“Very attractive. Perhaps I can introduce you to her.”
“That would be delightful.”
We wandered across the patio to where a plump and smiling woman was cutting some roses. She turned and waited expectantly, and the General said: “Senhor Cabot Cain...my wife, Dona Clara.”
She took my hand and smiled. “Our house is the better for your presence, Senhor Cain.” Her voice was all up and down the musical scale, a softly-lilting voice with the accent of the mountains of the northwest where the Spanish influence is strong. The roses were the very rare Sharastenaks, a variety of the old Provence Rose, the rosa centifolio that Pliny wrote about more than sixteen hundred years ago; I was surprised and delighted to see them here, in their neat little bed heavily mulched with walnut shells. We moved over to the edge of the steep drop down to Alfama’s cavernous little streets and leaned on the railing there while she went back to her work.
The General said: “But that’s Fenrek’s problem, isn’t it? Let’s get down to our own. The problem of Major Arthur Loveless.”
I said: “I read the file you gave me, and I think I should know more about the man who told you Loveless was here.”
“My old servant, a man I trust implicitly.” Queluz jumped away from the railing as if a wasp had stung him and then froze again. “Let me go back a few years. On that memorable occasion that was to give me so much heartbreak, out in Angola, I received a note from the rebels saying they were prepared to discuss peace terms with me personally. Their leader then was an African called Ojugo, a good man, really, and a fine soldier too. One day he’ll probably rule the whole of Angola, and he’ll be a very good ruler too. He wanted me to meet him in the bush, alone, and in secret. The kind of secrecy he demanded usually means, out there, a trap of some sort, and I debated long and carefully with myself before accepting the invitation. I kept the news of it even from my staff officers, and when I went to the meeting place I took with me only one man, my servant, whose name is Nacimento, Corporal Nacimento. Now, Nacimento was born in Angola, the son of immigrant settlers who had a coffee plantation there, and he knew the bush like the back of his hand. So he followed me to the meeting place and kept well out of sight, his rifle ready just in case of the treachery which I half-expected but which, as you know, took a rather different and much more violent form.
“While I was talking with Ojugo, and giving way much too much, incidentally, Nacimento saw, from his hiding place, a small commando of four mercenaries moving back along the way we’d come. He thought at the time that they were merely being posted along the track to make sure that one of our own commandos was not following me and preparing to take Ojugo himself. But, of course, subsequent events showed that they were on their way to blow up my H.Q., an act of violence which resulted in the deaths of eight senior officers, and subsequently in my own...dismissal.”
I said: “Let me interrupt you. Was Ojugo alone?”
“He was.”
“And presumably he knew about the attack. Presumably, he even planned it.”
“No.” The General was very emphatic now. He said: “Later, Ojugo told me personally that the attack was carried out without his knowledge, and I believe him.”
“That’s a very hard thing to be so sure about, isn’t it?”
“No.” He shook his head. “I am absolutely sure. I’d stake my life on it. I’m a good judge of character, Senhor Cain, and if Ojuge says black is white I’d believe him, because that’s the way it would be.”
I accepted that.
He went on, slowly, frowning: “But perhaps I should have warned my staff officers after all. In my absence...” He sighed. “It was always hard to keep them on their toes, and the moment I turned my back, ever, they all tended to sleep too soundly. And after the attack, as you know, this man Major Loveless, a guerrilla working for Ojugo, openly boasted that his commandos were responsible for it.”
“And all we know about Loveless,” I said, “is that he’s a Scotsman, a deserter from the British Army of the Rhine, and a little more competent than most of the mercenaries working in Africa.”
“And many of them,” the General said, “are extremely competent, make no mistake about that. They work for the highest bidder, and they are not as responsible as soldiers in a regular army, but they’re highly trained professionals, most of them with long experience, and they’re very dangerous men.”
He sat down and put his stubby hands on his knees, staring at his wife as she took her roses into the house.
“But that one coup not only disgraced me,” Queluz continued, “it also put Loveless at the top of his profession, and he became...should I say, famous? Or notorious? And ever since, I must confess, the problem of this man has obsessed me. I believe to this day that Ojugo, who still commands the rebels out there, was acting in good faith. I believe to this day that had Loveless not carried out that attack there’d be peace in Angola now, through my efforts and Ojugo’s. We’re both intelligent men, may I say...humane men? And, to tell the truth, he didn’t really demand very much that I didn’t think he was entitled to. It all boiled down to...to recognition of the Africans’ right, and I’m the last man to deny them that. But he had engaged mercenaries to fight for what he felt was a good cause, and...if you give a professional killer a gun, he’s liable to use it wrongly, and Ojugo could never control his mercenaries—most of them had nothing but contempt for him.”
