Twenty fourth level pete.., p.4
Twenty-Fourth Level (Peter Craig Book 1), page 4
“Not the favelados again,” cried Pessoa. “I thought we had stopped those incursions when we set up the new guard.”
“Somebody got into the grounds last night and shot an arrow at Craig.”
“An arrow? It must have been one of the favelado children playing at Red Indians, the little devils. I will send—”
“The arrow,” interrupted Craig, “was intended to kill me. I don’t know why, but it very nearly did.”
Pessoa stared at him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Please tell me what happened.”
“I must be going,” said Sir Wallace. “I don’t think you’ll need me. But as you can imagine, I am very concerned indeed about this, and we shall have to have a full investigation. But please, with as little publicity as possible.”
“Of course. But before you go, Sir Wallace, I wonder if you would be kind enough to tell me how you came to know Mr. Craig, and why he is here?”
“Why? Oh, I see. Peter Craig has been a friend of mine for twelve years, since he came out to Sierra Leone as a probationary Assistant Superintendent of Police. I was Deputy Governor at the time. He was appointed Commissioner of Police in Bangasa two years ago, the youngest in the Service, I think. But of course by that time I had transferred to the Foreign Office. When Bangasa became independent last year, he joined the Commonwealth Office, which is now part of the Diplomatic Service, as one of the Police Advisers. He is going to Chile in a few days’ time to give lectures at a Chilean police academy, and my wife and I asked him to break his journey here and stay with us.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Pessoa. “I will keep you informed.”
When the Ambassador had left, the Colonel turned to Craig. “Thank you for trying to help me out,” he said with a smile. “It was an embarrassing situation.”
Craig grinned. “You were in a spot,” he said, “but only because you were trying to save His Excellency embarrassment. That was very decent of you, if I may say so.”
“Now to your story,” said Pessoa.
Craig reported in concise official style what he had experienced, and took Pessoa to the first floor. He unlocked his bedroom door.
“No one has been into this room, except me, since the attack. The servants come in to do the rooms later, and as mine is the only bedroom on this side of the house which is in use at present, I can assure you that nobody has been out on the terrace either. But to make quite sure I got up early this morning and brought in the rocking-chair, as you see.”
Pessoa stared at the chair, which stood in the middle of the room, with the long shaft of the arrow projecting incongruously from the middle of the upholstered back. “Jesus Maria,” he muttered. “What did he think you were—a pirarucu?”
“A what?”
“A pirarucu. It’s a big fish of the whale family, which is found all along the Amazon. The Indians hunt it with harpoons as a rule, but I’ve seen them using these long, heavy arrows—at least, far the smaller fish.”
“What do you call small—for a pirarucu?” asked Craig.
“Oh, six to eight feet. And they fight like hell. I was with my regiment at Santarem, and we used to go out with the Indians after these fish. The Indians are big, broad-shouldered men, and they use long bows which most people could hardly draw. And that’s what your attacker—how do you say it?—the assailant, that’s it, that’s what he used last night. I’ve never seen anything like it in these parts. Look how the barb was forced through the cushions and into the wood. If you had been sitting there—”
“But I was, as I told you,” said Craig dryly. “I had a lucky escape.”
“You did indeed. Help me to put the chair exactly where it was last night.” The two men manoeuvred the chair through the French window and into position. “As far as you can tell, was the chair facing just like this, at right angles to the balustrade?”
“It’s difficult to say” said Craig. “But as you see, the other chairs on the terrace are like that and I don’t think I moved mine at all when I sat down in it.”
Pessoa crouched down and looked along the shaft. “Well” he said “that’s clear enough. The obvious place for him to stand, well under cover, and right in line with the arrow. See for yourself. That tree with the big jiboya growing round it. We’ll start tracing him back from there.”
He looked over the rail of the balustrade. “There’s a half-smoked cigar there. Was that yours?”
“Yes. Sorry. I forgot to tell you I was smoking.”
