“You Mario Silva?” the older cop asked, not unkindly. He had a protuberant blue vein on his forehead, just below the hairline.
“Yes.”
“You got a sister named Carla?”
“What is it? What happened to her?”
The cop pursed his lips. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing’s happened to her. Not as far as I know. Do you know where she is?”
“Probably at home, asleep.”
“She doesn’t live here?”
“No. She’s married. She lives with her husband. What’s this all about?”
The cop threw his cigarette to the macadam and ground out the glowing butt with his heel. “Sergeant Mancuso,” he said, extending a hand, “São Paulo PD.” His palm was moist. “This is Officer Branco,” he continued. The younger cop nodded, but didn’t offer to shake hands.
“Is it about my parents?”
Mancuso gave a little nod.
“Your mother’s in the hospital,” he said, then added quickly, “She’s fine. She’s going to be okay, but your father. . . .”
He made a little grunting noise in his throat.
“What? What about my father?”
Mancuso reached out his hand, gripped Silva’s upper arm and gave him a squeeze of sympathy. The younger cop, fat and with a baby face that made him look like a cherub, answered Silva’s question.
“They shot him.”
“Shot him? Is he—”
“Dead,” the cherub said, bluntly.
Mancuso, the older cop, bit his lower lip. Even in the pale light, Silva could see the lip turning white.
“Dead?” Silva blinked, trying to get his head around the idea. After a moment, he said, “Who did it?”
Mancuso gave his arm a final squeeze and let go. “How about we go inside?”
In a daze, Silva unlocked the front door and led the way into the living room. Without being invited, the cherub sat down on the couch. Mancuso remained standing. Silva walked over to the piano, picked up the wedding picture of his parents and stared at it. “How did it happen?” he asked, trying to get his head around what they were telling him.
“Your dad screwed up, Senhor Silva,” the cherub said. “He stopped for a red light.”
Silva felt a sudden flash of anger. He looked up. “I’m sorry, Officer. What was your name again?”
“Branco.”
“My father always stopped for red lights, Officer Branco.”
“Yeah? Tell me something, Senhor Silva. How long did he live in this town?”
“All his life. He was born here.”
“A native-born Paulista, huh? Then he should have known better. You can’t stop for a red light. Not after midnight. The best thing is to slow down and keep rolling. That’s what most people do.”
“I know what most people do, Officer, but my father isn’t . . .” Silva swallowed “ . . . wasn’t like that. As far as I know, he never broke a law in his life, never even got a speeding ticket.”
“Too bad everybody’s not like him,” Mancuso said.
Silva searched the older cop’s face for a sign of irony. There wasn’t one. He put the photo back on the piano. “Where’s my mother?”
“At the Hospital das Clinicas. They got her under sedation,” the cherub said, “so it’s not going to make any difference to her whether you get there in twenty minutes or two hours. Why don’t you sit down a little? I’ll tell you the rest.”
“I’ll stand.”
“Suit yourself, but when I finish you’re going to wish you were sitting.”
Mancuso narrowed his eyes at his partner. “That’s enough, Paulo,” he said. “Let me tell it.”
“Well, excuse me,” the cherub said petulantly, and crossed his arms in front of his chest.
Mancuso turned his back on him and addressed Silva. “Your mother was pretty hysterical before they put her under,” he said, “so we still don’t have all the details. Basically, the story is this: Your parents were coming home from some kind of a party—”
“A charity affair,” Silva said. “A dinner to raise funds for a new wing at Nossa Senhora de Misericordia. My father is . . . was a doctor there.”
“Right. So they were coming home, and your old man stopped for a red light, and two elements came up on your mother’s side, tapped on the window and pointed a handgun at her head. Your father did the right thing. He didn’t resist. I mean, it’s only money, right? No matter how much they take, it isn’t worth losing your life for. We always tell people—”
“Please finish the story, Sergeant.”
“Okay. So your father unlocked the door. The two perps hopped into the back seat. Your mom said the guy holding the gun put the muzzle up against your father’s neck, like this.”
Mancuso walked around behind his partner and demonstrated, putting the tip of his extended index finger up to the back of the cherub’s neck. The cherub didn’t move, kept his cold eyes fixed on Silva.
Silva shook his head in disbelief. “And shot him? Shot him just like that? With no warning? For no reason? For nothing?
“No,” the cherub said, apparently finding it impossible to keep his mouth shut. “Not then. The punk told him to drive up to the Serra de Cantareira.”
The Serra, a mountain range that looked down on the city from the north, was a place of unpaved roads, few houses, and thick vegetation. There were monkeys up there and brightly colored tropical birds.
“Why? Why the Serra de Cantareira?”
“Yeah, well, I was getting to that,” Mancuso resumed. He looked pained. “It’s isolated. There wouldn’t be anybody around at that time of night. They weren’t likely to get interrupted.”
“What do you mean ‘interrupted’?”
“They . . . well; first they took everything of any value, money, watches, jewelry. Then they told both of your folks to get out of the car.”
