Buried Strangers (16 page)

Chapter Thirty-four

“REMEMBER THAT COUPLE, THE Portellas?” Hector asked.

The telephone connection was, for once, a good one. Silva could even hear the rumble of traffic on the street in front of Hector’s office.

“The ones who turned in that complaint about a missing family,” he said. “You bet I do.”

“We got a call from a lady by the name of Alcione Camargo. Clarice Portella cleans for her on Tuesdays.”

“And?”

“And Clarice is on her way back from Pernambuco.”

“Wasn’t she supposed to stay two weeks?”

“She was. But no more. According to what she told Dona Alcione by telephone, there’s a family feud going on up there. It seems that Ernesto, that’s Clarice’s husband, fancies himself a member of the oppressed masses. His brother-in-law, the guy they were staying with, owns a shop and has a couple of employees. The two of them, Ernesto and the brother-in-law, downed a bottle of cachaça the night before last. The brother-in-law was opening another one when Ernesto accused him of being one of the oppressors. The brother-in-law told Ernesto that if he felt that way he could buy his own damned cachaça. By that time it was well past midnight and all the shops and bars in town were closed, so Ernesto made a grab for the bottle. It isn’t clear who hit whom first, but Clarice and her sister had to break it up. And now the Portellas can’t stay there anymore, and none of their other relatives have any room for them, and they can’t afford a hotel, so they’re coming back.”

“And Dona Alcione told you all this?”

“No. She told Babyface.”

“Babyface, huh? And he managed to extract all this infor-mation in a simple telephone call?”

“He did. His charm continues to amaze.”

“Why would Clarice go into the ugly details with some-one she works for?”

“Babyface says Dona Alcione and Clarice have one of those relationships where they bitch to each other about their husbands.”

“Dona Alcione told him that, too?”

“Uh-huh. Babyface ought to be wearing a warning label. He’s a danger to women, that’s what he is. They pour their hearts out to him. If he wasn’t working for us, we’d have to consider arresting him.”

“You sound jealous.”

“I am.”

“When are the Portellas due back?”

“The day after tomorrow, sometime in the afternoon. Babyface will be waiting. He’ll bring them here.”

“Don’t start questioning them without me. I’ll be there by four.”

“Understood. Heard anything from Arnaldo?”

“Not a word.”

“Merda
.
Did he bring a gun?”

“No. Only a telephone. I had the service provider check. It’s switched off. I’m beginning to get a bad feeling. He’s been out of touch too long.”

“Anything I can do?”

“Check out that travel agency on the Rua Sete de Abril. See what other information you can dig up. Make sure they’re doing business as usual.”

“Will do. How are things in Brasilia? Have you dug up any dirt on that fellow Pluma?”

“Not a thing.”

“You’re not even trying, are you?”

“And thereby ignore a direct order from my superior? Perish the thought.”

“Isn’t that superior’s nose going to go out of joint if you get on an airplane and come here?”

“It most definitely is.”

“He won’t bankroll the trip. He won’t sign the forms.”

“That’s what credit cards are for. I’ll find some way to recover the money later.”

“And you can’t be here before four because you’ll be leav-ing at lunchtime when he’ll be ingratiating himself with some politician in an expensive restaurant.”

“Exactly right, my boy. Your powers of deduction are excellent. They must be genetic.”

THREE HOURS later, Hector placed another call to his uncle.

“Turns out that travel agency was doing most of its book-ings with an airline called Mexicana.”

“So?”

“So we’re doing a computer run, crossing the names on Mexicana’s reservations database with recent missing per-sons’ reports from Brasilia, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo. Guess what?”

“A correlation?”

“Five hits so far, all within the last six months. Seems a bit excessive, don’t you think? Especially when you consider that not one of those five people actually made the flight.”

“It sure as hell does. Pick up that Argentinian.”

“I’ll have to find him first. The place has a big sign on the door: closed for vacation. We have no name for the guy other than Juan, which at least one out of every five
Argentinos
calls himself.”

“I would have said one out of four.”

“The office space is rented in the name of Gabriel Larenas, but it turns out Larenas died in 2005. The owner of the building didn’t give a damn whose name was on the lease as long as he kept getting his check every month. The tele-phones and other utilities are in Larenas’s name as well. Babyface had a look through the glass and he says the place has an empty feel to it. His guess is that the bird has flown. We’re getting a search warrant. I’ll keep you posted.”

