“At Urubuapá. Or here. I only go from there to Rio, or sometimes—rarely—to São Paulo. I don’t go into the interior.” He shrugged. “It’s a small town. Everyone there knows me.”
“All right,” Da Silva said. “Don’t discuss this with anyone, either the drivers here or any of your passengers. Nor in Urubuapá, not even with your family. Do you understand?”
“I understand. I won’t say anything. What could I say?” He looked up. “Can I go now? I mean, can I leave the city now?”
“You can go.” The large detective smiled at the young man. “And boa viágem.”
The young man nodded vaguely and then walked slowly back to his truck, tapping people who stood along the fence and motioning silently to the truck. The thirty conto was still his, but somehow the pleasure of it had largely disappeared. For some reason he thought of the girls in the little houses back of the Avenida Vargas, and he was suddenly glad that he had not visited them the night before.
Da Silva stowed the slip of paper back in his wallet but kept the photograph in his jacket pocket for easy access. As he started to cross the Praça again in the direction of the bar he nodded to himself in satisfaction. Little by little he was gathering information; eventually the pieces would start falling into place. And then the satisfaction disappeared. The little snake … when would he be able to fit that into the picture?
The radio of the all-night bar was blaring as always; the whining voices of a caipira duet gained over the faint sounds of the shipboard band now playing from the middle of the bay. He paused on the curbstone, looking about. It was almost certain that the man in white had taken a cab; at that hour any other conveyance would have been uncertain. The cab drivers were seated near the doorway of the bar, and he walked over and sat at a table where one of the drivers, elderly and alone, was reading his paper. The driver looked up inquiringly as Da Silva simply laid his badge on the table. The driver’s face hardened. He folded his paper deliberately and pushed it to one side.
“Yes?”
“Last night,” Da Silva said. “Do you recall a man dressed in a white suit taking a cab from this rank? About two in the morning?”
The driver watched him coldly and then shrugged. “A man in a white suit? How should I remember? We’re in and out all night.”
“A big man,” Da Silva persisted patiently. “As big as I am. This man.” He laid his photograph on the table.
“Puxa!” The driver looked up, eyes narrowing, thinking. This didn’t look like anything to get mixed up in, but still, the police could be very rough with people who withheld information.
“Well?”
The driver shrugged; it was pointless to lie. “Yes, he was here.”
“Who drove him?”
The driver stared at him. “I did.”
This was luck. Da Silva slipped his badge and picture back in his pocket and leaned back. “Relax,” he said easily. “Let’s have something to drink and you can tell me all about it.”
The driver’s eyebrows went up at this beneficence; it was far from usual in a police interview, but on the other hand, his conscience was clear. They called over the waiter and ordered two batidas. It was not Da Silva’s favorite drink, but the thought of drinking the brand of cognac exhibited on the dirty bar was impossible; and it was obviously the driver’s drink and most guaranteed to aid him in telling his story.
“Well,” said the driver, wiping his lips and shivering a bit from the first sharp tang of the lemon, “he came in. He wanted to go to Copacabana; I took him. We started off—oh yes, he wanted to go the long way around—so I turned up Vargas, and then we were followed …”
“Followed?” Da Silva leaned forward with interest. “Who followed you?”
“Two men. He wanted me to try and lose them, but …” He sighed disconsolately. “In my heap I couldn’t lose a streetcar. Anyway, then he stopped in a bar to telephone, and when he came back …” He told of their ride to Copacabana, the mad dash past the traffic light, the man descending, running for the hotel. And his being stopped later by the two men who had been on their trail.
“What did they look like?”
“I didn’t see the one who was driving very well. The one that stopped me—they cut me off, and this one came out and opened the door of my cab—well, he looked like a mean little bastard. With a gun …”
“You didn’t report it? To the police?”
The driver merely looked at him sardonically, and Da Silva changed the subject. “What kind of a car were they driving?”
