“Well, believe it, babe. The proof is right here in my pocket.”
And, in a deliberately slow and dramatic gesture, Max drew an envelope covered in blue plastic from his jacket pocket. He carefully unfolded the plastic, removed the letter from inside the envelope, and slid it across the table.
Rose read it a few times, without touching the paper. There was no doubt about it. The letter was from Ricardo; she knew that handwriting better than her own. What made her reread it several times was the content. She knew how sly Ricardo was, but she never thought he’d be capable of pulling off a stunt like this. Negotiating with the police, even after he was dead, sure of coming out a winner: she couldn’t help feeling a certain pride.
“And what about the twenty thousand dollars?” she asked.
“It’s all true. I’ve got the money,” Max answered, and then went on: “Do you understand what’s happening? We’re not doing anything wrong. The money was for whoever made off with the gun. It just so happens that I showed up before the police got there. I did exactly what he wanted. I have a right to that money.”
“Yeah, but the money was to hide the suicide, and now you want it plus the insurance money. If we do that, we’re betraying Dr. Ricardo.”
“Honey, we’re not going to publicize the suicide. We’re just gonna cut a deal with the widow. Besides us, no one is going to know anything, unless the wife doesn’t come around.”
“I don’t think she will if she can’t see the letter,” Rose said.
“Fine. We’ll make a copy and show it to her.”
Rose knew her next steps would be decisive. She asked him to put the letter back in the envelope and sat for a few seconds staring at her glass, thoughtful. Finally, she whispered, looking into his eyes:
“Max, I believe you. I believed you when you called and I believe you even more now. I’ve never done anything like this and I don’t feel like I’m doing anything wrong. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life as a secretary in that company. With that money I could buy myself an apartment. I live with my mother in a rental. I could open a business, a little shop … but only if Dona Bia agrees. I can see her letting go of all that money, just so she doesn’t have to share it with us.”
“But she can’t be that stupid,” said Max, outraged.
“It’s not stupidity, it’s pride. You don’t know her. Money’s not a problem for her. She’s the only child of a rich father. As incredible as it may seem, a million dollars is going to make her richer, but it’s not going to change her life. I think the only thing that could bring her around is if she was convinced that her husband killed himself. Every woman is responsive to that. We just don’t know how she’ll react. She could get mad or feel guilty, and both could work in our favor.”
Max was intoxicated. It was like the words were perfumed. Finally, he’d found a partner. Pretty, smart, obedient, and needy. There was no reason not to trust her. He was thinking what a lucky guy he was when Rose spoke up.
“We need to make a copy of the letter—we can’t take the chance of handing over the original to Dona Beatriz.”
“I could do that in the morning,” answered Max.
“Yeah, but there’s one thing that worries me. The clerk in the copy shop makes the copy, and they usually glance at the document to make sure it can be copied. On this letter, the capital letters to the police at the top of the page would definitely attract their attention. We can’t take that risk.”
Max’s look suggested he was out of his depth.
“If you want,” Rose went on, “I have my own copier in my office at Planalto Minerações. I’m the only one who uses it, and no one will see anything. But you’ll have to leave the letter with me at least until my lunch hour tomorrow. You know where I work and I can give you my address, which you can verify right now by calling my house. My mother can’t sleep until I come home.”
“I don’t doubt you,” said Max.
“But you should. You just met me, you don’t know who I am or what I might do.”
“I don’t need to know anything else.” There was a touch of pride in Max’s voice. “In my line of work, I have to know immediately what kind of person I’m dealing with—a wimp, a bully, someone who’s going to shut up or someone who’s going to run screaming down the street. And I’ve never once been wrong. You aren’t a swindler. Besides, as you yourself said, I know where you work—”
“And where I live,” she added, taking a napkin and jotting down her address and phone number on it.
