Brazil abolished slavery in 1888.
The imperial family and the majority of the people were in favor of the act.
The great landowners were appalled. Who’d pick their cotton? Cut their sugarcane? Harvest their coffee?
In desperation, they turned from Africa to the Orient, solving their labor problem by importing tens of thousands of Japanese peasants to work as indentured servants. And work they did, for the five years it took them to fulfill their con-tractual obligations. Then they gravitated to the great cities, struck out on their own, and worked even harder. So hard, in fact, that many of the new immigrants made modest fortunes.
By the end of the twentieth century, Brazilians of Japanese descent were doctors, lawyers, politicians, and university professors. They were businessmen, firemen, and policemen like Yoshiro Tanaka. And they’d transformed Sao Paulo into a city that boasted more ethnic Japanese than any place out-side of the home islands.
Liberdade, the heart of the Oriental district, had become fully as large, and equally as colorful, as San Francisco’s Chinatown.
It was there, in Liberdade, under a red Shinto arch that marks the entrance to the neighborhood that Gilda and Hector agreed to meet. Hector arrived fifteen minutes early. Gilda was spot on time. He took her arm and led her to a little restaurant that was patronized almost exclusively by the locals. It was a narrow, but very deep establishment, wedged between a grocery smelling of dried seaweed and a shop displaying a suit of samurai armor. They were guided to the sole unoccu-pied table.
Two hours later, four customers remained: Gilda, Hector, a man in a blue suit, and a woman in a kimono. The woman was seated Japanese-fashion, perched high on her chair, calves doubled under thighs, her white-crowned head only a few centimeters from that of the man in the suit. He looked to be less than half her age, possibly her son, perhaps her grandson. They were murmuring softly in Japanese.
Gilda put down her chopsticks, picked up her rectangular box of cold sake, and managed to sip from it without drib-bling anything on her chin, a trick that Hector, for all the time he’d spent in establishments like this one, had yet to master.
The waiter came to take Gilda’s plate, noticed there were still two pieces of tuna on it, and asked if she was finished. Gilda shook her head.
“Not quite,” she said.
“I think he wants to close,” Hector said, when the waiter was gone.
“Close?” Gilda blinked and looked at her watch. “Nossa,” she said. “Five to three already? I have to get back.”
She popped another piece of sashimi into her mouth, put down her chopsticks, and reached for her purse.
Hector realized, with something of a shock, that they hadn’t gotten around to discussing the findings of the med-ical examiner’s office. And that, ostensibly, was the reason for the lunch.
“I sent the report to your office,” she said, as if she could read his mind. “It’ll probably be waiting for you when you get back.”
“It’s finished?”
“It’s finished.”
“That was quick.”
“I haven’t slept much over the last couple of days.”
That explained the dark circles under her eyes, circles that hadn’t been there the first time he’d met her.
“When I was excavating the bodies,” she said, “long before we had DNA results, I just knew I was looking at par-ents buried with their children. And I knew it was murder. It revolts me. I want to see whoever did this put into a cage.”
“I sometimes wish we had a death penalty in this country.”
“I don’t.”
He would have liked to debate that one. He picked up his box of sake, paused with it halfway to his lips, decided he’d done too much dribbling for one day, and put it down.
“So the DNA results are in?” he said.
She bobbed her head, fidgeted in her chair, looked again at her watch.
“All part of the report,” she said. “The corpses interred in common graves were blood related: mothers or fathers, sometimes both, buried with their children.”
Hector reflected on the many corpses she must have seen, thought again how it must take a strong stomach to be a medical examiner. He’d been exposed to no more than thirty murder victims in the course of his career, and the image of every one was burned into his brain. He could seldom face lunch or dinner after visiting a murder scene.
“Let me ask you something else,” he said.
“Ask away, but be quick about it. I told Paulo we’d be lunching together. He says I’m allowed to answer all your questions.”
“Including what you were starting to say when he cut you off?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What was it?”
Gilda raised a hand, caught the waiter’s attention, and made a gesture as if she were writing on a pad. He hurried over to their table.
“Coffee?” he said. “Dessert? I’ve got a nice sweet made from beans.”
Both shook their heads.
“Just the check,” Hector said.
