“Are you going to tell Godo he might have been right after all?”
Silva sighed. “I suppose it’s the correct thing to do. And if your namorada is right-”
“She’s not my namorada.”
“-Godo will wind up finding out about it anyway. It’s going to make him even more insufferable.”
“I’m not sure that’s possible.”
“I’m not sure you’re wrong.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Put Danusa and Rosa on it.”
Danusa Marcus and Rosa Amorim were a study in contrasts.
Danusa was in her early thirties, shapely, and darkly beau-tiful, the only child of a rabbi, a woman who’d spent all of her teenage vacations working on a kibbutz. After gradua-tion, she’d returned to Israel and become an officer in the defense forces. She’d been happy there, might never have come home, if a group of Muslim terrorists hadn’t bombed her father’s synagogue. Both of her parents had perished in the explosion, as had thirty-four other people from Sao Paulo’s Jewish community.
Danusa was what her father had once referred to as an
In the meantime, she fervently believed she was doing God’s work by cutting a broad swath through Brazil’s crimi-nal underworld. She had an extensive private collection of automatic and semiautomatic weapons and didn’t hesitate to use them when circumstances demanded-and sometimes when they didn’t.
Rosa Amorim, on the other hand, was an agent in her midforties and the mother of three, two teenage boys and a daughter of nine. People meeting her for the first time often took her for an innocuous housewife. She was anything but.
Rosa had black belts in three martial arts and a degree in criminal justice from the University of Sao Paulo. For years, Silva had been trying to get her to stand for the examination for delegado, and for years she’d been refusing. Her husband was a successful businessman. Money wasn’t an object for Rosa. Putting bad guys behind bars was. She kept telling Silva she wasn’t “management material.”
Rosa and Danusa were specialists in “street work,” the canvassing process that most agents found tedious, but at which both of them excelled.
Hector briefed them at ten o’clock in the morning. They were already waiting, with a preliminary report, when he got back from lunch.
Danusa kicked it off: “It seems logical that if there’s any substance to the theory of that namorada of yours-”
“She’s not my namorada, just a friend.”
“-we can limit our search to just a few hospitals and pri-vate clinics, all of them within a radius of about fifty kilo-meters from the Praca da Se.”
The Praca da Se is a square in the heart of Sao Paulo. The zero kilometer post, from which distances on all of the state’s highways are measured, stands in the center of that square.
“What if this place is completely clandestine?” Hector said. “What if it’s not registered as a hospital or clinic?”
“Possible,” Danusa said.
“But not probable,” Rosa said. “Concealing the fact that it’s a medical facility would be counterproductive, likely to attract even more attention. Better, we think, to admit to being a hospital or clinic and simply conceal the sort of thing that goes on inside. Fifty kilometers, because we’re assuming the killer-”
“Or killers,” Danusa put in.
“-or killers wouldn’t run the risk of transporting the bod-ies for any great distance before disposing of them.”
“Okay,” Hector said, “but why only a few hospitals?”
“Or clinics.” Danusa again.
“Or clinics,” Hector dutifully repeated. “There must be hundreds of them in this town.”
“There are,” Danusa said, “but well-to-do people wouldn’t be caught dead in most of them and when they are, they are.”
“Huh?”
“Dead. Anybody who’s alive, and possesses any money at all, is going to insist on the quality of care and treatment that can only be bought in a private hospital, someplace like the Albert Einstein or the Sirio Libanes. If they were, God for-bid, to wind up in a public hospital like the Clinicas, they’d be in there with the poor, getting poor people’s treatment.
And the well-to-do don’t want to put up with that,” Rosa said. “They tend to frequent very few institutions, places where they’ll be cosseted in accordance with their wealth and station.”
“Cosseted?”
“Look it up. Anyway, our point”-Danusa cast a glance at her partner, extracted a nod and turned back to Hector-“is that it’s only the well-to-do who could afford the kind of operation your namorada is talking about.”
“She’s not my namorada.”
“Babyface says otherwise. Babyface says-”
“I don’t care what Babyface says. Babyface doesn’t know squat. How do these rumors get started anyway?”
“Babyface started dating a doctor by the name of Sylvie Charmet. Sylvie’s a friend of your-”
“Enough about Babyface.”
Danusa looked hurt. “You did ask. You wanted to know how rumors get-”
“How many of these hospitals and clinics are there?”
“Eleven.”
“Only eleven in the whole city?”
“Only eleven in the whole city
The ABCD, as it was called, was composed of the adjoin-ing cities of Santo Andre, Sao Bernardo, Sao Caetano, and Diadema. All of them abutted the city of Sao Paulo on its southern border.
“Seems like damned few hospitals to me,” Hector said, dubiously.
“Taken as a percentage of the whole,” Danusa said, “there are damned few rich people in this city.”
Chapter Thirty-three
They were alone now, alone for the first time, the mother, the father, and their baby.
A light pulsed on the heart monitor next to the baby’s crib, every pulse accompanied by a high-pitched beep. His lips, rose-colored in the first few hours after birth, had taken on a bluish tinge. Sweat soaked his hair. His breathing was labored.
Clovis Oliveira flinched when the readout jumped from 136 to 137 beats a minute. He half expected to hear com-motion in the hall, someone rushing toward him from the nurses’ station. They had some kind of alarm down there, an alarm to warn them if Baby Raul’s vital signs turned critical.
But there was no commotion in the hall, only the normal sounds of the hospital: a muted conversation, the buzzing of a fluorescent light, the distant ping of an elevator.
Clovis put out a hand. His son’s forehead, barely two fin-gers in breadth, was moist and hot to the touch. Clovis tried to focus his mind as he’d seen the tribal healers do, tried to send energy from his body into Raul’s, tried to slow his baby’s heartbeat.
It didn’t work. The readout didn’t budge. Withdrawing his hand didn’t make any difference either. The monitor remained constant at 137.
