The Last Place God Made

‘This way, senhor.’

The cabby insisted on placing his old oilskin coat about my shoulders and escorted me to the end of the pier where a lantern hung from a pole above a rack festooned with fishing nets.

An old riverboat was moored out there in the darkness, lights gleaming, laughter and music drifting across the water. He leaned down and lifted a large, wooden trapdoor and the light from the lamp flooded in to reveal a flight of wooden steps. He went down and I followed without hesitation. I had, after all, no reason to expect foul play and in any event, the Webley .38 which I’d had the forethought to slip into my right-hand coat pocket was as good an insurance as any.

A kind of boardwalk stretched out through the darkness towards the riverboat, constructed over a series of canoes and it dipped alarmingly as we moved across.

When we reached the other end the cabby smiled and slapped the hull with the flat of his palm. ‘The Little Boat, senhor. Good appetite in all things but in food and women most of all.’

It was a Brazilian saying and well intended. I reached for my wallet and he raised a hand. ‘It is not necessary, senhor. The good captain has seen to it all.’

Hannah again. I watched him negotiate the swaying catwalk successfully as far as the pier then turned and went up some iron steps which took me to the deck. A giant of a man moved from the shadows beside a lighted doorway, a Negro with a ring in one ear and a heavy, curly beard.

‘Senhor?’ he said.

‘I’m looking for Captain Hannah,’ I told him. ‘He’s expecting me.’

The teeth gleamed in the darkness. Another friend of Hannah’s. This was really beginning to get monotonous. He didn’t say anything, simply opened the door for me and I passed inside.

I suppose it must have been the main saloon in the old days. Now it was crowded with tables, people crammed together like sardines. There was a permanent curtain of smoke that, allied to the subdued lighting, made visibility a problem, but I managed to detect a bar in one corner on the other side of the small, packed dance floor. A five-piece rumba band was banging out a carioca and most of the crowd seemed to be singing along with it.

I saw Hannah in the thick of it on the floor dancing about as close as it was possible to get to a really beautiful girl by any standards. She was of mixed blood, Negro-European variety was my guess and wore a dress of scarlet satin that fitted her like a second skin and made her look like the devil’s own.

He swung her round, saw me and let out a great cry. ‘Heh, Mallory, you made it.’

He pushed the girl away as if she didn’t exist and ploughed through the crowd towards me. Nobody got annoyed even when he put a drink or two over. Mostly they just smiled and one or two of the men slapped him on the back and called good-naturedly.

He’d been drinking, that much was obvious and greeted me like a long lost brother. ‘What kept you? Christ, but I’m starving. Come on, I’ve got a table laid on out on the terrace where we can hear ourselves think.’

He took me by the elbow and guided me through the crowd to a long, sliding shutter on the far side. As he started to pull it back, the girl in the red satin dress arrived and flung her arms around his neck.

He grabbed her wrists and she gave a short cry of pain, that strength of his again, I suppose. He no longer looked anything like as genial and somehow, his bad Portuguese made it sound worse.

‘Later, angel – later, I’ll screw you just as much as you damn well want only now, I want a little time with my friend. Okay?’

When he released her she backed away, looked scared if anything, turned and melted into the crowd. I suppose it was about then I noticed that the women vastly outnumbered the men and commented on the fact.

‘What is this, a whorehouse?’

‘Only the best in town.’

He pulled back the shutter and led the way out to a private section of the deck with a canvas awning from which the rain dripped steadily. A table, laid for two, stood by the rail under a pressure lamp.

He shouted in Portuguese, ‘Heh, Pedro, let’s have some action here.’ Then he motioned me to one of the seats and produced a bottle of wine from a bucket of water under the table. ‘You like this stuff – Pouilly Fuisse? They get it for me special. I used to drink it by the bucketful in the old days in France.’

I tried some. It was ice-cold, sharp and fresh and instantly exhilarating. ‘You were on the Western Front?’

‘I sure was. Three years of it. Not many lasted that long, I can tell you.’

Which at least explained the Captain bit. I said, ‘But America didn’t come into the war till nineteen-seventeen.’

‘Oh, that.’ He leaned back out of the way as a waiter in a white shirt and cummerbund appeared with a tray to serve us. ‘I flew for the French with the Lafayette Escadrille. Nieuport Scouts then Spads.’ He leaned forward to refill my glass. ‘How old are you, Mallory?’

‘Twenty-three.’

He laughed. ‘I’d twenty-six kills to my credit when I was your age. Been shot down four times, once by von Richthofen himself.’

Strange, but at that stage of things I never doubted him for a second. Stated baldly, what he had said could easily sound like boasting and yet it was his manner which said most and he was casual in the extreme as if these things were really of no account.

We had fish soup, followed by a kind of casserole of chicken stewed in its own blood, which tasted a lot better than it sounds. This was backed up by eggs and olives fried, as usual, in olive oil. And there was a mountain of rice and tomatoes in vinegar.

Hannah never stopped talking and yet ate and drank enormously with little visible effect except to make him talk more loudly and more rapidly than ever.

‘It was a hard school out there, believe me. You had to be good to survive and the longer you lasted, the better your chances.’

‘That makes sense, I suppose,’ I said.

‘It sure does. You don’t need luck up there, kid. You need to know what you’re doing. Flying’s about the most unnatural thing a man can do.’

When the waiter came to clear the table, I thanked him. Hannah said, ‘That’s pretty good Portuguese you speak. Better than mine.’

‘I spent a year on the lower Amazon when I first came to South America,’ I told him. ‘Flying out of Belem for a mining company that had diamond concessions along the Xingu River.’

He seemed impressed. ‘I hear that’s rough country. Some of the worst Indians in Brazil.’

‘Which was why I switched to Peru. Mountain flying may be trickier, but it’s a lot more fun than what you’re doing.’

He said, ‘You were pretty good out there today. I’ve been flying for better than twenty years and I can’t think of more than half a dozen guys I’ve known who could have landed that Vega. Where did you learn to fly like that?’

‘I had an uncle who was in the R.F.C.,’ I said. ‘Died a couple of years back. He used to take me up in a Puss Moth when I was a kid. When I went to University, I joined the Air Squadron which led to a Pilot Officer’s commission in the Auxiliary Air Force. That got me plenty of weekend flying.’

‘Then what?’

‘Qualified for a commercial pilot’s licence in my spare time, then found pilots were ten-a-penny.’

‘Except in South America.’

‘Exactly.’ I was more than a little tight by then and yet the words seemed to spill out with no difficulty. ‘All I ever wanted to do was fly. Know what I mean? I was willing to go anywhere.’

‘You certainly were if you drew the Xingu. What are you going to do now? If you’re stuck for a job I might be able to help.’

‘Flying, you mean?’

He nodded. ‘I handle the mail and general freight route to Landro which is about two hundred miles up the Negro from here. I also cover the Rio das Mortes under government contract. Lot of diamond prospecting going on up there these days.’

‘The Rio das Mortes?’ I said. ‘The River of Death? You must be joking. That’s worse than the Xingu any day. I’ve been there. I took some government men to a Mission Station called Santa Helena maybe two years ago. That would be before your time. You know the place?’

‘I call there regularly.’