Crimes of August: A Novel: 5 (Brazilian Literature in Translation Series) (17 page)

“Does she hallucinate?”

“No. Let’s say she has illusions, at the height of the episodes. Hallucination is perception without an object. Illusion, the deformed perception of the object.”

“What kind of illusions?”

“Some ideas of persecution, transitory and epiphenomenal.”

IN THE MORNING
, while the president was in Belo Horizonte, General Zenóbio conferred at length with General Caiado de Castro at the Catete Palace. The main topics aired were the disturbances in Marechal Floriano Square, the gathering of military officers at the Aeronautics Club, and the interrogation of Lieutenant Gregório in the barracks of the Second Military Police Battalion.

In the afternoon, Zenóbio, the secretary of war, called a meeting of seventy-three generals serving in the capital, among them General Estillac Leal, who had come from São Paulo especially for that purpose.

No general was willing to make a statement to the press following the meeting.

Later, at about seven that night, a note would be distributed: “At the meeting today, at which were present all the general officers serving in this capital, along with the army general in command of the Central Military Zone, Estillac Leal and his Chief of Staff General Floriano Keller, the following position, arrived at yesterday by high-ranking officials of the three armed forces, was reaffirmed: to persevere in the goal of investigating the criminal action that culminated in the assassination of Major Rubens Florentino Vaz, to effect the trial of the criminals by the justice system, and, furthermore, to remain, under any circumstance that may occur, within provisions imposed by the Federal Constitution.”

GREGÓRIO HAD BEEN INTERROGATED
at Galeão air base for eight hours. The main interrogators had been Inspector Pastor, Prosecutor Cordeiro Guerra, and Colonel Adyl. Several air force officers were also present.

Gregório had said that he had eighty men under him in the personal guard, each of whom earned five thousand cruzeiros a month. He earned ten thousand. The monthly outlay of the personal guard came to five hundred thousand cruzeiros. He was sleeping when they called to inform him of the attack. He didn’t attribute the slightest importance to it and went back to sleep. The next day he learned greater details. He had assumed it was a personal matter and not political. It had never crossed his mind that one of his men might be involved, which is why he didn’t bring the fact to the attention of the head of state or General Caiado de Castro. Later, he had been surprised to learn that Climerio had been involved in the attack.

At the end of the interrogation, Gregório had felt ill. He was taken under escort to the Galeão hospital, where military doctors confirmed that his health was good.

THAT NIGHT
, when he arrived at the Deauville Building, Pedro Lomagno had the street door opened by a new doorman.

“Please, sir, who are you visiting?”

“You’re new here?”

“I work in the garage. I’m sitting in for Raimundo.”

“Dona Luciana Gomes Aguiar is expecting me. I’m Pedro Lomagno.”

Luciana opened the door with a champagne glass in her hand. She embraced Lomagno tightly, biting his ear.

Lomagno moved his head away. “How long have you been drinking?”

“I feel so happy, so happy. I think the last time I felt this happy was when I was six years old. Remember I told you about it? The time my mother gave me that doll? Didn’t I tell you about that? I didn’t want to wear braces.”

“You told me. How long have you been drinking?”

“Since the time you called me to say the cop thought the Negro—but it wasn’t because of that. I’m happy because I love you . . .”

Luciana picked up the bottle and filled two glasses. They were in the spacious living room of the Deauville apartment.

“It’s better if you stop for a while.”

“Everything’s turning out right, my love. Don’t you feel freer? Freer than ever? Oh . . . I was forgetting Alice. You poor thing, having to carry all that weight.”

Lomagno took the glass from Luciana’s hand. “Stop for a while.”

“Let’s get Alice out of our way too. In any case, a crazy woman like her won’t be missed. You deserve to be happy, we deserve to be happy. I want to be happy!”

“Don’t cry, Luciana.”

“My father didn’t love me, my mother didn’t love me.”

“No child loves its parents.”

“That’s what I meant to say.”

“Give me that bottle.”

