The Night Watchman (35 page)

I got out my notebook and wrote down the names he’d given me. ‘About the payments that Pedro made in cash, do you have any records?’ I asked.

‘No, Pedro kept them.’

‘Where?’

‘I don’t know. He often discussed the amounts with me and who he was about to bribe, but he never gave me any information about his records.’

‘Then how can we be sure he kept any?’

‘Because he told me he did. I’ve always assumed he had them in his house. I’ve no idea where, though if a handsome police officer like you were to try a little mild torture on me,’ he said with an amused twist to his lips, ‘I’d hold out for a while just to please him and then I’d suggest Pedro’s library.’

Sottomayor had clearly found it useful to let me know he was gay – perhaps to prove he trusted me and that I ought to trust him. But I was beginning to get the idea that he was a member of the elite who had ruined this country’s economy.

‘Why his library?’ I asked.

‘Because he was the only one who ever went in there. Except for Senhora Grimault.’

‘His wife never went in?’

He tapped the tip of his cane on the ground and gave me a displeased look. ‘Have you met Susana, Chief Inspector?’

‘Yes.’

‘And did you come away with the impression that she was an admirer of classic French literature – Proust, Zola, Anatole France . . .?’

‘She struck me as intelligent,’ I told him.

‘Then you didn’t spend much time with her.’

‘Are you always so mean-spirited?’ I asked.

‘Mean-spirited?’ He laughed at the idea. ‘You have me completely wrong, Chief Inspector. I
like
Susana. I like her enormously! And she was one hell of a sexy woman when Pedro married her, I can assure you.’

He eyed me as though he were challenging me to disagree.

‘Okay,’ I said, unable to keep the irritation out of my voice, ‘so why did Coutinho tell you anything at all about his bribes? What did he get out of it?’

‘He liked to have someone with whom he could share his amusement. We’ve been friends since we were little. And we have a similar sense of humour.’

‘So he was amused by the bribes he made?’

‘When he started his business, having to pay off politicians turned his stomach. As a defensive strategy, you might say, he learned to make it into a game. He ended up getting a kick out of making absurdly low offers and watching a mayor or minister haggle for more. It pleased him to bring out their greed. Best of all was seeing every pretence of public service fall apart. Inspector, are you familiar with a certain kind of Portuguese politician who wears Italian suits and who needs a Mercedes or BMW to give him the class that he has always lacked? I once called a particularly loathsome one of them a cheap whore, and Pedro grew furious with me. He said such men had nothing in common with whores, even the cheapest ones, because a woman who offers sex for a price provides a useful service to society.’

‘So who did Pedro buy off?’

‘Anyone whose approval we needed and who took Pedro’s hint that he would be happy to help
his favourite political cause –
every politician’s favourite cause being himself, you understand.’

Sottomayor grinned at his witticism, but I was so far out to sea – with no sign of the landmarks I might recognize as Portugal – that I didn’t find anything he said the least bit funny. Had bribes been offered me many times over the past seventeen years without my even realizing it?

‘I’d like some names,’ I said.

‘Where do you want me to start?’

‘Who got the biggest bribes?’

‘Ministers and secretaries of State. Mayors received less, and city councillors were usually only the price of a week at a four-star hotel in Madeira. These days, however, everyone is on sale. You can get bargains if you shop around.’

‘Did Coutinho pay them directly?’

‘He’d usually pay a relative. Cousins are popular, especially if they have accounts abroad. Pedro made many payments in France for projects he was building in Portugal, and vice-versa.’

Sottomayor went on to name two of the last four mayors of Lisbon and three current city councillors. He also named a former Minster of the Interior and a current Secretary of State. He told me that a former president of a Lisbon football team held the record for Pedro’s largest bribe: forty thousand euros. By way of explanation, he said, ‘The man was a close friend of several well-placed members of the Socialist Party, at a time when they controlled most of the important city halls.’

‘How about the shopping mall Coutinho was building in the Sado National Reserve?’

‘What about it?’

‘Who’d he pay off?’

‘A local city councillor received fifteen thousand euros, as I recall – Jorge something-or-other. But the man was going to use that sum to pay off other officials. Alas, I have no idea who they were or how much they got.’

