Every Bitter Thing Read online

  “Silva. Chief Inspector Silva.”

  “Put him on,” Mansur said.

  THE FIRST thing the São Paulo businessman said was, “What’s so goddamned important?”

  Silva took the telephone away from his ear and looked at it, as if it was the instrument itself, and not the man, who had offended him.

  “Am I speaking to Luis Mansur?”

  “You are.”

  “Senhor Mansur, I’m—”

  “Chief Inspector Silva of the Federal Police. So my secretary told me. I repeat, what’s so goddamned important?”

  Silva suppressed a brusque retort. “There is a chance, Senhor Mansur, that your life is in danger.”

  “What?” Mansur said. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “You traveled business class aboard TAB flight 8101 from Miami to São Paulo on the twenty-second of November, correct?”

  “I already answered that question the last time you people called. What’s this ‘life in danger’ crap?”

  “Someone has murdered five of the people who traveled with you.”

  “Five people on the same plane?”

  “Five people who were in the business-class cabin.”

  Silva elected not to mention young Julio Arriaga. Five killings were, he thought, quite enough to make an impact; gauging by Mansur’s response, he was right.

  “You’re shitting me,” Mansur said.

  “I can assure you, Senhor Mansur, that I am not, as you put it, shitting you.”

  “Caralho. What happened to them?”

  “They were shot and subsequently beaten to death.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line.

  “Senhor Mansur?”

  “I’m here. Who’s doing this and why?”

  “We have, as yet, no idea. The murders took place in four different cities.”

  “Then how can you be sure they’re connected?”

  “The method of killing was the same, a single shot to the abdomen followed by beating with a blunt object. And the bullets were all fired from the same gun.”

  “Who was killed?”

  “The flight attendant, Bruna Nascimento.”

  “I remember her all right. Arrogant bitch. Lousy service.

  Who else?”

  “Juan Rivas—”

  “Sounds like a fucking Argentinean.”

  “A Venezuelan, actually.”

  “Almost as bad. Who else?”

  “Victor Neves.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Jonas Palhares.”

  “Him either.”

  “And Paulo Cruz.”

  “The professor? The writer? That Cruz?”

  “That Cruz.”

  “His funeral was in the paper. I didn’t know he was on the same plane.”

  “He was. What were you doing in Miami, Senhor Mansur?”

  “Huh?”

  “I asked you what you were doing in Miami.”

  “Business.”

  “What kind of business?”

  “I deal in petroleum-based industrial lubricants. Let’s cut right to the chase. You’re telling me I could be a victim, but you’re thinking I could be a murderer, right?”

  “You’re a perceptive man, Senhor Mansur.”

  “You’re goddamned right I am. Well, Senhor Chief Inspector Silva, let me tell you this: I didn’t kill anybody.”

  “Then you could be in danger yourself.”

  “Who else was in that cabin? Remind me.”

  “Would names have any significance for you?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Then it would suffice to say there was a fifteen-year-old boy, the son of an airline employee—”

  “I remember him. I wondered why he was traveling alone in business class. They must have upgraded him because of his father. I guess we can rule him out. Who else?”

  “An American.”

  “Aha.”

  “Aha?”

  “You can’t trust Americans.”

  “You’re entitled to your opinion, Senhor Mansur.”

  “What does this American do for a living?”

  “He appears to be a priest.”

  “What do you mean, ‘appears to be’?”

  “We’re awaiting confirmation on that.”

  “Priests don’t murder people.”

  “I have to differ with you. Occasionally they do. I’ve known one who did.”

  “Who are the other—dare I say—survivors?”

  “Three Brazilians. We haven’t located any of them either.”

  “So let me add this up. You got the American priest, the woman, a teenager, four dead guys, a dead stewardess, three other people, and me. That’s twelve altogether.”

  Whatever else Mansur might have been, he wasn’t stupid. And he had a good memory.

  “Correct,” Silva said.

