by Tim Wirkus
Sílvia knew that the current situation was unacceptable, that she needed to do something, but none of the options before her seemed appealing.
On the eighth day of this, Aurélio came home an hour later than usual with Cabral in tow, both of them already tipsy. Cabral set a bag of three marmitas down on the table and opened a bottle of cachaça. Aurélio got three plates and glasses down from the cupboard and set them on the table.
“We’ve got it all worked out,” said Aurélio, pouring a glass of cachaça. “We start next week.”
He handed the glass to Sílvia who shook her head. So he handed it to Cabral, who drained it in one go.
“I’d ask what the plan is, if I thought you’d tell me,” she said.
Aurélio poured a glass for himself and sat down.
“We can let you in on the broad outline,” said Cabral, tearing into his marmita.
“I picked up one for you,” said Aurélio, opening the lid of his own meal.
“I already ate,” said Sílvia. “So what’s the plan, broadly.”
Cabral brushed away a clump of rice that had stuck in his beard.
“First,” he said, “a low-risk, moderate-yield venture up north. We need to raise funds for our big scheme. That should take two to three months. When we have enough money, the prep for our main venture should take another month or two. Then the big con itself will last about a month and a half.”
“That’s only a timeline,” she said. “You told me next to nothing.”
Cabral reached out and lay his thick hand on top of Sílvia’s. She pulled her hand away.
“Unfortunately,” said Cabral, “the details of our venture are limited to a need-to-know basis and I can say no more.”
“I’m sure you can’t,” said Sílvia.
Cabral smiled and shrugged. Sílvia looked at Aurélio, stuffing his face, most of the way to drunk. She looked back at Cabral. He scratched at one of his pointy little ears.
“If you want to be so exclusive with your big con, I understand,” she said. “But I don’t see why I can’t help out with the fundraising. If I’m going to be there anyway, it seems like a waste of manpower to have me just hanging around some apartment in a no-name town up north.”
Cabral looked at Aurélio, who set down his fork and looked at Sílvia.
“What is it?” she said.
He looked down and straightened the fork.
“Actually,” said Aurélio, “we were thinking it might be best if you stayed here.”
He kept his eyes down, his fingers fidgeting with his fork.
“Are you serious?” said Sílvia.
Aurélio didn’t respond.
“What am I supposed to do in this town for three months by myself?”
“It’ll be closer to six months, actually,” said Cabral, refilling his glass with cachaça.
“Look at me,” she said to Aurélio.
He looked up at her.
“Leaving me behind isn’t an option,” she said. “I don’t care what you’re up to, you’re not leaving me alone. We’re going to talk this over in the morning when you’ve sobered up.”
Cabral smiled and sipped from his glass.
“I’m sorry,” said Aurélio. “But it’ll be better if you stay. When it’s over, we can—”
Sílvia got up from her chair and hit him across the face with the back of her hand. He gave a short, surprised yelp and hid his face from her. She turned around and left the kitchen.
She walked into the bedroom, closed the door, and got into bed without undressing. The apartment was silent for several minutes. Before long, though, Aurélio and Cabral were talking quietly, and then not so quietly, and then laughing and singing. Sílvia curled under the sheets and closed her eyes.
She woke up to a thick, rough hand pressed over her mouth. She opened her eyes. Junior Cabral loomed over her, and as she tried to squirm away, he grabbed her by the throat. He squeezed and said that if she put up a fight, he’d crush her larynx like it was an ice cream cone. He removed one hand from her mouth, maintaining a firm, steady pressure on her throat with the other. He moved in and kissed her face, the whiskers of his beard chafing against her skin. With his free hand he began unbuttoning her pants. She twisted away and he squeezed her throat until she couldn’t breathe. She stopped struggling and he released the pressure enough for her to draw a breath. His thick fingers ran over her skin. She didn’t move. He breathed heavily against her face.
“I’m not doing this because I want you,” said Cabral, “I’m doing this because I can.”
