The Mystery of Rio

by Alberto Mussa

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © - by -

  First publication 2013 by Europa Editions

  Translation by Alex Ladd

  Original Title: O senhor do lado esquerdo

  Translation copyright © 2013 by Europa Editions

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco

  www.mekkanografici.com

  ISBN 9781609451493

  Alberto Mussa

  THE MYSTERY OF RIO

  Translated from the Portoguese

  by Alex Ladd

  This is the story of one

  who kills, then dances.

  Beware! A true hunter

  first lures, then pounces.

  It is not the geography, it is not the architecture, it is not the heroes, or battles, much less so the chronicles of customs, or the fantasies conjured up by poets. No, what defines a city is the history of its crimes.

  I am not, of course, referring to run-of-the-mill crimes. Ordinary, predictable, and petty criminals exist everywhere in the world. I am speaking of foundational crimes, necessary crimes, those that would be inconceivable, that could never have existed, anywhere but in the cities to which they belong.

  I arrived at this conclusion by way of the Unesco Standing Committee on the Theory and Art of the Police Novel, headquartered in London and financed by Scotland Yard.

  I was on the Fourth Panel, whose task it was to study the criminal annals of the great world capitals and list examples of “perfect crimes” that occurred in real life but whose nature was on a par with their literary counterparts.

  Although I was troubled by the inapt description, I accepted the Committee’s rules and pulled up a large number of cases for Rio de Janeiro, the city I was assigned to investigate. I was about to conclude my report when I noticed that one crime stood out from the rest.

  It, too, was a perfect crime. However, its “perfection” lay not in the infeasibility of uncovering evidence, but rather in the logical impossibility of accepting the solution. I was not content simply to include material such as this in a bureaucratic report.

  My meetings in London did not go well. Not only is the city not in the tropics, I was not prepared for how exotic its natives were: they were incapable of grasping notions of chance or disorder; they were ponderous, restrained, punctual; they did not react well to spontaneous emotions. I left the Committee’s headquarters without a job, but I did not hand in my notes.

  This novel is based on those notes, following, of course, the template of a detective story. But it can also be read as an adventure story, a “treasure hunt” of sorts, filled with duels, ambition, and revenge. It is thus closer to Dumas than to Melville or Conrad—a similarity that betrays the city’s French leanings.

  Others will read it as a tour through Rio de Janeiro, in both time and space, because one cannot understand or interpret a crime outside of where it was committed.

  And since crimes define cities, it is also the myth of Rio de Janeiro. The foundation myth, although not chronologically so. I now realize that the concept of city is independent of the concept of time.

  Many will say that I have veered, once again, into the realm of fantasy. I reject this assertion. This is a real story, and an autobiography, although it may seem like fiction. For in order for literature to be interesting at all, it must differ from life.

  The House of Swaps, formerly the residence of the Marquise of Santos, São Cristovão, Rio de Janeiro

  So then they asked Tiresias.

  “If you divide pleasure into ten,”

  the Seer said, “of that number,

  surely, nine belong to women.”

  They asked the Prophet too.

  Mohammed spoke not of ten:

  “Of a hundred parts,” he said,

  “ninety-nine belong to women.”

  The crime, whose victim was the Secretary to the Presidency of the Republic during the Hermes da Fonseca administration, was committed in the old imperial neighborhood of São Cristovão, on the old Imperador Street (now Pedro Segundo Avenue), where the legendary mansion known as the House of Swaps once stood.

  The House of Swaps, once the residence of the Marquise of Santos, and later the property of the Baron of Maúa, had been awarded in a court of law, after all appeals had been exhausted, to the Polish doctor Miroslav Zmuda. The doctor, a controversial defender of abortion and female sterilization, took possession of the mansion in 1906.

  This fabulous little palace at one point was also headquarters to the Ministry of Health, as well as the Fourth Centenary Museum. Today it houses the Museum of the First Empire. On the day our story begins—Friday, June 13, 1913—it seemed to house the Polish doctor’s imposing clinic.

  I say seemed to house. I overstate the point: Doctor Zmuda’s clinic, along with a very rarely used delivery room, did in fact function in that house during morning hours, in the left wing of the ground floor. However, behind its façade, there also existed a magnificent brothel, whose mysteries were concealed on the second floor.

  Doctor Zmuda’s brothel was the most exceptional establishment of its kind in the city. For it was not merely an establishment where men rented the services of prostitutes; women could rent the services of men there, too. As a matter of fact, every imaginable arrangement, combination, and permutation was allowed there.

  And it was not always a matter of prostitution: the House was also frequented by lovers, there of their own free and spontaneous accord (in fact, the price charged to give them cover was among the highest). And there were those who went there seeking random liaisons with strangers, which would give them access to the orgy nights—collective lovemaking sessions for couples only. And that is how the mansion became known, to this last group, as the House of Swaps.

