10
Why couldn’t it have been a moth? The question nagged Espinosa for the rest of his Saturday, like a dog trailing after its owner. The difference was that just then the owner was afraid of the dog. What really made him uncomfortable wasn’t the doubt the question implied. He didn’t have any doubts about whether the girl had been scared by something sexual or by a moth. Despite the form, the question wasn’t a question; there was no doubt, just the certainty: it wasn’t a moth.
At the end of the afternoon, Irene called to suggest that they spend the night together, an idea he immediately embraced. Espinosa took up reading about Montalbán’s latest travels, in an attempt to frighten off the ghosts that surrounded his rocking chair, so that he would greet Irene in a lighter mood. Despite his precautions, when he opened the door to her two hours later, Irene’s question was right on the mark.
“What happened?”
“Why?”
“Because something obviously happened … something serious.”
“Nothing happened. I mean, nothing happened today.”
“And yesterday?”
“No. Nothing. Everything’s fine.”
“Baby, when we feel the need to say that everything’s fine, that means everything’s not fine. Why don’t you tell me what’s on your mind—because something’s obviously bothering you—so that we can finally have a pleasant night together?”
“It’s not easy.… Even though it happened over thirty-five years ago.”
“Thirty-five years ago?!”
“Almost.”
“To you?”
“I still don’t know to what extent.”
“Of course you don’t, you were a child.”
“Twelve.”
“You’re tormented by something that happened when you were twelve?”
“Those are the things that really torment us. Other things are just problems.”
“And can you tell me about that thing?”
“That’s the problem: the clarity I used to have for recalling things that happened so long ago.”
Espinosa told her the story of the dead girl as best he could.
“And why are you worried about this after almost thirty-five years?”
He briefly told her about Hugo Breno, without mentioning the death of the pensioner.
“The first story is really sad; the second one is really interesting. But the first one is the one that bothers you.”
“Both of them bother me. I was there for both stories. Which, for me, aren’t two separate stories; they’re just episodes in my own story.”
“You’re haunted by the ghost of your childhood, but you’re also feeling stalked by a ghost today. Which is interesting.”
“What’s interesting?”
“That man … Hugo.… He gets off on losing himself in the crowd … for no reason … for the pleasure of the crowds. He’s not a thief. He’s not a murderer …”
“There’s some doubt about that.”
“How do you mean?”
“He’s suspected of having pushed an old lady under a bus.”
“And why would he do that? To rob her?”
“No. That’s the other problem. We couldn’t discover any motive for the crime.”
“And did they see him push her?”
“No. Nobody saw anything.”
“Espinosa, you’ve told me two ghost stories. In neither of them can you assure me that a murder took place, and in neither of them do you have a murderer. Two people definitely died. But how do you know they were murdered? What’s haunting you about these stories?”
“The fact that I can’t distinguish between my real memories and the memories that are superimposed on the real memories and hiding them. I’m afraid I might be using the image of the boy that Hugo Breno was to hide another image, which would be the one of the true cause of the girl’s death.”
“And what real image might that be?”
“That’s just it. It could be any of them. Including my own.”
“Are you trying to tell me, Espinosa, that when you were twelve you could have caused the death of the girl?”
“It’s a possibility.”
“Espinosa, hon, why don’t we do something concrete that feels good that also involves fantasy?”
The next morning, while they were having their coffee, Irene took up the conversation from the night before.
“Before I fell asleep, I was thinking about the man in the crowd. He’s very interesting. You said that he lives alone, has no friends, no wife, doesn’t talk to anyone, and that he gets his thrills by mingling in the crowd.”
“Right. But be careful not to romanticize him. We call him the ‘man of the crowd’ because of the Poe story, but he’s nothing more than an employee of the Caixa Econômica who has some odd tics.”
“Some odd tics? Babe, you have some odd tics. This guy is flat-out weird. But that doesn’t mean he’s not interesting. He’s completely solitary, but his greatest pleasure is to spend hours in the middle of the densest crowds, and during all that time he doesn’t speak to anyone, he doesn’t touch anyone. And you think he tossed the old lady under the bus? And you think that when he was eleven he threw that girl down the stairs? Is it because of the modus operandi that you’re connecting the two?”
“In …”
“Sorry, honey, that was in bad taste. Let’s not talk about the man anymore.”
They didn’t speak of Hugo Breno, just as they didn’t speak of the girl, but that didn’t mean they weren’t thinking about them, feeling that the strange story of the two characters was present as a subtext in everything they were saying. Sunday ended without invoking noteworthy emotion, bathed in the soft autumn light that was coming through the French windows.
Monday morning. Overcast, temperature dropping, rain predicted for the afternoon. It wouldn’t be as hot, and that was fine with Espinosa. He put his newspaper aside and went to get dressed. It was eight-ten in the morning and he wanted to be at the station by eight-thirty.
