The Fugitive

Начало книги

The first time Erick von Roesler saw Brazil was in June, 1939. He crossed on a special summer cruise of the Hamburg Line, ostensibly the managing director of a large company manufacturing agricultural machinery. He dined at the captain’s table, contributing little to the stilted conversation, watched the swimming pool antics from the lonely height of the deck rail above, the evening dancing from a comfortable chair in one corner of the spacious salon, and spent most of his deck hours either calmly contemplating the pulsing sunlit waves, or jotting notes in his voluminous diary.

They docked at Rio de Janeiro on a cool misty morning, with the famed heights of the city lost in a bank of fog that blanketed the mountains and drifted down to muffle the waterfront sounds and clothe the tall buildings with eerie mystery. The ship was scheduled to spend a day in port, unloading machinery from Europe, wines from the Rhine and the Madeiras, tin plate from Spain, and all the miscellaneous welter of cases, casks, boxes and crates that make up the lifeblood flowing along the arteries of commerce. Von Roesler spent the greater part of the morning on deck, leaning curiously over the rail as disembarking passengers dashed back and forth, screaming to their friends on the dock below, or brusquely commanding blue-jacketed porters doubled under towering loads of luggage. His shipboard acquaintances would trot up for a hasty goodbye, a self-conscious handclasp, and immediately forgetting him, dash down the gangplank to be kissed by women and hugged fiercely by men clustered on the dock. Children indeed, he thought, with some satisfaction; children indeed.

Читать дальше →