“And he asked her if the guy took anything, and she said not as far as she knew.”
“So the chief steward didn’t take any action?”
“Leandro has fluent Japanese. He mostly works that Tokyo run.”
“So?”
“I guess what I’m trying to say is that Bruna wasn’t an alarmist. She was a good judge of character. But Leandro never had a chance to learn that about her. They only worked together a few times. Oh Jesus!”
“Oh Jesus what?”
“Oh Jesus, what am I going to say when I talk to Bruna’s mother?”
Chapter Sixteen
“Aline Arriaga?” Hector asked.
The woman who’d opened the door nodded. She had eyes as blue as aquamarines, was moderately tall, had medium-length black hair, and her figure wouldn’t attract a second glance. But her eyes were beautiful. They were also bloodshot and underlined with dark circles. The woman had been doing a good deal of crying and getting very little sleep.
“What is it now,” she said glumly.
“Now? I’m sorry, Senhora. I don’t-”
“The guard downstairs said you were from the police.”
“I am,” Hector said. “The Federal Police. I’d like to talk to you and Julio.”
“Julio?”
“Your son.”
“Junior,” she said. “Not Julio. Julio is my husband. My son is Julio Junior. And if you want to talk to him, it means you’re not here for the reason I thought you were. It means you don’t know.”
“Know what, Senhora?”
“You’d best come in,” she said and stepped aside. After he’d entered, she closed the door behind him and leaned against it as if she needed the support.
“Junior’s dead,” she said.
“Dead?”
She narrowed her eyes. “They said he fell, but I don’t believe it. Not for one minute.”
“My sympathy for your loss, Senhora. When? When was this?”
“Almost three months ago,” she said. “He was on his way back from the United States. My husband, Julio, lives there. Junior was visiting him. They arrested Junior at the airport.”
“Arrested him? For what?”
“Drug smuggling, they said. And I don’t believe that either. They dragged him off to a delegacia and put him into a shower with a bunch of perverts. Junior was only fifteen years old. What could they have been thinking? Tell me that! What could they have been thinking?”
“Senhora, I’m sorry to hear all this. Truly sorry.”
“Spare me your pity. I don’t want pity.”
She pointed toward the small couch. Her outstretched finger was trembling. Hector, wishing to avoid an outburst of hysteria, sat. She took a seat facing him and then a deep breath.
“Now,” she said, “tell me.”
“The flight Julio-”
She cut him off. “Junior. It’s Junior. You say Julio, you’re talking about his father.”
“Junior, then. The flight he was on, 8101, the one that arrived on the morning of the twenty-third of November-”
“Yes?”
“There were some… incidents, things that happened to some of the other passengers.”
“What kind of incidents?”
“Senhora, I-”
“Tell me. What kind of incidents?”
“Murders. One of the victims was the son of the foreign minister of Venezuela. We’ve been asked to investigate.”
“The death of the son of the foreign minister of Venezuela rates an all-out investigation by the Federal Police, but the death of my son doesn’t matter to anyone but me. Is that what you’re telling me?”
“No, Senhora,” Hector said. “That’s not what I’m telling you.”
“Well, it sure sounds like it. It sounds exactly like what you’re telling me.”
“Senhora, believe me-”
She held up a hand to silence him, stood up, walked to a table near the door. “I want you to hear something,” she said.
She started pushing buttons on an answering machine. Her movements were very rapid. Whatever she was doing, she’d done it many times before. There was a final click, and she turned up the volume on a young and frightened voice.
“Mom? Where are you? Mom? For God’s sake, Mom, pick up the phone.” Some indistinguishable words were growled in the background. “Mom, they say I have to be quick. It’s like this: they opened my backpack when I was coming through Customs. There were pills in there, drugs, they said. And now they say I need a lawyer, but I didn’t do anything. I swear. Those pills weren’t mine. They weren’t-”
The boy’s plea came to an abrupt end followed by a beep.
Aline pushed another button and scoffed, “Drugs! My Junior with drugs!”
“You don’t believe it?”
“I never believed it! Not for a moment. I still don’t.”
“What kind of drugs?” he asked quietly.
“Ecstasy.”
A drug teenagers favored. Hector had seen kids as young as twelve using the stuff. Junior might well have been carrying it; in fact, Hector couldn’t think of any other reason why the boy might have been arrested. But he wasn’t about to say that to his overwrought mother.
Aline Arriaga walked to the windowsill, picked up a picture frame, and handed it to him.
“Junior,” she said.
Julio Arriaga-Junior-a good-looking kid with his mother’s black hair and a lopsided smile, wore a gray shirt with blue piping. A baseball bat, gripped in one hand, was resting on his shoulder.
“His last photo,” she said, “taken in Florida. Julio sent it.”
“His father lives there?”
“I already told you that.”
“Yes, I’m sorry. You did.”
“And I live here, but not for long. I want to get out of this country, wanted to get out even before what happened to Junior… happened. Julio’s saving money. He’s going to send for me.”
“I’d like to speak to him,” Hector said.
“Julio? Why? Why do you want to talk to Julio?”
“He took your son to the airport, didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“Then he might have spoken to one of the other passengers, seen something that would be significant for our investigation.”
“Julio moved recently. I don’t have his new phone number.”
“An address perhaps?”
“I don’t have an address either. I’ll have to get back to you.”
She wasn’t meeting his eyes. And there was something else, too. Something he couldn’t put his finger on. He suddenly had the feeling she wanted to get rid of him. He looked back at the photo in his hands, made a point of admiring it. “A handsome young man,” he said.
The tactic was successful.
“Sit right there,” she said. “I have lots more.”
She went into another room and, seconds later, came back with a thick album.
She put the heavy book on his lap and took a seat next to him. “This one,” she said, “was taken on the same day as that one.” She pointed to the picture in the frame.
Junior was looking over his shoulder. There was a baseball cap on his head, a number on the back of his shirt. She started leafing through the pages, going slowly, so he could admire the pictures. “Up there, in the United States, they called him Jule.
Julio wasn’t ‘cool’ enough; neither was Junior.” She paused at a photo that took up a full page. “That’s his father,” she said, tapping the image with her forefinger.
Julio wore combat fatigues and looked every inch the soldier: lean, hard, not the sort you’d like to tangle with.
“That was taken about four years ago,” she said, “in Manaus. Before Manaus, we were in Belo Horizonte, and before that it was Porto Alegre. We spent two winters there. Do you have any idea how cold it gets in Porto Alegre in the winter? That was some change, I’m telling you, Porto Alegre to Manaus.”
Hector leaned in for a closer look. Julio was turned slightly away from the camera, and his shoulder patch was clearly visible: CIGS.
CIGS is the acronym for the Centro de Instrucao de Guerra na Selva , the Brazilian army’s elite training corps for jungle fighting. They were the best of the best, a unit exclusively composed of career men.
Hector felt his pulse quicken. “Why did Julio leave the army?”
Again, she avoided his eyes. “It was a problem with one of his officers.”