Buried Strangers Page 6

  “Hang on a second,” Goldman said. He took out a pair of reading glasses, gave the card a careful inspection, and then said, “What can I do for you, Delegado?”

  He didn’t strike Tanaka as being nervous.

  “For the moment,” Tanaka said, “you can just follow along. Lead the way Senhora Portella.”

  Clarice navigated her way through the warren of furniture and stopped in front of a cupboard. Stained a walnut brown, with two latticework panels for ventilation, the triangular cupboard had been designed to fit into the corner of a room.

  “This one,” she said. “And that’s the dining set over there.” She frowned and looked around. “I don’t see the bedside tables. They were right there, between the sofa and the wall.”

  “Formica tops?” Goldman asked.

  “Formica tops,” she confirmed.

  “I sold them. What’s this about?”

  Tanaka turned a cold eye on the merchant.

  “Stolen goods,” he said.

  Senhor Goldman held up his hands, palms outward, as if he were pushing something away from him.

  “I had no idea,” he said. “I swear. No idea.”

  “No?”

  “No. I run a legitimate business. I pay my taxes.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure you do,” Tanaka said. “No cash deals, right?”

  Goldman reddened. “Well, yeah, sure,” he said. “A lot of my customers haven’t got bank accounts, much less credit cards. I wanna do business, I have to sell for cash. But I de-clare all of it.”

  “Uh-huh,” Tanaka said skeptically.

  “And I never buy for cash. I pay by check.”

  “Do you now?” Tanaka said. “So you’ve got a record of who sold you this stuff? The cupboard? The bedside tables with the Formica tops?”

  “Sure I do. All part of the same purchase. I’ve got the can-celed checks in the back. Probably even have an itemized receipt with the guy’s name on it. I’ll go have a look.”

  “Not alone, you won’t,” Tanaka said. “Does this place have a back door?”

  Tanaka’s caution was unfounded. Goldman had no inten-tion of making a run for it. And he’d been telling the truth. He had both a canceled check and an itemized receipt, signed by someone named Roberto Ribeiro.

  “That’s it!” Clarice said when she heard the name. “That’s the name I was trying to think of, Roberto Ribeiro. He’s the one who offered Edmar the job. The carioca. The one who took them away.”

  Tanaka’s heart lifted when he saw the logotype on the check, lifted even more when he saw the endorsement on the back. He, Ribeiro and Goldman all shared the same bank: Bradesco, Brazil’s second-largest and least exclusive banking institution. It meant he wouldn’t have to go through official channels. He could track the man down without leaving a trail.

  “I may be here awhile,” he said to Clarice. “You can go now. If I find any trace of your friends, I’ll be in touch.”

  “Who’s gonna pay for the bus?” Ernesto said.

  “You are,” Tanaka said.

  Before Ernesto could open his mouth to reply, Clarice took his arm and led him toward the exit. Tanaka thought he heard him say the word “fascist” as they went out the door. He turned back to Goldman. “You remember what this guy Ribeiro looked like?”

  “Mulatto,” Goldman said promptly, no longer nervous. “Big mustache, hair slicked back with oil, wearing a chain with a Flamengo medallion. Can you beat that, somebody running around São Paulo with a Flamengo medallion? He’s lucky he’s so goddamned big. If he wasn’t, somebody would beat the crap out of him.”

  “That somebody would have to get in line behind me,” Tanaka said.

  Goldman protested when Tanaka told him he was taking both the check and the receipt. “I need that stuff for taxes,” he said. “Couldn’t you just make a note of—”

  “No,” Tanaka said.

  “But—”

  “If you want to stand here talking,” Tanaka said, “maybe we can discuss the merchandise you’ve got out there block-ing a public sidewalk.”

  Goldman, to his credit, blushed. “The guys on the beat know all about it.” he said.

  “The guys on the beat,” Tanaka said, “report to me.”

  “How about a cup of coffee, Delegado?” Goldman asked immediately.

  “Coffee would be fine,” Tanaka said.

  TANAKA WAITED until he was behind the wheel of the car before taking out his cell phone and calling Ricardo Fortunato.

