Alone in the Crowd

by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza

  Welber went back to the station. He was sure that he hadn’t let the target escape. There was only one door to the Caixa. There was no back exit or internal access to the upper floors of the building. And Hugo hadn’t gone out the front door. He’d return to the bank the next morning to see if Hugo Breno had left before four-thirty. Meanwhile, he’d have to tell Espinosa that the suspect had disappeared.

  “Disappeared? What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know, boss. I got there at four-thirty. He always leaves right at five. I waited until they’d locked the doors and turned out the lights. He didn’t show up.”

  “He might have taken advantage of several people leaving at once to go out with a group, and you might not have seen him.”

  “There’s only a revolving door. Only one person comes out at a time. And I was watching everyone who came out.”

  “Could he have left disguised?” Ramiro asked.

  “Only if he was a master of disguise. And even then, why would he hide, if he could just walk out? And it’s not just that. His building’s watchman says he hasn’t seen him since Friday. He fled.”

  “Couldn’t he be on vacation?” Espinosa asked.

  “That would be a big coincidence, Chief. Tomorrow morning I’ll go back to the bank and see if he missed work, took vacation, or was out sick.”

  Ramiro, in turn, shared what he’d learned that afternoon, from Dona Adélia, the dead pensioner’s friend, and from Pernambuco, the watchman in Hugo Breno’s building.

  In the first interview, the most important information related to Hugo Breno’s mother; the second, with the watchman, covered Hugo burning documents, letters, and notebooks right after his mother died.

  “I think his mother left some written record of her son’s story and of the event that was causing him to suffer,” Ramiro said. “I just wonder: How far did Hugo go in burning the records?”

  “Are you thinking he killed his mother?” Espinosa asked.

  “It’s more of a feeling than an idea.”

  “Let’s see what Welber finds out at the Caixa tomorrow. Depending on that, we’ll put more pressure on him.”

  The next morning, Welber confirmed what they already suspected. Hugo Breno hadn’t fled, he’d only asked to take some of his vacation days starting on Monday, thereby extending the holiday to Saturday and Sunday as well. So he was already on his fourth day of vacation, which meant that at that point he could be anywhere in the world.

  It was almost eleven in the morning when Espinosa called Ramiro and Welber and asked them to close the door to his office so that they wouldn’t be disturbed.

  “I think we already have enough material to take a deposition from Hugo Breno … as soon as he comes back from his vacation, of course. Nobody knows where he went. But I think he’ll be back. We won’t call it a deposition, we’ll just call it a preliminary procedure, and tell him that we’re trying to gather information. Which is true. Meanwhile, there are a few facts that shouldn’t be brought into the investigation, but it’s important for you to know about them. What I’m going to tell you happened when I was twelve years old and the man we’re investigating, Hugo Breno, was eleven. These memories started coming back to me after I saw what Chaves found in some newspapers from the period and after a few chats I had with a man called Onofre, who was, and still is, the watchman at a building where an eleven-year-old girl died. She was a neighborhood girl who played with us.”

  Espinosa recounted the girl’s death in as much detail as possible, including the comments people made at the time and adding what Onofre had said about it, followed by his own suspicions about the involvement of a neighbor boy in the accident.

  “But listen,” he continued. “At the time, there was nothing to incriminate any of the kids in the group. There was nothing—and this I just realized—to suggest sexual violence against her. Everything suggested that the girl’s fall was an accident. There were only rumors, stories, comments suggesting that she hadn’t been alone. Thirty-something years later, a lady confides to a friend that she’s got a terrible guilt on her mind, that she’s suffering horribly because of a crime her son committed. That lady is Hugo Breno’s mother. We were a group of about ten kids, which included, depending on the game, a few girls. It’s impossible to say exactly what they were all like after so much time, especially because I was involved myself. I’m not trying to incriminate an eleven-year-old boy today who might have been involved in the death of a girl the same age, a death considered accidental. I’m just trying to put myself in the place of that boy to try to understand facts related to him now.

