“Which brings us back to Gloria’s question,” Lefkowitz said. “How far do you want them to go?”
“Take it out to five hundred kilometers beyond Riberão Preto.”
“As far as that?”
“For now. We might have to go even further.”
Lefkowitz turned to the radio, and Silva to Mara.
“Let’s try shaking something loose on the diamonds. How about we take another shot at jewelers, dealers in gemstones and receivers of stolen goods?”
“Receivers of stolen goods?” Mara said. “Good luck with that one.”
“Probably useless to ask, I agree, but maybe not. Even crooks hate the idea of us having our butts kicked by Argentina. They might feed us some anonymous tips.”
“You’ve got a point,” she said.
“I’m brimful of ideas,” Silva said. “That’s why I’m the boss.”
“And here I was,” Arnaldo said, “thinking you got the job just because you’re older than everyone else.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
THEY RIPPED OFF THE duct tape that covered Jordan Talafero’s mouth, pulled out the handkerchief and stuck a hose down his throat.
Toninho Feioso, the author of the hose idea, had heard, somewhere, that such a procedure, followed by turning on the water full-blast, could be particularly painful to the victim. He, therefore, decided to give it a try, because, in his opinion, Jordan Talafero was a canalha who deserved the very worst that he and Gaspar could dish out.
The result of the hose operation was gratifying. So gratifying, in fact, that Toninho was loathe to give it up. It took quite some cajoling on Gaspar’s part before he finally agreed to turn off the water and replace the handkerchief and the duct tape.
Toninho meant “little Tony”, but this was a misnomer. Little Tony was neither little nor named Tony. Some of his colleagues, Gaspar for one, knew that much, but no one claimed to know what his true name actually was. No one ever had the guts to ask.
Feioso meant “ugly,” which was entirely appropriate. Toninho Feioso was the ugliest of men, and he appeared even uglier when he was attacking your kneecaps with a ball peen hammer, as Jordan Talafero, after they’d finished with the hose, had occasion to find out.
“And this, you bastard, is for the guy downstairs,” Toninho informed Talafero, the statement eloquently punctuated by the crack of breaking bone and a muffled scream from beyond the duct tape.
Toninho, who wasn’t very smart, couldn’t remember the name of Miranda’s downstairs neighbor, which was Atilio Nabuco, and he didn’t care much about Nabuco anyway, but he had previously dedicated bones on other parts of Talafero’s anatomy to Miranda, his wife, and each of his kids. He was grasping for names since it appeared he was going to run out of them before he ran out of bones.
Gaspar would have liked a turn with that ball peen hammer, but he knew better than to interrupt Tony when he was exercising his professional skills.
Gaspar, therefore, confined himself to questions of the kind Talafero could respond to with movements of his head.
“I’m gonna ask you one more time,” he said, “did you, or did you not, plant that fucking bomb that killed the Captain?”
For the first time, Talafero nodded.
Gaspar took a step backward, looked at Tony and smiled. Then he turned back to Talafero.
“You shoulda come clean in the first place, admitted it right away, saved us all this trouble. Then you coulda been dead by now.”
Under normal circumstances, it wouldn’t have been much of a reward for honesty. But Talafero, at that moment, wanted nothing more than a quick bullet to his head.
Gaspar, however, wasn’t quite ready to give it to him. Some questions remained.
“There was something about diamonds,” he said. “The boss was gonna talk to the federal cops. You know anything about that?”
Talafero shook his head.
“And the Artist’s mother? You have anything to do with grabbing her?”
Again, Talafero shook his head.
Gaspar turned back to his colleague.
“Well, I guess that’s that.”
“Yeah,” Tony said, “that’s that.”
He took out his pistol.
“Hang on,” Gaspar said.
“What?”
“Lend me that hammer.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
TALAFERO’S BODY WAS FOUND on the street in front of what remained of Captain Miranda’s building.
Silva was watching the TV coverage and sipping a coffee when Hector joined him in the conference room.
“I just got off the phone with São Paulo homicide,” he said.
“And?”
“They fingerprinted Talafero’s corpse. We got a match.”
“To the fingerprint on that fragment of electrical tape?”
“Exactly.”
“That’s it then. Talafero killed Miranda.”
Hector waved a sheet of paper.
“Additional confirmation,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“The contents of a note found pinned to Talafero’s body.” Silva patted the pockets of his jacket.
“I left my glasses in your office.”
“I’ll read it. ‘This canalha killed the Captain. He didn’t have anything to do with the kidnapping of Juraci Santos.’”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“Must have been meant for us.”
“Must have been. But why would they bother?”
“Miranda wanted to help. My guess is they either honored his wishes, or feel the same way he did. For us, it doesn’t matter. What matters is we’ve got another dead end.”
“Appropriate choice of words.”
“Quite intentional.”
“The kidnappers have their diamonds. If they intend to release her, or kill her, wouldn’t they have done it by now?”
“Not necessarily. They’ll want to be sure about the worth of the stones, evaluate them before they take further action.”
“So what now?”
