Carnival of Spies

by Robert Moss

  Some hired hands bouncing along in the back of a horse-drawn cart whistled after her.

  “I’m in love with you!” one of them called. “I’ll make an honest woman of you!”

  “So what do you call your wife?” another baited him. She did not hear them. She was going to Caxias, to Ivan’s terreiro. She was going for revenge.

  She would give Ivan all the money she had and tell him the strange, foreign name she had heard in the night. She would plead with him to speak the terrible name of Exti Caveira, Exti Skull, the dark power that closed off a man’s paths and snuffed out his life like a candle.

  4

  It was two days’ ride to the Parana River, Inocencio said, unless the rains came again. In their saddlebags they stowed enough beef jerky, beans and rapadura to last a week. But in that country, no man who could shoot need ever go hungry. The woods and the marshes were teeming with wild pigs and tapirs, deer and muscovy ducks. As they followed a red dirt trail through the rain forest, Inocencio would lean from the saddle to scoop an orange or papaya from a branch.

  Leaving Fox Hill, they had travelled for a time through massive stands of conifers Parana pines, Harry explained — with a distant view of a vast coffee plantation on the hills to the south. Now, they were surrounded by true jungle, laced with lianas woven together in the high canopy, far above their heads, so that they rode through a patchwork of light and shade.

  Each of the three men had a rifle slung behind his saddle — the shortbarreled .44 Winchester that Harry favoured because it was light and the flat-nosed lead bullets were easy to find anywhere between here and Asunciόn.

  Twenty miles west of Fox Hill Farm, they dismounted and left the horses in a clearing to graze at will. Harry’s little mare, no mean forager, made straight for a maté plant; to a horse in these parts, the fruit of the yerba maté (as the Spaniards across the border called the plant) was as irresistible as catnip to your average feline.

  Maitland and Johnny followed Inocencio for half a mile or so into a shallow, stinking marsh teeming with water fowl.

  “The deer love it in here during the day,” he whispered, showing Johnny where to crouch. “They get away from the ticks.”

  Johnny was squatting in the stagnant water when Inocencio put a finger to his lips. A regal stag, six points at least — no, eight — was advancing among the trees. He stopped short and started butting his head against the branches. What was he up to?

  Johnny watched the animal over the sight of his Winchester. The stag, not sensing danger, had paused to make his toilette; he was rubbing the fur off his antlers against the rough bark.

  “He’s yours.” Harry reached over and squeezed Johnny’s shoulder.

  Johnny watched the stag. There was a kind of majesty about him. The way he shook his head, the way he stood up with his chest thrown out, reminded Johnny of someone. Was it Heinz Kordt?

  There was a scuffling among the leaves — perhaps a sloth changing position — and the stag reared up his head. The next instant, he was bounding away, across Johnny’s line of fire.

  Johnny swung the rifle, keeping the sight trained a few yards ahead of the deer. That was the trouble with a .44 Winchester. It threw its bullets rather slowly. You had to aim well in advance of your target.

  Johnny went through the motions. At the last possible moment he tightened his finger and squeezed the trigger halfway back, then released it. He lowered the rifle and watched the stag complete his escape.

  “You had him,” Maitland said, disappointed.

  “But I didn’t want him.”

  Maitland shot him a quick glance and turned to Inocencio.

  “I don’t think venison agrees with our guest. Can we rustle up something else for supper?”

  They bagged a cateto, a wild pig, back in the woods, and roasted it on a spit that night over a blazing campfire. The sweet-sour reek of the forest seemed more intense after sundown, but the stink from the roasting pig overwhelmed it.

  Johnny wrinkled his nose.

  Inocencio guffawed and said, “He’s got musk glands there—” he pointed to the short ribs “—like a skunk. Good eating, though. You’ll see.”

  He was right. It was better than any pork Johnny had ever tasted, though they all had to pay for it afterwards by picking the ticks off their bodies that had migrated from the drying hide of their dinner.

