Alone in the Crowd

by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza

  Irene shot out of bed.

  “What happened? Did they find her?” At that instant she saw her friend emerge from behind Espinosa.

  “Vânia!” she cried, darting out of bed to hug and kiss her friend.

  Irene was crying and laughing simultaneously, and Vânia, still clinging to Irene and holding her up, said the words “boat,” “sea,” and “Angra,” waiting for them alone to explain what had happened.

  Espinosa left the two to their embrace, closed the apartment door without making a sound, and went downstairs to look for a taxi.

  5

  Hugo Breno thought he had it pretty good as an employee of the Caixa Econômica Federal, especially for someone who lived alone, in his own apartment, and in a style he considered almost monastic. The “almost” was because of the hookers he employed to satisfy his biological needs, needs he tried to reduce with his daily exercise routine. He aimed to stay as physically fit as a member of some special military force about to swing into action in enemy territory. Of course, he didn’t train in the jungle or jump out of planes with a parachute; his theater of operations was exclusively urban. His hours at the Caixa Econômica made his exercise easier. He could use the early-morning and evening hours. Every morning, no matter what the weather, he ran up and down the whole length of Copacabana Beach, on the sand, and then swam two hundred meters, no matter what the conditions in the sea. At home, he did his sit-ups and push-ups and worked out his biceps on the bar he’d installed in the doorway of his bedroom. He didn’t smoke or drink. He could stand long periods of privation. Yet he’d never had to test his physical preparedness in conditions that exceeded his daily life. From ten to five he was a bank employee. He efficiently executed his duties, he never missed work or arrived late, he hardly spoke to his colleagues, and he never got upset when clients complained. The worst threat was boredom. But he thought that was made up for by the parallel reality that awaited him after his shift, until ten the next morning.

  The idea to sign up for the test for placement in the Caixa Econômica occurred to him when he found out that Espinosa had secured his job with the police through an open test. Their motives were probably different. Espinosa was motivated by the desire to get married, so he was looking for a government job that could guarantee him financial security, without a boss who could fire him on a whim. Breno’s boss was anonymous and impersonal and they didn’t even have to meet. As for getting married, he wasn’t planning on it. It wasn’t even a vague possibility. He regretted terribly that Espinosa had done so, an error it had taken him ten years to realize. Hugo Breno wondered for what purpose people tried to make life more complicated. Women complicate men’s lives, just as men surely complicate women’s lives. So whose idea was marriage, anyway? Wasn’t it enough to screw and then move on? What did marriage add to the sex? Surely it didn’t add anything—it only subtracted. And the first thing marriage took away was happiness. Espinosa was proof of this: a sad man, aged by his memory, tired. A few more years and he wouldn’t be able to go up the two flights of stairs without getting to his door out of breath, his heart thumping in his chest. Now, after another decade had gone by, Espinosa was trying to take up the old path, as if that were possible. Once he’d chosen one of the two paths (which was not only physical but temporal), it was impossible to return and take the other. Once you’d been married, there was no way you could stop being that way. At most, someone could become unmarried. Which only added an “un” to the word “married,” which meant kids, memories, guilt, resentments …

  It was true that Espinosa kept his old classiness and dignity. It was like something he’d been born with, a personal trait that experience had added to. For that reason, despite the error of his marriage and his new attempt with his girlfriend, Hugo still saw Espinosa as a model. Even though the model had been strained a bit, though its best days were past, it was still a model. He hadn’t stopped admiring him simply because he had changed. Their age difference, though slight, made Espinosa the model he had looked up to since he was a boy. Espinosa was still his older brother.

  Hugo didn’t like weekends. It wasn’t that he couldn’t stand them—he even thought they had certain advantages over other days of the week (not having to work being one of them), but there was something about them that bothered him. Sundays more than Saturdays. Saturdays weren’t as bad; they were like a weekday where you didn’t have to go to work. At least for him. Sundays, though, felt like false or failed days, in which everything was available but nothing was possible. The closed shops cleared out the streets. The day felt abandoned. Everything felt artificial, including rest.

