It was nearly 5.30 as I passed through the city centre and out on the Avenida Brasil towards Duque de Caxias. I continued as far as the turning marked Barra do Pirai, followed that road to the fork and this time went left. Five hundred yards further on I found somewhere to hide the car.
I strapped on the holster and marched into the trees, carrying Pedro’s holdall.
There was thick undergrowth between the trees and it took almost twenty minutes to reach the line of telegraph poles stretching from the villa. The trees had been felled in a swathe twenty feet wide along the path of the poles but the space created had long since started to fill with new vegetation.
I followed the poles towards the villa but was about to turn back when I saw something I had half been looking for. Somebody had been here before me, with the same aim in mind. Screwed on to one of the poles was a small black box. Within a range of a few miles somebody was listening to every phone conversation that the residents of Villa Nhambiquaras had. And the people most likely to be doing that were the group watching the front of the villa. Like Pedro, I had assumed that these men were some kind of secret police, but suddenly that seemed unlikely. A government organisation would listen in at the exchange. There would be no need to put up this box. It was possible that Martines was known to have a spy at the local exchange or that this particular police department could not arrange a wiretap at the exchange without arousing somebody else’s suspicions, but it seemed improbable.
I walked a few hundred yards away from the villa back towards the car before clambering up a wet pole and attaching the taps. I trailed the wire down the pole and about thirty feet into the trees and connected it to the headset.
With incredible luck within a few minutes someone began dialling. A woman’s voice asked for Georgio di Roma, expressed herself pleased that he hadn’t gone home and made an appointment for Friday at eleven for restyling and setting her hair. At least the tap worked.
I put the headset in the holdall, after first removing the camera and film, and zipped up the bag as far as possible with the wires to the tap coming out. After shoving the bag under a large bush, I returned to the car.
If I had read Pedro’s map correctly I planned to turn right just ahead and after another six or seven miles turn right again. I did that and parked in the same spot as earlier after driving almost a full circle round the villa.
Leaving my car again I entered the trees and moved slowly through them. The first thing I saw was that the brown Volkswagen that had been there earlier had been replaced by a green one. It was starting to get dark but there was still enough light to take a few shots of the Volkswagen’s solitary occupant. I hadn’t seen him before. Nor had I seen his companion who emerged from the trees a few minutes later. The two men talked and changed places.
As I moved round to the front of the villa, a police car came down the drive. Before it sped off in the direction of Rio, I had time to snap the officer in the back seat.
The light was fading so it was safe to stay near the villa entrance rather than clamber up a tree.
In the next hour and a half only one car went past. Then the black Mercedes reappeared with three men inside. It drove past the villa and round the curve in the road. I moved quickly in that direction and found the Mercedes parked beside the Volkswagen with its lights off.
Four men stood talking beside the cars, silhouetted in the moonlight. A fifth emerged from the trees. Just then there was the sound of a car approaching; suddenly the road was becoming busy. Two of the men disappeared into the trees. The other three opened the bonnet of the Mercedes and when the new car came into view were peering at the engine.
The newcomer stopped and the driver climbed out. It was Pedro. I could see the three unknown men plainly in Pedro’s headlights. One I’d never seen before. These three plus the two in the trees and two that I had seen before but who weren’t here now meant that there were at least seven in the group. That was a big team if they weren’t local.
Pedro walked towards them but evidently they didn’t want any help. After a few words Pedro shrugged his shoulders and drove away.
Shortly after three of the watchers disappeared towards Rio in the Mercedes.
Pedro was standing by my car when I returned.
‘You saw me stop?’
‘Yes. Did you recognise them?’
‘No, but one thing’s for sure: they’re not Brazilian. Only one of them spoke, the big bloke, and his Portuguese was terrible. He claimed they were Americans on their way from Duque de Caxias to Barra do Pirai for a meeting. I tried his English and he certainly had an American accent which may or may not prove anything. As you could see he was adamant that they didn’t need any help and they made sure I didn’t get to look at the actual engine. Not that I’d have been able to tell if there really was anything wrong.’
‘So we didn’t gain anything?’
‘Wait a minute, old son, we did. The Mercedes had a sticker on the dashboard with the name of a car hire firm near the Praça Mauá on it; I’ll follow that up. Whoever hired that car will have had to show his passport. Have you got the number of the Volkswagen?’
‘Yes, I have and there are two of them; the one that’s here now isn’t the one that was here earlier. You think they may have hired them from the same firm but in different names?’
‘Well we can always hope. If they’ve hired one car they may well have hired the others and from the same place. Any hire car firm is going to be suspicious of one man coming in and hiring three cars.’
