Crimson Jade

by George B Mair

Krystelle laughed aloud. ‘Petra, you can’t,’ she said at last. ‘You just can’t. Any more than David could when you foxed on him during that fight. Get me?’

  ‘Well, you can at least say what you’re prepared to do?’

  ‘Sure.’ Krystelle checked that the safety sneck on her gun was ‘off’ and judged its weight. ‘And this is my last word. Take it or leave it. All three of you would deserve to die if it wasn’t that you were mad. And madness is the one thing that saves your lives. So since it’s maybe going to save Cyp and you, then you got no bitch coming when I explain it’s also going to save Mikel. ’Cos Mikel isn’t only crazy as a coot, but blood-crazy as a screwy coot, and it’s his only entitlement to live. So, Petra honey, your husband, Mikel the con, goes to the quacks in hospital and after that it’s up to them. ’Cos we’ll be strictly out of it.

  ‘Then you two! You came from Amazonia so it would be reasonable to send you back to Amazonia. Right back to where it all began, and then if you can talk your way out of trouble back home and persuade the locals that you didn’t mean any harm when you did the last killing jobs then you can live happily in incest ever after. So think it over. You’ve got the time it takes me to mix and lower another daiquiri.’

  Grant saw Cyp’s eyes flicker with excitement and Krystelle was pouring a measure of bacardi, her gun at her waist, when Bas appeared as though from nowhere. Grant later discovered that there was a door flush with a wall panel and opening into the bathroom direct from the salon, but Bas moved with the sleek confidence of a panther and he was carrying an automatic which could eliminate everyone in front of him with a two-second burst. ‘Do nothing silly,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ve waited a long time for this and sometimes it hasn’t been easy. So please be patient.’

  10

  ‘I always travel with one weapon

  which matters’

  ‘Your fifth man, I think!’ said Grant, forcing a show of ‘know-all’ self-confidence. ‘But Bas, my dear fellow, will you please allow my friend Miss Christine de Tourvel to continue mixing her daiquiri. She’s had a bad time and feeling thirsty.’

  Bas had relaxed into a tall gentle personality with grave features and the smouldering eyes of a poet. Every movement was slow, yet with an economy of effort which was unusual, and for once he seemed at ease with himself. ‘She can do that, Doctor,’ he said. ‘And you too if you wish. But without rocks?’

  Grant remembered that glass of water which now seemed like a lifetime earlier. ‘Rocks cause trouble,’ he quoted. ‘Well, Bas, we’ve been in plenty of trouble since then. Or did you know?’ And then a thought crossed his mind. ‘By the way, remember telling me about how you got two years for breaking into the house of a political? I haven’t had time to ask about it. But would you care to tell? This seems to be everyone’s confessional. Oh! And another thing. We’ll all be safer if Miss Petra remains blindfold. You probably know that as a hypnotist she’s pretty good. Okay?’

  ‘Okay, Doctor,’ said Bas. ‘She has lived in darkness for many years. So she can soon die in darkness if it be God’s will.’

  Grant paused. Bas, it seemed, might be as crazy as any of them. ‘Forgetting that,’ he said at last, ‘would you care to tell us about your robbery?’

  Bas eased himself against the corner of the room and his fingers relaxed around the trigger. ‘It was before Miss Petra agreed to marry Mikel Brandt and we were in London for two months when an exiled Peronista bought a house in Strawberry Hill. Miss Petra suspected that Brandt also belonged to the party, but wasn’t sure. However, the exile did belong to the General’s organisation and she believed that he might have papers which could give an idea about other top party members. Now Dom Cyp Moreiro hoped to become a future Peron in Brazil, and, as he saw it, if Mikel Brandt was an undercover Peronista still working in Argentina then it would be a good reason for allowing him to marry my mistress. You must remember that Dom Cyp Moreiro had known Mikel Brandt ever since he was a young man: and young men talk too much about their ambitions. After many talks together Dom Cyp had guessed that Brandt worked for General Peron and hoped to be his successor, but it was important for Dom Cyp and my mistress to prove his connection with the General and know his exact position within the party. Because if all went well, and both men became presidents at around the same time, Brazil and Argentina could make a Peronista-type bloc which might later control most of South America.’

