by Robert Moss
Bailey agreed with this assessment. His cheerful response came back by cable: “Stop the buggers!”
2
Betrayal is easier for little men, Harry thought. Easiest for those, like Iago, who were so stunted in spirit that they could consume their lives in the service of the “green-eyed monster,” jealousy, or in pursuit of trivial advancement. Johnny was built to larger proportions.
In the months he had known the German, even though most of their meetings were hurried and furtive, Harry had found much to admire and. even more to identify with: the restless appetite for adventure, the readiness to gamble against the odds. He had never known Johnny to be mean-spirited, even in discussing the men he had most reason to hate.
So Maitland was not altogether surprised when Johnny balked at the final stage of betrayal. The Englishman had anticipated a long conversation and a deal of soul-searching, so he had prepared his ground carefully. He had rented a flat in Flamengo with a view of the bay and filled one of the kitchen cupboards with single-malt scotch.
“The place is yours whenever you need it,” he told Johnny.
Maitland cooked dinner himself. It was spaghetti bolognaise, one of the few dishes he was confident about preparing. He was not offended when Johnny showed more interest in the whisky than the food.
“Colin and I both feel that it’s time to roll things up,” Harry said tentatively. Johnny listened while he rehearsed his reasons.
Then he astonished the Englishman by quoting one of Iago’s lines from Othello: “I follow him to serve my turn upon him.”
He laughed at Harry’s expression. “You see, my visits to the Richmond Theatre weren’t entirely wasted.”
Johnny’s smile faded. He had heard grim stories about what the police were doing to the Communists who had been rounded up. The Brazilians might eschew capital punishment, but they were quite inventive when it came to torture. It was one thing to betray the plan for the revolution; it was quite another to deliver up comrades to the certainty of physical abuse. In many ways it would be easier for him to shoot Emil or Max himself — he had thought of doing so, more than once — than to turn them over to the police.
He said to Harry, “Who do you want?”
“All of them. The whole South American bureau.”
“Prestes, too?”
“Prestes most of all.”
No, Johnny thought. I won’t give them Prestes. The man is washed up, whether he knows it or not — a sleepwalker stumbling about in a violent dream. Let him run back to Moscow, if Stalin still wants him.
Johnny said, “I don’t know where he lives.”
Maitland was fairly sure he was lying but resolved not to push the issue. In part of his being, Harry realized, Johnny still belonged to the revolutionary cause. There were people and things he would never betray.
Emil was not one of them. In Johnny’s eyes, Emil had blood on his hands — the blood of Heinz Kordt and of thousands of young Chinese herded to the slaughter. If Johnny had had second thoughts, they would have been academic; he had already given Maitland the address of Emil’s luxury apartment in Ipanema.
Nilo also deserved whatever was coming to him, Johnny thought. Miranda was one of those — Johnny now knew — who had helped talk Manuilsky and the Comintern into believing that Brazil was ripe for revolt. Johnny would lose no sleep over him. Verdi, the simpatico, eloquent Argentinian, had proved more clear-sighted than the others, which possibly made him more dangerous.
Johnny was drinking too much whisky and knew it. But he didn’t slow his intake. He didn’t like playing God with people who had shared the same trenches.
One more name was unavoidable.
Harry mentioned it first. “What about Max?”
“I don’t know where to find him,” Johnny responded. This time his answer was truthful. He had not seen Max since before the brief, premature spasms of the risings in the north. From what Sigrid had let drop he was convinced that Max was still in Rio, but had no idea where he had gone to ground.
“We have to deal with Max,” Harry observed.
“You mean, before he deals with us,” Johnny completed the thought for him.
“Exactly.”
“Did you have anything particular in mind?”
“Sigrid.” Harry watched him as closely as a surgeon making an incision. He knew he was cutting into the most sensitive part of Johnny’s life, the part he had always refused to expose.
Johnny shied away angrily. “I won’t have her involved,” he said flatly.
“She’s our only way to Max.” Since Johnny did not contradict him, he risked the next sentence. “And this is the only way you can get her away from Max.”
“What do you want to do?” Johnny’s words came slowly and painfully.
“Put a tail on her.”
“No!” Johnny shouted. “You can’t expose her to the police! If it has to be done, I’ll do it myself.”
“Please think it over, Johnny. She’s bound to spot you. She’s a professional. She’s been trained by the best. A man your size and colour can’t just blend into the Carioca street scene. Brazilians might have a chance.”
“No,” Johnny repeated, shaking his head.
“It doesn’t have to be the police,” Harry said patiently. “I’ll organize everything myself. I can hire a few smart kids. I’ll make out I’m a jealous husband. They don’t have to know anything more than that.”
Johnny thought this over for a bit, pacing round the room. He reminded Maitland of a large animal circling its cage.
Suddenly, Johnny rounded on him.
“You could do it anyway,” he said. “You could set watchers on me and follow Sigrid when she leaves me.”
“I could,” Harry agreed, “but I won’t. Not unless you give your consent. You matter a damn sight more to me than Max Fabrikant.”
This must have been a turning point, because the next time Johnny spoke, he said “I’ll help you. But you must promise me you’ll get her away safely.”
