its day during the great rubber boom at the end of the nineteeth century, Manaus had been the original hell-hole, millionaires walking the streets ten-a-penny, baroque palaces, an opera house to rival Paris itself. No sin too great, no wickedness too evil. Sodom and Gomorrah rolled into one and set down on the banks of the Negro, a thousand miles up the Amazon.
I had never cared much for the place. There was a suggestion of corruption, a kind of general decay. A feeling that the jungle was gradually creeping back in and that none of us had any right to be there.
I felt restless and ill-at-ease, reaction to stress, I suppose, and wanted nothing so much as to be on my way, looking back on this place over the sternrail of a riverboat for the last time.
I found the agent in the office of a substantial warehouse on the waterfront. He was tall, cadaverous, with the haunted eyes of a man who knows he has not got long to live and he coughed repeatedly into a large, soiled handkerchief which was already stained with blood.
He gave thanks to Our Lady for my deliverance to the extent of crossing himself and in the same breath pointed out that under the terms of my contract, I only got paid on safe delivery of the Vega to Belem. Which was exactly what I had expected and I left him in a state of near collapse across his desk doing his level best to bring up what was left of his lungs and went outside.
My cab still waited for me, the driver dozing in the heat of the day, his straw sombrero tilted over his eyes. I walked across to the edge of the wharf to see what was going on in the basin which wasn’t much, but there was a stern-wheeler up at the next wharf loading green bananas.
I found the captain in a canvas chair under an awning on the bridge and he surfaced for as long as it took to tell me he was leaving at nine the following morning for Belem and that the trip would take six days. If I didn’t fancy a hammock on deck with his more impoverished customers, I could have the spare bunk in the mate’s cabin with all found for a hundred cruzeiros. I assured him I would be there on time and he closed his eyes with complete indifference and returned to more important matters.
I had just over a thousand cruzeiros in my wallet, around a hundred and fifty pounds sterling at that time which meant that even allowing for the trip down-river and incidental expenses, I would have ample in hand to buy myself a passage to England from Belem on some cargo boat or other.
I was going home. After two and a half years of the worst that South America could offer, I was on my way and it felt marvellous. Definitely one of life’s great moments and all tiredness left me as I turned and hurried back to the cab.
I had expected the worst of the hotel but the Palace was a pleasant surprise. Certainly it had seen better days, but it had a kind of baroque dignity to it, a faded charm that was very appealing, and Hannah’s name had a magic effect on the Senhor Juca he had mentioned, an old, white-haired man in an alpaca jacket who sat behind the desk reading a newspaper.
He took me upstairs personally and ushered me into a room with its own little ironwork terrace overlooking the river. The whole place was a superb example of late Victoriana, caught for all time like a fly in amber from the brass bed to the heavy, mahogany furniture.
An Indian woman in a black bombazine dress appeared with clean sheets and the old man showed me, with some pride, the bathroom next door of which I could have sole use, although regrettably it would be necessary to ring for hot water. I thanked him for his courtesy, but he waved his hands deprecatingly and assured me, with some eloquence, that nothing was too much trouble for a friend of Captain Hannah’s.
I thought about that as I undressed. Whatever else you could say about him, Hannah obviously enjoyed considerable standing in Manaus which was interesting, considering he was a foreigner.
I needed that bath badly, but suddenly, sitting there on the edge of the bed after getting my boots off, I was overwhelmed with tiredness. I climbed between the sheets and was almost instantly asleep.
I surfaced to the mosquito net billowing above me like a pale, white flower in the breeze from the open window and beyond, a face floated disembodied in the diffused yellow glow of an oil lamp.
Old Juca blinked sad, moist eyes. ‘Captain Hannah was here earlier, senhor. He asked me to wake you at nine o’clock.’
It took its own time in getting through to me. ‘Nine o’clock?’
‘He asks you to meet him, senhor, at The Little Boat. He wishes you to dine with him. I have a cab waiting to take you there, senhor. Everything is arranged.’
‘That’s nice of him,’ I said, but any iron in my voice was obviously lost on him.
‘Your bath is waiting, senhor. Hot water is provided.’
He put the lamp down carefully on the table, the door closed with a gentle sigh behind him, the mosquito net fluttered in the eddy like some great moth, then settled again.
Hannah certainly took a lot for granted. I got up, feeling vaguely irritated at the way things were being managed for me and padded across to the open window. Quite suddenly, my whole mood changed for it was pleasantly cool after the heat of the day, the breeze perfumed with flowers. Lights glowed down there on the river and music echoed faintly, the freedom from the sound of it, pulsating through the night, filling me with a vague, irrational excitement.
When I turned back to the room I made another discovery. My canvas grip had been unpacked and my old linen suit had been washed and pressed and hung neatly from the back of a chair waiting for me. There was really nothing I could do, the pressures were too great, so I gave in gracefully, found a towel and went along the corridor to have my bath.
Although the main rainy season was over, rainfall always tends to be heavy in the upper Amazon basin area and sudden, violent downpours are common, especially at night.
I left the hotel to just such a rush of rain and hurried down the steps to the cab which was waiting for me, escorted by Juca who insisted on holding an ancient black umbrella over my head. The driver had raised the leather hood which kept out most of the rain if not all and drove away at once.
The streets were deserted, washed clean of people by the rain and from the moment we left the hotel until we reached our destination, I don’t think we saw more than half a dozen people, particularly when we moved through the back streets towards the river.
We emerged on the waterfront at a place where there were a considerable number of houseboats of various kinds for a great many people actually lived on the river this way. We finally came to a halt at the end of a long pier.
‘This way, senhor.’
The cabby insisted on placing his old oilskin coat about my shoulders and escorted me to the end of the pier where a lantern hung from a pole above a rack festooned with fishing nets.
An old riverboat was moored out there in the darkness, lights gleaming, laughter and music drifting across the water. He leaned down and lifted a large, wooden trapdoor and the light from the lamp flooded in to reveal a flight of wooden steps. He went down and I followed without hesitation. I had, after all, no reason to expect foul play and in any event, the Webley .38 which I’d had the forethought to slip into my right-hand coat pocket was as good an insurance as any.
A kind of boardwalk stretched out through the darkness towards the riverboat, constructed over a series of canoes and it dipped alarmingly as we moved across.
When we reached the other end the cabby smiled and slapped the hull with the flat
