The Mystery of Rio (25 page)

“Honestly, I doubt that the secretary proposed a toast to the killer before dying.”

Baeta almost laughed at such naïveté. These traditional cops, good men of an older generation, were all in the habit of thinking of crimes as literary works, and sought psychological coherence when the objective evidence, scientifically controlled, pointed them in another direction.

To strengthen his argument, the expert noted that some nurses had already admitted mistaking Aniceto for Fortunata, that the same person who had taken the wine upstairs could have been a man.

The police chief, who seemed visibly uncomfortable as they talked, wanted first to understand how Aniceto had entered the House, and why, since if the secretary were bound, the prostitute herself could have strangled him. He wanted to understand why it had been Aniceto, and not Fortunata, who had brought back the wine, thus increasing the risk of being discovered.

The answers, according to the expert, were pure speculation. There was one material fact, though: Aniceto's fingerprints were those on the bottle, and the hands on the bottle had been on the neck. Therefore, Aniceto had strangled the secretary.

Baeta did not rule out the hypothesis that the whole scenario—the ropes, the gag, the blindfold, a man dressed as a woman, and the wine bottle—had to do with the sexual proclivities of the victim. And he concluded his reasoning with a phrase that could have come straight out of the mouth of Madame Brigitte or Miroslav Zmuda:

“Anything is possible in that house.”

The police chief was very circumspect. Deep down, he had a deep admiration for Baeta; he considered him one of his best men, one of the prides of the Rio de Janeiro police force. He could see Baeta's tremendous internal anguish as he struggled with these questions, and his sincere belief in this version, this absurd fable that this was the work of the twins Aniceto and Fortunata, a view he held only because he was ignorant of one essential fact.

“I need to tell you a story.”

The expert sensed something serious afoot.

“Remember that, while you were closing in on the capoeira, we were investigating the political side of the case?”

Baeta nodded. He had suggested as much in his first report.

“The secretary really did have enemies. He'd exerted his influence against important interests and he'd swayed the marshal against certain individuals. One of those enemies was on Fortunata's list of clients, which you yourself obtained from Dr. Zmuda. We also have information that there was a mistress, a prostitute he visited regularly, and whose description resembled that of the suspect's. We tried to identify her, but then it occurred to us that in São Cristovão she would go by a fake name, as all of these ladies do. And that perhaps this was what was hindering our efforts. Then I remembered your report, in which you claimed Fortunata was Aniceto Conceição's twin sister. All we would have to do was check the birth records. We checked the entries for Aniceto: the son of an unknown father and of a certain Maria Conceição dos Anjos. If he in fact had a twin sister, if the mother had gone to the trouble of registering her son, it was only a simple matter of confirming the identity of the daughter born to the same mother on the same day.”

There was a short pause.

“The problem, Baeta, is that record doesn't exist: Aniceto Conceição never had a sister.”

It is hard to describe Baeta's amazement, and his humiliation. After all, in this case he had failed to apply the principle he always advocated: a continuous and exhaustive investigation. If he had insisted on checking all of these facts, he would have arrived at the same conclusion.

And the police chief went further and said that all Offices of Vital Records were subpoenaed to provide records of any daughter Maria Conceição dos Anjos might have had, born five years before and five years after Aniceto's date of birth. He really did not have a sister. There really was no Fortunata Conceição.

Stunned, the expert actually considered the hypothesis that Aniceto was Fortunata disguised as a man—perhaps because the mother had made a mistake when identifying the sex of the child, in the birth records. And he was about to utter a response when an officer knocked on the door with an urgent message:

“Mr. Baeta, the captain of the First District just telephoned. He's asking that you go immediately to this address on Alfândega Street. It seems that there's been serious incident there with Mrs. Baeta.”

 

Do not think for one minute that the expert found a woman sobbing and humiliated at the Alfândega Street apartment, in the old stretch where the Quitanda do Marisco used to be. Guiomar had made the crossing—albeit not completely, but she was now free.

