by Robert Moss
“In Rio we are unstoppable,” Prestes volunteered.
Only Verdi expressed open dissent. He started quoting the signal from Moscow, and Emil snatched it away from him.
“This changes nothing,” Emil announced, when he had scanned the contents. “There’s no time for consultations. Moscow will back whatever decisions we take.”
Verdi complained that the premature risings in the north could be the product of police provocation.
“Suppose you are right,” Emil responded. His tone was patronizing, almost insulting. “That would merely prove that the police don’t know their business. If the actions in the north were triggered by police spies, they’ll find they have started something they can’t stop.”
“But the raids in Rio this morning—”
“What damage did they do? Answer me that. The police rounded up the usual suspects. They didn’t bag a single man we depend on. You see? They’re still fumbling in the dark.”
“Or leading us on,” Verdi suggested gloomily.
“I saw Jorge this morning,” Nilo intervened on Emil’s behalf. This Jorge was a popular writer of leftist leanings, a supporter of the ANL. “He told me the police raided his apartment. They confiscated every book that was bound in red.”
Everyone laughed except Verdi.
Emil made inventory of the units they could count on. There were reliable cells inside the Third Regiment, a short drive away from the presidential palace and the barracks of the Special Police. Communists in the Second Regiment, which supplied guards for the War Ministry, were ready to seize the commanding generals and the army headquarters. Revolutionary cadets and instructors at the Aviation School would neutralize the air force base next door.
Emil asked Johnny to report on his commando teams. In neutral tones, Johnny described how the men he had trained would cut road and rail links to Sao Paulo and the huge military complex at Vila Militar, and black out Rio Light.
Then Prestes held up the sheaf of letters he had just written to his admirers in garrisons in the interior, directing them to act without hesitation as soon as they received word from him.
“You always leave out the navy,” Verdi interjected.
They all recognized that the navy could be a decisive factor in a battle for Rio, with its long-range guns, its planes and its crack corps of marines, who supplied bodyguards for the president. Despite all the propagandizing by Sisson and the other ex-navy men on the council of the ANL — and Johnny’s own efforts — the Communists had made few friends in the fleet and almost none within the officer corps. Unlike their counterparts in the army, Brazilian navy officers belonged to an exclusive caste, monied, white and patrician, hostile to ideas of social reform.
“If the navy moves against us, we’re sunk,” Verdi pressed his point.
Prestes dealt with this. He puffed out his chest and declared, “I can personally guarantee that the navy will join the revolution.”
Johnny noticed that even Emil appeared thunderstruck by this intervention.
“I have received certain pledges,” Prestes went on. “The navy is on our side.”
There was no way for Johnny to tell whether these pledges were real or whether Prestes was hallucinating.
Johnny said, “That decides it, doesn’t it?”
He was rewarded with a look of sheer misery from Verdi, who returned to his bottle, and a broad beam from Emil, who roared, “We move within forty-eight hours! Wenn schön, den schön!”
Verdi stifled a belch with his hand. “I beg your pardon?”
“If it’s got to be done,” Emil translated freely, “do it right!”
What troubled Johnny most was Emil’s extraordinary self-confidence. The only reason for it he could fathom — unless Emil himself was a provocateur, which Johnny considered improbable — was that there was a strand to the conspiracy that had been kept hidden even from the other members of the South American bureau.
What could it be?
He stumbled across a possible clue when he went back to Vasco’s house, which was being used as an armoury for his sabotage squads, to check on the distribution of arms and explosives.
“We’re five Thompsons and six revolvers short,” the Spaniard reported.
“I don’t understand.”
“A kid came around with an order signed by Nilo. I couldn’t very well send him away empty-handed, could I?”
“What kid?”
“They call him Escoteiro.”
Johnny remembered the young tough who had played bodyguard at the meeting in Petropolis, the one they called Boy Scout. He had been running errands for Nilo for several months.