  “What can I do for you today, Yoshiro?”

  Tanaka and his bank manager were on first-name terms. A few years earlier, when inflation had been running at upwards of 30 percent a month, Tanaka had spent more time on the telephone with Ricardo Fortunato than he had with his current mistress. In those days, you had to invest your money in the overnight market or you might wind up scratching for food at the end of the month. The people who manipulated the investments were the bank managers, peo-ple like Ricardo Fortunato. It was all done on the basis of verbal commitments; paperwork following after the transac-tions had been made. Relationships of trust were created, relationships that persisted long after hyperinflation had become history.

  “I need some information, Ricardo.”

  “Not about your own account, I take it?”

  “No. And you know how it is when I have to go through channels. Takes too goddamned long.”

  “I understand,” Ricardo said, his voice softer than before.

  Ricardo didn’t have an enclosed office. His desk was right in front of the long counter where the tellers worked. Tanaka imagined him looking over his shoulder to make sure no one was listening.

  “I’m holding a canceled check,” Tanaka said, “paid out of one Bradesco account into another. The recipient’s name is Roberto Ribeiro. Got that?”

  “Got it. What do you want to know?”

  “I want Ribeiro’s address.”

  “Easy.”

  “The check was issued by—”

  “Don’t need it. Just give me the numbers: the payee’s account at the lower left and whatever’s written on the back.”

  Tanaka did.

  He heard Ricardo clicking away at his keyboard.

  “Here it is,” the bank manager said. “Got a pen?”

  Tanaka couldn’t believe it was going to be that easy.

  Chapter Ten

  BOCETA HAD MORE TO offer, but as usual, he was going to make them work for it. If people didn’t listen to him around the watercooler, they sure as hell had to sit still when they asked him for an opinion—no matter how long it took. He settled back in his chair.

  “Remember Villasboas?” he said.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ, here we go again,” Arnaldo said.

  Boceta took off his glasses. “You are becoming tiresome, Agente.”

  “Me? Tiresome? You should have to listen—”

  Silva put a hand on Arnaldo’s arm and squeezed. “Villasboas,” he said. “I was working in São Paulo then. I remember, but I’m a little foggy on the details.”

  “Who the hell is Villasboas?” Arnaldo said.

  “Not who,” Boceta said, taking his usual satisfaction at the opportunity to correct someone. “Your question should have been what. Villasboas is a what. More specifically, it’s a town in Pará.”

  Pará was the state that embraced the mouth of the Amazon River, a huge area, much of it remote jungle.

  “Alright,” Arnaldo said, letting out a long sigh of defeat. “You got me. I’ll bite. What happened in Villasboas?”

  Boceta’s smile was more like a smirk. He took his time about answering. “Some bodies were found,” he finally said, “probably only a small percentage of the victims, but enough to excite interest. They were all young, all male, and all of them had their genitals removed. One of the perpetrators confessed. He was a medical doctor. The other people he implicated, another doctor, a few lawyers, some prominent local businessmen, denied involvement. It appears that he and his coreligionists all sig
ned an oath in their own blood: lifelong obedience, secrecy about the rituals—”

  Arnaldo tried to hurry things along. “Coreligionists? So they were members of some kind of cult?”

  Boceta, running true to form, refused to be hurried. “Can you imagine any other reason why I might call them coreli-gionists?”

  Arnaldo sighed. “No,” he said.

  “Of course you can’t,” Boceta said. “Yes, it was a cult, a satanic cult. They believed that the devil wanted anyone with certain characteristics . . .” He paused and looked at the ceiling.

  “What’s the matter?” Silva said.

  “I forgot some of the characteristics. I’ll go to my office and look them up.”

  He started to rise. Arnaldo put the heels of his hands over his eyes.

  Silva motioned the profiler back into his chair. “That won’t be necessary, Godo. Look them up later. Put them in your written report.”

  “Ah, yes, my written report. Alright. Where was I?”

  “The devil wanted everyone with certain characteristics . . .” Silva prompted.

