Buried Strangers cims-2

by Leighton Gage

  The American took a gulp of his wine. The first bottle was almost empty. From past experience, Silva knew he’d finish another before the lunch was over.

  After a few seconds of silence, Silva said, “The illegal immigrant I’m interested in is the son of a woman who’s worked in our home for years.”

  He knew Unger didn’t gave a damn about the man or his mother, but he did think a small diversion would help the FBI agent to recover from his alcohol-induced flash of anger about illegal immigration.

  Unger took the bait. “Worked in your home?” he said. “As what?”

  “A faixineira.”

  “What’s a faixineira?”

  “She helps my wife clean. Not full time. Several days a week.”

  Unger poured himself more wine.

  “Why the hell would you want to go out of your way to help a cleaning woman? They’re supposed to serve you, not the other way around, right?”

  Unger had a driver, a cook and a full-time maid, but like many foreigners he’d never learned how to deal with them. More than once, he’d complained to Silva about the con-stant turnover of his domestic staff. You only had to spend five minutes with the man to understand the reason.

  Silva ignored the FBI agent’s question. “According to his mother,” he said, “the fellow booked a trip to Mexico. He planned to cross the border from there.”

  Unger drained the bottle and held it up to show the wait-er. The waiter nodded and headed toward the bar.

  “From Mexico, huh? Just like a million other wetbacks. We gotta do something about that. Fucking liberals in Congress are still talking about offering amnesty to those people. They’re criminals, for Christ’s sake! Can you beat it? Criminals who hold parades and march around the country demanding their rights? Rights? Crap! They don’t have any rights. They all broke the law to get there. Don’t get me started on this. I could go on and on.”

  “I promise,” Silva said, “that I won’t get you started. That would be a waste of a perfectly beautiful afternoon.”

  “You’re damned right it would.”

  “Returning to the boy, his mother hasn’t heard from him in more than two months. She’s very concerned.”

  “Two months? She should be concerned. The kid’s body is probably lying under some cactus, shriveled like a prune.”

  Silva inhaled patiently. “She received a postcard,” he said.

  He opened the briefcase that he’d put on the vacant chair to his left, took out the postcard Maria de Lourdes had given him and handed it to Unger.

  Unger gave the card a cursory glance. “You know I can’t read Portuguese,” he said.

  “The boy wrote that he was fine and that he’d call his mother soon. But that’s not why I showed you the card.”

  “Okay, I’ll play. Why did you show me the card?”

  “The kid told his mother he was going to Boston.”

  “So how come he sends her a card from Miami?”

  “I, too, found that strange,” Silva said. “I suppose he might have wound up in Miami, on his way to Boston, although I can’t imagine why. Nevertheless, he might be in the custody of your immigration people.”

  “If he is, and if he’s in Miami,” Unger said, “he’d most likely be at a place called the Krome Detention Center.” He rubbed the nonexistent stubble on his jaw. Like all of the other FBI agents Silva had known, he was clean shaven. “Did the kid ever call?”

  “No. But there might be an explanation for that. His mother lost her prepaid cell phone. When she replaced it, she got a new number.”

  “So why didn’t he send her something else by snail mail? He coulda done that even if he was in custody. How much cash was he carrying?”

  “I don’t know. Why?”

  “You can’t trust those fucking Mexicans. They find out that one of their clients is carrying a lot of cash, they’re as likely to kill him and steal it as they are to bring him across the border. Maybe he never made it into the States. Any chance the postcard is bogus?”

  Silva shrugged. “I can’t discount the possibility, but his mother said she recognized his handwriting and his signature.”

  “They could have made him write it and then killed him. Then they send the postcard in an envelope to some relative of theirs in Miami, and he puts a stamp on it and mails it. That introduces a red herring, while the trail goes cold. Meanwhile, the kid is under the ground somewhere in Mexico.”

  “Certainly a possibility.”

  “More than a possibility. Look at it this way: if he croaked on our side of the border, and it was natural causes, and nobody tried to hide his body, the odds are we’d know about it by now. We regularly scour every inch of that desert. Not that we’d necessarily have the kid identified by name. We might have him listed as a John Doe.”