Here the driver was on safer ground. “A 1948 Buick, four-door. A private car. It had a twisted bumper; the car must have hit something sometime. Painted black, a fairly recent repaint. Not a very good job.”
Da Silva nodded, not at all surprised by the details. A Rio cab driver, he knew, could forget a passenger in five minutes, but the details of an automobile, even one that only passed casually in the street, could remain with him for years. He arose.
“If you are free …”
“Why?” The cab driver set his glass down reluctantly.
“I’d like you to take me to that bar you stopped at last night, where he telephoned.” He smiled. “The police pay when they take cabs on official business, you know, the same as anyone else.”
The driver arose slowly. “All right,” he said, and added a bit defensively, “I have no reason to be afraid of the police.”
They walked to the curb and got into the cab. The driver turned the ignition key and waited patiently while the motor ground noisily for some minutes before reluctantly catching in submission to the insistence of the starter. The driver turned to Da Silva as he forced the gearshift into place. “You see? How could I lose anyone in this?”
They entered the Avenida Vargas; buses and cars whirled past them dangerously. “This is the way he wanted to go,” the driver explained. “Then down Rua Riachuelo. That’s where the bar is, where he stopped. At the end, in Lapa.”
“Did he seem to know the city, or did he act like a stranger?”
“Oh, he knew the city.…” He nursed the engine; they rumbled precariously along, turning at last into Rua Riachuelo, swaying as the car tracks snatched at the wheels and then suddenly released them.
Da Silva leaned back, one arm draped over the front seat. “One thing I don’t understand. There might have been trouble. How does it happen that you waited for him at the bar?”
The driver looked a bit embarrassed. “Well, to tell you the truth, he reached over and took my documents out of my shirt pocket before I could stop him.…” He did not mention the ignition key; that would have been too embarrassing. But he did not have to; it takes months to get documents in Rio and years to replace lost ones. The driver changed the subject. “The bar’s on that corner there. I’ll pull up and—”
He paused in amazement. The bar where he had stopped the previous night had a crowd surging about the entrance; an ambulance was leaving, its siren keening mournfully. A black-and-white police car was pulled up at the curb before the lighted front.
“Hold it!” Da Silva commanded. The driver braked and his passenger opened the door and dropped to the ground. “Wait for me.” He strode into the crowd, elbowing his way to the front. A police sergeant was questioning people, pad in hand. He jumped to attention when he saw the tall detective.
“What happened, Sergeant?”
“Two men beat up the owner. They ripped the place apart and left.” He stared in disgust at the blank page of his pad. “Nobody saw a thing. They wouldn’t, in this neighborhood!”
Da Silva stared about him. The bottles had been pushed back from the bar mirror; several had tumbled and the smell of pinga sharpened the air. The small cash register stood open and small bills were scattered about the floor. The normal array of papers, boxes, and general catchall that make up the contents of the shelves beneath the bar had been dumped out and lay strewn about the floor.
“Stay with it,” he said to the sergeant. “I’ll want a
full report in the morning.” He looked about once more but could see nothing to require his continued presence. He pushed his way back to the street, forcing a path through the curious crowd. Well, Mr. Wilson, he said to himself in grim satisfaction, still just coincidence? And then he could almost hear the flat tones of Wilson’s sardonic response: for a snake? For a dead little stuffed snake?
He got back into the cab, thinking. “When you left here, did you stop anywhere else?”
“No. We went on to Copacabana and didn’t stop.” The driver tilted his head toward the bar. “What happened?”
“A fight.” Da Silva drummed his fingers on his knee, coming to a decision. “All right. Let’s go back to Praça Mauá. My car’s there.”
