The Silence of the Rain

by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza

  “That other one” was the body Espinosa supposed, but couldn’t prove, belonged to Max. He was relieved to see that it wasn’t Rose.

  “It’s not the one I’m looking for, doctor, but thanks for letting me know.”

  The news of the girl’s kidnapping and the shootout in the hotel had quickly spread throughout the city. The police radio and telephone were still the best ways to leak information.

  In the street, he thought about walking back to the Praça Mauá. The way downtown passed through the land of his childhood. He remembered going to the Colégio Pedro II, on the Avenida Marechal Floriano, and walking there every day. From there to the Praça Mauá: another walk he’d taken countless times. It was a good chance to revisit some sites from his childhood, especially because the landscape hadn’t changed very much.

  Certain institutions contaminate neighborhoods, bringing down the level of housing, inhabitants, and shops. Cemeteries are an example, as if death required a border post between itself and the world of the living. The same thing was true of the Forensic Institute, a frozen legal cemetery that lacked even the transforming tenderness of graveyards. The neighboring buildings looked abandoned except for a few low-rent bars where cheap rum was the only way to restore human warmth.

  He went down Rua dos Inválidos toward the Praça da República. Despite the location and the hour, a pleasant breeze was blowing from no certain direction. Right on the corner of Rua da Relação stood the imposing building of the Central Police, crumbling, as if atoning for the abuses of the dictatorship. The building’s function had been assumed by a newer building next door, this one free of notable architectural features. The houses across the street, opposite Santo Antônio Church, had become run-down; there were only about half a dozen of the old furniture stores left, and the colonial houses were only minimally kept up.

  At the end of Rua dos Inválidos, he crossed Visconde do Rio Branco toward the Praça da República. He took the narrow sidewalk in the middle of the street (nonexistent during his childhood) that bisected the street running alongside the Praça da República. On the left, the Campo de Santana, with its age-old trees and the squirrels that had survived the predators. On the right, the General Archives and the Museum of Justice, with the arms of the republic in relief on the top of its facade. Next door, the home of the Fourth Precinct, taken over by the Heritage Society, clearly demonstrating that, at least visually, not every police station had to look like the hovel on the Praça Mauá. Directly ahead, the tiny but nice colonial building that housed the Brazilian Geographical Society, just after Rua da Constituição, itself an archaeological find.

  He walked down Rua Senhor dos Passos and stopped on the second block at the Cedar of Lebanon, a little store counter in the middle of street with different kinds of fried pastries and juices. He wanted to finish the lunch he’d had to break off. It was almost three, and the long tables where everyone sat next to each other had some seats available. But he didn’t want to sit down; he just wanted to fill the hole in his stomach. That he could do standing up, right there on the sidewalk.

  He kept walking, overtaken by the smell of tobacco coming from the Syria Cigar Store. It was like smoking a cigarette after lunch, something he still missed. He turned left into Avenida Passos, crossed Presidente Vargas, and came out on Marechal Floriano, directly in front of the Colégio Pedro II. He could even feel the little leather schoolbag whose handle changed every year as the books and notebooks got heavier. I don’t carry a schoolbag anymore, he thought. I carry cadavers. He tried to push the image of Rose’s mother’s fingers out of his head. He stood for a while in front of the stonework facade of his old school, with its iron and wooden doors and cast-iron and marble staircases. How many times he’d run up those stairs, late for class! Rose hadn’t called back; rather, the kidnapper hadn’t used Rose to call back. Why didn’t he call himself? Welber said he looked somehow familiar. Was that the reason he’d made Rose call? Because if he did it himself he’d be recognized? He continued down Marechal Floriano toward Rua Acre. And what if someone was calling his apartment or the station right now? The phone could be ringing as the inspector was downtown, strolling down memory lane. Passing the corner of Rua dos Andradas, he looked to the left and momentarily lost his train of thought. The street was a corridor of little old houses from the middle of the last century, with tiny balconies of wrought iron, the sidewalks almost touching each other on the narrow street, at the end of which the hill of Santo Cristo was lit up by the sun. The beauty of the place was moving. Turning to the right, down Rua Leandro Martins, he experienced a similar sensation. Back then, he said to himself, crimes were extraordinary. Today they were committed in series. Without realizing it, he’d arrived back at Rua Acre, practically at the station.

