Buried Strangers (18 page)
MANOLO NABUCO DROPPED THE nose of his ancient Cessna 310B and leveled off at nine thousand feet. It was a moonless night, with an unlimited ceiling and thousands of stars above. Below, on the black mass of the firmament, there wasn’t a single light. The pitch-blackness down there wouldn’t last much longer. Once they’d cleared the reserva-tion, there’d be the occasional glimmer of light from an iso-lated farm. And then the lights would multiply, and the illu-mination build, until they finally reached a crescendo. By then, they’d be on their final approach to Congonhas airport in São Paulo.
Manolo was anxious to roll into the hangar and cut the engines. He needed a snort. Not because of his nerves. His nerves were fine. Ask anybody. They’d tell you. Manolo Nabuco was a stand-up guy with nerves of steel. He wasn’t like most of the other coke smugglers, the ones that only found their courage after they’d snorted a line or two.
Yeah, okay, he snorted. Maybe he snorted a lot. But who didn’t these days? One thing about him, though: he never snorted when he was working, never got behind the controls when he was high on cocaine. Sometimes he did it when he was a little drunk, but high on the white stuff? Never.
Manolo Nabuco wasn’t addicted. Not him. Ask anybody. They’d tell you. They’d tell you Manolo Nabuco just used it because he wanted to, not because he had to. There’d been times when he was alone, high above the pitch-blackness of the Amazon rain forest, heading south with a full cargo of snow on board. It would have been easy to put the Cessna on autopilot, climb back there, cut into one of the bundles, and help himself to a healthy snort. He’d been tempted, but he’d never done it. Not once.
Hell, who wouldn’t have been tempted? Since the fucking air force got permission to shoot down unidentified aircraft, you never knew what might be coming at you. The radar coverage had gotten better, too, so no matter how low you were, there was always a chance you could show up on some-body’s screen. It was scary. But despite all that, he’d always stayed in his seat, never once taken out his knife. Not once.
Sometimes he wondered, though, how much it could hurt if he—
“How much longer?” the little wimp in the backseat said, interrupting the pilot’s musings.
Annoying little bastard!
Manolo thought.
For some reason, he was on a short fuse. Funny, he’d always been kind of laid-back and good-tempered, but recently he’d been flying off the handle for no reason. What he wanted to do at the moment was to turn around and bust the little wimp in the mouth. But he didn’t. He just gritted his teeth and suppressed a sigh.
The wimp must have thought he hadn’t heard him, because he went and asked the same question again, using exactly the same words and in the same tone of voice. Merda! They hadn’t been in the air for more than fifteen minutes, and the little prick was already asking when they were going to land.
“You mean, like, are we there yet?” Manolo said, raising the pitch of his voice on the last four words, doing what he thought was a pretty good imitation of a whiny kid.
Roberto Ribeiro, sitting next to Manolo in the copilot’s seat, must have thought the imitation was pretty good as well. The big carioca’s lips curled back in a smile.
Manolo turned his head and glanced into the rear of the aircraft. The wimp had been staring at the back of his head, but as soon as they locked eyes, he turned his gaze away, crossed his arms, and leaned his forehead against the window.
Manolo set the automatic pilot, let his eyes sweep over the instrument panel, and addressed Roberto. “Where did you get
him
from?” he asked, cocking a thumb over his shoulder.
“Friend of the boss,” Roberto said.
“I’m not your boss’s friend,” the wimp said,
“I’m not any-body’s friend. I don’t want to be. I don’t even want to be here.
Who the fuck was talking to you?” Roberto said.
“I’m only doing it for my son,” the wimp persisted, “to save his life.”
Manolo adjusted one of the trim tabs and studied the effect. He figured that by bringing up the subject of his sick kid, the nervous little asshole was going for sympathy.
But Manolo Nabuco didn’t do sympathy, and he didn’t give a shit about the wimp’s kid, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to give the wimp the satisfaction of asking him any questions.
But he did turn around.
The wimp’s lower lip was trembling and he looked like he was going to burst into tears again. He’d actually been doing just that, bawling like a baby, when he and Roberto had bro-ken out of the jungle, the carioca running ahead and carry-ing a bundle under each arm. When they mounted the wing to climb inside, Manolo had seen big, wet tears rolling down the wimp’s face.
Roberto had handed in the bundles, which turned out to be babies, one after the other. The little bastards were also crying, squalling and red-faced, making a hell of a lot more noise than the wimp.
