The Xavier Affair

by Fish, Robert L. ;

  “And you were also the only one in the entire detective bureau at the time with a complete command of the English language,” Wilson suggested shrewdly.

  “Well, yes—there was that minor factor,” Da Silva admitted, “but let’s not dwell on unimportant matters. The salient point is that they wisely picked me out and sent me on my way. I might mention that in those days the biggest plane they had flying was a DC-6, and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. And that only got you as far as Port-of-Spain in Trinidad, by way of every potholed, bumpy runway between here and there. Something like six or seven stops, as I recall, but it could have been sixteen or seventeen just as well. And then from Port-of-Spain you made it to Bridgetown in Barbados in a tico-tico—a single-engine affair with floats, that came down for gas roughly every five minutes. I’m convinced it was that trip that put me off flying and airplanes for life. I personally can’t even see what birds see in it. If I was a bird, I’d walk. Or crawl. It seems a shame the Wright brothers couldn’t have stuck with bicycles—”

  “I hate to interrupt, but you were saying?”

  “I was saying that when I finally got to Bridgetown, I climbed down from that monster, stinking of castor oil—which doesn’t help the appetite—and I kissed the very ground—”

  “You climbed down from a seaplane and kissed the ground?” Wilson stared at him. “How far down did you have to swim to do it?”

  “You know what I mean.” Da Silva pointed to the bottle. “Have a drink. Apparently it’s the only way to occupy your mouth other than talking. And then push it over.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Apologies, apologies! Where was I? Yes—Bridgetown, Barbados. Well, it seems that a ship—a Brazilian cruise ship named the SS Porto Alegre—was in Bridgetown at the time of Carnival, anchored out in the roadstead. In those days they hadn’t built the deepwater harbor they have there now, nor the docks that run into shore; ships had to anchor out, and lighters ferried passengers and even cargo back and forth. At any rate, this particular night nearly all the passengers and crew were ashore raising general hell, and along came a rowboat with four men in it, and held up the ship.”

  Wilson stared at him, his amazement this time genuine. “Held up a ship? A big oceanliner? Four men?”

  “You’ve been paying attention,” Da Silva said approvingly, and put out his cigarette, immediately reaching over to borrow another.

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “I’m not kidding. Boy Scout honor. Four men in a rowboat held up the ship and took roughly half a million dollars in gems in the haul. It’s the truth. Most of the passengers hadn’t wanted to wear their jewels ashore, and they didn’t want to leave them lying around their cabins—for which I certainly don’t blame them—so they left them in the ship’s safe. A logical move, on the surface, but in this particular case a rather bad mistake as it turned out.”

  “But, how—”

  “You will keep interrupting, won’t you? As I said, it was Carnival, and everybody and his grandmother—possibly that’s the wrong word, say companion, instead—was ashore. And these four came up in a rowboat with steel drums and managed to talk the deck officer into letting them come aboard to entertain the few people who were still on the ship. To pick up some loose change in tips, he thought; at the inquiry he was a bit vague about how they managed to convince him, because it was a breach of the rules, of course. But they did and he let them come aboard, and they played their way all over the place—playing very well, everyone said—but they ended up in the purser’s square. Three of them kept up the music, but the fourth—who was the boss, it seems—put a gun on the assistant purser who was on duty. The purser was a youngster, and he tried to tell this fellow the safe was in the captain’s quarters, but he didn’t get very far with that bit of nonsense. The boss man worked him over with a rough gunsight until he opened the safe. The boss man then cleaned out the safe, knocked our boy out, but only after he’s worked him over a bit more—maybe for luck—”

  “A nice lad.”

  “One of nature’s finest. Anyway, the four of them played their drums back to the promenade deck, said good night to the deck officer and an engineer who was there with him, all as polite as you could wish, climbed into their chariot—pardon me, rowboat—and”—he made a horizontal cutting motion with one hand—“zoop! Off into the wild blue yonder.”

  “Any description?”

  “None.”

