“You think he’ll try to get out of the country?” Hector said.
“Pray that he does,” Silva said. “And get the word out that I’ll personally eat the liver of any agent who allows him to do it.”
“WHY CAN’T I JUST go to Bahia or someplace?” Roberto asked.
He sounded like he was half in the bag.
One of Helena Ribeiro’s hands whitened as she tightened her grip on the telephone. The other continued to stroke her cat. She’d called his cell phone while the federal cops were still tossing his apartment, reached him in the bar where he liked to drink his lunch.
He tried her patience, that son of hers did. He’d tried her patience ever since he was a little boy, always wanting to know why he had to do this, why he had to do that. Why he had to eat his rice and beans. Why he couldn’t sleep in the same bed when she had a customer. There was a time when she’d thought he’d grow up, stop besieging her with questions, but, no, here he was, forty-one years old and still doing it.
She hovered over him too much. She knew it. She did his cooking, did his cleaning, made his decisions for him, treated him like a kid. So maybe she was at fault. Maybe the reason he’d never gotten married was because he’d never found a woman who would take care of him as well as she did. But it was too late now. He was grown. He’d never change.
“You can’t go to Bahia or someplace,” she said patiently, “because the men who’re looking for you aren’t the São Paulo cops. They’re federal police and they’re everywhere. They’re in Bahia, and Rio Grande do Sul, and Rondonia, and Minas Gerais. Everywhere! If you want to avoid them, you have to do as I say.”
There was silence on the other end of the line as he thought it through. She knew he didn’t want to leave the country, didn’t want to go anywhere they didn’t speak Portuguese, anywhere he didn’t know the ropes. But he’d wind up doing what she told him to do. He always did.
“How come you’re so sure they’re federal?” he finally said.
She took a deep breath.
“One of them waved his ID right in my face. And he wasn’t just any federal cop, he was that Silva, the one who’s on tele-vision every now and then. He’s a big-shot chief inspector or some such. And, if he’s on your case, it shows they’re serious.
I’m not scared of him. I’ve had trouble with cops before.
It’s not like the last time. Or any other time for that mat-ter. You’re not going to be able to bribe them like you do the locals. These people are relentless. If they catch you, they’ll put you away for a long time. Is that what you want?”
“No,
mamãe.
”
“Then for God’s sake, stop arguing with me and do as I say.”
It was hard for her to accept that she’d given birth to a dunce. Roberto’s half brother, José Antonio, dead these five years after a drug-gang shoot-out, had inherited the brains in the family. Roberto was no more than a lout, but he was
her
lout, and she couldn’t help loving him with a mother’s love. That was the reason she’d moved into the apartment across the hall, to be close to her only surviving son.
“I have some money for you,” she said.
“How much money?”
“After I pay for your passport, I should be able to give you five thousand American dollars.”
“Only five? Caralho
,
mamãe
,
I’m going to need more than that. I’d better drop by the bank.”
“Are you crazy? Remember how that Jap tracked you the last time? Who’s to say the federals haven’t done the same thing? No, Roberto, you stay away from that bank. Five thousand will keep you in food and lodging for five or six weeks at least. I’ll send you more once you’re settled. Now, listen care-fully. I want you to go to one of those machines that make photos, you know the kind?”
“Where you put in some money and sit inside and—”
“Yes, yes, that’s right. You have to get me a photo. There are different options you can choose from, but the one I want has to be passport sized. You’re not allowed to wear any sun-glasses, you have to look directly into the lens of the camera, and for God’s sake, take that gold chain and that stupid medallion off your neck.”
“It’s not stupid, it’s—”
“Don’t argue with your mother, Roberto. If I say it’s stupid, it’s stupid.”
“Alright. Alright. How long is it gonna take, this passport?
After I have a suitable photo, probably three or four days. I’ll try to pay them extra for a rush job. We have to move quickly. They’ll be circulating your photo before long, might even put it on television. Why, oh why, did you ever have to take up with those disgusting people? Now, see where it’s brought you? You should have listened to me when I told you—”
“Okay, okay, you were right. Now, stop being a pain in the ass.”
“Don’t take that tone with me, Roberto Ribeiro. Apologize to your mother.”
Silence.
“Tell me you’re sorry.”