  “There is no evidence that Hugo Breno is responsible for any of the deaths we’ve referred to. So it’s possible that the three of us have been taken over by our own fantasies and that Hugo Breno, instead of being guilty, is just the victim of sick minds. Ours. For myself, I hope that’s the case. Yet as policemen, we have elements that might add up to something that’s not just a flight of fancy but a real story that’s developed over the course of almost thirty-five years, involving three deaths. Hugo Breno, when he was a child, could have somehow been involved in the death of a girl; years later, as an adult, he might have found out that his mother knew about it and that she’d told Dona Laureta; months later, Hugo Breno’s mother dies in unknown circumstances; after another year he kills Dona Laureta, getting rid of the only witness to his childhood crime.

  “I’ve got to tell you that the more I try to clear up this story, the more mysterious and unlikely it seems. Its starting point—Hugo Breno, when he was a kid, causing the girl’s death—as well as its conclusion—Hugo Breno pushing Dona Laureta under a bus—seem unreal to me. The motive, first of all. Why and how would an eleven-year-old kid kill his friend? Of course she fell down the stairs and hit her head on a marble step. Terrible, but probably an accident. In that case, why would there be that guilt? Similarly, even if his mother had started feeling guilty about the supposed participation of her son in that accident, why would that boy, more than thirty years later, kill an old lady who was close enough to dying of natural causes because of the simple fact that she’d heard his mother tell that story? The most realistic and factual version of our case is still uncomfortably strange. I’m afraid that it’s less of a case than a collective delusion.”

  The three of them were seated, mulling over their own ideas, unsure what to say or do.

  “Let’s go to lunch,” Espinosa suggested.

  The three of them went to lunch, but not together, as if they all needed to be alone to think about what had been said that morning. Welber went home for lunch, which he’d been doing ever since he’d moved to Copacabana, because that way Selma could supervise his diet. Ramiro preferred to save money and get a sandwich and a juice at the bar across the street. Espinosa went to the trattoria.

  After lunch, he left the restaurant, on his way back to the station by a different, and definitely longer, route. First, because he needed to think, and he thought better walking than when he was sitting down with his head resting in his hands, and second, because he wanted to check out the area around Hugo Breno’s building. It was still cloudy and the temperature was pleasant. Espinosa went down the Avenida Atlântica, walked four blocks, turned right onto Siqueira Campos, and went up to the subway station, on the corner of the Rua Tonelero, where Siqueira Campos split into two streets, at the beginning of the Ladeira dos Tabajaras. The block to the right, farther down Siqueira Campos, was where Hugo Breno’s building was. It wasn’t a very attractive area, near a shopping center that had seen better days, full of sleazy bars and auto-repair shops and close to the entrance to the Tabajaras slum. On the next corner, only a few blocks from Copacabana Beach, there was a small, friendly hotel for foreigners in search of cheap accommodations that also housed natives who wanted a room and a bed, as in an inn, only a few feet from the subway station. A good place for someone to hide out for a few days. He went around the block down the Rua Santa Margarida and stopped right where the watchman had se
en smoke coming out of the back of Hugo Breno’s apartment, which made the man suppose that he was burning his mother’s papers. The short street ended up at the Ladeira dos Tabajaras, near a taxi stand. Espinosa realized that some of the drivers at the stand had recognized him. He went down the street toward Siqueira Campos and returned to the station. Maybe Hugo Breno had burned his mother’s papers not because they were compromising but because they were useless.

  Welber and Ramiro thought about all the possibilities for locating Hugo Breno. They’d do that after talking to his colleagues at the Caixa and with his managers. None of his fellow bank employees knew anything beyond what neighborhood he lived in, much less where he spent his holidays. Once the two policemen had exhausted all the possible sources of information, they then started considering hypotheses. They stopped as soon as they realized that all hypotheses were possible, which meant that there was no hypothesis. Hugo Breno liked crowds, but he lived completely alone. He could be spending his holidays in São Paulo or in an isolated cabin in the mountains. There was nothing they could do but wait for him to come back to the Caixa Econômica.

