They passed the time in chat until the coffee was served. Tarcisio had three daughters and two grandchildren, and he loved to talk about them, but he wouldn’t have brought them up if Silva hadn’t. He was a sensitive man and a kind one, unusual traits in someone who’d seen as much of the bad side of human nature as he had. His recital over, he put down his coffee cup and got down to business.
“How can I help you, Mario?”
Silva filled him in on the case, starting with the discovery of the graves and telling him about Boceta’s theory.
Mello’s lip curled when he got to the part about the curi-ous meeting with the minister of tourism. “What’s Cavalcante trying to hide?”
“That’s what I want to find out.”
“You came to the right place.”
There was no discussion of money or fees. Mello’s business depended entirely on the ability to access information. Often, that information was something that his former colleagues at the federal police were able to provide. He never offered to pay, since payment could have been con-strued as bribery. But he was always willing to return favors.
“Let me see if I already have something on him,” he said, and got up to call his secretary.
A shapely brunette soon appeared and put a dossier down on the coffee table in front of them. The brunette flashed a smile at Silva, turned, and walked out without saying a word. Mello picked up the folder, leaned back in his chair, and started scanning it. After a minute or two he looked up.
“Cavalcante never ran for public office,” he said, “but he headed up the Restaurateur’s and Hotel Owner’s Association for almost twenty years. That’s an elected position. During his tenure, he built the association a building in the center of Sao Paulo, put up a training school for chambermaids and waiters, and installed a dentist and a doctor so members could get dental and medical care in exchange for their dues.”
“Sounds like he did a good job.”
Tarcisio scanned some more of the document and stroked his mustache. The mustache was a pygmy compared with Silva’s.
“He played to the people who owned
“Power corrupts. .” Silva said.
Tarcisio smiled. “And absolute power corrupts absolutely. Do you know who said that?”
“No idea.”
“An English lord, name of Acton. More than a hundred years ago.”
“Not much has changed.”
“I can attest to that. Anyway, getting back to your friend Cavalcante, a couple of years ago, the owners of some of the more elite restaurants and hotels got together and tried to topple him. They hired us.”
“And?”
“And we couldn’t find anything truly damaging.”
“No sexual peccadillos? No corruption?”
“No sexual peccadillos. Not recently, anyway. The guy’s seventy-six.”
“Seventy-six? Jesus, he doesn’t look it.”
“He lies about it. But so what? His health’s good for a man of his age. Nothing to impede him from doing the job he had then or the job he has now.”
“And corruption?”
“Not an easy thing to prove, corruption. Nepotism for sure. While he was running the association, he put his wife, all three sons, and one of his two daughters on the payroll. Various nieces and cousins as well, but the association mem-bers knew about it and nobody complained. He spent a lot of the association’s money flying back and forth between Sao Paulo and Brasilia and between Sao Paulo and Orlando in the American state of Florida. In the first case, he claims he was lobbying for the association-”
“And probably himself, since he’s now the minister of tourism.”
“And probably himself, since he’s now the minister of tourism,” Mello echoed.
“And in the case of Orlando?”
Mello referred again to the page he’d been reading.
“He was going to open a branch office up there. That’s what he said, anyway. Claimed that Brazil had a lot to learn from the Americans in the hospitality area. He also just hap-pens to own a home there.”
“Coincidence, eh?”
“Amazing, isn’t it?”
“And the branch office? Did it ever happen?’’
“Nope.”
“But on the surface, he’s pretty clean?”
“Cleaner than many others in this town.”
Silva snorted, frustrated. “Nothing else?”
Tarcisio leafed through the remaining pages of the docu-ment. Silva would have liked to do that himself, but he didn’t want to ask. His friend had already bent confiden-tiality agreements to the limit.
“His other daughter, the one that doesn’t work for the association, is a Wiccan.”
“A Wiccan? What the hell is that?”
Tarcisio scratched his head. “I haven’t the faintest idea,” he said.
Chapter Fourteen
The mansion stood atop one of the high hills in the posh neighborhood of Morumbi. It had once been a wealthy family’s home, and the properties on either side of it still were. The building had come into being with a French name, a French architect, and a front gate designed by Eiffel himself.
Back then, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, it had been called Sans Souci, French for carefree. The name might have been an apt description of the original owner’s state of spirit, and even of that of his son and grandson, but it had no longer applied to his great-grandson, who entered his adult life with many cares indeed, all of them rooted in a lack of money.
The family’s coffee plantations had been sold when the boy was still an infant. They’d brought in millions at the time, but it took his father less than twenty years to drink and gamble most of it away. By the time the young man achieved his majority, the only thing remaining of a once-great fortune was the house.
It was, therefore, no surprise that the great-grandson of the builder had been mightily pleased when his father took a tumble down the main staircase one evening and wound up at the bottom with a broken neck. There were those who said he might have been given a push, but after a zealous beginning to a short investigation, the delegado in charge took a sudden disinterest in the case and bought himself a new car.
The building was imposing, with a mansard roof and a smaller building, originally the servant’s quarters, at the rear. What had once been a vast front lawn had been reduced by half to make a parking lot. At first, this had disturbed the neighbors who felt that it took away from the residential nature of the street, but the new owner had been able to pacify them by planting shrubs against the cast-iron fence and having Eiffel’s masterpiece lined with sheet metal painted in the same black as the gate itself. From the street, the only indication that anything other than a mansion occupied the two-acre lot was a discreet bronze plaque to the left of the entrance. Above it was a small aperture and, beyond that, a television camera. Twenty-four hours a day, a security guard monitored the images and appeared, unbidden, when any-one stopped their car in front of the gate.
Yoshiro Tanaka rolled down his window, identified him-self to the guard, and was admitted to the grounds. Before he’d even parked his car, a woman was waiting for him at the front door. She led him through a warren of corridors and showed him into a room that overlooked a rose garden.
The man he’d come to see was dressed entirely in white: white suit, shirt, tie, socks, and even (Tanaka noted as the man crossed the room to shake his hand) white shoes. His outfit made him look like a high priest of
