Buried Strangers (11 page)
AS THE ORNATE FACADE suggested, the apartment block had once been in the heart of one of São Paulo’s most pres-tigious neighborhoods. But those halcyon days were gone. Now, the area was a hangout for drug dealers and male prostitutes.
Tanaka’s building faced a patch of withered grass and stunted trees called the Praça de República, Republic Square. On the far side, trembling under a flux of constant traffic, was Avenida Ipiranga, one of the busiest thorough-fares in the city. The honking of horns and the rumble of buses pursued Hector into the creaky, old elevator and fol-lowed him up to the second floor.
The elevator opened onto a dark corridor illuminated by low-wattage lamps and perfumed by frying garlic. Hector located the door for apartment 2F and looked for a bell. There wasn’t one, so he knocked. A moment later, he saw movement beyond the peephole.
“Who’s that?”
It was a deep voice that could have been male.
Hector held up his credentials.
“Federal police. I’m looking for Marcela Tanaka.”
The door opened as far as a chain would permit. A suspi-cious and heavily shadowed eye stared through the crack, the brown pupil oscillating between Hector’s face and the photo on the document he was holding.
“That’s me. What do you want?”
“Senhora Tanaka, I’m sorry to intrude on your grief. I’m Delegado Costa of the federal police. May I come in?”
“Why?”
“I’m investigating your husband’s murder.”
“That’s a job for the policia civil. How come you people are interested?”
“I’ll be happy to explain.”
At first, Hector thought she was going to tell him to do it from the corridor, but then she slipped the chain and revealed herself. She was a little shorter than Hector, but much heav-ier, wearing a loose-fitting dress in white linen that reminded him of a circus tent. She blocked the opening from side to side, and had to take two steps back to let him enter.
The front door opened directly onto a small living room. Heavy drapes framed French doors and a miniscule terrace, its white-painted metalwork blackened with grime. Through an open door to his left, Hector could see a hallway. There was another door to his right, but it was closed. The carpet was threadbare and the furniture had seen better days. Overall, the place was a dump. With one exception: a large-screen television, one of those plasma jobs. Hector had been pricing one just like it for a couple of months now and kept coming to the conclusion that he still couldn’t afford it. This one looked brand-new.
Senhora Tanaka didn’t offer refreshments, and she didn’t suggest he sit down. She simply sank her considerable bulk into an armchair and stared at him. Hector picked a place on the sofa, facing her across a coffee table with a stained sur-face only partially concealed by a lace doily.
The doily was the only delicate thing in the room. Everything else looked massive, solid. And that included Marcela Tanaka. If she had Japanese blood, it wasn’t evident. She was dark complexioned, had a slight mustache on her upper lip. And she seemed angry.
Hector had been prepared for grief, not rage. He considered inquiring about the source of her irritation, but decided not to. He had a feeling she’d tell him soon enough. He did a mental shrug and got down to business.
“Can you think of anyone with a reason to murder your husband?”
“What kind of a stupid question is that? You got any idea how many pieces of trash my husband put away in his life-time? Any one of them could have popped him.”
She talked like a cop. There was nothing surprising in that. She’d been married to one for years.
“No one in particular comes to mind?”
“No.”
“How about recent threats? Did your husband—”
“Look,” she said, “I have nothing to add to what I already said. You want answers? Go over to the delegacia and talk to them.”
“Senhora Tanaka,” Hector said patiently, “I’m only trying to help.”
“Help? You want to help? So go complain about the lousy pension they’re giving me. You know how much it is? Eight hundred a month, that’s how much. How am I supposed to live on eight hundred a month? The answer is I can’t. I got two young daughters to raise. I got rent to pay. I need food for the table. I’m gonna have to go out and get a job. A
job.
Me. At my age.”
“I’m sorry—”
“Sorry?
You’re
sorry?
I’m
the one who’s sorry. You know what? You can kiss my ass!”
