“Of course. A table where I can’t be seen and disgrace you will be fine.”
People turned to stare as we moved. We were on the patio, the best part of the restaurant, and we found a dark corner in an angle of the wall, where the scent of the jasmine was delicious.
I said to Fenrek: “Why didn’t you find us a dark corner to begin with? I’m surprised at you.” I turned to Estrilla, looking absolutely charming now in the soft yellow lights here. “How did you find the Jensen?”
Her teeth were white and gleaming. I thought: what an agreeable looking woman Fenrek found himself this time! She said:
“I’ll never drive a car again that has power to only two of its wheels. And those brakes!”
“Did you punch it?”
She said calmly: “Not really, until I realized that you hadn’t the slightest intention of following me. I should have thought of that at once, shouldn’t I? The Colonel told me you were a devious sort of character. He says there’s always something up your sleeve.”
I said: “In this case, I was playing it off the cuff. You just gave me an opportunity I couldn’t resist. Am I forgiven?”
She looked at me shrewdly: “Of course, my own fault. I should have realized that no one hands over a car like that to a perfect stranger without an excellent reason.”
I said gallantly: “Perfect, but no stranger. Your reputation was enough to assure me you’d take care of it. You didn’t...er...bash anything?”
“Nothing. And where did you go once you’d lost me?”
Fenrek said tightly: “That’s what I’m waiting to hear, Cain.”
The waiter was hovering. We ordered the pork pieces hot-fried with dozens of tiny scallops in a rich Madeira sauce that they call porco Alentejano, and another two bottles of Dao, the dry white wine from Douro that deserves an international reputation it doesn’t really have, and I said happily:
“I’ve been making sure that our Loveless friend doesn’t leave the country quite as easily as he probably expected to.”
There was a long, silent pause of the kind commonly called pregnant. Fenrek said at last, heavily:
“He’s almost certainly not ready to leave the country yet. He’s lost his chemist, remember, so it’s a fair assumption that he’ll try to find another. That might take a considerable time.”
“He doesn’t need a chemist. He’s got enough botulin to take care of half Africa.”
He said, protesting: “But he doesn’t know that, isn’t that the crux of the whole matter?”
I said gently: “He knows that now. Before, he didn’t.”
He said, incredulously: “Have you seen him? God damn your eyes, Cain, if that’s what you’ve...”
I interrupted him: “Not yet. I just sent him a message. A couple of messages.”
He glared at me.
I said: “The more I thought about it, the more certain I was that we’d never have trapped him in his Rua Vicente house. We were forgetting that Loveless is an animal, a man who’s spent almost his whole adult life as a mercenary in Africa, keeping alive by the sheer competence of his wits, fighting against insuperable odds all the time, with a price on his head wherever he goes. How does a man like that stay alive?”
Fenrek shrugged. “You just said it. By the competence of his wits.”
“And you expect me to believe he’s going to run to his lair with a dozen men—or was it fifty?—watching it? You expect me to believe he wouldn’t know that the house was being watched? In my opinion, a man like that would smell the danger. Physically smell it. And he’d run. Not in panic, but carefully.”
“In your terms, it was at least a likelihood that we’d get him there.”
“But not strong enough. The weak ones, you have to throw out. And there’s another difficulty, a matter of mechanics. Not so obvious, but a very serious one. This really is an excellent wine, don’t you think? I wish they’d export it to the States.”
Astrid silently filled my glass, and the waiter brought the porco on a silver platter; for good measure, they had it flambe, with cheerful blue conhaque flames hovering over it. When he had served it and had gone, I said, taking advantage of the hiatus to make the switch:
“If you were a damn good soldier, much decorated in the field and with every prospect of getting a commission one of these days, how would you feel about a man who held you back deliberately? Merely because your competence also made you a very good servant?”
Fenrek sat up straight, staring at me. “We talking about Loveless now, are we?”
“No. About a sergeant named Nacimento. I was always worried that Loveless attacked the old General for the first time no less than a week after he realized that the General would be aware of his presence here. The big question was: why didn’t he act at once? And the answer is a rather sad one. It took Nacimento a week to decide—hesitantly, I’m happy to guess, but none the less he decided—that here was a chance to get back at the man who’d kept him in servility all these years when he had a brilliant military career ahead of him.” I shrugged. “He was too good a servant, the General suggested, to be let go and get the field promotion he deserved. Oh yes, the old man was very selfish here, but kind men can be selfish without even realizing it, it’s very easy for them because they don’t do it deliberately. Nacimento told the General he’d seen Loveless. And then, for a week, he worried about it, worried about whether he could pluck up the courage to pay off an old debt, a debt the General wasn’t really very conscious of owing him, though he admitted to me that he’d been unfair. He just didn’t know how unfair, or how that would rankle with a man like Nacimento.”
He was ahead of me already, Fenrek. But he said stubbornly: “You couldn’t have been certain of that.”
“No. Not till Nacimento told me a quite insignificant little lie that he, really, needn’t have bothered with. He told me he never used the cafe next to the Rua Vicente hideout because their wine was too expensive. Not the sort of place I’d go to, and not the sort of thing I’d check—if I hadn’t already formulated a certain suspicion. But you told me yourself, remember? Three cents American, the same as anywhere else. That foolish little lie clinched it.”
He grumbled: “Precious little to go on, if that’s all it was.” I shook my head, and he said sourly: “And now were back in Africa, aren’t we?”
He could always read my thoughts, a most disturbing talent.
I said: “We are indeed. On that momentous occasion, do you remember the General’s secret meeting with the rebels? With Ojugo? A meeting so secret that only the General himself knew about it. The General, Ojugo, and...one other man. The man who accompanied Queluz on his journey through the bush. It always worried me that Loveless and his mercenaries knew exactly when to hit the General’s H.Q., knew exactly when the General himself wouldn’t be there. He told me, the old man, that when he was at his H.Q., the security was tight as a drum, that he hated to leave his H.Q. because his overworked officers, Portuguese fashion, immediately relaxed. So somebody told Loveless just when to lead his mercenaries in. Why?” I shrugged. “Don’t ask me why, but it’s a likelihood that Nacimento was in cahoots with Loveless even then, wondering if perhaps he could pluck up courage to desert from the army and become a mercenary himself.”
Fenrek said: “Now you’re guessing, and nothing else. And the characterization is all to hell and gone.”
“No, it’s correct, I’m certain.”
Fenrek sighed. “I say it again, Cain, you’re a son of a bitch. So you let Nacimento volunteer as one of the stake outs in Rua Vicente. And if we lose him as a result...”
I said gently: “The problem of mechanics. I wanted to make damned sure that when we find Lovelace, he’s not in the middle of a big city with four ounces of botulin in his pockets. Or, worse still, with the toxin hidden away somewhere where we’d never find it. Can you imagine the complications that would derive from that?”
