“What if this place is completely clandestine?” Hector said. “What if it’s not registered as a hospital or clinic?”
“Possible,” Danusa said.
“But not probable,” Rosa said. “Concealing the fact that it’s a medical facility would be counterproductive, likely to attract even more attention. Better, we think, to admit to being a hospital or clinic and simply conceal the sort of thing that goes on inside. Fifty kilometers, because we’re assuming the killer-”
“Or killers,” Danusa put in.
“-or killers wouldn’t run the risk of transporting the bod-ies for any great distance before disposing of them.”
“Okay,” Hector said, “but why only a few hospitals?”
“Or clinics.” Danusa again.
“Or clinics,” Hector dutifully repeated. “There must be hundreds of them in this town.”
“There are,” Danusa said, “but well-to-do people wouldn’t be caught dead in most of them and when they are, they are.”
“Huh?”
“Dead. Anybody who’s alive, and possesses any money at all, is going to insist on the quality of care and treatment that can only be bought in a private hospital, someplace like the Albert Einstein or the Sirio Libanes. If they were, God for-bid, to wind up in a public hospital like the Clinicas, they’d be in there with the poor, getting poor people’s treatment.
And the well-to-do don’t want to put up with that,” Rosa said. “They tend to frequent very few institutions, places where they’ll be cosseted in accordance with their wealth and station.”
“Cosseted?”
“Look it up. Anyway, our point”-Danusa cast a glance at her partner, extracted a nod and turned back to Hector-“is that it’s only the well-to-do who could afford the kind of operation your namorada is talking about.”
“She’s not my namorada.”
“Babyface says otherwise. Babyface says-”
“I don’t care what Babyface says. Babyface doesn’t know squat. How do these rumors get started anyway?”
“Babyface started dating a doctor by the name of Sylvie Charmet. Sylvie’s a friend of your-”
“Enough about Babyface.”
Danusa looked hurt. “You did ask. You wanted to know how rumors get-”
“How many of these hospitals and clinics are there?”
“Eleven.”
“Only eleven in the whole city?”
“Only eleven in the whole city and in Guarulhos, Cotia, and the ABCD. Like I said, we’re going out to fifty kilome-ters from the Praca da Se.”
The ABCD, as it was called, was composed of the adjoin-ing cities of Santo Andre, Sao Bernardo, Sao Caetano, and Diadema. All of them abutted the city of Sao Paulo on its southern border.
“Seems like damned few hospitals to me,” Hector said, dubiously.
“Taken as a percentage of the whole,” Danusa said, “there are damned few rich people in this city.”
Chapter Thirty-three
They were alone now, alone for the first time, the mother, the father, and their baby.
A light pulsed on the heart monitor next to the baby’s crib, every pulse accompanied by a high-pitched beep. His lips, rose-colored in the first few hours after birth, had taken on a bluish tinge. Sweat soaked his hair. His breathing was labored.
Clovis Oliveira flinched when the readout jumped from 136 to 137 beats a minute. He half expected to hear com-motion in the hall, someone rushing toward him from the nurses’ station. They had some kind of alarm down there, an alarm to warn them if Baby Raul’s vital signs turned critical.
But there was no commotion in the hall, only the normal sounds of the hospitaclass="underline" a muted conversation, the buzzing of a fluorescent light, the distant ping of an elevator.
Clovis put out a hand. His son’s forehead, barely two fin-gers in breadth, was moist and hot to the touch. Clovis tried to focus his mind as he’d seen the tribal healers do, tried to send energy from his body into Raul’s, tried to slow his baby’s heartbeat.
It didn’t work. The readout didn’t budge. Withdrawing his hand didn’t make any difference either. The monitor remained constant at 137.
Raul had fallen asleep again. He slept almost all the time. He had to. He needed all of his strength just to stay alive.
Clovis couldn’t bear to watch him anymore. He turned his back on his son, walked to the window, and leaned his fore-head against glass cooled by rainfall lashing the other side of the panes. It was coming down hard, the kind of rain that drenched Sao Paulo almost every day in summer, but rare in this month of June.
Morumbi Stadium, the skyscrapers of Avenida Paulista, the blue-gray bulk of the Serra da Cantareira, all were gone, van-ished behind a veil of falling water. On the street below, cars were creeping by, immersed to their hubcaps by the sudden flood. A long roll of thunder momentarily overpowered Ana Carmen’s voice. Then the thunder was gone, and he could hear her saying the same words over and over again as she fin-gered the beads of her rosary. She lay on the bed, covers tossed aside, her hair in disarray, staring at the ceiling. The grief on her face made her look far older than her twenty-eight years.
Clovis leaned back from the glass, took out the paper Dr. Levy had given him, and stared at it. There was a telephone number, nothing more. No name, no address. He took his cell phone from his pocket and walked out into the hallway to make the call.
By that time, the nightmare was sixty-two hours old. A nightmare that weakened when he snatched a few hours of sleep, returned with renewed force when he awoke. It had begun in the delivery room, just after Ana Carmen had given birth. It had begun, more properly, with the arrival of Dr. Dirceu Amaral, one of the house pediatricians.
Amaral, an outgoing fellow in his early forties, had arrived to examine the new baby, Clovis and Ana Carmen’s first. He gave Clovis a firm handshake and smiled at a weakened but beaming Ana Carmen. He was still smiling when he applied his stethoscope to the baby’s chest, the disk huge against Raul’s tiny rib cage.
But then the smile disappeared. He whipped the earpieces from his head, ordered an immediate electrocardiogram, and paged Dr. Jacob Levy, a cardiovascular specialist.
Levy arrived within three minutes, even before they had the electrodes in place. He hung over the machine, analyzing the results as the paper emerged. Then he and the pediatri-cian went into a corner and started conferring in low tones.
After that, things happened fast. Raul was carried off. Ana Carmen was given a sedative and wheeled to her room. Clovis was shown to Dr. Levy’s office and asked to wait. He took a seat on a couch between two end tables. Ten minutes later, a middle-aged woman in a blue pants suit came in with a stack of forms.
“What’s this?” Clovis said.
“Just some authorizations,” she said. “You sign here, here, and here.”
Clovis read the paper on the top of the stack and balked.
“You’re asking me to authorize you to cut his chest open?” he asked in disbelief.
The woman shook her head and put a motherly hand on his shoulder. “Only a precaution,” she said. “In very rare cases, something goes wrong. And if it does, we have to get at the heart quickly. There’s little chance of that. Dr. Levy’s the best, but the insurance people insist-”
“What’s going on? What’s wrong with him?”
She extended a pen. “Dr. Levy will come and talk to you as soon as he’s finished.”
“No. Now. I want to talk to him now.”
“You can’t. He’s with your son. Please, sign the papers.”
Clovis shook his head.
The edges of the woman’s mouth took on a stubborn set.
“We have no time for this,” she said.
“But-”
“Doctor has to do a cardiocath, and he has to do it now.
What’s a cardiocath?”
“It’s no big deal. We do it all the time. Now if you’ll just-”
“What is it? I have a right to know.”