Buried Strangers (7 page)
TARCISIO MELLO WAS A private investigator who’d retired from the federal police after a thirty-year career. He’d been a vigorous fifty-five at the time, and had been casting around, trying to find something to do with the rest of his life.
One day, after being turned down for a security job, he got a call from a childhood friend who was running for office in Tarcisio’s native state of Santa Catarina. The friend asked him to look into the background of his political rival, a long-standing federal senator. The senator was a born-again Christian, a moral pillar of the community, and an odds-on favorite for reelection.
Mello’s investigation uncovered that he was also carrying on an affair with his personal assistant. Brazil is a tolerant place, and the senator’s love life might well have been per-fectly acceptable to the electorate, if the senator hadn’t been married and the assistant had been female.
Mello’s friend was elected. Word got around. Mello let it be known that his services were available to others, but that he’d only accept work from one candidate for any given office. Homosexual liaisons weren’t the only things that Brasilia’s politicians wanted to hide. Some hired Mello because they hoped to repeat the success of the new senator from Santa Catarina. Others hired him out of fear, hoping to avoid the fate of the new senator’s predecessor. Within a year, Mello had opened an office in Brasilia; within five, he had a staff of sixty-three and representation in five state capitals.
Mello received Silva in a book-lined office. Back when he was a federal cop, he’d been in the habit of bringing paperback novels along on stakeouts. Two of the shelves were lined with books of that type, their well-thumbed spines contrasting sharply with the expensive jacaranda wood. When Silva came in the door, his old friend came around his desk, gave him a firm embrace, and led him to the couch in the corner.
“How have you been, Mario?”
Mello knew about Silva’s wife, Irene. He knew about her drinking problem, about the long-standing depression that had plagued her since the death of her only child.
“Good, Tarcisio, good,” Silva said, knowing exactly what Mello was getting at by asking the question.
“She’s better, then?”
“Oh, yes, much better.”
She wasn’t, but it was sometimes kinder to lie.
They passed the time in chat until the coffee was served. Tarcisio had three daughters and two grandchildren, and he loved to talk about them, but he wouldn’t have brought them up if Silva hadn’t. He was a sensitive man and a kind one, unusual traits in someone who’d seen as much of the bad side of human nature as he had. His recital over, he put down his coffee cup and got down to business.
“How can I help you, Mario?”
Silva filled him in on the case, starting with the discovery of the graves and telling him about Boceta’s theory.
Mello’s lip curled when he got to the part about the curi-ous meeting with the minister of tourism. “What’s Cavalcante trying to hide?”
“That’s what I want to find out.”
“You came to the right place.”
There was no discussion of money or fees. Mello’s business depended entirely on the ability to access information. Often, that information was something that his former colleagues at the federal police were able to provide. He never offered to pay, since payment could have been con-strued as bribery. But he was always willing to return favors.
“Let me see if I already have something on him,” he said, and got up to call his secretary.
A shapely brunette soon appeared and put a dossier down on the coffee table in front of them. The brunette flashed a smile at Silva, turned, and walked out without saying a word. Mello picked up the folder, leaned back in his chair, and started scanning it. After a minute or two he looked up.
“Cavalcante never ran for public office,” he said, “but he headed up the Restaurateur’s and Hotel Owner’s Association for almost twenty years. That’s an elected position. During his tenure, he built the association a building in the center of São Paulo, put up a training school for chambermaids and waiters, and installed a dentist and a doctor so members could get dental and medical care in exchange for their dues.”
“Sounds like he did a good job.”
Tarcisio scanned some more of the document and stroked his mustache. The mustache was a pygmy compared with Silva’s.
“He played to the people who owned
cantinas,
roadside
churrascarias,
little inns in the countryside, surrounded him-self with yes-men, got to the point where he was running the joint like a fiefdom. In time, he turned into an egomaniac.”
“Power corrupts . . .” Silva said.
