"Claudio," she said, calmly. "Please. Take off the watch and give it to him."
But Claudio didn't. Instead, he made a sudden lunge for the revolver, trying to grab the barrel.
The man with the beard took a quick step backward, extended his arm, and pulled the trigger.
The bullet caught Claudio in the chest. Carla screamed. Little Hector started to bawl. The man opened the flap of a leather haversack, put the revolver inside, and walked away. No one tried to stop him.
The police did what they usually did in such cases: They wrote up a report and took no further action.
The day after the funeral, her brother, Mario, came for her. "Would you recognize him?" he asked.
She nodded. Recognize him? She'd never be able to forget him.
"Come with me," he said, reaching out and taking her hand.
They spent the next few days searching the neighborhood, the same streets, over and over again, centered on the place where it had happened. She drove. He sat on the front seat beside her.
Mario had been a cop for almost nine years by then. She knew almost nothing of his professional life, but she knew her brother. He would be good at anything he turned his hand to.
Once, years earlier, he'd talked to her about vengeance for their parents. She'd told him she didn't want to hear anything about it, that it wouldn't change anything. He'd never brought the subject up again. Now, with Claudio, she felt differently. By the third day she was beginning to wish that Mario wasn't a cop, that he wouldn't be forced to act like a cop was supposed to act, that they could just deal with the assassin themselves rather than deliver him to judgment by the court.
On the afternoon of the fourth day she saw the killer hurrying down the street. He'd shaved, but he had the same leather haversack dangling from his shoulder.
"There," she said.
"You're sure?"
"I'm sure. It's him."
"Go home. I'll call you later."
"What are you going to… "
She let her voice trail off. Her brother had already slammed the door and was following the man with the haversack.
The driver in the car behind her leaned on his horn.
She did what Mario had told her to. She went home.
As promised, he called her. It was just after midnight, more than five hours after he'd left her car.
"You were right," he said. "It was him."
"He confessed?"
"He confessed. It's late, Clara. Go to sleep."
"Tell me about him, Mario."
"No."
"No? Mario, he-"
But her brother had hung up.
The next day, and the following day, she scanned the paper looking for news of the arrest.
There wasn't any.
They never discussed the subject again.
Some families seem to be cursed with tragedy. Mario Silva's was one of those, and his suffering wasn't over.
In the years that followed the death of his parents, the lights of his life had been his sister, her family, his wife, and his son. The next light that died wasn't snuffed out with the suddenness of a gunshot. It faded slowly.
Irene and he had married in the summer of 1980. Their son was born in 1981. It was a difficult birth, rife with medical complications. When it was over the doctors told him their baby was destined to be an only child.
They named him Mario, after his father and grandfather before him. He was a baby who hardly ever cried, an infant who always smiled, a toddler who old ladies passing on the street wanted to pick up and hug. In late 1988, he contracted leukemia. It took him five months to die. His parents dealt with it in entirely different ways. Mario threw himself into his work. Irene started to drink.
First, it was just a little, to help her, as she said, "to get through the night." First, it was sweet concoctions, caiparin- has, with the rinds and juice of limes, or batidas made with mango juice, or coconut milk. Then, gradually, she'd eased off on the fruit juice and the sugar, claiming they were making her fat. Within a year it had become straight cachaca, pure cane spirit, with no sugar and no juice at all.
The stuff was killing her as surely as the leukemia had killed their son. Perhaps Irene knew it, but she wasn't willing to admit it. She insisted that she was still a "social drinker" even though almost all of her imbibing took place at home and when she was alone. She only drank at night, but it was every night, and her nights started at five o'clock in the afternoon. She was generally sleeping it off when Mario left for work, drunk by the time he returned home.
In the beginning, he tried drinking along with her, trying to be companionable, seeking common ground through a haze of alcohol. But the solace he found was only temporary, and the hangovers weren't worth it. In the end, he communicated with her by trying to call her several times a day, trying to catch her when she was still sober. He never contemplated divorce, nor did he sleep with other women but what remained between them was only the ghost of what their relationship had once been.
As for Hector Costa, having his father shot to death in front of him turned him into an old little boy. For almost a year he lost the gift of laughter.
Carla thought it best to get him out of Sao Paulo, away from the memories. They moved to Campos de Jordao, a little town in the mountains, north of the road linking Sao Paulo with Rio de Janeiro.
It was a place where people went in the wintertime to sit in front of fireplaces, bundle up in woolen sweaters, and drink hot chocolate; where the summers were times of empty hotels and unending boredom, and where people who shot people tended to know their victims.
Mario had always doted on Hector, but after the death of his son, and the boy's father, the two of them reached out for each other. The little boy came to idolize his uncle. By the time he was fifteen, he'd already decided he wanted to follow in Mario's footsteps and become a cop.
At first, Carla treated it the same way she'd treated his previous aspirations: to be a teacher, a fireman, a soldier. But time passed, and he mentioned no other vocation. She was momentarily relieved when Hector started law school. You had to be a lawyer to achieve officer rank in the Brazilian Federal Police, but she remained hopeful he'd become enchanted by some other aspect of the law and find something else to do with his life.
But he didn't. Even before he'd received his law degree, he submitted his application to join Silva's organization.
She hoped he'd be rejected.
He wasn't.
Six months later, he was posted to Sao Paulo. As far as Carla was concerned, that was just about the worst thing that could have happened. There was no more dangerous place for a cop to work.
Chapter Eleven
The Cascatas airport wasn't in Cascatas at all. It was just outside the city limits, in the neighboring municipality of Miracema.
The airport consisted of a single unpaved strip of red earth and a white stucco building with blue trim reminiscent of a farmworker's cottage. There were no hangars, and there was no control tower.
The twenty-odd aircraft sprinkled here and there on the dusty grass were all high-wing monoplanes except for a vintage Cessna 310B and an old biplane that looked like something out of a World War I movie.
The airplane Hector was waiting for started out as a speck in a cloudless sky, a sky free of dust and therefore much bluer than the one back in Cascatas. As it got closer, he could see that it was an Embraer Bandeirante, a twin-engined job that dwarfed anything else parked on the field. The markings of the Brazilian Air Force were prominent on the tips of the wings and above the cabin windows.
Hector waited until the pilot had cut both of the engines and some of the dust had settled. Then he drove his rental car right onto the strip.
The man who opened the door to the cabin wore an open-necked blue shirt with chevrons on his sleeves. Once he'd lowered the steps he snapped a salute and made way for the familiar figure of Mario Silva.