Before going to sleep, for more than an hour, he called Vieira’s house.
PART 3
Espinosa awoke tormented by the image of Vieira running down the sidewalk. He stayed in bed for a while, trying to make sense of the previous evening’s events. He made his coffee, stuck a few slices of bread into the toaster, picked up the paper at the door, and debated whether to ring Vieira before or after reading it. Save for exceptional circumstances, he didn’t bother people on Saturday or Sunday mornings, but in this case he could justify the call. The toast popped up just as the call went through; he stayed on the line. It rang more than twenty times. It occurred to him that perhaps Vieira had gone on a binge and couldn’t hear anything. He also imagined other things. After two hours, he called again, with the same result; he could no longer imagine that his friend had been out on a bender; he started to really worry.
He decided to stop by his colleague’s apartment right after lunch, but he hadn’t managed to leave before the phone rang. Someone who introduced himself as Joelmar, the policeman stationed in the Hospital Miguel Couto, asked him to come to the men’s ward at the request of someone named Vieira, who said he was a police officer. Espinosa left immediately, without even asking how the patient was doing—if he had managed to give Espinosa’s name and phone number he could at least talk. Saturday afternoon had just joined the events of Friday night.
“What happened?” The question was directed toward the resident who accompanied him to the ward.
“He was attacked, probably by more than one person … such cowards. He’s not a young man.”
“How is he doing?”
“Pretty beat up, but nothing serious. At his age it’s hard to predict how they’ll recover from hard blows to the head. In any case, we’ll have to run some tests on him in a few weeks.”
“Can he be discharged?”
“From a clinical standpoint, he’s ready, but you’d have to take responsibility for him…. He’s not in a condition to be by himself.”
Vieira had lots of cuts and bruises on his face; one eye was so swollen it looked like it wanted to abandon his head entirely. He had a cut lip and some broken dentures, and his nose, along with the open eye, formed one big blob; his body was black-and-blue. He had been admitted to the hospital in the morning, brought by a police car, and they hadn’t wanted to release him before making sure that there were no internal fractures. They had also been keeping him because the only number they’d found in his wallet was his own, and no one had picked up.
Just after four in the afternoon, they entered Vieira’s apartment. Espinosa helped him stretch out in bed, then placed the analgesics and creams on the bedside table. Before he could ask any questions Vieira started to talk.
“Espinosa, it was the son of a bitch we’re looking for…. If not him personally, someone acting for him…. I didn’t see anything…. I turned the first corner, and when I turned the second, before I could see anything, they were already on me.”
“They? There was more than one?”
“I’m not completely sure; most of the blows were directly to my face…. To protect myself I put my hands over my eyes, I was afraid of going blind…. It could have been just one … I can’t say for sure.”
“What were you doing?”
He felt terrible asking such questions at a time like that. Vieira looked awful; it was hard for him to speak. He had to pause every few words to touch his wounded lip, but Espinosa needed to know what had happened.
“I was waiting for you to call … it took you too long…. I’d been warned that the fake officer was trying to sell cocaine in the Galeria Alaska. When I got there, he was inside that old cinema that’s now an evangelical church. With the help of one of the girls, who’s an informer and who’d seen his face, I went in and tried to find him. It was packed. After a few minutes, I noticed some movement in a row near the exit. I sent the girl away and went over to the place; the guy noticed and ran out. I went after him, but no matter how fast I went he still kept a good way ahead. When he got to the sidewalk along the beach he went one block and then turned onto the first street toward the Avenida Copacabana, walking really fast, always looking over his shoulder. I think he was running from me, I’m not sure. He turned one corner, then another, then another, then it happened, I couldn’t tell how many they were.” He paused to rest and organize his thoughts. After a few seconds, he went on: “The guy really isn’t very bright. He takes the powder from the addicts and then immediately sells it for lower than its market value. He doesn’t even know who he’s selling it to. He won’t last long. The only thing I want is to get to him before the traffickers do.”
“For now you’re not in a state to get anyone. You were lucky that nothing worse happened to you; no matter what, you’re going to be out of commission for a few days. I’m going to go buy a few things. Try not to walk if you don’t have to; your leg has an ugly wound on it. The guy must have beaten you with an iron bar, as well as with his fists.”
“Espinosa.”
“What is it?”
“Bring me a mirror. I want to see what my face looks like…. I know it’d be hard to make it any worse, but I want to see how it is.”
Espinosa brought him a two-sided mirror he found in the bathroom, the only portable one. Vieira preferred to look in the magnifying side. He was most upset about his broken dentures.
“That’s fixable, just like everything else,” said Espinosa, trying to cheer him up.
“Espinosa.”
“What?”
“I want to call Flor and ask her to come take care of me. The notebook with phone numbers is on top of the table in the living room.”
