The green hell treasure, p.3
The Green Hell Treasure, page 3
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?”
Da Silva puffed on his cigarette and then crushed it out in the ashtray. His gesture was somewhat like that of a man who has just refused a bandage for his eyes, preferring to face the firing squad fearlessly. He shrugged.
“When? Too soon. Tonight, to be exact.”
“And the big one: why? Vacation?”
“You know better than that,” Da Silva said with pretended sternness. “Did you ever see a bright, healthy man like me take an airplane to go anywhere for pleasure?” He shook his head suspiciously. “You’re merely trying to worm information out of a police officer in the pursuit of his duty.”
“Now you’re getting the idea,” Wilson said approvingly. “And having an awful time doing it, too.”
“I wouldn’t want to bore you.”
“I don’t bore easily. Anyway, I never knew that to stop you in the past,” Wilson said, and grinned. His grin faded. “Unless, of course, the matter is classified.”
“It isn’t classified.”
Da Silva paused, suddenly serious. He stared across the runways to the dark waters of the bay, with the tiny white blocks of apartments in Niterói on the far side standing out starkly against the mountains topped by threatening black storm clouds. Always when I have to fly! he thought morosely and sighed, bringing his attention back to the restaurant and his companion.
“Well,” he said slowly, “it all started a long time ago—fifteen years ago, to be exact. I was all of twenty-four years old, two years out of the University with a degree in criminology—whatever that was worth—a shock to my family, I might mention. The rest of the clan always went in for either law or medicine, the lawyers in order to enter politics, and the doctors in order to raise cattle or grow coffee. Don’t ask me the connection—I’ve never known it. Maybe to sit up with a sick calf …”
He lit another cigarette from Wilson’s pack and tossed the match aside.
“At any rate,” he went on, “there I was, as proud as a grandee to be a great big real live first-grade detective, collaring kids for stealing hubcaps, and occasionally making a big splash by dragging in some character, who—by fabulous deduction—we calculated to be a brute because we caught him beating up his girlfriend—”
Wilson nodded sagely. “I know what you mean.”
“Good. Anyway this case came along and they instantly chose me for the assignment because I was bright, intelligent, hard-working, handsome, clever, analytical, logical, and—did I forget anything? Oh, yes, of course: modest.” He stared calmly across the table, challenging Wilson to find fault with any of his qualifications.
“And you were also the only one in the entire detective bureau at the time with a complete command of the English language,” Wilson suggested shrewdly.
“Well, yes—there was that minor factor,” Da Silva admitted, “but let’s not dwell on unimportant matters. The salient point is that they wisely picked me out and sent me on my way. I might mention that in those days the biggest plane they had flying was a DC-6, and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. And that only got you as far as Port-of-Spain in Trinidad, by way of every potholed, bumpy runway between here and there. Something like six or seven stops, as I recall, but it could have been sixteen or seventeen just as well. And then from Port-of-Spain you made it to Bridgetown in Barbados in a tico-tico—a single-engine affair with floats, that came down for gas roughly every five minutes. I’m convinced it was that trip that put me off flying and airplanes for life. I personally can’t even see what birds see in it. If I was a bird, I’d walk. Or crawl. It seems a shame the Wright brothers couldn’t have stuck with bicycles—”
“I hate to interrupt, but you were saying?”
“I was saying that when I finally got to Bridgetown, I climbed down from that monster, stinking of castor oil—which doesn’t help the appetite—and I kissed the very ground—”
“You climbed down from a seaplane and kissed the ground?” Wilson stared at him. “How far down did you have to swim to do it?”
“You know what I mean.” Da Silva pointed to the bottle. “Have a drink. Apparently it’s the only way to occupy your mouth other than talking. And then push it over.”
“Sorry.”
“Apologies, apologies! Where was I? Yes—Bridgetown, Barbados. Well, it seems that a ship—a Brazilian cruise ship named the SS Porto Alegre—was in Bridgetown at the time of Carnival, anchored out in the roadstead. In those days they hadn’t built the deepwater harbor they have there now, nor the docks that run into shore; ships had to anchor out, and lighters ferried passengers and even cargo back and forth. At any rate, this particular night nearly all the passengers and crew were ashore raising general hell, and along came a rowboat with four men in it, and held up the ship.”
Wilson stared at him, his amazement this time genuine. “Held up a ship? A big oceanliner? Four men?”
“You’ve been paying attention,” Da Silva said approvingly, and put out his cigarette, immediately reaching over to borrow another.