Hector couldn’t think of a less appealing prospect. Senhora Tanaka’s ass was the size of a mule’s and equally attractive. He made an attempt to get the conversation back on track.
“I’d like to have a look at any papers your husband might have left around the house,” he said.
“What for?”
The answer should have been obvious, but Hector gave her the benefit of the doubt. “There might be some clue as to who killed him.”
“There isn’t. There are no papers here, no official papers anyway. He never brought anything home. Now, if you’re done . . .”
She rose to her feet.
She hadn’t repeated her question. She no longer seemed interested in why the federal police had taken an interest in her husband’s murder. That was odd. And there was some-thing else as well: Hector had the distinct impression she was trying to get rid of him. He decided to dig in his heels.
“I’m sorry, Senhora Tanaka,” he said, not stirring from his seat, “but I must insist.”
“You can fucking insist all you want. I don’t want you sticking your nose into my bedroom.”
“Your bedroom?”
She was already flushing, but now she turned an even darker shade of red. “My bedroom, my daughters’ bedroom, anywhere in the house. Now, leave.”
Hector pulled out the search warrant and dropped it on the table.
Marcela’s mouth dropped open.
Less than ten minutes later he found the money. It was in a canvas bag, stuffed into the back of her bedroom closet, concealed under a pile of old sheets.
“SHE SAID IT WAS their life’s savings,” Hector reported to his uncle two hours later.
“And pigs have wings,” Silva said.
“When I asked her why she didn’t keep the money in a bank, she said they didn’t trust banks. Not after Collor.”
“Oh,
please,
” Silva said.
Fernando Collor had assumed the presidency of Brazil in 1989, a time of economic turmoil. His first significant act in office had been to freeze withdrawals from private bank accounts in an attempt to contain hyperinflation. People eventually got most of their money back, but it took a year. It took much longer for them to get over the fear of it hap-pening again.
But hyperinflation was now a thing of the past. Faith in the fiscal responsibility of government had been restored. Anyone who could justify where their money came from, and who wasn’t earning interest on it, was a fool. Tanaka hadn’t struck Silva as a fool.
“She’s a piece of work,” Hector went on, still somewhat shaken by his confrontation with Tanaka’s wife. “For a moment, I thought she was going to jump me. She outweighs me by God knows how many kilos. I started wishing I’d brought Arnaldo.”
“I fail to understand why you went over there on your own. You know you’re not supposed to do things like that.”
“I had no idea of what I was getting into,” Hector said, his tone defensive. “I’d pictured a visit to a bereaved widow, not an angry rhinoceros.”
“You should have brought Babyface.”
“If she’d wanted to, she could have snapped Babyface like a matchstick. Even Arnaldo would have had trouble if she’d decided to make a fight of it.”
“But she didn’t.”
“In the end, she didn’t. When I found the cash, she just collapsed. It was like letting air out of a balloon. But then she started thinking about how she’s gonna get it back.”
“And you know that because?”
“She started yelping about a receipt, made me count it twice, sat there watching me like a hawk while I did it. Before we even started, she called the office to verify my identity, make sure I was who I said I was. Then she put me on the line to talk to Babyface.”
“Why Babyface?”
“He was the guy I told her to ask for. She got me to talk to him, and then she took the phone back so she could hear his reaction to my voice. She made him give her a question that only Hector Costa would know the answer to.”
“What was the question?”
“That’s not important.”
“What was the question?”
“Okay, okay. The question was, what is the eye color of the assistant medical examiner who works with Dr. Couto?”
“I seem to recall that Babyface is the office expert on peo-ple’s love lives. You think he was suggesting something?”
Hector didn’t deign to respond to that. “Senhora Tanaka wouldn’t take my word for the office’s number, either. She looked it up in her telephone book.”
“What kind of money are we talking about here?”
“Ninety-four thousand American dollars. Rosa and Danusa are ranking the serial numbers as I speak, but there doesn’t appear to be any sequence. All the bills are old. Chances of tracing them are about nil.”