  “Well, I sure as hell didn’t kill anybody. The old lady probably didn’t, and the teenager ditto. That brings you down to four suspects.”

  “One of the four is a child.”

  “Oh, yeah. I remember him too. Traveling with his father.

  Waste of money, taking a kid into business class. His old man should have popped him back in coach and let the stewardesses take care of him.”

  Silva was beginning to develop a healthy dislike for Luis Mansur.

  “So, let’s see who we have left,” Mansur said. “There’s only the priest and those two other guys, right? Maybe you’d better give me their names after all.”

  “The father of the boy is Marnix Kloppers.”

  “What the fuck kind of a name is that?”

  “It’s of Dutch origin, I believe.”

  “And the priest?”

  “Dennis Clancy.”

  “And the last guy?”

  “Darcy Motta.”

  “Oh, yeah, Motta.” Luis Mansur chuckled.

  Silva picked up on the reaction. “You know him?”

  “Know him? Hell, no.”

  “You didn’t sit down next to him?”

  Mansur bristled. “He tell you that? Tell you I sat down next to him? If he did, he’s lying.”

  “He hasn’t told us anything. We’re still looking for him.”

  “You found me. How come you haven’t found him?”

  “His ticket was purchased with cash. We’ve been unable to uncover any credit cards. He has no driver’s license, no telephone, no cell phone, no criminal record. It’s possible that Darcy Motta is an alias, that his real name is something else.”

  “Hmmm,” Mansur said. He sounded pensive.

  “Is there something you want to tell me?” Silva asked.

  “No.”

  “Does the name Girotti mean anything to you? João Girotti?”

  “Not a thing. Why?”

  “He, too, was murdered. The method of killing, and the bullet used, matched the others.”

  “But he wasn’t on the plane?”

  “No, he wasn’t. Listen, Senhor Mansur, I’d like to speak to you personally. Could we meet on Tuesday morning? About ten?”

  Mansur did a noisy flip through of his desk calendar.

  “Make it nine,” he said. “I’ve got a busy day, but I’ll shuffle my schedule around.”

  “Nine, then. In the meantime, be careful.”

  “Let me tell you something, Senhor Chief Inspector Silva. I’ve got a Taurus .38 and, before you ask, yes, I do have a permit to carry it. I was robbed one time on the street; a little punk threatened me with a knife. I gave him my wallet, and my watch, and the little fucker cut me anyway. It took six stitches to close the wound, and if I’d raised that arm up a fraction of a second later, I would have gotten it right in the face. I’m not about to let anything like that happen again. Anybody, man, woman, or child, who threatens me is gonna eat a bullet.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  THE CUSTOMS AGENTS WHO’D nabbed Junior Arriaga were Fausto Mainardi and Douglas Caetano. Mainardi, who seemed friendl
y enough, was a veteran in a baggy suit. Caetano, new to the service, was surlier but a better dresser. They brought Gonçalves to the windowless room where they’d interrogated the teenager.

  A television camera was mounted high in one corner, a monitor in another. A microphone protruded from the ceiling. The only source of illumination, a fluorescent tube, was protected by a metal grate.

  Gonçalves, preparing to take notes, tried to move his chair closer to the table. It wouldn’t budge. He looked down and saw it was bolted to the cement floor.

  “Why are we interested in this kid?” Mainardi said.

  The we was a reminder. The Customs Service was a division of the Federal Police. Mainardi and Caetano fell into the category of colleagues. They expected Gonçalves to tell them the whole story.

  Which he did, starting with the murder of Juan Rivas and emphasizing the director’s personal interest in the case.

  When he told them about young Arriaga’s murder, neither man seemed shocked—or even interested.

  “Sounds unrelated,” Mainardi said.

  “Probably no connection at all,” Gonçalves agreed, “but my orders are to follow up on it. Tell me what you remember.”

  “Start with the old system,” Caetano said to his partner.

