Buried Strangers

by Leighton Gage

  Paulo Couto was also a man who didn’t miss much.

  Five minutes later, the meeting broke up, Gilda remaining with Dr. Couto, the four cops heading for the street, Silva leading the way.

  HE PAUSED in the reception area just inside the front door. “Taken on a yearly basis, how many people are reported missing in this city?” he asked Tanaka.

  “I don’t know,” Tanaka said. “I’ll find out and call you.”

  “Just give me a rough estimate.”

  Tanaka took out his notepad and started making calcula-tions. He spoke aloud while he was doing it. “If I multiply the total number of delegacias . . . by the figures for my own . . . I come up with . . . something like . . . thirty-two thousand cases. Mind you, those would be reported cases. Lots of them turn out to be false alarms. Girl runs away from home, for example; par-ents report her missing; she comes back. Sometimes, they don’t bother to inform us. We haven’t got the staff to keep doing fol-low-ups, so we just keep her on the books.”

  “What if we make an assumption?” Silva said.

  “We don’t do assumptions in this building,” Arnaldo said in a pretty good imitation of Dr. Couto’s gravelly voice.

  Silva ignored him. “Let’s assume the DNA verifies the sus-picion that we’re dealing with family groups.”

  Tanaka nodded.

  “I get your drift. If we go after individuals reported miss-ing, we’d have thousands of cases to deal with, but if we limit ourselves to families there’d be damned few. I’ve never had a case like that myself. If I did, I would have remembered.”

  “And so, I think, would everyone else. Can you go back seven years? Get all the reports filed up until three years ago?” Tanaka shook his head.

  “Recently, we’ve been managing to get everything into a centralized computer system, but three years ago that wasn’t the case. All those reports are going to be buried in paper archives. Different archives, in different delegacias. It could take us months to find them all.”

  “But, as you said, you would have remembered. I’m will-ing to bet any other delegado would, too. You could talk to those men personally. Anybody who’s retired, dead, or oth-erwise unavailable, you talk to their deputy.”

  “That I can do. Give me a week.”

  “Tell us more about the graves,” Hector said. “How is it possible they went undiscovered for so long?”

  “You know anything about the Serra da Cantareira?”

  “Only that it’s a park.”

  “Most of it. Not all. They call it the world’s largest urban forest. Read that as rain forest, which really means jungle.”

  “Thick jungle?”

  “I’ll give you an example: a small plane on its final ap-proach to Congonhas Airport went down back in 1963. Three people on board. They knew it was somewhere in the Serra. They drew a reverse vector from the end of the runway, spent almost a month searching for two kilometers to either side of that line. They sent in men and dogs, used a helicopter for four days straight. No dice. A biologist doing a study on monkeys finally stumbled across the wreckage in 1986, twenty-three years later. The pilot and both passengers, what was left of them, were still in the fuselage. People get lost in the Serra all the time. Nowadays, most people who venture off the paths carry a radio. You’re crazy if you don’t.”

  “You said most of the place was a park, but not all. What else is up there?”

  “A few houses, a few condominiums, all of them pretty iso-lated. It’s the kind of place that appeals to people who have to work in São Paulo, but who’d rather be living in the Amazon. So they went out and bought themselves pieces of the park.”

  Hector was the only one who looked surprised. He often affected cynicism, but he was still young, still learning. “They bought pieces of a city park?”

  “So what else is new? You can buy just about anything in this town if you’ve got the money.”

  “Yeah, but Jesus, a city park.”

  “Same thing with the graveyard,” Tanaka said.

  “Wait a minute,” Silva said, narrowing his eyes. “You mean to tell me those graves were on private property?”

  “Uh-huh. Surrounded by park on all sides. The law would have given the owner access through the park if he’d asked for it. He never did.”

  “And who is this owner?”

  “Was, not is. His name was Eduardo Noronha, and he conveniently died not fifteen days after he got title to the land. He willed it to a niece who’s somewhere in Europe. His lawyers claim they’re still looking for her.”

