The Silence of the Rain

by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza

  “For what?”

  “Persuasion.”

  “Persuasion of what?”

  “He hasn’t said yet.”

  “Inspector, what are you trying to say? I don’t get it.”

  “They’re just suppositions. I think he wants something from you, and not only from you but from the other people he’s doing the same thing to, but he hasn’t decided to reveal what it is yet. Maybe he thinks the time isn’t right, or maybe he doesn’t know exactly what it is he wants. When he finds out and when it’s the right time, he’ll already have created an atmosphere in which he can intervene more directly. But, as I said, these are only ideas, and very vague ones at that.”

  “What should I do? What do you think I can do?”

  “Change your routine a little and stay away from places where there aren’t a lot of people around when you’re by yourself. At the first sign of anything suspicious, let me know immediately. Always keep your phone in your purse.”

  “Do you think this has anything to do with my husband’s death?”

  “I do. Now I think it’s time I took you home. You go in your car and I’ll follow in mine.”

  I followed her to her building, looking at all the many trucks we passed. We arrived without incident. While the doorman put her car in the garage, we stood talking in the lobby. We could have gone up—there was no reason to wait for him. But she didn’t extend the invitation directly or even insinuate that I should come up. We said good-bye there on the pavement and I headed home.

  Bia’s presence continued to disturb me. Alba disturbed me too. Different disturbances. Both were intense, but the one Bia provoked was, besides intense, extensive; it affected a bigger part of me. And it lasted longer. I took a hot shower, which for me is better than Valium, and behind the ice trays I found one last frozen dinner, which at first glance looked like pasta with red sauce or lasagna with red sauce. I opened a beer and waited for the three beeps from the microwave.

  4

  As soon as I walked into the station, Welber came to meet me. He wanted to know if I’d found anything in the old lady’s apartment. I said I’d only found some empty spaces, but that we shouldn’t let that get us down because things often show up in empty spaces. He hadn’t had much more luck in Max’s room. He had noticed two things, though. The first was that the cover of the toilet tank was slightly out of place—besides the fact that the tank, which hadn’t been cleaned in a while, had water stains on the outside, as if someone had stuck their hand in the water and dripped on the tank a little as they removed it. The other item of note was a piece of blue plastic tossed into the garbage can that still had marks on it, indicating that it had been folded. We concluded that Max had hidden something in the tank. It couldn’t have been too many things: jewels, money, drugs. Considering that there was no sign that Max was mixed up with drugs, it could probably only be jewelry or money. Probably something he’d picked up in grocery-store parking lots. There was another possibility: the plastic could have been used to wrap up the gun, I thought silently, not saying anything to Welber. I needed to sort my ideas out. The scene was setting itself up effortlessly in my head. Rose getting to the parking garage with the gun from Ricardo’s drawer hidden in her purse. They meet, as usual. She gets into the car and, before he turns the key, she fires on her lover and leaves, running, and meets Max with the gun in her hand. She tosses the gun to the ground and runs away. Max grabs the gun and follows her. He tries to blackmail her. Rose flees, afraid of being turned in. The scene made sense, but I knew that there were two facts it didn’t explain: Ricardo Carvalho’s life-insurance policy and the murder of Rose’s mother.

  I called Aurélio to confirm our lunch. I still hadn’t decided if I should confide in him about my latest fantasy scene—I hadn’t even told Welber. I kept thinking about the possibility that Rose, upon being blackmailed by Max, seduced and then killed him, hiding the body afterward. But that would require cold blood and didn’t jibe with the picture of the nervous girl throwing the gun down in the parking lot. Unless she didn’t throw it away … and Max forcibly disarmed her. Even so, the insurance and the death of the old lady still wouldn’t fit. I let my head fantasize freely, effortlessly.

  I got to the restaurant before Aurélio. It wasn’t a good time to find an empty table, but I didn’t have to wait more than ten minutes. When Aurélio finally showed up, I was already working on my first beer. He threaded his three hundred pounds through the tables with the smoothness of a cat, something that always fascinated me.