Espinosa left him an hour later, convinced that Vieira felt not self-pity but hatred, which can be as powerful as love. What most intrigued him was the amount of violence employed against someone who wasn’t, after all, much of a threat. A small-time lowlife chased by an old man wouldn’t have risked attacking him so violently in the middle of the street when he could have simply run faster and hidden. And if he suspected that his pursuer was a policeman, there would have been even more reason to try to escape rather than to assault him. There was a distinct possibility that Vieira had been beaten by mistake.
Espinosa couldn’t say what it was about Flor that made him so uncomfortable and so intrigued, in the same proportion and intensity; he couldn’t even claim that though she was a hooker she had an infantile ingenuousness, or that she was smart enough to transform her sexual sophistication into innocent artlessness. She wasn’t extraordinarily beautiful, but her beauty did turn the heads of men and women, perhaps because it wasn’t created only from the usual elements of beauty. In her beauty there was something demonic. The result was more alchemical than aesthetic, and its effect was uncommon. Flor disquieted and attracted him, not only sexually, though sex was the way her fascinating alchemy expressed itself. But Flor presented herself not as an answer to his desires but as a question posed to him, inviting him somewhere he could never really identify, modest but shameless, like a girl in a dirty magazine.
“I’m impressed. Let’s see: you worry that something happened to your friend because she doesn’t answer your phone calls all afternoon; at night, using a copy of the key to her apartment, you open the door and find your friend—’sister,’ as you say—dead, tied to the bed, with a plastic bag around her head, and you calmly remember to get the key to your own apartment, kept in a place you immediately recall, and only then do you leave, scared, and call the doorman and the police.”
“Well, that’s exactly what happened.”
“You didn’t take the key back before she was killed, during a fight about who would get to stay with Vieira, for instance?”
“Are you crazy? Don’t tell me that even during a conversation on a Sunday, visiting a friend who’s been hurt, I’m going to need my lawyer.”
“I’m sorry…. You’re right. I won’t bring it up again … at least for today.”
They wer
e a block away from Vieira’s apartment, in a restaurant with food by the kilo, buying their Sunday lunch. The conversation had started in the elevator, a few seconds after they had left Vieira in his bed. Never before had an elevator seemed so small; Espinosa felt that the least movement would make them bump into each other. Flor was wearing a light dress made out of something like silk and held over her shoulders by two slim ribbons; it showed off every curve of her body, completely free beneath the material. Espinosa started to talk out of pure nervousness. The distance to the ground floor seemed interminable. He had brought up the subject because he couldn’t manage to think about anything besides the body alluded to by the cut of the dress; once he brought it up he couldn’t stop himself. He could let go of it only when Flor reacted. They didn’t exchange a single word on the way back. They took up the conversation the second they got back in the elevator.
“I was completely terrified. When I opened the door to the apartment the light was on.… She was tied to the bed…. The plastic bag … it looked like she no longer had a face…. I got so scared and I don’t know why, but the first thing I thought of was the key.”
“Why worry about the key?”
“I was scared.”
“Of what?”
“Scared … that’s all.”
The elevator arrived on Vieira’s floor.
While Flor helped Vieira eat (he really didn’t need help for that), Espinosa opened a beer and sat in an armchair he’d brought in from the living room. Flor was completely focused on her task; the outside world lingered in parentheses.
He could describe what was so attractive about her in detail. What he couldn’t say was what it was about her that made him so uncomfortable. Perhaps he should formulate the question another way: why was he so uncomfortable with her attractiveness? The first response that came to mind was: because Flor was a hooker. Or did that make her even more attractive?
He thought that such ideas were leading him down tortuous paths; those weren’t the kinds of questions to resolve rationally. Besides, a splitting headache made reasoning impossible, even in its most basic form. Experience had taught him that the best way to get through moments like this one was to take two aspirin and beat a discreet retreat.
He went home on foot, hoping that the walk would help him concentrate; he had a lot to think over. The second half of the trip took place under a late-afternoon summer rain, which soaked his clothes and shoes. Though it only touched his body he felt that it was also cleansing his soul, and he arrived home renewed, careful to remove his clothes and shoes before stepping off the doormat.
The detective sent to the Campos area came back empty-handed. Not only had nobody at the ranch of Dr. Elói Azevedo—this was the name of the apartment’s owner—seen anybody from out of town, but Dr. Elói himself and his wife had been off in São Paulo for almost a month “to put some bridges in his heart,” as the ranch’s foreman put it.
It had been almost ten days since the boy’s disappearance, and still no light had been shed on the matter. With each passing day, the initial events became more thickly and darkly shadowed, blurring the outlines of the facts. The links between the events had become tenuous and the people involved had themselves disappeared from the scene or taken on other roles, diluting a story so unfocused that it could hardly even be called a story. On the one hand, there was Magali’s murder, and on the other the boy’s disappearance, a disappearance that, from a police standpoint, was not even considered relevant. Espinosa knew that for the police none of the facts was relevant: in their eyes the murders of prostitutes and street children were nonevents. At the most they could inspire some police officer who had a relationship with the victim, but they were incapable of mobilizing even a minimal fraction of the force itself. In the case of the boy, Espinosa was galvanized by the idea that he might still be alive, but after ten days he had hoped to have a little more than banal, inconsistent musings to go on. Over the course of the day, with the release of Magali’s apartment and its return to its owner, there was one more surprise added to the clues he already had: the apartment was not in the name of Magali (or Lucimar) but Vieira.
