Alone in the Crowd

by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza

  “Are you sorry you came?” he asked.

  “Of course not.”

  “Worried about something? Irene maybe …”

  “No. Irene has nothing to do with the fact that we’re here.”

  “Then forget the question.”

  “I already have.”

  But she hadn’t. Espinosa clearly felt the division between wanting to hand herself over and needing to resist, both of which were intense. The intriguing and ambivalent experience that he was having was like being in bed with a Nordic goddess who would let him stroke her anywhere but whose body language made him think it would be a mistake to go further. And all he wanted just then was to go further, before he went crazy. He didn’t go crazy, but he couldn’t go further. When he could no longer contain himself and Vânia noticed that she was starting to be penetrated, she moved Espinosa’s body away and got up with a start. As she was apologizing, she began putting on her clothes. In a few seconds she left, repeating under her breath: “Sorry, sorry, sorry …”

  A half hour after Vânia’s sudden retreat, and with the sound of the slamming door still ringing in his ears, and with every inch of Vânia’s body still present in his senses, and without understanding what had happened in that bed, and feeling naked and ridiculous, pissed off, Espinosa took a cold shower, which he hated doing.

  He got dressed and went outside.

  Nothing to do then. There was no immediate substitute for a woman like Vânia. And even if there was, it wouldn’t have been right, either for him or for the substitute. He wasn’t one to drink to drown out his romantic frustrations. Or one to stuff himself with food. There was no question of reading, writing, or working. Walking down the Avenida Atlântica obviously wouldn’t solve the problem, but it would help him to alleviate the tension. On the walk, he would try to decipher the enigma.

  The enigma was that a pretty, intelligent, experienced woman would call a man asking if he wanted to go to bed with her and then, once she was in that man’s arms, would suddenly turn into a teenager about to be deflowered by her boyfriend. Compared to Irene’s exuberant sexuality, Vânia’s sexual behavior had been almost meek, frightened, which hardly squared with the image she presented. The most paradoxical thing was the distance between her proposition and the actual event, between the “Would you like to see …?” and the “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” between the telephone seduction and the hysterical retreat. Vânia was no virgin. But at least that night, she had been floored by a fear verging on panic when about to consummate the act. That was the enigma: Isn’t that what she had wanted to happen? Wasn’t that the explicit proposition she herself had made? No matter how long he walked, Espinosa couldn’t figure out what had happened in that bed … in the last moments. Maybe she herself couldn’t have explained it. Or, even worse, maybe there wasn’t any enigma at all, and he was trying to come up with a hidden meaning for something that was nothing more than what it appeared. Vânia regretted the proposition she’d made over the phone. When a game of seduction turned into a concrete fact, she beat a retreat. But Espinosa was convinced that the truth was much more complex than that simplistic explanation. The incontestable fact was that he’d never gotten so close to the pleasure of the gods without having to die for it.

  He kept walking, indifferent to the sea, the weather, the people he was passing, and, after a while, he became indifferent even to his own thoughts. He’d walked down the entire length of Copacabana Beach. Tired, he went home.

  7

  Ever since Welber and Selma had moved from Tijuca to Copacabana to live in a rented apartment on the Rua Santa Clara, the couple’s life had undergone a radical transformation. They were now steps from the beach, they had all the shopping of Copacabana at their doorstep, and their cultural life had been enriched. This, despite the financial strains resulting from the more expensive rent and the urban noise that they weren’t used to. But what made the detective the happiest was being able to walk to the station in ten minutes, a trip that formerly had taken him more than an hour and required two different modes of transportation.

  By Wednesday morning, nine days after Dona Laureta’s death, Welber and Ramiro had gathered evidence not only of a connection between Hugo Breno and Dona Laureta but also suggestions that the woman and his mother had been friends for years. Even considering these materially inconsistent signs, the two thought that they could be taken as meaning that the three people—two of which were dead—had something in common, something more than simply being neighbors. What didn’t make sense was how the link between the two ladies and the son of one of them could have produced a murder.

