Mario Silva - 02 - Buried Strangers Page 9

  Directly ahead, a long, dimly lit corridor stretched into darkness. There were parallel corridors to the right and left. Lining them, up to ceiling height, were metal cupboards. Each cupboard bore a number, a heavy steel hasp, and a pad-lock. The two men were standing in the evidence locker, sit-uated in the basement of the delegacia central, headquarters of São Paulo’s policia civil.

  Orestes Blessa, the man who ran the operation, had a skin bleached by the sunless light in which he spent his days. He had virtually no neck, a wide mouth, and bulbous eyes, all reminiscent of a toad, an albino toad in a police uniform.

  With concrete walls, a steel door, and only one entrance, the evidence locker gave every appearance of being secure.

  It wasn’t.

  Blessa had been working there for fifteen years and for most of that time he’d been running the place like a shop.

  “What’s your pleasure?” Blessa asked, sounding, as he usu-ally did, more like a merchant than a cop.

  “I want to be alone with that”—Soares pointed to Blessa’s computer—“and I want access to the cupboards.”

  Blessa nodded agreeably.

  “Okay, Lieutenant, but remember, if whatever you need is something that might attract attention—”

  “It won’t. You won’t even miss it. And it’s small. I’ll be taking it away in this.”

  Soares hefted his briefcase.

  “I run a special for cases that require, uh . . . a certain degree of discretion,” Blessa said. “Five hundred reais and no questions asked.”

  “Five hundred?”

  Five hundred was nothing. The deal Soares had negotiated with Claudia Andrade was for ten thousand, but it was against the lieutenant’s principles to accept the first price he was offered. He lifted an eyebrow and waited for Blessa to crumble.

  And after a few seconds, Blessa did. He was, after all, only a sergeant. Soares was a lieutenant and the brother-in-law of the secretary of public safety, to boot.

  “Normally, yeah,” Blessa said, “five hundred, but for you, being a special customer and all, four fifty. A twenty percent discount.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  Blessa opened a drawer in his desk, took out a brass ring holding a single key, and went over to pull down a shade over the service window.

  “Fifteen minutes?” he said, offering Soares the ring.

  “Twenty,” Soares said, taking it. “This is the master key?”

  “Yeah,” Blessa said. “Fits all the padlocks.”

  Blessa might have been a crook, but he was an efficient and extremely well-organized crook. Items in his cupboards were always in their proper place and meticulously listed in his database. The computer allowed searches by name (of both the victim and the accused), by case number, by date of entry into the locker, and by item. Soares started searching by item.

  When he couldn’t find the listing he was looking for, he opened his briefcase and took out the notes he’d made dur-ing his search of the archives. The man who styled himself Abdul Al Shakiri was a terrorist, arrested fifteen months ear-lier while in transit through Guarulhos airport.

  International pressure, mostly from the Americans, had resulted in a speedy trial. An appeal was under way, but it wasn’t likely that the exhibits used to convict Al Shakiri would be required any time soon, if at all. Soares typed in Al Shakiri’s name and hit ENTER.

  Nothing.

  He referred back to his notes and tried the man’s real name, Muhammad Wahabi.

  And got a hit.

  When he’d done the search by item, he’d tried “explo-sive,” “plastic,” “plástico,” and “plastique.” Now he could see why he’d been unsuccessful. The stuff Al Shakiri/Wahabi had been arrested with was listed under its brand name: Semtex. The detonators were in the same cupboard as the explosive. Both were securely stored away in his briefcase by the time Sergeant Blessa knocked on the door.

  “Find everything you need?” Blessa asked.

  “Four fifty, you said?”

  Blessa nodded.

  Soares fished out his wallet and counted out nine bank-notes of fifty reais each. Blessa put them into his hip pocket and smiled.

  “A pleasure doing business with you,” he said, looking very much like he’d just snapped up a fat and extremely tasty dragonfly.

  “THREE FULL watts of power.”

