Crimes of August: A Novel: 5 (Brazilian Literature in Translation Series) (15 page)

His friend Zuleika was at home. He asked her to store the package.

“What’s in it?”

Chicão opened the package.

“What you want those weapons for?”

“I like looking at them. I think everybody who was in a war ends up liking guns.”

“I get the creeps just looking at them. Wrap them up again.”

Chicão asked Zuleika if he could borrow her car that night.

“What you gonna do with the car? Some woman?”

“You’re my woman,” said Chicão, picking up his friend and carrying her to the bed.

“What’s that mark on your chest? It looks like a bite.”

“It is a bite. I was fighting, in a clinch, and the other guy bit me.”

“Weird . . .”

In bed, Zuleika forgot about the bite. Chicão could stray once in a while as long as he was in love with her as he was that day.

Chicão went out to do some shopping, and when he returned, with a small suitcase, it was already night.

“What do you have in there?” asked Zuleika, who was a curious woman.

“They’re barbells,” said Chicão, sticking his hand in the suitcase and taking out two ten-pound weights.

Zuleika took one of the weights in both hands. “What a heavy thing. What are they for?”

Chicão picked up a barbell in each hand and began to open and close his extended arms, exhibiting his strength. Then he grabbed both weights in one hand and easily raised them over his head.

“Don’t you think there’s better ways of working off energy?”

“Aren’t you the little devil, eh, Zuleika?”

Chicão placed the barbells back in the suitcase, carefully closing it. He didn’t feel like fucking again, but he needed the car, and when Zuleika took off her clothes the desire came.

AT ALMOST ELEVEN P.M.
, Marshal Mascarenhas de Morais, chairman of the armed forces Joint Chiefs of Staff, received a telephone call from a member of the general staff, Brigadier Neto dos Reis, asking permission to come to his house accompanied by Deputy Amaral Peixoto and General Juarez Távora, superintendent of the Superior War College and a member of the Joint Chiefs, to discuss a matter of the utmost importance, relating to the political crisis the country was experiencing. Marshal Mascarenhas agreed to the request. He then phoned General Humberto Castello Branco, also a member of the general staff, who had been part of the general staff in Italy, relating the call he had received and asking that he, Castello Branco, come to the house to witness the meeting Brigadier Neto dos Reis had requested.

Upon returning from Italy in July 1945, where he had commanded the Brazilian Expeditionary Force, Mascarenhas had suffered various setbacks. On October 29 of that year, his friend Vargas was deposed; General Gaspar Dutra, who had been Vargas’s secretary of war and with whom Mascarenhas did not have a good relationship, was elected president in the elections of December 3 and took office on January 31, 1946. On top of that, Góes Monteiro, his enemy, was appointed secretary of war. No command was offered him, which obliged him to retire. Thus, on August 27, 1946, his transfer to the reserves was published in the
Diário Oficial
.

After seven years in the reserves, the marshal had been appointed by Vargas as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In that capacity he conferred weekly with the president, as well as presiding at the meetings of the
JCS
.

At the meeting requested by Neto dos Reis, the marshal was told that Vargas was said to be thinking of handing over the reins of government to General Zenóbio, according to information leaked from the palace.

The one who answered the deputy and the generals there to sound out the marshal was General Castello Branco, a short man who, like his superior Mascarenhas, seemed to lack the minimum height demanded by military regulations to serve in the army. Castello Branco said, and none of his interlocutors had the courage to disagree, that if the president resigned, it would not be a general who should assume the office but the legal replacement, the vice president.

twelve

IT WAS SHORTLY PAST MIDNIGHT
when Chicão asked his friend Zuleika for the keys to her car.

“I don’t know when I’ll be back. Don’t wait up for me.”

“You didn’t tell me what you’re gonna do.”

“I’m taking a big shot to get his rocks off with a girl at the Hotel Colonial, on Avenida Niemeier. He tells his old lady he’s going to São Paulo and heads there to get some strange. I think he’s afraid to go to that neighborhood by himself. I don’t know if he’s planning to spend the night with the woman. If he does, I won’t be back till morning, I’ll be waiting in the car for him. Satisfied? Later, me and you’ll split the money the guy’s giving me. I’m taking the black suitcase. The barbells are for him.”