  Mainardi nodded and leaned back in his chair. “Time was,” he said, “we asked people with taxable goods to fill in a form. Those that didn’t, they’d go straight to nothing-to-declare. There was this button they had to push, and a sign right next to it, all in lawyer’s language: By pushing this button I affirm yadda, yadda, yadda and so forth and so on. If an arrow in front of the pusher went green, it would be pointing left and they were home free. But if the arrow went red and pointed to the right, and a loud fucking buzzer went off, they’d have to go to the tables and start opening their bags. Way I heard it, some cousin of some higher-up sold us this system and cut a nice deal for doing it. Way I heard it, it was the most expensive buzzer-and-light system in the history of the world.”

  “Not to be impolite,” Gonçalves said, “but what’s this story got to do with—”

  “Hold your horses. I’m getting there.”

  “You gotta hear the whole thing,” Caetano said. “Otherwise you’re not gonna get it.”

  Mainardi waited until Gonçalves nodded. Then he continued. “A lot of us were pissed off about the changes. We figured we were better than any random system. We lobbied for an override, a little transmitter we could keep in our pockets and use to buzz anybody who looked suspicious. In the end, the higher-ups agreed.”

  “Uh-huh,” Gonçalves said. He started to drum his fingertips on the table.

  “Almost there,” Mainardi said. “So we used the hybrid system, random and override, for a couple of years, until the guy who had it installed retired to his villa on the French Riviera, or some such place, and the new regime took over. That’s when we switched.”

  “To what?”

  “Now everybody has to fill in the form, whether you have goods to declare or not. We stand there and collect them. Anybody looks suspicious, we shake ’em down. Back to square one, you know what I mean? But it wasn’t square one, because working with the other system taught us something.”

  “Which was?” Gonçalves said, still drumming.

  “Which was that no matter how good we think we are, we’re still gonna make mistakes. The random system picked up people we would never have expected. And we chose to stop people who, no matter how shifty they looked, weren’t trying to get away with a thing.”

  “And that’s what happened on this flight, the one the kid was traveling on?”

  Mainardi pointed a finger at Gonçalves as if it was a gun. “You got it,” he said. “There we were, young Douglas and me, working the flight in question and collecting the forms. First thing that happens is, I pull a guy name of …”—he consulted the file he’d brought with him—“Darcy Motta.”

  “Why did you pick on him?” Gonçalves asked, his interest quickening.

  “Same reason I pick on anybody. He looked shifty. But no, I’m wrong. The guy’s carrying hand luggage and a small suitcase, that’s it. Inside the suitcase there’s a pair of pants, a couple of dirty shirts, ditto underwear. In the hand luggage, there’s a carton of cigarettes, a pack of chewing gum, some condoms, and a couple of girlie magazines. Meanwhile, young Douglas here decides to shake down Arriaga, an innocent-looking fresh-faced kid, somebody you wouldn’t suspect in a million years.”

  “But if you wouldn’t suspect him, why—”

  “Let me finish. Turns out the kid is carrying three plastic containers. They’re pretty big, about the size of a jar of mayonnaise. On the outside, it says they’re multiple vitamins.

  Under the caps are foil seals. At least there are on two of them. The seal on the third one is broken. And what’s inside that one really are vitamin pills.”

  “Kid’s eyes got real big,” Caetano said, “and he started to stammer. Claimed he’d never seen those containers before in his life. I picked up one of the sealed ones and rattled it. It sounded like it was full of pills, just like it’s supposed to be. But then I ask myself what kind of pills. I break the seal, and guess what?”

  “Not vitamins.”

  “Ecstasy. Branded, no less. Little dollar signs on every pill.”

  “Again, why did you pick on the kid?”

  “You’re gonna laugh.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “No, really, you’re gonna laugh. It wasn’t because I suspected him at all. I just wanted to bust his chops.”

  “Why did you want to bust his chops?”

  “Because he was an arrogant little punk who pissed me off, that’s why,” Caetano said.

  “Let me get this straight. You chose to make trouble for him because he rubbed you the wrong way?”

