Senhora Garcia ignored her question.
“I couldn’t see his face very well,” she said. “My eyes aren’t what they used to be, and by the time I’d fetched my binoculars from the windowsill upstairs he’d gone inside.”
“And the other man? What was he wearing?”
“Slacks and a blue shirt. Short sleeves.”
“You haven’t seen either one of them since they went in there?”
“Did I say that? Did I say I hadn’t seen either one of them since they went in there?”
Silva sighed.
“No, Senhora Garcia, you didn’t.”
“You’re damned right, I didn’t. The one with the blue shirt has been out of there three times. The first time was just after he went in. He was away for about ten minutes and came back with a box of bottled water, Minalba, the one with the red label, the one without gas. The second time, he went down to the padaria on the corner. He came back carrying a paper bag.”
Senhora Garcia’s vision might not have been quite as sharp as she would have liked, but it wasn’t all that bad either. And there didn’t appear to be anything wrong with her memory.
“What about the third time?” Silva asked.
“He came back with a couple of plastic bags, looked like they were from the supermarket around the corner on Rua Francesco Bellini.”
“Did you see either one of them with a gun?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“What do you think, Gloria?” Silva said, turning to the head of the hostage rescue team.
“We checked with the power company,” she said. “They haven’t got electricity in there. If anyone comes out, we pounce on him. If not, we wait until five in the morning and go in with night-vision scopes.”
“You’re the expert,” Silva said, “but I really hate the idea of waiting that long.”
“Hate it, but you’re going to do it, eh?” Senhora Garcia said. “Bunch of goddamned pussies.”
In the end, they didn’t have to wait at all. Fifteen minutes after adopting Gloria’s strategy, the man in the blue shirt walked out the front door of the building.
Her people grabbed him as soon as he’d rounded the corner. Minutes later, he was shackled to a metal table in the RV that the team was using as a mobile command post.
Silva kicked off the interrogation: “What’s your name?”
“Tulio Santiago, Senhor.”
Santiago was scared, short, and hunger thin. His brown eyes, big behind steel-rimmed glasses, kept oscillating from the MP5 in Gloria’s hands to the Glock on Arnaldo’s belt.
“Who else is in that warehouse, Tulio?”
The prisoner squirmed. “Just my companheiro Elvis, Senhor.”
“Elvis, is it? Elvis what?”
“Pinheiro, Senhor.”
“You weren’t armed. Is Elvis?”
“Armed, Senhor?”
“Is he carrying a gun? Or a knife?”
“Oh, no, Senhor. We never carry those kinds of things.”
“If you don’t carry weapons, Tulio, how do you control your victims?”
“Victims, Senhor?”
“Stop beating around the goddamned bush, Tulio. The game is up. Someone heard her scream. So save us the trouble of roughing you up. Tell us what we’ll find in there when we break down the door.”
Santiago hung his head and sighed. He was ready to cooperate.
“Did you torture her?”
Santiago’s head snapped up.
“Torture her? Of course not. What kind of people do you think we are?”
“If you didn’t torture her, why did she scream?”
“They all scream, Senhor. That’s just the way they are. We try to keep them quiet, but it doesn’t always work.”
“Keep them quiet? Really? And what do you do to keep them quiet?”
“We give them nuts, Senhor, and sometimes a piece of fruit.”
The hostage in the warehouse wasn’t the Artist’s mother. She was a Lear’s macaw.
One of Gloria’s men put in a call to the IBAMA, the Brazilian environmental agency. A no-nonsense female wearing a bush shirt and sporting a nose stud showed up about half an hour later. She introduced herself as Doutora Kipman.
“Physician?” Hector asked.
“Biologist,” she said. “Who’s Silva?”
“That would be me.”
She stuck out a hand. “Congratulations, Chief Inspector. You did a great job today. We’ve been after these two characters for quite some time.”
“What’s going to happen to them?”
“You caught them em flagrante.” She rubbed her chapped hands together in glee. “They’re gonna get at least five years, maybe even seven.”
“Five years? For smuggling birds?”
Kipman bristled. “The Lear’s macaw is the second rarest macaw in the world. Do you know how many of these birds survive in the wild, Chief Inspector?”
“I have no idea.”
“Then let me tell you. There aren’t more than eight hundred of them, eight hundred in the wild and maybe another fifty in captivity. That’s it. There are no more. That one preening itself over there represents more than one-tenth of one percent of the entire species.”
Silva looked at the blue bird with new respect. “Is that so?” he said.
“That’s so,” she said. “And God knows whether it would have survived the journey to wherever they were sending it to. They pack them in boxes, tape their beaks shut so they can’t squawk, tie their feet together so they can’t move. Jail is too good for those two bastards. They should get a taste of their own medicine.”
Kipman looked angry enough to tape their mouths and tie their legs herself.
“How much money are those things worth?” Silva asked.
“We have strict legislation against keeping them in captivity, even stricter legislation against their export. No permit has ever been issued. I’d estimate they would have realized at least twenty-thousand Reais for this one.”
“Twenty thousand Reais? For a parrot?”
“You think that’s a lot? There’s one collector in Singapore who’d pay double that if they could get the bird to him. Poor thing. Look at her. She’s so nervous.”
“How can you tell?”
“She’s picking at her breast feathers.”
Chapter Seventeen
“Crap,” Sampaio said. “I already told the minister about that warehouse.”
“Told him what, Director?”
Silva was holding the telephone several centimeters from his ear. Sampaio wasn’t quite shouting, but it was close.
“I assured him it was just a matter of hours until we had the Artist’s mother back. What do I tell him now?”
“Perhaps, Director, it was a little premature to have assured the minister-”
“If I want your advice on how to do my job, Chief Inspector, I’ll ask for it. You have no idea what kind of pressure I’m under. What’s Godofredo’s take on this?”
“I haven’t spoken to Godofredo yet.”
“Call him. Call him right away. You should have involved him long before now.”
Godofredo Boceta was the Federal Police’s profiler, an academic blowhard hired by Sampaio himself. Silva was never averse to asking for expert advice from people he respected, but Boceta was a man for whom he had no respect at all. The profiler had never been of help in the solving of any case.
“I’ll call him as soon as I get back to the office,” he lied.
“Where are you calling from?”
“A car. We’re on our way to see Fiorello Rosa.”
“Rosa? What the hell do you want to talk to Rosa for? Rosa has been in jail for five years!”
“Seven.”
“Seven, then. What can you possibly expect from him?”
“He re-wrote the book on kidnapping. He’s the best that ever there was. He might have some ideas about how this one went down.”
“Even if he does, why should he talk to you?”
“Because he has a parole hearing coming up.”
“How do you know that?”
“I received a letter. I’ve been asked to testify.”
“Don’t waste your time with Rosa. It’s not going to get you anywhere. Godofredo is the guy you have to talk to. How about that network of snitches Pedro Cataldo’s got?”