Dying Gasp

by Leighton Gage

  “Enough,” Silva said.

  Hector reached out and pressed a button, stopping the DVD at almost exactly the same point where Marnix Gans, the Dutch postal inspector, had sprung to his feet and gone running into his bathroom to vomit.

  “Fuck,” Arnaldo said unsteadily, his usual sarcasm momentarily suspended. “You hear that? The person calling the shots, the one behind the camera, was a woman.”

  “I heard it,” Silva said.

  “She’s some sick human being. She reminds me of—”

  Silva said it for him. “Claudia Andrade.”

  NELSON SAMPAIO, Silva’s boss, did not believe in sharing glory for success or in taking blame for defeat. When there were victories, they were always his victories. When there were debacles, he always looked for a scapegoat.

  One such debacle was a famous case involving a team of rogue physicians who specialized in the transplantation of vital organs. Doutora Claudia Andrade and her associates were often able to prolong and increase the quality of life in patients wealthy enough to pay for the privilege. In that there was nothing amiss.

  What was amiss was their source of organs. They harvested them from living, breathing human beings. Scores of innocent people had been murdered in the process.

  And, in the end, Claudia Andrade had gotten clean away.

  In an exclusive interview in the Folha de São Paulo, Sampaio spun it this way: it wasn’t the federal police who’d failed to apprehend her. No. It was one man: Mario Silva. He’d been in overall charge of the case, had been given all of the resources of the state to back him up and had failed miserably. If it hadn’t been for Silva’s ineptitude, the psychopathic lady doctor would never have been able to escape incarceration and judgment. Silva’s actions clearly required a review, and Sampaio, for one, would welcome an investigation by an independent body.

  The day after Sampaio’s comments appeared, droves of reporters descended on Silva’s office. He fled down a back stairway, but others were waiting for him at home, milling around in the basement parking lot, clustered in front of the building, packing the hallway in front of his apartment. By the time he’d elbowed his way through the throng and reached his front door, all three groups had joined together into an insistent, jostling mob, shouting questions and demanding explanations.

  A particularly strident young brunette—Silva took her for a newspaper reporter or someone from a radio station, because she was casually dressed in hip-hugging yellow jeans—inserted a sandal-clad shoe between his front door and the jamb and told him she was going to keep it there until he answered her questions.

  Silva asked her to remove it. When she didn’t, he brought down the sole of his shoe on her exposed toes, not hard enough to break anything, but with sufficient force to discourage her. With a screech of pain and an expletive her mother never taught her, the brunette pulled back her foot. Before a hardier soul could take her place, Silva slammed the door, locked it and went to look for Irene.

  He found her curled up on the sofa, breathing heavily, although it wasn’t quite four in the afternoon. An attack on the man she loved, her only anchor, was all it took to get her to break her five o’clock rule, but it took a great deal of drinking to render her unconscious. She must have been at it since early morning.

  Later, after he’d tucked her into bed, he found the copy of the Folha, crumpled and folded back to the op-ed page. She’d stuffed it into the garbage compactor next to the kitchen sink. The cartoon was the first thing that caught his eye. It showed Claudia Andrade as a bird of prey, flying off into the sunset with a human heart in her beak. Down below, hanging out of a tiny, ineffectual paddy wagon, were the Keystone Kops, wearing tall hats, blowing whistles, waving billy clubs. The sergeant leading the Kops bore a striking resemblance to Silva. The accompanying editorial went on to excoriate him and those who served under him. It didn’t seem to matter that the organ-theft ring had been broken up and that all of the other members, save only Claudia, were either imprisoned or dead. What mattered, apparently, was that Doutora Claudia Andrade, one of the cardiovascular surgeons who’d plucked hearts from the healthy and poor to transplant them into the critically ill and rich, was still at large.

