Carnival of Spies

by Robert Moss

  Bailey was a great believer in luck. Unless you were born lucky, in his view, you had no business dabbling in intelligence.

  But luck often walked in company with other people’s interests. Was it conceivable that there was somebody else close to the Communist leadership who wanted the conspiracy to fail?

  Bailey could not answer his own questions, yet he felt certain the answer lay with one man: Max Fabrikant. He had tried to fathom that restless intelligence, to project himself inside Max’s mind. But the gulf of character and circumstance that divided them was immense. Max’s behaviour since he had arrived in Brazil had been curiously contradictory. He was clearly attached to Sigrid, yet he had sent her back to Johnny’s bed. He distrusted Johnny, but he had not taken the simple step of getting him recalled to Moscow.

  Max might despise Emil, the man in charge of the plot, but it was difficult to imagine the chekist propelled by anything as trivial as personal spite. Max was a ruthless, highly efficient instrument of his masters; his whole life represented the triumph of the Russian state party over personal loyalties, of raison d’etat over philosophy and morals. He was also a chess player. If he had staged the scene in Prestes’ apartment, it was as a gambit in a larger play authorized by Moscow.

  Bailey sighed. He had concluded early in his career in counterintelligence that one of the worst mistakes was to over-estimate the subtlety of your opponents.

  Max might be baiting a trap. On the other hand, his people might simply have made a cock-up.

  Sitting in London, Colin Bailey could not determine the truth. In the meantime, the Communists were gearing up for a coup d’etat, and Harry needed guidance.

  We have to run with it, Bailey decided.

  He picked up his pen and started drafting a reply to Maitland. He suggested that at this stage Harry should take his friend Colonel Plinio into his confidence without, of course, disclosing the source of his information.

  At the mayor’s dinner party in Rio, Colonel Plinio had lyricized his visits to London, and Bailey had not failed to do his homework. He had found that his own bootmaker’s on St. James’s Street, made shoes for the colonel from his personal last. Bailey concluded that a Brazilian with a private last at the finest bootmaker’s in London must be both a confirmed Anglophile and capable of discretion.

  These were desirable qualities for what Bailey had in mind. It was plain now that there were many influential men in Rio, even in the police, who could not be trusted. There were those like the mayor who were flirting in secret with the Communists. There were also the Fascist sympathizers, well represented in the police, who might seize on new evidence of a Moscow plot to eliminate anyone they did not like the look of, or even to justify a coup of their own. De Salis had reported from Berlin that a team of Gestapo officers had left for Rio at the invitation of Colonel Plinio’s chief, to provide certain technical instruction for the Brazilians. Bailey had no intention of making Hitler’s friends a gift of Johnny’s information.

  No, Plinio was their man. He was an opportunist, no doubt, but for that very reason he could be easily influenced. It would not escape the colonel’s attention that the. British could help him to earn a substantial reward from his government, perhaps in the form of his boss’s job.

  More than a month before, Bailey had started to clear the ground by arranging for the bootmakers in St. James’s to furnish Colonel Plinio with an exceptionally fine pair of paddock boots, charged to Bailey’s own account. Plinio had not disdained this offering.

  In Bailey’s mind there was only one satisfactory way for Harry and the colonel to proceed.

  “Think of yourself as a midwife,” he wrote to Maitland. “Your task is to force an early delivery.”

  He rather liked his analogy. But to ensure that Harry did not miss the point, he went to some pains to explain it in detail.

  He had almost finished encrypting the text when one of the lights at the base of his black telephone flashed on. “Yes?”

  “It’s Rowecliff here, Major. There’s a young man been waiting for you over half an hour.”

  “Tell him I’m on my way.”

  In his excitement over the news from Rio, he had completely forgotten his appointment.

  He gave the cable to one of the girls to send off and took a taxi to a house off the King’s Road that had had a For Sale sign up for as long as anyone could remember. The real estate agent whose name appeared on the sign was less than helpful when prospective buyers called to ask about it.

  Bailey entered the house, using his own key, and found Nicholas twiddling his thumbs in the drawing room at the back, overlooking a small walled garden. Nicholas was one of the new crop of Oxbridge men, slightly baffled by his present environment. He was very good-looking, with curly brown hair worn a little too long at the back. Bailey had interviewed him personally. He thought that the boy would do nicely for an opportunity that had just presented itself on the other side of the world from Brazil. According to de Salis, the wife of the new German Ambassador to Istanbul was a holy terror, given to jumping into bed with any man bold enough to make an advance.

  Bailey eyed his new recruit speculatively.

  “Do you know Turkey at all?”

  “No, sir. I’m afraid not.”

  “Well, never mind. How would you like to do some fucking on the Secret Vote?”

  10 - The Bomb Factory

  A decision that is quick but

  wrong is worth more than one that is correct but too late.

  -LUIS CARLOS PRESTES

  1

  The revolution began three weeks ahead of schedule, and the Comintern team in Rio first heard about it over the radio.

  It began far away to the north in Natal, the old port city on the bulge of Brazil, on a coast lined with strange, steep sand dunes pleated like skirts that gave way, farther north., to immense salt flats so white that they hurt the eyes.