Max folded the paper and put it in his jacket pocket without reading it. He was much more interested in the real woman sitting in front of him than in addresses, references, or guarantees. Things were going a lot better than he had planned or even imagined. The starry night, the perfect temperature, the Biblioteca Nacional and the Teatro Municipal all lit up—everything made Cinelândia the ideal setting for a tale that, in Max’s mind, was only just beginning. A new life.
Rose was afraid everything was moving too fast. The guy shouldn’t be so trusting—his excessive optimism and trust could turn on her in a matter of seconds. She tried to change the subject; it wouldn’t do to look too interested in the letter. She asked about Max himself—what was his story?
Max thought everything was going along just fine until she decided to ask about his life. What the hell did that have to do with anything? What did she want to know? That he lived in the maid’s room in his sister’s house in Méier? That his main occupation was holding up women in parking lots? That he was such a pussy that if any woman ever screamed he’d bail the fuck out of there as fast as he could? What did she want to know? Why did women always want to know everyone’s life story? He winced.
Rose saw it. Better keep the conversation strictly business—no personal questions except what she absolutely had to know. On the other hand, she couldn’t ignore his obvious interest in her, plan or no plan. The trick was to mix the two ingredients in exact proportions. She didn’t have the whole night, either, unless Max was thinking they’d end up in bed together, which would be rushing things, a tactical error. She didn’t know anything about him. He must be between thirty-five and thirty-eight—no older. Good-looking, good body, but an attentive eye could tell that life hadn’t dealt him a very good hand. His clothes were tacky, his hands were delicate but badly cared for, and his slightly low-class accent got worse when he was irritated. The only thing he kept contained were his gestures. What was he doing in the parking garage if he didn’t have a car? Rose tried to paint herself as complete a picture as possible with the few things she knew about him. It was puzzling: even with Max right in front of her, she couldn’t get a take on him. He was a strange mixture of good looks and bad form.
He soon forgot his irritation with her personal questions. Max was studying Rose’s face as if it were a beautiful inanimate object—until he noticed that he himself was being studied by that same face. He was surprised. While he was looking, he’d lost himself completely in the act; he’d melted away. Rose’s attention gave him back his own body and self. He felt good, without knowing why. He took the envelope out of his pocket and handed it over to her.
“I’ll wait for you tomorrow, at your lunch hour, on the corner of Rua do Ouvidor and Avenida Rio Branco.”
He gestured to the waiter, paid the bill, got up, waited for Rose to put the envelope in the bottom of her purse, and, taking her arm, said:
“We can get the subway right here—I’ll take you home.”
They rode home in silence. To make up for the awkwardness and distract him from thinking about the letter, Rose let their bodies touch a little when the train shifted. At ten-thirty, she walked into her building. They said good night in the lobby. Then she got in the elevator, pushed a button at random, waited for the automatic light in the corridor to go off, went up, went back down, and waited awhile in the dark, until she was sure that Max had really gone away. Just after eleven-thirty a taxi dropped her off at the Hotel Novo Mundo.
5
Max got to the corner of Rua do Ouvidor and Avenida Rio Branco before noon. He’d forgotten to ask Rose what time she ate lunch, and he’d also forgotten to ask which of the four corners they were going to meet at: the intersection was one of downtown’s busiest. He chose the corner closest to the Planalto Minerações building. In spite of the hour, the temperature was pleasant; the sky was cloudy but it wasn’t raining.
Max turned his eyes in the direction of Planalto Minerações. Every woman who surfaced on his visual horizon held a promise of Rose. Surely she’d talked the widow into it. She’d have to be an idiot not to accept—nobody throws away a third of a million dollars. If she put up much resistance, he’d naturally agree to give her half and divide the other half between himself and Rose. He was reasonable. After all, she was the beneficiary. Meanwhile he’d better keep an eye on the other corners—Rose could be coming from a different direction. He was, though, pretty visible: she wouldn’t have a hard time finding him. He decided to relax and look at the newspapers and magazines in the corner kiosk. There was a big open map of the city. Twelve-thirty. He was early.
