Still only forty-two, Sacca had a criminal record going back thirty-three years, more than two thirds of them spent behind bars. First arrest: age nine. Shoplifting. Charges dismissed. First conviction: age eleven. Armed robbery. It was Sacca’s debut in that particular specialty-and his last performance in it.
He’d the misfortune to choose a plainclotheswoman for his victim. When she’d drawn her gun, the woman reported, the kid had dropped the shard of broken glass he’d been threatening her with and started to cry.
Since he either didn’t know, or wouldn’t admit to, the whereabouts of his parents, Abilio was committed to the FEBEM, a reform school where no reform ever took place. The judge gave him five years, partly to get him off the streets, partly in the hope he’d get an education. The judgment was successful on both counts. It kept him away from honest citizens, and it taught him a great deal about breaking the law.
It was true that he’d never become a successful criminal, but that stemmed from Abilio’s own shortcomings and had nothing to do with the excellent instruction he’d received from his fellow delinquents. He was a pathetically bad liar, and he liked people, commendable attributes in an honest citizen but two major drawbacks for a criminal. He was, furthermore, a practicing alcoholic. Of all things in life, he was most fond of getting drunk with a few convivial companions.
Sao Paulo’s underworld being what it was, it stood to reason that not all of those convivial companions had Abilio’s best interests at heart. Sometimes they were police informers; sometimes, even, cops. That had led to a number of charges, some proven, some not, but Abilio never seemed to learn. Within a week of being released, he would be back in one bar or another, shooting his mouth off all over again.
Abilio’s most recent arrest hadn’t stemmed from indiscretion, but it had been monumentally stupid all the same. His objective had been a jewelry store, and jewelry stores, because of their alarm systems, were invariably hard targets. A wiser crook would have picked something easier, or would have planned better. A wiser crook wouldn’t have undertaken the enterprise dead drunk. And a wiser crook certainly wouldn’t have chosen a shop where the owner lived upstairs and was known to possess a firearm.
Sacca’s record contained another indication that he wasn’t among the brightest: other than the time he’d spent at the cost of the state, Sacca had never lived anywhere except in Santo Andre. He was, by now, one of the “usual suspects,” one of the first people the cops would look for whenever a burglary was committed.
Burglary. Burglary. Burglary. As Silva scanned Sacca’s record the word kept repeating itself. No murders, no assaults, nothing but burglaries.
And that, Silva thought, was inconsistent with the personality of a murderer. Sacca may not have been good at what he did, but it was a specialty. And that specialty was nonviolent. After his single youthful indiscretion Sacca had never again been accused, or suspected, of threatening someone’s life, much less of taking it.
Silva studied Sacca’s most recent likeness, the booking photo from the jewelry-store affair. It revealed some things the video hadn’t. Sacca had large brown eyes and rather delicate features. Despite the stain on his cheek, he was a type who would have attracted sexual attention from his fellow prisoners, particularly when he was a younger man. That fact, and a further perusal of Sacca’s sins, strengthened Silva in his conviction that they hadn’t yet found their killer. If Sacca had had a violent turn, he would have fought to protect himself from rape. There would have been a record of fights, maybe even stabbings, in the time he was behind bars. But there was nothing of that nature. On the contrary, the man had, again and again, been given time off for good behavior.
Of course, it was remotely possible that no one who’d shared prison with him had found Abilio attractive. More likely, Silva thought, he’d had one powerful lover or had been, in the parlance of prisoners, “everybody’s punk.” A man who’d put up with that and not fight back did not seem like a person capable of doling out the hideous damage done to any of the current victims.
Before they even spoke, Silva had a strong conviction that Abilio Sacca was not his man. That conviction was strengthened when he actually had Sacca seated in front of him.
Sacca’s eyes were reminiscent of a fawn’s, without a sign of even moderate intellect behind them. And he had a tic, an irregular spasm of the muscles around his right eye.
Silva found it disturbing, so disturbing that he was having trouble giving Sacca the fish-eyed stare he reserved for felons.
“Your eye always do that?” he asked, confronting the distraction head-on.
“Nah. I only get it sometimes,” Sacca said.
“Like when?”
“Like when I’m nervous, that’s when. What’s this all about? Why are the Federal Police interested in me?”
“Come on, Sacca. You know the drill. You don’t ask the questions, we do.”
“Yeah, yeah, okay.”
“I want to know if you were on TAB flight number 8101 from Miami to Sao Paulo, the one that arrived on the morning of the twenty-third of November.”
Tic.
“No.”
“I think you were.”
“You can think what you want. Go ahead. Check the passenger list. You’re not gonna find me.”
“Not as Abilio Sacca, no.”
Tic. Tic.
“What are you talking about?”
“Ever hear of a guy called Darcy Motta?”
“Never.”
“Uh-huh. You should ask a doctor to check out that tic.”
“I already did. He says it doesn’t mean anything.”
“You ever play poker, Sacca?”
“No.”
“Let me give you a word of advice: don’t.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Bluffing isn’t one of your strengths.”
“I’m not bluffing. You got the wrong guy. Somebody makes a couple of mistakes in his life and you never let him forget it. You know what this is? This is police harassment, that’s what.”
“We’ve got a DVD.”
“You’ve got a what?”
“We have a video recording of you boarding the flight in Miami.”
Sacca put a hand over his right eye in an attempt to still the tic and stared balefully at Silva out of his left.
“Not true,” he said.
“The God’s honest truth,” Silva said.
Chapter Thirty-Four
One of the most traumatic events in Haraldo Goncalves’s life took place in the living room of his parents’ home. Haraldo had been three weeks short of his eleventh birthday. It was the final game of the World Cup, the decisive game of the tournament.
Twenty-three minutes into the first half, with the score at nil all, Argentina’s principal striker fired off a shot that narrowly cleared the top of the goal. Five centimeters lower, and Brazil’s hated rivals would have scored. Young Haraldo, in his excitement, wet himself.
The last thing Haraldo wanted was to be saddled with a derisive nickname like Pisspants. Hurrying to his room, he slipped into clean underwear, changed his jeans, and, without giving it a second thought, grabbed a team shirt with the logo and colors of Corinthians. Then he raced back to the living room, clutching the fatal jersey in his hands.
He’d no sooner slipped it over his head when an Argentinean shot struck home. It was the only goal of the game.
There is an expression in Brazilian Portuguese, vestir a camisa, literally to wear the shirt, but also signifying support for any movement, group, company, or philosophy.
Corinthians was having a spectacularly bad year. To wear their shirt signified supporting a loser. By the final whistle, Haraldo’s family, and their invited friends, had reached general agreement: young Haraldo had transferred Corinthians’ bad joss to the Brazilian National Team. He was a pe frio, a Jonah, a bringer of bad luck. He, personally, had brought on the disaster. That they believed this was bad enough. Worse was that Haraldo came to believe it himself. He took upon his young shoulders the heavy responsibility for Brazil’s defeat.