In the largest city south of the equator, springtime is generally too warm for comfort and the spring of 1978 was no exception. In those days, automobile emission standards had yet to be established. To make it worse, a thermal inversion persisted over the city for twenty-nine of October's thirty-one days. The resulting smog reduced visibility to less than 500 meters. Eyes stung. People buried their noses in handkerchiefs and addressed each other with gravelly voices emerging out of irritated throats. In Liberdade, the Japanese neighborhood, residents took to wearing surgical masks. The black waters of the Tiete, the river that flowed in a sluggish crescent around the city's western boundaries, generated vapors strong enough to bring nausea to queasy stomachs. Socks, clean and white in the morning, were peeled off at night, begrimed with black soot so fine that it penetrated shoe leather. The smell of rotting garbage hung in the air. It was a typical springtime in Sao Paulo.
Back in those days, long years before the bishop's murder, Mario Silva was at peace with the world. His legal training was behind him. So, too, was the exam that admitted him to the OAB, the Brazilian Bar Association.
In the week before his world fell apart, he'd spent his days setting up a law practice. Nights were reserved for courting Irene Camargo, a petite brunette he'd met in law school.
The twelfth of October, Irene's twenty-second birthday, was an event her parents had insisted she celebrate at home. The young couple reserved the night of the thirteenth for themselves. Friday the thirteenth. Silva didn't give the portentousness of that a second thought until much later.
The evening began well. They dined at the Ca d'Oro, one of Sao Paulo's finest restaurants, and one that Mario Silva avoided forever after. Next, they drove out onto the Rapouso Tavares, a highway lined with high-rotation motels. Silva and Irene had to wait in a long line before they could pass through one of the dimly lit kiosks. They put the car into the enclosed garage, ordered a bottle of champagne, and frolicked in the whirlpool bath while the tiny sauna came up to temperature. Afterward, they lingered in bed to talk.
It was almost 4:00 by the time Silva dropped her off, approaching 4:20, when he arrived at the house he shared with his parents. In the driveway, where his father's big Ford Galaxy should have been, was a black and white sedan. Leaning against it, puffing on cigarettes, were two men in uniform. They squinted in the glare from Silva's headlamps and then stood upright. In the seconds before he cut the lights, Silva noticed the seal of the city of Sao Paulo and the words POLICIA MUNICIPAL painted on the car. The lamp over his front door was dim, but it cast enough light to read their expressions. Those expressions were grim.
"You Mario Silva?" the older cop asked, not unkindly. He had a protuberant blue vein on his forehead, just below the hairline.
"Yes."
"You got a sister named Carla?"
"What is it? What happened to her?"
The cop pursed his lips. "Nothing," he said. "Nothing's happened to her. Not as far as I know. Do you know where she is?"
"Probably at home, asleep."
"She doesn't live here?"
"No. She's married. She lives with her husband. What's this all about?"
The cop threw his cigarette to the macadam and ground out the glowing butt with his heel. "Sergeant Mancuso," he said, extending a hand, "Sao Paulo PD." His palm was moist. "This is Officer Branco," he continued. The younger cop nodded, but didn't offer to shake hands.
"Is it about my parents?"
Mancuso gave a little nod.
"Your mother's in the hospital," he said, then added quickly, "She's fine. She's going to be okay, but your father…"
He made a little grunting noise in his throat.
"What? What about my father?"
Mancuso reached out his hand, gripped Silva's upper arm and gave him a squeeze of sympathy. The younger cop, fat and with a baby face that made him look like a cherub, answered Silva's question.
"They shot him."
"Shot him? Is he-"
"Dead," the cherub said, bluntly.
Mancuso, the older cop, bit his lower lip. Even in the pale light, Silva could see the lip turning white.
"Dead?" Silva blinked, trying to get his head around the idea. After a moment, he said, "Who did it?"
Mancuso gave his arm a final squeeze and let go. "How about we go inside?"
In a daze, Silva unlocked the front door and led the way into the living room. Without being invited, the cherub sat down on the couch. Mancuso remained standing. Silva walked over to the piano, picked up the wedding picture of his parents and stared at it. "How did it happen?" he asked, trying to get his head around what they were telling him.
"Your dad screwed up, Senhor Silva," the cherub said. "He stopped for a red light."
Silva felt a sudden flash of anger. He looked up. "I'm sorry, Officer. What was your name again?"
"Branco."
"My father always stopped for red lights, Officer Branco."
"Yeah? Tell me something, Senhor Silva. How long did he live in this town?"
"All his life. He was born here."
"A native-born Paulista, huh? Then he should have known better. You can't stop for a red light. Not after midnight. The best thing is to slow down and keep rolling. That's what most people do."
"I know what most people do, Officer, but my father isn't…" Silva swallowed "… wasn't like that. As far as I know, he never broke a law in his life, never even got a speeding ticket."
"Too bad everybody's not like him," Mancuso said.
Silva searched the older cop's face for a sign of irony. There wasn't one. He put the photo back on the piano. "Where's my mother?"
"At the Hospital das Clinicas. They got her under sedation," the cherub said, "so it's not going to make any difference to her whether you get there in twenty minutes or two hours. Why don't you sit down a little? I'll tell you the rest."
"I'll stand."
"Suit yourself, but when I finish you're going to wish you were sitting."
Mancuso narrowed his eyes at his partner. "That's enough, Paulo," he said. "Let me tell it."
"Well, excuse me," the cherub said petulantly, and crossed his arms in front of his chest.
