“This whole project of ours,” he said to Silva one night when they were working late, “it’s not just for the greater glory and efficiency of the Federal Police, is it?”
“What do you mean?”
Silva stared at Cicero out of hooded, black eyes. “Oh, come on, Mario, this is me you’re talking to,” Cicero said, ripping open a bag of potato chips. “There’s something personal about this business. Why don’t you just admit it?”
“What makes you think it’s personal?”
Before he replied, Cicero stuffed a handful of the chips into his mouth, chewed, and swallowed. “Are you telling me it’s not?”
“That’s what I’m telling you.”
“Chips?” Cicero offered the bag.
Mario shook his head. Cicero took out another chip, nibbled it up in two bites. “Why did you choose São Paulo for the pilot project?”
“Why not? I wanted to give this thing an acid test.”
“I’m not buying it, Mario. Brasilia would have been much better, and you know it.”
“I don’t know any such thing.”
Cicero took in an exasperated breath and let it out in a snort. Some fragments of potato chip came with it. He grabbed one of the napkins he kept next to his workstation and wiped his mouth.
“You want me to spell it out for you? Okay, I will.”
Cicero crumpled the empty bag and tossed it. Then he gripped his right thumb with the other hand and started to count off his reasons. “First, because São Paulo is just too damned big. It doesn’t make the job twice as hard, it makes the job twenty times as hard. Second reason: We’re here, so instead of being able to put on pressure locally, we have to do it by telephone and letter. Third reason: We—and by that I mean the federal police—are a force in this town. Here in Brasilia it’s relatively easy to get the data we need to input. It’s much harder in São Paulo. We’re not much of a player in that shit-hole. Oops! You’re from there, aren’t you? Sorry about that.”
“No, Cicero. You’re not sorry, and you know damned well I think it’s a shithole too.”
“Maybe I do, but getting back to the subject: Being from there doesn’t have anything to do with choosing São Paulo for our pilot project, right?”
“No. Not a damn thing. And will you please back off?”
“Temper, temper, Mario. No need to get huffy about it. No need to deal in falsehoods, either. Your secret is safe with me.”
“Secret? What secret?”
“That you’re more concerned about tattoos and a lack of front teeth than you are about scars, or moles, or birthmarks. Have I got that right?”
“No, you don’t.”
“Well, I hope not, because what we’re supposed to be doing is to set up a database that’ll make it possible to zoom in on a felon based on any identifying characteristic. That’s the brief, isn’t it? Collect any and all identifying characteristics and get them into the computer so they can be sorted and cross-referenced? Any and all, not just tattoos? Not just teeth?”
“Right.”
“And there’s nothing personal about anything we’re doing?”
“How many times do I have to tell you, Cicero. There’s nothing personal about this. Not a damned thing.”
SILVA KNEW, all too well, that he was working against the clock. The director hadn’t specifically said it, but unless his new system for identifying repeat offenders proved its worth within the first six months, it was likely to be written off as a failure.
Department heads were constantly filing into the Director’s office with their hands out. The budget of the Federal Police was never sufficient to do everything that everyone wanted to do, and the fact that Silva had gotten any financing at all was proof positive that Fagundes considered him to be on a fast track.
Every day Silva prayed for results. Four months into the experiment, and long before their database was anywhere near complete, his prayers were answered.
Estrella Alba was a white woman in her mid-thirties with a red birthmark, about the size of a strawberry, on her left cheek. Her previous arrests, two for shoplifting, one for assault, and one for prostitution, coupled with her prominent facial feature, had brought her into Silva’s database.
Digital photography was still some years in the future. All of the references were verbal. In Estrella Alba’s case, the keywords were, in order of importance, BIRTHMARK, CHEEK, LEFT, and RED.
At ten o’clock one morning, and only a few days after Cicero had made the entry, an inquiry came in: A woman with a red birthmark on her left cheek was being sought for the holdup of a bank on São Paulo’s Avenida Paulista. Could they help with an identification? By noon, Estrella’s name had been telexed to the inquiring officers in São Paulo. They located her a little before 3:00 in the afternoon. And, by 6:00, after a little coercion, she confessed.
The news spread quickly throughout the law enforcement community. From that time on, Cicero and Silva no longer had to beg people to make the necessary contributions to their database. Other successes followed, first only a few, then many more as the database grew. They bought another computer, then another.
Silva got a promotion. He was no longer entrusted with the day-to-day operation of the database, but he still made it a part of his daily ritual to check the computer for the references he’d been seeking all along: TATTOO, NECK, SNAKE, all of them together in one file. In October of 1985, almost seven years to the day after his father’s murder, he found them.
Chapter Nine
HIS NAME WAS JOÃO MIRANDA.
Most people called him by his nickname: Cobra.
The word, in Portuguese, means snake, any snake, not just those of the mantled variety. As it happened, however, the snake depicted in Cobra’s tattoo was one of those. It started on his chest, went up to encircle his neck and ended just below his ear. That’s where the mouth was, and the mouth was red, and open, and had a little pink tongue flicking out as if it was trying to touch his earlobe.
