Yet Espinosa’s suspicion didn’t match the pathetic private story of a solitary man who apparently required psychiatric attention more than a police investigation.
That afternoon, after his usual meeting with his team, Espinosa decided to walk home via the longer route. He needed to let his ideas flow freely, without the pressure imposed by the station.
Carried along by this flow of ideas, Espinosa’s steps sped up or slowed down depending on how fast they came into his mind. At some points, the chief slowed down so much that he almost stopped, in an effort to articulate ideas and images that were apparently irreconcilable. He’d already considered the possibility that the case of Hugo Breno had moved from the police realm into the personal sphere, with the conversation in the hotel being the latest sign of that shift. That was nothing new. Whether or not the whole conversation in the hotel had been set up by Hugo, the question of how far he had been willing to go just to meet Espinosa didn’t remove his own reservations. In the absence of proof or even of concrete signs of Hugo Breno’s involvement in any of those deaths, there wasn’t even the possibility of initiating an official inquiry. His preliminary investigations had been inconclusive. Reduced to the two participants, the case would soon, once again, be nothing more than something in two people’s memories. The meeting in the Peixoto District hotel had not only been an extrajudicial deposition, it had nothing to do with the police case being investigated, at least not directly; the police investigation had done nothing more than bring about the first meeting between them in more than thirty years. Espinosa thought that this figure meant two different things to Hugo Breno and himself. The impression he’d gotten after their conversation in the hotel was that for Hugo Breno, that Friday and their games in the square were one and the same present tense, not two distant moments separated by decades. Those years of distant contact with Espinosa in the neighborhood park, when Hugo was eleven, and his contact with him now, when he was past forty, were, for Hugo, a circle that was about to close. It was as if the early years were the first words of a sentence that was about to be given its last word, the word that would give the whole phrase its meaning. So Hugo Breno wouldn’t be in the least worried about eliminating witnesses or anything else (a simple police matter); he would concentrate on preparing the final act.
That was the useful portion of the ideas that were floating through his brain as Espinosa returned home. He thought that they were useful only to the extent that they formed a nexus, not because they revealed the enigma of a life. Just ideas, he thought as he crossed the square.
Only once he was already in front of his building did he see Irene seated on the steps in front of the door. He sat next to her and neither said anything for a short while, her head resting on his shoulder.
“Shall we go up?” Espinosa proposed, taking her hands and helping her up.
“I didn’t bring anything to eat or drink,” she said.
“We’ll call and order something. Until it arrives, we can act like cannibals.”
The next morning, the e-mail Meireles sent to Espinosa turned the case on its head once again. All it said was: “The autopsy confirms that the cause of death was a break in the spinal cord, but added this morning was that the woman was already dead when she fell in the bathroom. Best, Meireles.” Espinosa, Ramiro, and Welber looked at the message on the screen, perplexed.
“So are we back where we started?” Ramiro asked.
“So the cause of death …” Welber babbled.
“The cause of death was the break in her neck. Except that that happened before her fall. In other words, someone broke the poor woman’s neck and then arranged her body on the floor of the bathroom to give the impression that she had died in a fall,” said Espinosa.
“Hugo Breno,” Welber suggested, still puzzled.
“Not necessarily,” said Espinosa. “You can’t conclude that ‘the woman was already dead when she fell in the bathroom’ has to mean that the murderer was Hugo Breno. That’s much more an expression of our own desires than the logical conclusion. Let’s be careful not to get into dangerous speculations.”
“So you think Hugo Breno wouldn’t have wanted to make his life more complicated with this new twist?”
“How would it change his situation?”
“He doesn’t have an alibi.”
“He has the same one he had before.”
“But he can’t prove it.”
“You don’t need to prove that you were home watching TV on a Sunday night. Besides, he gave the names of the movies he watched, described the three stories in detail, told me the names of the actors.… Of course he could have taped them. The problem is that I don’t know if he has a recorder that could tape three full-length films.”
“There are other ways.”
“Fine. I’m not saying it wasn’t him, I’m just trying to show that we don’t have any way to prove that it was him. And that’s why I’m saying that his situation hasn’t changed since last week.”
“What are we going to do? Wait for him to fess up voluntarily?”
“That’s not out of the question. We just need some bait.”
“What kind of bait?”
“Me, for instance.”
“Chief—”
“If you really think that he was the one who killed Dona Adélia, you must have noticed that in that case he’s changed his tactics radically. For the first time he would have committed a deliberate murder. If we believe the story he told me, the previous victims died without his intentionally and directly causing their deaths. The death of Dona Adélia, though, would be the first instance of a crime he planned and carried out with the precision of a professional killer. I even thought that he might have been the intellectual author of the crime and that he’d hired someone else to carry it out. He doesn’t consider himself a murderer. It’d make sense if he’d hired someone. But I changed my mind. He’s essentially a loner who acts alone; he wouldn’t want to join forces with someone else.”
“And why would he have killed Dona Adélia?”
