Espinosa left Kika in the hands of the detective and went to follow a hunch—nothing very strong, but all he had to go on. If Clodoaldo knew who’d killed the boy, he wouldn’t sit around waiting for someone to do something; the answering-machine message was a kind of warning or indication that he was about to take the matter into his own hands. There was a serious possibility that the street teacher was hunting the man with the wallet.
The Avenida Atlântica at that hour was even busier than it had been the previous Saturday, and the weather, which had seemed to be shifting earlier in the day, held; the night was dazzling. Espinosa decided to continue on foot. He’d certainly be more mobile that way than moving around in a car in Copacabana Saturday-night traffic. He walked steadily down the blocks that separated him from the Rua Santa Clara; not a great distance, but not exactly nearby, either. He walked past the restaurant where the wallet episode had taken place and the spot where the boy had been burned to death, then turned left and walked one block up to the Avenida Copacabana, where he turned right; from that point on he tried to be as discreet as possible. A man staying put and staring at a fixed point would attract more attention than someone moving with the crowds, which is what Espinosa did in front of the man’s building. First he walked down one sidewalk, then he crossed the street and walked down the opposite one, paying close attention to the people entering and leaving the building as well as to the area around it, since the man himself could be trying to make sure that no one was watching him. On one of his passes he noticed a group (or possibly a family) of beggars asking for handouts on the sidewalk across from the building’s entrance. The second time he walked by the spot, he noticed that only the children were left; by the third trip there was nobody. That was when he realized that the beggar with his hat pulled down over his head had been Clodoaldo. But now he was gone.
Espinosa combed the area in search of Clodoaldo; after walking around the block, scrutinizing every corner, lobby, garage, and side door, he realized that he couldn’t compete with the street teacher on his own turf. He returned to the sidewalk in front of the man’s building just as the stores were beginning to shutter down for the evening; this was immediately followed by a decrease in foot traffic. He had decided to go back to Kika and Maldonado and was taking a last glance at the lobby of the building when he had his second surprise of the day. The heavy iron-and-glass door opened to release Chaves, the detective in charge of tracking the man’s comings and goings. Espinosa stood where he was, taking care not to be seen; when the detective left, walking down the Avenida Copacabana, he followed at a prudent distance. Halfway down the next block the detective got on a bus, leaving time only for his pursuer to note the number of the line. Espinosa walked back to Kika’s stand slowly enough to mull over the events he’d just witnessed. Why had Clodoaldo been disguised as a beggar in front of the building? Why had he fled when he saw Espinosa walk by? What had the detective been doing leaving the man’s building? Could it be that Clodoaldo had his eye on the detective, rather than the man who’d taken the wallet?
One of the inconveniences of living in a building with no doorman is that newspapers are dumped on the ground floor, forcing the residents to go down to retrieve them themselves and creating opportunities for unwanted meetings. But on that Sunday morning the source of Espinosa’s awkwardness was the fact that he had gone to sleep the night before with at least four important questions still unanswered. At least the toaster worked and the coffeemaker cooperated, things he couldn’t always take for granted. The toaster often burned the bread and the coffee was too weak, or the coffee was so strong that it stained the cup and the bread emerged from the toaster white. So reaching the balance of a perfectly toasted slice of bread and a tasty cup of coffee would have been nothing to sneeze at—had any of yesterday’s questions been resolved.
The weather had changed during the night, and the sky was covered with heavy gray clouds. He was on his second cup of coffee when it started to rain. At first scattered drops, no bigger than the seeds falling from the nearby tree, spattered onto the zinc protecting the air conditioner. Slowly they gathered speed and started to tinge the floor of the little balcony outside the French windows; in a matter of minutes the sky darkened noticeably, and a weighty, momentarily refreshing rain began to fall. Espinosa left the window open, at the risk of getting the living room carpet wet; he sat down in front of the balcony and stared out. He felt like he was watching the world through a veil of water; the nearby building and the distant hill loomed as one indistinct, shallow mass. The rug closest to the window was soaking wet when he uncrossed his legs, which he had rested on the little table in front of the sofa, and got up to close the glass doors; he wanted to keep watching the rain.
At eleven he dialed Vieira’s number. A woman’s voice answered. In the fraction of a second he needed to recognize the voice of Flor, she identified his and spoke first.
“Officer Espinosa, good morning. How have you been?” Her voice was artificial and forced, as if she were talking not to him but to someone she had with her.
“Not as well as my friend Vieira, but I’m getting by.”
“Do you want to talk to him?” Her voice returned to normal.”
“If I could.”
It took a minute for Vieira to come on.
“Espinosa, buddy! The rain made you nostalgic and you remembered your old friend?”
“Something like that, Vieira. At least the second part is accurate. How are your scars?”
“The ones on my body are fine …” There was an interval during which Espinosa guessed that he was touching Flor. “All thanks to Flor. The ones in my heart are almost cured, also thanks to her.”
“Maybe this isn’t a good time …”
“My dear, for you it’s always a good time.”