It was one of the busiest hours of the day for cars and pedestrians. Every time the light changed, a terrifying quantity of people accumulated on the curb, waiting to cross the street. Max disappeared, swallowed up by the crowd. At times like that, Rose could miss him. Better back off the corner a little bit. They should have planned to meet at the entrance of her building: they would risk being spotted but couldn’t miss each other. She’d probably decided to wait for everyone else to go to lunch so she could make a copy without being seen. One-ten. Maybe something had happened. And what if the police had decided to interview her right then? Better to call and make sure everything was okay; but to do that he’d have to move from the meeting place. No reason to worry—one-twenty—lunch went till two.
He thought about the events following the scene in the parking garage. Everything had been completely unexpected: the suicide, the twenty thousand dollars, the note, the dead man’s certainty that his request would be honored, the value of the policy, Rose. Most impressive was the note. Everything led him to believe that the businessman had no doubt that he’d be taken care of. True, he’d been wrong about who would take care of it, but the result was the same. The note was the key that opened the insurance company’s vault.
It was only as he was considering these facts that it occurred to Max that they could negotiate directly with the insurance company. If he and Rose had to give up the widow’s part, why not deal directly with the insurance people? He and Rose would get the same amount, with the advantage of not having to count on the widow. The company could keep her 50 percent and they would get the other 50 percent, without getting her involved. Fantastic. He needed to talk to Rose right away.
Quarter to two. Something must have happened. On the corner diagonally across from his was a phone. He could call without abandoning his post. He’d copied the Planalto Minerações phone and fax numbers onto a piece of paper; it wasn’t such a good idea to walk around with Ricardo Carvalho’s card on him. He decided to wait till two. During the last fifteen minutes he mistook several women for Rose. He realized that he’d only been with her once, that women can change their appearance completely from one day to the next: all she’d have to do was change her hair, her clothes, her makeup, add sunglasses, and—a new woman. But there was no reason Rose would do that. Or was there? He crossed Avenida Rio Branco diagonally, before the cars had completely stopped. On the curb, a kid was selling phone cards. When he got the piece of paper out of his pocket, his hand was sweating.
“Good afternoon, Planalto Minerações.”
“I’d like to speak to Rose, Dr. Ricardo’s secretary.”
“Rose didn’t come in today, could I take a message?”
“ …”
“Hello, are you there? Would you like to leave a message, sir?”
“ …”
Max’s vision grew blurred and he felt the blood drain from his head. He wasn’t afraid of fainting: his legs were firm and the hand holding on to the telephone was as strong as pincers. The emptiness he felt was not a lack of blood but a lack of ideas. He couldn’t think. All he could do was hang up the phone.
She could have gotten sick! Of course! That was it. He took the phone off the hook again and turned over the piece of paper; there he’d written Rose’s home number. The voice on the other end was weak and trembling but answered on the first ring.
“I’d like to speak with Rose, please.”
“Who’s calling?”
“A friend. Please, it’s urgent. Is she sick?”
“Rose didn’t come home last night…. I don’t know what happened to her,” the lady responded, obviously shaking. “Who are you?” she repeated.
“I’m a friend,” he said without much conviction. “I dropped her off last night, I saw her go in.”
“I’ve never heard your voice. You can’t be telling the truth. Rose went to work yesterday morning and hasn’t come back home since.”
Max couldn’t believe his ears. He now wasn’t sure if Rose was Rose or, at least, if he and the lady were talking about the same Rose. He checked the address. It was the same place he’d dropped her off. Well, what if the woman he’d met had taken Rose’s name, address, and phone number, but wasn’t Rose? The thought seemed absurd. Hadn’t he called Planalto Minerações first and asked for Rose? And hadn’t she answered? And what if the other secretary, when she heard a man’s voice, had decided to play around and when push came to shove couldn’t take it back? Because of what was at stake, some people could even have killed Rose to temporarily take her place. It was a fact: the woman he’d been with the night before had taken the dead man’s note, the only possible key to the million-dollar vault. He was still holding the phone in his hand, a little bit out of it, but not enough to avoid hearing the woman’s voice on the line. He hung up.