Cobra loved that tattoo. It had been with him since he was sixteen years old. He’d chosen it out of a book in a one-man tattoo parlor wedged between a bar and a cheap hotel in Pelourinho. That had been back in Bahia, long before he ever thought of coming south to São Paulo.
The original design was smaller, and the snake was coiled up. Making it bigger and having it twist around his neck was Cobra’s idea. The guy with the needle was so pleased with his work that he’d asked Cobra to let him take a picture. He wanted to put it into his book and offer the same tattoo to other people. He thought Cobra would be pleased.
Cobra wasn’t. That tattoo was his, his and nobody else’s. The very next night, just as the artist was closing up shop, Cobra had gone back and slit the man’s throat.
People in São Paulo, if they thought about it at all, figured that Cobra’s nickname came from the tattoo. It wasn’t true. The kids in the favela where he grew up were already calling him that before he was thirteen. The name fit, because little João Miranda, just like a snake, was quick to anger, quick to strike, and had eyes that showed no compassion at all.
By the time he was eighteen, he was already well known—too well known for his liking—to the cops in his native city of Salvador. Back in those days, he was just an ignorant kid, still learning how to steal and kill and get away with it. They’d busted him more times than he had years, even managed to keep him behind bars for a while, until his brothers raised enough money to buy him out. By that time, he’d learned that only chumps served out their sentences. And that was only if they were sentenced in the first place, which they generally weren’t, because the cops and the judges were just as crooked as the prison guards.
The situation, he soon discovered, was no different in São Paulo. With one exception: the Municipal Police. They were real bastards, as bad as anybody working the street. They’d shake you down just because they didn’t like the color of your skin, or the clothes you were wearing, or for no reason at all. But, he didn’t let it bother him. He’d ste
al from others, and they’d steal from him. It was just a cost of doing business, right? One thing they hardly ever did was to put him away. It just didn’t happen if you weren’t stupid. This time, he’d been stupid.
He’d just smoked his last rock, and he was uptight about where he was going to get another one. Without the crack in his system, or if he hadn’t been in such a hurry, he would have pegged the two guys sitting at the bar as the off-duty cops they were. Hell, one of them was even wearing the trousers that went with his uniform. There were red stripes on the outside seams, and they ran all the way up his legs. Who else wore that kind of pants? Answer: nobody. Just cops.
They had their pistols out less than a second after he’d pointed his own at the guy behind the cash register. He was lucky that the cachaça the cops had been drinking had made them mellow. Lucky, too, that he’d had the presence of mind, high on crack or not, to drop the gun the instant they told him to.
So here he sat, stuffed into an overcrowded cell packed with drunks, transvestites, and juveniles. It just took one kick to somebody’s balls to communicate to his cellmates just where he stood in the pecking order. And when he went a little further, and smashed the guy in the face with his steel-tipped workman’s shoes, they even cleared a corner for him.
He’d hit the bar in the early hours of a Monday morning. Another mistake. There was bound to be a big backlog of cases from the weekend. It could be two days, maybe even three, before he’d be called up for arraignment. Three days in the stench and the shit. He didn’t even want to think about it. God help him if he fell asleep.
Before they’d brought him to the cell, one of the cops showed an interest in his tattoo. Cobra didn’t find it unusual. A lot of people were interested in that tattoo. After all, it was the only one like it in the whole world, at least as far as he knew. But what Cobra did find unusual was that the cop pulled out a measuring tape, measured the snake from head to tail, and wrote the measurements down in a little book.
“What the fuck are you doing that for?” he’d asked.
“Watch your mouth when you talk to me, you fucking punk,” the cop said, and walked off.
Then, at around three o’clock on Tuesday morning, almost twenty-four hours after they’d locked him up, something else happened.
He wasn’t asleep, not even dozing. He’d propped himself up with his back against the wall, and was keeping a wary eye on his cellmates, when he heard the jangling of keys in the corridor. He lifted his head and watched a guard insert one of those keys into the lock on the door of his cell. The guard was a young guy, somebody Cobra hadn’t seen before, and he wasn’t alone. The guy next to him was wearing a gray suit and had cold, black eyes and a thick mustache on his upper lip. Cobra pegged him for a detective.
“Where’s João Miranda?” the cop called out.
It was a common name. Two men stood up. Cobra wasn’t one of them.
The cop shook his head. “The Miranda with the tattoo,” he said, impatiently. “The one with the snake.”
Heads turned toward Cobra’s corner.
“You,” the cop said. “Get on your feet and get over here.”
Cobra took his time about it. He figured to be back in the cell before long, and his cellmates would be all over him if he let a couple of cops intimidate him.
“Hurry up, you punk,” the guard said.
When he reached the door, the man in the gray suit pulled out a pair of handcuffs and spoke for the first time. “Turn around. Put your hands behind you,” he said, in an emotionless voice.
“For Christ’s sake,” Cobra said, “It’s the middle of the night. Can’t a guy get some sleep?”
“Shut up and turn around.” This time the man let a bit of irritation show.