  The owner of the model-aircraft shop said it with a touch of pride, as if he’d designed and built the thing all by himself.

  “And that’s the most powerful one you’ve got?” Claudia said.

  The owner looked hurt.

  “Well . . . sure,” he said. “That’s the maximum permitted by law. You don’t need any more than that. By the time it gets out of range of this baby, you’re gonna need binoculars to see whatever you’re flying.”

  “That should do it then.”

  “Absolutely. Aileron control here, rudder control here, and elevator control here,” he said, stabbing at the front panel of the remote control designed for model aircraft.

  “Receiver and motors?”

  “In the box. Everything you need is in the box. Instructions, too. What’s the wingspan by the way?”

  Claudia knew nothing of aircraft models. She gave him the first number that popped into her head.

  “One meter sixty-two.”

  It was her height.

  The owner whistled. “That big, huh? Jesus, you don’t fool around, do you? I can see why you’d be afraid of losing it. You’re gonna need a set of batteries. They’re not included.”

  “Okay.”

  He selected some batteries from a shelf behind him, turned back to the register, and started hitting buttons.

  “The whole business,” he said, “comes to eight fifty seven and sixty centavos. Let’s call it eight fifty seven even, okay?

  “Fine.”

  Claudia opened her purse and took out her wallet.

  “Cash or credit?”

  “Cash.”

  “I don’t get many women in here,” the shop owner said, taking her money and giving her three reais in change.

  “It was my uncle’s hobby,” Claudia lied. “He taught me.”

  In fact, the things her uncle Ugo had taught her were more in the nature of what an erect penis looked like, and how she’d better keep her mouth shut about what he did to her with it.

  The shop owner closed the drawer of the register, brought out a plastic bag from under the counter, and filled it with her purchases.

  “You got any questions, just call,” he said.

  Chapter Seventeen

  BRAZIL ABOLISHED SLAVERY IN 1888.

  The imperial family and the majority of the people were in favor of the act.

  The great landowners were appalled. Who’d pick their cotton? Cut their sugarcane? Harvest their coffee?

  In desperation, they turned from Africa to the Orient, solving their labor problem by importing tens of thousands of Japanese peasants to work as indentured servants. And work they did, for the five years it took them to fulfill their con-tractual obligations. Then they gravitated to the great cities, struck out on their own, and worked even harder. So hard, in fact, that many of the new immigrants made modest fortunes.

  By the end of the twentieth century, Brazilians of Japanese descent were doctors, lawyers, politicians, and university professors. They were businessmen, firemen, and policemen like Yoshiro Tanaka. And they’d transformed São Paulo into a city that boasted more ethnic Japanese than any place out-side of the home islands.

  Liberdade, the heart of the Oriental district, had become fully as large, and equally as colorful, as San Francisco’s Chinatown.

  It was there, in Liberdade, under a red Shinto arch that marks the entrance to the neighborhood that Gilda and Hector agreed to meet. Hector arrived fifteen minutes early. Gilda was spot on time. He took her arm and led her to a little restaurant that was patronized almost exclusively by the locals. It was a narrow, but very deep establishment, wedged between a gr
ocery smelling of dried seaweed and a shop displaying a suit of samurai armor. They were guided to the sole unoccu-pied table.

  Two hours later, four customers remained: Gilda, Hector, a man in a blue suit, and a woman in a kimono. The woman was seated Japanese-fashion, perched high on her chair, calves doubled under thighs, her white-crowned head only a few centimeters from that of the man in the suit. He looked to be less than half her age, possibly her son, perhaps her grandson. They were murmuring softly in Japanese.

  Gilda put down her chopsticks, picked up her rectangular box of cold sake, and managed to sip from it without drib-bling anything on her chin, a trick that Hector, for all the time he’d spent in establishments like this one, had yet to master.

  The waiter came to take Gilda’s plate, noticed there were still two pieces of tuna on it, and asked if she was finished. Gilda shook her head.

  “Not quite,” she said.

