Dying Gasp Read online

  After a short discussion between a judge and the landlord’s lawyer, the proper paperwork was issued. The cops called a locksmith. Why break down a door when you don’t have to? The locksmith made short work of getting them into the place. The maintenance people repaired the broken pipe and departed.

  The police stayed. They were intrigued by the sole contents of an otherwise empty apartment: an answering machine sitting in the middle of the living room floor.

  Research revealed that the individual who’d rented the flat had been doing so for nineteen months and had been dead for a year and a half. The rent, however, was still being paid directly into the landlord’s postgiro out of a numbered account in Riga.

  It was time to bring in Hoofd Inspecteur Kuipers.

  Kuipers listened to the greeting on the machine, a teenage voice reciting a series of numbers in English. The numbers began with the digits zero and six and totaled ten in number, leading Kuipers to conclude (1) that the digits were the number of a cellular telephone, (2) that the answering device was an anonymous way of divulging it, and (3) that anyone who took such precautions was up to no good.

  Kuipers tried calling the number, but a recorded voice informed him that the phone was either switched off or out of service. There was no voice mail.

  Rather than meddle with the equipment, he gave instructions to keep the place under discreet surveillance, to make a duplicate key for the lock and to erase all evidence of a visit. Two days later a kid showed up and recorded a new number. They followed him back to his home and put a man to watch him, but they didn’t pick him up. They made a note of the new number, but they didn’t dial it. They simply put a tap on it.

  Within a week, Kuipers had discovered (1) that his suppositions were correct, (2) that the man using the phones was Martin Smit, aka The Surinamer, and (3) that he was switching the phones on only minutes before using them.

  “MARTIN SMIT, eh?” Kuipers said after he’d studied the transcript of the first series of calls. He was talking to Inspector Guus Hein, his principal assistant. “Well, well. Not just drugs any more. That lowlife scum has diversified. And now we know why we never get any useful information from the taps we have on his other numbers. The scumbag set up a whole alternative system of communication. His associates call the answering device and get a new contact number every week.”

  “You want to put surveillance on Smit?” Hein asked.

  “Certainly not. It might spook him.”

  During the following weeks, they recorded Smit receiving calls to four successive numbers. He took care to make few outgoing calls and kept the incoming ones to a minute or less. On the fourth of May, they registered an incoming from a woman he addressed as Carla. She began by dunning him about money and went on to pester him about a distributor, an affair in which he told her he’d made little progress. He asked her to drop her price. She said she wouldn’t, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t working. She was stockpiling material, and if he didn’t get his ass in gear she’d take measures to find someone else.

  The police managed to get a trace, but it led to a prepaid cell phone in Brazil, which wasn’t a lot of help.

  As soon Kuipers had finished reading the transcript, he picked up the phone and asked for a few minutes with his boss, Albertus Montsma.

  TWO HOURS later, Kuipers and Montsma were sitting across a desk from each other.

  “I think you can safely assure the burgemeester,” Kuipers said, “that the videos aren’t being produced here, only the copies.”

  “Thank God for that,” Montsma said.

  Amsterdam depended heavily on tourism. Sex and drugs were among the attractions, but the city fathers underplayed them. They preferred to present the city as a family destination and would not look kindly upon a revelation that snuff videos were being produced in their midst. Distribution of the damned things was bad enough.

  “Some of the worst,” Kuipers said, “are coming from Brazil.”

  He told his boss about the telephone call, adding that the woman had spoken in English and that her English was fluent.

  “That young fellow, Costa,” Montsma said, “Is he still here?”

  “The Brazilian? Yes, he’s still here. I just saw him downstairs, talking to Hugo de Groot. You want him involved?”

  “I know his uncle,” Montsma said.

  “His uncle?”

  “Mario Silva, Chief Inspector of the Brazilian Federal Police. He’s a good cop.”

  Kuipers grunted. Coming from Bert Montsma, a good cop was high praise.

