A Vine in the Blood

by Leighton Gage

  Cintia was not just a beautiful face; she was a prima donna, generally disliked by the photographers and art directors with whom she spent her days. Tico followed her around like a lapdog. They were due to marry in the spring. A few of Tico’s friends suggested she might be a gold-digger. Those that did were no longer Tico’s friends.

  She gave the cops an appraising look. “I hope,” she said, “you’ve got some good news.”

  “I wish we did,” Silva said. “At the moment, all we’ve got is questions.”

  “In that case,” she said, taking charge, “Let me say this: Tico has had a long day. There’s nothing more he can tell you. He’s tired. He’s stressed. He needs sleep. How about you come back tomorrow morning?”

  “The first few hours are always crucial. We’ll try to take up as little of his time as possible. Yours, too, Senhorita Tadesco.”

  “I’m not too tired,” the Artist said. “This is my mother we’re talking about. I want to do everything I can to help. Make yourselves comfortable.”

  Cops one, Tadesco zero, Silva thought as he took a seat.

  “Discounting the ransom,” he said. “Can you think of any reason why someone might have kidnapped your mother?”

  “You don’t think five million dollars is reason enough?” Cintia said.

  If she couldn’t get rid of them, she apparently intended to make her presence felt.

  “It’s a good one, Senhorita Tadesco, and it may be the only one, but we shouldn’t fail to consider other possibilities.”

  “Like what?”

  “A group of Argentineans so focused on winning the Cup they kidnapped Senhora Santos to put Tico off his game.”

  “That’s ridiculous!”

  “It probably is. How about this: someone thinks he has star quality, but Tico outshines him. He kidnaps Tico’s mother. Tico doesn’t play, and the kidnapper has a chance to be the big star of the Cup.”

  Silva put as little faith in that possibility as he had in the first. He expected Cintia to reject it out of hand.

  But she didn’t.

  “Romário de Barros!” she said.

  “Aw, come on, Cintia,” Tico said, “it’s not fair to accuse a guy just because—”

  “Fair?” she said. “Querido, this is Romário de Barros we’re talking about.”

  Romário de Barros was the Corinthians’ principal striker, a brilliant player, just not as brilliant as Tico. The fans knew that, the other players knew that, everyone in Brazil knew that. Everyone except Romário de Barros. Truth be told, he probably knew it as well, he just didn’t want to admit it. Had it not been for the Artist, Romário would have been Brazil’s greatest star. As it was, he ran a distant second. For most people, what Romário insisted on calling the “rivalry” between himself and Tico was no more than a joke.

  “Romário de Barros,” Silva said, “is a distinct possibility. We’ll look into it.”

  “I think you’re gonna be wasting your time,” Tico said.

  “Who cares about their time if it pisses Romário off?” Cintia said. “He’s caused you plenty of aggravation. It’s time you caused him some.” She yawned and looked at her gold Rolex. “How about you guys speed it up? It’s getting late.”

  Not very concerned about our future mother-in-law, are we? Silva thought.

  “And then,” he said, “we also have to consider the possibility that Senhora Santos’s abduction might have been an act of revenge.”

  “Revenge?” Tico said.

  “Revenge,” Silva said. “Do you know someone, anyone, who might want to punish you by kidnapping your mother?”

  Tico rubbed his chin. Then he shook his head. “I can’t think of anybody.”

  “How about Joãozinho Preto?” Arnaldo said.

  “Never,” Tico said. “He’d never—”

  “Who’s Joãozinho Preto?” Cintia said.

  All the men looked at her.

  “He was a striker for Palmeiras,” Silva said. “Tico broke his leg just before the national playoffs.”

  “I still feel bad about that, but it was an accident. Ask anybody. I never even got a yellow card.”

  “I don’t debate it. But the accident ruined Joãozinho’s career. He hasn’t played a day since.”

  “He never said a word against me,” Tico said, “not then, not since. It was the fans that made a big issue of it, not him. And that photo they took at the time shocked a lot of people. Hell, it even shocked me. But we all take our chances. Joãozinho understood that.”