“You have my word.”
This will be the end of it, Johnny pledged himself, and Sigrid. We’ll leave together, and that will be the end of betrayals.
But the figure of a player on a Richmond stage loomed up out of memory, mocking him. He heard the actor’s lines as clearly as if he were squeezed into those cramped front stalls instead of standing at the window before the shadowed, sensuous curve of the Sugarloaf:
So I will turn her virtue into pitch
And out of her own goodness make the net
That shall enmesh them all.
3
The police took Emil and his wife in the flat in Ipanema. Emil watched with a bemused smile as they tinkered with the safe. When they attacked the steel door with a blow-torch, he squeezed Lenka’s hand. He had watched Johnny booby-trap the safe with enough explosives to blow all of them into the sea. There were worse ways to die, he thought.
His smile faded when they opened a hole in the steel shell and there was still no explosion. There were more than a thousand documents inside, plus his address book and receipts for payments to agents in Brazil.
“Johnny,” he murmured under his breath.
“What’s that?” one of the policemen rounded on him. “Nothing.”
I’ll give them nothing, Emil promised himself. Not even that. If I start talking, it will never end.
He tried to take Lenka’s hand again, but they tore her away.
In the police barracks, when the questioning began, he puffed out his chest and said, “I could tell you these things, but I won’t. You can do what you like. I have been tortured by the police before. Even in China.”
The one behind the table with a face like a skull gave a thin smile of recognition.
“We are an underdeveloped country,” he said. “But not in this.”
They took Miranda and his girl. They caught Verdi. They got the Romanian. The surviving conspirators roamed the city like vagabonds, from one transient address to the next.
>
The police released Miranda’s mistress, Elza, after only a few days in captivity. She was a pretty, illiterate country girl, little more than a child. Nilo, who had managed to elude the police dragnet, was convinced that she had been blackmailed into working as a police spy. She seemed to be allowed extraordinary access to her man inside the House of Detention; this weighed against her more heavily than anything else. Nilo claimed she was passing on whatever she gleaned about the Communist underground to the Department of Political and Social Order.
The girl was lured to a safe house rented by Nilo and interrogated for several hours. Max was the chief inquisitor, but he remained offstage. Sigrid drove back and forth between his hideout and Nilo’s flat with lists of questions and rough transcripts of what the girl had said.
In the early hours of the morning Max pronounced the death sentence.
There were five men present in Nilo’s apartment when it was carried out. Nilo wanted to garrotte her; he maintained that this was the quietest way and would sow terror among other potential police spies. They found a length of clothesline in the laundry and looped it around Elza’s neck. But they were rank amateurs at the business of killing. The first man who tried to choke off the girl’s life lost his nerve. Nilo poured strong liquor for all of them and told another to try again, while Elza lay gasping, blue-faced, on the floor. The second executioner was so terrified he lost control of his bowels. It was quite a long evening before they were ready to bury the body, rolled up in a rug, in a garbage dump up in the hills.
Johnny was not invited to this entertainment.
He heard about it from Sigrid. She was oddly detached, as if she were describing a scene from a film, as if the murdered girl existed only on celluloid.
“Was it really necessary?” he asked.
“She knew the punishment.” She frightened him when she added, “I would have done the same.”
You can’t mean that, he pleaded with her silently. This is the madness that Max has induced. At the same moment he was trying to push away the sense of guilt that twisted his stomach. He had given the police Miranda — and the Communists had claimed Miranda’s girl, who meant the world no harm.
Later Sigrid responded naturally, even ardently, to his caresses. But he found that his sexual desire was less potent than the image of the terrified girl with the rope sawing at her neck.
When Sigrid left him in the early morning, Harry Maitland’s men were watching.
Left alone in the apartment, Johnny felt chilled to the marrow, despite the muggy heat. He threw his head back against the pillows, because everything in the room was churning. He was trying to stay afloat in an empty, hostile sea.
It wasn’t easy to follow a car in Rio without being spotted. Private automobiles were still a rarity; even the wealthiest Cariocas patronized the streetcars (first-class, to be sure) or took a taxi. Harry Maitland had allowed for this. He had engaged four trackers: one on a bicycle, posted at the corner nearest Johnny’s flat, two in taxis, one in a Ford. It would have been easier and certainly less costly to turn the whole affair over to Colonel Plinio. But Harry did not want to break faith with Johnny. He had to be the one person in Rio Johnny could trust unconditionally.
In any event, Harry’s painstaking preparations paid off: by the end of the morning his trackers had identified three separate addresses that were new to Maitland. By the end of the day he was reasonably certain that one of them, on the Rua Guerreiro, was Max’s bolthole.
At this point keeping faith with Johnny involved one further complication. Johnny had insisted that, when the police closed in on Max, Sigrid must be with him, safely removed from the scene.
Harry intended to keep that promise, too.
Almost a week later, Johnny lay on the sofa of the apartment in Flamengo that Harry had rented for him, listening to the rain. It fell in sheets, blocking off his view of the bay. It had even silenced the drums rehearsing for Carnival. A sour taste of tar bubbled up from his pipe, and he tossed it aside.