  “You think Costa might be of some help?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” Montsma said, “but I’m sure his uncle will be. Let’s get the young man up here, shall we?”

  HECTOR COSTA was a slim fellow of slightly below average height. His mother was Mario Silva’s sister and only sibling; Hector, her only child.

  His father, Claudio, an architect, had been thirty-four years old when he was shot to death. Hector, now thirty-two, looked nothing like him. Claudio’s eyes had been blue. Hector’s were black. Claudio had been fair-skinned. Hector, like the rest of the Silva family, was dark, so dark that his mother’s ancestors had been suspected of Moorish blood. And Moorish blood had not been a good thing to have in sixteenth-century Portugal.

  In those days, the country was under the Spanish yoke and subject to the Spanish Inquisition. Moorish blood was regarded as a sign of less than complete devotion to the true faith, and less than complete devotion to the true faith could be fatal. To escape distrustful inquisitors, the Silvas had left their native country and moved to Brazil, a melting pot where the prejudice against darker skin was less strong and the Inquisition less pervasive.

  They chose São Paulo as their new home. It wasn’t a city then, not even a village, just a frontier outpost founded by the Jesuits for the express purpose of converting the Indians. The place grew little over the next one hundred and fifty years, remaining a sleepy hamlet well into the eighteenth century. That changed when the Europeans developed a passion for coffee. The soil and climate around São Paulo were found to be ideally suited to the new crop. The great coffee barons became cash-rich. They had money to invest, and many of them invested it in manufacturing. By the mid-twentieth century, the city had become the premier industrial center, the largest city in the country.

  And the most dangerous.

  Hector’s maternal grandfather had been shot to death by bandits in 1978, just two years after Hector was born. His grandmother, raped by the same individuals and forced to watch her husband’s murder, lost all interest in life and didn’t survive the year.

  The incident motivated Mario, Hector’s uncle, to give up a promising career as a lawyer and join the federal police.

  Nine years later, his nephew had been moved in the same direction.

  On a sunny Saturday morning, Hector’s parents were driving to a shopping center. His father, Claudio Costa, was behind the wheel. Hector was in the back seat. He’d been playing with a toy, a Rubik’s cube, when he heard a voice.

  “Hand over your watch.”

  A man was standing just outside, pointing the barrel of a gun at his father’s head. They were stopped at a traffic light, locked in by other automobiles. The day was hot. The car had no air-conditioning. The windows were open.

  The watch, his mother told him later, was a family heirloom. His father was reluctant to give it up. Twenty years on, as an experienced cop, Hector would have recognized the man with the gun as a drug addict, trying to gather enough money for his next fix. At the time, he just thought the man was scary. His mother folded the newspaper she’d been reading over her lap, thereby concealing her wedding ring. The ring was the only jewelry she ever wore on the street.

  “Claudio,” she said, keeping her voice low and steady, “give him the watch.”

  Almost everyone in the extended family had been robbed at one time or another. If it wasn’t some kid threatening you with a sliver of glass, or a gang with clubs and rocks,
it was someone like this: a frightened little man with bloodshot eyes, a two-day growth of beard, and a revolver that was trembling in his hand.

  Claudio took his hands off the steering wheel, as if he was going to unfasten the clasp on his watch, but then he swiveled to his left and made a grab for the revolver. The man stepped backward. There was a loud explosion, louder than any firecracker Hector had ever heard. His father flew backward, as if someone had given him a push.

  Hector stared at the shooter, and for a moment they locked eyes. Then the man was putting the weapon into a canvas bag and backing away.

  He looked down at his father. Blood covered the front of his shirt. Sucking noises were coming out of a hole in his chest. Hector’s mother was saying “Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God,” over and over. Hector leaned over the seat, buried his nose in his mother’s neck, and tried to comfort her.

  The sucking noises stopped.

