by Peter Leslie
Try as he would, he could not overtake her and put himself in view - there was always some segment of the noisy throng which obtruded just as he was getting near...
They had drifted away from the seafront now and were pushing their way up a narrow street towards one of the heights which lay behind the old town. On all sides the throbbing of the combos, the rattle of tambourines and the yowl of electric guitars filled the air. The roadway was filled with a stream of papier-mâché mandarins, Popeyes and mythical beasts, all pressing down towards the sea. But the population here was predominantly colored, the laughter more boisterous, the dancing less inhibited.
Kuryakin followed the beaked mask as it threaded its way to the top of the street, across a cobbled square, and up a steep, stepped path traversing the side of a bluff sprinkled with wooden shacks among the trees. Several times the grotesque headed turned in a questing way - almost as though she knew that she was being followed and wanted to make sure he was still there, the agent thought with a frown.
He quickened his pace as the girl in the Carnaval mask sprang agilely across a gap in a ruined wall and began to climb a street - it was more of a path, really - so steep that it had to be buttressed every two yards with risers of planking pegged into the hard earth.
Again the beak swung his way as he closed the gap between them. The shanties clinging to the sides of the cliff were ablaze with light and shaking with music. This was getting ridiculous - he must approach her right away. Now…
As he panted up the steps, his eyes came level with the girl's hurrying heels. How odd, he thought, that she should be wearing rope-soled espadrilles with a smart town suit. Suddenly suspicious, he sped up, drew level with her—and halted. The girl in the mask had stopped outside the door of one of the huts. A dim light burned behind a window looking onto a tiny porch.
"Now just a minute…" Illya began, when the girl turned toward him, raised a pair of slender arms, and lifted the beaked mask from her head and shoulders.
"Man, I thought you was never going to catch up," she said with a silvery laugh. "Still, I guess it saves us walkin' all the way up here to get a drink, eh? And it is Carnaval time…"
The Russian stood rooted to the spot. Above the girl's plump cheeks, lustrous violet eyes twinkled in an eighteen-year-old face the color of mahogany.
---
He was still cursing himself for not realizing that the vendors of Carnaval masks would sell many of the same type in one evening when he got back to his hotel - footsore and still a little humiliated at the embarrassing explanation he had had to make to the girl on the heights. All in all, it had not exactly been his day: when he hadn't realized it, he had been tailed; when he had wanted to be tailed, he had lost the follower; except for the good fortune of finding O'Rourke, all his inquiries had drawn blanks; and now he had made a fool of himself!... Better to write the whole day off, have a nice refreshing bath, and get up early to catch the first available plane: to Brasilia tomorrow!
He unlocked his door, switched on the lights in his room and checked his personal "signposts" to make sure it had not been searched in his absence.
Dropping the ridiculous coolie's head on a settee, he dragged off his jacket and strode through to the bathroom to switch on the taps.
"This absurdly large perforated thing is a silencer," the girl said. She was sitting on the edge of the tub. "The gun behind it is small. It's a Berretta, and unless you shoot terribly accurately, you haven't a hope in hell of stopping a man with one. The only thing is - I'm afraid I do shoot terribly accurately."
She rose swiftly to her feet. "Now - into the other room, if you please," she said briskly. "There are one or two questions I want to ask you..."
Chapter 7
Trespassers Will Be Liquidated
ILLYA KURYAKIN slumped into an easy chair, sighed, and broke open a pack of cigarettes. "Look, I don't know who you are..." he began.
"Put that down," the girl rapped. "I've seen that one before: the first cigarette to come out of that pack is a bolt of metal, painted white. It comes out fast, because there is a powerful spring inside the pack - and it hits me right between the eyes. By the time I've recovered consciousness, you have the gun."
The agent shrugged and tossed the pack onto the bed. There were unusual glints of copper in the mass of dark hair, he saw in the bright lights of the hotel room, and the face was even more rakish and thoroughbred than he had thought
"All right," the girl was saying, "we'll have your hands lying along the arms of the chair if you please… that's it… and now perhaps you'll tell me just exactly who you are and what you're doing here."
