Crimes of August: A Novel: 5 (Brazilian Literature in Translation Series) (23 page)

Brigadier Eduardo Gomes, the opposition military leader, was immediately informed of the fugitive’s capture. No thought was given to informing the secretary of the air force, Nero Moura, with the same rapidity. In any case, he was to be replaced that same day by a new secretary, Brigadier Epaminondas. But neither of them was respected by air force officialdom. The de facto secretary was Eduardo Gomes.

IN HIS FORTRESS IN BANGU
, Eusébio de Andrade met with his fellow bankers Aniceto Moscoso and Ilídio.

“Did you get the summons yet?”

“Not yet. But the clerk told me it’s coming.”

“That inspector is going to give us trouble yet,” said Aniceto.

“He’s already giving us trouble,” said Ilídio.

“I’m not talking about this. This is something you created,” said Aniceto.

“I already spoke to my lawyer,” said Ilídio.

“You need to change lawyers. That peg leg can’t get it up.” Aniceto and Moscoso laughed; Ilídio’s attorney actually did have a mechanical leg.

“He fell off the streetcar when he was a student,” Ilídio said.

“We can’t have lawyers who fall off the streetcar,” said Eusébio. “Go into a sanatorium this very day, one of those that specialize in rest cures. There’s a very good one at Alto da Gávea. Spend a week there. When the summons arrives, send the peg leg with a medical certificate to say you’re sick. In the meantime, we’re going to act on another front, aren’t we, Aniceto?”

“We’ll find a way. It’ll cost money, your money, Ilídio, but we’ll get out of this jam.”

“Is it going to be a lot?”

“Whatever it takes. That’ll teach you to go off half-cocked.”

eighteen

“
I’VE GOT TO GIVE
Senator Freitas some information. He’s pressuring me.”

Rosalvo remained silent, meditating.

“You told me the inspector is investigating a homicide in which the senator may be involved. Just what crime are we talking about?”

Teodoro, the Senate security officer, and Rosalvo, aide to Inspector Mattos, were conversing in a restaurant on General Osório Square, in Ipanema.

“Remember that rich guy who turned up dead in the Deauville Building?”

“Is that the case?”

“The high roller was involved in under-the-table business with the senator, import licenses obtained fraudulently from the Cexim, along with other backroom deals. He knew too much, and he got killed.”

“And the inspector thinks it was the senator who killed the guy?”

“His conclusion is that the senator ordered the killing, to hide his role in the larceny.”

“Does the inspector have proof or is it all supposition, a hunch?”

“I don’t know.”

The waiter brought pork loin with manioc flour.

“There’s a rumor that the senator’s a fruit,” said Rosalvo.

“How can you say that! Some people have the habit of calling any fellow who’s not married a pansy. The senator’s a man.”

“Could be a bull dyke.”

“Impossible. If he were, I’d know.”

“Don’t go telling the senator what I said.”

“No way! The senator will get rid of me if I say something like that to him.”

“Inspector Mattos is crazy. Real crazy, the kind who talks to himself and tears up money. Tell the senator that. He has to be careful with him.”

TEODORO LOST NO TIME
telling Clemente what Rosalvo had said. The part referring to the senator’s possible homosexuality was omitted.

“I’ll talk to the senator about this . . .”

Clemente stared at Teodoro for a long time, until he detected nervousness in his expression. “Can we trust you?”

“But of course, sir.”

“Can the senator trust you? Blindly?”

Teodoro paled.

“The senator will know how to reward that trust,” continued Clemente.

“Whatever the senator asks, not asks, orders, I’ll do.”

Ordering the killing of political adversaries, Clemente said, was common in the interior of Brazil, even more so in Pernambuco, the senator’s home state, but in Rio de Janeiro, capital of the Republic, it was rarer, for one simple reason: it was difficult to find a killer “of faith.” A killer so reliable that if caught he would never reveal who hired him. After this long buildup, Clemente stared at Teodoro and said:

“The senator wants to get rid of that inspector. Could you do it?”

“Me?!”

“The senator has confidence in you.”

“Mr. Clemente, I know someone better than me.”

“Our man can’t be some asshole like that Alcino of the Rua Tonelero business. Who’s the man?”

“My brother.”

“Your brother? I didn’t know you had a brother.”

“He’s the black sheep of the family. He’s been in and out of trouble since he was a boy. He can do what the senator wants. He’s a tough guy from Pernambuco. If he gets caught, he won’t open his mouth; he’ll kill himself first. But that won’t happen. My brother has already killed over twenty people, and they’ve never laid a finger on him. You know who killed the mayor of Caruaru? The chief of police in Maceió? It was him. He’s killed politicians, soldiers, priests. He’s very good.”