Chapter Thirty-five

BEYOND THE OPEN WINDOW of Dr. Horst Bittler’s office, a bright sun shone out of a cloudless sky. Birds twittered. A cicada sang in the rosebushes.

In sharp contrast to the cheerful day, Clovis Oliveira sat like a man condemned.

Bittler, his eyes enlarged by gold-rimmed spectacles, stud-ied his visitor as if he were a scientific specimen. Clovis was dressed in a cheap suit that hung on his frame like it was two sizes too big for him. His hair was disheveled. There were dark pouches under his bloodshot eyes. He was still young, probably in his early thirties, but his shoulders were stooped like those of an old man.

Bittler filled the younger man’s demitasse, replaced the pot on its silver tray, and continued with the small talk that, like the coffee, opens every business meeting in Brazil.

“The FUNAI, eh?” he said, tapping a manicured finger on the open file that lay on the desk before him.

The FUNAI, Fundação Nacional do Índio, was Brazil’s Federal Bureau of Indian Affairs. Clovis had listed them as his employer.

“The FUNAI, yes,” Clovis said.

“And what, may I ask, is the nature of your work?”

“I’m an anthropologist. I work in the Xingu.”

Clovis picked up his cup with a thumb and forefinger.

Bittler took a moment to absorb the stroke of good luck.

The Xingu was the name of a river, but also of Brazil’s largest Indian reservation. Founded in 1961, home to many different tribes, it occupied a tract of rain forest about the size of the American States of New Jersey and Delaware combined.

“You work with the Indians?” Bittler cloaked his eager-ness, made his question sound casual.

“That’s right,” Clovis said, taking another sip. The coffee was excellent, export quality, but the anthropologist showed no sign of appreciation. On the contrary, he was drinking it as if he wanted to get through the ritual as quickly as possible.

“You speak their languages?” Bittler persisted.

“Not all of their languages, no. No one does. There are tribes that speak languages that are unique, languages unlike any other. Some are spoken by a dozen people, or less. They’re no longer of any practical value, only worth learning if you have an academic interest.”

“Remarkable.”

“I even know of a language,” Clovis went on, warming to his subject in spite of himself, “spoken exclusively by a sin-gle old woman, the last of her tribe. She no longer has any-one to talk to in her native tongue. When she dies, the tribe will be extinct, and the language along with it.”

“Astonishing,” Bittler said. He removed a handkerchief from his breast pocket, took off his glasses, and set to polish-ing the lenses. The handkerchief was snowy white, whiter, even, than the suit he was wearing. “And have you worked in the area of establishing initial contact with these tribes?” he asked. “Contact with people who haven’t previously been exposed to our civilization?”

“I have, yes,” Clovis said, “but we don’t make it a policy. We bring them no benefits, no benefits at all, only sickness and death. Our value system is very different, and who’s to say which is better? They don’t use money or anything that takes the place of money. Personal possessions are of little value. Food is communal, everyone sharing rights to what everyone else hunts or gathers. They’re not resistant to our sicknesses. They know that now. They’ve seen contacted tribes decimated by diseases like simple colds. Now, they avoid us, run the other way when they see us coming.”

“How many of them are there, would you say?”

“Uncontacted people?”

“Yes.”

“No one knows,” Clovis said. “Some estimates run as high as forty thousand.”

Bittler smiled a genuine smile, rare for him. “As many as that?”

“I think it’s probably a gross overestimation,” Clovis said, “but, despite all of the pillaging and the burning, despite the landgrabs by predatory ranchers, and the lumber companies, and the prospectors, we’re still lucky enough to have more than four million square kilometers of rain forest. Much of it is still unexplored. It makes sense to assume that a good deal of it is populated.”

Bittler put his glasses back on. Clovis was talking about an area well over half the size of the continental United States.

“I’ve heard,” he said, “that the Indians in the Xingu are permitted to live the lives they’ve always led, warring among each other, stealing their wives from other tribes, that sort of thing.”

“That’s not strictly true,” Clovis said. “We do what we can to prevent bloodshed. It is true, however, that many of them resist any kind of integration into modern society.”

Bittler leaned forward in his chair. “No integration, eh? So would it be right to say they have no birth certificates, no death certificates, no national identity cards?”

