by Robert Moss
“What about the others?”
“Max is safe enough,” he said bitterly. “We can be sure of that. His kind know how to look out for themselves. By now he’ll be drinking at the bar of the Crillόn in Buenos Aires. What I want to know is who told the police about the safe house.”
She thought about this for a moment. With her dress disarranged, hanging partway off her shoulder, and the fabric stretched tight to reveal the upward tilt of her breasts, she looked wickedly — discordantly — sensual.
She said, “It could have been Emil,” and instantly bit her lip, as if to choke back the words. Emil was the chief of the conspiracy, and he had been in jail since Christmas, two full months. What they had done to him in the barracks of the Special Police was almost beyond imagining.
“No,” Johnny said flatly. “It wasn’t Emil. He never knew the address.”
She mentioned the names of other prisoners, the handful of men and women who had been privy to the secrets of the envoys of the Comintern in Rio — the “Grey Cardinals,” as one of the Brazilians jeeringly described them — and Johnny dismissed them one after another.
“Only three people knew that house,” he said curtly.
He watched the cloud pass across her face. What it left behind was a deeper layer of fear.
“Johnny, you don’t think—” she faltered. “You don’t think it was me?”
“If I believed that,” he said carefully, “I think I’d go out in the street and shoot myself. Or possibly both of us.”
He covered her hands with his own. “We’ll leave it for now,” he said softly. “Das wird auch abgerechnet. The account will be settled later.”
It had been this way since the failure of the rising, since the mutineers in the army barracks on the pretty beach of Praia Vermelha, at the foot of the Sugarloaf, had been bombed and strafed into submission. The surviving conspirators — “Communist bandits,” according to the government-controlled press — had been stalking each other, hunting for police spies. Now he was bone tired and wounded and fighting back the blackest doubts about his own mission. For an hour or two at least, he wanted a truce, a sanctuary.
“Sigrid,” he said, coaxingly. “I’ll never doubt you. I hope you believe me. You must never doubt me either. Promise me that.”
“Johnny, you’ll never have to ask for that.” Her eyes were full of pain and bewilderment.
“Promise me,” he insisted.
“All right, I promise. But I don’t know what you’re saying.”
“Whatever I have done — whatever I may have to do — is for love of you.” He seemed on the point of making some larger statement. Instead, he nestled his head on her breast. When he plucked at the fastenings of her clothes and tossed them across the room like whirling leaves, she did not resist. There was a great wind in the room whose deliberate violence gathered them together and shut out all the commotion from the dance floor below and the Carnival that was spending its last energies outside.
Afterwards, she fell into a deep sleep and he smoked and listened to the thud of insects beating against the screen in the window and the twang of a single-stringed instrument someone was playing in the street below. Sexual arousal is the last reflex of a hanged man. The thought flicked maliciously, repetitively at the edge of his consciousness, so that sleep, when it came, was shallow and haunted by fearful images.
He dozed until a hammering at the door shook the dresser he had pushed against it to reinforce the simple lock. Still half asleep, with the girl clutching the sheet to her throat while he grabbed for the ten-shot Mauser he had hidden under a pillow, he imagined he was in another city and called out in German, “Who’s there?”
In the babble of words from beyond the door he recognized the voice of the woman who collected the rent. “Forgive me, Father,” she was saying. “But the police are downstairs. A raid during Carnival! Whoever heard of such a thing?”
He rushed to the window. There was a truck blocking off one end of the street and men in red kepis, carbines at the ready. Special Police. So it wasn’t a matter of checking that the tarts’ medical papers were in order.
He tucked the gun back into the waistband of his shorts and slipped the cassock over his head.
“Listen,” he said to Sigrid. “They’re after me, I’m sure of it. I may have been followed. I want you to stay here till the search is over.”
She started to protest, but he put a finger over her lips and went on, “You’ll be all right. They’ll think you’re one of the working girls. I’ll fix it with the woman outside.”
“But what about you?”
“I’ll find a way. Whatever happens, you must be at this place at six o’clock.” He made her memorize the address on a street near the Praça Maua. “There’ll be a man waiting. You must do whatever he says.”
“How will I know him?”
“He’ll know you. Whatever happens,” he repeated, “you must be on that boat.”
“Johnny—”
“You promised you would trust me.”
“It’s not that. I just want you to kiss me.”
He had words with the woman in the booth, and money changed hands. She made sympathetic clucking noises over the plight of a married lady discovered by chance under such circumstances and pointed the way to the fire escape. Leaning from the window over the iron steps, Johnny saw more red caps along the alleyway behind the Babylõnia Club. The police seemed to be checking everyone who came and went — but only the men, he noted, were asked for their papers.
The music was still blaring from the dance floor, which suggested that the police were not being over-assertive on the premises of the club itself, and a plan began to shape itself in Johnny’s mind. It was insane, just insane enough to work.
He went back down the stairs into the Babylõnia Club. He could spot the policemen at once, from their hats and the way their double-breasted jackets were buttoned tight across their midriffs. One had taken off his hat, and his hair was stiff and shiny with cream. They were moving from table to table.