He sat in thought as they swung around the point beneath the arches and headed back. Some things were fairly clear. The man in white, the corpse, had come up from Urubuapá with the package. He hadn’t time to pick it up, and nobody had met him to give it to him. The package, then, came from the tiny fishing village on the south coast of the state of São Paulo. And he had been followed and finally discovered this fact, deciding therefore to leave the package somewhere safe until … But, of course! That was why he had called from the bar, in order to make a reservation in a fictitious name. So that he could leave the package in that name at a leading hotel, an American name: the name of William Drury. Da Silva suddenly smiled. Drury! He remembered the bar and the scattered and broken bottles and was suddenly sure. Of course he might have called himself Sam Seagram, or Gilbert Gilbey! And the two who were following him, intent upon that small package, were searching every place he had been, or had stopped, and they weren’t fooling! Their search was serious: one dead, one badly beaten, and … A sudden chilling thought struck him and he turned to the driver.
“Do you have a second taxi rank you can work from?”
The driver shook his head. They were pulling into the Praça Mauá once again, and Da Silva pointed a finger.
“Drop me at that red Jaguar there. Now listen carefully. I do not want you to go back to that cab rank at the bar tonight. Drop me, and then go right home. I’ll give you enough money to take care of any loss of fares you might suffer tonight. And tomorrow morning I want you to come down to my office and I’ll arrange with the licensing board to place you at another posto. Until this is settled.” He dug out one of his cards, doubled the corner as is the custom in Brazil, and scribbled a number on it. “This is where you’ll find me tomorrow. This number I just wrote is my home, unlisted. If you need me for anything before tomorrow, call. And one more thing—on your way home don’t pick up any passengers. None at all. Do you understand?”
The driver stared in Da Silva in frowning doubt. “But why?”
For a moment Da Silva contemplated explaining, but then he rejected the thought. The long hours of inactivity that accompanied the labor of taxi driving were too conducive to gossip.
“Because I say so,” he said shortly. “And because it’s for your own good.” He took several large notes from his wallet and passed them over. He opened the car door. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then,” he said, getting down. “Any time before noon. And don’t forget what I told you. No stops, and no passengers!”
“But …”
“Also no buts!” Da Silva said firmly, and slammed the door.
The driver shrugged in a puzzled fashion, and Da Silva waved him good night. The ancient car coughed its way out of the Praça and turned up the cobbled dock-side avenue that led in the direction of the north zone of the city. Da Silva slid into his Jaguar and headed in the opposite direction, toward Copacabana.
It had not been a bad night’s work, he thought with satisfaction. Slowly but surely the thing would take shape; it was always that way with police work. People liked to think of police work as a sort of cops-and-robbers film, like something on TV, with gun smoke and flashing fists, and the good guys always winning. But it usually went like this. Ask questions, get answers. Ask more questions and get more answers. If you asked enough questions, and got enough answers, sometimes you could see a small hole in the murky web and begin to poke your finger through.
But still, he had to admit as he curved into the beach road, a dead snake?
The black Buick was nestled once again in the tiny cul-de-sac across the Praça from the bar. Luis, sitting quite erect now, did not even think of reaching for a cigarette; in the black mood that Jorge was in, the cigarette was more apt to be slapped from his mouth than picked from it.
“Jorge …”
“Shut up!”
“But, look, Jorge …”
“Just shut up!” The smaller man’s voice was bitter with resentment and barely concealed violent anger. “If you hadn’t lost him for those damn five minutes last night! If you hadn’t let him get away! If you had any idea how to drive …!”
This was patently and grossly unfair and Luis resented it. He suddenly also resented the endless waiting, the lack of a drink, the inability to smoke, the entire madness and uselessness of their scheme. And most of all he suddenly resented his younger brother, this mean-faced, always-snarling, pulsing bomb of barely contained violence at his side. Who was the eldest? Who was the strongest? In sudden resolution he reached into his side pocket, pulled out a cigarette, and lit it. When the hand beside him reached up viciously to slap it from his mouth, he calmly took the tiny fingers in his huge hand and twisted. There was a muffled scream.
“Luis …!”
