The Xavier Affair

by Fish, Robert L. ;

He was behind the counter in one move before the purser could raise a hand. The gun was steady as rock, jammed into the young man’s kidneys. The big man pleasured at the involuntary wincing and pushed the gun harder than necessary.

  “When you lift them hands off the countertop, you just lift them real easy, like, eh? And we’ll be going along now. Somebody comes down them steps won’t help, believe me. Just more people gets hurt, is all. There’s a gun strapped under every one of them other drums, believe me. And this gun I have here carries lot of bullets, you know. Just like in those cowboy movies on television, you know? Bullets? Bullets all day long, all night long. Never stop, never load. I’m telling you, that’s the truth, mon. My word!”

  His large hand reached out, grabbing the young man by the back of the collar, jerking him, twisting cruelly, swinging him about, almost throwing him through the door into the small corridor, dragging him down it. There was the sharp sound of a door being closed, the click of a latch sliding in place. The remaining three members of the band kept up their rhythms, their quick hands drumming the wrapped batons automatically, going from one song to the next with no spoken communication, no hesitation to determine who took the melody and who the two levels of harmony. Nor did any face turn from its assigned duty of watching the stairway and passageways; each man kept his eyes where they belonged, their faces immobile, intent, graven, all the light laughter and the mincing clowning of the upper deck put aside as one would shed a garment inappropriate for the occasion, replacing it with the proper one.

  To nervous men the wait might have seemed to consume hours; these men were not nervous. To these men it seemed exactly what it was—three minutes plus a few seconds—time for two songs, well rehearsed, and a portion of a third; the time calculated. There was the sound of the latch again, the sound of a door opening and closing, and their big leader was back. A glance about satisfied him that all was well; he picked up his drum, slung it about his neck, retrieved his mallets from the small of his back. He tapped the top of the drum experimentally a few seconds, locating the place in the song the others were playing, thrummed the proper sections of the drum-top quietly at first, and then joined in fully, turning toward the steps.

  “Entertainment all finished, chaps,” he said soberly. “Let’s go.”

  One of the others inadvertently glanced in the direction of the purser’s stateroom and office. No muscle moved in the big man’s face for a moment; his very solemnity seemed to express his reprimand for this rare breech in discipline. Then suddenly he grinned widely, as if the success of the venture allowed for a slight relaxation.

  “No worry, chaps. We climb no scaffolds to hang for nobody. Do we? We don’t, my word! He’ll live to gamble again, no fear—stud poker, draw poker. Take a while is all, I’m afraid. Take a while for his friends to get used to his face, too. Pity. Good-looking chap. Or was …” His grin widened. “Good bone structure, but bad skin. Tore like my poor da’s pants …”

  They formed up again, almost as if in drill, going up the carpeted steps to be joined by the one stationed there, moving no faster, no slower, smiles re-forming on their faces, stiff at first but slowly thawing to reality, eyes beginning to roll again, feet beginning to shuffle to this side and that as they moved from step to step, rhythm keeping time for them, with them, a part of them and the drums, the throbbing music echoing up and down the steep stairwell. The door to the promenade deck was swung open and held by the muscular buttocks of the leader, while the others stepped across the high sill, grinning foolishly, childishly. The music never broke beat for a second. The heavy door, released, swung shut behind them, sucked into place obediently by an air cylinder. The four did their shuffling dance to the ship’s ladder, mallets flashing. The young officer was still at his station, still accompanied by the Scottish engineer, whose teeth were still locked on the black cigar. The deck officer smiled at the four in his most friendly fashion and summoned his very best English.

  “We heard of you all the way. You sounded most excellent, I do say. Did you have a good night? In tops, that is?”

  “Tips,” said the Scottish engineer.

  “Tips, then.” The deck officer shrugged off the unneeded correction.

  “Not bad, mon. I mean, sir. Not bad at all, considering the few people aboard.” One black hand continued to beat out music, selecting the dented sections of the drum-top unerringly, while the other hand slapped against a pants pocket. There was the jingle of coins. “Could have been worse, mon. Sir. It usually is; then it’s disaster.”

