What had once been a middle-class bastion had become cheap and run-down. People chose the neighborhood only if they couldn’t afford to live anywhere else.
There was no telling what color Ribeiro’s building had originally been, or even if it had been built of blocks, stone, or concrete. Exhaust fumes, and time, had colored the facade a uniform, sooty black, just like the stanchions that supported the viaduct.
For want of a better option, Babyface pulled onto the side-walk, the tires of the car crunching over broken concrete until they came to a stop. There was just enough room between the car and the front of the building to get the door open. While Silva struggled to work his fuller frame through the narrow space, Hector went in for a cursory reconnais-sance of the target. He was back in less than thirty seconds.
“No rear entrance,” he said. “No other way in or out.”
Silva instructed Babyface to stay behind the wheel and to keep an eye on the door. Then he and Hector trudged up three flights of stairs and located Roberto Ribeiro’s apart-ment. The doorbell didn’t work, or perhaps it couldn’t be heard over the rumble of traffic, so after three unsuccessful attempts, Hector pounded on the door with his fist.
There was no response. He tried it again, knocking even harder. If Ribeiro was in there, there was no way he wouldn’t have heard it.
“Police,” Silva said. “Open up.”
Still no response. Both men took out their pistols. Silva tried the knob. It was locked. Hector examined the door and the frame.
“A cinch,” he said, “unless he’s in there and has it bolted from the inside.”
“Do it,” Silva said.
Hector was lifting his foot when a door across the hall opened.
“What’s all this fuss?” a woman with a carioca accent said. She looked to be in her late sixties, was wearing a housecoat, and carrying a cat. The cat didn’t take its eyes off Hector.
“Do you know the man who lives here?” Silva pointed at Ribeiro’s door.
“Who the hell are you?”
“Federal Police.” Silva produced his identification and held it up in front of her. She took a pair of reading glasses that were dangling from a chain around her neck, put them on the end of her nose, and leaned in for a closer look. Apparently satisfied, she stroked the cat and answered Silva’s question.
“I know him. He’s been here just about as long as I have. Three years. Seems like a nice boy. Polite.”
“Name of Roberto Ribeiro? Carioca? Mustache?”
“Yes, all of that. What do you want with him?”
“Police business. Do you know where he is?”
The woman shook her head and transferred the cat to her other arm. The cat blinked and then went back to looking at Hector as if he were a bowl of cream.
“Any idea where he works?” Silva said.
Again, she shook her head, this time stroking the cat with her other hand. The feline began to purr.
“I hardly know him,” she said. “Just, you know, to exchange a few words when we pass in the hall.”
“He live alone?”
“Alone. Yes.”
“Go inside, Senhora, and lock your door.” Silva said.
For a moment, she looked as if she were going to ask another question, but in the end she didn’t. She closed her door without another word. The cops heard her key turn in the lock.
“Remind me to call Dantas,” Silva said.
Now that Ribeiro’s neighbor had seen them, they could no longer claim they’d found the door already smashed. They were going to have to justify the break-in. That meant they’d have to get a predated search warrant, and that meant getting Dalton Dantas, that most accommodating of judges, to provide it.
Ribeiro wasn’t there.
The place was surprisingly clean, even the curtains on the window that overlooked the Minhocao, even the win-dowsill. The curtains must have been washed, and the sill dusted, within the last few days. There was a vase of fresh flowers on the coffee table. The bed was made. There were no dishes in the sink. The place even smelled clean, with faint odors of furniture polish and pine-scented disinfectant.
Hector scratched his head. “Didn’t that woman say he lives alone?”
“She did.”
“Sure as hell doesn’t look like it.”
“No,” Silva said, “it doesn’t.”
“A namorada, you figure?”
“Maybe. Or maybe he’s gay, or maybe he’s got the world’s best faixineira, but this place doesn’t look like your run-of-the-mill bachelor pad, that’s for sure.”
“If it’s his faixineira,” Hector said, “I’m going to fire mine and hire his. She’ll be looking for a new employer when we put the bastard away.”
The apartment consisted of a kitchen, a living room, a bedroom, and a bathroom. The interior of the kitchen cup-boards was orderly, the rug in the living room was vacuumed, the sheets on the bed had recently been washed and even ironed, and the towels in the bathroom were neatly arranged on a rack.
A thorough search of the apartment turned up nothing of interest. No photos, no letters, no record of Roberto’s work-place. The only papers they found were a stack of bills, some paid, some unpaid, and a checkbook from the Bradesco Bank.
After tossing the place, Silva and Hector canvassed the other apartments in the building. There were sixteen in all, four floors and four apartments on each. They’d already spoken to the woman with the cat. Seven of the other fourteen resi-dents didn’t answer their doors or weren’t at home. They made a note of the apartment numbers for subsequent follow-up.
No one they questioned seemed to know anything about Roberto Ribeiro. He had no social relationship, as far as they could determine, with anyone else in the building. Finally convinced they’d done as much as they could, Silva called in a two-man team.
When the men arrived, he told them to keep the building under surveillance in the hope that Ribeiro would come home sometime soon. He and his nephew went back to Hector’s office.
“Pictures,” he said to Babyface when they got there. “Get me pictures. Ribeiro must have a national identity card, maybe he’s got a record, maybe he’s got a driver’s license, maybe you can track down his family. Make up a circular and an e-mail. Get them to all the field offices, to local and state police, and to the border-crossing checkpoints, particularly the border-crossing checkpoints.”
“Gonna cost a bundle to do all of that,” Hector said. “Sampaio isn’t going to like it.”
“I don’t care. Just do it.”
Babyface nodded and left the office.
“You think he’ll try to get out of the country?” Hector said.
“Pray that he does,” Silva said. “And get the word out that I’ll personally eat the liver of any agent who allows him to do it.”
Chapter Forty-two
“Why can’t I just go to Bahia or someplace?” Roberto asked.
He sounded like he was half in the bag.
One of Helena Ribeiro’s hands whitened as she tightened her grip on the telephone. The other continued to stroke her cat. She’d called his cell phone while the federal cops were still tossing his apartment, reached him in the bar where he liked to drink his lunch.
He tried her patience, that son of hers did. He’d tried her patience ever since he was a little boy, always wanting to know why he had to do this, why he had to do that. Why he had to eat his rice and beans. Why he couldn’t sleep in the same bed when she had a customer. There was a time when she’d thought he’d grow up, stop besieging her with questions, but, no, here he was, forty-one years old and still doing it.
She hovered over him too much. She knew it. She did his cooking, did his cleaning, made his decisions for him, treated him like a kid. So maybe she was at fault. Maybe the reason he’d never gotten married was because he’d never found a woman who would take care of him as well as she did. But it was too late now. He was grown. He’d never change.
“You can’t go to Bahia or someplace,” she said patiently, “because the men who’re looking for you aren’t the Sao Paulo cops. They’re federal police and they’re everywhere. They’re in Bahia, and Rio Grande do Sul, and Rondonia, and Minas Gerais. Everywhere! If you want to avoid them, you have to do as I say.”