The Fugitive

by Fish, Robert L. ;

  The rounded railing was damp under his fingers, the concrete steps slippery beneath his feet; he seemed to be mounting into the heights of the sky itself. Below he heard the scraping sound and the thin whining of the cables as the little car hesitatingly took off on its descent to the earth so far below. Then the silence about him was complete.

  The upper platform was lit only by the growing brilliance of the now triumphant moon, and by a red airplane-warning beacon mounted on a slim steel pole high above. He stepped into the red puddle of light that the beacon cast and watched his skin take on a bloody tinge. With a faint shudder he stepped away to the soft clean moonlight, leaning on the railing, turning his back on the cynical red eye, peering down into the ocean of fog that flowed beneath. From the distant hidden rocks far below, the tiny sounds of surf came up in weak crashes, fighting their way through the thick insulating layers of yellow mist; he tried to remember the foot of the cliff as he had seen it many times in brilliant sunlight, but the picture refused to form. He could only see the waves beating against the black rocks in endless darkness, tragically tearing at the giant, wearing upon it, trying to drag it down under the murky sea.

  His eyes swept the fog bank below; lighter spots came and went, reflecting the lights of the city in thinner layers. Somewhere below this cloud mass lay the beauty he had come to know and love, the winding beaches, the swaying palms. A sudden puff of breeze cleared a spot for an instant; the glittering curve of Copacabana sprang into view and then was lost again as the mist rolled back. At least I’ve been to Sugar Loaf, he thought in sudden sardonic bitterness. And then, surprisingly, his feelings changed to thankfulness. Yes, he thought, at least I’ve been to Sugar Loaf! I promised myself to come, and I am here! Even though it is dark and foggy, even though I came through no volition of my own, I am here! I shall take my satisfaction from this; we must take our satisfaction where we can!

  Time passed slowly,; then the creaking of the car wheels straining against the taut cable came clearly again through the night, gradually increasing in sound. The tiny car was once again approaching. He listened intently. There was the familiar scraping sound again, the car dragging slowly against the ledge, and then silence. A few minutes passed as he waited, suddenly tense, feeling the fog at his back. Then hesitant footsteps could be heard as they came across the slower walk and started slowly up the steps, dragging, as if their owner were feeling his way. A figure began to emerge from the slower level, rising from the stairwell; the heavy hat first, then the shadowed face, and finally the tall, slightly stooped body. It paused at the top of the stairway, as if in contemplation or seeking rest, and then came slowly across the platform to Ari’s side.

  They faced each other in silence. The taller man had a rough scarf wound about his mouth and nose, as if for protection against the fog, and with a brief nod of his head in Ari’s direction, he began to remove it, glancing contemptuously about as he did so. The scarf came off slowly, like a mummy’s bandage; Ari found himself studying the glittering eyes during the unwinding operation. This man is mad, he suddenly thought; and his heart began to accelerate, rumbling in his ears.

  The cowl was finally disengaged, the grizzled head shook itself in freedom, casting aside the narrow band of cloth; he turned abruptly to Ari.

  “Herr Busch?”

  Ari said nothing; the face before him wavered and then took shape again; it was lined and aged, the hair beneath the brim of the huge hat was sprinkled with white. There was something familiar in the voice, in the cast of the face.

  “Herr Busch?” The repetition was demanding.

  Where had he seen this face before? His mind fled through the past, down the years of the horror that had been his homeland, and came automatically to Buchenwald; and there he found the answer. The shock of recognition struck Ari brutally; his voice caught in his throat. The mad features before him dimmed as dizziness swept him and then faded, but a nameless joy also swept him at his discovery. The harsh face stood waiting impatiently.

  “Von Roesler.” The words were forced from his throat in a burst of vengeful happiness; his heart increased its dreaded tempo, drumming wildly in his breast, physically shaking him.

  The face before him suddenly smiled, congenial. “You know me? You are familiar with me?” The stoop disappeared as he stood militarily erect. “Then we can clear up this unfortunate misunderstanding quickly.” He paused in reflection, turning to stare into the gleaming blue eyes with imperiousness. “You know me? From where?”

