Loureiro came running up and stared at the mess, and said: “They tried to stop him at the entrance to Monsanto, to the Parque Florestal. But he turned the car round and came racing back. Why would he want to go into the Park?”

The car was a wreck, and the shotgun was gone. And of Loveless, there was no sign at all.

◆◆◆

We were in the suburbs here, in the suburb of Belem, which the Portuguese pronounce as though it were spelled Bleng. It grew from the strand called the Restelo, now a main street, which once was an inlet of the river, the narrow harbor the Adventurers used when they sailed off, in the Fourteen Hundreds, to discover new worlds and bring great wealth to their homeland.

The ornate and startling Tower of Belem, surely the most beautiful military fortification in the world, stood watch over the Docks of Success, less than half a mile to the south of us.

Closer still, at the nearest edge of the sea—or rather, the broad river Tagus which they call the Straw Sea—the huge marble caravel of the Discoveries stood like a symbolic stone vessel headed out for strange horizons, with Prince Henry at the prow, pointing the way, and all his sailors and fighting men, cartographers and chroniclers clambering up behind him with the sun on their finely-carved stone faces. Henry the Navigator, they call him, though he never went farther afield than Tangier. But the nobility was remembered there, carved in stone for the world to see, with the sunlight gilding them all beyond the tall masts of the blue and yellow yachts at anchor in the little dock.

To our north, a little over a mile away, the great forest of Monsanto began, with the steeply-winding road leading through the crowded trees up to the Heights of Help, where the old flares once burned that guided the mariners home from their long and hazardous voyages.

You could not forget the sea here; even the lovely old houses, many of them fallen from grace now, with laundry hanging from their iron balustrades, were faced in brightly-colored Faience tiles depicting scenes of the sea, bright in the hot light of the morning.

Fenrek found a police officer and was already giving orders to close the roads into the forest; within minutes, thirty police cars would be covering every entrance on the south, or speeding along the Avenida da Ponte to the north. And in the immediate area, a hundred men, the local police reinforced by the army, would be closing off every road, every alley, every tiny beco. A radio truck was already coursing the streets, giving out orders to the patrolling men, and I saw three men carrying a long ladder and running to climb to points of vantage on the rooftops. Two officers were hurrying into the Cathedral; heading for its high towers.

Fenrek said: “As long as we keep him out of the forest, we’ve got him. Once in there...who knows? With maybe a knife in his pocket he can last for a year, even without the shotgun. I wonder how many shells he has in his pockets?”

I shrugged. “I don’t think it matters, really.” He looked at me and frowned, remembering the near collision. I said: “You saw the kind of desperation that’s on him. The next step’s obvious—once he finds he can’t break through the cordon.”

I’d never seen so many police all together at one place. I’d forgotten, or never realized, that while we were going our own way, setting our own traps, worrying this thing out between the two of us, the whole weighty mass of the law was also there behind us. From the time the first poor fisherman had died, all the resources of the police and the army had been standing by, ready for just this moment. The sheer weight of it, the mass of it, was startling.

I said, brooding about it: “He started this hunt for a new weapon because of the odds against his mercenaries. Now, he’s on his own, and look at the odds stacked up against him now.”

Wherever you looked, there were men in uniform stringing barbed wire across the roads, climbing up ladders to lookout posts, shepherding people into their houses, clambering over rooftops, standing on balconies and at street corners, their officers giving out orders, quietly and authoritatively, on bullhorns. It seemed as if the whole of the City were mobilized against one man; but that one man was all that was left of a deadly and terrifying menace. I counted twelve official cars in this small street alone.

We heard the squeal of tires, and Estrilla’s bug came tearing in, a policeman closing a barricade behind her; even here, she was driving that potent little toy like a racing car. She braked to a skidding stop beside us and said: “I saw him once, driving like a madman.” She looked at the steaming Buick, down at the front now with the second tire leaking air, and said: “Do we know where he went?”

I shook my head.

Astrid climbed out and stood there, looking around at the highly-organized chaos, looking at Fenrek’s shoulder and worrying how many more wounds would be coming his way before this was over.

Estrilla said: “How big an area?”

I shrugged. “A square mile, two at the most. A hundred men combing it, it’s the end.”

