“Follow him again today. And don’t believe that he’s as out of it as all that. A guy who walks around with a gun in his pocket can’t be as distracted as you think. What looks like distraction might be something else.”
“And what if he is armed?”
“Don’t do anything, for now. It might even be a nervous tick, and he’s just holding on to something inoffensive. Another thing. The Argentine should be getting here soon. I want you to interrogate him before I talk to him. Threaten to charge him with fraud. Don’t worry if we’ve got proof or not—he’s a foreigner and he’ll get scared.”
Even though nothing linked the Argentine directly to Olga’s death, Espinosa thought that his prediction and her death were at least a strange coincidence. Naturally, for everything to make sense, he’d still have to determine that she had been murdered and that there was a connection between Gabriel and the murderer.
At eleven-thirty Welber came back into Espinosa’s office.
“I’ve been with the couple for almost an hour. They’re not easy. He’s arrogant and won’t let himself be intimidated. I think it’s time for you to talk to them.”
Hidalgo and Stella were in a small room whose single window was closed. The room contained a desk with no drawers and four chairs, two of which were occupied by the couple. There were two ashtrays on the table. There was also an old filing cabinet that didn’t fit in any other office in the old building. When Espinosa came in, accompanied by Welber, the Argentine looked at the officer without getting up or greeting him. Espinosa resumed the questioning.
“It seems that your conversation with Detective Welber failed to shed much light on our problem.”
“Officer, there are several mistakes that we ought to clear up before you take up what you call a conversation, but which is actually an interrogation. I wasn’t invited here for a social event, but ordered to appear to clear up some facts that, from what I gathered from Detective Welber’s words, are pretty nebulous. Moreover, I’m not a foreigner, as your assistant has said, and I’m certainly not Argentine. I am Chilean by birth and a naturalized Brazilian. Finally, I’m a university professor and I’m not going to be intimidated by the childish hints dropped by the detective.”
Espinosa was about to respond when Stella started to speak. He was surprised because he’d never heard her voice, which was surprisingly incisive.
“Officer, Hidalgo is a higher being. Nothing you can do can touch him.”
“We don’t want to touch either one of you; to the contrary, you are the ones who are being accused of touching innocent people who have been traumatized by the suffering you caused. I would like to make something else clear, before you two go on putting on airs. What you are doing is defined as the crime of fraud, which is punishable by five years in prison in addition to a fine. Now, with your permission, we can continue the conversation. When, and if, the conversation becomes an interrogation, you will notice the difference immediately.”
Espinosa knew that he had very little to press Hidalgo with, and Hidalgo knew it too; however, the officer wasn’t in the least interested in his subject’s philanthropic activities in hospitals. He wanted to know about his relationship with Gabriel, if there had been any contact beside the meeting in the restaurant. The encounter stretched out for another hour, during the course of which Hidalgo and Stella didn’t soften their resistance one bit. Espinosa concluded that one thing was practically certain: there was nothing between Hidalgo and Gabriel beyond their encounter at the birthday party. Another thing was that despite what Stella said, Hidalgo had no psychic powers. The two were dismissed. Espinosa figured that in spite of their arrogance, he’d scared the couple enough to put a brake on any clairvoyant impulses they might feel in the future.
7
As soon as her son left for work, Dona Alzira started her search. When she’d brushed against Gabriel’s jacket, she’d felt a hard, heavy object in his outer pocket. Her late husband had kept a weapon inside a canvas bag in the wardrobe, and several times she’d had to move it when she was cleaning. She could swear that Gabriel had a revolver in his pocket. She hadn’t said anything at the time, because her son was starting to open up again, and she didn’t want to push him away. She hadn’t noticed the shape that morning. She’d have until the afternoon to go through his room. She wasn’t really looking for the gun as much as a confirmation of her fear that he was up to something that could put his life in danger.
The room was small, and she knew it well; it wouldn’t take her long. In less than half an hour she’d gone through all the obvious places: under the mattress, inside the drawers, and behind the clothes in his wardrobe. But she knew that he’d hidden it somewhere hard to reach, somewhere she’d have to climb up to get to, and the highest place was the bookshelves. She didn’t find the revolver, but she did find the box of bullets, and nobody hides a box of ammunition behind the books on the highest shelf in his room unless he’s also hiding, probably on his own person, a gun.
The last two days had been very dull for Espinosa. The newspapers were consumed with the death of a prostitute in an apartment not far from the station. The event wouldn’t have elicited a single line if the body hadn’t had an ice pick buried in its chest with a note that said: “To teach all the girls to do their homework.” The word that circulated among the dead woman’s friends was that it was a message from the person who controlled prostitution in the area—whom everybody knew to be a policeman at Espinosa’s station. The papers didn’t name the cop who’d ordered the hit, but they made it clear that they knew who it was and demanded a rigorous investigation.
“What are you going to do?”
“Name a commission to investigate.”
“It’ll be a lot of work.”
“I know, but I can’t cover up something like this. How was the stakeout yesterday?”