“What’s his name?”

“Genésio.”

“Does he live in Rio?”

“Recife. But just call him and he comes, does the job, and takes it on the lam the same day.”

“Then tell him to come right away. By plane. The senator’s in a hurry. As soon as—Genésio, isn’t it?—gets here, let me know. If everything goes well, that appointment for your wife will go through right away. You have a nineteen-year-old son, don’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“The senator can arrange something for him, too.”

Meanwhile, in his office, Senator Freitas was receiving his main electoral supporter, a plantation owner known as “Colonel” Linhares. The “colonel” informed him that he was buying false voting papers for the October election for five cruzeiros apiece.

“Here in the State of Rio the same papers can be bought for two, three cruzeiros at most,” protested Freitas. “You think I have a printing press to manufacture money like Oswaldo Aranha?”

“I brought you a bottle of your cherry liqueur,” said Linhares.

“Don’t change the subject. You’ve got to get the voting papers for less. I doubt if my opponents are paying all that.”

“I’ll see what I can do, senator. Now try the liqueur. Try it, it’s really very good.”

THE INSPECTOR BEGAN THE DAY
by going to have an x-ray done of his stomach.

The doctor’s office was in Copacabana, on Rua Barata Ribeiro. The inspector saw in the street many women carrying on their heads and in their hands cans, buckets, pots, and teakettles filled with water.

“I don’t even have water to wash my hands,” was the first thing the radiologist told him. “My wife went out this morning with the maid. It’s absurd. She didn’t even make breakfast. Yesterday it was the same thing. My children’s school closed for lack of water, and there haven’t been any classes for three days. I’m washing my hands with bottled water. Meanwhile, the politicians make speeches, everybody makes speeches, but nobody solves the problem of lack of water.”

With dramatic gestures, as if to demonstrate the gravity of the situation, the doctor opened a bottle of São Lourenço water and used it to wash his hands in the small sink in the consultation room.

“How are your stools? Very dark?”

“I always forget to check.”

“You have to take care of your health. The hemoglobin count from your blood test indicates that you’re having gastric hemorrhaging. We’ll see what the x-ray has to say.”

“I take care of my health. I always carry antacids in my pocket and drink milk all the time.”

The radiologist handed him a glass with a thick beige-colored liquid.

“What’s this concoction that I’m drinking?” The taste of dirt mixed with chalk, similar to the taste of the whitewash on walls he sometimes ate when he was a child.

“Barium. For the contrast.”

Mattos took off his clothes, put on a gown, and lay down on the x-ray table.

The x-rays were taken.

“You may suffer some constipation because of the barium,” the radiologist said.

A CHECK OF FINGERPRINTS
with the Félix Pacheco Institute confirmed that the corpse identified by Mattos at the morgue was Ibrahim Assad.

Mattos had asked Leonídio to record the name of whoever came to the morgue to claim the body and provide him with the information at once. For three days the cadaver had remained in the refrigerator, without receiving a single visitor. Administrative measures were being taken for Assad to be buried as an indigent when an employee of the Santa Clara mortuary showed up to embalm the body.

“The remains are going to be transported to Caxambu, in Minas, to be buried,” Leonídio said. “The body snatcher says he doesn’t know who paid the expenses.”

In the office of the Santa Clara funeral home, an employee received Mattos and explained that the person who had paid the costs of embalming and transport of the body had asked for his act of charity to be anonymous.

“That person knows the mother of the deceased, a lady without resources . . . There are still good people in this world capable of a disinterested act of kindness . . .”

Mattos, who until then had not said he was from the police, showed his
ID
. His stomach felt heavy because of the barium he’d taken for the x-ray, but at the same time he believed the test had improved his health, and that he was cured.

“I’m investigating a murder. Tell me who paid the costs.”

“You put me in a difficult position.”

“Out with it. I’ve got a lot ahead of me today.”

“A difficult situation . . .”

“Do you prefer to go the precinct with me?”

“It was a police officer, like you.”

“His name.”

The employee wiped sweat from his forehead with a purple handkerchief he took from his pocket. “Mr. Ubaldo Pádua.”

THE MAYOR OF NEW ORLEANS
, Lesseps S. Morrison, received by President Vargas, said that Rio de Janeiro was still, despite a degree of pessimism among some of its people, one of the most pleasant cities, and certainly the most beautiful city, on earth.

Morrison, visiting Rio for the third time, accompanied Henry Kaiser, one of the kings of the American automotive industry.

In the audience with the president of the Republic, Kaiser assured that his firm was ready to transport immediately to Brazil a factory with an annual production capacity of fifty thousand automobiles intended for the domestic market and for export.

