Crimes of August: A Novel: 5 (Brazilian Literature in Translation Series)

A NOVEL

Crimes of August

RUBEM FONSECA

Translated by Clifford E. Landers

Tagus Press | UMass Dartmouth

Dartmouth, Massachusetts

TO READERS OF

crimes of august

IN ENGLISH:

THE NOVEL BLENDS
historical fact (the assassination attempt against Carlos Lacerda, resulting in the death of Air Force Major Rubens Vaz; the political plot to depose President Getúlio Vargas) with a fictional murder (the death of entrepreneur Paulo Gomes Aguiar). It takes place in Rio de Janeiro, then the nation’s capital, during the period of August 1–25, 1954.

THE THREE POLITICAL PARTIES OF THE ERA WERE:

PSD
(Social Democratic Party): Vargas supporters

PTB
(Brazilian Workers Party): Vargas supporters

UDN
(National Democratic Union): the major opposition party

The political figures depicted are real, with the exception of Senator Vitor Freitas and Luiz Magalhães, who are composites. Cemtex, Brasfesa, and Corpax are fictional firms.

one

THE NIGHT DOORMAN
of the Deauville Building heard the sound of footsteps stealthily descending the stairs. It was one a.m. and the building was enveloped in silence.

“Well, Raimundo?”

“Let’s wait a little,” the doorman replied.

“Nobody else is coming. Everybody’s already asleep.”

“One more hour.”

“I gotta get up early tomorrow.”

The doorman went to the glass door and looked out at the empty, silent street.

“All right. But I can’t take very long.”

On the eighth floor.

The death took place in a discharge of pleasure and release, expelling excremental and glandular residue—sperm, saliva, urine, feces. He backed away in disgust from the lifeless body on the bed, sensing his own body polluted by the filth excreted from the other man’s dying flesh.

He went into the bathroom and carefully washed under the shower. A bite in his chest was bleeding a little. In the medicine cabinet on the wall were iodine and cotton, which he used to make a quick bandage.

He picked up his clothes from the chair and dressed without looking at the dead man, acutely aware of his presence on the bed.

No one was at the reception desk when he left.

THE MAN KNOWN TO HIS ENEMIES
as the Black Angel entered the small elevator, which he filled completely with his voluminous body, and got out on the third floor of the presidential residence, the Catete Palace. He walked some ten steps in the dimly lit hallway and stopped in front of a door. Inside the modest bedroom, wearing striped pajamas, sitting on the bed, his shoulders bowed, his feet several inches from the floor, was the person he protected, an insomniac, pensive, fragile old man: Getúlio Vargas, president of the Republic.

The Black Angel, after listening to detect any sound coming from the bedroom, withdrew, resting against one of the Corinthian columns laid out symmetrically on the iron tetragonal balustrade that surrounded the central area of the palace hall, silent and dark at that hour. He must be sleeping, he thought.

After making sure there was nothing abnormal on the residential floor of the palace, Gregório Fortunato, the Black Angel, head of president Getúlio Vargas’s personal guard, descended the stairs toward the military advisers’ office on the ground floor, checking en route that the guards were at their posts and that all was peaceful in the palace.

Major Dornelles was chatting with Major Fitipaldi, another adviser, when Gregório entered the room.

After examining the security plan for the president’s visit to the Jockey Club on Sunday, the day of the Brazilian Grand Prix, with the two military advisers, the head of the personal guard went to his room.

He removed the revolver and dagger he always carried, placed them on the small table, and sat down on the bed, where several newspapers were strewn.

Apprehensively, he read the headlines. The year had begun badly. In February, eighty-two colonels, supported by the then secretary of war, General Ciro do Espírito Santo Cardoso, had issued a reactionary manifesto backing a coup, criticizing the workers’ strikes and speaking craftily about the cost of living. The president had fired the treacherous secretary, without having a trustworthy replacement. Gregório knew the president didn’t believe in the loyalty of anyone in the armed forces since General Cordeiro de Farias, who had always eaten out his hand like a puppy, had stabbed him in the back, figuratively, in 1945. But he had ended up having to appoint as secretary of war a man in whom he also had no confidence, General Zenóbio da Costa, accepted unconditionally by the military because he had been one of the commanders in the
FEB
, the Brazilian Expeditionary Force that fought beside the Americans in World War II. To appease the military, he had been obliged to remove his friend João Goulart as labor secretary. All of that had happened before the end of February. Yes, the year had begun badly, thought Gregório. In May the conspirators had tried to impeach the president, and the traitor João Neves had helped spread lies about a secret agreement between Perón and Getúlio. Gregório hadn’t forgotten what Neves, when he was still secretary of foreign affairs, had told him: “Don’t stick your nose in where you don’t belong, you dirty nigger”—all because he, Gregório, had attempted to establish a direct contact between the president and the emissary of the president of Argentina, Juan Perón. Still in May, the funeral of a journalist, beaten to death by a cop known as Mule Kick, had been used as a pretext for an anti-government demonstration by fanatic followers of the Crow, a band of conspirators who met at the so-called Lantern Club, supported by an association of hysterical women. In July, the rabble, always aiming at a coup, had fabricated a communist conspiracy. Behind everything loomed the sinister figure of the Crow.

