Ira Levin: Boys from Brazil

Getting down on his knees, he thrust his blond head in under the table and looked into the foot-well. He bent lower, turned his head, and looked up with one blue eye at the table’s underside, scanning it slowly from end to end.

He backed from the table, took the bamboo frame, restored its two cushions, and placed the backrest at an accessible angle. Rising, he stood attentively behind it.

The man in white came, unbuttoning his jacket. He set his briefcase on the floor and turned and lowered himself carefully, finding the backrest’s arms. He folded his legs in under the table, his feet toward the foot-well.

The blond man, bending, pushed at the backrest and squared it to the table.

“ Danke ,” the man in white said.

“ Bitte ,” the blond man said, and went and stood with his back against the wall-opening.

The man in white peeled at a glove, looking approvingly at the table before him. The black-haired man, arms high, side-stepped slowly across the opening between the two rooms, fingering along the top of a projecting black lintel.

A soft tapping sounded; the blond man moved to the door and the black-haired man turned, lowering his arms. The blond man listened, and opened the door to a pink-kimonoed waitress who came in with her head bowed, holding a tin-kling glass and its tray. Her white-mittened feet whispered over the tatami.

“Ah!” the man in white exclaimed happily, folding his gloves. His enthusiastic expression faltered as the waitress, a flat-faced woman, crouched beside him and moved the napkin and chopsticks from his plate. “And what’s your name, dear?” he asked with strained jollity.

“Tsuruko, senhor.” The waitress put a paper coaster down.

“Tsuruko!” With wide eyes and pursed lips the man looked to the blond man and the black-haired man, as if marveling with them at an impressive revelation.

The waitress, having put the drink down, rose and backed away.

“Until my guests come, Tsuruko, I don’t want to be disturbed.”

“Yes, senhor.” She turned and hurried close-kneed from the room.

The blond man closed the door and stepped back to his place before the wall-opening. The black-haired man turned and raised his hands to the lintel-top.

“Tsu, ru, ko,” the man in white said, drawing his briefcase close to his side. In German he said, “If she’s a pretty one what do the not-so-pretty ones look like?”

The blond man grunted a laugh.

The man in white finger-sprang the lockflap of his briefcase and opened it wide enough so that it stayed open. He tucked his folded gloves into an end of it, and leafing through the edges of papers and manila envelopes, drew from among them a thin magazine. He set it down— Lancet , the British medical journal—on the table beside his plate. Scanning its cover, he took from his breast pocket a frayed and faded petit-point eyeglass case, from which he drew a pair of black-framed glasses. Opening them, he put them on, pocketed the case and side-fingered his thin bristly mustache. His hands were small, pink, clean, young-looking. From inside his jacket he brought a gold cigarette case on which a lengthy handwritten inscription was engraved.

The blond man stood before the wall-opening. The black-haired man examined the walls, and the floor, and the serving table, and the backrests. He moved one of the middle table settings aside, spread his handkerchief in its place, and stepping up on it, opened with a screwdriver the chrome-bordered lighting panel.

The man in white read Lancet , sipping now and then at his Dubonnet, smoking a cigarette. He hissed air intently through a gap in his upper teeth. Occasionally he seemed surprised by what he read. Once he exclaimed in English, “Absolutely wrong, sir!”

The guests arrived within a period of four minutes, the first checking his hat but not his attaché case at three minutes of eight, the last at one minute after. When each made his way through waiting groups and couples to the tuxedoed Japanese, he was graciously directed to the blond man at the foot of the stairs; words were exchanged and the guest was shown upward, to the black-haired man pointing at the row of shoes beside the open door.

Six well-dressed businessmen in their middle fifties, fair-skinned, Nordic; sock-footed, they nodded politely to one another and bent to present themselves in Portuguese and Spanish to the man in white. “Ignacio Carreras, Doctor. An honor to meet you.”

“Hello! How are you? I can’t get up, I’m trapped here. This is José de Lima from Rio. Ignacio Carreras from Buenos Aires.”

“Doctor? I’m Jorge Ramos.”

“My friend! Your brother was like this right hand to me. Forgive me for sitting; I’m trapped. Ignacio Carreras from Buenos Aires, José de Lima from Rio. Jorge Ramos from right here in Paulo.”

Two of the guests were old friends, happy to see each other. “In Santiago! Where have you been?” “In Rio!” Another introduced himself with a heel-click that failed: “Antônio Paz, Pôrto Alegre.”

They lowered themselves in at the sides of the table, joking about their awkwardness, groaning; settled themselves with portfolios and attaché cases close beside; shook napkins open, named their drinks to a pretty young waitress gracefully crouching. Flat-faced Tsuruko set a steaming rolled-up washcloth before each man; the man in white and his guests scrubbed appreciatively at their hands, wiped at their mouths.

Wiping away, apparently, Portuguese and Spanish. German began to emerge; German names were exchanged.

“Ah, I know you. You served under Stangl, right? At Treblinka?”

“Did you say ‘Farnbach’? My wife is a Farnbach, from Langen near Frankfurt.”

The drinks were served, and small plates of appetizers—baby shrimp and balls of browned meat. The man in white demonstrated the use of chopsticks. The men who were adept gave guidance to those who weren’t.

“A fork, for God’s sake!”

“No, no!” the man in white laughed to the pretty young waitress. “We’ll make him learn! He has to learn!”

Her name was Mori. The girl in the plain kimono, bringing plates and covered bowls to Tsuruko at the serving table, blushed and said, “Yoshiko, senhor.”

The men ate and drank. They talked about an earthquake in Peru, and the new American president, Ford.

Bowls of clear soup were served, and more plates of food, fried and raw; tea was poured.

The men talked about the oil situation and its probable lessening of the West’s sympathy for Israel.

More food was served—strips of cooked meat, chunks of lobster—and Japanese beer.

The men talked about Japanese women. Kleist-Carreras, a thin man with a glass eye that moved badly, told a wonderfully funny story about a friend’s misadventure in a Tokyo brothel.

The tuxedoed Japanese came in and asked how everything was. “First rate!” the man in white assured him. “Excellent!” The other men agreed, in Portuguese-Spanish-German.

Melon was served. More tea.

The men talked about fishing, and different ways of cooking fish.

The man in white asked Mori to marry him; she smiled and pleaded a husband and two children.

The men climbed up from creaking backrests, stretched their arms and stood on tiptoe, patted their stomachs. A few, the man in white among them, went out into the hallway to find the men’s room. The others talked about the man in white: how charming he was, and how lively and youthful for—was it sixty-three? Sixty-four?

The first group came back; the others went.

The table was clean black, set with brandy snifters, ashtrays, and a box of glass-tubed cigars. Mori went around crouching with a bottle, feeding each snifter a bottomful of dark amber. Tsuruko and Yoshiko whispered at the serving table, disagreeing about the clearing up. “Out, girls,” the man in white said, going to his place. “We wish to speak in private.”