  If not for the fact that Dr. Zmuda’s clinic was frequented by people of prominence, run with the utmost discretion, protected by the authorities, and above all loved by its clientele, it would not have withstood the tremendous shock of the death of the president’s Secretary to the Presidency of the Republic.

  Witnesses were unwavering and pointed to only one suspect: the prostitute known as Fortunata.

  Fortunata had been in the room with the secretary. She was one of the “nurses,” as they were called in the House—full-time prostitutes who had their own private clients. Her activities on that day were routine—she saw two gentlemen before the victim and, when she received the secretary at 4 p.m., she quickly began tending to him in one of the rooms. Moments later, she came down for glasses and a bottle of red wine.

  No one thought it odd when Fortunata, at around the time of the Ave Maria, rushed into the oval parlor on the top floor, where the nurses normally went to relax. She said she was very late, and rather rudely refused a glass of cashew liqueur, before exiting through the front door.

  It was only two hours later, after it occurred to them that the secretary’s nap seemed unusually long, that they knocked on the door. Fortunately, the nurse who discovered the crime did not scream.

  The victim’s wrists and ankles were tightly bound to the iron bedposts in such a manner that, according to the forensic expert, he could not possibly have untied himself. The neck still exhibited the murderer’s deep thumb marks. The coroner’s report (marked “Confidential”) confirmed that the causa mortis was strangulat
ion, even though the force applied exceeded that normally exerted by a woman.

  Apparently, no objects of value were missing—the gold ring with its flashy ruby was still there, as were the pocket watch and its long chain, made of the same metal, the tie clip with its inlaid ivory cameo, plus eleven mil-reis in cash—which early on ruled out the possibility of a robbery.

  One circumstance was cause for embarrassment: the president’s secretary lay gagged and blindfolded with a thick strip of black cloth and a whip with a silver handle was found on the floor near the bed, which explained the deep lacerations on his legs and pubic region.

  According to an old legend, underneath the House of Swaps, which had been especially remodeled to become the residence of the Marquise of Santos, there were several tunnels connecting it to the palace at Quinta da Boa Vista, as well as to other nearby houses, so that Emperor Pedro I could come and go without arousing suspicion.

  This is one of the ironies of the city: in a building endowed with secret passages, criminals could exit through the front doors, as Fortunata had done. This would never have happened in London, Baghdad, or Buenos Aires, to name only a few examples.

  While authorities tried to quash the scandal, an enormous contingent of police officers scoured the streets of São Cristovão and the neighboring bars to arrest a woman named Fortunata, of whom they had only a cursory description, taking care not to link her to a murder.

  The police were hoping that the fugitive had not made it far, and that she had sought refuge in the home of a lover or a friend. Just the same, civil guards and public safety officers rushed to the ferry terminal and the railway stations to try to prevent the killer from slipping away.

  Fortunata rented a room in a second-floor apartment on Conceição Hill. Her landlady, who ran a sewing school on the first floor, was horrified when the police came to search her tenant’s quarters, and stated that she had not seen her that day, having assumed she was still on night duty at the Polish doctor’s clinic. Her statement seemed consistent with the facts, since the probable killer’s personal effects were still in her room.

  The searches of the street and of the suspect’s room were unfruitful. To police officials, who initially believed the fugitive would be arrested in a matter of hours, the failure of these efforts was becoming a source of consternation, and increased pressure was placed on the officers. That is, until a fortuitous turn of events a little past midnight in Gamboa changed the course of the investigation.

  A police officer reported that, while going down one of the slopes of Favela Hill along the edge of the English Cemetery, he saw a moving shape, perhaps that of a man, a grave robber, trying to jump over a wall from inside the cemetery via a rope tied to a camboatá tree, whose branches extended over the wall onto the street.

  He did not blow his whistle to summon his fellow officers because he was not entirely certain about the existence of ghosts. He had the distinct impression, however, that the man, or whatever it was, after noting his presence, retreated. It was enough for him to show his mettle. Grabbing hold of the same rope that the shape had intended to descend with, he climbed the wall and jumped into the cemetery.

  In those gloomy surroundings, spiked with trees whose canopy of leaves cast shadows everywhere, the fearless policeman searched for the footprints of the desecrator. And, to his despair, he saw an apparition pass below where the chapel stood. Filled with panic and already regretting his decision, he managed to utter that he had a warrant, and he threatened to come closer. It was then that the being betrayed its true nature by fleeing once again, this time behind a headstone.

  Every predator’s courage grows in inverse proportion to the fear exhibited by the prey. With the policeman it was no different. He thus leaped in pursuit of someone who could only be a grave robber.

  There was no struggle, so to speak. Straight away, the officer arrested an old man dressed very plainly, with a large cloth sack worn bandolier-style across his chest.

  “I came to do a job. It’s for a private client. Don’t ask me his name.”

