“I… forgot,” he said.
Again, the chief looked at Coimbra. “He forgot. He fucking forgot.”
Coimbra shot his eyes toward the ceiling as if asking God for patience.
Pinto shifted his attention back to Bento. “Clean out your desk,” he said. “Don’t leave anything behind. You’re on unpaid leave until further notice.”
“Unpaid-”
“Leave. Something wrong with your ears?”
“No, Senhor. Ah…”
“What?”
“May I ask the chief when I might be permitted to come back?”
He’d addressed the chief, but used his title, like he’d seen in war movies. You piss anybody off, for any reason, you act like you’re in the army, Tarcio had told him.
Coimbra and the chief exchanged a glance. The chief hesitated then said, “You never heard of Damiao Rodrigues, and there was no file, right?”
“ Sim, Senhor,” Bento said, smartly. “Unknown name. No file.”
The chief grunted.
“All right,” he said. “Find someplace where you can stay. Don’t tell anybody where it is. I don’t want those federals to go looking for you, but if they do, I sure as hell don’t want them to find you. Call Coimbra in a week or so. If everything has blown over by then, you can come back. If not, you stay away longer.”
Bento tried to be a good cop. He may have been only a clerk, but he liked to think of himself as a cop, and a cop followed orders. He went to his desk, cleaned it out and left the building. Joel Lopes, his new best friend, tried to ask him what happened, but Bento told him he wasn’t allowed to talk about it.
Only later did he realize what it all meant. It meant there were felons to whom the chief was extending his protection. It meant, in short, that the chief was a crook. But, at the time, Bento was so shocked he didn’t take time to think. He simply went home, packed a bag, and told his mother he had orders directly from the chief. He wasn’t permitted to tell her where he was going.
She wouldn’t have approved if he had.
He went to Samuel, his mother’s ex-husband, Bento’s stepfather for almost five years. Samuel had no children of his own-none he could be sure of, anyway. But it wasn’t from lack of distributing his seed. Samuel was a man who couldn’t be content with one woman, so he always had several at a time. When Arlette, Bento’s mother, found out about what she thought was Samuel’s second extramarital affair, although it was really more like his fifteenth, she’d thrown him out. Literally.
Samuel worked in a fish shop, and never lifted anything heavier than a pacu. Arlette worked in the central market, shifting wooden boxes of vegetables. She was half a head taller than Samuel and thirty kilograms heavier. The night she evicted him, he went flying from the front door of the house and halfway across the street, hit his head on the cobblestones, and lay there, stunned, while she threw the contents of his dresser drawers on top of him.
Bento had been fourteen at the time. He’d adopted Samuel as a father figure and was sorry to see him go. So sorry, in fact, that within a month he’d gone to the fish shop, discovered where Samuel was living, and had been clandestinely visiting him ever since. So when Bento was ordered to go underground, Samuel’s home was the logical choice. It was a little cramped because Samuel was living with a widow and her five children, but the widow was a friendly soul, and she did her best to make Bento feel welcome.
Bento was twenty-one years old, an only child, and had never lived anywhere except with his mother. After a week of being away, he’d come to miss her a great deal. He crept back to her house in the middle of the night and was about to tap on the door when a bullet smashed into the doorjamb above his head. Nobody had ever fired a shot at Bento Rosario. He didn’t, at first, realize what it was. Then another shot rang out. That one missed as well, probably because the street was dark, and the shooter couldn’t draw a proper bead over his sights.
Bento took off like a gazelle. He knew every alley, every back street of his neighborhood, which his pursuer apparently didn’t, so it wasn’t long before he’d gotten clean away. He hadn’t dared to go back that night, or even the next. Bento couldn’t think of a reason why anyone would want to kill him. He concluded that the assault had been a robbery attempt. But that was before Samuel brought the newspaper home.
On the morning of the third day after the shooting incident, Samuel had been using a sheet of two-day-old newsprint from the Diario de Manaus to wrap a fish for a waiting customer. He’d just about finished the job, when an article less than ten centimeters high caught his eye.
Woman murdered, the headline read.
Samuel read further and his jaw dropped. He wrapped the fish in another sheet, took off his apron, and asked one of his colleagues to cover for him. It was less than a five-minute run to the widow’s place. Samuel found his erstwhile stepson watching a cartoon show on television and shoved the article, now reeking strongly of fish, under his nose.
Below the headline, and after giving Bento’s mother’s name and stating her age, the journalist went on to write:
… was tortured and murdered sometime in the early hours of the morning, probably in an attempt to get her to reveal the whereabouts of her valuables.
Bento was devastated. What kind of valuables could thieves hope to find in the shack of a box-shifter who worked in the Municipal Market? It didn’t add up.
But there was another explanation that made sense: that they’d been trying to get her to reveal Bento’s whereabouts. Originally, the chief had wanted him to go away for a while. Now, it looked as if he wanted him to go away permanently. Bento was frightened, so frightened that he was staring at another article on the page for at least a minute before it registered: Mario Silva, the well-known Chief Inspector of the Federal Police was in town and staying at the Hotel Tropical. And right then and there, in the midst of his fear and grief, Bento experienced an epiphany: the federal police had dropped him in the shit; the federal police were the ones who were going to pull him out of it. He needed protection. He needed to get to Silva.
Chapter Twenty-seven
“ I haven’t seen it myself,” Nelson Sampaio said, shifting his telephone to his other ear, “and after the deputado’s description of the contents, I’m quite sure I don’t want to.” He was referring to the videotape Claudia Andrade had sent to Roberto Malan. “He called me within a few minutes of looking at it,” the director went on. “I have to tell you, Mario, his comportment was most… extraordinary.”
“Extraordinary?”
“You’d expect him to be distraught, right? Break down, release some of the sadness he must be feeling. But he didn’t. All he did was to threaten and bluster.”
“Threaten?” Silva said.
“And bluster,” Sampaio said. “He wants your head, Mario. He said it was your fault. He said you failed. He’s going after our budget allocations, told me that if I didn’t get rid of you immediately, he’d cut everything to the bone. It’s his committee, Mario. He’s a powerful man. He can do that.”
The director paused.
Silva didn’t say anything.
After a second or two, the director continued, “I like you, Mario, I really do. And I don’t blame you for what happened to the girl, but he does.”
“Hmm,” Silva said.
“You’ve got to understand my position, Mario. It would be wrong to prejudice the whole organization just because of one man. You’ve got to think like a team player here.”
“You want me to resign?”
Sampaio sighed.
“I think it would be best for all concerned,” he said.
“Tell him I want to see him.”