‘Fifteen thousand is all they received?’

Sottomayor laughed. ‘Tell me, Chief Inspector, how much are
you
paid for your signature?’

‘But fifteen thousand isn’t much for a multimillion-dollar project.’

‘Like I said, there are bargains out there if you’ll just do a little comparison shopping.’

My next move seemed risky, but his tone of bemusement – with an undercurrent of real contempt – led me to believe that he was telling the absolute truth. ‘What if I were to say that I had your old friend’s entire list of bribes for the last twelve years,’ I told him, ‘but that it was in code.’

‘Neither of those two pieces of information would surprise me.’

‘Because?’

Sottomayor’s pipe had gone out again. As he knocked out the spent tobacco from the bowl into my clamshell, he said, ‘Because I’ve been told you’re competent, and because Pedro was a cautious person. He wouldn’t have wanted the police to find out what he was up to – especially not an upstanding officer like you. You might spoil all his fun!’

‘Do you know anything about the code?’

‘I might. Is it all numbers?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s a system we figured out as kids. All you need is what we used to call a master sentence. Imagine the following, ‘My pipe has just gone out.’ The first letter, M is assigned the number one, the second, Y, is given the number two, the third letter becomes three, and so on. It’s easy.’ He took out his tobacco pouch and began filling his pipe. ‘Without the master sentence, it’s extremely hard to crack the code. And we developed ways of distorting it so that it would be virtually impossible for anyone to figure it out.’

‘What was the sentence you used when you were kids?’

‘The first verse of the
Lusíadas.’
He sat upright and unfurled his arms to embrace the epic scope of his words:
‘As armas e os barões assinalados, que da ocidental praia Lusitana . . .
Arms and heroes, who from Lisbon’s shore . . .’

After declaiming the first verse in triumphant Portuguese, as though playing to the back row of a theatre, Sottomayor leaned back and let out an exhausted sigh. ‘If it’s not that sentence, Inspector,’ he said, ‘then I’m afraid I can’t help you. My advice – forget the code and forget the bribes he made in cash. Track down the transfers to the Caymans. It’s the only way forward.’ He lit his pipe and funnelled the smoke towards the ceiling. ‘Anything more I can do for you?’ he asked.

‘One last thing,’ I said. ‘To your knowledge, had Pedro conducted any business in Japan lately?’

‘Japan?’

‘His killer forced him to write the name “Diana” in Japanese characters on his living-room wall.’

‘Diana? Whatever for?’

‘I don’t know. So did he have any deals in Japan in the works?’

‘Not to my knowledge.’

‘Are you aware of any connection the name Diana might have to his stay in Japan when he was a young man?’

‘No, none at all.’

‘How about a connection to his present life?’

He shook his head. I consulted my notes one last time and found a gap I needed to fill in. ‘Where did your old friend get the cash to make his payoffs?’

‘He kept a stash at home.’

‘Where did he keep it?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘And how’d he put together so much cash?’

‘Everybody keeps cash around for emergencies, Inspector.’

‘I don’t.’

He laughed again. ‘Yes, but how many shopping malls or soccer stadiums have you built lately?’

Luci called me shortly after Sottomayor had left to tell me that a limousine service had picked up Susana, Sylvie and Morel, and was taking them to the Ajuda Cemetery for Pedro Coutinho’s funeral. An hour and a half later, I’d just finished with my twelfth sporting goods store – with no leads on the sneakers the killers might have bought – when she rang again to tell me that the limousine had just dropped them at home. ‘And I’ve got some disturbing news,’ she added. ‘Burglars broke in to her house while we were gone. It’s been trashed.’

Getting to my feet, I asked, ‘Has anything obvious been stolen?’

‘No.’

I gazed out through my window as though I were peering through my stunned silence. Then I remembered Coutinho’s French–Farsi dictionary; it was possible that the burglars had been after the flash drive I’d found in its cubbyhole.

‘Did they mess up the library?’ I asked.

‘Yes, the books are all over the place.’

‘And Sandi’s room?’ I was hoping we hadn’t lost the evidence of how she’d spent her last hours.

‘Ever see what a tornado does to a small town?’

‘Any idea how they got in?’

