“What’s his name?”
“Genésio.”
“Does he live in Rio?”
“Recife. But just call him and he comes, does the job, and takes it on the lam the same day.”
“Then tell him to come right away. By plane. The senator’s in a hurry. As soon as — Genésio, isn’t it? — gets here, let me know. If everything goes well, that appointment for your wife will go through right away. You have a nineteen-year-old son, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“The senator can arrange something for him, too.”
Meanwhile, in his office, Senator Freitas was receiving his main electoral supporter, a plantation owner known as “Colonel” Linhares. The “colonel” informed him that he was buying false voting papers for the October election for five cruzeiros apiece.
“Here in the State of Rio the same papers can be bought for two, three cruzeiros at most,” protested Freitas. “You think I have a printing press to manufacture money like Oswaldo Aranha?”
“I brought you a bottle of your cherry liqueur,” said Linhares.
“Don’t change the subject. You’ve got to get the voting papers for less. I doubt if my opponents are paying all that.”
“I’ll see what I can do, senator. Now try the liqueur. Try it, it’s really very good.”
THE INSPECTOR BEGAN THE DAY by going to have an x-ray done of his stomach.
The doctor’s office was in Copacabana, on Rua Barata Ribeiro. The inspector saw in the street many women carrying on their heads and in their hands cans, buckets, pots, and teakettles filled with water.
“I don’t even have water to wash my hands,” was the first thing the radiologist told him. “My wife went out this morning with the maid. It’s absurd. She didn’t even make breakfast. Yesterday it was the same thing. My children’s school closed for lack of water, and there haven’t been any classes for three days. I’m washing my hands with bottled water. Meanwhile, the politicians make speeches, everybody makes speeches, but nobody solves the problem of lack of water.”
With dramatic gestures, as if to demonstrate the gravity of the situation, the doctor opened a bottle of São Lourenço water and used it to wash his hands in the small sink in the consultation room.
“How are your stools? Very dark?”
“I always forget to check.”
“You have to take care of your health. The hemoglobin count from your blood test indicates that you’re having gastric hemorrhaging. We’ll see what the x-ray has to say.”
“I take care of my health. I always carry antacids in my pocket and drink milk all the time.”
The radiologist handed him a glass with a thick beige-colored liquid.
“What’s this concoction that I’m drinking?” The taste of dirt mixed with chalk, similar to the taste of the whitewash on walls he sometimes ate when he was a child.
“Barium. For the contrast.”
Mattos took off his clothes, put on a gown, and lay down on the x-ray table.
The x-rays were taken.
“You may suffer some constipation because of the barium,” the radiologist said.
A CHECK OF FINGERPRINTS with the Félix Pacheco Institute confirmed that the corpse identified by Mattos at the morgue was Ibrahim Assad.
Mattos had asked Leonídio to record the name of whoever came to the morgue to claim the body and provide him with the information at once. For three days the cadaver had remained in the refrigerator, without receiving a single visitor. Administrative measures were being taken for Assad to be buried as an indigent when an employee of the Santa Clara mortuary showed up to embalm the body.
“The remains are going to be transported to Caxambu, in Minas, to be buried,” Leonídio said. “The body snatcher says he doesn’t know who paid the expenses.”
In the office of the Santa Clara funeral home, an employee received Mattos and explained that the person who had paid the costs of embalming and transport of the body had asked for his act of charity to be anonymous.
“That person knows the mother of the deceased, a lady without resources. . There are still good people in this world capable of a disinterested act of kindness. .”
Mattos, who until then had not said he was from the police, showed his ID. His stomach felt heavy because of the barium he’d taken for the x-ray, but at the same time he believed the test had improved his health, and that he was cured.
“I’m investigating a murder. Tell me who paid the costs.”
“You put me in a difficult position.”
“Out with it. I’ve got a lot ahead of me today.”
“A difficult situation. .”
“Do you prefer to go the precinct with me?”
“It was a police officer, like you.”
“His name.”
The employee wiped sweat from his forehead with a purple handkerchief he took from his pocket. “Mr. Ubaldo Pádua.”
THE MAYOR OF NEW ORLEANS, Lesseps S. Morrison, received by President Vargas, said that Rio de Janeiro was still, despite a degree of pessimism among some of its people, one of the most pleasant cities, and certainly the most beautiful city, on earth.
Morrison, visiting Rio for the third time, accompanied Henry Kaiser, one of the kings of the American automotive industry.
In the audience with the president of the Republic, Kaiser assured that his firm was ready to transport immediately to Brazil a factory with an annual production capacity of fifty thousand automobiles intended for the domestic market and for export.
Also present at the meeting were Secretary Oswaldo Aranha, the American Ambassador James Kemper, and Mr. Herbert Moses.
When the Americans left the interview, Kaiser commented in the car taking them from the Catete to the Hotel Copacabana Palace that from the photos of Vargas he’d seen in the United States, always smiling and with a cigar in his mouth, he expected him to be a happy and good-natured person; he had been surprised by the president’s melancholy and somber appearance.
“He must be sick,” said Kemper, who had also noticed Vargas’s sadness. “It’s the only explanation for his depression.”
Morrison ventured the hypothesis, quickly accepted by the others, that the president might have the same flu virus that he had caught upon arriving in Brazil. “It was very kind of him to receive us in that condition.”
MATTOS TRIED ALL DAY to locate Pádua.
When he got home, Alice was sitting in the living room writing in a thick notebook with a leather cover.
“My diary. But it’s not really a diary, it’s more a book of thoughts. I was writing about the death of Colette, what it means to me. I wrote down what you said to me that day: I have other deaths to worry about.”
“I said that?”
“Yes.”
“May I read it?”
Alice closed the notebook. “No one has ever read my diary. I’ve never shown it to anyone in this world. Especially you. One day, when we were seeing each other, I gave you a poem I had written, and you laughed, saying it was funny.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“You don’t like poetry.”
“I never told you I don’t like poetry.”
“You only like opera. Because when you were a little boy your mother would play ‘Una furtiva lagrima’ on the Victrola, and you would cry.”
“You’re making that up.”
“It was you who told me.”
“Making up that business about me not liking poetry.”
“A policeman can’t like poetry. He has other deaths to worry about.”
“Did you look for an apartment to rent?”
“I didn’t have time. Know what I’d have liked to do these days? I’d have liked to go to São Paulo to the International Writers Conference, but you didn’t even think about taking me.”