  “Von Roesler! Colonel von Roesler!” Ari chuckled, a frightful sound in the whispering night; a sound to turn a more sane man in querying doubt.

  “From the Fatherland? From the war?” The crazed eyes turned inward in glorious memory. “I’m sure that we have met; you know me, and you seem to be most familiar. Most familiar. Possibly I was a bit hasty in my first reaction to your visit, my dear Herr Busch.” The eyebrows furrowed in thought.

  “Colonel von Roesler!”

  “From Poland, perhaps? Or Riga? Or possibly Paris. Was it Paris?”

  Ari stared at him in mounting joy; a vicious smile twisted his lips. The other peered at him curiously.

  “Or one of the camps. Did we meet in one of the camps? I was in many, you know.” There was an unconscious pride in his tone. “I was at Auschwitz, and Maidanek. And Dachau. And Buchenwald, of course…”

  Ari listened to this fearful litany in grinning hate. At the sound of this name he chuckled aloud, almost sobbing. The crazed eyes swung around at the sound.

  “Buchenwald? You were at Buchenwald? Of course!” He stared into the glittering blue eyes in grimacing concentration. “You were a guard there, I remember… or a clerk.… Or were you one of the attendants at the ovens…?” The voice faltered, becoming querulous. “You do not wish to say? To tell me? But I know—I know!” He suddenly giggled in infantile triumph; how could this one expect not to be remembered with those startling blue eyes? “It was Hamburg! On the train—the brakeman…” He shook his head in sad bewilderment. “No; you were not the brakeman. But it was Hamburg—one of the guards there? The barracks, perhaps…?” His mind wandered off, slipping back into that awful nightmare. “The fire—you remember? You remember the fire?” The twisted face jutted forward, the voice became petulant. Those deep blue eyes, those terribly blue eyes! “You do not want to tell me? But Know!! I remember! It was—Buchenwald! It was Hamburg—!” The triumph suddenly returned; he almost crowed. “No, no! I know! It was Paris! Of course; it was Paris! I knew I would remember! It was Paris! We were coming around a corner, I was with Monica, you know; and we were coming around this corner, we had been to the Portuguese Embassy…!”

  And then recognition struck him like a huge fist, slamming through him, battering him, tearing away his reserves. He lurched back against the railing, his mouth opening in shocked horror.

  Ari laughed. He reached for the shaking arm drawing away from him in desperation, gripping it tightly, speaking from an inspiration or direction he could not recognize. “You must not make a sound!” he said quietly, staring with almost equal madness into the crazed eyes before him, his heart beating in a frenzied tempo, his body beginning to tremble. Von Roesler tried to pull away, cringing, his blanched lips opening in terror.

  “No, no!” Ari whispered as one would to a frightened child, some corner of his brain sniggering at the insanity of the scene, the unreality of it, the hopelessness of it. “You must be perfectly quiet!”

  A faint cry broke from the terrified madman, a pitiful mewing sound. The silence on the deck below was broken by the uncertain shuffling of feet.

  “Ah, no!” Ari whispered fiercely. The pain was sweeping him now, washing over him in terrible waves, choking his words deep in his chest. Von Roesler’s cries grew in intensity, sobbing as they forced their way through the paralyzed throat. A wild scream burst from the drooling lips. The footsteps below, no longer hesitant, pounded up the stairway.

  Ari smiled quietly. With superhuman strength he gra
sped the shrieking figure in his thin arms and leaned backward as far as he could over the broad railing, pulling the struggling body of the other with him. The pain almost paralyzed him, robbing him of the power of his arms, but he forced himself ever backward, panting, fighting. With a violent arch of his back he rolled sideways, never loosening his grip on the other, dragging the squirming body with him; a low growling sound came from his throat, from the exertion and the terrible stabbing pain.

  The footsteps came clattering across the concrete of the platform; hands reached out desperately. He felt the fingers clawing at him, the fingernails scraping urgently across the cloth of his sleeve. The pain in his body spelled to a climax; a star-burst exploded before him, releasing a beautiful brilliance in his eyes; and then released him to final peace and freedom as they dropped away from the dragging hands into the void below.