“Damn it, Espinosa, what do you expect? Do you think people rent apartments to whores? Renting in my name was only natural; the owner has almost half of the building and loved the idea of having a cop renting the place.”
“Vieira, I’m not judging you. I just don’t want any more surprises.”
“There aren’t any more. I didn’t think that the apartment’s being in my name was a big deal.”
“How’s your face?”
“It couldn’t be worse than it was. The guy gave me a free face-lift. When the swelling goes down I’ll look gorgeous.”
Espinosa hung up convinced that there were more surprises in store for him. After all, he liked Vieira: his earthy bluntness, his lack of arrogance, and his ability to get mixed up with evil without being polluted personally, or at least without being polluted mortally. Espinosa considered himself a member of a club that seemed to be shrinking day by day—a club of people who believed that honor was a value worth defending—and within that club, there was an even more rarefied circle for those who believed that honor didn’t depend on race, creed, religion, or profession, who believed that even a cop, even a banker or a politician, could be honorable.
The guiding principle of the police force was no different from the one that directed society: if the victim was important, the investigation was immediate and the solution quick; if the victim was unimportant, the investigation took its time on its inexorable course toward the file of unsolved cases, unless the criminal was caught in flagrante delicto. Hookers weren’t important. Magali had been important to Vieira, and probably to nobody else. Lucimar may have been important to someone when she was a child, but that person died as soon as Magali was born, or survived only in her dinners with Vieira. The fact was, no one besides Vieira and Flor had missed her, and even they didn’t seem too worried about solving the case. And then there was Espinosa, probably the only one who hadn’t definitively buried Magali-Lucimar, though he had seen her only once, face twisted in pain, suffocated in a plastic bag. He could have let the case die. But that wasn’t his way.
Espinosa thought it was curious how Magali and Lucimar occupied, in Vieira’s mind, two separate and independent lives. Even when they’d fucked, he hadn’t been with Magali but with Lucimar. His near indifference to the death of his lover could be explained only by this schism: Magali was the one who had been killed. Lucimar had only disappeared, left the scene temporarily, and until she came back Vieira would pass the time with Flor.
It occurred to Espinosa that what he considered Vieira’s lack of interest in discovering Magali’s murderer could also be interpreted as a realistic acceptance of the facts. A thirst for justice or revenge had probably played a role in his life back when he had hope and plans for the future, but now Vieira’s life consisted of moments; justice and revenge required time and energy, both of which were becoming increasingly rare in the life of the ex-policeman. Magali’s legacy to Flor, the proof of her supreme love for a woman, could not be written off in the name of a fidelity that he probably had never had even with his own wife; more than an inheritance, Vieira seemed to consider Flor a gift of love and fantasized that Magali had died only so that he could be with Flor. The truth was, however, that nothing could justify a lengthy investigation; a murder had been committed and it had fallen to him, Espinosa, to investigate and find the murderer, no matter what he thought of Vieira’s enchantment with Flor. The only clue he had was a collection of fingerprints found on the plastic bag, among them those of Flor and the victim; the rest of the impressions had not been identified. The little can of Mace had yielded no usable prints. As for the motive, whom did Magali’s death benefit? The idea that Flor or Vieira had killed Magali to stay together was absurd. He would have to find someone else who had known Magali, and a starting point was the night doorman, who hadn’t come to the funeral. Espinosa lo
oked for his name in his notes.
That night, after ten, Espinosa paid a visit to Ismael. He gave him half an hour to get settled into the reception desk, to plug in a little, antiquated black-and-white television he kept under the desk and prepare himself for the shift that would end at six o’clock the next morning. Through the glass door, Ismael’s face, illuminated by the bluish light from the television screen, looked like a ghost in the dark hall of the building. Espinosa pressed the doorbell and got his attention. Unable to identify him, even from such a short distance, Ismael got up, visibly irritated. Before the doorman could say anything, Espinosa pressed his badge up against the glass.
“I’m sorry, Officer, I didn’t recognize you,” Ismael said while looking at the badge and opening the door.
“Good evening, Ismael.”
“Good evening, sir.”
He seemed to want to receive the officer appropriately, but there wasn’t even another chair for Espinosa to take. They remained standing, leaning against the desk, upon which stood a Christmas tree not more than a foot tall, decorated with little silvery threads. The doorman switched off the television and turned on the hall light. For a few seconds, the only noise came from a little fan that was threatening, from on top of the desk, the precarious balance of the little tree.
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