  There had been trouble brewing in the local garrison. On. Friday an unpopular lieutenant called Santana had been shot in the back by one of his own men. He had them loaded up like mules in full battle kit, despite the heat. When the shot rang out, his fellow officers came running from the mess. Nobody would admit to pulling the trigger, but the officers placed half a dozen known dissidents under armed guard. They were going to face a court-martial on Monday morning!

  The court-martial never took place.

  Saturday, November 23, was graduation night in Natal. The new governor and the notables of the town were assembled in the Civic Theatre to applaud each other’s speeches and hand out prizes to the honours students of the Escola Santo Antonio. The band introduced each speaker with a patriotic tune. It was missing the trombone that evening. Sergeant Quintinho, a self-taught musician who donated some of his free time to the band, had other business to attend to back at the barracks. Everybody liked Quintinho, even if he came from Pernambuco — you might as well say Timbuktu — and held rather advanced opinions for a man who had never set foot in a schoolhouse.

  The governor was lost in an interminable sentence. His plight seemed desperate; he had repeated his phrase about “the flower of northern youth” twice over, and there was still no sign of a verb.

  The punctuation, when it came, was explosive. Three rifle shots cracked out, then a staccato burst of machine-gun fire. It sounded as if the firing was coming from just outside the doors. Some members of the audience tried to crawl under the seats in front of them. A big man in the second row, a cotton planter, shoved his way to the aisle and stood there brandishing a pistol.

  “Show me a Communist!” he bellowed. “I’m ready for those sons of bitches!”

  He squeezed off a couple of rounds that blacked out one of the chandeliers and brought down a shower of plaster dust and tinkling glass.

  The governor abandoned his hunt for a verb and ordered the band to strike up “Reunir.”

  The music could hardly be heard above the din. Women screamed as another burst of automatic fire stitched a zigzag line across the
double oak doors. The cotton planter, panicking, hurled himself into the frightened mob that was trying to squeeze through the side door, using his pistol as a club.

  “They’re setting fire to the theatre!” someone screamed.

  The governor took his wife by the arm and hurried her out through the stage entrance. The police chief and a dozen army and government officials fled after them.

  “Go to your posts!” the governor yelled at his followers outside. “I entrust the city to you! Fight to the last man!”

  Without further ado the governor rushed to the house of an old business partner whose beautifully engraved cards declared him to be the Honorary Consul of the Republic of Chile.

  “I claim political asylum!” the governor shrieked at his astonished friend. “Quick, man! Put out the flag!”

  The shots were interspersed with the sound of breaking glass as looters raided the stores.

  The honorary consul produced a small, somewhat faded Chilean flag.

  “Haven’t you got a bigger one?” the governor said doubtfully.

  “I’m sorry. But you could go to the French shipping company,” the consul added brightly. “They’ve got a tricolor as big as a house.”

  “Raul—” The governor’s wife squeezed his wrist.

  He peeked out the window and saw a squad of soldiers with their caps reversed, rebels from the Twenty-first Battalion, those trouble-makers Vargas had transferred up here from Recife. They had expropriated a supply of hooch and were swilling it from the bottle. There were rowdies in civilian clothes trooping along with them and a few men in the uniforms of the Civil Guard, that gang of political brigands he had just ordered disbanded. Nobody seemed to be resisting them. As he watched, some of them broke down the door of a fine townhouse down the street. He recognized the man who came to argue with them; he was a young engineer, the heir to a wealthy family that supported the governor’s party. One of the men in civilian clothes was poking him with his rifle. The engineer’s wife tried to push between them. The others dragged her away by the hair and threw her down in the gutter. They shot the engineer right in front of her.

  The governor’s wife fell into a dead faint.

  “Don’t think you’re not welcome,” the honorary consul said to the governor. “But there are two Mexican corvettes in the harbour. You’d be much safer on board.”

  “If I go, you go too,” the governor snapped.

  The neck of the decanter shivered against the glass as the consul poured them all drinks.

  “I never knew there were so many Communists in Natal,” he said unhappily.

  While the governor hid behind the flag of Chile, resistance to the rebels centred on the police barracks, whose rear windows looked out over coconut palms and muddy shacks along the Pontengui River.

  The white stucco facade had developed eczema; it was scarred and pitted by hundreds of bullets from the rebels who had occupied the houses across the street. They were using the sign for target practice. It used to read “Regimento Policial Militar,” but only the initial “R” had survived.

  It was hard for the men inside the police barracks to tell what exactly the rebels wanted. Some voices in the mob were cheering the name of the federal defence minister, a notorious reactionary. Others shouted the names of Prestes and the National Liberation Alliance. Somebody was proposing an assault on the Young Ladies’ Academy, an expensive boarding school for the landowners’ daughters. This idea was received with enthusiastic roars. It was getting impossible to tell soldiers from civilians; the mutineers from the barracks were arming people at random and swapping clothes with the crowd. Quite a few jailbirds had got hold of rifles. The warden of the state prison was a well-known bleeding heart, little better than a Red (if you asked the police chief’s opinion). He had taken to letting some of his prisoners go home every night. It would be no surprise if he were in on the plot.

