Arnaldo, leading the way into the room, came to a standstill so quickly that Goncalves bumped into his back.
“Hey,” Goncalves said. “What-”
“You see the guy with the big moustache?”
“The one with a bald spot and the number ten on the back of his football jersey?”
“Him. That’s Federico Lorca.”
“Your ex-brother-in-law?”
“The very one.”
Lorca, an overweight man pushing sixty, was nursing a glass of wine and swiveling his head first one way, then the other, as he held forth to the people along the length of the bar. At a given point, one of them tried to break-in on his monologue, but Lorca wouldn’t have it. He raised his voice and talked right over him.
“What a windbag,” Goncalves said.
“You have no idea,” Arnaldo said. “Come on. Let’s get this waste of time over with.”
He walked over to Lorca and tapped him on the shoulder. Lorca turned, looked at Arnaldo, and rocked back on his heels.
“Ha,” he said. “Still alive? I was hoping you were dead.”
“Still shooting off that big mouth of yours, are you, Federico?”
“You’ve got it wrong. As usual. What I’m doing is having a conversation with friends. But you wouldn’t know about friends, would you? I seem to recall you never had any. What are you doing in our club?”
“Business.”
“What kind of business?”
“Federal Police business.”
“If you lived in Argentina, and worked for our federal cops, they would have fired you a long time ago.”
“If I lived in Argentina, and worked anywhere, I would have killed myself a long time ago.”
The Argentineans within earshot didn’t appreciate the remark. There was some grumbling.
“One of the best things I ever did,” Lorca said, “was to divorce Alicia.”
“Watch out what you say about my sister, Federico.”
“I wasn’t really referring to your sister, Arnaldo. I was referring to getting rid of you as a brother-in-law. The day the divorce became final was one of the happiest days of my life.”
“Mine too. So, finally, we’ve got one thing we agree on. I can’t think of anything in this life that I ever wished for more.”
Lorca took a sip of his wine. “You’re starting to bore me. How about you get down to that Federal Police business of yours?”
“My young colleague here has some questions for you and your friends.”
Goncalves stepped in. “About the kidnapping of Tico Santos’s mother.”
“What about it?”
“From what I understand, the Argentinean newspapers are crying crocodile tears.”
“Crocodile tears?”
“Yeah. They’re saying it’s a terrible thing, but they don’t really mean it.”
Lorca smiled a thin smile. “Really?”
“Yeah, really. So how do you people feel about it? Do you ascribe to the official line? Or are you kind of happy to see the Artist with his mind off of the game?”
Federico Lorca looked around him, as if he was taking a visual poll. Then he looked back at Goncalves.
“We all live here in Brazil. We’ve got a different take on it.”
“Which is?”
“We’re annoyed.”
“Annoyed?”
“It’s like this: if Tico doesn’t play, or if he plays badly when we win, people could say it wouldn’t have happened if he’d been in top form.”
A red flush crept up Goncalves’s neck and suffused his face.
“ When you win. Did you say when you win?”
“I did.”
“And you really think that’s going to happen?”
“I do.”
Arnaldo dug Goncalves in the ribs. “See what I mean?” he said.
Goncalves ignored him. “And yet, if Tico doesn’t play, it would bother you?”
The Argentinean smiled. “Of course it would. It would diminish our triumph. Back home, our countrymen don’t have daily contact with Brazilians. Those of us who live here do. And we’ll get to rub our victory in your faces every day for the next four years.”
“We were discussing the issue just before you guys came in,” one of the other Argentineans said. “Somebody suggested a Brazilian did it.”
“That somebody was you, Jose,” one of the other men said.
“Okay, so it was me,” Jose said. “But it’s possible, isn’t it?”
There was a general murmur of approval.
“Wait a minute, wait just a minute,” Goncalves said. “Are you telling me you people actually believe we’d kidnap the mother of our own best striker just to diminish the prestige of an unlikely Argentinean victory?”
“Who says it’s unlikely?” one of the other men said.
“ I said it’s unlikely,” Goncalves said, his voice taking on an edge.
“Of course you did,” the Argentinean said. “You’re Brazilian, and therefore deluded about the outcome.”
“Deluded?” Goncalves sputtered.
“Deluded. Let me tell you how it’s going to be, young man. First, we’re going to make mincemeat of the three teams in our group-”
Goncalves made a dismissive gesture. “Honduras, Greece and Nigeria. Big deal. No real competition-”
“-and then we’re going on to topple the runner-up in group C, which will be-”
“The pushovers from the United States-”
“Or the brutes from the Netherlands. Take your pick.”
“I don’t debate any of that. Get to your point.”
“My point is, we’re going to play Brazil in the finals. And we’re going to crush you.”
“Crush us? Senor, you people have about as much chance of-”
Arnaldo gripped Goncalves’s arm.
“This isn’t getting us anywhere,” he said. “Ask the question.”
Federico took another sip of wine and ran a finger along his moustache. “What question?” he said.
Goncalves disengaged his arm from Arnaldo’s grip and took a deep breath.