  “To die. And the members of the cult were to be his instrument. To reward them for their obedience, he’d send a spaceship to rescue them from the destruction of the earth.”

  “And they truly believed that crap?” Arnaldo asked.

  “Enough to murder at least fourteen people,” Boceta said.

  Chapter Eleven

  CLOSING IN ON RIBEIRO had been far simpler than Tanaka had dared to hope. In addition to the address, Ricardo had supplied the man’s telephone number.

  Tanaka’s call was answered by a sleepy male voice.

  He hung up and immediately called for backup. An hour later, he and Detective Danilo Coimbra rousted Ribeiro out of bed in his surprisingly neat and clean two-room flat. Overriding his protestations of innocence, they cuffed him and hauled him off to Tanaka’s delegacia.

  In the early stages of his interrogation, Ribeiro demon-strated a self-confidence that bordered on arrogance.

  “Hey, Delegado, you didn’t have to drag me all the way down here. I woulda taken care of you, and that partner of yours, too, without going to all of this trouble. I mean, time is money, right?”

  “Is it? Is time money? Are you trying to bribe me, Ribeiro?”

  “I got a good friend on the force. Maybe you know him. Lieutenant Soares?”

  “Yeah, I know Soares,” Tanaka said.

  It was true. Tanaka did know Soares—and so did every-one else in the policia civil. Soares was the brother-in-law of Adolfo Mendes, the secretary for public safety, and Mendes was the top law-enforcement official in the state’s government.

  Soares was a man who’d made a fortune by being a cop. It was said that most of his earnings went to his brother-in-law and the governor, but Soares did very well with what was left for him. He drove a Lexus, and the parties at his beach house in Guarujá were said to be fantastic, although Tanaka couldn’t confirm that from personal experience. Even though he was only a lieutenant himself, Soares would never think of invit-ing a mere delegado titular.

  Soares wouldn’t invite a lowlife like Ribeiro either, but he would help him get out of jail, for a price.

  “Why don’t you just call the lieutenant?” Ribeiro said. “He’ll vouch for me. I’m sure he will.”

  “I’m sure he will, too,” Tanaka said. “But maybe we don’t have to do that.”

  Ribeiro smiled. “Well, I’m glad to hear that,” he said. “Means there’s more to go around.”

  “More of what?”

  “Come on, Delegado. You know what I’m talking about.”

  “Money?”

  “Yeah, money.”

  “So what have you done, Ribeiro, that you feel you have to offer me a payoff?”

  “Nothing. I haven’t done anything. It’s just the . . . con-venience. Your time is valuable, right? So is mine. So let’s cut to the chase. What do you think you have on me, and how much is it gonna cost to make it go away?”

  That was when Tanaka hit him with it. He told him he didn’t want his money. He told him he knew about the fur-niture and the Lisboas. He told him he had a canceled check from Goldman, that he had witnesses who could identify the furniture, who could put him at the scene on the day the family disappeared. He told him about the corpses down at the Instituto Médico Legal. And then he tied it all together: he accused Ribeiro of kidnapping entire families—and killing them.

  “And now,” he said, “all I need to know is why.”

  Ribeiro denied knowing anything, but from that point on he stopped talking and started avoiding Tanaka’s eyes.

  That was what he was doing now, five minutes into what had become a hostile interrogation. He sat with his shoul-ders slumped, staring at his hands. They were pudgy hands, like big, brown gloves, and they were splayed palm down-ward on the surface of the steel table. When Ribeiro moved them, they left spots of moisture on the cold metal. The air-conditioning in the interrogation room was cranked up high, but it didn’t dispel the pungent odor of sweat generated by years of interrogations like this one.

  Ribeiro was on the point of cracking. Tanaka knew this, because he’d known hundreds of men like Ribeiro. But then Tanaka did something that surprised Ribeiro: he stood and abruptly terminated the interview. He could see incompre-hension written all over the carioca’s face, but only because he was looking for it. Almost immediately, incomprehension was replaced by a crafty expression. Ribeiro, the stupid bas-tard, was thinking that he’d actually pulled it off, that his stonewalling had brought Tanaka to a screeching halt. It would never have occurred to him that Tanaka didn’t want a confession. All he’d wanted to know was where Ribeiro worked and for whom. Now he did. The delegado waved at the one-way mirror on the wall. The door opened, and a uni-formed guard entered.