“I’m going to have another talk with our consultant, Professor Rosa. Call Arnaldo and ask him to order up a car.”
ROSA WAS waiting in the interrogation room. No handcuffs this time. He greeted them with a smile and a deep intake of breath, as if he was capturing a scent. “You bring with you the air of freedom.”
“All I agreed to do, Professor,” Silva said, “is to testify on your behalf. I don’t make the final decision, so don’t blame me if they don’t let you out of here.”
“You were the last impediment, Chief Inspector.”
“You’ve bribed all the members of that parole board? Is that what you’re implying?”
“Tut, tut, tut, Chief Inspector! You shock me. I’m not implying any such thing. Even if those sterling citizens were to accept bribes, where would I get the money?”
“More than half of the money you took from your victims was never found. You must have squirreled away a bundle.”
“Alas, if it were only true. In those, my halcyon days, I lived high off the hog. The best wine, luxury hotels, fine restaurants. I owned a Ferrari, you know, and a Porsche.”
“I know it very well. We confiscated both of them. But you could have done all you did, and bought all you bought, and still have a bundle left over.”
“Goodness, no, Chief Inspector. You have no idea how expensive luxuries are. But then, I wouldn’t expect you to, given your well-known incorruptibility. I admire you. I truly do.”
“You’re convinced you’re going to get out of here, aren’t you?”
“I am. And I shall go and sin no more. I’m reformed.”
“I daresay that, even after you’ve paid those people off, you’ll still have enough not to have to work ever again.”
With a gesture, Rosa dismissed the thought. “I’d work even if all of my needs were provided for. Most prisoners vegetate. Many retired people do the same. But I abhor idleness. That
’s why I’d like to work with you.”
“Not for the money? You don’t need it, is that it?”
“Money is always nice. But it’s the intellectual challenge that appeals to me. What brings you back this time?”
“The ransom has been paid.”
“Has it now? How did they arrange for delivery?”
“Carrier pigeons,” Silva said and went on to explain.
When he was done, Rosa pushed back from the table and applauded slowly. “Bravo,” he said. “A tour de force. I seem to have seriously underestimated the intelligence of those people.”
“Put your thinking cap on, Professor. I really need your help.”
“And I really want to give it, believe me I do. Here’s one thought: they would have known, even before they started, that this would be the high-profile kidnapping of the year, perhaps of the decade.”
“Yes. Go on.”
“They would have anticipated that Juraci’s face would make the front page of every newspaper in the country; they would have expected her kidnapping to be the lead story in every newscast. She’d be transformed from someone that almost no one recognized into someone that virtually everyone recognized. And it would have occurred within a matter of hours.”
“Which leads you to postulate … what?”
“It would have been inadvisable to take her far from the scene of her abduction. This neighborhood of Juraci’s, Granja Viana?”
“What about it?”
“What’s it like?”
“It’s not the country, but it’s not the city either. Semi-rural, the occasional horse farm, that sort of thing.”
“Then that’s where she is. They’re holding her in Granja Viana, or somewhere close to it. Think about it. Every hour, every minute that she was in transit would have augmented their risk. It wouldn’t matter if she was well concealed. It wouldn’t matter if she was sedated. Traffic accidents, documentation blitzes from the Policia Rodoviaria, things like that, can always interfere with the best laid plans. They would have wanted to get her into a place of security as quickly as possible. That place is unlikely to be one that’s recently rented or acquired. That attracts too much attention. People get curious about their new neighbors. It’s likely to be a place that the kidnappers have been visiting for some time, a place where they’ve achieved invisibility through familiarity. It would be best, too, if the place had some land around it, a garden, or a field, where they can bury her once they’re finished with her.”
“Makes sense. Other thoughts?”
“I assume your estimable Mara Carta is already looking into the bird angle?”
“She is. But she’s come up blank. Breeders, she tells us, sell them for between forty and sixty Reais each. Even at the lower price, sixty birds would have cost twenty-four hundred, a major purchase in that business. No breeder she’s spoken to, and she’s spoken to a lot of them, recalls making a sale of that magnitude. Ever. We’re extending our area of inquiry, but our current hypothesis is that the kidnappers have been doing their own breeding.”
“I’m not talking about acquiring the birds. The kidnappers would have expected you to try to track the birds back to their source. They would have done everything they could to prevent you from doing so.”
“What are you talking about then?”
“Alternative profiles for the people who came up with the idea of using carrier pigeons.”
“Such as?”
“An ex-convict, for example. Such birds are used in places like this, you know.”
“We know,” Arnaldo said.
“Or someone who might have read about carrier pigeons in a newspaper, or seen a documentary on television.”
“Which would lead us nowhere.”
“Not necessarily.”
“How so?”
“Turn it around. Mara and her people can, quite quickly, do a media search. If they discover that there hasn’t been a television program or an article in a consumer publication in the course of the last six months, what would that suggest?”
“That the kidnappers didn’t get their information from one of those sources.”