Luciana clutched the bottle tightly. Her face was contorted.

“Crazy people throw themselves under trains, jump out of windows, drink ant poison, set fire to their clothes, slash their wrists, put a bullet in their head. Why doesn’t Alice do any of those things? Do you still love me? Then prove it, go on, fuck me, kill Alice, fuck me first, now.”

The bottle slipped out of Luciana’s hands, shattering on the floor.

Lomagno picked her up in his arms and carried her, moving slowly, carefully climbing the stairs to the bedroom on the upstairs floor.

Before arriving at the bedroom, Luciana had fallen asleep. Lomagno laid her down on the bed. He stood there for several moments, looking at his lover as if she were a stranger.

Leaving the lamp on, he left the bedroom and walked, curious, through the ample apartment. The quarters formerly occupied by servants were empty. None of the help any longer slept at the apartment. “I don’t want anyone watching me,” Luciana had said.

Finally Lomagno stopped, pensive, in a room that had originally been planned as a nursery and now served as a storage area. He opened the window and let in fresh air from the sea.

A good place for a punching bag, he thought.

LATE AT NIGHT
, Inspector Pádua entered the precinct lockup.

“Ibrahim Assad,” he shouted.

Assad approached the bars.

“You’re being let go,” said Pádua.

“At this time of night?”

“Your habeas corpus just came down.”

The only ones on duty in the precinct at that moment were Pádua, Detective Murilo, who had worked with Pádua for years, and the lockup guard.

Pádua, accompanied by Murilo, took Assad to the empty Robbery and Theft office.

“Where’s my lawyer?”

“There isn’t any lawyer, no fucking habeas corpus. I’m going to waste you,” said Pádua. “But if you tell me why you wanted to kill Inspector Mattos, I might spare you.”

“You’ll forgive me, but I can’t say, Mr. Pádua.”

The prisoner’s calmness impressed the inspector.

“Why can’t you say?”

“I’d be discredited, sir. I have a name to defend.”

“Ibrahim? That’s a name to defend?” Murilo laughed.

But Pádua remained serious. This guy wasn’t just some two-bit loser.

“Exactly. You understand these things. I’m better known by the nickname Old Turk.”

“
The
Old Turk?” said Murilo, admiringly.

“No wonder I suspected something when I saw your
ID
card . . .” said Pádua. “Old Turk . . . I’ve always wanted to meet you, Old Turk.”

“Good thing you’ve heard of me. Then you know it’s not possible for me to do what you ask, sir. I can’t, even if I wanted to, I couldn’t rat—and I don’t want to. Please, don’t waste your time.”

“You understand that you’ve got to die, to serve as an example?”

“I do understand, sir. I know how life is,” said Old Turk stoically. “It was written the day I was born that I would die.”

“You killed a lot of people. What’s the fastest and most painless way?”

“In the back of the neck. Holding the barrel steady. What in the old days they called the coup de grace.”

“Good. Shall we have some coffee?”

“Can you do me one favor?”

“Yes, what is it?”

“To call my mother and tell her to pick up a deed I left at the public registry in Caxambu. I bought a small house for her and the dear old lady doesn’t know it yet. It was for her birthday, day after tomorrow.”

“Give me the phone number, and I’ll call her.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Old Turk knew that Pádua would honor his word. The three of them drank coffee from a thermos. Afterward, they left by car.

thirteen

PÁDUA SPENT THE RAINY MORNING
in his office, flexing his arm muscles and thinking. He phoned Old Turk’s mother as agreed. A promise was a promise, even when made to an outlaw.

“You worried, boss?” asked Murilo, who rarely saw Pádua so somber.

“No,” replied Pádua.

