Every Bitter Thing (11 page)

“Did she speak to him?”

“She did. Asked him, sarcastic like, if he needed any help.”

“And he?”

“And he told her no. But she could see he wasn't happy.

Looked furtive, was the way she put it.”

“Furtive?”

“That's the word she used. Furtive. Bruna was always using words like that. She had two years of university, you know.”

“No, I didn't. Did she report the incident?”

“Right away. She went to first class and talked to Leandro, the chief steward.”

“And?”

“And he asked her if the guy took anything, and she said not as far as she knew.”

“So the chief steward didn't take any action?”

“Leandro has fluent Japanese. He mostly works that Tokyo run.”

“So?”

“I guess what I'm trying to say is that Bruna wasn't an alarmist. She was a good judge of character. But Leandro never had a chance to learn that about her. They only worked together a few times. Oh Jesus!”

“Oh Jesus what?”

“Oh Jesus, what am I going to say when I talk to Bruna's mother?”

Chapter Sixteen

“A
LINE
A
RRIAGA
?” H
ECTOR ASKED
.

The woman who'd opened the door nodded. She had eyes as blue as aquamarines, was moderately tall, had medium-length black hair, and her figure wouldn't attract a second glance. But her eyes were beautiful. They were also bloodshot and underlined with dark circles. The woman had been doing a good deal of crying and getting very little sleep.

“What is it now,” she said glumly.

“Now? I'm sorry, Senhora. I don't—”

“The guard downstairs said you were from the police.”

“I am,” Hector said. “The Federal Police. I'd like to talk to you and Julio.”

“Julio?”

“Your son.”

“Junior,” she said. “Not Julio. Julio is my husband. My son is Julio Junior. And if you want to talk to him, it means you're not here for the reason I thought you were. It means you don't know.”

“Know what, Senhora?”

“You'd best come in,” she said and stepped aside. After he'd entered, she closed the door behind him and leaned against it as if she needed the support.

“Junior's dead,” she said.

“Dead?”

She narrowed her eyes. “They said he fell, but I don't believe it. Not for one minute.”

“My sympathy for your loss, Senhora. When? When was this?”

“Almost three months ago,” she said. “He was on his way back from the United States. My husband, Julio, lives there. Junior was visiting him. They arrested Junior at the airport.”

“Arrested him? For what?”

“Drug smuggling, they said. And I don't believe that either. They dragged him off to a delegacia and put him into a shower with a bunch of perverts. Junior was only fifteen years old. What could they have been thinking? Tell me that! What could they have been thinking?”

“Senhora, I'm sorry to hear all this. Truly sorry.”

“Spare me your pity. I don't want pity.”

She pointed toward the small couch. Her outstretched finger was trembling. Hector, wishing to avoid an outburst of hysteria, sat. She took a seat facing him and then a deep breath.

“Now,” she said, “tell me.”

“The flight Julio—”

She cut him off. “Junior. It's Junior. You say Julio, you're talking about his father.”

“Junior, then. The flight he was on, 8101, the one that arrived on the morning of the twenty-third of November—”

“Yes?”

“There were some … incidents, things that happened to some of the other passengers.”

“What kind of incidents?”

“Senhora, I—”

“Tell me. What kind of incidents?”

“Murders. One of the victims was the son of the foreign minister of Venezuela. We've been asked to investigate.”

“The death of the son of the foreign minister of Venezuela rates an all-out investigation by the Federal Police, but the death of my son doesn't matter to anyone but me. Is that what you're telling me?”

“No, Senhora,” Hector said. “That's not what I'm telling you.”

“Well, it sure sounds like it. It sounds exactly like what you're telling me.”

“Senhora, believe me—”

She held up a hand to silence him, stood up, walked to a table near the door. “I want you to hear something,” she said.

She started pushing buttons on an answering machine. Her movements were very rapid. Whatever she was doing, she'd done it many times before. There was a final click, and she turned up the volume on a young and frightened voice.

“Mom? Where are you? Mom? For God's sake, Mom, pick up the phone.” Some indistinguishable words were growled in the background. “Mom, they say I have to be quick. It's like this: they opened my backpack when I was coming through Customs. There were pills in there, drugs, they said. And now they say I need a lawyer, but I didn't
do
anything. I swear. Those pills weren't mine. They weren't—”

The boy's plea came to an abrupt end followed by a beep.

