A Vine in the Blood (28 page)

Before the war, Francesco’s youngest cousin, Giuseppe, the one who stood to inherit the least, had picked up his family and moved to someplace in America called Brodowski. Francesco still had Giuseppe’s address somewhere. He found it, wrote a letter, and much to his surprise, got a reply within a month.

It turned out that this Brodowski was, indeed, in America, but it was
South
America, Brazil to be precise.

Giuseppe was happy with his life there. There were opportunities for Francesco as well. Giuseppe would be happy to have company from the old country. Francesco could stay with him for as long as he liked.

So Francesco, as soon as he’d saved enough for the fare, sold out, packed up his few remaining goods and took Clara off to Brazil. She was, by then, already pregnant with Luigi.

Francesco and Clara’s only son was born on a coffee plantation in the interior of the State of São Paulo. By the time he was eleven, his father had saved enough to set up a modest shop in the neighboring city of Riberão Preto, where he proceeded to teach his son, Luigi, everything he knew about jewelry and gemstones.

By the time Francesco died, in 1991, Luigi had surpassed his father in knowledge of precious stones, but he’d never held in his hand a stone more precious than the one he was holding now.

He looked across the counter of his shop, taking in the fellow who was offering it for sale. There was definitely something shifty about him, which immediately caused Luigi to remember the circular that some
cabo
from the
Polícia Militar
had dropped off on the morning of the previous day.

He’d done no more than scan it, but he remembered where he’d put it: on the right-hand side of his worktable.

“I’ll have to take a closer look at this,” he said to the man who’d brought the stone. “Have you got a few minutes?”

The man said he did, so Luigi told Priscila, his sole employee, to keep an eye on things while he did an evaluation. He went into the back, switched on the light and read the circular, this time with care.

The police were looking for diamonds
of exceptional quality
and cut and weights between three and five carats
. It was just such a stone that he held in his hand.

If he’d had any idea how little the shifty man knew of the gem’s true value, and for how little he’d have been willing to sell it, Luigi might not have called the police.

But he didn’t know, so he did.

T
HREE DAYS
had passed since the disappearance of the birds, and in all that time there hadn’t been a single break in the case. True, Juraci Santos still hadn’t turned up dead, but that was little solace for Silva. He didn’t feel they were any closer to finding her, and he feared she might already have been murdered.

The call, therefore, came like a ray of hope breaking through dark clouds of despair. He and Arnaldo set out immediately for Riberão Preto.

Helio Fortunato, the delegado who’d called, was waiting to receive them.

“Where’s our perp?” Arnaldo said when introductions were complete.

“It’s not him,” Fortunato said. “He’s not part of it. But he can give you a description of the woman you’re looking for.”

“
Woman?
” Silva said. “We’re looking for a woman?”

“It seems you are.”

“That bitch,” Arnaldo said.

“What bitch?” Fortunato said.

“Cintia Tadesco,” Arnaldo said, “Tico’s girlfriend. It’s gotta be her.”

“That bombshell?” Fortunato said. “You figure?”

“More like wishful thinking,” Silva said. “My colleague here isn’t too fond of the lady. How about filling us in?”

“I think it would be better if you heard it from the man himself. Come on. It’s this way.”

Fortunato took them down a green-painted corridor to a windowless interview room, blue with cigarette smoke. There was a ring welded to the steel table, one to which a prisoner could be shackled, but the man seated there wasn’t handcuffed. He was smoking a cigarette, one of many by the looks of the overflowing ashtray. He looked nervous.

“I’m out of smokes,” he said to Fortunato. “Be a pal, Delegado, and see if you can’t get me a few more.”

Fortunato took a pack out of his pocket, removed four cigarettes and lined them up on the table. Then he made the introductions.

“Senhores, meet Tancredo Candido. Tancredo, this is Chief Inspector Silva, and this is Agent Nunes. They’re from the Federal Police. They want to know how the stone came into your possession.”

