December Heat

by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza

“I do. No one who has grabbed a child out from under the nose of the police and then killed him would show up to get fresh clothes in his apartment. He’s not running from us. Maybe he doesn’t even suspect we’re after him.”

  “So who’s he running from?”

  “I don’t know, and I don’t think he does either. See if you can find out the full name and address of the owner of apartment 607 from the building management.”

  The bad taste in his mouth and the package of antacids in his pocket made him remember the car he had left parked near the restaurant the night before. After he went to the Largo do Machado to get the car, he decided to go see Clodoaldo. If he was in fact the one who’d given his name to the kid, he might know where the kid was hiding out. Since the street teacher’s place of work wasn’t an educational establishment but the streets themselves, it wasn’t always easy to find him; the same could be said for looking for a specific street kid. Espinosa knew it was a question of patience. Even though they moved around a lot, street kids weren’t exactly nomads. They moved within a restricted area. A Copacabana street kid didn’t go downtown or to Leblon; in those places he was a foreigner. They usually stuck to well-demarcated territories, relatively circumscribed, unless there was a problem, which would lead them to seek out their families or institutions like the children’s shelter, which lay outside their domain.

  Espinosa started the search at two of these shelters, hoping that someone would know where Clodoaldo was. The only lead he got was that he had been hanging out one set day a week on the Avenida Atlântica, around Posto 5, near a discotheque. The kids knew to look for him there on that day, and knew that he would help them. No one was sure exactly which was the designated day of the week, though.

  Today was a Wednesday, the middle of the week: a good day for regular periodic meetings, if such considerations applied to street urchins and their teachers. Apparently Clodoaldo spent all day with the kids. For some time the group had met in the Praça do Lido, but for reasons unknown they had moved their meetings to the area around the discotheque.

  Coincidence or not, it was the same place where the boy had disappeared.

  Before parking the car, Espinosa cruised the streets near the disco where the meetings were supposed to take place, but neither Clodoaldo nor any street kids were to be seen. He drove along the beach to see if they were there, came back, and stopped the car in front of the disco. The attendant, from a distance, had been pointing out a parking place. As he approached the car, Espinosa asked if he’d seen Clodoaldo, the street teacher. No; he hadn’t shown up for a few days.

  “What day does he usually come?”

  “I’m not sure, but I think it’s Thursday or Friday. Are you a friend of his?”

  “I am. If he comes by, tell him Espinosa wants to talk to him.”

  “Espinosa?”

  “That’s right.” He gave the attendant a ten so he wouldn’t forget his name.

  “You don’t want me to wax your car, sir?”

  “No thanks. It can stay unpresentable.”

  Espinosa guessed that Clodoaldo must come on Thursday; if it was Friday, the day of the chase, the boy would have gone for him instead of Espinosa. Around a bench in the square, sitting in the sand, under a tree, always in the open air, Clodoaldo and the kids talked about their problems—usually strictly practical ones related to day-to-day survival. Espinosa had heard that they talked about their difficulties with their families, about threats from juvenile delinquents, beggars, private security guards, and cops, and about their dreams. Whoever saw them from a distance would think that the street teacher—a short, muscular man with Indian features and a carrot-colored bowl cut—was a low class charmer of abandoned children. And they wouldn’t be far off. His many years of working on the street had made Clodoaldo respected by boys and girls, by the institutions that supported them, and by the police. The kids affectionately called him “Clodô.” But only them, nobody else. When a new detective had once addressed him as such in a street meeting, Clodoaldo, whose voice was surprisingly low for his size, replied, “That name was a gift from the kids. You can’t have it.” He was capable of the greatest kindness and the greatest violence.

  When Espinosa spotted Clodoaldo the next day, the man’s orange hair reminded him of a life raft against the blue summer sea. He was seated beneath an almond tree on the strip dividing the two lanes of traffic on the Avenida Atlântica. In his hands he had a big bag of bread, which he was dividing among the ten or so children. He didn’t interrupt his speech when the officer approached the group, but extended the bag to offer a warm roll and continued talking about a shelter that they could use. Not until the end of his talk did he make the introduction: “This is Officer Espinosa. He’s a cop, but you can trust him like you trust me.” Espinosa thanked him and sat on the cement ring surrounding the tree’s roots. For almost an hour he listened in silence to the conversation, the topics of which ranged from problems with personal hygiene to the boy who was murdered while he slept. They were afraid it could happen again. At that moment Clodoaldo invited Espinosa to participate in the discussion.