  On Sundays, he went for his run down the Avenida Atlântica as soon as the sun came up. It was exactly enough time before the beachgoers started arriving and taking up all the room. It was impossible to run on the sidewalk after eight. Swimming wasn’t a problem. Most bathers didn’t venture beyond the surf, and he liked to swim past the breaking waves, parallel to the beach.

  He’d just run and swum and was on his way back home. He didn’t feel any attraction to the compact mass of people that occupied the entire strip of sand on the beach, forming a stationary agglomerate of languid, nearly naked, sweating people with sand stuck to their bodies. He thought it was repellent. It wasn’t the same kind of crowd that was permanently moving down the sidewalks, dressed, clean. From the beach to his building, going up Siqueira Campos, was a straight line. He could also go down Figueiredo Magalhães, one block over, and pass through the Peixoto District to check out Espinosa’s building. Afterward all he had to do was take the little side street back to Siqueira Campos. He didn’t expect to see Espinosa waving from the window. He wasn’t the pope. But it was enough for Hugo to see the open window, a sign that he was home, probably reading the papers, as he did on weekends.

  It was both confirmation and compensation. The window was open; Espinosa was home. He couldn’t see if he was reading the papers. Wherever he went in the square, all he could see was a little part of the living room, the wall with heaps of books on it, the top of a standing lamp, a few pictures or photographs, and a lighting fixture on the ceiling that looked like it was made of smoked glass (another thing they had in common: he also had a light fixture like that). But that morning, after spending a few minutes observing the two windows of the living room, he saw, besides Espinosa’s head … Irene’s, his girlfriend’s. It wasn’t so usual for her to spend Saturday night there too. It must have been a special weekend.

  Espinosa had gone to bed late the night before and got up early on Monday morning. Even though Vânia’s disappearance had turned out fine, he suspected that the consequences of that weekend wouldn’t be so positive. At least for him. He called off the alert he’d put through to the other precincts and the military police and concentrated on the investigation of Dona Laureta’s death.

  The only thing that prevented him from considering it an accident was the visit she had paid to the station with the clear intent of speaking with the chief. Not with him, Espinosa. She didn’t know him. She wanted to talk to whoever the chief was. Nobody would make such a specific request just to say that her cat was missing. It wasn’t a threat to the cat that the lady didn’t even possess, but to herself. The fact that she preferred to come back later instead of speaking just then to Detective Welber showed that there was no urgency to what she had to communicate. In a word, it was an important enough matter that she could discuss it only with the boss, but not urgent, having to do with an immediate threat. Another point that in Espinosa’s opinion ruled out an accident was the fact that several people said she seemed to have been pushed from the curb into the street, though nobody there had witnessed the supposed push. It occurred to Espinosa that she might have stumbled or tripped. Which would make it neither a murder nor a suicide. An accident. But that hypothesis wasn’t very plausible. The sidewalk wasn’t wet, and nobody around had seen anything that might have made her slip. Besides, when people slip they usually fall into a sitting position and aren’
t propelled forward. But though the hypothesis was implausible, it wasn’t less probable than the idea that she had been pushed under the wheels of the bus.

  It was four in the afternoon on a hot and bureaucratic day, the kind of day that inspired Espinosa to fantasize about jumping ship. He was dreaming about creating the post of administrative chief, leaving the nonadministrative chief (he’d have to invent a name for him) just one police duty: thinking. Of course, he wouldn’t be a speculative thinker, a kind of police Platonist, but committed to an essentially investigative kind of thinking oriented toward solving crimes and capturing criminals. The policeman-philosopher’s dream was interrupted by the arrival of Welber, and by the way he arrived, tapping his finger on the glass divider, Espinosa knew that he had good news.

