"Excuse me," he said, stopping a passerby, "do you know if these shops - the airline office in particular - will be open again later?"
White teeth flashed in a dark face. "Open later?" a deep voice chuckled. "Tonight? Man, you must be jokin'!"
"But I thought... Usually they're open until..."
"Usually is other days. You must be out of your mind! Don't you know what day it is?" the man said, passing on with a wave of his hand.
Illya saw a modern hotel across the road and went into the foyer. There seemed to be an extraordinary number of laughing, chattering people about in noisy groups. Some of the women were wearing paper hats.
"Excuse me," he said to the reception clerk. "I wonder if you could possibly find out for me whether there is a plane tonight -"
"Tonight!" the clerk exploded. He reached under his counter and came up with a half full bottle of champagne. "Tonight is not for planes, senhor," he caroled.
"Have a drink. Be my guest - tomorrow we can think about airplanes" Strident giggling cut short his harangue and a group of teenage girls with linked arms infiltrated his cubbyhole to carry him away shouting and waving his bottle. Illya shrugged his shoulders and went out again. From behind him a burst of laughter and the sound of breaking glass were cut short by the closing of the swinging doors.
In the streets, now that he noticed it, there was an air of subdued excitement, a purpose and a direction to the knots of people hurrying all the same way. And there was a noise - distant, imprecise and exciting - that he suddenly realized he had been aware of deep in his subconscious for some time.
It was a composite, even a complex, sound… rising, falling, altering in pitch, almost hammering away at the threshold of hearing. And gradually, bit by bit, he came to separate the various components: there were voices, many many voices; there was the faint sound of musical instruments; there was clapping, cheering, shouting, laughing; there was the sound of multitudes of feet - and over and above everything there was a persistent muttering and thumping of hundreds of drums.
Almost against his will, Illya found himself carried along with the main body of the crowd. Darkness was thickening and strange illuminations flared over the roof- tops to the east. Here was an opportunity to lose the tail if he wished to. Should he do so - or should he deliberately encourage the girl to keep in touch so that he could turn the situation to his own advantage later? He decided to let her stick. He wanted to find out exactly why she was following him and on behalf of whom.
Now suddenly the road erupted into an open space on the far side of which stretched Copacabana Beach.
Kuryakin halted, amazed at the astonishing sight which met his eyes. The place was jam-packed with people, weaving and dancing and bouncing to the disparate music of at least a dozen different bands - guitars, mandolinas, accordions, flutes, an occasional trumpet or trombone, and everywhere the insistent pounding of percussion. There were hand-hit conga drums, timbales thrashed with flat sticks, tomtoms, snare drums, maraccas, claves, guiros and, above all, bongos beaten in a complexity of rhythms so intoxicating as to be irresistible. Into the surging mass of dancers flooding the spaces between the bands, a parade with huge papier-mâché masks, banners, and bobbing balloons in the shape of vast and grotesque beasts was forging its way, spear headed by its own group of buglers. Great monsters in bright crêpe paper and wood floated in the air on wires, surrounded by clusters of more ordinary balloons and lines of ornate lanterns. Beyond, the enormous beach was black with people against the lines of phosphorescence rolled shorewards by the incoming tide.
As he watched, the sky was split by jots of fireworks fountaining into the dark from further along the promenade. A cheer burst from the celebrating throng and the dancing redoubled in energy.
It was, of course, Illya remembered, the season of Carnaval - and in Rio, Carnaval is something more than a religion! No wonder the man he had asked about the shops opening had been surprised.
More than half of the people in the colorful crowd were either garlanded or in some kind of costume, and around the square stalls and booths were selling streamers, paper hats and masks.
He turned - just in time to see, out of the corner of his eye, that the girl following him was buying a mask at a corner stall. It was a tall thing - a beaked animal rather like a North American Indian totem pole, with huge round eyes - and the wearer's own viewpoint was a slit halfway up the neck lost among a cascade of paper feathers falling almost to the ground.
Very well, the Russian thought with an inward smile. Carnaval disguise is a game with room for more than one player…
He turned aside and selected a giant head for himself, an outsized turnip shape with the orientally bucolic features of a Chinese coolie, surmounted by the three tiers of pagoda-shaped hats. From within the hollow sphere of this mask, he surveyed the merrymakers, who now stretched as far as he could see in either direction along the promenade. It would be a nice exercise in subtlety to swing the roles around so that it was really he who was following the girl... by making sure that she followed him in the manner - and the direction - he wanted.
The density of the crowd made it harder to execute than to plan, however. He was continually caught up and hurried along in tidal waves of merriment - and when this happened, it was almost impossible to regulate his pace so that the girl was sure to be able to keep up. Nor was he able, so far, to burst out of the crowd altogether.
Struggling to beat his way against the tide, he caught isolated snatches of conversation as groups of people were carried past.
"Watcha say, boy! Slake it a while from this one, man…"
"Fabulous, just fabulous..."
"…ever been kissed by a man with a beard before?"
"Hey, Charlie! Over here, Charlie… Hey, Charlie!"
"… so colorful, I just can't bear it. Oh, look…"
"You got room for one more on that arm, handsome?"
"The drums go dudder-dudder bidder-bodder beeden dooden dada - the same rhythm all the time - had you noticed?"
"... so beautiful, so lovely. I should like to…"
"Charleee!..."
The mask with the bird's beak and the paper feathers bobbed now near, now further away. Several times Illya was in danger of becoming separated from his follower by phalanxes of laughing, singing dancers with linked arms. Once he did lose sight of it altogether when an unexpected display of frenzied acrobatics from a girl in a tight blue dress attracted a howling circle of admirers between them. Then he caught sight of the mask again, further to the left than he had expected, and plunged in pursuit.
He strove, without making it obvious, to place himself in a position from which the girl could discreetly take up the chase again - for she must have lost him as much as he had lost her. But she had apparently given up, for he realized now that she was trying to reach the fringes of the crowd.
Try as he would, he could not overtake her and put himself in view - there was always some segment of the noisy throng which obtruded just as he was getting near...