Having composed herself by then, though she was still being detained at gunpoint, she denied everything, claiming that she was the victim and the police were the aggressors. Hermínio, who was no less clever, confirmed the lie. The officers were stunned: they really believed that Guiomar was being raped because of the way the rower had roughed her up when he brought her into the apartment and the scene with Aniceto, which did not leave much room for interpretation. They waited anxiously for Mixila to return, bringing the capoeira back, to confirm the truth.

The case was complicated due to the history. On October 9th, Baeta had filed a complaint with the chief against the men of Mauá Square, mentioning Mixila explicitly. Now there was this situation. Baeta did not allow Hermínio or Guiomar to respond to the captain's question about what had brought them there, and he interjected his own question:

“Why were you following my wife?”

Implicit in his question was an accusation. Alfândega Street was outside the First District's jurisdiction. Any action there would be justified only if investigating a crime committed in the Mauá Square area. The actions of the officers, therefore, were illegal and showed that the expert was the real target of this persecution, ever since his meeting at Hans Staden's with the police chief.

Seldom have I seen a man act in this manner. Baeta sensed the truth. In fact, he had known the truth since before, since he had returned home from the Portuguese landlady's rooming house and had had those furtive thoughts about Aniceto, his wife, and the silver-handled whip.

The news of the presence of the capoeira in that apartment was evidence of Guiomar's gross betrayal. Later, he would review those facts in his mind and deduce that she herself had faked the burglary at their home.

The expert's vanity, however, was immense. He could not acknowledge to his enemies any misconduct on the part of his wife—even if it meant they would ridicule him behind his back. He would take care of Aniceto and avenge the outrage committed (even though Baeta had already admitted defeat with regard to the bet). Guiomar represented another problem, one the two could only resolve at their first-floor corner home in Catete. He had so much passion and so much hatred inside of him, he felt an overwhelming urge to pummel her.

Baeta's surprising attitude had the effect of intimidating the officers of the First District. Maybe it was because they now recognized, on an intuitive level, that he was a true capoeira, at least in his moral makeup. At last, Baeta was reconciled with his origins.

So much so that, four days later, when Rufino was arrested and they found the bodies of Mixila and one of the lieutenants in different points of the dense Tijuca forest, the name of the expert was the first to be mentioned in Mauá Square.

The police chief himself personally organized the search operations. However, with the sorcerer's arrest, and since the presumptive victims were First District officers, it fell on their captain to carry out the investigation.

Baeta was called in and asked to give his opinion as to whether Mixila and the lieutenant had been murdered, as was suspected. Regarding the officer, who exhibited clear signs of poisoning (later confirmed to be
jararacuçu
venom, from perhaps more than one snake), nothing conclusive could be determined.

With regards to the lieutenant, however, who had fallen into a pit and been pierced by caltrops, the intent was clear.

Rufino confessed that he had dug, covered, and camouflaged the trench with dry twigs. However, he said he had not intended to kill the lieutenant; the caltrops had been put there over forty years earlier to protect against bounty hunters, when he, Rufino, was the head of the runaway slave society known as Cambada.

The captain wanted to know if forensics could go down into the hole and determine the age of the trap. Baeta was prepared to go. That's when someone said to the captain:

“Waste of time, boss. The old man doesn't lie.”

That was when Baeta let out something he had been holding in for some time. He rushed at the old man, his finger pointed at his face, as if he were about to strike him.

“The old man does lie! And I have proof!”

Nothing could have been more demeaning to Rufino. Outraged, he challenged Baeta to prove it.

“He lied when he said Fortunata was Aniceto's twin sister. Aniceto never had a sister.”

The old man let out such a cavernous laugh that he unsettled everyone: “I never said they were brother and sister, much less twins! I said they shared the same belly.”

This time, it was the officers who burst into laughter.

“And is it not the same thing?”

With a touch of sarcasm, revealing an ancient contempt for all of that false wisdom, the sorcerer answered softly:

“No, no, sir. They shared the same belly because they're the same person.”