However, Pádua was very worried. He regretted having killed Old Turk. In the past he had regretted not having killed someone. But for having killed, it was the first time. It had been a mistake to liquidate Old Turk. Old Turk was an expensive gunman who usually worked for politicians, plantation owners, and others with financial resources. Now it was impossible to find out who had hired him to kill Mattos. There was some bastard in the city with the balls to order a police inspector killed; the fucker had to be identified. How? How? On top of everything, now he couldn’t warn that idiot Mattos, saying “Know who Ibrahim Assad was? The famous Old Turk, the biggest hired gun in the country. Somebody with a lot of green wants you dead.” Mattos was nuts; if he knew that he, Pádua, had killed Old Turk, he’d immediately open an inquiry, saying in that damned way of his, “Very sorry, Pádua, but you broke the law.” What important interests could Mattos be bucking, who had Mattos gotten riled up to cause such a strong reaction? Pádua, mistakenly, lost no time thinking about the arrest of Ilídio. Numbers bigwigs don’t have policemen killed. Someone else was behind it.

Mattos arrived at the precinct shortly after eleven in the morning.

Pádua turned over the blotter to Mattos.

“Anything important?”

“Nothing. Just routine.”

“Are you feeling all right?”

“I’ve got a slight headache. Oh yeah, I was forgetting. I released that itinerant peddler that you arrested.”

“What peddler?”

“That guy that entered your apartment. A third-rate burglar who got the wrong address. I think he learned his lesson.”

“He wasn’t some shitass burglar. I’d like to know more about him. Did you ask
HQ
for his record?”

“I asked for the information by phone, like you do. The guy was, is clean.”

“Did you draw up the concealed weapons charge?”

“No. You’ve done the same thing with me. Releasing crooks I arrest. See how annoying it is?”

“This case was different. He was caught in the act.”

“But I let the guy go. It’s too late now.” Pause. “Too late now.”

Mattos perceived lies and bitterness in his colleague’s voice.

“How are things going?” asked Pádua.

“What things?”

“Work.”

“Nothing new.”

“You never told me why you want info on Senator Vitor Freitas. Anything I can help with?”

“No. Thanks.”

“If you need help, you can count on me, okay?”

After Pádua left, Mattos went to the lockup. He told the jailer to open the cell.

“Odorico, come to my office.”

The cell boss followed Mattos to his room.

“Remember that tall guy who was arrested two days ago?”

“I remember him, sir. A guy with the face of a Syrian. I didn’t like him. He kept to himself in a corner, without speaking to nobody. I figured I’d have problems with him. He got out.”

“Who let him out?”

“Inspector Pádua.”

“Did you see it?”

“Uh-huh. At night Inspector Pádua showed up at the cell and called the guy. Said he was getting out.”

“Anything else?”

Odorico thought it very strange for Pádua to release a prisoner. But a cell boss’s job was to maintain order in lockup. Anybody who talked a lot was a gossip.

“After the man was let go, I went back to sleep, sir. Everything in order.”

Mattos summoned Rosalvo.

“Call all the precincts and tell them we’re looking for a dark-skinned man with a mustache, named Ibrahim Assad. Born in Caxambu, Minas Gerais, in 1912. Call the morgue and ask them to notify me if a corpse matching that description shows up.”

Mattos remained in his office listening to the radio while he signed poverty papers and proofs of residence.

Brigadier Eduardo Gomes had denied that an uprising had taken place at the air base at Santa Cruz, where the Brazilian Air Force fighter planes were housed. There was an atmosphere of apprehension in the city, according to the newscast. Families were taking their children out of schools.

Radio Globo spoke of a second attack on Lacerda, kept secret till then. On Sunday, August 8, Lacerda was arriving by boat to the island of Paquetá for a rally, accompanied by a Radio Globo reporter, Raul Brunini, and other persons when, amid the popping of fireworks launched by voters in welcome, they heard a loud blast underfoot. It was a stick of dynamite that had exploded near the hull. No one had been hurt. The vessel had begun taking on water, without, however, sinking. Lacerda’s party attempted to downplay the fact and returned to the mainland on a different boat.

Downplay the fact? Did anyone believe that? thought Mattos. A cherry bomb had probably gone off near the launch, and some joker must have suggested, “Why don’t we say we were under attack?”

