Crimes of August: A Novel: 5 (Brazilian Literature in Translation Series) (4 page)

When she got to the street, she felt great consolation in noting that men turned their heads to watch her go by. She killed some time in the downtown area in order to catch the two o’clock showing of
The Robe
, with Victor Mature, at the Palácio theater. She cried during the film.

It was still early to go to Mother Ingrácia’s spiritualist center, in the Rocha favela. In a pharmacy she bought a bottle of Vanadiol, which the radio claimed was good for the nerves. She walked down Gonçalves Dias, Ouvidor, and Uruguaiana, looking at the shop windows. She entered the A Moda clothes store and asked to try on a dress she saw in the window.

“The store doesn’t live up to its name,” she told the saleslady. “It’s very démodé.”

Since there was little movement in the store, Salete and the saleslady soon began trading confidences in hushed tones. The saleslady confessed she couldn’t take working in that place anymore; the manager was a shrew. Salete said that neither was her life anything great. She loved one man and was living with another; what saved her was having money to buy clothes. When she felt really unhappy, she explained, she would buy a new dress, one of those models that made people look at her on the street. She liked to have people look at her when she was well dressed. That helped her feel a bit more, a bit more, uh, free.

“Elegant clothes have helped me get ahead in life.”

Seeing that the woman was understanding, Salete spoke of her past, even knowing that it was mean to put ideas in the head of a woman with neither the face nor the body to advance in life.

If she weren’t always elegant, she’d still be in Dona Floripes’s house on Rua Mem de Sá, near the Red Cross hospital, fucking bank tellers and salesmen. She told how she’d had the strength to disdain bad advice and bad influences, like those of the madam Floripes, who told her to save her money for the lean years: “Whores have a short shelf life. The breasts can sag overnight. And then there’s cellulite. Stop spending everything on clothes and accessories.” If not for the clothes and accessories, she wouldn’t have been noticed by the important men she came to socialize with, politicians, people from high society, big shots in government, and today she would be wearing toilet water instead of French perfume.

“But you have to have a nicely formed body for clothes to fit well.”

Around 12:30 p.m. she went for lunch at the Colombo. Magalhães said the Colombo was no longer frequented by upper-class people like in the past, but she loved to enter that large dining room with its high mirror-covered walls, was moved by the small orchestra playing Strauss waltzes. She had seen such lovely things only in Europe, when she traveled with Magalhães.

After the movie, she took a taxi to the spiritualist center. She handed Mother Ingrácia the undershorts that she had taken from Mattos’s apartment for the old woman to work her magic.

When she got to her apartment, she called Magalhães and said she’d like to go to a nightclub that evening. Salete wanted to go to the Beguine, but Magalhães said he needed to meet someone at the Night and Day.

The nightclub was housed in the mezzanine of the Hotel Serrador, in Cinelândia on the corner of Rua Senador Dantas, between two movie theaters: the Odeon, on the left, and the Palácio, on the right. From the glassed-in window of the nightclub could be seen the eastern side of the congressional building, the Monroe Palace, deserted at that hour. Further to the right, the dark stain of the gardens of the Passeio Público stood out amidst the lights of the movie theater façades.

“Can you arrange for me to go to the tea at the Vogue, on Sundays? Yesterday I tried and wasn’t allowed in.”

“What do you want in that
thé dansant
?” Magalhães knew that only rich young men and women frequented Sunday afternoons at the Vogue. They would never let a whore in.

“I wanted to hear Fats Elpídio’s band.”

“There are a thousand other places where you can hear Fats Elpídio’s band. It doesn’t have to be in the middle of those shitty bourgeois canapé eaters.”

Shortly before the beginning of the midnight show, the maître d’ brought to Magalhães a man whose dark bookkeeper’s suit clashed with the tussahs, linens, and white Panamas of the other men present.

“Sit down,” Magalhães said.

The man sat down, after nodding in Salete’s direction in a small gesture of courtesy.

“Did the Japanese send the parcel?”

“Mr. Matsubara asked me to give you this,” said the man drily, taking an envelope from his pocket. Only then did Magalhães realize, in the dim light of the nightclub, that the recently arrived man was a Nisei.

