"Room four-oh-seven," he said to Hector, "in the back of the building. Certainly not one of our best, but he asked for the cheapest-"
"Where's the house phone?"
"Over there, senhor."
Hector had already turned his back when the clerk added, "But if you're going to call Senhor Pillar, I'm afraid you're not going to find him."
Hector turned back to the clerk. "No?"
"No, senhor. There are quite a few messages for him, some of them urgent, so I tried to call him when I came on duty."
"When was that?"
"At five. When he didn't pick up, I asked the chambermaid to check the room. His bed hasn't been slept in."
"How about his room key?"
"He left it with me at about this same time last night. I don't think he's been back since."
Hector was breathing hard when he got back to the suite. Too impatient to wait for the elevator, he'd run up four flights of stairs.
His uncle's aplomb immediately deflated him.
"So you don't think he was kidnapped?"
Silva shook his head. "By the landowners? Unlikely." He set aside the thick folder he'd been leafing through and picked up the scotch and water he'd prepared for himself. "Muniz is their local leader, and he's gone missing."
"Well, then, maybe somebody else organized it."
"Maybe. But I doubt it. You leave a message?"
Hector nodded. "And a tip to the desk clerk to make sure it stayed on the top of the pile. Some pile, by the way. He has more people trying to get in touch with him than you do. What's that?" He pointed to the folder Silva had been perusing.
"Pillar's dossier. I brought it from Brasilia. Pour yourself a drink and have a look."
Hector did just that.
The dossier had been opened back in the days of the military dictatorship, before Pillar had been forced to flee to asylum in Uruguay. Kept current to the present day, it chronicled, in great detail, the life of one of Brazil's premier activists.
Hector didn't see eye-to-eye with Pillar's politics, but as he skimmed the pages, he started building up a grudging respect for the man. Pillar was a firebrand, but he certainly wasn't a megalomaniac. When he spoke, and there were summaries of many of his speeches, he always stressed that he wasn't the President of the Landless Workers' League. The organization had, he insisted, no chief executive, no board of directors, no hierarchy. They were all comrades, all equals in the struggle for land reform.
And Pillar certainly wasn't in it for the money. He lived simply, drove a sixteen-year-old Fiat and resided alone in a studio apartment in one of the less-fashionable neighborhoods of Brasilia. An exhaustive examination of his financial dealings seemed to indicate that he was scrupulous in accounting for the contributions made to his organization and that he regularly paid his taxes.
In dictatorships, people like Pillar are imprisoned and tortured, often killed. In the great democracies they sometimes become candidates for president or prime minister. But they seldom win.
More than 1,500 of Pillar's colleagues had been murdered in the land wars of the last decade. He was more visible than any of them, but the threat to his life didn't seem to make him afraid, only angry. If Pereira, the local man, was anything like him…
The telephone rang. Hector started to close the dossier, but his uncle stood. "Keep reading. I'll get it."
Silva identified himself, said "yes" twice, gave his room number, and replaced the receiver. "Better conceal that dossier after all," he said. "That was Pillar. He's on his way up."
Luiz Pillar was older, and thinner, than he looked in his photographs. His brown eyes were sunk deeply into their sockets. His cheekbones showed sharply under his brown skin. He was certainly a man under pressure. Perhaps he was ill. He reminded Hector of a painting by Edvard Munch, the one called The Scream. He was dressed in faded jeans and a red T-shirt emblazoned with the logotype of the league, a crossed hoe and pitchfork on a circular white field.
Silva offered him a hand and after a moment of hesitation Pillar took it.
Hector offered him a drink and Pillar refused.
"Are you here to arrest me?" he asked.
"Why would you think that?" Silva said.
Pillar shrugged and smiled. The smile was surprisingly gentle. "Because policemen, when I meet them, almost always do. Arrest me, I mean."
Pillar wasn't exaggerating. He'd been arrested tens of times. He'd been convicted, too, but that didn't necessarily mean anything. Policemen and judges often worked handin-hand with vengeful landowners. Juries often were vengeful landowners.
"You have nothing to fear from us, Senhor Pillar. We work for the federal government," Silva said.
"I know who you are, Chief Inspector. Your reputation precedes you."
"Yours, too. Now, will you sit down?"
Pillar sank into the offered chair.
"What brings you to Cascatas?" Silva asked.
"League business. You?"
"Murder. Initially, the murder of Dom Felipe Antunes, the Bishop of Presidente Vargas, and of your colleague, Aurelio Azevedo. More recently, the probable murder of a landowner by the name of Orlando Muniz."
Pillar's eyebrows shot up in surprise.
"Senior?"
"Junior."
"Too bad."
"You mean too bad it wasn't his old man?"
"Isn't murder a local matter?" Pillar asked, as if he hadn't heard Silva's question.
"Normally, yes. But the minister asked us to help the local police with their inquiries."
Pillar smiled again. "Assisting Colonel Emerson Ferraz with his inquiries? And is the colonel grateful?"
"Not particularly."
"No. I wouldn't think so. Still, your presence means that he's probably working harder to find the murderer of the bishop."
"But not to find the murderer of your colleague?"
The smile vanished. "No," Pillar said. "The colonel doesn't give a damn about what happened to Aurelio. What do you want from me, Chief Inspector?"
"There's been a suggestion that members of the league might have been involved in the murder of the bishop."
"Ridiculous."
"How about in the murder of Orlando Muniz Junior?"
"Now, that one I could understand. But I deny it, of course."
"Of course. You knew him?"
"Not personally, no, but I knew the bishop. He was misguided, but he was a well-meaning man, true to his convictions. I can't say I liked him, but I certainly didn't hate him, and neither did anyone else in my organization. That's not the case with Muniz. We all hate his guts. He's an exploiter of the worst kind."
"You just told me you didn't know him."
"Personally, I said. I'm basing my opinion on things I've heard."
"Heard from whom?"
"People who worked for him. Other people who knew him."
"You think he's dead?"
Pillar shrugged. "Dead or alive, I had nothing to do with it. His father won't believe that, of course. The old bastard will probably come after me next."
Silva took in a breath and let it out slowly. Before he uttered his next words, he already knew they'd be wasted but he said them anyway. "There's no end to this. Whenever you kill one of them, they're going to come right back and kill one of you. You know that, don't you?"
"I know more than that, Chief Inspector. I know that when one of them is murdered they go out and kill fifty or even a hundred of us. They've killed more than fifteen hundred of us in the last ten years."
"Yes, I know."
"But we're still going to win."
"What makes you so sure?"
"Because we have the numbers on our side. There are less than fifty thousand of them. There are almost five million of us out there." He pointed at the window as if all of them were just outside the hotel. "Five million landless workers. We've got them outnumbered by a margin of more than one hundred to one. We can't lose."