Clovis nodded his head. “Exactly,” he said. “They have nothing like that. They’re not required to.”

His enthusiasm was fading as quickly as it had come. Impatience was beginning to show.

“But of course you didn’t come here to talk about Indians,” Bittler said smoothly. “We have something far more impor-tant to discuss.” He mopped his brow with the handkerchief he’d used to polish his glasses, folded it, and put it back into his pocket. “I’ve read Raul’s medical records,” he went on, pointing at the file in front of him, being careful to use the boy’s name. The parents liked it when he did that. It gave them the impression that he actually cared about their off-spring. “But I’d like you to tell me more about him. What kind of a baby is he?”

Clovis beamed and his words began to flow. The child had been born with a full head of hair. You could see he was intel-ligent just from the way he moved his little arms and legs. His wife assured him that Raul resembled both his father and himself, although he definitely had his mother’s . . .

Bittler kept his eyes fixed on Clovis and maintained a half smile. But he didn’t pay any more attention to what the anthropologist was saying than he did to the singing of the cicada in the garden. He had weightier issues to consider than a father’s twaddle about a dying baby. That, too, was a song he’d heard tens of times before.

But an anthropologist with access to the Indians of the Xingu? Now, that was entirely new, and it had set him to thinking.

“ . . . I’m not wealthy,” Clovis was saying as Bittler focused anew on the conversation. “I know operations of this kind are terribly expensive. I don’t even know how I’ll be able to pay you. Perhaps a little bit each month, with interest, of course. I’d be perfectly willing to sign any kind of a contract. I’d trust you to—”

“Don’t worry about the money,” Bittler said.

Clovis’s mouth opened in surprise. “I beg your pardon?” he said.

“The money. Don’t worry about it. It’s not our major concern.”

Bittler’s use of the word
our
was intentional. He wanted the anthropologist to believe that it was
their
problem, that they were going to have to work
together
to solve it.

“What is it then? Our major concern, I mean,” Clovis asked, grasping at the straw.

“Obtaining the organ,” Bittler said.

Clovis sank back in his chair. “Yes,” he said. “Dr. Levy explained the difficulty, but he also said you might . . .”

Bittler let the silence go on for a while before he said, “Might what?”

A sparkle appeared in Clovis’s left eye, built to a droplet, started to roll down his cheek. He reached for his handkerchief.

Bittler continued to stare at him, making silence his ally.

“My son can’t wait, Doctor Bittler,” Clovis finally said. “We could . . . lose him. He could die waiting for a new heart.”

“But surely, Dr. Oliveira, it
is
doctor isn’t it?”

Clovis nodded and swallowed.

“Surely, Dr. Oliveira, you know about the lists? Surely, you’re also aware that it’s illegal to remove an organ from a cadaver without the express consent of the deceased or the deceased’s immediate family?”

Clovis waved an impatient hand.

“I think it’s a stupid law. What harm can it do if someone’s already dead?”

Bittler nodded in agreement, but lifted his palms in a ges-ture of helplessness.

“A law, nonetheless.”

Clovis bit his lower lip and stared at the floor. Now there were tears running down both cheeks. He was a picture of misery.

Bittler, on the other hand, had seldom been happier. He was careful, however, to keep his features immobile.

“Perhaps . . .” he said.

Clovis looked up.

Bittler pursed his lips, tried to appear as if he were giving the problem serious thought. “ . . . there is something that might be done.” But then he shook his head, as if he were rejecting the idea. “No, no, I couldn’t do it. It would involve breaking the law.”

“But you just agreed with me,” Clovis said. “Some laws are stupid.”

“Stupid, yes. But the penalties for breaking them are severe.”

“Tell me what you were thinking. Maybe there’s some way—”

Bittler waved a dismissive hand. “I’ll have to give it more thought. Can you come back on Thursday at the same time?”

Of course Clovis could.

“Couldn’t you give me some inkling,” he said, “of what you’re considering?”

Bittler shook his head. “That would be . . . precipitate,” he said. “But keep your spirits up. By Thursday, I may have found a solution.”

Clovis’s eyes brightened. His shoulders straightened, as if some terrible burden had been removed.

“I don’t know how to thank you,” he said.

Of course you don’t,
Bittler thought,
but I do.