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'And the key? I understand Senhora Figueiredo can be regrettably careless regarding its whereabouts.'

'Something else well known to everyone in Landro,' I said. 'She hangs it behind the bar. Look - what is this?'

'I had a message from Senhor Figueiredo over the radio half an hour ago to say that when he opened his safe this morning to check the contents after his absence, he discovered a consignment of uncut diamonds was missing.'

I took a deep breath. 'Now, look here,' I said. 'Any one of fifty people could have taken them. Why pick on me?'

He nodded briefly, three of the policemen crowded in on me, the fourth climbed up into the observer's cockpit and threw out the mail sack and my grip which the comandante started to search. The man in the cockpit said something briefly in Portuguese that I couldn't catch and handed down a small canvas bag.

'Yours, senhor?' the comandante inquired politely.

'I've never seen it before in my life.'

He opened the bag, peered inside briefly, then poured a stream of uncut diamonds into his left palm.

*

There was a terrible inevitability to it all after that, but I didn't go down without a struggle. The comandante didn't question me himself - not at first. I told my story from beginning to end and exactly as it had happened, to a surprisingly polite young lieutenant who wrote it all down and made no comment.

Then I was taken downstairs to a cell that was almost a parody of what you expected to find up-country in backward South American republics. There were at least forty of us crammed into a space fit for half that number. One bucket for urine, another for excrement and a smell that had to be experienced to be believed.

Most of the others were the sort who were too poor to buy themselves out of trouble. Indians in the main, of the kind who had come to town to learn the white man's big secret and who had found only poverty and degradation.

I pushed towards the window and most of them got out of my way respectfully out of sheer habit. A large, powerful-looking Negro in a crumpled linen suit and straw sombrero sat on a bench against the wall. He looked capable of most things and certainly when he barked an order, the two Indians sitting beside him got out of the way fast enough.

He smiled amiably. 'You have a cigarette for me, senhor?'

As it happened, I had a spare packet in one of my pockets and he seized them avidly. I had a distinct feeling I had made the right gesture.

He said, 'What have they pulled you in for, my friend?'

'A misunderstanding, that's all,' I told him. 'I'll be released before the day's out.'

'As God wills, senhor.'

'And you?'

'I killed a man. They called it manslaughter because my wife was involved, you understand? That was six months ago. I was sentenced by the court yesterday. Three years at hard labour.'

'I suppose it could have been worse,' I said. 'Better than hanging.'

'It is all one in the end, senhor,' he said with a kind of indifference. 'They are sending me to Machados.'

I couldn't think of a thing to say, for the very name was enough to frighten most people locally. A labour camp in the middle of a swamp two or three hundred miles from nowhere on the banks of the Negro. The sort of place from which few people seemed to return.

I said, 'I'm sorry about that.'

He smiled sadly, tilted his hat over his eyes and leaned back against the wall.

I stood at the window which gave a ground-level view of the square at the front of the building. There weren't many people about, just a couple of horse-drawn cabs waiting for custom, drivers dozing in the hot sun. It was peaceful out there. I decided this must all be a dream, that I'd waken very soon and then the Crossley tender from the airstrip pulled up at the bottom of the steps and Hannah got out.

*

They came for me about two hours later, took me upstairs and left me outside the comandante's office with a couple of guards. After a while, the door opened and Hannah and the comandante emerged, shaking hands affably.