by Robert Moss
I abandoned my duty, Max reproached himself. I sheltered Johnny because I became an emotional fool, because I imagined I saw something in him I once had, because he is worth — even now — a thousand snivelling Emils. He betrayed the revolution, and I smelled it. But I still refused to interrogate him — I even avoided seeing him because he was the one person in my life I needed to believe was above suspicion.
I’m going to make all of that right, Max promised himself.
Max left Rio the same day on a steamer registered in Panama and bound for Buenos Aires. The police were all over the docks, but he met the captain of the boat in a waterfront tavern and bribed him to have his passenger smuggled on board inside a packing crate. Deliberately, Max did not entrust his fortunes to any of the Communist cells that survived around the docks. In the age of Stalin and Hitler, he had learned, faith was uncertain; the venal side of man was one thing you could count on.
Now Max’s room at the Crillόn was quiet except for the scratch of his pen against the writing paper. He waited for the ink to dry, then folded the letter and tucked it inside a plain envelope.
He straightened his tie, put on his hat and took the elevator down to the marbled lobby.
The uniformed doorman ushered him out.
“Would you like a taxi, sir?”
“No. I think I’ll walk.”
“Perfect day for it, sir.”
The girls along the Calle Florida wore light summer dresses and exuberant hats. He picked out one of the boys who were ogling them and beckoned with his finger.
“Señor?”
“Would you like to earn some money?”
“Si, señor.”
“I want you to deliver this for me, as quick as you can.”
He held out the envelope and an Argentinian banknote with an impressive number of zeroes.
The boy goggled at it.
“All right?”
“Macanudo, señor!” the boy exclaimed happily. He raced off after only the briefest glance at the inscription on the envelope. It was addressed to the military attaché at the German Embassy.
“I’m getting you out tonight,” Maitland told Johnny on the last day of Carnival. Colonel Plinio had told him of Max’s escape. Colin Bailey agreed that it had become too dangerous for Johnny to stay on in Rio.
“Sigrid comes, too,” Johnny said.
“Naturally.” Maitland cleared his throat. “Does she know — anything?”
“I haven’t told her.”
“Will you — I mean—”
“Maybe. When she’s ready.”
Harry wondered then, as he had wondered often during the time they had spent together in Brazil, at the hidden reserves that kept this man going, that enabled him to withstand the appalling loneliness of his double life.
He gave Johnny the address.
“You must be there no later than six in the morning. I’ll see you on board myself. How will you introduce me?”
“I’ll think of something. She knows I have my own contacts. She won’t ask too many questions. After all, she’s a professional.”
Johnny told Sigrid to meet him at the Babylõnia Club. It was a place where a single woman wouldn’t raise eyebrows. He had gone there with Hossbach. The fact that the place had a sizable German clientele was an asset rather than a liability, in Johnny’s estimation. It wasn’t the sort of place where the police would expect to find Communists on the run.
He had told Sigrid nothing about the boat, nothing about the escape plan. He preferred to face whatever questions she might raise at the last minute. Besides, he knew she had been to see Olga. He couldn’t risk letting anything slip.
In the early evening — the eve of Ash Wednesday Johnny fought his way through laughing crowds to the safe house in Flamengo. He wanted to pick up a few of his belongings and destroy any papers he would no longer need.
He made a bonfire in a metal wastepaper basket. It gave out more smoke than he had expected. As he struggled with the broken sash of the window above the sofa, he saw them in the street below, their red caps bobbing as they piled out of their truck. Special Police.
They might have been coming for one of his neighbours, but instinct told him they had come for him.
I must have been followed, he thought. Only two people knew that address: Sigrid and Harry Maitland. Whatever Sigrid might suspect, she would never tip off the police.
But she might have told Olga, Johnny realized. Or Max. Could she have told Max? Johnny thought back to the morning they had stopped at a rustic café on the winding road to Petrôpolis, the morning Max was supposed to be arrested. Sigrid went to the rest room and was gone for what seemed like a very long time...