She listened to Aurélio snoring in the other room. Cabral held her closer. She raised her head and kissed Cabral. He froze for a moment. She kissed him again.
“That’s right,” he said.
She kept kissing him and he relaxed his grip on her throat. She kissed his lips, his neck, his ear. He let go of her throat, his hand moving down her body. She licked his tiny, pointed ear, and he laughed. He pulled her close to him. She wrapped her mouth around his ear and then bit down as hard as she could, the adrenaline clenching her jaw, jerking her neck back, the skin and cartilage giving way between her teeth, tearing away from his head. He yelled and jumped off the bed, his hand clutching the side of his head where a ragged flap of skin was all that remained of his ear. Sílvia spit the rest of his ear onto her pillow and wiped the blood from her face, gagging, but managing not to vomit. Cabral looked at the bloody chunk of ear on the pillow and pulled his hand away from the side of his face. He saw the blood on his hand, his eyes rolled back in his head, and he passed out, falling to the floor.
Sílvia didn’t waste any time. She found Aurélio still asleep on the couch, undisturbed by the screaming in his deep, drunken slumber. She briefly considered leaving him a note, but then decided against it. She threw on a jacket, stuffed her pockets with some cash from their emergency drawer, and walked out of the apartment.
• • •
She worked on her own for a few years—avoiding the beach towns that Aurélio had always favored—until a big scam gone wrong forced her to move someplace where the police wouldn’t come looking for her. She remembered Vila Barbosa from her grandmother’s crime show, and so she settled down there, recognizing the neighborhood as a place so crowded and dangerous that a small-time crook like her could become invisible. She worked an assortment of odd jobs, most of them legal, although if an opportunity for a small con proved irresistible, she took it. Over time, she saved enough money to open the lanchonete that she currently owned.
She heard through the grapevine that Cabral had been arrested in the middle of a big con, had done a little hard time, but had been released early for helping the federal police track down and catch a few of his most notorious associates. He now operated a highly successful consulting firm here in the city, helping large corporations to protect themselves against fraud.
She heard nothing about Aurélio.
Sometimes on Sundays, Sílvia took the train downtown to the wealthy neighborhood where she had grown up. Walking down the sidewalk, she caught brief glimpses of the businessmen in their immaculate suits getting into and out of their armored town cars, always accompanied by musclebound bodyguards who looked at Sílvia with no small degree of mistrust. When she heard the once-familiar chop of rotors from above, she stopped walking and, shading her eyes, looked up at the helicopters taking off from the roofs of luxury apartment buildings, ferrying their human cargo to Sunday dinners across town with other members of the city’s airborne elite. And when she got tired of walking, she bought a hot dog or a coxinha from a stand and ate it on a bench across from the gated park she had played in as a girl. Then when she finished eating, she got on the train and rode back home to Vila Barbosa.
CHAPTER 15
Elder Schwartz stood in their bathroom under the clunky electric showerhead, letting the spray of lukewarm water rinse away the outermost layer of sweat, grime, and urine that had accumulated on his body over the previous two days. As the dirty water
pooled on the tiled floor below him, he tried to process everything that had happened that evening.
Sílvia had left only a few minutes earlier.
After explaining her history with Marco Aurélio, she had told the elders that she was getting as far away from Vila Barbosa as possible and suggested that they do the same. Whoever had killed Galvão wouldn’t hesitate to deal similarly with a couple of nosy missionaries or a curious ex-wife.
“I don’t plan on going anywhere until I find Marco Aurélio,” Elder Toronto had said.
“Then you’re being incredibly stupid,” she had said.
And with that she had gathered up her purse and her gun and walked out their door.
Now, alone and safe in the bathroom, all Elder Schwartz had to worry about was getting clean and then getting some sleep. As he reached for his bar of soap, however, he caught a whiff of plastic melting above his head. With a whimpering yelp, he jumped out from under the stream of water just as the electric showerhead began to pop and spark. He leaned over and shut off the water, and with it, the heater inside the showerhead. The now-useless appliance emitted two thin lines of smoke, its plastic casing melted and charred.
