The boy had disappeared.
He felt completely useless; he felt that the two of them had come to find him at home simply to verify the skill of a man who could snatch the boy out from under his nose. While he looked around indiscriminately at everything and everyone, he reflected that the whole time they’d been together he’d been so charmed by the girl that he’d forgotten the most basic norms of witness protection. Instead of calling for backup from patrol cars in the area, he had believed he could master the situation by himself. But his eyes had been much more focused on Kika than on the boy and his supposed persecutor. The boy had vanished while he was practically holding his hand.
They got into the car and started scouring the area. Their assumption was that the boy had been kidnapped and that the kidnapper had been on foot; he couldn’t have gotten too far from the scene of the crime. They drove around all the nearby blocks, scrutinizing all men and boys, together or not. After half an hour, Espinosa returned to the place they’d started, giving up the search; it was no use. To pacify his conscience, he called headquarters to ask for an alert and provided a detailed description of the boy, along with a less precise sketch of the alleged kidnapper.
He parked his car in the same space he’d first left it; then he and Kika walked toward Leme down the Avenida Atlântica, in a last stab at remedying their failure. Of the two of them, only Kika had seen the man, and Espinosa glanced at her every time he saw a man who looked like the one she had described. He was frustrated, angry, and tired. The bars on the beachfront were almost all still open. During the search, he didn’t say a single word. When he decided to give it up, he suggested having a beer and a sandwich before taking her home. They didn’t pick a bar; they just sat down in the first one they came across.
“You’re feeling guilty for no reason. I didn’t see him disappear either, and I was as close to him as you were.” Kika put her hand lightly on Espinosa’s arm, touching only the material of his jacket, as if there were a great distance between it and his skin.
“True, but you’re not a police officer; there was no reason for you to pay as much attention as me. It was incompetence.”
“Why do you sound like you’re mad at me?”
“I’m not mad at you.”
“Of course you’re mad. Just look at your face.”
“What does my face have to do with it?”
“The way it looks, the waiter won’t come near us.”
Espinosa was trying to picture the state of his own face when the waiter came up to take their order.
“The kitchen’s already closed, but we can do sandwiches and snacks.” He spoke in the impersonal tone of a supermarket checkout girl while running a towel across the wet table.
Until seconds earlier, Espinosa had thought of the boy like a cloud of uncertain density but clear form, while Kika looked like a strike of lightning in the middle of the night, fascinating and disturbing. When they sat at the table, the picture changed and the boy’s shriveled face was the only thing he could think about. He didn’t want to chat, and certainly not about anything personal.
He made a few comments about the boy’s disappearance, raising all the possible explanations, and quickly exhausted every conceivable reason. The awkwardness was shared, and any conversation was destined to fall into the void. He tried a few questions about painting. Kika said she studied painting at the School of Fine Arts, mentioned her favorite painters, and then went from aesthetic considerations to economic ones, discussing the cost of materials and her difficulties in selling her work. When the sandwiches arrived, they ate heartily, despite the circumstances. Two beers were enough to impress on both of them their fatigue and frustration, and made perfectly clear that for them the night was over.
“I’ll take you home. Where do you live?”
“In Catete. That’s where we found a good deal on an apartment.”
“We?”
“Me and some girlfriends; three of us share an old house on the Rua do Catete.”
On the way, she pressed her head against the window and wordlessly pushed her legs against the front of the car. Except for her pretty brown eyes, focused on the windshield, she looked like she was asleep. She didn’t accept Espinosa’s help in taking her pictures upstairs, saying only, “I do it every day.” They said good-bye with a kiss on each cheek, like two schoolmates. While she went up the staircase leading to the third floor of the little building, Espinosa was struck by the contrast between the modernity of Kika and the antiquity of the old colonial house on the Rua do Catete. He sat for a few minutes, the deafening noise of his motor throwing the quiet of the night into relief, and stared at the empty street, beneath the serious gaze of the venerable Catete Palace across the way.
He woke from his hangover. Failure, too, intoxicates, he thought, looking at himself in the bathroom mirror. While the coffeemaker made its usual gargling noise, he called the station. The officers on duty hadn’t heard any news about a kid. The Forensic Institute hadn’t received any dead children.
The two cups of coffee contributed little to his sluggish mood. During their meeting, before they had lost him, the boy had mentioned a building on the Avenida Copacabana, between the Rua Santa Clara and the Rua Siqueira Campos, with a shop on the ground floor and a. small entryway bordering the next building. The description was good. It wouldn’t be hard to find it.
Sunday morning under a cloudless blue sky. Local residents were sleepily walking toward the beach, alone or with children, tents, rafts, balls, rackets, mats. Moving against this tide, Espinosa didn’t have any trouble finding the building. It was a little after ten when the doorman answered the insistent buzzing of the bell. He was wearing shorts, a T-shirt, and sandals and carrying a twisted wet rag. He arrived saying that today was Sunday so the cleaner had the day off and he had to do everything himself and couldn’t sit around in the lobby and … Espinosa flashed his badge.
“Good morning, I’m Inspector Espinosa from the Twelfth Precinct. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
“What happened?” The voice softened and sounded frightened.
