“I’m a cop,” he said.
The kid scrambled to his feet and backed up against the wall, as if Arnaldo had said, “I’m a murderer.” He held his hands up in front of him, the palms toward Arnaldo, as if he was fending him off. He looked terrified.
“Look, kid . . . What’s your name?”
The kid swallowed, twice, before he got it out: “Rambo.”
Arnaldo wanted to smile, but didn’t. “Okay, Rambo, listen up. I’m not from here. I’m not one of Ferraz’s men. I’m a federal cop, and I come from São Paulo. Look.”
He reached into his coat, saw the kid flinch when he caught sight of the shoulder holster, then relax when he pulled out his wallet, not his gun. He showed the kid his badge and warrant card. It didn’t help. Rambo remained as skittish as a colt. Arnaldo could only think of one reason for him to be acting like that.
“You’ve been warned about us, right?”
The kid licked his lips.
“Told that anybody who talks to us is going to get hurt?” The kid blinked.
“Killed?”
The kid looked at the door.
“Okay. Here’s the way it’s going to be. You’re going to tell me what you know about Edson Souza—”
“No. I don’t know anything.”
“Shut up and listen. You’re going to tell me what you know about Edson Souza, or I’m going downstairs and tell that asshole at the reception desk that you did.”
“What?”
“I’m going to tell him I’m a cop, show him my badge and tell him you spilled your guts all over this room, tell him you told me everything I wanted to know. Then I’m going to question him, and when he refuses to talk, as he will, I’m going to beat the shit out of him.”
“You can’t. You can’t tell him I told you anything. That would be a lie—”
“No shit? Now if, on the other hand, you tell me what I want to know I’m going to give you two hundred reais, and I’m going to walk out of here with a smile on my face just like somebody who got his dick satisfactorily sucked. I’m not going to like that, first, because I’m going to have to advance you the two hundred from my own pocket and, second—”
“They’ll kill me.”
“—and, second, because I really would like to beat the crap out of that tub of lard downstairs. Kill you? They’ll kill you if they think you talked. Since when would they kill you for giving somebody a blowjob? Isn’t that how you pay for the stuff they sell you? How old are you?”
“Sixteen.”
“One more lie, just one more, and I’m on my way downstairs. Then, after I finish with that filho da puta, I’m going to find some other kid who’ll tell me whatever I want to know. I won’t bother to come back looking for you because within a day or two you’re going to be dead. With two hundred reais, on the other hand, you could easily afford a bus ticket out of town. It’s your choice.”
He didn’t expect the kid to tell him cops weren’t supposed to do what he was doing, and the kid didn’t. This kid had seen cops do much worse.
Rambo ran his hand through his hair, muttered something under his breath and finally met Arnaldo’s eyes. “Give me the two hundred,” he said.
Arnaldo handed it over. He was getting low on cash. He’d have to stop by an ATM.
“They’re looking for him, too,” the kid said, taking the money. He counted it, folded it and stuffed it into the pocket of his jeans. Then he started putting them on.
“Who?”
“The cops. The State Police. Anybody who finds out where Pipoca is gets five hundred reais. Anybody who tells you guys anything gets a bullet in the back of the head.”
“What do they want him for?”
“He owes them money. For dope.”
“You know that for a fact?”
“No. But that’s what it usually is. You stop buying, they beat you up; you don’t pay them what you owe, they make a ham out of you.”
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know.”
Arnaldo shook his head and stuck out his hand. “Give me the two hundred back,” he said.
“Wait. Will you fucking wait for a second? Listen to me. Honest to God, I don’t know. If I did, I would already have told them. Shit, man, they would have given me five hundred reais. You only gave me two hundred.”
The kid had a point. Arnaldo dropped his hand. “Where’s he from, this Pipoca?”
“Around here.”
“What do you mean by ‘around here’?”
“Around here. Cascatas.”
“Look, Rambo”—Arnaldo tried to keep the sarcasm out of voice when he used the kid’s street name—“if I don’t find Pipoca before your friends do, they’re going to kill him.”