"Surely we have the roles reversed?" Kuryakin murmured. "Those are my lines you are saying."
The girl tossed her head impatiently. "I lose my temper easily," she warned, "and a slug from a Berretta can be very painful - through the ear or a wrist, for example."
"Oh, come now," the Russian said easily, leaning forward to rise from the chair. "You know very well you wouldn't use that thing, even if it is silenced."
He dropped abruptly back into his seat. He had seen the almost imperceptible whitening of the knuckle as the girl put the first pressure on the trigger. "So-ho," he said softly. "We really would have used it, would we? Or else we know enough to bluff - knowing also that a professional couldn't afford to take a chance on it."
"All right, all right," the girl said. "So you read the sign, which told me what I wanted to know too; so let's just assume we're both professionals shall we, and go on from there?... I repeat: Who are you and what are you doing here?"
"My dear young lady, there is no secret about that: you could have found out simply by coming up to me and asking. There was no need for all the melodrama."
"I'm waiting."
"My name is Illya Kuryakin; I live in New York; and I am in Rio looking for a friend who has disappeared."
"What was his name and what was he doing here?"
"His name is Williams, I hope. He was investigating something for some friends of mine."
"Investigating what?"
"I'm sorry, but I do not think that is any of your business."
"That's just where you're wrong," the girl said. "It is just that which makes it my business. For these friends of yours on whose behalf the so-called Mr. Williams was investigating are actually friends of mine - and they have never heard of Mr. Williams!"
"Friends of yours?" the Russian echoed. "You're working for the D.A.M.E.S.? But this is ridiculous!"
"I did not say I was working for the Daughters of America Missionary Emergency Service. Your Mr. Williams affected to be doing that: he went all over, asking questions and searching around, claiming to be a lawyer briefed by the organization. This was not true; nor is there a New York lawyer named Williams with his particular description. Naturally enough, therefore, there are a number of interested parties wanting to find out what gives.
"I see. And you represent which one of them?"
"So, to begin with," the girl said, ignoring, his questions, "I ask you once more: Who sent you here? And who sent Williams?"
"The same people."
"Thank you very much. And there's no use pretending to be a member of the C.I.A., the Brazilian counter intelligence service, or any special branch of the Rio police. I have friends in many places arid I have checked them all."
"I wouldn't presume," Kuryakin said. "I wasn't aware that this matter impinged in any way on espionage… Look, a man has disappeared. I'm trying to find him. That's all."
"Are you working for any American organization?"
"No."
"Any Brazilian organization?"
"No."
"Any underworld group? Any international organization?"
"I told you. I'm hired. To find a man. The hirers are clients and their identity is privileged information. You know that."
"I'm not a policewomen. I have a gun on you. I don't have to observe the niceties of legal protocol. You're a private detective?"
Illya glanced over the girl's shoulder and raised an eyebrow. "All right, Petersen," he said. "Don't hurt her - just take the gun."
The weapon remained steady as the girl said evenly, "The French windows are locked. The catch makes quite a noise when it is operated. The balcony is nine floors up. There is no drainpipe, no fire escape connecting with it, and no way of reaching it from the neighboring rooms... Do you think I'd sit here with my back to the windows if I hadn't checked all this, for God's sake? I thought we agreed to consider each other professionals."
"My apologies for underestimating both your training and your intelligence," Illya said dryly. "What is your name?"
"Coralie Simone, if it matters. Don't you ever smile?"
"Only when something amuses me. Don't you?"
"I'm too busy to notice. Now… once more: Who hired you?"
"An organization calling itself Thrush," the agent said blandly.
"I never heard of it. What's that?"
"A syndicate of powerful and ruthless men dedicated to the overthrow of all legal government and the eventual despotism of the world."
"I don't believe you."
"Don't believe what - that there is such an organization, or that I am hired by it?"
"I don't believe either of them."
"Well, I've heard of candor," Kuryakin said, "but this really is something..."