  “The advantage of being late is that your friend’s already scored a table,” he said with his big smile.

  He arranged his huge body as best he could in the space we had been allotted, fixed a familiar eye on me, and said:

  “So you want to tell me about the little birdie you let fly away?”

  He said it without malice, irony, or judgment. As I understood him, he meant to say: “Watch it, buddy. They could get you.”

  “The little birdie isn’t going to get out of the yard. He could be less benign than I thought, but I don’t think he’s a murderer. He’s too shy. He doesn’t have the fearlessness of a killer.”

  “Espinosa, it’s not for nothing that you’ve got the name of a philosopher. Who’s ever heard of calling a robber shy? He holds up women and old couples in parking lots and you come tell me he’s shy, that he’s too scared. Damn, Espinosa, you’re the shy one. This guy gets picked up with the crime weapon, tells a story not even he believes, but he comes across a sainted policeman who believes him. You’re that guy’s lucky number, Espinosa.”

  Aurélio’s voice was as big as his body, and he knew it; he talked as if squeezing the hand brake of his car. You could smell the burning rubber.

  “I’m not a saint, Aurélio; it so happens that sometimes I let intuition take the place of reason. That doesn’t mean that I’m his get-out-of-jail card; if he’s guilty, I’ll get him.”

  “I just don’t want you to hurt yourself, pal, or for anyone to get you because of your saintly soul. After all, was Espinosa a philosopher or a saint? I’ll tell you what I think. This Max went, as always, to rob somebody in the parking lot. When he saw the guy get into his car, he thought he could count on the surprise factor and threatened him. He wasn’t counting on Ricardo being armed and turning the whole thing upside down. Through a stroke of luck, Max managed to get the gun out of Ricardo’s hand and fire it. Nothing would have happened if the moron hadn’t tried to sell the gun. After that, the only thing he could do was come up with the story of the secretary.”

  “Aurélio, you know as well as I do that that story is only good for sending that poor guy to jail, that it’s got nothing to do with what really happened. And how do you account for the disappearance of the secretary, her mother’s death, or Ricardo’s life-insurance policy—which, if I may say so, was discovered by you? Just to find a quick culprit you’re going to toss all that out? I know you’re a good cop, so I can’t accept what you’re saying.”

  “Okay, the story isn’t very well put together, but it so happens that there are people trying to get rid of you.”

  “In fact, Monday they almost managed to.”

  “How?”

  “A guy in a car shot a tree a few inches above my head.”

  “Damn it, and you’re still trying to protect this lowlife?”

  “Aurélio, you never saw this Max. I’ll turn in my badge if this guy was driving a car in Ipanema, shooting with one hand while with the other he was weaving his way through all the parked cars and dodging the bullets I fired at him. No way. That’s a job for a professional, not a loser pickpocket who lives in his sister’s house.”

  “In that case,” said Aurélio, “someone new has come on the scene, since none of the known players fit that description. Unless you believe that guy Lucena, Ricardo’s partner, is going around firing at cops.”

  “That guy wouldn’t kill anybody—he’d hire someone.”

  “So, my friend, you’re back
at square one.”

  “Unfortunately, at square one I had one body. Now I’ve got two bodies and two disappearances. I’m worse than at square one. What about your investigations?”

  “Nothing to report. The idea of requesting an exhumation was shelved—there’s nothing to justify it. I’m as lost as you are.”

  From what I knew of Aurélio, he was hiding something. I also knew that what he was hiding wasn’t anything he’d share; there was no sign that he would trade me his information for some tidbit of my own. Or, perhaps, I could no longer decipher my friend’s language.

  Aurélio drank beer as if it were guaraná. Not me—three beers could hold me for the rest of my afternoon. We said our good-byes when I was on my third or fourth, Aurélio having put back a dozen.

