“Must there be a reason for everything?”
“Yes, of course.” He sort of squinted at me and said: “Your argument always is that there’s always a reason for everything.”
I said: “Well, that will come out in the wash in the course of time, no doubt. High up on the hill? An animal instinct perhaps? That just might be the way a man from the African bush would behave.”
“Even in a big city?”
I shrugged. “Habit dies hard. Is there any reason why he shouldn’t have chosen a place like that?”
“No. But I was wondering if he’s got contacts here. If so, this might be the place they live.”
I said: “Or there might be a more plausible reason. We’ll soon find out.”
He nodded, letting it slide by because he knew I wasn’t sure enough to tell him what I was thinking.
I said: “The chances are that Loveless would not carry the stuff with him, he wouldn’t risk keeping it on his person. But he just might. If we go for Rua Vicente and he’s not there...”
“A stakeout then.”
“Yes. Someone with a good description of Loveless to watch the place carefully. Maybe from the castle, there are good points of vantage there.”
He said grimly: “I’ll have a dozen men with binoculars, watching every side of that house, every door, every window.”
“Good. And will you do me a favor?”
“Of course.”
“There’s a sergeant in the Honor Guard at the castle. His name’s Nacimento, he used to be the General’s servant in Angola, remember? When all that scandal broke out? It might be a nice gesture to let him be one of them. Help to avenge the death of his old master.”
He scowled. “A nice gesture? I’d rather use men I know to be fully trained for this sort of thing. This is hardly the time for gestures, the stakes are too high.”
I said smoothly: “He knows Loveless by sight.”
“Oh. Well, all right. We’d better have a word with him first. We don’t want him exposing himself like an amateur with glasses glued to his eyes for everyone to see.”
“I’ll talk to him. And if Loveless is sighted going in?”
“We’ll hit. Hard. As many men as necessary.”
“Good. Just in case of accidents, make sure every one of them gets an inoculation and keeps his mouth shut about it.”
Fenrek said: “Inoculations? You mean you haven’t noticed? There’s a hospital truck on every corner in the city, free inoculations for anyone who wants them. They’re saying it’s for typhoid, and recommending that everybody take one.”
There’s no inoculation that’s any good for botulinum; they just pump you full of Type A and Type B anti-toxin to slow down the destruction of nerve tissue; does no good at all.
“Ah yes, of course. Can I get into the grounds of the castle without being seen? I’d have to pass by Rua Vicente, and there’s always a chance I’d be stopped up there. If I were, he just might cut and run immediately. We don’t want to lose him at this stage of the game.”
“We’re not going to lose him,” Fenrek said. That’s the trouble with the Interpol people. They’re so damned good that they get overconfident; it’s their only weakness. He said now, puzzling about it: “What was all that about a serpent’s tail?”
“Histermann? I’m afraid that drug was taking him further on his trip than I’d thought it would. You can never tell with these things, that’s why they’re dangerous. He was back in his youth, as a kid, on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. There’s a waterspout there called the Serpents Tail, quite a tourist attraction. I hope he’s being well guarded. That’s the kind of man a jail can hold for just about a long weekend and no more.”
“Two men in the cell with him, that should keep him there.”
“Don’t underestimate him. I was very impressed with the way he conducted himself under the influence of that psilocybin.”
Fenrek raised an elegant eyebrow. “You were? It sounded to me as though he was talking his head off.”
“His conscious was fighting hard with his subconscious, and they were taking turns at overcoming each other. Impressive is the only word for it. When I asked him where the boat was hidden, he really ought to have answered at once, right off the top of his head. But he didn’t. He went off into regression instead, off to the Great Barrier Reef and his childhood. Very impressive. Something I want to think about a bit more.”
Fenrek grunted.
I said: “Are you interested in the power of auto-suggestion?”
“Huh?”
“Rather interesting. Histermann said his feet were going dead, merely because I’d pointed out to him that botulin attacks the extremities with paralysis first. Psilocybin doesn’t have that effect at all. Pure self-delusion. You just plant an idea in someone’s mind, and they do the rest. Thought it might intrigue you.”
◆◆◆
I went up to the castle in the back of the truck that delivers the daily rations in the late afternoon. I found Nacimento waiting for me in an obscure corner of the beautiful, shady grounds. He had been warned of my coming, and was turned out in his most spotless uniform. He stood at ease, rigid as though he were on parade, under the archway in the northern wall where he’d been told to wait, in the tiny courtyard by the Martim Munez Gate. Here, in 1147, an obscure cavalryman in the army of the great Alfonso Henriques, Portugal’s first king, fought off a hundred Moors who were trying to close the gate against the liberating troops; he held it alone, Horatio at the Bridge, and lost his life in the process. All that’s left of the history now is a tiny bust of Munez, high in the wall over the gate, cut from soft limestone and eroded by time down to almost nothing.
But there’s a silence and an aura of post-war peace in this tiny shaded courtyard, as though all we need is the ghost of a brave man to tell us that peace is the product of virtuous strength.
And, come to think of it, that’s a commodity that’s pretty hard to find these days.
A small man, Nacimento, nearly sixty years old by the looks of him, with a sharp and somewhat bitter look to his face, and a scarcely noticeable limp. His white hair was cropped short, his brown face scraped shiny-clean except for a startling black moustache. There was an air of alert efficiency about him, the air of a man who, under better circumstances, would have gone a long way in the world; but he was an old horse put out to pasture, a horse that could still show its mettle if it were given half a chance. I thought: forty years in the army, and still a sergeant, with nothing but a once-a-month parade for a breath of the glory that might have been his. It’s important to the Portuguese, the glory bit, and to the soldier more than any of them.
I put him at ease, not without difficulty; there was a feudal barrier between us, which was going to be hard to break down. I wandered about among the acacia trees, making him walk with unaccustomed leisure beside me; I felt he wanted to salute every time he opened his mouth.