“For a while it was just like the day before, but this time he did something that took me by surprise. All of a sudden, with no warning, he signaled to a passing taxi and left me there in the street. There was no other taxi around. I don’t know if he was trying to lose me or if it was just one of those weird things he does. He never looked behind him to see if he was being followed. And yet he got into the cab so fast that nobody could come after him.”
“Keep following him today. Take the mornings off to rest. I think he noticed that he was being followed. Don’t forget that he’s obsessed with the idea that he’s going to kill someone, so he could also be thinking that somebody is trying to kill him. If it’s true that he’s armed, he might want to use his weapon. Don’t expose yourself. I don’t want you wounded again.”
Nine o’clock at night. Espinosa was preparing a ham and cheese sandwich, attempting to rekindle memories of his only trip to Paris. But no matter how many different kinds of bread he tried, and no matter how many different brands of ham and cheese he auditioned, the finished product never hit the mark. It was true that he’d lost the power to compare them—he’d tried so many that he no longer exactly remembered the prototype. Wine took him back to the experience. Over the course of the evening, with the help of a few sandwiches, he drank an entire bottle, which put him to sleep so soundly that he didn’t hear the phone ringing. Only in the morning did he listen to his messages and realize how much had happened the night before. The messages only identified the caller and expressed urgency. They were almost all from Welber and from a detective on duty in the Tenth Precinct, in the neighborhood of Botafogo.
While he was eating breakfast, he called Welber. It took a few tries before the phone was picked up.
“Sorry, Welber, I told you to take the morning off and I’m the first one to wake you.”
“No problem. I was already up. Before you called, the phone had already rung twice.”
“That was me. What happened last night?”
“We’d better talk about it in person. I’ll stop by your house in an hour.”
He finished his coffee. Even after he showered, shaved, and dresse
d, he still had time to get through nearly the whole paper before Welber arrived. The detective didn’t want to come up for coffee; he said he’d rather talk on the way to the station.
“I called you several times last night because a detective from the Tenth Precinct was looking for you. It’s a long story, and it starts when I was following the guy. Like the day before, I waited for him to get off work. He stuck to the same routine as the previous day, until he got to Botafogo. When he passed the subway station, he went downstairs instead of continuing on; I waited for him to reach the platform and then followed. When I made it to the platform myself, he was nowhere to be found. I searched the whole station, but there was no sign of him, and no trains had come. That’s when I realized he’d tricked me again; he must have gone up the other staircase. After that, nothing, besides the fact that he’d made me look like an idiot. Around eleven at night I was getting ready for bed when the phone rang. It was from our station. The guy said that an officer from the Tenth was looking for you because there’d been a homicide and the dead guy’s wife was screaming that you’d had the guy killed. It was Stella. When they’d gotten home, Hidalgo had apparently gone to open the living room window to air out the apartment and was shot in the face. The murderer was outside, in a side passage leading to the electric and gas meters. Stella said the murderer fired and then left through the little door to the street; she didn’t see anything because she was so scared, with Hidalgo lying there with his face covered with blood. Because they live on the ground floor, they have burglar bars, but that doesn’t stop anybody from shooting in. When our colleagues from the Tenth Precinct arrived, she was shouting that Officer Espinosa had done it. Of course they didn’t believe her, but they wanted to talk to you to see what was going on. I didn’t say anything about following Gabriel, since it wasn’t official.”
They walked past the station and kept going. Espinosa spoke.
“The interval between the disappearance of Gabriel in the subway and Hidalgo’s death—”
“Matches perfectly. Gabriel vanished around eight. According to Stella, Hidalgo died around nine-ten. As soon as I could, I went to Gabriel’s building. Mother and son were already asleep. I managed to talk to the doorman, who was still up, watching TV. He said that Gabriel had gotten home between nine-thirty and ten. He couldn’t give an exact time. That’s it. I still haven’t talked to Gabriel or his mother; I wanted to wait and talk to you first. Should we get some coffee?”
They went into one of the few coffee shops in Copacabana that had resisted the temptation to turn itself into a luncheonette, where you could still get a cup of coffee and a buttered roll while sitting down. The weather had stabilized, promising another series of clear days.
“I was worried about the tone Stella took with the Tenth Precinct people. I don’t know what she said about the interview they’d had with us, or if she said anything about Gabriel; I only know that she kept screaming that you were responsible for her partner’s death. By the time I arrived, she had already finished giving her deposition.”
“If she’s blaming me, that means she hasn’t made a link between Gabriel and the Argentine’s death.”
“Chilean.”
“Whatever.”
“You don’t think it would take a lot of nerve for him to kill the guy that we all knew he hated, at the precise hour that he knows I’ve been following him?”
“Maybe that will be his defense: do you think I’d be stupid enough to kill the guy under those circumstances? I might as well have called the police to witness my crime. To which we could respond: And isn’t that exactly what you did? And he could say: Why would I do that? Our answer: Because you could say that you couldn’t kill the guy while you were being followed by Detective Welber. To which Welber could respond: Not the whole time; you vanished right when you went downstairs into the subway. I didn’t disappear, he’d say, you just lost me; I got on a subway train and went home for dinner.”