“Didn’t you bring anything to shut ’em up?” he’d asked Roberto.
He’d been thinking of something in the nature of a gag, or maybe an injection. Roberto worked with doctors. They could have given him something to knock the little bastards out.
“I got something,” Roberto said, and surprised Manolo by taking a couple of pacifiers out of the pocket of his bush shirt. He stuffed one into a baby’s mouth, and the kid started suck-ing on it and immediately shut up. The other baby refused the rubber nipple, kept spitting it out, kept on howling.
“There’s a roll of electrical tape in that locker,” Manolo said, offering his knife. “Hack off a piece and tape his fucking little mouth shut.”
Roberto shook his head. “Can’t,” he said.
He’d gone on to explain that taping their mouths shut could suffocate them and that he had strict instructions to deliver them alive. Now, almost twenty minutes later, the first kid had spit out his pacifier, and both of them were squalling again.
They were lying right next to each other, and next to the wimp, but he didn’t reach out to try to shut them up, not once. It was like they were contaminated or something, like he was afraid of touching them. The constant bawling was starting to give Manolo a headache.
Other than that, it had been a pretty good night, prof-itable as hell, and with almost no risk. The Brazilian Air Force didn’t give a shit about who flew in and out of the Xingu. They were only concerned about flights coming in from places like Colombia and Bolivia.
“How’d you manage to snatch them?” Nabuco asked Roberto. Not because he was interested, or because it was any of his business, but just to pass the time.
“You don’t want to know,” Roberto said.
“He killed their mothers,” the wimp said, “He cut their throats and threw them in the river. He didn’t have to do that. He didn’t have to kill them. He told me he was going to take the mothers along.”
“Yeah, you asshole,” Roberto said, “and you wanted to believe it, didn’t you? You trying to tell me you’re so stupid you didn’t notice there’s no goddamned room in this thing, no room for anybody besides us and those two brats?”
“I didn’t. I didn’t notice. I thought you were going to put them into the luggage compartment or something. And I’m not the one who’s stupid. You’re stupid.”
“Me stupid? I should wring your fucking little neck. I would, too, if the boss hadn’t told me to take care of you.”
“You want to know why you’re stupid? You didn’t ask me before you did it! You didn’t ask me about what to do with the bodies. You had me next to you all the time and you never asked.”
“Why the fuck should I ask you anything?”
“Here’s why: Indians never pollute a river. Never. They don’t urinate in them, they don’t defecate in them, and no Indian would ever use a river to dispose of a body. Once they find those women, and they will, they’re going to know they weren’t murdered by another tribe. They’re going to know it was white men who did it. They’ll complain for sure.”
“Shut up,” Roberto said, and made a gesture with his fist.
The wimp looked at the fist, almost half the size of his head, and did what Roberto had told him to do. He shut up.
The murders were news to Manolo, but the news didn’t bother him. He’d done his share of killing. He waited until the wimp had lapsed into silence and nudged Roberto. “What’s your boss gonna do with the little buggers?”
Roberto shook his head. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Try me.”
“He’s gonna cut out their hearts.”
Manolo’s only visible reaction was to raise his eyebrows slightly. The answer was a surprise, but he figured that play-ing it cool was what a guy like Roberto would expect from a guy like him.
“You’re shitting me,” he said.
Roberto waved a finger back and forth. “I shit you not. That’s the boss’s business, taking out hearts and giving them to people who can afford to pay for them.”
“I’m not paying him,” the little fairy in the backseat said.
Both of them ignored him.
“So he does, what the fuck do you call it?” Manolo said.
“Heart transplants.”
“Yeah, that’s it. Heart transplants. What do you figure he gets for an operation like that?”
“Six hundred thousand,” Roberto said.
“Reais?”
“Dollars.”
Manolo whistled. “Fuck me,” he said. “I shoulda asked for more money.”
“You shoulda,” Roberto agreed. Then he leaned in closer so that the wimp couldn’t hear him above the sound of the engines. “Next time,” he said, “you hold the old bastard up for another twenty grand. Half of it’s mine, okay?”
“A quarter,” the pilot said.
Roberto pursed his lips and thought about that for a moment. Then he extended a hand, and the pilot shook it. “Five grand,” Manolo said, quantifying the deal, making sure there wouldn’t be a misunderstanding later. “But what makes you think he’ll agree?”
