Alice appeared in the room.
“Are you going out?”
“I always get dressed when I wake up. I take a bath and get dressed. But I haven’t put on my tie.”
“That’s true. You haven’t put on your tie.”
“I don’t know how to say this. .”
“Say what?”
Alice seemed to have become emaciated during the night. The dark circles around her eyes hadn’t disappeared, despite a night’s sleep, and they stood out against her pale skin.
“It’s nothing important. We can talk later.”
“How nice. I wake up completely foggy. I don’t wake up right until — How to say what? What is it you don’t know how to tell me? Something unpleasant?”
“No. . It’s not — I already told you, it’s not important.”
“I want to know. Please. .”
“This isn’t a good place for you to stay. That’s what it is.”
“Why?”
“Several reasons. The other day a man came here to kill me.”
“Were you afraid?”
“No.”
“Then I’m not afraid either.”
“This place isn’t comfortable. . It’s very small. .”
“Are you sending me away?”
“No, it’s not that. . You could rent an apartment, a larger place, more comfortable. . That wouldn’t be a problem for you.”
“Will you come live with me?”
“We’ll see about that later.”
“Later when?”
“You’re a married woman. .”
“Separated.”
“Later we’ll see.”
The telephone rang.
“Mr. Mattos, this is Leonídio, from Forensics. Today’s Sunday, but I thought you might want to come here anyway. A cadaver showed up with the characteristics of the guy you were looking for.”
“I’m on my way.”
“Where are you going?” asked Alice.
“Duty.”
“Where?”
“Rua dos Inválidos.”
“Rua dos Inválidos? To do what, on Rua dos Inválidos? What’s on Rua dos Inválidos?”
“A government department.”
“Will you be long?”
“I don’t know. Think about what I told you.”
“Don’t be long. I’ll wait for you to get back so we can have lunch together. Or would you rather I made lunch for you? I can go out and buy whatever’s needed. You like meat, don’t you?”
“Don’t wait for me, please. I seldom eat lunch. I’ve got a bad stomach.”
“I’ll wait anyway.”
Leonídio lifted the faded blue sheet, displaying the cadaver on the metal table. When the sheet was raised, the smell of the body diffused into the room.
“Is it him?”
“Yes. His name is Ibrahim Assad. Where was he found?”
“In the Tijuca Forest. He was killed by a bullet to the base of the skull.”
“When?”
“What’s today’s date?”
“The fifteenth.”
“The eleventh or twelfth.”
“What are those marks on his mouth and face?”
“Ants. He was being eaten by ants.”
There was little difference between the various noxious odors given off by a dead man and a dead rat. There were cadavers, of animals and men, that smelled like spoiled cheese; others, like rotten broccoli; others, like rancid pork; still others, like deteriorated beans; et cetera. That repulsive catalog of the stench of putrefaction gathered by Mattos’s sensitive nose gained new entries as he encountered additional pestilential cadavers in his work.
The inspector descended Rua do Riachuelo toward Lapa, smelling in the air the rotten-cabbage odor of Ibrahim Assad’s corpse. He crossed the Arches, passed the door of the Colonial movie theater, and continued walking along Rua Joaquim Silva to Rua Conde Lage.
The street of the elegant high-priced prostitutes of his youth. He would go there in the evening to see them, when he cut classes from night school. The women moved sumptuously under the light of candelabras in their long, elegant satin dresses, their faces an unreal alabaster, scarlet mouths and shining eyes, distributing smiles to their clients. Standing in the dark street, watching them from afar, through the windows of the large old houses, he perceived in the women’s smiles something beyond the desire to seduce, something secret that showed when one of them looked at the other; something he now knew was disdain and scorn.
He had never been on that street in the light of day.
All those years later, the street seemed insipid and melancholy. The trees were less imposing. The great boardinghouses — as they were euphemistically called — had become flophouses with ruined facades, broken windows and gates. The only woman he saw was a laundress with a bundle of clothes on her head.
He walked to the gardens of Paris Square, in the Glória neighborhood, and sat on a bench. A boy was staring at the crown of an almond tree, looking for nuts. That species of almond bore a bitter nut that only a poor kid could manage to eat. He himself, at that boy’s age, used to go there and throw stones at the riper fruits, to eat the nuts from those dark-yellow trees with reddish spots.
“This time of year there aren’t any almonds,” Mattos shouted at the boy. “No point in looking.”
“Not in any tree?”
“Not any.”
Since he already had stones in his hand, the boy threw them at the tree and left.
Mattos went along Flamengo beach to Rua Machado de Assis, from which he arrived at Machado Square and from there to his home on Rua Marquês de Abrantes.
Alice was listening to L’Elisir d’Amore.
“Do you want to hear ‘Una furtiva lagrima’?”
“No, please, no.”
“Want me to turn off the record player?”
“Yes, please.”
“Are you sad? What happened on Rua dos Inválidos?”
“It wasn’t on Rua dos Inválidos.”
“I called Pedro. I told him I was here.”
“What did he say?”
“For me to come home. I said I wasn’t returning. He said he loved me. That he’d broken it off with that woman. I think he really does love me, just that he’s very selfish. He ordered me to see Dr. Arnoldo. I answered that I’m fine and don’t need any Dr. Arnoldo. I said I love you and all I need is you.”
DESPITE IT BEING SUNDAY, a group of PSD senators met at the Seabra Building to discuss the country’s political situation and hear the information that Freitas usually obtained from his various sources.
Freitas had an influential friend in the palace, the head of the Civilian Cabinet, Lourival Fontes, who was playing both sides against the middle by making secret contact with allies and enemies of the government, a process Fontes had employed since the time he was the all-powerful head of the Department of Press and Propaganda in the era of the dictatorship — a tactic he’d learned from Filinto Müller, then chief of Vargas’s political police. Freitas also had his spies among the Lacerdists and knew that someone inside the Catete, perhaps the head of the Civilian Cabinet himself, was secretly leaking confidential information to the archenemy Lacerda about what went on at private meetings in the governmental palace. Betrayal was part of the political game. Now more than ever, when the major newspapers, the military, politicians, students, the manufacturing classes, the Church, were all contributing with fervent ardor to the tumult that was beginning to dominate the country.
That group had come to be known as “the Vitor Freitas independents,” thanks to notes planted in the press by a reporter from O Jornal whose beat was the Senate and who owed to Freitas his appointment as administrator of the Commercial Employees Retirement and Pensions Institute. It was common for journalists who covered the chambers of Congress or the executive branch to arrange public positions that ended up being for a lifetime. The various pensions and retirement institutes in the Department of Labor were the favorite of journalists for several reasons, one of them being that they were not obligated to show up regularly for work.