  “I think he wants to close,” Hector said, when the waiter was gone.

  “Close?” Gilda blinked and looked at her watch. “Nossa,” she said. “Five to three already? I have to get back.”

  She popped another piece of sashimi into her mouth, put down her chopsticks, and reached for her purse.

  Hector realized, with something of a shock, that they hadn’t gotten around to discussing the findings of the med-ical examiner’s office. And that, ostensibly, was the reason for the lunch.

  “I sent the report to your office,” she said, as if she could read his mind. “It’ll probably be waiting for you when you get back.”

  “It’s finished?”

  “It’s finished.”

  “That was quick.”

  “I haven’t slept much over the last couple of days.”

  That explained the dark circles under her eyes, circles that hadn’t been there the first time he’d met her.

  “When I was excavating the bodies,” she said, “long before we had DNA results, I just knew I was looking at par-ents buried with their children. And I knew it was murder. It revolts me. I want to see whoever did this put into a cage.”

  “I sometimes wish we had a death penalty in this country.”

  “I don’t.”

  He would have liked to debate that one. He picked up his box of sake, paused with it halfway to his lips, decided he’d done too much dribbling for one day, and put it down.

  “So the DNA results are in?” he said.

  She bobbed her head, fidgeted in her chair, looked again at her watch.

  “All part of the report,” she said. “The corpses interred in common graves were blood related: mothers or fathers, sometimes both, buried with their children.”

  Hector reflected on the many corpses she must have seen, thought again how it must take a strong stomach to be a medical examiner. He’d been exposed to no more than thirty murder victims in the course of his career, and the image of every one was burned into his brain. He could seldom face lunch or dinner after visiting a murder scene.

  “Let me ask you something else,” he said.

  “Ask away, but be quick about it. I told Paulo we’d be lunching together. He says I’m allowed to answer all your questions.”

  “Including what you were starting to say when he cut you off?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What was it?”

  Gilda raised a hand, caught the waiter’s attention, and made a gesture as if she were writing on a pad. He hurried over to their table.

  “Coffee?” he said. “Dessert? I’ve got a nice sweet made from beans.”

  Both shook their heads.

  “Just the check,” Hector said.

  The waiter smiled in satisfaction, gave a little bow, and hurried off. Gilda watched his retreating back for a moment, and then fixed her gray-green eyes on Hector.

  “Every corpse had a split sternum,” she said.

  “A split what?”

  “Sternum. Breastbone. Cut through from top to bottom. Like this.”

  She reached across the tiny table and traced a vertical line on his chest, dividing his ribs. It was a strangely intimate ges-ture. He had a sudden attack of gooseflesh and couldn’t be sure what was causing it, her words or her touch.

  “Paulo cut me off because we weren’t sure, then, that the sternum-cutting applied to all of the corpses. It would have been premature to suggest that it did.”

  “What reason could anyone have for doing something like that?”

  “Only one I can think of: to obtain access to something behind the ribs.”

  “The heart, maybe?”

  “Maybe.”

  Hector recalled a woodcut he’d once seen of a victim bent backward over an altar while an Aztec priest ripped the heart out of his chest.

  “Seems to reinforce the idea of ritual killing,” he said.

  She hesitated for a moment. “Possibly,” she said. “But, if you really want me to make a wild and unsubstantiated guess . . .”

  “Live dangerously.”

  “A doctor did it.”

  “A doctor?”

  “I’ll rephrase that. Not just a doctor. A surgeon. He or she did a clean job of it, and he or she used a saw.”

  “A saw?”

  “A sternal saw. It’s a device with an electric motor and a blade that moves like this,”—she waved a finger up and down in the air—“a medical instrument that has only one purpose, to open the chest cavity.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Sternal saws have a unique signature. Under a micro-scope, the serrations stick out like a Caucasian in this neigh-borhood. They’re unmistakable.”

