River of Death Read online

  They drove through the wide avenues of that futuristic city and pulled up outside the Grand Hotel. Hamilton dismounted—the door having magically been opened for him, of course—and passed swiftly through the revolving door. Once inside, he looked out through the glassed-in porch. The Rolls, already more than a hundred yards away, was turning a corner to the left. Hamilton waited until it had disappeared from sight, left by the revolving door by which he had entered and started to walk briskly back in the direction from which they had come. He gave the impression of one who knew the city, and he did: he knew Brasilia very well indeed.

  Five minutes after dropping Hamilton the Rolls pulled up outside a photographer’s shop. Hiller went inside, approached a smiling and affable assistant and handed over the film that had been taken from Hamilton.

  ‘Have this developed and sent to Mr Joshua Smith, Haydn Villa.’ There was no need for Hiller to add the word ‘immediately’. Smith’s name guaranteed immediacy. Hiller went on: ‘No copy is to be made of this film and neither the person who develops it nor any other member of your staff is ever to discuss it. I hope that is clearly understood.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Of course, sir.’ The smile and the affability had vanished to be replaced by total obsequiousness. ‘Speed and secrecy. Those are guaranteed, sir.’

  ‘And a perfect print?’

  ‘If the negative is perfect so will the print be.’

  Hiller couldn’t think of how else he could threaten the now thoroughly apprehensive assistant so he nodded and left.

  Another ten minutes later and Hiller and Serrano were in the drawing-room of the Villa Haydn. Serrano was seated, as were Tracy, Maria and a fourth and as yet unidentified man. Smith talked somewhat apart with Hiller—‘somewhat apart’ in that huge drawing-room meant a considerable distance—glancing occasionally in Serrano’s direction.

  Hiller said: ‘Of course, I can’t vouch for him. But he knows an awful lot that we don’t and I can always see to it that he’ll make no trouble. Come to that, so would Hamilton. Hamilton has a rough way of dealing with people who step out of line.’ Hiller went on to tell the sad tale of Serrano’s mugging.

  ‘Well, if you say so, Hiller.’ Smith sounded doubtful and if there was one thing Smith didn’t like it was being doubtful about anything. ‘You certainly haven’t let me down so far.’ He paused. ‘But your friend Serrano seems to have no history, no past.’

  ‘Neither have most men in the Mato Grosso. Usually for the simple reason that they have too much of a past. But he knows his jungle—and he knows more Indian dialects than any man except maybe Hamilton. Certainly more than any man in the Indian Protection Service.’

  ‘All right.’ Smith had made up his mind and seemed relieved for that. ‘And he’s been close to the Lost City. Could be a useful back-up man.’

  Hiller nodded towards the unidentified person, a tall, very heavily built, darkly handsome man in his mid-thirties.

  ‘Who’s that, Mr Smith?’

  ‘Heffner. My chief staff photographer.’

  Hiller said: ‘Mr Smith!’

  ‘Hamilton would think it extremely strange if I didn’t take a staff photographer along on this historic trip,’ Smith said reasonably. He smiled slightly. ‘I will confess, though, that he can use one or two instruments other than his cameras.’

  ‘I’ll bet he can.’ Hiller looked at Heffner with even closer interest. ‘Another with or without a past?’

  Smith smiled again but made no answer. A phone rang. Tracy, who was nearest to it, picked it up, listened briefly and replaced the receiver.

  ‘Well, well. Surprise, surprise. The Grand Hotel has no one registered there under the name of Hamilton. Not only that, no member of the staff can recall ever seeing a man answering to the description.’

  Hamilton, at that moment, was in a lavishly furnished suite in the Hotel Imperial.

  Ramon and Navarro, seated on a couch, were admiring Hamilton, who was admiring himself in front of a full-length mirror.

  ‘Always did fancy myself in a fawn seersucker,’ Hamilton said complacently. ‘Don’t you agree? This should knock Smith for six.’

  ‘I don’t know about Smith,’ Ramon said, ‘but in that outfit you’d terrify even the Muscias. So no trouble with getting the invitation?’

