The Diving Dames Affair - Leslie Peter. Страница 15

Almost against his will, Illya found himself carried along with the main body of the crowd. Darkness was thickening and strange illuminations flared over the roof- tops to the east. Here was an opportunity to lose the tail if he wished to. Should he do so - or should he deliberately encourage the girl to keep in touch so that he could turn the situation to his own advantage later? He decided to let her stick. He wanted to find out exactly why she was following him and on behalf of whom.

Now suddenly the road erupted into an open space on the far side of which stretched Copacabana Beach.

Kuryakin halted, amazed at the astonishing sight which met his eyes. The place was jam-packed with people, weaving and dancing and bouncing to the disparate music of at least a dozen different bands - guitars, mandolinas, accordions, flutes, an occasional trumpet or trombone, and everywhere the insistent pounding of percussion. There were hand-hit conga drums, timbales thrashed with flat sticks, tomtoms, snare drums, maraccas, claves, guiros and, above all, bongos beaten in a complexity of rhythms so intoxicating as to be irresistible. Into the surging mass of dancers flooding the spaces between the bands, a parade with huge papier-mache masks, banners, and bobbing balloons in the shape of vast and grotesque beasts was forging its way, spear headed by its own group of buglers. Great monsters in bright crepe paper and wood floated in the air on wires, surrounded by clusters of more ordinary balloons and lines of ornate lanterns. Beyond, the enormous beach was black with people against the lines of phosphorescence rolled shorewards by the incoming tide.

As he watched, the sky was split by jots of fireworks fountaining into the dark from further along the promenade. A cheer burst from the celebrating throng and the dancing redoubled in energy.

It was, of course, Illya remembered, the season of Carnaval - and in Rio, Carnaval is something more than a religion! No wonder the man he had asked about the shops opening had been surprised.

More than half of the people in the colorful crowd were either garlanded or in some kind of costume, and around the square stalls and booths were selling streamers, paper hats and masks.

He turned - just in time to see, out of the corner of his eye, that the girl following him was buying a mask at a corner stall. It was a tall thing - a beaked animal rather like a North American Indian totem pole, with huge round eyes - and the wearer's own viewpoint was a slit halfway up the neck lost among a cascade of paper feathers falling almost to the ground.

Very well, the Russian thought with an inward smile. Carnaval disguise is a game with room for more than one player…

He turned aside and selected a giant head for himself, an outsized turnip shape with the orientally bucolic features of a Chinese coolie, surmounted by the three tiers of pagoda-shaped hats. From within the hollow sphere of this mask, he surveyed the merrymakers, who now stretched as far as he could see in either direction along the promenade. It would be a nice exercise in subtlety to swing the roles around so that it was really he who was following the girl... by making sure that she followed him in the manner - and the direction - he wanted.

The density of the crowd made it harder to execute than to plan, however. He was continually caught up and hurried along in tidal waves of merriment - and when this happened, it was almost impossible to regulate his pace so that the girl was sure to be able to keep up. Nor was he able, so far, to burst out of the crowd altogether.

Struggling to beat his way against the tide, he caught isolated snatches of conversation as groups of people were carried past.

"Watcha say, boy! Slake it a while from this one, man…"

"Fabulous, just fabulous..."

"…ever been kissed by a man with a beard before?"

"Hey, Charlie! Over here, Charlie… Hey, Charlie!"

"… so colorful, I just can't bear it. Oh, look…"

"You got room for one more on that arm, handsome?"

"The drums go dudder-dudder bidder-bodder beeden dooden dada - the same rhythm all the time - had you noticed?"

"... so beautiful, so lovely. I should like to…"

"Charleee!..."

The mask with the bird's beak and the paper feathers bobbed now near, now further away. Several times Illya was in danger of becoming separated from his follower by phalanxes of laughing, singing dancers with linked arms. Once he did lose sight of it altogether when an unexpected display of frenzied acrobatics from a girl in a tight blue dress attracted a howling circle of admirers between them. Then he caught sight of the mask again, further to the left than he had expected, and plunged in pursuit.

He strove, without making it obvious, to place himself in a position from which the girl could discreetly take up the chase again - for she must have lost him as much as he had lost her. But she had apparently given up, for he realized now that she was trying to reach the fringes of the crowd.

Try as he would, he could not overtake her and put himself in view - there was always some segment of the noisy throng which obtruded just as he was getting near...

They had drifted away from the seafront now and were pushing their way up a narrow street towards one of the heights which lay behind the old town. On all sides the throbbing of the combos, the rattle of tambourines and the yowl of electric guitars filled the air. The roadway was filled with a stream of papier-mache mandarins, Popeyes and mythical beasts, all pressing down towards the sea. But the population here was predominantly colored, the laughter more boisterous, the dancing less inhibited.

Kuryakin followed the beaked mask as it threaded its way to the top of the street, across a cobbled square, and up a steep, stepped path traversing the side of a bluff sprinkled with wooden shacks among the trees. Several times the grotesque headed turned in a questing way - almost as though she knew that she was being followed and wanted to make sure he was still there, the agent thought with a frown.

He quickened his pace as the girl in the Carnaval mask sprang agilely across a gap in a ruined wall and began to climb a street - it was more of a path, really - so steep that it had to be buttressed every two yards with risers of planking pegged into the hard earth.

Again the beak swung his way as he closed the gap between them. The shanties clinging to the sides of the cliff were ablaze with light and shaking with music. This was getting ridiculous - he must approach her right away. Now…

As he panted up the steps, his eyes came level with the girl's hurrying heels. How odd, he thought, that she should be wearing rope-soled espadrilles with a smart town suit. Suddenly suspicious, he sped up, drew level with her—and halted. The girl in the mask had stopped outside the door of one of the huts. A dim light burned behind a window looking onto a tiny porch.

"Now just a minute…" Illya began, when the girl turned toward him, raised a pair of slender arms, and lifted the beaked mask from her head and shoulders.

"Man, I thought you was never going to catch up," she said with a silvery laugh. "Still, I guess it saves us walkin' all the way up here to get a drink, eh? And it is Carnaval time…"

The Russian stood rooted to the spot. Above the girl's plump cheeks, lustrous violet eyes twinkled in an eighteen-year-old face the color of mahogany.

---

He was still cursing himself for not realizing that the vendors of Carnaval masks would sell many of the same type in one evening when he got back to his hotel - footsore and still a little humiliated at the embarrassing explanation he had had to make to the girl on the heights. All in all, it had not exactly been his day: when he hadn't realized it, he had been tailed; when he had wanted to be tailed, he had lost the follower; except for the good fortune of finding O'Rourke, all his inquiries had drawn blanks; and now he had made a fool of himself!... Better to write the whole day off, have a nice refreshing bath, and get up early to catch the first available plane: to Brasilia tomorrow!