  “He would have been carrying a passport.”

  “Yeah, and the coyotes-the real coyotes I mean, not those fucking Mexican smugglers-could have torn his body apart and scattered his stuff, including his ID.”

  “The boy is an only child,” Silva said. “His mother is fran-tic. I’d appreciate your help.”

  Unger took a bite of his fish and stuffed a piece of bread into his mouth. When he started to chew, some butter drib-bled down his chin. He wiped it off with his napkin.

  “You got a picture?” he said, through a mouthful of food.

  “I do.”

  Silva took out an enlarged copy of the photo Maria de Lourdes had given him.

  Unger looked at it.

  “Fucking kid needs a decent barber,” he said. “Look at that haircut.”

  The waiter was back with another bottle of wine. While he made a show of opening it, Unger finished the contents of his glass. The waiter offered him the cork to smell, but he didn’t take it.

  “Just pour it in there,” he said, pointing to the glass he’d just emptied, “and then buzz off. I’ll let you know if there’s something wrong with it.”

  The waiter, who spoke only limited English, looked to Silva for an explanation.

  “Thank you,” Silva said, in Portuguese. “Just fill the same glass. No more for me.”

  The waiter smiled, did as he was bidden, and tried to pick up Unger’s plate, which still contained a fragment of fish.

  “Put that down,” Unger snapped. “I’m not finished.”

  That much English the waiter understood. His face turned red. He put down the plate, mumbled excuses, and fled.

  “Asshole,” Unger mumbled. He took a pen out of the pocket of his jacket. “Name?”

  “Norberto Krups.” Silva spelled it for him. Unger wrote it on the back of the photograph.

  “Age?”

  “Nineteen.”

  Unger noted that, too.

  “He could be calling himself something else,” he said.

  “He could,” Silva admitted.

  “Makes no fucking difference to us. We print them, so we don’t give a shit what they call themselves. They show up again, we can ID them within fifteen minutes.”

  Silva produced a white sheet of paper with a single thumbprint.

  “From his national identity card,” he said.

  “Something we’ve been trying to adopt for years,” Unger said, “national identity cards. You know what passes for iden-tification in most states?” He snorted and answered his own question: “Driver’s licenses.”

  “I’ve heard they’re easy to get,” Silva said.

  “You heard right.”

  Unger put his pen away, folded the fingerprint over the photo, slipped both into another pocket of his jacket, and picked up his fork.

  “I gotta admit,” he said, “that our relationship up to now, yours and mine, I mean, has been pretty much a one-way street. This is the first time you ever asked me for anything, and I figure I owe you. So I’m going to get on to this right away, even if it is for a fucking cleaning woman.” He looked at his watch. “It’s three hours earlier in Washington. I should have an answer for you by tomorrow.”
>
  “Thanks,” Silva said.

  “Thanks, nothing,” Unger said, grinning, “just take off your panties.”

  Silva vaguely remembered the joke, something about an elephant doing a favor for a mouse and wanting sex in return. It seemed appropriate. America, the elephant, Brazil, the mouse. He forced a smile.

  Unger shoveled up the last bit of fish and put it into his mouth. “How are the desserts in this place?” he asked, still chewing.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  “I’ve got some foreigner on the line,” Camila said. “I think he wants to talk to you.”

  “You think?” Silva said.

  She shrugged. “He doesn’t speak Portuguese.”

  Camila apparently found it unnecessary to add that she didn’t speak anything else.

  Silva’s new secretary was surly and inefficient, but firing her was out of the question. She’d been appointed by Sampaio as a favor to her father, a highly ranked bureaucrat in the federal accounting office.

  “I’ll take it,” Silva said.

  “Line two.”

  The foreigner turned out to be Grant Unger.

  “We’ve got nothing on this guy Norberto,” he began with-out preamble. “There’s a Krupps with two p’s, but his first name is Adolph. How’s that for a Brazilian name, huh? Adolph Krupps. Sounds like some fucking Nazi. Border Patrol picked him up last March. I had them e-mail me his mug shot. He doesn’t look anything like your guy.”