  “You mean nobody could give a decent description? It doesn’t make sense.” Wilson frowned and then nodded as one possible solution came to him. “You said it was Carnival. Were they wearing masks?”

  “They were indeed. I hate to say this,” Da Silva said slowly, seriously, “especially about Brazilians—because both the deck officer and the youngster from the purser’s staff who got worked over were Brazilians—but according to the testimony we got at the inquiry from those two, not to mention at least twelve passengers, six Americans, three Brazilians, and an assorted bag for the other three, plus this engineer who was with the deck officer, those four were wearing the most impenetrable masks in the world. Impossible for a blind man to see through. They were wearing their own faces.” He raised a hand almost wearily, as if to ward off words. “Oh, everyone put it in different language at the inquiry, but what it amounted to when you sorted it out was that all ‘natives’ look alike, whatever they meant by ‘native.’”

  He shrugged, poured himself another drink, but didn’t drink it at once. His eyes stared out of the window at the deepening blackness building up over the mountains to the east while his fingers unconsciously moved the glass in little circles on the white tablecloth. A sudden puff of wind brought a light sprinkle of rain through the open windows; waiters hurried to close them, muffling the sound of the aircraft on the runways. Da Silva suddenly upended his glass, crushed out his cigarette, and put out his hand.

  “Let me have another.”

  Wilson dutifully pushed the package across the table, waiting silently for Da Silva’s mood to pass. The swarthy man lit the cigarette, inhaled deeply, and tossed the spent match toward the ashtray.

  “Well,” he said in reminiscence, “it was quite an inquiry. I was in charge. It took some of the passengers and even a few of the crew a while to realize that a Brazilian ship is Brazilian national territory wherever it is—I’m speaking of the non-Brazilians, of course—but eventually we got that cleared away and got down to business. I learned a lot of useless things; at the time I thought it was unusual in an investigation, but I’ve learned better since. We learned, for example, that the ages of those four drum players was somewhere between twenty and fifty—depending to a large extent on the age of the person being interviewed. We also learned that they could play their instruments with remarkable skill, which, in the islands, I was informed, is like describing someone in Brazil as playing good football—”

  “Soccer,” Wilson interrupted.

  “Soccer in your country. Football in every civilized nation on earth. However, I’m not in the mood to argue. Let’s say it’s like looking for a teen-ager in the States who plays guitar. Satisfied? All right. Oh, yes—there was one other bit of evidence of major importance that came to light at the inquiry. The deck officer was enough of a seaman to notice that when they tied their rowboat to the gangplank, they used a running hitch of some sort, because when the big man who ran the gang gave it a tug in the opposite direction, the knot ran free. Apparently, according to Webster, that’s the definition of a hitch. I didn’t know it before, and even after all these years I’m still not sure I believe it now.” He sighed heavily. “Anyway, that apparently made them sailors, since who but a sailor would know anything about hitches? Except, possibly, Boy Scouts, and I sincerely doubted we were dealing with Boy Scouts.”

  “A reasonable conclusion.”

  “Thank you.”

  “However—you were about to say—good sailors in the islands being about as rare as chess players in Russia, that information also p
roved to be of momentous help to you.”

  “Correct.” Da Silva nodded. “So there we were. We took down over a hundred thousand words in shorthand at the inquiry—more than enough for a bad novel—every word anyone remembered anyone else saying, including themselves. Quite a performance …”

  “No fingerprints on or about the safe?”

  “All neatly wiped off. As a matter of fact, the youngster watched him do it. The advantages, you see, of our improved means of communication; anyone with a TV set or the price of a movie now automatically wipes all knobs after using.”

  Wilson stared at him and then shook his head almost in admiration.

  “Not a bad evening’s work. Half a million dollars …”

  Da Silva smiled at him sardonically. He crushed out his cigarette and reached for the brandy, filling his glass. He raised it, looking at Wilson over the rim.

  “Really not all that much when you think about it in this day and age,” he said. “Just about enough to keep your Department of Defense going for—what? Thirty seconds? A minute?”