“Did you come directly from Marília?” asked Magalhães, putting the envelope in his pocket? “Did you have a good trip?” he added, trying to be amiable.

The Nisei didn’t reply. He stood up. “Any message for Mr. Matsubara?”

“Tell him his contribution won’t be forgotten.”

The man turned his back, this time without acknowledging anyone, and left.

In the envelope was a check for five hundred thousand cruzeiros, a contribution to the campaign of Deputy Roberto Alves, private secretary of the president. Recently, Matsubara had obtained a loan of sixteen million from the Bank of Brazil.

Magalhães gestured to the maître d’, who came over.

“Champagne,” Magalhães said.

“Any preference? We have Veuve Cliquot, Taittinger, René Lamotte, Moët et Chandon, Krug, Pol Roger,” recited the maître d’ proudly.

GREGÓRIO FORTUNATO WAS SURPRISED
that only a few politicians, like Gustavo Capanema, noticed the mood changes that were occurring lately in the president. He had heard Capanema, who had been Mr. Getúlio’s secretary of education during the time of the dictatorship and was now leader of the government party in the Chamber of Deputies, whisper at a gathering, “In the twenty years I’ve known Getúlio, he’s gone from a happy and outgoing man to sad and reserved.” Everyone thought the cause was age, which made people unhappy, but the president wasn’t old, he was Getúlio Vargas, one of those men who are ageless. Gregório knew the reasons for the president’s unhappiness: the hurt caused by all the betrayals he had suffered, the heartbreak over the cowardice of his allies. Major Fitipaldi, one of his military advisers, said that the friends of the president, who had been the beneficiaries of honors and rewards, were nothing but hypocrites and traitors. If there was a man in the world who deserved to be happy, because of all he had done for the poor and humble, that man was Getúlio.

Gregório’s thoughts were interrupted by a telephone call from his wife, Juracy. They had an unpleasant exchange. The head of the guard disliked hearing her complain that he was becoming a visitor in his own home and hung up the phone.

Immediately afterward, he received a call from Magalhães.

“I’ve got the Japanese money.”

“Don’t say anything to Roberto. Bring the check to me.”

“Won’t it bother him if he finds out?”

“I’ve known Roberto from the time he used to clean Mr. Getúlio’s latrine on his ranch in Itu, when we were in exile. Don’t worry about it.”

“Mr. Lodi wants a meeting with you.”

“I was with the deputy here in my room in the palace, I know what he wants.”

“About the Cemtex license—”

“The license has already been issued. It wasn’t easy. Fifty million dollars is a lot of money.”

“Good lord! Is there any way to change the license to another company? That’s what I wanted to talk to you about yesterday. The name of the other company is—”

“You think the government is some damn whorehouse? You think anything goes? Now you come to me with that? After all the problems I faced to get the license granted?”

“The president of Cemtex was murdered. That changes everything. You could say a few words to Souza Dantas—”

“It’s too late.”

“Please, lieutenant, for the love of God, the license has to be transferred to that other company, Brasfesa.”

“It’s too late.”

“Your part is at stake.”

“A cat doesn’t eat a man’s food. Tell your friends that.”

After he hung up, Gregório jotted down on a piece of paper his conversation with Magalhães. In his home he kept a file with confidential information that he deemed important to record; in a folder he would put what he had said to Magalhães about Cemtex and Brasfesa. He needed to arrange a safe place for that folder; his relationship with Juracy was getting worse by the day, because of the woman’s idiotic jealousy. “One of these days I’m going to do something crazy,” she had said, in the middle of an argument. A jealous woman was capable of anything.

three

IT WAS SIX IN THE MORNING
when Mattos’s telephone rang.

“It’s me.”

Silence.

“Remember me?” Alice.

Only three years had gone by.

“I know you like to get up early, that’s why I called at this hour . . .”

It was as if he were at the edge of an abyss, ready to fall. Three years earlier he had called Alice’s home, her mother had come to the phone and said that Alice didn’t want to talk to him and for him not to call again.

Alice had traveled abroad, spent six months in Europe. Upon her return she had married some society type whose name he didn’t remember. Three years.

On the edge of the abyss.

“I’d like to see you. Have tea. How about at the Cavé? They haven’t closed the Cavé, have they?”

