CHAPTER 10

“Instant notoriety. That’s what I said,” Da Silva said over his shoulder and continued to prepare drinks for his guests. He handed Wilson a pony of brandy, crossed the living room to hand his other guest Luis Rangel, a gin and tonic, and took his own after-dinner brandy to his chair and sank into it, looking across the room. “Well?”

Rangel, managing editor of the newspaper Correio de Manha, sipped his gin and tonic and stared back equably. It sounded as if his old friend and usually reliable news source, Captain Da Silva, had changed in character. This pushing for publicity was not like him at all.

“What do you want with instant notoriety?” he asked curiously, his newsman’s nose sensing a story. “Don’t we give you enough play in the papers as it is? In fact, our board at its last meeting decided we should reduce personal coverage in favor of—”

“Not for me!” Da Silva was irritated that his friend should misunderstand his motives so completely.

“Oh? Then for whom?”

“For a man named Jose Maria Carvalho.”

“I see.” Rangel nodded; on his small body the movement was similar to a bird bobbing its beak. He sipped his drink again, placed his glass on the small table beside him, removed a handkerchief from his top jacket pocket and lightly patted his lips, but his eyes never left the face of his host. The eyes were pitch black and quite alert. “I don’t suppose this José Maria Carvalho could possibly be any relation to Captain Jose Maria Carvalho Santos Da Silva?”

“Heaven forbid!”

“And you said ‘notoriety’ and not just ‘publicity’?”

“Exactly,” Da Silva said, pleased that he had been so clear, and lit a cigarette.

“I see.” Rangel drank again and again patted his lips delicately with his handkerchief. It appeared to be an effeminate gesture as he did it, but Da Silva knew very well that the small Rangel, while still a reporter, had taken on the most desperate of Rio’s underworld without fear where a story would result. Rangel tucked his handkerchief away, straightening the corners, and then brought his attention back to his host. “Just what did this José Maria Carvalho do to deserve the attention of our newspaper? I gather, from your use of the word ‘notoriety,’ that whatever it was he did was not particularly nice?”

“He’s an extremely unworthy character,” Da Silva assured him, “and one any country, including ours, would be better off without.”

“Unworthy in exactly what way?”

“He steals,” Da Silva said solemnly. “Worst, he doesn’t even steal, himself; he has a gang that steals for him. He’s the main force behind the pilferage from the Santos docks, among other things.” He paused to think a moment and then shook his head. “No, let’s leave it at that. He’s guilty of a hundred other things, but—”

“He smokes too much, he drinks too much, and he can’t be trusted within a block of a woman,” Wilson interposed, his face expressionless.

“—but let’s just go after him for running the dock racket in Santos,” Da Silva finished, paying no attention to Wilson. “You can stress the amount of pilferage that goes on, on the docks, in your article; it all eventually comes out of the pockets of the Brazilian people—”

“And,” Wilson added, cutting in, “it makes a nice sum which should be attractive to anyone who might want to take it away from this Jose Maria Carvalho.”

“Forget that part,” Da Silva said, and frowned disapprovingly at Wilson. “Just stick to the fact that this Carvalho is a thief on a very major scale.”

“Odd,” Rangel said, not smiling. “I was under the impression that the Santos docks were one of the most competently policed docks in the world. From what information we have at the paper, I would have said that stealing on any major scale there was next to impossible.”

“Ah!” Da Silva raised a finger dramatically. Wilson was relieved to see that at least his friend refrained from tapping his nose with the finger; in a histrionic mood there were few limits to Da Silva’s capabilities. “You see? That impression is just because you don’t know! Everyone believes there’s no stealing on the Santos docks. That’s precisely why this Carvalho gets away with it. And anyway,” he added, relaxing a bit and brushing ash from his cigarette, “if everyone knew all about the stealing, it would scarcely be news when you exposed it, would it?”

“True,” Rangel said, and allowed a faint smile to touch his lips. If it was a game, he was fully prepared to join in; he was sure he would be given the rules if it became necessary. Still, normal precautions were in order. “You understand, of course, Zé, that a newspaper has to be very careful of libel suits—”

“No problem, I assure you. I guarantee. Besides, I expect you to allege, suggest, quote certain-private-sources, and so forth. This isn’t your first expose, for heaven’s sakes.”

