“Sure she is. You tell her to call me.”
“Uh, maybe it was fourteen she said. Fourteen or thirteen. I can’t remember.”
“Just tell her to call me.”
The first thing the chief said to Claudia when she got him on the phone was “You know who keeps those records? The federal cops, that’s who.”
“They get hundreds, maybe thousands, of requests like that every day,” she said. “Why should they notice one inquiry?”
“You’re not telling me anything I don’t know already,” he said, “but it’s extra work for me. How much you agree to pay Joaquim?”
She told him.
“Lying filho da puta,” he said. “Okay, you’re not gonna pay him anyway. Me you’re gonna pay an extra two thousand.”
“Two thousand? For something that’s gonna take one of your men no more than five minutes and isn’t costing you a centavo?”
“Maybe you know some other place you can get the information? Two thousand.”
Claudia sighed, but it wasn’t as if she hadn’t been expecting it. “I’ll send it over,” she said.
By ten o’clock the following morning, she knew that Lauro Alexandre Tadesco, age eighteen, son of Maria Lourdes Tadesco, father unknown, had listed his address as number thirteen, Rua Barbosa, in the bairro of Sao Conrado.
There was, of course, no guarantee that he still lived at the same address. But, according to one of the neighbors, he did. It turned out that Lauro was one of his mother’s seven children, neither the oldest nor the youngest, and they all lived at number thirteen, Rua Barbosa, in the bairro of Sao Conrado.
According to the same neighbor, a talkative old crone with only a few teeth, the mother took in washing, and the kids did all sorts of odd jobs to keep the family afloat. They were poor, but they were decent churchgoing folks, and they never caused anyone any trouble.
But if Joaquim was to follow Carla’s instructions to the letter, he still needed a visual of the kid. Fortunately for him, there was a bar just across the street. He settled in with a drink and watched the house.
About an hour later, when he was already feeling the effects of his sixth cachaca and was thinking of switching to Guarana, a kid of about the right age came out of the front door of number thirteen and started walking purposefully toward a nearby bus stop. There was no one else in the bar, and the bartender and Joaquim had been having a spirited discussion about the national sport. If you wanted to bond with any male in Brazil, that’s how you did it, talking about futebol. Joaquim touched his new buddy on the arm.
“That kid,” he said, pointing. “You know him?”
The bartender turned around for a look.
“Yeah,” he said. “Why?”
“Looks like a guy I used to know,” Joaquim said, “name of Joao Catanga.”
“Nah,” the bartender said. “That’s Lauro Tadesco. He lives there.”
Silva gave the whoremaster a decent interval, almost twenty-four hours, to ruminate upon what he’d said. Goat stew, Arnaldo dubbed the process. Then he went back to lean on him.
This time, Roselia was behind the bar.
“Where is he?” Silva asked.
“Said he was going fishing.”
“Fishing? Where?”
“Where else does one fish, Chief Inspector? On the river, of course.”
“He told me his boat sank.”
“It did. He went with a friend.”
“What friend?”
“He didn’t say.”
“When’s he due back?”
“He didn’t say.”
“Goddamn it, what did he say?”
“Just that he was going fishing.”
“You’re lying.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are.”
And so forth.
The investigation was going nowhere fast.
Her name was Socorro Lins, and she needed another abortion. The old lady who worked out of that shithole down by the municipal dock was going to charge her seventy Reais to do it, up from sixty for the last one.
She’d just paid her rent, had some rice and beans in the cupboard, and still had ten Reais sewn into a corner of her hammock. Coming up with the extra sixty meant she’d have to hustle, doing eight tricks for the next three days instead of knocking off after the usual seven. But she wasn’t about to get uptight about it. Being pregnant was just another occupational hazard, like gonorrhea, and it was one Socorro had faced many times before. She’d been living the life for sixteen years now, and no longer remembered how many abortions she’d had, much less how many men. The wonder was that her body still kept trying to produce children. She thought it should have learned its lesson by now.
A few years ago, she would have said no to the creep with the round face, emotionless brown eyes, and tobacco-stained teeth. But now she was pushing thirty, and she hardly ever turned anyone down anymore. If they had the money, she’d deliver the goods. As soon as he’d met her price, she nodded and preceded him into an alley.
He did her standing up with her back against the wall of one of the buildings. There was no kissing, no stroking, none of that kind of crap. He just did a quick in and out. Fortunately, he was one of those guys who took precautions, and the condom he’d used was lubricated. It would have been a painful process without it.
She was using a tissue to wipe herself off, and he was zipping up his fly, when he came up with the proposition.
A few hours later, she found herself sitting in a car in Sao Lazaro, smoking another cigarette, a hundred and twenty Reais richer. And she was prepared to sit there all night if need be, because the deal was that she’d get another hundred when the job was done.
A dark-skinned kid, wearing eyeglasses, came out of a building in front of a bar and turned right, walking away from them.
“Merda,” the guy with the stained teeth said. He started the engine.
“That’s him?” she said.
“That’s him. Sit tight, I’m gonna go around the block and get in front of him.”
Joaquim watched the whore wriggling her ass toward the kid and watched the kid cross the street to get out of her way. Then she crossed the street too and took up a position against a lamppost, right where the sidewalk narrowed.
Now the kid had three choices: he could turn back, he could cross the street again, or he could pass her at a distance of not more than a meter. He chose to pass her, but to do it with his head down, avoiding eye contact. He also picked up his pace.
But then she spoke, and he came to a sudden, almost comic, stop.
The whole drama didn’t last long, no more than a minute or two. When she stopped talking, the kid reached for his wallet and handed her some money. She took it, smiled, and said something else. He listened, turned around, and went back in the direction from which he’d come, not once looking back. She let him get about a hundred meters away before she sashayed over to the car.
“Okay,” she said, sliding into the front seat. “All done. You owe me another hundred.”
Joaquim handed it over. She looked relieved, probably thought he was going to stiff her.
“You took money from him,” he said.
She shrugged, unconcerned.
“You wanted him to believe me, didn’t you?”
“So?”
“So what would a whore be doing out here on the street waiting for him, if it wasn’t for money? You ever see a whore do anything for free?”
Joaquim gave that some consideration and came to the conclusion she was right. He thought about beating her up, or maybe even offing her and recovering his investment. But it was late, and he was tired, and two hundred and twenty Reais was peanuts.
“How about taking me back to where you found me?” she said.
“Fuck you,” he said. “You got money. Call a taxi.”
“ So this whore stops Lauro, on the street,” Arnaldo said, spooning sugar into his cafe com leite, “tells him she’s a friend of Topaz’s, tells him she knows where they took Marta and for fifty Reais, she’ll tell him.” He sipped some of the froth, wiped his mouth with a paper napkin and looked first at Hector, then at Silva. “Come on, amigos, how likely is that?”