different case altogether. Cruz’s colleagues lamented the lack of scholarship. The critics turned up their noses. The scientific journals panned it. And it went through seven printings in four months, each one bigger than the last. His publishers, attempting to explain the phenomenon to the astonished author, compared Cruz’s work to that of the American Alfred Kinsey in the 1950s.
They were right.
The author’s detractors, almost exclusively professors of sociology and social psychology, ascribed his success to prurient interest. They accused Cruz of titillating his readers under the guise of educating them.
And they, too, were right.
But, after seven printings in four months, there was no stopping Doctor Paulo Cruz. He wrote two more books in quick succession.
O Casamento (Marriage) appeared in 1999, and was re-released in 2000 with a lurid new cover and a new title: Sexualidade no Casamento (Sex within Marriage). Cruz followed it up in 2003 with Sexo e a Familia (Sex and the Family). And that became the biggest hit of all, ultimately translated into thirty-two languages. Cruz’s reputation was made, and he was offered a lucrative sinecure in the psychology department at the University of Ribeirao Preto, which he accepted.
By 2005, he was traveling the world, delivering-over and over again-variations of the same speech. It was a talk he constantly updated by introducing new and different slides. The slides were of attractive and well-endowed men and women photographed in “scientific” poses.
The professor, required to show his face in a classroom no more than once a week, and not even that if he was away on a speaking engagement, could permit himself to live quite far from the campus. He hit upon Brodowski, selected the house and grounds of a former coffee planter, and settled in as the town’s newest resident. Living in the great house, and playing the lord of the manor, suited Cruz well. So, too, did his domestic arrangements.
He met a young psychology student named Florinda Gomes, who soon became his mistress. Florinda assumed Cruz was going to marry her. In that hope, as with many other things in their life together, she was disappointed. Cruz’s research on male/female relationships in general had convinced him that a fixed union was not for him. He liked feminine companionship, he even liked children, but he didn’t want to have a wife or offspring living with him in the same house, and he certainly didn’t intend to entangle himself in a marriage.
He forbade Florinda to move in. If she had, within a few short years the law would have considered her his commonlaw wife. But by setting her up in an apartment of her own in downtown Ribeirao Preto, all she could hope for, should he tire of her, was child support. Officially, and before the law, Professor Paulo Cruz remained a bachelor.
Florinda’s mother, a widow named Eustacia Gomes, lived almost fourteen hundred kilometers to the north, on the island of Itaparica. She visited her daughter infrequently, offering as an excuse that the arthritis in her knees made it difficult to travel. All of them knew this to be a lie. The truth of the matter was that Eustacia Gomes didn’t like Paulo Cruz.
The island’s sandy beaches and lukewarm seas made it an ideal place for a family vacation. During the summer months, January through March, it seldom rained on Itaparica, and Paulo and Florinda’s three kids, released from the imprisonment of their school back home, were in their element.
That year, taking advantage of the drop in airfares after the Christmas season, Florinda scheduled a visit that was to last a month. Cruz remained behind. He always did. In the absence of his mistress and their brood, he coveted his solitude. The lack of distraction also had a concrete advantage: it would enable him to make significant progress with his next book, a work he’d provisionally titled Sexualidade Entre Doze e Vinte (Sexuality between Twelve and Twenty ).
Cruz’s insistence on being left alone while in the throes of creation was well known. Friends and family were aware that they’d meet with a cold reception if they attempted to visit, or even to telephone, at such times.
So his murder remained undiscovered for quite some time. The medical examiner’s estimate was that Professor Paulo Cruz had already been dead eight to ten days before Florinda returned and found him. The local police had no clue as to the motive for the crime, and had no suspects. The rarity of murder in the vicinity of Ribeirao made undertaking a murder investigation difficult for them. It was already being chalked up as the work of a random killer, an unsolvable crime.
Chapter Three
Chief Inspector Mario Silva of the Federal Police suppressed a yawn.
He’d been up late the night before, struggling through yet another crisis with his wife, Irene. They were coming up to the anniversary of little Mario’s death, always a bad time of the year.
Then, too, his boss’s urgent summons had come between him and his second jolt of morning caffeine.
Add to those two facts another: an urgent summons from Sampaio was commonplace. Sampaio was an alarmist, a chronic worrier. Most of what he considered urgent turned out not to be urgent at all.
But Silva still had had no choice but to hurry to the office.
It wasn’t until the director of the Brazilian Federal Police dropped his bombshell-“Somebody killed Juan Rivas”-that Silva came instantly and completely awake.
But he was an optimistic man, and he remained hopeful. “Please tell me Juan Rivas is no relation to Jorge Rivas,” Silva said.
“His son.”
Silva’s hope evaporated.
Jorge Rivas was the Venezuelan foreign minister. In the days when he’d been ambassador to Brazil, Rivas had forged links with everyone who mattered in the Brazilian government. The president liked him, and the minister of justice liked him, so it was a sure bet that Nelson Sampaio, ever eager to emulate his superiors, would declare a liking for him as well.
“I like him,” Sampaio said, as if in response to the thought.
“He’s a fine man, and a great representative of his country.”
“I see,” Silva said.
What he saw was trouble ahead. The murder of Rivas’s son would be a killing with political implications, the kind of case he hated above all others.
“Tell me the kid wasn’t killed on federal property,” he said.
“The kid, as you choose to call him, was thirty-two years old. And he wasn’t.”
“Kidnapped, then?”
Sampaio shook his head. “The murder took place in his apartment.”
Silva sat back in relief. “Then it’s a concern of the civil police. We’re out of it.”
“Don’t kid yourself. You think we can hide behind our mandate? Mandates don’t mean squat if I get a direct order from Pontes.”
“You got a direct order?” Silva felt a headache coming on.
“Any time now. A call is coming. You can bet your ass on it.”
When Sampaio predicted a call from the minister of justice, Silva didn’t doubt him. The director was never wrong about the machinations of Brazil’s federal bureaucracy.
“Now, in case the seriousness of this situation isn’t clear to you,” Sampaio said, “let me spell it out: no one gets to be foreign minister of Venezuela without being a buddy of the clown who runs the country. And nobody in this government wants to get on the wrong side of The Clown. This isn’t just a murder, Mario; it’s a major political incident.”
“Because of the oil,” Silva said.
“Of course it’s because of the oil. What else? You think the president shows up in all those pictures hugging The Clown because he likes The Clown?”
A green light started flashing on Sampaio’s telephone. He punched a button and picked up the receiver.
“It’s him?” he asked.
Ana, in the outer office, said something Silva couldn’t quite hear. Sampaio grunted and punched another
