“Oh, I’ve already done that,” Wilson said airily.
“You have?”
“Of course.” Wilson’s eyes twinkled; he leaned forward confidentially. “I did it while you were pouring that last drink. Actually, the man didn’t get out at all, or at least not of his own volition.”
“I see.” Da Silva nodded. “You mean he was kidnapped.”
“No,” Wilson said. “The way I figure it, the attendants didn’t want to admit they were speeding, but what actually happened was that they took a curve too fast and our patient simply went flying—”
“In this weather?” Da Silva shook his head. “He couldn’t go flying. The runways are closed.”
“Flying without runways. Flying under one’s own power. It has to be.” He looked at Da Silva in a superior manner. “Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” He shrugged modestly. “Just a little thing I coined together with a friend of mine named Doyle.”
He had expected a smile from his friend, but instead Da Silva was looking at him in a curious manner. “The only question, of course,” the tall Brazilian said slowly, “is what is impossible.”
“That’s easy,” Wilson said, and leaned back in his chair. “Your suspicions about the C.I.A. and your friend Dorcas, for instance. Those are impossible.”
Da Silva said nothing; instead his jaw tightened slightly. His hands slid into his jacket pockets; one hand stroked the envelope there. Wilson studied the serious look on his friend’s face and then became equally serious.
“I have a feeling, Zé, that there’s something you’re not telling me...”
Da Silva’s fingers tightened on the smooth envelope. It had arrived from Salvador de Bahia that morning addressed to the Security Division of the Foreign Office, and had only filtered through the system to arrive at his desk a few moments before he had left for lunch. It had been written in a small angular hand, had been both unsigned and undated. Its message was extremely succinct:
Juan Dorcas will be assassinated at the coming O.A.S. meetings. I leave it to your judgment which nation stands to gain the most by his death.
Da Silva studied his friend’s face evenly.
“I have a feeling,” he said slowly, “that there’s probably a lot neither one of us is telling the other...” And he turned rather abruptly to give his order to the small waiter standing patiently at their side.
Three
In the latter years of the nineteenth century, the center of social activity in the then relatively small city of Rio de Janeiro was centered for the most part about the picturesque arches of the section called Lapa, at the juncture of the Rua Riachuelo, Mem de Sá, and the rest of the spider web of minor streets that also sought haven in the friendly atmosphere of the gay praça. In those days, many who preferred not to live too far away were forced by the configuration of the neighborhood to build their two-storied stucco homes on the rocky shelves that jutted from the serra above, and in many cases to join them with the winding Rua Riachuelo far below with ladderlike streets of granite steps, unmountable by the hansom cabs and fiacres of the day, or even by the high bicycles which were slowly beginning to gain favor among the more affluent.
Today, the Carioca, bound by the imagined necessity of living only where one may be delivered by automobile or omnibus, has abandoned these narrow climbing defiles to those hardy souls too poor to afford mechanical transportation, or to those few aesthetics who consider the low rental and excellent view worth the effort of getting home. And, of course, a few who fall into neither of these categories also live here, for the towering heights of the morro are seldom visited by strangers — such as police — since the climb is a long and arduous one.
Nacio Madeira Mendes, slowly making his way from one wide slippery step to the next up the steep Ladeira Portofino, had long since ceased to protect himself against the gusts of driving rain that had soaked him to the skin seconds after he had left the ambulance. His only hope was that Sebastian was at home, and had a change of dry clothing available, as well as a bottle of something warming, be it cognac, or even pinga. The water rushing down the incline of the granite steps swirled madly about his sodden shoes and several times nearly took him off balance. He paused momentarily to catch his breath and glance about, bracing himself against the onslaught of the torrent, and wiped his face more from force of habit than from any hope of benefit to be gained from the action. Below him the red tile roofs glistened wetly; across the stepped and tilted roofs the buildings of downtown Rio were lost in the gray mist of the driving rain.
He shook his head. The pleasure he had always thought to experience upon returning to his beloved Rio de Janeiro after an absence of nearly three years was oddly missing; in his dreams he had somehow always pictured himself coming back on a day when the hot sun would be gleaming from the deep blue of the sea, and when warm winds would be ruffling the giant palm trees, lifting their fronds in welcoming gestures. It was not that he hadn’t remembered how it could rain in Rio — Deus me livre, how it could rain! — but it was only that somehow he had been sure he would come back on a day of good weather, and as a result felt a bit cheated. And even the slight pleasure of having outwitted a seemingly impossible situation by escaping the Santa Eugenia no longer gave him the feeling of calculated elation he had allowed himself once the helicopter was descending at Galeão Airport and he realized he was not going to be destroyed in the flimsy craft after all. If any pleasure could be garnered from the events of the morning at all, it could only have been when he managed to leave the ambulance, and this mainly because he had been sure at any moment they would skid into a lamppost, and that both he and the two maniacs in front would be crushed to bits.
The escape from the ambulance had been much easier than he had anticipated. He had been sitting in the back of the vehicle — for he had not tolerated lying down once his restrictive straps were removed — wondering at what point he should hammer on the front panel and get them to stop, when the ambulance had come roaring into the Frei Caneca to encounter a solid line of trucks trapped behind a stalled omnibus. Fortunately, the driver of the ambulance had managed to halt his careening charge in time. Even more fortunately he had jumped down to answer the reflections on his ancestry offered by one of the truck drivers who wearied of hearing a siren keen in his ear when he obviously was helpless to get out of the way. The ambulance driver had instantly been joined by his helper, who resented trucks and their drivers as a matter of medical principle, since he felt they prevented ambulances from attaining their true and predestined velocity. During the argument Nacio simply got out, closed the doors behind him, and moved swiftly around the nearest corner. No one saw him. The few people who were on the street at the moment were scurrying along with their heads bent against the rain, in no position to observe anything but their shoes, or the potholes in the sidewalk.
Nacio sighed, staring up at the apparently endless steps still waiting to be climbed, and then resumed his dreary march. One thing was certain; the job that Sebastian had for him had better be worth all the trouble and discomfort he had suffered. He was referring, of course, to the fee he would receive, and not to the nature of the assignment, for this had not only been understood, but had also been discussed in Lisbon. In any event, anyone who employed Nacio Madeira Mendes did so for one reason only, and that was to utilize the one true talent he possessed. There was nobody in Brazil, interior or urban, more accurate with a high-powered rifle than he; and extremely few with less compunction as to where it was aimed.