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“I’m not kidding. Boy Scout honor. Four men in a rowboat held up the ship and took roughly half a million dollars in gems in the haul. It’s the truth. Most of the passengers hadn’t wanted to wear their jewels ashore, and they didn’t want to leave them lying around their cabins—for which I certainly don’t blame them—so they left them in the ship’s safe. A logical move, on the surface, but in this particular case a rather bad mistake as it turned out.”
“But, how—”
“You will keep interrupting, won’t you? As I said, it was Carnival, and everybody and his grandmother—possibly that’s the wrong word, say companion, instead—was ashore. And these four came up in a rowboat with steel drums and managed to talk the deck officer into letting them come aboard to entertain the few people who were still on the ship. To pick up some loose change in tips, he thought; at the inquiry he was a bit vague about how they managed to convince him, because it was a breach of the rules, of course. But they did and he let them come aboard, and they played their way all over the place—playing very well, everyone said—but they ended up in the purser’s square. Three of them kept up the music, but the fourth—who was the boss, it seems—put a gun on the assistant purser who was on duty. The purser was a youngster, and he tried to tell this fellow the safe was in the captain’s quarters, but he didn’t get very far with that bit of nonsense. The boss man worked him over with a rough gunsight until he opened the safe. The boss man then cleaned out the safe, knocked our boy out, but only after he’s worked him over a bit more—maybe for luck—”
“A nice lad.”
“One of nature’s finest. Anyway, the four of them played their drums back to the promenade deck, said good night to the deck officer and an engineer who was there with him, all as polite as you could wish, climbed into their chariot—pardon me, rowboat—and”—he made a horizontal cutting motion with one hand—“zoop! Off into the wild blue yonder.”
“Any description?”
“None.”
“You mean nobody could give a decent description? It doesn’t make sense.” Wilson frowned and then nodded as one possible solution came to him. “You said it was Carnival. Were they wearing masks?”
“They were indeed. I hate to say this,” Da Silva said slowly, seriously, “especially about Brazilians—because both the deck officer and the youngster from the purser’s staff who got worked over were Brazilians—but according to the testimony we got at the inquiry from those two, not to mention at least twelve passengers, six Americans, three Brazilians, and an assorted bag for the other three, plus this engineer who was with the deck officer, those four were wearing the most impenetrable masks in the world. Impossible for a blind man to see through. They were wearing their own faces.” He raised a hand almost wearily, as if to ward off words. “Oh, everyone put it in different language at the inquiry, but what it amounted to when you sorted it out was that all ‘natives’ look alike, whatever they meant by ‘native.’”
He shrugged, poured himself another drink, but didn’t drink it at once. His eyes stared out of the window at the deepening blackness building up over the mountains to the east while his fingers unconsciously moved the glass in little circles on the white tablecloth. A sudden puff of wind brought a light sprinkle of rain through the open windows; waiters hurried to close them, muffling the sound of the aircraft on the runways. Da Silva suddenly upended his glass, crushed out his cigarette, and put out his hand.
“Let me have another.”
Wilson dutifully pushed the package across the table, waiting silently for Da Silva’s mood to pass. The swarthy man lit the cigarette, inhaled deeply, and tossed the spent match toward the ashtray.
“Well,” he said in reminiscence, “it was quite an inquiry. I was in charge. It took some of the passengers and even a few of the crew a while to realize that a Brazilian ship is Brazilian national territory wherever it is—I’m speaking of the non-Brazilians, of course—but eventually we got that cleared away and got down to business. I learned a lot of useless things; at the time I thought it was unusual in an investigation, but I’ve learned better since. We learned, for example, that the ages of those four drum players was somewhere between twenty and fifty—depending to a large extent on the age of the person being interviewed. We also learned that they could play their instruments with remarkable skill, which, in the islands, I was informed, is like describing someone in Brazil as playing good football—”
“Soccer,” Wilson interrupted.
“Soccer in your country. Football in every civilized nation on earth. However, I’m not in the mood to argue. Let’s say it’s like looking for a teen-ager in the States who plays guitar. Satisfied? All right. Oh, yes—there was one other bit of evidence of major importance that came to light at the inquiry. The deck officer was enough of a seaman to notice that when they tied their rowboat to the gangplank, they used a running hitch of some sort, because when the big man who ran the gang gave it a tug in the opposite direction, the knot ran free. Apparently, according to Webster, that’s the definition of a hitch. I didn’t know it before, and even after all these years I’m still not sure I believe it now.” He sighed heavily. “Anyway, that apparently made them sailors, since who but a sailor would know anything about hitches? Except, possibly, Boy Scouts, and I sincerely doubted we were dealing with Boy Scouts.”
“A reasonable conclusion.”
“Thank you.”
“However—you were about to say—good sailors in the islands being about as rare as chess players in Russia, that information also proved to be of momentous help to you.”