“Right. Right,” Candido said. He used his glowing butt to light one of Fortunato’s cigarettes, and took a deep drag. Then he launched into his story. “The woman who rented the place,” he said, “she was—”

“Wait. Stop,” Fortunato said. “Start by telling the officers about what you do for a living and where you do it.”

“Oh. Right. Right,” Candido had just taken another puff. He held it in while he said, “Well, it’s like this: I’m a
caseiro
. I take care of a
sitio
owned by Senhor Yakamura.” Then he exhaled the smoke.

“Who’s Yakamura?” Arnaldo asked.

“A rich
Paulista
.”

“Not Japanese?”

“That too.” Candido waved his cigarette, the ember a glowing jewel in the dimly-lit room. “I mean, that’s what he
looks
like, but when he talks, he
sounds
like he comes from São Paulo.”

“Go on.”

“Right. Right. Where was I?”

“Sitio.”

“Right. Right. There’s the main house, a swimming pool, a little house for me and about two hectares of land. That’s it. Yakamura doesn’t live there, hardly ever visits, rents it to people who get it into their heads it’d be nice to have a little place in the country.” He took another drag. “City folks, always city folks. First couple of weekends they generally show up with just the family. Then they start inviting friends. They do barbecues. They get drunk. Sometimes they screw each other’s wives. I remember one time—”

“What we’re really interested in,” Silva said, “are the circumstances pertaining to the diamond you tried to sell.”

Candido finished the cigarette and ground it out in the ashtray. This time, he didn’t light another from the stub.

“Oh. Yeah. Right. Right. So these people who rent the place?”

“Yes?”

“They mostly get tired of it pretty quick. I mean, unless you’re eating, or getting drunk, or screwing somebody’s wife it’s pretty boring, right?”

“The diamond, Tancredo.”

“I’m getting there. So one family after another moves along, and Senhor Yakamura rents it to another one. Now, me, I stay on, because I take care of the place. I cut the grass, and clean the pool and fix the little things that go wrong. The water’s from a well, for example, and the damned pump—”

“We don’t care about the pump,” Arnaldo said. “We care about the diamond. Where did you get it?”

“Anybody got a light?”

Fortunato tossed him a pack of wooden matches. He took one out of the box and struck it. Candido used the flame to light his cigarette, shook out the match, exhaled more smoke. “One of the birds brought it.”

“Birds?”

“See? You don’t know about the birds. And now you’re gonna want me to tell you about the birds, which I already would have if you’d let me tell it my way in the first place.”

“Then tell it your way,” Silva said.

Tancredo tossed the match in the ashtray, picked up the box.

“Can I keep these?”

“Sure,” Fortunato said. “Keep talking.”

“Right, right. Well, it was like this: about four months ago Senhor Yakamura rented the place to this woman. She shows up with five crates of birds and a couple of sacks of the shit they eat.”

“These birds,” Silva said. “Were they carrier pigeons?”

“Yeah, but I didn’t know that until later.”

“This woman. Describe her.”

“A lot younger than you guys.”

“How much younger?”

“I dunno.”

Silva closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Getting information out of this guy was like pulling teeth. “Thirty-five?” he said. “Forty?”

“Yeah, like that.”

“Like what?”

“Thirty-five.”

“What else?”

Tancredo took another puff. “What else do you want to know?”

“Hair? Was she pretty?”

“Brown hair. Kinda curly. Not bad looking.”

“How tall?”

Candido held up a hand, palm down, to indicate her height.

“Average,” Silva said. “Her eyes? What color?”

“Brown … I think.”

“How was she dressed?”

“Tight pants. Nice ass.”

“What else do you remember?”

“About how she looked?”

“Yes.”

“What’s to remember? She was normal. She had a nice ass, that’s all. And, oh yeah, she smelled good.”

“What do you mean she smelled good?”