This is madness, he told himself. The police weren’t coming for him. They were going to somebody else’s apartment.
But he could hear the clatter of their boots on the concrete steps. He peered down the fire escape. They were coming up that way, too. They must have his building surrounded.
A terrible, debilitating lassitude crept over him.
Let them come. Let it end.
He trained his thoughts on the girl he loved, waiting for him alone and scared among the dubious clientele of the Babylõnia, and his energy began to seep back.
There was still a way out. He had tested it before. He had never liked to live in a place that had only one back door. He flung himself out the back window, onto the little platform at the top of the fire escape, and was greeted with a volley of rifle shots that ricocheted off the wall.
He clutched at the pipe running up to the roof and started to haul himself up, hand over hand.
Then he was running stooped across the rooftops, trying to keep his balance as he weaved to avoid the shots from below. There was a sudden, searing pain across his leg. He gasped and felt himself slithering down the steep angle of the roof. He flailed out with his arms, seeking support. His legs shot out into space. He was gone. No, not quite. He grabbed hold of the gutter. It creaked but held. A bullet drove brick dust into his eyes. Mustering all his strength, he heaved himself back onto the roof, threw himself at a chimney and clung to it. Then he was off again, willing himself not to feel the pain, not to remember that one of his legs was dragging, a dead weight that could no longer support him. The red caps were jumping up and down in the street, trying to follow his passage.
Afterwards it was hard to imagine how he had made it to the end of the row of houses, down another fire escape and through the swirl of samba dancers into the side door of the church before they caught up with him.
Inside the church there was the smell of incense, the sweet melodious chime of organ music. Lighted candles sputtered in a brass stand at the back. Johnny took a spill from the box, lit it and placed it beside the others.
He saw a rubicund priest, preceded by shiny altar-boys swinging censers, moving towards the altar to conduct evening Mass. The pews were mostly deserted; the last night of Carnival was no time for Portuguese priests. Johnny slipped past the side altar, with its great gilded image of the Virgin, and found the door to the vestry. The largest cassock in the closet failed to cover his calves, but it would have to do.
The rest of the night had a dream quality tinged with the musky scent of the lança perfumes the young swells in their flashy convertibles were spraying into the sashaying crowd.
Johnny emerged from the church as a mock priest in his stolen cassock and lurched toward Lapa. As he approached the door of the Babylõnia Club, the pink lights of the sign overhead stained his face like grenadine in a milky cocktail.
The dream turned to a nightmare when he entered the club and saw Sigrid sitting with Hossbach and a second German.
His first instinct was that whoever had sent the police for him must have sent the Gestapo for her. But he could not walk away and leave her. He resolved to brazen it out. He calculated that the Germans wouldn’t risk a gunfight in public. He would find a way to get Sigrid to safety. When he joined the table, Hossbach’s drunken maunderings and
the other German’s distant curiosity began to persuade him they both had a real chance. Hossbach seemed to suspect nothing. The encounter was purely accidental.
Johnny’s first instinct was sounder; there is a limit to coincidence. He learned that as dawn broke on Ash Wednesday, lying flat on his back inside a ring of Special Police, with the muzzle of his own pistol jammed against his teeth, so that the end of Carnival tasted of blood and gunmetal.
4
Sigrid made sure the police had gone before she slipped out of the Babylõnia Club. The rain was coming down in buckets, washing out the last night of Carnival. She huddled in the doorway while the doorman ran to the end of the street to fetch her a taxi.
She watched the red fez bobbing back towards her under the huge candy-striped umbrella, minus the taxi.
“I’m sorry, Senhora,” Zé apologized. “With the rain, and all the people going home...perhaps one of the gentlemen could take you.” He glanced back at the door to the club.
“It’s all right. I can walk.” She clutched her light stole to her throat.