Aline pushed another button and scoffed, “Drugs! My Junior with drugs!”

“You don't believe it?”

“I never believed it! Not for a moment. I still don't.”

“What kind of drugs?” he asked quietly.

“Ecstasy.”

A drug teenagers favored. Hector had seen kids as young as twelve using the stuff. Junior might well have been carrying it; in fact, Hector couldn't think of any other reason why the boy might have been arrested. But he wasn't about to say that to his overwrought mother.

Aline Arriaga walked to the windowsill, picked up a picture frame, and handed it to him.

“Junior,” she said.

Julio Arriaga—Junior—a good-looking kid with his mother's black hair and a lopsided smile, wore a gray shirt with blue piping. A baseball bat, gripped in one hand, was resting on his shoulder.

“His last photo,” she said, “taken in Florida. Julio sent it.”

“His father lives there?”

“I already told you that.”

“Yes, I'm sorry. You did.”

“And I live here, but not for long. I want to get out of this country, wanted to get out even before what happened to Junior … happened. Julio's saving money. He's going to send for me.”

“I'd like to speak to him,” Hector said.

“Julio? Why? Why do you want to talk to Julio?”

“He took your son to the airport, didn't he?”

“Yes.”

“Then he might have spoken to one of the other passengers, seen something that would be significant for our investigation.”

“Julio moved recently. I don't have his new phone number.”

“An address perhaps?”

“I don't have an address either. I'll have to get back to you.”

She wasn't meeting his eyes. And there was something else, too. Something he couldn't put his finger on. He suddenly had the feeling she wanted to get rid of him. He looked back at the photo in his hands, made a point of admiring it. “A handsome young man,” he said.

The tactic was successful.

“Sit right there,” she said. “I have lots more.”

She went into another room and, seconds later, came back with a thick album.

She put the heavy book on his lap and took a seat next to him. “This one,” she said, “was taken on the same day as that one.” She pointed to the picture in the frame.

Junior was looking over his shoulder. There was a baseball cap on his head, a number on the back of his shirt. She started leafing through the pages, going slowly, so he could admire the pictures. “Up there, in the United States, they called him Jule.

Julio wasn't ‘cool' enough; neither was Junior.” She paused at a photo that took up a full page. “That's his father,” she said, tapping the image with her forefinger.

Julio wore combat fatigues and looked every inch the soldier: lean, hard, not the sort you'd like to tangle with.

“That was taken about four years ago,” she said, “in Manaus. Before Manaus, we were in Belo Horizonte, and before that it was Porto Alegre. We spent two winters there. Do you have any idea how
cold
it gets in Porto Alegre in the winter? That was some change, I'm telling you, Porto Alegre to Manaus.”

Hector leaned in for a closer look. Julio was turned slightly away from the camera, and his shoulder patch was clearly visible: CIGS.

CIGS is the acronym for the
Centro de Instrução de Guerra na Selva
, the Brazilian army's elite training corps for jungle fighting. They were the best of the best, a unit exclusively composed of career men.

Hector felt his pulse quicken. “Why did Julio leave the army?”

Again, she avoided his eyes. “It was a problem with one of his officers.”

“What kind of a problem?”

“I couldn't say.”

Can't, or won't
, Hector thought.

“When he was here for Junior's funeral, did—”

“Julio didn't come to Junior's funeral,” she interrupted quickly.

“No?”

“No. He … doesn't have a work visa for the States. He's there illegally.”

“What's that got to do with—”

“If he leaves, they won't let him back in. Then I'd never get out of here either. And what would have been the point? To see Junior's body in a box? To see the box being put in the ground? Junior wasn't here any more. Junior was gone.”

But his grieving mother wasn't. And a husband who loved her wouldn't let her go through the funeral alone. Or would he?

A tear dropped from her cheek. She took a paper handkerchief from a box on the coffee table, dried the photo, and blew her nose. “Sorry,” she said.

More to calm her than for any other reason, Hector said, “Tell me about that day. Did you go to the airport to meet your son?”

“I
always
went to the airport to meet him. Sometimes I had to take a day off to do it, but I always went. First, I'd call to make sure the flight was on time. We have two flights a day, both in the morning. He was on the early one. It arrived just a little after six.”