I explained why there were at least seven in the group and Pedro’s reaction was the same as mine. ‘That’s one hell of a team. They have to be American or Russian but if they’re American I’m sure the local CIA Station doesn’t know about them.’
‘But if the Russians have the capacity to get seven people here in a matter of hours why would they have sent Kardosov on his own to Chicago?’
‘Maybe they just didn’t want to make the same mistake again. But you’re right. You can’t just get seven KGB agents into Brazil without any preparation and with nobody here noticing. My money’s on the Americans.’
Pedro was probably right.
‘Have you got all the gear?’ I asked.
‘I’ve got the radios, binoculars and a tape recorder with an audio switch. We can attach that to the tap you’ve just set up. There’s also a couple of spare cassettes and an ordinary cassette recorder to keep with you. I couldn’t get a radio connection for the wiretap. We’ll have to keep coming out here and running the tape through. And I have something else: a photograph of Hans Budermann.’
‘Who the hell’s Hans Budermann?’
‘Budermann is Barcisa. But let’s start at the beginning. I saw Persio, Nebulo’s ex-bodyguard, and he filled me in on the details of the Martines household. There are seven people in the villa. Martines of course. Four servants, two local couples. A woman named Miranda Gonçalves who’s a combination of mistress and nurse to Martines, and a general factotum called Hans Budermann who exactly fits your description of Barcisa.’
He handed me a photo. ‘After you left I tried to find a recent photo of Nebulo and came across this.’
Nebulo was standing in the foreground, now without his moustache. Behind him sat Martines in a wheelchair. Holding the chair was a man in a white tuxedo.
‘That’s Barcisa,’ I said. ‘Not a doubt.’
‘I showed the photo to Persio who identified him as Hans Budermann.’
‘What else did Persio say?’
‘Not much. Martines arrived here in the early fifties from Uruguay. He had a lot of money then and has made a lot since. He bought the Villa Nhambiquaras in 1962 and hired the two local couples.’ Pedro consulted his notebook. ‘The men are called Joao Moros and Paulo Pinteiro.
‘The woman Gonçalves appeared eight or nine years ago. She’s not Brazilian; Bolivian Persio thinks. Anyway, her native language is Spanish. She’s got an Alfa Romeo, so that’s who you saw this afternoon. Martines has apparently got an enormous pre-war Mercedes, a Mercedes 770, which he is very proud of. It’s the only one in Brazil. And there are a couple of Fords and a Chevrolet van in the villa too, or at least there were when Persio was last there.’
‘Did you get him to draw a plan?’
‘Yes, but it’s not too good. Just the ground floor.’
He passed it to me but it didn’t help much.
‘I think Persio put some of those little rooms at the back just to fill up space. He’s probably never been in them. The servants sleep in two small huts behind the villa beside a big shed used as a garage. Martines, Budermann and Gonçalves sleep on the top floor, and Persio reckons there are at least four unused bedrooms up there.’
‘Before we discuss anything else,’ I suggested, ‘let’s get that tape recorder in place.’
We left the camera and binoculars in my car. Pedro stayed at the villa entrance with one of the walkie-talkies.
It took me nearly forty minutes to attach the recorder, put it in the holdall with the spare cassettes so that it wouldn’t get wet, and return to Pedro.
‘Anything happen?’
‘Nothing. No traffic at all.’
‘There never is, although before you arrived, a police car left the villa. I got a picture of the officer in it, although the light was fading. You’d better take the film out of the camera when you leave.’
‘OK. But I can probably guess who it was. I should have told you about him earlier. His name’s Jânio Gomes. You remember in 1971 the Archbishop of Sao Paulo claimed to have personally verified two cases of torture by the DOPS?’
The DOPS, the Department of Political and Social Order, was what the Brazilian regime then called the security police.
‘I vaguely recall something like that. They were Italians weren’t they, nuns or priests?’
‘One priest and one woman social worker. They were treated pretty roughly to say the least. Of course priests getting tortured is nothing new here, but these two were foreign and one was a woman, and of course Archbishop Arns was creating quite a stink about it, so the regime promised to investigate.
‘The actual course of investigation isn’t important, but one thing that was beginning to come out was that one Tenente Jânio Gomes was up to his neck in the case. Then he suddenly appeared here in Rio, promoted to Capitão, and acting as bodyguard to Nebulo. Since then he’s been doing an impersonation of Nebulo’s shadow. He’s a hatchet man and he’s legal. If you can avoid tangling with him, my boy, you’re going to stay a much healthier man.’