‘No. No doors were forced and no windows were broken. Sir, if I can be perfectly frank, I don’t see how this fits in with your theory about the Frenchmen at Morel’s stables. I mean, if they were responsible, then they did what they came to Lisbon to do – Coutinho is dead. There was no need for them to go back to the house.’

All I could think of was that we were dealing with two separate cases – a murder committed by one or both of the Frenchmen who had raped Sandi, and a burglary ordered by a shady politician. As I explained my theory to Luci, I decided we’d better make sure that the burglars hadn’t merely been petty criminals taking advantage of a grieving family’s absence.

‘Luci, are you in the living room?’

‘The kitchen.’

‘Go to the living room and see if any of the paintings there have been stolen.’

A few seconds later, she told me that the only one missing was the Almeida drawing that Fonseca had taken back to the lab for fingerprinting.

‘Check to see if any of Susana’s jewellery is missing,’ I told her.

Shortly after hanging up on Luci, I realized there was still a chance the crimes were connected and called her back. I told her to look for
Les Confessions
in Coutinho’s library. ‘I should have had you hold onto it,’ I confessed. ‘If Savarin and Mercier burgled the house, then they probably took it.’

‘But why would they want it?’ she asked.

‘Coutinho got Mercier fired by removing it from Morel’s shelves and claiming the Frenchman stole it. If that had happened to me, I’d have grabbed it the first chance I got. That would have seemed fair to me – like rectifying an injustice. Not to mention that the book must be worth a small fortune. I wouldn’t be surprised if a suitcase full of Coutinho’s first editions are missing.’

‘But Mercier could have taken
Les Confessions
on the day of the murder.’

‘He didn’t want to hang around long enough to locate it – not with Coutinho choking to death in the living room. First-time murderers often lose their cool, Luci.’

‘But why trash the rest of the house?’ she asked.

‘Expect one big goddamn mess where there’s hatred,’ I replied, and for once I didn’t mind sounding like a private eye from the 1940s.

‘So if it was Mercier, then he must have been watching the house,’ she said.

As the consequences of her revelation became clear to me, a shiver shook me hard. ‘Very true, Luci. So don’t waste time on the jewellery for now. Go to the library and look for
Les Confessions.
It’s the only book that we can be sure was there and that should now be missing.’

‘Locating it is going to take a while, sir,’ she replied in a dispirited voice.

‘Cheer up – this is the best thing that could have happened!’ I told her.

‘Why’s that, sir?’

‘Because if Mercier did this, then he was still in Lisbon as of an hour ago, and he probably hasn’t managed to flee the country yet.’

On the way to Coutinho’s house, I instructed Inspector Quintela to call our contacts at the airlines and at the Portuguese National Railway and to instruct them to stop any passenger named Bernard Mercier or François Savarin from leaving Lisbon. Luci called soon after that. She was in the library, searching for
Les Confessions,
but had asked Sylvie to check on Susana’s jewellery; none of it was missing.

Twenty minutes later, Sylvie answered my knocks on Coutinho’s front door. She held a tall, pink-tinted flute of champagne and was stirring it with the slender arm of a pair of metal-rimmed eyeglasses. She was barefoot and wore thick gold anklets. Spotting my interest in them, she said, ‘Susana and I travelled to India last year.’ Holding up her champagne, she added with bitter irony, ‘Here’s to taking advantage of the poverty of others!’ She downed it in a single gulp. It was clearly her turn to get smashed.

‘Any ideas what the burglars were after?’ I asked.

‘That’s what I was about to ask you, Inspector.’

‘I see the living room hasn’t been touched.’

‘Is that important?’

‘It leaves two possibilities: either they already knew that whatever they were hunting for wasn’t here, or they found what they wanted before starting to look here.’

‘I see. Any idea how they got in?’

‘I’m betting they had a key.’

‘Except that we had the front door lock changed yesterday.’

‘How about the back door? Did you have the lock changed?’

‘No, not yet, we scheduled that for today. But could they have come through there?’

‘Why not?’

‘The garden is enclosed by a ten-foot wall.’

‘One of the properties behind the garden looks like it has been abandoned for years. With a ladder, climbing over the wall would be easy. I’ll have my Forensics people check for footprints and other evidence.