The corridors were filled with people when I left the sanctuary of the priest’s room, most of them still in their night clothes, and there were the usual rumour mongers amongst them, their speculation ranging from revolution to multiple murder. Surrounded by an aura of holiness I remained aloof from useless conjecture, making my dignified way to safety. The first obstacle came in the person of the policeman stationed by the lifts. Assuming my most pious mien I simply behaved as though he wasn’t there, pressing the button for the lift. The policeman approached me diffidently.
‘Excuse me, Father,’ he said apologetically. ‘You’d better return to your room. There’s a dangerous criminal loose in the hotel. A killer.’
Slowly I turned to face him, my head held low, knowing the encounter would be an acid test for my Portuguese. I spoke the language fluently but I didn’t usually pretend I spoke it well enough to pass as a native Brazilian.
‘There have always been killers in the world,’ I intoned, feeling the sweat trickle down my back. ‘They have never prevented the ministers of the church from doing their duty.’
This was a horrible, crappy line, one which would make me cringe with embarrassment when I thought of it in retrospect. Even Hollywood in the thirties could hardly have done worse. Fortunately the lift doors opened as I finished speaking and I swept majestically inside, not waiting to explain myself. Or to hear the policeman’s comments on my accent. For two nerve-racking moments I stared gravely out of the open lift doors while the policeman gawped in, then the doors swished closed and the lift began to descend.
As I went down I was clammily aware that this had been the easy part, that the policeman could afford not to voice any objections because he knew there was another line of defence in the lobby. In fact there seemed to be dozens of policemen scattered around the place, many of them officers, and two men were guarding the revolving doors, machine pistols at the ready. Slowly I walked towards them, trying to convince myself I was a priest on an urgent errand of mercy, not a craven, quaking Englishman on the run from the police, his immortal soul in jeopardy for assaulting one of God’s representatives on Earth. When I approached the door two machine pistols swung inwards to bar the exit.
‘No one is to leave the hotel,’ one of the policemen snarled unpleasantly.
His tone didn’t display a glimmer of respect for the cloth and the bastard had all the hallmarks of a militant, died-in-the-wool atheist. Instinctively I performed the bravest act of my young life, gently pushing both guns out of my way, my hands leaving damp marks on the barrels.
‘A man is dying,’ I said solemnly. ‘He needs me.’
If possible, this was a lousier line than the first and I went through the doors expecting either a command to halt or a bullet in the back. Neither eventuality occurred. Seconds later I was out in the street, pushing my way through the small crowd surrounding the entrance and past the police jeeps lining the kerb, their drivers leaning against the bumpers and only too glad they didn’t have to chase dangerous, armed criminals inside the hotel.
As the real priest was likely to be discovered at any moment my natural inclination was to vanish over the horizon in a cloud of dust but, exercising iron restraint, I held myself down to a brisk walk until I reached the Kombi. Once there I abandoned all pretence.
*
Minus the clerical gear I drove flat out, staying ahead of the road blocks until I was forty miles from Caxias. Porto Alegre was surrounded by two distinct ethnic zones. The inner circle, including Novo Hamborgo and Sao Leopoldo, was predominantly German, so much so that until the war expectant mothers would board German ships in Porto Alegre harbour to have their babies beyond the three-mile limit to ensure German citizenship for their offspring. Inland, where the land rose, this merged into the wine-growing area and the more successfully integrated Italians took over. I was well up into the hills when, rounding a comer, I spotted the road block. There was nothing elaborate about it, just a red and yellow pole across the road and a jeep containing two policemen parked on the verge, but it wasn’t something I could ignore.
Dutifully, I slowed down as the policemen stepped into the road, waiting until I was less than fifty yards away before I stamped on the accelerator. The Kombi’s acceleration was nothing to write home about but what it lacked in speed it more than made up for in weight and it crashed through the flimsy barrier like a tank, sending the policemen diving for their lives. They were still sorting themselves out when I rounded the next bend, some three hundred yards away.
If I’d been travelling fast before, now I should have been driving for my life but my responses were becoming sluggish. Over the past day or two fear, anger and shock had been pumping bursts of adrenalin into my system at crucial junctures and I appeared to have exhausted the supply. The new threat left me absolutely cold and, hunched over the wheel, I was only aware of physical exhaustion, my eye sockets feeling as though they were coated with sandpaper. At the best of times I was no Stirling Moss and, under stress, I deteriorated to L-driver standard, clipping the verges at almost every comer. My poor driving, the narrow, winding road and the uncomfortably steep drops on one side or the other made disaster almost inevitable at the speed I was travelling, especially when they were combined with the tricky, half-light of dawn. In fact I managed just five miles before it struck.
I was negotiating one of the rare downhill sections, uneasily ignoring the warning notices, when I failed to complete a left-hand bend which came back nastily at me, the narrow bridge only serving to complicate matters. Instead of following the road the Kombi hit the wooden railings of the bridge at an angle, ending up with the front wheels precariously balanced over a sheer drop to the fast-flowing river thirty feet below.