“Another reason to stop the habit now,” said Pessoa, slapping Craig in the back. “It was a very dark night, as you said, and he probably aimed at it.”
They made their way downstairs again and Pessoa went to the telephone to give further instructions to his headquarters. “I will wait here until Captain Moura comes. He is a good officer for this kind of thing and will know what to do. You will have to move your things out of your bedroom, I’m afraid, and Moura will reconstruct the crime with your help. Then there will be the fingerprint men and the trackers. They will bring a dog, and the handler had better start where I said, at the jiboya. You said the assailant panicked after the attack, so he was probably dropping sweat around, which always helps. But it rained very heavily after midnight, and I’m not optimistic. My main hope is to pick up the trail in the favela. In the meantime,” he added, looking at Craig sternly, “perhaps you will explain why you did not report this attack at once.”
Craig explained as best as he could.
“Officially,” said Pessoa, “as you know perfectly well, I must complain about your lack of action last night. Between ourselves, and not—you understand—for Captain Moura’s ears, I can understand why you were reluctant to raise the alarm. As you say, it would have frightened Lady Blakemore, for whom I have the greatest respect.” (Craig smiled; it was so typically Brazilian to pay attention to the feelings of friends as a first priority.) The Colonel continued: “Moreover, as you also said, there was really very little that could have been done usefully last night. Nevertheless, we ought to have been notified first thing this morning. The man in the favela may have got away.”
“He probably did that last night,” said Craig. “He must have known that you would go through the favela with a fine comb—by daylight.” He looked at Pessoa with a half-smile.
Pessoa laughed. “Touché!” he said. “You know, and he knew, that we couldn’t possibly have sealed off the Dona Marta favela in the middle of the night. It would take me a company of troops by day. But mind you,” he added seriously, “in front of Moura I shall be very critical of you for not letting us know about the attack at once.”
“Say I was in such a panic that I didn’t dare leave my room,” suggested Craig.
“I will do just that,” said Pessoa. “And serve you right for jumping to conclusions about the efficiency of the Guanabara security forces. I will omit to tell Moura that you apparently went quietly off to sleep as soon as you got into bed.” He paused and looked at Craig. “I hope I shall see more of you while you are here. Are you by any chance P. V. Craig?”
“Yes,” said Craig.
“I read your book on jungle warfare with interest and, I may say, respect. You can teach us a lot. Why waste your time with the Chileans? They only think they have a guerrilla problem; we have one.”
“I’d like nothing better, but there is so little time.”
“Well then, perhaps when you are on your way back. But before Captain Moura arrives, I must ask you one last and vital question.”
“Whom do I know in Rio who would want to do me in ?”
“That’s it, of course.”
“I really think, you know, that it was a random attack by a madman,” said Craig, and explained the theory he had put to the Ambassador.
Pessoa looked doubtful. “If it had happened during the day, and the man could have seen you, I could understand it. But this sounds to me like a carefully planned attack. Had you made a custom of sitting out on the terrace after dinner, before going to bed?”
“Yes, once or twice. But with the lights on.”
Pessoa took him to the window and pointed upwards to the right. “Those huts up there are only a hundred and fifty or two hundred metres away. You could have been observed easily by a watcher with binoculars. But that doesn’t sound to me like a crazy favelado. Now think, please. Is there nobody here in Rio who might have a grudge against you?”
“Yes. There is one. One only. But he couldn’t possibly have organised an attack like this in time. It’s really out of the question. I thought it all out last night, and decided it couldn’t be Graben.”
“Graben? Who is that?”
“I was going to tell you about him anyway,” said Craig. “But in connection with Gomes’s death, not the attack on me.”
“Explain, please,” said Pessoa. “I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”
Craig told him the story of his glimpses of Graben coming out of Gomes’s house, and the encounter afterwards at the hotel.
“So you see,” he concluded, “Graben realised that I had spotted him outside the dealer’s house, and jumped to the conclusion that Gomes had told me all about him. It didn’t strike me at the time, but he may have gone off to have it out with Gomes. Do you know if a jeep was seen there later?”