“So there’s no way we can prove ill-gotten gains? The lady is going to get it all back?”
“So it appears, deserving creature that she is. A hundred thousand dollars in the closet, and in the beginning of our conversation all she did was bitch about her paltry pension. You know what I think?”
“What?”
“Between being married to that woman, and being where he is now, Tanaka is better off dead.”
GRANT UNGER’S EYES WERE both gray, one a slightly darker shade of gray than the other. They were eyes that reminded Silva of those of his sister’s cat. The cat, Diogenes by name, had been a huge tom, finally brought low by a sum-mer downpour that swept him into a storm drain. Silva’s sis-ter, Clara, thought it was a tragedy and cried for a week. But the cat’s demise had been a relief to the other cats in the neighborhood, some of the smaller dogs, and most of Clara’s neighbors. To all of them, Diogenes had been a thoroughly disagreeable creature. And being disagreeable was another trait it shared with Grant Unger.
Unger had a habit of cupping a hand behind his ear when someone talked to him. A hearing aid might have caused him to change that habit, but Unger didn’t use one. Knowing Unger, Silva thought he avoided the apparatus for vanity’s sake. He also thought that Unger’s use of a hearing aid would have been superfluous much of the time. Unger was one of those people who paid scant attention to what others said, especially if they weren’t other Americans who were higher up in the pecking order. He never seemed entirely content unless he was doing the talking. And be-cause he was hard of hearing, Unger seemed to think that everyone else was, too. He didn’t talk to you, he shouted at you. The noise he was making at the moment evoked cold stares from neighboring tables. He and Silva were in the Belle Époque, a French restaurant that was one of Silva’s favorites. Not Unger’s, though. He’d just finished telling Silva how much he disliked all things French.
Unger was the FBI’s LEGAT, the legal attaché, at the American Embassy in Brasilia. His job, among other things, was to liaise with the Brazilian federal police. He’d been in the country for two years, but his Portuguese was still halt-ing, which put him at a definite disadvantage since most of the people he was supposed to be liaising with weren’t fluent in anything but their native tongue. Unger’s predecessor, Norton Wallace, had mastered the language in a little over a year. Silva sometimes wondered if Unger’s superiors were aware of the lousy job he was doing.
Brasilia is a city of diplomats, so to hear English being spoken isn’t unusual. But loud, American-accented English is another matter. The more sophisticated Americans are all too aware of how unpopular they’d become since the war with Iraq. Most of them took care to speak softly when in public.
Not Grant Unger.
“Jesus,” the FBI agent said, picking at his
truite almondine,
“they call that a trout? That’s not a trout. It’s a minnow. I’ll bet the damned thing doesn’t weigh more than four ounces.”
Silva didn’t bother to make the conversion to grams.
“And the taste?” he asked.
“It tastes okay,” Unger admitted grudgingly, “but they’ve got a lot of nerve charging thirty reais for it.”
Silva had issued the invitation and was paying. He thought the trout was delicious and well worth the price, but in the interest of harmony, he chose not to pick up the gauntlet.
“So what do you want?” Unger said, breaking off a piece of bread and slathering it with butter.
On every previous occasion, it was Unger who’d wanted something and Unger who’d issued the luncheon invitation. Whatever else he was, the FBI agent wasn’t stupid. When Silva called
him,
he’d immediately recognized that the shoe was on the other foot.
“Some information about an illegal immigrant,” Silva said.
“To my country?”
“Yes.”
“A Brazilian?”
“Yes.”
“What makes you think we’ve got a record of him?”
“I don’t think you do, and I don’t think you don’t. I’m sim-ply inquiring. If you do, it could have been as long ago as ten weeks.”
“Christ, Silva, why don’t you ask me something easy? Do you have any idea how many Brazilian illegals there are in the United States?”