“They’re not my friends.”
“And they’re not mine, either. Give me some help here.”
The kid thought about it. After a while, he said, “I heard him say he has a mother.”
“Everybody’s got a mother.”
“A mother he visits. A mother he talks to. Somebody who cares about him.”
The kid made it sound as if having someone who cared about you was a marvel, like it was the rarest thing in the world.
“Now we’re getting somewhere. You got a name?”
Rambo didn’t. And he didn’t have anything else that would have helped, other than a vague memory that Pipoca seemed to be pretty familiar with a favela by the name of Consolação.
Favelas are shantytowns. There are no numbers on the shacks; there are no names given to the streets; they aren’t to be found on municipal maps; there’s no mail delivery. If Souza’s mother lived in a favela, it might not be easy to find her. Arnaldo recognized that he was going to need help, local help. Not the kid. He’d scamper off at the first opportunity.
“Take my advice,” he said. “Use the money to get out of town.”
The kid swallowed. “And you won’t tell? You won’t tell anyone what I told you?”
“No. Put your clothes on and get the hell out of here.”
He let Rambo leave first. After a minute or so, he followed him downstairs and walked up to the desk.
“You owe me twenty reais.”
Fat Boy lowered the magazine and looked at his watch. “You figure?” he said, insolently.
“Yeah, I figure.”
Fat Boy looked Arnaldo up and down. Arnaldo was a head taller and at least twenty kilos heavier. None of it was fat.
Fat Boy reached into his pocket.
Their parting was about as cordial as could be expected. Fat Boy didn’t thank Arnaldo for his business, and Arnaldo didn’t give in to the temptation to beat the crap out of Fat Boy.
Arnaldo walked around until he found an ATM that would accept his bankcard. The limit was R$500, so he withdrew that. And then he went looking for a taxi.
Chapter Twenty-four
“ROADBLOCK,” HECTOR SAID, TAKING his foot off the accelerator pedal.
He put the gearshift in neutral, lightly tapped the brake, and glided to a stop behind a blue truck piled high with bunches of green bananas. On the tailgate, the truck’s owner had made his contribution to popular literature:
KIDS ARE LIKE FARTS. MOST PEOPLE CAN ONLY TOLERATE THEIR OWN.
The majority of Brazil’s owner-operated commercial vehicles display something similar, pithy expressions of folk wisdom dreamed up by the drivers themselves. This one was surrounded by little painted roses, white and pink.
Silva got out and assessed the extent of the traffic jam. The space between their car and the roadblock, a distance about the length of a soccer pitch, was packed with all kinds of vehicles, mostly trucks.
He got back in. “Plenty of room on the right shoulder,” he said.
Hector put the car in gear, spun the wheel, and drove the hundred meters or so to the roadblock.
A man with a paunch, and a gap where his two front teeth should have been, wearing a State Police uniform with sergeant’s stripes, saw them coming. He walked toward them wit
h a scowl on his face, flapping his hands at the wrist as if they were wet and he was trying to shake the water off.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he said as soon as he was close enough not to have to exert himself by raising his voice. He lisped. It would have been difficult not to with those missing teeth, but it was still funny, coming from such a big man.
Silva suppressed a smile and reached for his badge. “Federal Police.”
“You Silva?” the cop said, not in the least impressed. It came out “Thilva.”
Silva nodded.
“We weren’t expecting you so soon. The colonel said to bring you up when you got here.”
“What are you talking about?”
The sergeant scratched the bulge of flab that hung over his belt.
“You’re here to see the body, right?”
“What body?”
“Muniz. They found him.”
THE ENTRANCE to the Fazenda Boa Vista was a stone’s throw from where the cops had set up the roadblock. The sergeant got into their car and went with them to show the way.
“You go left at the fork,” he said as they drove through the front gate.