“People don’t notice jeeps,” said Pessoa ruefully. “Only Rolls-Royces. But I will ask my people to question everyone in the street. Now tell me. How did you know Graben in Africa?”
“He was a diamond-mining engineer in Bangasa, and quite a good one. But he spent his money very freely and got mixed up in the diamond-smuggling racket, trying to get rich quick. In the end he was running quite an important gang. It took me a long time to get the evidence together and lay a trap for him. But I brought him to court finally and he got a stiff sentence.”
“When was this?”
“Eighteen months ago.”
“A stiff sentence?” queried Pessoa, staring.
“I see what you mean,” said Craig. “He got eight years, but escaped. He hit a warder over the head with his mattock and got clean away and out of the country. He must have had money hidden somewhere. I knew nothing more about him until I met him yesterday.”
“He is a violent man?”
“Oddly enough, that’s just how Gomes described him yesterday, and it’s true. He’s clever, but he has a very nasty temper.”
Pessoa grunted. “It fits,” he said. “Where can we get hold of him?”
“But that’s just what I don’t know. I didn’t worry very much yesterday, because Gomes had admitted that he could get in touch with his garimpeiro—who turned out to be Graben—and I was pretty sure that if Alvim Gross put on the pressure he could find out enough to satisfy Blenkhorn. “
“Alvim Gross? The jeweller? But how does he come into this? And who is Blenkhorn?”
“Well,” said Craig, “this will also explain how I came into it. When I was in Bangasa—I was transferred there four years ago; it was two years later that I was appointed Commissioner—one of my main jobs was stamping out the diamond smuggling, and I became quite interested in the whole business of diamonds—the stones themselves, and how they are found and cut for the trade, the mines and prospectors, the international controls, and so on. I am by way of writing a book about the Bangasi smugglers and their links with London and Amsterdam, and I was given a lot of help in collecting material by Blenkhorn, who is the head of the International Diamond Institute in London. When I went to see him before I came out here, to look at some of his records, he asked me to make an unofficial enquiry for him in Rio.
“You see, he gets little parcels of industrial diamonds—not suitable for cutting up as gem-stones—from all over the world. At the Institute they are examined purely for research purposes, and then sold to the industrial users. Well, the Brazilian stones all come from the London agent of Gross e Filho, who as you know are the biggest dealers in Brazil.
“The experts had spotted that some of these stones from Gross e Filho were extraordinarily alike; they all had the same distinctive colour and carried microscopic markings of a certain type, which seemed to show that they had all come from the same peridotite pipe, like one of the famous diamond pipes in South Africa. These markings on the crude stones, which as I said are only visible under a microscope, are so distinctive that some experts are supposed to be able to tell from what part of a diamond mine a parcel of stones has come.”
“But in Brazil—” began Pessoa.
“Precisely. In Brazil there are no diamond mines, in the accepted sense. The stones come from river beds, or from shallow pockets of conglomerate—what you call maça—which are bound together by iron pyrites. And these, too, I think, are always found in existing or ancient river beds. But the mining of deep volcanic pipes, as at Kimberley, where the diamonds are found in a hard volcanic mud, which is called “blue ground,” is quite unknown here. And yet that is just what the markings on these particular Brazilian stones seemed to indicate. “
“If they had approached our Ministry of Mines and Energy,” remarked Pessoa stiffly, “they might have got their answer more quickly.”
“Yes, obviously, that would have been the next step. But the evidence was so scanty—a few crude stones—that Blenkhorn thought it was worth making an unofficial enquiry first, and Gross could be trusted to handle it discreetly. It is all a rather delicate matter, because if the newspapers got hold of a rumour, there would be a lot of unwarranted speculation, which is the last thing the big diamond firms would want.”
“And Alvim Gross?”
