Her heart gave a leap. She’d been right about the door. It did lead to the outside. She could see daylight shining through a gap at the bottom.
Cautiously, she reached out a hand and turned the knob. The door didn’t budge, but a loud bell began ringing with an ear-splitting clang.
She ran back to her cell and sat on the bed. A moment later, she heard a door open and a woman’s unhurried steps coming along the corridor to her left. The steps paused. The ringing stopped. The girls, too, had fallen silent.
Roselia appeared in the doorway.
“Tomorrow,” she said, with a triumphant grin, “try going the other way.”
She slammed the door, and Marta heard the key turning in the lock.
Chapter Eight
BRASILIA
The day after her delivery, Irene Silva’s obstetrician came into her hospital room, sat down in the chair next to her bed and gently told her she’d have no more children. She and Mario had planned on two. They were disappointed, but not devastated. Their newborn son got a clean bill of health from the pediatrician. They knew couples who didn’t have any children at all. One baby was surely enough to make their happiness complete. And he did, for the next eight years.
There was a photograph from that happy time: all of them crowded together on a couch. On the far left was Irene, radiant and smiling with her arm around little Mario. Next to her was the youngster himself, proud of his new school uniform, pointing at the crest on his white shirt. Next to him, leaning against his shoulder, Clara’s son Hector, five years older than little Mario, his face serious, as if he could look into the future and see the trouble lurking there. Lastly, on the far right, Mario Silva himself, his hair and moustache still black, without a sign of gray.
In the photo his son had a grin from ear to ear. He looked robust and healthy, but the sickness had been in him even then. Four months later he was dead, struck down by leukemia thirteen days before his ninth birthday. He died on the eighth of May, 1989.
The next day Silva put the photo into his desk drawer, and there it sat.
When he’d become a chief inspector, they’d offered him a modern glass desk, with an accompanying credenza, and no drawers. He’d turned it down, just so he could have the photo close to him, but in a place where no one could see it.
And what he did with the photo, he did with his memories: locked them away, never discussed them with anyone.
It hurt too much when he did.
Irene handled her grief in a different way.
She drank.
Most days she’d sleep until noon. Then she’d get up and spend a few hours working at the orphanage to which Silva sent twenty percent of his salary. That, too, was something he never discussed.
Sometimes the children at the orphanage could coax a smile from Irene’s lips, just a smile, never a deep, full-throated laugh like the ones that bubbled out of her in the old days. When he could, Silva would take an afternoon off and stop by, just to see her like that, smiling, with the kids, before she went home and got drunk.
She usually started at five o’clock in the afternoon. Five o’clock exactly, trying to prove to him that she wasn’t really an alcoholic, just a woman having a cocktail at the end of the day. She’d insist that alcoholics drank in the morning. She didn’t drink in the morning, only at night.
But it was every night. And it was always to excess.
When Silva was on a trip, he’d try to ring home before eight P.M. If he called much later he’d hear Irene’s slurred speech and know she wasn’t absorbing half of what he said. But he’d call anyway, because he knew she needed to hear his voice, even if they weren’t going to have a coherent conversation. He worried about what would happen to her if someone were to kill him. He’d taken to being more cautious. For her sake.
And now, here it was, the eighth of May come around again. On the night before the anniversary of her son’s death, Irene Silva hadn’t gone to bed at all.
At seven-thirty A.M., her husband found her on the couch in the living room, an empty vodka bottle on the coffee table in front of her, clutching little Mario’s teddy bear in her arms. She didn’t wake when he carried her into the bedroom and tucked her in.
At ten, Hector called from Amsterdam. It was five hours later there, and Hector sounded more awake than Silva felt.
“Today’s the day,” were the first words Hector said.
“Yes,” Silva said.
“How’s Tia Irene?”
“Sleeping. I hope.”
“But she didn’t sleep last night?”
“No. Not last night. How was the drug conference?”
Hector knew the signs. His uncle wanted to talk about something else, anything else. “Like being inside a bag full of cats,” he said.
“The Americans blaming the Bolivians and Colombians for growing it; the Bolivians and Colombians telling them that it’s their own damned fault for creating a market?”
“And the other Europeans all ganging up on the Dutch because they think they’re too soft. It didn’t help, either, that the Dutch have cornered the world’s Ecstasy market. These days, they’ve got more labs than windmills.”
“And we import more of it than their cheese and their chocolate. You pick up any promising leads?”
“Not as far as drugs are concerned, but there’s something else. I have to see you.”
“Personally?”
“Personally. My flight from Amsterdam arrives in Sao Paulo tomorrow morning at seven. I’ll catch a connecting flight and come right to Brasilia.”
“It’s that serious?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’d better bring Arnaldo.”
Agente Arnaldo Nunes was about Silva’s age and had been a cop for almost as long. The fact that he hadn’t achieved a lofty position in the hierarchy had nothing to do with being irreverent and sarcastic, which he was, nor to do with his abilities and competence, both of which were considerable. But he’d come from a poor family, married young, and had never been able to raise the money to go to law school. Without a law degree, the statutes governing the federal police blocked him from becoming a delegado, which was the first step to every other position of major responsibility. So on paper, Arnaldo remained a lowly agente. In practice, he wielded far more power and influence.
“What do you mean, bring Arnaldo?” Hector asked. “Isn’t he there with you?”
“He’s in Sao Paulo at the moment. I’ll call him and tell him to meet your flight.”
“It’s Air France.”
“Not KLM?”
“No. I connect in Paris.”
“Number?”
“AF 0454.”
“Consider it done. Now, tell me.”
Hector gave his uncle a rough overview of the situation, and then described his conversation with Montsma and Kuipers. He finished by saying, “There are tapes from Russia and Thailand, too, but the Brazilian ones are the most disturbing. They made me sick, Tio, physically sick. They all have titles in English. One is called Killing the Vampire. The killer uses a sledgehammer to drive a sharp stake through the woman’s chest.”
“Ouch,” Silva said.
“All of them cover the murder in one shot. And they all end with either dismemberment or severe mutilation of the victim. Kuipers thinks that’s to prove to the buyers that what they’re seeing is real, not faked. That it’s proof of death. Another one was entitled The Lumberjack’s Revenge. The killer takes a chain saw and-”
“That’s enough. I get the picture. How can they tell which ones came from here?”
“They’ve all got live sound. It appears that the… clients like hearing what’s going on.”
“Sick bastards. Any luck following the money?”
“None. They were using a bank in Riga.”
“Riga?”
“Capital of Latvia. Apparently, Latvian banks are much tougher to deal with than the Swiss. Montsma says they won’t violate their security for anyone.”
“How about the master tapes? Any fingerprints?”
“Only Schubski’s and Oosterbaan’s. But I got a list of their clients. It was password protected and encrypted, but Oosterbaan gave it up.”