  “And he’s the only one with a similar name?”

  “The only one. I put the print through AFIS, our com-puterized system. No match. Son of a bitch could be working some unregistered shit job or using somebody else’s social security number. We got a law that punishes people who em-ploy illegals, but you know how it goes. Lots of cheaters slip through the cracks. I arranged to have his picture posted and I got his name and print into the computers. If they pick him up, I’ll hear.”

  “I’ll keep my fingers crossed.”

  “Okay, but don’t hold your breath.”

  When Silva hung up, he unlocked the top drawer of his desk, took out a large, manila envelope, and went down the hall to Arnaldo’s office. Arnaldo was still working the phones, calling the cops in city after city, trying to get a lead on cults that might be involved in ritual murder.

  “Any luck?” Silva asked.

  Arnaldo hung up and made a checkmark on his list to remind him where he’d left off. “Nothing that rings a bell.”

  “How would you like to get back to Sao Paulo for a while?”

  “Who do I have to kill?”

  Arnaldo, a Paulista, born and bred, hated his temporary assignment to the federal capital. He gave all sorts of reasons for his displeasure, everything from the quality of Brasilia’s restaurants to daily exposure to the director, but Silva sus-pected that Arnaldo’s major problem was that he missed his family. He’d never admit it, of course. Arnaldo enjoyed bitching about his wife and two teenage sons, and he down-right gloried in excoriating his mother-in-law.

  “You don’t have to kill anybody,” Silva said, “but the job may involve some travel.”

  “I knew there had to be a catch. Same case?”

  “Something different. A nineteen-year-old carpenter was trying to get into the States. He disappeared.”

  “What’s that got to do with us?”

  “Officially? Nothing. He’s my faixineira’s son. I want to help her.”

  “What good is power if you can’t abuse it, right?”

  “My sentiments exactly. Do you want the job or not?”

  “Yes, I want the job. What’s the timing?”

  “Immediate.

  “Good. You know how much time I spent sleeping at home in the last thirty days? Two nights, that’s how much, two lousy nights. My wife is starting to think I’ve got a mistress.”

  “Do you?”

  “On my salary? Kindly outline what I have to do to escape from durance vile.”

  “Durance vile?”

  “You think you’re the only guy who reads books? Brief me.”

  Silva detailed his conversation with Maria de Lourdes and showed Arnaldo copies of the postcard and the photo.

  “You try the Americans?” Arnaldo said when he’d finished.

  “I cashed in a favor with Grant Unger.”

  Arnaldo did a mock shiver. “I can see you’re willing to carry this to great lengths.”

  “I am. Unger already called me back. They have no record of the kid.”

  Arnaldo pointed at the list on his desk. “How about all these calls I haven’t made?”

  “I’ll put Camila on it, move her in here. It’ll make her feel important.”

  “And keep her out of your hair.”

  “I never thought of that.”

  “Like hell you didn’t. You’ll have to answer your own phone, you know.”

  “I do now.”

  “This Norberto kid was going to the States of his own volition. What’s our mandate here?”

  “None.”

  “So how are you going to account for my time? Sampaio goes over the time sheets like a fucking miser counting his money. He’ll be onto us within two weeks.”

  “I’ll sign off on the sheets. Besides, I don’t think it’s going to take two weeks. And, by that time, he’ll be grateful. It’ll be another solution he can take the credit for.”

  “And if we don’t have a solution?”

  “We’ll have a solution. My faith in you is boundless.”

  “I’ll bet you say that to all the girls. Where do you want me to start?”

  “Go to the travel agency he used. Act like you’re desper-ate to get into the States.”

  “And then?”

  “Take a cell phone, conceal it on your person, do what they tell you to do, follow the trail to where it leads.”

  “Including creeping through the desert in Arizona, or Texas, or wherever?”

  “If it comes to that, yes.”

  “And Sampaio, when he notices I’m not coming into the office? How are you going to handle him?”