He stood in front of the phone, gaping like an idiot, staring fixedly inside the phone booth. A voice behind him asked:
“Are you done?”
He realized that it had started to drizzle; his face was wet. He had completely lost his sense of direction. He felt his head empty again and thought he was about to faint. He leaned on a pole and waited for the feeling to pass. Even without seeing himself, he knew he was as white as a sheet. As soon as he felt better, he went into the Empregados do Comércio shopping center. In the middle was a good café. He ordered a big cup of coffee and ended up drinking another as well.
The café restored him to his normal state of agitation. He went back to Avenida Rio Branco and started walking toward Flamengo Beach. He was totally disoriented and didn’t care where he was going. He walked without noticing people, without looking out for cars, without worrying about the soft rain that was still falling. As he walked through Cinelândia, he glanced at the bar where, the night before, he had sat with Rose, making plans and dreaming about the future. What made him feel like a total imbecile was the fact that he had included in that future the young woman he’d found so docile, meek, obedient. “Imbecile! Moron! Retard!” he said out loud. At the end of the avenue, he found the easiest place to cross over the several lanes of traffic and got to the Monumento aos Pracinhas in Flamengo Park. He didn’t want to go anywhere; he just wanted to walk. He walked around the monument, crossed the paths in the park, and came to the stone wall of the Glória Yacht Club. He walked along the wall, a few feet from the boats anchored there. Many had foreign names; on some of them he couldn’t tell if they were names of places or people. Maria Candelária, Vagabond, Bruma Seca, Rosa do Prado (this one discomfited him a little), Casablanca (sounded like a movie), Tokay (suggestive of the Orient), Dona Dinorá. Why would anyone name a sailboat Dona Dinorá? Maybe it was the name of the beloved, but then it’d be just Dinorá; or it could be someone close, a mother, grandmother, girlfriend … and then it’d still be Dinorá. Dona Dinorá sounded like the name of the boss’s wife. He continued walking alongside the
wall, past the club, and ended up on Flamengo Beach, deserted on a rainy afternoon.
He walked across the stretch of sand and wandered almost a mile along the water’s edge. Finally, he sat in the sand in front of the Sugarloaf. Until this point, he’d just been letting his ideas flow, but now he needed to figure some things out. One thing was for sure: the secretary had pulled a fast one. With that nice-girl face, she’d set up the whole thing and dropped him. She’d had everything in place by the time she’d met him. And the moron had acted like such a genius. It was clear to him that after his second phone call to Planalto Minerações she had been in charge. Max went over every moment of the conversation they’d had the night before, remembering Rose’s every gesture, her meek gaze, more interested in him than in the money. He started to sob convulsively, more out of anger than sadness. He cried until he was exhausted. He was less than two hundred meters from the Hotel Novo Mundo.
6
A whole week had passed uneventfully. No sign of Rose. No indication whether she was dead or alive. The suspects in the murder of the businessman weren’t really suspects, for the simple fact that none of them had any motive. A kidnapping attempt was a very remote possibility. And any robbery, if there’d been one, was nothing more than sheer opportunism. It was Monday morning in the Praça Mauá station, and Espinosa’s soul was not very radiant.
“Espinosa, phone,” shouted someone who didn’t feel much better than he did.
“Inspector Espinosa?”
“Dona Bia, how have you been?” he answered, immediately recognizing the voice.
“You’ve got a good ear, Inspector.”
“And you have a lovely voice.”
“Thanks…. Inspector, there are a couple of things I thought I should tell you—I don’t know if they’re important, but they seem interesting.”
“Would you like me to come over?” he asked hopefully.
“No, don’t bother. It’s not much and I can tell you over the phone, unless you’re really busy now.”
The Silence of the Rain Page 9