  “So we can probably discount him. Nobody else you can think of?”

  “No.”

  “But they’re out there,” Cintia said. “You can count on that, querido, they’re out there. Lots of envious bastards who earn their pissy little hundred thousand Reais a year and are jealous of people like you and me.”

  She gave his hand a supporting squeeze. He shot her a grateful look.

  Arnaldo, whose annual salary, after almost thirty years as a federal cop, was considerably less than one hundred thousand Reais, started to cough.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Getting a cold.”

  “Maybe,” Cintia said, “you should go and get it somewhere else.”

  “Could it have been an act directed against the lady herself?” Silva asked. “Someone intent on hurting her?”

  “Impossible,” Cintia said. “There’s no one easier to get on with than my future mother-in-law. Everybody loves her, and she loves them right back.”

  Not everybody, Silva thought. Not her neighbors, not that postman she was seen talking to. And, if the lady was fond of you, it’s unlikely she’d have had a detective following you around.

  “Let’s talk about Senhora Santos’s house keys,” he said. “Did she give keys to people who worked in her home?”

  “Sure,” Tico said, “but she was always careful, always changed locks when she changed servants.”

  “How often was that?”

  Tico shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe three or four times a year?”

  “So she had a problem holding on to servants?”

  “She had a problem finding good ones,” Cintia said. “Everybody does. Why do you care about her keys?”

  “Just reviewing the possibilities.”

  “Wasting our time is the way I see it. They told us the kidnappers smashed her kitchen door. So where do keys come into it?”

  Silva was running out of patience with the woman.

  “I’m not wasting your time, Senhorita Tadesco. I have good reasons for my questions. Now, Tico, do you have any idea how many sets of keys your mother had?”

  “Four. She always got four.”

  “Four.”

  “Uh huh. One for herself, one for the servants, one for us, and an extra one to keep in the house in case someone lost one of the others.”

  “You have yours?”

  “Why?” Cintia said.

  “Senhorita Tadesco, please. Tico, may I see them?”

  “I gave them to you,” Tico said to Cintia.

  “No,” she said. “You didn’t.”

  “No? I coulda sworn—”

  “You didn’t.”

  “Then I got no idea where they are,” he said. “We never used the keys she gave us. We never had to. We only went out there when we knew she’d be home, and we always called before we went.”

  Silva took a card out of his wallet, jotted the number of his cell phone on the back and handed the card to Tico. “If you find those keys,” he said, “give me a call.”

  Tico took the card, looked at one side of it, then the other.

  “You think it’s important?” he asked.

  “It might be.”

  “Okay, then.”

  “The radio people, the ones at Radio Mundo,” Silva said, “knew about your mother’s kidnapping before we did. Any idea how that happened?”

  Cintia didn’t give Tico time to answer.

  “Her Royal Highness,” she said, “Princess Jacques Jardin.”
/>   “The hairdresser?”

  “Stylist, the little bicha calls himself. Stylist or coiffeur. He hates to be called a hairdresser. Juraci was late for an appointment. They couldn’t get her at home, so they tried here.”

  “And you were here to take the call?”

  “We forwarded calls to my cell phone.”

  “Dumbo won’t let me have one during training,” Tico said. “He thinks cell phones are a distraction.”

  Danilson “Dumbo” Hoffmann was the coach of the Brazilian national team. Nobody who saw his ears ever had to ask where the nickname came from.

  Cintia refused to be sidetracked. “Jardin keeps everybody waiting, but he doesn’t like to wait for anyone. You know how much he charges for a cut? Six hundred Reais, that’s how much, and he’s booked back-to-back. Missing a session with Jardin is like missing a private audience with the Pope. Except the Pope probably doesn’t go ballistic and Jardin does. If you’re ten minutes late, it’s like you insulted him. I did it once and now the little bastard refuses to give me any more appointments.”

  “Showing up late really gets his nose out of joint,” Tico said. “Even I know that.”

