his cameras.'
' I’il 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 Sexist. Not that it
'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
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
'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 rain forest 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 180° 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 rain-forest, 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 rain-forest, 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 criss-crossed 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.1 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.'
