his spouse and two daughters. Nilda and Adilson were people who frequented all of Sao Paulo’s better restaurants. They often took shop-ping trips to Miami. Once, they’d even been to Europe.
Nilda’s passions were fine clothes and expensive jewelry, but to Tanaka it seemed as if the woman lived for the sole purpose of raising his wife to Olympian heights of jealousy. Marcela didn’t begrudge Nilda’s trim figure or high cheek-bones. But she deeply coveted Nilda’s income.
Neither Adilson nor his wife had been born to wealth. Nilda, like Marcela, didn’t work outside the home. Tanaka was a full-fledged delegado titular, while Adilson was only a section head. But Adilson was the section head of the unit charged with investigating white-collar crimes.
And that made all the difference. When it came to aug-menting a municipal cop’s meager salary, there was no better assignment than the white-collar unit.
The unit consisted of only seven men. And one woman.
The woman hardly counted. She’d been on the job for a little over four months and was expected to continue for another six, after which there’s be a new vacancy. Her name was Eleni Soares, and she was the daughter of Lieutenant Soares. Her father was the brother-in-law of the state secre-tary for public safety. Eleni’s position was a stopgap measure, an opportunity to save money for her upcoming marriage.
The men were in a different category altogether. On the rare occasions when one of them retired, or died (those being the only reasons a male ever left the white-collar unit), new appointments were hotly contested and candidates had to fulfill at least one of the two requirements, preferably both. Adilson had: he’d been able to scrape up the cash necessary to grease the requisite palms, and he had an uncle in the hierarchy, a man who had considerable influence when it came to making appointments.
Adilson’s sinecure hadn’t come cheap. It had cost him twenty thousand reais, but he’d once told Tanaka that it was the best investment he’d ever made. He’d earned his money back within three months, and by the end of that year there were already eighteen businessmen that had Adilson to thank for being out on the street, instead of sitting in jail, accused of crimes like embezzlement.
Bribes were a way of life in the policia civil. Not
“Justice through enrichment” was the way Adilson liked to put it.
Some said true justice would have entailed fines rather than payoffs, would have entailed giving the perpetrators their day in court, putting them in front of a judge.
Adilson wouldn’t have it. Judges, he reasoned, would sim-ply do as he did. They’d take a bribe. Ergo the money had a zero chance of ever winding up in a government coffer. What’s more, judges were a hell of a lot more expensive than cops, so Adilson was actually doing his “clients” a favor by keeping their costs down.
And, besides, what would happen if the money, by some remote chance, actually wound up in the hands of the gov-ernment? What would happen then? The politicians would steal it, that’s what.
The paltry sums of cash Tanaka was able to extort from the people who passed through his delegacia were a mere pit-tance compared with the bounty that Adilson reaped, and when Marcela compared the Ferreira’s union with her own, Tanaka invariably came out as The Great Loser and she as The Great Victim.
It was a comparison frequently made, and one which invariably brought down the wrath of The Victim upon The Loser.
“That’s the second new car in the last three years,” she said, continuing to commit mayhem on the cauliflower. “What kind of a provider are you? Answer me that!”
“Not a very good one, I’m afraid,” Tanaka said meekly.
He didn’t really believe that. It wasn’t as if he were an ordinary beat cop. He was a delegado titular for Christ’s sake, in charge of an entire precinct. It was just. . well, it was just that he hadn’t had the breaks. And he sure as hell didn’t have an influential uncle down at headquarters. But he knew that another attempt to explain himself to Marcela would not only be fruitless, it could also result in physical pain.
He backed out of the kitchen, put the bottle of beer down on the Formica-topped table next to the front door, and crept out of the house. He was already driving away when he looked in the rearview mirror and saw her standing up on their miniscule terrace with her hands on her hips. He had no doubt that she had a scowl on her face, but the distance was too great for him to see it.
The thirty-third Delegacia da Policia Civil, the domain ruled over by Delegado Titular Yoshiro Tanaka, hadn’t been built to serve the needs of law enforcement. Even people unaware of the building’s history could easily figure that out, because the original owner’s name, and the year 1923, were still up there on the gable.
The name, Johann Fuchs, had belonged to an exporter of coffee who’d spent most of his life in Brazil, but who could never bring himself to give up his German nationality or his intention to die and be buried in his home town of Bremen.
But Fuchs suffered a sudden and fatal heart attack in 1944, and by that time Brazil was at war with Germany, so there was no chance of having his body shipped back to the
Two years earlier, largely as the result of Johann’s insistence, both of his sons had gone off to fight for
When Tanaka took over, in 2001, the cell had been a drab place, its walls battleship gray, designed for short- term incarceration. But the Brazilian justice system being what it was (slow), and the availability of space being what
Tanaka hadn’t been in the job a week when a certain Maria Aparecida do Carmo, a prostitute jailed for rolling drunks because she’d grown too old to attract anyone who wasn’t desperate for sex, had been strangled by one of her fellow inmates. The crime occurred at night. None of the women in the cell would admit to having witnessed it. The case wasn’t going to be solved. Ever.
If Maria Aparecida had been a man, her death probably wouldn’t have attracted much attention, but a female was something else. It was potential news. An enterprising reporter managed to get his hands on a twenty-three- year-old mug shot of Maria Aparecida. She was white, and back then she hadn’t looked half bad.
Two days after the murder, the photo appeared in the
Tanaka’s boss, the delegado
The obvious scapegoat was Tanaka.
He found himself contemplating the possibility of losing the cushy job he’d worked so long and so hard to get. Tanaka knew the bitches were bound to murder another of their number before long, and when they did, it could result in the sudden termination of his flourishing career. He desper-ately sought a solution, however cosmetic, that would keep his superiors off his back.
He found it, of all places, in his own bathroom. Marcela had left one of her magazines next to the toilet. One morn-ing before work, bereft of other reading material, and faced with the necessity of remaining seated for a while, Tanaka started leafing through an article on household decoration.
Certain colors, it seemed, could have a soothing effect. Tanaka didn’t quite believe it, but liberal journalists, the only kind who cared about some dead whore, and the ones that proliferated at the
His first problem would be funding the project. He solved it by passing the hat and pressuring all of his