  The two policemen were waiting for the boss to finish a call that was obviously boring him and to which he was only contributing with a few monosyllabic responses, which later evolved into unintelligible grunts. Finally, the conversation ended. Which was to say that the other person must have said good-bye, because the chief simply replaced the phone.

  Ramiro explained to the chief what they’d found about the connections between the pensioner, the lady, and her son.

  “Then examine Hugo Breno’s working life from the day he started working at the Caixa Econômica. Take note of any irregularities and see if there’s any sign of mental disturbance since he’s been working there.”

  “We already did, boss. Not investigating mental disturbances, but his behavior in general. He’s a model worker. He never misses a day, he doesn’t get there late, he doesn’t take sick days, he doesn’t cause trouble with anyone, and his performance is considered excellent. The only problem, which isn’t exactly a problem, is that he doesn’t make friends with anyone, even though he is very polite when people speak to him.”

  “The other thing I want is for you to follow Hugo Breno from the moment he leaves his job in the afternoon until he goes to sleep. The same thing in the morning, until he goes to work. One at a time, on alternating days. If you find it’s too tiring, we can call in someone else to share the work. For now it’s just the two of you. I want to know if he meets up with anyone, if he goes anywhere, if he’s a member of any religious organization, what he does for recreation or sport. He has to hang out with someone—friends, girlfriends, boyfriends, guru, whatever. Be careful not to be seen: he already knows us and knows we’re keeping an eye on him.”

  “We’ll need a bicycle,” Ramiro said.

  “A bicycle?”

  “For the mornings. He leaves home at sunrise. He runs up and down Copacabana Beach, and then swims around two hundred meters. And then he runs back home. We’re not in that kind of shape, chief.”

  “Fine. Rent a bicycle. There’s a store a block away.”

  Espinosa’s effort to remember the event in his childhood connected to Hugo Breno was getting mixed up with his memories of the day before with Vânia. The more he thought about the former, the more the latter took over in his mind. He stopped thinking about it. In the middle of the afternoon, the image of Vânia leaving the bedroom naked gave way to Vânia as a little girl, dead. Of course, it couldn’t be a memory of Vânia. It wasn’t Vânia who had collapsed and died. Why was she a girl, and why was she dead? Who was that girl? She had fallen in a building. A dead girl inside a building. Not inside an apartment; maybe in a hallway or a stairwell. In the Peixoto District. He himself was a boy too.

  He started rummaging through his head and figured out a rough date. Welber hadn’t yet gone out to follow Hugo Breno and promptly answered his call.

  “Welber, I want you to go through the Rio papers looking for news about the death of a girl about eleven years old, in the Peixoto District. It must have been around 1975. I don’t know the exact date. I don’t know the girl’s name. I just know that she must have been around eleven and that she must have been murdered. We can find something in the newspaper archives. Try the most important ones and the ones that cover crime news. It’s no use looking on the Internet because the papers have only been digitized up to about twenty years back. I think that you can look in the papers themselves, in
the National Library. You can delegate the job to someone you think is good at that kind of thing.”

  “Girl, eleven, found dead, suspected murder, Peixoto District, 1975,” Welber noted as Espinosa repeated the facts. “We have a new detective, Chaves, who’s good at research.”

  Welber assigned the task to Chaves, emphasizing that it was a special request made by Chief Espinosa. He went to his locker, took some gear from inside a box, changed his pants and shirt, and went down to the first floor of the station. Then he went to wait for Hugo Breno at the branch of the Caixa Econômica.

  At five in the afternoon, the guard opened the staff door and Hugo Breno came out. Stopping on the sidewalk, he looked both ways, walked to the corner, waited for the light to change, and crossed the street in the direction of the Avenida Copacabana. He walked unhurriedly, but without seeming to be just out for a stroll. His gaze seemed to take in what was going on around him, as if he was looking for something in particular. Nothing in him was spontaneous, but it all seemed natural. Welber walked ten meters behind him, sure that he couldn’t be recognized. Not even Espinosa would recognize him in this getup if he walked by him in the street.