  “How long ago did this Noronha die?”

  “Eleven years last January.”

  “Eleven years! And the land hasn’t reverted to the city?”

  “Nope.”

  “Who’s paying the taxes?”

  “A bank account is being held in escrow for the niece. It also feeds the lawyers and gives them power of attorney to resolve taxes and assessments.”

  “Sounds like a setup.”

  “Sounds like indeed.”

  “You speak to the lawyers?”

  “I did. Got nowhere. I don’t think they’re being obstruc-tive. They just don’t know anything.”

  “This . . . cemetery? How isolated is it exactly?”

  “Pretty isolated. The closest homes are six kilometers away, but you only get to drive five of those six. Then you have to cut through the rain forest. Ferns taller than you are, leaves a meter across, parrots, monkeys, snakes, beetles the size of your hand, the whole business. Once the jungle swallows you up, you feel like you’re in the middle of the fucking Amazon.”

  “And people build houses in the middle of that?”

  “Hell, no. Not in the middle of that. The houses are in a closed condominium. And the condominium is surrounded by a wall three meters high. You get inside that wall and you could be anywhere. Big green lawns, landscaped gardens, swimming pools, it looks like Alphaville.”

  Alphaville was a series of luxury condominiums, num-bered 1 through 14, stretching from the suburb of Barueri to the suburb of Santana do Parnaiba. The walls that surrounded each project, and the guards stationed at their gates, guaran-teed a degree of isolation from the otherwise harsh realities of the city.

  Alphaville and the other closed condominiums were like small towns in the United States, an ersatz paradise only a few Paulistas could afford.

  No crimes ever occurred in closed condominiums, at least no crimes that any of the home owners would be willing to talk about.

  “And that’s where that caseiro lives, the guy who was searching for the dog? In a closed condominium?”

  Tanaka bobbed his head.

  “It’s called Granja das Acacias. There are thirteen houses. We talked to nine of the owners and at least one employee from every house. They’ve got drivers, gardeners, caseiros, maids, all of them live-in because there’s no city bus line that gets anywhere near the place. Nobody recalled any sus-picious activity. None of the owners would admit it if they did. Property values, you know. It gets around that there’s criminal activity in the neighborhood, the prices plummet. Those people are scared to death of that, almost more than they are of the crooks. And they’re so cut off from the world that they could as well be living on Mars. They only come out from behind their walls to work, or to shop, or to go to a restaurant or a show. Otherwise they sit around their pools and talk about their servants, or whatever else it is that rich folks talk about.”

  “So no help there,” Arnaldo said. He sighed. “I guess we’re going to have to talk to the buceta.”

  Tanaka looked mystified at this use of the vulgar term for the female genitalia.

  “Talk to the what?”

  “A nickname,” Silva said. “Godofredo Boceta is our pro-filer. He’s going to want photos of the corpses in situ and of the site overall.”

  “Some nickname,” Tanaka said. “I’ll bet it pisses him off. Photos shouldn’t be a problem. Dr. Caropreso’s assistant must have taken a hundred of them. I’ll ask her t
o send you copies.”

  “I could take care of that,” Hector said, “call her directly, save you the trouble.”

  “I’d appreciate that,” Tanaka said. “I have quite a bit on my plate at the moment.” He glanced at his watch. “Now, if you gentlemen will excuse me, I have to get back to my del-egacia. I’ll keep in touch. You can count on it.” He shook hands with them, turned on his heel, and hurried away.

  Silva watched his retreating back for a moment, then turned and looked at his nephew.

  “Your professional zeal is praiseworthy,” he said.

  “What?” Hector asked, innocently.

  “Your generous offer to unburden Delegado Tanaka of the onerous task of calling Dr. Caropreso.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Hector said.

  But of course he did.

  Chapter Five

  TANAKA LIED TO THE federal cops. He had no intention of going back to his delegacia.