Tarcisio smiled. “And absolute power corrupts absolutely. Do you know who said that?”
“No idea.”
“An English lord, name of Acton. More than a hundred years ago.”
“Not much has changed.”
“I can attest to that. Anyway, getting back to your friend Cavalcante, a couple of years ago, the owners of some of the more elite restaurants and hotels got together and tried to topple him. They hired us.”
“And?”
“And we couldn’t find anything truly damaging.”
“No sexual peccadillos? No corruption?”
“No sexual peccadillos. Not recently, anyway. The guy’s seventy-six.”
“Seventy-six? Jesus, he doesn’t look it.”
“He lies about it. But so what? His health’s good for a man of his age. Nothing to impede him from doing the job he had then or the job he has now.”
“And corruption?”
“Not an easy thing to prove, corruption. Nepotism for sure. While he was running the association, he put his wife, all three sons, and one of his two daughters on the payroll. Various nieces and cousins as well, but the association mem-bers knew about it and nobody complained. He spent a lot of the association’s money flying back and forth between São Paulo and Brasilia and between São Paulo and Orlando in the American state of Florida. In the first case, he claims he was lobbying for the association—”
“And probably himself, since he’s now the minister of tourism.”
“And probably himself, since he’s now the minister of tourism,” Mello echoed.
“And in the case of Orlando?”
Mello referred again to the page he’d been reading.
“He was going to open a branch office up there. That’s what he said, anyway. Claimed that Brazil had a lot to learn from the Americans in the hospitality area. He also just hap-pens to own a home there.”
“Coincidence, eh?”
“Amazing, isn’t it?”
“And the branch office? Did it ever happen?’’
“Nope.”
“But on the surface, he’s pretty clean?”
“Cleaner than many others in this town.”
Silva snorted, frustrated. “Nothing else?”
Tarcisio leafed through the remaining pages of the docu-ment. Silva would have liked to do that himself, but he didn’t want to ask. His friend had already bent confiden-tiality agreements to the limit.
“His other daughter, the one that doesn’t work for the association, is a Wiccan.”
“A Wiccan? What the hell is that?”
Tarcisio scratched his head. “I haven’t the faintest idea,” he said.
THE MANSION STOOD ATOP one of the high hills in the posh neighborhood of Morumbi. It had once been a wealthy family’s home, and the properties on either side of it still were. The building had come into being with a French name, a French architect, and a front gate designed by Eiffel himself.
Back then, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, it had been called Sans Souci, French for carefree. The name might have been an apt description of the original owner’s state of spirit, and even of that of his son and grandson, but it had no longer applied to his great-grandson, who entered his adult life with many cares indeed, all of them rooted in a lack of money.
The family’s coffee plantations had been sold when the boy was still an infant. They’d brought in millions at the time, but it took his father less than twenty years to drink and gamble most of it away. By the time the young man achieved his majority, the only thing remaining of a once-great fortune was the house.
It was, therefore, no surprise that the great-grandson of the builder had been mightily pleased when his father took a tumble down the main staircase one evening and wound up at the bottom with a broken neck. There were those who said he might have been given a push, but after a zealous beginning to a short investigation, the delegado in charge took a sudden disinterest in the case and bought himself a new car.
The building was imposing, with a mansard roof and a smaller building, originally the servant’s quarters, at the rear. What had once been a vast front lawn had been reduced by half to make a parking lot. At first, this had disturbed the neighbors who felt that it took away from the residential nature of the street, but the new owner had been able to pacify them by planting shrubs against the cast-iron fence and having Eiffel’s masterpiece lined with sheet metal painted in the same black as the gate itself. From the street, the only indication that anything other than a mansion occupied the two-acre lot was a discreet bronze plaque to the left of the entrance. Above it was a small aperture and, beyond that, a television camera. Twenty-four hours a day, a security guard monitored the images and appeared, unbidden, when any-one stopped their car in front of the gate.
