numbers began with the digits zero and six and totaled ten in number, leading Kuipers to conclude (1) that the digits were the number of a cellular telephone, (2) that the answering device was an anonymous way of divulging it, and (3) that anyone who took such precautions was up to no good.
Kuipers tried calling the number, but a recorded voice informed him that the phone was either switched off or out of service. There was no voice mail.
Rather than meddle with the equipment, he gave instructions to keep the place under discreet surveillance, to make a duplicate key for the lock and to erase all evidence of a visit. Two days later a kid showed up and recorded a new number. They followed him back to his home and put a man to watch him, but they didn’t pick him up. They made a note of the new number, but they didn’t dial it. They simply put a tap on it.
Within a week, Kuipers had discovered (1) that his suppositions were correct, (2) that the man using the phones was Martin Smit, aka The Surinamer, and (3) that he was switching the phones on only minutes before using them.
“ Martin Smit, eh?” K uipers said after he’d studied the transcript of the first series of calls. He was talking to Inspector Guus Hein, his principal assistant. “Well, well. Not just drugs any more. That lowlife scum has diversified. And now we know why we never get any useful information from the taps we have on his other numbers. The scumbag set up a whole alternative system of communication. His associates call the answering device and get a new contact number every week.”
“You want to put surveillance on Smit?” Hein asked.
“Certainly not. It might spook him.”
During the following weeks, they recorded Smit receiving calls to four successive numbers. He took care to make few outgoing calls and kept the incoming ones to a minute or less. On the fourth of May, they registered an incoming from a woman he addressed as Carla. She began by dunning him about money and went on to pester him about a distributor, an affair in which he told her he’d made little progress. He asked her to drop her price. She said she wouldn’t, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t working. She was stockpiling material, and if he didn’t get his ass in gear she’d take measures to find someone else.
The police managed to get a trace, but it led to a prepaid cell phone in Brazil, which wasn’t a lot of help.
As soon Kuipers had finished reading the transcript, he picked up the phone and asked for a few minutes with his boss, Albertus Montsma.
Two hours later, Kuipers and Montsma were sitting across a desk from each other.
“I think you can safely assure the burgemeester,” Kuipers said, “that the videos aren’t being produced here, only the copies.”
“Thank God for that,” Montsma said.
Amsterdam depended heavily on tourism. Sex and drugs were among the attractions, but the city fathers underplayed them. They preferred to present the city as a family destination and would not look kindly upon a revelation that snuff videos were being produced in their midst. Distribution of the damned things was bad enough.
“Some of the worst,” Kuipers said, “are coming from Brazil.”
He told his boss about the telephone call, adding that the woman had spoken in English and that her English was fluent.
“That young fellow, Costa,” Montsma said, “Is he still here?”
“The Brazilian? Yes, he’s still here. I just saw him downstairs, talking to Hugo de Groot. You want him involved?”
“I know his uncle,” Montsma said.
“His uncle?”
“Mario Silva, Chief Inspector of the Brazilian Federal Police. He’s a good cop.”
Kuipers grunted. Coming from Bert Montsma, a good cop was high praise.
“You think Costa might be of some help?” he said.
“I don’t know,” Montsma said, “but I’m sure his uncle will be. Let’s get the young man up here, shall we?”
Hector Costa was a slim fellow of slightly below average height. His mother was Mario Silva’s sister and only sibling; Hector, her only child.
His father, Claudio, an architect, had been thirty-four years old when he was shot to death. Hector, now thirty-two, looked nothing like him. Claudio’s eyes had been blue. Hector’s were black. Claudio had been fair- skinned. Hector, like the rest of the Silva family, was dark, so dark that his mother’s ancestors had been suspected of Moorish blood. And Moorish blood had not been a good thing to have in sixteenth-century Portugal.
In those days, the country was under the Spanish yoke and subject to the Spanish Inquisition. Moorish blood was regarded as a sign of less than complete devotion to the true faith, and less than complete devotion to the true faith could be fatal. To escape distrustful inquisitors, the Silvas had left their native country and moved to Brazil, a melting pot where the prejudice against darker skin was less strong and the Inquisition less pervasive.
They chose Sao Paulo as their new home. It wasn’t a city then, not even a village, just a frontier outpost founded by the Jesuits for the express purpose of converting the Indians. The place grew little over the next one hundred and fifty years, remaining a sleepy hamlet well into the eighteenth century. That changed when the Europeans developed a passion for coffee. The soil and climate around Sao Paulo were found to be ideally suited to the new crop. The great coffee barons became cash-rich. They had money to invest, and many of them invested it in manufacturing. By the mid-twentieth century, the city had become the premier industrial center, the largest city in the country.
And the most dangerous.
Hector’s maternal grandfather had been shot to death by bandits in 1978, just two years after Hector was born. His grandmother, raped by the same individuals and forced to watch her husband’s murder, lost all interest in life and didn’t survive the year.
The incident motivated Mario, Hector’s uncle, to give up a promising career as a lawyer and join the federal police.
Nine years later, his nephew had been moved in the same direction.
On a sunny Saturday morning, Hector’s parents were driving to a shopping center. His father, Claudio Costa, was behind the wheel. Hector was in the back seat. He’d been playing with a toy, a Rubik’s cube, when he heard a voice.
“Hand over your watch.”
A man was standing just outside, pointing the barrel of a gun at his father’s head. They were stopped at a traffic light, locked in by other automobiles. The day was hot. The car had no air-conditioning. The windows were open.
The watch, his mother told him later, was a family heirloom. His father was reluctant to give it up. Twenty years on, as an experienced cop, Hector would have recognized the man with the gun as a drug addict, trying to gather enough money for his next fix. At the time, he just thought the man was scary. His mother folded the newspaper she’d been reading over her lap, thereby concealing her wedding ring. The ring was the only jewelry she ever wore on the street.
“Claudio,” she said, keeping her voice low and steady, “give him the watch.”
Almost everyone in the extended family had been robbed at one time or another. If it wasn’t some kid threatening you with a sliver of glass, or a gang with clubs and rocks, it was someone like this: a frightened little man with bloodshot eyes, a two-day growth of beard, and a revolver that was trembling in his hand.
Claudio took his hands off the steering wheel, as if he was going to unfasten the clasp on his watch, but then he swiveled to his left and made a grab for the revolver. The man stepped backward. There was a loud explosion, louder than any firecracker Hector had ever heard. His father flew backward, as if someone had given him a push.
Hector stared at the shooter, and for a moment they locked eyes. Then the man was putting the weapon into a canvas bag and backing away.
He looked down at his father. Blood covered the front of his shirt. Sucking noises were coming out of a hole in his chest. Hector’s mother was saying “Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God,” over and over. Hector leaned over the seat, buried his nose in his mother’s neck, and tried to comfort her.
The sucking noises stopped.