“Alright, I’m sorry. But don’t you think you’re going over-board? All they got is a description. You know how those police artists are. They hardly ever get it right. I’ll just shave off my mustache and cut my hair. It’s not like they’ve got a photo of me or anything.”
“Roberto, they
have
a picture of you.”
“A picture? No way.”
She sighed. José Antonio would have been one step ahead of her all the way. With Roberto, you had to explain every damned thing.
“They’ll have gotten it from your national identity card.
That one’s no damned good. I was what? Fourteen? Fifteen?
They’ll age it. We’ve wasted enough time in talking. Cut your hair, shave off the mustache, get the photograph, and then check into some cheap hotel downtown. Call me from there, and I’ll come over and pick up the photo. Don’t go back to that clinic. Don’t even put your head out of the door of that hotel room until I come to you with the passport and an airline ticket.”
“You mean I gotta sit around a fucking hotel room for three or four days?”
“Maybe longer.”
“Goddamn it! Where am I going?”
“Paraguay.”
“Paraguay? Fuck me.”
SILVA LEANED over the photos on Hector’s desk. The one from the national identity card showed Ribeiro as a teenager. The mug shot e-mailed by the police in Rio was more recent, only twelve years old. According to the paperwork, Ribeiro was now forty-one.
A police artist had taken the two photographs as a point of departure, spoken to the Portellas and Senhor Goldman, and done a likeness of how Ribeiro currently might look. He’d had to add a mustache and move Ribeiro’s hairline up toward the top of his head. Then he’d made another version with shorter hair and without the mustache. Silva figured that the first thing Roberto would do was lose the mustache.
Just to be safe, the artist had also made a version with Roberto’s hair tinged blond. They probably wouldn’t need that one. The carioca’s skin was swarthy. Blond hair would have made him more noticeable.
“What about his driver’s license?” Silva asked.
Hector shook his head. “He’s had it for years,” he said. “It’s like yours and mine. No photograph. The state of São Paulo didn’t require them until 1998. He’s kept renewing it with-out one.”
“Alright,” Silva said. “How soon can we get the flyer out?
You want to use this one?” He pointed at the version without a mustache and with the cropped hair.
“Hell, no. Use all of them. And add this headline: Wanted for the kidnapping and possible murder of one of our own. That should get everyone’s attention. How soon?”
“We can distribute to the field offices, airports, seaports, and border crossings within an hour.”
“Thank God for e-mail. How about the local cops?”
“Only sure way is to use paper flyers and distribute them by courier service. Two days, minimum.”
“TV stations?”
“It’ll be on the national news at eight tonight.”
“Good. Okay, I think we’re covered on Ribeiro. Let’s get back to Arnaldo. What about that travel agency?”
“We tossed it. There’s nothing useful in their paperwork. Rivas is looking at their computer as we speak. We still have the building covered.”
“And Arnaldo’s cell phone?”
“Hasn’t been switched on since the last time you spoke to him.”
PASSPORTS AND visas are not checked only upon arrival in Brazil, but also upon departure. The people who do the checking are the federal police, so Silva was in a position to exercise a certain degree of control.
He followed up the e-mails by initiating a series of tele-phone calls to the delegados responsible for monitoring Brazil’s borders. He could have let Babyface, or Hector, or someone else do it, but he knew the personal touch, his own voice on the line, would have more impact.
He started with São Paulo’s three international airports, moved on to the seaports of Santos and São Sebastião, and then continued the process in an ever-widening circle. He took a break, and caught five hours of sleep on the couch in the reception area, but he was up again at seven in the morning, calling people at home when he couldn’t get them anywhere else.
By nine thirty, he’d gotten as far as Manaus, the self-styled capital of the Amazon and most definitely not one of his favorite places. Manaus was a cesspool, dirty, hot, foul smelling, with one of the highest indices of childhood pros-titution in the country and administered by corrupt and indolent officials. Corruption and indolence had a way of affecting almost everyone transferred there, including mem-bers of the federal police.
“Who the hell is this?” the sleepy delegado said when Silva awoke him at home.
It was an hour earlier up there, but Silva still thought the lazy bastard should have been behind his desk, or at least on the way to the office.
“Chief Inspector Silva, calling from São Paulo.”