 

The last antecedent crime—whose history is entitled
The Sedition of the Amazons
—can now be presented to the reader for interpretation.

It is 1531, the year that Martim Afonso de Souza, the recipient of the Captaincy of São Vicente, came with his ships and four hundred men into the bay of Rio de Janeiro to replenish their water supplies, dropping anchor near the mouth of the Carioca River, at what is now Flamengo Beach. It was Martim Afonso who ordered the erection, on the banks of this river, of the famous Casa de Pedra.

However, that is neither here nor there at this point in the narrative. The fact is that Martim Afonso was kept busy at the bay for about three months with several tasks. The real intent of the grantee was disclosed by his own brother, Pero Lopes de Souza, a minor captain in the fleet, in a logbook that recorded every step of the journey. In a famous passage, he reported that the Captain General ordered four men into the hinterland, and that these men walked one hundred and fifteen leagues and returned two months later, with quartz crystals and news that the Paraguay River was full of silver and gold.

Martim Afonso, of course, soon departed, heading south. We do not know if he discovered anything in the Rio del Plata. What is certain is that, by his orders, part of his fleet returned to Portugal. Pero Lopes led that voyage, in a mission that we can deduce was a secret one, dropping anchor along the way, once again, in Rio de Janeiro.

What they did in Guanabara, between May 24th and July 2nd, the diary does not tell us. But this is where I come in, to repair this terrible lapse, because I know exactly what happened.

Just as in the first visit, some men were sent into the hinterlands, accompanied, as always, by a native escort. This time, three adventurers were sent—three convicts who had been stationed in forgotten trading posts along the coast, who had lived for years in the land and knew the language very well.

This expedition would not cover nearly the same distance as the first, and they would not need to spend two months in the wilderness. In fact, it was meant to last no more than a fortnight and was confined to city's natural boundaries: the Guanabara Bay to the east, and the Sepetiba Bay to the west.

But they were not be trusted, these convicts. Pero Lopes was actually counting only on the natives' loyalty; however, since he had not mastered the language of the natives, he did not notice a certain tension, a certain estrangement among the natives in the group.

The expedition followed an old aboriginal trail, approximately parallel to the coast, that extended as far as Angra dos Reis. It is likely that the adventurers had coordinates, or even a copy of part of Lourenço Cão's map—hence, they supposedly asked about the Piraquê River. However, when they reached the vicinity of said place in Marambaia, the Indian escorts simply stopped.

There was no discussion: they simply claimed that if they continued along that route, they would end up at an undesirable location, where they would certainly not be welcome. The convicts insisted on knowing what was going on, and one of the guides answered that, if they were to continue in that direction, they would go very near a native village ruled by women, which it was best to avoid.

Unfortunately, I still have not obtained a copy of Lourenço Cão's map, so I really do not know how important it was to keep on the path recommended by Pero Lopes. But I suspect that the mention of women—sovereign women—must have excited the imagination of the adventurers, who by nature were predisposed to risk.

The agreement reached was as follows: the natives stayed back, waiting, while the convicts went ahead to see what fate had in store for them.

The village did, in fact, exist. It was on an elevated stretch of ground, surrounded and protected by mangroves. The hut—because it was not, strictly speaking, a house—combined native and European traits: it was tall and spacious, twelve fathoms wide and six long, covered with foliage and able to accommodate a hundred people in its wall-less interior. The entrance was through a single door, low and in the middle. But the structure was composed of straight lines and it had windows along the edge of the roof, for ventilation and light. I do not know whether it was made clear that this one house was, in essence, the entire village.

The convicts, however, seemed unimpressed by any of this. The savages had spoken of a village made up solely of women, yet there were men there. What's more: with the exception of about one third of the female population, who were very native-looking, the rest of the inhabitants were mestizos,
mamelucos
all of them. Although some women walked around naked, clothing for both sexes consisted of a kind of thick cotton fabric with a hole in the middle to pass their head through, covering their front and back like a clergy's surplice, and tied at the waist with a simple string.