Dying Gasp (5 page)

Chapter Ten

BRASILIA

H
ECTOR COSTA LOOKED LIKE hell.

There were dark circles under his bloodshot eyes, and the long hours he’d spent inside windowless Dutch conference rooms had bleached his customary tan.

“You sure you want to do this now?” Silva said. “You could go over to my place and take a nap first, you know.”

“I told him the same thing,” Arnaldo said. “But he’s stubborn, like someone else I know.”

Silva raised an eyebrow. “And just who might that
someone
be, Agente Nunes?”

“My uncle Eustacio,” Arnaldo said, without missing a beat. “You haven’t got an uncle Eustacio.”

Arnaldo opened his mouth to refute that, but Hector interceded. “If I was going to sleep,” he said, “I would have done it in São Paulo and in the loving arms of my
squeeze
.”

“Squeeze, is it?” Arnaldo said. “Does Gilda know you call her that? And where did you pick up a word like ‘squeeze’?”

“She doesn’t know it, not yet, because I have yet to see her since I got back,” Hector said. “As to the word, it’s a bit of European sophistication that I learned from my new friend, Chief Inspector Lane of Scotland Yard.”

“That does it,” Arnaldo said to Silva. “You got to stop sending the kid off on conferences. Every time he gets back, I have to scrape the sophistication off. It smells bad, and it gets under my fingernails.”

“Is that what it is?” Silva said. “I always thought the stuff under your fingernails was a consequence of poor personal hygiene.”

There was a knock on the door of Silva’s office.

“Come,” Silva said.

A guy in a white lab coat appeared in the doorway.

“Where do you want it, Chief Inspector?”

“Over there, Soares,” Silva said. “Turn the screen toward us.”

Soares went out into the hallway and returned, wheeling a metal cart almost as tall as himself.

The top shelf of the cart was entirely occupied by a large TV monitor. The two shelves below it contained three tape players, VHS, Beta SP, and digital Beta. There was also a DVD player and a computer with a couple of disk drives.

“DVD, right?” Soares asked.

Silva looked at his nephew.

“DVD,” Hector confirmed.

The technician unplugged a cable, plugged in another one, toggled a switch, pressed a button and held out his hand for the DVD.

Hector didn’t surrender it.

“Confidential,” he said.

Soares shrugged, pushed another button. With a click and a whirr, the DVD player stuck its tongue out at the cops.

“Enjoy the movie,” Soares said. And left.

Hector put the DVD onto the extended tray, gave it a gentle push, and hit the PLAY button.

Fourteen minutes later, the girl’s severed head hit the floor with an audible
clunk.

“Enough,” Silva said.

Hector reached out and pressed a button, stopping the DVD at almost exactly the same point where Marnix Gans, the Dutch postal inspector, had sprung to his feet and gone running into his bathroom to vomit.

“Fuck,” Arnaldo said unsteadily, his usual sarcasm momentarily suspended. “You hear that? The person calling the shots, the one behind the camera, was a woman.”

“I heard it,” Silva said.

“She’s some sick human being. She reminds me of—”

Silva said it for him. “Claudia Andrade.”

N
ELSON
S
AMPAIO, Silva’s boss, did not believe in sharing glory for success or in taking blame for defeat. When there were victories, they were always
his
victories. When there were debacles, he always looked for a scapegoat.

One such debacle was a famous case involving a team of rogue physicians who specialized in the transplantation of vital organs.
Doutora
Claudia Andrade and her associates were often able to prolong and increase the quality of life in patients wealthy enough to pay for the privilege. In that there was nothing amiss.

What
was
amiss was their source of organs. They harvested them from living, breathing human beings. Scores of innocent people had been murdered in the process.

And, in the end, Claudia Andrade had gotten clean away.

In an exclusive interview in the
Folha de São Paulo,
Sampaio spun it this way: it wasn’t the federal police who’d failed to apprehend her. No. It was one man: Mario Silva. He’d been in overall charge of the case, had been given all of the resources of the state to back him up and had failed miserably. If it hadn’t been for Silva’s ineptitude, the psychopathic lady doctor would never have been able to escape incarceration and judgment. Silva’s actions clearly required a review, and Sampaio, for one, would welcome an investigation by an independent body.

The day after Sampaio’s comments appeared, droves of reporters descended on Silva’s office. He fled down a back stairway, but others were waiting for him at home, milling around in the basement parking lot, clustered in front of the building, packing the hallway in front of his apartment. By the time he’d elbowed his way through the throng and reached his front door, all three groups had joined together into an insistent, jostling mob, shouting questions and demanding explanations.

A particularly strident young brunette—Silva took her for a newspaper reporter or someone from a radio station, because she was casually dressed in hip-hugging yellow jeans—inserted a sandal-clad shoe between his front door and the jamb and told him she was going to keep it there until he answered her questions.

Silva asked her to remove it. When she didn’t, he brought down the sole of his shoe on her exposed toes, not hard enough to break anything, but with sufficient force to discourage her. With a screech of pain and an expletive her mother never taught her, the brunette pulled back her foot. Before a hardier soul could take her place, Silva slammed the door, locked it and went to look for Irene.

He found her curled up on the sofa, breathing heavily, although it wasn’t quite four in the afternoon. An attack on the man she loved, her only anchor, was all it took to get her to break her five o’clock rule, but it took a great deal of drinking to render her unconscious. She must have been at it since early morning.

