Leighton Gage - Every Bitter Thing

“Meanwhile,” Clancy said, “I was ordained. I’m not cut out to run a parish. I was doing social work. One day, I ran into Petra’s sister, Heidi, on the street.”

“She wrote me afterwards,” Petra said, “told me what he was doing, gave me his address. By then, I was in this little town up north, Sao Bento. I doubt you’ve heard of it.”

Arnaldo shook his head.

“No,” Goncalves said. “I never have.”

“It’s in Tocantins, near Miracema. Dennis and I began a regular correspondence. His work. My work. Nothing that you might call really personal.”

“Not in the beginning,” he said.

“In one letter,” she said, “I referred to what we’d shared as ‘puppy love.’”

“But I didn’t think so,” he said, “I thought it was much deeper, much more profound than that. And, in my next letter, I shared the thought with Petra. It was the hardest thing I ever wrote.”

“And when I read it, I started crying again.”

“The situation was driving me crazy,” he said. “Most people go to psychiatrists when that happens, but I was a priest. I went to another priest.”

“Damon O’Reilly,” she said. “We’d known him all our lives.”

“Damon died in Boston a month ago,” he said. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t tell you this: there was a girl, in Ireland, when he was young. They exchanged a kiss. One kiss, and in more than sixty years, he told me, a month hadn’t gone by when he hadn’t thought of that girl at least once. He’d learned to live with it, he said, but if he had his life to live over again, he wasn’t sure he’d do the same. He told me to come down here and talk to Petra, get it out of my system one way or another. One way or another, he said, but I think he knew what was going to happen. I wrote her straightaway.”

“And I,” she said, “told him not to come. I didn’t think I could stand losing him twice.”

“Damon,” Clancy said, “was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He spent his last days in a hospital. I went to visit him, morning and night. Toward the end, he pushed himself up on his elbows and asked me what the hell I was doing there. He wanted to know why I wasn’t in Brazil.”

“Delirious?”

“Not at all. Sharp as a tack. Right up to the very end. I told him she wouldn’t have me. He said he’d only kissed a girl once in his life, but he knew more about women than I did. He told me to go catch a plane.”

“And you did?” Arnaldo said.

“Not until he died. He was the kindest man I ever knew. I wanted to be there for him at the end. I performed his last rites, and left for Brazil on the evening of his funeral.”

“We traced you,” Arnaldo said, “as far as Miracema. Then you dropped off the map.”

“There are no hotels in Sao Bento,” Clancy said. “It’s a tiny place, a church, a few shops, no hotel. No airport, either, and no train, but there’s a bus from Miracema. Petra fixed it so I could stay with a family.”

“He showed up on my doorstep,” Petra said.

They smiled at each other.

“There were classes to teach,” she said, “and they had to find someone to replace me. I didn’t want to scandalize my Sisters any more than I already had. We took care not to be alone together, not until we left.”

“We got married in Palmas,” Clancy said. “I called my mother to tell her. She hung up on me. Petra’s family has been more understanding. They’re supporting what we’ve done. Tomorrow we’re going to leave for Boston and try to put things right with my folks.”

“And then?”

“And then, Agente Goncalves, we’re going to have three kids.”

“Four,” Petra said. “And now, officers, you’ve heard our story. We’d like to hear yours. Why are you here?”

There was a wooden picnic table in the courtyard. Hector and Silva sat on one side, Sacca on the other. The federal cops asked to be left alone with the prisoner.

“It was like this,” Sacca said when the guard was gone. “I’m in a bar in Freguesia. You know Freguesia?”

Freguesia do O, once a hilltop village, had long since been absorbed by its expanding neighbor. These days, it was simply one of Sao Paulo’s many neighborhoods, with little to distinguish it except for the old central square with its church and cemetery.

“I know it,” Silva said.

“So I’m up there,” Sacca said, “in this bar, and a guy I know comes to me with a proposition.”

“What guy?” Silva said.

“You don’t have to know that, do you?”

“Maybe not. What was the proposition?”

“Carry a package to Miami.”

“What was in the package?” Silva said.

“I got no idea. It was none of my business.”

“None of your business?”

“Look, he doesn’t tell, and I don’t ask, okay? He’s like, you want to do this? And I’m like, how much? And he’s like, ten thousand dollars, American.”

“Guy wants to give you ten thousand dollars to take a package to Miami, and you think it’s on the up-and-up?”

“I never said that. I’m not stupid. I just said I didn’t know what was in there.”

“Uh-huh. So then?”

“So I tell him I’ve never been out of the country, and I don’t have a passport, and, with my record, there isn’t much chance of me getting one. And he says no problem. He’s gonna get me a passport, and he’s gonna furnish the ticket, and I’m even gonna travel business class. He’ll pay me half of the ten grand before I leave. The person I deliver it to in Miami will pay the other half.”

“All right. So you agreed, and…”

“And he tells me to be ready to leave on Friday, meet him in the same place at seven o’clock, and bring a suitcase with what I need for a couple of nights in Miami.”

“And you did.”

Sacca nodded. “And I did. And he gives me the package, and a ticket, and a reservation for a hotel, and a passport.”

“And the passport was in the name of Darcy Motta?”

“Yeah. And the photo in it was from one of my mug shots. But the background was different, and they took out the sign they make you hold on your chest.”

“You think this guy is a cop?”

Sacca shrugged. “How else would he get one of my mug shots?” he said.

“And the passport? It got you into the States with no trouble?”

“Uh-huh. There was a visa in it and all, good for five years with multiple entries, if you can believe that. Multiple entries means-”

“I know what it means. If you don’t overstay your welcome, you can keep going back and forth. Go on with the story.”

“Yeah, okay. Well, it must have been a real visa because it had one of those holo… holo…”

“Holograms?”

“Yeah, one of them on it.”

“Where did you deliver the package?”

“He gave me an address. It was typed out on a piece of paper, and he told me I’d better not lose either the address or the package, because if I did, he’d cut my balls off. ‘Just show it to a taxi driver,’ he says. ‘It’s a bar,’ he says. ‘Get there at ten the day after tomorrow. Take the package with you. Leave it out on the bar where people can see it, and have a drink. Somebody will contact you.’”

“And somebody did?”

“A woman. An ugly skank, name of Maria.”

“Maria what?”

“There you go again,” Sacca said, showing peevishness for the first time. “Don’t you get it? You do this kind of stuff, you don’t ask people to tell you things like that. And even if you did, they’d lie. Maria, just Maria, okay?”

“Okay. Blond? Brunette? Redhead?”

“Blond. But not really. Her eyebrows were dark.”

“What else can you remember about her?”

“She was old enough to be my mother. And she had rough hands, I mean really rough, with calluses and all, probably worked as a maid somewhere.”