“A charming young gentleman,” Vasco commented with distaste. “He bragged about how he’s been given a really big job. You know what he told me? He said he’s been preparing for this for months. He said he had a dog, an animal he grew up with. He butchered it, hacked it to bits and disembowelled it. He said he wanted to drive out pity, to harden himself so he can kill without flinching.”
“Absolutely charming,” Johnny observed. “What would he consider a really big job?”
“He shot off his mouth about sticking a needle up Getulio’s backside. But he clammed up when I asked for more. It’s hard to believe a kid like that has it in him to do more than make a nuisance of himself on the bleachers. He was dressed like he was going to the game.”
“What game?”
“Well, he was sporting a Fluminense tee shirt. I told him he was a bit late for this season.”
Johnny could not make much sense out of this, except that Nilo was arming gunmen for purposes that remained obscure to him. But the remark about Getulio — President Vargas — stuck in Johnny’s mind. Vargas was still regarded by many Brazilians as a genuine reformer, a man committed to social justice and improving working conditions. His administration included progressives; Doctor Alcibiades was one of his appointees. Though the Vargas reforms had been denounced in the Communist press as a sham, Emil’s team privately acknowledged that the President’s liberal reputation was a major obstacle to the revolution that was being planned.
Was it possible that Nilo and whoever was behind him — Emil or Max, or the two of them in concert — had decided to remove that obstacle by killing the president?
No, Johnny told himself, such a plot would be madness. The assassination of the president would rally the whole country against his murderers.
He tried to put himself inside Emil’s mind, the mind of a desperate man who had been warned by Stalin and his creatures that no excuse would be accepted for failure in Rio, a man who had learned to trample on every moral scruple, every shred of loyalty, in order to pleasure the murderous paranoia that reigned in Moscow.
If I were Emil, Johnny reflected, I wouldn’t hesitate about killing a president, if that were the key. But it would have to be done right.
Then he realized how the job might be accomplished.
On the afternoon of Tuesday, November 26, after frenzied preparations, the members of the South American bureau agreed that the revolt would start in Rio at two o’clock the following morning. Prestes signed orders that were to be carried to trusted agents inside the garrison and others that were to be taken to Sao Paulo and the south by couriers who would leave from the Pedro II station.
The previous day, Johnny had warned Harry Maitland that “the balloon was about to go up.” They had taken their normal precautions, meeting in the Gloria church. Now there was no time for elaborate subterfuge. Early on Tuesday evening, for the first and only time, Johnny risked a visit to Harry’s home in Tijuca. He crept round the side, peering in through the windows like a burglar. He saw a handsome mulatto woman singing to herself as she stirred a pot in the kitchen, and then at an upstairs window he saw Harry himself, fiddling with his bow tie. He tossed a small stone at the insect screen. The second one caught Harry’s attention.
“What the devil—”
Harry peered down and saw the strongly built figure in the shadows.
>
“Hold on. I’m coming down.”
In urgent, staccato sentences, Johnny explained the last-minute arrangements for the rising. Maitland was relieved to learn the exact locations of the bombs that were to be planted at Rio Light, including one in Major Mackenzie’s office. He was pensive when Johnny confided his suspicions of a second plot, concealed from the full membership of the South American bureau. He would suggest to Colonel Plinio that the president’s guard should be reinforced, even though there was nothing solid to go on.
Johnny mentioned that Prestes had been trying to set up a personal meeting with Doctor Alcibiades. The conspirators were counting on the mayor to play a decisive role in the plot.
It occurred to Harry that the very best way to monitor the night’s entertainments might be to carry on exactly as he had planned. He had been invited to a reception at Doctor Alcibiades’.
But first he had some telephone calls to make.
