As it continued to ring, Silva got up and opened the door to his office. His new secretary, Camila, wasn’t at her post. He returned to his desk, punched the appropriate button, and picked up the instrument.
“Silva.”
“Answering our own phone, are we?”
Silva recognized the voice: Ana, Nelson Sampaio’s secretary.
“I think Camila found another boyfriend in the building,” he said.
“She did. This time, it’s that tax accountant down on the second floor, the cute one with the blue eyes.”
“Maybe she’ll get married and leave me.”
“You can always hope.”
“Not to interrupt the pleasant chat, but why are you calling?”
“He wants to see you.”
“Now?”
“Now. He’s got the minister of tourism with him.”
“The minister of-”
“Where the hell is he?” Sampaio said from somewhere in the background.
“On his way, Director,” Ana said sweetly. And hung up.
Brazil’s poor had put the current president into office and then sent him back for a second term. An ex-union leader, he spent much of his time attending to their needs. The reduction of poverty had accordingly become his first priority. His second priority was extending Brazil’s influence throughout South America. His third priority was making Brazil a permanent member of the UN Security Council. Tourism came near the bottom of the president’s concerns, somewhere below ribbon-cutting and baby-kissing.
That left Caio Cavalcante, the minister of tourism, with little to do and a tiny budget. He was the smallest cog in the wheel and everyone in Brasilia knew it. But he was a minis-ter. He had the ear of the president. And possessing even a tiny piece of the president’s ear was enough to cause Nelson Sampaio to treat Caio Cavalcante with deference. Sampaio firmly believed that if you aspired to be a minister, you had to be seen to associate with ministers.
The director of the federal police had targeted Cavalcante because, as the least important man in the president’s cabi-net, he should have been the most accessible.
That much was true. Cavalcante had little official busi-ness to occupy his time, but the two men had no common interests, no mutual friends, no long-term history. And even the Least Important Man In The Cabinet had a myriad of people vying for his attention. Cavalcante chose his lunches with care, limiting them to men of potential and men who were in a position to tell him things he wished to know.
Nelson Sampaio was twice blessed. He was marked as a man on the rise, and he always prepared an interesting story or two with which to regale the minister prior to picking up the tab. Generally,
Before being appointed to his present lofty post, the min-ister had spent nineteen years as head of the (twenty-thou-sand-member strong) Restaurateur’s and Hotel Owner’s Association, a position that gave him access to many of Brazil’s movers and shakers. He was seen as an expert on the hospitality business, which, in fact, he was not. But in Brasilia, appearance beats substance every time, and appear-ance was something the minister had in spades. He always dressed well, was carefully groomed, appeared comfortable at the podium, kept his mouth shut at cabinet meetings, and carefully concealed his true nature from the public. His appointment was regarded favorably by almost everyone in the president’s political party.
He sat now on the couch in Sampaio’s office. The director hovered over him with an open humidor of cigars in one hand and a cutter in the other. Sampaio, who kept the humi-dor on the credenza behind his desk, liked to smoke a Montecristo Number 2 after lunch, but he never offered one to Silva.
“Sit down,” the director said when his chief inspector appeared on the threshold. He nodded to a chair that faced the couch from the other side of a low coffee table.
The minister chose one of the cigars, clipped off the end, and held it out for a light. Sampaio put down the humidor, performed the service with a long wooden match, took a seat at the other end of the couch, and busied himself with preparing a cigar. Once he had it lit, the two of them sat there, puffing away, looking at Silva through the smoke. The smell of aromatic tobacco filled the office.
The minister withdrew the Montecristo from his mouth and gazed upon it affectionately, giving it a look that most men of his age reserved for their grandchildren. “You know, the Americans ban the importation of these things?” he said.
“It’s those so-called exiles in Miami,” Sampaio said. “Exiles,” he snorted, “like they’re planning on leaving America and going back.”
“More power to them,” Cavalcante said. “Let the Americans smoke that Dominican crap. Keeps the price of the good stuff down. Supply and demand and all that.”
They smoked awhile in silence.
Silva waited.
“You’ve met Minister Cavalcante?” Sampaio asked, finally getting down to business.
“Never had the pleasure,” Silva said.
The minister took the cigar out of his mouth and extended a hand. Silva had to rise from his chair to take it. Cavalcante’s hand was soft and dry. He applied just the right amount of pressure. Not so weak as to demonstrate frailty, nor so strong as to imply he was a bully. Silva immediately recognized that he was in the presence of a master hand-shaker. The guy could have earned money by giving lessons to young politicians.
“The minister, as you know, is from Sao Paulo.”
Silva didn’t know any such thing, but he nodded and resumed his seat.
“The subject of that cemetery in the Serra da Cantareira came up at lunch. The minister expressed concern.”
Silva opened his mouth to say something, but a look from Sampaio caused him to shut it again.
“I told him,” the director went on, “that I share his con-cern, that I had dispatched you and Arnaldo to Sao Paulo, that I had already assigned our profiler to the case. Minister Cavalcante had some time before his next appointment, so he came back here with me to read Boceta’s report and dis-cuss the issue.”
Before Silva could formulate a polite way of asking why the hell the minister of tourism was sticking his nose into a murder investigation, Cavalcante took his cigar out of his mouth and leaned forward.
“This Boceta guy,” he said, “I think he’s full of shit.”
He returned the cigar to his mouth and leaned back on the couch.
“Could you elaborate on that?” Silva asked.
Sampaio responded for his guest. “The minister feels there’s no substantiation for Boceta’s speculations.”
“About a satanic cult?”
“Exactly. He feels, as I do, that there could be all sorts of other explanations for that cemetery. In the old days, for example, they used to have private cemeteries on the big estates. It could be one of those.”
“There were no tombstones, Director.”
“Who’s to say they used tombstones? Anyway, that’s just a hypothetical example. Remember that big flu pandemic after the First World War? There were millions of deaths world-wide. Whole families were wiped out. Something like that fits right in.”
“No, Director, it doesn’t. The forensics indicate that the graves weren’t that old.”
“But they weren’t from last week, or last month, or last year either,” Sampaio insisted. “You could almost call them ancient.”
“I don’t think I’d go quite as far as that, Director.”
“So how far would you go?”
“Dr. Couto, the medical examiner in Sao Paulo, estimates that the graves are between three and seven years old.”
Again, the minister leaned forward and took the cigar out of his mouth. “Let’s not quibble about how long those people have been in the ground,” he said. “When I say this guy. .”