“Besides,” Wilson added, “this Carvalho is basically a coward. Confront him with the truth and the chances are he’ll flee—” he paused, thinking, “to Paraíso?”

Da Silva frowned, considering it. “Maybe. I suppose it’s a possibility. I’m not sure.” He thought about it a bit longer and then shook his head. “No, probably not. Not without a good and logical reason. Damn! We keep coming back to that same damn question! Why Paraíso?”

Rangel had been listening to this exchange with a frown that grew more puzzled by the moment. He could understand his old friend’s desire to be labeled a thief—under a pseudonym—because it was obviously a trap of some sort; what he could not understand were all the side references.

“What’s Paraíso?”

“Nothing. Forget it,” Da Silva said, and dropped the matter. He looked across the room, remembering his duties as a host. “Can I refresh your drink?”

“No, thanks.” Rangel stared at Da Silva. “Zé, are you really serious about this?”

Da Silva stared back. “Do you think I dragged you down here at this hour of the night to play games? Of course I’m serious. And I want this story spread all over the country, not just in your one paper, and not just in Rio. You’ve got the contacts in radio and television; you know people in the wire services. Get them to push the story if only as a favor to you. I want it spread around, and fast!”

Rangel shrugged. “If we print it, it’ll be picked up by everyone; papers, magazines, and the media as well. After all, we are the Correio de Manha.” He dug into an inner pocket, bringing out a notebook and a thin gold pencil. Unlike Perreira’s rubberband-restrained wad of paper, this notebook was bound in fine leather and the corners were delicately decorated with gold. The newspaperman turned the pencil carefully, and then examined the extended lead much in the manner of a physician checking a hypodermic needle. Satisfied that his instruments were ready for the operation, Rangel looked up. “First of all, the description of the man.”

“Of course. In fact, that’s most important. Well,” Da Silva said, as if he had been thinking about it, “he’s about my height and weight. In fact, he looks like me. Handsome—”

Wilson snorted.

“Handsome, I said,” Da Silva went on, not at all perturbed by Wilson’s uncouth sound, “around six feet tall, maybe one-ninety in weight; generally a fine figure of a man—”

“Who wears his hair short, plastered down with grease,” Wilson added.

Da Silva stared. “What?”

“And who is clean shaven,” Wilson went on implacable. “No mustache.”

“What!”

“Short hair and no mustache,” Wilson repeated firmly. “We wouldn’t want him to look too much like another person whose vanity has allowed him to get his picture into the media as often as he could. A mistake in identity could waste us valuable time.” He thought a moment while the distasteful idea sank into the captain’s head. “He might also sport a distinctive scar on his face,” Wilson added helpfully. “Something genuine, I would think. Which I’d be only too happy to arrange, if desired.”

“No mustache.…” Da Silva sighed musingly. “I suppose it makes sense, and a different hair style isn’t a bad idea. But I honestly can’t see him as the type to put grease in his hair. Or ever get into enough trouble—he couldn’t handle—where a scar might result. He strikes me as being more the dark-glasses type. A sort of Tarcísio Meira. Suave, you know, but reserved, as befits a man who shuns the limelight.”

Wilson looked at Da Silva with a grin. Rangel, taking notes, paused and looked up. “Which will it be? Scar or no scar? Grease or no grease?”

“No grease; no scar.”

Rangel noted it. “And where does he live?”

Da Silva looked surprised. “Santos, of course.”

Rangel frowned. “And nobody has ever seen him there? Doesn’t that seem a bit farfetched?”

“No. He—”

“Yes,” Wilson said positively. “It sounds preposterous. Where he lives is Sao Paulo, where you could hide an army. When he has to go to Santos he drives down and back the same day—it’s only an hour’s run. Still,” he added, “we don’t want him never to be around Santos. Make him the retiring type; but your intrepid reporters have been able to get telephoto shots of him in various places around Santos. Shots,” he added slowly, “that lack enough clarity to allow a reader to identify the man at close range.”

Da Silva nodded, pleased with the idea.

