Buried Strangers (21 page)
“WE GOT A BREAK, ” Danusa Marcus said. “No line on anyone we can bust, not yet anyway, but there’s some indi-cation that your namorada’s hypothesis is correct.”
“I already told you,” Hector said. “She’s not my namor—
Whatever,” Rosa Amorim said. “Have you got a few minutes?”
Hector studied the two women who’d burst into his office without as much as a courteous rap on the door.
“For you two?” he said. “Always. Sit down.”
Rosa sank into a seat.
Danusa remained standing, leaned over, opened the
Estado de São Paulo
she was carrying, and spread the news-paper out on Hector’s desk. She tapped a manicured finger on the headline of an article: COUPLE FOUND DEAD IN APARTMENT.
“I saw this on the way to work this morning,” she said. “The murdered couple are the Oliveiras, Clovis and Ana Carmen. Their names rang a bell. They were on our list of people to interview, but we hadn’t gotten to them yet.”
Hector took a moment to scan the article.
“Suspicion of poison, huh?”
“What it doesn’t say,” Danusa continued, “is that they had a baby boy, and that the kid needed a heart transplant. I spoke to one of the homicide guys assigned to the case. He told me Senhora Oliveira’s mother had a key to their apart-ment. She was accustomed to talking to her daughter by tele-phone at least twice a day. Last night, after no contact since early morning, she went over there and let herself in. They were in the dining alcove, pitched over the table, dead. Her daughter was clutching her husband’s hand.”
“You go to see the mother?”
Danusa looked pained. “Had to, right? I didn’t enjoy it.”
“No, I’m sure you didn’t.”
“She lost her only daughter, and her only grandchild, and she’s a widow to boot. Her husband died not six months ago, killed in a holdup for twenty reals in cash and a thirty-real watch. Sometimes, I hate this town.”
“Her grandchild is dead, as well?”
“I was getting to that. Raul, his name was, born at Albert Einstein, up in Morumbi. Kid was less than two hours old when he was diagnosed with something called dilated car-diomyopathy, whatever the hell that is.”
“Fatal?”
“Without a heart transplant, yes.”
“And?”
“And Ana Carmen, that’s the baby’s mother, told
her
mother that they’d arranged for one, and that it was supposed to take place the day before yesterday. She also said there was something irregular about it, which precluded her from giv-ing any more details. Irregular, that’s the word she used.”
“The plot thickens.”
“Goddamned right it does. Now, get this: we can’t be ab-solutely sure the kid’s dead, but it seems like a safe assumption. We can’t find any trace of him. We’ve called every single hospital and clinic known to be able to perform heart trans-plants. Nobody admitted to performing one on a kid called Raul Oliveira.”
“Merda. How about the people at Einstein? What did they have to say?”
This time it was Rosa who spoke up.
“I talked to the cardio who did the diagnosis, a guy by the name of Jacob Levy. He says he put the baby’s name on the list to receive a heart, but he has no idea where the case went from there. I think he’s lying.”
“Why?”
“Nothing I can put my finger on. Just a feeling. Call it a mother’s intuition. My sons try it on all the time.”
“I’ve learned to trust your intuition. You think this Levy is involved in the murder of the parents or the disappearance of the kid?”
“I wouldn’t go that far. I talked to a number of other peo-ple at the hospital, did a little background check. Levy is competent and well liked. Compassionate is a word that came up often. I think he might have suggested a way for the Oliveiras to work around the waiting list and get a heart for their son. But there’s no way he’s going to admit that. If he did, he’d lose his license in a flash.”
“Yeah, he would. Sweat him anyway. In the meantime, keep digging.”
“We intend to,” Danusa said. “So, like I said in the begin-ning, it looks like your namorada was right. Oh, sorry, she’s not your namorada, is she?”
“No, she sure as hell isn’t. We’re friends, that’s all. Who the hell is this Sylvie woman?”
“Told you. She’s a friend of Gilda Caropreso’s . . . and something a little more than that when it comes to Babyface Gonçalves.”
“Well, she’s misinformed.”
“If you say so,” Danusa said.
Rosa didn’t say anything at all, but she looked at Hector as if he were one of her teenage sons, and she could see right through him.
PARAGUAY IS A COUNTRY about the size of California, ruled by dictators during most of its existence. Officially, the economy depends on agriculture and the exportation of iron ore and manganese. Unofficially, it depends on money laun-dering, smuggling, drug trafficking, and providing a safe haven for tax dodgers, criminals, and Islamic militants.
It was, therefore, an ideal choice of destination for Roberto Ribeiro.
His flight to Asunción, the TAM 8033, was scheduled to depart from Guarulhos at 10:30 AM. They arrived at the air-port at 8:30 and Roberto checked in.
“I’ll wait here until I see you pass the checkpoint,” his mother said.