“You’re on board now. You’re part of the club. You know how he earns his money. Not many people do, and he wants to keep it that way. He’ll take it.”
“So you figure there’ll be more jobs? Like this one?”
“I can virtually guarantee it.”
“What are you guys talking about?” the wimp asked.
Manolo turned around and stared at him again. “Why don’t you just shut up?” he said.
Roberto didn’t even bother to turn his head. “Yeah,” he said. “Shut the fuck up.”
The wimp started crying again. And he kept on crying, all the way back to São Paulo.
“ANY NEWS?” THE DIRECTOR said, sticking his head into the doorway of Silva’s office.
Silva could have told him about Tanaka, about the impending return of the Portellas, about Arnaldo’s disap-pearance, about the minister of tourism’s misplaced concerns about his daughter, but he knew there was only one kind of news that would truly interest Nelson Sampaio.
“You’re talking about the Romeo Pluma investigation?”
“Of course I’m talking about the Romeo Pluma investi-gation.”
Silva shook his head. “Nothing yet,” he said.
Sampaio raised a suspicious eyebrow. “You
are
giving this case the importance it deserves?”
“Absolutely.”
Silva didn’t consider that a falsehood. In his opinion, he was giving the press secretary’s background check
exactly
the importance it deserved.
“There’s got to be something,” Sampaio said, more to himself than to Silva. “Got to be. Let’s discuss this further when I get back from my luncheon appointment. Perhaps I can suggest some new directions for the inquiry.”
Sampaio’s head disappeared. Silva waited until he heard the ping of the elevator, went to the window and peered through the blinds.
A minute or two later, the director came out of the build-ing and entered a black BMW smack in the middle of the no-parking zone. The uniformed chauffeur closed the door, got behind the wheel, and drove off.
Silva left the window, took an overnight bag out of his closet, and headed for the airport.
THE PORTELLAS hailed from the city of Caruaru in the northeastern state of Pernambuco. By road, the distance from there to São Paulo is a little over two and a half thou-sand kilometers, a bus trip that’s supposed to take forty-two and a half hours, but seldom does.
The roads in Pernambuco, and in the next three states to the south, Alagoas, Sergipe, and Bahia, are in a deplorable state of repair. The equipment used for public transport is sorely tried. Breakdowns are constant. Accidents are fre-quent. Even in the dry season, the traffic often slows to a crawl. Scheduled arrival times are more in the nature of an ideal than a reality.
Babyface Gonçalves knew all of this. Instead of subjecting himself to the discomforts of the bus terminal, with its nox-ious fumes and wall-to-wall people, he elected to await the Portellas arrival in a little bar across the street from their one-room shack.
There were hours to go before dark, and Babyface wasn’t particularly concerned about being set upon in daytime, but he kept his Glock loose in its holster and had chosen a chair with his back to the wall.
“You want another coffee?” Bento asked.
Bento owned the place. The two of them were on first-name terms by now, Bento and Heraldo, Gonçalves being damned if he’d tell Bento that most people addressed him by the hated sobriquet of Babyface.
It was almost three hours after the scheduled arrival time of the Portellas’ bus. The “lunchtime” crowd had cleared out, and the “dinner” crowd hadn’t yet arrived. Lunch and dinner were relative terms at Bento’s place, because most of the patrons never ate anything more than a
coxinha
or an
empada,
and most of them spent mealtimes drinking straight cachaça. Nonalcoholic beverages weren’t in high demand, which made it all the more surprising that Bento’s coffee was as good as it was. Babyface considered the offer before shaking his head.
“That’s enough for one day,” he said.
“You look young to be a cop,” Bento said. “Anybody ever tell you that?”
Babyface sighed. “All the time,” he said.
“I’m not surprised. When you walked in here, I would have taken you for . . . hey, look, that’s them.”
Bento pointed to a couple at the Portellas’ front door. The man was a bit shorter than the woman, thin and wiry, wear-ing jeans and a sweat-stained yellow T-shirt with a hammer and sickle on the front. On his head, he had a black beret. The woman was as dark skinned as he was, with her hair gathered up into a serious bun. She was also wearing jeans and a T-shirt, but her T-shirt was black, except for some rings of dried perspiration around the armpits, rings that showed white against the fabric.
While she struggled with the padlock, the man was stand-ing there holding the bags. He had to. The street was unpaved and covered with a thick layer of mud. He looked around, caught sight of Bento, and nodded his head.
