He took the smoldering stub of cigar from his mouth, stared at it a moment without seeing it, and then brought his thoughts back to consider its length. Too small; he flung it into the water, watching it fall. After that he was silent. Without his cigar in his mouth he found it hard to converse; besides, at the moment he hadn’t anything to say.
2
Captain José Maria Carvalho Santos Da Silva, liaison officer between Interpol and the Brazilian police, smiled pleasantly at his usual waiter and carefully examined both the label and the cork of the bottle of cognac being held out for his inspection. In this naughty world, as he had had reason to learn in his long experience, labels can be duplicated and corks re-used, horrible though the thought of such malfeasance might be. Satisfied that he had taken as much reasonable precaution as any man could be expected to take, he submitted the offering to the ultimate test: taste. Satisfied, he relieved the waiter of the burden of the bottle, filling both his own glass and that of his companion, and then leaned back to enjoy it. The waiter, having completed his mission, disappeared to other tasks, aware that it would be at least half an hour before he would be required to bring menus to, the two men at the table.
Captain Da Silva — Zé to his friends, and unspeakable things to his enemies — was a tall, athletic-looking man in his late thirties, with a swarthy pockmarked face and a thick mustache that, combined with his curly black hair, gave him more the appearance of a brigand from the interior — or the appearance of one of his tougher customers — than that of a captain of police. His high cheekbones gave him an almost Indian appearance; his smile, when he was pleased about something, could take years from his age, a flash of white even teeth against his almost copper skin, a crinkling of humor lines at the corners of his large black eyes. On the other hand, an angry frown on that rugged pockmarked face was one that was known, respected, and feared not only by the Rio underworld, but also by any subordinate who did not perform to the high standards Captain Da Silva set both for himself and for those who worked for him. It was rare, however, that a person working for the captain did not perform to the standard. Under those circumstances he did not work for the captain very long.
Across the table his companion smiled at the examination of the cognac bottle, accepted his glass, and grinned over the rim as he sipped it and set it down.
“You’ve got a laboratory,” he said. “Why not run it through a complete analysis? Or I could probably get it done for you through the Embassy. One of these days the contrabandistas in Rio are going to come up with the taste of Reserva San Juan as well as the proper color. Then you’re going to be lost.”
“As long as they don’t fool around too much with the proof,” Da Silva said with a grin. “And, of course, the price.” He raised his glass in a gesture of a toast. “Here’s luck.”
“Luck.”
The man across from Da Silva was quite the opposite of the flamboyant captain. Wilson was a man of medium size, with light sandy hair and pale gray eyes, of indeterminate age, nondescript in the extreme. He was the type of person who could be — and usually was — passed daily upon the street and never remembered, a man whose very clothing seemed to be selected to compliment the picture of his subdued personality. Yet this standard uniformity was no accident. It had been carefully cultivated over the years, as Da Silva well knew, and it served Wilson excellently in his job. Ostensibly he held the position of Security Officer at the American Embassy in Rio de Janeiro, a job that not even the State Department could have properly defined, assuming they had ever wished to do so. On the surface he was the whipping boy for American tourists caught in their own thoughtlessness or folly, the locator of lost passports, and quite often the re-uniter of sailor and ship, wife and husband, suitcase and owner.
Wilson’s position at the American Embassy, however, was actually far more important. Like Da Silva, he was a member of Interpol, and also played a vital role in a number of his government’s activities which were less publicized but often more far-reaching. Among Embassy personnel only the Ambassador was fully aware of Wilson’s true responsibilities. Even the Political Officer — representing the CIA — did not know his colleague’s true status — which was precisely how the State Department had conceived and promulgated the job. Among the very few people aware of Wilson’s true position was Captain Da Silva; as a result the two had had more than their share of adventures together, and the swarthy Brazilian would rather have had the colorless, nondescript Wilson at his side in times of trouble than any other man he knew.
As they did quite often when both of them found themselves in Rio and free at the same time, they were having lunch at the upper-level restaurant at the Santos Dumont Airport on the edge of Guanabara Bay, the airport for national traffic, a neat block of land jutting out, manmade, in the shadow of Sugar Loaf, just a short walk from downtown Rio and the American Embassy on the Avenida Presidente Wilson, and even closer to Da Silva’s office just a few blocks away in the Rua Dom Manuel. Still, even walking a few blocks was not Captain Da Silva’s idea of proper locomotion, because otherwise why had pioneer inventors such as Duryea and Ford — or De Soto or La Salle for that matter — been born? His red Jaguar had brought him to the airport terminal and even now was parked illegally before the main entrance, well guarded by a patrolman, not so much to prevent some newly recruited traffic officer from ticketing it or having it towed away, as to prevent the removal of a carburetor, if not the car itself, by someone less official. Daylight has never served as too great a deterrent to knavery in that most beautiful of all cities.
Wilson drank, refilled his glass, and returned his friend’s hospitality by lighting a cigarette and shoving the pack across the table. They were American cigarettes, as they would be.
“The advantages of PX privileges,” he said lightly, “although I get the feeling sometimes that some of our more famous brand names are being rolled by hand somewhere up in São Paulo. On a farm.”
He smiled and leaned back comfortably. Da Silva was in his shirtsleeves as was his custom, his jacket hanging on his chair behind him; Wilson, more the conformist, retained both jacket and tie. The two relaxed, listening to the muffled sounds from the ground floor beneath the open balcony of the restaurant, from the impatient lines before the ticket windows, hearing the clatter of dishes and the chatter of animated conversation from all sides, and also the occasional deafening roar of an airplane engine warming up for takeoff just beyond the wide windows open for the breeze from the bay.
Da Silva winced unconsciously at the sound of the airplanes; Wilson drew on his cigarette and frowned, studying his friend’s face with curiosity.
“Was that a cringe I saw? From you? I thought your main argument for eating here every day was that nothing pleased you as much as seeing planes taking off every two minutes without your being aboard. Have you changed?”
Da Silva took a sip of the Reserva San Juan, so rarely available in Rio, rolled it around in his mouth a moment to savor the full bouquet, swallowed with appreciation, and looked up.
“Unfortunately, no,” he said with a faintly rueful smile. “If you were half the detective you’re supposed to be, you would have analyzed the situation instantly. Quite obviously the cringe was because very soon I shall be watching a plane take off, and — poor me — I’ll be watching it from the inside.”
Wilson’s curiosity deepened.
“Where are you off to? And when? And why?”
“Barbados. It’s an island in the Caribbean.”
“And has been for a long time,” Wilson agreed. “Now for question number two: when?”