The cop paused to light a cigarette. He didn’t bother to ask Silva if he minded. It was the 1970s. Nobody asked back then. He took a deep drag, expelled the smoke and looked around for an ashtray. There was one on the coffee table. He leaned over and dropped the extinguished match into it.
Silva was about to snap at him to finish the goddamned story when he realized that the cop was stalling for time, trying to find a gentle, less painful way to say what he had to say.
Mancuso couldn’t find one. In the end, he just blurted it out, “They raped her.”
“They what?”
“Raped her.”
“Sergeant Mancuso, my mother is fifty-three years old. She’s overweight, she’s diabetic—”
“They wanted your father to stand there and watch it,” Mancuso said, talking faster now, eager to get it over with. “He wouldn’t have it. He went after the guy who was holding her down. The other guy shot him twice in the head. It was quick. He didn’t suffer, didn’t live long enough to see what they did to her.”
Silva put his hands over his eyes and started to cry.
Mancuso stood and put a hand on his shoulder. “But your mother’s okay. You hear me? She’s okay. They took the car. We’re looking for it. It’s one of those big Ford Galaxies, right?”
Silva nodded.
“There aren’t too many of them,” Mancuso said, “so they’re easy to spot. If they hold on to it for any time at all, we’re going to nail them.”
At that moment, Silva couldn’t have cared less about the two punks. “And . . . my mother. What happened then?”
“When they were . . . done, she managed to get herself back to the main road.”
“She walked?”
“Crawled is more like it,” the cherub said.
“Shut up, Paulo,” Mancuso said. “There’s not much traffic up there after nine or ten at night and she was . . . well, she was bleeding, so she just didn’t have it in her to go any further. She propped herself up under a streetlight and started waving at the cars that went by. After a while, somebody had the guts to stop.”
“Who?”
&n
bsp; “We don’t know. He called it in from a phone booth, left her by the side of the road, told us where to find her, said he didn’t want to get involved. It happens. At least he stopped for a look. Not everybody would have.”
DR. SILVA’S Galaxy was found later that morning abandoned on a suburban back street. The killers had removed the tires. They’d also taken the radio. If there were any latent fingerprints, the cops didn’t find them. The truth of the matter was they hardly tried.
Silva’s parents weren’t particularly prominent people. The incident drew no bold headlines. São Paulo was one of the major murder capitals of the world, and the municipal police had other priorities.
Silva was told that such things are solved within the first 48 hours or not at all. It was something he refused to accept. If the cops wouldn’t do anything about it, Silva was bound and determined that he would. He questioned his mother again and again. There were some things she couldn’t bring herself to talk about, others that her son couldn’t bring himself to ask, but a few salient facts emerged: both men were mulattos, in their twenties, clean-shaven, curly haired. Both had distinctive accents. They were from the northeast, Bahia perhaps, or one of the neighboring states. One of them had a tattoo, a snake that started on his chest, wrapped once around his neck, and ended in a protruding tongue that pointed at the lobe of his left ear. The other one, a man missing a couple of his front teeth, had done the shooting.
The cops’ initial questioning hadn’t brought out the details about the snake or the teeth. Silva thought they were important clues. The investigators didn’t.
“It’d be different if we had something to cross-reference,” a detective named Valdez told him, “like a list of all the punks with tattoos, or all the punks with dental problems. But we don’t. And we sure as hell don’t have the manpower to put people on the street trying to find somebody who knows somebody with a tattoo like that. Best thing for your mother to do is to put it all behind her, put the whole thing out of her mind. Jesus Christ! It’s been three weeks already, and that’s much too long. Let me level with you, Senhor Silva, we haven’t got one chance in a million of catching these guys, and it’s not going to do her any good to keep dwelling on what happened to her.”
Detective Valdez was right. It didn’t do Carla Silva any good at all, but she was unable to dwell upon anything else.
For three months, she cried day and night. Then she ingested twenty of the sleeping pills she’d been hoarding. Silva laid her to rest in the family crypt, turned his back on a legal career, and joined the Federal Police.
Chapter Four
MARIO SI LVA’S TRAINING AT the Federal Police Academy took seven months. He graduated first in his class and was assigned to the field office in Rio de Janeiro, working drug control.
That kept him busy for five days out of every week. The other two he spent in São Paulo, a 45-minute flight away. Partly, it was to pursue his courtship of Irene, but mostly it was to follow up on what he then considered to be his best lead. His mother’s wristwatch had vanished along with the rest of her jewelry. It was a Patek Phillippe in yellow gold, unusual anywhere, unique because of the inscription on the back of the case:
To Carla,
Who enriches my autumn
As she enriched my springtime.
Mario
Mario had also been his father’s name.
Canvassing all of the jewelry stores in São Paulo was a big job. There were thousands of them and some, no doubt, specialized in stolen goods. He thought it best to represent himself as a potential buyer, not a cop. After months of disappointment, Silva no longer felt a surge of adrenaline when he saw a watch that resembled his mother’s until the day he turned one over and found his father’s words staring up at him.
It was the end of November, 1979. His mother had been dead for ten months.
