Alone in the Crowd

by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza

  Not only was Carioca station one of the busiest points on the subway line, but the Avenida Rio Branco, in the late afternoon, hosts one of the most dense concentrations of people and vehicles in the entire city. Ramiro couldn’t take his eyes off Hugo for a single second without risking losing him entirely. Further complicating his efforts, Hugo always seemed to choose to walk exactly where the most people were. He didn’t try to move past or avoid people, instead maintaining the same pace for several blocks. When he got to the corner of the Rua Sete de Setembro, he turned left toward Uruguaiana. Once there, he turned right and walked one block down Uruguaiana, returning to Rio Branco via the Rua do Ouvidor. Halfway down Ouvidor, Ramiro lost sight of him. Hugo was a few steps ahead of him and then suddenly disappeared. He couldn’t have turned around, since Ramiro would have seen him.… Maybe he’d picked up the pace and headed into some gallery, though that would be unlikely, given his actions up to that point.

  Ramiro was walking in circles—not an easy maneuver—and looking in every direction when suddenly Hugo Breno walked right by him coming from behind, almost bumping into him, still heading toward Rio Branco. Ramiro followed more closely, taking the chance of being discovered. Which, judging from the circumstances, had already happened. Back on Rio Branco, Hugo walked one more block and turned left again onto the Rua do Rosário, and continued up to Uruguaiana, returning once again to Rio Branco. And that’s what he did, followed by a despairing Ramiro, until he reached the corner of Rio Branco and Presidente Vargas: nine or ten blocks as the crow flies, or about fifteen blocks in Breno’s zigzag pattern. All this during the busiest hour of the day in the middle of town, when people were getting off work. At no point did Hugo Breno stop to go into a store, look into a window, speak to anyone, or even appreciate that mass of moving humanity. What stunned Ramiro the most was that as soon as he got to the corner of Rio Branco and Presidente Vargas, Hugo turned around and redid the whole trip in reverse, taking the same side streets, all the way back to Carioca station, where they’d begun. On the way, Ramiro lost sight of him a few times, until he’d suddenly appear out of nowhere, as if he’d been playing hide-and-seek with the inspector. At Carioca station, they went down the escalator and waited on the packed platform for the train to Copacabana.

  The journey had begun in broad daylight and finished up at night. It was almost eight when Ramiro left Breno at his home, not having seen him speak to a soul during that whole time. The inspector was convinced that Hugo Breno wasn’t interested in people or whatever was around him; he didn’t look at anyone or pay attention to the traffic or to buildings while he was walking. He derived pleasure from being among the crowd, as Welber had observed the day before. He didn’t bump into people, except accidentally. He liked being among them, without touching them. He wasn’t a groper or a voyeur. People, individually, didn’t interest him.

  Espinosa’s meeting with his team ended after seven that night. As soon as the group broke up, Welber and Chaves approached to tell him that Detective Chaves had finished his inspection of the newspaper archives.

  “What did you find?” Espinosa asked the detective.

  “Not much, boss. The tough part was the word ‘murder.’ I focused the search on news about murders and murdered children, but I didn’t find anything connected to the Peixoto District or to Copacabana. I only got something by crossing the obituaries with the local news. I wrote up what I found.”

  Espinosa took the printed page with Chaves’s summary: “In January 1975, an eleven-year-old girl was found dead next to the stairwell leading to the roof, inside the building she lived in, located in the Peixoto District, in Copacabana. The girl had a bruise at the base of her cranium, suggesting that she had fallen from high up in the stairwell and hit her head on the side of one of the stairs. The bruise, followed by an intercranial hemorrhage, was the cause of death. There were no markings on her legs or arms. The door leading onto the roof was closed with a padlock. It was not possible to discover if the girl was alone in the place or what she was doing on the stairwell that led up to the roof. There was no police description of the accident.” Chaves waited for the boss to finish reading and added:

  “I noted the address on this piece of paper. They didn’t publish the name of the girl or of her parents.”

  “Thanks, Chaves. Good job.”

  The policemen at the station, familiar with the chief’s laconic manner, knew that a phrase like that amounted to high praise, and the young detective went away grinning from ear to ear.

  The address indicated that the girl had lived less than fifty meters away from Espinosa’s own building. When he went home, Espinosa walked by the building, trying to uncover some hidden memory, but he decided not to visit until the next morning, in daylight. That night he wanted to catch up on some reading, including Montalbán’s latest book. Except if Vânia called suggesting a striptease, he thought. But Vânia didn’t call or turn up. There was no striptease. He read a few dozen pages.