  ‘Anyhow! You got this information?’ said Grant.

  ‘Yes. I broke into a man’s house and opened his safe with a machine for cutting metal. There were many papers and Mikel Brandt’s name was often mentioned. Then two men came into the room and I tried to escape by a window but was caught by a policeman when I was running away. Since I didn’t want to hurt an innocent man I allowed the policeman to arrest me and a judge sent me to prison for two years.’ Bas smiled sadly and his pale white face looked more than ever like an El Greco Christus. ‘I worked well and caused no trouble so I was made free early in the second year and returned to my mistress.’

  ‘To find her married.’ Grant felt that at last he knew the whole story.

  ‘Yes. Dom Cyp had arranged for people to visit me in prison and I had been able to send letters with code words which meant that I had proof of Mikel Brandt being an important Peronista and big in the party.’ He paused. ‘I was not surprised to find they were married or that I had to live in Argentina. It was what I expected and I was glad when Dom Cyp allowed me to go to her new home as her own number one servant.’

  Bas wasn’t reacting according to expectation and Grant became increasingly curious. Hadn’t Petra described him as ‘her man’? ‘You said something about your mistress living in darkness and having waited a long time for this. What have you in mind?’

  Bas crossed himself and his eyes became very serious. ‘Any person who has lived with Cyp Moreiro has lived in darkness. My little sister has known …’

  ‘Sister!’ Grant cursed himself for not having guessed it right from the beginning. ‘Petra really is your sister! Then your name is Ramon Bosca.’ He turned towards Cyp with a triumphant grin. ‘I told you, Cyp. Your fifth man! Any comment?’

  Bas had snapped to attention when Grant began to speak and his lips were twisted in self-conscious confusion. ‘My sister,’ he repeated. ‘Though I didn’t want to say so just now. The word only slipped out accidentally, because you must understand that although I speak English I must always translate in my mind. So I think of what I say and then the translation. It is not easy to concentrate and I made a mistake. But Petra is my half-sister since we had the same mother. Mikel Brandt is my half-brother because we had the same father.’ He looked towards Cyp and his pallor deepened. ‘And Dom Cyp Moreiro is my father’s murderer: and the murderer of friends in Manaos: the man who would also have murdered me if I hadn’t, by the grace of God, gone back to my family’s home when I heard that my mother had died. It was because God sent me to meet my baby sister that my own life was saved. It is a pity,’ he added, ‘that she has now sold herself to the devil even after all my prayers and love.’

  ‘My name is Christine de Tourvel,’ said Krystelle unexpectedly. ‘And I’m sorry you weren’t properly introduced. But you were Petra’s manservant?’

  Bas bowed slightly, though his fingers tightened against his gun and his eyes were very guarded.

  ‘Petra was saying when you arrived that she wanted to give me her jewels. I wonder if you would ask room service or whatever you call it here to send the stuff up.’

  ‘She said that you were to have her jewels?’

  ‘Sure. All except a necklace given by Cyp. It’s a business transaction.’ Krystelle flashed her most infectious smile. ‘So how about getting them out of the safe or something?’

  ‘Impossible.’ Bas pointed his gun expressively round the room. ‘I’m just one single man fighting devils and I must stay here until everything is finished.’ He again crossed himself swiftly with his right hand. ‘It is my duty to tell everyone what she did
to me.’

  Petra’s head was now tilted towards Bas and Grant counted her heart-beat flicking below her left breast at around one hundred and ten. Which meant that she was more uptight than he had ever known. ‘Bas,’ she said quietly. ‘Please help me. You were the one person I could always trust, so for the sake of everything in the past let me out of here.’

  ‘It is for the sake of everything in the past that I do not shoot you,’ said Bas slowly. ‘You are evil, and perverted and cruel. But it took me many years to understand everything.’

  Krystelle was still standing by the fridge sipping her daiquiri. ‘Tell us about these years,’ she said. ‘They must have been real bad.’

