Hector pulled out the search warrant and dropped it on the table.
Marcela’s mouth dropped open.
Less than ten minutes later he found the money. It was in a canvas bag, stuffed into the back of her bedroom closet, concealed under a pile of old sheets.
Chapter Twenty-four
“She said it was their life’s savings,” Hector reported to his uncle two hours later.
“And pigs have wings,” Silva said.
“When I asked her why she didn’t keep the money in a bank, she said they didn’t trust banks. Not after Collor.”
“Oh, please,” Silva said.
Fernando Collor had assumed the presidency of Brazil in 1989, a time of economic turmoil. His first significant act in office had been to freeze withdrawals from private bank accounts in an attempt to contain hyperinflation. People eventually got most of their money back, but it took a year. It took much longer for them to get over the fear of it hap-pening again.
But hyperinflation was now a thing of the past. Faith in the fiscal responsibility of government had been restored. Anyone who could justify where their money came from, and who wasn’t earning interest on it, was a fool. Tanaka hadn’t struck Silva as a fool.
“She’s a piece of work,” Hector went on, still somewhat shaken by his confrontation with Tanaka’s wife. “For a moment, I thought she was going to jump me. She outweighs me by God knows how many kilos. I started wishing I’d brought Arnaldo.”
“I fail to understand why you went over there on your own. You know you’re not supposed to do things like that.”
“I had no idea of what I was getting into,” Hector said, his tone defensive. “I’d pictured a visit to a bereaved widow, not an angry rhinoceros.”
“You should have brought Babyface.”
“If she’d wanted to, she could have snapped Babyface like a matchstick. Even Arnaldo would have had trouble if she’d decided to make a fight of it.”
“But she didn’t.”
“In the end, she didn’t. When I found the cash, she just collapsed. It was like letting air out of a balloon. But then she started thinking about how she’s gonna get it back.”
“And you know that because?”
“She started yelping about a receipt, made me count it twice, sat there watching me like a hawk while I did it. Before we even started, she called the office to verify my identity, make sure I was who I said I was. Then she put me on the line to talk to Babyface.”
“Why Babyface?”
“He was the guy I told her to ask for. She got me to talk to him, and then she took the phone back so she could hear his reaction to my voice. She made him give her a question that only Hector Costa would know the answer to.”
“What was the question?”
“That’s not important.”
“What was the question?”
“Okay, okay. The question was, what is the eye color of the assistant medical examiner who works with Dr. Couto?”
“I seem to recall that Babyface is the office expert on peo-ple’s love lives. You think he was suggesting something?”
Hector didn’t deign to respond to that. “Senhora Tanaka wouldn’t take my word for the office’s number, either. She looked it up in her telephone book.”
“What kind of money are we talking about here?”
“Ninety-four thousand American dollars. Rosa and Danusa are ranking the serial numbers as I speak, but there doesn’t appear to be any sequence. All the bills are old. Chances of tracing them are about nil.”
“So there’s no way we can prove ill-gotten gains? The lady is going to get it all back?”
“So it appears, deserving creature that she is. A hundred thousand dollars in the closet, and in the beginning of our conversation all she did was bitch about her paltry pension. You know what I think?”
“What?”
“Between being married to that woman, and being where he is now, Tanaka is better off dead.”
Chapter Twenty-five
Grant Unger’s eyes were both gray, one a slightly darker shade of gray than the other. They were eyes that reminded Silva of those of his sister’s cat. The cat, Diogenes by name, had been a huge tom, finally brought low by a sum-mer downpour that swept him into a storm drain. Silva’s sis-ter, Clara, thought it was a tragedy and cried for a week. But the cat’s demise had been a relief to the other cats in the neighborhood, some of the smaller dogs, and most of Clara’s neighbors. To all of them, Diogenes had been a thoroughly disagreeable creature. And being disagreeable was another trait it shared with Grant Unger.
Unger had a habit of cupping a hand behind his ear when someone talked to him. A hearing aid might have caused him to change that habit, but Unger didn’t use one. Knowing Unger, Silva thought he avoided the apparatus for vanity’s sake. He also thought that Unger’s use of a hearing aid would have been superfluous much of the time. Unger was one of those people who paid scant attention to what others said, especially if they weren’t other Americans who were higher up in the pecking order. He never seemed entirely content unless he was doing the talking. And be-cause he was hard of hearing, Unger seemed to think that everyone else was, too. He didn’t talk to you, he shouted at you. The noise he was making at the moment evoked cold stares from neighboring tables. He and Silva were in the Belle Epoque, a French restaurant that was one of Silva’s favorites. Not Unger’s, though. He’d just finished telling Silva how much he disliked all things French.
Unger was the FBI’s LEGAT, the legal attache, at the American Embassy in Brasilia. His job, among other things, was to liaise with the Brazilian federal police. He’d been in the country for two years, but his Portuguese was still halt-ing, which put him at a definite disadvantage since most of the people he was supposed to be liaising with weren’t fluent in anything but their native tongue. Unger’s predecessor, Norton Wallace, had mastered the language in a little over a year. Silva sometimes wondered if Unger’s superiors were aware of the lousy job he was doing.
Brasilia is a city of diplomats, so to hear English being spoken isn’t unusual. But loud, American-accented English is another matter. The more sophisticated Americans are all too aware of how unpopular they’d become since the war with Iraq. Most of them took care to speak softly when in public.
Not Grant Unger.
“Jesus,” the FBI agent said, picking at his truite almondine, “they call that a trout? That’s not a trout. It’s a minnow. I’ll bet the damned thing doesn’t weigh more than four ounces.”
Silva didn’t bother to make the conversion to grams.
“And the taste?” he asked.
“It tastes okay,” Unger admitted grudgingly, “but they’ve got a lot of nerve charging thirty reais for it.”
Silva had issued the invitation and was paying. He thought the trout was delicious and well worth the price, but in the interest of harmony, he chose not to pick up the gauntlet.
“So what do you want?” Unger said, breaking off a piece of bread and slathering it with butter.
On every previous occasion, it was Unger who’d wanted something and Unger who’d issued the luncheon invitation. Whatever else he was, the FBI agent wasn’t stupid. When Silva called him, he’d immediately recognized that the shoe was on the other foot.
“Some information about an illegal immigrant,” Silva said.
“To my country?”
“Yes.”
“A Brazilian?”
“Yes.”
“What makes you think we’ve got a record of him?”
“I don’t think you do, and I don’t think you don’t. I’m sim-ply inquiring. If you do, it could have been as long ago as ten weeks.”
“Christ, Silva, why don’t you ask me something easy? Do you have any idea how many Brazilian illegals there are in the United States?”
“I-”
“Probably a million and a half and counting, that’s how many. Pisses me off. Okay, I admit, I wouldn’t want to stay in this dump myself if I was in their position, but why the fuck don’t they try to sneak into Canada, or England, or some other civilized place? We’ve got too many of your people as it is.”