Monday morning isn’t just any morning; it’s a kind of symptom of the weekend. Instead of arriving rested up and happy to get back to work, people got in late, as if Saturday and Sunday had unleashed a massive sociocultural hangover. Ramiro and Welber hadn’t avoided the syndrome of the first day of the week.
“Morning, Chief, you called us?”
“That’s right. Which of you is going to follow Hugo Breno this afternoon?”
“I am, boss,” Welber said.
“Then, Ramiro, you’re going to go speak with Dona Adélia, Dona Laureta’s friend. She said that she couldn’t remember everything all at once. You were with her last Wednesday. It’s time for her to try to remember something else. See what you can find out about Hugo Breno’s mother.”
Ramiro’s best weapon in interviews was managing to get close to the person he was interviewing, like a cousin who had been missing for years, or an old neighbor. People who resisted talking to the police, after half an hour talking to him, would start confiding in him as if he were a childhood friend. And since that favorable climate had already been established on a previous visit, the eighty-two-year-old lady, who had dressed up to receive the visitor, came down to talk to Ramiro in the lobby of the hotel where she lived. The hotel was only a block away from Catete Palace. It wasn’t a big hotel: not five stars or even four; some guidebook might have awarded it three at the most. But it still retained a few traces from the old days, when it had been a sought-after location for politicians from other states in town for meetings in the palace, back when Rio de Janeiro was still the seat of the federal government.
“Good afternoon, Inspector, how nice of you to come back.”
“It’s my pleasure, Dona Adélia. The only reason I didn’t come earlier was so as not to bore you with police business.”
“But we’ve never talked about police business …”
The discreet elegance of the lady could also be felt in the way she spoke and listened, and even in
her impenetrable solitude. She didn’t complain about anyone, she didn’t mourn the loss of anything, and she seemed to look for her pleasures in the slightest facts of everyday life. The conversation with Inspector Ramiro was certainly outside her everyday life.
“I feel like you are looking for something, sir, but I can’t quite tell what it is.”
“I myself don’t know exactly what I’m looking for. I just know that it has to do with the strange death of Dona Laureta and with Dona Alzira, Hugo Breno’s mother, the one who works at the bank. Do you know what she died of?”
“All I know is that it was sudden. As far as I can remember, she wasn’t sick. You know that after a certain age the favorite subjects of conversation become illness and medicine.”
“And Dona Laureta didn’t have any serious illness?”
“No. Nothing serious, at least. She was a bit nervous, but that was all.”
“How do you mean, nervous?”
“She was … it’s hard to put my finger on it.… She was electric, agitated.”
“And Dona Alzira?”
“I knew her less; she wasn’t exactly my friend, she was a friend of my friend Laureta’s, but we did see each other sometimes. Since the three of us lived nearby, we did sometimes run into each other at the grocery store or even at the market. She was a strange person.”
“How do you mean?”
“A bit wary, not too friendly, but when she spoke she did sometimes reveal things about her private life. She didn’t reveal anything as a complaint; it had something to do with her religion, something moral, as if she was permanently doing battle with something.”
“Do you remember any of those revelations?”
“Not exactly about the revelations specifically, but about the theme, which was always about her son and her worries about him. Which frightened me, because her son was a strong, healthy, grown-up man, with a good job at the Caixa Econômica.… I didn’t understand what she was so worried about.”
“And she didn’t say?”
“From what I could make out, it wasn’t anything that affected her son directly, but it was something to do with her, though it also had to do with her son. It was a complicated situation. Her son, she said, didn’t complain about anything; she was the one who complained, as if there was something wrong with the son that she felt but he didn’t. It wasn’t a sickness, it was some kind of guilt she had in relation to her son. Hard to understand.”
“Did she die in an accident?”
“No. I think she died of something that came over her suddenly. It might have been her heart, though I can’t remember her saying that she had anything wrong with her heart.”
“And her son, did you ever meet him?”
“No. I saw him once or twice, but from a distance. We never spoke.”
“You also said that none of the three of you had any serious illness, despite the minor complaints of old age. Was there any possibility that your friend Dona Laureta might have had a serious illness and not told you about it?”
“No. If she’d had something serious, I would have known. We were really close.… And we didn’t have that many other people to talk to … except our doctors, of course.”
“Do you think your friend could have killed herself?”
“No. Definitely not. When I said she was nervous, I didn’t mean that there was anything wrong with her mentally. She was someone who was always busy doing things, she was jumpy, but not at all crazy. She’d never have committed suicide. You can be sure that she didn’t throw herself in front of that bus.”
The interview continued a little while longer, but Ramiro knew that the chances of obtaining any more useful information were small. He made a few more comments and then brought the conversation to a close. The old lady’s confidential assurances that her friend would never have committed suicide seemed to have more to do with her than with her friend. Nobody could guarantee that another person would never commit suicide, especially when that person was eighty years old and had lost her husband and all her relatives. The two bits of information that might possibly be useful were reaffirmations of what she’d already said, both about Dona Alzira, the bank teller’s mother.