  “And Juraci knew that,” Cintia said. “I started to worry right away. I told Jardin’s secretary I’d check around and call her back. I was still trying to locate her, when the bitch called for a second time.”

  “How does this—” Silva started to say.

  Cintia interrupted him. “You wanted to know why I think Jardin tipped off the radio people. I was telling you. Do you want to hear it, or not?”

  “Please go on.”

  “So I was talking to this bitch of a secretary, and before I could get in a word edgewise, she started telling me how pissed off Jardin was and how, if Juraci didn’t have a really, really good reason for not showing up, she couldn’t be a client anymore. Jardin was going to give Juraci another fifteen minutes grace, she said, but only in deference to the fact that she was such a good client, and because he liked her. Two minutes after she hung up, Tico called me with the news that she’d been kidnapped.”

  “And how did you get that news?” Silva asked him.

  “The kid who runs the website,” Tico said. “He read the email, looked at the photo the kidnappers sent, the one of my Mom holding up the newspaper, and panicked. The note said not to contact the police, said they’d hurt her if I did.”

  “I remember.”

  “And, to tell you the truth, maybe I wouldn’t have gone to you guys at all if the story hadn’t come out on the radio.”

  “Understandable. Go on.”

  “The kid knew I was in Curitiba because it’s been all over the sports news, so he decided to try calling the training facility. They wouldn’t let him talk to me, at first. But then he told them what it was about, and they called me in from the field. They still thought it was some kind of hoax, but they didn’t want to run the risk that it wasn’t. And it wasn’t.”

  “Tico told me he was going to charter a plane and come to São Paulo,” Cintia said. “We agreed to meet here. Then, just after he hung up, the bitch called for a third time. And, to shut her up, I told her.”

  “You told Jacques Jardin’s secretary about the ransom note?”

  “What did I just say? I blurted it out. I was nervous. So what? It’s done. Jardin was probably talking to the media five minutes after his secretary hung up. He’s like that.”

  “Probably all for the best,” Silva said. “The kidnappers must know we’re involved by now, and they seem to have accepted that fact. Who does the website? A kid, you said?”

  “My agent’s kid,” Tico said.

  “That’s his job? Websites?”

  “Nah! He studies during the day, does the sites on the side, mostly at night. He does them for most of his old man’s clients. He does Cintia’s too.”

  “These days,” she said, “everybody has to have a website.”

  “I don’t have a website,” Arnaldo said.

  “Let me amend that,” she said. “Anybody of any importance has to have a website.”

  “Where did you spend last night?” Arnaldo said, his voice taking on an edge.

  “Me? What’s that got to do with anything?”

  Arnaldo gave Cintia his cop’s stare, perfected by almost three decades of facing down felons.

  “At home,” she said, buckling under it. “So?”

  “Alone?”

  “Of course, alone. I’ve got a part in a novela. I was learning my lines. What are you implying?”

  “I’m not implying anything,” Arnaldo said.

  But he was.

  Arnaldo Nunes had taken a distinct dislike to Cintia Tadesco.

  Chapter Eight

  JACQUES JARDIN HAD A French accent as round and thick as a great wheel of Camembert. Haraldo Gonçalves would undoubtedly accepted it as genuine—had he not discovered, before leaving the office, that Jardin did, indeed, have a rap sheet.

  Jardin, the records revealed, had acquired his current name at the age of twenty-seven. Until then, he’d been Giovanni Giordano, the youngest of nine children born to an Italian immigrant couple who’d settled in São Paulo’s middle-class bairro of Mooca.

  Jardin had never spent any appreciable amount of time in France. He had, however, spent a good deal of time in public toilets. It was the time in those public toilets that had given rise to the aforementioned rap sheet. It registered half a dozen arrests, and two convictions, for indecent exposure.