Although the affair of the windows had not fooled the girl into turning around - he hadn't thought it would - the subsequent exchange had sufficiently diverted and held her attention for him to do what he wanted to. He was sitting fairly well forward in the chair, his forearms lying along its padded arms. The chair, he knew, ran very easily on its castors across the tiled floor. Imperceptibly as he had talked and held her eyes with his own, he bad drawn his feet back under him and edged his hands forward so that the fingers now dropped over the front ends of the chair arms. His center of gravity now should be such that, if the chair was suddenly removed from under him, be could stay in the same squatted position and not fall over. He flexed his muscles experimentally. Yes. He could make it.
The time had come to end the interview. He wasn't sure at all that the girl was employed by the D.A.M.E.S. If she was, surely they would have liaised with Waverly. On the other hand, he couldn't believe she was a Thrush member. Even the most accomplished of actresses could hardly have feigned that bland incredulity when he'd mentioned the organization and its aims. In any event, the riddle of her allegiance must wait until another time: at the moment be was tired of being questioned himself.
"...essential that you tell me your principals," Cora he Simone was saying.
Once more, Illya searched for, caught and held her eyes. "But surely you must realize, my dear..." he began.
Tensing the muscles of calf, back and thigh, he raised himself minutely from the chair and sent it rocketing backwards with a powerful thrust of his fingers.
The girl's eyes tore themselves away from his as the chair skated across the floor with a rumble and a screech. Involuntarily, she followed its path with her glance. At the same time, like a trepak dancer from the Cossack country, Kuryakin kicked out one leg horizontally from his squatting position.
The toe of his shoe caught the underneath of the gun's butt as it nestled in her hand, sending the weapon spinning upwards. Before she had switched her gaze back from the errant chair, he had risen to his feet, stretched out a hand and snatched the Berretta from the air.
"Forgive the liberty," he said quietly. "I have to leave early in the morning and I really do need some sleep."
The girl, scarlet with anger, her eyes flashing, nursed her hand and watched as he broke the automatic, slid the clip out and shook the shells into the palm of one hand. He crossed the room to the bed, picked up the white shoulder-strap bag she had left there, and dropped them inside. Then he bowed, handed her the bag and the empty gun, and turned to open the door for her. He was smiling.
"Until the next time, Miss Simone," he said gently.
"If there is one," the girl said grimly. "I do not like people opening my handbag without my permission. It's rude. Also, I have a rooted objection to being followed. So if you'll forgive me…"
She reversed the gun in her hand and slashed the butt expertly down to the side of Illya's head while he was bent over the lock.
---
He still had a headache when the plane landed at Brasilia the following morning. The weather was humid, close and fiercely hot, the sky overcast by a lowering front.
In view of O'Rourke's information, he decided to go first of all to the auto rental companies. It wasn't until the fourth attempt that he found anyone who had heard of "Mr. Williams." But the boy behind the shabby counter in this one remembered at once.
"Why goodness me, yes!" he exclaimed, his dark face lighting up at the memory. "As a matter of fact he hired the car personally from me. Nice chap, really top-hole."
"He was going up to the San Felipe dam, was he?"
"Oh rather. Absolutely. Told me so himself, don't you know. In fact be asked me to help him work out the jolly old route. He was going to spend the night at Goiás, I believe."
"He didn't bring the car back himself?"
"Well, no. As a matter of fact a different bloke did. Just handed it in, paid out the cash and hooked it, you know."
"And you haven't seen Mr. Williams since?"
"Williams? No. Not a hide nor a jolly old hair. But..."
"You have seen the other man?"
"Not to say since, old bean. Before. I've seen him around. Cove by the name of Greerson. Hardly the type I'd expect your friend -"
"Does he live here?"
"Live here? Who does, old chap, who does? No, I fancy he's a backwoodsman. Tell you the truth, I rather thought he was a foreigner employed on the construction site or something of that sort."
"You've been very helpful," Illya said. "Here, take this - and I'd like to rent a car myself for a few days. Any chance at all of getting the same one Williams had?"
"Oh, I say, thanks awfully. Most decent of you… Not to say the same actual one. One just like it – another VW. But you can't very well have the actual one - the girl's already taken that."
"The girl?"
"Smashing bird, old boy. About an hour ago. Asked all the same questions you've asked - and off she drove."