A right turn at the same fork would have brought them to their original destination, a cluster of pavilions surrounding a red banner on a long pole. There must have been at least fifty of the structures, fluttering roofs of black plastic. Around and among them were gathered people of both sexes and all ages. There was a smell of cooking fires, and the distant sound of a baby’s crying.
“League encampment,” the sergeant said. “Smells real bad if you get too close. Stop over there next to the ambulance. We gotta climb the fucking hill.”
The hillside was steep and strewn with gray rocks, some of them as big as a baby’s head. The sergeant picked his way carefully over the ground, going slow and huffing like a steam engine. At the pace he set, Silva and Hector didn’t even work up a sweat.
About halfway up, Silva’s cell phone rang.
“Director?” he said.
“That Mario Silva?”
“It’s Silva. Who’s this?”
“Corporal Borges from the State Police. I’ve got a message for you from Colonel Ferraz.”
“How did you get this number?”
“The colonel gave it to me.”
Silva sighed. “What’s the message?”
“Orlando Muniz Junior is dead. We found the body. The colonel said to meet him at the Muniz fazenda, the Boa Vista. You know where that is?”
“Yes.”
“He says somebody will be waiting for you at the gate.”
Silva thanked him and hung up without bothering to explain that he was already there.
The flat area on the crown of the hill had once been cleared, probably for grazing, but that must have been quite some time ago. A few stunted trees and some clumps of brush were sprinkled here and there. Silva stood still for a moment and let his eyes sweep around the horizon. Down below there were endless fields, most planted with sugarcane, some lying fallow. At the margin of one vast, empty area he could see the plastic shelters and flapping banner of the Landless Workers’ League.
Close at hand, red earth was piled next to a rectangular hole cut into dried grass. Half a dozen cops in uniform, and some who weren’t, were hanging around the site. Most were looking at the contents of an oblong wooden box about the size of a coffin.
The spectators didn’t include Ferraz, who was standing to one side, engaged in conversation with the same officer Silva had seen entering and leaving his office, the one with the scar and the knife hanging from a scabbard on his belt. The colonel was dressed in a red polo shirt, jodhpurs, and boots, as if he’d been out riding when he got the news.
A man wearing latex gloves squatted over the box. There was a black medical bag standing open-mouthed on the ground near the man’s right foot.
“Colonel.”
Ferraz turned at the sound of Silva’s voice. “How the fuck did you get here so fast?”
Silva ignored the question. “Why don’t you introduce me?” he said, nodding at the officer.
Reflexively, the officer nodded back. Ferraz looked from one to the other and finally said, “Osmani Palmas, Mario Silva.” He didn’t elaborate, and he didn’t include Hector in the introduction.
“How did you find him?” Silva asked, pointing at the makeshift coffin.
“His old man hired a helicopter, had it fly back and forth over the property. The pilot spotted what looked like a grave. Turned out, it was.”
“Does Muniz know his son’s dead?”
“He sure as hell does, and he’s on his way. Those league guys screwed up big this time. He’s going to fuck them up good.” Ferraz seemed pleased, almost gleeful.
“There’s no proof they did it.”
“No proof?” Ferraz laughed out loud. A couple of the other cops turned toward him. “No proof?” he repeated. “What do you think that is?” He pointed toward the corpse. “How much more proof you think the old man needs?”
Silva brushed past the colonel and went to talk to the man wearing the latex gloves, a Nisei with rimless glasses and a purple birthmark on his forehead.
“Ishikawa,” the man said, rising to his feet. “Medical examiner. You?”
“Costa,” Silva pointed at Hector, “and Silva,” he stuck a thumb into his own chest. “Federal Police. Any conclusions?”
“He was alive when they buried him,” the doctor said. He stuck the thermometer he was holding into a breast pocket, pulled out a pencil, and made a note. “He tried to free his ankles and wrists. Cut himself up pretty badly. The marks on his forehead came from battering his head repeatedly against the lid. Maybe he was trying to knock himself out.”