  “Bring me the tapes of this interrogation,” Tanaka said, “both the audio and the video. As for Senhor Ribeiro here . . .” he paused, relishing the look of optimism on his prisoner’s face, “take him back to his cell and lock him up.”

  Ribeiro’s face fell as the realization hit him that there was more, and probably worse, to come. His forehead was still creased in a frown, partly fear, partly confusion, when the guard pushed him into the corridor.

  Chapter Twelve

  “BOCETA’S CONCLUSIONS,” SILVA SAID, pushing a thin document toward Arnaldo’s side of the desk.

  It was the afternoon after their meeting with the profiler. They were alone in Silva’s office.

  Arnaldo picked up the report and hefted it.

  “One of his usual weighty tomes,” he said.

  Silva nodded.

  “Four pages,” he said. “Took me less than five minutes to read it.”

  Boceta was known for talking long, but writing short. He loved the sound of his own voice, but found composing reports an onerous task.

  “I had enough of him to last me a month,” Arnaldo said. “Why don’t you summarize?”

  “He speculates that a cult or cults from Pará or Amazonas may be networking with a cult in São Paulo.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing. The rest is a detailed account of what hap-pened in Villasboas. He didn’t add a damned thing to what he said yesterday.”

  Arnaldo grunted and shook his head in disgust. He was still shaking it when the telephone rang.

  As it continued to ring, Silva got up and opened the door to his office. His new secretary, Camila, wasn’t at her post. He returned to his desk, punched the appropriate button, and picked up the instrument.

  “Silva.”

  “Answering our own phone, are we?”

  Silva recognized the voice: Ana, Nelson Sampaio’s secretary.

  “I think Camila found another boyfriend in the building,” he said.

  “She did. This time, it’s that tax accountant down on the second floor, the cute one with the blue eyes.”

  “Maybe she’ll get married and leave me.”

  “You can always hope.�
��

  “Not to interrupt the pleasant chat, but why are you calling?”

  “He wants to see you.”

  “Now?”

  “Now. He’s got the minister of tourism with him.”

  “The minister of—”

  “Where the hell is he?” Sampaio said from somewhere in the background.

  “On his way, Director,” Ana said sweetly. And hung up.

  BRAZIL’S POOR had put the current president into office and then sent him back for a second term. An ex-union leader, he spent much of his time attending to their needs. The reduction of poverty had accordingly become his first priority. His second priority was extending Brazil’s influence throughout South America. His third priority was making Brazil a permanent member of the UN Security Council. Tourism came near the bottom of the president’s concerns, somewhere below ribbon-cutting and baby-kissing.

  That left Caio Cavalcante, the minister of tourism, with little to do and a tiny budget. He was the smallest cog in the wheel and everyone in Brasilia knew it. But he was a minis-ter. He had the ear of the president. And possessing even a tiny piece of the president’s ear was enough to cause Nelson Sampaio to treat Caio Cavalcante with deference. Sampaio firmly believed that if you aspired to be a minister, you had to be seen to associate with ministers.

  The director of the federal police had targeted Cavalcante because, as the least important man in the president’s cabi-net, he should have been the most accessible.

  That much was true. Cavalcante had little official busi-ness to occupy his time, but the two men had no common interests, no mutual friends, no long-term history. And even the Least Important Man In The Cabinet had a myriad of people vying for his attention. Cavalcante chose his lunches with care, limiting them to men of potential and men who were in a position to tell him things he wished to know.

  Nelson Sampaio was twice blessed. He was marked as a man on the rise, and he always prepared an interesting story or two with which to regale the minister prior to picking up the tab. Generally, just prior to picking up the tab, because Cavalcante tended to abandon his loquaciousness only when he got well into the Macieira, the Portuguese brandy he con-sumed to crown his repasts.