“What?”
“Tell Malan I want to see him.”
“See him?”
“I’ll do a quick in and out. I’ll come down there on Wednesday night, see him the following morning, and return in the early afternoon.”
“Wednesday, as in the day after tomorrow Wednesday?”
“Yes.”
“He’s an important man, Mario. You can’t expect him to adjust his schedule on such short notice.”
“That’s why I’m giving him until Thursday morning. Tell him it’s in his best interest.”
“That sounds like an ultimatum.”
“Let him take it any way he likes.”
The director was a worrywart, but he was a politician, and he wasn’t stupid.
“You’ve got something on him, haven’t you?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do. All right. Thursday morning. I’ll tell him, but I’m warning you: as far as Malan is concerned, the issue is already resolved.”
“Not by a long shot,” Silva said.
Bento Rosario was getting desperate. The sun was approaching its zenith. The heat was intolerable. His water bottle was empty. The comfort he got from being in the shade of the bushes was offset by the fact that those same bushes blocked the breeze from the river. Worst of all, Bento was now convinced that one of the cab drivers wasn’t a cab driver at all.
When, five times, the man’s vehicle had come to the head of the rank, he’d driven off without a passenger. And each time, after a short interval, he’d returned to join the end of the queue.
The other drivers were as aware of this strange behavior as Bento was. They weren’t treating him as one of their own. No one had exchanged a word with him in all the time he’d been there, which was almost as long as Bento had been hiding in the bushes.
The man was wearing a jacket, and who the hell would wear a jacket in a place as hot as Manaus? That alone was suspicious. And something else boded ilclass="underline" the driver’s eyes were fastened on the front door of the hotel. He was watching it like a cat watches a mousehole. is watch.
It was a little past one.
“I’m not gonna eat another damned fish,” Arnaldo said. “And I’m not going to eat anything that tastes like fish.”
“Which means you’re either on your way to the airport, or you’re going to starve,” Silva said.
“Which means neither,” Arnaldo said. “I am going to get a steak.”
Silva and Hector looked at him.
“While you people,” Arnaldo said, “confined your conversations with Lefkowitz to DNA testing and suchlike, I got him aside and questioned him about something of real importance.”
“Food?” Silva said.
“Food,” Arnaldo confirmed. “There is a restaurant in this culinary desert owned and operated by a Gaucho.”
Gauchos were people from the State of Rio Grande do Sul, and the State of Rio Grande do Sul was famous for its beef.
“This restaurant,” Arnaldo continued, “is less than ten minutes from here. The owner flies his steaks up from Porto Alegre. According to Lefkowitz, they are untainted by fish.” “Lead us to this marvel,” Silva said.
The heat outside hit them like a Turkish bath. Arnaldo went over to speak to the valet. Hector reached for his sunglasses. Silva, wiping his forehead with a handkerchief, was the first to see a figure scuttle out from under the shrubbery and head toward them at a dead run.
He was a thin young man in dark shorts and a T-shirt, wearing tennis shoes, and carrying what appeared to be an empty water bottle. One of the cab drivers caught sight of him, got out of his car and put a hand under his jacket, a move that attracted the attention of the federal cops. All three of them reached for their weapons. The driver took in the situation, got back into his cab and took off down the drive with a screech of rubber.
By that time, the young man was in front of them, panting from the effort. He reached out a hand and took Silva by the wrist.
“You’re Silva, aren’t you?” he said. Then, without waiting for an answer, “You people have gotta help me.”
Bento Rosario started talking right there on the street. He was still talking when they were shown to a table in the Recanto Gaucho, the restaurant suggested by Lefkowitz. He paused long enough to drink an entire bottle of mineral water, asked for another, and continued his story.
The three federal cops nursed glasses of beer. Silva and Hector sat where they could keep on eye on the entrance. Arnaldo chose the other side of the table, next to Bento, and covered the door leading to the kitchen.
Bento finally took a break to scan the menu. He ran his finger down the offerings and frowned.
“Hey,” he said, “what’s the matter with this place? They don’t serve fish.”
From the restaurant, they went directly to Manaus’s sole federal magistrate, a man by the name of Rosenblatt. After being sworn to secrecy, and listening to Bento Rosario’s story, Judge Rosenblatt issued a fistful of warrants and wished them good luck. He too was no fan of the chief’s.
Silva told Arnaldo to call Brasilia from the judge’s chambers.
“Get Gloria up here,” he said. “We can’t do this alone. We’re going to need her.”
Gloria Sarmento, a woman who, according to Arnaldo, had “more balls than a pool table,” headed ERR1, one of the federal police’s elite hostage rescue teams.
“Gloria isn’t going to like it,” Arnaldo said. “She hates Manaus.”
“Tell her to bring six of her people,” Silva said. “We shouldn’t need any more than that.”
“Which six?” Arnaldo said.
“Let her choose.”
“No, no, no,” Arnaldo said. “What if she brings Diogo Carmo?”
Diogo Carmo was one of those people who couldn’t finish a story. You’d meet Diogo in the hallway and he’d say something like, “On the way into the office this morning I stopped off for coffee, and speaking of coffee, have you ever bought coffee at that little shop down among the warehouses in Santos? Oh, yeah, Santos, that reminds me, how about that game between Santos and Sao Paulo last Thursday? You know, Thursday, the same day…”
And so on and so forth. He drove his colleagues nuts.
Silva considered for a moment, then shook his head.
“Gloria won’t bring him,” he said. “Diogo has the same effect on Gloria as he does on everybody else.”
“Gloria,” Arnaldo said, “might get so pissed off about coming to Manaus that she’d pick Diogo just to-”
“I get the point,” Silva said. “Tell her not to include Diogo.”
From Judge Rosenblatt’s chambers, they went directly to the municipal dock, where they rented a boat. They told the owner/captain to moor the vessel in the mouth of an out-ofthe-way tributary, turn on the air-conditioning, and leave them alone in the cabin.
While Hector took a handwritten statement from Bento, Silva made calls from his cell phone. One of them was to the reception desk at the Hotel Tropical. There’d been two calls from Chief Pinto and one from Silva’s wife, Irene. He ignored the messages from the chief and was lucky to catch Irene still relatively sober. He told her to expect him the following evening in Brasilia.
“I’ll pick you up at the airport,” she said. “We’ll share a cocktail when you’re safely home.”
“Don’t start without me,” he said.
At eleven o’clock that night, the three federal cops took the boat back to the municipal dock. They left Bento aboard and packed themselves into a cab for a quick trip to the airport. Gloria and her people arrived on time, aboard the 11:30 P.M. flight from Brasilia. It took three more cabs to carry the personnel and equipment. Thirty minutes later, they arrived at the headquarters building of Manaus’s Municipal Police.
Silva assigned men to oversee the operations of the switchboard operator and the radio dispatcher, then assembled the rest of the small nighttime staff. He identified himself, showed his credentials, and waved a paper.
“This,” he said, “is a search warrant for this building and these”-he waved two other papers-“are arrest warrants for Chief Pinto and Coimbra, the guy who runs the archives. Under no circumstances are you to attempt to contact them. Nobody leaves the building. All calls, incoming and outgoing, are going to be monitored. Turn in your cell phones to the little lady with the big gun and line up to submit yourselves to a body search, men on this side, women over there.”