  ‘None. When he saw me flashing those gold coins in public he must have panicked in case someone else would step in fast. Now, I’m pleased to say, he’s convinced he’s got me hooked.’

  ‘You still think that gold hoard exists?’ Navarro said.

  ‘I’m convinced it did exist. Not that it does.’

  ‘Then why did you want those coins?’

  ‘When this is over they will be returned and the money reimbursed—all except the two that are now in the possession of Curly, the head barman at the Hotel de Paris. But those were necessary: the shark, as we know, took the bait.’

  ‘So, no hoard, huh?’ Ramon said. ‘Disappointing.’

  ‘There is a hoard and a huge one. But not of those coins. Perhaps melted down, although that’s unlikely. What is likely is that it’s been split up into private collectors’ hands. If you want to dispose of an art treasure, be it a stolen Tintoretto or a Penny Black, then Brazil is the place in the world. The number of Brazilian millionaires who spend hours in their air-conditioned, humidity-controlled, burglar-proof deep underground cellars gloating over stolen Old Masters boggles the imagination. Ramon, there’s a wet bar right behind you, and I’m developing a sore and thirsty throat from lecturing callow youngsters on the facts of criminal life.’

  Ramon grinned, rose and brought a large whisky and soda to Hamilton and a soda each for himself and his brother—the twins never drank anything stronger.

  Having eased his throat, Hamilton said: ‘What did you get on Smith?’

  ‘Nothing more than you expected,’ Ramon said. ‘The number of companies he controls is beyond counting. He’s a financial genius, charming and courteous, totally ruthless in his business dealings and must by any reckoning be the richest man in the Southern hemisphere. A sort of Howard Hughes in reverse. About Hughes’s early days everything was known in detail but the latter part of his life was so wrapped in mystery that many people who should have been in a position to know could scarcely believe that he had died on that flight from Mexico to the States, having been firmly convinced that he had died many years previously. Smith? Dead opposite. His past is a closed book and he never talks about it: neither do any of his colleagues, friends or supposed intimates—no-one really knows whether he has any intimates—for the good reason that none of them was around in his early days. Today, his life is an open book. He conceals nothing and operates in a totally straightforward fashion. Any one of the shareholders in his forty-odd companies can inspect the firm’s books whenever they wish. He appears to have absolutely nothing to hide and I would suppose when you are as brilliant as he unquestionably is there’s just no point in being dishonest. After all, what’s the point in it if you can make more money being honest? Today he knows everybody’s business and lets anyone who wishes know all about his businesses.’

  ‘He’s got something to hide,’ Hamilton said. ‘I know he has.’

  Navarro said: ‘What?’

  ‘That’s what we’re going to find out, isn’t it?’ Hamilton said.

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t play your cards so close to your chest,’ Navarro said.

  ‘What cards?’

  ‘We look forward to watching you at work, Mr Hamilton,’ Ramon said. His tone was neutral to the point of being ambiguous. ‘It should be worth watching. By every account, the man is totally above suspicion. He goes everywhere, sees everyone, knows everyone. And everyone knows that he and the President are blood brothers.’

  The President’s blood brother was leaning forward in a chair in his splendid drawing-room, oblivious of the company around him, staring in fascination at the silver screen. The room had been so efficiently darkened by the heavy drapes that he would have had difficulty
in seeing those around him: had it been broad daylight, he still wouldn’t have seen them. His absorption was total.

  The transparencies were of superb quality, taken with a superb camera by an expert photographer who knew precisely what he was about. The colour was true, the clarity and the resolution impeccable. And the projector the best that Smith’s money could buy.

  The first group showed a ruined and ancient city, impossibly clinging to the top of a narrow plateau with, at the far end, a breathtakingly well-preserved ziggurat, as imposing as the best surviving works of the Aztecs or the Maya.

  A second group showed one side of the city perched on the edge of a cliff that dropped vertically to a river and the rainforest beyond. The third group showed the other side of the city overlooking a similar gorge with a river sliding swiftly past in the distant depths. A fourth group, clearly taken from the top of the hills, showed a reverse view of the ancient city, with a brief glimpse of scrub-land beyond—once obviously terraced for cultivation—and with the two cliff-sides meeting in the middle distance. A fifth group, obviously taken I80° from the same position, showed a flat, grassy plateau, the sides curving to meet like the bows of a boat. Nearly incredible as those pictures were, the next few groups were staggering.