“The guy needs barbells to screw the woman?”

“The world’s full of rough people, love.”

At the wheel of Zuleika’s old Armstrong, Chicão stopped in front of the Deauville. Raimundo was in the reception area. It was still too early to do the job. Chicão started the car and went to Machado Square, parking near the trolley stop.

He walked to the Lamas restaurant, crossed the long room among tables almost entirely occupied, toward the rear where the pool tables were.

No pool table was vacant. Kinda busy for late Wednesday night, thought Chicão. For a time he watched the players and the kibitzers. He liked watching people, they were so much alike and at the same time so different. During the war he had lived for a long time among men wearing the same olive drab uniform, using the same slang, cracking the same jokes, seeking the same pleasures, feeling the same fears, and yet he’d been able to perceive that the differences among them were greater than the similarities. He’d spoken with Lieutenant Lobão, but the lieutenant had replied that all men were basically the same. The lieutenant didn’t know anything. He was like Zuleika, who after listening, without understanding the first damned thing he said about it, had replied, “The habit doesn’t make the monk.”

He asked one of the kibitzers loitering around one of the tables if he wanted to play.

“I’m broke,” the guy said.

“I’ll pay for the hour.”

They played, without betting.

“You play good,” said Chicão, who, his mind on the job he was going to do, had paid little attention to the game and even so had won one match.

“I once beat Carne Frita. You know who Carne Frita is, don’t you?”

“Who doesn’t?”

“I swear, the same one. It came down to the seven ball. People crowded around to watch.”

“Was that here, in the Lamas?”

The guy hesitated.

“Uh . . . No . . . Downtown . . . At the pool hall on Tiradentes Square.”

Chicão placed his cue on the green felt of the table.

“If you beat Carne Frita, I’m a monkey’s uncle.”

Carne Frita’s phony opponent looked at Chicão as if about to say something, but then desisted. The black man was very large, and beneath that soft voice lurked something very bad. He lowered his eyes and chalked his cue.

The clock on the wall read 1:15. It’s showtime, thought Chicão.

He got in the car and returned to the street where the Deauville was located. He chose a spot distant from the lampposts. He took from the glove box a wide strip of cloth that he wrapped around his neck. He stuck his right arm inside the strip.

He got out of the car. He knocked on the building’s glass door. Raimundo, the doorman, came to open the door, indicating that he had recognized him.

“I’ve got a suitcase in the car for Dona Luciana. You could be a big help by grabbing the suitcase for me. I can’t take my arm out of the sling. I think it’s broken.” He grimaced. “It’s hurting like hell. I’m going from here to the emergency room for the doctors to take an x-ray.”

Raimundo followed Chicão to the car.

“It’s on the back seat.”

Raimundo looked at the suitcase inside the car.

“It’s better if you get inside to grab the suitcase.”

Using his left hand, Chicão awkwardly opened the car door.

“If I had to earn a living using my left hand, I’d have to be a beggar.”

“You could be a doorman. To be a doorman all you need is more patience than a whore working a retirement home.”

They both laughed. Raimundo felt like telling the black man that the police were after him, but why get involved?

Raimundo bent over and got into the car. Chicão entered behind him.

Throwing his heavy body on top of the undernourished, fragile skeleton of the Northeasterner and grabbing him forcefully by the neck, Chicão immobilized him. If anyone had passed by at the moment, they would not have heard even a moan or noticed any movement of dark shadows thrashing about in the car. The only sound heard seemed to be that of a popsicle stick snapping. It was Raimundo’s neck bones being broken in the hands of Chicão.

The street was empty. The windows in the buildings, dark. Chicão had killed Raimundo in less than two minutes.

Leaving the dead man’s body in the rear seat of the car, Chicão leaped into the front seat and set out on the journey he had planned for that night. Part of the trip could be made more quickly on a stretch of the Rio-São Paulo highway, but he didn’t want to risk being stopped by a routine highway patrol inspection.