“He was very willing to investigate, and soon found that all the stones in question came from one dealer—Gomes. He agreed to let me try my hand on Gomes first.”
“Did he indeed?” said Pessoa. “You must be a very persuasive man, Mr. Craig.”
“He didn’t want to blow up the importance of the enquiry.”
“Well, it’s an interesting story, which I will keep entirely to myself, unless it has to come out in connection with Gomes’s death. I take it that all the stones came from Graben?”
“Yes, so Gomes said. But of course I said nothing to him about the real reason for my enquiries. I pretended I was a rich collector of diamonds who was interested in a particular colour—the Graben stones are all an odd shade of pale blue—and he swallowed it.” Craig smiled. “The Rolls helped,” he added.
The Colonel thought for a moment. “So now we can narrow the motive—the potential motive—in Graben’s mind. He thought, quite wrongly, that Gomes had given you his name. He didn’t know, from what you said, that Gomes had not told you how to find him. He is exploiting a source of diamonds which he wants to keep secret—all garimpeiros do, and he apparently had a particularly strong reason—he had to get hold of Gomes and find out how much you knew. And he is a violent man with a criminal record. If we find him we can hold him for a few days anyway, for questioning.”
Craig protested. “But it’s all speculation, you know. He could deny everything, unless you can get someone who actually saw him go back to Gomes’s house. And it was getting dark already when he left the Copa Palace. You surely can’t hold him on the grounds of his record in Bangasa?”
“You must leave that to me,” said Pessoa, smiling.
“But the manner of Gomes’s death is another indication.”
“How did he die?” asked Craig, remembering the cagey little man and the delicate hands which had fingered the stones so knowingly.
“He had been beaten over the head with a heavy ruler—no, it had been wiped clean of fingerprints—and then strangled.”
“Poor little chap,” said Craig. “Strangled outright?”
“No, there were two sets of marks, overlapping.”
Craig nodded. “Someone beat him up and then half throttled him to make him talk. And then finished him off. Perhaps by mistake.”
“Exactly. He was an old man. We are still awaiting the doctor’s report. That’s why we don’t know the time of death.”
“You won’t get a very accurate guess, with temperatures like this. Was he robbed?”
“The murderer hadn’t got the combination of the safe out of him, but he had used his keys. There was an open drawer, with the keys still in the lock, but nothing inside except a cotton bag, empty.”
Craig whistled. “A blue bag, about this size?” He gestured with his hands,
“Yes. Where did you see it?”
“In Gomes’s hands. It contained the stones Graben had just sold to him. He took it out of the safe. That’s no proof against Graben, of course. Any thief might have done that. Gomes had probably been examining the stones again, after what I had told him about my interest in their colour, and locked them in the drawer when he heard someone coming in.”
“If the attack took place while the messenger was away—as it must have done—there would have been nobody else in the office. Do you think Gomes would have opened the door at all to someone he didn’t know?”
They looked at each other. “That’s a point,” said Craig. “It looks pretty black for Graben, doesn’t it? I suppose you’ll want me here until you find him. That’s going to be a bit awkward.”
“I’m sorry,” said Pessoa, “but you know I’ve no alternative. You’re a material witness,”
“If I came back here in a month’s time, after finishing my course of lectures?”
Pessoa frowned. “I’ll try to make it possible, but you can see how difficult it is. The first thing is to find Graben. What about the girl? She must know how to find him. Would you recognise her again?”
“Anywhere,” said Craig, emphatically.
Pessoa laughed. “Like that, is she? Do you know her name? You said very little about this young woman. Is she a foreigner?”
Craig said carefully: “I don’t know her name because she wouldn’t give it me. She’s Brazilian but talks English. She fairly bawled me out, if you know what that means—”
“She upbraided you?” suggested Pessoa, in his precise manner.
“Exactly. She said it was all my fault that Graben had gone off in a temper, and wouldn’t tell me how to get hold of him. But I told her I meant him no harm, and asked her to tell Graben where I was staying.”