Silva looked down at the body. The younger Muniz’s pants were pulled down over his thighs. The thermometer the medical examiner had been using was obviously rectal.
“Cause of death?”
“Asphyxiation,” Ishikawa said, “unless something else turns up in the autopsy.”
The doctor was friendly and more forthcoming than Silva would have expected. Silva was used to dealing with the big-city medical examiners, men and women who were unwilling to hazard a guess about a cause of death, much less commit themselves, until they’d completed an autopsy.
Ferraz came up to stand at Silva’s shoulder. “His eyes were open when we dug him up,” he said. “The doc here closed them for him. He musta been shit scared.”
Doctor Ishikawa winced at Ferraz’s tone and lowered his eyes so he wouldn’t have to look at him.
“You want to take him now?” he said.
“Hell, no,” Ferraz said. “His old man’s on the way. He’ll want to have a look.”
He glanced at the road leading toward the main gate of the fazenda and squinted. Silva followed his gaze. There were three vehicles down there, coming fast, trailing red dust.
“That’s probably him now.”
Silva took Hector by the arm. “Let’s go,” he said.
“You mean you’re not going to stick around for the old man?” Ferraz asked, incredulously.
“We’re going down to see what the league people have to say.”
Silva turned to go and then, remembering, he turned back to face Ferraz.
“I’ve been asked to look into the murder of Senhorita Poli as well.”
“So?”
“So I’d like to know why she gave you an authorization to go through her safe-deposit box and what you were looking for.”
“Confidential matter between her and me.”
“Confidential?”
“Confidential. And she must have made some kind of a mistake, because it was empty.”
Silva stared at him. Ferraz wasn’t intimidated. As if to prove it he said, “By the way, my boys have been all over the crime scene. The guy who cut their throats was left-handed, just like Major Palmas here. And the blonde was raped, but there was no DNA, nothing under their fingernails, no strange pubi
c hairs, no semen. No prints, either. Too bad, huh?”
Silva didn’t trust himself to speak. He turned on his heel and started back to where they’d left their car. Behind him, Ferraz and Palmas shared a laugh.
Hector followed his uncle down the slope. A moment later they passed the dead man’s father, hurrying upward. The two bodyguards from the hotel were hot on Muniz’s heels.
One of the bodyguards stopped to talk, but the other two men brushed by without a word. The old man’s anxious eyes were fixed on the crown of the hill.
“Is it him?” the bodyguard asked Silva.
“Yeah. It’s him.”
“Then God help them.”
“Help who?” Silva said, but the man was already scrambling to catch up to his boss.
“Let’s get down to the encampment,” he said, “before they do.”
Another two minutes brought them onto the flat. All three of Muniz’s vehicles were pulled up next to Hector’s rental car. A driver sat behind the wheel of a black Mercedes. The others were vans and they were packed with armed men.
Chapter Twenty-five
ONE THING SILVA COULD have anticipated, but hadn’t, was the presence of the press in the league’s encampment.
A pod of them surrounded Luiz Pillar. All were men, except for one very attractive brunette.
“That’s all we need,” Silva said when he spotted her.
“Wow,” Hector said, “That’s—”
“Yeah. Vicenza Pelosi.” Vicenza was an ex-model turned investigative journalist. If the stories about her were true, she’d gotten her break into journalism by having an affair with the president of the network, but that was ancient history. These days, it was said, she tended to avoid entanglements with men, and had a low opinion of most of them. Her father had been a shop steward in the metalworker’s union, mysteriously shot down one night by a person, or persons, never identified. She’d been twelve years old when they’d buried him. By the time she was fourteen, she’d blossomed into a black-haired, olive-skinned beauty with pouting bee-stung lips, an hourglass figure, and intriguing green eyes. She entered a modeling contest and won it. The prize was a contract, and within six months she’d appeared on the cover of half a dozen magazines. The camera loved her, and in another sense, so did the photographers and art directors upon whom her work depended. By eighteen, she’d bedded dozens and her photos had appeared in publications all over the world.
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