A Spy in Time

by Imraan Coovadia

  Then I was being shaken. My dream vanished and João was staring down at me. For a moment, I could only focus on the tobacco leaves in his mustache.

  “Your girlfriend is back. Do you want to see?”

  I sat up and peered wearily through the binoculars. The lights of the Mercedes shone mysteriously in the morning. Soledad got out and looked around. She had a scarf on her head now. She knelt down, unlocked the garage, winched up the door, and returned to the car. Then she disappeared into the house and didn’t come out again, as far as we knew, for a total of sixty hours.

  Three days later, I was waiting in a Fiat on Largo dos Guimarães when the radio crackled.

  “The package is on its way.”

  “What package?”

  “Soledad, I mean. She is on her way to you. You should have her in view in a minute.”

  João was correct. Soledad’s Mercedes paused at the entrance to the square, crossed the tram tracks, and headed down the mountain. I counted to twenty, turned on the car, and followed. I caught sight of her white tires and stayed close, leaving two other cars and a hundred yards between us as we descended.

  The narrow road was bordered by a low stone wall, covered here and there by rapacious fingers of jungle. It curved sharply. Soledad sped without hesitation, never flinching when a car or a truck came in the opposite direction. She didn’t seem to worry about being followed.

  I had trouble keeping up. On the bends, the Fiat slid to the outside and came close to the wall. It accelerated grudgingly on the open stretches, rattling like a tin can on the cobblestones, as the smell of motor oil rose from the engine.

  The ocean came round and then round again, circling in the mirror, and the green mountains, the alpine slums, the skyscrapers on Avenida Presidente Vargas. In the other lane a van went by like a missile. I felt my heart racing in my neck, and slowed down until the blue Mercedes was barely visible.

  By the time we reached Lapa, and the buses and trams on Avenida Gomes Freire brought the traffic to a crawl, I promised that I would hire a driver before ever again stepping into a death trap like a manual car. I opened the window and enjoyed the wind on my face while changing lanes to stay behind my quarry.

  We went straight through Lapa and onto another highway. I hung on and was rewarded when the Mercedes took an exit into the Zona Sul. Men were playing football on a nearby field, some in collared shirts. We went past big private houses protected by guards in fatigues. Then an army barracks around which were parked rows of flatbed trucks, consular residences with their national flags flying at the gates. An open-air cinema, its tall screen standing silent in the last minutes of the afternoon.

  Soon we were driving on the road which followed the contours of the lagoon, Sugarloaf on the right. The Mercedes stopped abruptly at the entrance to an official compound. I continued along the road for a few minutes and stopped on the verge.

  I counted to a hundred, turned around, and came back to find a boom gate and a stern-faced sentry in a tin helmet and gold-buttoned shirt. He examined the Fiat without letting go of his rifle. He went around the entire car, bent down and looked underneath, and leant in the window, bringing the sharp smell of his cologne into the compartment.

  “Are you lost, my friend?”

  “No, I’m not lost. I want to go in, if you don’t mind.”

  He stepped back from the window and leant on his rifle, straining the buttons on his shirt. Behind him was a grand hall, four stories high, with slatted windows, pennants on the roof fluttering in the wind. Soledad’s Mercedes was parked in a space beside a number of jeeps and a truck with canvas sheeting on the back. Behind that, the water.

  “And yet I see no proof of membership, my friend.”

  “Membership of what?”

  “Membership of the Naval Club of the Republic, my friend. You are standing at the entrance to the estate of the great Naval Club of the Republic.”

  This information made sense when I looked around. A ship’s cannon was mounted on a stone circle set upon the waterside. I saw there were sailors in stiff white uniforms on the bank. They were smoking cheroots, arguing lazily as the evening descended from the mountains to the lagoon. Young men. Neither older nor younger than myself, their skin tanned brown. I longed to be among them.

  I opened the car door. The guard shook his head.

  “I know what you have in mind, my friend. I am afraid you cannot apply for a membership in the Naval Club. Either you are already known as a friend of the Brazilian navy, or you are a mere stranger.”

  “May I be honest?”

  “That is always the best policy, my friend.”

  I said, “It’s not the membership that is important to me. I am following a young woman.”

  The guard didn’t smile but he relaxed his hold on his rifle. “Soledad, needless to say. The mythical beauty who has turned Rio’s heart upside down. Why should I allow you to pursue her into the Naval Club?”

  “Love has its own reasons. Sometimes the rest of the world has to respect it for that, step back, and allow it to develop according to its own rules.”

  “I like your philosophy, my friend. I cannot say I disagree with it, even if you speak like a bumpkin from Recife. But I still cannot allow you to enter through this gate. Look at the shirt you are wearing. This is the main entrance to the Naval Club. Come over there.”

  He pointed to a gate further up the road. I backed up and drove to it while he walked over. The guard lifted the chain and let me through. I stopped in the delivery bay next to a van loaded with wooden boards. Holding my breath, I sat there, waiting to be arrested. I couldn’t figure out what the guard’s game was.