  Espinosa explained that he was from the Twelfth Precinct on the Rua Hilário de Gouveia, and that they could always find him there if they needed him. All they had to do was go to the reception desk and ask for Officer Espinosa. Someone asked if children could come into the station; Espinosa answered that they didn’t need to come in, that he would come down to meet them. Then, not without a certain anxiety, he told them, minus a few details, the story of the boy who had supposedly been kidnapped, from the time he was chased by the man up until his disappearance when they were walking to his car last Friday night, close to where they were now sitting.

  “There’s no proof, or even any hint, that it was the same man who killed your friend. For now, the man has disappeared. He knows that the police want to interrogate him, but he could think it’s for some other reason. The boy I mentioned is the only one who can identify him, and the man knows it; if he’s the same one who killed your friend on the sidewalk, then the boy’s life could be in danger.”

  “More danger than we live in every day?” The question came from the boy seated next to Clodoaldo; he was a little older and was clearly the leader of the group.

  “I think so. Let’s say he’s in extra danger.”

  “And what can we do?”

  “Help me find the boy and, maybe, help me find the man.”

  After a few kids offered their views on the subject, Clodoaldo asked for a moment alone with Espinosa. As soon as the kids moved away, the officer asked:

  “So? What do you think?”

  “I knew the boy who was killed. His name was Washington. That wasn’t the work of a group. It was someone acting on his own, but it doesn’t sound like the guy you described, a small-time pimp.”

  “Do you know who he might be?”

  “No. Without a picture it’s hard to say; it could be a lot of people.”

  “That’s why we have to find the boy.”

  “Him we can help you find … if he’s still alive.”

  “He has to be.”

  “It’s possible. If he was dead we or you would have heard. As for our help, don’t count on anything very organized. The kids can help, but not in a very systematic way. If they feel threatened they’ll stop immediately. As for me, I’ll do whatever I can.”

  Most of the kids had wandered off. The three who were left were examining a hubcap they’d found near the curb. The sun that came through the leaves of the tree projected hundreds of little circles onto the paving stones. It was one more in a series of splendid summer mornings. It was hard for Espinosa to connect the sight before his eyes with the murder of a boy who had barely entered puberty. He said farewell to Clodoaldo with a handshake and waved to the children.

  If the owner was enough of a friend to let the man live in his apartment on the Avenida Copacabana, he was also enough of a friend to hide him for a while on his ranch. That was the main reason the
y didn’t try to call and instead opted to send an agent to the region around Campos. If they needed it, they could get backup from the local police.

  Espinosa, for his part, decided to attack another side of the case and brought Flor in to “lend a few clarifications” (as he instructed the bearer of the order to say) about the events leading to her friend’s death. Flor answered that she could not come until the next day; it would interfere with today’s business. “The police are there to protect honest working people, not to get in their way” was the observation with which she sent away the detective, the same one who had gone to fetch her the first time. “I was waiting for her to say that she would only appear in the presence of her lawyer,” he commented.

  And that was exactly what happened. The next morning, Flor swooshed in triumphantly accompanied by a lawyer who, in the opinion of those present, wasn’t old enough to have a high school diploma. He did. And he wasn’t stupid. Espinosa couldn’t accomplish what he had hoped to and was forced to dismiss her after a series of questions that led nowhere. She said good-bye, adding that if they wanted to see her, she didn’t require an official summons. Espinosa sat wondering where Flor had gotten the lawyer.