He marched over to the table where the Germans were sitting. The wine waiter, or the intrusion of the police, must have dissatisfied them, because they had sent for their bill. A heavily rouged woman hung on Trott’s arm but was clearly getting nowhere.
“I didn’t expect to see you again tonight, Herr Gruber,” Trott greeted him, shaking off his female companion. Johnny sat down without waiting to be invited.
Hossbach, who had been sunk in torpor, rallied himself to make a coarse remark about sexual staying power. “I’ll go and finish the job,” he announced. “Show her what a real German is made of.” He launched into a graphic description of what he had in mind.
“By the way,” Trott interjected, “what have you done with the lady?” The man from the German Embassy had screwed an eyeglass into his face, and it stayed there as effortlessly as if it were grafted to the skin.
“She went out the back way,” Johnny lied. “She was terrified that her husband would find out.”
Trott did not comment. He tossed a thick pile of Brazilian banknotes onto the saucer on top of the bill.
“I see you’re bored with the Babylõnia,” Johnny remarked. “I know a superior establishment that is quite diverting, on the Rua Alici.”
“Hah!” Hossbach chimed in. “I bet I know the one. You can get anything you want.” He dug Trott in the ribs. The attaché looked pained but also mildly inquisitive.
“It’s not far,” Johnny prodded. “I’ll show you the way if you like.”
Trott gave a little nod and stood up, indicating the decision was made.
The police stopped them only at the door, and their profuse apologies were amplified when Trott showed his embassy credentials. The inspector peered at the man in the priest’s cassock curiously.
“This is our embassy chaplain,” Trott announced without the shadow of a smile. Johnny was not asked for his papers.
“These people lack formation,” Trott said, when the
y were outside, waiting for Zé Pimenta to summon the embassy driver. “I’m sure that if I had declined to show my papers they would never have insisted. They can’t conceive that a subversive could be dressed in a dinner jacket. We Germans know better, don’t we, Herr Gruber? We have a great deal to teach them. But they’re a weak race,” he added reflectively, “a mongrel race, leached by the climate of the tropics. Hossbach was telling me just now that the reason that half the Brazilian men hold the cup with their left hand when they’re drinking their eternal cafezinhos is that they are terrified of syphilis. They think that by holding the cup in the wrong hand, they’ll avoid sipping from the same spot where a syphilitic might have pressed his lips. Have you seen that?”
“Yes, I’ve seen it,” Johnny acknowledged. He watched the red caps patrolling the street from the corner of his eye.
“But since so many of them do it, they defeat the whole object of the exercise!” Trott observed triumphantly. “And they don’t even see their own absurdity! They’re worse than Italians. It will take an iron man to change them.”
Hossbach puffed himself up as if he thought he were a candidate for this role.
Trott’s powerful black Mercedes was waved through the roadblock and purred to a stop in front of them, with Zé Pimenta on the running board. Zé excelled himself, holding his pasteboard scimitar in front of his nose with one hand while the other fished for tips.
To Trott’s surprise, Johnny did not accompany them into the house on the Rua Alici, pleading sudden fatigue.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I think I’ve overdone it.”
“My man will drive you home,” Trott suggested solicitously. “What’s your address?”
“No, but thank you. I’ll walk for a while to clear my head.”
Trott squinted at him through the eyeglass, which gave him the aspect of a man inspecting an unidentified organism through a microscope.
Johnny set off in search of a taxi. There were always a few on the prowl in this neighbourhood, which was home to the most exclusive bordellos in the city. His head was light, but the sky had clouded over. He could no longer see moon or stars, only the great statue of the Redeemer, arms outstretched, lit up on top of the hunched peak of Corcovado. The cobbled street he was following sloped down the hill into a well of darkness where the street lamps were sparse. He must have mistaken his direction. He wheeled around to retrace his steps.
At the same instant a car on the slope above him turned on its headlights. For a moment he stood blinded by the high beams. It occurred to him that Trott might have sent his chauffeur after him.
But it was a Brazilian voice that called out, “Good morning, Senhor Gruber.”
He hurled himself into the shadows, out of the headlights, tearing at his useless priest’s disguise to find his Mauser. Before he could get it loose, several men came running at him. One of them dealt him a blow to the chest with his rifle butt that sent him toppling backward into the street.
Laid out on his back, he summoned enough strength to send one of his assailants flying with a hard left kick. He got the gun out and fired wildly. He heard the tinkle of glass as one of the car headlights blew out. Then they were all over him. They wrestled the Mauser away from him and one of them rammed it up against his closed teeth so he could taste the steel of the muzzle.
The one in charge sauntered down the hill and stood over him. Behind his captor, beyond the vast bay of Guanabara, a narrow slash of pink had appeared in the eastern sky.
Captain Honorio Schmidt, the chief of the Special Police, studied his prize with satisfaction and decided to allow himself one of his slim Bahian cigars. One of his assistants sprang forward to strike a match.
Captain Honorio huffed life into the cheroot and re-marked, “It’s Ash Wednesday, Father.”
Part I – BOLSHEVIKS (1913-1934)
We are fighting for the gates of heaven.