News from everywhere in Brazil was transmitted by the radio, emphasizing the atmosphere of agitation among students, politicians, the manufacturing class, and professionals, because of the assassination of Major Vaz.

The
ASA
agency distributed statements by Federal Deputy Otávio Mangabeira, offered at the Hotel Bahia, in Salvador. Mangabeira said the nation was exhausted from so much humiliation and suffering. However, everything had limits. Only the armed forces could come to the aid of the country. “Let us unite around them as one, placing in them our complete confidence, obeying their command as if we were at war.”

What could be expected of a guy, thought Mattos, who as a sitting federal deputy had subserviently kissed Eisenhower’s hand in Congress when the American general had visited Brazil after the war? What could be expected from an old enemy of Vargas? From one of the founders of the
UDN
?

Mangabeira said he had no doubts about the responsibility of the government and of the president himself for the monstrous attack that was having such an effect on public opinion in the nation. Until then, it was the unprecedented levels of embezzlement, the immorality that corrupted with incredible insolence. The people, driven to hunger by the cost of living resulting in great part from acts of the government, were clearly and calculatingly being led toward anarchy, to the benefit of the administration itself. But now came the effort to eliminate the unvanquished denouncer of the scandals, who had escaped only by a miracle. But the bullets intended for him had killed an officer of the air force, an exemplar of devotion to his kind, who was accompanying the intrepid Lacerda. What was operating in the country under the name of legality was the negation of legal order, even greater now that it had stooped to murder. The wretch who had committed the crime was, in this case, the least responsible. The one most responsible, the one truly responsible occupied the Catete Palace, though ready, if necessary, to shed tears. Mangabeira preferred to see Brazil attacked and bravely expelling the foreign aggressor than to see what he said he was seeing: the country sapped, undermined, and corrupted by the enemy within, ensconced in power.

At seven p.m. Mattos told Rosalvo he was going out. “I won’t be long. If anyone comes looking for me, I’ll be back around nine.”

“Can I ask where you’re going?”

“No. It’s official.”

He took a cab. “Sixty Rainha Elizabeth,” Mattos told the driver. Had Rosalvo been lying or mistaken José Silva’s address? Number sixty was a luxury apartment building.

“Which is Mr. José Silva’s apartment?” Mattos asked the doorman.

“Five-oh-one,” the doorman said.

Mattos took the elevator. One apartment per floor.

He rang the bell. A little girl, with her hair in two long braids, opened the door.

“Daddy,” the girl shouted, “it’s for you.”

The man who came forth appeared to be about forty-five, with light brown hair, beginning to go bald. He was holding a newspaper.

“I’m looking for Mr. José Silva.”

“That’s me.”

Mattos identified himself. “I’m investigating the murder of Paulo Gomes Aguiar.”

“I don’t know how I can be of any help.”

“May I come in?”

“Uh . . . Yes . . . Please.”

The girl was still in the living room, staring at the cop with curiosity.

“Go inside there, with Mommy,” said José Silva.

José Silva folded, then unfolded the newspaper. He put it on a table.

“Please have a seat.”

“I have information that you knew Paulo Gomes Aguiar.”

“Yes. But I haven’t seen him for many years.”

“Could you be more precise?”

“We were classmates in the first years of high school, at the São Joaquim. I never saw him after that.”

“What about Pedro Lomagno? Were you also a classmate of his?”

“Yes.”

“Have you seen Pedro Lomagno?”

“Also no. They weren’t friends of mine. Just classmates. In fact, they left the school before graduating.”

The girl appeared at the door and stared at the policeman.

“What is it, Aninha?”

“Mommy wants to speak to you.”

“One moment, please.”

Mattos and the girl were alone in the room.

“Are you from the police?” she asked.

“Yes, I am.”

“Are you going to arrest Daddy?”

“No.”

“Mommy?”

“I’m not here to arrest anyone.”

“Oh . . .” exclaimed the girl, disappointed.

José Silva returned.

“My wife isn’t feeling well.” A smile. “We’re expecting another child, you know? It’ll be our second.”