“Oh.” There was a rustle of bedclothes and a muffled com-plaint from a female somewhere in the background.
“What can I do for you, Chief Inspector?”
Silva explained the situation, told the delegado to check his e-mail, and moved on to the next number on his list.
WHILE SILVA WAS SPEAKING to the people in charge of border checkpoints, Denise Ramiro, a medical technician at Dr. Bittler’s clinic, was gently sucking air out of a pipette she’d inserted into a test tube of blood.
A thin column of the red liquid arose. Swiftly, with a ges-ture she’d performed a thousand times, Denise removed the pipette from her mouth, covered the tiny hole with the tip of one latex-gloved finger, and then lifted it, allowing a small quantity of the blood to dribble into another test tube on the opposite end of the same rack.
Denise had no inkling of the origin of the blood in the first tube, no idea that it had been drawn from an Indian baby snatched from the Xingu reservation. She knew only that the blood in the second tube was that of Raul Oliveira, one of Dr. Bittler’s patients.
Denise, like most of the employees at the clinic, was a thor-oughly honest person with an impeccable record. And, like them, she was wholly unaware of how Dr. Bittler sourced the organs he used for transplants. In fact, the only people on his staff privy to that information were Bittler himself, Claudia Andrade, Roberto Ribeiro, Gretchen Furtwangler, Bittler’s longtime secretary, and the anesthesiologist, Teobaldo Vargas.
Harvesting organs was not a simple procedure, but it was a good deal simpler than implanting them. It required fewer people, less expertise, and less time. And it was performed in one of two secret operating rooms, located under the build-ing, accessible only from the parking lot.
Denise had no knowledge of those operating rooms, or of the adjoining oven used for cremating human remains, or of the holding cells that were used to keep the unwilling donors until their time came.
She
was
aware that the clinic seemed to have an almost unending supply of organs, but as far as she was concerned, the organs were obtained in ways common to the profession, if not strictly legal. She assumed it was a simple matter of her boss giving money to the families of the recently deceased.
No, it wasn’t supposed to be that way, but this was Brazil. People with money had always enjoyed special privilege. That’s just the way it was. It had been going on for so long that Denise, and most of her compatriots, didn’t even think of questioning it.
The procedure she was performing that day was called a crossmatch. The objective was to determine an organ’s com-patibility. A so-called positive crossmatch was, in fact, a neg-ative result for the patient. It meant that the available organ would probably be rejected by the body of the person who needed it. Each test was carried out with samples of refriger-ated blood and each took about forty-five minutes.
The result of the first test had been positive. It appeared that the young patient, Raul Oliveira, had a shot at only two organs. He would have been out of luck if the second cross-match had turned out the same way as the first.
But it didn’t.
“Bingo,” Denise said, irreverently, leaning back from her microscope. She peeled off her latex gloves, stretched her back, and picked up the telephone to report the result to Claudia Andrade.
ARNALDO AWOKE to the sound of music.
He had a pain in his head that surpassed any hangover he’d ever known. His mouth was dry, his lips were cracked, and his vision was blurry. He sat up. It took some effort. He felt weak as a kitten.
When the area around him came into focus, it turned out to be a prison cell. At least that’s what it looked like. The door was steel, with a little peephole. He was naked, but not cold. The room, in fact, was uncomfortably warm.
He tried to put two and two together. The big guy with the fucking Flamengo medallion had picked him up. He’d called Silva from the back of the van. He’d drunk something, eaten something, and then . . . and then he couldn’t remem-ber anything more.
The bastard must have drugged him. But why? What the hell was going on?
He started to get up, but movement made his head spin and he sank back onto the sheets, sheets only, no cover, no pillow, a thin mattress. He put his aching head in his hands and looked down. The floor was concrete, the metal bed frame fas-tened to it with bolts, bolts with large hexagonal heads.
The music went on. Something classical. It might have been an overture, the way it slipped from melody to melody. And the volume was turned up far too high. The sound was driving daggers into his head.
He stuck his fingers in his ears, lifted his head, and let his eyes sweep around the room.
There was a toilet in the corner, a stainless steel toilet without a seat. Next to it, bolted to the wall, was a sink, also stainless steel, with a single tap. No shower. No other furni-ture, only the bed. No windows. No indication whether it was day or night.
