Dying Gasp

by Leighton Gage

  When asked why the priest was at the Mainardi home in the first place, Pinto frankly admitted that he didn’t know. And as to Lauro Tadesco’s role in the affair, that was still under investigation.

  The chief’s performance was followed by a series of reactions to the murder.

  A spokesman for the National Association of Bishops said Father Vitorio’s death was a tragic loss and so forth and so on, the usual nil nisi bonum.

  This was followed by a montage of comments from some of Father Vitorio’s former students, none of whom seemed to have acquired a turn-the-other-cheek attitude from associating with their former mentor, and all of whom expressed satisfaction that at least one of the killers had paid with his life.

  The next face to appear on the television screen caused Arnaldo to choke on his breakfast coffee.

  ROBERTO MALAN wasn’t a Catholic, didn’t represent the State of Amazonas in the chamber of deputies, and had nothing to do with the death of a priest in Manaus. But there he was, in a tight close-up, speaking from his office in Brasilia.

  “Rede Mundo wouldn’t have gone to him,” Hector said. “He must have—”

  He stopped short when Silva held up a hand.

  “. . . not of my faith,” Malan was saying, “but Father Vitorio was a man whose service to the poor demanded respect. Certainly, he had mine.”

  “Five will get you ten Malan never heard of him before he got knifed,” Arnaldo put in.

  “No bet,” Silva said. “Now will the two of you kindly shut up?”

  Malan paused and continued. “Brazil has, this day, lost a good shepherd. It’s not only a loss to his flock, it’s a loss to our country as a whole.”

  “Does he talk like that in person?” Arnaldo asked.

  “No,” Silva said.

  The deputado leaned forward. He looked straight into the lens. His skin began to redden in anger. His voice took on a tone of righteous indignation.

  “His death,” he said, “is an outrage, made all the more outrageous because it was entirely avoidable. Yes, avoidable! So who, in the end, are we to blame for Father Vitorio’s demise?”

  Malan left viewers in no doubt he had the answer to that, but he took another pause, building up the expectation.

  “The Almeida brothers, certainly,” he said, “and the nefarious—”

  “Nefarious? Oh, please,” Hector said sotto voce, and raised his eyes to the ceiling.

  “—person or persons who employed them. But they’re not the only ones. Others contributed to Father Vitorio’s death. They didn’t contribute by shooting him, or ordering him to be shot, but they’re guilty just the same. They’re guilty of gross negligence.”

  “Here it comes,” Arnaldo said.

  “And who are these negligent incompetents? My fellow Brazilians, they are the federal police! Yes, the federal police! Those same federal police who let the mass murderer, Claudia Andrade, slip through their fingers not twenty months ago. If the federal police had been truly zealous in their efforts, dedicated in their comportment, efficient in their methods, they would have apprehended Claudia Andrade long ago. And if they had taken the initiative to suppress the dastardly exploitation of minors, with which the death of Father Vitorio Barone is undoubtedly linked, he would be alive today instead of—”

  Click.

  Silva put down the remote control. “I give him fifteen minutes,” he said.

  Hector scratched his head. “Who?” he said. “Who do you give fifteen minutes?”

  Nelson Sampaio was on the line in less than ten.

  “Did you see Roberto Malan’s interview on Rede Mundo?” His voice was higher-pitched than usual. He sounded, Silva thought, like someone was squeezing his scrotum.

  “Yes, Director, I did. Grandstanding, I think they call it.” Sampaio, who was prone to doing quite a bit of grandstanding himself, glossed over Silva’s critique.

  “Why, Mario? Why would he go and do a thing like that?”

  “I assume,” Silva said, “the deputado has become impatient with us in general and with me in particular. I’ve kept him waiting for news about his granddaughter. He can’t go public with that, so he chose another opportunity to make us the whipping boy. He knows the escape of the Andrade woman still galls us. He knows it would be painful to reopen the wound. What he doesn’t know is it’s all connected: the death of Father Vitorio, the disappearance of his granddaughter, Claudia Andrade, they’re all tied together.”