Cobra figured he’d done enough. He’d made a show for his cellmates, but he didn’t want to wind up getting the shit kicked out of him. He turned and allowed the cop to shackle him, staring down the other men in the cell while it was happening. Most of them avoided his eyes, proof that he’d played it right. To solidify the impression of a tough guy, he didn’t speak again until they’d gone through the steel door and into the corridor outside.
“Where you taking me?”
“Brasilia,” the guard said.
“Brasilia? Why Brasilia?”
“You’ll find out soon enough.”
SILVA WAS surprised when he saw the little man in the cell. For almost seven years he’d been imagining someone who was tall and strong. The punk who offered his wrists to be cuffed didn’t even reach his chin, and Mario Silva wasn’t a particularly tall man.
But the tattoo was there, and it was just as his mother had described it. There couldn’t possibly be another one like it. Or could there? Doubt plagued him. He’d have to get the punk to open up. He’d have to be sure.
Getting João Miranda out of the delegacia was no problem. The military dictatorship had ended in January, but it had persisted for twenty years and old habits die hard. Silva was a federal cop. He’d come all the way from Brasilia. He had clout.
The SPPD was all too happy to deliver their charge, and even happier when Silva told them they could dispense with the paperwork. Someday, some bureaucrat might discover forms that showed they’d once had a punk by the name of João Miranda in one of their holding cells. Someday, someone might even remember that a federal cop had come in, given them some story about Miranda being a material witness in a drug case, and taken him away.
But, even so, nobody would give a damn, and in the unlikely event that they did, Silva had a story all worked out. There would be an escape report filed away in a place that no one would look for it unless he told them it was there.
Ostensibly, he’d been bringing Miranda over to the federal building for questioning in a drug case he was working on. They’d stopped at a light. He’d seen a couple of punks trying to assault an old couple. He’d hopped out of the car to help. When he got back the felon was gone. End of story.
Silva shackled the punk’s thin ankles together with a second pair of handcuffs, tossed him into the back of his rental car, and started driving through the early morning streets. There was little traffic. The punk gave him the silent treatment for a while and then started to talk. By the time he did, they were already outside of town and climbing into the Serra de Cantareira.
“What kind of a cop are you, anyway?”
“Federal,” Silva answered shortly.
“Your colega said you were taking me to Brasilia? Why Brasilia? I didn’t do anything in Brasilia.”
“Meaning that you only did stuff in other places?”
“Meaning nothing. What’s this all about?”
“It’s about a rape and a murder.”
“I don’t know nothing about no rape and no murder.”
“It was a long time ago. Seven years.”
“Seven years! Shit, I can’t remember back seven months. Except I never raped nobody. Never had to pay for it neither. I got women lining up to fuck me, I do.”
Silva drove on in silence, giving no sign that he’d heard what Miranda had said. The car began to jolt when he hit the unpaved road. A light rain had been coming down when they left the delegacia, but had tapered off before they entered the forest. The air was heavy and tinged with the smell of rotting vegetation. When Silva braked to a stop, it was gray dawn over the road, still dark under the shade of the trees. The place hadn’t changed since his last visit. The little depression in the ground, the surrounding vegetation, the large rock with the flat face, all were just as he remembered them. Silva had been back to this place many times over the course of the last seven years, at first to walk the ground and investigate, later to meditate about what he might do here, and to pray for his father’s soul.
He opened the back door, pulled João Miranda out by his heels, and started dragging him across the ground.
“Hey,” the thug said when his head hit a rock. “Hey, no need to get rough. Let me up. Let me walk.”
Silva didn’
t respond. He kept dragging Miranda until they reached the place his mother had pointed out to him, the place where his father had been shot.
“You know where you are?” he asked. “You know why you’re here?”
The punk shook his head. Silva gave him a kick in the ribs. “Answer me,” he said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m talking about you and a friend of yours. I’m talking about a man you shot to death, here on this spot.”
“I didn’t shoot nobody.”
Silva kicked him again. The punk assumed the fetal position, protecting his soft parts, his genitals and his abdomen.
“Talk, you filho da puta.”
“I told you, I didn’t shoot nobody.”
“The next kick is going to be in the balls.”
That was the only threat Silva had to make. Despite his façade, the punk was a coward at heart. “It wasn’t me,” Miranda said. “It was Escorpião. Escorpião did it.”
The name meant scorpion.
“Who?”
“Dante Correia. Escorpião. It was an old guy, right? We were gonna do his wife and he came on strong, and he took a swing at Escorpião and Escorpião shot him in the head.”
“How many times?”
“Twice. He shot him twice.”
“Where’s this Escorpião now?”
“Dead.”
Silva kicked him again. “Don’t lie to me.”
“No. I swear. You know the Commando Vermelho?”
The Commando Vermelho was a drug gang, one of the largest. They were in constant warfare for control of the trade. The battles were fought out in the favelas, the shantytowns.
“Yeah, I know the Commando Vermelho,” Silva said. “What about it?”
“He was one of their soldiers. Got himself shot dead, maybe five years ago. I swear. You’re a cop. You can look it up. Dante Correia. Escorpião. It was in all the papers.”
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