“In his mind, it wouldn’t be a murder. For him, the important thing isn’t Dona Adélia, but her function. The same thing goes for Dona Laureta. That man, when he was a child, imagined a destiny for himself that opposed the one planned for him by his mother, who thought that her son was possessed by evil. His mother, Dona Laureta, and Dona Adélia play a role and have a function in this delirious construction. He doesn’t see himself as a murderer. He’s just living out his destiny.”
“And what is your role in that delirium?”
“I represent good. By identifying with me, which is to say with good, he can escape the figure of evil that inhabits him.”
“Chief,” Ramiro asked, “where did you pull all this out of?”
“From my head. Where else?”
“You mean that none of it is based on reality?”
“All the characters are real. And they’re all, more or less, the way Hugo sees them.”
“Then why don’t we have him put into a psychiatric hospital?”
“Because just like it’s not always easy to prove that someone’s a criminal, it’s not always easy to prove that someone’s crazy.”
Espinosa didn’t tell his two colleagues what he himself really thought about the murder of Dona Adélia in the hotel. If her death eliminated the last witness to Hugo Breno’s past, that death also wrapped up the investigation into his hypothetical guilt. Case closed, the cops would say, and now we don’t have any other way to get him. He’d be free from Espinosa’s persecution. And that was exactly what Hugo Breno didn’t want to happen. After more than three decades, he’d managed to meet up with Espinosa.… They’d spent almost an entire day talking in a hotel room.… Espinosa had gone to see him at the bank and then waited for him when he was coming off work.… Hugo wouldn’t want to move away from Espinosa now that the investigation had been closed. Hugo wouldn’t allow that to happen, Espinosa thought. If necessary, he’d confess to a crime just to
keep up a relationship with Espinosa, so as not to lose the connection he’d waited for through so many long decades.
He thought it was excessive to get into all that with his two associates, when both Welber and Ramiro had found his interpretation of Hugo Breno’s delirium strange and overdone. For now, the best thing to do was wait. If he was right, the next move would be Hugo’s, at which point he might try a more radical approach.
On Thursday, there was a market in the square in the Peixoto District, which Espinosa visited to stock up on fruits and vegetables. It was also the day when he could gauge his popularity from the greetings he got during his walk through the market and the eagerness with which the vendors tried to help him. Despite his reserved character, the chief thought it was pleasant to be greeted that warmly by the neighborhood residents.
Espinosa had walked all around the square, done his shopping, and was getting ready to take his purchases home when he saw Hugo Breno coming toward him. That wasn’t the person he had wanted to meet that early in the morning, before he’d even gone in to the station. From what Welber and Ramiro had told him about Hugo Breno, at that hour he must have already run up and down the entire length of Copacabana Beach, finished his swim, gone home, taken a shower, and … here he was, ready for his encounter with Espinosa. He was carrying a bag with a few groceries. Not much. Probably just enough to justify his presence at the market, at the same hour, when they had never seen each other there before. Or maybe they had, several times, though Espinosa had never noticed the resemblance between that man and the boy he’d seen countless times in that same square, when he too was a child.
“Chief Espinosa, good morning. What a nice surprise!”
“Good morning.”
“What a special day. The first time we’ve run into each other here, buying food for our solitary meals. The only thing that keeps us from being twins is that your Friday night meals aren’t solitary like mine. Good for you. I hope we see each other again. It really was a pleasure. See you.”
Hugo Breno said this and walked off, as if he’d delivered that short speech on somebody’s orders.
Espinosa didn’t like it. First, because there was nothing casual about it: he’d never before seen Hugo Breno at the market. Second, for the elaborate, excessive politeness. It wasn’t like Hugo. In fact, it was the opposite of him. So why had he gone to such lengths to be so polite? It could only be to send a message: I know about your habits and when you come and go; I know that you’re by yourself, except on Friday nights, when your girlfriend has dinner and sleeps over with you in your apartment. Espinosa didn’t like that one bit. He considered it an invasion of privacy, though an open market couldn’t be considered a private space. He went up to his apartment, left his purchases in the kitchen, went into the living room, opened one of the windows, and scanned the whole perimeter of the square. Not a sign of Hugo Breno. He waited a few minutes and then went back down.
At the station, he mentioned the encounter to Welber and Ramiro.
“He turned up earlier than I’d expected,” Ramiro said.
“What could that mean?” Welber asked.
“It might mean that he’s more nervous than we are,” Espinosa answered.
With that in mind, they decided that the best thing to do would be to make clear to Hugo Breno that Chief Espinosa was no longer interested in him.
“That means that we’re not going to do anything at all,” said Espinosa. “Nothing that he can see, of course.”
That same morning, shortly after ten, Welber got a call from his house. It was Selma telling him happily that they’d received a gift of a fruit basket from the market vendors in the Peixoto District. A note welcomed Detective Welber and his wife. Welber immediately passed on the news to Ramiro and Espinosa.
“It was him! That piece of shit was in my building.”
“He delivered it himself?” Espinosa asked.
“No. He left it with the doorman.”
“Try to remain calm. Any slight sign of nervousness on our part would be a point for him. The more indifferently we act, the more he’ll feel weak and unprotected. It’s a face-off. The winner is whoever resists longer.”