-KARL LIEBKNECHT, murdered leader of the Spartacist rising (1919)
1 - The Call
Man is the only animal who
refuses to be what he is.
-ALBERT CAMUS
1
When he stood by the window, he could hear the sirens from the harbour, calling him. At times they were women’s voices, keening on the wind. The siren voices came from places with magical names, across shining oceans, from Ceylon and Madagascar and Manaus. It was all he could do not to drop everything and run out the door, out of that overheated room with its fat-bellied stove and the dark, heavy furniture that seemed to close in on him, squeezing out the air and the life, like someone forcing a pillow down over his face.
“Johann!” his mother barked at him. “Be careful with those!”
It was a few days before Christmas, and he had been conscripted for women’s work, helping his mother and his sister Bertha to trim and decorate the Tannenbaum that occupied the middle of the front parlour. It was a grey, cheerless day outside, and the light was nearly spent, but that wouldn’t have stopped him rushing down to the docks.
He liked to hang around the ferry landing and watch the seamen going back and forth to the giant wharves across the river where the ships of the Hamburg-Amerika Line came in. He played games of pirates around the godowns, which smelled of tea and spice. He loved the bustle of the fish market at St. Pauli. More daring, he and his friends would range the streets above it, past tattoo shops with pictures of big-hipped tropical girls in the window, down alleys where the naked girls in the windows were real and where pimps and policemen came running to shoo the boys away.
But here he was, fussing over Christmas decorations. It was part of his punishment. He had been sent home from school early with a note from the headmaster after giving Willi Rausch, the school bully, a black eye. Willi Rausch was a swaggering lout who was suffered by the masters because his father was a boss of the Shipowners’ Association. That morning, he had pushed Johnny too far. He started by crowing that Johnny’s pants were too short. Then he put two fingers above his head, like horns, and cackled that Herr Lentz was a capon who didn’t know who was doing it with his wife. When Johnny went for him, he got out his penknife, but it didn’t help him a bit. Johnny knew how to use his fists, and he knew when to ignore the rules. He had learned all about that in the back alleys behind the harbour.
His mother had ordered him to stay inside until his father got home. There would be a reckoning, she promised. And tomorrow Johnny would have to make a formal apology to Willi Rausch and his parents. The Rausch family were important people, and Hermann Rausch was his father’s employer.
Herr Lentz was unusually late coming home from the office that night. Johnny did not fear his anger. In that household the mother was the angry one. She seemed to tower over her husband, a big-boned woman who twisted her thick blonde hair into a coronet. She never tired of telling him that she had married beneath her, that he was dragging her down in the world. Johnny often thought of his father as a wounded bird. He wasn’t made to walk on the ground, but his wings wouldn’t work. He was a shy, unassuming man who went about in a dove-grey tie and striped trousers like a government functionary. His stoop and his pince-nez made him look smaller than he was. He could sometimes be heard tinkling on the harpsichord in the music room. This expensive instrument — as Johnny’s mother frequently recalled during family squabbles — had been purchased with her money.
The Lentz family, like the street in Hamburg where they lived, had come down sharply in the world. Only Frau Lentz’s inheritance kept the bailiffs away. When she had married Gottfried, Johnny’s father, he had been thought to be a fine young musician with a brilliant career. But he had wasted years writing experimental pieces that no orchestra wanted to perform, and his brilliant career had receded further and further into the future. By day, he was reduced to toiling as a clerk in the great gloomy hall of the Shipowners’ Association down by the docks. By night, he gave himself over to his secret world. Johnny would sometimes wake in the early hours to hear him working on some strange, discorda
nt composition with plunging gaps in the scales, as sombre and unsettling as the black well under the trapdoor leading to the coal cellar. Then he would hear his mother’s angry tread, her voice raised shrill in anger and, as often as not, the thud of blows rained on his father’s unresisting back. She would fly at the failed composer with anything that fell to hand, even a poker. He never fought back. Herr Lentz was a pacifist.
“We’re going for a walk,” he had announced to his wife one Sunday afternoon, clutching Johnny’s hand. They had walked as far as a coffeehouse, where six or seven men were assembled in a back room. Johnny recognized the family doctor and the director of a funeral parlour. They greeted Gottfried Lentz warmly, and Johnny was proud that, here at least, his father commanded respect.
A plump fellow with a Polish accent gave a talk on how technical progress had made war obsolete. In the age of the telegraph and steam shipping, he asserted, the countries of the world were all interdependent; for one to make war on another would be like setting out to burgle your own home. Furthermore, the instruments of slaughter had become so lethally effective — witness the invention of the magazine rifle — that soldiers would never consent to fight each other.
There was a good deal of applause, and Johnny’s father got up and made a short speech on the brotherhood of man, garnished with quotations from Fourier in the original French.
“Well, what do you have to say?” Gottfried Lentz asked his son on the way home.
“You can’t remake men overnight. Men are made to fight.”
“That’s not so! We only fight because of the kind of society we live in. When we change the social order, when we abolish class tyranny, everything will be different.”
“And do you think that can happen without a fight?” A small troop of hussars came clattering past, splendid in their blue dolmans. “They think your Fourier is just another Frenchman to be put to the sword.”