The one useful result of the collision was that I smacked my head painfully against the windscreen, waking myself up. My sense of urgency restored I hastily grabbed the money from the glove compartment, adding Melanie’s peashooter as an afterthought. Luckily the police jeep must have been a slow starter because I could hear no sounds of pursuit as I clambered gingerly from the Kombi, praying it wouldn’t slide into the river for a minute or two.
It was almost dawn and the birds were already breaking into joyous song at the approach of another day but I was in no mood to share their appreciation. Stationed at the rear of the Kombi I pushed with all my strength, nearly rupturing myself with the effort, and the vehicle didn’t budge an inch. Changing tactics I tried lifting the back bumper and met with no more success. There was no time for anything else as police sirens were wailing in the distance, from both directions unless my ears deceived me.
Conceding defeat I stepped away from the Kombi and as I did so it tilted noiselessly forward of its own volition, then slid gently out of sight over the edge of the bridge. I didn’t hang around to listen for the splash. The sirens were coming too close for comfort and I sprinted towards the cover of the woods at the far side of the bridge, not looking back until I was safely concealed amongst the trees.
The jeep I’d passed at the road block was first on the scene, having less than a minute in hand over the one which arrived from the opposite direction. Their advent proved there was something to be said for dangerous driving after all because if my incompetence hadn’t caused me to smash into the bridge I would have been sandwiched between the two of them. The policemen were soon huddled round the gap in the railings and it wasn’t difficult to guess what they were thinking. They expected me to be trapped inside the van, somewhere in the wreckage on the stream bed, and even when they failed to find my body they wouldn’t be surprised. It was a hell of a drop from the bridge and the river had a strong current so they’d merely think my corpse had been swept downstream. Eventually someone would get to checking the woods but by then I’d be long gone.
*
I slept far longer than I’d intended and it was early evening before I breasted the brow of the low hill overlooking the de la Sagra fief. It had been a hard afternoon, my exertions le
aving me hot, scratched and thirsty, so I sat on an outcrop of rock to smoke a Continental before facing the last quarter of a mile through the immaculately tended vines.
Ramon de la Sagra was a Spaniard, my friend and one of the greatest rogues in the world, almost too large for life. He maintained he was an anarchist, basing the claim on his family name, which I was certain he’d assumed, and his former membership of the Confederacion Nacional del Trabaio. He even had a tattered red and black flag over his mantelpiece, just to back up his story.
If he was to be believed, and I didn’t, he’d been active in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War and then fought with Buenaventura Durutti in Aragon and Madrid. Despite the impeccable record Bakunin or Kropotkin would have had considerable difficulty in recognising him as a disciple. Whatever his beliefs as a young man the years had turned Ramon into an old-time, feudal despot. The two hundred peasants on his vast estates acknowledged his laws, not those of Brazil, and his rule was so absolute it was a wonder he didn’t establish Customs posts. The sole reason his serfs put up with him was that no one ever went hungry on the de la Sagra estates. For a man whose original capital had come from a Spanish bank robbery Ramon hadn’t done at all badly.
The cigarette finished I trudged across the dry, crumbly soil between the vines, glad it was no more than a quarter of a mile. Ramon’s dwelling place, an enormous, rambling bungalow, was in the centre of the village, the cottages of his employees grouped around it. Several of the villagers greeted me as I passed, some of them welcoming me by name, and the fact they knew who I was didn’t worry me in the slightest. They would never divulge the information to an outsider unless their master instructed them to.
Ramon himself was seated on the veranda of his house, a stocky, bearded man with the inevitable bottle of wine in front of him. He existed in a permanent state of semi-inebriation, never completely sober and never incapably drunk. I was halfway across the clearing in front of his bungalow palace when he spotted me.
‘Philis, my friend,’ he roared, dark eyes twinkling with pleasure as he advanced on me, his friendly embrace powerful enough to crack a lesser man’s ribs. ‘What kept you so long? I was expecting you hours ago.’
‘What?’ I said weakly.
Weakness was an emotion I usually experienced when I was exposed to the full blast of Ramon’s personality.
‘Those pigs of policia said you’d been killed in the crash,’ he explained. ‘I knew they were lying.’
By this time I was sitting on the veranda with a glass of wine in my hand. Ramon’s unexpected boom of laughter made me spill half of it.
‘I would have loved to have seen that priest, trussed up like a turkey in his underwear,’ he spluttered. ‘You remind me of when I was young.’
‘Heaven forbid,’ I muttered uncharitably, dabbing at my sodden trousers. ‘And for God’s sake don’t tell me I’ve got cojones.’
My remark passed unnoticed — there was no stopping Ramon once he’d started on one of his anecdotes.
‘I shall never forget one village we took in the drive towards Saragossa,’ he continued inexorably. ‘The villagers were living on slops while the priest had a great storehouse packed to the rafters with food. We organized a feast for the whole village, with the priest serving at table, and before we shot him we made him set fire to his own church. It was a marvellous sight.’
‘No wonder Franco won the war,’ I commented acidly. ‘Your mob did so much church burning and bank robbing there wasn’t any time for fighting. Anyway, I’m not sure I believe you anymore.’
‘What do you mean?’
Ramon did his best to sound hurt.