Mancuso turned his back on him and addressed Silva. "Your mother was pretty hysterical before they put her under," he said, "so we still don't have all the details. Basically, the story is this: Your parents were coming home from some kind of a party-"
"A charity affair," Silva said. "A dinner to raise funds for a new wing at Nossa Senhora de Misericordia. My father is… was a doctor there."
"Right. So they were coming home, and your old man stopped for a red light, and two elements came up on your mother's side, tapped on the window and pointed a handgun at her head. Your father did the right thing. He didn't resist. I mean, it's only money, right? No matter how much they take, it isn't worth losing your life for. We always tell people-"
"Please finish the story, Sergeant."
"Okay. So your father unlocked the door. The two perps hopped into the back seat. Your mom said the guy holding the gun put the muzzle up against your father's neck, like this."
Mancuso walked around behind his partner and demonstrated, putting the tip of his extended index finger up to the back of the cherub's neck. The cherub didn't move, kept his cold eyes fixed on Silva.
Silva shook his head in disbelief. "And shot him? Shot him just like that? With no warning? For no reason? For nothing?
"No," the cherub said, apparently finding it impossible to keep his mouth shut. "Not then. The punk told him to drive up to the Serra de Cantareira."
The Serra, a mountain range that looked down on the city from the north, was a place of unpaved roads, few houses, and thick vegetation. There were monkeys up there and brightly colored tropical birds.
"Why? Why the Serra de Cantareira?"
"Yeah, well, I was getting to that," Mancuso resumed. He looked pained. "It's isolated. There wouldn't be anybody around at that time of night. They weren't likely to get interrupted."
"What do you mean `interrupted'?"
"They… well; first they took everything of any value, money, watches, jewelry. Then they told both of your folks to get out of the car."
The cop paused to light a cigarette. He didn't bother to ask Silva if he minded. It was the 1970s. Nobody asked back then. He took a deep drag, expelled the smoke and looked around for an ashtray. There was one on the coffee table. He leaned over and dropped the extinguished match into it.
Silva was about to snap at him to finish the goddamned story when he realized that the cop was stalling for time, trying to find a gentle, less painful way to say what he had to say.
Mancuso couldn't find one. In the end, he just blurted it out, "They raped her."
"They what?"
"Raped her."
"Sergeant Mancuso, my mother is fifty-three years old. She's overweight, she's diabetic-"
"They wanted your father to stand there and watch it," Mancuso said, talking faster now, eager to get it over with. "He wouldn't have it. He went after the guy who was holding her down. The other guy shot him twice in the head. It was quick. He didn't suffer, didn't live long enough to see what they did to her."
Silva put his hands over his eyes and started to cry.
Mancuso stood and put a hand on his shoulder. "But your mother's okay. You hear me? She's okay. They took the car. We're looking for it. It's one of those big Ford Galaxies, right?"
Silva nodded.
"There aren't too many of them," Mancuso said, "so they're easy to spot. If they hold on to it for any time at all, we're going to nail them."
At that moment, Silva couldn't have cared less about the two punks. "And… my mother. What happened then?"
"When they were… done, she managed to get herself back to the main road."
"She walked?"
"Crawled is more like it," the cherub said.
"Shut up, Paulo," Mancuso said. "There's not much traffic up there after nine or ten at night and she was… well, she was bleeding, so she just didn't have it in her to go any further. She propped herself up under a streetlight and started waving at the cars that went by. After a while, somebody had the guts to stop."
"Who?"
"We don't know. He called it in from a phone booth, left her by the side of the road, told us where to find her, said he didn't want to get involved. It happens. At least he stopped for a look. Not everybody would have."
Dr. Silva's Galaxy was found later that morning abandoned on a suburban back street. The killers had removed the tires. They'd also taken the radio. If there were any latent fingerprints, the cops didn't find them. The truth of the matter was they hardly tried.
Silva's parents weren't particularly prominent people. The incident drew no bold headlines. Sao Paulo was one of the major murder capitals of the world, and the municipal police had other priorities.
Silva was told that such things are solved within the first 48 hours or not at all. It was something he refused to accept. If the cops wouldn't do anything about it, Silva was bound and determined that he would. He questioned his mother again and again. There were some things she couldn't bring herself to talk about, others that her son couldn't bring himself to ask, but a few salient facts emerged: both men were mulattos, in their twenties, clean-shaven, curly haired. Both had distinctive accents. They were from the northeast, Bahia perhaps, or one of the neighboring states. One of them had a tattoo, a snake that started on his chest, wrapped once around his neck, and ended in a protruding tongue that pointed at the lobe of his left ear. The other one, a man missing a couple of his front teeth, had done the shooting.
The cops' initial questioning hadn't brought out the details about the snake or the teeth. Silva thought they were important clues. The investigators didn't.
"It'd be different if we had something to cross-reference," a detective named Valdez told him, "like a list of all the punks with tattoos, or all the punks with dental problems. But we don't. And we sure as hell don't have the manpower to put people on the street trying to find somebody who knows somebody with a tattoo like that. Best thing for your mother to do is to put it all behind her, put the whole thing out of her mind. Jesus Christ! It's been three weeks already, and that's much too long. Let me level with you, Senhor Silva, we haven't got one chance in a million of catching these guys, and it's not going to do her any good to keep dwelling on what happened to her."
Detective Valdez was right. It didn't do Carla Silva any good at all, but she was unable to dwell upon anything else.
For three months, she cried day and night. Then she ingested twenty of the sleeping pills she'd been hoarding. Silva laid her to rest in the family crypt, turned his back on a legal career, and joined the Federal Police.