Kuryakin gave an exclamation of annoyance. If the girl was Coralie Simone, it meant she had help in a big way. For she hadn't been on the first plane, he could have sworn - and that in turn meant she must have a private aircraft, for to have made Brasilia from Rio in any other way would have been impossible in the time.
"Don't you find that collar uncomfortable in this weather?" he asked sourly as they turned together to go out into the garage.
---
San Felipe do Caiapo was a collection of shacks, some wood, some adobe-and-thatch, dispersed around a rutted open space that did service as central square, market, sports ground and local park. There was an inn, a mud walled church, a swaying bridge over the river, and a garage - an open shed flanked by a single rusty gasoline pump which was surrounded by an assortment of decrepit vehicles. Without exception, these were of pre-war vintage and looked as though they had just man aged to struggle as far as San Felipe when they were new, and had never been able to raise the necessary horsepower to leave again.
Most of the population were seated outside the front doors of their houses, leaning against the walls to get the maximum amount of shade from the projecting eaves, but there were several groups of men along a boardwalk linking the building on one side of the square rather in the manner of a Hollywood western.
Illya bumped the Volkswagen across the plaza, scattering chickens, dogs and mules, and edged the car cautiously over the bridge. There was only a trickle of water in the pebbly river bed below.
Beyond the town, the road twisted through a belt of forest, breasted a rise, and dropped down to the river again, where it joined a wider, paved highway run
ning almost due north and south. Kuryakin took the northerly direction and beaded for Getuliana. Presently the valley widened, the hills at each side became lower, and the river looped away in a series of ox-bows across an alluvial plain.
In a few miles, he caught sight of the new city. Or, rather, the place where the new city was destined to be.
The road clung to higher ground at the side of the wide valley, and the excavations - a couple of miles away in the middle of the plain - were spread out before him like a map. Hundreds of acres had been cleared, bulldozed into squares and rectangles and crescents, segmented by radial boulevards converging on a central space, laterally divided by wide avenues. But apart from the temporary huts erected by contractors, there wasn't a building in sight. A cloud of dust above the yellowish earth marked the place where a single bulldozer was working near a pair of cranes in one corner of the vast site. But the only other activity Illya could see was a mile away to the north, where the antlike movements of a fleet of trucks and several dozen men centered on a pair of heavy transport aircraft drawn up at one end of a wide landing strip.
Soon the distant puttering of the bulldozer was submerged in a heavier, deeper rumble. For a moment, he sought the source of the noise. Then his eye caught a moving dust cloud to his right. A column of trucks was winding its way along a route leading from the site to the road be was on. In a few minutes, the convoy roared past, heading for San Felipe and the damn. All the trucks were covered - and each one seemed to have a man in some sort of uniform beside the driver.
It was unbearably hot parked in the sunlight at the edge of the road. Making up his mind suddenly, Kuryakin swung over the VW's wheel and set off the way he had come, following the convoy back towards the dam.
Three or four miles after the junction with the road to San Felipe village, the valley narrowed and the sides became steep and rocky. Soon he was driving along a serpentine defile above whose thickly wooded lower slopes great cliffs reared skywards.
Abruptly the gorge divided: the river in its stony bed burrowed beneath the road and was seen to be emerging from the canyon on the right, while the tributary valley on the left was marked only by a dried-up watercourse showing not even a trickle of moisture. The road forked too, though in a contrary sense - for while the highway to the south twisted away towards the pass at the head of the minor valley, the road following the main gorge was blocked a hundred yards further on by wire mesh gate on steel frames. And the smooth blacktop which had distinguished the highway ever since Getuliana swerved aside from the main road and continued beyond the gates to where, a half mile away, the great bulk of the dam itself was visible around a bend in the valley. Beyond a cracked and peeling sign pointing to AGUACALINDA - SANTA MARIA DA CONCEICAO - GOIÁS the trunk road relapsed at once into an unsurfaced dirt-track alternating chassis-breaking potholes with extrusions of naked bed rock. Clearly the pavement had been laid only to assist the contractors in moving materials from landing strip to dam, and the hell with local communications.