“You can get pictures of him coming out of one of those bars down by the Praça Guilherme Bacia, looking as if he’d just concluded a deal to steal one of the Moore-Mac ships; or at the docks themselves, speaking with a crude type—Wilson can play that role—or in a relaxed mood, taking a drink in the garden at the Parque Balneário.”

“With an American confederate,” Wilson added.

Da Silva shook his head. “No American confederate.”

“Why no American confederate?” Wilson sounded irked.

“Because we don’t want to scare them off by looking like a gang.”

Rangel had been waiting, a trifle bored. “American confederate or no?”

“No,” Da Silva said, his tone closing the matter. “Now, what about an address in Sao Paulo?”

“We ought to be a bit subtle,” Wilson said. He still wasn’t happy at not being the American confederate, but he was willing to let it go for the time being and give his all to their efforts. “Let them do a little work in getting the address, or the phone number.” He looked at Rangel. “You have any place we could put up in Sao Paulo? Your newspaper, I mean?”

“We maintain an apartment, yes.” Rangel thought about it a moment and brightened. “It would be a good place, actually. There are often different people staying there, so the neighbors have long since stopped paying attention to anyone they see in the hallway.”

“Except,” Da Silva pointed out, “how many people know it’s an apartment rented by the Correio de Manha, and not by Jose Maria Carvalho?”

“Damn few,” Rangel said flatly. “We’ve hidden a lot more disrespectable people there than J. M. Carvalho. Just don’t tell the cops.” He went back to his pad. “What else?”

“That should do it,” Da Silva said. “Somebody is bound to try and worm the address from your paper—I hope—and we might have a very important lead.” He frowned at Rangel. “How soon can you get this rolling?”

The little newspaperman methodically noted the intended use of the apartment, tucked the notebook away, and then carefully turned the pencil to retract the lead; he made the operation seem both intricate and a little intimate. Only when the pencil had been neatly clipped into his inside jacket pocket did he look up, and then only to shrug.

“How soon? A week; two weeks …”

“A week? I thought you were a daily!” Da Silva shook his head decisively. “No, senhor! If I wanted to serialize this thing I would have asked my friends at Manchete, or Cruzeiro, or had Victor Civita put it in a picture book for children. I want this in the Correio de Manha the day after tomorrow, on the front page, under a banner headline that says something like ‘Dock Racket Exposed!’ or ‘Scandal on Santos Pier!’ or something like that. And I want it to be a long article, detailed, and startling; the stuff people normally read O Globo to get. You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if this even built up your circulation.” He thought a moment and came up with an addition. “And I want the headline to be in the size type you use when nations go to war. Is that clear?”

Rangel sighed hopelessly. “Day after tomorrow?” Even for an editor accustomed to unreasonable demands from stockholders, this was patently unfair. “It’s impossible.”

“What do you mean, impossible?” Da Silva demanded. “It isn’t even improbable! The day after tomorrow.” His voice was unrelenting. “Pretend we’re a national bank crisis. Or a fire in an orphanage.”

Rangel was staring at him stubbornly. “We want to do this right, don’t we? It has to be a good article, well-written, and that takes time. And then there’s the matter of the pictures; they have to be taken in Santos if they’re to have any degree of authenticity at all, and we go to press at eleven at night.” Rangel glanced at his wrist watch. “Tomorrow’s edition is just starting to roll now.”

“So you have a full twenty-four hours,” Da Silva said calmly. “What more do you want?” He looked over at his desk with the covered typewriter on it. “You can write it here. Now. You used to be a newspaperman before they kicked you upstairs, weren’t you?”

“We’ll even help you with it,” Wilson said generously. “We can probably come up with some additional details we’ve forgotten to brief you on.”

“No thanks!” That was all he needed, Rangel thought, to get additional details from this pair. They’d probably add a Chinese spy, a ravishing Indonesian slave girl, not to mention a car chase and a prison escape. “I’ll write it at the office.” He saw the look in Da Silva’s eye and added with a sigh, “All right. Tonight.”

“Good!” Da Silva said, his smile forgiving all past hesitation. “Then the first thing tomorrow we can catch a plane—your paper has a plane, I know—and go down to Santos with a photographer and get those pictures. How long does it take to snap a few pictures, fly them back to Rio, develop them and print them? The day after tomorrow is liberal,” Da Silva said, his tone of voice chiding Rangel for his pessimism. “It’s a pity you’re not an afternoon paper; we could get it out tomorrow.”