“Nothing to do with you, I hope. I’m looking for information about a resident of this building. A white man, around thirty, skinny, straight black hair, well dressed, lives in an apartment at the back, goes out at night.”
“Sir, the building has eighty apartments. I can’t know everyone.”
“But you know this guy. Think about it. We’re not talking about a retired gentleman. He’s relatively young, good looking, a nocturnal Copacabana crook. He probably doesn’t talk a lot and probably lives by himself. I’m not sure about the last part. But maybe the police have come for him before.”
“You say he goes out at night. I wasn’t here last night; I just arrived this morning.”
“I’m not talking about last night. I just want you to give me his apartment number.”
“I don’t know … I don’t remember anybody like that.”
“Well, maybe back at the station? Maybe that would refresh your memory?”
“Hold on a second. It might be the guy in 607.”
“Great. And does the guy in 607 have a name?”
“I don’t know, sir. He never said.”
“And the guy in 607 doesn’t pay his maintenance or get any mail or bills or anything with his name on it?”
“No, sir. It all comes in the name of Mr. Elói.”
“And who is Mr. Elói?”
“The owner of the apartment.”
“Very good. Let’s have a word with Mr. Elói.”
“He doesn’t live here; he’s a rancher in the state of Rio. Sometimes he doesn’t show up for a whole year. The one who uses the apartment is the guy you’re looking for.”
“Whose name you don’t know, even though he lives here.”
“He lives here but he’s not always around. Sometimes he doesn’t show up for days and weeks, and then suddenly there he is—he stays a few days and then disappears again.”
�
��And you don’t know if he’s home?”
“No, sir.”
“Do you have the key to the apartment?”
“No, sir. It’s against the rules. I prefer it that way. Something goes missing and they blame us.”
“Like you said, there are a lot of apartments; you can’t pay attention to all of them. I’m going to go see if he’s there.”
“We can call him on the intercom.”
“That’s exactly what I don’t want you to do. I’m going to go up and you’re going to sit still and not touch the intercom.”
“No problem, sir.”
During the conversation, the doorman had been wringing the wet rag he had in his hands, which Espinosa interpreted as a sign of nervousness. Maybe he wanted to wring 607’s neck; maybe he wanted to wring Espinosa’s neck; maybe he was thinking about what 607 would do to him. Espinosa concluded that something that can be interpreted in so many ways probably didn’t have any meaning at all. He went up.
The apartment had only one door. He rang the bell, then tried the knocker. The door didn’t seem to have been bolted. He tried to pop it open with a credit card but only managed to mangle his card in the process. A lady opened the door to one of the neighboring apartments and surprised him at the moment he was removing his card from the door frame. She scowled at him, frightened; Espinosa replied with his best ambiguous smile and then, imagining she’d be too uncomfortable to ride down with him in the same elevator, waited for the next one. When he got down, he found her warning the doorman, who was still squeezing the rag. When Espinosa walked over to them, she scurried off.
“When the man shows up, call me immediately,” he said, giving the doorman his card. “I don’t have to tell you not to say anything to him.”
“Of course, sir.” Espinosa left with the absolute certainty that he would not be alerted when the resident of 607 reappeared.
Once he was back home, he opened an Italian wine to accompany some pasta he had made himself. It wasn’t the best lunch of his life, but neither was it the worst.
The fact that no body had been found corresponding to the boy’s calmed him down a bit. He was already coming to accept the idea that the boy had run off when he’d seen the man nearby; he would have hidden, and when he felt less threatened he would come find Espinosa again. At least that’s how Espinosa hoped things would turn out.
He hesitated for a while between doing the dishes from breakfast and lunch or letting them pile up in the sink in expectation of Wednesday, when Alice, the cleaning lady (who didn’t think the apartment was a wonderland), would arrive to restore order.
He decided to get the Conrad he had bought a month before in a used book store downtown. It was a translation of Lord Jim dating to 1939. The former owner had written on the first page, “I began reading this book on 22.2.40 (Thursday),” and on the last page, “I finished it on 24.2.40 (Saturday) at 23.30. A little monotonous …” Just below, in a darker ink in a different blue, were the words “21.3.54 (Sunday)—I’ve just reread this book and now I think it’s one of the best I’ve ever read.” Fourteen years later. Had he changed? Had his reading changed? Had he become more condescending? More mature? Seduced by the extra ingredient introduced by the former owner, Espinosa began reading, his mind made up to be the referee between the two readings, considering himself within his rights to add a decisive stroke. But it still wasn’t time to enter the world of Tuan Jim: he couldn’t concentrate on the words; images of Kika and the boy kept invading the story. Joseph Conrad deserved a more attentive reader. He put the book aside for another, better occasion.