“My resistance ends the moment he sticks his nose into my home,” said Welber.
“He knows what your limits are,” Espinosa observed.
“And if he doesn’t lay off?”
“Then we’ll let him know we think he’s annoying.”
“That’s it?”
“That, for him, is everything.”
There were times when Espinosa had the idea that he was doing exactly the opposite of what a law enforcement officer ought to be doing. Not deliberately, based on clear ideas or a firm decision. And that was the problem. Sometimes he felt like he was being blown along by events that escaped any means of prediction or control. For Hugo Breno, killing a defenseless old lady who hadn’t done anything at all to him wasn’t a criminal act, just like it wasn’t a criminal act to kill an enemy in battle. For someone who thought along those lines, homicide was not necessarily judged according to what was good or evil, but according to what was permitted and what was forbidden, or even according to aesthetic criteria, as in a struggle between warriors. After that thought, Espinosa wondered if Hugo Breno wouldn’t be able to kill someone just to “stay in touch.” In that case, how much would Espinosa himself be strengthening that perverse logic in Hugo Breno’s mind? If he thought of it that way, the decision not to do anything for a while might not be correct, or even very prudent.
Espinosa chose a sandwich and a fruit juice at the bar across the street. Out of pure lack of initiative, not because he was expecting something important or imminent to occur. Sometimes his daily life was taken over by a generalized lack of interest, but that rarely lasted for more than part of a day. It never lingered into the next.
At the end of the day, before he went home, Espinosa called Welber and Ramiro into his office. The two were the only cops involved in the case and Espinosa wanted to warn them of possible actions Hugo Breno might take.
“Be prepared not only for violence, but also for little things like what he did this morning, designed just to irritate and provoke us. You should only react if he resorts to physical violence against you or others. Warn your families about these friendly, seductive deliveries.”
On his way home, he decided to call Irene in order to warn her about Hugo Breno as well and temporarily suspend her visits to his apartment in the Peixoto District. It would be better for them to meet at her place or somewhere else.
Irene told him that morning she had received a dozen white roses, with an electronically printed card that said: “Sorry we can’t meet tomorrow. Love, Espinosa.”
“I didn’t send you flowers …”
“I didn’t think so. Who did?”
“That guy who likes crowds.”
“And how does he know about our meeting tomorrow?”
“He knows that we meet here on Fridays. He spies on my apartment. He knows my routines. From the square, he watches the living-room window.”
“Who is this person? What does he want?”
“His name is Hugo Breno. He wants to be my friend …”
“He wants to be your friend and he’s spying on you? For how long?”
“Apparently, since we were kids.”
“Since … ! Is he sick?”
“Maybe. That’s better than the other possibility.”
“Which is?”
“That he might have committed a few murders.”
“Might have or did?”
“We’re still not sure about that.”
“And there’s no proof? Do you think you’re going to find any?”
“I think so. It won’t be long. Maybe as soon as the end of the week. Until then, I want you to be extra careful. Only take official taxis, and when you call, ask for a driver you know. Tomorrow, avoid going out in the neighborhood on foot. Keep your cell phone close by and always have it on. I’ll give you Welber�
��s cell number. If you have to go out on foot, call him.”
“Honey, you’re not overdoing it?”
“I hope so. Do you have anything tomorrow?”
“I have an important meeting at an advertising agency in Botafogo.”
“I’ll send Welber with you.”
“It might be a long meeting. Is he just going to sit there waiting for me?”
“That doesn’t matter. He’s used to long waits, and in much less pleasant places.”
16
Friday morning. Welber was assigned to protect Irene and Ramiro was going to track Hugo Breno in the morning, before he went to work, and in the evening, after he got off. Espinosa didn’t like the note Irene had received, in his own name, calling off their meeting. He didn’t like the white roses either. He might be overdoing it, as Irene had said, with his precautions as well as in the ways he interpreted the facts, but he felt that Hugo Breno had changed his pattern of behavior. He’d become more daring, more flashy in his intentions and actions, and Espinosa didn’t want to be taken by surprise.
He spent the morning and the afternoon handling the most bureaucratic and uninteresting tasks in the life of a police chief. It was one of the most efficient ways to turn off the outside world and transport himself into the world of papers and the computer screen. Even so, every phone call provoked a mixture of discomfort and fear. Luckily, as if obeying a secret command of his, he got very few phone calls. It wasn’t until five-twenty that his cell phone rang. It was Ramiro.
“Chief, Hugo Breno’s not at the bank, he’s at home.”
“Home?”
“I got to the front of the bank at four-thirty, waiting for him to come out. When he hadn’t come out by five-ten, I called the security guard and went in. He wasn’t there. A coworker said that he hadn’t felt well and had left earlier. I went to his building, rang the doorbell, and the watchman said that he’d gotten back around four and hadn’t gone out since. I crossed the street and sat watching the sidewalk in front. After a few minutes, he turned up at the window and closed the curtains. The watchman told me that that was his bedroom window. Now I’m down here waiting for him to come out, but it doesn’t seem like he’s going to.”
Alone in the Crowd Page 15