Later, after he’d tucked her into bed, he found the copy of the
Folha
, crumpled and folded back to the op-ed page. She’d stuffed it into the garbage compactor next to the kitchen sink. The cartoon was the first thing that caught his eye. It showed Claudia Andrade as a bird of prey, flying off into the sunset with a human heart in her beak. Down below, hanging out of a tiny, ineffectual paddy wagon, were the Keystone Kops, wearing tall hats, blowing whistles, waving billy clubs. The sergeant leading the Kops bore a striking resemblance to Silva. The accompanying editorial went on to excoriate him and those who served under him. It didn’t seem to matter that the organ-theft ring had been broken up and that all of the other members, save only Claudia, were either imprisoned or dead. What mattered, apparently, was that Doutora Claudia Andrade, one of the cardiovascular surgeons who’d plucked hearts from the healthy and poor to transplant them into the critically ill and rich, was still at large.

Physically, Claudia was an attractive woman. The photograph that circulated in the press had been shot head-on, foreshortening her rather prominent nose and thereby enhancing her features. Press and public alike were intrigued by the fact that someone who looked like
that
could have been directly responsible for killing tens, maybe hundreds, of innocents.

Silva survived the attack, and the ensuing independent inquiry, only by a stroke of luck: a string of call girls serving a group of prominent politicians made for even juicier news. The pack of journalists that had been hounding Silva went off to sniff and bark elsewhere. Fortunately, the gentlemen of the board of inquiry were no friends of Nelson Sampaio. Freed from the necessity of pillorying someone whom the director disliked, they closed their sessions without issuing a reprimand.

The relationship between Silva and his boss suffered, but both were practical men. It helped, too, that the Chief inspector had never had any illusions about his boss in the first place, so there was nothing for him to be disappointed about. In time, scar tissue formed over Silva’s wounds.

But not Irene’s.

“You have to catch her, Mario.”

In the year and a half that followed, she’d say it at least once a week. Irene didn’t believe that her husband’s honor could be vindicated until Claudia Andrade was behind bars, or dead.

From time to time, Silva would take out the photo he carried in his wallet. The image, lifted from her driver’s license application, showed Claudia smiling at the camera, a picture of innocence, displaying not a trace of the dark soul that nestled within.

He’d stared at that photo so often, showed it to so many people, that he could have made a sketch of her from memory, accurate down to the little mole on her left cheek.

But that was all he had, a photo and bitter memories. Of the woman herself, there hadn’t been a single trace. She seemed to have vanished into thin air.

“
C
LAUDIA
A
NDRADE,” Arnaldo repeated, still staring at the empty screen. “You think it’s her?”

“Maybe not,” Silva said, “Maybe it’s just wishful thinking on my part. We still have a score to settle between us.”

“And me,” Arnaldo said. “I’ll never forget waking up on that table of hers.”

Claudia had nearly succeeded in making Arnaldo Nunes her final victim prior to disappearing.

Hector said, “I have to ask myself how many women like Claudia this country could produce in a generation.”

“Damned few,” Silva said. “Maybe only one, but let’s not get our hopes up. Not just yet.” He turned to Arnaldo. “When can we expect some answers from those Internet people?”

“Got the list right here,” Arnaldo said, pulling a paper from his pocket. On it were the E-mail addresses obtained by the Dutch police, typewritten and in alphabetical order. Each was followed by a handwritten annotation.

Silva started reading at the top, running his finger down as he went.

On the eighth line his finger stopped.

He raised both eyebrows.

“I’ll be damned,” he said.

A
T A quarter past seven that evening, the telephone in Silva’s office rang. Camila, his secretary, was long gone. Ditto Hector, probably already sleeping in Silva’s apartment. Silva was in the washroom at the end of the hall. Arnaldo picked up the receiver.

“
Pronto
.”

“Mario Silva?” a no-nonsense female voice said.

“Not here,” Arnaldo said. “Who wants him?”

“This is Deputado Malan’s office.”

“Wow,” he said, “a talking office. Do you have brother and sister offices? Are your parents buildings?”

There was a short pause while she digested the attempt at humor.

“Who’s this?” Now she sounded bitchy.

“Nunes. I work with Silva.”

“Nunes,” she said, as if she was making a note of it. “Inspector Nunes?”

“Agente Nunes.”

“Ah. Agente Nunes.”

An office, particularly the all-important Deputado Malan’s office, didn’t have to be polite to a mere agente, and when next she spoke, she wasn’t.

“Get in touch with the chief inspector,” she snapped, “and tell him he’s to be here tomorrow morning at ten. Suite four-forty-one, Congressional Office Building,” the woman said, and hung up.

No sense of humor at all.

SILVA WAS ten minutes late.

Malan’s secretary had a sharp chin and a long nose, and she wore no wedding ring. She looked to be in her midfifties.

When Silva gave his name she looked pointedly at her watch.

“Didn’t that Nunes person inform you that your appointment was for ten?”

Silva admitted that the Nunes person had told him exactly that. He didn’t try to explain that he’d been trapped in traffic for almost an hour. The first city in the world designed for the automobile, the city that had once boasted the complete absence of traffic lights, had become a vehicular chaos just like all the other major cities in the country. Knowing that, Silva had allowed a full hour to cover eight kilometers. But that morning a demonstration in front of the Ministry of Agriculture, one that included about a hundred and fifty farmers on tractors, had introduced a further complication into the gridlock.

The woman pursed her thin lips, stared at him over a pair of steel-rimmed reading glasses, and waited for him to apologize.

Silva didn’t. He figured she was going to make him wait anyway.

She did. For nearly an hour.

D
EPUTADO
M
ALAN’S inner office was decorated partly in nineteenth-century French colonial and partly in twenty-first-century Brazilian egomaniac. There were photos of the deputado with every recent President of the Republic, there were trophies for raising prize livestock, there were honorary degrees and diplomas, there was a glass-topped case full of medallions. The office reminded Silva of the one his boss had boasted before turning to the One True Religion for spiritual sustenance and votes.