4
As evening deepened, the Cariocas gave themselves over to familiar pleasures. In Lapa they sang serenades of transient love. In the smart casinos the chandeliers blazed on whirring roulette wheels and outrageous decolletes. Along the beaches couples snuggled among the dunes and packs of feral boys — the “captains of the sand” — roamed in search of sport. The city seemed too normal, Harry thought. He wondered whether it had been the same in Paris the night before they stormed the Bastille. As usual, there were a dozen fashionable parties to choose from. But, also as usual, the party to be seen at was at Doctor Alcibiades’. Rarely if ever had a bachelor been known to be such a consummate host. But then, with half the women of Rio at his feet, the handsome mayor had no lack of counsellors.
Harry drove up to the gates of the villa but was stopped by an apologetic policeman who asked if the Senhor would mind parking farther up the street. He found a space a couple of blocks away, and when he strolled back the same policeman checked his name against a list, making the standard confusion of first name and surname so that Harry had to assist him.
“Your security is very thorough tonight,” Maitland re-marked, noting that a squad of Special Police, in their bright-red kepis, were patrolling inside the high wrought-iron fence. It occurred to him to wonder whether all the extra guards were there to screen the guests coming in or to stop some of them, and possibly their host, from coming out.
“There you are, dear boy,” Desmond Wild assailed him, whisky in hand, as he entered the main salon. The journalist looked subtly different, and Harry realized that this was due less to his startling red cummerbund than to the thing that was perched on top of his pate like a beaver on a rock. Harry could not help staring at it.
Wild was quite unabashed. He patted his hairpiece lovingly. “I got it through the mail,” he reported. “Stella Mackenzie says it takes off about ten years. What do you think?”
“I’d say it takes off more than that.”
Harry tore his eyes away and examined the crowd. There was the predictable array of beautiful women, some of them competing for the attention of Courtland Bull, who was holding court on the far side of the room near the French doors. Harry spotted a couple of cabinet ministers and several high-ranking officers in dress uniform. He recognized Admiral Wilson Cavalcanti, the navy’s chief of operations. There had been a fuss about him only a few days before, when the newspapers published a photograph showing him giving the stiff-arm salute at a Greenshirt rally, and there were calls for his resignation.
The admiral was the centre of another little group.
“I see that Cavalcanti is still in circulation,” Harry remarked.
“He’s in his element. The place is positively crawling with Fascists. See that horse-faced Kraut with him? That’s Wolfgang Trott from the German Embassy. He’s one of yours.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Cloak-and-dagger type.”
“I’ll overlook that.” Harry scooped a drink from a passing waiter’s tray. He wondered how a Fascist admiral fitted into Doctor Alcibiades’ lifestyle. Perhaps the mayor was simply playing the old political game, being all things to all men. Or perhaps, if he were secretly involved in the Communist plot, he calculated that a party attended by men like Cavalcanti would supply him with a perfect cover — and an unassailable alibi in the event that the plotters failed.
“I must go and pay my respects to our host,” Harry announced. “Have you seen him?”
They both peered around.
“The doctor seems antsy tonight,” Desmond Wild observed. “He’s been rushing off to the telephone. Do you suppose something’s up?”
Stella Mackenzie rescued Harry from the rest of the conversation, squeezing him to her ample bosom as if she intended to smother him.
“Darling Harry,” she gushed. “The major’s hot for your blood tonight. But I’m going to protect you.”
“Come and tell me all about it, Lovie.” He winked at Desmond Wild and steered her safely out of earshot. One more gin, he thought, and they would have to carry Stella out.
“The local constabulary are all over head office,” she explained jerkily. “They put one of the major’s engineers in the jug. Something about a bomb, was it? They said you knew all about it. The major’s on the warpath because he wasn’t informed.”
“I’ll sort it out in the morning. There’s really nothing to worry about.”
“But it’s not the bomb that got him so upset. It’s the buses.”
Harry glanced around nervously, but nobody seemed to be paying any heed to what Stella was saying. Colonel Plinio had called him in some agitation just before he had left for the party, to report that saboteurs had done a pretty good job of knocking out the motor pool at Vila Militar, smashing up transmissions and gear shifts and setting a fire in the main garage. This would delay the arrival of loyalist troops for hours if things got out of hand downtown. Harry had promptly volunteered to put Rio Light’s fleet of buses at the disposal of the government. He had tried to telephone Major Mackenzie to prevent a blow-up but had learned from Stella’s maid that his boss had already left home. It was bad luck to run in to the Mackenzies at Alcibiades’ party, and he had no intention of risking a scene with the major, whom he could see advancing resolutely through the throng.