  His staff was accustomed to see him disappear at lunchtime on Friday and resurface on Monday morning. So accustomed, in fact, that he no longer bothered to inform them of his impending absences. They not only took those absences for granted, they followed his example. Friday afternoons at Tanaka’s delegacia had taken on the aspect of Saturday morn-ings. There were empty desks throughout the building.

  His plan on that particular Friday was to catch the three o’clock replay of the match between São Paulo’s Corinthians and their nemesis from Rio de Janeiro, Flamengo.

  But it was not to be.

  He drove directly to his apartment, parked under the building, pressed the button for the elevator, and waited. And waited. He pressed the button again, and put his ear to the door to see if the damned thing was moving.

  It wasn’t.

  “Piece of shit,” he mumbled to himself and made for the stairs.

  Tanaka’s front door opened directly onto his living room. He turned on the television, went to the kitchen to get a beer, and found himself standing face-to-face with his own nemesis: his wife, Marcela.

  Marcela was the daughter of Sicilian immigrants, one of those women who, when they stop getting taller start getting wider. For almost twenty years she’d outweighed Tanaka by a considerable margin, an attribute she used to good advantage when their spats turned physical. Her husband had learned to be wary of her fierce temper and took care not to provoke her. It was embarrassing to show up at the office with a split lip or a black eye, an occurrence so frequent that Tanaka had long ago run out of excuses to explain his injuries.

  His hand had barely closed around one of the cold bottles in the refrigerator door, when he realized there was some-thing amiss. His wife was seated at the kitchen table, attack-ing a cauliflower, ripping off the outer leaves, tearing pieces off the core, occasionally looking up at him with angry eyes.

  From long experience, Tanaka knew that if he didn’t con-front the situation right then and there, Marcela would fol-low him into the living room, turn off the TV, and start haranguing him. He decided to get it over with, harboring the hope that he could appease her before the game began.

  “Bad day, querida?” he said tentatively.

  She narrowed her eyes in exasperation.

  “Nilda Ferreira was here,” she said. “They have another new car.”

  Nilda Ferreira, a svelte brunette some fifteen years younger and thirty kilograms lighter than Marcela, was the second wife of Inspector Adilson Ferreira. She and her husband lived in a spacious apartment in one of the tonier areas of the city, an apartment that was a far cry from the tiny two-bed-room affair that Tanaka shared with his spouse and two daughters. Nilda and Adilson were people who frequented all of São Paulo’s better restaurants. They often took shop-ping trips to Miami. Once, they’d even been to Europe.

  Nilda’s passions were fine clothes and expensive jewelry, but to Tanaka it seemed as if the woman lived for the sole purpose of raising his wife to Olympian heights of jealousy. Marcela didn’t begrudge Nilda’s trim figure or high cheek-bones. But she deeply coveted Nilda’s income.

  Neither Adilson nor his wife had been born to wealth. Nilda, like Marcela, didn’t work outside the home. Tanaka was a full-fledged delegado titular, while Adilson was only a section head. But Adilson was the section head of the unit charged with investigating white-collar crimes.

  And that made all the difference. When it came to aug-menting a municipal cop’s meager salary, there was no better assignment than the white-collar unit.

  The unit consisted of only seven men. And one woman.

  The woman hardly counted. She’d been on the job for a little over four months and was expected to continue for another six, after which there’s be a new vacancy. Her name was Eleni Soares, and she was the daughter of Lieutenant Soares. Her father was the brother-in-law of the state secre-tary for public safety. Eleni’s position was a stopgap measure, an opportunity to save money for her upcoming marriage.

  The men were in a different category altogether. On the rare occasions when one of them retired, or died (those being the only reasons a male ever left the white-collar unit), new appointments were hotly contested and candidates had to fulfill at least one of the two requirements, preferably both. Adilson had: he’d been able to scrape up the cash necessary to grease the requisite palms, and he had an uncle in the hierarchy, a man who had considerable influence when it came to making appointments.