“It’s only gonna make me nervous. Go home. I’ll call you when I get settled.”
“Don’t be stupid. When they find out who I am, they’ll tap my phone. Call your aunt Dolores. Here, I’ve made a note of her number.”
She passed him a piece of paper. Dolores, not truly his aunt, was a close friend of his mother’s. They’d turned tricks together all through their teenage years and right up until Dolores’s marriage to a naïve accountant she’d met at a Sunday-morning mass.
“What do I tell her?”
“Just give her a number and a time to call. I’ll get in touch.” Roberto pocketed the paper without looking at it. “Okay,” he said. “Go.”
She kissed him, held on for a while, and finally walked off, turning to wave several times before going out the door. He glanced at his watch. There was still time for a quick tele-phone call.
“WHERE THE hell are you?” Bittler asked.
He was angry. Had to be. It was the first time Roberto had ever heard him use profanity. “None of your goddamned business,” he said.
It felt good to talk to the old bastard like that. He’d been eating shit for far too long.
There was a shocked silence at the other end of the line. Then, “What’s happened?”
“The federal cops are what happened. They’re onto me.
How?”
“I got no idea. But you better get your place cleaned up before they show up on your doorstep.”
“What did you tell them, you fool?”
“Fool, my ass, you sack of shit! I didn’t tell ’em a thing. But that’s only because they didn’t catch me. If they do, I’ll sing like a canary.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I wanted to hear you squirm. You been treating me like a lowlife for years. Now the shoe’s on the other foot.”
Bittler started cursing. Roberto hung up on him. He hadn’t been totally frank with the old bastard. He’d had another rea-son for calling. If Bittler got a chance to do some housecleaning before the federal cops showed up, the less evidence there’d be.
And less evidence would be a good thing for Roberto Ribeiro.
THE PASSPORT Ribeiro was using was, as his mother had remarked, a fine piece of work. The gold lettering on the green, cloth cover was faded and, in part, worn away. It bore visas from the United States and France as well as stamps for multiple entries and departures, all of which were genuine. In fact, the whole passport was genuine, except for the altered photograph and the pages with the holder’s vital sta-tistics. The document had been stolen at that very airport two weeks earlier and was the former property of a salesman dealing in agricultural products.
Ribeiro’s new name was Eduardo Noronha, and his birth-place was listed as São Paulo. His mother had foreseen no problem with that and there wouldn’t have been one had he not come up against a zealous young border-control agent named Renato Wagner.
Ribeiro, who’d never been abroad in all of his life, didn’t know the drill. He handed over his new passport for perusal, but he didn’t hand over his ticket.
“I need the ticket, too,” Wagner said.
One of the tasks of the inspectors was to make sure that the visitor had paid his departure tax. The evidence of that was a stamp affixed to the ticket.
“Oh,
desculpe,
” Ribeiro said, and reached into his pocket.
The one word was enough. Desculpe, sorry, had been pro-nounced with a slurry, sibilant “s.” The only people who talked like that were cariocas.
Wagner double-checked the birthplace on the passport. São Paulo. He had it right the first time he’d looked. Something was fishy.
“You from Rio de Janeiro?” he asked.
“Born and bred,” Ribeiro said proudly.
Wagner nodded. The dumb bastard hadn’t even bothered to memorize his history. He glanced at the flyer that had been taped under the counter not two hours earlier. It was out of sight of the passengers, but in clear view of all of the agents.
“Uh-huh,” he said, and pushed a button.
ARNALDO EXPECTED THE DRUG to wear off, but some-how it didn’t. It was a mystery. They hadn’t fed him, so he couldn’t be taking it in that way. And he hadn’t seen a sin-gle soul in all the time he’d been in the cell, so he didn’t think they were injecting him.
And that was another mystery, the time he’d been in the cell. He had no way of knowing, no way of keeping track. They’d kept his watch. The single lamp in the ceiling never went off, so there was no way of distinguishing when it might be day and when it might be night.
The lamp was enclosed in a steel cage, so the prisoners couldn’t get at it. Not that he would have bothered. The light was so dim that he had no problem falling asleep.
And that’s about all he wanted to do. Sleep.
So, maybe that was the way they were doing it. Waiting until he was asleep, and then sneaking in and putting a mask over his face or a needle in his arm. Or maybe they were pump-ing in some kind of gas through the vent up near the light. Or maybe it was in the water. He doubted it was the water. There was just the one tap and it looked like a normal tap. They hadn’t given him a glass. To drink he had to bend over the sink.
But drugging him they were. He was sure they were get-ting it into him in one fashion or another. There was no other explanation for the way he felt. He was dazed and dis-oriented. And he was in no condition to put up a fight when the two of them finally came for him.