  “Claudia Andrade? She’s involved?”

  Sampaio was silent for a moment. Silva thought the director was going to insist on more details.

  But he didn’t.

  “Shouldn’t we tell Malan what we already know?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Why not?”

  “The only way to appease him is to tell him something concrete about the whereabouts of his granddaughter. I’m not yet in a position to do that.”

  JUST BEFORE lunchtime, Lefkowitz came to call. He settled into a chair in Silva’s suite, and while he mopped his brow Hector went to fetch him a guaraná from the little refrigerator.

  “I didn’t want to use the telephone,” Lefkowitz said, removing his glasses and wiping off sweat with his handkerchief. “The chief has a tap on it. I know that for a fact, because I’m the one who put it there. He’s also instructed that all contact with you guys is to go through him. He’s going to be pissed if he finds out I was here.”

  “If he does, it won’t be from us,” Arnaldo said. “We’re giving the chief the mushroom treatment.”

  “Keeping him in the dark and feeding him a lot of shit, huh?”

  “You know them all, don’t you, Lefkowitz?”

  “Just the really old ones. Has he told you about the prints?” “Not a word,” Silva said.

  “I figured as much.”

  “Was I right?”

  “Yes, Chief Inspector, you were. That Andrade woman left her prints all over the house.”

  He took a long draught of his guaraná.

  “Anything else?”

  Lefkowitz smacked his lips and nodded.

  “There were three cars on the street near Carla’s, sorry, Claudia’s place. One was registered to a lowlife by the name of Delfin Figueiredo. Soon as you left, the chief and his buddies were all over it.”

  “You and your people weren’t invited to participate?”

  “Nope. The story’s going around there was money found. They split it among themselves. Lion’s share for the chief, of course.”

  “Of course,” Silva said. “You see him do it?”

  Lefkowitz shook his head.

  “And nobody else would be willing to testify they did. The chief scares people. Now as to the blood, it’s gonna take a while to get the DNA results.”

  “So you can’t tell us how many victims there were?”

  “Not yet, but I can make an educated guess.”

  “So, guess.”

  “At least a dozen.”

  THE PACKAGE arrived about an hour after Lefkowitz left. It was wrapped in brown paper, bore no stamps, no return address. Silva’s name was on the front, neatly written with a felt-tipped marker.

  “Dropped off at reception by some kid,” Arnaldo said. “Desk clerk never saw him before.”

  The package contained a single VHS tape, no note, no label.

  The hotel’s convention center had a VCR, but it was broken. In the end, Arnaldo had to go out and buy one. It was almost six in the evening before they had it hooked up. The tape opened with a close-up of Claudia Andrade and maintained that visual all the way to the end. The composition was so tight that her pores were prominent, so tight that no clue to her surroundings was visible. The recording could have been made anywhere. The camera captured her head-on, foreshortening her prominent nose. There was a smile on her face. She looked quite attractive.

  “Sorry I missed you,” she said. She paused to let the significance of the remark sink in. Missed killing them, she meant. “It’s so difficult to hir
e decent help these days.”

  Her smile faded and her eyes turned hard. “Your attentions are getting tiresome. You need something else to worry about, so I’ve arranged it. Deputado Roberto Malan is going to get a little package. After what I saw on Rede Mundo, I’d hazard a guess that he dislikes you almost as much as I do. What I’ve sent him is going to make him dislike you even more.”

  The screen went black.

  “Bitch scored another goal.” Arnaldo said, his face grim.

  “Game’s not over,” Silva said, hitting the stop button.

  Hector looked from one to the other. “What the hell was she talking about?”

  “She killed Marta,” Silva said. “She killed her, made a video of it, and mailed the damned thing to Marta’s grandfather.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  BENTO ROSÁRIO SCREWED OFF the cap and took a tiny sip of water. It loosened his tongue from the roof of his mouth, but did nothing to assuage the dryness in his throat. Still, he had to conserve the little he had. There was less than a centimeter left in the bottle, barely enough for a healthy swallow.