  The case of Hugo Breno was obviously not the only one being investigated by the Twelfth Precinct, nor was it the most important. So during the two weeks the suspect spent on holiday, work in the station went on as usual, until Sunday, the day before Hugo was supposed to be back at work, when Welber got a collect call. It was Pernambuco, telling him that Hugo Breno had returned on Saturday night. If he’d come home, that meant that he’d be back at work the next day. Welber called Espinosa and the boss agreed that if Hugo was back home without making a secret of it, that meant that he’d be at the bank on Monday morning. There was no reason to detain him for an interrogation on Sunday afternoon.

  12

  Monday morning dawned with a hot sun, mercury rising. From his window, Espinosa had a broad vision of the blue sky above São João Hill. He’d just had breakfast and was checking the weather page to confirm what he’d already seen for himself: good weather with slightly rising temperatures. Even though he’d been born in Rio, he didn’t like the heat of the Rio summers. He thought that winter was the city’s best season. Nice days with a temperature around eighty degrees.

  When he got to the station, Welber and Ramiro were waiting for him. He told them how to approach Hugo Breno in the bank and about the measures they needed to take with his superiors to make sure he was let off for the rest of the morning. The main thing was not to frighten him. They didn’t have anything on him, only hints, and they didn’t want to lose what little they had.

  It was ten-thirty when Welber and Ramiro returned to the station with Hugo Breno. Though he was waiting for Hugo, Espinosa felt surprised and touched by having in front of him the man he’d played with when they were kids in the Peixoto District. The discomfort they both felt was palpable immediately. Of course Hugo knew who he was, and of course he knew that Espinosa also knew who he was. What were they supposed to do? Greet each other like old friends? Walk down memory lane? Talk about how the neighborhood and the city had changed?

  Espinosa got up, greeted Hugo, and invited him to take a seat, saying, “You’re not being detained or forced to testify. I think that Inspector Ramiro and Detective Welber made clear that you’re just being invited to clarify a few things in this preliminary phase of the investigation. In case you don’t feel like doing so, you can get up and walk out of here at any time.”

  “I don’t feel that way at all. I’m ready to help you.”

  Hugo Breno sat down in the chair nearest to Espinosa, while Ramiro and Welber sat farther off.

  “Great. Nothing we say here is being recorded, and we won’t take notes either,” Espinosa said. “If that becomes necessary, we’ll do so at another time. We’re investigating the death of an eighty-year-old woman, a retiree who drew her pension at the same Caixa Econômica where you work. Her name is Laureta Sales Ribeiro. This woman was helped by you in the morning and died beneath the wheels of a bus the same afternoon, in circumstances that have not yet been totally clarified.”

  “And you think I can help clarify them?”

  “Can you?”

  “Chief Espinosa, the police are paid to solve crimes, not bank clerks. I don’t investigate crimes and I don’t commit them, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”

  “I’m not suggesting that you committed any crime at all.”

  “Then why was I brought here by two police officers, who picked me up at my workplace?”

  “Because there are signs that your relationship with Senhora Sales Ribeiro was something more than the monthly encounters at the bank window.”

  “Then those signs are wrong.”

  “And there are others that suggest a connection between the lady and your own mother.”

  “And what does that have to do with her death?”

  “That’s one of the things we’d like to know.”

  “Are you insinuating that the death of Dona Laureta has something to do with the fact that she was friends with my mother?”

  “I just said that she and your mother were friends.”

  “Just like she might have been friends with any number of other ladies. What could that incredible fact prove?”

  “Probably nothing except that they were sociable people. But I’m not thinking about those other ladies, I’m thinking about Dona Laureta’s relationship with your mother … and the kinds of confessions they might have made to each other.”