  Petra made as though to rise from her seat. ‘Tell them nothing, Bas. The past doesn’t belong to them.’ She lapsed into Portuguese, hoping that she would be speaking too fast for either Grant or Krystelle to understand. If Bas saved her life she would give him anything. Anything at all. He could do what he wanted with the others, even with Cyp, her father, but if he allowed her to kill both Grant and Krystelle and then leave the house he could take all her jewels and money and live anywhere he wished in the world. ‘Please. Bas,’ she ended. ‘As a last favour please be kind.’

  He shook his head. ‘You see, Doctor,’ he said in English, ‘she would sell even her father. For her nothing is sacred. But I was going to tell you what happened.’

  Grant was desperate to hear the story of Cyp’s fifth man, but he was more anxious about Sureen and Mikel Brandt. ‘Can I see how the young lady is keeping?’

  Bas hesitated and then agreed, though doubts and fear reflected in his eyes. ‘But please don’t spoil things, because this is the hour for which I’ve waited during more than thirty years.’

  Grant had a fine estimate of when it could pay to take risks, and both Krystelle and he knew that in spite of his quiet courtesy Bas would let no one get away with anything. He kept his hands fully in view while he walked across the room avoiding all target areas. Sureen was unconscious, but her breathing had improved and it was an open bet as to whether or not she would live, while Mikel Brandt sagged against his ropes with sweat streaming down his face and his features twisted with pain. ‘Do we take him down?’ Grant forced himself to sound off-hand, but the clinical part of him which could still unexpectedly rise to the surface when it was often least expected wanted to help.

  ‘No.’ Bas spoke with almost judicial authority. ‘God allowed him to be tied to that board and only God will decide when he can leave it. Now do you want to hear why this is so important for me?’

  He watched Grant return to his seat and light a cigarette. ‘I’ll tell you everything as I knew it from the beginning, and how little pieces of new information began to fit together until I discovered the truth.

  ‘I was born in 1930, less than one year after my father Pedro Bosca married my mother Maria Theresa. My father often took me a few kilometres by canoe to visit his friends the Moreiros and I can only just remember them, because they were killed in an aeroplane accident when I was four or five, but they left a son, Cyp Moreiro, who was older than me and I thought that everything he did was perfect. I enjoyed these visits and sometimes mother went with us. The estates were not going well, so it seemed a good idea when Cyp Moreiro suggested that my father and he make one big business which would be cheaper to run.’

  He paused for a while. ‘My mother wanted the merger … is that the word? … to go through. But my father said that they would have to be careful and make no mistakes.’ His eyes darkened. ‘I didn’t know at the time what went wrong, but months later I came home one evening and saw my mother crying when I passed a window of our house. Moreiro was kissing her neck and she was leaning against his arm. Then a house servant said that my father had killed himself because Cyp Moreiro had robbed him.

  ‘Perhaps I was old for my years, but I thought about everything in the past and remembered a day when my father and other men had been shooting Indians. I had seen nothing wrong, but that day God began to show me what was good and what was bad and made me leave home. Mother had given me a small box camera when I was seven and I look my photographs with me, but it was only later that I saw how important they were, because some showed Moreiro either doing some of the killings or else flogging a woman.

  ‘The servant and her husband who had told me about my father’s death ran away with me and while we were stowing our canoes another three men joined us. Everyone said they would never work for Cyp Moreiro and that he hadn’t only killed my father but stolen my mother, which was why she had enjoyed visiting the Moreiro place.’ He crossed himself again and his face became even more pale as his eyes burned with anger. ‘We travelled up to Iquitos, and after two years or so my friends found work back in Manaos building little boats.

  ‘A boy changes much in the jungle. I left home a child, but when I was twelve I was quite strong and big for my years. And I was only twelve or thirteen when I heard that my mother had died giving life to a girl child.’ He hesitated. ‘Even although people said that Cyp Moreiro was almost certainly her father, the baby and I had the same mother and my mother was bad. But I thought I could learn to love a girl child who had never asked to be born. So! God sent me to my father’s house during a week that my four friends were murdered in Manaos and I heard about it a few days later. The Moreiro-Bosca Plantations Incorporated … as they were then called … had lost most of the old Bosca workers, but one or two men remained. And they knew what had happened, because the gang which did the killing flew down to Manaos from our landing strip and returned drunk next day.

