“Too much narrow road there. Too many places where he can’t turn round in a hurry if he has to. Right, Estrilla?”
Estrilla nodded. “If one of the mountain villages there is blocked, he’d have no room to turn, certainly. Some of the streets there are as narrow as they are in the Alfama, just room for a car to squeeze through. Maybe only a small car, even.”
And then, just five hundred yards away on the road, we saw the car.
We didn’t even hear it, the wind was in the wrong direction, or the rustle of the pines around us deadened it, or perhaps...that’s a pretty quiet mill in the Buick anyway.
But we heard the crash. The Riviera went through the red-and-white barricade as though it was made of paper. We saw a policeman leap aside, saw and heard him fire his rifle into the air as a warning to all of us. We saw the great coil of barbed wire wrapping itself round the car and not stopping it in the least. And then, it was gone.
Loureiro was already on the phone, joggling the connection in his impatience and finally yelling: “He’s on his way to you in a big American car. Put a truck across the road, quickly, he smashed through our barricade. He’ll be there in a few moments.”
I said “Keep the line open, Lieutenant. We may as well know when he goes through that one, too.”
Twelve kilometers, the man on the barrier had said, “the next barrier kilometers down the road. Seven and a half miles, or say five minutes in a Riviera being pushed. A winding road, but to Loveless that wouldn’t matter too much; he would have his foot on the floor and he would keep it there, and the hell with everything and everybody.”
I said to Fenrek: “We’ll take the Jensen, and this time you stay here.”
“This time, I come with you.”
“The girls stay behind then.”
Estrilla said: “You don’t really believe that, do you, Mr. Cain?”
And Astrid said, with a fine disregard for grammar: “Me too.”
All I needed was passengers on a hundred-mile-an-hour chase through the streets of Lisbon. Well, you’ve got to be philosophical about these things. At least, it would help to keep the rear end of the car from taking fight.
We had a few minutes. If he had the sense to turn off instead of trying to get through the second barricade, he could still have made it through be the woods. He wouldn’t have gone very far in a Buick without bogging down in soft sand, with no four-wheel drive to help him out of it. But if he stopped to think about it, he’d realize that this was the best thing he could do, get off the road and out of his car so that he’d be closer to what was his own element: the land.
The Lieutenant, phone in hand, was watching as we piled back into the Jensen. I began to say: “We’re waiting,” when he listened at the earpiece, put down the phone, threw up his hands, and said: “He went through the second barrier too, round the truck. He smashed the barricade.”
I yelled: “Tell them to keep it open for us,” and touched the starter button.
We knew where he was now, and where he was heading. I gritted my teeth in sympathy for Fenrek as we bounced at forty over the forest’s floor, (and not a sound out of him either), and then made a hard left on the smooth highway. I put my foot down and heard the motor start to hum; it never does more than hum.
I drove the first few miles at ninety, till I saw the little bug up on the road ahead of us. I slipped down a gear and shouted to Fenrek: “Brace yourself, were braking hard,” and slammed my foot on the Maxarets. She pulled quickly, smoothly, to an incredible halt in fifty feet. I yelled at Estrilla: “Take the side roads.”
She was out before I’d finished speaking, and as we leaped forward again I saw that Astrid had fallen out with her and was just getting to her feet and climbing into the bug.
And when we shot by what was left of that second barricade, we were just topping a hundred and thirty miles an hour.
It was exhilarating.
CHAPTER 14
It was, I suppose, a conscious effort to get the girls out of the way, out of the way of the danger that was surely going to wrap itself around us the moment we found that Buick. He had a four minutes start, he was four minutes ahead of us, and that could have been anything up to seven or even eight miles, the way he was likely to drive.
There was no question of the competence of the two cars; mine was immeasurably superior. It’s never a question of how fast a car will go—it’s more a matter of how well and how long it will sit on the road at maximum speed. In the Jensen I could blow a front tire and still keep a fairly straight line till I stopped; but a Buick?
And the question of driving skill mitigated against me rather than for me. That’s a matter of talent and care, and if one man’s got less care than the other he can still outrace him, even with a lesser talent; he might break his neck in the process, but he’ll get there first.
And now, it was largely a matter of understanding the man we were chasing. If you’re on the run in a very fast car, the only way you can make use of your power—and a sad lack of maneuverability—is to bash on regardless, keep going as straight as you can. So he’d take the main highway, the one with the good surface, and bulldoze his way through anything they could get in the time to stop him, rather than attempt the hazards of the winding, narrower back roads, where a sharp bond or a patch of gravel could hurl him headlong into the ditch.
I heard the wail of sirens, and two motorcycle cops were ahead of us, speeding down the highway flat out; they didn’t stay ahead of us for long. I passed them easily, wondering where they’d come from and where they thought they were heading. We took the back road through Estoril, well north of the town, hit the highway again beyond Parede, and then began to run into traffic.
It was a question of knowing, or guessing, where he was headed, a question of deciding where a man like Loveless—and I knew him well now—would go to hide himself. To one of the smaller villages, where a stranger would excite immediate comment? Of course not. To Lisbon itself, where he might succeed in getting lost in the crowds? Perhaps. But for how long? I had certain ideas on the subject; for Loveless, it was all a question of ifs and buts now, and I thought I knew every one of them. The mind of a complex man is sometimes more simple than it would appear to be, once you learn which way those twisted passions are heading.
We passed a police car that had crashed at a tight bend, and was sitting there in the ditch with its engine boiling over; the two men standing by it waved us on and pointed ahead. I slammed on the Maxarets again, sacrificing a moment of time for knowledge, and yelled: “How long ago?” I was already moving on again fast when I heard one of them shout back: “Two minutes, Senhor...” The rest of the shout was lost on the wind.
And now, as we drew close to the town, there were police cars and motorcycles all around us, cutting in from the side streets, swinging on two wheels round sharp bends, all heading fast in the same general direction. Fenrek muttered: “For God’s sake, we should trade cars, get a police car with a radio in it.” It wasn’t a bad idea. But better the tool you know than the tool you don’t know.
We tore through the heavy traffic of Alges at an alarming speed; and now, we were on the main and busy streets and there was no sense in trying to break our necks any longer. I dropped down to eighty, and a police car pulled alongside us, neck and neck on the wrong side of the road, its sirens blasting, and the officer in the passenger’s seat yelled: “Pedroucos, Rua de Pedroucos...He was seen there...” I put my foot down again and cut across his bows, hearing the sudden shriek of his skid behind me as he let me through, and headed up the wide, lovely Avenue of Belem’s Tower. I said to Fenrek: “So back there at Praca Manuel, we must have been almost on top of him. That means we’ve caught up; that means he’s out of his element in that car.”
“His element?”
“The bush, where else?” He let it go.
The police car we’d almost ditched was tight on my tail now, keeping up with us sensibly. I swing past an alarmed donkey cart and stood on the brakes as a little car shot out of Tristan da Cunha Street ahead of me. It was Estrilla in her bug; she hadn’t done badly either to keep up with us.
Fenrek yelled at me: “You’ve passed Pedroucos.”
I said: “I know that. Take a guess at where he’s heading.”
Fenrek said promptly: “The Alfama, the place he seems to know best. He’s probably got a hideout there somewhere.”
I said: “No. A bushman on the run is going to head for the bush, and in Lisbon that means only one place.”
“Monsanto?”