The music changed. A woman began to sing, but not in Portuguese.
It sounded to Arnaldo like some fucking German opera.
* * *
THE INDIAN baby’s heart wasn’t much larger than one of his tiny fists. Cutting it out was a delicate business, and it took Bittler longer than usual. When he’d finished, he told Teobaldo to go upstairs and anesthetize Raul Oliveira.
Three hours later, Raul, too, was dead.
Bittler’s surgical mask concealed his nose and mouth, but not his anger. Claudia could read it in his eyes. He looked at the dead child as if it had displeased him and was deserving of punishment.
“Shock him again,” he said.
“It’s no use,” she said. “He’s gone.”
“Shock him, I say.”
So she did. The little heart contracted once. But only once.
“Damn,” Bittler said.
“His parents are outside,” Claudia said.
“You think I don’t know that?” Bittler replied testily. “Go out there and lie to them.”
“What?”
“Tell them we’re finished. Tell them the operation was a success. Tell them he’ll be in intensive care for the next twenty-four hours, and that we never allow family or friends into intensive care.”
“They won’t believe it.”
“Why shouldn’t they?”
“We’ve only been in here for the last two and a half hours. They must know that a successful procedure takes—”
“They don’t know a damned thing,” he snapped.
Teobaldo’s eyes were twinkling above his mask. It was a rare thing for Bittler to lose his temper, and the anesthesiol-ogist seemed to be enjoying the spectacle. Bittler glanced at Teobaldo, noted his amusement, and flushed. Then he took a deep breath and went on in a calmer voice.
“They’ll believe you because they’ll
want
to believe you. Tell them to go home and get some rest. Tell them we’ll call them just as soon as his condition stabilizes. Come to me as soon as they’ve left.”
TEN MINUTES later, Claudia found her employer in his office. She came in with a sour expression on her face. Bittler took it in with a certain degree of satisfaction.
“I was right, wasn’t I?” he said smugly. “They believed every word.”
“They’re gone for the moment,” she admitted grudgingly. She closed the door and leaned against it. “But it doesn’t solve anything. We’ve won a few hours, nothing more. We can’t keep them in the dark forever.”
“A few hours is long enough,” Bittler said. “Stick your head outside and tell Gretchen to summon Roberto.”
Claudia shook her head.
“He’s not here.”
“Not here?”
“I wanted him to incinerate the remains of the Indian brat. When I couldn’t find him, I asked Gretchen if she knew where he was. She said he didn’t come in yesterday, and he isn’t here today. She’s called his cell phone re-peatedly. She keeps getting his voice mail, and he doesn’t call back.”
Bittler frowned.
“There’s no time to waste. We can’t just sit around and wait for him to turn up. You’ll have to do it yourself.”
“Incinerate the Indian brat?”
“No. Teobaldo can attend to that.”
“Then what?”
“Kill the Oliveiras.”
* * *
“DR. ANDRADE, ” Ana Carmen said when Claudia showed up at the apartment unannounced. “Oh, my God, is there anything wrong?”
The chain was on the door, reducing the opening to just a few centimeters. Claudia could see little more than one of Ana Carmen’s eyes. The eye was blue—and huge with fear.
“Raul’s fine,” Claudia reassured her. “Your place is on my way home. I’d thought I’d stop by and give you a progress report.”
Claudia heard Ana Carmen breathe out a long breath and realized, only then, that she’d been holding it in. The eye was returning to normal size, but the woman still wasn’t quite over her shock.
“May I come in?” Claudia asked.
“Oh, of course. Forgive me.”
Ana Carmen fumbled with the chain and opened the door. She was wearing a bathrobe over a nightgown. Behind her, the corridor was unlit. In the dim light the smudges under her eyes looked like badly applied makeup.
Claudia crossed the threshold. Ana Carmen locked and chained the door. It was São Paulo, after all. One had to take precautions.
“Where’s your husband?” Claudia asked.
“In the bedroom,” Ana Carmen said, “trying to get some rest. Please, come this way.”
Claudia followed her down a hallway lined with Indian artifacts: bead necklaces, feather headdresses, bows, arrows, spears, wooden knives, and some other objects she didn’t recognize.