“What I said. She smelled good.”

“Her soap? Her deodorant?”

“Yeah, her soap maybe. What’s deodorant?”

“Never mind. What happened next?”

“She tells me it’s a hobby of hers, raising these birds. She says she’s busy in town all week, and she’ll only visit on the weekends, and maybe not every weekend, so she wants my help.”

“What kind of help?”

“Feeding them, cleaning the cages, that kind of stuff. I tell her okay, I’ll do it. She asks me how much I want to earn. I tell her four hundred a month. She says she’ll pay two.”

“But you accepted?”

“Yeah. I never figured she’d pay four. I was just trying it on. A week later, she’s back with a van—”

“What kind of a van?”

Tancredo ground out his butt, getting ash on his fingers in the process. He wiped it off on his pants.

“One of those Volkswagen things,” he said. “White, like most of them are. In the van, she’s got all the stuff to hammer together a house for the birds. She stands around being bossy while I do it, and then she has me move the pigeons from the cages into their new house, which isn’t very difficult because they’re little, and they’re not flying yet.”

“And then?”

“And then she tells me to keep feeding them and to let them out when it looks like they’re about ready to fly. I ask her if she isn’t worried about losing them, and that’s when she tells me they’re homing pigeons, which means they’ll always come back as long as I keep feeding them. So I keep feeding them. Pretty soon they’re taking off, and flying around and coming back to their house to sleep.”

“And the woman?”

“I don’t see her for a while.”

“How long?”

Tancredo thought about it while he lit another cigarette. “More than a month. When she finally shows up, she stays just long enough to make sure the birds are doing their thing, coming back to their house at night. Some hobby, huh? You know what I thought?”

“What?”

“I thought she didn’t give a shit about those birds; she only cared about what they could do, which, as it turned out later, was absolutely right.”

“What happened next?”

“Four weeks or so later she’s back again. Just to have a look, make sure I’m feeding the birds. She does the same thing, maybe four or five weeks after that.”

“And then?”

“And then, on her next visit, she has me put all the birds in the cages she brought them in, but she leaves their little house right where it was. ‘They’ll be flying back,’ she says, ‘and, when they do, they’re going to have little bags tied on them.’ She tells me not to mess with those bags and, she says, if I do, she’ll have her husband cut my balls off. How about that, huh? Is that any way for a woman to talk? Cut my balls off!”

He took a puff and shook his head at the sad decline in the vocabulary of women.

“You believed her?”

He pointed at Silva with his cigarette. “You bet I did. You should see the bitch. She’s mean.”

“But, despite her warning, you messed with those bags anyway, didn’t you?”

He looked pained that Silva would ask. “One of them. Just one. I was curious. I mean, wouldn’t you be? Her making such a big deal of it and all?”

“Just curious?”

“Honest to God. Just curious. It wasn’t like I was planning anything ahead of time. I wasn’t. But, when I saw what was inside …”

“You started thinking how you could keep some of those diamonds for yourself.”

He sighed and extinguished the third cigarette. “Yeah. And I counted the birds, and I noticed one of them hadn’t made it back.”

“So you decided to make it two?”

“I did. I figured she’d have no way of knowing. And she did’t. She showed up, took the birds, had me break down the little house I’d set up and took that too. I haven’t seen her since. That’s the end of the story. I got nothing else to tell you.”

“Listen to me, Tancredo,” Silva said, “I really don’t care about you trying to nick those diamonds.”

Tancredo raised his eyebrows. “You don’t?”

“No, I don’t. We’ve got bigger fish to fry. So here’s what we’re going to do: if you cooperate, I’m not going to charge you.”

“You’re not?”

“No.”

Tancredo smiled, showing tobacco-stained teeth. “Right. Right. I’m your man. How do I cooperate?”

“First off, I’m going to send an artist from São Paulo. He’ll sit down with you and, based on your description, try to work up a sketch of what the woman looked like.”