  On the way to the Praça Mauá, I resisted going into Carlos Ribeiro’s used-bookstore. The old bookseller could wait for another day. I always tried to take different routes back to the station. There weren’t many possibilities, but there were a few variations. On that day I stopped by an old office supply on Rua da Quitanda instead because I’d seen a bottle—maybe up to a liter—of Parker Quink ink in the window. I had a Parker Vacumatic that dated back to the war—the second, naturally—and I couldn’t resist the box: dusty, but the printing on it was perfectly clear. Even if I were possessed with a writing fever, I couldn’t ever manage to use all that ink. It was a common bottle in the schools back when people used fountain pens, the seller informed me. As I left the store, I fantasized about the prisoner in his cell, with only paper and pen. I thought about my Parker Vacumatic and the washable royal blue ink. It was enough to write my own memoirs and every other prisoner’s. I remembered that I was a policeman and not a prisoner. I’d have to come up with some other fantasy, which for me was never a problem. What was tough was keeping myself on a level of reality compatible with my profession.

  “Inspector, no sign of Max. We put everyone on it—gamblers, hookers, night watchmen, doormen, besides the sister’s whole neighborhood—and we couldn’t get any sort of line on where he might be.”

  “Look in the hospitals and morgues—there’s no more obvious clue as to where someone ended up than their own body.”

  I realized the sentence was meaningless and pompous, but it had already left my lips. Until that moment I hadn’t considered that Max might be dead, but given the death of Dona Maura, it was a very real possibility. If he wasn’t the murderer, and I didn’t think he was, chances were high that he would be the next victim.

  “Look for unidentifiable bodies, especially burned and mutilated ones.”

  It was just after four. The station was hot and full of people. They talked loudly, the telephones were all ringing at once without anyone answering, and from some indistinct place came the ear-splitting sound of a battery-operated radio. I stuck the bottle of ink in my desk and went down to the plaza. After less than fifteen minutes, it started to drizzle and I came back to the station. The rest of the day didn’t add a single comma to the story of my life.

  5

  Thursday morning. It had been sixteen days since Ricardo Carvalho’s death, and I hadn’t given the chief anything to justify sticking with the case. Before I was sent back to regular duty, I thought I’d pay Max’s sister a visit. I parked the car on a cross street. Before knocking on her door, I walked one block to the left and one block to the right, looking for the lottery players. There they were, just across the street on the same block. I came back and found the door open. I entered without ringing the doorbell. The woman recognized me immediately. Without visibly moving, her body shrank back like an oyster. From the silence of the house, I figured the girls were at school. I asked if we could talk and suggested we close the door to avoid interruptions. She was still young and might have been pretty, had she taken even the least bit of care of herself. In spite of her slenderness, her body weighed on her and her spirit was bitter.

  “I want to help you—I know your brother’s not a bad person.”

  “You’re the detective who was here with the other guy and took my brother to the station.”

  She said this without anger or emphasis, just naming the game, not the rules. She seemed to realize that I would establish them.

  “I’m Inspector Espinosa. I was here with my colleague Detective Welber.”

  She nodded her head, agreeing with something she herself had said. Then she sat in the only chair there was in the room while I settled onto an old wooden trunk that leaned against the wall. I interpreted this as a sign that she was ready to start talking.

  “You haven’t helped much and we need to find your brother. I think he’s in danger.”

  “He’s always been in danger. Ever since we were left alone, he’s been in danger.”

  “But he’s managed to survive. I think this time the threat is greater. What I mean is that now his life is in danger.”

  “Inspector, for us, our lives are always in danger.”

  “So you know what I’m talking about.”

  “Max said you treated him well,” she said, changing the tone of the conversation.

  “There was no reason not to.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “I’d like you to help find your brother … while there’s still time.”

  “I’ve never known anything about his life. Sometimes he’d disappear for weeks on end. When he got back he threw in some money and didn’t say a word.”

  “He never said where he was going, he never mentioned anyone’s name or talked about any place?”

  “Nothing. I don’t even know when he left. I just know that someone called him, a man, and I answered, but I don’t know what they talked about. Max hardly said anything, he just agreed.”