Yoshiro Tanaka rolled down his window, identified him-self to the guard, and was admitted to the grounds. Before he’d even parked his car, a woman was waiting for him at the front door. She led him through a warren of corridors and showed him into a room that overlooked a rose garden.
The man he’d come to see was dressed entirely in white: white suit, shirt, tie, socks, and even (Tanaka noted as the man crossed the room to shake his hand) white shoes. His outfit made him look like a high priest of Candomblé with only one false note:
babalorixás,
or
pais de santo
as they were sometimes called, were invariably black or mulatto. This man was Caucasian with blond hair turning white and light-blue eyes behind gold-rimmed spectacles. His lips were pursed in an expression of what might have been disapproval and his head seemed too large for his thin neck.
Coffee was offered.
Tanaka accepted.
A silver service was brought.
The host poured.
“Excellent coffee,” Tanaka observed after he’d savored his first sip.
“Export quality, Delegado. I buy it at the port, in Santos. There’s a little shop among the warehouses. Do you know it?”
“Regretfully, no.”
Tanaka ran his fingertips along the polished surface of the desk that separated them. “Impressive place,” he said, look-ing around, taking in the deep-blue carpeting, the marble fireplace, the little ormolu clock on the mantelpiece, the bookcases of solid jacaranda.
“Thank you,” his host said.
Strict observance of Brazilian protocol would have dictated that pleasantries continue, at least for another few minutes, but the man in white couldn’t contain himself. Tanaka’s call, his request for an urgent meeting, his unwillingness to dis-cuss the subject of that meeting over the telephone, had made him too curious.
He had to ask.
“How can I help you, Delegado?”
Tanaka put down his cup, a delicate affair in the willow pattern.
“It’s not so much a question of
you
helping
me,
as it is of
me
helping
you.
Let me see, how shall I begin?”
The host slid forward in his chair, undoubtedly wishing the cop would get to the point. And then the cop did. With unsettling suddenness.
“I’m carrying out an investigation concerning the disap-pearance of the Lisboa family: a stonemason, his wife, and their two adolescent daughters.”
“What’s that got to do with me?”
Tanaka continued as if he hadn’t heard the interjection.
“They lived in Jardim Tonato, a favela, and were ostensibly moving to a fazenda in the interior of the state. They never got there. In fact, there is no such fazenda
.
Their furniture, furniture that should have been transported to their new home, was sold to a shop.”
“Sold?”
It came out as a croak.
“Sold,” Tanaka repeated
.
“The seller accepted a check and deposited it in his personal account. He told the buyer that he’d acquired the furniture as an investment, acquired it from one of those trucks that sells merchandise along the highways. That would make it untraceable, of course.”
While Tanaka was delivering this information, the man in white swallowed twice. Each time, his prominent Adam’s apple bounced up and down on his thin neck. Tanaka paused for a few seconds and then drove in the final nail: “The seller’s name is Roberto Ribeiro.”
Tanaka’s host reached for his coffee, but before he could grasp it his hand began to tremble. In an attempt to conceal his original intention, he began to tap his fingers on the desk.
“You know this Ribeiro, do you not?” Tanaka said.
Silence.
“He told me he works for you,” the cop insisted.
More silence.
“He also claims he knows nothing about the Lisboa family. I don’t believe him. Shall I tell you why?”
The man in white was looking at him like a cobra looks at a mongoose.
“It’s because Ribeiro flaunts a medallion from Flamengo,” Tanaka said, “and the man who took the Lisboa family away also wore just such a medallion. It’s rare here in São Paulo to find a man who demonstrates his support for Flamengo like that. Coincidence, do you think? Or is he the same man?”
“I deny any—”
Tanaka cut him off. “Don’t waste your breath. You’ve got yourself a nice little racket going,” he said. “A man could live well off the proceeds, couldn’t he?”
His host blinked. It took him less than another second to recognize where Tanaka was going.