“No. I passed by there the other day.”

“Can you? Today? At five?”

“All right.”

After he hung up, the inspector remembered he had an appointment with Mr. Emilio, the maestro, at 5:30 p.m. Since he had the time, as it was still early, he decided to honor Mr. Emilio by listening to
La Traviata
. The recording he owned, made at La Scala in Milan in 1935, wasn’t complete, running only 111 minutes, lacking the aria “No, non udrai rimproveri,” the Germont cabaletta at the end of Act 2, Scene 1. There were thirteen 78-rpm disks, which couldn’t be stacked on the record player. Every eight minutes the inspector had to change the record. Sometimes that irritated him. So, even before hearing all the disks, still in the second act, Mattos turned off the phonograph, put the disks back in the album, and left.

Mattos had asked Rosalvo to investigate the backgrounds of Paulo Gomes Aguiar, Claudio Aguiar, and Vitor Freitas. He hadn’t mentioned Luiz Magalhães.

“Paulo Machado Gomes Aguiar,” said Rosalvo, consulting a notepad in his hand, “Brazilian, white, born here in the Federal District on January 12, 1924. Father a doctor, mother a housewife, both deceased. Studied at the São Joaquim secondary school and the National Law School, where he graduated in 1947. Never practiced law. In 1950 he married Luciana Borges, a banker’s daughter. Seems he married for money. In 1951 he founded the Cemtex import-export firm, which quickly became one of the largest in the country. He has contacts with high-placed government officials. Appears to be the figurehead for foreign groups. I read in the
Tribuna
—”

“Leave the political intrigues till the end. First the facts.”

“Cemtex’s shady deals
are
a fact. For example, the firm obtained an import license from Cexim worth fifty million dollars. The Bank of Brazil never gave that much money to anyone; it’s plain as day that it’s one more underhanded trick by some bigwig at the top. Gomes Aguiar was a friend of senator Vitor Freitas, who’s probably one of those clearing the path for him.”

“Continue.”

“Gomes Aguiar had a very active social life. I went through a collection of old newspapers and saw photos of him with Vitor Freitas in the society columns. And also with his cousin and other upper-crust types, especially Pedro Lomagno, son of the late Lomagno, the coffee king.”

“Continue.”

“Claudio, the cousin, also studied at the São Joaquim. Then he left the country and stayed away for a long time; his father was a diplomat or some such thing. He studied economics in London. As for Senator Freitas, it’s possible that he frequents the ‘Senate Annex.’ Those playboy senators, when they get tired of making speeches, are in the habit of crossing the street for a relaxing lay. They say the girls at the annex are marvelous.”

“Where is that annex?”

“You don’t know?” Rosalvo was surprised, but he pretended to be very surprised. “It’s in the São Borja Building, 227 Avenida Rio Branco, right across from the Senate. Very handy. I feel like going there, but they say the madam is a tough old bird, and she’s not going to rat out guys with clout just like that. It’d be good for us to meet one of the whores the senator is screwing.”

“The senator’s sex life doesn’t interest me.”

“I don’t like to nose around in anybody’s sex life either. But the senator must be the type of john who gets off on bragging to girls in bed while drinking champagne. Lots of times we get useful information.”

“You don’t have the slightest notion of ethics, Rosalvo.”

“Sorry, sir.”

“What I’m interested in is finding out whether Gomes Aguiar had enemies, problems with partners, that sort of thing. I’m not interested in gossip, much less your ironies.”

“I don’t argue with you. You’re my boss, and I have the greatest respect for you.”

Actually, Rosalvo was afraid of the inspector. He was sure that Mattos wasn’t right in the head, the faces he made, that crazy strike he’d tried to promote, that business of going unarmed to investigations, and especially his habit of not taking numbers dough—shit, the guy rode the bus, didn’t even own a car, and yet he turned up his nose at the boodle from the bankrollers. You had to be careful with a man like that.

“You’re new in the police—not that I’m trying to give you lessons, who am I to do that? It’s just that I’m older, almost an old man of fifty-five, thirty of them in the police. The only thing I’ve learned in all those years is that in a homicide there are just two motives. Sex and power. That’s the crux. People kill only over money and pussy, excuse my French, or both of them together. That’s the way of the world.” Pause. “I have some business to take care of. Do you need me?”

