He gave me back the phone, and I said: “In the last two hours, Senhora, has a telegram been sent overseas from there?”
She sounded rather crabby, but a code thirty-seven is not to be argued with. She said: “One moment, Excellency.” I could hear the papers rustling at the other end. She said in a moment: “One, Excellency, to Larache, in Morocco, that’s somewhere near Tangier, I believe.”
“Yes, I know where Larache is. Who sent it?”
“One moment, Excellency.” I waited a while and she came back and said: “A young man named Miguel Sampaio, Excellency, a page at the Hotel Quinta.”
“And he was posting letters, letters from the hotel guests, at the time?”
“Sim, Excellencia.”
“Good. Would you read it to me please?”
I heard her clear her throat: “Addressee, Hans Dedijer; Poste Restante, Larache, Morocco. Message reads: Delayed twenty hours same place one repeat one extra passenger. Signed, Commander.”
“Thank you, Senhora. Just tell me what time that was.
“Eight fourteen, Excellency.”
“Thank you.”
I rang off and repeated the message to Fenrek. I said: “So he was going to take me along after all. That’s interesting, isn’t it? Interesting—and rather gratifying.”
Fenrek said: “Stop preening yourself, Cain, and tell me what that’s meant to mean.”
I said: “We were almost going into partnership.”
Fenrek said expressively: “Huh?”
“One day I’ll tell you how I nearly became a mercenary, specializing in mass slaughter by botulin toxin. He must have decided it was safer, on principle, to hand his message and a tip to a pageboy from the hotel.”
Fenrek said grimly: “Or, as you say, he saw them watching the place. I’ll have their guts for garters.”
“No. If he’d seen them, he’d have known he was being carefully trapped. And that extra passenger would have been lying dead in the bottom of the lake, a hundred feet underground and unmourned. The only question is...where is he now?”
“All right, where is he?” Fenrek always suspected that I knew the answer whenever I asked a question.
I said: “He walked up over the dunes into Guincho, and once he knew that was safe he’d presumably take the same way back. So he’s probably seen Histermann lying dead there just by the entrance. He may even have seen Van Reck. Or just possibly...No. Where the devil is he, Fenrek? He can’t take all that time, not from eight-fourteen to now, to get back to the Bocca. Unless he’s decided...”
I broke off when the phone rang. Loureiro reached for it and listened. His face was grave. He put down the phone at last and said: “I’m afraid...” He hesitated, and Fenrek said harshly: “What is it, Loureiro?”
Loureiro said: “It’s Loveless, Senhor Colonello. That was the post at Cabo Raso. It seems...it seems that one of the men from Guincho, Patrolman Arisco, walked along the road to the cafe there, to get sandwiches, leaving the two others to watch the post office, you understand? It seems that...he found Loveless sitting in the cafe with a glass of beer.”
So that’s where he’d gone. Pretty simple, really. Too simple to have occurred to anyone. A man not even on the run, just aware that the police were out looking for him, and with plenty of time on his hands and some thinking to do, some thinking that he’d want to do in the habitual loneliness that was so much a part of his character.
Loureiro said: “He recognized him, of course, from the description, and tried to arrest him.”
Fenrek said: “Tried to arrest him? One man?”
“And Loveless shot him. It seems he pulled a kind of shotgun from under his coat, and shot him in the stomach. He ran out, and...and disappeared.”
I said: “But presumably Arisco is not dead?”
“Nao, Senhor. The cafe proprietor called the police, and they were there in a few minutes. Arisco is badly hurt, but...” I sensed from his tone that he wanted to apologize for his patrolman, but he didn’t.
The phone rang again, and as Loureiro went to it, I said: “So now he’s on the run with a vengeance.”
He had always known, of course, that he was being hunted. But up to now he must have known that the search was centered on Lisbon itself, with its epicenter at the Rua Vicente house. How far around that would we be working? Perhaps within the circle contained by Sacavem, Odivelas, Amadora and Alges, with a subsidiary area around the Bocca itself, where the initial action had been and where he might be presumed to be continuing his activities. But round the peninsula at Cabo Raso and as far to the west as Guincho? Almost certainly not. So, when poor Arisco hopefully tried to arrest him, he must have realized at once that all the events of the past few hours had been nothing more than a careful, well-planned scheme to trap him.
And so? Where would he go now?
I was just deciding that he’d be at his safest heading for Lisbon, to lose himself in the crowds there while he started to plan again from scratch, when Loureiro put down the phone and said:
“A car stolen, Senhor Colonello, at Charneca. That’s just outside the barricaded area, about four kilometers outside, up on the mountain.”
Estrilla was frowning. “Charneca? That’s high up on the sierra, why would he want to go there?”
I told her it was nothing but the instinct of the hunted animal. I said: “More important, what kind of car has he got?”
Loureiro said: “An American car, Senhor, a Buick that belongs to Senhor Remedio who owns the flower gardens up there. This year’s model, a Riviera, grey, and the license is 428-17. He already had a map spread out on the table. Fenrek hobbled over and stared at it with me. The Lieutenant stabbed at it with his finger and said: “Here, Charneca. But which way he will go...?”
I said: “To Lisbon, without a doubt.”
He accepted that. He said at once: “Then this road here, through Cascais, or all the way round, by Sintra.”
I said: “Sintra? Not a hope in hell.”
Fenrek looked at me. “Why not?”