Bento nodded back. The nods were perfunctory. Babyface didn’t think there was any love lost between the guy wearing the beret and the owner of the bar.
“The Portellas?” he asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“What’s with the hammer and sickle?”
Bento grinned. “You’ll find out soon enough,” he said.
The couple disappeared inside. Babyface paid his bill, squished his way down the narrow street, and knocked on the plywood door. Ernesto opened it. The black beret was still on his head, and now that Babyface was standing less than a meter away, he could see that the beret bore a little pin in the shape of a red star.
Ernesto took one look at Babyface’s jacket and tie and turned belligerent.
“What?” he said.
Babyface held up his ID. “Federal Police.”
“Oh, the federal police is it? Our very own Brazilian gestapo. Our very own Praetorian guard.”
Babyface blinked. “Praetorian guard?”
Ernesto Portella was probably the only guy in the whole favela who’d ever even heard of the Praetorian guard.
“Don’t give me that innocent look. You guys fool most people, but you don’t fool me. I know what you are. You talk up a storm about maintaining law and order, existing to serve and protect the people, but it’s all a big lie. The reality is you’re the ones who shore up the bloodsuckers.”
“Bloodsuckers? What bloodsuckers?”
“You know damned well who the bloodsuckers are. They’re the ones who prey on the masses. If it wasn’t for you and your cronies, capitalism would be a thing of the past.”
Babyface recognized that the guy had just come off a long bus ride, and he was inclined to cut him some slack, but not too much. And he sure as hell wasn’t about to be drawn into a political discussion. He opened his mouth to reply, but didn’t get a chance. The man’s wife appeared in the doorway and brushed her husband out of the way.
“Is this about the Lisboas?” she said. “The missing persons report we filed?”
“As a matter of fact, it is.”
“Why didn’t you say so? Come in.”
“Actually,” Babyface said, “I’d like you to come out. I’d like you to accompany me to our field office. I’ve got a car. I’ll bring you home afterward. It shouldn’t take more than an hour or so.”
“Are you out of your mind?” Ernesto said. “We just got home from a trip to Pernambuco. I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to sleep.”
“Shut up, Ernesto,” Clarice said. And then, to Babyface, “
Federal
police, you said? Why are you people getting involved?”
“It might turn out to be a kidnapping,” Babyface said. “It’s part of our mandate to investigate kidnappings.”
“Look, Agente . . .”
“Gonçalves.”
“Agente Gonçalves, I’d like to help, I would. That’s why I went to the police in the first place, but I’ve told them everything I know. Not once, but twice. Read the report, talk to Delegado Tanaka, he’ll—”
“Delegado Tanaka’s dead.”
“What?”
“Delegado Tanaka is dead. Someone blew him up with a bomb. We think it might be related to what you told him.
But, what . . . how?”
“Senhora Portella, I don’t want to stand here in your doorway, trying to explain the whole thing. I want you to come with me and meet a gentleman who’s flying in from Brasilia specifically to interview you and your husband.”
“From Brasilia?”
Babyface nodded.
“And this gentleman thinks it’s that important? To speak to us, I mean?”
“He does,” Babyface said. “We all do.”
Clarice turned and addressed her husband.
“Ernesto,” she said, “splash some cold water on your face and change that damned shirt.”
SILVA AND Hector were waiting for them in one of the con-ference rooms.
Ernesto had changed to a T-shirt that had Alberto Korda’s famous portrait of Che Guevara on the front, the one where Che is wearing a beret. The beret was black, and it looked just like the one Ernesto had on his head, red star and all.
Silva took one look at Ernesto’s shirt, and his eyes nar-rowed. It wasn’t because of Che’s politics. Silva felt politics were a man’s own business, even if the man in question was a goddamned Communist. No, politics weren’t the issue. Nationality was.
In 1978, an Argentinian tie with Brazil, and Argentinian victories over Poland and Peru, had knocked Brazil out of contention for the World Cup. Then, in 1990, Argentina had done it again, playing a defensive game and beating Brazil 1–0 in some of the least spectacular soccer ever.
Soccer in Brazil is a serious business, and World Cups are the most serious soccer of all. Silva knew his smoldering resentment of Argentinians and things Argentinian was big-oted, but he couldn’t help himself. His dislike was visceral.
“Senhora,” he said, taking Clarice’s hand and giving her a little bow. To Ernesto, he said, “You
are
aware, are you not, that that man”—he pointed to the portrait on the front of the shirt—“was an Argentinian?”