Also present at the meeting were Secretary Oswaldo Aranha, the American Ambassador James Kemper, and Mr. Herbert Moses.

When the Americans left the interview, Kaiser commented in the car taking them from the Catete to the Hotel Copacabana Palace that from the photos of Vargas he’d seen in the United States, always smiling and with a cigar in his mouth, he expected him to be a happy and good-natured person; he had been surprised by the president’s melancholy and somber appearance.

“He must be sick,” said Kemper, who had also noticed Vargas’s sadness. “It’s the only explanation for his depression.”

Morrison ventured the hypothesis, quickly accepted by the others, that the president might have the same flu virus that he had caught upon arriving in Brazil. “It was very kind of him to receive us in that condition.”

MATTOS TRIED ALL DAY
to locate Pádua.

When he got home, Alice was sitting in the living room writing in a thick notebook with a leather cover.

“My diary. But it’s not really a diary, it’s more a book of thoughts. I was writing about the death of Colette, what it means to me. I wrote down what you said to me that day: I have other deaths to worry about.”

“I said that?”

“Yes.”

“May I read it?”

Alice closed the notebook. “No one has ever read my diary. I’ve never shown it to anyone in this world. Especially you. One day, when we were seeing each other, I gave you a poem I had written, and you laughed, saying it was funny.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“You don’t like poetry.”

“I never told you I don’t like poetry.”

“You only like opera. Because when you were a little boy your mother would play ‘Una furtiva lagrima’ on the Victrola, and you would cry.”

“You’re making that up.”

“It was you who told me.”

“Making up that business about me not liking poetry.”

“A policeman can’t like poetry. He has other deaths to worry about.”

“Did you look for an apartment to rent?”

“I didn’t have time. Know what I’d have liked to do these days? I’d have liked to go to São Paulo to the International Writers Conference, but you didn’t even think about taking me.”

“You didn’t mention it to me. In any case, I couldn’t leave Rio. I’m in the middle of a very difficult investigation.”

“Please don’t yell at me.”

“I’m not yelling.”

“Try to control your aggressiveness for a minute and listen to what I’m going to read to you now.” Alice displayed a sheet of paper in her hand. “Can you do that? One minute?”

“All right.”

“Let’s go sit in the bedroom.”

Mattos took of his coat. Now, owing to the present of Alice in the apartment, he left his revolver at the station.

They sat on the bed. “May I read?”

“Go ahead.”

“Declaration of Principles of the Conference on Poetry. Are you paying attention?”

“Yes, yes.”

“See how it is? You can’t hide your impatience.”

“Please, read, I’m paying total attention.”

“The poetry section of the International Writers Conference, meeting in São Paulo, during ceremonies commemorating the quadricentennial of the city in whose foundation collaborated the poet-priest José de Anchieta, recognizes the considerable technical progress that has characterized poetry, both international and Brazilian, systematized by critics of the most diverse conceptions; proclaims the broad right of the poet to aesthetic search and the necessity that he dominate his instrument in order to enrich creation; and manifests not only the conviction that conquests of form will be directed toward expressing great collective aspirations, belief in human beings and in individual rights, as well as confidence that there will be found in all its fullness the way to reach the sensitivity of the man of today—that’s directed straight at you, Alberto—the man of today unattuned to the poetry of high quality that is being published.”

“Interesting.”

“Interesting? Do you know who’s in São Paulo at this very moment? Robert Frost, William Faulkner, Miguel Torga, João Cabral de Melo Neto. And all you can say is ‘interesting.’”

“Wonderful.”

Alice tore up the paper she was holding. With closed fists she beat against Mattos’s chest, saying that he couldn’t treat her so cruelly. Her blows were weak; Mattos let her go on striking him until she tired.

Leaving Alice lying on the bed, now immobile as if dead, Mattos went back to the living room. His stomach hurt, but there was no milk in the refrigerator, and he had run out of antacids.

The telephone rang.

“This is Pedro Lomagno. Is my wife there?”

“She’s sleeping.”

“I want to talk to her.”

“She’s sleeping.”

“You’re aware that my wife . . . uh . . . has problems . . . I spoke to the doctor and he told me it would be best for Alice to come home . . . She feels more protected in familiar surroundings . . . I’d like to have your help for that . . .”

“Mr. Lomagno, I don’t feel good about this situation either. But Alice is here because she wants to be. She told me she’s separated from you. She asked to stay here, because she doesn’t have a family member to stay with. I don’t think it’s a good solution either, but I can’t throw her out . . .”

“I’d like to hear her say that.”