Blood of the Wicked (7 page)

Chapter Ten

In character, she resembled her brother. Once she’d made up her mind that something, or someone, was worth pursuing, she did it with singleminded determination.

In September of 1974, she made up her mind about a fledgling electrical engineer named Claudio Costa. In August of 1975, they were married.

At first, her parents greeted the news of her engagement with protest. Not that they didn’t like Claudio. They just thought the match was premature. The young people had, after all, known each other for such a short time. Then there was the matter of Carla completing her education at the University of São Paulo.

Carla admitted, and promptly brushed aside, the matter of the relationship’s short duration. As to the degree, she said, one thing didn’t preclude the other. She’d keep on studying.

Dr. Silva and his wife had to admit that they’d never known Carla to promise anything she couldn’t deliver. Backed into a corner, they reluctantly gave their consent. A very pregnant Carla Costa was awarded her diploma in June of 1976. Her son, Hector, was born a week later. He was two years old on the night his grandfather died, eleven when he witnessed the murder of his father.

* * *

Claudio was behind the wheel. Carla was seated next to him, her attention absorbed by a notepad into which she was jotting names and gift ideas. Hector was in the back seat, manipulating a little plastic puzzle.

They heard the man before they saw him.

“Your watch,” he said. “Hand it over.”

Carla looked up to see a man with a day’s growth of beard pointing a revolver at her husband’s head. The man was standing just outside the car, on the driver’s side. The muzzle of the gun protruded through the open window.

Carla looked around for help. People in the neighboring cars were staring straight ahead or in other directions. They’d seen the gun. Nobody wanted to get involved. Carla looked back at the gunman. The muzzle of the revolver was trembling, the man’s brown eyes glazed and distant.

Drugs,
she thought.

“Do it,” the man said to Claudio. “Do it, now. Take off the goddamned watch.” As if to emphasize what he said, he cocked the revolver.

Carla watched the cylinder spin, heard the click, saw Claudio’s Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed. Both of her husband’s hands were frozen on the wheel. She knew the watch had been his father’s, knew he didn’t want to give it up.

“Claudio,” she said, calmly. “Please. Take off the watch and give it to him.”

But Claudio didn’t. Instead, he made a sudden lunge for the revolver, trying to grab the barrel.

The man with the beard took a quick step backward, extended his arm, and pulled the trigger.

The bullet caught Claudio in the chest. Carla screamed. Little Hector started to bawl. The man opened the flap of a leather haversack, put the revolver inside, and walked away. No one tried to stop him.

The police did what they usually did in such cases: They wrote up a report and took no further action.

The day after the funeral, her brother, Mario, came for her. “Would you recognize him
?”
he asked.

She nodded. Recognize him? She’d never be able to forget him.

“Come with me,” he said, reaching out and taking her hand.

They spent the next few days searching the neighborhood, the same streets, over and over again, centered on the place where it had happened. She drove. He sat on the front seat beside her.

Mario had been a cop for almost nine years by then. She knew almost nothing of his professional life, but she knew her brother. He would be good at anything he turned his hand to.

Once, years earlier, he’d talked to her about vengeance for their parents. She’d told him she didn’t want to hear anything about it, that it wouldn’t change anything. He’d never brought the subject up again. Now, with Claudio, she felt differently. By the third day she was beginning to wish that Mario wasn’t a cop, that he wouldn’t be forced to act like a cop was supposed to act, that they could just deal with the assassin themselves rather than deliver him to judgment by the court.

On the afternoon of the fourth day she saw the killer hurrying down the street. He’d shaved, but he had the same leather haversack dangling from his shoulder.

“There,” she said.

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure. It’s him.”

“Go home. I’ll call you later.”

“What are you going to . . .”

She let her voice trail off. Her brother had already slammed the door and was following the man with the haversack.

The driver in the car behind her leaned on his horn.

She did what Mario had told her to. She went home.