  He went out to eat something in the neighborhood. Before settling on a place, he walked a good ways, thinking about the little lawyer. The lawyer had prevented Espinosa from capitalizing on the nervousness everyone feels when summoned to a police station. Not that Flor had given any signs, the first time she’d been there, of being prone to nervousness, but the lawyer’s presence meant that they wouldn’t be able to push her any further today. Espinosa thought about himself at the lawyer’s age, trying to enter the force “for more financial security and to be able to get married.” The security remained, but the marriage didn’t. Espinosa felt like a bandit.

  When he snapped out of his reverie, he was on the Avenida Copacabana, almost in front of the Galeria Menescal. His thoughts about the young lawyer were still spinning around his head, along with more practical ones, including the sensation that someone was once again watching him. It was practically the same spot he’d felt it last time. He let his gaze wander distractedly through the arcade, which at that hour was being traversed by hundreds of people moving in both directions; once again he was unable to single anyone out. Instead of taking the Avenida Copacabana route, he returned to the station along Barata Ribeiro, which had fewer pedestrians, stopping in front of a few shop windows, even entering a clothes store, in the hopes of surprising his stalker on the way out. No one. Maybe the young lawyer had messed with his head; even in the best of circumstances, his intimate daydreams could rear up in the light of day in the middle of Copacabana—though he felt more invaded than threatened. He reflected that it would be the height of paradox to be invaded by his own self. No doubt it was all a figment of his hyperactive imagination.

  As the afternoon approached the evening, he found himself wanting to walk down the Avenida Atlântica to the place where Kika showed her pictures; he would use the walk as an excuse to have a look around the area, though he wasn’t sure what he expected to find, unless the man or the boy was putting in an appearance to fortify his professional esteem. But he didn’t follow his whim; he knew that neither the man nor the boy would be there. As for Kika, the best thing was to bear in mind that times had changed and that for a young woman, especially a young woman artist, to go out to dinner with a man meant nothing more than the obvious: that she wanted company. But he let his thoughts take their own course. It occurred to him that this was what was meant by his “contemporaries”—people who weren’t contemporaries of the time they lived in. Some were contemporaries of a time that was still to come, and they still had hope; others were contemporaries of a moment that had passed, and such people could do nothing more than live off their memories. Espinosa believed that there was one further complication: his body, his tastes, his clothes, his outlook were perfectly contemporary to the time he was living in, but his system of signs—the code people used to navigate through the world—belonged to a time that had already passed. He felt like a computer from an earlier generation, running on old, outdated software.

  As more days passed without any news of the boy, Espinosa became increasingly convinced that he had sought shelter somewhere else, out of the reach of heroes and villains. He knew it wasn’t easy to make a corpse disappear, even for professionals, and he was fairly certain that whoever was responsible for the boy’s disappearance, if anyone was responsible, was an amateur. Some street children returned periodically to their homes to contribute whatever they’d gathered in the street to their families; the street, for them, wasn’t a house but a workplace. That could certainly be the case for this boy.

  Stretched out on the sofa in his living room, with the lights off, Espinosa alternately contemplated the blinds and the building on the other side of the square. He was fully aware that the answering machine was blinking behind him; he had avoided listening to his messages. There would surely be one from Kika inviting him to come out to the Avenida Atlantica to keep her company. “Maybe you’ll bring me luck,” she would say at the end of the phone call, and he would head out to his car like a madman.

  Around nine, tired of looking at nothing, he decided to give in to the messages. There were two from Vieira and one from the bank notifying him that his car insurance was expiring the next week. Nothing from Kika. He felt frustrated, angy, and resigned, in that order, after he consulted his saved messages one more time. He mentally reviewed their last meeting and decided yet again that everything had been perfect. All the ingredients for positive future developments had been there, but nothing had happened: no message, no word, no satisfaction. It was what he always said to himself, that his fantasies were the only reality that existed for him; things happened in his head, not in reality. He still didn’t understand, though, why he was frustrated and angry. Of the feelings assaulting him at the moment, the one that made him most uncomfortable was the resignation, which among feelings was about as dignified as bad breath on a nun.

  It was a few minutes before he focused on the messages from Vieira. The first said that he had gotten some information from the manager of one of the clubs, and that he was waiting for his orders (this part spoken with an ironic tone); the second said that if he waited any longer he would lose his lead and that in the meantime he would conduct some preliminary investigations near his house and the Thirteenth Precinct. Espinosa picked up the phone immediately. Vieira was no longer at home.