‘I’ve done some checking,’ I told him. ‘If you were with Durutti when he assassinated the Archbishop of Saragossa you were only nine years old.’
‘It must have been some other bishop, then,’ Ramon said offhandedly, suddenly eager to change the subject. ‘Drink up your wine and we’ll go in to see Rosita. She put on her best dress when I told her you were coming.’
Ramon had been a widower for the past twelve years so I’d never met his wife but it was easy to see Rosita must have inherited her good looks from her. Only eighteen, she was enough of a woman to make my adopted uncle role something of a chore and I would have liked to see her. Unfortunately, when I rose from the chair my legs went rubbery beneath me, my head started an unscheduled trip on a rollercoaster and the next thing I remembered was waking up in bed, my chest heavily bandaged, with the early morning sun shining through the unshuttered windows. I had the impression I must have been overdoing things.
All next day Rosita mollycoddled me unmercifully and I lapped it up, dozing in between meals and bandage changing, the total relaxation raising my morale one hundred per cent. When Ramon made his appearance before dinner I was ready for anything, including the two bottles of wine he’d brought with him. We’d seen them off and started on two more before I’d finished relating my misadventures.
‘What do you intend to do now?’ Roman asked. ‘You know you’re welcome to stay here for as long as you like. Rosita would be only too glad of the company.’
I laughed at him, something the wine made easy.
‘You know damn well I’m not staying here. You’d never speak to me again if I did. I want to get to Santos.’
‘Good,’ Ramon said, rising to his feet with a beam on his face. ‘I’ll tell Rosita that we’ll be leaving in the morning.’
This was a reaction I’d anticipated and I grabbed hold of Ramon’s arm before he was out of range.
‘You’re not coming with me, Ramon,’ I told him. ‘I need your help with the transport but the rest I’ll do alone.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Ramon protested. ‘Just because I’m getting old you think I’m incompetent as well. You’re wrong.’
‘It’s not that at all,’ I interrupted hastily, before he began regaling me with Civil War exploits. ‘I’m only being realistic. Whatever happens I’m finished here in Brazil. Whether I catch up with Biddencourt and Gordinho or not I’ll still have to leave the country. With you it’s different. You’ve spent thirty years building up this place — it’s your whole life. And you have Rosita to think about. You had your fight in Spain, this one is mine.’
Even a man as pig-headed as Ramon couldn’t fail to appreciate that I was talking sense and he agreed that seeing me to Sao Paulo was as far as his direct involvement went. For a man in his position it was easy to arrange. All the year round lorries full of wine were plying between the Caxias area and Sao Paulo and, as one of the leading producers, a fair number of these lorries belonged to Ramon. In these circumstances it didn’t involve much of a break with routine to lay on a special trip for me. Nevertheless, Ramon refused to be left out of the act entirely. Maintaining it was high time for one of his outings to Sao Paulo, when he turned the Praca Roosevelt on its ear, he took the wheel for the journey. Even so I was in Sao Paulo by nightfall the next day.
Chapter 9
The services provided by Zephyr taxis had to rank among the best in the world. Every fifteen minutes during the day, and for most of the night, their comfortable, roomy cars gave door-to-door portage between Sao Paulo and Santos, cities forty-five miles apart, for the cruzeiro equivalent of a few shillings. Price apart, the journey was quite something and, seated in the front of the nine o’clock taxi, I fully appreciated it. Sao Paulo, a megalopolis of breath-taking architecture which erupted from the rich terra rossa of the plateau, stood at a height of nearly three thousand feet and in less than fifty miles the road was down at sea level, with Santos as its terminus. It was a clear morning, with no haze to spoil the spectacular view, and three quarters of the way down from the plateau Santos was already in sight. The beach could almost have been an imitation Copacabana, a long, golden sweep of sand flanked by its white hedge of skyscrapers, the rest of the city stretching out behind until it was finally hemmed in by the surrounding hills. On the far side of the city a scattering o
f tall buildings made another break in the general skyline, marking the commercial area around the Praca Maua, and, close by, the ungainly bulk of the cranes dominated the docks, still handling more coffee than any other port in the world. All this was spread in a panorama below me as the taxi spiralled down the last few miles of the descent and approached the vast COSIPA complex marking the entrance to the town. Although I’d only been away for a few days it was like returning home.
Of course, this brought its attendant difficulties. Brazilian cities were far more intimate than their British counterparts and, despite the fact Santos was almost as large as Leeds, there was no part of the city where I’d be safe from recognition. News of my exploits in the south would have reached Santos ahead of me and word of my return would soon go round. I was going to need protection, powerful protection which would cost a lot of money. Quite possible every cruzeiro I’d saved.
Until this was arranged there was no question of visiting either of my apartments and I had the taxi driver drop me on the front. Luckily Inspector Pinto was at police headquarters when I phoned him.
‘It’s Philis,’ I said in response to his query.
‘And to think I’ve been wearing a black armband,’ Pinto lied shamelessly. ‘Where are you calling from?’
‘I have to see you,’ I told him, ignoring the question. ‘Alone.’
‘Of course. You know I’m always at your service.’
‘This is serious, Vicente. Can I trust you?’
‘You have my word,’ he said solemnly.
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