Rubem Fonseca: Crimes of August

“Listening to Lacerda, sir? ‘The sea of mud grows more and more.’ Did you see the word the guy invented? Kakistocracy — government by the worst elements in society. The kakistocrats are going to lose the elections. Sarazate is going to win in Ceará, Meneghetti in Rio Grande do Sul, Pereira Pinto in Rio, Cordeiro de Farias in Pernambuco. People don’t trust Getúlio anymore. Did you see the scheme Etelvino set up for the presidential election? A Juarez-Juscelino ticket, a shoo-in.”

“What do you want?”

“The prisoners’ breakfast arrived,” Rosalvo said. “You wanted me to let you know.”

In the lockup, in two cells intended for eight prisoners, were thirty men. Cells in every precinct in the city were overcrowded with prisoners awaiting space in the penitentiaries, some still to be tried, others already found guilty.

Mattos considered the situation illegal and immoral and had tried to organize a strike in the Federal Department of Public Safety: the police would stop working until all those prisoners were transferred to penitentiaries. The inspector had gotten no support from his colleagues. The penitentiaries were also packed, and the strike proposed by Mattos would have no practical effect other than to cause negative repercussions. Mattos stated that this was the preliminary objective of the strike, to get the attention of public opinion and force the authorities to find a solution to the problem. “A wacky utopia,” Inspector Pádua had said. “You’re in the wrong profession.”

The counsels of the DPS had orders to find a legal way to get rid of Mattos, but the most they’d been able to do was to suspend him for thirty days. Commissioner Ramos, who headed the precinct where Mattos worked, had prevented, through his friendships with higher-ups, his being transferred to the remote Brás de Pina precinct as the dirty cops in the office wanted in order to punish him. Besides being remote, Brás de Pina had precarious facilities and a crime rate second only to the Second Precinct, Copacabana.

But Ramos didn’t wish to protect the inspector; he used Mattos’s name to cow banqueiros , the men financing the illegal lottery. On one occasion, Rosalvo, the investigator, had caught Ramos telling a banqueiro in an intimidating tone: “I’ll have Inspector Mattos shut down all your betting sites, you hear?!” When the banqueiro left, Rosalvo had told Ramos, “Alberto Mattos will kill you if he finds out you’re using his name.”

Ramos turned pale. “How’s he going to find out? The banqueiros aren’t crazy enough to tell him. It’d have to be you.”

“Me, sir? An old dog doesn’t stick his nose in a meat grinder.”

Every precinct had a cop who collected the money from the numbers bosses to distribute to his colleagues. That policeman was known as the “bagman.” The money collected — the boodle — varied in accordance with the business at betting sites and the greed of the commissioner. Rosalvo, discreet to a fault, wasn’t part of the split because he received his directly from the numbers bosses, who desired to stay in the good graces of Inspector Mattos’s assistant; the inspector’s honesty was considered by the lawbreakers as a threatening manifestation of hubris and dementia.

Policemen assigned to the chief’s office also participated in that venal conspiracy. Periodically, some numbers racket counting house, known as a “fortress,” was raided by the police, always provoking the same headline: POLICE BUST NUMBERS FORTRES. It was a way of satisfying the scruples of certain rarefied sectors of public opinion; the majority of the population openly practiced that modality of contravention. Journalists, judges, college graduates in the justice department, of which the Federal Department of Public Safety was part, were also bribed by the banqueiros. The vice squad, which had as one of its principal goals the suppression of illegal gambling, was the recipient of the largest number of bribes.

BEFORE DAWN ON AUGUST 1, Zaratini, the butler at the presidential palace, who customarily awoke early, opened a window facing the garden and saw Gregório sitting on a bench near the small marble fountain. The head of the guard, hearing the sound of the window being opened, looked up and saw the butler. Without acknowledging the greeting Zaratini gave by nodding, Gregório rose and walked toward the building housing the personal guard, next to the palace. It was five a.m.

Gregório knocked at the door of the room where the chef, Manuel, slept. Looking drowsy, he came to the door.

“Make me some mate tea, real hot.”

Gregório sat down at a table in the empty dining room. Manuel brought the tea. At that moment, Climerio Euribes de Almeida, a member of the president’s personal guard and a friend of Gregório’s, arrived. He had left his house, in a distant suburb, in the middle of the night to be able to get there at that hour.

“Any orders, chief?”

“Come to my room,” said Gregório, noticing the proximity of Manuel, who was setting a table beside him. He didn’t want to discuss the matter in the presence of others; Lacerdism was like a contagious disease, worse than gonorrhea or syphilis. It wouldn’t surprise him if there was infection among the guard.

Alone with Gregório, behind closed doors:

“What the hell? Where’s that reliable man of yours? We should’ve done the job in July and it’s already August.”

Gregório was tired of waiting for some victim of the Crow’s slanders to do something. They all claimed to be friends of the president, but other than cursing the Crow in futile rants, the most they did was foolishness like Oswaldo Aranha’s son, who with a gun in his hand had merely punched the defamer in the face; with the opportunity to kill the Crow he had been content to break his glasses. None of them wanted to sacrifice the comfortable life they enjoyed thanks to the president, drinking whiskey in nightclubs and chasing whores. Nothing much could be expected of those cowardly ass-kissers. They had all gotten rich in government, but few were grateful to the president.

Climerio, nervously: “Leave it to me, chief.”

Actually, Climerio had no such reliable man to do the job. Gregório didn’t want it to be anyone connected to the palace, much less the personal guard, and the only person Climerio had found, a guy named Alcino, an unemployed carpenter and friend of the snitch Soares, was certainly not qualified. Some days earlier, Climerio had gone with Soares and Alcino to a rally held by the Crow in Barra Mansa. Soares’s car had broken down and they got to the rally late. “That’s the man there,” Climerio had said, pointing to Lacerda, who was giving a speech. Alcino had hesitated when he saw that Lacerda was not some good-for-nothing like Naval, a guy Soares had asked him to kill because he suspected he was his wife’s lover. Naval was standing at the Pavuna train station; Alcino shot and killed a stranger near Naval, who wasn’t hit. Climerio was convinced that Alcino wasn’t right for that undertaking, but in order not to lose the confidence of his boss, he didn’t relate the fiasco at Barra Mansa when he returned to Rio. He had won Gregório’s confidence when he told him the names of Lacerda’s armed bodyguards, all or almost all of them majors in the air force: Fontenelle, Borges, Del Tedesco, Vaz. There was also one Carrera, who Climerio thought was in the army, and a Balthazar, in the navy. They were rabid Lacerdists and carried large-caliber weapons. Then the Black Angel had said that if Lacerda’s gunmen used.45s, the man chosen by Climerio would have to do the same. “Don’t worry, chief. Leave it to me,” Climerio had replied.

Now, rubbing the smallpox scars on his face, which he always did when nervous, he repeated the same phrase: “Leave it to me, chief.”