“Very well indeed,” he said. “And not that man alone. Others could benefit as well. Others have.”
The cop smiled. “I can see we understand each other,” he said, lifting the delicate cup from its saucer. “I have my sus-picions, of course, but I can honestly claim to be ignorant of what you’re up to here. I didn’t press Ribeiro for a complete confession, and I don’t intend to, as long as we come to . . . an arrangement. Your business need not necessarily be my business. I’m sure you’d prefer I keep it that way.”
“I would.”
“Good.” Tanaka drained the coffee and picked up his brief-case. “I have here,” he continued, “the recordings of the inter-rogation of Ribeiro, the
only
recordings of that interrogation. If you look at the video, you’ll note that I was the only one present.” He slid two tapes across the desk, one a VHS video, the other an audiocassette. “They’re for sale. The release of Ribeiro, my silence, and my promise not to pursue the inves-tigation, are included in the package. It will cost you one hun-dred thousand American dollars. The price is not negotiable.”
“And if I refuse?”
Tanaka lifted his eyebrows, feigning surprise.
“Refuse? I suggest you take a moment to consider the con-sequences.”
“One hundred thousand dollars is a great deal of money.”
“Yes, it is. Nonnegotiable.”
When his host failed to respond, Tanaka stood, crossed to the mantelpiece, admired the ormolu clock, and idly picked up a photo in a silver frame. It showed his host as a much younger man, arm in arm with an older gentleman. They were standing on the lawn in front of the building, the part that had later been transformed into a parking lot.
“Your father?” he asked.
“No.”
When no further information appeared to be forthcom-ing, Tanaka put the photo down. “Well?” he said. “Do we have an arrangement?”
In lieu of an answer, the man in white gathered the tapes and put them into the top drawer of his desk. Tanaka smiled and returned to his seat.
“When will Ribeiro be released?”
“This very afternoon,” Tanaka said. “Now, before I leave, I must caution you. The federal police are also involved in this investigation. They’ve become very curious about a cer-tain clandestine cemetery in the Serra de Cantareira, a cemetery about which I’m sure you know nothing.”
“Absolutely nothing.”
“No. That’s what I thought. Well, there’s nothing to pre-vent them from stumbling across Ribeiro, just like I did. That being the case, it might be best if he . . . disappeared.”
“I understand.”
“As to the payment, I’ll give you three business days to get it together. I want cash, and I want American dollars. Once I’ve received the money, there’ll be no need for either of us to see the other ever again.”
“Nothing would please me more,” the man in white said.
HE WAITED until the guard watching the front gate assured him that Tanaka was gone. Then he summoned Claudia Andrade. She entered the room frowning. She was almost always frowning, and her frown deepened when he told her about the policeman’s visit.
“Are we going to pay him?” she asked when he’d finished.
“We are. To gain time. It’s only a hundred thousand dol-lars, after all. A trifle.”
“And take his advice? About Ribeiro?”
“Certainly not.”
She walked to the window, turning her back to him, con-cealing her expression. When she spoke again, her posture hadn’t altered, but her tone of voice had.
“I most emphatically disagree. The man’s an idiot. He had strict instructions to destroy that furniture. Instead, he sold it, and for the sake of a few reais he’s put us in jeopardy. We should get rid of him immediately.”
“Perhaps you didn’t hear me. I said no.”
“Why not?”
“Because he continues to be useful.”
“Useful?” She snorted. “He’s dangerous, that’s what he is. If that cop wasn’t venal, where would we be then? Tell me that.”
“Ah, but the cop
is
venal, which means there’s no serious harm done.”
“No? What makes you think we’ve seen the last of him? I’ve heard blackmailers always come back for another bite of the apple.”
“They do. And that’s the problem we should be concen-trating our energies on, not Ribeiro. What’s the name of that police official we have on the payroll?”
“Soares. Lieutenant Soares. Why?”
“Sit down and I’ll tell you.”