  “What good is power if you don’t abuse it, right?”

  “What did he do to annoy you?”

  “It was the way the little bastard looked at me, like I was beneath him.”

  Julio Arriaga, a fifteen-year-old kid, was dead because of a few Ecstasy pills and because this prick hadn’t liked the way he’d looked at him.

  Gonçalves tightened his jaw, but Caetano didn’t seem to notice and went blithely on. “‘What’s this?’ I said, when I pulled the first container out of the kid’s bag. ‘I got no idea,’ the kid says. ‘It’s not mine.’”

  “Not mine,” Mainardi said, joining in. “You have any idea how often we hear that?”

  “A lot, I suppose,” Gonçalves said.

  “You bet your ass,” Mainardi continued, “a whole lot. We took him here, cuffed him to the table, let him stew while we ran the tests. We needed the results to make the case.”

  “We came back here,” Caetano chimed in, “told him he was good and busted, and guess what? He’s not so arrogant any more. You want to see the tape?”

  “In a minute. What did you do next?”

  “Did what we’re supposed to do.” It was Mainardi again. “We called the civil police. They took him away.”

  “To the nearest delegacia? The one where Bittencourt is in charge?”

  “The nearest. The Fifteenth. I don’t know what the chief honcho’s name is.”

  “Tell me more about this Darcy Motta.”

  “What’s to tell?”

  “Physical description?”

  “Forty, maybe forty-five,” Caetano said after a moment’s thought. “Maybe a meter ninety, maybe ninety kilos. Got a brown spot right here.” He touched his right cheek. “Like one of those things old people get.” His eyes shifted to his partner’s hands. There were liver spots on the backs of both.

  Mainardi took them off of the table and folded them in his lap.

  “Anything else you remember?”

  Mainardi shook his head.

  Gonçalves turned back to Caetano. “And you?”

  “No,” Caetano said. “That’s it. The little fucker practically pissed himself. The tape’s a gas.” He poin
ted at the television monitor. “Want to see it now?”

  Chapter Nineteen

  “MAJOR FUNCHAL ISN’T AVAILABLE at the moment. Who’s speaking?”

  It was a woman’s voice, and she wasn’t happy.

  Jealous wife, Mara thought. “Agent Mara Carta of the Federal Police,” she said.

  The woman’s tone softened. “Sorry. He’s sleeping.”

  “Sleeping?” Mara glanced at the clock on the wall of her office. It was two thirty in São Paulo, one thirty in Manaus.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” the woman said. “He walked in here this morning stinking like a pig and looking like death warmed over. I doubt if he’s slept more than two hours in the last forty-eight. People who call here generally know how it goes when he’s on a mission. They don’t want to wake him up. You probably did just that.”

  “Sorry,” Mara said. A protective spouse, not a jealous one. “Who am I speaking to, please?”

  “Beth.”

  “His wife?”

  “The only one, as far as I know. What did you say your name was?”

  “Mara.”

  “It’s like this, Mara. He always comes back from one of these things flat-out exhausted. The officers feel they have to set an example, so they push themselves harder. He’s only thirty-six, but this jungle survival stuff is a young man’s game. I’m trying to talk him into getting out of it, but he loves it. And I love him. So what am I going to do, huh? What do you want to talk to him about?”

  “I need some information about a man who served under him, a certain Julio Arriaga. It would have been three or four years ago, maybe a little more.”

  “The name doesn’t ring any bells. But I’ll have him call you back. You’re here in Manaus?”

  “No. São Paulo.”

  Mara recited her telephone number. Beth read it back. “If he runs true to form,” she said, “he’ll get up in a few hours, eat something, and then crash for the night. If that happens, I’ll have him get back to you. Otherwise, he’ll call tomorrow morning.”

  But Mara didn’t have to wait that long. Major Funchal called back less than half an hour later.

  “Julio Arriaga?” he said, his voice hoarse. “Yeah, I remember him. He was a good soldier, but that temper of his…. What’s he done now?”