asked the same question twenty times since they had boarded the train in Rio.

  “She’s fine,�
�� Harry assured him. “Probably a bit disoriented, but you’ll sort that out. Bradbeer’s a good man. He’ll keep her out of trouble until you arrive.”

  Harry expressed more confidence than he felt. He didn’t like the tone of the cable he had finally received from Bradbeer that same morning. Bailey’s man said there had been complications in Buenos Aires, without specifying what had gone wrong. Bradbeer strongly recommended that Johnny should take the roundabout route to the Argentine capital, via Paraguay. The British agent was going to arrange for a contact to meet them on the other side of the Parana River, which Harry remembered as a nest of gamblers and contrabanders. With that evil-looking patch over his eye, Johnny would fit in beautifully.

  Harry had yet to break the news of this unexpected detour.

  “When do we leave?” Johnny asked.

  “We’ve got a couple of choices. There’s a British ship leaving from Santos the day after tomorrow.”

  “Would that be quickest?”

  “If we get through. I’ve been informed that our friends from Rio have got the ports pretty well covered. It would be safest to skip across the border into Paraguay. No one is looking for us there. We wouldn’t lose very much time, because we can fly direct from Asunciόn to Buenos Aires. There’s a mail plane twice a week.”

  “So your vote is for Paraguay.”

  “I think it makes sense, don’t you?”

  Johnny was frustrated by the prospect of a further delay before he caught up with Sigrid. But he tried to make light of the situation.

  “I think you’re being less than candid, Harry. I think you want to go overland to Paraguay so you can bag a few more deer.”

  “It never hurts to keep one’s hand in,” Harry grinned.

  3

  Luisa scrubbed herself until her palms and the inside of her thighs were chafed, and still did not feel clean. She dug a shallow grave under the bougainvillea and buried what was left of Dudley. Then she took another bath and put on her prettiest dress and her butterfly hat. She took the housekeeping money and walked down the hill to the bus stop.