  “Chief, I’ve just gotten back from the NIED.”

  Espinosa wrinkled his brow and made a questioning gesture with his hands.

  “The National Institute for the Education of the Deaf,” Welber said. “I took them the video of Dona Laureta’s conversation with the cashier. All they could do was read their lips during fragments of the initial conversation, but they agreed that the conversation involved much more than what the cashier told us. Part of the dialogue is impossible to read because of the security bars and their position, but it’s clear enough that the conversation lasted much longer than the initial exchange. The two really did talk a lot more than the cashier said.”

  “Have you already asked him about this?”

  “Not yet. I want to look at the tapes from earlier months to see if I can find anything else. It’s a tiring and monotonous task. It’s the same scene, without sound, repeated hundreds of times. The picture is bad quality, out of focus, and the movement of people seems not to be continuous. That almost makes it impossible to do more with lip-reading.”

  “What did you find out about this cashier?”

  “His name is Hugo Breno, he’s a good worker, he doesn’t miss work, he doesn’t get in late, he’s never had problems with customers or colleagues. Nobody knows much about his private life, except that he’s single and has lived at the same address for more than thirty years.”

  “What’s the address?”

  “On Siqueira Campos, near the subway station, a few blocks from the bank where he works.”

  “And close to where Dona Laureta lived,” Espinosa added.

  “And also close to where you live.”

  “Close to the station.”

  “Pure coincidence,” said Welber with a smile.

  “Death in the neighborhood,” said Espinosa without a smile. “Tomorrow morning I want to stop by the Caixa Econômica. I want to see what kind of a man this is.”

  It was the first day of autumn. Not that, in Rio de Janeiro, that meant an expressive or immediate change of climate, but in homage to the calendar, the weather had in fact shifted a bit overnight. The day began gray, rainy, and the temperature had fallen a few degrees, enough to allow Espinosa to walk to the branch of the Caixa Econômica, a kilometer away, without breaking a sweat. He thought it was strange that everyone involved in the case lived within a circle a kilometer in diameter, whose center was the Twelfth Precinct. Even Welber, who was investigating the case and who had always lived in Tijuca, had just moved to Copacabana, within the circumscribed area. That coincidence was not, for Espinosa, a sign of any real mystery, but just something that made him aware of possible relationships between all those people. The chief didn’t much believe in coincidences, especially when they resulted in deaths.

  It was ten-fifteen when he went into the bank. Even from far away, he easily spotted Hugo Breno in one of the windows. Welber’s description had been precise. He took a number as soon as he got in and looked for a chair at a comfortable distance from the teller, where he could observe him like anybody else sitting there. There were few seats available, all quite far from the counter. With his ticket in hand, Espinosa kept looking for a spot while he watched the numbers on the screen and observed Hugo Breno through the window. He didn’t look unfamiliar; he had the idea that he knew him, though he didn’t know from where. Even the name Hugo Breno wasn’t unfamiliar.

  The cashier had just finished helping a customer and had already pressed the button for the next number when he saw Espinosa move toward a chair that had opened up. The impact was just like the one he had felt when he was eleven, when he saw Espinosa for the first time. Back then, the square in the Peixoto District hadn’t been fixed up. Neither the heavy fountain, the fences, nor all the prefabricated playground equipment had arrived. In those days games didn’t require the intervention of child development professionals and the square was a generous open space. The wooden benches were the most comfortable and welcome acquisition. The earthen field where the neighborhood kids played soccer had been preserved. It was in the middle of a game, during the summer holidays, that he’d seen for the first time the boy the others called Espinosa. He thought it was a nickname, since he’d never known anyone with a name like that. Espinosa was only a little older than Hugo, but he seemed much bigger, stronger, and better looking. He had a well-made body, defined muscles in his legs and arms, though he wasn’t very old, and he moved his body with elegance, besides being a talented soccer player. He didn’t talk much. He wasn’t everyone’s friend, though everyone tried to be friends with him. He didn’t do anything just to seem friendly, though he was naturally amiable.

