never, ever, volunteer for anything.”
Tarcio knew what he was talking about. In the army he’d risen to the rank of master sergeant, and now he’d been on the city payroll for almost three decades. Currently, he had a cushy sinecure in the sewer department, which gave him contacts throughout municipal government. But you needed more than contacts to get a job in Manaus. Contacts only put you in touch with the people who had jobs to give. You still had to bribe them to get one.
When Tarcio told him about the opening, Bento had been anything but enthusiastic.
“Clerk for the municipal police?” he’d said to his uncle. “Sounds boring.”
Tarcio hadn’t liked that. Hell, Bento knew for a fact that he didn’t even like him. He thought his nephew was a prissy little pain in the ass, had told him so more than once. He wouldn’t have lifted a finger to help if Bento’s mother, Tarcio’s kid sister, Arlette, hadn’t bullied him into it.
“It’s the only thing going,” Tarcio said, “and it’s a hell of a lot better than mucking around in other people’s shit, which is where I got my start. Take it or leave it.”
Bento knew what his mother would say if he didn’t take it. He didn’t want to put up with that.
So Tarcio had pulled the strings, and Arlette had paid the bribes, and the next thing Bento knew he had his very own seat behind one of three identical desks in the cellar of the delegacia central.
Alberto Coimbra, his new boss and the head clerk, was a benevolent despot who didn’t look too closely at the time Bento started in the morning and seldom complained if Bento came back half an hour late from lunch, both of which were big pluses. Bento had always found it difficult to wake up early, and he loved long lunches.
Another plus was that Coimbra generally left everybody to do their own thing. He didn’t go hanging over your shoulder, double-checking every damned piece of paper and file. The last thing Bento had expected was that he’d incur Coimbra’s wrath by taking a bit of initiative. Tarcio had clearly told him initiative was a no-no, but what did Tarcio know? There was a considerable difference between the sewer department and the municipal police, right?
Wrong. Coimbra had been furious.
“Why didn’t you talk to me first?” he’d said, his face so close to Bento’s that Bento could feel little drops of spittle while Coimbra was shouting at him. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
“I just answered a query. I thought you’d be pleased. I thought-”
“You’re not paid to think. You’re paid to do. I’m paid to think.”
Bento didn’t get it at first. All he’d done was respond to an E-mail from the federal police in Brasilia. The E- mail had a photo attached. The federals wanted to know if they had a file on anyone who looked like the man in the photo.
Simple.
And easy for Bento, who had a good eye for faces.
He’d started with the “A’s” and, within minutes, he’d come up with a match. The guy’s name was Damiao Rodrigues, but somebody had misfiled his jacket under the A’s instead of under the R’s where it belonged.
By the time Coimbra got back from his afternoon coffee break, which usually involved cachaca instead of coffee and generally went on for an hour or more, Bento had already shot off a reply to the federal cops and put a copy of that reply onto Coimbra’s desk. Coimbra’s reaction had been swift and terrible.
First, he looked at the E-mail. Next, he unlocked a drawer of his desk, took out a piece of paper and ran his finger down the page. Then his face turned red.
He sprang to his feet and came storming over.
After Coimbra spat all over him, Bento took the wise course and apologized for thinking. But Coimbra wasn’t having it.
“Apologies don’t cut it,” he said. “This is more serious than you know. I have to see the chief. Don’t move until I get back.”
Bento hadn’t moved.
Five minutes later, Coimbra swept back into the room, took him by the arm and led him up to the chief’s office.
“We already got an answer to your fucking E-mail,” the chief said.
Those were the first words the chief had ever spoken to him. Bento had never even been introduced to Chief Pinto, much less seen the inside of his office. He didn’t get much of a chance to see it that day either. The chief didn’t tell him to sit down.
“You, Rosario, are a first-class fuckup. I should fire your ass right now.”
“But… why?”
The chief looked at Coimbra.
“He wants to know why,” he said. “Jesus.”
“Jesus,” Coimbra echoed.
The chief looked back at Bento.
“Because you fucking ignored your instructions, that’s why!”
“You’re supposed to come to me first,” Coimbra said. “You’re supposed to come to me whenever any outsider asks for information from our archives. You’ve been told that.”
Bento hadn’t been told any such thing. Coimbra was covering his ass. Bento opened his mouth to defend himself, but when he saw the way Coimbra was looking at him, he shut it again. If he lost his job, it was going to reflect on his uncle Tarcio, which meant his uncle Tarcio was going to be pissed. And not only that, his mother’s hard-earned money would be right down the drain. It was time to eat crow, and he did.
“I… forgot,” he said.
Again, the chief looked at Coimbra. “He forgot. He fucking forgot.”
Coimbra shot his eyes toward the ceiling as if asking God for patience.
Pinto shifted his attention back to Bento. “Clean out your desk,” he said. “Don’t leave anything behind. You’re on unpaid leave until further notice.”
“Unpaid-”
“Leave. Something wrong with your ears?”
“No, Senhor. Ah…”
“What?”
“May I ask the chief when I might be permitted to come back?”
He’d addressed the chief, but used his title, like he’d seen in war movies. You piss anybody off, for any reason, you act like you’re in the army, Tarcio had told him.
Coimbra and the chief exchanged a glance. The chief hesitated then said, “You never heard of Damiao Rodrigues, and there was no file, right?”
“ Sim, Senhor,” Bento said, smartly. “Unknown name. No file.”
The chief grunted.
“All right,” he said. “Find someplace where you can stay. Don’t tell anybody where it is. I don’t want those federals to go looking for you, but if they do, I sure as hell don’t want them to find you. Call Coimbra in a week or so. If everything has blown over by then, you can come back. If not, you stay away longer.”
Bento tried to be a good cop. He may have been only a clerk, but he liked to think of himself as a cop, and a cop followed orders. He went to his desk, cleaned it out and left the building. Joel Lopes, his new best friend, tried to ask him what happened, but Bento told him he wasn’t allowed to talk about it.
Only later did he realize what it all meant. It meant there were felons to whom the chief was extending his protection. It meant, in short, that the chief was a crook. But, at the time, Bento was so shocked he didn’t take time to think. He simply went home, packed a bag, and told his mother he had orders directly from the chief. He wasn’t permitted to tell her where he was going.
She wouldn’t have approved if he had.
He went to Samuel, his mother’s ex-husband, Bento’s stepfather for almost five years. Samuel had no children of his own-none he could be sure of, anyway. But it wasn’t from lack of distributing his seed. Samuel was a man who couldn’t be content with one woman, so he always had several at a time. When Arlette, Bento’s mother, found out about what she thought was Samuel’s second extramarital affair, although it was really more like his fifteenth, she’d thrown him out. Literally.
Samuel worked in a fish shop, and never lifted anything heavier than a pacu. Arlette worked in the central