  They couldn’t sleep on the ground because the tiny blood-sucking ticks were everywhere. Inocencio slung his hammock at a discreet distance, on the other side of the fire, so the two foreigners could talk in English and drink pinga deep into the night.

  Maitland lay back in his hammock with his hands behind his neck and a cigar in his teeth and looked up at the distant lights of the Southern Cross.

  “Bradbeer’s been told to organize a boat to England for you,” he remarked to Johnny through a veil of white smoke.

  Johnny grunted and reached for the flask of cane brandy.

  “I’m sure Colin will understand if you decide to pull out at this stage,” Maitland said gently, removing the cigar.

  “It’s not my decision to make,” Johnny responded curtly. “I’m sure Colin will understand if you decide to pull out at this stage,” Maitland said gently, removing the cigar.

  “It’s not my decision to make,” Johnny responded curtly. “I’m sure Colin won’t put any obstacles in your way. After all you’ve been through.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of Colin.”

  Of course not, Harry thought. He was thinking of the girl. Maitland prayed that Bradbeer had handled her with some degree of subtlety. She must be very confused and very frightened — and must by now have guessed part, if not all, of Johnny’s secret role. It worried Maitland that Bradbeer had made no direct mention of the girl in the telegram that had been carried on horseback from the post office at Londrina.

  “Did your man in Buenos Aires say anything about Max?” Johnny asked.

  “No. I assume there hasn’t been a sighting. Max would have gone back to Europe straightaway, wouldn’t he?”

  “Not necessarily. Not before taking care of unfinished business.”

  “You think it was Max who got you arrested, don’t you?”

  “He was returning a favour.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “It had to be Max. He must have obtained the address from Sigrid.”

  “You might have been followed.”

  Johnny shook his head. “We were always very careful.”

  “But Honorio Schmidt’s information came from the Gestapo. Isn’t it possible they started checking up on you after that business with Willi Rausch?”

  “It’s possible,” Johnny conceded. “But they had information about me — party work names, personal things — that the Gestapo could only have known from an insider.”

  “Are you suggesting that Max sent your dossier to the Gestapo?”

  “Something like that. I’m sure he’s done it to others.” He told Harry what he had learned in Copenhagen about the systematic betrayal of Stalin’s critics inside the German Communist underground to Hitler’s secret police.

  Max Fabrikant was an enigma to Maitland. He was a man with blood on his hands, including the blood of some of the most vigorous anti-Nazis in Germany. Max had played his own game of provocation and betrayal in Brazil for ends that were still obscure.

  “Have you ever considered that Max might be a double agent working for the Gestapo?” Harry asked suddenly.

  “I’ve considered it,” Johnny replied. He thought of how Max had nearly got him killed in the shoot-out with the Gestapo at the fish market in Rio and then, at the last minute, had saved his life. “I don’t believe Max is working for the Germans,” he went on. “The funny thing is, he couldn’t have done much more damage if he were.”

  In the dream, Johnny was walking with Sigrid in a warm northern countryside, perhaps in Portugal. The place was beautiful, but there was a stifling sense of unseen oppression. The land was occupied by some hos
tile presence. They were surrounded by children, not their own, yet children for whom he was responsible. They passed through formal gardens into a vast, many-storied mansion with endless galleries and corridors. Johnny knew this great house, its staff and its secrets, quite well; once he had been trusted here. But the house was troubled. There was some terrible, unidentified danger growing close at hand. He realized they were being hunted. He and Sigrid were suddenly running through the house, looking for a way out. They stumbled through a labyrinth of hallways and stairs before they found an ancient elevator and rode down inside its rickety cage to a flagstoned lobby, where each of the massive doors had half a dozen panels, each with its own locks. All the locks had to be opened simultaneously by the deft manipulation of a bewildering series of catches and keys. Johnny found he could manage this surprisingly easily. Outside, in a walled garden of fleshy plants and running fountains, he sensed that he was nearing the source of the danger. Beyond the wall rose the foreboding bulk of another great house, or a castle. Sigrid and the children backed away, making for the far wall. But Johnny made them hold hands and led them towards the danger. He joked at the top of his voice and burst into snatches of song, as if, by presenting himself as anything other than a fugitive, he would not be taken for one. He saw armoured cars and truckloads of enemy soldiers moving away from them in a cloud of dust. There was a wonderful sense of imminent liberation.