  He got up a bit later than usual the next morning to give the inhabitants of the neighboring building time to leave for work without having to bump into a policeman poking around the premises. He called the station, saying he’d be a bit late but that he expected to be in the office by around ten. On the short walk to the girl’s building, he was greeted by two people. He was well known in the Peixoto District. Since he’d already located the building the day before, he didn’t have to confer with any doormen. The only precaution he took was to check if the addresses had changed in the last three decades. They hadn’t. And the building in question corresponded vaguely to the one suggested in his murky memory. It was a building only three stories high, without an elevator or a garage, just like his own and all the area’s original buildings. There was no doorman. There was a guard who kept an eye on that building and two others. Espinosa was informed by a resident that the guard was named Onofre and that he was probably in the next building at the moment. The chief had to ring twice before a man appeared, not in the doorway but in a narrow lateral hallway that led to the back part of the building. He was short and strong, with a creased face, white, short-cropped hair, and an attentive gaze, between sixty and seventy years old.

  “Good morning,” Espinosa said. “Are you Mr. Onofre?”

  “I am,” he said in a deep, hoarse voice that still had a trace of a northeastern accent.

  “I’m Chief Espinosa from the Twelfth Precinct.”

  “I know. I know you from here in the neighborhood.”

  “I need your help, Mr. Onofre.”

  “I’ll do whatever I can, sir.”

  “How long have you worked here?”

  “Ever since there was a bamboo grove in the square. More than forty years. I got here when I was twenty-three and I’m about to turn sixty-five.”

  “Always in this building?”

  “This was the first one I took care of. Then I started working in the next one and then in that one over there, with the green fence.”

  “Do you remember an accident, a long time ago, more than thirty years back, with a little girl here in the next building? She died after having fallen down a staircase. She hit her head.… I don’t know her name.”

  “I don’t know either,” the man said, “but I remember the accident. It was horrible—the parents couldn’t stand to keep living here and moved a month later.”

  “Would you mind showing me where it happened?”

  “Of course, Chief. Right away. I’ll go get the keys from my room.”

  Onofre was wearing some pretty ragged jeans, sandals, and a checked shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his biceps. Despite his age, he didn’t wear glasses. He came back with a key ring. They went around the low wall separating the two gardens, and he opened the front door of the next building—which was an exact twin of the one they had just seen. The buildings in the Peixoto District were all very similar, in Portuguese colonial style, all three stories high. The only thing that separated them were their details and their colors.
As soon as they walked into the lobby, Onofre pointed up the marble staircase and said:

  “That’s not where she fell, it was all the way up … as if she was going to the roof.”

  The guard went up on ahead, noting any disorder. He closed the lid of a garbage bin, picked up a piece of paper, and put it in his pocket. But the building was clean, the walls were neatly painted, and the floor was well taken care of. When they got to the last floor, he pointed to the staircase that went a bit higher.

  “This is the last floor, but the stairs go up to the rooftop.”

  There were two more L-shaped flights, with a landing between the first and second. He stopped, with Espinosa, on the landing.

  “Here’s where she fell. She must have fallen from up there and knocked her head on one of the stairs.”

  “Was she by herself when she fell?”

  “Since nobody saw her fall, nobody could say.”

  Espinosa went up the last few stairs, which ended on a little landing a couple of feet square, bordered by a low wall, beside the door to the rooftop. The watchman went up and opened the padlock. The terrace ran along the back half of the building, where the water tank was; the front half was covered with ceramic tile. Espinosa wasn’t interested in the terrace, since it had been closed when the accident occurred. They went back down the stairs, and the door to the roof was locked once more.

  “What floor did the girl live on?”

  “The top.”

  “Onofre, I’d like to stay up here by myself for a few minutes. When I’m done, we’ll talk some more.”

  “Fine, Chief. When you’re done, just knock on the front door.”

  Espinosa went back to the landing between the two flights of stairs and looked up. What he saw was the final flight ending in the little landing and the door. He counted ten stairs, including the upper landing. If the girl had fallen from the last step, the fracture at the base of her skull would have been the final blow after she’d fallen, stretched out on the landing where she was found. The question was: What was she doing on those stairs? She knew that there was nothing more up there except the rooftop terrace, and that it was sealed with a padlock. If she had gone up those stairs, it was because something had attracted her attention. What? What made her fall? What could she have seen that frightened her? Had she been frightened and then fallen or had she been pushed? Espinosa sat on the floor and looked up. He thought: The girl goes out of her apartment and closes the door without making any noise. Just out of habit, since her mother’s told her so many times not to slam the door. As she moves toward the stairs, she hears something in the area that leads to the roof.… She stops, quiet, attentive. After a few seconds, she hears something else, perhaps a whisper. She stays where she is, silent, and even more alert.… After a few more seconds, she hears a noise and what appears to be a soft voice.… It could be a child’s voice, or a woman’s.… She tiptoes over to take a look at the first flight of stairs. Empty … and dark … another whisper. She goes up the first flight, sticks her neck around to see the rest.… The noise continues. She goes up the last flight and sees … what?