  It wouldn’t take him more than ten minutes to reach the station. It would be overdoing it to call the on-duty officer to ask him to keep Vieira there in the event that he showed up; he was only a retired policeman looking for his stolen I.D. What seemed insufferable was sitting at home staring at the blinds while the world, baked by the summer heat and invigorated by the Christmas spirit, went on outside. He decided to look for his colleague.

  Before his retirement, Vieira had been posted for almost three years to the Thirteenth Precinct, only a few blocks from his apartment. The station was in front of the Galeria Alaska, which connected the Avenida Atlântica and the Avenida Copacabana, and which until recently had held the highest concentration of the most varied fauna of the Copacabana underworld. Vieira’s intimacy with the area could have made it the starting point for his investigation. A few blocks away, Kika was showing her paintings.

  Espinosa stopped by the station first. Only the on-duty officer, out of everyone there, knew who Vieira was, but he hadn’t seen him in over a year. Espinosa left the station and went through the Galeria Alaska toward the Avenida Atlântica. It hadn’t been so long ago that the cinema, the nightclubs, and the little dives that had made the place famous had metamorphosed into an evangelical church and tasteful boutiques. The people around at night were no longer prostitutes, cruising homosexuals, transvestites, junkies, and dealers, but believers with their Bibles searching for God—the devil had presumably stopped paying. The years of close cohabitation with the police stat
ion, however, had given the local businesspeople, the doormen, and the clients an acute ability for spotting a cop anywhere, so that when Espinosa got to the Avenida Atlantica, after passing through the arcade, he was sure that everyone knew that he was a police officer. Not finding Vieira there, he walked down the beach to the place where Kika usually was, taking a sidelong approach; he wanted to see her before she spotted him. He wasn’t entirely sure how he would greet her, but the closer he got the more confident he became of the inevitability of the meeting. He could see her figure—tall, slim, gesticulating broadly—half a block away; she had already spotted him before he could choose an approach. A surreptitious arrival was now impossible. She crossed the street toward him, weaving between the cars, and then hugged him affectionately.

  Kika was radiant because she had sold a picture, which, she said, covered her Christmas expenses as well as her part of the rent on the house in Catete.

  “Let’s go celebrate after I finish up here. Maybe with you nearby I’ll sell another painting.”

  She didn’t. But they talked for almost two hours about any subject that could be covered in the middle of a little art fair on a busy sidewalk. Their previous conversation, in the Largo do Machado, had taken place in an area of less than a square meter. For Espinosa, a bar table was an almost enclosed space, very intimate, despite the surrounding multitudes. On the beach there were no spatial restrictions like the bar table, so they could allow themselves little movements and twists and turns that both freed them and tied their bodies together. The date concluded almost monastically, on the glassed-in veranda of a restaurant on the avenue. They hadn’t wanted the evening to end on a gloomy note, but as they were sitting there in the wee hours, they saw, through the window, Vieira hurrying down the street, only a few meters from them and moving away from the direction of his house. Espinosa threw some money on the table, asked Kika to wait, and stood up to leave the restaurant. A few more seconds were lost when the occupants of the next table rose at the same time, blocking his passage. When he reached the street, he couldn’t get Vieira’s attention. He ran to the nearest corner but couldn’t spot the retired cop on the Avenida Atlântica or on the intersecting street. He climbed on top of a cement bench, but even so he didn’t see anyone who looked like Vieira; he ran to the corner of the first street parallel to the beach, but that effort was just as fruitless. Judging from the way Vieira had passed the restaurant, it didn’t look like he was heading anywhere in particular; he looked, rather, like he was fleeing or chasing someone. Espinosa went back to the corner on the beach and walked two or three blocks in the direction he’d seen Vieira running. Nothing. It was the same corner where the boy had disappeared. He thought he’d start calling it the Bermuda Triangle. He returned to the restaurant to explain his hasty departure to Kika. She was no longer there. He went home the same way he’d left, on foot and alone.