Since the interview was shorter than he’d expected, Ramiro decided that before going back to the station he’d try something else in the building on Siqueira Campos where Hugo Breno lived. The Catete subway station was only one block from the hotel where he was, and the Siqueira Campos station was itself only a block from Hugo Breno’s building. It couldn’t have been more convenient.
The three-story building had been built on a lot that wasn’t more than six meters wide and was limited at the back by the Rua Santa Margarida. In front, there was just a double door and a little hall that ended in a stairwell. There was no lobby, strictly speaking, just a doorbell outside. Ramiro rang a few times and waited for a long while. He was about to leave when he saw a man come out whose status was not immediately apparent. He wasn’t wearing a uniform, but he didn’t seem to be a resident either.
“Good morning, are you the doorman?”
“I can help you.”
The building didn’t have a doorman; instead, it had a kind of watchman who also cleaned and did some electrical work. He’d worked on the construction of the building when he was still very young, and had come back years later in search of a job. They didn’t have anything regular to offer him, but they needed someone to do some cleaning and small odd jobs. He accepted and never left. He’d never had a clearly defined job. He wasn’t the doorman, but he also wasn’t the custodian. He said he was the watchman. He wasn’t a regular employee of the building. He got a salary contributed to by the tenants and he lived in a room that had originally been a storage area. The provisional situation had now lasted twenty years. All this was told to Ramiro by the man who called himself the watchman, after Ramiro asked if he was the doorman.
Ramiro thanked him for the information and asked his name.
“People call me Pernambuco.”
“I’m Inspector Ramiro, from the Twelfth Precinct. I need to talk to a lady who they said lives here. She’s a widow with a son who works at the Caixa Econômica.”
“That could be Dona Alzira from the first floor …”
“Does she have a son who works at the Caixa?”
“Yes, sir.… But the problem is that she died.”
“She died? A long time ago?”
“No. Last year.”
“Do you know what she died of? She was in such good health.”
“She sure was. It was sudden. One day she was fine, the next day she was dead. Her son said it was her heart.”
“And the son, does he still live here?”
“He does. The apartment’s his.”
“And what’s he like?”
“Quiet. He hardly says a word. He must have been sad when his mother died.… That’s what I think.… But he was always like that.”
“Like what?”
“Quiet. He doesn’t talk to people. He only says what he has to say, and nothing else.”
“And did he get along well with his mother?”
“That I don’t know, sir.”
“Did you notice anything strange between them?”
“Between them, no. What I thought was strange was that one day after his mother died he spent the whole afternoon burning her things. He called me and told me to give her clothes to whoever I wanted. And I saw on the living-room floor a big pile of papers, notebooks, all with stuff written on them, which he was tearing up and putting into a big metal bucket. Later I saw him light it all on fire. I mean, I didn’t see him do it, but since he lives on the first floor I can see his outside area. Smoke was coming out of there the whole afternoon. And I saw him throwing bits of paper into the bucket.”
11
Welber got to his observation post half an hour before five and stood waiting for Hugo Breno to emerge for another one of his plunges into the crowd. Even though he was prepared for any adventu
re, Welber ardently desired for the man not to repeat his downtown tour, nor go out in search of new crowds; instead, he hoped he would remain in Copacabana, more accessible, without any extra complications with the subway. At five to five, Welber focused on the revolving door of the Caixa branch. Five o’clock. One minute past … two … three.… The detective checked his watch against the clock in the shop where he was: five past five. Something must be keeping Hugo Breno in the bank. Quarter past. Maybe he hadn’t closed yet; maybe he was a few centavos off and he couldn’t leave until they spotted the error. Five-thirty. No, it had nothing to do with the cash box; maybe he’d fallen ill. Six o’clock. All the lights went out and the door of the agency was locked. Hugo Breno hadn’t come out for the simple reason that he wasn’t inside.
Welber went straight to the building where he lived, on Siqueira Campos, and rang the bell. When the man who answered heard the question, he said:
“Your colleague was already here this afternoon asking about his mother.”
“My colleague? Asking about his mother? She’s dead.”
“That’s what I told him.”
“Did my colleague give his name?”
“I think it was Ramires.”
“Ramiro. Inspector Ramiro.”
“That’s it. If he’s an inspector, he ought to know that the man’s mother’s dead.”
“That’s true, but I’m interested in him, not his mother.”
“I haven’t seen him. Not yesterday or today. I think I didn’t see him the day before either.”
“He took advantage of the weekend and disappeared.”
“So to speak. Maybe he took a trip. I didn’t see him with a suitcase. But I didn’t see him without a suitcase either.”
“If he shows up, no matter what time it is, call me. My name is Welber. This is my cell phone number. You can call collect.”
Alone in the Crowd Page 10