  When he’d first clapped eyes on the famous coiffeur, Gonçalves hadn’t been quite sure whether Jardin was using eyeliner, or whether he was permanently tattooed. Curiosity about what he was actually seeing had caused him to stare long and hard at Jardin’s eyes. Perhaps too long, and too hard. The stylist licked his thin lips, almost as if he could taste Gonçalves on his chops, and smoothed back his immaculately styled hair. The word preening came to mind.

  In the initial stages of their conversation Gonçalves learned little that the Federal Police didn’t already know. Revelations, however, began to surface when he touched on the subject of the Artist’s girlfriend, Cintia Tadesco.

  “I can well understand that you have an interest in her.” Jardin managed to insert another oval cigarette into his ivory holder without taking his eyes off Gonçalves. “The woman is a total bitch.”

  “A total bitch, eh?”

  Gonçalves had already learned that Jardin required only a minimum of prompting.

  “I don’t mean she’s just a gold-digger,” Jardin said. “God knows, I’ve known my share of gold-diggers. I don’t dismiss them as a category. Some of them actually give quite good value for money.”

  “Value for money?” Gonçalves echoed.

  Jardin’s lighter was a Dupont, in black lacquer and gold. It made a musical ding when he lit up.

  “Suppose,” he said, “that you’re old, and rich, and single. Divorced, maybe, or a widower. You’re lonely. You haven’t seen what a twenty- to thirty-year-old body looks like”—he took another puff, expelled the smoke and looked Haraldo up and down before going on—“for maybe the last quartercentury. Then along comes this nubile young thing who sells you on the idea that May-December relationships are all the rage. She tells you she loves you for yourself, not your money, or your status, or your fame. You believe it because you want to believe it. You say to yourself, hey, it’s not as impossible as I thought. It’s happened once or twice before. And now it’s happening to me.”

  “Uh huh. And then?”

  “And then you start bonking her, and she makes you feel like you’re the most virile man she’s ever met. You may have to swallow a handful of pills to get a hard-on, but when it’s up, it’s up, and it’s glorious. She admires it, kisses it, strokes it, runs her hand up and down the shaft, tells you you’re the first man who’s ever made her feel truly like a woman. So you start buying her expensive jewelry, and you set her up in a nice place of her own. Why not? You can afford it.” Jardin took another drag on hi
s cigarette. Gonçalves made no attempt to interrupt. “Then, if you’re really besotted, you might even marry her, marry her no matter what your family might be saying about her. If a friend opens his mouth, you’d sooner lose the friend than lose the girl.”

  “And you call that value for money? Estranging people from their friends and family?”

  “Estrangement occurs only if the friends and family are stupid enough to question the lady’s motives and start telling you things you don’t want to hear. And yes, it is value for money if the woman has a sweet nature, is grateful for what she’s being given and is willing to keep up her side of the bargain by hanging in there until you’re so senile you don’t recognize her anymore or dead, whichever comes first.”

  “You’re talking about an old man. That’s not the Artist’s case. He’s a young guy. It’s different.”

  “Different, is it? Have you ever met the Artist?”

  “No.”

  “Seen a photo then?”

  “Well, yes, but—”

  “But nothing. He’s ugly as sin and, stating it kindly, intellectually challenged. What he’s got going for him is the same thing that lots of old millionaires have going for them: fame and money. The only difference between him and them is they need their pills to get an erection.”

  “Don’t you think you’re being a bit cynical about this?”

  “Cynical? My Young Innocent, you have no idea how society works, or what real money can buy, do you?”

  “Let’s get back to Cintia, okay?”

  “Of course, dear boy, of course.”

  “Why do you think she’s a bitch?”

  “Two reasons. First, because I have personal knowledge of the woman. She used to be one of my clients. People say I struck her from my roster because she was late for an appointment. Not true. Between you and me, dear boy, that’s one of the excuses I use when I tire of someone’s company. Would you like a glass of sherry?”

  “Thank you, no.”

  “But you won’t mind if I have one, will you?”

  Without waiting for a reply, Jardin balanced his cigarette holder across a large, jade ashtray and stood up. He went to a cherry wood cabinet and took out a bottle. “You’re sure?”