  “About a minute and a half, if you want to be accurate,” Wilson said, and smiled. “Of course that’s on the basis of an eight-hour day, which few in Defense work—except, of course, the soldiers in the field. But in getting other people’s money, the Pentagon, you want to remember, are professionals. This half a million isn’t a bad amount for a few rank amateurs to put into their pockets and get clean away.”

  Da Silva paused in his act of drinking and then finished his glass. He set his glass down and stared at his friend in surprise.

  “Get away? Who said they got away?” He shook his head in amazement at Wilson’s lack of faith. “What a thought! I told you I was in charge of the case, didn’t I?”

  “What did they do? Talk in their sleep? Walk into a police station and confess?”

  “They did neither. They disappeared after leaving a bad taste in the mouth of the deck officer and a chopped-up face and a sore skull—plus a certain loss of faith in the kindness of his fellow humans—for the purser. The Scottish engineer was more philosophical, at least. To him the loss was only money—and not his, at that.”

  “Then, how—”

  “What they did leave,” Da Silva said, his tone conversational, “was a lesson to all people who talk too much. You might try to learn from them. The big boss man not only knew where the safe was, he even knew where the toilet was, and the purser’s cabin and his office and everything. That’s quite a bit of knowledge regarding a ship that hadn’t even been in Bridgetown before. That was his big mistake. With that gun and that edged front sight he could have gotten the boy to admit that the safe was in the purser’s office, and gotten him to open it, too. But he had to prove he already had the information.” Da Silva shook his head. “He talked too much, and he said things you just don’t pick up in idle conversation in a waterfront bar, certainly not within twenty-four hours of a ship’s arrival in port.”

  Wilson nodded agreement.

  “So you figured he hadn’t gotten it from a Ouija board, but that someone in the classroom had been helping him with his homework, and that was cheating. Which you frown on.”

  “With reason,” Da Silva said virtuously. “Cheaters never prosper.”

  “A Barbadian in the crew.”

  “I think I’ll recommend to your Ambassador a well-deserved pay-raise for you,” Da Silva said, and nodded his head. “A rare occasion, but you are right. Except, of course, that the people there prefer to be called Bajans instead of Barbadians.”

  “A steward.”

  Da Silva frowned at the tablecloth and then looked up.

  “I don’t know if that would qualify as a correct answer or not. He was the ship’s librarian, a clever lad, but he doubled as a bar steward every now and then, so I’ll let it go. There were three Bajans in the crew: one in the kitchen, one in the deck crew, and this ship’s librarian. There was—and still is, as a matter of fact—a sergeant of police in Bridgetown named Storrs, except he’s the Chief Inspector there now; he handled the questioning of these people, and he did a beautiful job.”

  “A confession?”

  “No, the man never confessed, but he was one of the two who had been ashore the previous night when the ship came in. He also came from a small town in St. Joseph parish called Brighton, near Bathsheba. The other one who had been ashore came from Holetown. Storrs did a check of the two towns and found that in Brighton our four pals were not only well known for their steel-drum playing, but also for a few of their nastier habits. They were picked up with no great effort, and a week later they were extradited to Brazil.”

  “Just the four? What happened to the librarian?”

  Da Silva sighed. “God knows. He managed to get out of the local jail in Bridgetown where he was being held; Storrs took better precautions with the others.”

  “And they ended up where?”

  “Recife. It was the port of call of the ship they were returned in—they deserved being flown back, but it wasn’t so common in those days,” he added almost sadly.

  “And you mention this matter today because it is exactly fifteen years since it happened, so this judge gave them fifteen years in the penetentiary.”

  “You are so right.” Da Silva smiled at him. “And that, my friend—in case you ever decide to put aside your meager efforts at detection and turn to writing my biography—was the beginning of my meteoric rise to fame and fortune.”

  Wilson nodded, his mind on his own thoughts rather than on his friend’s banter. He looked up.