  Then a shadow fell across his eyes. Something was choking him, blocking his mouth and his nose.

  He opened his eyes. The clearing was dappled with morning light. Something warm and furry was dragging itself across his face. He could not see it clearly, because it was on the cheek under his bad eye. The movement tickled, yet suddenly he wanted to scream.

  “Don’t move,” Maitland said softly. He was standing next to Johnny’s hammock, holding his rifle by the barrel.

  The thing edged down the angle of Johnny’s jaw. He felt its hairy legs scrabbling for a purchase on the slope of his neck. Beads of sweat broke out across his forehead. He dug his nails into the palms of his hands until he broke the skin.

  The thing dropped off his neck on to the hammock.

  “Now!” Maitland ordered.

  He did not need a second invitation. He flung himself off, leaving Maitland to swing the butt of his rifle down savagely, once, twice, till the cords of the hammock broke and the tarantula was a sticky black lump among the leaves.

  Johnny took a series of deep breaths.

  “If Schmidt had used one of those,” he said later, “I would have told him anything he wanted to hear.”

  From the rise they could see the peaceful, muddy expanse of the Parana River, still many miles to the west. Inocencio produced an old brass telescope. Through it Johnny saw a flock of ibises, a couple of Indian canoes and a powerful motor launch that Inocencio pronounced to be a rumrunner’s boat.

  “There’s a little river port downstream,” Maitland announced. “We’ll ride down in the morning and hire a boat to take us across.”

  Inocencio did not like the mention of this particular town. The people were all thieves and bloodsuckers, he muttered, worse than the ticks.

  “What he means to say,” Harry interpreted with a grin, “is that one of his girlfriends’ husbands ran him out of town.”

  They camped near a stream. Maitland magicked a bottle of champagne out of the depths of his saddlebag and placed it in the running water to chill.

  “It’s your last night in Brazil,” he explained to Johnny. “I thought it called for a celebration.”

  They had an hour of daylight left, and Maitland proposed bagging a few ducks for the dinner table.

  A strange, striped bird with a high black comb, two-pronged like devil’s horns, fluttered away through the trees as they moved along the watercourse. Higher over the treetops, vultures sailed on their great wings.

  Johnny scored the first hit. The bird dropped like a stone, somewhere on the far side of the stream. They sloshed across to the other bank and were still searching the undergrowth when Inocencio stopped and motioned for the others to remain still.

  He stretched out full length and pressed his ear to the ground.

  “What is it?” Maitland asked.

  “Listen.”

  They felt it before they heard it: a faint, rhythmic vibration under the leaves.

  “Horses?”

  Inocencio nodded. “Six. Maybe more. One far ahead.”

  “Two parties, then?”

  “Or one, with a tracker.”

  “Are they tracking us?” Johnny asked, his face lined with tension.

  “They could be bandits, after the horses,” Maitland said. “We’d better get them. Inocencio doesn’t like to walk,” he added, trying to make light of it. Inocencio was already on his feet, running almost noiselessly through the woods. “Johnny, I think you should wait here.”

  “No. I’m coming, too.”

  They could hear the riders clearly now, approaching at a fast clip.

  They led the horses deeper into the woods. Winston was shying a bit. Maitland fed him a lump of rapadura to quiet him down and tied his reins to a tree, just in case.

  They watched the trail from the cover of thick scrub.

  The first rider to appear wore a red bandanna and the flapping grey pants of a gaucho, and a hat with bobbing corks hanging below the brim to keep the flies off his face.

  “I know that bastard,” Inocencio whispered. “They call him Throat Slitter.”

  “What is he?”

