A Question of Ethics Read online

  Rodolfo examined the photograph of Eunicia. It showed her lying limp and unquestionably dead on the beach at Amaralina. He nodded with satisfaction. “This should be adequate proof,” he said. He kept looking at the picture. Then he smiled. “Even the young donkey sometimes loses its footing,” he said sententiously. “May I keep this photograph? It will be passed along to our principal. And if all is well. I shall meet you at the same place tomorrow afternoon at three.”

  He went off with Manuel’s print. And at three the next afternoon, he met Manuel again near the flower market and paused only long enough to shake his hand and say, “Good work. Satisfactory.” This time, he left an even thicker pad of currency in Manuel’s hand than when first they had met.

  Manuel pocketed the banknotes almost casually, and hailed a taxi. In it, he had himself driven to Copacabana Beach, where he descended about a block from the Aranha Hotel on Avenida Atlantica. Dismissing the cab, he glanced appraisingly at the wide beach, peopled at this hour of the afternoon by bathers as numerous as ants on a dropped sugar cake. Then he entered the public telephone booth across the street, called the Aranha Hotel, and was soon talking in a purposely muffled voice to Senhor Luis Ferreira, one of the hotel’s bookkeepers.

  All he said to him, however, was, “I have a message for you from Bahia, Senhor Ferreira. Meet me on the beach across from your hotel in ten minutes. By the kite-seller’s stand.” He waited for no reply, but hung up and left the booth.

  Then he strolled up the beach toward the hotel, automatically picking his way between the thousands of sea and sun worshippers scattered on the sand. Near the small dark man who sold bird-kites to the children he stationed himself, an unnoticed member of the holiday crowd. From the corners of his eyes, he watched the hotel entrance.

  Soon a slightly stooped young man with a receding chin and thinning blond hair, came out of the hotel door, dodged through the rushing traffic of the avenue to the beach and approached the kite salesman. He paused there, looking with worried eyes at the people around him. The beach was crowded; any one of all those thousands could be the message-bringer from Bahia. He looked at his wrist watch, gauging the ten minutes Manuel had mentioned. And Manuel was sure, then, that this was Luis Ferreira, and none other than the half-brother of Eunicia Camarra.

  Manuel stepped quietly toward him through the hodge-podge of bathers. As he did so, he withdrew his hand from his pocket, and brought out with it, concealed in the palm, a truncated dart of the kind, with a long metal point, that is used to throw at a cork target. The dart had its point filed to a needle sharpness; half the wooden shaft had been cut off, so that the dart handle fitted easily into Manuel’s hand with only a half inch of needle projecting. And on the needle’s point was thickly smeared a dark, tarry substance.

  Several customers were clustered around the kite seller. Four youths were playing beach ball three yards away. A fat man and a thin woman lay on the sand, almost at Ferreira’s feet.

  Approaching Ferreira, Manuel seemed to stumble over the out-thrust foot of the fat sunbather. He staggered a bit, and his heavy boot came down with sickening force on the instep of Luis Ferreira. Manuel threw out his hands as though to catch himself. And in that act, the point of the dart entered deeply into Ferreira’s wrist, just below his coat sleeve.

  Ferreira did not notice. The prick of the needle was overlooked in the excruciating pain of his trodden instep. He jumped back and cursed. Manuel apologized for his clumsiness and walked on up the beach, losing himself in the crowd within seconds.

  He neither hurried enough to be conspicuous, nor lagged enough to waste precious time. Nor did he look back. Not even when he left the beach after a few blocks and walked briskly down Avenida Atlantica toward the city’s center, did he so much as turn his head toward where he had left Ferreira. What need? He knew perfectly well what was happening back there.

  Already the curare from the dart point would have completed its deadly work. Ferreira’s body would be lying upon the beach, still unnoticed, perhaps, among all those reclining figures, but with the motor nerve endings in its striated muscles frozen and helpless, the beating of its heart soon to be forever stilled by the paralyzing drug. In three minutes or less, Ferreira would be dead. That was certain. And the blonde child of Bahia who had so strangely touched the long-dormant buds of affection in Manuel Andradas, was safe from harm.

  Manuel permitted himself a chuckle as he walked toward town. If someone saves your life, he thought, you owe them a life in return. And if someone pays for a death, you owe them a death for their money.

  He smiled, his muddy brown eyes looking straight ahead.

  This question of ethics, he thought, is not so difficult after all.