“I’m not paying him,” the little fairy in the backseat said.
Both of them ignored him.
“So he does, what the fuck do you call it?” Manolo said.
“Heart transplants.”
“Yeah, that’s it. Heart transplants. What do you figure he gets for an operation like that?”
“Six hundred thousand,” Roberto said.
“Reais?”
“Dollars.”
Manolo whistled. “Fuck me,” he said. “I shoulda asked for more money.”
“You shoulda,” Roberto agreed. Then he leaned in closer so that the wimp couldn’t hear him above the sound of the engines. “Next time,” he said, “you hold the old bastard up for another twenty grand. Half of it’s mine, okay?”
“A quarter,” the pilot said.
Roberto pursed his lips and thought about that for a moment. Then he extended a hand, and the pilot shook it. “Five grand,” Manolo said, quantifying the deal, making sure there wouldn’t be a misunderstanding later. “But what makes you think he’ll agree?”
“You’re on board now. You’re part of the club. You know how he earns his money. Not many people do, and he wants to keep it that way. He’ll take it.”
“So you figure there’ll be more jobs? Like this one?”
“I can virtually guarantee it.”
“What are you guys talking about?” the wimp asked.
Manolo turned around and stared at him again. “Why don’t you just shut up?” he said.
Roberto didn’t even bother to turn his head. “Yeah,” he said. “Shut the fuck up.”
The wimp started crying again. And he kept on crying, all the way back to Sao Paulo.
Chapter Forty
“Any news?” the director said, sticking his head into the doorway of Silva’s office.
Silva could have told him about Tanaka, about the impending return of the Portellas, about Arnaldo’s disap-pearance, about the minister of tourism’s misplaced concerns about his daughter, but he knew there was only one kind of news that would truly interest Nelson Sampaio.
“You’re talking about the Romeo Pluma investigation?”
“Of course I’m talking about the Romeo Pluma investi-gation.”
Silva shook his head. “Nothing yet,” he said.
Sampaio raised a suspicious eyebrow. “You are giving this case the importance it deserves?”
“Absolutely.”
Silva didn’t consider that a falsehood. In his opinion, he was giving the press secretary’s background check exactly the importance it deserved.
“There’s got to be something,” Sampaio said, more to himself than to Silva. “Got to be. Let’s discuss this further when I get back from my luncheon appointment. Perhaps I can suggest some new directions for the inquiry.”
Sampaio’s head disappeared. Silva waited until he heard the ping of the elevator, went to the window and peered through the blinds.
A minute or two later, the director came out of the build-ing and entered a black BMW smack in the middle of the no-parking zone. The uniformed chauffeur closed the door, got behind the wheel, and drove off.
Silva left the window, took an overnight bag out of his closet, and headed for the airport.
The Portellas hailed from the city of Caruaru in the northeastern state of Pernambuco. By road, the distance from there to Sao Paulo is a little over two and a half thou-sand kilometers, a bus trip that’s supposed to take forty-two and a half hours, but seldom does.
The roads in Pernambuco, and in the next three states to the south, Alagoas, Sergipe, and Bahia, are in a deplorable state of repair. The equipment used for public transport is sorely tried. Breakdowns are constant. Accidents are fre-quent. Even in the dry season, the traffic often slows to a crawl. Scheduled arrival times are more in the nature of an ideal than a reality.
Babyface Goncalves knew all of this. Instead of subjecting himself to the discomforts of the bus terminal, with its nox-ious fumes and wall-to-wall people, he elected to await the Portellas arrival in a little bar across the street from their one-room shack.
There were hours to go before dark, and Babyface wasn’t particularly concerned about being set upon in daytime, but he kept his Glock loose in its holster and had chosen a chair with his back to the wall.
“You want another coffee?” Bento asked.
Bento owned the place. The two of them were on first-name terms by now, Bento and Heraldo, Goncalves being damned if he’d tell Bento that most people addressed him by the hated sobriquet of Babyface.
It was almost three hours after the scheduled arrival time of the Portellas’ bus. The “lunchtime” crowd had cleared out, and the “dinner” crowd hadn’t yet arrived. Lunch and dinner were relative terms at Bento’s place, because most of the patrons never ate anything more than a coxinha or an empada, and most of them spent mealtimes drinking straight cachaca. Nonalcoholic beverages weren’t in high demand, which made it all the more surprising that Bento’s coffee was as good as it was. Babyface considered the offer before shaking his head.
“That’s enough for one day,” he said.
“You look young to be a cop,” Bento said. “Anybody ever tell you that?”
Babyface sighed. “All the time,” he said.
“I’m not surprised. When you walked in here, I would have taken you for. . hey, look, that’s them.”
Bento pointed to a couple at the Portellas’ front door. The man was a bit shorter than the woman, thin and wiry, wear-ing jeans and a sweat-stained yellow T-shirt with a hammer and sickle on the front. On his head, he had a black beret. The woman was as dark skinned as he was, with her hair gathered up into a serious bun. She was also wearing jeans and a T-shirt, but her T-shirt was black, except for some rings of dried perspiration around the armpits, rings that showed white against the fabric.
While she struggled with the padlock, the man was stand-ing there holding the bags. He had to. The street was unpaved and covered with a thick layer of mud. He looked around, caught sight of Bento, and nodded his head.
Bento nodded back. The nods were perfunctory. Babyface didn’t think there was any love lost between the guy wearing the beret and the owner of the bar.
“The Portellas?” he asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“What’s with the hammer and sickle?”
Bento grinned. “You’ll find out soon enough,” he said.
The couple disappeared inside. Babyface paid his bill, squished his way down the narrow street, and knocked on the plywood door. Ernesto opened it. The black beret was still on his head, and now that Babyface was standing less than a meter away, he could see that the beret bore a little pin in the shape of a red star.
Ernesto took one look at Babyface’s jacket and tie and turned belligerent.
“What?” he said.
Babyface held up his ID. “Federal Police.”
“Oh, the federal police is it? Our very own Brazilian gestapo. Our very own Praetorian guard.”
Babyface blinked. “Praetorian guard?”
Ernesto Portella was probably the only guy in the whole favela who’d ever even heard of the Praetorian guard.
“Don’t give me that innocent look. You guys fool most people, but you don’t fool me. I know what you are. You talk up a storm about maintaining law and order, existing to serve and protect the people, but it’s all a big lie. The reality is you’re the ones who shore up the bloodsuckers.”
“Bloodsuckers? What bloodsuckers?”
“You know damned well who the bloodsuckers are. They’re the ones who prey on the masses. If it wasn’t for you and your cronies, capitalism would be a thing of the past.”
Babyface recognized that the guy had just come off a long bus ride, and he was inclined to cut him some slack, but not too much. And he sure as hell wasn’t about to be drawn into a political discussion. He opened his mouth to reply, but didn’t get a chance. The man’s wife appeared in the doorway and brushed her husband out of the way.