  The chief of police found that fewer than forty of his men had stayed to defend their barracks. They were supplemented by a handful of army officers, including the newly appointed commander of the Twenty-first, a colonel from the south. The colonel was strutting up and down, inspecting everyone as if he were on a parade ground.

  “We’ll show this rabble what we’re made off” he announced to the chief of police. “Where’s your bugler?”

  “Noberto!” the police chief barked at a young man who was trying to make himself scarce. “What do you want with him?”

  “Get up on the roof!” the colonel ordered the unhappy bugler. “Sound the call to arms!”

  Noberto appealed to his chief with spaniel eyes. The police chief shrugged.

  “You are a symbol of the heroic resistance,” the colonel informed him.

  The bugler climbed out the back window and started scaling the wall. They knew when he had reached the top, because the snipers in the houses across the street started blasting away with everything they had — rifles, pistols and machine guns. The men inside the barracks raised a ragged cheer when the strains of “Unido” rang out, only slightly off key. Then the bugle fell silent in the middle of a bar.

  Several men rushed to the back windows.

  “Did those bastards get him?” the colonel shouted.

  “No, sir,” someone called back. “He’s climbing down the wall.”

  The colonel rushed over to see. The ground fell away sharply between the street and the river, and the back side of the barracks was a full story higher than the front. Noberto had tossed away his bugle and was crouched on a window ledge, trying to pluck up the courage to jump.

  “Get back to your post, you coward!” the colonel bellowed at him, brandishing his service revolver.

  This settled things for Noberto. He jumped at the same moment the colonel fired. The bullet went wide, anyway. Some of the other policemen cheered when they saw the bugler fall on his hands and knees in the soft mud, pick himself up and go zigzagging off into the shacks along the river.

  “Your men haven’t got a pair of balls between them,” the colonel informed the police chief.

  “Then why don’t you go and join your men across the street?”

  The colonel turned an ugly shade of red and went to inspect the gunners. The defenders’ heavy artillery consisted of two Hotchkiss machine guns and an old Maxim gun. From the sound of things and the quantity of shattered glass on the floor, the attackers had superior firepower. But there was no sign of casualties on either side.

  One of the policeman had methodically blasted out every pane of glass in the building directly opposite. Satisfied with his accomplishment, he swung the Hotchkiss round to inflict the same demolition on the house next door.

  After a whole night of fireworks in which they fired off almost their entire stock of ammunition — a hundred thousand rounds — the defenders agreed to stage an orderly retreat at breakfast time on Sunday. They all took off their uniforms, descended on ropes from the rear windows of the barracks and splashed across the river to take shelter among the stilt shacks on the far side.

  The city of Natal was now entirely in the hands of the rebels. In the course of the battle for the police barracks — the only military engagement of any note — the rebels had expended three hundred thousand bullets and wounded a grand total of twelve men. Ten of the twelve had been winged as they fled across the river.

  A revolutionary junta set up shop in the Vila Cincinato, a government palace on the outskirts of town. Its apparent chief, a slender mulatto who was a cobbler by trade, presided over meetings with a cavalry saber in his hand. His finance minister, the town postmaster, scented them with his fancy cigars. Sergeant Quintinho, the illiterate trombone player, was appointed minister of defence. A plump, bearded lawyer whom everyone called “Papai Noel,” or Father Christmas, was named minister of public works. He was the chief of the Communist underground in Natal, the recipient of secret messages from Recife addressed appropriately, if insecurely, to “Santa.”

  This Santa was delighted but somewhat bewildered to fin
d himself a member of the first soviet ever formed in Brazil. He had received just three hours forewarning of the rising, when Sergeant Quintinho had hauled him out of his favourite bar in the middle of a lazy Saturday afternoon. “Orders from the top,” Quintinho had said. Santa was slightly miffed that the orders had gone straight to the barracks, passing him by. This suggested that the leadership in Rio trusted the sergeants who had joined secret cell inside the army more than properly constituted part officials like himself. But Santa wasn’t a man to hold grudges. What did it matter, when the wind was obviously blowing their way? The government of Natal had deflated like a tired meringue. The message would carry clear across Brazil. Santa read the announcement on the radio. It ran on the hour, every hour, in between recordings of the Internationale and popular songs of the north.

  It was carnival time in the town. Santa came across some kids who were trying to set fire to a streetcar.

  “No, no,” he intervened. “Don’t destroy your own property. The bondes are free! They belong to the people!”

  The kids got the idea, soon enough. They piled into the tram and shunted off, looking for girls.

  The revolution needed a treasury, so Quintinho and the other members of the junta drove down to the local depository of the Bank of Brazil. The manager refused to open the vault. He made out he had swallowed the key. Quintinho sat on his stomach but succeeded only in bringing up the man’s breakfast. Someone ran down to the docks and came back with a blowtorch, which the finance minister naturally claimed as an appurtenance of his office. Half an hour later, their pockets stuffed with cash, the members of the junta were ferrying moneybags and gold bars out to their truck. As they made their triumphal progress back to the Cincinato, Quintinho threw fistfuls of banknotes to the crowd.

  “Revolution is fun!” he proclaimed.