Rubem Fonseca - Crimes of August

“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.

Severino served drinks and hors d’oeuvres while the Freitas independents analyzed the situation.

“What do you think about Lutero voluntarily going to the Republic of Galeão”—an ironic reference to the power of the Air Force High Command—“to be interrogated? Lodi refused to accept the writ and invoked his congressional immunities.”

“Getúlio told Lutero to go,” said Freitas. “Lutero voluntarily waived his immunities, temporarily, and went to Galeão accompanied by Adroaldo Mesquita da Costa, vice president of the Chamber of Deputies. Adroaldo told me, in confidence, what happened. Colonel Adyl de Oliveira did not deign to receive the deputy. He sent a subordinate, a major or colonel named Toledo, to interrogate him. When they got there, Toledo handed Lutero a sheet of paper, saying, ‘Read this, deputy.’ It was Gregório’s statement from the interrogation he underwent. Dumbstruck — that was the term he used later with Adroaldo — Lutero read what was written. Gregório said, dotting all the i ’s and crossing all the t ’s, that the brains behind the Tonelero crime was he, Lutero. In the deposition Gregório made inelegant references to Getúlio. Lutero protested, claiming that the statements were nothing but vile slander, a plot to involve his name and thus harm his father, that the attack merited the strongest possible repudiation from the president, and that no one was more committed than he to the complete uncovering of the events and the severest punishment of those responsible. Adroaldo says that Lutero was quite eloquent, but knowing as we do that Lutero was never capable of improvising even slightly bearable oratorical flights, everything indicates that he was speaking a text written by someone else.”

“Probably by Tancredo Neves. It’s known that Lutero consulted that sly fox before agreeing to the deposition.”

Severino served more drinks and hors d’oeuvres.