  “I’m going to tell him you’re following up a rumor about Romeu Pluma.”

  “What rumor?”

  “The one about Pluma molesting teenage boys.”

  “Such a rumor exists?”

  “It does now. It will turn out to be unsubstantiated.”

  “How much longer do you think you can keep using Pluma to get away with stuff?”

  “He shows no sign of backing off, so Sampaio won’t either. It could go on forever.”

  “We should give Pluma a citation for meritorious service. Alright, getting back to the Americans, if I wind up crossing their border, they’re not going to like it.”

  “The Americans aren’t going to know about it. Not if you don’t get caught.”

  “They’ve got cameras. They’ve got helicopters. They’ve got vigilantes. They catch a lot of people.”

  “So they catch you. No big deal.

  They’ll send you back.” “They’ll print me first, and they won’t let me back in if I ask for a visa. What if I want to take my kids to Orlando to see Disney World? What do I do then?”

  “You can’t afford to take your kids to Orlando.”

  “You’re right. I can’t. But what if my rich uncle Uriel dies?”

  “You haven’t got a rich uncle Uriel. Do you want to get back to Sao Paulo or not?”

  “I want.”

  “I can’t ask Ana to do the paperwork. Sampaio would never sign it. I’m gonna have to advance the money myself. Here.”

  He held out the envelope he’d been carrying.

  “What’s this?” Arnaldo said, taking it.

  “Seven thousand American dollars, a ticket to Sao Paulo, and a thousand reais. The so-called travel agent in Sao Paulo is probably going to ask you for five of the seven. The rest is for expenses if you get into the States. Don’t forget to bring sunscreen. The thousand Reais is for expenses here.”

  Arnaldo drew t
he flap and looked inside the envelope. He let out a low whistle. “You’re really taking this seriously, aren’t you? Want me to count it?”

  “No need. I already did. Twice. I don’t have money com-ing out of my ears.”

  “Your own damned fault. You’re too fucking honest. This travel agency, you got an address?”

  “Also in the envelope. It’s called Estrela Viagens and it’s on that street they reserve for pedestrians, the one near the Praca da Republica.”

  “The Sete de Abril?”

  “That’s the one.”

  Arnaldo glanced at his watch. “There’s a flight in about an hour. If I hurry, I can make it.”

  “So, hurry,” Silva said.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Along the back wall, a glass-fronted case contained petit fours, biscuits, rosquinhas, cookies, Lebanese esfihas, German pretzels, and a variety of cakes. Two attendants, dressed identically in paper hats and starched, white blouses, were behind the counter. They had no more than a half dozen customers and were having an easy time of it.

  Not so the six attendants to Arnaldo’s right. Charged with dispensing the bread, they were beleaguered by a crowd that was elbow to elbow and three rows deep. Service seemed to be on the basis of push and shove. Every now and then an altercation would break out. But since most of the buyers were females, fights never seemed to escalate beyond an exchange of insults.

  The loaves in contention were marvels of the baker’s art. There were narrow loaves, thick loaves, short loaves, long loaves, loaves made out of barley, manioc, rye, and wheat. There were loaves with sausage, cheese, and onion baked into the dough. There were French baguettes, loaves of Jewish rye, Syrian pitas, and German black breads, all reflec-tive of the multicultural nature of the neighborhood.

  Arnaldo could have done without the noise, but he adored the mouth-watering smells and the jostling, rollick-ing atmosphere that was unique to a Sao Paulo padaria. Brasilia, too, had padarias, but they were nothing like this.

  Every few minutes a guy in a white apron, rivulets of sweat running through a dusting of flour on his forehead, would come out of the back where the ovens were. He’d be carry-ing a wicker basket filled with something freshly baked, and he’d dump the contents into one of the unpainted wooden boxes reserved for that kind of bread. The effect on the women was immediate. They couldn’t wait to get at it. It reminded Arnaldo of the time he’d been in the Mato Grosso and had tossed the remainder of a ham sandwich into a pool of piranhas.