Upon his return, he was transferred to Brasilia, the federal capital. The expectation of his superiors was that he'd be able to put some of the things he'd learned into practice. Those were the days when experienced law enforcement officers, not political appointees, ran the Federal Police. The man who held the job, Helio Fagundes, was a consummate professional who recognized talent when he saw it. And he saw it in Mario Silva.
"How BIG is this thing?" Fagundes asked. They were in his office. Silva had been back from the United States for about a week.
"About like that," Silva said, as if demonstrating the size of a fish he'd caught, "and like that, and that," tracing the other dimensions in the air.
"That small? Jesus!" Fagundes leaned forward, leafed through the proposal on his desk, and looked at the bottom line. "Cheap, too," he said, "Compared to those monsters we've got downstairs. Okay, you've got a green light. I'll send you the paperwork. Go buy the thing."
The "thing" was an IBM Personal Computer. The device, less than two years on the market, was just beginning to come into use in law enforcement agencies in the United States. Silva had seen his first one when he was in Quantico.
The computer was duly installed in a small room down the hall from Silva's new office. Silva started learning how to use it, and with the blessing of the director, he hired a young man to help him. The young man was Cicero Morales. Cicero had a sparse goatee, a developing potbelly, thick horned-rim glasses, an acne problem and unkempt hair. Years later, and thirty kilograms fatter, he would become the head of the Federal Police's forensic laboratory. Even then, at twenty-three, Cicero was an unusually perceptive man.
"This whole project of ours," he said to Silva one night when they were working late, "it's not just for the greater glory and efficiency of the Federal Police, is it?"
"What do you mean?"
Silva stared at Cicero out of hooded, black eyes. "Oh, come on, Mario, this is me you're talking to," Cicero said, ripping open a bag of potato chips. "There's something personal about this business. Why don't you just admit it?"
"What makes you think it's personal?"
Before he replied, Cicero stuffed a handful of the chips into his mouth, chewed, and swallowed. "Are you telling me it's not?"
"That's what I'm telling you."
"Chips?" Cicero offered the bag.
Mario shook his head. Cicero took out another chip, nibbled it up in two bites. "Why did you choose Sao Paulo for the pilot project?"
"Why not? I wanted to give this thing an acid test."
"I'm not buying it, Mario. Brasilia would have been much better, and you know it."
"I don't know any such thing."
Cicero took in an exasperated breath and let it out in a snort. Some fragments of potato chip came with it. He grabbed one of the napkins he kept next to his workstation and wiped his mouth.
"You want me to spell it out for you? Okay, I will."
Cicero crumpled the empty bag and tossed it. Then he gripped his right thumb with the other hand and started to count off his reasons. "First, because Sao Paulo is just too damned big. It doesn't make the job twice as hard, it makes the job twenty times as hard. Second reason: We're here, so instead of being able to put on pressure locally, we have to do it by telephone and letter. Third reason: We-and by that I mean the federal police-are a force in this town. Here in Brasilia it's relatively easy to get the data we need to input. It's much harder in Sao Paulo. We're not much of a player in that shithole. Cops! You're from there, aren't you? Sorry about that."
"No, Cicero. You're not sorry, and you know damned well I think it's a shithole too."
"Maybe I do, but getting back to the subject: Being from there doesn't have anything to do with choosing Sao Paulo for our pilot project, right?"
"No. Not a damn thing. And will you please back off?"
"Temper, temper, Mario. No need to get huffy about it. No need to deal in falsehoods, either. Your secret is safe with me."
"Secret? What secret?"
"That you're more concerned about tattoos and a lack of front teeth than you are about scars, or moles, or birthmarks. Have I got that right?"
"No, you don't."
"Well, I hope not, because what we're supposed to be doing is to set up a database that'll make it possible to zoom in on a felon based on any identifying characteristic. That's the brief, isn't it? Collect any and all identifying characteristics and get them into the computer so they can be sorted and cross-referenced? Any and all, not just tattoos? Not just teeth?"
"Right."
"And there's nothing personal about anything we're doing?"
"How many times do I have to tell you, Cicero. There's nothing personal about this. Not a damned thing."
Silva knew, all too well, that he was working against the clock. The director hadn't specifically said it, but unless his new system for identifying repeat offenders proved its worth within the first six months, it was likely to be written off as a failure.
Department heads were constantly filing into the Director's office with their hands out. The budget of the Federal Police was never sufficient to do everything that everyone wanted to do, and the fact that Silva had gotten any financing at all was proof positive that Fagundes considered him to be on a fast track.
Every day Silva prayed for results. Four months into the experiment, and long before their database was anywhere near complete, his prayers were answered.
Estrella Alba was a white woman in her mid-thirties with a red birthmark, about the size of a strawberry, on her left cheek. Her previous arrests, two for shoplifting, one for assault, and one for prostitution, coupled with her prominent facial feature, had brought her into Silva's database.
Digital photography was still some years in the future. All of the references were verbal. In Estrella Alba's case, the keywords were, in order of importance, BIRTHMARK, CHEEK, LEFT, and RED.
At ten o'clock one morning, and only a few days after Cicero had made the entry, an inquiry came in: A woman with a red birthmark on her left cheek was being sought for the holdup of a bank on Sao Paulo's Avenida Paulista. Could they help with an identification? By noon, Estrella's name had been telexed to the inquiring officers in Sao Paulo. They located her a little before 3:00 in the afternoon. And, by 6:00, after a little coercion, she confessed.
The news spread quickly throughout the law enforcement community. From that time on, Cicero and Silva no longer had to beg people to make the necessary contributions to their database. Other successes followed, first only a few, then many more as the database grew. They bought another computer, then another.
Silva got a promotion. He was no longer entrusted with the day-to-day operation of the database, but he still made it a part of his daily ritual to check the computer for the references he'd been seeking all along: TATTOO, NECK, SNAKE, all of them together in one file. In October of 1985, almost seven years to the day after his father's murder, he found them.
Chapter Nine
His name was Joao Miranda.
Most people called him by his nickname: Cobra.
The word, in Portuguese, means snake, any snake, not just those of the mantled variety. As it happened, however, the snake depicted in Cobra's tattoo was one of those. It started on his chest, went up to encircle his neck and ended just below his ear. That's where the mouth was, and the mouth was red, and open, and had a little pink tongue flicking out as if it was trying to touch his earlobe.
Cobra loved that tattoo. It had been with him since he was sixteen years old. He'd chosen it out of a book in a oneman tattoo parlor wedged between a bar and a cheap hotel in Pelourinho. That had been back in Bahia, long before he ever thought of coming south to Sao Paulo.
The original design was smaller, and the snake was coiled up. Making it bigger and having it twist around his neck was Cobra's idea. The guy with the needle was so pleased with his work that he'd asked Cobra to let him take a picture. He wanted to put it into his book and offer the same tattoo to other people. He thought Cobra would be pleased.