The waiter smiled in satisfaction, gave a little bow, and hurried off. Gilda watched his retreating back for a moment, and then fixed her gray-green eyes on Hector.
“Every corpse had a split sternum,” she said.
“A split what?”
“Sternum. Breastbone. Cut through from top to bottom. Like this.”
She reached across the tiny table and traced a vertical line on his chest, dividing his ribs. It was a strangely intimate ges-ture. He had a sudden attack of gooseflesh and couldn’t be sure what was causing it, her words or her touch.
“Paulo cut me off because we weren’t sure, then, that the sternum-cutting applied to all of the corpses. It would have been premature to suggest that it did.”
“What reason could anyone have for doing something like that?”
“Only one I can think of: to obtain access to something behind the ribs.”
“The heart, maybe?”
“Maybe.”
Hector recalled a woodcut he’d once seen of a victim bent backward over an altar while an Aztec priest ripped the heart out of his chest.
“Seems to reinforce the idea of ritual killing,” he said.
She hesitated for a moment. “Possibly,” she said. “But, if you really want me to make a wild and unsubstantiated guess. .”
“Live dangerously.”
“A doctor did it.”
“A doctor?”
“I’ll rephrase that. Not just a doctor. A surgeon. He or she did a clean job of it, and he or she used a saw.”
“A saw?”
“A sternal saw. It’s a device with an electric motor and a blade that moves like this,”-she waved a finger up and down in the air-“a medical instrument that has only one purpose, to open the chest cavity.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Sternal saws have a unique signature. Under a micro-scope, the serrations stick out like a Caucasian in this neigh-borhood. They’re unmistakable.”
The waiter appeared with the check. Hector took out a credit card and slipped it into the leather cover embossed with the name of the restaurant. “So, if it’s not a cult thing,” he said when the waiter was gone, “if it’s not some kind of ritual murder, what else could it be?”
“We don’t-”
“Speculate. Yeah, I know.”
“How did you know what I was going to say?”
“You started with a we. That’s the medical examiner’s office talking.”
She sighed.
“Look,” she said, “you may not like it, but I think Paulo’s right. We’re supposed to deal in facts. If we start speculating, there’d be no end to it. Experience has taught us it’s better if we just tell you guys what we know, and you come up with a hypothesis to explain it.”
The waiter came back. Hector scrutinized the bill and the accompanying credit card slip.
“Service included?”
“Sim, Senhor.”
Hector scrawled his signature. The waiter thanked him, detached the customer’s copy of the slip, and wished them both a pleasant afternoon.
“Mind you,” she said, when they were alone again, “I don’t think you can rule out ritual murder just because the killers used a saw. The cult thing remains a distinct possibil-ity; I’m not saying it isn’t, but. .”
“But you have another theory?”
“Yes.”
“How about sharing? Not the cop and the medical exam-iner, just a young couple having a romantic lunch?”
“Romantic lunch, huh? What would your namorada have to say about that?”
“Was there a question behind that question?”
“Absolutely.”
“If it was what I think it was, the answer is no. I haven’t got a namorada.”
“It was what you think it was. You’re not gay?”
“No.”
“So?” She made that writing gesture again.
He reached into his pocket, pulled out his notebook, and handed her a pen. She jotted down her address and tele-phone number.
“It’s the building on the corner with Rua Aracaju,” she said. “Fourth floor.”
“Thursday night?”
“Friday’s better.”
“Eight o’clock?”
“Fine.”
She’d released her purse, left it on her lap. Now, she picked it up again and stood.
He remained glued to his chair.
“You’re not going to tell me, are you?” he said.
“Maybe on Friday. It will give you something to look for-ward to.”
“I already have something to look forward to.”
“Which is?”
“Seeing you.”
“There. That wasn’t so hard, was it? You do know how to flatter a girl. You were just holding it in.”
“I wasn’t holding it in.”
“And you can wipe the hurt puppy expression off your face. It’s not going to help. I’m not telling you what my the-ory is, not today at any rate.”
“Why not?”
“I need a second opinion. I have a girlfriend, a specialist. She’s in a position to give me one.”
“What do you need a second opinion for?”
“Someone has to tell me I’m not crazy.”
And before he could ask her what she meant by that, Gilda had turned her back on him and was heading for the door.