“But your beautiful hair!” Zé was mortified. “Wait!” He rushed back inside and returned with a handsome umbrella with a mahogany handle banded with silver. “Take this.”
She saw the monogram. “But it belongs to someone.”
“The cheapskate hasn’t given me a tip in weeks. You take it.”
“You’re marvellous,” she said, and gave him a peck on the cheek.
Zé Pimenta beamed and saluted with his pasteboard scimitar.
She lingered as if waiting for the downpour to ease. “The police gave everybody a scare,” she remarked.
Zé spat. “The boss must have forgotten to give someone his squeeze.”
“Did they arrest anyone?”
“Not here.”
“I saw a priest as well. I thought somebody must have died.”
Zé laughed until he was doubled up. “If somebody died in the sack,” he confided when he was sufficiently recovered, “they’d drag him up the street.” He pointed to the entrance of a rival establishment. “Bad for business.” He started chuckling again. “And that wasn’t a priest. That was Senhor Gruber. He’s a real joker.”
“Did he leave alone?”
“He had his pals with him. A couple of Germans in their bibs and tuckers. It looked like they were out to make a real night of it.”
Zé watched appreciatively as the girl trotted off. That one was a looker, all right. A lot more class than you usually saw at the Babylõnia. It was a crime to let a girl like that walk herself home.
The rain stopped as suddenly as it had started, as she crossed into Cinelandia, pursued by wolf whistles from the elegant young rowdies in a passing convertible. One of them tried to spray her with cologne. She smelled musk and tired lilacs.
A drunk came out of a doorway with his pants around his knees and staggered after her, mouthing obscenities. She tried to walk faster, but her high heels snagged in the cracks of the broken mosaic sidewalk. She took her shoes off and padded on in her stockinged feet.
Her chest was tight, her breathing shallow, when after a few false turns she found the address Johnny had given her. She hesitated at the foot of the steps. The place looked like a sailors’ dosshouse. There was a blue light in the front window, behind a torn shade. The hallway reeked of urine and stale beer. There was something sprawled across it, a mound of flesh that shook and shivered with its snores.
She looked back along the street and saw two men in tight-waisted suits and fedoras, like the detectives from the club.
She gripped the furled umbrella and stepped gingerly over the sleeping hulk. It gave a terrific snort and rolled over on to its back, so that she had to skip sideways to avoid a flopping arm. At the same instant a hand reached out of the shadows and clamped her shoulder.
“You’d better come in here.”
The voice was quietly authoritative. She moved with it, into the room with the blue lamp. The other furnishings consisted of a bed with an iron frame, a scuffed dresser with a bottle of whisky on top and an armchair with the stuffing hanging out. There was a pile of soiled sheets in the corner, partially concealed by a tan leather suitcase.
“Not quite the Ritz, I’m afraid.”
The man was about Johnny’s height but younger, with a warm, open face. You didn’t learn his kind of English in a language course. She knew there was something very wrong about that.
She felt ready to drop, but she stayed on her feet, close to the door, when he offered her the chair. A moth was trying to batter itself to death against the lamp.
“Would a drink help?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I could try to rustle up some breakfast,” he said doubtfully.
She was trying to read him from his eyes, his hands, the way he crossed his legs when he sat down on the end of the bed. There was nothing threatening about him. The hands were sensitive, the hands of a painter or a surgeon.
“Who are you?”
“A friend of Johnny’s.”
“The nameless kind?”
“You can call me Harry, if you like. I do think you ought to sit down and rest.” He was eyeing her muddy stockings.
She lowered herself into the armchair. It was the first concession.
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know. We met at the Babylõnia Club. There was a police raid. He said it would be safer if he left first.”
“Go on.”
“He’d been shot.”
“Shot?”
“Not seriously. But he lost a lot of blood. And he was dressed like a priest.”
Maitland frowned. Johnny must have fled into the church where they sometimes met — it was only a few blocks from the safe house. Had he tried to leave a message?