  KUIPERS ASKED Hector how he liked Amsterdam. Hector said he liked Amsterdam very much. Montsma asked him if the conference on the suppression of the drug trade had been useful. Hector said it had. Then, unlike Brazil where the pleasantries would have gone on for at least another five minutes, they got down to business.

  “You heard about that bomb, the one set off by a group calling itself Justice for Islam?” Kuipers asked.

  Hector nodded. “Terrible thing,” he said, wondering why they wanted to talk to him.

  “The bomb,” Kuipers said, “also took out a mail truck. The explosion blew mail all over the street.” He paused.

  Hector waited for him to get to the point.

  “Among the scattered envelopes,” Kuipers continued, “were a number of DVDs. The newspapers are calling them ‘videos that are pornographic in nature’, but that’s not the half of it. They were snuff videos. The action was all covered in one shot, no cuts, and at the end there was something . . . convincing. Proof that the action wasn’t faked.”

  Hector frowned. “Proof? What kind of proof?”

  “After the murderer strangled her,” Kuipers said, “he cut off her head with an ax.”

  Chapter Seven

  MANAUS

  MARTA AWOKE TO FIND her door ajar, a crack of light spilling in from the corridor. At first, she was too wary to approach it. What if they were toying with her, what if someone, maybe The Goat, was standing on the other side?

  She sat up, legs together, fighting the urge to urinate. After a while she could stand it no more. She stood, reached for the knob and drew the door toward her.

  No Goat.

  She stuck her head into the corridor.

  Nobody.

  She went to the bucket and used it.

  No one disturbed her.

  She pulled up her panties, washed her hands at the sink, and resumed her seat on the bed.

  Reason told her the open door was no accident, no mistake. But it might have been, and so she’d be foolish not to take advantage of it.

  When they’d brought her in, there’d been a dusty burlap sack over her head. She hadn’t seen anything of the building, and had little idea of its floor plan, except for the location of the shower. That was about ten meters down the corridor to the right. Rosélia took her there every other day in the small hours of the morning when the rest of the house was asleep. The soap was brown and smelled like medicine. The water was lukewarm, never hot. She only got two minutes, and she was expected to dry herself with a rough fragment of terrycloth; but after the grinding monotony of her prison, every shower felt like a holiday.

  When it was over, Rosélia would throw some clean clothing at her and push her back to her cell where she was permitted to dress.

  But it wasn’t the bathroom she was thinking of at the moment. She was thinking about another door she’d seen in the corridor, bigger and heavier than all the others. She just knew it led to the outside.

  Gingerly, she stepped through the doorway. To her left, she could hear voices. Except for the choice of words, they could have been coming from the playground of an all-girls’ school

  One girl said, “I told her she could kiss my ass.”

  Another was saying she didn’t care about how many other girls he’d done it to, there was no way she was going to let him do it to her.

  Still another exclaimed “. . . three hundred Reais. Can you imagine? Three hundred Reais?” As if that was a fortune, when it wasn’t even half of what Marta used to pay for one of her dresses.

  The whores. It had to be them.

  Marta turned the other way, to the right, toward the bathroom, toward the door that led to freedom. As she scurried along, a random thought popped into her head: her uncle had once given her a pair of hamsters for Christmas. By Easter, they were dead, but she remembered how there’d been a maze inside their cage. They’d scurry back and forth along the corridors of that maze. They’d gone on scurrying, every waking hour, until they died.

  Her heart gave a leap. She’d been right about the door. It did lead to the outside. She could see daylight shining through a gap at the bottom.

  Cautiously, she reached out a hand and turned the knob. The door didn’t budge, but a loud bell began ringing with an ear-splitting clang.

  She ran back to her cell and sat on the bed. A moment later, she heard a door open and a woman’s unhurried steps coming along the corridor to her left. The steps paused. The ringing stopped. The girls, too, had fallen silent.

  Rosélia appeared in the doorway.

  “Tomorrow,” she said, with a triumphant grin, “try going the other way.”

