Rubem Fonseca - Crimes of August

“No. He’s just got an ulcer.”

“A sick man usually wants a woman to take care of him.”

“Not Alberto. When he gets sick, he hides and doesn’t want to see me.”

“Strange. .”

“He’s a policeman.”

“That explains it. But look, don’t get involved with a policeman. Stay with that rich guy who gives you everything.”

“I think Alberto likes another woman, a high-class hussy.”

“That’s better for you. Let her have him.”

“I’m going to tell you something. I’ve never told this to anybody. I was born and raised in the Tuiuti favela, there close to São Cristóvão. My mother worked, and I took care of my two younger brothers. We went hungry. Sometimes I would go with them, without my mother knowing, to walk in the Quinta da Boa Vista. We would swim in the lake, run on the lawns. It’s the only good memory I have of that time. I stayed in the favela till I was thirteen, when my mother died, and I went to be a nanny in the home of a family in Botafogo.”

“What did your mother die of?”

“Booze. She drank a lot.”

“And your brothers?”

“They went to live with an aunt. I never saw either of them again.”

In reality, she wasn’t sure whether her mother had died or not. At thirteen, Salete had run away from home. She didn’t have the slightest idea what had happened to her mother and her brothers. But she liked to think she was dead. Her mother was a dark-skinned mulatto, almost black, fat, ugly, and ignorant. She feared that one day she would turn out to be alive and show up, like a ghost.

“What about your father? Don’t you have a father?”

“I never knew my father. All I know is that he was a lowlife Portuguese.”

She had been working for two years as a nanny in a house in Copacabana when she met Dona Floripes. She was pushing the baby carriage down the street when a woman came up to her and, after a great deal of conversation, said that if Salete came to work in her house, she could earn much more. But Salete didn’t mention that to the pedicurist.

“The time in the favela was a horror. I suffered a lot before managing to get ahead in life and become what I am today, a fashion model.”

“It’s good to be well-off, isn’t it? After having it so rough, like you.”

“Magalhães is an important man, and he gives me everything. Still, I’d trade it all to live with Alberto. But like I said, he doesn’t love me.”

The pedicurist felt sorry for her client.

“You shouldn’t just give up like that. We have to fight for the man we love. Even if he is a policeman.”

“What does that have to do with it?”

“They’ve got women all over the place and can get killed from one day to the next.”

Before the pedicurist left, Salete gave her, as she always did, the Cinelândia, Grande Hotel and Revista do Rádio magazines that she had already read.

Salete sat on the sofa, thinking, while leafing absentmindedly through the new Cigarra , without seeing even the fashion designs. She thought about what the pedicurist had told her. We have to fight for the man we love.

AT THAT MOMENT, Mattos was lying on his sofa bed listening to La Bohème . He had just seen a photo on the front page of the Tribuna da Imprensa that had greatly disturbed him. The amorous misfortunes of Rodolpho and Mimi, even though continuing to be expressed with emotion by Tebaldi and Di Stefano, had yielded to his cogitations about the Deauville Building murder.

Mattos, though recognizing that he was excessively emotional and impulsive, felt he possessed sufficient clearheadedness and perspicacity to escape the classic traps of the criminal investigator, especially the “snare of logic.” To him, logic was the policeman’s ally, a critical instrument that, in the analysis of disputed situations, allowed one to arrive at knowledge of the truth. Still, just as there was one logic adapted to mathematics and another to metaphysics, one adapted to speculative philosophy and another to empirical research, there was a logic adapted to criminology, which, however, had nothing to do with premises and syllogistic deductions à la Arthur Conan Doyle. In his logic, knowledge of the truth and the understanding of reality could only be achieved by doubting logic itself, and even reality. He admired Hume’s skepticism and regretted that the reading he had done at the university, not only of the Scottish philosopher but also of Berkeley and Hegel, had been so superficial.

He looked again at the large photo of Gregório Fortunato on the front page, with the caption underneath: “Gregório is the patent symbol of the thugs with whom Getúlio Vargas in his fear of the people attempts to surround himself. He represents the primacy of the methods of stilling the voices that disturb the sleep of the great oligarch, who wishes to sleep without nightmares despite his crimes.”

In the photo, Gregório, in a hat, coat, and tie, a white handkerchief in his coat pocket, had his hands around Vargas’s head, as if smoothing the president’s hair. What caught the inspector’s attention, however, was not that public demonstration of the affection of a hired gun for the man he was protecting. It was the bodyguard’s left hand.

The inspector took from his pocket the ring he had found in Gomes Aguiar’s bathroom and the gold tooth. Inexplicably, to him, they were in the same pocket. He hastily placed the gold tooth on the floor, beside the sofa bed. With the ring in his hand, he again looked at the photo in the newspaper, at what truly interested him, the ring finger of Gregório’s left hand, on which could be seen a ring resembling the one he held at that instant. He recalled the conversation he’d had with the doorman Raimundo about a Negro visiting Gomes Aguiar’s apartment the day of the murder. He put this information together with that of the medical examiner Antonio Carlos, according to which the hairs found on the soap from the dead man’s bathroom were from a Negro. The inspector fought the excitement of the hunt that he was experiencing, which resulted as much from the possible discovery and contingent arrest of the one responsible for the crime as from the identity of the suspect. He had to maintain his clearheadedness and confront such indications coldly: they were merely a clue, a lead to be followed like any other.

He picked up the gold tooth and went into the bathroom. Standing before the mirror, he peeled back his lips and put the gold tooth in front of where it had been previously, now occupied by a porcelain incisor. No one remembered anymore, or perhaps no one even knew, for the dentist who did the work had died, that he once had a gold tooth in his mouth. But he didn’t forget.

The music had stopped. Mattos flipped the LP on the turntable. His stomach was hurting. He needed to eat something. As he was opening the refrigerator, the doorbell rang.

“May I come in?” Alice asked.

“Come in.”

The two stood there, in the living room.

“What opera is that?”

“ La Bohème .”

Alice paced from side to side in the small living room.

“Tell me right off what you want to say to me.”

“My husband is Luciana Gomes Aguiar’s lover.”

Alice spoke rapidly, never stopping her pacing.

“That’s what I wanted to tell you that day when we had tea at the Cavé. I had read in the paper that you were investigating her husband’s death.”

“Does your husband know you’re here?”

“No. He went to São Paulo to a boxing match.”

Lomagno had left the night before to attend the fights on Saturday, at the Pacaembu Gymnasium, of two Brazilian pugilists, Ralph Zumbano and Pedro Galasso, against Argentine opponents.

“Sit down, please. Why are you telling me this story of your husband and Luciana Aguiar?”