“Exactly. If the people who used those carrier pigeons didn’t get the idea from a prison experience, or by talking to ex-convicts, or from the media, where did they get the idea from? That could narrow the search considerably. Maybe, just maybe, this brilliant idea of theirs, the idea to use carrier pigeons, wasn’t so brilliant after all.”
Silva stroked his chin. “My gut feeling,” he said, “is that they wouldn’t make a mistake that elementary. It’s likely the brilliance remains.”
“Perhaps. But my core argument stands. If I were you, I’d be looking for people who keep, or know someone who keeps, carrier pigeons, who had access to a key that would get them into Juraci Santos’s house, and who have a hideout in or near Granja Viana.”
“You make it sound simple, Professor.”
“I’m not saying it’s simple. But when you get to the end of it, you’ll find someone there who fulfills all three of those characteristics. I guarantee it.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
ONE OF THE PRIME requisites in Nelson Sampaio’s former profession, corporate law, was obfuscation. Sampaio was an expert at it, and he quickly recognized it in others.
He was recognizing it right now, seventeen minutes into the briefing he’d requested on the Santos case.
“Let’s cut right through the crap,” he said, looking around the table. “You people don’t know where the birds came from, you don’t know where they went, the diamonds are gone, and you’ve got no line on where Juraci Santos might be. You’ve got zip.”
“I think that’s a fair summary, Director,” Silva said.
The director snorted. “What about that postman? You interrogate him?”
“We did. It led nowhere.”
Sampaio referred to his notes, raised his head to lock eyes with Silva.
“You think Jordan Talafero had anything to do with it?”
“We did once. Not anymore.”
“That bicheiro? Captain Miranda?”
“No.”
“Cintia Tadesco?”
“It’s possible.”
Sampaio made some check marks on the yellow legal pad in front of him. The tip of his pencil slid further down the page.
“And that ex-agent of hers, whatshisname?”
“Tarso Mello.”
“Yeah, him.”
“Also a possible suspect.”
“You interview Juraci’s former servants? The ones she had before the two who got shot?”
“We did,” Mara said. “We went back two years. We’re satisfied they’re all clean.”
“How about professional enemies? People like Joãozinho Preto? The Artist broke his leg. That must have pissed him off.”
“Joãozinho’s mother is Italian. She got him a passport, and he bought himself a villa in Tuscany. He’s been living there for six months.”
More check marks.
“And that other striker? Whatshisname? The guy who’s convinced himself he’s as good as the Artist is?”
“Romário de Barros?”
“Yeah, him. If the Artist is out of the picture, he’s the logical replacement, right?”
“Right.”
Sampaio drew a circle around something. Then he put a big asterisk right next to it.
“Well there you go. That gives him a motive. Without the Artist, bingo, Romário is the star of the Cup.”
“The Argentineans have got Dieguito Falabella,” Arnaldo said. “Dieguito can run circles around Romário de Barros.”
Sampaio refused to be sidetracked.
“You didn’t talk to him, did you?”
“We didn’t think it was necessary,” Mara said.
Sampaio turned on her. “Why the hell not?”
Mara stood her ground. “Every year at this time, Romário earns a bundle doing a football clinic for rich kids. He was in Campos do Jordão, doing just th
at, on the night of the kidnapping. He’s got more than a hundred witnesses to prove it.”
“He could have hired someone else to do it. Talk to him anyway.”
Mara nodded and made a note.
Sampaio turned back to Silva.
“Did you consult with Godofredo?”
“No.”
“Why not? As I recall, I instructed you to do so.”
“You did, Director, but I haven’t had the time.”
Sampaio stabbed his pencil in Silva’s direction.
“But you had plenty of time to talk to that felon, Rosa, right?”
“We talked to him, yes.”
Sampaio dropped his pencil and held out his hands, palms upward.
“And?”
Silva told him about Rosa’s conclusions.
Sampaio shook his head. “Rosa’s all wet. You’re wasting your time with that guy.”
“I don’t think so, Director.”
“But I do. And the last time I heard, I’m running this shop.” He picked up his pencil. “Let’s go over this again step by step.” He reversed the pencil and tapped the eraser three times on the table. “Answer me yes or no. Lefkowitz thinks the kidnappers had a key to Juraci’s house, correct?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re inclined to agree with him?”
“Yes.”
“Three sets of keys were found in the house?”
“Yes.”
“Both the locksmith and the Artist confirm that Juraci ordered four?”
“Yes.”
“The fourth set was with the Artist and his girlfriend.”
“Yes.”
“But it seems to have gone missing for a while and then mysteriously turned up?”
“Not so mysteriously. The Artist—”
The director waved his pencil. “All right. All right. Strike the word mysteriously. The fourth set went missing and later turned up. Yes or no?”
“Yes.”
Sampaio leaned forward, a sign he was coming to the end of his peroration.
“And it’s obvious the Artist wouldn’t kidnap his own mother.”
“Yes.”
“And, therefore,” Sampaio said, with a smile of triumph, “his girlfriend, Cintia Tadesco must be involved.”
A Vine in the Blood Page 20