  When I got out of the car, I tried to put some cruzeiros in his jacket pocket, but he pushed my hand away.

  “I will never take advantage of a lover.”

  “How do you know, for sure, that I am a lover?”

  “How can I mistake that look? I will let you in on a secret as long as you do not inform my wife. I am also a lover. During the week, I am a husband and a father. On the weekends, I am a lover. If I am lucky, now that I have done something for you, the world will respect my own situation. Concerning karma, concerning matters of the heart, tit for tat. But be sure that you don’t let me down.”

  “I won’t.”

  “You have your work cut out for you. I am sorry to tell you this. They say Soledad has a heart of ice.”

  With this encouragement ringing in my ears, I went around to the front and into the hall. To my astonishment, the ground floor was covered in round tables, candles and flower arrangements in the center of each one. There were more sailors standing around in their dress uniforms, only a few women, in formal dresses and blouses, heavily made up and their hair arrayed in tight bundles, whose conversation was sought by the men. Paintings of admirals in ceremonial dress hung on the walls in heavy gold frames.

  Along one side of the room was the bar: a table covered with fluted glasses plus bottles of rum, white wine in pans of ice, and fruit juices. A man in an apron was tending bar, sliding paper umbrellas into the glasses before he handed them over.

  I found my way into the line behind Soledad. She had taken off her riding jacket and was wearing a short red coat, a jade necklace around her neck, her hair up in a pinned bun. Her blouse was open a few buttons, revealing a few tiny moles scattered on her collarbone. She had only become more beautiful with the passage of time, ripening beauty that only a time traveller could appreciate for what it was.

  I stood as close as I dared. Her brown body, so frighteningly close to me, had the exact smell of baking bread. I didn’t mind the lightness of her complexion at all.

  When she had her glass, she turned round, looked at me in the face for a minute, and hesitated.

  “I know you. Where did we meet?”

  “Nowhere.”

  “Not nowhere. Somewhere. I k
now your face. Tokyo? It must have been Tokyo.”

  Could she have recognized me? She could hardly have been twenty years old in Marrakesh, although Section had been unable to find any surviving records of her birth.

  In the meanwhile, she had become a fully fledged woman. I had slept thousands of years in a graveyard. So much traveling in the meanwhile, this meanwhile in which my soul was supposed to be frozen. I had visited the rings of Jupiter, a voyage unimaginable to a person of this century, while she had followed Keswyn Muller to Finland, Tokyo, Yokohama and Brazil in pursuit of whatever it was that the doctor sought. Yet there had been some connection between us, I thought, since the evening in the Green Dolphin. There had been some secret form of influence which had worked on the heart’s level.

  “I would remember if I had been to Tokyo. I would remember when we met.”

  “It seems to be a competition in Brazil, each time I talk to someone, for him to come up with the most romantic sentence.”

  I said, “I don’t think we could have met. I cannot believe it.”

  Soledad put her hand on my shoulder for a moment. We were alone in the deserted hall.

  “And I could swear that we have. Are you really from Brazil?”

  “Not originally.”

  “You speak very good Portuguese. Like a local.”

  “I had very good teachers.”

  It was thrilling simply to be talking to Soledad once again. I could only compare it to riding a bicycle faster and faster, flying down the slope of the steepest hill, when I had no idea what lay at the bottom…

  “But you are quite black even for a Brazilian. Since we have never been introduced, will you tell me, what is your name?”

  “They call me Enver.”

  “Enver, Soledad, pleased to meet you.” She repeated my name as if to listen through new ears. “Enver, Enver, Enver sounds familiar.”

  “It’s a common name. You hear it from place to place.”

  Only the senior officers, men in their fifties and sixties, seemed to have the right to converse with Soledad. One of them, a gray-haired column of a man, kept trying to break into our conversation. He became even more severe, his face as troubled as the ocean, when Soledad politely turned her back to him.

  When he came around, Soledad went to make a telephone call. The admiral stroked his gardened beard and considered me disapprovingly. He brought out a box of snuff and offered me a pinch. I accepted, held the peppery-white dust under my nose, and almost choked trying to breathe it in. The man put his arm on my back until the coughing stopped.

  “And what is your connection with the Brazilian navy? If I may be permitted to enquire.”

  “I don’t have any such connection.”

  “And with Soledad?”

  “We don’t have one either. We were just starting to talk when you interrupted.”

  The admiral flushed red, trembled in his ruffled shirt, swayed from side to side. I regretted the criticism. I didn’t want to end my career fighting with pistols at dawn in the tropical squalor of the twentieth century.

  I said, “Excuse me. I spoke out of turn. The fact is, I hardly know Soledad or what to make of her. I am sure you admire her good qualities as much as I do.”

  “Ah, she is an exceptional woman. Even for Brazil.”

  “I can see that. Even for Brazil. I may sound like one of you but I was not in fact born in this country. I am only an admirer.”

  The admiral said, “And there is a lot to admire.”