She repeated what the doorman had said about the Germans. She remembered that one of them was from the embassy. Maitland made her describe them, just to be sure. There was no doubt about it. Johnny had left the club in the care of the Gestapo. It was not encouraging news. However dim-witted, Hossbach had had plenty of time to mull over what had gone wrong at the fish market and to formulate some questions Johnny might have trouble fielding.
Sigrid asked, “Is he safe?”
“I’m sure everything will be fine,” Harry sought to reassure her. “He’s a hard man to stop.” He looked at his watch. “Besides, we’ve got plenty of time. Why don’t you curl up for a bit? I’m sure Johnny will turn up.”
She shook her head, but he could see she was fighting to keep her eyelids open. She accepted a swallow of whisky, and ten minutes later, she was fast asleep in the armchair. It wasn’t an easy dream. Her teeth chattered a bit, and her head rocked against her shoulder. Gently Maitland took the cover from the bed and draped it over her.
When he raised the blind almost two hours later to let the morning light into the room, she woke immediately, sitting up wide-eyed like a cat.
“Johnny—”
Maitland had had time to go over all the possibilities. That Johnny was being held at the German Embassy or a Gestapo hideout. That he had been turned over to the police. That Max’s people were onto him. That he was safe but forced to lie low for the time being.
Since he knew nothing for certain, except that the boat for Buenos Aires would be leaving within the hour, he decided it was best to lie a little.
“He’s been held up,” Harry said. “He wants you to go on ahead. He’ll be joining you soon.”
“You saw him?” she asked eagerly.
“There was a message.”
“Why didn’t you wake me?”
“I thought you needed your strength. Look, we’ll have to get our skates on.”
“Skates?” This colloquialism eluded her.
“I promised Johnny I’d put you on that boat.”
“But my clothes—” She looked ruefully at her rumpled party dress, her ruined shoes and stockings.
“The morning after Carnival, people make allowanc
es. You’ll find everything you need for the voyage in here.” He hoisted the suitcase. “I hope they fit.” He handed her an envelope. “Money, tickets, passport. There won’t be any problems,” he rushed on, leaving no space for objections. “You know who to contact in Buenos Aires?”
She obediently recited the Comintern cover address Max had told her to memorize, a language school on the Calle Florida.
“There is something you must do first,” Harry instructed her. “As soon as you arrive before you talk to anyone — you are to call on this man.” He showed her a card and let her study it until they were both satisfied she had committed the contents to memory. The name was one of those funny English ones that belonged in a cottage with a rose garden and a privet hedge: Bradbeer.
“I won’t leave without Johnny,” she said defiantly.
“You must,” Harry said patiently. “It’s what he wants.”
“Then let him tell me himself!”
He saw the fear and suspicion in her face and assumed it was all bound up with Johnny. “I’ll get him out,” Harry promised. “He means a lot to me, too.”
She finally acquiesced, but her expression did not change.
She’s got every right to be bloody scared, Harry thought. Johnny disappears with a pair of Gestapo hoods, and now she’s being batted around between unexplained Englishmen.
He got her on board the boat and tipped the steward to take her flowers and champagne. He lounged around the harbour till he saw the steamship leave. He hoped that Bradbeer would have sense enough to know how to play her. It was a damn tricky thing to spell out in a telegram.
He had something more pressing to worry about now. What had become of Johnny?
5
If Johnny stood on tiptoe, he could touch the ledge of the tiny barred window high up on the wall. If he pulled himself up, like a gymnast on the parallel bars, he could see the spire of a church planted on top of a rocky hill. He had attempted this exercise only once, because the guard who kept watch behind the Judas hole in the steel door had rushed in and beaten him about the kidneys and on the inside of the knees with a rubber truncheon. The guard had gone on thwacking at the soles of his feet when Johnny had fallen to the ground; he had had to bite his lip till it bled so as not to cry out.