Buried Strangers

“What’s his name?” he said when he’d resumed his seat.

“Norberto. Norberto Krups.”

“No middle name?”

“No.”

“Age?”

“Nineteen.”

“Father’s name?”

Maria de Lourdes drew her mouth into a thin line and shook her head.

“Unknown,” Silva said, making a note, as he had when she’d responded to the other questions.

“I’ll need a picture,” he said.

She opened the hand that wasn’t gripping Irene’s and revealed a small photo, passport sized, the type that could be obtained from machines in bus stations. Damp with her per-spiration, the paper had begun to curl. She offered it to him. He studied the image.

Norberto Krups’s skin was lighter than his mother’s, more milk than coffee in the cafe com leite. The kid’s hair was so badly cut that, if there were penalties for such things, his bar-ber would have been sitting in a cell somewhere. He was wearing a baseball cap with what Silva recognized as the logotype of the New York Yankees baseball team over his uneven shaggy hair. On his T-shirt a red heart acted as a sub-stitute for the English word “love,” and what Norberto Krups loved was New York.

“Can I keep this?” he asked.

Maria de Lourdes nodded.

“I brought it for you. Dona Irene said you’d need one.”

That confirmed Silva’s suspicion that the meeting with him had been some time in the making, but Irene hadn’t said a word about it. He shot a glance at his wife. She appeared to be studying a defect on the stem of her coffee spoon.

He put the photo between two pages of his legal pad and waited for Maria de Lourdes to go on.

She didn’t. She, too, seemed to have taken a sudden interest in Irene’s coffee spoon.

Silva thought he knew why.

“What Norberto did,” he said, “isn’t a crime. We wouldn’t put him in jail for trying to get into the United States. Your son has nothing to fear from Brazilian law.”

That seemed to reassure her. She truly met his eyes for the first time and her voice became more confident.

“There’s a travel agency in Sao Paulo,” she said. “They charged him five thousand dollars. Dollars, not reais.”

“Five thousand dollars? Where did your son get that kind of money?”

“He lived like a monk for over three years, saving every centavo, scraping it together. Worked seventeen, eighteen hours a day. Worked weekends and holidays. Never went to bars. Stopped buying cigarettes.”

“I’m assuming the Americans refused him a visa?”

She nodded.

It was the usual story. The Americans always denied visas to Brazil’s undereducated poor. They were convinced that, as soon as the Norberto Krupses of the world got over their bor- der, they were going to stay. And the Americans didn’t want any more people like Norberto Krups.

“This tourist agency,” Silva asked, “they proposed to smug-gle him through Mexico?”

It was the normal route: a flight to Mexico City, a truck-load of immigrants up to the border to hide for a day, then a mad dash across in the wee hours of the morning.

“I don’t know the details,” she said, toying with her empty cup. “He wouldn’t tell me, said he didn’t want me to worry.”

“What does he do for a living, this son of yours?”

She brightened. “Norberto’s a carpenter,” she said. “Every-body says he’s very good and very fast. He said they need good carpenters in America. He said he could earn twenty dollars an hour.”

The way she said it made twenty dollars an hour sound like a princely sum and as if she didn’t quite believe it.

“You have an address for this travel agency?”

Maria de Lourdes bobbed her head and reached for her purse, old and showing signs of many repairs. Covered with all of those L’s and V’s that were the designer’s trademark, it was an obvious castoff from one of her clients. She fumbled around inside the bag and removed a piece of paper.

“He left this,” she said.

Silva unfolded it, found it to be a receipt from the travel agency. The address was on the Rua Sete de Abril, a busy shopping street in the heart of Sao Paulo.

“May I keep this?”

She nodded.

“Any news of him since he left? Anything at all?”

Again, she reached into her purse. This time she handed him a postcard.

“All going well,” someone had written. “I’ll call you soon.”

An incomprehensible scrawl followed the short message. Silva put a finger on it.

“This is his signature?”

“Yes.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

The photograph on the card showed three models in skimpy bathing suits. The legend above them informed the reader that they (and presumably the sender) were having “A Great Time on South Beach.”

Silva was still wearing his jacket. He reached into his breast pocket, retrieved his reading glasses, and subjected both sides of the card to closer scrutiny. The stamp had been canceled in Miami.

“He was going to Miami?”

Maria de Lourdes shook her head.

“He never mentioned Miami,” she said. “He was going to Boston. He has a friend there. Well, not really a friend, but someone he knew, someone he could stay with until he found a job.”

“Do you have the man’s address?”

“No.” Then added quickly, “He said I wouldn’t need it, that he wouldn’t be staying long. He expected to be set up on his own in no time.”

Silva waved the postcard as if he were fanning himself. “No other cards? No letters?”

“No.”

“And the call he refers to?”

“Never came. But. .”

“But what?”

“I don’t have a telephone at home,” she said, “only a cell phone, and it’s new. Somebody stole my other one, took it out of my pocket in the bus. When I went to get a new one, I found a place that was cheaper, but I had to change the number.”

“It’s one of those prepaid things?”

“Yes.”

“So your son would have nowhere to turn if he wanted to discover your new number.”

“I didn’t think about that at the time. But then, when he didn’t write and he didn’t call, I tried to get my old number back. They wouldn’t give it to me.”

“Why not?”

“Someone else had it.”

“Have you tried calling that new number? Telling whoever answers that you’re worried about your son? Telling them he might try to get in touch?”

“Yes.”

“And?”