“That case of the workshop? Did the boy’s father show up?”

“No, sir. The boy said the old man doesn’t have anybody to take care of the orange grove.”

In a small automotive repair shop, in a fight, the mechanic Cosme, using a lug wrench, had hit in the head a guy who had left his car for work, killing him. The mechanic, a skinny guy, twenty-two years old, had a huge hematoma over his left eye. The shop belonged to him and his father, a Portuguese who was absent at the time of the fight, at the orange grove the family owned in Nova Iguaçu. A woman, called as a witness, had complicated matters by saying she had seen a guy in a gray shirt hit the victim in the head with something. Cosme, when arrested, was wearing a red shirt.

“Is the woman back from her trip?”

“No. I went to her apartment on Friday, and no one knows when she’ll return. She must have that thing you said about seeing everything in gray.”

“For us to be certain whether the woman is colorblind, it’s necessary to have her vision checked.”

“Sir, the boy confessed. The woman’s disappeared. The inquest period is ending.”

“Go to Nova Iguaçu and subpoena the old man to come to the precinct to talk with me. The mother comes here every day to see her son, so does his wife. It’s just the father who doesn’t appear.”

“He’s taking care of the oranges.”

“These Portuguese families are very close. For them, not all the oranges in the world matter more than a son.”

“The grove is, pardon the expression, in the middle of nowhere.”

“I want the old man here day after tomorrow.”

“I have to go to the Senate to talk to senator Freitas.”

“I’ll do that. You’re going to leave here directly for Nova Iguaçu. Now.”

Cosme had been brought from the holding area and taken to the room where he normally received visits from his wife. The two were sitting, silently holding hands, when the inspector entered. The woman wiped her face, swollen from crying and her eighth-month pregnancy. Beside the bench was a lunch pail with food that she brought daily for her husband. The woman knew she owed those meetings to the inspector and tried to smile but didn’t succeed.

“You brought some nice food for him?” said the inspector. “One of these days I’m going to try those delicacies.”

“Whenever you like, sir. Today it’s a cheese turnover,” said the young man, taking it from the lunch pail. The woman remained silent. The two were young and unattractive. Cosme’s ugliness had afforded Rosalvo the opportunity to repeat to the inspector other lessons learned in school: Cosme was a Lombrosian type with physical stigmas of criminality such as recessive forehead, prominence of the zygomas, sharpness of the facial angle, prognathism, plagiocephalism. “Sir, don’t laugh at me, that means an oblique, oval head, asymmetric, pressed between the two halves so that the right side, more developed in front, corresponds to a greater development of the left side in back.”

Looking at Cosme, the inspector saw none of that. Just a scared youth.

“I had your father summoned to come here to talk to me,” said Mattos.

Cosme jumped up from the bench.

“Don’t do that, sir, please, my father is a sick man.”

“I need to speak with him.”

“Please! Isn’t everything already decided? Everything decided? Please,” said Cosme, holding the cheese pastry.

Could the cause and effect relationship be essential to the nature of all the reasoning relevant to the facts? Mattos asked himself. What good were inferences resulting from a chain of suppositions? He knew that propositions allusive to the facts could only be contingent. The conclusion to which he was coming, observing the tremulous couple before him, resulted merely from the senses, from impressions of the moment, which might be false. Everything could be false. My God, my mind is becoming as bizarre as Rosalvo’s.

“I’m very sorry, but I need to question your father.”

The inspector left the room after saying this, not wishing to see the couple’s other reactions. He had no desire to further confuse his ideas and perceptions. For better understanding, he wanted to have more facts available—and more perceptions and more ideas. The attempt to understand things always led him to a frustrating vicious circle.

Mattos stopped beside one of the two lions flanking the stairway of the Monroe Palace. He turned to look at the imposing São Borja Building on the other side of Avenida Rio Branco. The senators had chosen a very convenient place for their dalliances.

The Senate was in session, but Senator Freitas wasn’t on the floor. His aide Clemente Mello Telles Neto, an elegantly dressed young man in a white three-piece linen suit, said the senator was busy at a meeting of the Foreign Relations Committee.

