She went into another room and, seconds later, came back with a thick album.
She put the heavy book on his lap and took a seat next to him. “This one,” she said, “was taken on the same day as that one.” She pointed to the picture in the frame.
Junior was looking over his shoulder. There was a baseball cap on his head, a number on the back of his shirt. She started leafing through the pages, going slowly, so he could admire the pictures. “Up there, in the United States, they called him Jule.
Julio wasn’t ‘cool’ enough; neither was Junior.” She paused at a photo that took up a full page. “That’s his father,” she said, tapping the image with her forefinger.
Julio wore combat fatigues and looked every inch the soldier: lean, hard, not the sort you’d like to tangle with.
“That was taken about four years ago,” she said, “in Manaus. Before Manaus, we were in Belo Horizonte, and before that it was Porto Alegre. We spent two winters there. Do you have any idea how cold it gets in Porto Alegre in the winter? That was some change, I’m telling you, Porto Alegre to Manaus.”
Hector leaned in for a closer look. Julio was turned slightly away from the camera, and his shoulder patch was clearly visible: CIGS.
CIGS is the acronym for the Centro de Instrucao de Guerra na Selva , the Brazilian army’s elite training corps for jungle fighting. They were the best of the best, a unit exclusively composed of career men.
Hector felt his pulse quicken. “Why did Julio leave the army?”
Again, she avoided his eyes. “It was a problem with one of his officers.”
“What kind of a problem?”
“I couldn’t say.”
Can’t, or won’t, Hector thought.
“When he was here for Junior’s funeral, did-”
“Julio didn’t come to Junior’s funeral,” she interrupted quickly.
“No?”
“No. He… doesn’t have a work visa for the States. He’s there illegally.”
“What’s that got to do with-”
“If he leaves, they won’t let him back in. Then I’d never get out of here either. And what would have been the point? To see Junior’s body in a box? To see the box being put in the ground? Junior wasn’t here any more. Junior was gone.”
But his grieving mother wasn’t. And a husband who loved her wouldn’t let her go through the funeral alone. Or would he?
A tear dropped from her cheek. She took a paper handkerchief from a box on the coffee table, dried the photo, and blew her nose. “Sorry,” she said.
More to calm her than for any other reason, Hector said, “Tell me about that day. Did you go to the airport to meet your son?”
“I always went to the airport to meet him. Sometimes I had to take a day off to do it, but I always went. First, I’d call to make sure the flight was on time. We have two flights a day, both in the morning. He was on the early one. It arrived just a little after six.”
“So you called to check the flight’s arrival time…”
“And I took the shuttle to the airport. When I’m on my own, I use the company shuttle. It doesn’t cost anything, and it’s convenient. One of them leaves every hour, day and night. I stood waiting for him to clear Customs, waited for two and a half hours after the flight landed. By that time I was frantic. I went to the TAB counter and spoke to a woman I know. She has a pass.”
“A pass?”
“You need a pass to get into the Customs area. She came back and told me they’d taken him away.”
“What did you do then?”
“I called my answering machine to see if he’d left a message. He had. You heard it.”
“He didn’t say where he was calling from, did he?”
“No,” she said. “He didn’t.”
“And next?”
“I opened the yellow pages, looked for criminal lawyers.”
“And picked the lawyer with the biggest ad?”
“Yes.”
“Dudu Fonseca?”
She raised her head and looked at him. “You know him?”
Hector nodded. Not every cop in Sao Paulo knew Dudu Fonseca, but those who did hated his guts.
“I got him on the second try. It was just after nine. He asked for ten thousand. A ‘nonrefundable retainer,’ he called it.”
“You paid him ten thousand?”
She hung her head. “I was desperate. Over the telephone he told me he’d only take cash. I went to the bank and got it. Then I went to his office. The first thing he asked me was if I’d brought the money. I said I had. He told me to give it to him, and I did. Then he made one telephone call. One telephone call. He put it on his speakerphone so I could hear the whole thing. Whoever he called, and I have no idea who it was, told him my son had been in a shower at the Fifteenth Delegacia, the one out near Guarulhos. He’d fallen. That was the story. He’d fallen when he was in the shower, and he’d hit his head, and it had killed him. Fonseca just sat there, saying uh-huh, uh-huh. They’re telling him my son is dead and he’s saying uh-huh, uh-huh.”
“And then?”
“I don’t even know how the call ended. I’d broken down by that time; I was crying my eyes out. That didn’t affect him either. He sat there looking at me like an ugly toad. It must happen to him all the time, people getting hysterical in his office.”
“I expect it does,” Hector said. “How about your money?”
“He kept it. All of it. It was nonrefundable, like he said. I really didn’t care. For years, Julio and I have been saving for Junior’s education, and Junior wasn’t going to need it any more. I left Fonseca’s office in… oh, I don’t know… a kind of trance, and I took a cab to the Fifteenth Delegacia to see my baby. They’d stretched him out on the floor in a storage room, a storage room, and covered him with a sheet of black plastic. They’d closed his eyes, stuffed cotton wads into his nose and ears. He looked fine from the front, like he was sleeping. But there was a horrible wound here.” She put her hand to the back of her head. “I couldn’t see how anyone could get a wound like that from a fall. I told them that. They said he must have hit it on one of the fixtures.”
“They hadn’t bandaged the wound?”
“No, there was no bandage, nothing. And his body was already cold. Finally, an ambulance showed up. The paramedics were the only ones who showed me any kind of sympathy at all. One was a man. He said he was sorry it had taken them so long, but they had to give priority to the people they could help. The woman looked at me, looked at Junior, and started to cry. She hugged me before she left.”
“And then?”
“They brought him to the Instituto Medico Legal. It took them three days to release his body. God knows why. The story didn’t change. They’re still saying he fell. Lots of his friends came to the funeral, almost his whole class from school. He had sixty-three people in all.”
“And no one, at any time, suggested that what happened might have been anything other than an accident?”
Aline gave him a bitter look. “No one, at any time,” she said. “The cops in that delegacia must have thought I was really stupid, that I’d never read about the sort of things that happen in jails, that I never picked up a newspaper. Afterward, after the funeral, I went back to the place where they’d been holding him. The delegado didn’t want to see me.”
“Why not?”
She shrugged. “Sergio Bittencourt, that’s the little bastard’s name. He tried to sneak out the back door.”
“He what?”
“I’d been crying. There was a sergeant, an older man, not like a policeman at all. He kept giving me paper handkerchiefs, offering me coffee. Then another policeman came in and whispered something in the sergeant’s ear.