The hallway opened onto a small living room. Two arm-chairs, a sofa, and a coffee table crowded the narrow space. Watery sunlight spilled through the blinds and illuminated a painting on the opposite wall, a watercolor of some baroque church. Claudia approached the work, as if she were admiring it.
“Very nice,” she said.
Beyond kitsch,
she thought.
“We bought it on our honeymoon. The church is in Ouro Preto. You’ve been to Ouro Preto?”
Ouro Preto was deep in the mountains of Minas Gerais, a jewel of eighteenth-century colonial architecture.
“Yes,” Claudia said.
“But you’re not here to talk about travel or art,” Ana Carmen said, obviously anxious to get to the subject of her son.
A good thing, too,
Claudia thought,
because Ouro Preto is a
boring backwater and that piece of trash is anything but art.
“My husband and I are immensely in your debt,” the baby’s mother went on, “yours and Dr. Bittler’s.”
“And we’re immensely pleased that we were able to save Raul,” Claudia lied, going through the motions.
“I have to tell you, though, that the doctor’s attitude toward the other children, the Indian babies, was something my husband and I found . . . well . . . shocking.”
“I hope you haven’t been talking about that, about where we got the heart for Raul.”
“No, no, of course not,” Ana Carmen said, wringing her hands. “Not even to my mother. Clovis wouldn’t permit it.
Wise,” Claudia said.
“You can trust us. We’ll never tell.”
Not until you find out your son is dead,
Claudia thought.
There was a door in one corner of the living room. It opened and Clovis came in. He caught sight of Claudia and his face turned pale.
“No,” Ana Carmen said quickly. “He’s fine. Doctor Andrade stopped by on her way home. She’s going to give us a progress report.”
Clovis’s color returned, and some of the stiffness seemed to go out of his body. He looked down at his feet. He was wearing a tattered pair of his wife’s slippers. One of them had the remnants of a pink bow.
Claudia saw it and smiled.
He caught her look and forced a smile of his own. “Yeah,” he said. “Pretty ridiculous, huh? But we don’t have a carpet in the bedroom.”
As if that explained it.
Ana Carmen put a hand on Claudia’s arm. “I’m being such a bad hostess,” she said. “How about some coffee? You
will
drink some coffee.”
“Coffee would be nice,” Claudia said.
Clovis pointed at one of the four chairs in the tiny dining alcove.
“Why don’t we sit there?”
Claudia reached into her bag and removed a metal box that had once held English chocolates. “I brought some cookies. They’re to die for,” she said, and almost smiled.
Clovis pulled out one of the chairs for her and took one on the opposite side of the table. A vase of wilting flowers stood between them. He moved it aside.
“I’m glad you came,” he said. “I find it easier to talk to you than I do to Dr. Bittler.”
“Many people do. He’s a shy man. Sometimes it comes across as arrogance.”
“Yes,” he said. He picked up a dead petal from the table and distractedly rolled it between a thumb and forefinger. “The two of you have been doing this for a long time, haven’t you?”
“Doing what?”
“Stealing organs.”
Claudia crossed her arms and leaned back in her chair.
“Wherever did you get an idea like that?”
“I don’t know. I just . . . I . . . well, frankly Dr. Andrade, I’m finding it very difficult to live with what I’ve done.”
“Pangs of conscience?”
“Call it whatever you like, but now that Raul’s procedure has been successful . . .” His words drifted off.
“Surely, you’re not thinking of going to the authorities?”
“No, of course not,” he said, his voice totally lacking in conviction, “but I’m not inclined to help you with any fur-ther kidnappings out of the Xingu reservation.”
“You do recognize that Dr. Bittler only wants those Indians so he can save other lives?”
“I . . . I’ve been discussing the issue with my wife . . .”
“And?”
“You needn’t look at me like that. I know I agreed to the scheme, but I feel differently now.” He gave her what Claudia interpreted as a sly look. “I’d find it a lot easier to keep quiet if we just forgot about any future plans for the Indians.”
Claudia removed the lid from the metal box, and pushed the cookies across the table to rest in front of Clovis. “We should discuss that in more detail,” she said, “as soon as your wife comes back with the coffee.”
THERE WAS a chance that one, or both of them, would refuse a cookie. Claudia was prepared for that. She had a 6.35 mm Beretta semiautomatic pistol in her purse.
The weapon proved unnecessary.