  From then on, Espinosa became Hugo’s idol. He did everything to be where Espinosa was. He tried to participate in the same games, whether on his team or the opposing one. He tried to find out where he lived, if he had brothers or sisters, where he went to school, everything about him. But there was one thing he wanted more than anything else. That was to belong to Espinosa’s group, who rode their bikes through the neighborhood, up and down the streets, which Hugo wasn’t allowed to do because of his age. Hugo was too small to participate in such daring adventures. He remembered perfectly the English bicycle with which Espinosa led his small group of biking friends. Maybe “led” wasn’t the right word. Espinosa was just a member of the group without having been appointed leader, but there was no question that his English bicycle and the way he interacted with his friends made him the group’s most important figure. And it was he himself, Espinosa, who at that moment had just come into the waiting room at the Caixa Econômica. Hugo Breno noted that Espinosa was looking for somewhere to sit. There was a seat available at the very front, facing the window, but he chose one farther away. He was absolutely sure that the chief was there for him. First his two assistants had come, and now he was here in the flesh. He was wondering whether the chief would come up to him or if he should take the initiative to meet him first.

  Espinosa noticed the cashier observing him and felt a bit uncomfortable. Hugo didn’t watch him openly but discreetly kept an eye on him, as he was doing with Hugo. He thought that the cashier might know that he was the chief of the precinct in the neighborhood. Espinosa was more or less well known. His picture had come out in the papers and he’d been interviewed on television, so it was natural that people should look at him. But no, that wasn’t it. He felt observed in the same way that he was observing the man. Even more so. With every passing moment, he became more and more sure that he knew him. Not at random, from having seen him on the street, but from something he couldn’t quite remember.

  While he mechanically helped the elderly gentleman who was presenting two or three cards in order to withdraw his benefits, Hugo Breno followed Espinosa’s every glance, every movement, trying to guess what he was thinking. At a certain moment, he had the impression that the chief was going to get up. It could be to come up to the window or to leave. And he felt that he couldn’t miss the opportunity that would be the only time Espinosa would come looking for him and not vice versa, in his own timid attempts. He thought about closing the window, in a clear sign that he was available to talk. As soon as he finished dealing with the old man, he turned off the light on his counter and looked f
or Espinosa, but he had just risen from his seat and was walking away without a backward glance.

  6

  It was Tuesday at noon. Espinosa and Irene still hadn’t spoken since Vânia’s reappearance on Sunday night. The receptionist put the call through to the chief’s office.

  “Espinosa, what’s going on?”

  “Well, just since yesterday, here in the neighborhood, a teenager stabbed his grandmother to death, a man was found dead inside the trunk of a car, an assailant dropped his gun while holding up a senior citizen, a passerby grabbed the gun and fired two shots into the assailant—”

  “Fuck! I don’t mean that kind of goings-on.”

  “You called a police station to ask what’s going on.”

  “Espinosa, I’ll talk to you later on tonight. I feel like now isn’t even the right time to say hello.”

  “Which, now that you mention it, you didn’t say.”

  “Hello. And good-bye,” she said, hanging up.

  After less than a minute, she called back.

  “Sorry, I was rude.”

  “It’s fine. I wasn’t that welcoming either.”

  “Can we have lunch? Maybe in that trattoria you like.”

  Suggesting the trattoria was an obvious olive branch. Less tradition-bound, Irene always preferred the restaurants in Ipanema to those in Copacabana, so Espinosa was happy to accept the gesture. He left immediately and managed to reach the Italian restaurant in time to get a table next to the window. Not for the view—the windows were curtained—but because those were the most private tables. Before Irene got there, all the others filled up. The usual customers were businesspeople, bankers, professionals, and local residents who preferred to eat out. The food was typical of an Italian trattoria, and the regular presence of the boss guaranteed quality service.