  “He’s a bloodhound. He works on a German fazenda near Maringa. He killed three men in a fight.”

  Throat Slitter got off his horse, a big bay, and inspected the remains of the camp. He sniffed the air and peered into the forest. Johnny could see his eyes, hard and glinty, like obsidian. The man seemed to be staring straight at him.

  They heard the drumbeat of many hooves, saw a haze of red dust.

  Throat Slitter put two fingers in his mouth and let out a piercing whistle.

  The riders following him reined in just short of the clearing. There were eight or nine of them, lean, weathered and sunbrowned, except for the one who appeared to be in charge. He was wearing a sun helmet and an army officer’s tropical kit with the badges of rank removed. He was too big for his horse, though the horse was a sturdy Arab grey. His face was bright scarlet from the heat and the exertion.

  “Hossbach,” Johnny murmured.

  Hossbach and his men dismounted, leaving their horses to forage. Most of them carried rifles. While Hossbach conferred with his guide, the others started fanning out into the brush.

  Maitland would have liked to put a bullet between his eyes then and there — not just because of what had happened in Rio, but because he recognized several of the horses. They had been stolen from Fox Hill. One of them was a promising two-year-old he had hoped to enter in the Grande Prémio someday. Her rider was using a wicked snaffle bit of twisted wire. Her mouth would be ruined. Harry doubted she would ever see a racetrack after the way she had been used on that punishing trail.

  He guessed that Hossbach must have flown down from Rio in a light plane. The German Embassy had a two-engine job he could have borrowed. Some of the big fazendas had landing strips. The German had boasted to Johnny about the number of Nazi sympathizers in the state of Parana. He must have touched down at one of their ranches, hired his gang of toughs and set off overland by car or truck for Fox Hill, where he had picked up their scent — and Harry’s horses.

  Harry knew they had to make an instant decision. They could make a fight of it, but they were badly outnumbered. They could try to get away through the forest, but then they would have to abandon their mounts and try to hack their way to the river on foot. There was only one way they had a fighting chance.

  “Inocencio.”

  Inocencio was silently fuming. He clearly had his own notions about the correct treatment for horse thieves.

  “Senhor Gruber and I will draw them after us. See if
you can get round behind them and drive off the horses. Then we’ll make a bolt for it.”

  Inocencio slipped away through the dense vegetation. The vines parted and closed behind him again like a curtain.

  Hossbach hated the jungle. It stank, and it was full of biting, sucking things you couldn’t see. It pressed in around you, closing in like the walls of a medieval torture chamber, till you were gasping for air. Twenty yards from the trail, he was lost. He stumbled along, breathing hard, terrified that he would lose sight of Throat Slitter’s bobbing red bandanna and never find his way out.

  He had volunteered for this job because he had a score to settle. Johnny Gruber duped him and murdered one of their best agents. Also, Trott had promised to recommend him for an important job in Europe if he succeeded. It had seemed straightforward enough: a surprise raid on a horse farm in a part of the country where half the ranchers spoke German. He hadn’t reckoned with this.

  Someone was calling him by name.

  There it was again. “Psst! Hossbach!”

  The voice was coming from nearby. Hadn’t the others heard it? Damn. Throat Slitter had vanished among the trees.

  “Johnny?”

  “Here! Over here!”

  He fired in the direction of the sound twice, three times. There was no echo. The silence of that green hell seemed to mock him.

  “Hossbach!”

  He fired again and yelled for Throat Slitter and the others, who were pushing their way through the jungle to get to him, drawn by the shots.

  He swung round to shout his orders, and that sudden motion may have saved him, because a rifle bullet hissed past his ear and got one of his men, who collapsed like a punctured balloon, in the chest.

  Scared and sweating hard, Hossbach waved the others forward and staggered along after them sideways, covering the rear.

  There was a tremendous volley from the other direction, over to the east, followed by the whinnying and stamping of hooves.

  Throat Slitter came running back, shouldering his way through the rest of the men.

  “Back!” he yelled out. “Back! It’s a trick.”