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.”
“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 ill: 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.