  Physically, Claudia was an attractive woman. The photograph that circulated in the press had been shot head-on, foreshortening her rather prominent nose and thereby enhancing her features. Press and public alike were intrigued by the fact that someone who looked like that could have been directly responsible for killing tens, maybe hundreds, of innocents.

  Silva survived the attack, and the ensuing independent inquiry, only by a stroke of luck: a string of call girls serving a group of prominent politicians made for even juicier news. The pack of journalists that had been hounding Silva went off to sniff and bark elsewhere. Fortunately, the gentlemen of the board of inquiry were no friends of Nelson Sampaio. Freed from the necessity of pillorying someone whom the director disliked, they closed their sessions without issuing a reprimand.

  The relationship between Silva and his boss suffered, but both were practical men. It helped, too, that the Chief inspector had never had any illusions about his boss in the first place, so there was nothing for him to be disappointed about. In time, scar tissue formed over Silva’s wounds.

  But not Irene’s.

  “You have to catch her, Mario.”

  In the year and a half that followed, she’d say it at least once a week. Irene didn’t believe that her husband’s honor could be vindicated until Claudia Andrade was behind bars, or dead.

  From time to time, Silva would take out the photo he carried in his wallet. The image, lifted from her driver’s license application, showed Claudia smiling at the camera, a picture of innocence, displaying not a trace of the dark soul that nestled within.

  He’d stared at that photo so often, showed it to so many people, that he could have made a sketch of her from memory, accurate down to the little mole on her left cheek.

  But that was all he had, a photo and bitter memories. Of the woman herself, there hadn’t been a single trace. She seemed to have vanished into thin air.

  “CLAUDIA ANDRADE,” Arnaldo repeated, still staring at the empty screen. “You think it’s her?”

  “Maybe not,” Silva said, “Maybe it’s just wishful thinking on my part. We still have a score to settle between us.”

  “And me,” Arnaldo said. “I’ll never forget waking up on that table of hers.”

  Claudia had nearly succeeded in making Arnaldo Nunes her final victim prior to disappearing.

  Hector said, “I have to ask myself how many women like Claudia this country could produce in a generation.”

  “Damned few,” Silva said. “Maybe only one, but let’s not get our hopes up. Not just yet.” He turned to Arnaldo. “When can we expect some answers from those Internet people?”

  “Got the list right here,” Arnaldo said, pulling a paper from his pocket. On it were the E-mail addresses obtained by the Dutch police, typewritten and in alphabetical order. Each was followed by a handwritten annotation.

  Silva started reading at the top, running his finger down as he went.

  On the eighth line his finger stopped.

  He raised both eyebrows.

  “I’ll be damned,” he said.

  AT A quarter past seven that evening, the telephone in Silva’s office rang. Camila, his secretary, was long gone. Ditto Hector, probably already sleeping in Silva’s apartment. Silva was in the washroom at the end of the hall. Arnaldo picked up the receiver.

  “Pronto.”

  “Mario Silva?” a no-nonsense female voice said.

  “Not here,” Arnaldo said. “Who wants him?”

  “This is Deputado Malan’s office.”

  “Wow,” he said, “a talking office. Do you have brother and sister offices? Are your parents buildings?”

  There was a short pause while she digested the attempt at humor.

  “Who’s this?” Now she sounded bitchy.

  “Nunes. I
work with Silva.”

  “Nunes,” she said, as if she was making a note of it. “Inspector Nunes?”

  “Agente Nunes.”

  “Ah. Agente Nunes.”

  An office, particularly the all-important Deputado Malan’s office, didn’t have to be polite to a mere agente, and when next she spoke, she wasn’t.

  “Get in touch with the chief inspector,” she snapped, “and tell him he’s to be here tomorrow morning at ten. Suite four-forty-one, Congressional Office Building,” the woman said, and hung up.

  No sense of humor at all.

  SILVA WAS ten minutes late.

  Malan’s secretary had a sharp chin and a long nose, and she wore no wedding ring. She looked to be in her midfifties.

  When Silva gave his name she looked pointedly at her watch.