  They were taken from the air and as transparency succeeded transparency, it became evident that they, like a number of the previous ones, could only have been taken from a helicopter.

  The first of those helicopter shots showed the entire ruined city from above. The second, from perhaps five hundred feet higher up, showed that the city was perched on top of a vertically-sided, boat-shaped pinnacle of rock splitting a river which swept by on either side of it. Both arms of the river were rock-strewn, foaming white and clearly unnavigable. The third and fourth groups, from an even higher altitude, were a shock: taken horizontally they showed pictures of a densely crowded rainforest, reaching out, it seemed, almost to touch the camera and extending, unbroken, to the distant horizon. The fifth set, vertically downwards, made it clear that the great outer cliff-walls of the twin gorges were at least several hundred feet higher than the top of the cliff-walls that formed the island on which the Lost City was built. The sixth group, taken at a still higher elevation, showed just a narrow gap between two great stretches of forest reaching towards each other, with the Lost City just vaguely visible in the gloomy depths below. The seventh and last group, taken anywhere between five hundred and a thousand feet higher up again, revealed nothing but the continuous majestic sweep of the Amazonian rainforest, unbroken from pictorial horizon to pictorial horizon.

  It was small wonder, then, that the planes of the Brazilian ordnance survey services, whose pilots claimed, probably rightly, to have crisscrossed every square mile of the Mato Grosso, had never discovered the site of the Lost City. It just could not be seen from the air. But the ancients had stumbled across it, discovered the most invisible, the most inaccessible, the most impregnable fortress ever created by nature or devised by man.

  The viewers in the Villa Haydn drawing-room had sat throughout in silence. They knew they had seen something that no white man, with the exception of Hamilton and his helicopter pilot, had ever seen before, something, perhaps, that no-one had ever seen for generations, maybe even for centuries. They were hard people, tough people, cynical people, people who counted value only in the terms of cost, people conditioned to disbelieve, almost automatically, the evidence of their own eyes: but there is yet to be born a man or woman the atavistic depths of whose soul cannot be touched by that one questing finger that will not be denied, that primitive ancestral awe inseparable from watching the veil of unsuspected history being swept aside.

  The slowly comprehending silence stretched out for at least a minute. Then, almost inaudibly, Smith exhaled his breath in a long sigh.

  ‘Son-of-a-gun,’ he whispered. ‘Son-of-a-gun. He found it.’

  ‘If your intention was to impress us,’ Maria said, ‘you’ve succeeded. What on earth was that? And where is it?’

  ‘The Lost City.’ Smith spoke absently. ‘Brazil. In the Mato Grosso.’

  ‘The Brazilians built pyramids?’

  ‘Not that I know of. May have been some other race. Anyway, they’re not pyramids, they’re-Tracy, this is more in your field.’

  ‘Well. Not really my field either. One of our magazines had an article on those so-called pyramids and I spent a couple of days with the writer and photographer on the job. Curiosity only, and wasted curiosity—I didn’t learn much. Pyramid-shaped, sure, but those stepped-sided and flat-topped structures are called ziggurats. No-one knows where they originated although it is known that the Assyrians and Babylonians had them. Oddly enough, this style bypassed the virtually neighbouring country of Egypt, which went in for the smooth-sided and conically-topped version, but turned up again in ancient Mexico where some are still to be seen. Archaeologists and such-like use this as a powerful argument of prehistoric contact between east and west but the only sure fact is that their origins are lost in the mists of those same prehistoric times. My word, Mr Smith, this is going to drive those poor archaeologists up the wall. A ziggurat in the Mato Grosso.’

  ‘Ricardo?’ Hamilton said. ‘I shall be leaving our friend’s place in about two hours’ time. I’ll be driving—moment.’ He broke off and turned to Ramon lounging on the couch in the Imperial Suite. ‘Ramon, what shall I be driving?’

  ‘Black Cadillac.’