At some point the man would have to come home to take a shower and change clothes, unless he had really fled, which would be an admission of guilt. There was no evidence that he was the murderer of the sleeping boy, and he couldn’t be sure that the boy he had lost had anything to do with the wallet found in the street. One thing, though, was indisputable, no matter who had killed the first boy: if he had killed the wrong kid, he would have to hurry to rectify his mistake. Espinosa decided to go back to the building. He waited until five for a possible phone call from Kika, at which point he left and headed toward the Avenida Copacabana. Since it was summer, the sun was still shining brightly. There was a new doorman, who promised that the resident of 607 hadn’t come through the door of the building in either direction. “Sometimes he goes for days without showing up,” the man said, adding that he didn’t know why. From there Espinosa walked to the point on the Avenida Atlântica where Kika showed her pictures, but her colleague was the only one there and Espinosa didn’t feel like approaching him. He retraced his steps from the night before several times but still couldn’t see how the boy had disappeared. His few suppositions didn’t hold together. He walked down the sidewalk by the beach, wandered through the streets of Copacabana, and ended the night eating a piece of pizza, standing up, in a snack bar as inelegant as the pizza. The third part of the Sunday only added a feeling of dejection to the first two-thirds.
Monday morning. Chaves, a new detective bursting with eagerness, had been placed in charge of monitoring the building on the Avenida Copacabana to make sure the man hadn’t returned. No sign of the kid, but at least he hadn’t turned up at the morgue. An NGO who worked with street children buried the incinerated boy. Espinosa devoted great mental effort toward convincing himself that the kid he was looking for hadn’t met with the same fate. He considered the idea that the kid had fled not only from the man but from Espinosa himself, from Kika, from everyone but his peers.
He felt incredibly uncomfortable that Kika had witnessed his failure, all the more because that bothered him more than the boy’s disappearance. He thought about dropping by her house with the excuse that he needed a better description of the man to compare it with the boy’s, or even to suggest that she use her drawing skills to produce a portrait of the man. Or, he thought, he could find something useful to do instead of giving himself over to adolescent fantasies.
The chief asked for his help in reducing the mountains of paperwork accumulating on his desk. It was a dull, strictly bureaucratic job, which is why he thought it matched his mood perfectly. They worked at neighboring tables in the chief’s office. His difficulties in concentrating on the work stemmed not only from his situation but from his fear that at any moment the door could open to reveal someone with a problem that had nothing to do with what he was reading. For the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon he worked through the piles, an activity as exciting as standing in line at the bank.
Right before four o’clock, Chaves came in to report that every time he had gone by the building he had been told that the man was not there. The doorman might be protecting the man, more scared of him than of the cops. There was also the possibility that the man lived in several different places, which would explain how he could regularly stay away for days on end. It was even more probable that he didn’t have a fixed residence, moving according to the moment and the circumstances.
The description of the kid that Espinosa had given to the radio patrollers turned up no new leads. The same description matched no known body at the Forensic Institute, though it was possible for people to die without their bodies ever being recovered.
Early that evening he went home, hoping the boy was tailing him as he had before. He took the longest and busiest route in order to be followed more easily, stopping in front of several stores, pretending to examine things on display, in the hopes that he would capture the face of his stalker reflected in the glass, but he didn’t see a thing. He arrived home feeling heavy, ascended the three flights of stairs with difficulty, and entered panting, as if he’d been running. The answering machine was blinking. He hit the playback button and heard Kika’s voice regretting that he wasn’t home; another call with no message; and the voice of Kika once more, promising to call again at nine that night. It was seven-ten; he had time to think of something not off-putting to say to her. He imagined the emotions of younger people as being like a light switc
h, on or off, while his own seemed more like those dimmers that adjust the light intensity on a spectrum from weaker to stronger. He thought the thesis was ridiculous, but it was all he could muster before his bath.
Kika sounded less anxious than she had earlier; her tone was friendly, almost caring. She wanted to know if there was any news of the boy; she too felt guilty about it. But that wasn’t the real reason for the call; Espinosa felt clearly that she was extending the offer of conversation in the hopes of an invitation. He wanted a little more time. Not for her, but for himself. Fifteen years of difference was enough to create lots of static on his communication channels. At the end of the message, she had left her beeper number—”In case you want to talk to me, of course.”
He had gotten used to living alone. The freedom of having full run of his space and time and not having to explain anything to anyone was seductive. Marriage and separation demanded difficult decisions, but it was just as tough to decide whether to stay married or separated. Ever since he and his wife had separated, he’d been noticing this—and noticing that people like Kika threatened (but also contributed to) this state of affairs. This was how he had spent the last decade—with some moments more intense, some less.
He tried not to think about Kika. He tried to pick up Lord Jim again. Conrad versus Kika. After half an hour, he had to grant Kika the victory. It was impossible to keep reading with her image stamped on every paragraph. He put down the book, opened a beer, and threw a frozen dinner into the microwave without bothering to check what was written on the box.
As persistently as Kika’s face, the emptiness left by the boy’s disappearance forced itself into his thoughts. It seemed impossible for the boy to have been snatched so close to him and Kika without either of them noticing and without his making the faintest sound. Espinosa was starting to believe that he had disappeared of his own volition. He knew the basic principle of all street kids: “A boy on his own is a dead boy.” A group provided the minimal conditions for security; an isolated boy was easy prey. Perhaps he had decided that he couldn’t count on anyone’s help and had fled to seek protection with his group. That was what Espinosa wanted to believe.
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