“Correct.” Da Silva nodded. “So there we were. We took down over a hundred thousand words in shorthand at the inquiry—more than enough for a bad novel—every word anyone remembered anyone else saying, including themselves. Quite a performance …”
“No fingerprints on or about the safe?”
“All neatly wiped off. As a matter of fact, the youngster watched him do it. The advantages, you see, of our improved means of communication; anyone with a TV set or the price of a movie now automatically wipes all knobs after using.”
Wilson stared at him and then shook his head almost in admiration.
“Not a bad evening’s work. Half a million dollars …”
Da Silva smiled at him sardonically. He crushed out his cigarette and reached for the brandy, filling his glass. He raised it, looking at Wilson over the rim.
“Really not all that much when you think about it in this day and age,” he said. “Just about enough to keep your Department of Defense going for—what? Thirty seconds? A minute?”
“About a minute and a half, if you want to be accurate,” Wilson said, and smiled. “Of course that’s on the basis of an eight-hour day, which few in Defense work—except, of course, the soldiers in the field. But in getting other people’s money, the Pentagon, you want to remember, are professionals. This half a million isn’t a bad amount for a few rank amateurs to put into their pockets and get clean away.”
Da Silva paused in his act of drinking and then finished his glass. He set his glass down and stared at his friend in surprise.
“Get away? Who said they got away?” He shook his head in amazement at Wilson’s lack of faith. “What a thought! I told you I was in charge of the case, didn’t I?”
“What did they do? Talk in their sleep? Walk into a police station and confess?”
“They did neither. They disappeared after leaving a bad taste in the mouth of the deck officer and a chopped-up face and a sore skull—plus a certain loss of faith in the kindness of his fellow humans—for the purser. The Scottish engineer was more philosophical, at least. To him the loss was only money—and not his, at that.”
“Then, how—”
“What they did leave,” Da Silva said, his tone conversational, “was a lesson to all people who talk too much. You might try to learn from them. The big boss man not only knew where the safe was, he even knew where the toilet was, and the purser’s cabin and his office and everything. That’s quite a bit of knowledge regarding a ship that hadn’t even been in Bridgetown before. That was his big mistake. With that gun and that edged front sight he could have gotten the boy to admit that the safe was in the purser’s office, and gotten him to open it, too. But he had to prove he already had the information.” Da Silva shook his head. “He talked too much, and he said things you just don’t pick up in idle conversation in a waterfront bar, certainly not within twenty-four hours of a ship’s arrival in port.”
Wilson nodded agreement.
“So you figured he hadn’t gotten it from a Ouija board, but that someone in the classroom had been helping him with his homework, and that was cheating. Which you frown on.”
“With reason,” Da Silva said virtuously. “Cheaters never prosper.”
“A Barbadian in the crew.”
“I think I’ll recommend to your Ambassador a well-deserved pay-raise for you,” Da Silva said, and nodded his head. “A rare occasion, but you are right. Except, of course, that the people there prefer to be called Bajans instead of Barbadians.”
“A steward.”
Da Silva frowned at the tablecloth and then looked up.
“I don’t know if that would qualify as a correct answer or not. He was the ship’s librarian, a clever lad, but he doubled as a bar steward every now and then, so I’ll let it go. There were three Bajans in the crew: one in the kitchen, one in the deck crew, and this ship’s librarian. There was—and still is, as a matter of fact—a sergeant of police in Bridgetown named Storrs, except he’s the Chief Inspector there now; he handled the questioning of these people, and he did a beautiful job.”
“A confession?”
“No, the man never confessed, but he was one of the two who had been ashore the previous night when the ship came in. He also came from a small town in St. Joseph parish called Brighton, near Bathsheba. The other one who had been ashore came from Holetown. Storrs did a check of the two towns and found that in Brighton our four pals were not only well known for their steel-drum playing, but also for a few of their nastier habits. They were picked up with no great effort, and a week later they were extradited to Brazil.”
“Just the four? What happened to the librarian?”
Da Silva sighed. “God knows. He managed to get out of the local jail in Bridgetown where he was being held; Storrs took better precautions with the others.”
“And they ended up where?”
“Recife. It was the port of call of the ship they were returned in—they deserved being flown back, but it wasn’t so common in those days,” he added almost sadly.
“And you mention this matter today because it is exactly fifteen years since it happened, so this judge gave them fifteen years in the penetentiary.”
“You are so right.” Da Silva smiled at him. “And that, my friend—in case you ever decide to put aside your meager efforts at detection and turn to writing my biography—was the beginning of my meteoric rise to fame and fortune.”
