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 bang-ing out acarioca 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 starv-ing. 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 hisagain, I suppose. He no longer looked anything like as genial and somehow, hisbad 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 any-thing, 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 re-fill 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 enor-mously 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 tricker, 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 Squad-ron 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 any-where."
"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."
"You used a phrase today," I said. "The Last Place God Made. Well, that's the Rio das Mortes, Hannah. During the rainy season it never stops. At other times of the year it just rains allday. They've got flies up there that lay eggs in your eyeballs. Most parts of the Amazon would consider thepirhona bad enough because a shoal of them can reduce a man to a skeleton in three minutes flat, but on the Mortes, they have a microscopic item with spines that crawls up your backside given half a chance and it takes a knife to get him out again."
"You don't need to tell me about the damn place," he said. "I've been there. Came in with three Hayleys and high hopes a year ago. All I've got left is the baby you arrived in today. Believe me, when my government contract's up in three months you won't see me for dust."
"What happened to the other two planes?"
"Kaput. Lousy pilots."
"Then why do you need me?"
"Because it takes two planes to keep my schedules going or to put it more exactly, I can't quite do it with one. I managed to pick up an old biplane the other day from a planter down-river who's selling up."
"What is it?"
"A Bristol."
He was in the act of filling my glass and I started so much that I spilled most of my wine across the table. "You mean a Brisfit? A Bristol fighter? Christ, they were flying those over twenty years ago on the Western Front"
He nodded. "I should know. Oh, she's old all right, but then she only has to hold together another three months. Do one or two of the easy river trips. If you'd wanted the job, you could have had it, but it doesn't matter. There's a guy in at the week-end who's already been in touch with me. Some Portuguese who's been flying for a mining company in Venezuela that went bust which means I'll get him cheap."
"Well, that's okay then," I said.
"What are you going to do?"
"Go home - what else."
"What about money? Can you manage?"
"Just about." I patted my wallet "I won't be taking home any pot of gold, but I'll be back in one piece and that's all that counts. There's a hard time coming from what I read of events in Europe. They're going to need men with my kind of flying experience, the way things are looking."
"The Nazis, you mean?" he nodded. "You could be right. A bunch of bastards, from what I hear. You should meet my maintenance eingineer, Mamie Sterne. Now he's a German. Was a professor of engineering at one of their universities or something. They arrested him because he was a Jew. Put him in some kind of hell-hole they call a concentration camp. He was lucky to get out with a whole skin. Came off a freighter right here in Manaus without a penny in his pocket"
"Which was when you met him?"
"Best day's work of my life. Where aero engines are con-cerned the guy's the original genius." He re-filled my glass. "What kind of stuff were you flying with the R.A.F. then?"
"Wapitis mainly. The Auxiliaries get the oldest aircraft"
"The stuff the regulars don't want?"
"That's right. I've even flown Bristols. There were still one or two around on some stations. And then there was the Mark One Fury. I got about thirty hours in one those just before I left."
"What's that - a fighter?" I nodded and he sighed and shook his head. "Christ, but I envy you, kid, going back to all that. I used to be Ace-of-Aces, did you know that? Knocked out four Fockers in one morning before I went down in flames. That was my last show. Captain Samuel B. Hannah, all of twenty-three and everything but the Congressional Medal of Honour."
"I thought that was Eddie Rickenbacker?' I said. 'Ace-of-Aces, I mean."
"I spent the last six months of the war in hospital," he answered.
Those blue eyes stared vacantly into the past, caught for a moment by some ancient hurt, and then he seemed to pull him-self back to reality, gave me that crooked grin and raised his glass.
"Happy landings."
The wine had ceased to effect me or so it seemed for it went down in one single easy swallow. The final bottle was empty. He called for more, then lurched across to the sliding door and pulled it back.
The music was like a blow in the face, frenetic, exciting, filling the night, mingling with the laughter, voices singing. The girl in the red satin dress moved up the steps to join him and he pulled her into his arms and she kissed him passion-ately. I sat there feeling curiously detached as the waiter re-filled my glass and Hannah, surfacing grinned across at me.
The girl who slid into the opposite seat was part Indian to judge by the eyes that slanted up above high cheekbones. The face itself was calm and remote, framed by dark, shoulder-length hair and she wore a plain white cotton dress which but-toned down the front.
She helped herself to an empty glass and I reached for the newly opened bottle of wine and filled it for her. Hannah came across, put a hand under her chin and tilted her face. She didn't like that, I could tell by the way her eyes changed.