On the bed was a copy of
Última Hora
, the only important newspaper that defended the president. On the front page, a caricature of Carlos Lacerda, the Crow. The artist, accentuating the journalist’s dark-framed glasses and aquiline nose, had drawn a sinister crow sitting on a perch. The Black Angel raised his arm and plunged his dagger into the drawing. The blade pierced the paper and the bedding, perforating the mattress and emitting a horrible sound when it scraped one of the steel springs.

Gregório returned the revolver to its holster at his waist and the dagger to its leather sheath. He put on his coat and left the bedroom.

EARLY IN THE MORNING OF AUGUST 1, 1954,
police inspector Alberto Mattos, tired and feeling pain in his stomach, popped two antacid tablets in his mouth. As he chewed the tablets, he leafed through the book on civil law that lay on the desk. He had always been an awful student of civil law in college. He needed to put in a lot of study in that subject if he hoped to pass the judgeship examination in November. He turned on the small radio he always kept by his side. He stopped rotating the dial when he heard a voice saying: “I was denied access to television by Mr. Assis Chateaubriand, to whom the government is now allied with the same ease and cynicism with which they earlier branded him a traitor.”

There was a knock at the door.

“Come in,” said the inspector.

Investigator Rosalvo, who worked the same shift as Mattos, entered the office. The inspector believed Rosalvo wasn’t on the take from the bosses of the numbers game, a popular but illegal lottery, or from the Spaniards who ran the prostitution trade. Actually, however, Rosalvo was “under wraps,” in police slang, a cop whose corruption was unknown to his colleagues.

“Listening to Lacerda, sir? ‘The sea of mud grows more and more.’ Did you see the word the guy invented? Kakistocracy—government by the worst elements in society. The kakistocrats are going to lose the elections. Sarazate is going to win in Ceará, Meneghetti in Rio Grande do Sul, Pereira Pinto in Rio, Cordeiro de Farias in Pernambuco. People don’t trust Getúlio anymore. Did you see the scheme Etelvino set up for the presidential election? A Juarez-Juscelino ticket, a shoo-in.”

“What do you want?”

“The prisoners’ breakfast arrived,” Rosalvo said. “You wanted me to let you know.”

In the lockup, in two cells intended for eight prisoners, were thirty men. Cells in every precinct in the city were overcrowded with prisoners awaiting space in the penitentiaries, some still to be tried, others already found guilty.

Mattos considered the situation illegal and immoral and had tried to organize a strike in the Federal Department of Public Safety: the police would stop working until all those prisoners were transferred to penitentiaries. The inspector had gotten no support from his colleagues. The penitentiaries were also packed, and the strike proposed by Mattos would have no practical effect other than to cause negative repercussions. Mattos stated that this was the preliminary objective of the strike, to get the attention of public opinion and force the authorities to find a solution to the problem. “A wacky utopia,” Inspector Pádua had said. “You’re in the wrong profession.”

The counsels of the
DPS
had orders to find a legal way to get rid of Mattos, but the most they’d been able to do was to suspend him for thirty days. Commissioner Ramos, who headed the precinct where Mattos worked, had prevented, through his friendships with higher-ups, his being transferred to the remote Brás de Pina precinct as the dirty cops in the office wanted in order to punish him. Besides being remote, Brás de Pina had precarious facilities and a crime rate second only to the Second Precinct, Copacabana.

But Ramos didn’t wish to protect the inspector; he used Mattos’s name to cow
banqueiros
, the men financing the illegal lottery. On one occasion, Rosalvo, the investigator, had caught Ramos telling a banqueiro in an intimidating tone: “I’ll have Inspector Mattos shut down all your betting sites, you hear?!” When the banqueiro left, Rosalvo had told Ramos, “Alberto Mattos will kill you if he finds out you’re using his name.”

Ramos turned pale. “How’s he going to find out? The banqueiros aren’t crazy enough to tell him. It’d have to be you.”