  “Yes.” The deck officer tried to look as if he understood.

  “Want to thank you, sir.”

  This was clear. The young officer smiled. “Don’t thank me. Your thank you should be owed to Scotty, here.”

  “Then I thank him.”

  The music stopped as suddenly as it had begun, although there hadn’t appeared to be a signal of any sort. The silence still seemed to carry the faint echo of the pulsing music on the night breeze. There was a hail; the men on the freighter across the roadstead were calling, but their words were lost in the distance and the wind, which was beginning to pick up. Their arms substituted, waving, indicating their desire for the band to visit them next.

  “Business is good tonight, eh?” said the engineer.

  “Never better, mon.”

  A flash of white teeth from each and the four started down the shaky ladder, one hand of each sliding down the rope railing, the other hand pressed against the surface of the ship’s plates, damp with the mist beginning to rise from the warm water. Their drums hung limp, as if exhausted by the pounding they had taken. The first man down leaped into the boat, unslung his drum, and dragged at the rope, pulling the rowboat closer to the bobbing platform for his companions. One by one they stepped down, taking off their instruments, placing them carefully in the bottom of the boat. The second and third to enter sat down side by side at the oars and unshipped them, waiting. The large man who was their leader stepped in last, gave a reverse tug to the rope holding them to the stanchion and stood in the prow, balancing himself easily in the heaving boat as the knot ran free. A. wave of his large hand in the general direction of the upper deck of the Porto Allegre and, their small boat rising and falling on the choppy waves, the four had disappeared into the dark night.

  “Well, you were right, my friend,” the deck officer conceded generously, reverting to Portuguese, partially because he was far more fluent in it, but also to a large extent because he didn’t want to concede too much to the Scottish engineer. Engineers were basically people who, if you gave them an inch, usually ended up wanting a yard. “No harm at all.” He frowned in recollection. “Odd, though, how only the large preto spoke. The others didn’t say a word.”

  “Eh?” said the engineer.

  The deck officer took pity on him and gave him of his fluent English.

  “I said, all went good, don’t you know? But how strange that only the big one talked. What?”

  “Maybe they’re mutes,” the engineer suggested dryly, and added, “the world would be a better bloody place if more people followed their example.”

  “Yes,” said the deck officer, who hadn’t understood enough to comment more intelligently. He frowned and went back to Portuguese. “I wonder why we don’t have steel bands in Rio? They’d be great for a Carnival band.” He stared across the span of water separating them from the rusty freighter. “And there’s another funny thing. They’re not going over to that ship that was calling them. I thought they were.”

  This was sufficiently understood.

  “They’d be bloody fools if they did,” said the Scottish engineer philosophically, speaking around the stub of his black cigar. “They made a day’s pay on board—let them enjoy it. When they need more they can always play again.” He thought a moment. “It’s what everyone’d do if they only had the brains.”

  He took the smoldering stub of cigar from his mouth, stared at it a moment without seeing it, and then brought his thoughts
back to consider its length. Too small; he flung it into the water, watching it fall. After that he was silent. Without his cigar in his mouth he found it hard to converse; besides, at the moment he hadn’t anything to say.

  2

  Captain José Maria Carvalho Santos Da Silva, liaison officer between Interpol and the Brazilian police, smiled pleasantly at his usual waiter and carefully examined both the label and the cork of the bottle of cognac being held out for his inspection. In this naughty world, as he had had reason to learn in his long experience, labels can be duplicated and corks re-used, horrible though the thought of such malfeasance might be. Satisfied that he had taken as much reasonable precaution as any man could be expected to take, he submitted the offering to the ultimate test: taste. Satisfied, he relieved the waiter of the burden of the bottle, filling both his own glass and that of his companion, and then leaned back to enjoy it. The waiter, having completed his mission, disappeared to other tasks, aware that it would be at least half an hour before he would be required to bring menus to, the two men at the table.

