"Sergeant Mancuso, my mother is fifty-three years old. She's overweight, she's diabetic-"
"They wanted your father to stand there and watch it," Mancuso said, talking faster now, eager to get it over with. "He wouldn't have it. He went after the guy who was holding her down. The other guy shot him twice in the head. It was quick. He didn't suffer, didn't live long enough to see what they did to her."
Silva put his hands over his eyes and started to cry.
Mancuso stood and put a hand on his shoulder. "But your mother's okay. You hear me? She's okay. They took the car. We're looking for it. It's one of those big Ford Galaxies, right?"
Silva nodded.
"There aren't too many of them," Mancuso said, "so they're easy to spot. If they hold on to it for any time at all, we're going to nail them."
At that moment, Silva couldn't have cared less about the two punks. "And… my mother. What happened then?"
"When they were… done, she managed to get herself back to the main road."
"She walked?"
"Crawled is more like it," the cherub said.
"Shut up, Paulo," Mancuso said. "There's not much traffic up there after nine or ten at night and she was… well, she was bleeding, so she just didn't have it in her to go any further. She propped herself up under a streetlight and started waving at the cars that went by. After a while, somebody had the guts to stop."
"Who?"
"We don't know. He called it in from a phone booth, left her by the side of the road, told us where to find her, said he didn't want to get involved. It happens. At least he stopped for a look. Not everybody would have."
Dr. Silva's Galaxy was found later that morning abandoned on a suburban back street. The killers had removed the tires. They'd also taken the radio. If there were any latent fingerprints, the cops didn't find them. The truth of the matter was they hardly tried.
Silva's parents weren't particularly prominent people. The incident drew no bold headlines. Sao Paulo was one of the major murder capitals of the world, and the municipal police had other priorities.
Silva was told that such things are solved within the first 48 hours or not at all. It was something he refused to accept. If the cops wouldn't do anything about it, Silva was bound and determined that he would. He questioned his mother again and again. There were some things she couldn't bring herself to talk about, others that her son couldn't bring himself to ask, but a few salient facts emerged: both men were mulattos, in their twenties, clean-shaven, curly haired. Both had distinctive accents. They were from the northeast, Bahia perhaps, or one of the neighboring states. One of them had a tattoo, a snake that started on his chest, wrapped once around his neck, and ended in a protruding tongue that pointed at the lobe of his left ear. The other one, a man missing a couple of his front teeth, had done the shooting.
The cops' initial questioning hadn't brought out the details about the snake or the teeth. Silva thought they were important clues. The investigators didn't.
"It'd be different if we had something to cross-reference," a detective named Valdez told him, "like a list of all the punks with tattoos, or all the punks with dental problems. But we don't. And we sure as hell don't have the manpower to put people on the street trying to find somebody who knows somebody with a tattoo like that. Best thing for your mother to do is to put it all behind her, put the whole thing out of her mind. Jesus Christ! It's been three weeks already, and that's much too long. Let me level with you, Senhor Silva, we haven't got one chance in a million of catching these guys, and it's not going to do her any good to keep dwelling on what happened to her."
Detective Valdez was right. It didn't do Carla Silva any good at all, but she was unable to dwell upon anything else.
For three months, she cried day and night. Then she ingested twenty of the sleeping pills she'd been hoarding. Silva laid her to rest in the family crypt, turned his back on a legal career, and joined the Federal Police.
Chapter Four
Mario Silva's training at the Federal Police Academy took seven months. He graduated first in his class and was assigned to the field office in Rio de Janeiro, working drug control.
That kept him busy for five days out of every week. The other two he spent in Sao Paulo, a 45-minute flight away. Partly, it was to pursue his courtship of Irene, but mostly it was to follow up on what he then considered to be his best lead. His mother's wristwatch had vanished along with the rest of her jewelry. It was a Patek Phillippe in yellow gold, unusual anywhere, unique because of the inscription on the back of the case:
To Carla, Who enriches my autumn As she enriched my springtime. Mario
Mario had also been his father's name.
Canvassing all of the jewelry stores in Sao Paulo was a big job. There were thousands of them and some, no doubt, specialized in stolen goods. He thought it best to represent himself as a potential buyer, not a cop. After months of disappointment, Silva no longer felt a surge of adrenaline when he saw a watch that resembled his mother's until the day he turned one over and found his father's words staring up at him.
It was the end of November, 1979. His mother had been dead for ten months.
"If she's Clara, and you're Mario, this is definitely the watch for you," the man behind the counter said, pushing the sale, trying to make a joke of the inscription.
He had buck teeth and was young, too young to own the place. He wore an expensive black suit and a silk tie covered with little butterflies. Silva, who'd pegged him as the business's heir apparent, didn't reply, didn't even smile. He just kept staring at the watch, running his thumb over the words on the back of the case.
The clerk continued his pitch. "I've got to be honest with you. We considered polishing it off, but the engraving is too deep. That's why it's such a good deal. Do you have any idea what one of these things costs when it's new?"
He was distinctly displeased when Silva produced his warrant card and demanded to know how the watch had wound up in the shop.
THE YOUNG man's father, as Silva had suspected, owned the place. He wasn't particularly surprised to be told that the watch was stolen, and his previous experience with such things had taught him to keep meticulous records of his sources.
The trail led to a pawnshop near the center of town. It was a place with a frontage no more than four meters wide, but it was at least twenty deep, and stuffed with everything from musical instruments to household appliances.
"Sure, I remember it," the pawnbroker told Silva. He was a little man with a bald pate, a shock of surrounding white hair, wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a denim vest. "One of the best deals I ever made. The guy had no idea what it was worth. I didn't figure he was coming back, and he didn't, but I kept it for the full ninety days anyway."
"Why did you think he wasn't going to come back?"
The owner hesitated. "I just didn't," he said, avoiding Silva's eyes.
The man in the vest knew more than he was telling.
"You got a name? An address?"
"Sure. It's the law, right?"
According to the man's records, the watch had come into his possession five days after the murder. Still, Silva didn't get his hopes up. The address was probably false.
First, he thought, he'd go check it out. Then he'd come back and squeeze the pawnbroker for whatever else he knew.
An outdated map of the city, and two stops to ask for directions, brought Silva to a little street in the workingclass suburb of Sao Caetano.
The house was identical to the buildings on either side, hastily constructed out of white stucco, showing fissures in the mortar. In contrast to the green and flowery gardens of the neighbors, the short path leading to the front door was hemmed by dusty red earth. The door was blue, but its paint was peeling, showing the cheap pine beneath. The tiles on the front steps were cracked, and one was missing altogether, the impression of its ribbed underside still visible in the gray cement.