“I—”
“Probably a million and a half and counting, that’s how many. Pisses me off. Okay, I admit, I wouldn’t want to stay in this dump myself if I was in their position, but why the fuck don’t they try to sneak into Canada, or England, or some other civilized place? We’ve got too many of your people as it is.”
“I understand your concerns,” Silva said, straining to keep his temper.
Unger chose to take
understand
to mean
agree with.
“Sure you do. Anybody who’s got their head screwed on does. It’s costing us a fortune. We’ve spent a bundle on fences, and electronic surveillance, and all that kind of shit. We’ve had to call in the National Guard to help patrol the Mexican border. So what are your Brazilians doing? They’re using the sea route, that’s what, going to Florida by boat. Some of them die of thirst. Some drown. Fortunately, the Gulf Stream runs a few miles offshore. If it didn’t, their bodies would be washing up on Florida’s beaches, scaring the shit out of legitimate tourists.”
The American took a gulp of his wine. The first bottle was almost empty. From past experience, Silva knew he’d finish another before the lunch was over.
After a few seconds of silence, Silva said, “The illegal immigrant I’m interested in is the son of a woman who’s worked in our home for years.”
He knew Unger didn’t gave a damn about the man or his mother, but he did think a small diversion would help the FBI agent to recover from his alcohol-induced flash of anger about illegal immigration.
Unger took the bait. “Worked in your home?” he said. “As what?”
“A faixineira.”
“What’s a faixineira?”
“She helps my wife clean. Not full time. Several days a week.”
Unger poured himself more wine.
“Why the hell would you want to go out of your way to help a cleaning woman? They’re supposed to serve
you,
not the other way around, right?”
Unger had a driver, a cook and a full-time maid, but like many foreigners he’d never learned how to deal with them. More than once, he’d complained to Silva about the con-stant turnover of his domestic staff. You only had to spend five minutes with the man to understand the reason.
Silva ignored the FBI agent’s question. “According to his mother,” he said, “the fellow booked a trip to Mexico. He planned to cross the border from there.”
Unger drained the bottle and held it up to show the wait-er. The waiter nodded and headed toward the bar.
“From Mexico, huh? Just like a million other wetbacks. We gotta do something about that. Fucking liberals in Congress are still talking about offering amnesty to those people. They’re criminals, for Christ’s sake! Can you beat it? Criminals who hold parades and march around the country demanding their rights? Rights? Crap! They don’t have any rights. They all broke the law to get there. Don’t get me started on this. I could go on and on.”
“I promise,” Silva said, “that I won’t get you started. That would be a waste of a perfectly beautiful afternoon.”
“You’re damned right it would.”
“Returning to the boy, his mother hasn’t heard from him in more than two months. She’s very concerned.”
“Two months? She
should
be concerned. The kid’s body is probably lying under some cactus, shriveled like a prune.”
Silva inhaled patiently. “She received a postcard,” he said.
He opened the briefcase that he’d put on the vacant chair to his left, took out the postcard Maria de Lourdes had given him and handed it to Unger.
Unger gave the card a cursory glance. “You know I can’t read Portuguese,” he said.
“The boy wrote that he was fine and that he’d call his mother soon. But that’s not why I showed you the card.”
“Okay, I’ll play. Why
did
you show me the card?”
“The kid told his mother he was going to Boston.”
“So how come he sends her a card from Miami?”
“I, too, found that strange,” Silva said. “I suppose he might have wound up in Miami, on his way to Boston, although I can’t imagine why. Nevertheless, he might be in the custody of your immigration people.”
“If he is, and if he’s in Miami,” Unger said, “he’d most likely be at a place called the Krome Detention Center.” He rubbed the nonexistent stubble on his jaw. Like all of the other FBI agents Silva had known, he was clean shaven. “Did the kid ever call?”
“No. But there might be an explanation for that. His mother lost her prepaid cell phone. When she replaced it, she got a new number.”