“Me, sir? An old dog doesn’t stick his nose in a meat grinder.”

Every precinct had a cop who collected the money from the numbers bosses to distribute to his colleagues. That policeman was known as the “bagman.” The money collected—the boodle—varied in accordance with the business at betting sites and the greed of the commissioner. Rosalvo, discreet to a fault, wasn’t part of the split because he received his directly from the numbers bosses, who desired to stay in the good graces of Inspector Mattos’s assistant; the inspector’s honesty was considered by the lawbreakers as a threatening manifestation of hubris and dementia.

Policemen assigned to the chief’s office also participated in that venal conspiracy. Periodically, some numbers racket counting house, known as a “fortress,” was raided by the police, always provoking the same headline:
POLICE BUST NUMBERS FORTRES
. It was a way of satisfying the scruples of certain rarefied sectors of public opinion; the majority of the population openly practiced that modality of contravention. Journalists, judges, college graduates in the justice department, of which the Federal Department of Public Safety was part, were also bribed by the banqueiros. The vice squad, which had as one of its principal goals the suppression of illegal gambling, was the recipient of the largest number of bribes.

BEFORE DAWN ON AUGUST 1
, Zaratini, the butler at the presidential palace, who customarily awoke early, opened a window facing the garden and saw Gregório sitting on a bench near the small marble fountain. The head of the guard, hearing the sound of the window being opened, looked up and saw the butler. Without acknowledging the greeting Zaratini gave by nodding, Gregório rose and walked toward the building housing the personal guard, next to the palace. It was five a.m.

Gregório knocked at the door of the room where the chef, Manuel, slept. Looking drowsy, he came to the door.

“Make me some
mate
tea, real hot.”

Gregório sat down at a table in the empty dining room. Manuel brought the tea. At that moment, Climerio Euribes de Almeida, a member of the president’s personal guard and a friend of Gregório’s, arrived. He had left his house, in a distant suburb, in the middle of the night to be able to get there at that hour.

“Any orders, chief?”

“Come to my room,” said Gregório, noticing the proximity of Manuel, who was setting a table beside him. He didn’t want to discuss the matter in the presence of others; Lacerdism was like a contagious disease, worse than gonorrhea or syphilis. It wouldn’t surprise him if there was infection among the guard.

Alone with Gregório, behind closed doors:

“What the hell? Where’s that reliable man of yours? We should’ve done the job in July and it’s already August.”

Gregório was tired of waiting for some victim of the Crow’s slanders to do something. They all claimed to be friends of the president, but other than cursing the Crow in futile rants, the most they did was foolishness like Oswaldo Aranha’s son, who with a gun in his hand had merely punched the defamer in the face; with the opportunity to kill the Crow he had been content to break his glasses. None of them wanted to sacrifice the comfortable life they enjoyed thanks to the president, drinking whiskey in nightclubs and chasing whores. Nothing much could be expected of those cowardly ass-kissers. They had all gotten rich in government, but few were grateful to the president.

Climerio, nervously: “Leave it to me, chief.”

Actually, Climerio had no such reliable man to do the job. Gregório didn’t want it to be anyone connected to the palace, much less the personal guard, and the only person Climerio had found, a guy named Alcino, an unemployed carpenter and friend of the snitch Soares, was certainly not qualified. Some days earlier, Climerio had gone with Soares and Alcino to a rally held by the Crow in Barra Mansa. Soares’s car had broken down and they got to the rally late. “That’s the man there,” Climerio had said, pointing to Lacerda, who was giving a speech. Alcino had hesitated when he saw that Lacerda was not some good-for-nothing like Naval, a guy Soares had asked him to kill because he suspected he was his wife’s lover. Naval was standing at the Pavuna train station; Alcino shot and killed a stranger near Naval, who wasn’t hit. Climerio was convinced that Alcino wasn’t right for that undertaking, but in order not to lose the confidence of his boss, he didn’t relate the fiasco at Barra Mansa when he returned to Rio. He had won Gregório’s confidence when he told him the names of Lacerda’s armed bodyguards, all or almost all of them majors in the air force: Fontenelle, Borges, Del Tedesco, Vaz. There was also one Carrera, who Climerio thought was in the army, and a Balthazar, in the navy. They were rabid Lacerdists and carried large-caliber weapons. Then the Black Angel had said that if Lacerda’s gunmen used .45s, the man chosen by Climerio would have to do the same. “Don’t worry, chief. Leave it to me,” Climerio had replied.

Now, rubbing the smallpox scars on his face, which he always did when nervous, he repeated the same phrase: “Leave it to me, chief.”