  ‘Dom Cyp Moreiro had a nervous breakdown and if he had died my friends were going to see that I was given back my father’s property. But he didn’t die, and when he was recovering I sent him photographs of the Indians he had killed over five years earlier.

  ‘The men who had gone away with me were all on the pictures. Four of them! And they had left because they were frightened Dom Cyp might remember how much they knew about his past. You see, by 1942 or so things were changing. The government had found precious metals, people were now visiting us and we were no longer so far away from the law. Men were afraid that the past might catch up with them, because the Indian Protection Agency was trying to stop Indian killings and General Rondin had eyes everywhere. When I sent the photographs of Cyp Moreiro doing bad things it reminded him some eyes were also on him and that at least one living person still knew the truth.’

  The man’s authority filled the room. Grant forgot to smoke and Krystelle ignored the last of her daiquiri. ‘So I went to Belem and planned my future, because I wanted a job near my half-sister, and when I heard that Dom Cyp was going to bring the baby to Manaos I knew that my chance had come.

  ‘I paid two men to attack him, and then pretended to beat them off. I had no money after paying the thugs and if Dom Cyp had refused to help me I would have been desperate. But five years had changed me in every way and he took me into his house as a servant to help with anything.

  ‘I was very careful and did all the right things. But once when I was cleaning his room I saw a birth certificate on his desk. I knew that he told people the baby was his sister and I didn’t know much about birth certificates, but I did know that the names of the baby’s parents were wrong, because the two people whose names had been used had died years earlier. Then I remembered a newspaper which had told the story, and a friend told me how all copies of newspapers were kept in a library. So I found a copy and managed to steal it. Then later I got a photographer to take a picture of the page showing the story about the aeroplane accident and used it to frighten Dom Cyp.’

  He paused again, as though collecting his thoughts. ‘Life was difficult. I was a perfect servant. But in my own room I hated and planned to frighten him, because if he died or ran away I thought I might be able to see my little half-sister more and claim my own share of the estate.

  ‘She was very lovely,’ he added. ‘And she wanted me to play with her. Dom Cyp was often
away from home and she began to love me. When it was time to go to school she was sent to Rio. Dom Cyp bought a house at Teresopolis and during school-time we lived there. Cyp Moreiro trusted me and Petra seemed to need me for everything. In fact,’ he added slowly, ‘although we didn’t know it, until then we had been nearly savages, but at Terespolis we learned how to be Brazilian, both at the same time.

  ‘Everything was a joke in Dom Cyp’s house. We laughed and we sang songs about everything.

  ‘We began to dance the samba and were proud that we were Brazilians and not Latin Americans. We made jokes about the Portuguese, because although we were descended from Portuguese we were still Brazilian.

  ‘We mastered the tango, although we thought the Argentines sad and stupid. We sometimes flew to Mexico and listened to their brassy trumpets, or to Paraguay to watch them making music on the harp, but we always came back to our own African drums in time for Carnival.

  ‘I took Petra to her first football match and Cyp showed us voodoo at a terreiro not far from Gloria Church. And when she was eleven we all went to Copacabana on New Year’s Eve to watch thousands of voodoo blasphemers worship Iemanja the sea goddess.

  ‘That year I gave her a figa[*] for a Christmas present and she began to ask questions about what “fertility” meant.’ He hesitated again. ‘Sometimes I think that that figa did something to her mind, because she became crazy about fertility and sex and men and women and even animals. And yet at the time everything she did seemed quite natural. Maybe the devil had blinded me,’ he added. ‘Maybe he blinded us all.

  ‘Anyhow, after Rio she was sent to England for a year and later to Switzerland. But I was then controller of the household and we usually had a flat near the school. I first met Sureen, now the wife of President Socosani, in Switzerland. Petra and she were friends and Sureen often visited our flat near Lausanne.’