“How about this: how about a group of Argentineans snatched the Artist’s mother so your country would have some chance of winning? How about that?”
“Ridiculous,” Jose said, and laughed.
“Absurd.”
That was from the Argentinean who’d called Goncalves deluded.
“Listen to this guy,” Federico said, addressing his countrymen. And then, to Goncalves, “Wishing won’t make it so, young man. You people are going to have your asses kicked. But, since you’ve given all of us a good laugh, how about we buy you a drink?”
“And how about you all go fuck yourselves,” Goncalves said, and stormed out.
I N THE parking lot, Arnaldo caught up with him.
“If you’re about to tell me I told you so,” Goncalves said, “you can just keep your damned mouth shut.”
“I was about to tell you a couple of Argentinean jokes. I thought they might drive home the lesson.”
“I don’t want to hear any Argentinean jokes.” Goncalves kicked a stone. “Open the damned car.”
“You know the one about how to make a fortune?”
Goncalves paused, his hand extended toward the door handle. “No,” he said.
“You buy an Argentinean for what he’s worth and sell him for what he thinks he’s worth.”
Goncalves wasn’t amused.
“That’s not funny,” he said.
“You know what an ego is?”
“No.”
“It’s a tiny Argentinean who lives in all of us.”
“That’s not funny either.”
“Argentinean jokes aren’t made to be funny. They’re made to be instructive.”
“Get in the car and drive,” Goncalves said.
Chapter Five
Rodolfo Sa, Juraci’s neighbor, was a florid-faced man with a big belly. His wife, Angela, was a petite woman a head shorter than he
r husband.
They sat Hector at their dining room table, offered him coffee and tried to pump him for information.
He fended off their questions, accepted a second cup and launched into his questions.
“Tell me about Juraci Santos.”
“What do you want to know?” Rodolfo said.
“Start with her character. What kind of a lady is she?”
Rodolfo’s horn-rimmed glasses had slipped down his nose. He used a finger to push them back into place, and then looked at his wife.
“You want to answer that one?”
“Not me,” she said. “You go ahead.”
After a pause to consider his words, Rodolfo said, “To begin with, Juraci Santos isn’t a lady at all. She doesn’t belong here in Granja Viana, she belongs in a slum.”
“Back where she came from, is that what you’re saying?”
“It sounds bigoted, I know, but you try living next door to someone like that.” Rodolfo pointed to a set of French doors. “Our deck overlooks her back yard. Go out there and have a look. You’ll see what I mean.”
Through the glass, Hector could see patio furniture, a wooden rail and some greenery. He couldn’t see Juraci’s home.
“Why don’t you just tell me?” he said.
“Garbage, that’s what you’ll see. When she and her friends party out there, and they party a lot, they don’t throw their paper cups, and paper plates, and chicken bones, and rib bones in the trash. They simply toss them onto the ground. We never had a rat problem before Juraci moved in, but we’ve sure as hell got one now. I had to put out poison, and Adolph ate some of it-”
“Adolph’s your dog?”
“Yeah. He’s a Doberman. It was all the vet could do to save him, and he hasn’t been the same since. Intestinal problems. Believe me, you don’t want to hear the details.”
Angela had put a dish of bite-sized cookies on the table. Her husband put one in his mouth, masticated it and washed it down with coffee before continuing.
“Then there were the parrots,” he said. “She used to have two of them over there, Macaws, a red one and a blue one. They’d squawk at dawn, and they’d squawk when the sun went down, and they were even noisier than the damned rooster she used to keep. Which, by the way, checked in every morning about half an hour before the parrots did.”
“Noisy, huh?”
Rodolfo snagged another cookie.
“Noisy is an understatement. And her former menagerie isn’t the half of it. She’s got lousy taste in music, and she recently invested in the biggest amplifier and loudspeaker system known to man. She plays musica sertaneja every goddamned day, the same crap over and over again, and she plays it so loud that the glasses in our china cupboards rattle. She’s got a little toy poodle that barks all night long. Which, of course, sets off Adolph, who always used to sleep through the night until she moved in. And then there are her goddamned hens.”
“Hens?”
“Hens. No coop. They just wander around the yard.”
“Every now and then,” Angela put in, “one of them gets over the fence and goes straight for my roses.”
“You’ve spoken to her about all of this?”
Rodolfo threw up his hands in a gesture of frustration. “Repeatedly. Nothing I say makes any difference. When I go over there to complain, she either won’t answer the door, or she shuts it in my face. Juraci Santos is the neighbor from Hell. We built this house ourselves. I spent three years getting it done. It was our dream. We had great neighbors, and we were happy. And then Tiago Serra divorced his wife, and he needed to get rid of the house, and Juraci Santos moved in. Now we’re thinking of selling out and leaving Granja Viana altogether. All because of that woman.”
Goncalves took a sip of his coffee. “How about her other neighbors? Do they share your opinions about the lady?”
“They sure as hell do. They don’t have to put up with her eyesore of a back yard, or her hens, but all of them hear her noise. We’re in a valley here. The racket carries clear over to the other side. And then there are the thefts.”