  “Didn’t that Nunes person inform you that your appointment was for ten?”

  Silva admitted that the Nunes person had told him exactly that. He didn’t try to explain that he’d been trapped in traffic for almost an hour. The first city in the world designed for the automobile, the city that had once boasted the complete absence of traffic lights, had become a vehicular chaos just like all the other major cities in the country. Knowing that, Silva had allowed a full hour to cover eight kilometers. But that morning a demonstration in front of the Ministry of Agriculture, one that included about a hundred and fifty farmers on tractors, had introduced a further complication into the gridlock.

  The woman pursed her thin lips, stared at him over a pair of steel-rimmed reading glasses, and waited for him to apologize.

  Silva didn’t. He figured she was going to make him wait anyway.

  She did. For nearly an hour.

  DEPUTADO MALAN’S inner office was decorated partly in nineteenth-century French colonial and partly in twenty-first-century Brazilian egomaniac. There were photos of the deputado with every recent President of the Republic, there were trophies for raising prize livestock, there were honorary degrees and diplomas, there was a glass-topped case full of medallions. The office reminded Silva of the one his boss had boasted before turning to the One True Religion for spiritual sustenance and votes.

  The deputado motioned Silva to a chair, one of normal height this time, but the deputado’s head was still higher than his guest’s. Malan’s desk stood on a little platform.

  The deputado shuffled through the clutter on his desk, found the photos he was looking for, and handed one to Silva.

  “Marta,” he said.

  A brown-haired girl in pigtails—not ugly, but sullen— stared at the camera as if it was an enemy. She appeared to be about twelve.

  “You said she was fifteen,” Silva said. “She doesn’t look it.”

  Malan scowled.

  “Take this one then,” he said, handing Silva another. “It’s more recent.”

  The second photograph showed the same girl, now looking her age. She was no longer in pigtails and had her arm around another girl, who appeared to be two or three years older. Both were smiling. When Silva saw the face of the girl next to Marta, he took in a sharp breath.

  “What’s the matter?” the deputado said.

  “Nothing. Who’s her friend?” he said.

  “I’m only interested in Marta. If you need to show that photo around, have it cropped.”

  Silva repeated the question, keeping his inflection exactly the same, acting as if Malan might not have heard him the first time.

  “Who’s her friend?”

  The deputado fidgeted and finally spit it out. “Her name is Andrea de Castro. She’s a fucking bull dyke.”

  “A lesbian?”

  “What did I just say?”

  “They were lovers, Marta and Andrea?”

  “My son caught them at it, rolling around in Marta’s bed, right there in his own house. He threw the dike out and gave Marta the beating of her life.”

  “And then?”

  “And then he locked her in her room.” The deputado snorted. “She had some tools in there, screwdrivers and chisels. She was always fucking around with stuff like that, doing boy things instead of playing with dolls. She managed to get the hinges off the door. When her parents got up the next day, she was gone.”

  “I see.”

  “I doubt that you do. Let me spell it out for you: I’m a Northeasterner. Where I come from, men are men, and women are supposed to be women. If my political enemies found out about this, they’d have a field day.”

  “I know how to be discreet, Deputado.”

  “See that you are. No need to bother my son or daughter-in-law with this. You got any questions, you come back to me. That’s all I have to say. Go to it. On your way out, tell Maria to send in the next visitor.”

  Silva stood.

  “Just one more thing, Deputado. What can you tell me about this girl, Andrea?”

  “She’s missing too. Maybe they’re together, maybe not. The cops in Recife have no idea what happened to her.”

  But Silva did. He knew exactly what had happened to her. Andrea de Castro had been raped, strangled, and decapitated with an ax.

  Chapter Eleven

  “SO WHAT DID YOU do then?” the director asked.

  “Nothing,” Silva said. “I left.”

  Outside, a tropical downpour was lashing the windows. Lights in the offices of the Ministry of Culture, just discernible through the curtain of rain, were little flags of cheer punctuating the gloom.