  There was no obvious way to continue the conversation. We both looked at the cook, a fat man laughing in a white apron, who was prying off the tops of a line of wine bottles set on the counter. The sailors had found partners. Couples were dancing, cheek to cheek. Others were talking, their hands and faces almost touching in the starlight of the chandeliers. The scent of the flowers had spread throughout the hall.

  In the windows, the evening was coming across the lagoon, the water and the mountain turning dark for this building of love. I could feel Section and its attendant haze of paranoia and conspiracy fall away from me forever. I was in a place apart from its tentacles, apart from the impending death of João Twenty.

  The admiral’s face was still red. He was watching impatiently for Soledad.

  “May I ask you a question?”

  He opened his hands. “Go ahead.”

  “What exactly do you do in the navy? Do you command a ship or a flotilla? Do you work in the harbor?”

  “I am not a commander of a vessel. That is a common misunderstanding, to believe that every admiral and commodore is in charge of a ship. As a matter of fact, I am an engineer, working on the capabilities of submarines and surface ships. Naval aviation also, coincidentally. The Tracker aircraft, for example, belongs to my area of responsibility. I help them to communicate with one another and with Operations Command on shore. Within that general area, my expertise is technical. It is not easy to explain to a civilian.”

  “Try me.”

  “Very well. You understand that Brazil is a very proud country.”

  I said, “And you have every right to be. You have the best of everything here.”

  The admiral paused, seemed to wonder if I could be doubting him. Then he went on.

  “As I say, we are proud enough to dislike and bridle at the fact of the superpowers reading our internal communications. So we are investing in our own protection, our own self-respect. I am supervising the design and construction of a number of code-making machines, fit for our ships, submarines, and aircraft. Soon, we will be able to speak from one corner of the world without fear of eavesdropping. I can tell you all this because it is natural that a country like ours has secrets to keep. And that in itself is no secret. It is something we can take pride in as Brazil takes its place in the forefront of nations.”

  “Soledad?”

  “She has a connection, yes, to the great work.”

  “What is that connection? What possible relationship can exist between her and the existence of a military code?”

  The admiral waited and put his hand on Soledad’s back when she returned. She didn’t accept his attention. Nor did she reject it.

  “You left me in the company of a very inquisitive man, my dear.”

  “What does he want to know about?”

  “Ah, he wants to know about you. In that respect, he is not unique. Every man and every woman in Rio wants to know about you. Beauty is always of interest.”

  I excused myself, my face burning. I went to telephone João from an upstairs line, located in the admiral’s office, and was separated from Soledad for the rest of the evening. I spent the time listening to the various conversations going on around the room.

  When I couldn’t eavesdrop anymore because my ears were falling off, I went outside and sat on the stone circle, beneath the cannon, watching the couples who came out of the lighted hall and went along the promenade, following the metalwork fence along the water until it turned at the edge of the estate.

  When the staff cars arrived for the officers, I made my way to the Mercedes and opened the door. It took a matter of seconds to get in. I lay in the back, trying to make myself invisible. Soledad got in and turned the car on. She drove through the gates, turned onto a side road, and then onto the main road. There was nobody about. The street lights hung like orange lanterns outside the consulates and diplomatic residences.

  She stopped in the driveway of a mansion. The Canadian flag hung above it. Two sentries in white helmets and gloves watched us from their cubicle. Soledad turned off the car and produced a gun from her handbag. Then she turned around and put the barrel against my forehead. It was a cold circle.

  “Admiral Coriolis had the right opinion. You are very inquisitive, Enver. You know there’s an expression in English? Too much curiosity killed the cat. We don’t have the equivalent in Portugue
se, as far as I know.”

  “I don’t know the expression.”

  “In this case it applies.”

  “If I die, I die. Those are the rules of the game. I only wanted to have a conversation which could be to your benefit. And believe me, Soledad, you don’t want to be the one responsible for my death. I am protected by the statute governing time travel to foreign locations. I am protected under the Constitution as an employee of the Historical Agency. Interfering with my work has the potential to have you expunged from existence. And not only you.”

  “I have never heard of it. What on Earth is a Historical Agency? Like a museum association?”

  I ignored the question. I kept hoping the consulate guards would come towards us, but they seemed to be satisfied that we were having an ordinary conversation at gunpoint. My heart was beating very fast. My eyelids closed and could hardly be opened. I wanted to sleep.

  To my relief, Soledad put the gun on her lap and allowed me to sit up. She turned on the light inside the cabin.

  “You have already been blamed for the death of a senior member of the foreign service. I am talking about what transpired in Marrakesh, in 1955.”

  “I was in Marrakesh, yes, but I have no idea what you are referring to.”

  “You are considered an enemy to the cause of historical purity, as defined by S Natanson. If you harm me, I promise you, the Agency won’t hesitate to apply the ultimate sanction, no matter the cost in energy. They will erase you and your parents and other relations, any children you might have had, and your children’s children. They will travel into the past to punish you. If there is anything and anyone that means anything to you, they will find out and make it as if it had never been.”

  “You’re speaking nonsense, just a jumble of words that are coming out of your mouth.”