  Espinosa knew the kidnapper wouldn’t call during the day. He preferred the protection of the early morning, when he had the added buffer of finding Espinosa groggy and disinclined to effective action—if there was any action he could take. Espinosa knew there was no reason to stay up all night; that would only make him even less effective.

  At the station everyone asked for news of Welber. People whispered that if there had been more police officers inside and outside the hotel, he wouldn’t be in the hospital. The problem was that if Espinosa had included more people, he would have run the risk of including the kidnapper as well. Espinosa calmed everyone down. The doctor said that Welber was out of danger, and talk like that wouldn’t help him get better any sooner.

  He sat wondering what life had been like in those houses on Rua dos Andradas, back in the old days.

  4

  The incident in the parking garage had taken place almost a month ago. There hadn’t been a Mass for Ricardo Carvalho. Or mourning. Or memorials. It looked as though everyone wanted to forget about him. The only one who had seemed to regret his loss was Rose, and right now she must be more concerned about her own situation. If everyone was satisfied with what had happened to Ricardo Carvalho, why seek out the guilty? When people were making laws, they were trying to express in the human microcosm the order of the macrocosm. The function of the police was to capture deviants. Only a few people were authorized to kill; anyone else who did must be brought to justice. Espinosa didn’t think that this particular justification, however fictive, was any better or worse than the others. Sometimes, he made little adjustments on his own.

  One of the adjustments he wanted to make had to do with Bia Vasconcelos. Where was it written that they were incompatible? For now, though, he preferred to pursue the possible. He called Alba. He’d forgotten the name of the magnificent receptionist, but she hadn’t forgotten his.

  “How’s it going, Espinosa? When are you going to start?”

  “Start what?” he answered, not sure he knew exactly who he was talking to.

  “Start working out.”

  He remembered her name.

  “Adriane, I couldn’t stand working out for five minutes.”

  “Depends on the workout, though, doesn’t it?”

  He smiled into the phone and asked if he could speak to Alba.

  “Hey, handsome, what’s this about it being dangerous for us to meet?”

  “Until some things get resolved, I wouldn’t like people to know that you’re important to me.”

  “Am I?”

  Espinosa was always surprised by Alba’s responses. The fraction of a second he needed to react, pretending nothing happened, was an unmistakable sign for Alba that she’d hit the nail on the head.

  “You don’t need to answer, sweetheart. Come get me and show me yourself.”

  When he drew his car up to the door of the gym that night, Alba was already waiting for him. She wasn’t wearing her workout clothes; she had on jeans, a blue T-shirt, and blue tennis shoes: her firm breasts hinted that they were loose under her shirt. They kissed as if they’d been together for a long time.

  “Do you live alone?”

  That question surprised him too.

  “Ye
s,” he responded, a little nervous.

  “So take me to your house and show me around. On the way you can explain why it’s dangerous for us to go out together.”

  Espinosa told her the story of Rose’s reappearance, the kidnapping, the shooting in the hotel, and the phone call.

  “I’m scared,” he continued, “that the kidnapper might try to force my hand, using something he thinks is important to me.”

  It was clear that Alba did feel important, more beloved than threatened. Espinosa had to reiterate that the threat was real.

  “Alba, I don’t know who this guy is, but he’s definitely a cold-blooded killer, probably a psychopath. He’s already seen us together once and I don’t want to take any chances. My apartment is not safe—I even thought he’d tapped my phone. He’s not an amateur.”

  Espinosa finished this last sentence as they were pulling up to his building. He wasn’t worried about the guy just then—he was probably busy guarding Rose. Unless they were a team.