It wasn’t the carioca. It was a man and a woman. The woman appeared to be in her early thirties and the man maybe a decade older. Both were wearing green medical scrubs. The gurney they’d brought was equipped with leather restraints that buckled around his upper torso, wrists, thighs, and shins. By the time they’d finished, he was all but immo-bile. The ride down the hall took only a few seconds. They wheeled him into a tile-walled room smelling of hospital and positioned the gurney next to a metal table surmounted by an immense surgical light.
“Your doctor will be with you in a moment,” the guy in green scrubs said.
And laughed.
HECTOR COSTA stared into the mirror and rubbed the bristles on his chin. He didn’t like the idea of being in the office unshaven. The bags under his eyes made him look as if he’d had a long night of drinking behind him. He splashed some water on his face, dried it with a paper towel, and returned to where his uncle was still working the phone.
“I’m going down to the padaria for breakfast and a razor. Want anything?”
“Coffee with milk and a buttered roll,” Silva said, and started dialing the next number on his list.
HECTOR WAS sitting at the counter, reading the morning paper, and sipping
café com leite,
when his uncle stepped up behind him and grabbed his arm.
“We’ve got him,” Silva said.
“Ribeiro?”
“He was trying to board a flight to Paraguay. They’re hold-ing him at Guarulhos. Come on.”
There was a car waiting in front of the office, Babyface Gonçalves behind the wheel. Babyface started rolling even before Hector had fastened his seat belt.
São Paulo shares with Bangkok the distinction of having the most serious traffic gridlocks in the world. Isolated inci-dents make those gridlocks even worse.
The isolated incident du jour was a tractor trailer whose driver had misread the height of a viaduct over the
marginal,
one of the belt roads that rimmed the city. The cab of the big truck passed under the Limão Bridge with more than twenty centimeters to spare. The forty-foot container it was pulling did not. The leading edge of the container hit the concrete abutment at a speed of almost fifty kilometers an hour, and stuck there, bringing the rig to an immediate stop and block-ing one lane of traffic.
The driver, who hadn’t been wearing a seat belt, had been propelled out of his cab by inertia. He’d flown through the windshield and come to rest on the other side of the dividing island, where he’d been promptly run over by a delivery van.
The driver of the van, in a desperate attempt to avoid the collision, had stood on his brakes and been rear-ended by another tractor trailer that had jackknifed over the entire road, blocking it in both directions.
When Babyface rolled to a stop, they had almost five kilo-meters of stalled vehicles in front of them. The traffic behind them was bumper to bumper, so they were effectively trapped. Television helicopters were converging at a distant point directly ahead. Silva, seated in front next to Babyface, switched on the radio. The accident was on all of the traffic reports:
“ . . . expected to impede the free flow of traffic for at least the next four hours,” the announcer said. “Drivers are advised to avoid the belt road at all costs. Seek alternative routes.”
That was all Silva had to hear. He punched the button to shut the radio off, and he didn’t do it gently. “Call for a god-damned helicopter,” he said.
Babyface did. But it took almost thirty-five minutes to get there and find a suitable place to land. The spot chosen by the pilot was a construction site about three hundred meters from their car. Babyface stayed behind the wheel while Hector and Silva transferred to the aircraft.
After that, it was easy sailing. A ten-minute flight brought them to Guarulhos. A golf cart was waiting on the tarmac. They were met by a female agent with a federal police badge pinned to her black blazer. She brought them to the interro-gation room, one level down from the arrival hall.
It was a windowless space with a television camera mounted high in one corner, a steel table, and four wooden chairs, all bolted down. There were two other federal agents in the room, both in suits, both with badges pinned to their lapels, both leaning against the wall, and both looking down at Ribeiro.
One of the federal agents was Antonio Moreira, the guy who headed the federal police assigned to Guarulhos. He was one of the first people Silva had spoken to after sending out the advisory e-mail. The other agent was a young guy who looked like he could have been Babyface’s younger brother. If it hadn’t been for the badge, Silva might have taken him for a teenage bystander.
“You got the wrong guy,” Ribeiro was saying when Silva and Hector entered the room. He’d shaved off his mustache, streaked his black hair with gray, and ditched the Flamengo medallion, but it was him, no doubt about that.
He was seated at the table, sweating profusely, and shak-ing his head. It wasn’t that hot in the room, but he was blot-ting his forehead with a handkerchief clutched in a meaty left hand about the size of a boxing glove. His other hand was cuffed at the wrist. A chain ran from the cuff to an eye-bolt welded into the top of the table.
“Crap,” Delegado Moreira said, “You’re Ribeiro. Stop denying it.”
Ribeiro kept shaking his head.
“No way,” he said.
Moreira looked up and smiled at Silva. He introduced the young guy as Renato Wagner, the man who’d spotted Ribeiro.
“Good work,” Silva said, “but now I think it would be bet-ter if you left us alone.”