  She slammed the door, and Marta heard the key turning in the lock.

  Chapter Eight

  BRASILIA

  THE DAY AFTER HER delivery, Irene Silva’s obstetrician came into her hospital room, sat down in the chair next to her bed and gently told her she’d have no more children. She and Mario had planned on two. They were disappointed, but not devastated. Their newborn son got a clean bill of health from the pediatrician. They knew couples who didn’t have any children at all. One baby was surely enough to make their happiness complete. And he did, for the next eight years.

  There was a photograph from that happy time: all of them crowded together on a couch. On the far left was Irene, radiant and smiling with her arm around little Mario. Next to her was the youngster himself, proud of his new school uniform, pointing at the crest on his white shirt. Next to him, leaning against his shoulder, Clara’s son Hector, five years older than little Mario, his face serious, as if he could look into the future and see the trouble lurking there. Lastly, on the far right, Mario Silva himself, his hair and moustache still black, without a sign of gray.

  In the photo his son had a grin from ear to ear. He looked robust and healthy, but the sickness had been in him even then. Four months later he was dead, struck down by leukemia thirteen days before his ninth birthday. He died on the eighth of May, 1989.

  The next day Silva put the photo into his desk drawer, and there it sat.

  When he’d become a chief inspector, they’d offered him a modern glass desk, with an accompanying credenza, and no drawers. He’d turned it down, just so he could have the photo close to him, but in a place where no one could see it.

  And what he did with the photo, he did with his memories: locked them away, never discussed them with anyone.

  It hurt too much when he did.

  Irene handled her grief in a different way.

  She drank.

  Most days she’d sleep until noon. Then she’d get up and spend a few hours working at the orphanage to which Silva sent twenty percent of his salary. That, too, was something he never discussed.

  Sometimes the children at the orphanage could coax a smile from Irene’s lips, just a smile, never a deep, full-throated laugh like the ones that bubbled out of her in the old days. When he could, Silva would take an afternoon off and stop by, just to see her like that, smiling, with the kids, before she went home and got drunk.

  She usually started at five o’clock in the aftern
oon. Five o’clock exactly, trying to prove to him that she wasn’t really an alcoholic, just a woman having a cocktail at the end of the day. She’d insist that alcoholics drank in the morning. She didn’t drink in the morning, only at night.

  But it was every night. And it was always to excess.

  When Silva was on a trip, he’d try to ring home before eight P.M. If he called much later he’d hear Irene’s slurred speech and know she wasn’t absorbing half of what he said. But he’d call anyway, because he knew she needed to hear his voice, even if they weren’t going to have a coherent conversation. He worried about what would happen to her if someone were to kill him. He’d taken to being more cautious. For her sake.

  AND NOW, here it was, the eighth of May come around again. On the night before the anniversary of her son’s death, Irene Silva hadn’t gone to bed at all.

  At seven-thirty A.M., her husband found her on the couch in the living room, an empty vodka bottle on the coffee table in front of her, clutching little Mario’s teddy bear in her arms. She didn’t wake when he carried her into the bedroom and tucked her in.

  At ten, Hector called from Amsterdam. It was five hours later there, and Hector sounded more awake than Silva felt.

  “Today’s the day,” were the first words Hector said.

  “Yes,” Silva said.

  “How’s Tia Irene?”

  “Sleeping. I hope.”

  “But she didn’t sleep last night?”

  “No. Not last night. How was the drug conference?”

  Hector knew the signs. His uncle wanted to talk about something else, anything else. “Like being inside a bag full of cats,” he said.

  “The Americans blaming the Bolivians and Colombians for growing it; the Bolivians and Colombians telling them that it’s their own damned fault for creating a market?”

  “And the other Europeans all ganging up on the Dutch because they think they’re too soft. It didn’t help, either, that the Dutch have cornered the world’s Ecstasy market. These days, they’ve got more labs than windmills.”