As promised, he called her. It was just after midnight, more than five hours after he’d left her car.

“You were right,” he said. “It was him.”

“He confessed?”

“He confessed. It’s late, Clara. Go to sleep.”

“Tell me about him, Mario.”

“No.”

“No? Mario, he—”

But her brother had hung up.

The next day, and the following day, she scanned the paper looking for news of the arrest.

There wasn’t any.

They never discussed the subject again.

SOME FAMILIES seem to be cursed with tragedy. Mario Silva’s was one of those, and his suffering wasn’t over.

In the years that followed the death of his parents, the lights of his life had been his sister, her family, his wife, and his son. The next light that died wasn’t snuffed out with the suddenness of a gunshot. It faded slowly.

They named him Mario, after his father and grandfather before him. He was a baby who hardly ever cried, an infant who always smiled, a toddler who old ladies passing on the street wanted to pick up and hug. In late 1988, he contracted leukemia. It took him five months to die. His parents dealt with it in entirely different ways. Mario threw himself into his work. Irene started to drink.

First, it was just a little, to help her, as she said, “to get through the night.” First, it was sweet concoctions,
caiparin-has
, with the rinds and juice of limes, or
batidas
made with mango juice, or coconut milk. Then, gradually, she’d eased off on the fruit juice and the sugar, claiming they were making her fat. Within a year it had become straight cachaça
,
pure cane spirit, with no sugar and no juice at all.

The stuff was killing her as surely as the leukemia had killed their son. Perhaps Irene knew it, but she wasn’t willing to admit it. She insisted that she was still a “social drinker” even though almost all of her imbibing took place at home and when she was alone. She only drank at night, but it was
every
night, and her nights started at five o’clock in the afternoon. She was generally sleeping it off when Mario left for work, drunk by the time he returned home.

In the beginning, he tried drinking along with her, trying to be companionable, seeking common ground through a haze of alcohol. But the solace he found was only temporary, and the hangovers weren’t worth it. In the end, he communicated with her by trying to call her several times a day, trying to catch her when she was still sober. He never contemplated divorce, nor did he sleep with other women but what remained between them was only the ghost of what their relationship had once been.

As for Hector Costa, having his father shot to death in front of him turned him into an old little boy. For almost a year he lost the gift of laughter.

Carla thought it best to get him out of São Paulo, away from the memories. They moved to Campos de Jordão, a little town in the mountains, north of the road linking São Paulo with Rio de Janeiro.

It was a place where people went in the wintertime to sit in front of fireplaces, bundle up in woolen sweaters, and drink hot chocolate; where the summers were times of empty hotels and unending boredom, and where people who shot people tended to know their victims.

Mario had always doted on Hector, but after the death of his son, and the boy’s father, the two of them reached out for each other. The little boy came to idolize his uncle. By the time he was fifteen, he’d already decided he wanted to follow in Mario’s footsteps and become a cop.

At first, Carla treated it the same way she’d treated his previous aspirations: to be a teacher, a fireman, a soldier. But time passed, and he mentioned no other vocation. She was momentarily relieved when Hector started law school. You had to be a lawyer to achieve officer rank in the Brazilian Federal Police, but she remained hopeful he’d become enchanted by some other aspect of the law and find something else to do with his life.

But he didn’t. Even before he’d received his law degree, he submitted his application to join Silva’s organization.

She hoped he’d be rejected.

He wasn’t.

Six months later, he was posted to São Paulo. As far as Carla was concerned, that was just about the worst thing that could have happened. There was no more dangerous place for a cop to work.

Chapter Eleven

The airport consisted of a single unpaved strip of red earth and a white stucco building with blue trim reminiscent of a farmworker’s cottage. There were no hangars, and there was no control tower.

The twenty-odd aircraft sprinkled here and there on the dusty grass were all high-wing monoplanes except for a vintage Cessna 310B and an old biplane that looked like something out of a World War I movie.