She must come soon, he told himself. It’s been nearly three hours.
He had managed to persuade Sigrid to come for a drive up into the hills, out of the sweltering city.
The sudden, torrential rain had turned their side road into a mudslide, and they had had to reverse back down. He had clutched at one excuse after another to prolong their outing. He had found a little restaurant whose outside walls were adorned with murals depicting its specialties — turkey, suckling pig, rabbit — and ordered two bottles of wine to give himself an excuse to dawdle at the table. She’d become impatient, driving too fast for the wet road, so that they’d skidded on the way back to the city and dented the right fender on a slow-moving oxcart, whose owner had to be pacified with enough milreis to pay for a new bullock.
When they parted, he prayed that the thing was over: that the police had come and gone from the house on the Rua Guerreiro, that Max had been exorcised from their lives for good. That she was coming back to him. He had told her to meet him at the new address in Flamengo. Harry was the only other person in Rio who knew it. Max’s people couldn’t touch them here.
He heard the scratch at the door, like a cat asking to come in, and rushed to open it.
She was holding a little umbrella but was soaked to the skin. Her eyes were wild, her breathing shallow and too fast. She looked on the edge of tears.
“What’s happened?” His alarm was unfeigned.
“The police — oh, God. I think they took Max.”
“You saw them?”
“They were in the street, outside the house.”
“You came straight here?”
“Of course not. I went to Danton.” This was a code name for the new radio man, whom Johnny had never met.
“And?”
“The same story.”
He fussed over her, fetching towels from the bathroom, pouring stiff drinks, trying not to show the tremendous sense of relief that suddenly possessed him.
It’s over, he thought. Within twenty-four hours, two days at most, they would both be on a boat bound for Buenos Aires. They might run into Helene; Johnny had learned that, after Max had sent her south, she had stayed on in Buenos Aires to run the Comintern liaison office there. But there was no reason for Helene to suspect anything. She would know by now that the whole operation in Rio had ended as a rout. He and Sigrid would be accepted as two of the survivors.
After Argentina, Europe. He would take Sigrid to England. He would have to tell more lies to begin with, but later she would understand. She had to.
He felt her forehead. She was running a fever. But already she was on her feet, picking up her bag and umbrella.
“I can’t stay,” she said. “I have to go back, to make sure—”
“You’re not leaving,” he said firmly. “I’ll go. I want you to lie down.”
“Johnny?”
“Yes?”
“What will they do to Max?”
“He’ll get by. He’s a professional. Eventually Moscow will arrange a trade.” He said whatever came into his head. But he realized as he spoke that it was all too glib. His rosy sense of relief had ebbed away, giving place to more complicated, less complacent emotions. In part of himself he was sorry for Max, sorry for what the interrogators would do to him, sorry that Max had survived more formidable opponents to end up in a Brazilian cell. But fear was the larger emotion: fear that Sigrid would never be free of Max’s mystique, fear that he would always have to lie to her.
He watched her staring around at the unfamiliar surroundings, the low-slung leather chairs, the coloured prints of sailing ships on the walls.
“How long have you had this place?” she asked.
“Not long.” He didn’t like the tilt of her question. “Listen,” he said, “I want you to take a nice hot bath and go to bed. I’ll go and check on Max.” He remembered, just in time, to ask, “What’s the address?”
No amount of bad weather could stop Carnival. The Avenida Rio Branco was afire
with plumes and satins and sequins. Even inside the penitentiaries, they took up the chorus of Cidade Maravilhosa and Pierrot Apaixonado.
Max Fabrikant was hundreds of miles removed from this scene, comfortably ensconced in a suite at the Crillόn in Buenos Aires, a fitting address for a Belgian businessman of evident means. He had explained to a sympathetic clerk that his luggage was being sent on after him. He could pick up the basic necessities at the elegant emporiums along the Calle Florida, behind the hotel.
He had eluded the police trap that Harry Maitland and Colonel Plinio had laid for him in Rio by purest chance — luck, if you were a gambler at heart. Max had taken his morning stroll later than usual and had paused to read the newspapers over a cafezinho at a restaurant around the corner from his apartment on the Rua Guerreiro. Even a novice would have found it difficult not to notice the four men who got out of the unmarked car that pulled up directly opposite his building.
Max indulged in a second coffee, sipped it slowly and read the editorials before he resumed his stroll. He observed that plainclothes detectives were covering both the front and back of his building.
He walked on in the most leisurely way in the world but his mind clamped down like a steel trap.
Johnny, he told himself. It had to be Johnny.
He had changed his lodgings after Emil was arrested. Only Sigrid knew where to find him. He was certain that she hadn’t consciously betrayed him. That same morning, shortly before he had left his apartment, she had telephoned to report that Johnny had a new address — something Max was quite sure no one in the party had authorized. At the time he had accepted the information merely as proof that Johnny’s survival instinct had not atrophied. Now it enlarged all the other question marks over Johnny’s activities in Rio. What had Johnny been doing in the cemetery in Botafogo after dark? Why hadn’t Emil’s safe blown up?