  Captain Da Silva—Zé to his friends, and unspeakable things to his enemies—was a tall, athletic-looking man in his late thirties, with a swarthy pockmarked face and a thick mustache that, combined with his curly black hair, gave him more the appearance of a brigand from the interior—or the appearance of one of his tougher customers—than that of a captain of police. His high cheekbones gave him an almost Indian appearance; his smile, when he was pleased about something, could take years from his age, a flash of white even teeth against his almost copper skin, a crinkling of humor lines at the corners of his large black eyes. On the other hand, an angry frown on that rugged pockmarked face was one that was known, respected, and feared not only by the Rio underworld, but also by any subordinate who did not perform to the high standards Captain Da Silva set both for himself and for those who worked for him. It was rare, however, that a person working for the captain did not perform to the standard. Under those circumstances he did not work for the captain very long.

  Across the table his companion smiled at the examination of the cognac bottle, accepted his glass, and grinned over the rim as he sipped it and set it down.

  “You’ve got a laboratory,” he said. “Why not run it through a complete analysis? Or I could probably get it done for you through the Embassy. One of these days the contrabandistas in Rio are going to come up with the taste of Reserva San Juan as well as the proper color. Then you’re going to be lost.”

  “As long as they don’t fool around too much with the proof,” Da Silva said with a grin. “And, of course, the price.” He raised his glass in a gesture of a toast. “Here’s luck.”

  “Luck.”

  The man across from Da Silva was quite the opposite of the flamboyant captain. Wilson was a man of medium size, with light sandy hair and pale gray eyes, of indeterminate age, nondescript in the extreme. He was the type of person who could be—and usually was—passed daily upon the street and never remembered, a man whose very clothing seemed to be selected to compliment the picture of his subdued personality. Yet this standard uniformity was no accident. It had been carefully cultivated over the years, as Da Silva well knew, and it served Wilson excellently in his job. Ostensibly he held the position of Security Officer at the American Embassy in Rio de Janeiro, a job that not even the State Department could have properly defined, assuming they had ever wished to do so. On the surface he was the whipping boy for American tourists caught in their own thoughtlessness or folly, the locator of lost passports, and quite often the re-uniter of sailor and ship, wife and husband, suitcase and owner.

  Wilson’s position at the American Embassy, however, was actually far more important. Like Da Silva, he was a member of Interpol, and also played a vital role in a number of his government’s activities which were less publicized but often more far-reaching. Among Embassy personnel only the Ambassador was fully aware of Wilson’s true responsibilities. Even the Political Officer—representing the CIA—did not know his colleague’s true status—which was precisely how the State Department had conceived and promulgated the job. Among the very few people aware of Wilson’s true position was Captain Da Silva; as a result the two had had more than their share of adventures together, and the swarthy Brazilian would rather have had the colorless, nondescript Wilson at his side in times of trouble than any other man he knew.

  As they did quite often when both of them found themselves in Rio and free at the same time, they were having lunch at the upper-level restaurant at the Santos Dumont Airport on the edge of Guanabara Bay, the airport for national traffic, a neat block of land jutting out, manmade, in the shadow of Sugar Loaf, just a short walk from downtown Rio and the American Embassy on the Avenida Presidente Wilson, and even closer to Da Silva’s office just a few blocks away in the Rua Dom Manuel. Still, even walking a few blocks was not Captain Da Silva’s idea of proper locomotion, because otherwise why had pioneer inventors such as Duryea and Ford—or De Soto or La Salle for that matter—been born? His red Jaguar had brought him to the airport terminal and even now was parked illegally before the main entrance, well guarded by a patrolman, not so much to prevent some newly recruited traffic officer from ticketing it or having it towed away, as to prevent the removal of a carburetor, if not the car itself, by someone less official. Daylight has never served as too great a deterrent to knavery in that most beautiful of all cities.

  Wilson drank, refilled his glass, and returned his friend’s hospitality by lighting a cigarette and shoving the pack across the table. They were American cigarettes, as they would be.