  The waiter appeared with the check. Hector took out a credit card and slipped it into the leather cover embossed with the name of the restaurant. “So, if it’s not a cult thing,” he said when the waiter was gone, “if it’s not some kind of ritual murder, what else could it be?”

  “We don’t—”

  “Speculate. Yeah, I know.”

  “How did you know what I was going to say?”

  “You started with a we. That’s the medical examiner’s office talking.”

  She sighed.

  “Look,” she said, “you may not like it, but I think Paulo’s right. We’re supposed to deal in facts. If we start speculating, there’d be no end to it. Experience has taught us it’s better if we just tell you guys what we know, and you come up with a hypothesis to explain it.”

  The waiter came back. Hector scrutinized the bill and the accompanying credit card slip.

  “Service included?”

  “Sim, Senhor.”

  Hector scrawled his signature. The waiter thanked him, detached the customer’s copy of the slip, and wished them both a pleasant afternoon.

  “Mind you,” she said, when they were alone again, “I don’t think you can rule out ritual murder just because the killers used a saw. The cult thing remains a distinct possibil-ity; I’m not saying it isn’t, but . . .”

  “But you have another theory?”

  “Yes.”

  “How about sharing? Not the cop and the medical exam-iner, just a young couple having a romantic lunch?”

  “Romantic lunch, huh? What would your namorada have to say about that?”

  “Was there a question behind that question?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “If it was what I think it was, the answer is no. I haven’t got a namorada.”

  “It was what you think it was. You’re not gay?”

  “No.”

  “So?” She made that writing gesture again.

  He reached into his pocket, pulled out his notebook, and handed her a pen. She jotted down her address and tele-phone number.

  “It’s the building on the corner with Rua Aracajú,” she said. “Fourth floor.”

  “Thursday night?”

  “Friday’s better.”

  “Eight o’clock?”

  “Fine.”

  She’d released her purse, left it on her lap. Now, she picked it up again and stood
.

  He remained glued to his chair.

  “You’re not going to tell me, are you?” he said.

  “Maybe on Friday. It will give you something to look for-ward to.”

  “I already have something to look forward to.”

  “Which is?”

  “Seeing you.”

  “There. That wasn’t so hard, was it? You do know how to flatter a girl. You were just holding it in.”

  “I wasn’t holding it in.”

  “And you can wipe the hurt puppy expression off your face. It’s not going to help. I’m not telling you what my the-ory is, not today at any rate.”

  “Why not?”

  “I need a second opinion. I have a girlfriend, a specialist. She’s in a position to give me one.”

  “What do you need a second opinion for?”

  “Someone has to tell me I’m not crazy.”

  And before he could ask her what she meant by that, Gilda had turned her back on him and was heading for the door.

  Chapter Eighteen

  YOSHIRO TANAKA’S TELEPHONE RANG. He leaned to his left to look through the open door. Sergeant Lucas, who should have been screening incoming calls, wasn’t at his desk. Tanaka cursed and grabbed the receiver.

  “Tanaka,” he said sharply.

  “Delegado?”

  “Who’s this?”

  “Sergeant Corvo.”

  Corvo was in charge of the police garage, the building the cops called the Beehive because of its tapering, circular shape.

  “What is it, Sergeant?”

  “Uh, Delegado, I think you’d better come over here.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, uh . . . they broke into your car.”

  “Broke into my . . . right in the middle of your goddamned garage?”

  “Sim, Senhor. Smashed the front window on the passen-ger’s side. The radio and CD player are still there, though. Bastard must have gotten interrupted before he could get them out.”

  “Interrupted, but not caught, right?”

  “Hey, Delegado, this is a big place, and I’ve only got three—”

  “Save it for your annual evaluation meeting, Sergeant. You’re going to need it. I’m on my way. Meet me out in front.”

  * * *

  AN UNHAPPY-LOOKING Sergeant Corvo was waiting for Tanaka at the base of the ramp. They started climbing it together. A shift change was under way, and Corvo had to raise his voice to be heard over the sound of the ascending and descending vehicles.