The Diamond Bubble by Fish Robert L.;

Author:Fish, Robert L.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road

X.

Wilson squatted, caboclo fashion, hunkered down with his back against one of the grotesquely carved wooden pillars that halfheartedly upheld one of the corners of the ferry-slip entrance in the Praça Quinze de Novembro. With the warm sun of late afternoon in his face, and the soft noise of the square about him, he waited quietly, comfortably, happy that they were once more embarked on an adventure that took them from the crowded and predictable city.

The majority of the people about him were standing in queues of one nature or another. Some marked time for the erratic arrival and departure of the madly driven lotacões that used the square as a starting gate in their suicidal race to return as soon as possible; others stood with the endless patience of their kind, waiting for the plodding ferries that would take them across the bay to their homes in Niterói. On all sides peddlers attempted to whip up enthusiasm for their wares, trudging along the queues and offering every useless article imaginable, from vegetables long since wilted from the day’s heat to live baby squid, plastic raincoats, and statuettes cast from purest chalk. Over the entire busy scene the huge outspread arms of the Perimetral Highway loomed, curving massively through the Praça, and angling wide shadows across the grassless packed earth to the water front beyond, impervious to the chatter of the crowds below.

Wilson had had time for several errands since Da Silva’s telephone call, and these had included his following instructions to dress properly for the trip. With the wilted collar of his tan work shirt open at the throat and his small battered overnight bag tucked for safety between his accordion-booted feet, he appeared to be a reasonable facsimile of most of those about him in the square. He was still as nondescript as always, but now in a Brazilian rather than an American style. One of his fingers, dangling to the sidewalk beneath him, traced an idle design in the dust and then brushed it away. Da Silva had said five o’clock, and it was past that hour already. And they had a long and bumpy trip ahead of them. Well, at least one thing was sure—the taxi would get them there. It always had.

His mind dwelt a moment on Da Silva’s unusual taxi and on some of the adventures they had enjoyed in it. He considered the word and rejected it; suffered, he decided, would be more accurate. Although to all outward appearances the battered vehicle was a duplicate of all the other ancient taxicabs that limped, shuddered, and coughed their asthmatic way through the streets and over the rutted highways of Brazil, held together by string, rust, and prayer, and peering myopically at the world through cracked and rheumy glass, beneath the crumpled hood of Da Silva’s taxi beat as finely tuned a twelve-cylinder engine as money or mechanics could arrange. And in its scarred horn ring dwelt a two-way radio set, and beneath the scratches and dents of its body lay bulletproof steel.

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