I said politely: “So much, General, I know.”
He laughed shortly. “Yes, of course you do. But at that meeting Corporal Nacimento got a very good long look at Loveless. In fact, he trailed him for a short distance until he was half a mile or so from the meeting place, and then he decided he’d better go back just in case I got into trouble. And as you also know, we left the meeting shortly, with a concrete plan for peace that came to nothing because of the commando attack which wiped out my staff. Clear?”
“Very clear.”
“Good. After my dismissal, Nacimento stayed on in the army, and he’s a sergeant now, in the Honor Guard at Castelo de Sāo Jorge. He got a bullet in the foot, so he’s been...put out to graze, a good man now in a peaceful, comfortable job. Now, ten days ago, Nacimento came to me and told me he’d seen Loveless with two other Europeans, down in the Baixa. And he was absolutely sure that it was Loveless. Absolutely and completely sure, with no shadow of doubt at all. That’s when, on Fenrek’s recommendation, I called you over here. Because, if you can find Loveless for me...” He sighed. “How wonderful it would be to tell them, to prove to them, that my negotiations with Ojugo would have paid off after all but for that one irresponsible act.”
“Which, you are sure, Ojugo himself did not order. It all hinges on that, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, it does. And a confession from Loveless that he was acting on his own would never reinstate me. But it would at least inform a public that’s tired of the constant guerrilla warfare out there that I was not as wrong as they said. That’s all I need.” He looked at me a trifle wistfully, and said: “The country needs people like me—can I say that without arrogance? We’ve been a stable and well-run Dictatorship for more than thirty years now, and at last...at last that stability might end.” There was a little twinkle in his eye now. “I won’t pretend that we have a Democracy, provided you won’t pretend that Democracy can solve all the world’s problems, agreed?”
“Agreed. Could I have a drink?”
I thought for a moment he hadn’t heard me. Suddenly, he came alive again and his face fell. He threw up his hands. “There’s so much on my mind these days, can you ever forgive me?” He went to the door, tile-decorated, that led into the house, and tuned back and said: “I could offer you our local Antigua, but I seem to remember Fenrek said you were a cognac man?”
“Cognac would be fine, thank you.”
“Muinto bem, tambem para mim, I’ll have one too.”
He disappeared inside, and I strolled over to the iron balustrade and leaned on it and watched the woman washing her clothes down there. Close by, a young girl brought a small brazier out from her front door, set it down in the middle of the narrow street, and began fanning the red coals; the blue smoke drifted up and scented the hot air, cooling off a trifle now that the sun was getting lower; and soon, I watched her throw on a couple of small fish, and the scent changed.
Then Queluz came back, followed by a white-jacketed, white-gloved young man who looked at me stolidly, and bowed slightly, and looked again with a very sharp, appraising glance that somehow startled me. It was a glance that denied any of the self-effacement I would have expected, a quick, almost impudent look, but it was gone almost at once. He put down a tray on which there was a bottle of cognac with two delicate glasses, lovingly handmade, I imagined, in the old glass factory on Rua do Alacrim.
We stood for a while by the balustrade and watched the sun slowly sinking, casting its glorious gold light over the red roofs and the white stucco and the green vines all around us. Two small Naval Patrol boats were moving slowly into the harbor, coming up the broad river, so wide that now, in the evening mist, you couldn’t see the opposite bank, and I jerked my head at them and told him:
“They’ve been dying the sea red with cochineal.”
He stared at me, just as Astrid had done. “Cochineal? But why?”
I said: “That red tide that’s got Fenrek so worried turned out to be just that and nothing else.”
“What an extraordinary thing: There must be a reason, I suppose?”
I said: “There’s a reason that comes to mind a little too easily, perhaps.”
“Oh?”
“There is a virulent poison down there somewhere that looks like mussel poisoning but turns out to be something else. It occurred to me that if Portugal had a department for bacteriological warfare, someone just might have made a mistake, maybe allowed a slight leakage. And if so, that someone might just try to cover up that mistake by simulating a red tide—to brainwash the civil population.”