  Luckily he’d stocked up at the supermarket. The frozen dinners would last another week, and there was still plenty of cheese, cold cuts, and drinks. He even had ice cream in the freezer.

  The sexual readiness Alba projected contrasted with the deliberation with which she arrived at intimacy. She wandered around the living room seeming to notice more what was there than what wasn’t, until she came to the bookshelf. She smiled. She went to the balcony and turned around, leaning on the railing. Espinosa was still standing in the living room.

  “Your apartment is your face.”

  “What do you mean?” he wanted to know.

  “All makeshift, all wonderful.”

  She sat lazily on the sofa while Espinosa went to get something to drink. In movies that’s what the guy did; when he was embarrassed he showed up with a glass in each hand. Not a bad idea when you didn’t know what to do with the girl.

  It had been a while since a woman had been in the apartment. Espinosa had been afraid that when it happened he’d feel invaded. But that absolutely wasn’t how he felt now. He also didn’t feel as if he had a visitor. It felt so natural to have her there. And what he liked the most was that he didn’t feel as though he had to justify himself to her. In one of his hands he had a beer, in the other a soda. He looked at her on the sofa a little awkwardly, as if he’d been surprised to realize he had been thinking out loud.

  It didn’t look as if Alba felt uncomfortable in the least, even though she knew next to nothing about him. In any case, she didn’t seem interested in his life story right now. She made it clear that she loved the sense that much about him still remained to be written, not because he didn’t have a life story but because it was written on a surface that had proven easy to erase.

  While he served the beer, Espinosa remembered the night he’d spent with Alba. Things had happened so naturally, facilitated, perhaps, by the drama of the previous day. The role of protector had made intimacy easier. Now there was still something to be scared of. But what the hell. People didn’t get together because they were scared, because there was a threat …

  He wasn’t shy. At least he didn’t feel shy, just a little out of sync with the prevailing rules. Even animals, when forming couples, follow signals, the code of their species. The problem was that in the human world, depending on the time and place, the codes were extremely changeable, and he always seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  From the sofa, Alba looked up at him, clearly bemused.

  “Espinosa, I think you need to change your battery.” She pushed him with her leg and he fell to the sofa on his knees, holding on to the two bottles. He put them on the coffee table and grabbed Alba. Her hair was still wet from her shower; her skin smelled like a woman’s. While she was pulling off her T-shirt she asked Espinosa to pull her underwear down to her thighs. After pulling them all the way off, Espinosa, standing, let Alba’s feet rest against his stomach for a while. She let him look at her, confident of her beauty. Espinosa remained standing, taking his clothes off slowly, afraid to break the magic, keeping her feet against his body, grabbing her ankles and spreading them slowly and sliding his head between her legs until he lost himself in a tangle of moist perfume.

  Espinosa groped in the dark and found Alba’s body. Half of it was on top of one of his legs; she was sleeping so soundly that she didn’t hear the telephone ringing. With great effort he found the phone at the same time he turned on the lamp. The alarm clock read two-ten in the morning.

  5

  Just like last time, Rose mechanically read the kidnapper’s instructions into the phone, voice uninflected, no doubt with a gun to her head. He gave Espinosa approximately twenty hours to get his hands on the letter, in case he didn’t already have it. It should be placed in its original envelope within a brown envelope approximately twenty-five by twelve centimeters, the kind available anywhere. After ten o’clock the next night, he was to wait at home for a call with new instructions. In the event that he tried to get help from the station or the Anti-Kidnapping Division, the kidnapper would know about it even before Espinosa hung up the phone, and the price would be the fingers from one of Rose’s hands.

  “So it’s a letter!” Espinosa tried to mentally reproduce his search in the Hotel Novo Mundo and couldn’t remember any envelope. It was true that at the time he didn’t know what he was looking for, and he could have missed it. But he surely would have remembered an envelope.

