purpose behind its construction in the first place.
When the owner died in the early seventies, the suite had been taken over by a personality whose real name was Meyer Katz, but whom all of Brazil knew as Bobo.
The television program that made Bobo a household name billed itself as a talent hunt. But in reality, performers were chosen not because they had talent, but because they lacked it. Bobo, dressed in a clown suit and a stovepipe hat with a flower pinned to it, would receive them with great fanfare and give them a big buildup. Then they’d sing, or dance, or tell jokes, or do whatever they thought they could do well-and generally did very badly-until the studio audience would begin to groan and boo. At that point Bobo, feigning surprise and disappointment, would squeeze the rubber bulb on his horn. Honk. Honk. Honk. And the unfortunate performers would be forcibly removed from the stage with a long hook resembling a shepherd’s crook. The mere sight of that crook creeping in from offstage was enough to throw the five hundred people in the studio audience, and millions more watching throughout the country, into paroxysms of laughter.
Add to the formula the occasional performer who introduced an element of surprise by demonstrating true talent, add seven scantily clad women who danced to canned music, and you had a recipe that made Bobo a household name for a generation.
And things might have gone on for still another generation if fate hadn’t cancelled Bobo’s act. One night, returning from dinner with one of the more lissome of his dancers, Brazil’s most famous clown had had a fatal heart attack. He collapsed and expired right there in the Gloria’s lobby.
This lent cachet to the hotel where he’d lived and died. Many were the tourists who wanted to spend a night in the same place Bobo had spent his nights. And many were the tourists who wanted to see the spot where he’d breathed his last.
The widow of the Gloria’s original builder, the woman who’d become the hotel’s sole proprietress, recognized that Bobo’s fading fame wouldn’t sustain the place forever. But at the moment it still did.
And thus it was that the Hotel Gloria went on, providing small, relatively clean, overpriced rooms at an occupancy rate that sometimes exceeded eighty percent.
The two cops followed each other through the revolving doors, skirted the easel with the black-bordered photo of Bobo, and headed for the hotel’s reception desk.
Ricardo Vasco, as promised, was there to meet them. He was a white-haired gentleman in his mid-sixties, somber and thin. Goncalves introduced Arnaldo. Arnaldo took the lead.
“We appreciate your call, Senhor Vasco.”
“I’m pleased to be of service. You don’t intend to take Senhor Clancy and his wife out of here in handcuffs, do you?”
“Hopefully not.”
Vasco looked relieved. “I’m glad to hear it. It wouldn’t be a scene we’d relish. Such things have a way of upsetting the guests.”
“You sound like it’s happened before.”
Vasco smiled a sad smile. “The Gloria has been here a long time. For that matter, so have I.”
“Where’s our man?”
“Sixth floor. Room 666.”
“Six sixty-six,” Goncalves said. “But that-”
“Is the number of the beast,” Vasco said. “Yes, I’ve heard that one before. Silly, isn’t it?”
But Goncalves didn’t think it was silly at all. He was already turning pale.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Abilio Sacca’s criminal history was such that it would have caused even the most dedicated of social workers to throw up her hands in defeat.
Still only forty-two, Sacca had a criminal record going back thirty-three years, more than two thirds of them spent behind bars. First arrest: age nine. Shoplifting. Charges dismissed. First conviction: age eleven. Armed robbery. It was Sacca’s debut in that particular specialty-and his last performance in it.
He’d the misfortune to choose a plainclotheswoman for his victim. When she’d drawn her gun, the woman reported, the kid had dropped the shard of broken glass he’d been threatening her with and started to cry.
Since he either didn’t know, or wouldn’t admit to, the whereabouts of his parents, Abilio was committed to the FEBEM, a reform school where no reform ever took place. The judge gave him five years, partly to get him off the streets, partly in the hope he’d get an education. The judgment was successful on both counts. It kept him away from honest citizens, and it taught him a great deal about breaking the law.
It was true that he’d never become a successful criminal, but that stemmed from Abilio’s own shortcomings and had nothing to do with the excellent instruction he’d received from his fellow delinquents. He was a pathetically bad liar, and he liked people, commendable attributes in an honest citizen but two major drawbacks for a criminal. He was, furthermore, a practicing alcoholic. Of all things in life, he was most fond of getting drunk with a few convivial companions.
Sao Paulo’s underworld being what it was, it stood to reason that not all of those convivial companions had Abilio’s best interests at heart. Sometimes they were police informers; sometimes, even, cops. That had led to a number of charges, some proven, some not, but Abilio never seemed to learn. Within a week of being released, he would be back in one bar or another, shooting his mouth off all over again.
Abilio’s most recent arrest hadn’t stemmed from indiscretion, but it had been monumentally stupid all the same. His objective had been a jewelry store, and jewelry stores, because of their alarm systems, were invariably hard targets. A wiser crook would have picked something easier, or would have planned better. A wiser crook wouldn’t have undertaken the enterprise dead drunk. And a wiser crook certainly wouldn’t have chosen a shop where the owner lived upstairs and was known to possess a firearm.
Sacca’s record contained another indication that he wasn’t among the brightest: other than the time he’d spent at the cost of the state, Sacca had never lived anywhere except in Santo Andre. He was, by now, one of the “usual suspects,” one of the first people the cops would look for whenever a burglary was committed.
Burglary. Burglary. Burglary. As Silva scanned Sacca’s record the word kept repeating itself. No murders, no assaults, nothing but burglaries.
And that, Silva thought, was inconsistent with the personality of a murderer. Sacca may not have been good at what he did, but it was a specialty. And that specialty was nonviolent. After his single youthful indiscretion Sacca had never again been accused, or suspected, of threatening someone’s life, much less of taking it.
Silva studied Sacca’s most recent likeness, the booking photo from the jewelry-store affair. It revealed some things the video hadn’t. Sacca had large brown eyes and rather delicate features. Despite the stain on his cheek, he was a type who would have attracted sexual attention from his fellow prisoners, particularly when he was a younger man. That fact, and a further perusal of Sacca’s sins, strengthened Silva in his conviction that they hadn’t yet found their killer. If Sacca had had a violent turn, he would have fought to protect himself from rape. There would have been a record of fights, maybe even stabbings, in the time he was behind bars. But there was nothing of that nature. On the contrary, the man had, again and again, been given time off for good behavior.
Of course, it was remotely possible that no one who’d shared prison with him had found Abilio attractive. More likely, Silva thought, he’d had one powerful lover or had been, in the parlance of prisoners, “everybody’s punk.” A man who’d put up with that and not fight back did not seem like a person capable of doling out the hideous damage done to any of the current victims.
Before they even spoke, Silva had a strong conviction that Abilio Sacca was not his man. That conviction was strengthened when he actually had Sacca seated in front of him.
Sacca’s eyes were reminiscent of a fawn’s, without a sign of even moderate intellect behind them. And he had a tic, an irregular spasm of the muscles around his right eye.
Silva found it disturbing, so disturbing that he was having trouble giving Sacca the fish-eyed stare he reserved for felons.
“Your eye always do that?” he asked, confronting the distraction head-on.
“Nah. I only get it sometimes,” Sacca said.