A doctor, summoned, I learned, by Lieutenant Loureiro, had come to do something about Fenrek’s injuries, but he shook his head impatiently and said: “No, when this is all over...”

There was a large-scale map of the area spread out over the hot hood of one of the cars, and Fenrek was staring at it, leaning still on his shillelagh, frowning and unhappy. And then, from the roof across the street, a policeman shouted; he was pointing to the east.

I said to Fenrek: “I’ll go see.”

A dozen men were already running down Rua do Embaixador, running fast with their rifles unslung, three policemen and a squad of soldiers, a hundred and fifty yards ahead of me. I sprinted and overtook them, and found a long ladder set against the wall of a house, a wall of diamond-pointed bricks that caught the sunlight prettily and cast sharp shadows over the white stone; a woman was leaning over the rail of her balcony on the second floor, a balcony covered with pots of geranium and ageratum, with a long vine of rose-pink Antigonon Leptopus trailing handsomely over the wrought iron work, Someone shouted at her: “Get back, Senhora, into the house! There is danger!” She scurried back indoors.

I climbed up the ladder, two rungs at a time, and the man who had shouted was there, a very young corporal in khaki battle dress, camouflaged with patches of maroon and brown and yellow. He said excitedly: “There, Senhor, above the Chao Salgado...”

The Chao Salgado, the Salted Ground...I remembered the story:

Once, in the Seventeen Hundreds, there was the mansion of the Eighth Duke of Aveiro standing there, and the Duke, an angry and violent man caught up in the protests of the times, had planned an assassination of King Dom Jose, together with four members of a family named Tavora, if my memory is as good as it’s supposed to be. They’d all been executed for their pains. The Duke’s mansion had been razed to the ground, and the earth had been ceremonially strewn with salt, and cursed. There is a plain and simple marble column standing there to this day to mark the spot, topped by a flaming urn of stone, and decorated with only five stone rings, symbolizing the chains of the conspirators. Now the later-built houses have encroached upon Aveiro’s fine old estate, crowding close upon one another, cheek-by-jowl, in Lisbon style; but there is still a little corner the superstitious keep away from, and no one will ever build there.

Even now, two hundred years later, it’s as though the specter of the curse still haunts the place. Because of the steep hills, it’s hard to find building room within the confines of the City these days, and every inch is taken up; but not here.

There is just a little corner left, an empty corner that has become, as the hesitant houses were built around it, a tiny courtyard. The nearest house to the epicenter of the old curse is only a few feet away from the column, but it gives the impression of turning away from it, of hiding itself; no window overlooks the little monument; the houses seem to hide themselves, turning their backs, ashamed of their proximity. The inscription at the base of the monument, which is no more than twenty feet high, is eroded and scarcely legible; but if you’ve a curious mind for trivia, and struggle with it, you can still make out the words: This ground is cursed, and nothing shall live here.

It’s a tiny courtyard, no more than a few feet square, called the Blind Alley of the Salted Ground, with a plain and unpretentious column to tell of the tragic days when the scheming for power was on a much more simple basis. There hasn’t been much change in intent, really; the scheming is still going on all over the world, but now the means are more sophisticated, more deadly; and curses don’t do much good any more.

We were on a small fat roof, two stories high, abutting onto a fourth floor that was roofed in steeply-pitched red tiles. I found a pipe that would bear my weight, I hoped, and climbed up to take a look. I straddled a ridge and eased my way along. I found a chimney that would take me a few feet higher, and climbed to its top, wrapping my legs around the brickwork. I could see nothing.

I jumped the few feet across the gap onto the next roof, worked my way around to the other side, and stood there looking down into the tiny courtyard. The Chao Salgado.

I’d never seen the monument from this high angle before. It looked like a slender spear pointing up at the sky, its top a few feet below me and ten yards or so away.

And then, I saw him.

He was less than five hundred feet away from me, crawling along the lower edge of a steep roof, ready, I thought, to slip at any minute; there was no abutment to break his fall if he should find a couple of loose tiles there. He was reaching for a rope, a long manila rope that was wound once around the chimney stack and dropped down into the street, left there by the workmen cleaning some yellow and blue tile work when they’d been herded away by the police. I saw him haul it up and unhook it from its mooring, and he flung it almost like a lasso, slinging its loop over a cast iron sewer vent on the roof of the house opposite. He missed on the first throw, and on the second as well; but the third try was successful. He put his weight on it and swung out and down, swinging fast like Tarzan on the end of a vine.