“Thanks. I’m just calling to see how you’re doing, but it seems you haven’t changed a bit.”
“That’s right, baby. I’m a man blessed by the Almighty. After what I went through … and am still going through … to get to savor something like this …”
Espinosa felt the officer starting to drift off, so he didn’t push him any further and hung up. He himself was disturbed; he knew he hadn’t called only to find out how Vieira was feeling. He was also interested in finding out if Flor was with him, just as he’d been hoping she’d be the one to pick up the phone. In a corner of his mind, Flor’s voice formed part of a whole, together with her body, the smell of her skin, and the grace of her movements. He didn’t quite understand why, with Kika so much closer, he was so interested in a woman who belonged to someone else and who hadn’t shown any interest in him. Maybe it was because of their very different kinds of beauty: Flor’s was a native type, with Asian overtones and the strength of an ancestral Brazilian archetype. But Espinosa suspected that the real source of her provocative powers lay in a perverse glint in her eyes. While he was talking on the phone, he watched the rain, but his attention kept returning to Vieira’s little apartment. After he hung up, he focused again on the masses of water framed by the window. He couldn’t say how long he sat in that same position, his gaze lost in the brilliant gray of the rain. It was only when it stopped that he got up, as if to do something; he went out to the balcony to make sure the shower had really passed, then turned around and headed for the kitchen, anticipating lunch.
The rain started up again in the early afternoon and, with short intervals, fell for the rest of the day, eliminating the possibility of an exposition on the sidewalk of the Avenida Atlantica and consequently the need to protect Kika. He thought the most honest thing to do that afternoon was to try to break the impasse between the two annotations on the final page of Lord Jim—which meant’ sitting down to read.
Vieira’s Sunday was just as rainy, but instead of Conrad he had Flor. At least for part of it. The other part, following Espinosa’s phone call, was used to contact colleagues who were still on active duty. Now that he had recovered, it was time to act. Espinosa hadn’t allowed him
to participate in the investigation into Magali’s murder, but he hadn’t said anything about conducting a private investigation into the attack on himself. He wanted answers to a series of questions, the first being: who had assaulted him? He also wanted to know if the person responsible knew who he was, if the attack had anything to do with the man who had his wallet, and, finally, who that man was. The best place to start, in his opinion, was with the circle of informers for the Thirteenth Precinct, located right in front of the Galeria Alaska. The beginning of his private investigation led him to make two Sunday visits and a few phone calls; the results of his exertions, he hoped, would become apparent on Monday.
It was night when he got home. He was always sad when Flor wasn’t there; he didn’t know whether it was because the girl was so attractive or because every day he felt more keenly aware of his own mortality. Seated on the side of his bed, he looked at the reddish bruises on his body, especially on his arms, which he had used to protect himself from the blows, and saw the fragility of his aged body. Though he still had some vigor left, the increasing limits of his age were clear, and that hurt him more than the blows he’d received. He hadn’t felt like he needed to stay young for Magali; in some ways his relationship with her was a continuation of his marriage to Maria Zilda. With Flor it was different. Her youth, even when she tried to play it down, marked a dramatic difference between them. Magali had made herself look older to go out with him to restaurants; Flor wasn’t his day-to-day accessory but a concrete fulfillment of his fantasies. Flor didn’t live in his world; she lived in his dreams.
He had undressed to his underwear and, still sitting on the side of his bed, was trying to remove his socks; his belly was like a float around his waist, preventing him from bending over. The simplest everyday task left him out of breath. He squeezed his hands, trying to strengthen the muscles in his arms, and noticed that they still responded. But if he kept squeezing them they threatened to start aching; fortunately his legs were still fine. He examined every part of his body in this way, thinking about Flor—and when he thought about Flor he put a different part of his body to the test.
The night before, he’d suggested to Flor that they move in together, with the understanding that she would stop working as a prostitute. Her response made him swell with pride. She would love to, she said, but they ought to wait a little longer. It was still early to make such a radical decision; maybe he’d be excited by her youth at first but would come to regret his suggestion eventually. For her part, she’d move in the next day, but for his own good they had better give it some time. There was a long pause while they stretched out on the bed, looking at the ceiling.
“Damn it, sweetheart. I don’t have enough time left to think about it. I’m already living on borrowed time.”
“Don’t talk like that, focusing on the negative. We always have to think positively. It’s just like energy. There’s positive and negative.”
“Okay, love. But I’m running on fumes. If you don’t fill me up I’m going to run out of gas.”
He firmly believed that the afternoon’s intense activity was a direct response to that of the night before. And yet he felt Flor’s absence keenly. Sunday-afternoon television bordered on the repugnant; at night it was merely insufferable. He found the least awful movie, opened a beer, and let himself relax, still thinking about Flor.
On the way to the station, one image kept popping into Espinosa’s brain: the detective leaving the building on Saturday night. He didn’t know what to conclude, even though he’d thought about it a lot. The man had been in the precinct for less than a month, arriving the night before Magali’s murder, and the assignment to keep an eye on the building, like his trip to Campos to talk to the owner of the apartment, was a way to keep him busy until they had a better sense for what kind of man he was.