  They fell through the night, a dead man still clasping a screaming maniac in his rigid, locked grasp. The sea reached out with calm arms to greet them….

  Encore—A Tempo

  Chapter 1

  Da Silva and Wilson stood on the broad marble steps of the Instituto Medico-Legal in the hot afternoon sun, staring silently at each other. Wilson’s head carried a wide bandage; his left arm swung stiffly from a silken sling.

  “It’s von Roesler, all right,” Wilson said quietly. “I’ll send his fingerprints off this afternoon, but I don’t think there is any doubt.” He stared at his companion’s rigid face. “You were right, of course, all along.”

  “I was late, of course, all along,” Da Silva said bitterly. He stared back over his shoulder at the tall bronze doors of the Instituto. “Ways Ari who was right all along. Even at the end….”

  Wilson touched the tall man’s shoulder with his free hand, in compassion. “You cannot take a thing like this personally. You did everything you could have done.”

  Da Silva sighed, forcing his mind away from the battered, smiling body that he had so recently left behind, lying in peaceful oblivion in his narrow tier in the Medico-Legal. A thought that had lain dormant below the surface of his mind for some time now arose. He turned to Wilson somberly. “And the report? How will it go?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ll have to put in a report, you know. He was an American citizen. And what will your report say? Will it be another case of endless revenge by a Jew against a Nazi?

  Must we end up, after all this, with what would amount, in the eyes of so many blind people, to another Eichmann case after all?”

  Wilson looked surprised. “Another Eichmann case? They were both Nazis, don’t you remember?” His voice was gentle. “As far as I am concerned, Herr Busch and Colonel Von Roesler had a terrible accident. Or possibly they committed suicide.” He looked calmly into Da Silva’s eyes.

  “It could be that their consciences bothered them.”

  Da Silva looked down at the bandaged man beside him, his warm eyes full of thankful appreciativeness. “Very good.” He turned away again, sighing deeply, shrugging. “Little Ari Schoenberg took care of the beast’s head; I’ll take care of the wriggling fingers and toes that were left behind!” There was grim promise in his tone of voice.

  “How?” Wilson asked curiously.

  Da Silva smiled, a hard smile. “I don’t know. Maybe they will all be bothered by consciences. Possibly they will all commit suicide.” He laughed angrily, slapping Wilson on the back. “Don’t look so shocked.” He patted Wilson more gently this time. “Don’t be worried. I said I don’t know. I don’t know what I will do. But it will be taken care of; that I promise!”

  They left the wide steps, beginning to walk slowly down the street, accommodating their pace to Wilson’s slight limp. At the corner they paused and Da Silva looked back at the Instituto, the morgue, where the tattered remains of Ari’s body lay. “When this is all over and forgotten,” he said softly, “I’ll take his body from wherever they put it and have it buried in the Jewish Cemetery here in Rio. I think that is what he would have wanted.”

  They turned the corner into the Avenida. Ahead of them, across the little spit of bay with tumbling waves, the sheer cone of Sugar Loaf rose in the bright sunlight. A tiny car pulled its way along the fine cables, struggling toward the summit.

  Da Silva tore his eyes away from it and turned to Wilson, suddenly smiling in his old carefree style.

  “There is one punishment that Mathais, Strauss, Gunther, and all of the others will suffer,” he said almost happily, “a punishment that is worse than any I could possibly inflict upon them!”

  Wilson looked at him with raised eyebrows, questioningly.

  “The money!” Da Silva said with a bitter chuckle. “The money! The two million dollars! Here it is, in Brazil, somewhere; here it is with no owner, theirs for the taking! But where? You see, now that Herr Busch is dead, nobody knows!”

