“I understand your concerns,” Silva said, straining to keep his temper.
Unger chose to take understand to mean agree with.
“Sure you do. Anybody who’s got their head screwed on does. It’s costing us a fortune. We’ve spent a bundle on fences, and electronic surveillance, and all that kind of shit. We’ve had to call in the National Guard to help patrol the Mexican border. So what are your Brazilians doing? They’re using the sea route, that’s what, going to Florida by boat. Some of them die of thirst. Some drown. Fortunately, the Gulf Stream runs a few miles offshore. If it didn’t, their bodies would be washing up on Florida’s beaches, scaring the shit out of legitimate tourists.”
The American took a gulp of his wine. The first bottle was almost empty. From past experience, Silva knew he’d finish another before the lunch was over.
After a few seconds of silence, Silva said, “The illegal immigrant I’m interested in is the son of a woman who’s worked in our home for years.”
He knew Unger didn’t gave a damn about the man or his mother, but he did think a small diversion would help the FBI agent to recover from his alcohol-induced flash of anger about illegal immigration.
Unger took the bait. “Worked in your home?” he said. “As what?”
“A faixineira.”
“What’s a faixineira?”
“She helps my wife clean. Not full time. Several days a week.”
Unger poured himself more wine.
“Why the hell would you want to go out of your way to help a cleaning woman? They’re supposed to serve you, not the other way around, right?”
Unger had a driver, a cook and a full-time maid, but like many foreigners he’d never learned how to deal with them. More than once, he’d complained to Silva about the con-stant turnover of his domestic staff. You only had to spend five minutes with the man to understand the reason.
Silva ignored the FBI agent’s question. “According to his mother,” he said, “the fellow booked a trip to Mexico. He planned to cross the border from there.”
Unger drained the bottle and held it up to show the wait-er. The waiter nodded and headed toward the bar.
“From Mexico, huh? Just like a million other wetbacks. We gotta do something about that. Fucking liberals in Congress are still talking about offering amnesty to those people. They’re criminals, for Christ’s sake! Can you beat it? Criminals who hold parades and march around the country demanding their rights? Rights? Crap! They don’t have any rights. They all broke the law to get there. Don’t get me started on this. I could go on and on.”
“I promise,” Silva said, “that I won’t get you started. That would be a waste of a perfectly beautiful afternoon.”
“You’re damned right it would.”
“Returning to the boy, his mother hasn’t heard from him in more than two months. She’s very concerned.”
“Two months? She should be concerned. The kid’s body is probably lying under some cactus, shriveled like a prune.”
Silva inhaled patiently. “She received a postcard,” he said.
He opened the briefcase that he’d put on the vacant chair to his left, took out the postcard Maria de Lourdes had given him and handed it to Unger.
Unger gave the card a cursory glance. “You know I can’t read Portuguese,” he said.
“The boy wrote that he was fine and that he’d call his mother soon. But that’s not why I showed you the card.”
“Okay, I’ll play. Why did you show me the card?”
“The kid told his mother he was going to Boston.”
“So how come he sends her a card from Miami?”
“I, too, found that strange,” Silva said. “I suppose he might have wound up in Miami, on his way to Boston, although I can’t imagine why. Nevertheless, he might be in the custody of your immigration people.”
“If he is, and if he’s in Miami,” Unger said, “he’d most likely be at a place called the Krome Detention Center.” He rubbed the nonexistent stubble on his jaw. Like all of the other FBI agents Silva had known, he was clean shaven. “Did the kid ever call?”
“No. But there might be an explanation for that. His mother lost her prepaid cell phone. When she replaced it, she got a new number.”
“So why didn’t he send her something else by snail mail? He coulda done that even if he was in custody. How much cash was he carrying?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
“You can’t trust those fucking Mexicans. They find out that one of their clients is carrying a lot of cash, they’re as likely to kill him and steal it as they are to bring him across the border. Maybe he never made it into the States. Any chance the postcard is bogus?”
Silva shrugged. “I can’t discount the possibility, but his mother said she recognized his handwriting and his signature.”
“They could have made him write it and then killed him. Then they send the postcard in an envelope to some relative of theirs in Miami, and he puts a stamp on it and mails it. That introduces a red herring, while the trail goes cold. Meanwhile, the kid is under the ground somewhere in Mexico.”
“Certainly a possibility.”
“More than a possibility. Look at it this way: if he croaked on our side of the border, and it was natural causes, and nobody tried to hide his body, the odds are we’d know about it by now. We regularly scour every inch of that desert. Not that we’d necessarily have the kid identified by name. We might have him listed as a John Doe.”
“He would have been carrying a passport.”
“Yeah, and the coyotes-the real coyotes I mean, not those fucking Mexican smugglers-could have torn his body apart and scattered his stuff, including his ID.”
“The boy is an only child,” Silva said. “His mother is fran-tic. I’d appreciate your help.”
Unger took a bite of his fish and stuffed a piece of bread into his mouth. When he started to chew, some butter drib-bled down his chin. He wiped it off with his napkin.
“You got a picture?” he said, through a mouthful of food.
“I do.”
Silva took out an enlarged copy of the photo Maria de Lourdes had given him.
Unger looked at it.
“Fucking kid needs a decent barber,” he said. “Look at that haircut.”
The waiter was back with another bottle of wine. While he made a show of opening it, Unger finished the contents of his glass. The waiter offered him the cork to smell, but he didn’t take it.
“Just pour it in there,” he said, pointing to the glass he’d just emptied, “and then buzz off. I’ll let you know if there’s something wrong with it.”
The waiter, who spoke only limited English, looked to Silva for an explanation.
“Thank you,” Silva said, in Portuguese. “Just fill the same glass. No more for me.”
The waiter smiled, did as he was bidden, and tried to pick up Unger’s plate, which still contained a fragment of fish.
“Put that down,” Unger snapped. “I’m not finished.”
That much English the waiter understood. His face turned red. He put down the plate, mumbled excuses, and fled.
“Asshole,” Unger mumbled. He took a pen out of the pocket of his jacket. “Name?”
“Norberto Krups.” Silva spelled it for him. Unger wrote it on the back of the photograph.
“Age?”
“Nineteen.”
Unger noted that, too.
“He could be calling himself something else,” he said.
“He could,” Silva admitted.
“Makes no fucking difference to us. We print them, so we don’t give a shit what they call themselves. They show up again, we can ID them within fifteen minutes.”
Silva produced a white sheet of paper with a single thumbprint.
“From his national identity card,” he said.
“Something we’ve been trying to adopt for years,” Unger said, “national identity cards. You know what passes for iden-tification in most states?” He snorted and answered his own question: “Driver’s licenses.”