  “And—since parole from a Brazilian penetentiary is an almost unknown thing for real bad boys—real bad boys that do not come from well-known families—they served every day of the sentence.”

  “Not quite.” Da Silva’s light tone disappeared. He shook his head slowly. “Only one of them is going to be released. The big man; the boss of the gang. His name is William Trelawney McNeil, a common enough name in Barbados. Or Trinidad, or Montsarrat, or the other formerly British islands. Most of the names there are either English or Scottish. Taken from the slave owner originally, of course.”

  “And the other three?”

  Da Silva turned his head, staring once again at the black clouds sweeping in from the east to cover the bay. When he spoke, his voice was quiet, touched in a way with sadness, as if he were relating a personal failure of some kind.

  “They didn’t make it.” He sighed. “Prison reform is something that Brazil isn’t alone in needing, but I must admit this isn’t the best place to be jailed. Actually, I suppose McNeil deserves an award of some sort; fifteen years in one of our penetentiaries must be damned near the record. The first of the others to go died of dysentery about ten years ago. Then another one talked back to a guard. The guard claimed he had a homemade knife. Maybe he did. Anyway, it never was found. Well, he left the prison hospital with a sheet over his face. That was eight years ago. The third one went to solitary confinement—four, five years ago. He was lucky enough to be able to pry a leg loose from his cot.” His eyes came back to Wilson’s face, unemotional now, almost Indian in their stoism. “He used it to stab himself to death. No easy task, I might mention.”

  “But McNeil, apparently, kept his nose clean.”

  “As a whistle. Seldom an argument with anyone, guard or prisoner. No trouble at all, except once when he slugged a prison doctor and wound up in solitary for a few weeks. But that was his only infraction, which is something in fifteen years. He kept pretty much to himself, even after he picked up Portuguese, which was fairly soon, since of course it was the only language spoken. He didn’t even pay too much attention to his old gang. No special friends; in fact, no friends at all. Spoke when spoken to, and politely, too. Did his work, ate his slop, and never squawked about it. No cup-rattling on the bars such as American movies love to depict. A model prisoner.” He sighed. “I guess he wanted to live and he did. And in two weeks he walks out of the pen at Bordeirinho. It’s about ten miles or so out of Re
cife on the road to Jabatão.”

  Wilson studied the face of his friend a moment with curiosity.

  “And you’re going to Barbados to be on hand to meet him when he gets there, because you can’t wait for your next airplane ride.”

  “If you’re guessing,” Da Silva said disdainfully, “you’re cold.”

  “Then you’re going there to meet him just to buy him a drink for old time’s sake.”

  “If anything, you’re getting colder.” Da Silva shook his head. “He doesn’t know me. I never saw the man in person in my life. I turned over all the evidence I had, together with the confessions Storrs finally got from the four of them, to the Public Prosecutor at Recife. I wasn’t even at the trial; something else more important was on the fire at the time. However, the purser’s assistant and the deck officer were there, and they recognized them in the line-up at the Recife police headquarters, native or no native.”

  He raised his hand to attract the attention of their waiter.

  “We’d better have lunch. I hate to break the Brazilian tradition of taking three hours for a meal—not to mention the American Embassy custom—but I’ve got a deskful of work to clear up before tonight, and I want to be sure to leave myself ample time to get properly stoned before I get aboard the plane. Otherwise they’ll have to drag me on, fighting and screaming, and that’s bad for the public image of a brave, fearless police officer.”

  Their waiter appeared almost instantly. Despite his other clients he had been keeping an eye on their table at all times, for Captain Da Silva and his American friend were two of his favorite customers. They drank the best cognac—when available—and tipped well. He placed a menu before each man and immediately stepped back out of earshot. He had no intention of even looking as if he might be eavesdropping on a captain of police.

  “Then you’re going to Barbados to make sure McNeil really gets off the plane and doesn’t stay on it and return to Brazil where he might end up in Rio de Janeiro and add to the steel-drum population here. Which, while not extensive, is large enough; especially those who go around holding up cruise ships.”