The airplane Hector was waiting for started out as a speck in a cloudless sky, a sky free of dust and therefore much bluer than the one back in Cascatas. As it got closer, he could see that it was an Embraer Bandeirante, a twin-engined job that dwarfed anything else parked on the field. The markings of the Brazilian Air Force were prominent on the tips of the wings and above the cabin windows.

Hector waited until the pilot had cut both of the engines and some of the dust had settled. Then he drove his rental car right onto the strip.

The man who opened the door to the cabin wore an open-necked blue shirt with chevrons on his sleeves. Once he’d lowered the steps he snapped a salute and made way for the familiar figure of Mario Silva.

Hector’s uncle was in his working uniform, a gray suit. All of Silva’s suits were immaculately cut and all of them were exactly the same color. It was one less decision he had to make when he got up in the morning. His mustache, a bushy island of vanity between his nose and upper lip, didn’t quite match the color of the suit but only because a few isolated strands of black hair gave a salt and pepper effect to the gray.

Waving off the sergeant’s attempt to help him, he carried his own bag down the steps, tossed it into the back seat of the car, and climbed into the front.

They embraced.

“Thank God for air-conditioning,” Silva said, when the mutual back patting was done. He reached for his seatbelt, fastened it with a click, and pulled out a handkerchief to mop his brow.

“You think the heat is bad? Wait until you get a lungful of the dust.”

“Dust?”

“Dust. The whole town is one big construction site. You want to stop by the hotel and freshen up?”

“No. Let’s get right into it. Did you see that colonel? Ferraz?”

“I saw him,” Hector said. He let out the emergency brake and slipped into first gear. “He doesn’t want any help from us.”

“Well, we’ve run into that before, haven’t we?”

“Yeah, but most people feign politeness. Ferraz doesn’t. He gave me five minutes of his time and then he threw me out.”

The air conditioning was coming up to speed. Silva mopped the remaining perspiration from his forehead and started folding his handkerchief. Hector turned onto the road that would take them back into town.

“You learn anything in your five minutes?” Silva asked.

“A bit.”

Hector briefed him on the weapon, the location the sniper had chosen from which to make the shot, the lack of leads, and the little that Ferraz had told him about the political situation. Then he recounted the details of his other interview.

“A priest, eh?” his uncle said when he heard Gaspar’s theory.

His voice expressed neither shock nor surprise. There was very little that shocked or surprised Mario Silva.

“That’s what he said. Are you familiar with this liberation theology stuff?”

“Oh yes. There was a time when it was considered subversive activity. A lot of those priests were tortured. Others disappeared.”

Hector nodded and turned off the main road onto a street lined with warehouses. He didn’t ask where the priests had “disappeared” to. The military regime had ended twenty years before, but the clandestine graves of dissidents were still being discovered.

He pulled out a newspaper that he’d stuffed between the two front seats. “The local rag,” he said, handing it to his uncle. “The editor is a woman by the name of Diana Poli.”

“So?”

“So that’s our first stop. They say she knows everything and everybody. I made an appointment.”

Her only jewelry was a Russian wedding ring—red, yellow and white gold in three interlocking bands—which she wore on the third finger of her right hand. Her hair was prematurely shot with gray, and except for lipstick of an indifferent red, she wasn’t using any cosmetics. Her outfit, black jeans and a man’s dress shirt, completed a distinctly masculine impression.

The
Cidade de Cascatas,
her newspaper, occupied a rectangular metal building with galvanized external walls, a tile roof, and a pervading smell of printer’s ink.

Diana met them at the reception desk, studied the business cards they gave her, and led them past a rumbling press into a glass-walled office at the back of the building. When she shut the door the noise dropped off by a considerable number of decibels. It wasn’t what you’d call quiet, but it was possible to hold a conversation without shouting.

