“You know this Harry Brock quite well, I take it?”
“I do. He helped Alex and I in Oman last year.”
“Bit full of it for my taste.”
Stokely looked over at him. It had been a long day in a small airplane and Ambrose was finally beginning to get on his nerves. “If I knew what Harry Brock was full of, I’d order a case of the stuff and split it with you.”
“Bollocks.”
Stokely was driving, thank God; the roads were ridiculous. The car, some sort of official four-wheel drive vehicle this Brock character had borrowed. Very official looking, taken from the local constabulary car pool via the CIA station chief in Manaus. It was beastly uncomfortable. Not that he’d ever mention it or complain, of course.
They were all such rugged outdoorsy fellows, every last one of them. Stokely, the Aussie pilot, Mick, this serious Arab fellow named Saladin, and, of course, the American spy, Harry Brock. Wearing their bloody bush shorts, shirts with epaulets, naff kit from the Indiana Jones Collection. Even the very attractive woman he’d met at the front desk, Caparina, he thought her name was, had a machete hanging from her belt.
He’d looked at his luggage waiting to go up on the trolley. All he had in his trunks were three-piece linen suits and gabardine trousers. And the pith helmet he’d found in his aunt’s attic which currently adorned his head.
“So, how do you like the Jungle Palace?” Stokely asked, trying to lighten the mood.
Congreve craned around and looked back at their hotel. Three stories high, a wide verandah on each floor, and surrounded by overwhelming vegetation. The shuttered windows, some open to the elements, were aglow through the misty rain.
“The Jungle Palace, I would say, only lives up to half it’s billing,” Congreve said with a grin.
“The Jungle part, you mean?” Stoke said, laughing.
“Precisely.”
Harry Brock certainly had exotic tastes in hotels. The palace was on the extreme fringes of Manaus. Brock had chosen this remote hostelry for one reason. Because it was perched on the banks of the Rio Negro; and there was a dock where Mick could moor the Grumman Goose seaplane.
Ambrose, bone tired from the flight down, sat back and tried to think positive thoughts. The hotel’s bar food was edible, at least. And the barman had Johnnie Black and was generous with his whisky. After flying by seaplane all day from Key West, it had been pleasant to taxi up to one’s private dock and heave out the luggage.
The Blue Goose, which had this day proved her airworthiness beyond question, certainly looked right at home in this tropical environment. She was moored on the river, just off the hotel dock. And, should it come time to get out of here in a hurry, Ambrose could think of no better man to do the job than the Goose’s pilot, a former bush pilot from Queensland, Mick Hocking.
All in all, there were some positives. There was a complimentary bottle of gin in one’s room. A vast four- poster with clean linen sheets stiff as boards, and acres of mosquito netting. A verandah outside his room where he could smoke his pipe in peace. And, Ambrose had learned upon checking in, there were eighteen species of bats in the garden.
How perfectly charming. All of this grandeur and luxe living, and only a scant thousand miles up the Amazon River.
Well, no matter, the game was afoot. He and Stokely Jones were wasting no time, already off on their mission to find the Widow Zimmermann and unlock the code. He had the thriller, the book he and Alex Hawke now fondly called the Da Zimmermann Code, resting in his lap. He had sweated bullets over the damn thing, reading and re-re-reading the book until his eyes glazed over.
Finding Hildegard Zimmermann was vital. There was simply nothing more he could do, no possible arrangement or rearrangement of words or ciphers, that would budge it forward past the mid-point. Where were those brainy chaps in Room 40 when one really needed them?
He closed his eyes, exhausted, in the vain hope of a catnap before they arrived at their destination.
“We’re here,” Stoke said seconds later, and he sat bolt upright just as they drove through the iron gates. There was a dimly lit guardhouse and uniformed sentries on either side of it. Seeing the Police shields on their doors, the guards snapped to a salute as the speeding buggy passed through. Ambrose noticed high stone walls with nasty concertina wire atop them. They soon passed under an arch, including an ancient portcullis, and now were on the hospital grounds proper.
St. James Infirmary suddenly loomed in the headlights. It looked more like a large prison reformatory than a hospital for destitute children. Pretty ghastly, but there you had it. They slowed, and Stokely waved some kind of credential at a lone sentry posted at the entrance to the bricked forecourt. He waved them in, and Stoke parked next to a decades old ambulance standing just outside the main entrance.
“I speak fluent Portuguese,” Congreve reminded Stokely, opening his door. “Just in case.”
“Don’t say anything unless you have to,” Stoke said as they climbed out of the car. “Anybody wants to know, you’re an English doctor who’s here to examine the patient for scientific reasons.”
“And who are you?”
“A friend of the guy who slipped the Chief of State Security in Manaus ten grand so you could see her tonight, Doc.”
“Ah. Why is she here?”
“This is where you go before you disappear.”
At the end of a long dark hall, an elderly woman in a starched nurse’s uniform sat at a reception desk in a pool of white light.
“May I help you?” the old woman said, her Portuguese sounding very neutral, if not downright unfriendly. She was tapping her pencil on a clipboard: a sign-in sheet upside down.
“Good evening, I’m here to see a patient,” Congreve replied cordially in the nurse’s native tongue.
“Name?”
“Mine? Or, the patient’s?”
“Yours,” she said, rather impatiently.
“Dr. Congreve. Dr. Ambrose Congreve.”
She checked the clipboard and looked up at Stokely. “Who is he?”
“My driver.”
Stokely offered her his best credential, a broad white smile.
She hesitated, then wrote something on a thin slip of note paper. She folded the paper and shoved it across the desk. In return, Stoke slid a sealed envelope across to her. She pocketed the envelope and nodded her head, indicating the stairwell.
“The Latin way,” Stoke said, opening the note the nurse had given him.
“It works,” Congreve replied, following him to the stairs.
“Your driver? You have to say that?”
“Whom would have me say you were?”
“Psychiatrist would be more like it. I’ve been trying to cure your fear of flying all damn day.”
“Where are we going, Dr. Jones?”
“Room 313,” Stoke said, “Top floor.”
If the hospital was grim, the top floor was grimmer. It was a long, poorly lit corridor. Filthy. There was a nurse’s station situated beneath a skylight at the center of the wide hall. The periodic lightning flashes gave the elderly nurse on duty a distinctly netherworld appearance. She wore steel-rimmed spectacles that glinted with each strobe as she silently watched their approach.
They paused at her desk and another envelope was delivered and pocketed. The nurse said a few words in Portuguese and Congreve nodded.
“What did she say?” Stoke asked.
“We’re allowed ten minutes, max. No gifts. No items can enter or leave the room.”
“You’ve got the lady’s book?”
“Of course. Underneath my mackintosh.”
Room 313 was at the end of the long hall, on the right. The door was closed and Ambrose tapped lightly upon it before entering. The patient was in a bed on the far side of the room, beneath a dormer window overlooking the hospital grounds. Heat lightning flickered in the heavy cumulus clouds moving rapidly over the treetops.
