“No! Zé, I don’t want you to go.” A better argument came to her. “I won’t go with you. You’ll get yourself killed for nothing. He’ll still have my letters.”
“I wish you’d stop chattering,” Da Silva said with a smile. “You’re as bad as a wife.”
“Zé—”
“Go to sleep, darling.”
She lay back and then suddenly turned to him, putting her arms about him convulsively, almost fiercely, drawing him close and holding him tightly, molding her body to his.
“If we go tomorrow, I don’t want to go to sleep yet...”
Da Silva came from sleep instantly, some sixth sense telling him there was an intruder in the apartment. At his side he could hear even breathing as Isabela slept. He opened his eyes a crack, listening intently, and then opened them further; the sound that had brought him from sleep was not in the room. He came to one elbow, listening carefully.
It came again, the sound of someone brushing against furniture, the faint sliding of shoe leather over the smooth wood floors. He judged the sound to be coming from the living room at the far end of the hallway. Da Silva frowned. Could it be that the assassins, disappointed at his failure to appear at Paraíso that evening as per the original schedule, had decided not to wait but to do away with him here in São Paulo? If so, his beautiful theory went down the drain, and if he wasn’t extremely careful, he could well go down the drain with it.
He swung from the bed, thankful — not for the first time that night — that the Correio de Manha, whatever their other parsimonious habits, did not stint where bedsprings were concerned. He slid his revolver from the night-stand drawer beside him, happy that the habit of keeping his weapon close to him followed him when he traveled. He moved stealthily toward the open doorway of the bedroom, his feet cool on the smooth wood. Suddenly he paused. It occurred to him that no man was quite as weaponless as one without pants; despite the seriousness of the situation, the picture of himself, armed but nude, brought a quirk to his grim lips. His jacket and top coat were in the front closet adjoining the room in which the intruder seemed to be, but fortunately his trousers, like his gun, were kept at his side. He retrieved them from their resting place on a chair, slid into them, and now, fully armed, edged from the room into the hallway, silently closing the bedroom door behind him.
The hall, lacking the benefit of windows or moonlight, was as black as the inside of a mine; he edged along it, his revolver at the ready, one hand brushing the wall, searching for the entrance to the living room. The sounds of the intruder increased slightly in volume; whoever he was, he seemed to be dragging something. Da Silva’s eyes narrowed as the many possibilities connected with that slithering sound came to him; his fingers encountered a light switch and then, inches beyond, the edge of the living room wall. The decision was made in an instant; he drew back his fingers until they encountered the switch once again. He pressed himself tightly against the wall, raised his weapon, and flipped up the switch.
Wilson, dragging a suitcase from the closet, blinked in the sudden brilliance. He straightened up, blinked again several times to get accustomed to the brilliance, and then considered Da Silva critically.
“Do you always sleep with lipstick?”
Da Silva took a deep breath. “One of these days, Wilson,” he said ominously, “you’re going to get shot breaking into houses. And what the devil are you doing here, anyway?”
Wilson looked hurt. “You didn’t expect me to leave São Paulo without my things, did you? I certainly couldn’t depend on you to bring them back to Rio. You might sell them to somebody on the docks, and I’d be out my favorite pajamas.” The thought brought to mind another thought. “I didn’t put on the light because I didn’t want to disturb you.” He glanced toward the bedroom. “I didn’t disturb you, did I?”
“No. But don’t be disappointed,” Da Silva said. “Instead you damn near scared me to death.” He tucked his revolver into the waistband of his trousers. “So you got your things. So good night.”
“I did disturb you,” Wilson said sadly. He sighed and moved to the outer door. “I’m sorry.”
Da Silva grinned. “You’re not sorry. You’re just jealous.”
“Jealous?” Wilson looked serious. “About some things, maybe. But not about your going to Paraíso tomorrow. I’m not jealous of your judgment...” He shut the door behind him.
Chapter 14
The vast sprawling city of São Paulo fell away below, its tiny lights scattered to the horizon and shimmering like stars under the vibration of the propeller-driven plane until a formless cloud bank slid between the earth and the plane, blotting out even the tenuous thread of reality represented by the outlined streets and parks of the metropolis. One nice thing about getting to the end of the case, Da Silva thought, will be a cessation, at least temporarily, of air flight; he seemed to have spent the greater part of the past week flying from one place to another. And this one an ancient prop job, probably just waiting for him to take it before falling down, bereft of a decent load of passengers and equally bereft of a bar. Did the Companhia Viacão Aérea de São Paulo — Vasp — expect people to risk their lives without liquid courage? Apparently they did.
He loosened his seat belt with a sigh of resignation, brought out his cigarettes, and glanced over at Isabela. The girl sat rigid, her lovely face expressionless, staring down the aisle; for she had insisted upon Da Silva taking the window seat as being safer from any assassins who might have boarded the same plane, and Da Silva had humored her rather than argue. This one was going to be formidable in the argumentation department, he thought with an inward smile, but she was also worth it. He offered her a cigarette but she refused. He lit his own and looked at the girl quizzically.
“What’s the matter?”
“You know. I wish we weren’t going to Paraíso.”
“Now, look,” Da Silva said patiently, “we’ve been all over that. This affair has to be cleared up sometime, and it might as well be now. If someone wants to kill me, they’re going to kill me eventually, unless I stop them first. My best chance is to find out who they are and take care of them before they take care of me. And that means going up to Paraíso and meeting them. Besides,” he added, “you don’t want those letters hanging over your head forever, do you?”
“The letters don’t matter.” She looked at him, her gaze a combination of tenderness and anger at him for threatening something important in her life. There also seemed to be a quality of memorization in her concentration, as if she felt she might not have the original to refer to in the future. Then she turned away, as if she were revealing too much in her eyes. “I don’t want you killed.”
“At least we agree on that.”
“Don’t joke,” she said sharply, turning back. “How do you think you can stop them?”
“I have ideas. Where is this Airport Hotel they said they’d meet us at?”
“It’s very close. Actually,” she said, “it’s a part of the terminal building itself, but there’s no entrance from one to the other on the inside. You have to leave the terminal by the front and walk to the hotel along the road. There’s a walkway there.”
“Good,” Da Silva said, and reviewed the plan that had occupied him for the better part of the day; actually, the plan was simple enough, it was simply in repeating it to himself endlessly, in lieu of anything else to think about, that had taken the full day. He had wondered at first why the lake had not been selected again, and then shrugged this off. It really made no difference. Chaney had been left in the driveway to this judge’s home; Valadares at the lake. Apparently the killers had no fetish as far as location was concerned. He found himself thinking aloud.