  At the Mauá Square police station, the seat of the First District (with jurisdiction over the port as well as northern downtown, from the old wharf of the Mineiros all the way to the Mangrove canal, near Formosa Beach), they found the following objects among the old man’s possessions: shells, stones, tiny implements, wood chips, stubs of magic pemba chalk, tallow candles, macerated leaves, tiny vials with mysterious brews, cartridges of gunpowder, as well as other small things. They also found a bottle of cachaça and fragments of animal bone.

  But what most surprised authorities were the gold pieces. Specifically, a pair of earrings in the shape of seahorses. The sergeant on duty, who earlier had received a description of Fortunata—brown-skinned, tall, approximately five feet six inches, wearing a turquoise taffeta dress and gold earrings shaped like seahorses—concluded that this could not be mere coincidence, and that those earrings had not long ago been on the ears of the woman they were pursuing.

  “That’s payment for my services.”

  He was known to police, the old man was. He went only by Rufino, and he was reputed to be a great sorcerer. An old-time character in the city, he lived high in Santa Teresa, in a remote area where there were half a dozen shanties by the entrance to the forest, but he was frequently seen at Rosario Church, at the Pedra do Sal, at Lapa Square, and Misericodia Hill, where even the wealthy, in search of prayers, potions, and amulets, could find him. He rarely saw clients in the hills, except for serious cases, procedures that needed to be performed on the patient’s actual body.

  Word had it that he was over 100 and the owner of a vast buried treasure, although few gave credence to such legends. In fact, he was feared and respected, and his power derived from the odd trait that he had never told—and was, in fact, incapable of telling—a lie.

  The sergeant, however, was the skeptical type. He wanted to know when and where Rufino had obtained jewelry belonging to a fugitive sought by a direct order of the chief of police.

  “A man gave me this gold.”

  It was not his answers that surprised the sergeant, but rather the solemn and reverential reaction of his subordinates.

  “Believe him, chief. The old man doesn’t lie.”

  Rufino revealed that the earrings had belonged to the man who had hired him for the job, given to him in appreciation for his trips to the cemetery, and that this man would be visiting his home, high up in Santa Teresa, within two weeks’ time, in order to complete the spell.

  After wavering, the sergeant had him arrested until he had further word from his superiors, whom he had notified. The jewels were retained as material evidence in a possible crime tied to Fortunata—although he had no idea what she was actually wanted for.

  The sorcerer objected, saying he was being robbed. Before he was led to his cell—escorted with great respect by the officers, who even went so far as to apologize—Rufino looked one of them in the face.

  “If you ever need my help, sir, don’t bother.”

  The old man was brash.

  Interestingly, the day after the murder, the obituaries reported that the death of the Secretary to the Presidency of the Republic was due to a case of sudden cardiac arrest.

  No mention was made of murder or of the incident at the English Cemetery. No mention was made, either, of the searches in Conceição Hill, and the name of Fortunata was never brought up. Only one newspaper was more astute than the others and published a brief article that made reference to a “strange death,” “ignored circumstances” and “the silence of the authorities.” However, no further suspicions were raised.

  Since this is a police narrative, it is important that the reader know exactly the way things transpired. Let us then go back to the night in question, so as to know the exact chronology of facts and to understand how such a scandalous tragedy could have been concealed from the public.


  It is true that Dr. Zmuda’s influence, because of his ties to people in power, was decisive in covering up the crime. The first measure he took, as soon as he confirmed the absence of breathing and a pulse, was to order that nothing be touched. He also instructed that no more clients be let in that night and that all the nurses remain in the oval parlor until further notice.

  Fortunately, it was a Friday, a slow day. The Polish doctor said goodbye to the remaining clients, who did not suspect a thing, and a little after 8 p.m. he telephoned the chief of police.

  Since 1907, the chief of police of Rio de Janeiro was directly subordinate to the minister of justice, who appointed him. Below the chief of police there were three auxiliary chiefs, followed by, in decreasing hierarchical order according to rank and seniority, the district-wide captains and lieutenants—not to mention, of course, the officers.

  In this instance, the chief of police might have had the backing of the minister, because certain actions needed to be taken immediately. Due to the case’s political overtone, he did not allow an inquiry to be launched in São Cristovão, where the crime had occurred, and he assumed personal control over the investigation, arriving at the House of Swaps before 9:15 p.m.

  From there, on the telephone, after hearing a brief report of the incident and writing down a description of the suspect, he ordered the searches, which began around 9:30 p.m.

  Time was against the chief of police. He could not delay notifying the family for too long. But he did not want the relatives to see the body in that state, before the bruises could be hidden, especially around the neck.

  On the other hand, an examination of the crime scene, even a cursory one, was essential. After all, there could be sinister motives behind the assassination, and extremely serious political implications. It was while in the throes of these thoughts that he asked the doctor, “Tell me something, Zmuda: which men from the department come here?”