  ‘A black Cadillac,’ Hamilton said into the phone. ‘I do not wish to be followed. Thank you.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  There were six people in Smith’s drawing-room that sunny afternoon—Smith himself, Tracy, Maria, Hiller, Serrano and Hamilton. All had glasses in their hands.

  ‘Another?’ said Smith. His hand reached out to touch the button that would summon the butler.

  Hamilton said: ‘I’d rather talk.’

  Smith raised an eyebrow in slight if genuine astonishment. Not only had he heard from Hiller of Hamilton’s reputation as a hard drinker, but his slightest suggestion was usually treated as a royal command. He withdrew his hand from the buzzer.

  ‘As you wish. So we are agreed on the purpose of our visit. I tell you, Hamilton, I have done many things in the past that have given me a great deal of pleasure, but I’ve never been so excited—’

  Hamilton interrupted him, something no-one ever did to Smith. ‘Let’s get down to details.’

  ‘By God, you are in a hurry. I’d have thought that after four years—’

  ‘It’s a lot longer than that. But even after only four years a man starts to become a little impatient.’ He pointed towards Maria and Tracy. People never pointed in Smith’s drawing-room. ‘Who are they?’

  ‘We all know your rough diamond reputation, Hamilton.’ When Smith chose to use a cold tone he could do so most effectively. ‘But there’s no need to be rude.’

  Hamilton shook his head. ‘Not rude. Just a man, as you observed, in a hurry. I just like to check on the company I’m keeping. As you do.’

  ‘As I do?’ Again the eyebrow. ‘My dear fellow, if you would kindly explain—’

  ‘And that’s another thing,’ Hamilton said. That made it twice in thirty seconds that Smith had been interrupted, which must have constituted some sort of a record. ‘I don’t like being condescended to. I am not your dear fellow. I am not, as you may come to learn, anybody’s dear fellow. As you do, I said. Check up. Or perhaps you don’t know the identity of the person who rang the Grand Hotel to see if I was actually staying there?’

  It was a guess, but in the circumstances a safe one, and the flickered glance between Smith and Tracy was all the confirmation Hamilton required. He nodded towards Tracy.

  ‘See what I mean?’ Hamilton said. ‘That’s the nosey bastard. Who is he?’

  ‘You would insult my guests, Hamilton?’ Smith’s tone was now positively arctic.

  I don’t much care who I insult—or should I say “whom”? He’s still a nosey bastard. An
other thing, when I ask questions about people I do it honestly and in the open, not behind their backs. Who is he?’

  ‘Tracy,’ Smith said stiffly, ‘is the managing director of McCormick-Mackenzie International Publications Division.’ Hamilton looked unimpressed. ‘Maria is my confidential secretary and, I might add, a close personal friend.’

  Hamilton looked away from Tracy and Maria almost as if he had already dismissed them from his mind as being of no importance. ‘I’m not interested in your relationships. My fee.’

  Smith was obviously taken aback. Gentlemen did not discuss business negotiations in this crude and abrupt fashion. Momentarily, his expression hovered between astonishment and anger. Many years had passed since any man had dared talk to him in such a way. He required considerable willpower to repress his anger.

  ‘Hiller mentioned it, I think,’ Smith said. ‘A six-figure sum. One hundred thousand dollars—U.S. dollars—friend.’

  ‘I’m not your friend. A quarter million.’

  ‘Ludicrous.’

  ‘I could say “Thanks for the drink” and walk out. I’m not childish. I hope you’re not either.’

  Smith had not become the man he was without the ability to make his mind up very rapidly indeed. Without in any way appearing to capitulate he capitulated immediately.

  ‘A man would want an awful lot of service for money like that.’

  ‘Let’s get our terms clear. You get co-operation, not service. I’ll return to this point later. I regard my fee as being far from excessive in view of the fact that I’m damned certain you’re in this not just to get a few nice photographs and a human interest story. Who ever heard of Joshua Smith engaging upon any enterprise where money was not the prime and motivating factor?’

  ‘As far as the past is concerned I would agree with you.’ Smith’s voice was quiet. ‘In this particular instance money is not the principal factor.’