  When Hugo Breno got to the Avenida Copacabana, he looked to both sides as if evaluating the situation, and once again waited for the light, crossed the avenue, and kept walking toward the beach. On the Avenida Atlântica, he stayed close to the buildings and kept walking. He didn’t look at the sea or at the scenery, and he didn’t seem interested by the people either. He seemed to have a defined goal that he was heading toward relentlessly. After walking for almost a half hour down the Avenida Atlântica, he went back to the Avenida Copacabana, checked out both sidewalks for a few seconds, chose the one that seemed to Welber to be the busiest, and entered the flow of pedestrians. His pace suffered a drastic reduction, but he didn’t seem to mind; to the contrary, he seemed quite peaceful. He walked for more than an hour, in both directions down the avenue, Welber tailing him, eventually heading back to the corner of Siqueira Campos and up the street to the building where he lived. During the whole journey, from the moment he walked out of the bank until he entered his building, Hugo Breno didn’t stop in a single shop, didn’t pause to look at anything in particular, and didn’t speak to anyone. When, two hours later, the light in his apartment went out, Welber waited for another half hour and then went home.

  That same afternoon, Ramiro managed to speak to one of Dona Laureta’s two remaining friends. She no longer lived at the address listed in Dona Laureta’s phone book, and it was only possible to find her thanks to another friend, a remainder of the old group of widows, who indicated an old hotel in the neighborhood of Flamengo as the last address she had for her. She couldn’t say if she was still alive.

  Ramiro discovered that she was alive and that she would be pleased to meet him. The conversation was productive.

  Espinosa wanted to get a call from Vânia explaining what happened the night before. Though it wasn’t exactly an explanation he wanted. He just wanted the presence of Vânia, which in and of itself would explain things, without explanatory speeches. Not for them to take up where they left off—though he did desire that, ardently—but he just wanted to get rid of the feeling of rejection that had been planted in his mind. Vânia’s gesture of pushing away his body and rushing from the scene left the strong impression that something in him had caused that rejection.

  The worst thing was that he’d gotten the idea that it hadn’t been an interruption but an end. Of course, for him, the scene had been interrupted, brutally interrupted, but the more time that went by, the more he was convinced that the encounter between himself and Vânia had had a beginning, a middle, and an end. It was a complete act. What he still couldn’t understand was what that act meant. Or at least its full meaning. And something told him that this full meaning would arrive through Irene.

  After describing his wanderings through Copacabana on the trail of Hugo Breno, Welber concluded by observing that the suspect didn’t go out walking in order to do anything specific, but that he was walking just for the sake of walking. For him, walking wasn’t a means, it was an end in itself. The strange detail was that Hugo Breno didn’t walk just anywhere or in any specific way, but that he seemed to think it was essential to walk in the middle of the crowd. If there was anything he was looking for on his wanderings, it was the crowd. He’d seemed to Welber like an extremely solitary man. A hermit among the crowd, Espinosa commented at the end of the detective’s story.

  After hearing Welber out, Ramiro shared the conversation he’d had the same afternoon with Adélia Marques, a friend of Dona Laureta’s, an eighty-two-year-old lady who lived in a hotel, thin, with elegant gestures, immaculately dressed and with her head square on her shoulders. She and Laureta had been friends for many years, when their husbands were still alive, and they’d stayed friends after their deaths. According to her, Laureta Sales Ribeiro was an intelligent and active woman. She didn’t like television and she hated any activity designed for senior citizens. She had her own opinions about politics and economics and she never liked the government, whether it was on the right or the left.

  “When I asked her if she’d ever heard Laureta mention a friend and neighbor whose son worked at the Caixa Econômica, she said that she knew who the friend was and that she’d even met her a few times. From Laureta, she learned that this friend had a very religious background, very morally strict, hardworking, and had been abandoned by her husband as soon as her son was born and had raised her son without any help from anyone. I asked her what she knew about the son. She said that she knew very little. The mother and son kept living in the same apartment until she died, about a year ago. The interesting fact is that Dona Laureta told her that the woman felt very guilty about her son. Dona Laureta didn’t know why, she just knew that it was something that caused her enormous suffering. That was the mother of Hugo Breno, our suspect. The lady didn’t remember anything else about his mother. As for Laureta herself, she told her friend she remembered lots of things, but that it would come back to her slowly; she couldn’t remember everything at once.”