  8

  For the rest of the morning, Espinosa tried to construct a profile of Hugo Breno. Though they were all referring to him as a suspect, they really didn’t have enough clues to justify that label. Espinosa had coined a term, contradictory in its redundancy, for situations like that: Hugo Breno was “suspected of being a suspect.” A borderline state of suspicion. The only thing Espinosa and his assistants had on Hugo up to that point was that he had talked to the victim a few times, which was itself very natural, since he was a teller responsible for dealing with pension recipients and Dona Laureta was one of the pensioners who got her payment at the branch where he worked. Besides that, he could, at most, be considered a weird guy. But Espinosa himself was considered a weird guy by many of his colleagues. A few thought the more adequate term was “eccentric.”

  “But, Chief, he is really strange,” Ramiro was saying. “I followed him for almost three hours through the streets of downtown without seeing him pause for a second to rest, to go into a store, or speak to a soul, or even to stand there and watch the world go by. Nothing, Chief. And there’s more. Sometimes he would disappear. Just vanish. All of a sudden, he’d be right next to me, almost taunting me, as if to say, ‘Here I am.’ How did he do that? There’s no doubt he’s weird. He’s like a robot, an automaton, loose in the streets of Rio de Janeiro. What Welber saw the day before yesterday, I saw yesterday. He’s not normal.”

  “I know. But you also found out that he’s an exemplary employee, efficient, that he doesn’t cause problems.… So what’s the conclusion? Is he normal or not?”

  “A person can be normal at work and abnormal when dealing with other people outside of work.”

  “And how does he act outside of work? Does he bother anyone on the street? Does he get upset? Did he use violence at any point? Did he suddenly start to scream? Did he get lost in the middle of the street and not know what to do? Not know how to get home?”

  “Chief, none of that had to happen for him not to be considered normal.”

  “We’re not psychiatrists, we’re cops. Those things might be similar, but they’re not identical. We don’t have to find out about his mental health, we have to find out whether he did or didn’t commit the murder. Of course we’re all guilty of murder, but here we’re only talking about a real murder.”

  Welber and Ramiro sat staring at Espinosa, thinking he was as weird as Hugo Breno. And he noticed.

  “Fine,” he said. “Let’s admit that Hugo Breno is a weird guy, and I agree that the way he walks through crowds is odd, but let’s not get obsessed by that. We don’t have any proof, any clue, no matter how weak, that he pushed the old lady under the bus. But we have a series of small hints connecting the two. Or, based on what Ramiro discovered in Dona Laureta’s address book, connecting the three: Laureta, Hugo Breno, and his mother, the mother being the common element. Instead of a love triangle, it’s a murder triangle. What’s missing, though, is an explanation for what that link means. Maybe that’s what Dona Laureta wanted to tell us when she came to the station.”

  Espinosa didn’t think it was the right time to add another angle, the death of the little girl, to the already fragile evidence they’d gathered. The accident had occurred over thirty years earlier and its connection with current events was suggested only by Espinosa’s memory, which was even more obscure than the events themselves. Of course, that didn’t keep him from exploring his childhood memories, it just meant that for now he preferred to keep to himself the little bits and pieces he was trying to sew together. Especially because he knew that memory helps us forget as much as it helps us remember.

  His cell phone showed that Irene had called, probably during his conversation with Welber and Ramiro about the case of the pensioner (which, he thought, was turning into the case of the man among the crowd). He called Irene. Her phone was off. It was Friday, the night they usually spent together. But he wouldn’t have been surprised if she had gone back to São Paulo with Vânia. Or even if she’d gone to São Paulo and left Vânia in Rio. Or if the two of them had stayed in Rio. But the best thing of all would be if Irene was alone in Rio.

  He didn’t have lunch. At least, not a normal meal. He ate a sandwich with an orange juice in a coffee shop in front of the station. But instead of going back to work, he headed toward the Peixoto District, more specifically to a little room at the back of the building next door to the girl’s. Onofre had just awakened from a nap.

  “Just a few minutes,” the guard said, “fifteen minutes a day after lunch. But how can I help you, sir?”

  “You may be able to help jog my memory. I was a boy, only twelve, about the same age as the dead girl, and I’ve already forgotten almost everything.”

  “If I may ask, Chief, why do you want to remember something that awful from so many years ago?”

  “Because I think it may be connected to something else awfu
l that happened last week.”

  “I have a good memory. The main thing I do when I work is remember. What do you want to know, sir?”

  “If there were any comments about the girl’s death …”

  “My memory is better for things I saw than things people said. I remember perfectly the girl fallen in the stairwell and her mother shouting. I remember that people were scared. But what they said … it’s been a long time.”

  “Of course you can’t remember what they said, but can you remember if there were any comments, rumors?”

  “The people who lived in these buildings all knew the kids who played in the square. They all knew the girl. They were really sorry about her death and felt sorry for the parents, who moved right after the incident.”

  “Was there any commentary about whether it really was an accident?”

  “I think there was a rumor that the girl hadn’t been alone. But nobody saw anything. Her mother found the body. I got there as soon as she started shouting. There wasn’t anyone else in the stairwell or in the lobby.”

  “Why didn’t they call the police?”

  “I think because the girl fell, because it looked like an accident. So they called the doctor.… But that’s what I think now; I don’t remember what I thought back then.”