  “The advantages of PX privileges,” he said lightly, “although I get the feeling sometimes that some of our more famous brand names are being rolled by hand somewhere up in São Paulo. On a farm.”

  He smiled and leaned back comfortably. Da Silva was in his shirtsleeves as was his custom, his jacket hanging on his chair behind him; Wilson, more the conformist, retained both jacket and tie. The two relaxed, listening to the muffled sounds from the ground floor beneath the open balcony of the restaurant, from the impatient lines before the ticket windows, hearing the clatter of dishes and the chatter of animated conversation from all sides, and also the occasional deafening roar of an airplane engine warming up for takeoff just beyond the wide windows open for the breeze from the bay.

  Da Silva winced unconsciously at the sound of the airplanes; Wilson drew on his cigarette and frowned, studying his friend’s face with curiosity.

  “Was that a cringe I saw? From you? I thought your main argument for eating here every day was that nothing pleased you as much as seeing planes taking off every two minutes without your being aboard. Have you changed?”

  Da Silva took a sip of the Reserva San Juan, so rarely available in Rio, rolled it around in his mouth a moment to savor the full bouquet, swallowed with appreciation, and looked up.

  “Unfortunately, no,” he said with a faintly rueful smile. “If you were half the detective you’re supposed to be, you would have analyzed the situation instantly. Quite obviously the cringe was because very soon I shall be watching a plane take off, and—poor me—I’ll be watching it from the inside.”

  Wilson’s curiosity deepened.

  “Where are you off to? And when? And why?”

  “Barbados. It’s an island in the Caribbean.”

  “And has been for a long time,” Wilson agreed. “Now for question number two: when?”

  Da Silva puffed on his cigarette and then crushed it out in the ashtray. His gesture was somewhat like that of a man who has just refused a bandage for his eyes, preferring to face the firing squad fearlessly. He shrugged.

  “When? Too soon. Tonight, to be exact.”

  “And the big one: why? Vacation?”

  “You know better than that,” Da Silva said with pretended sternness. “Did you ever see a bright, healthy man like me take an airplane to go anywhere for pleasure?” He shook his head suspiciously. “You’re merely trying to worm info
rmation out of a police officer in the pursuit of his duty.”

  “Now you’re getting the idea,” Wilson said approvingly. “And having an awful time doing it, too.”

  “I wouldn’t want to bore you.”

  “I don’t bore easily. Anyway, I never knew that to stop you in the past,” Wilson said, and grinned. His grin faded. “Unless, of course, the matter is classified.”

  “It isn’t classified.”

  Da Silva paused, suddenly serious. He stared across the runways to the dark waters of the bay, with the tiny white blocks of apartments in Niterói on the far side standing out starkly against the mountains topped by threatening black storm clouds. Always when I have to fly! he thought morosely and sighed, bringing his attention back to the restaurant and his companion.

  “Well,” he said slowly, “it all started a long time ago—fifteen years ago, to be exact. I was all of twenty-four years old, two years out of the University with a degree in criminology—whatever that was worth—a shock to my family, I might mention. The rest of the clan always went in for either law or medicine, the lawyers in order to enter politics, and the doctors in order to raise cattle or grow coffee. Don’t ask me the connection—I’ve never known it. Maybe to sit up with a sick calf …”

  He lit another cigarette from Wilson’s pack and tossed the match aside.

  “At any rate,” he went on, “there I was, as proud as a grandee to be a great big real live first-grade detective, collaring kids for stealing hubcaps, and occasionally making a big splash by dragging in some character, who—by fabulous deduction—we calculated to be a brute because we caught him beating up his girlfriend—”

  Wilson nodded sagely. “I know what you mean.”

  “Good. Anyway this case came along and they instantly chose me for the assignment because I was bright, intelligent, hard-working, handsome, clever, analytical, logical, and—did I forget anything? Oh, yes, of course: modest.” He stared calmly across the table, challenging Wilson to find fault with any of his qualifications.