“He left on business? On whose orders? To go where?”
“Neither you nor the chief was here. He said he’d be back before noon. Hadn’t you asked him to keep in touch with the doorman of that building on the Avenida Copacabana?”
“That’s right.”
“So he must be there.”
Whenever Espinosa was suspicious of a colleague he felt conflicted, but it was difficult to view the detective’s presence in the building at ten o’clock on Saturday night as proof of professional zeal. He’d told the kid to keep an eye on the building—not even to watch the building, actually, just to stop by a couple of times a day to see if the man had shown up. He didn’t like the expression he had seen on the detective’s face. He looked more like someone who had just wrapped up a deal than a cop investigating a murder suspect.
Until lunchtime, he was given over to bureaucratic tasks. At exactly noon, Chaves climbed the stairs leading to the second story and greeted Espinosa with a big, bright smile.
“How are things in the man’s building?” Espinosa asked the question disagreeably, barely raising his eyes from the file he was examining.
“Nothing new, sir, except …”
“Except?”
“Nothing, sir, it’s nonsense.”
“Nothing is nonsense when people are being murdered all around us.”
“Well, it could just be my imagination, but I get the feeling I’m being followed.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s nothing objective, and it’s not always, but I have the feeling someone’s following me.”
“Really?”
“That’s all. Just an impression.”
“When did you start having this impression?”
“In the last few days, especially after the boy’s death. Maybe, after feeling that he was being watched, the man set up a watchman.”
“Could be. When were you there last?”
“This morning. The doorman confirmed that he hadn’t been there.”
“And before today, when were you there last?”
“Sunday night and Saturday night. I go by twice a day, but never at the same time, in case the employees are in touch with the man.”
Espinosa sat wondering if he’d been unfair to the kid, or if the kid was smarter than he looked. He could have seen Espinosa as he was leaving the building—or noticed the almost brand-new sneakers on the beggar across the street, the one with the ridiculous wool hat pulled down to his ears on a hot summer night. He’d had all of Sunday to come up with a convincing story. That wasn’t hard, since he’d been assigned to keep an eye on the very same building he’d been seen leaving.
“Is there a problem?” Chaves asked. “Do you want me to put the squeeze on the doormen? I think we’re acting pretty delicately. The guy could be paying them off and threatening them. They’re not going to cooperate.”
“Don’t do anything for now.”
“Sir, if I may say so, I don’t think we’re going to get anything the way we’re behaving.”
“And what do you suggest?”
“I think we should call the doormen to the station to put a little pressure on them. Nothing violent. Just a little squeeze.”
“And then the guy’s going to find out that we’re after him…. Don’t forget that he doesn’t know what we know … or what we suspect.”
“So why is he hiding?”
“And who says he’s hiding from us?”
Espinosa remained seated, with the kid standing in front of him: jeans, tennis shoes, cotton jacket, and a mesh shirt, looking just like any other recent graduate of the police academy. There was no sign that he had more money than usual. No reason to pressure him; the only result would be to put him on the defensive.
He was hungry, but he didn’t feel like going out. At times like these, he usually resorted to the by-the-kilo place across the street, a better choice than most of the other cheap restaurants in the area. From his office window he could see the movement in the restaurant; he noticed that it wasn’t so busy and had decided to head over there when he saw a familiar figure crossing the street toward the station. It was Vieira. He was walking slowly,
limping slightly, and, despite the flowery shirt he wore loosely over cotton trousers, he was showing his age. Espinosa went down immediately to save him from having to climb the stairs.
“Espinosa, baby! I was afraid you’d already gone to lunch.”
“I wouldn’t call what I was about to do going to lunch.”
“Let’s go to the Polaca, for old times’ sake.”
“It’s not Polaca, it’s the Polonesa. Polacas are a thing of the past.”
“Damn, isn’t that right? There was a Polish girl like you wouldn’t believe on the Rua Viveiro de Castro. Boy, I was a little kid, as healthy as a prizewinning bull, and I had a tab with the Polish girl just like people have accounts at the corner store. Her name was Gertrude, but I called her Gerda.”
The restaurant was almost next door to the station; he spoke these last words as they were entering and being greeted by the waiter. They were still getting settled in when Vieira said:
“Espinosa, the son of a bitch who assaulted me has nothing to do with the guy with the wallet.”
“What are you saying?”
“Just what you heard. The information that led me to the guy in the Galeria Alaska was wrong. Those people are heavy into drugs and don’t give a fuck about a wallet; they would have dumped that shit if they’d found it. They have a well-organized cocaine-delivery system, and some of our people are on their payroll. Big shots and small change. They attacked me because they thought I was trying to get in on their turf.”
“How did you find this out?”
“I promised not to tell … the person who told me is on their list…. We used to be friends. He owed me one, and today he paid it back.”
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