He slammed into the opposite wall with an awful force, but he was climbing again immediately, climbing high onto the rooftops once more. He jiggled the rope till the other end was free, and ran fast towards me till he came to the end of the building. I saw him look down into the street and pull back quickly. Following the direction of his look, I saw that five or six policemen were down there, looking up towards him; I didn’t know whether they’d seen him or not.

I heard a shout, and Loveless looked round. Three soldiers were crawling along the steep roof-pitch towards him, three houses away, crawling on hands and knees with their rifles across their backs. There was more shouting down on the street below, and I looked down and saw Fenrek there, his white face staring up at me, Estrilla and Astrid were with him, and then they started running into the courtyard of the salted ground itself.

And now, Loveless was getting close. Worming his way along the roof on hands and knees, his rope trailing behind him, his shotgun still in his hand, he was directly opposite me now, less than fifty feet away. Between us, the tiny courtyard was a chasm, the monument poking its morbid spear into the air and looking, from this angle, somehow insignificant. He was groping his way along with a fine disregard for the danger he was in, when a tile fell and crashed to the courtyard below, he paid it no attention at all.

And then, he saw me. He raised his head and our eyes met. I was standing up in full view, because there just wasn’t any cover; he would have seen me long before if he hadn’t been looking back over his shoulder to where the three soldiers were approaching him. For a moment, he stayed there on his hands and knees, looking me full in the face. And then he stood up and looked to his right; two men there, a house and a half away, were running on a flat roof towards him. To his left there was a wide gap he could never hope to cross, not even with his rope, and a man on the roof there yelled for support anyway. He was still yelling as some men came clambering up on a ladder to join him.

Loveless stood up then, and came to the edge of the roof, his arms held out for balance, walking towards me till we faced each other across the thirty-foot gap that was the Salted Ground. On opposing edges of the buildings, high above the courtyard, we faced each other across the monument, and waited.

He held out his gun in both hands, in front of his body, and broke it open and laughed shortly; it was empty. He said: “Need a good gun, Cain? I’ve no more use for the bloody thing.”

He swung it once round his head and hurled it at me. I ducked, and it smashed into the steep roof behind me, shattering tile with its force, and slid noisily down the slope to crash in the courtyard below. I saw a police officer run and pick it up; it was Loureiro. I saw Fenrek down there put out a preventive hand as someone raised a rifle.

Loveless slung the loop of his rope, then, and it fell on the first throw over the urn on top of the monument. He leaned back and pulled it tight, and said calmly: “I’d liked to have taken you with me, Cain.”

An ambiguous remark, if ever I heard one.

And then, quickly, not wasting any time, he slipped the other end of the rope round his throat, knotted it, tugged it tight, and stood there, a man with a gallow’s rope round his neck. He stood quite still for a moment, not looking back at the men who were approaching, not even when he must have heard two of them clattering across onto the roof he was standing on. His fists were at his waist, his feet wide apart, his head thrown back. He looked me full in the face for a moment or two, looked around at the crowded, sunlit rooftops, looked at the tightly packed houses teeming with life, looked back at me and shrugged, and half smiled...And then, he jumped.

Just before the sound of Astrid’s screaming, I heard the slight, infinitesimal crunch that was his neck breaking. He hung there on the column, his feet no more than a yard from the ground, his head twisted round and his sightless eyes staring up at me.

I turned away and began the slow climb down back across the red and grey tiled rooftops to where the ladder was. And by the time I reached the courtyard, they’d cut the Major down and decently covered his broken, wretched body with a blanket.

◆◆◆

We drove up to the Alentejano that night, Fenrek in a couple of casts and still gloating from the roasting he’d given them at the hospital when they expected him to stay there for a few days. He had a pair of shiny aluminum crutches which he was delighted with, like a child with a new toy.

He said: “It’s a fine thing to be a cripple, if you’ve got the leisure and patience for it.”

We had thin scallops of pork, tightly rolled and stuffed with squid and sautéed in Madeira, and there were six bottles of Dao on the table for the four of us.