Ernesto, who disliked Argentinians quite as much as Silva did, and for much the same reasons, raised a belligerent jaw. “He was not,” he said.
“He was a Cuban and a hero of the revolution.”
“Argentinian,” Hector said.
“Argentinian,” Babyface said.
“Argentinian,” his wife said, “who went to Cuba to help Castro. Now shut up, Ernesto.”
Ernesto mumbled something about lies spread by capital-ist lackeys and lapsed into a sullen silence. It was with no input from him that Clarice recounted, at Silva’s request and for the third time in succession, the circumstances of the Lisboa family’s departure. Then she went on to tell them about her experience in the secondhand furniture shop. She didn’t go into detail, just glossed over everything to finish the story as soon as possible.
“And you told all of this to both Sergeant Lucas and Delegado Tanaka, is that right?” Silva said.
Clarice nodded.
“And I showed him the envelope, the one with the money.
By him, you mean Delegado Tanaka?”
“Yes, Delegado Tanaka.”
“And what did he do then?”
“He told us to bring him to the shop. He wanted to talk to the owner and see the furniture.”
“No goddamned consideration for the working man,” Ernesto said, speaking for the first time in about ten minutes, “none at all. It was a workday, we earn by the hour and we—
Shut up, Ernesto,” Clarice said.
If she hadn’t said it, Silva would have.
“So the three of you went to the shop?” he said.
“Yes, and Augusta’s armario was still there, and so were the table and chairs. The bedside tables, the ones with the Formica tops, had already been sold.”
“Do you recall the address of the shop?”
“I don’t think I ever knew it. But I can show you where it is.”
“For the second damned time,” Ernesto said.
Everyone ignored him.
“And the name of the owner?” Silva asked. “Do you remember that?”
She thought about that for a moment before shaking her head.
“Sorry,” she said.
“Alright, what did Delegado Tanaka do next?”
“He sent us away. It was almost as if . . . as if . . .”
“As if what, Senhora Portella?”
“Well,” she said, “I know this is going to sound silly, but . . . as if he were trying to get rid of us.”
“And I had to take three buses to get to work instead of two, and when I got there the foreman told me it was too damned late, and that I could turn around and go home,” Ernesto said.
This time, Clarice paid some attention to her husband.
“Delegado Tanaka knew we were going to be late, but he didn’t offer to pay for the bus, or anything. Not like this young man here”—she pointed to Babyface—“who says he’s going to take us home after we’re done.”
“And he will,” Silva said. “Now, answer me this, and it’s very important. Do you recall anything about Delegado Tanaka’s conversation with the shop’s owner?”
“Everything,” she said. “We were right there. Until he sent us away, that is.”
“Tell me.”
“Delegado Tanaka asked the owner about the furniture, how he got it, and the owner said he bought it, and Delegado Tanaka asked him if he could prove it, and the owner said he could, that he paid by check and he got the canceled check back, and he even had a copy of a paper he’d given to the carioca.”
“Carioca? What carioca?”
“Didn’t I mention that? The man was a carioca.”
“How did you know?”
“If it talks like a carioca,” Ernesto said, “and if it has a big, fucking medallion from the Flamengo Futebol Club hanging from its neck on a gold chain, it
is
a carioca
.”
Silva felt his heart pounding in his chest. The hairs on the back of his neck were starting to stand up.
“You saw this man? You saw the man who sold the furni-ture?”
“Don’t you get it?” Ernesto said. “He was the same guy who picked up the Lisboas, the same guy who offered Edmar the job. Jesus. You guys are slow on the uptake.”
“It must have been the same man,” Clarice said. “The shop owner said he had a mustache and black, oily hair, just like the man who came to fetch Edmar, Augusta, and their kids. Not only that, he gave the shop owner the same name he’d given us.”
“The same name?” Silva said.
And I’ll bet anything,
he thought,
that it’s the same name that
Arnaldo gave me. Christ Jesus!
“When we first spoke to Delegado Tanaka,” Clarice went on, “he asked me what the man’s name was, and I couldn’t remember. Neither could Ernesto. But then the shop owner went and fetched the check, and he read it off. And I’ve been able to remember it ever since.”
“Roberto Ribeiro,” Silva said.
Hector and Babyface looked at Silva in surprise, but they knew better than to interrupt.
“Yes,” Clarice said brightly. “That’s the man. Roberto Ribeiro.”