  “Chief, my mother was a very religious and very fanciful person. What she might have told an eighty-year-old lady, more than a year ago, and in what way that lady might have taken it can’t be considered a serious sign of anything whatsoever.”

  “And what do you think she might have confided to her?”

  “Anything possible about human evil.”

  “And could that include possible evils committed by her own son?”

  “My mother died a long time ago. Even if she had told Dona Laureta something about me, why the devil, after so much time, would I go push that lady underneath a bus?”

  “Maybe because of the devil …”

  “What?”

  “That’s what you said: why the devil …”

  “Officer, you can’t be serious.”

  “But I am. Of course I’m not thinking that Lucifer himself ordered you to provoke the accident that took the woman’s life. But there are all kinds of devils. I mean, there are the devils in religious allegories and there are the devils we carry around inside us. I believe more in the powers of the latter than in the former. I don’t know which one you were referring to.”

  “I can’t believe this is a police interrogation.”

  “And in fact it’s not. It’s a conversation that’s intended to clear up any ambiguities that we’ve found with respect to your relationship to Dona Laureta.”

  “What kind of ambiguities?”

  “About the nature of that relationship and about any participation you may have had, voluntarily or not, in the accident that provoked her death.”

  “In other words, if it was my demons or someone else’s that caused the accident.”

  “That’s a delicate way of putting it.… That’s what allegories are for.”

  “Chief Espinosa, I don’t think there’s any question at all.… At the most, a few confused guesses about a woman’s death, in which you don’t know how to place me and you don’t know how to exclude me. Besides, you’re the one using allegories, trying to fill in the lacunae with this talk of devils and demons. I don’t think you have enough material to start a formal investigation. If we’re talking here, it’s not because of fond memories of our childhood nor because you have some accusation against me. If you did, this wouldn’t be a conversation, it would be a police interrogation. So let me suggest this: in the name of our childhood friendship, let’s cut this short and do the interview again another time … if possible, without witnesses.… Especially if the conversation touches on our childhoods.” />
  “Do you think it ought to?”

  “That’s fine with me. Unless you’re afraid of your demons.” Hugo Breno got up. “Have a nice day, Chief Espinosa. Good-bye, Detectives.” And he walked to the door.

  Ramiro and Welber automatically got up to stop him, but Espinosa made a slight gesture for them to let him leave, which Hugo Breno did unhurriedly and without the slightest sign of indignation. As soon as he left, Espinosa said:

  “He’ll be back. He himself is going to take the initiative to seek us out. He needs to talk. And everything suggests that he’s more interested in talking about the past than about the present. He’s the one who brought up our childhoods; we didn’t mention it. And I’m sure that he won’t just want to talk about his own childhood but about mine as well.”

  “We wondered if you had known him because he lived in the Peixoto District too.”

  “We used to play together when we were eleven and twelve years old.”

  “You didn’t mention that.”

  “I didn’t know—or, rather, I didn’t know if it was true.”

  Ramiro and Welber scratched their heads and looked at the boss.

  “Did you ask him where he spent his vacation?”

  “In a small town in Minas … in a monastery … meditating.”

  “Either he’s in the middle of the crowd or he’s retreating in a monastery. That’s the man for you.”

  “I thought it was artificial …” Welber said.

  “What did you think was artificial?” Espinosa asked.

  “That cocksure attitude. Showing no sign of being intimidated. After all, there were three cops in this room, but it was like Ramiro and I weren’t even here. He was only interested in you. I think he was expecting this and had prepared for the meeting.”

  “He didn’t seem the slightest bit concerned about the supposed murder of the old lady,” Espinosa said. “But he seemed very interested in opening the door to mentioning his childhood, and in so doing to get me on his side, on the same team. We’re not dealing with a run-of-the-mill bank clerk here. He might have strange habits, but he’s intelligent and articulate. Let’s wait for him to get in touch. I have a feeling it won’t take more than three days. If he hasn’t come to us by Wednesday, we’ll check in on him again.”