“Double glazing,” she said when Hector looked surprised. “Call me Diana. Everyone does. Nice of you to stop by. Saves me the trouble of looking you up. How’s the investigation going? Any leads?”

Hector speared her with his black eyes. He didn’t actually say,
I’m the cop, I’ll ask the questions,
but he might as well have. It didn’t work. She wasn’t in the least intimidated. She leaned across her desk, putting her face closer to his.

“Look, Senhor—
”

“Delegado.”

“Okay, Delegado . . . what was your name again?”

“Costa.”

“Costa
.
I’m not just the editor around here. I’m the principal journalist, and I own the newspaper. And before you ask how that came to be, it’s because my daddy’s rich, I love journalism, and he dotes on his only daughter.”

“Senhora Poli—”

“I told you, it’s Diana, and it’s not senhora
,
it’s
senhorita.
Let’s get a couple of things straight. I’m a serious reporter, not a fucking gossip columnist. If you want anything out of me, you’ve got to make it a two way street.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that if you expect any answers to your questions, you’d better have some to mine.”

“Look . . . Diana, we’ve just started this investigation. I can’t—”

She held up a hand.

“Hear me out. The bishop’s murder is the biggest story ever to hit this town. There are reporters flocking in from all over.”

“Yes, we know,” Silva said unhappily.

“And I’m the soul of discretion. Ask anybody. If you tell me it’s not for publication, not yet anyway, I won’t publish it. I just want an inside track.”

“How about this,” Hector said, “how about we talk about your story after you answer our questions?”

“How about we don’t.”

“Then how about we charge you with impeding an investigation?”

“Don’t you threaten me, Delegado. That won’t stick and you know it.”

Hector flushed. Silva put his hand on his nephew’s arm.

“Let’s start all over again,” he said. “Hector has been in Cascatas since yesterday. He’s a bit upset with the level of cooperation we’ve been getting.”

“So?”

“So he’s a little grumpy.”

“A little?”

“Don’t take it personally.”

Diana sat back in her chair and smiled. “Okay,” she said. “I won’t. Lack of cooperation, huh?”

Silva nodded.

“Ferraz?”

He nodded again. “But that’s not for publication,” he said.

“What else do you know that isn’t for publication?”

“Ferraz has what he claims to be the murder weapon. It’s what you might call a sniper rifle, a Sako Classic with a Leupold telescopic sight, if that means anything to you.”

Diana picked up a pencil and made a note. “It doesn’t, but it will. I’ll look it up. What else?”

“The weapon and the cartridge casings are apparently free of fingerprints. The shots seemed to have been fired from the north tower of the new church. That’s where the rifle was found.”

She made another note. “Have you been able to trace it? The gun, I mean.”

“Not yet. We’re working on it.”

“The killer didn’t file off the serial number or anything like that?”

“No. But that probably only means he knows the weapon won’t be traceable.”

She tapped the paper she’d been writing on. “Why don’t you want me to publish this?”

“The ballistics tests haven’t been completed. We’re not absolutely sure that the rifle is the murder weapon.”

She leaned forward. “When will you know for sure?”

“Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow morning.”

“And you’ll tell me when you do?”

“I will if you help us.”

She leaned back. “Okay, we have a deal. Do you think the murderer was somebody from around here?”

“I’d be guessing.”

“Guess.”

“Probably. According to the bishop’s secretary, the decision to arrive by helicopter was made the day before the murder. There wouldn’t have been much time for an outsider to plan the shot, and he probably wouldn’t have known how to get access to the tower.”

“Okay,” she said. “What else can you tell me?”

She held her pencil poised.

“At the moment, nothing else. Your turn.”

“What do you want to know?”

Hector, calmer now, picked up the questioning.

“Why did you smile when you mentioned Ferraz? What do you know that we don’t?”

She dropped the pencil into a coffee mug she’d pressed into service as a penholder. SÃO PAULO. 450TH ANNIVERSARY, it said. Red letters on white porcelain with a black outline of the city’s most prominent buildings.