“Thefts?”
“There’s been a spate of thefts. I’m not accusing Juraci personally, but you gotta admit it’s a hell of a coincidence that all the incidents occurred since she moved in. Nothing big, mind you. Not yet. But clothes have been stolen off clotheslines, radios and CD players ripped out of cars, TV sets stolen from houses.” Rodolfo took another cookie and waved it in Goncalves’s direction. “They talk to her, the security guys do, and she claims she knows nothing about it. Maybe she doesn’t. But she isn’t willing to recognize that it might be the people she invites to her home, all those old friends of hers from her favela days.” He popped the cookie in his mouth.
“Go easy on those cookies,” Angela said. “You’re supposed to be on a diet, remember?” Then, to Goncalves, “More coffee?” Goncalves shook his head. “It was delicious, but, no, thanks. How about the Artist?”
“What about him?”
“Does he put in an appearance every now and then?”
“All the time. That’s the only positive side to the whole rotten business. It’s something for the kids to brag about at school. You know him personally?”
“Not yet.”
“He’s a nice guy, not arrogant at all, always willing to give a kid an autograph. And how about that girlfriend of his, huh? Cintia Tadesco? Now, there’s a-”
“Bitch,” Angela said. “The woman is a bitch. That’s a known fact.”
“How can you say that?” Rodolfo said. “How can you say it’s a known fact?”
“Because I read about her all the time.”
“In that trash magazine you subscribe to?”
“It’s called Fofocas, and it’s not trash. I don’t know why the Artist puts up with her.”
“Hell,” her husband said, “all you got to do is to take one look and you know why he puts up with her. If I had half a chance-”
Angela punched her husband on his arm.
“Hey,” he said, “that hurt.”
“It was meant to,” she said.
“People,” Hector said, “I’m in a bit of a hurry here.”
“Sorry,” she said.
“Yeah, sorry,” Rodolfo said-and reached for another cookie.
“Rodolfo,” she said, “you want me to take that plate-”
“Last one,” he said, not letting her finish.
“Tell me about the last time you saw Juraci Santos,”
Hector said.
“Yesterday morning,” Rodolfo said. “I told you guys about that already.”
“I’d appreciate it if you’d go over it again. With me.”
“Oh. Okay. Sure. I was leaving for work. I drove up the ramp to the street and got out of my car to close the gate.”
“What time was this?”
“Somewhere between 8:50 and 8:55,” he said without hesitation.
“You seem pretty sure of the time.”
“I am. That’s when I always leave.”
“I told him there was a shopping list on the kitchen table,” Angela said, “but he forgot to pick it up. I grabbed it and ran out the front door.”
“And all the while,” Rodolfo said, “the Santos woman was standing next to her mailbox, arguing with a postman.”
“You’re sure it was an argument?”
“Hell, yes. I heard her tell him he could go fuck himself. That’s the way she talks, always fuck this and fuck that. The woman has a really foul mouth. The postman saw me looking at him, and he must have said something to her because she looked over her shoulder and spotted me.”
“Did she wave? Acknowledge your presence?”
“Wave? No way. Those days are long gone. All she did was lower her voice.”
“Tell me more about this postman.”
“What’s to tell?”
“Was he your regular guy?”
“That’s the thing,” Angela said. “He wasn’t.”
“A substitute?”
She shook her head. “Not that either.”
“How can you be sure?”
“They always deliver to us first. I checked the box before I came inside. There was nothing there. But, later in the day, there was.”
“This postman, had either one of you ever seen him before?”
Rodolfo and Angela looked at each other, and then back at Hector. Both of them shook their heads.
“If you saw him again,” Hector said, “would you recognize him?”
“I think I would,” Angela said. “I’ve got a good memory for faces. Rodolfo is useless.”
“Hey,” Rodolfo said.
“You are. You know you are. It’s downright embarrassing sometimes.”
“I can’t help it if I’m not a goddamned social butterfly.”
“You could at least make an effort.”
Hector picked up his spoon and tapped it on his cup.
Ding, ding, ding.
“ Senhor Sa,” he said, when he had their attention, “it’s my understanding you heard a disturbance early this morning.”
“Yeah, I did.”
“Tell me about that.”
“There was this bang next door. It woke me up.”
“You’re sure it came from next door?”
“I’m sure. Adolph sleeps in our room. He went ballistic, and that’s the direction he was barking in.”
“So you got out of bed to have a look.”
“I did. I looked out the window-”
“Bedroom window?”
“No. You can’t see much from our bedroom. I went down the hall to my office.”
“Can you see her kitchen door from the office window?”
“No.”
“What about her front gate? Can you see that?”
“Yes. And the road in front.”
“Did you turn on a light?”
“In the office?”
“Yes, in the office.”
“I did. I’m in the middle of a project. I have papers stacked up all over the floor. I didn’t want to step on them.”
“What did you see from the window?”
“A car driving away. He floored it. The tires squealed. He kicked up a lot of gravel.”
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