“If she’s Clara, and you’re Mario, this is definitely the watch for you,” the man behind the counter said, pushing the sale, trying to make a joke of the inscription.
He had buck teeth and was young, too young to own the place. He wore an expensive black suit and a silk tie covered with little butterflies. Silva, who’d pegged him as the business’s heir apparent, didn’t reply, didn’t even smile. He just kept staring at the watch, running his thumb over the words on the back of the case.
The clerk continued his pitch. “I’ve got to be honest with you. We considered polishing it off, but the engraving is too deep. That’s why it’s such a good deal. Do you have any idea what one of these things costs when it’s new?”
He was distinctly displeased when Silva produced his warrant card and demanded to know how the watch had wound up in the shop.
THE YOUNG man’s father, as Silva had suspected, owned the place. He wasn’t particularly surprised to be told that the watch was stolen, and his previous experience with such things had taught him to keep meticulous records of his sources.
The trail led to a pawnshop near the center of town. It was a place with a frontage no more than four meters wide, but it was at least twenty deep, and stuffed with everything from musical instruments to household appliances.
“Sure, I remember it,” the pawnbroker told Silva. He was a little man with a bald pate, a shock of surrounding white hair, wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a denim vest. “One of the best deals I ever made. The guy had no idea what it was worth. I didn’t figure he was coming back, and he didn’t, but I kept it for the full ninety days anyway.”
“Why did you think he wasn’t going to come back?”
The owner hesitated. “I just didn’t,” he said, avoiding Silva’s eyes.
The man in the vest knew more than he was telling.
“You got a name? An address?”
“Sure. It’s the law, right?”
According to the man’s records, the watch had come into his possession five days after the murder. Still, Silva didn’t get his hopes up. The address was probably false.
First, he thought, he’d go check it out. Then he’d come back and squeeze the pawnbroker for whatever else he knew.
An outdated map of the city, and two stops to ask for directions, brought Silva to a little street in the working-class suburb of São Caetano.
The house was identical to the buildings on either side, hastily constructed out of white stucco, showing fissures in the mortar. In contrast to the green and flowery gardens of the neighbors, the short path leading to the front door was hemmed by dusty red earth. The door was blue, but its paint was peeling, showing the cheap pine beneath. The tiles on the front steps were cracked, and one was missing altogether, the impression of its ribbed underside still visible in the gray cement.
Silva tried the doorbell.
It didn’t work.
He knocked.
There was no answer, but he could hear a baby squalling from somewhere inside.
He knocked again, louder.
The woman who finally opened the door had prematurely graying hair and a crying, red-faced baby in her arms.
“Boa tarde, senhora,” he greeted her. “Does José de Alencar live here?”
To his surprise, she nodded. An appetizing smell of garlic sautéing in olive oil was coming from the kitchen. It reminded Silva that he hadn’t had lunch.
“Is he home?”
“Who wants to know?” she said, suspiciously.
Silva flashed his warrant card.
“Federal Police. I want to talk to him about a case.”
“Let me have a closer look at that,” she said.
He reopened his wallet. She scrutinized his credentials.
“Yeah, okay,” she said. “He’s here. Come in.”
As he stepped through the front door, she put the baby over her shoulder and started patting it on the back, but the squalling continued.
“You’re lucky,” she said. “He just switched over to the eight PM to four AM shift. If you’d come last week, you wouldn’t have caught him.” She’d raised her voice to make herself understoo
d over the baby’s crying. Now, she raised it still further. “José, you got company.”
She showed a distinct lack of concern about an unexpected visit from the police. The reason became clear when her husband walked in, buttoning his shirt. There were stripes on the sleeve and insignia on the lapels.
José de Alencar was a sergeant in the São Paulo Police Department.
That explained the reticence of the pawnshop owner. Nobody wanted any trouble with the SPPD.
“I’ve got lunch on the stove,” the woman said.
“You want me to take him?” the sergeant asked, pointing at his son.
De Alencar was in his mid-thirties, pale skinned, with a cruel mouth and gray eyes that turned soft when he looked at his offspring. He had a thin but well-tended mustache on his upper lip.
The woman smiled at him. “No,” she said, “He’s okay. Just a little bit of colic, I think. Come soon. I don’t want you bolting down your lunch.” A moment later, she and the squalling baby were gone, leaving the two cops alone.
Silva glanced around the room. An expensive stereo system, a brand-new television set, a leather sofa and two leather armchairs, a table that looked to be made out of jacaranda wood. None of it fit. Not with the house’s external appearance, and certainly not with a guy who was supposedly surviving on the salary of a municipal cop.
“So you’re José de Alencar?”
The sergeant picked up on Silva’s tone of voice. His gray eyes went from soft to hard, seemed almost to change their color, becoming a shade darker. “Yeah. Who are you?”
Silva’s credentials were still in his hand. He held them out.
De Alencar took a step closer and read them. “A federal, huh?” he said curiosity turning to hostility. “What do you want?”
Silva’s mother had described her assailants as in their early twenties and mulattos. This guy was in his thirties and white. His teeth were good. He had no tattoo. There was no way he could be one of them.
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