“So why didn’t he send her something else by snail mail? He coulda done that even if he was in custody. How much cash was he carrying?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
“You can’t trust those fucking Mexicans. They find out that one of their clients is carrying a lot of cash, they’re as likely to kill him and steal it as they are to bring him across the border. Maybe he never made it into the States. Any chance the postcard is bogus?”
Silva shrugged. “I can’t discount the possibility, but his mother said she recognized his handwriting and his signature.”
“They could have made him write it and then killed him. Then they send the postcard in an envelope to some relative of theirs in Miami, and he puts a stamp on it and mails it. That introduces a red herring, while the trail goes cold. Meanwhile, the kid is under the ground somewhere in Mexico.”
“Certainly a possibility.”
“More than a possibility. Look at it this way: if he croaked on our side of the border, and it was natural causes, and nobody tried to hide his body, the odds are we’d know about it by now. We regularly scour every inch of that desert. Not that we’d necessarily have the kid identified by name. We might have him listed as a John Doe.”
“He would have been carrying a passport.”
“Yeah, and the coyotes—the real coyotes I mean, not those fucking Mexican smugglers—could have torn his body apart and scattered his stuff, including his ID.”
“The boy is an only child,” Silva said. “His mother is fran-tic. I’d appreciate your help.”
Unger took a bite of his fish and stuffed a piece of bread into his mouth. When he started to chew, some butter drib-bled down his chin. He wiped it off with his napkin.
“You got a picture?” he said, through a mouthful of food.
“I do.”
Silva took out an enlarged copy of the photo Maria de Lourdes had given him.
Unger looked at it.
“Fucking kid needs a decent barber,” he said. “Look at that haircut.”
The waiter was back with another bottle of wine. While he made a show of opening it, Unger finished the contents of his glass. The waiter offered him the cork to smell, but he didn’t take it.
“Just pour it in there,” he said, pointing to the glass he’d just emptied, “and then buzz off. I’ll let you know if there’s something wrong with it.”
The waiter, who spoke only limited English, looked to Silva for an explanation.
“Thank you,” Silva said, in Portuguese. “Just fill the same glass. No more for me.”
The waiter smiled, did as he was bidden, and tried to pick up Unger’s plate, which still contained a fragment of fish.
“Put that down,” Unger snapped. “I’m not finished.”
That much English the waiter understood. His face turned red. He put down the plate, mumbled excuses, and fled.
“Asshole,” Unger mumbled. He took a pen out of the pocket of his jacket. “Name?”
“Norberto Krups.” Silva spelled it for him. Unger wrote it on the back of the photograph.
“Age?”
“Nineteen.”
Unger noted that, too.
“He could be calling himself something else,” he said.
“He could,” Silva admitted.
“Makes no fucking difference to us. We print them, so we don’t give a shit what they call themselves. They show up again, we can ID them within fifteen minutes.”
Silva produced a white sheet of paper with a single thumbprint.
“From his national identity card,” he said.
“Something we’ve been trying to adopt for years,” Unger said, “national identity cards. You know what passes for iden-tification in most states?” He snorted and answered his own question: “Driver’s licenses.”
“I’ve heard they’re easy to get,” Silva said.
“You heard right.”
Unger put his pen away, folded the fingerprint over the photo, slipped both into another pocket of his jacket, and picked up his fork.
“I gotta admit,” he said, “that our relationship up to now, yours and mine, I mean, has been pretty much a one-way street. This is the first time you ever asked me for anything, and I figure I owe you. So I’m going to get on to this right away, even if it is for a fucking cleaning woman.” He looked at his watch. “It’s three hours earlier in Washington. I should have an answer for you by tomorrow.”
“Thanks,” Silva said.
“Thanks, nothing,” Unger said, grinning, “just take off your panties.”
Silva vaguely remembered the joke, something about an elephant doing a favor for a mouse and wanting sex in return. It seemed appropriate. America, the elephant, Brazil, the mouse. He forced a smile.
Unger shoveled up the last bit of fish and put it into his mouth. “How are the desserts in this place?” he asked, still chewing.