Wagner frowned, but Moreira winked knowingly at Silva.
“I think we’ll take a stroll down the hall,” Moreira said. “You can’t hear a damned thing from down there. The door to this room is steel. It has a way of dampening anything that happens inside.”
He took Wagner firmly by the arm and led him into the corridor. Hector closed the door and leaned against it. Silva sat down at the table.
“Now,” he said, “let’s talk.”
CLAUDIA WAS laying out her instruments when Bittler hurried into the operating suite. He wasn’t wearing scrubs, a mask, or gloves. That alone was enough to tell her that some-thing was terribly wrong.
“Teobaldo,” he snapped to the anesthesiologist, “Leave us.
I haven’t got him completely stabilized,” Teobaldo said, pointing at an unconscious Arnaldo.
“I don’t care,” Bittler said. “Go. I’ll call you when we need you.”
Once the door had closed behind Teobaldo, Bittler came around to her side of the operating table, leaned forward, and spoke in a harsh whisper.
“They’re onto Roberto.”
Claudia went to the double door and opened it. Teobaldo was bending over, his ear to the crack.
He looked up at her sheepishly.
“Go to your office,” she said. “I’ll call you there.”
“And if the guy on the table dies?”
“He dies. Go.”
When he’d taken off down the corridor, she closed the door and turned back to Bittler.
“Tell me,” she said, “tell me everything.”
BITTLER’S ACCOUNT of his conversation with Ribeiro made Claudia angry, angrier than she could ever remember. But she suppressed her rage, and stood listening to his ration-alizations as if she accepted them at face value.
She recognized the game was over, recognized they’d lost, but the man in front of her, a man she’d once respected, was so blinded by self-importance and convictions of intellectu-al superiority he couldn’t see the disaster in its true light. If he’d listened to her in the first place, it would never have come to this. Roberto would have been long dead. The deba-cle was
his
fault, Horst Bittler’s fault, and no one else’s.
“They haven’t caught him yet,” he was saying, “and with a little luck they never will. But we’ll have to act quickly, just in case. If they do catch him, we can’t count on him to keep his mouth shut. The records are a problem. They’ve been good enough for a superficial inspection, but they won’t stand up to in-depth analysis. We’ll have to destroy them.”
“How about the others?” she said. “Gretchen? Teobaldo? That pilot you’ve recently taken into our confidence? What about them? What’s to prevent one of them making a deal and selling us out?”
He considered that for a moment. “They’re expendable,” he said.
“And I am, too, I suppose.”
He avoided her eyes.
“No, Claudia, of course not. I’ve always regarded you as my partner. Now, stop talking foolishness and let’s get busy. God knows how much time we’ve got to do it all. A few days at the minimum, I suspect. Unless they catch up with Roberto. If that happens, they could be here sooner. We have to make sure that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, for them to find. First the records. We could—”
“Set a fire in the archives? Burn down part of the building?
Yes, yes, an excellent idea. Destroying part of the build-ing would lend verisimilitude. And the holding cells? How can we justify the holding cells?”
“Claim that we intended to extend the clinic’s services to the treatment of the violently insane? That we had the cells constructed for that?”
“No. No, they’ll see through that in an instant.”
“They will. But can they prove otherwise?”
“You’re right. Proof is all.”
But she’d only been toying with him.
“You’re a piece of work,” she said.
“What?” His eyebrows climbed almost to his hairline. She’d never spoken to him like that. He flushed a deep red.
“I said you’re a piece of work.”
“How dare you?”
“I told you more than once to get rid of Roberto. But, no, you thought you knew better.”
“There was no reason to believe—”
“There was. There was every reason to believe that the man was a liability. You just didn’t want to see it.”
“I resent your tone.”
“And I resent your actions. I spent years preparing to practice my profession, and now you’ve put it in jeopardy through your lack of judgment. What am I supposed to do with my life from here on in? Tell me that!”
“You’re overreacting, Claudia. You’ll continue as you’ve always done. I will endeavor to forgive your lapse in courtesy. Now, if there’s nothing more . . .”
She shook her head in disbelief.
“Do you actually believe we can carry on? Just clean the place up and act as if nothing has happened?”
“We have the Kramer woman upstairs, waiting for her new heart. Get Teobaldo back in here and remove his.” He pointed at Arnaldo’s recumbent form. “Then, while the corpse is being dismembered, we can burn the body of the other Indian brat. But we’ll have to clean his ashes out of the oven ourselves. Damn Roberto Ribeiro!”
“You intend to go forward? You intend to harvest this heart and then implant it in the Kramer woman? After what you’ve just told me?”
“Why not? They won’t get onto us as quickly as all that. No use wasting what we have. Don’t forget that we already have the Kramer woman’s money. It’s against my principles to give it back.”
The man was insane. Strange that she’d never noticed it before.