“Justice through enrichment” was the way Adilson liked to put it.
Some said true justice would have entailed fines rather than payoffs, would have entailed giving the perpetrators their day in court, putting them in front of a judge.
Adilson wouldn’t have it. Judges, he reasoned, would sim-ply do as he did. They’d take a bribe. Ergo the money had a zero chance of ever winding up in a government coffer. What’s more, judges were a hell of a lot more expensive than cops, so Adilson was actually doing his “clients” a favor by keeping their costs down.
And, besides, what would happen if the money, by some remote chance, actually wound up in the hands of the gov-ernment? What would happen then? The politicians would steal it, that’s what.
The paltry sums of cash Tanaka was able to extort from the people who passed through his delegacia were a mere pit-tance compared with the bounty that Adilson reaped, and when Marcela compared the Ferreira’s union with her own, Tanaka invariably came out as The Great Loser and she as The Great Victim.
It was a comparison frequently made, and one which invariably brought down the wrath of The Victim upon The Loser.
“That’s the second new car in the last three years,” she said, continuing to commit mayhem on the cauliflower. “What kind of a provider are you? Answer me that!”
“Not a very good one, I’m afraid,” Tanaka said meekly.
He didn’t really believe that. It wasn’t as if he were an ordinary beat cop. He was a delegado titular for Christ’s sake, in charge of an entire precinct. It was just. . well, it was just that he hadn’t had the breaks. And he sure as hell didn’t have an influential uncle down at headquarters. But he knew that another attempt to explain himself to Marcela would not only be fruitless, it could also result in physical pain.
He backed out of the kitchen, put the bottle of beer down on the Formica-topped table next to the front door, and crept out of the house. He was already driving away when he looked in the rearview mirror and saw her standing up on their miniscule terrace with her hands on her hips. He had no doubt that she had a scowl on her face, but the distance was too great for him to see it.
The thirty-third Delegacia da Policia Civil, the domain ruled over by Delegado Titular Yoshiro Tanaka, hadn’t been built to serve the needs of law enforcement. Even people unaware of the building’s history could easily figure that out, because the original owner’s name, and the year 1923, were still up there on the gable.
The name, Johann Fuchs, had belonged to an exporter of coffee who’d spent most of his life in Brazil, but who could never bring himself to give up his German nationality or his intention to die and be buried in his home town of Bremen.
But Fuchs suffered a sudden and fatal heart attack in 1944, and by that time Brazil was at war with Germany, so there was no chance of having his body shipped back to the heimat for internment.
Two years earlier, largely as the result of Johann’s insistence, both of his sons had gone off to fight for Volk und Vaderland. Neither son came back. No survivors came forward to pay the taxes. In 1946, the city confiscated the property. Two years later, they turned it into a delegacia, and a delegacia it remained. The building was brick with small windows and a tiled roof, gloomy both inside and out. Its one remarkable fea-ture was the holding cell for female prisoners. Remarkable, because it was painted a color called shocking pink.
When Tanaka took over, in 2001, the cell had been a drab place, its walls battleship gray, designed for short-term incarceration. But the Brazilian justice system being what it was (slow), and the availability of space being what it was (limited), the cell had become overcrowded, so much so that only half the women could lie down at any one time. “Short-term” had also become a flexible concept, generally meaning no less than three months. The crowding led to squabbles about space and ultimately to something far more serious.
Tanaka hadn’t been in the job a week when a certain Maria Aparecida do Carmo, a prostitute jailed for rolling drunks because she’d grown too old to attract anyone who wasn’t desperate for sex, had been strangled by one of her fellow inmates. The crime occurred at night. None of the women in the cell would admit to having witnessed it. The case wasn’t going to be solved. Ever.
If Maria Aparecida had been a man, her death probably wouldn’t have attracted much attention, but a female was something else. It was potential news. An enterprising reporter managed to get his hands on a twenty-three-year-old mug shot of Maria Aparecida. She was white, and back then she hadn’t looked half bad.
Two days after the murder, the photo appeared in the Jornal da Tarde. The accompanying article implied that the policia civil were a bunch of bunglers, incapable of prevent-ing the murders of hot-looking chicks like Maria Aparecida, even within one of their own delegacias.
Tanaka’s boss, the delegado regional, didn’t like the article one bit. Neither did his boss, the state secretary for public safety.
The obvious scapegoat was Tanaka.
He found himself contemplating the possibility of losing the cushy job he’d worked so long and so hard to get. Tanaka knew the bitches were bound to murder another of their number before long, and when they did, it could result in the sudden termination of his flourishing career. He desper-ately sought a solution, however cosmetic, that would keep his superiors off his back.
He found it, of all places, in his own bathroom. Marcela had left one of her magazines next to the toilet. One morn-ing before work, bereft of other reading material, and faced with the necessity of remaining seated for a while, Tanaka started leafing through an article on household decoration.
Certain colors, it seemed, could have a soothing effect. Tanaka didn’t quite believe it, but liberal journalists, the only kind who cared about some dead whore, and the ones that proliferated at the Jornal da Tarde, ate up that psychol-ogy stuff. Tanaka’s mind was seldom far from his job, and the idea to paint the female holding cell came to him in a sud-den flash of inspiration. He could already picture the head-line: Caring Policemen Make Inmates’ Lives Better.
His first problem would be funding the project. He solved it by passing the hat and pressuring all of his subordinates to contribute money for the brushes and the paint.
He left the choice of color to the prisoners. That was something else the men and women of the press would look kindly upon: treating the inmates with some degree of dig-nity, letting them make up their own minds about the deco-ration of the cage they lived in.
After some biting, scratching, and hair-pulling, the bitches settled upon shocking pink. It wasn’t on the list of soothing colors mentioned in the magazine article, but Tanaka wasn’t particularly concerned about that.
The prisoners themselves did the painting. When they were done, Tanaka called in the press. It was a slow news day, and the journalists thought a shocking-pink holding cell was interesting enough to merit pictures and video footage.
The delegado regional loved it. So did the state secretary for public safety.
The violence continued, but by the time someone stuck a hairpin through the eye, and into the brain, of a petty thief by the name of Marlene Quadros, the murder of a female prisoner had become old news, and Tanaka’s superiors had other things to worry about. It helped, too, that Marlene Quadros was black and that she was ugly as sin, and always had been, even in her youth.
IN THE first week of his new posting, Delegado Tanaka had appropriated the largest room in the building as his office. He still had it. It was one flight up, directly above the (now fading) shocking-pink holding cell and beyond the detec-tives’ squad room. And it was to that sanctum Tanaka fled to escape the hostility of his wife.