  He put his hand under Wilson’s arm, helping him to cross a side street. They paused as traffic swept by them; then, with the street clear, they crossed and continued down the avenue, basking in the afternoon sun and the warm satisfaction of their friendship. In the distance, Sugar Loaf looked calmly down, endless and eternal, its peak fronting the sky majestically.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Captain José da Silva Mysteries

  ONE

  They call them Pau de Arara in Brazilian Portuguese, these ancient, wheezing, rattling, all-but-dying canvas-covered trucks that serve as transport in the interior of Brazil. The phrase is slang, born of the Brazilian’s sharp but critical sense of humor, and means the roosting bar of the macaw. Possibly the name derives from the nameless dirt that accumulates on the floor during a long trip; or it may come from the fact that, when overcrowded, many of the passengers sleep standing, accommodating their tired bodies to the swaying and bouncing of the complaining vehicle over the rutted roads of the interior, their knotted fingers locked onto a roof beam for support, or even at times clamped desperately to the patient shoulder of one lucky enough to have found space on the cramped benches that line the truck body. A tarpaulin shades them from the parching noonday sun, but beneath it the truck body is a shadowy furnace. Only their thin rags of clothing protect them from the miasmic damp chill that falls in the higher elevations of the coastal range every night.

  You find the Pau de Arara carrying despairingly silent men and women, wide-eyed children, squalling infants, and even—if space allows—terrified chickens and ducks. As a general rule, goats are not allowed. The people come from everywhere, going almost anywhere: from the dried cracked-earth farms of the desolate northeast, searching for some semblance of hope in the south; from the sunken flooded lowlands of Santa Catarina, looking for the relative security of a laborer’s job in some factory in Rio de Janeiro; from the endless hunger of some hovel in Matto Grosso, seeking the ever-present dream of food in the crowded environs of São Paulo.

  It is not that these steaming, groaning wrecks of Pau de Arara go only where there is no other transportation; the airplane covers this vast country, luxury omnibuses roll smoothly into every tiny crossroads village, and even rare uncomfortable trains haul between the major cities. But the Pau de Arara has the advantage of being cheap. Payment does not depend upon a fixed price scale posted on any official bulletin board—it is often the result of haggled agreement between the passenger and the driver, arrived at squatting at the dusty roadside in the shadow of the panting truck. Many times it depends upon the rider’s purse and the driver’s urgency at the moment for gasoline, or oil, or a new tube for his worn tires. Cooked food has been accepted, and even live chickens. And many times, when the gas tank is full, and the driver’s stomach also, credit takes care of the situation. They are the condução do povo, these Pau de Arara—the transport of the people—and they carry thousands daily in their endless search for the promise of tomorrow that, for the man swaying precariously along in the sweltering heat of the truck body, has to be better than the reality of today.

  In the interior
of Brazil, sudden blinding rains can reduce the roads to impassable mud wastes, or landslides can quickly block any semblance of passage, and for this reason the Pau de Arara has no fixed schedule or often any fixed route, other than a starting and an ending point. And for this reason they are, of course, an ideal means of travel for people who wish to avoid undue notice.…

  To the dull, kilometer-weary eyes of the passengers in the nearly filled 1938 Chevrolet truck coming up to Rio de Janeiro from the tiny village of Urubuapá on the south coast of the state of São Paulo, the large man in the crumpled white suit provoked no particular interest. As they alternately dozed, cuffed children, chattered, or unwrapped marmites to partake of cold rice and beans, they may have noticed that the man in white seemed able to pass the day without eating. Or without sleeping. True, some of them may have noticed his head drop once in a while, but he always came out of his nodding at once with an abrupt jerk and a swift clutch at the inner pocket of his jacket as if to be sure that no one had relieved him of his possessions during his lapse. And whereas it was customary for the passengers to take advantage of the breeze and the view afforded by a seat along the open side of the truck, even at times going to the extreme of usurping such prime space with worded or wordless threats, this one in white seemed more intent upon maintaining a place in the very center, well in the deep shadow of the tarpaulin. The heat here was stifling, but he did not even seem to sweat, only sitting silently, his big body rolling evenly with the dipping and jouncing of the truck, his eyes staring into some distant dream of his own. At times he would hug his arm to his side and smile vacantly to himself at the pleasant response to his arm’s pressure against his crumpled jacket pocket. At other times his hand would sneak unconsciously to stroke his calf, and no one doubted the presence there of some form of protection. But these actions were disregarded and only led his fellow passengers to look pointedly away, for privacy is a cherished and respected adjunct to riding a Pau de Arara.