So he chose a route that was more roundabout but safer. He filled the gas tank at a gas station on Avenida Brasil. The station attendant saw the dead man lying on the back seat and thought he was sleeping. Chicão drove through São João de Meriti, a city where he had lived for so many years, then to Nilópolis, and from there to Mesquita.

In Mesquita the car stalled and was slow to restart. In Nova Iguaçu a tire blew and changing it with the motor running took enormous effort. When he arrived in Queimados, Chicão stopped outside a tire repair shop with the intention of fixing the blowout but preferred to go on; it was better if his presence were not noticed in those areas.

He arrived in Engenheiro Pedreira and at once saw the river. It was four a.m. He stopped the car in a vast deserted plain, partially covered by low scrub vegetation. He turned off the lights, leaving the motor running. When his vision adapted to the darkness, he took the body from the car, tossing it onto a pile of grass. He got the suitcase and placed it on the ground beside the corpse. From inside the suitcase he removed a long flashlight, turned it on, and stuck it in his mouth, clutching it between his teeth; he needed his hands free for the work he was about to do. From the suitcase he removed a small hatchet, a canvas bag reinforced with metal eyelets, a rope, and a small cloth sack.

He stripped the body and examined it to see if it had any birthmarks or scars. Discovering nothing, he used the hatchet to cut off all the dead man’s fingers, without feeling the slightest pity, for the son of a bitch was causing a lot of problems. He placed the fingers, counting them one by one, in the small cloth sack. He prudently counted the fingers again, having no wish to lose one of them at that spot. With all ten fingers secured in the sack, Chicão stashed them in his pants pocket. He took off his shirt, placed the canvas bag around his neck like a gigantic napkin, and kneeled beside the cadaver.

He aimed the beam from the flashlight in his teeth at Raimundo’s bony face. With a face like that, the guy was never going anywhere in life. Where was the best place to start? He turned the body face down on the ground and with the hatchet began to strike the part of the neck directly below the hair.

Chicão had never beheaded anyone and didn’t expect so much work for something so simple.

The bastard, besides puncturing a tire and running down the battery, had a neck like ironwood. The rage he felt toward the dead man amplified the violence of the blows. An especially fierce stroke, at the same time it severed the head, made it turn around, and Chicão saw for the last time, illuminated by the flashlight beam, Raimundo’s dirty face, separated from his trunk.

“No-good fucker,” Chicão tried to say, but his tongue, pinned by the flashlight in his mouth, emitted an unintelligible sound that seemed the growl of a dog.

He removed the bag he had used as a bib to avoid covering himself in blood. He grabbed Raimundo’s head, stuck it into the bag. He took the corpse by the legs and, dragging it to the riverbank, pushed it into the water. The corpse floated for a few seconds and then sank. But Chicão knew that, with the gases forming in the intestines, the body would return to the surface somewhere.

He took the barbells and the rope from the trunk. He put the barbells in the canvas bag, along with the severed head.

The beam from the flashlight was beginning to weaken. He strung the rope through the eyelets, closing it with a tight knot.

Not even the devil’s going to untie that knot, he thought, swinging the bag over his head and hurling it into the river.

Simultaneous with the sound of the bag hitting the water, the flashlight went out for good. He removed it from his mouth and tossed it into the river.

On the return he thought about spreading the fingers along the streets, at intervals of five kilometers, but he remembered the story of Hansel and Gretel throwing bread crumbs in their path and, without knowing exactly why, decided to keep Raimundo’s fingers in his pocket.

After Queimados he took the Rio-São Paulo highway. He no longer feared running into the highway patrol. The day was beginning to dawn. He liked seeing the sunrise. In Italy he had seen beautiful dawns, but none as lovely as those of his country, none as beautiful as that day.

CHICÃO STOPPED
at an automotive repair shop on the highway and told a mechanic to fix the car. He arrived in Rio after eleven a.m. He got stuck in traffic downtown, in front of Candelária church.