“So you called to check the flight's arrival time….”

“And I took the shuttle to the airport. When I'm on my own, I use the company shuttle. It doesn't cost anything, and it's convenient. One of them leaves every hour, day and night. I stood waiting for him to clear Customs, waited for two and a half hours after the flight landed. By that time I was frantic. I went to the TAB counter and spoke to a woman I know. She has a pass.”

“A pass?”

“You need a pass to get into the Customs area. She came back and told me they'd taken him away.”

“What did you do then?”

“I called my answering machine to see if he'd left a message. He had. You heard it.”

“He didn't say where he was calling from, did he?”

“No,” she said. “He didn't.”

“And next?”

“I opened the yellow pages, looked for criminal lawyers.”

“And picked the lawyer with the biggest ad?”

“Yes.”

“Dudu Fonseca?”

She raised her head and looked at him. “You know him?”

Hector nodded. Not every cop in São Paulo knew Dudu Fonseca, but those who did hated his guts.

“I got him on the second try. It was just after nine. He asked for ten thousand. A ‘nonrefundable retainer,' he called it.”

“You paid him
ten thousand
?”

She hung her head. “I was desperate. Over the telephone he told me he'd only take cash. I went to the bank and got it. Then I went to his office. The first thing he asked me was if I'd brought the money. I said I had. He told me to give it to him, and I did. Then he made one telephone call.
One telephone call
. He put it on his speakerphone so I could hear the whole thing. Whoever he called, and I have no idea who it was, told him my son had been in a shower at the Fifteenth Delegacia, the one out near Guarulhos. He'd fallen. That was the story. He'd fallen when he was in the shower, and he'd hit his head, and it had killed him. Fonseca just sat there, saying uh-huh, uh-huh. They're telling him my son is dead and he's saying uh-huh, uh-huh.”

“And then?”

“I don't even know how the call ended. I'd broken down by that time; I was crying my eyes out. That didn't affect him either. He sat there looking at me like an ugly toad. It must happen to him all the time, people getting hysterical in his office.”

“I expect it does,” Hector said. “How about your money?”

“He kept it. All of it. It was nonrefundable, like he said. I really didn't care. For years, Julio and I have been saving for Junior's education, and Junior wasn't going to need it any more. I left Fonseca's office in … oh, I don't know … a kind of trance, and I took a cab to the Fifteenth Delegacia to see my baby. They'd stretched him out on the floor in a storage room,
a storage room
, and covered him with a sheet of black plastic. They'd closed his eyes, stuffed cotton wads into his nose and ears. He looked fine from the front, like he was sleeping. But there was a horrible wound here.” She put her hand to the back of her head. “I couldn't see how anyone could get a wound like that from a fall. I told them that. They said he must have hit it on one of the fixtures.”

“They hadn't bandaged the wound?”

“No, there was no bandage, nothing. And his body was already cold. Finally, an ambulance showed up. The paramedics were the only ones who showed me any kind of sympathy at all. One was a man. He said he was sorry it had taken them so long, but they had to give priority to the people they could help. The woman looked at me, looked at Junior, and started to cry. She hugged me before she left.”

“And then?”

“They brought him to the
Instituto Médico Legal.
It took them three days to release his body. God knows why. The story didn't change. They're still saying he fell. Lots of his friends came to the funeral, almost his whole class from school. He had sixty-three people in all.”

“And no one, at any time, suggested that what happened might have been anything other than an accident?”

Aline gave him a bitter look. “No one, at any time,” she said. “The cops in that delegacia must have thought I was really stupid, that I'd never read about the sort of things that happen in jails, that I never picked up a newspaper. Afterward, after the funeral, I went back to the place where they'd been holding him. The delegado didn't want to see me.”

“Why not?”

She shrugged. “Sergio Bittencourt, that's the little bastard's name. He tried to sneak out the back door.”

“He
what
?”

“I'd been crying. There was a sergeant, an older man, not like a policeman at all. He kept giving me paper handkerchiefs, offering me coffee. Then another policeman came in and whispered something in the sergeant's ear. As soon as he left, the sergeant said the delegado had gone out the back door and was on the way to his car. The car was a gray sedan. Bittencourt was wearing a brown suit. If I was quick, I could catch him in the parking lot, but I wasn't to tell the delegado he'd told me that. I took off like a shot.”