  Adilson’s sinecure hadn’t come cheap. It had cost him twenty thousand reais, but he’d once told Tanaka that it was the best investment he’d ever made. He’d earned his money back within three months, and by the end of that year there were already eighteen businessmen that had Adilson to thank for being out on the street, instead of sitting in jail, accused of crimes like embezzlement.

  Bribes were a way of life in the policia civil. Not all of the cops took them, of course. There were exceptions, but none of them worked in the white-collar unit. While other men spent their days shaking down petty criminals and traffic offenders, the white-collar cops moved from one rich prospect to the next, milking them for a percentage of their ill-gotten gains.

  “Justice through enrichment” was the way Adilson liked to put it.

  Some said true justice would have entailed fines rather than payoffs, would have entailed giving the perpetrators their day in court, putting them in front of a judge.

  Adilson wouldn’t have it. Judges, he reasoned, would sim-ply do as he did. They’d take a bribe. Ergo the money had a zero chance of ever winding up in a government coffer. What’s more, judges were a hell of a lot more expensive than cops, so Adilson was actually doing his “clients” a favor by keeping their costs down.

  And, besides, what would happen if the money, by some remote chance, actually wound up in the hands of the gov-ernment? What would happen then? The politicians would steal it, that’s what.

  The paltry sums of cash Tanaka was able to extort from the people who passed through his delegacia were a mere pit-tance compared with the bounty that Adilson reaped, and when Marcela compared the Ferreira’s union with her own, Tanaka invariably came out as The Great Loser and she as The Great Victim.

  It was a comparison frequently made, and one which invariably brought down the wrath of The Victim upon The Loser.

  “That’s the second new car in the last three years,” she said, continuing to commit mayhem on the cauliflower. “What kind of a provider are you? Answer me that!”

  “Not a very good one, I’m afraid,” Tanaka said meekly.

  He didn’t really believe that. It wasn’t as if he were an ordinary beat cop. He was a delegado titular for Christ’s sake, in charge of an entire precinct. It was just . . . well, it was just that he hadn’t had the breaks. And he sure as hell didn’t have an influential uncle down at headquarters. But he knew that another attempt to explain himself to Marcela would not only be fruitless, it could also result in physical pain.

  He backed out of the kitchen, put the bottle of beer down on the Formica-to
pped table next to the front door, and crept out of the house. He was already driving away when he looked in the rearview mirror and saw her standing up on their miniscule terrace with her hands on her hips. He had no doubt that she had a scowl on her face, but the distance was too great for him to see it.

  THE THIRTY-THIRD Delegacia da Policia Civil, the domain ruled over by Delegado Titular Yoshiro Tanaka, hadn’t been built to serve the needs of law enforcement. Even people unaware of the building’s history could easily figure that out, because the original owner’s name, and the year 1923, were still up there on the gable.

  The name, Johann Fuchs, had belonged to an exporter of coffee who’d spent most of his life in Brazil, but who could never bring himself to give up his German nationality or his intention to die and be buried in his home town of Bremen.

  But Fuchs suffered a sudden and fatal heart attack in 1944, and by that time Brazil was at war with Germany, so there was no chance of having his body shipped back to the heimat for internment.

  Two years earlier, largely as the result of Johann’s insistence, both of his sons had gone off to fight for Volk und Vaderland. Neither son came back. No survivors came forward to pay the taxes. In 1946, the city confiscated the property. Two years later, they turned it into a delegacia, and a delegacia it remained. The building was brick with small windows and a tiled roof, gloomy both inside and out. Its one remarkable fea-ture was the holding cell for female prisoners. Remarkable, because it was painted a color called shocking pink.

  When Tanaka took over, in 2001, the cell had been a drab place, its walls battleship gray, designed for short-term incarceration. But the Brazilian justice system being what it was (slow), and the availability of space being what it was (limited), the cell had become overcrowded, so much so that only half the women could lie down at any one time. “Short-term” had also become a flexible concept, generally meaning no less than three months. The crowding led to squabbles about space and ultimately to something far more serious.