Elder Schwartz stood there dripping, only slightly less dirty than he had been a few minutes before. He toweled off and, in what felt like an act of futility, put on some clean underwear. Head aching from the anxieties of the day, he sat down on the edge of his bed. He was too tired and overwhelmed to think, so he didn’t. From the front room he could hear the sounds of Elder Toronto rummaging through one of the desk drawers. He figured he should go see what Elder Toronto was up to, but first he would close his eyes for just a few seconds.
When Elder Toronto walked into the bedroom and asked where they kept the tape, Elder Schwartz sat up and realized he had fallen asleep, curled in a ball at the foot of his bed. He looked at his clock. He had been asleep for nearly three hours.
“What?” he said.
“The tape,” said Elder Toronto. “Where do we keep it?”
“I’ve got some in the bottom drawer of my desk,” said Elder Schwartz.
“Great,” said Elder Toronto. “Why don’t you get dressed and come help me out.”
Still sleepily disoriented, Elder Schwartz put on a T-shirt and a pair of gym shorts. In the front room, he found that Elder Toronto had taken their map of the neighborhood down from the wall and was currently taping an assortment of three-by-five cards up in its place.
“Aren’t you tired?” said Elder Schwartz.
“Couldn’t sleep,” said Elder Toronto, tearing off another piece of tape. “Here,” he said and handed the roll to Elder Schwartz.
Elder Schwartz looked at the cards on the wall. Each one had a name written on it in heavy black marker and below that, in pen, a brief description of who that person was, how they were connected to Marco Aurélio, and what they had told the missionaries about his disappearance. They were arranged in a careful grid, alphabetically by name.
“Tape, please,” said Elder Toronto.
Elder Schwartz obliged, tearing off a strip and handing it to his companion. Elder Toronto stuck another card to the wall.
“You made a card for Sister Beatrice?” said Elder Schwartz.
Elder Toronto held his hand out for another strip of tape, which Elder Schwartz handed to him.
“We have to consider everyone we’re aware of who knew Marco Aurélio,” said Elder Schwartz, “everyone who might be connected to him or his disappearance in any way.”
He attached the last card and stepped back from the wall.
“There,” he said.
There was a card for Grillo and a card for Lucinda. A card for Sílvia. A card for Bishop Claudemir and a card for Fátima and a card for each of their children. A card for Abelardo, a card for Beatrice. A card for Elder J. da Silva and for Elder Christiansen. A card for Ulisses Galvão, for each of the two police officers, for Junior Cabral. A card for Wanderley the cab driver, a card for Meire.
“I’m going to get some sleep,” said Elder Schwartz. “You should, too.”
Elder Toronto nodded and didn’t move. Elder Schwartz walked back to the bedroom.
For the next few hours he slept fitfully, plagued by a looping dream in which a gun-toting stranger pursued him between teetering stacks of index cards that cataloged every person Elder Schwartz had ever met in his life.
THE ARGENTINE
They say that the redundancies in his collection deeply dismayed the Argentine. His catalog was meant, after all, to be a universal one, encompassing the full breadth of human experience. To accomplish this, he needed specimens of every conceivable iteration of cruelty. These bland repetitions that filled the notebooks of his library simply wouldn’t do.
One day, while observing an act of domestic violence that was, for all taxonomic purposes, identical to countless acts before it, the Argentine came to a realization. If the conditions underlying life in Vila Barbosa contributed to the production of cruelty, then altering those conditions might result in new and different specimens for his collection. Although he had initially approached the project with a strict scientific integrity, doing everything he could to remain as unobtrusive as possible, the power available to him proved irresistible. With both his above-ground deputies and his subterranean minions willing to carry out his every command, the Argentine began engineering the conditions necessary to produce novel instances of human cruelty, to reduce the innumerable redundancies in his collection. Before long, he had come to involve himself, whether personally or vicariously, in every aspect of life in the neighborhood, ensuring that its residents produced every type of cruelty that he could possibly conceive of.