“Because I think—as a matter of fact I
know
—that Ferraz doesn’t want the Federal Police snooping around Cascatas.”

“And how do you know that?”

“Because I’m doing a little investigation of my own. Not about the bishop’s murder. Something else.”

“What?”

Diana hesitated, and then shook her head. “It has nothing to do with your case.”

“Why don’t you let us be the judge of that?”

“Because I’ve been working on the story for weeks, and I don’t want to tip my hand. You can read it when I publish it.”

“And when will that be?”

She picked up a cardboard desk calendar and consulted it. “The fourteenth. That’s a week from this Friday.”

Hector let his displeasure show.

Silva didn’t.

“What can you tell us about the Landless Workers’ League?” he asked. “Not the movement. I know about that. I’m talking about the local picture. Who runs the league here in Cascatas? What have they been up to recently? Who opposes it?”

Diana pulled another pencil out of the mug. “Why do you want to know?”

Hector and Silva exchanged glances.

“There’s been a suggestion made—” Hector said.

“By whom?”

“I can’t tell you that, but there’s been a suggestion made that Dom Felipe was acting against the best interests of the league. They might have wanted him out of the way, might have killed him.”

She dropped the pencil on her desk and made a dismissive gesture. “I don’t believe it. Not for a minute. Okay, Dom Felipe came down on liberation theology, and that hurt the league, but that’s no reason for them to kill him. As far as the higher-ups in the church are concerned, liberation theology is a dead issue. People like Dom Felipe don’t make the rules. The Vatican does, and they’re sure to appoint somebody with the same views.”

“So liberation theology is dead?”

“I didn’t say that. I said it’s a dead issue
in Rome
. Here, on the local level, it’s different. There are still a few priests who are—how shall I put this?—sympathetic to the doctrine.”

“And who might they be?”

She narrowed her eyes. “Why do you want to know?”

“Another suggestion was that a priest, one of those liberation theologians, might have committed the murder.”

She looked at him as if he’d given her a personal affront. “That’s insane. Who put an idea like that into your head. Gaspar?”

“I’m not at liberty to say. Why do you think it might have been Father Gaspar?”

“Ah, so it
was
him. Why do I think so? Because he’s like
that”
—she crossed her index and middle fingers—”with the landowners. One of his favorite themes for a sermon is the inviolability of property. The people from the Association love him.”

“The association?”

“Landowners’ Association, set up to oppose the league.”

Silva nodded knowingly.

“Oppose? How?” Hector said.

“Don’t you read anything other than the sports pages?”

Hector reddened and opened his mouth to reply. His uncle stepped on his foot.

“Ever since the government in Brasilia shifted to the left,” Diana continued, “the big landowners have been feeling like orphans. The bureaucrats have been grabbing their uncultivated property and giving it away.”

“So what?” Hector said. “It’s legal, isn’t it? And it’s not like they don’t get paid for it.”

“Legal, yes. And, yeah, they get paid for it—eventually— but most of them don’t want the money. They don’t need it. They want to keep the land. And there’s something else, too.”

“What’s that?”

The definition of ‘uncultivated.’”

“Seems pretty clear to me.”

“As it does to the people from the league. For them, anything that isn’t actually planted with food crops is ‘uncultivated.’ The landowners don’t see it that way. Some of them run cattle, some plant trees for the paper industry, some of them have land they’re allowing to lie fallow for crop rotation. The league goes in anyway. Next thing you know they’re setting up tents, occupying farm buildings, planting their own crops, and petitioning the government. It drives the landowners crazy. That’s why they set up the association.”

“To lobby the government?”

“That too. But also to force the eviction of league members who occupy their fazendas.”

“Force how?”

Diana shrugged. “By any legal means possible. But, for some of them, by using capangas
,
hired gunmen. They contract them in Paraguay and up north in places like Piauí. And sometimes they hire the local cops.”