Yep. I know.
Well then. There are people who remember my granddad. But no one remembers his death.
If no one remembers, then it didn’t happen.
I just want to be sure.
The officer’s enormous twisted hands come to life. He straightens his fingers, then clasps them together. He lowers his head a little and stares at him.
You won’t find anything here from back then. Maybe in Laguna.
There is some shouting outside that rises in volume before bursting through the door. The officer leans back and looks over his shoulder, on guard. Two other officers come in, violently dragging a young man in handcuffs. Behind them comes a pale, blond man of about fifty, fat from the waist up and thin from the waist down, who is gesticulating nonstop and shouting things in a foreign language. The hulking, big-eared police officer excuses himself, gets up slowly, and goes to give the newly arrived problem his attention.
What’s going on?
One of the officers who has just arrived, a short man whose uniform sits loosely on his body, says they caught the young man breaking into the German’s house. The blond man, who must be the German, bellows in protest in a tongue that isn’t German or any other foreign language but rather a truncated form of Portuguese with an almost incomprehensible accent. He shouts that it is the third time the thief has broken into his house, holding up three fingers. This time he saw the intruder coming into his garden, so he hid in his own garage and took the young man by surprise with a blow to the head.
Günther waited in the garage and wham, he says, simulating the gesture of a baseball player.
The other police officer says they found the man tied to a beam in the garage by his feet, hanging upside down. The German continues narrating the story at the top of his lungs and gesticulating. The officers start to interrogate the young man, whose hair at the back of his head is drenched with blood. Realizing that the officers are no longer listening, Günther turns to him.
Three times! he cries, exasperated. I tell police three times! I have thief’s address! Everyone knows him!
Günther is wearing leather sandals, a pair of battered cargo jeans, and a blue Pepsi T-shirt. He has very blue eyes and a white beard cut close to his red face. He says that the man broke his window twice in the last few weeks to steal a blender and a pair of running shoes.
They steal small things to smoke crack! Blow to the head! Wham! You can’t be afraid of the delinquent!
Günther grabs his arm forcefully and starts telling him how he came to Rio de Janeiro to look for his daughter, who had been kidnapped by her Brazilian mother. He had been warned that Brazil was very dangerous and stayed locked in his hotel room for four days eating nothing but peanuts and drinking only soft drinks. He ran out of peanuts and was forced to go downstairs and find a tavern where he could get something to eat. He ordered some fries, and a delinquent tried to take them. Günther stabbed him in the hand with his fork, and everyone stood around watching. No one else bothered him. Since then he’s never been afraid.
The police officers have begun beating up the young man in a corner of the police station. Günther’s face twists in horror. He shouts at them to stop and, seeing that it isn’t enough, lunges at the officers, who are trampling the kid, who can’t be more than eighteen years old and is curled up on the floor saying he is sorry. The officers try to immobilize Günther and stop the suspect from getting away at the same time. Tables are dragged about, and the bottle is knocked off the water cooler. He watches the pandemonium until the German is brought under control. The young man is sitting on the ground protecting his head with his hands. The officer looks surprised when he realizes he is still there.
Can I help you with anything else?
No. Thank you for your time.
Good evening.
Ah. One more thing. A girl was killed in Paulo Lopes a few weeks ago. Strangled. Her face was mutilated. Do you know which case I mean?
Yep. They caught the guy.
Did they? Who was it?
A neighbor. I don’t remember his name. He’s locked up. Why?
I read about it in the paper and just remembered it. Just curious.
He confessed. An acquaintance of the family. He’d already been seen with the daughter.
Did he say why he killed her like that?
Apparently he was in love with her. She wasn’t interested.
Is he normal or a whacko?
The officer looks as if he is about to laugh and shrugs.
He thanks him and leaves with his bike and Beta.
He returns home on foot, pushing his bike through the streets skirting Capivaras Lagoon. The light from the lampposts gives an oily yellow hue to the carpet of water moss that covers almost the entire surface of the polluted lagoon. A cloud of mosquitoes hovers over a small rotting warehouse. Huge dogs start to emerge from the vegetation on an empty lot, and he hooks his finger under Beta’s collar as a precaution. Several members of the pack are purebreds, Rottweilers, German shepherds, or mixed breeds in which he recognizes the features of collies and Labradors. They are all filthy and lean, with tongues hanging out, fur bristling with sweat and cold, trotting through the night with no apparent destiny as if following a ghostly leader. They are a common sight in the town, large dogs abandoned by vacationers who live hundreds of miles away. They seem haunted, as if they can’t fully stifle the instinct to search for home.
• • •
He notices that his front door isn’t locked, which is something he doesn’t usually forget to do. From the door he can see almost the entire apartment, and at first glance there doesn’t appear to be any sign of forced entry. He looks at the position of the cushions on the sofas, the pamphlets on the table, the two magazines on the counter next to his dirty dishes. His wetsuit, which is worth hundreds of reais and is, perhaps, the item of greatest interest to a thief, is still hanging on the clothesline in the laundry area. The folder where he keeps four hundred U.S. dollars and eight hundred reais in cash, among magnetic bank cards and personal documents, remains under the silverware tray in a kitchen drawer. He locks the door from the inside, keeps the shutters closed, sets out food and water for the dog, and goes to have a shower.
Later he sits on the sofa for a while, looking at his cell phone. He tops up his credits with a recharge voucher and dials a number.
Gonçalo?
His old school friend starts in with the usual interrogation about why he felt compelled to move to the coast out of the blue, but he quickly cuts him off. He asks Gonçalo if he is still working as a reporter for the newspaper Zero Hora. He says he is looking for any information at all about his grandfather’s death and tells him everything he knows: the year, the story about the unsolved murder at the dance, and the jumbled details that his dad told him about his move to Garopaba in the late sixties.
Man, are you really okay?
Listen, Gonça. Dad came here at the time and said he’d spoken to a police chief from Laguna who had supposedly come to look into the matter. But the folk here know fuck all, and no one at the police station is going to help me. The subject is taboo here, and I still don’t get why.
That’s going to be tricky. Didn’t your father have a death certificate?
No.
If that’s really what happened and a police chief actually did go to oversee the case, he must have started an inquest. But imagine the guy arriving, in 1967, in a fishing village that had just become a separate municipality, to deal with a murder without a culprit. To deal with a case of community justice. The only neutral witnesses were most likely hippies, and they were probably licking the sand, high on mushrooms. Or maybe the guy didn’t even start an inquest, or didn’t go to the trouble of finding a culprit. It was the people’s justice, period. That kind of thing used to happen a lot in small towns and still does. And even if he did conduct an inquest, I bet it’s sitting in some dead archive somewhere.