Just as a farmer understands the purpose of proper soil conditions to the success of his crops, the Argentine came to understand that some varieties of human cruelty required a special blend of chaos and misery in which to flourish and bear fruit. To create the desired conditions, he might flood one household with more money than they’d ever seen in their lives, introduce slightly toxic chemicals into the water supply of another, deploy an undercover deputy spouting new and dangerous religious ideas to a popular church, murder the neighborhood’s most popular samba group, and then harvest the new varieties of cruelty that these controlled conditions produced.
This comparison of the Argentine to a farmer, however, breaks down if extended much further. Farmers—for all their hard work fertilizing, plowing, planting, irrigating—ultimately remain at the mercy of forces beyond their control. A late frost. A hailstorm. Drought. Adverse market conditions. Any number of things that ultimately frustrate the farmer’s best efforts. The Argentine, on the other hand, left nothing to chance. Where a farmer can only control so many variables, the Argentine, for a time, controlled them all. He was not only the farmer, but also the soil, the seed, the rain and the hail, the frost, the sun, the chemicals in the ground, the competing farmers nearby and abroad, the pollen, the bee, the shade of the clouds, the worms, the rocks, the pestilent swarm of insects.
One morning, while shelving a notebook filled with observations of novel forms of cruelty, the Argentine realized a disturbing implication of his project. In taking this approach in his quest to comprehend human cruelty, he had transformed the neighborhood into no more and no less than the perfect embodiment of his elaborate imagination, rendering either Vila Barbosa, or perhaps the Argentine himself, superfluous to the compilation of the catalog. With the shock of this realization, he dropped the notebook from his hand, staggering backward, steadying himself against a bookshelf. When he had regained his balance he immediately called an unprecedented joint meeting of his closest above-ground deputies and his most trusted subterranean minions.
CHAPTER 16
Stepping into the air-conditioned waiting room, Elder Schwartz could feel the sweat evaporating from his skin. He looked around at the patterned granite flooring, the leather club chairs, the cherrywood reception desk, and tried to remember if he had ever been in a room so richly furni
shed. If so, it had been a while. The glass door eased shut behind the two missionaries.
“Can I help you?” said the receptionist, in a way that suggested she didn’t think she could.
Their shower was still broken, so although the two missionaries had both put on a fresh set of clothes that morning, they still looked—and smelled—a bit the worse for wear. In spite of their unwashed state, they boldly crossed the granite floor and approached the desk.
“We’re here to see Mr. Cabral,” said Elder Toronto.
“Do you have an appointment, young man?” said the secretary, opening the leather-bound appointment book on her desk.
“I don’t think I need one,” said Elder Toronto. “I’m Ulisses Galvão.”
“You’re Ulisses Galvão,” said the receptionist.
“That’s right,” he said.
The receptionist looked at the black nametag on Elder Toronto’s front pocket.
“Let me clarify,” said Elder Toronto. “I am not Ulisses Galvão. But I have an important message from Mr. Galvão to deliver to Mr. Cabral.”
The receptionist closed the appointment book.
“A message about salvation, right?” she said.
“No,” said Elder Toronto, “we’re here on different business.”
The receptionist looked the two missionaries over.
“I’m going to have to run this by Mr. Cabral,” she said. “You can wait over there.”
She pointed at the leather sofa in the waiting area and picked up the phone. The missionaries took a seat. After Sílvia had left their apartment the night before, Elder Toronto had found a business card on the floor under the chair where she had been sitting. Printed in an elegant font on the card were the address and telephone number of Junior Cabral’s consulting firm. Now, the identity of the earless man in the photograph discovered, here they were.
On the street outside the office building where the elders currently sat, Wanderley—the driver of the unlicensed cab that had taken them to their original appointment with Galvão—waited in his car with explicit instructions to call the police if the missionaries weren’t back outside within forty-five minutes. At least he was supposed to be waiting. Elder Toronto had promised the driver eighty reaís if he stuck around, but at the mention of the police, the man’s assurances to the missionaries that he’d be there when they came out had held much less conviction.