“Let’s go to the station, fill out a search warrant, and go to our friend’s apartment in Flamengo. I don’t think he’s stupid enough to shoot his declared enemy in the face and then put the gun back in his bedside table.”
“If he’s not stupid, he might be crazy, and crazies—”
“Can also kill people.”
It was ten-forty in the morning when Dona Alzira opened the door to the apartment. She recognized one of the men as the one she’d spied through the blinds the night before, talking to the night doorman on the sidewalk in front of the entrance. She hadn’t managed to make out what they were saying because the window was closed.
“Dona Alzira, these gentlemen are from the police. They’d like to speak with you, ma’am.”
“Good morning, Dona Alzira. I’m Officer Espinosa, from the Twelfth Precinct, and this is Detective Welber. We have a search warrant and would like to search your apartment, especially your son’s room.”
“But he’s not home; he’s at work.”
“Maybe it’s better that way. Don’t worry, we’ll be careful.”
“What are you looking for?”
“A gun.”
“My son doesn’t have a gun. He’s a peaceful person.”
“In that case, our search will confirm what you are saying.”
“Why are you looking for a gun? Did Gabriel do something?”
“We don’t know yet.”
They combed every inch of Gabriel’s room, every place where a weapon could possibly be hidden. They looked for hollow places in the walls and the floor, inside and outside the wardrobe, in the light fixture, and behind every book on the shelf; they also checked every book, to see if any of them had been hollowed out. Then they searched the bathroom, the living room, the kitchen, and finally Dona Alzira’s bedroom. When they took their leave, almost two hours later, they were sure that there was no firearm hidden in the apartment.
“He’s not stupid or crazy,” said Welber as soon as they got to the sidewalk.
“It’s still possible that it’s on him.”
“Or that he tossed it into a garbage can on the way home.”
“Go to his office and see if he’s got it with him. The mother’s probably already called ahead to tell him that we searched the apartment. But if he took it with him this morning and he hasn’t left the office since, he still has it on him.”
“And if he does?”
“Get it.”
Gabriel didn’t go out for lunch, and he could barely perform the most mechanical tasks after the detective finished with the search. He was on autopilot for the whole afternoon, though ideas were shooting through his brain and his internal organs seemed to be obeying multiple, contradictory commands. The unease the policeman had provoked in him seemed to spread throughout the whole workplace. Claiming that he didn’t feel well, he left early. He took the first bus that came along and was home in less than twenty minutes.
“What happened, Mom?”
“That’s what I want to know. What did you do to send two cops over here with a search warrant so they could turn this place upside down looking for a gun?”
Gabriel ignored the question. Taking off his jacket and walking toward his room, he asked what they were looking for and what they’d found.
“Nothing.”
“Didn’t you say they went over every inch of my room?”
“That’s right. They took all the clothes out of the wardrobe and all the books off the shelves.”
“And?”
“And nothing. I told you.”
Gabriel looked questioningly at the figure framed in the doorway, then looked back at the bookshelves and ran his hand through his hair. He was clearly baffled.
“If you’re worried about the box of bullets, I’d already gotten rid of it. Like I said, they didn’t find anything. They left here saying they were sorry for the inconvenience.”
“You what?”
“I got rid of the bullets. You think I’m a fool?”
“How did you know about them?”
“Son, you think you can do anything I don’t know about? I know you as well as any human being can know another. I know what you’re going to do before you do yourself. You don’t need to keep anything from me. I’ve been in this struggle with you since the beginning, and I’ll be with you to the very end.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“There’s no way they’ll find the bullets.”
“What did you do with them?”
“I wrapped them up and put them in the freezer, with the frozen food. They looked in the freezer, but they were looking for a revolver, not bullets. We can breathe easily now. I’ll go make dinner. When this is all over, we’ll go to a restaurant. Even better: we’ll have your birthday dinner in a restaurant. Without the fortune-teller.”
Gabriel didn’t comment. His mother removed some things from the refrigerator, put a teakettle on the range, and turned on the oven. His mother’s movements contrasted with the immobility of her son.
“How can you guess what I’m going to do? How did you know I’d hidden the bullets on the top shelf?”
“I don’t guess. I just notice when you’re up to something. I might not know what it is, but I know it’s something. I didn’t guess that the bullets were there, I just noticed that you were hiding something from me and figured that you would hide it in your room, somewhere I’d have trouble reaching. It was easy. I didn’t expect to find a box of revolver ammunition.”
“That scares me.”
“What, son?”
“That transparency. It’s like you can see the ideas in my head.”
“But that’s exactly what it’s like. I’m your mother. You came from inside me. For nine months, I carried you. You didn’t even need to breathe; I breathed for you. Just as you lived in me, I can see inside of you.”
“I’d like to know if it wasn’t the same transparency that allowed the Argentine to see through me. A clairvoyant sees through people. He’s not a psychic; he just sees. Some people are more transparent than others. I must be one of those.”
“Nobody else can see into you. He’s not your mother. He didn’t give birth to you. He’s just a foreign scoundrel trying to take advantage of people. Didn’t he say himself that it was only a joke?”
Southwesterly Wind Page 13