“Now you shut up!” He gave the small hand another twist and then flung it away from his disdainfully and drew deeply on his cigarette. It had never tasted better. “Now you just shut up! If you had let me take him when we first caught up with him, none of this would ever have happened! But you had to be a smart man, a big man, and we lost him. Don’t tell me about my driving …!”
There was a moment’s stunned, unbelieving silence from the smaller one. Then, to Luis’ utter amazement, he heard his brother speaking apologetically for the first time in his memory.
“It was a mistake,” Jorge admitted in a whisper, nursing his bruised fingers. Yes, he was thinking, it was a mistake, a bitter mistake, to depend in any way on this brutal, senseless hulk who is my brother simply because my mother had two children. But it is a mistake that shall be rectified as quickly as possible! When I do not need you any longer, brother, you shall realize where the mistake lay!
Luis swelled. He took one last deep draw on the cigarette and then snapped it from the window, watching the starburst of sparks scatter into oblivion as it hit the wall beside them. In his present mood the flare seemed beautiful. Jorge fumed silently; fortunately it seemed to pass unnoticed by the few people passing by in the lighted Praça beyond the end of their hiding place.
“I doubt that that cab driver would have the package,” Luis said with an assumption of authority he would not have believed possible in himself before. “You knew Armando; he would never have trusted it to a cab driver he didn’t even know.”
Jorge could not contain himself any longer. “Then where is it? And how do you know he didn’t know that cab driver? Armando had it; he left Urubuapá with it! And since he’s been here we’ve watched him every minute! He didn’t leave it at the hotel, and he didn’t leave it at the bar! So where is it?”
Luis thought carefully; it was an unaccustomed labor, but now that he had, in his own mind, assumed command of their efforts, he felt it only right to give it his best mental effort. “Well, maybe the driver does have it at that,” he conceded. “It isn’t any other place. Well, we’ll just wait for him here. This is his posto; he’s bound to come back to it sooner or later.”
“Brilliant!” Jorge said. “Now, are you through trying to think?”
Luis looked up in startled surprise; was his authority being challenged so soon? One look at his brother’s eyes and he knew it had all been an empty dream.
“What’s wrong with what I said?” he asked, his feelings hurt.
“Shut up!” Jorge was lean
ing forward, staring across the Praça. “I think that’s him coming now. Wait … he’s going to drop a passenger. There, at that red car. Well?” He stared at his brother. “What are you waiting for? Some street mechanic to come along and turn the ignition?”
Luis started the car and eased slowly out of their alcove. “All you have to do is tell me,” he complained. “You don’t need to be so sarcastic about it!”
“Just drive,” Jorge said. “He’s heading down the docks. We’ll pick him up about Armazen 14. It’s quiet there.”
“But he knows you,” Luis objected. “He’ll remember your face.”
“Everybody remembers my face,” Jorge said sourly. “Everybody knows me. Except you, apparently. His remembering my face won’t make any difference, believe me; he won’t be telling anyone about me.”
“But …”
“Please,” Jorge said fervently. “Do me a favor. Shut up and drive.”
Luis shut up and drove.
FOUR
Some incompetent, garbage-brained, blag-dabbed idiot was wildly ringing the fire bell. Da Silva swiveled his head in righteous fury: the men knew this was supposed to be a secret mission! But the foursome on the tail gate of the long red Jaguar fire engine were nowhere near the bell; they were laughing loudly and playing cards. It was remarkable, Da Silva thought with a burst of pride, how they were able to hold onto the swaying rail with one hand, grasp the full complement of cards with the other, and still manage to shuffle and deal on the small table that was perched so precariously on the tail gate. And that table must be new-issue equipment; he didn’t recall that before. They were a fine bunch of men, and he was happy to work with them. He turned his eyes back to the road in time to swerve violently, just missing a brick wall by scant inches. He couldn’t recall that wall blocking the street before, either. Go away for a week, he thought sourly, and you come back to find everything changed. And then someone began to ring the fire bell again; it was really too much!
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