Rangel came to his feet. “We’ll try.” He straightened the creases in his trousers, staring down at them sadly, although it was hard to tell if his lugubrious expression was due to the wrinkling of his suit or to the exigent deadline. Suddenly he looked up. A rather disturbing thought had just come to him, and he wondered how he had ever come to overlook it before. That Da Silva and his golden tongue!

“One thing I forgot,” he said. “What about the authorities in Santos? What reaction will our paper get from, say, the prefeito, or the chief of police, if we print a story that someone is stealing the Santos docks blind?”

“What can he say?” Da Silva asked, as if amazed by the question.

“What do you mean, what can he say? He can come to our board and raise so much general hell that—”

“Look! If the policing down there is so bad that a man like this Jose Maria Carvalho is able to walk away with half the docks, what can a chief of police say? He ought to get down on his knees and thank the Correio de Manha for bringing it to his attention.”

“Damn it, Zé! I’m serious! We could get into a lot of trouble if—”

Da Silva saw the stricken look on Rangel’s face and laughed.

“I’m only joking. Don’t worry. The chief there is Paulo Bombeba, and he’s an old and good friend of mine. I’m sure that after I explain what we’re trying to do, he’ll be only too happy to co-operate.”

Rangel didn’t seem overly convinced. “I hope so.…”

“Believe me. Don’t worry,” Da Silva said reassuringly. He came to his feet and walked Rangel to the door, his arm around the small newspaperman’s shoulders. “I’ll get hold of Bombeba right away if I have to wake him at home—or I’ll get him at his girlfriend’s apartment, which is more likely. But I’ll get hold of him tonight and straighten everything out. You can be assured.”

“Okay,” Rangel said, feeling better.

“You just go down to the office and write that story. And make it strong meat. We want this Jose Maria Carvalho to draw fire, so we want to leave a strong scent.”

The newspaperman in Rangel took over. Even though it was all imaginary, he determined to make the exposure of Carvalho a major story. With Da Silva squaring the authorities in Santos, he would be in the clear. He smiled at his old friend.

“We’ll make it strong. I just hope it works.”

“As do we all,” Da Silva said. “We’ll see you at the Santos Dumont airport at eight in the morning. You can show us your story while we’re flying down.”

“Right,” Rangel said, and strode away on his uplift heels.

Da Silva closed the door softly behind the small man and walked to the bar, stifling a yawn. “One last drink and then to sleep. You can go home anytime,” he said. “It’s been a long day and we have an even longer one ahead of us tomorrow. I just hope their company plane isn’t a Piper cub.”

Wilson frowned. “But what about your call to Santos? To this Bombeba?”

Da Silva paused in the act of pouring his nightcap and turned to consider Wilson over his shoulder. This time the expression of amazement on his pock-marked face was genuine.

“Did you take me seriously when I said I was going to call Bombeba? Did you really think I was about to warn the Santos police department that this Jose Maria Carvalho story is a hoax, when we may well have a member of a national death squad in the Santos department? We’re trying to scare them out with this story, not scare them off.” He shook his head in disbelief. “How naïve can you get?”

Wilson stared at him. “But what about your friend Rangel and the Correio de Manha? They could get into a lot of trouble printing charges that aren’t true!”

Da Silva shrugged. “One of the culinary tragedies of life is that you can’t generate omelets without breaking eggs.”

Wilson shook his head slowly. “I don’t think I’ll ever get to really understand you, Zé!”

“I wouldn’t stay up nights worrying about it,” Da Silva said, and carried his drink back to his chair. He sat down and sipped. “I’ll make it up to Rangel with a scoop when—and if—we ever break this case. And anyway,” he added a bit defensively, “I’m not so sure that story might not do some good. It has nothing to do with us or our case, but I’d be very much surprised if those docks are really as free of pilferage as Rangel and Paulo Bombeba think. As Gertrude Stein would have said if she’d thought of it, a dock is a dock is a dock, whether it’s in Port Said, New York, or Santos.…”