  Alba was already wide awake; she looked at his face, terrified.

  “What was that? What’s going on?”

  They were quiet but worried and frightened. Espinosa didn’t want to test the kidnapper’s threat—he’d already shown what he was capable of. Besides, the kidnapper really could be linked to someone at the station or in the Anti-Kidnapping Division.

  “I have approximately twenty hours to find a letter. I’d better take you home.”

  “You’re going to leave now, at two in the morning, to go look for a letter? Are you crazy? What letter?”

  “I haven’t got the slightest idea,” Espinosa said, starting to get dressed. Alba looked completely incredulous but got dressed anyway.

  The streets were empty, so he dropped Alba at home and was at the reception desk of the Hotel Novo Mundo before three, trying to convince the night clerk that he wouldn’t make any noise. At seven in the morning, after a painstaking search of every possible space in the room, he was absolutely certain that there was no envelope. He’d slept at most two hours and had hardly eaten the day before. He called the hotel restaurant and ordered a complete breakfast.

  While he ate he thought about the envelope. From the conversation he’d had with the hotel manager, he had learned that she had hardly left the room during her stay. Just to be safe, she could have left the letter with someone she trusted—if after the death of Ricardo she still trusted anyone. There was a remote possibility that Carmem had the letter. After all, she had suggested the hotel. Another remote possibility was that Bia Vasconcelos had it. Before she’d disappeared, Rose had called Bia to arrange a meeting to talk about something very important related to Ricardo Carvalho’s death.

  He stopped by his apartment to shower, shave, and change clothes, before going to Bia Vasconcelos’s studio.

  He arrived unannounced a few minutes after Bia had parked and turned on the coffeemaker. The receptionist announced that Inspector Espinosa was on his way up.

  “Inspector, it’s been a while.”

  “Almost a week since we last saw each other.”

  “Come in, please. You got here at coffee time. Any news?”

  “The first mangoes have appeared.”

  Bia didn’t understand immediately what Espinosa meant until he pointed to the mango tree in the garden.

  “The last time I was here it was flowering—now the first mangoes are coming out.”

  Weird guy, Bia thought. His answers are always different from the questions.

  “There’s actually a lot of news, but not th
e kind of news that clears anything up—mostly the kind that distorts, and hides, more than it reveals.”

  Bia filled up two coffee cups.

  “For example, Rose appeared.”

  Bia, holding the two cups and looking at Espinosa, stopped, waiting for what would come next.

  “Only to disappear again.” Bia gave him one of the cups.

  “Kidnapped.”

  Bia’s mouth was half open, she looked at him, not breathing.

  “Out of my hands.”

  She sat; Espinosa was still standing.

  “Sit down, please, Inspector.”

  If Espinosa had meant to surprise her, he’d done it.

  “You’re saying that Rose came back and then was kidnapped when she was with you?”

  “That’s right.”

  Júlio had warned Bia about this cop. Espinosa had come to his house on a Sunday afternoon with a story that could have been as much a product of a delirious brain as an attempt at blackmail. Now the two were seated on the sofa, drinking coffee. He wasn’t at all unpleasant—she even had to force herself to remember that he was a cop. If it weren’t for the gun that occasionally appeared underneath his blazer, she would have thought he was a university professor, no different from Júlio himself. But it would be imprudent to forget that he was a cop, and a cop on duty.

  “How do you think I can help you, sir?”

  The question was put with a slight hesitation, imperceptible to anyone who wasn’t looking for it, but loud and clear to Espinosa.

  “Before her first disappearance, Rose was on her way to your apartment. She’d called you alluding to something very important, so important that she had to meet you that very afternoon. The reason she’s been kidnapped now is for a letter she’s supposed to have, the contents of which are somehow linked to your late husband. The kidnapper proposed exchanging the letter for Rose’s life. But it happens that I don’t have the letter, and neither is it in the hotel room where she was hiding. I was hoping that perhaps she brought you that letter before disappearing the first time.”