Mattos noticed the small drops of sweat forming on José Silva’s brow.

“May I ask your profession?”

“I’m a dentist.”

“A good profession,” said Mattos.

“I like my work,” said José Silva.

Mattos stood up. “Well, Dr. Silva, I don’t think you have much to tell me. Sorry to have taken up your time.”

José Silva opened the door.

“One thing more. If another policeman shows up here, tell him you already spoke with me. Say: Inspector Mattos left orders for me to speak with no one but him about the death of Paulo Gomes Aguiar.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You don’t need to understand. Just say that to any policeman who appears.”

“Can I offer you some coffee?”

Mattos would like to have a glass of milk.

“No, thank you very much.”

Before nine, Mattos was back at the precinct. Rosalvo came to talk to him.

“I saw the reports. A Negro. Is Antonio Carlos making this up?”

“He’s competent and diligent.”

“You want me to start looking for that Negro?”

“No need. I already know who he is.”

“And was it him who killed Paulo Gomes Aguiar?”

“Very likely.”

“When are you going to arrest him?”

“At the right moment.”

The inspector was being very laconic. Maybe it was good to irritate him a bit. He always talked a lot when angry.

“Did you see the president is going to pardon more criminals? In July thirty murderers, twenty-two thieves, three swindlers, a macumba priest, and a fence were the beneficiaries. What do you think of that, sir? Sixty some-odd criminals let loose in the streets.”

“They should never even have been arrested.”

“Are you speaking seriously? I think our problem is there’s too many criminals in the streets.”

“Arresting a macumba priest or a fence is stupid. A prisoner costs society money, he spends some time in jail, and comes out worse than when he went in.”

“Then you think not even thieves or killers should be arrested? What about a rapist pervert like Febrônio?”

“If the guy is a major risk to society, a criminal psychopath, that sort of thing, then he just needs to get treatment.”

“And the victim’s family?”

“Fuck the victim’s family. You talk as if we were in the eighteenth century, before Feuerbach. Punishment as revenge. You should’ve studied that shit more carefully in college.”

“I’m not a cultured man like you, but please tell me: isn’t the number of criminals larger and larger? In the whole world? What’s the reason for that? Please enlighten me. Too many people, or too few in jail?”

“I’m not going to waste time arguing with you.”

This time it hadn’t worked. The man was hiding something. Rosalvo firmly believed that obsessives like Mattos shouldn’t be policemen or have any type of authority. He, Rosalvo, didn’t have any type of obsession other than living well, which meant sleeping well, eating well, and fucking well. He thought about Teodoro’s promise. When he transferred to Vice, his simple obsessions could be more easily satisfied. The problem was how to convince Senator Freitas that he’d done something to merit that prize. A Negro. He didn’t see how a Negro could be involved with the senator. In any case, now he had something to offer.

AS THEY HAD AGREED
, Lomagno arrived at the precinct to pick up Inspector Mattos, to look for the macumba priest in Caxias. He arrived in a new Buick, driven by a uniformed chauffeur from Lomagno & Co.

“Wait for my return,” Mattos told Rosalvo.

“Where are you going? Wouldn’t it be better for me to go with you?”

“No. Stay here.”

Mattos and Lomagno, sitting in the back seat of the car, did not talk until they got to the city of Caxias, in the Baixada Fluminense.

After driving around for a time in the city center, the car continued toward one of the neighborhoods on the outskirts. At a certain point, Lomagno told the driver to turn onto a dirt road. They stopped in front of a stonework house, with blue windows, beside which was a worship site with a compacted earth floor, surrounded by trees.

“This is it,” said Lomagno.

The two men got out of the car.

A gray-haired mulatto woman wearing clogs, who had come to the door when she noticed the car arriving, greeted the visitors.

“We’re looking for the priest,” said Lomagno.

“Please be so kind as to enter,” said the woman.

The living room was modestly furnished: a table, some chairs, a worn sofa, an old china cabinet.