“That drink looks pretty sick,” he said to Stella, seizing her glass, now empty except for the last sad ice cubes. “Let me get you the other half.”
Stella rewarded him for this gesture with a wet kiss.
He got to the other side of the room and pointed a waiter in Stella’s direction. Then he slipped out onto the patio, where he caught sight of a man who struck him as almost as unlikely a guest as Admiral Cavalcanti, a muscular fellow with heavy-lidded eyes who had turned up in a lounge suit instead of black tie. He looked more German than Brazilian. He would have looked all wrong in any kind of civilian rig, except maybe a pair of boxing shorts. Harry had seen him once or twice at official functions, always in uniform. He knew him by reputation as the most feared interrogator in Rio. He was Captain Honorio Schmidt, the head of the Special Police, that athletic corps of bruisers the local wits had dubbed the Tomatoheads.
“Good evening, Harry.”
Maitland turned to the source of this port-flavoured voice and found Colonel Plinio smoothing his moustache. Unlike Schmidt, the colonel was in uniform, with his cap under his arm.
“I see your men are out in force tonight,” Harry re-marked to him. “You’ve even got Honorio Schmidt guarding the back door.”
“So we do.” Plinio acknowledged the captain with the most distant of nods, and it was plain to Maitland that these two were very far from being friends.
This encouraged Harry to whisper, “I thought Schmidt spent most of his time torturing people.”
“Tsk, tsk.” Plinio clucked the mildest of reproaches. “You have lived in South America long enough to under-stand that here a man is put in jail so that he can confess.”
“Unfortunately, that philosophy is not unique to South America.”
“I did.”
“He has been sent here to assist us at the recommendation of Captain Schmidt.”
“Trott is Gestapo, then?”
Colonel Plinio sighed and consulted his watch. “Nearly eleven,” he said. “We still have over three hours to wait.”
“I wonder how many of Alcibiades’ guests will still be here.”
“You may well ask.”
“I’ve been trying to work out why they were all invited in the first place. Admiral Cavalcanti, for example. It’s hard to imagine that he has anything much in common with the mayor. And shouldn’t he be at navy headquarters, if there’s a general alert?”
The Colonel played with his whiskers. “You’re missing something that’s perfectly obvious, my dear Harry.”
“Which is?”
“The common denominator. They weren’t invited to the other party. Either by Prestes or the president. We are attending a salon des refusés.”
Much as he enjoyed Plinio’s bon mot, Maitland’s curiosity wasn’t slaked by it. He felt certain that their absent host was embroiled in the Comintern plot — though he had only the most circumstantial of evidence to go on — and that the guest list was somehow connected.
“Did you find the bomb?” Harry asked under his breath. “All three of them. I don’t think Alcibiades’ chandeliers will go out before the party is over.”
“Where did they plant them?”
“Exactly where you said. One in Major Mackenzie’s office. Two at the generator.”
“I’m trying to avoid the major. He’s upset about the buses.”
“I’m sure the government will be happy to pay for the gasoline.”
“And there’s no sign of trouble yet?”
“Not a squeak. We picked up two couriers at the railroad station.” He caught Harry’s look and added quickly, “We’re not altogether novices, Harry. We let them board their trains. If anyone was covering them, he will report to Prestes that they are safely on their way to Minas and São Paulo. The guard at the War Ministry and the Vila Militar has been changed. The duty officers were part of the conspiracy, as you thought. It was all done with perfect discretion. The war minister has put out a general alert, to take effect after midnight. We’ve sent out word that it’s a routine fire drill. You don’t look happy, Harry. Have I left anything out?”