A crowd was surrounding the church.

“What’s going on, officer?” Chicão asked a policeman who was trying to organize traffic.

“The seventh-day Mass for the soul of Major Rubens Vaz,” the cop said.

The Mass was being celebrated by the Bishops Hélder Câmara, Jorge Marcos de Oliveira, and José Távora. From the number of official cars, Chicão concluded that the church must be packed with high authorities.

The Mass ended. The crowd around the church increased.

A taxi, with an enormous loudspeaker on its hood, positioned itself in front of the crowd, on Avenida Rio Branco. A voice from inside the vehicle blared: “As happens with all Brazilians, my heart is filled with sadness and revolt. Brazilians, democracy is impossible in our country as long as that aged dictator occupies the presidency. Getúlio’s hands are stained with blood. Only a revolution can bring back decency, dignity, and honor to Brazil. Only a revolution can end this sea of mud. For alderman, vote for Wilson Leite Passos. For federal deputy, Carlos Lacerda!” In the car, giving the speech, was the alderman candidate himself.

Chicão, in his car, surrounded by a crowd that swelled by the minute, followed the taxi with the loudspeaker, which moved ahead slowly. The shouts from the crowd drowned out the discourse coming from inside the taxi.

At Marechal Floriano Square, in front of a building housing a campaign office of the
UDN
, the crowd stopped, yelling even louder.

Suddenly, the clamor from the crowd ceased. Its attention, now silent, had turned to the window of the second floor, the site of Wilson Leite Passos’s campaign headquarters. At the window was a man they all knew.

“Lacerda!” someone screamed, a bellow that seemed to pierce the square from end to end.

The crowd immediately began shouting the name of Lacerda, who gestured with both hands for silence.

“I ask all of you to go home,” Lacerda shouted through a loudspeaker. “Disorder in the streets helps only the murderous oligarchs who are in power.”

The shouts from the crowd drowned out his words. The national anthem was played through the loudspeakers, replacing Lacerda’s inaudible words, but the crowd’s wrath did not subside. In a rage, it surrounded a
PTB
propaganda car, yanking from the wheel a man who said he was Aires de Castro, president of the Metalworkers Union. In a few moments, the car was set on fire.

The popping sound of teargas grenades was heard. The square was quickly invaded by shock troops from the special forces, who stood out in their red berets; they began dispersing the crowd with blows from their batons. A tank, from the Military Police barracks on Evaristo da Veiga, entered the square, hitting the demonstrators with powerful jets of water. People running, protecting their eyes from the teargas bombs, fell and were trampled; the police violently dispersed anyone within reach. Cries of terror were heard. Demonstrators were dragged to patrol wagons parked on Rua Treze de Março. When the police action ceased, the now empty square held the wounded, lying on the ground or being helped by frightened individuals. All that could be heard were moans and brusque orders from the police.

Chicão watched it all from his car parked on Avenida Rio Branco, undisturbed. He’d seen worse things in the war. What was happening neither interested nor moved him. All politicians were corrupt, and those who weren’t thieves, if such existed, were liars. And the imbeciles who went into the streets to cheer on politicians deserved just what they were getting, whacks on the head.

He amused himself during the scrambling of demonstrators and policemen by throwing Raimundo’s severed fingers out the window; pieces of finger were supported on Chicão’s index finger, then propelled by his thumb as if he were shooting marbles.

After taking a shower at Zuleika’s, Chicão called Lomagno’s office, as they had agreed.

“All done, sir. I followed the plan.”

“Where are you?”

“At a friend’s place.”

“Where?”

“Almirante Tamandaré.”

“Leave. Get out of the South Zone. When I can, I’ll look for you at the gym.”

PRESIDENT VARGAS
, accompanied by Deputy Danton Coelho, left Rio at 8:45 a.m., on a Brazilian Air Force plane, headed to Belo Horizonte to inaugurate the new Mannesmann steel mill.

“Everything’s calm,” declared Secretary Tancredo Neves to the press, at the airport.