  “When was this?”

  “Friday afternoon. I don’t know if he stayed here on Friday night.”

  “Did he give you anything to keep for him?”

  “No.”

  “Please, don’t hide anything from me. His life could depend on your answer.”

  “Max wouldn’t give me anything illegal to hold on to. I never touch anything that could get me into trouble.”

  “I never said that it was illegal.” I said this as if I were pointing out a flaw in her defense, but the woman simply ignored my observation.

  “Did the man who called leave a name?” I asked. “How did he sound?”

  “He didn’t say his name. The voice was rough, someone used to giving orders.”

  “He only called once? Had you ever heard that voice before?”

  “I’d never heard that voice before, I’m sure of it.”

  “Your brother hid something inside the toilet tank. Do you have any idea what it might have been?”

  “No, I didn’t even know he’d hidden anything, especially not in the toilet.”

  In spite of her defensiveness and her obvious discomfort talking to the police, her attitude wasn’t humble or submissive. There was a pride in the woman that rendered her immune to all my efforts to intimidate her.

  “I’m going to leave my phone number and Detective Welber’s. If you hear any news or if you remember anything that might help us find your brother, call—but don’t say anything to anyone else, even the police.”

  We said good-bye with a handshake, wordlessly. From her house, I went straight to the nearest gambling post, which was little more than an improvised table underneath a marquee. A man with gray hair, seated on one of the benches, kept track of the game, while two others hovered around him. I waited until there was no betting, approached the table, and sat on the bench next to the dealer, discreetly showing him my badge. The gray-haired man didn’t flinch. He looked at me questioningly, while the other two moved closer.

  “What do you know about Max, the guy who sold the revolver?”

  The three looked at one another, looked at me. One of them cleared his throat and lit a cigarette.

  “I don’t want to make trouble for you. I just want to know if anyone’s seen him o
r knows anything about where he is.”

  Silence. Then the guy with the gray hair spoke.

  “We haven’t seen him since last week.”

  “He must have come out of his house carrying a bag or a suitcase. He could have been with another man. Try to find out if anyone saw or knows anything. Call this number. Don’t talk to anybody but me.”

  I left thinking about the paradox: I trusted the information I could get from lowlife street gamblers but was wary of that same information in the hands of my fellow policemen. The worst was that I didn’t even know exactly how much I distrusted them, but one of the things I’d learned from a life on the force was not to confide in other officers.

  Back at the Praça Mauá, I decided to eat a Big Mac at the McDonald’s on the corner of Avenida Rio Branco. I was thinking about the relation between fast food and the fast life when Welber appeared.

  “Espinosa, we’ve found something.”

  When Welber called me by my name, it meant he thought the news was important.

  “They’ve found a burned body, by the side of a backstreet, in the Baixada.”

  The night before, we’d put out a notice asking for news of any bodies found, especially those mutilated to hide their identity. Just before noon we had gotten the information Welber was now passing on.

  “The body is charred, impossible to identify. All we know is that it’s a white man about as tall as Max.”

  From McDonald’s we went straight to the Forensic Institute.

  When the expert showed us the body, the first thing I noticed was its similarity to the meat in my hamburger. The second was the severed hands. The body looked as if it had been grilled in a barbecue until every single inch was burned. If this had been an American movie, the identification could have been done with dental records. But it so happens that almost nobody in Brazil has dental records, especially poor people, who usually don’t even have a dentist and, if they did, wouldn’t have any records. The carbonized body bore no traces of clothing, shoes, or adornments, but even before the examination I was sure it would turn out to be Max. If any exam could verify with certainty the identification of the body, which I doubted. A gallon of gasoline would had been enough to cause that damage. The experts wouldn’t have much trouble determining the cause of death. Maybe a bullet. The severed hands and the fire came afterward. The identity of the dead man, however, could be established only with a DNA test, for which the police weren’t equipped and which was expensive—which meant it wouldn’t be done. I added another body to the count. Now we had three dead people and one disappeared.