"Get on with it," he snapped.
"I am getting on with it. See, the thing about this particular Rolex was that the guy who was wearing it was a lowlife punk with dirty sneakers and a fucking Palmeiras shirt."
He remembered the shirt, the sergeant told Silva, because, just the previous night, Palmeiras had stolen a game from Corinthians, four goals to three, because of a blind referee who, in de Alencar's opinion, had no place on a soccer pitch and should never have been given a whistle.
Silva told him to shut up about soccer teams and finish the story.
De Alencar swallowed, and continued. "The punk with the shirt… no, that was wrong, it wasn't a shirt. It was more like a jersey-"
Silva waved the pistol.
"-well, he wasn't alone. There were two of them. And both of them were punks. The other guy was dressed in one of those fucking, stupid-"
Silva narrowed his eyes and took in an audible breath.
De Alencar cut short his sartorial criticism and hastened to tell how he and the two rookies had taken both punks into a convenient alley for a quick search. The watch was a Rolex all right, stainless steel with a black face. They'd gotten six hundred cruzeiros for that one. The other watch, the one Silva was talking about, was in the pocket of the other punk. Because it was gold, it brought three times that. They'd split the money, half going to him, half going to the two rookies. He was a sergeant, after all, and that's the way it worked. The senior guy always got half the take.
All the while they were being shaken down, the punks didn't say a word. What could they say? That the watches were family heirlooms? Yeah, right! So they just emptied their pockets and asked de Alencar and the two rookies to leave them enough change for the bus. No hard feelings on either side. That was just the way it worked.
Names? No. It had been over a year ago. How could Silva expect him to remember names? He hadn't seen them before, he hadn't seen them since, and after all this time, he sure as hell wouldn't recognize them from a mug shot.
They were Bahianos, he remembered that much. Well, maybe not from Bahia, maybe from Pernambuco, or Alagoas. It could be anywhere up that way, because all of those fucking northeastern accents sounded the same to him, and in the sergeant's opinion, all of those lazy bastards should be crammed into a fleet of buses and shipped right back to where they belonged because, more than anybody else, it was them that were fucking up the city.
"And that's it? That's all you can remember?" Silva said, cutting the social commentary short.
"Yeah. That's it."
Before he'd smashed de Alencar in the face, Silva had lowered the hammer of his Taurus. Now, he cocked it again.
"What are you doing?" the sergeant said, nervously. "Watch out for that thing."
"Think hard. Give me something else."
The sergeant swallowed, crimped his eyes shut, opened them again. "There was one more thing," he said.
"What?"
"One of them had this tattoo. It was a snake that started under that fucking jersey, maybe down on his chest. Then it curved all the way around his neck and the head and tongue were just under his ear."
The tattoo clinched it for Silva.
The man in front of him had been face-to-face with the men who'd killed his father and raped his mother. De Alencar had been close enough to smell them, close enough to reach out and touch them. But now they'd vanished again, and Silva's lead had run out, all because of the venality of three municipal cops.
Only the thought of the woman and baby sleeping across the street caused him to stay his hand. The sergeant never realized how close his wife had been to becoming a widow.
Chapter Five
Emerson Ferraz, the colonel in charge of Cascatas do Pontal's State Police Battalion, had clumps of hair protruding from his nostrils, pockmarked skin, a forehead about two fingers high and a personality as ugly as the rest of him.
When Hector Costa, after a thirty-minute wait, was admitted to his presence, Ferraz didn't even look up. For a good minute-and-a-half Hector stood in front of the colonel's desk like a schoolboy called up for disciplinary action. All the while, Ferraz scratched away on a yellow legal pad with a Mont Blanc fountain pen. The pen, dwarfed by his pudgy fingers, looked out of place in the hands of a man earning the salary of a cop.
The office stank of sweat and cigar smoke, both of them stale. Topping the clutter on Ferraz's desk was the business card Hector had handed to the uniformed policewomanno beauty herself-who functioned as Ferraz's secretary.
Tiring of being ignored, Hector sank, uninvited, into one of the two chairs in front of the colonel's desk.
"Sure. That's right. Just make yourself comfortable," the colonel said, putting down his pen and raising his head. He stared at Hector out of a pair of porcine brown eyes and then screwed up his face as if his visitor had just passed gas. "I've heard about you," he said. Ferraz emphasized his words by jabbing at Hector's card with a pudgy forefinger.
Hector groaned inwardly. He knew what was coming.
"Your boss is Mario Silva, who just happens to be your uncle, am I right?"
Hector hated it when people brought that up.
"Yeah, I thought so." Ferraz said, responding to Hector's nod, as if he'd just wrung a confession from some criminal he particularly disliked. "Well, let me tell you something. I don't need your help." He picked up Hector's card, ripped it in half, and dropped the pieces into a wastebasket. "And I don't need your uncle, either." He made the word "uncle" sound as if it was some kind of epithet.
Hector was tempted to tell him that neither he, nor his uncle, needed, or wanted, Ferraz or his damned case either, but the colonel wasn't finished.
"Something else. I don't talk to messenger boys. If that uncle of yours wants anything from me, tell him to come himself."
Ferraz picked up his pen and went back to doing whatever he'd been doing when Hector arrived. For some time the only sound in the office was the constant whir and clank of heavy construction machinery drifting in through the closed windows and the scratching of the colonel's pen on paper. Hector waited him out, saying nothing.
After a while, Ferraz looked up and blinked theatrically. "Still here?" he said.
"He is coming himself," Hector said, picking up where Ferraz had left off, "but he had to clear his schedule. He'll be here tomorrow morning."
"Here?"
"Here. In Cascatas."
"The almighty inspector-general himself?"
"His title, Colonel, is Chief Inspector for Criminal Matters."
"No shit? Chief inspector, eh? Well, don't expect me to be waiting at the airport with a brass band. And tell him that if he wants to come here"-Ferraz stabbed the desktop with the same forefinger he'd used to jab the card-"he'd better call for an appointment."
As if emphasizing what the colonel said, someone on the floor above flushed a toilet.
Hector crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair."Do both of us a favor, Colonel," he said, choosing his words carefully, but letting his irritation show. "Answer my questions. It'll save you time in the long run."
Ferraz didn't appear to be ruffled by the absence of cordiality. In fact, he seemed to welcome it. "Okay," he said. "How about I give you five minutes of my time. Starting…" he glanced at his watch ". .. now."
He took a box of thin cigars from the drawer of his desk, chose one, and replaced the box without offering it to Hector.
Hector had already noticed that Ferraz had a slight wheeze when he talked. Probably, he thought, because he inhales the damned things. He wasn't looking forward to the colonel lighting up that cheroot.
The colonel seemed to sense it. He licked the cigar to moisten it and rolled it back and forth between his palms, staring at Hector all the while.