  If Silva doesn’t show up sometime soon, he thought, I’m gonna have to decide between thirst and a bullet.

  Just then, a mosquito bit him behind the right ear. He reacted instinctively.

  Slap.

  A mistake. One of the taxi drivers heard the noise and looked toward the bushes where he was hiding. Bento forced himself to lie perfectly still. After a while, the taxi driver went back to his newspaper.

  A tour group, headed by a woman with a name tag pinned to the lapel of her bush shirt, came out of the Hotel Tropical. She passed between two taxis and led her charges toward the pier, where the excursion boats were docked.

  He wiped his forehead. Partly, it was because of the heat, but he would have been sweating even if the day had been cooler. Bento Rosário was scared to death.

  The turnaround in Bento’s life had come with dizzying speed. It was his own fault. It would never have happened if he’d followed his uncle Tarcio’s advice.

  “Working for the city is like being in the army,” Tarcio had said.

  Bento had never been in the army. He’d escaped compulsory military service because of his flat feet. He had to ask Tarcio for clarification.

  “You keep your head down,” Tarcio had explained, “do what you’re told to do, never take initiatives, and never, ever, volunteer for anything.”

  Tarcio knew what he was talking about. In the army he’d risen to the rank of master sergeant, and now he’d been on the city payroll for almost three decades. Currently, he had a cushy sinecure in the sewer department, which gave him contacts throughout municipal government. But you needed more than contacts to get a job in Manaus. Contacts only put you in touch with the people who had jobs to give. You still had to bribe them to get one.

  When Tarcio told him about the opening, Bento had been anything but enthusiastic.

  “Clerk for the municipal police?” he’d said to his uncle. “Sounds boring.”

  Tarcio hadn’t liked that. Hell, Bento knew for a fact that he didn’t even like him. He thought his nephew was a prissy little pain in the ass, had told him so more than once. He wouldn’t have lifted a finger to help if Bento’s mother, Tarcio’s kid sister, Arlette, hadn’t bullied him into it.

  “It’s the only thing going,” Tarcio said, “and it’s a hell of a lot better than mucking around in other people’s shit, which is where I got my start. Take it or leave it.”

  Bento knew what his mother would say if he didn’t take it. He didn’t want to put up with that.

  So Tarcio had pulled the strings, and Arlette had paid the bribes, and the next thing Bento knew he had his very own seat behind one of three identical desks in the cellar of the delegacia central.

  Alberto Coimbra, his new boss and the head clerk, was a benevolent despot who didn’t look too closely at the time Bento started in the morning and seldom complained if Bento came back half an hour late from lunch, both of which were big pluses. Bento had always found it difficult to wake up early, and he loved long lunches.

  Another plus was that Coimbra generally left everybody to do their own thing. He didn’t go hanging over your shoulder, double-checking every damned piece of paper and file. The last thing Bento had expected was that he’d incur Coimbra’s wrath by taking a bit of initiative. Tarcio had clearly told him initiative was a no-no, but what did Tarcio know? There was a considerable difference between the sewer department and the municipal police, right?

  Wrong. Coimbra had been furious.

  “Why didn’t you talk to me first?” he’d said, his face so close to Bento’s that Bento could feel little drops of spittle while Coimbra was shouting at him. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

  “I just answered a query. I thought you’d be pleased. I thought—”

  “You’re not paid to think. You’re paid to do. I’m paid to think.”

  Bento didn’t get it at first. All he’d done was respond to an E-mail from the federal police in Brasilia. The E-mail had a photo attached. The federals wanted to know if they had a file on anyone who looked like the man in the photo.

  Simple.

  And easy for Bento, who had a good eye for faces.

  He’d started with the “A’s” and, within minutes, he’d come up with a match. The guy’s name was Damião Rodrigues, but somebody had misfiled his jacket under the A’s instead of under the R’s where it belonged.

  By the time Coimbra got back from his afternoon coffee break, which usually involved cachaça instead of coffee and generally went on for an hour or more, Bento had already shot off a reply to the federal cops and put a copy of that reply onto Coimbra’s desk. Coimbra’s reaction had been swift and terrible.