  But there was no cheer in Sampaio’s office. A single desk lamp with a green metal shade was the only source of illumination. The light pooled in a yellow circle on the uncluttered desk.

  “You just left? You didn’t tell the deputado that his granddaughter’s girlfriend was the star of a what-did-you-call-it?”

  “A snuff video.”

  “You didn’t tell him that?”

  “No, Director, I didn’t.”

  “In the name of heaven, why not?”

  “I don’t want to go public at this point. It could drive the people who did it even further underground.”

  “Informing the deputado isn’t exactly ‘going public.’”

  “I beg to differ with you, Director. He’d be bound to tell someone, his son and his daughter-in-law at least, and they’d tell someone else, and the next thing we know it’ll be all over the media.”

  “So what? The girl’s dead already.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Explain.”

  “The Dutch have thirteen videos made by the same woman. They have a tape recording of a telephone conversation where she declares her intention to make more. But, right now, she doesn’t have a supplier. Her most recent work, according to one of the men apprehended by the Dutch police, is the one of Andrea being beheaded. Andrea and Marta disappeared at the same time.”

  “So you think there’s a possibility they haven’t gotten around to Marta yet?” The director looked doubtful.

  “A slim possibility,” Silva admitted, “but still a possibility. And if they haven’t, and if her abductors discover we’re pulling out all the stops to find her, they’ll kill her at once.”

  “Uma queima de arquivo,” Sampaio said, knowingly. Literally, burning of the files, this was cop slang for the destruction of evidence. Sampaio loved to talk the talk.

  “I am right. And Director . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “It would be best if you didn’t mention this to anyone.”

  The light was too dim for Silva to be certain, but he thought he saw Sampaio flush.

  “Of course not,” the director snapped. “It never crossed my mind. What’s your next step?”

  “Now that we have the murdered girl’s name, and a photo to go with it, we’ll be able to track down her parents. They’ll be listed on the forms she filled in to get her national identity card. She didn’t look to be any more than twenty when she was killed, so the odds are she didn’t have the card very long. With luck, she was living with her parents when she got it, and with
luck, they’ll still be at the same address.”

  “And when you find them?”

  “Depending on the way they dealt with their daughter’s homosexuality, they may have maintained contact with her and might have something to contribute.”

  “All right. What else?”

  “We have some enhanced frame blowups of the man who killed Andrea. Someone who casually strangles a woman, then cuts off her head with an ax, probably has a record of previous offenses. We’ll go through the archives, try to match the blowups with mug shots.”

  “How long is that likely to take?”

  “There’s no central database. We’ll have to check municipal and state police files as well as our own. Many of the local databases aren’t computerized, particularly in the Northeast where Andrea came from.”

  “I don’t want a lecture; I just want a simple answer to my question. How long?”

  “A couple of weeks, minimum.”

  “Anything else you can do in the meantime? How about broadening the search, trying to identify the other thirteen victims?”

  “The more we ask local police departments to do, the more time it’s going to take them to get back to us.”

  “And time,” the director said, “is something we’re running out of.”

  “Exactly,” Silva said.

  WHEN ANDREA de Castro applied for her national identity card, she’d lived on the Avenida Boa Viagem in Recife. The telephone number still existed and was still listed to Otávio de Castro, her father.

  When Silva called, a woman answered. As soon as he told her he was a cop, she started asking if he had news about her daughter. He told her he didn’t, that he was a federal, new to the case.

  She asked why the federal police were now involved.

  Silva lied. “If your daughter was kidnapped, and taken across a state line, then it’s a federal offense.”

  “Of course,” she said. “How stupid of me. Well, I’ll be grateful for anything you can do. This is so unlike Andrea. Frankly, I’m scared to death.”

  “I’ll send an agent,” Silva said. “His name is Arnaldo Nunes. He’s going to want to speak to your husband as well.”