Silva admitted that the Nunes person had told him exactly that. He didn’t try to explain that he’d been trapped in traffic for almost an hour. The first city in the world designed for the automobile, the city that had once boasted the complete absence of traffic lights, had become a vehicular chaos just like all the other major cities in the country. Knowing that, Silva had allowed a full hour to cover eight kilometers. But that morning a demonstration in front of the Ministry of Agriculture, one that included about a hundred and fifty farmers on tractors, had introduced a further complication into the gridlock.
The woman pursed her thin lips, stared at him over a pair of steel-rimmed reading glasses, and waited for him to apologize.
Silva didn’t. He figured she was going to make him wait anyway.
She did. For nearly an hour.
Deputado Malan’s inner office was decorated partly in nineteenth-century French colonial and partly in twenty-first-century Brazilian egomaniac. There were photos of the deputado with every recent President of the Republic, there were trophies for raising prize livestock, there were honorary degrees and diplomas, there was a glass-topped case full of medallions. The office reminded Silva of the one his boss had boasted before turning to the One True Religion for spiritual sustenance and votes.
The deputado motioned Silva to a chair, one of normal height this time, but the deputado’s head was still higher than his guest’s. Malan’s desk stood on a little platform.
The deputado shuffled through the clutter on his desk, found the photos he was looking for, and handed one to Silva.
“Marta,” he said.
A brown-haired girl in pigtails-not ugly, but sullen- stared at the camera as if it was an enemy. She appeared to be about twelve.
“You said she was fifteen,” Silva said. “She doesn’t look it.”
Malan scowled.
“Take this one then,” he said, handing Silva another. “It’s more recent.”
The second photograph showed the same girl, now looking her age. She was no longer in pigtails and had her arm around another girl, who appeared to be two or three years older. Both were smiling. When Silva saw the face of the girl next to Marta, he took in a sharp breath.
“What’s the matter?” the deputado said.
“Nothing. Who’s her friend?” he said.
“I’m only interested in Marta. If you need to show that photo around, have it cropped.”
Silva repeated the question, keeping his inflection exactly the same, acting as if Malan might not have heard him the first time.
“Who’s her friend?”
The deputado fidgeted and finally spit it out. “Her name is Andrea de Castro. She’s a fucking bull dyke.”
“A lesbian?”
“What did I just say?”
“They were lovers, Marta and Andrea?”
“My son caught them at it, rolling around in Marta’s bed, right there in his own house. He threw the dike out and gave Marta the beating of her life.”
“And then?”
“And then he locked her in her room.” The deputado snorted. “She had some tools in there, screwdrivers and chisels. She was always fucking around with stuff like that, doing boy things instead of playing with dolls. She managed to get the hinges off the door. When her parents got up the next day, she was gone.”
“I see.”
“I doubt that you do. Let me spell it out for you: I’m a Northeasterner. Where I come from, men are men, and women are supposed to be women. If my political enemies found out about this, they’d have a field day.”
“I know how to be discreet, Deputado.”
“See that you are. No need to bother my son or daughter-in-law with this. You got any questions, you come back to me. That’s all I have to say. Go to it. On your way out, tell Maria to send in the next visitor.”
Silva stood.
“Just one more thing, Deputado. What can you tell me about this girl, Andrea?”
“She’s missing too. Maybe they’re together, maybe not. The cops in Recife have no idea what happened to her.”
But Silva did. He knew exactly what had happened to her. Andrea de Castro had been raped, strangled, and decapitated with an ax.
Chapter Eleven
“ So what did you do then?” the director asked.
“Nothing,” Silva said. “I left.”
Outside, a tropical downpour was lashing the windows. Lights in the offices of the Ministry of Culture, just discernible through the curtain of rain, were little flags of cheer punctuating the gloom.
But there was no cheer in Sampaio’s office. A single desk lamp with a green metal shade was the only source of illumination. The light pooled in a yellow circle on the uncluttered desk.
“You just left? You didn’t tell the deputado that his granddaughter’s girlfriend was the star of a what-did- you-call-it?”
“A snuff video.”
“You didn’t tell him that?”
“No, Director, I didn’t.”
“In the name of heaven, why not?”
“I don’t want to go public at this point. It could drive the people who did it even further underground.”
“Informing the deputado isn’t exactly ‘going public.’”
“I beg to differ with you, Director. He’d be bound to tell someone, his son and his daughter-in-law at least, and they’d tell someone else, and the next thing we know it’ll be all over the media.”
“So what? The girl’s dead already.”
“Not necessarily.”
“Explain.”
“The Dutch have thirteen videos made by the same woman. They have a tape recording of a telephone conversation where she declares her intention to make more. But, right now, she doesn’t have a supplier. Her most recent work, according to one of the men apprehended by the Dutch police, is the one of Andrea being beheaded. Andrea and Marta disappeared at the same time.”
“So you think there’s a possibility they haven’t gotten around to Marta yet?” The director looked doubtful.
“A slim possibility,” Silva admitted, “but still a possibility. And if they haven’t, and if her abductors discover we’re pulling out all the stops to find her, they’ll kill her at once.”
“ Uma queima de arquivo,” Sampaio said, knowingly. Literally, burning of the files, this was cop slang for the destruction of evidence. Sampaio loved to talk the talk.
“I am right. And Director…”
“Yes?”
“It would be best if you didn’t mention this to anyone.”
The light was too dim for Silva to be certain, but he thought he saw Sampaio flush.
“Of course not,” the director snapped. “It never crossed my mind. What’s your next step?”
“Now that we have the murdered girl’s name, and a photo to go with it, we’ll be able to track down her parents. They’ll be listed on the forms she filled in to get her national identity card. She didn’t look to be any more than twenty when she was killed, so the odds are she didn’t have the card very long. With luck, she was living with her parents when she got it, and with luck, they’ll still be at the same address.”