  First, he looked at the E-mail. Next, he unlocked a drawer of his desk, took out a piece of paper and ran his finger down the page. Then his face turned red.

  He sprang to his feet and came storming over.

  After Coimbra spat all over him, Bento took the wise course and apologized for thinking. But Coimbra wasn’t having it.

  “Apologies don’t cut it,” he said. “This is more serious than you know. I have to see the chief. Don’t move until I get back.”

  Bento hadn’t moved.

  Five minutes later, Coimbra swept back into the room, took him by the arm and led him up to the chief’s office.

  “We already got an answer to your fucking E-mail,” the chief said.

  Those were the first words the chief had ever spoken to him. Bento had never even been introduced to Chief Pinto, much less seen the inside of his office. He didn’t get much of a chance to see it that day either. The chief didn’t tell him to sit down.

  “You, Rosário, are a first-class fuckup. I should fire your ass right now.”

  “But . . . why?”

  The chief looked at Coimbra.

  “He wants to know why,” he said. “Jesus.”

  “Jesus,” Coimbra echoed.

  The chief looked back at Bento.

  “Because you fucking ignored your instructions, that’s why!”

  “You’re supposed to come to me first,” Coimbra said. “You’re supposed to come to me whenever any outsider asks for information from our archives. You’ve been told that.”

  Bento hadn’t been told any such thing. Coimbra was covering his ass. Bento opened his mouth to defend himself, but when he saw the way Coimbra was looking at him, he shut it again. If he lost his job, it was going to reflect on his uncle Tarcio, which meant his uncle Tarcio was going to be pissed. And not only that, his mother’s hard-earned money would be right down the drain. It was time to eat crow, and he did.

  “I . . . forgot,” he said.

  Again, the chief looked at Coimbra. “He forgot. He fucking forgot.”

  Coimbra shot his eyes toward the ceiling as if asking God for patience.

  Pinto shifted his attention back to Bento. “Clean out your desk,” he said. “Don’t leav
e anything behind. You’re on unpaid leave until further notice.”

  “Unpaid—”

  “Leave. Something wrong with your ears?”

  “No, Senhor. Ah . . .”

  “What?”

  “May I ask the chief when I might be permitted to come back?”

  He’d addressed the chief, but used his title, like he’d seen in war movies. You piss anybody off, for any reason, you act like you’re in the army, Tarcio had told him.

  Coimbra and the chief exchanged a glance. The chief hesitated then said, “You never heard of Damião Rodrigues, and there was no file, right?”

  “Sim, Senhor,” Bento said, smartly. “Unknown name. No file.”

  The chief grunted.

  “All right,” he said. “Find someplace where you can stay. Don’t tell anybody where it is. I don’t want those federals to go looking for you, but if they do, I sure as hell don’t want them to find you. Call Coimbra in a week or so. If everything has blown over by then, you can come back. If not, you stay away longer.”

  Bento tried to be a good cop. He may have been only a clerk, but he liked to think of himself as a cop, and a cop followed orders. He went to his desk, cleaned it out and left the building. Joel Lopes, his new best friend, tried to ask him what happened, but Bento told him he wasn’t allowed to talk about it.

  Only later did he realize what it all meant. It meant there were felons to whom the chief was extending his protection. It meant, in short, that the chief was a crook. But, at the time, Bento was so shocked he didn’t take time to think. He simply went home, packed a bag, and told his mother he had orders directly from the chief. He wasn’t permitted to tell her where he was going.

  She wouldn’t have approved if he had.

  He went to Samuel, his mother’s ex-husband, Bento’s stepfather for almost five years. Samuel had no children of his own—none he could be sure of, anyway. But it wasn’t from lack of distributing his seed. Samuel was a man who couldn’t be content with one woman, so he always had several at a time. When Arlette, Bento’s mother, found out about what she thought was Samuel’s second extramarital affair, although it was really more like his fifteenth, she’d thrown him out. Literally.