  “And the other friend?” Espinosa asked.

  “According to Adélia Marques, she’s senile, she hardly remembers anything, and she can’t even form a complete sentence. The only one alive who’s still in her right mind is her.”

  “Things are starting to make more sense,” Espinosa said, “mainly because we’re starting to see a connection between Dona Laureta and the suspect. A decisive contribution might come from the newspaper archives Detective Chaves is researching. Keep an eye on Hugo Breno when he’s not at work. He has to meet someone. Nobody can be as solitary as he seems to be.”

  It was lunchtime and neither Vânia nor Irene had called. Espinosa was starting to think that Irene wouldn’t find out about her friend’s visit to his apartment. Or, if she had found out, she would have sent Vânia packing back to São Paulo, and was mulling over ways to punish Espinosa. The scene of Achilles dragging Hector’s body through the dust and throwing it to the dogs to be devoured came to mind. He didn’t like the image. But he also didn’t think that Irene would try to pull an Iliad scene with him in the role of Hector. He went out to lunch.

  That afternoon it was Ramiro’s turn to follow Hugo Breno. At a quarter to five, he stood in a store on the other side of the street from the Caixa Econômica, waiting for Hugo Breno to come out. At five-ten, the bank employee emerged from the staff entrance and took a left down the sidewalk of Barata Ribeiro. Ramiro left the store and walked down the opposite sidewalk, parallel to him. He’d hardly walked a block when, in Cardeal Arcoverde Square, Hugo Breno went into the subway station. Caught by surprise on the other side of the street, facing heavy traffic, Ramiro had to wait to cross the street, giving Hugo Breno an advantage that could end his mission right then and there. When he finally managed to pass through the cars and enter the station, he saw Hugo Breno already on the other side of the entrance, and Ramiro didn’t have a ticke
t. There was a small line in front of every ticket booth. If he waited his turn, he would risk missing the train Hugo got on, and Hugo had already disappeared deep into the station.

  Ramiro ran up to the entrance, flashed his badge, saying it was an emergency, and jumped over. He ran down the first escalator, crossed the long hallway that led to the second escalator, ran down it, and did the same thing on the third escalator, until he reached the platform. The number of people waiting for the train indicated that Hugo was most likely still there. He looked to the right, where there was less room, and didn’t see him. The left side was much longer and was full of people. He walked along the wall eyeing the people waiting on the edge of the platform. He wouldn’t have a second chance. Either he would find Hugo Breno immediately or he would have to get into the last compartment and walk through the entire train, easy enough to do off-peak but unfeasible during rush hour.

  He heard the noise of the train approaching, saw its headlights, and then spotted Hugo Breno in the middle of the small crowd that was pressing forward on the platform. He took up a position likely to be near the other door to the same car and waited for the train to stop and the doors to open. He pressed his way through and managed, after much pushing and shoving, to get into the car he wanted but, distracted by the struggle, he couldn’t confirm that Hugo was in the same car or even if he’d stepped onto the train or still waited outside on the platform.

  As soon as the doors closed and the train started moving, Ramiro kept his gaze trained out the window, in the anxious expectation of seeing Hugo Breno calmly walking down the platform. He didn’t. Which meant Hugo was in the train. He scanned the faces in the car as the train headed toward Botafogo station. That was one of the longest distances between stations, which gave him time to locate the suspect. Moving slowly through the packed car, pretending to make his way toward the exit, he managed to spot Hugo in the middle of the car, standing in the thickest concentration of passengers. Ramiro stayed next to the door, in case he suddenly had to go out after him. But Hugo didn’t get off at Botafogo. Instead, many more people boarded, making any movement inside the car impossible. The next five stations went by, but Hugo didn’t move. When the train left Cinelândia station, Hugo started moving slowly toward the main door of the car. Ramiro was already next to the other door, tracking his every move. As soon as the train stopped at Carioca and the doors opened, both of them stepped onto the platform at the same time. Hugo moved toward the nearest escalator and went out onto the Avenida Rio Branco.