“What’s this about, Inspector?”

“I prefer to tell the senator himself what this is about.”

“It’s going to be difficult for you to speak with him. The senator is a very busy man. Is it anything personal?”

“No. It’s not personal.”

“Then you can speak with me.”

“I want to speak with him.”

“Then you’ll have to wait for the right time.” Pause. “Look, let’s agree on this: you leave me your phone number, and when the interview is possible, I’ll call and let you know.”

Mattos gave the precinct’s number to the aide. “Tell the senator it’s in his interest to speak with me.”

“I’ll tell him,” said the aide, formally.

The inspector took a small pad from his pocket.

“What’s the senator’s phone number, please?”

After hesitating, Clemente gave the inspector the number of the senator’s office.

Leaving the Senate, Mattos walked along Rio Branco to Rua Sete de Setembro. He turned to the left onto Rua Uruguaiana. The Cavé was on the corner.

He went into the tea room and sat down facing the door. It was ten minutes before five. For a few moments he thought of leaving. Why stay there and see the woman who had rejected him? What did Alice want from him? Help? He didn’t want to take revenge on her by refusing to help her, or take revenge by helping her, which would be even more petty. He sat there, staring at the art-nouveau drawings on the wall.

He stood up when Alice arrived and pulled out a chair for her to sit. They sat on opposite sides of the table, without looking at each other, silent.

The waiter approached.

“Tea and toast?” asked Mattos.

Alice nodded.

“Are you still in the, the Department?”

She doesn’t even want to say the word police, he thought. Federal Department of Public Safety is a bit less shameful.

“Yes.”

Alice opened her purse and took out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter, which she placed on the table. She tried to smile. “I smoke now.”

Mattos picked up the lighter and lit her cigarette.

The waiter brought the tea. Alice put out her cigarette in the ashtray.

“I have an appointment at 5:30. With the maestro. You remember the maestro?”

“Maestro?”

“The old man who ran the claque, Mr. Emilio. Remember?”

She vaguely recalled Mattos having said that as a student he’d been part of the claque at the Municipal Theater in order to attend operas free while making some pocket money.

“I haven’t seen him for some time . . . The last time, I cut class to meet him by the Chopin statue . . . That’s where the claqueurs gathered . . . That day we were setting up the claque for
Parsifal
. . .”

Alice stuck another cigarette in her mouth. Mattos picked up the lighter and lit the cigarette.

“Wagnerian operas were always a lot of work for the claqueurs. In
Parsifal
you’re never supposed to applaud at the end of the first act, and making the audience keep quiet was much harder than making them clap hands. I remember Mr. Emilio saying, ‘We’re not going to ask some second-rater for an encore.’”

“I saw
Parsifal
in—” Alice stopped. In London.

“I didn’t get to see it. It ended up not being staged. The claque was dissolved soon afterward. Finished. It went out of style. A thing of the past.”

Alice would have liked to be able to say something. She had lost the courage to speak about the matter that had led her to suggest that meeting. Why had Mattos told her that story? Because, like her, he didn’t know what to say? Or did he think she wanted to get back together, and he was telling her that like the claque she, too, was a thing of the past? He had always been very odd.

“Have you been going to the Municipal?”

Some time after the breakup with Alice he had gone to see
La Bohème
at the Municipal with Di Stefano and Tebaldi. He was used to sitting in the peanut gallery because it was cheaper and because it was where the claque stationed itself, and he was accustomed to the location. But on that occasion he had bought a ticket in the orchestra section, near the dress circle, where a man and a woman dozed the entire time. He also noticed that other people fell asleep in their boxes, even when Di Stefano hit a fabulous high C in the aria “Che gelida manina.” It irritated him greatly; at the time he was feeling the initial symptoms of his duodenal ulcer and his hatred of the rich. Going to the opera, to concerts, to museums pretending they read the classics, it was all part of a grand scheme of playacting by the rich, whose objective was to show that they—he thought mainly of Alice and her family—belonged to a special superior class that, unlike the ignorant rabble, knew how to see, hear, and eat with elegance and sensitivity, which justified their having money and every privilege they enjoyed.