In 1957, a young architect named Lucio Costa was given the go-ahead to start constructing Brasilia. He pro-jected his country’s new capital as a metropolis for the auto-mobile age, a place where roads and avenues flowed through tunnels and over viaducts, never once meeting at intersec-tions. The way he imagined it, there’d be five hundred thou-sand inhabitants and not a single traffic light.
Half a century later, the population of Brasilia was two and a half million, there were traffic lights galore, and the dream of free-flowing traffic was dead, suffocated under a cloud of gasoline and diesel fumes.
It took Silva forty-two minutes to cover the eight kilo-meters from his office to his home, a two-bedroom affair in a government-owned building. The apartment had been part of Costa’s original project and was considered ancient by Brasilia standards, but Silva liked the high ceilings and ample terrace.
His parking slot was close to the service elevator, so he went up that way, letting himself in by way of a laundry room that divided the kitchen from the maid’s quarters. The quar-ters were entirely occupied by shelves lined with books. Silva and his wife, Irene, didn’t maintain a full-time domestic servant.
They did, however, employ a faixineira. She invariably arrived after Silva had left for work, and left before he returned home. He was, therefore, surprised to find her sit-ting at the kitchen table.
He was even more surprised to find his wife completely sober. It was almost ten minutes to eight, and if Irene had been running true to form, she would have downed enough cachaca by then to slur her speech. As it was, there was only an empty coffee cup in front of her.
Silva kissed his wife, smiled at the faixineira, walked to the stove, and sniffed at the coffeepot. The coffee smelled fresh, but the pot was only lukewarm. He lit the gas.
“Maria de Lourdes,” Irene said to his back, “has a problem.”
The faixineira was a small woman, perhaps in her fifties, perhaps younger, a native of one of those states to the south of Sao Paulo-Parana or Santa Catarina. Silva couldn’t remember which. Her full name was Maria de Lourdes Krups. If it had once been Krupps, which Silva suspected it had, the spelling had fallen victim to an ancestor’s illiteracy or per-haps to the ministrations of some careless clerk in a public registry office.
And if her name-giving forebears had been Caucasian (like their illustrious namesakes, the armaments barons of Essen), Maria de Lourdes had lost that, too. She was a mulata with almond-shaped eyes.
Silva’s coffee was now warm enough to drink. He shut off the gas, poured out a cupful, and took it to the table.
“How can I be of assistance?” he said, somewhat formally.
He’d been raised with servants and was comfortable with them as long as it didn’t involve sitting down for a chat. On the rare occasions like this one, he found it difficult to bridge the social gap, especially with women. Gardeners and drivers were easier. With them, you could always talk about soccer.
Maria de Lourdes looked at her lap.
Silva drained his beverage, and waited.
“Go on,” Irene said to her cleaning woman.
Maria de Lourdes looked at Irene and bit her lower lip.
“It’s about her son,” Irene said. “He’s missing.”
“That’s a matter for-”
“No, it isn’t, Mario. I know what you’re going to say, and it’s not a matter for the policia civil. Listen to her story.” Irene turned to Maria de Lourdes. “Tell him,” she said.
Maria de Lourdes took a deep breath, and then started talking in a rush.
“I didn’t intend to trouble you, Senhor Mario, but I was talking to Dona Irene about it, and she said you might be able to help.”
Irene reached out and offered Maria de Lourdes a sup-porting hand. Maria de Lourdes took it and squeezed. Unlike her husband, Irene had no problem befriending servants. Maria de Lourdes was squeezing hard. Silva could see his wife’s knuckles going white.
“He always wanted to go to America,” Maria de Lourdes continued, speaking more slowly now, her eyes still on her lap, “always been crazy about American things: American music, American movies, even that stupid game where they throw the ball with their hands and knock each other down.”
She stopped talking, as if she’d lost the thread. After a few seconds of silence, Silva gave her a prompt.
“And?”
“And that’s why he decided to sneak into the United States.”
Silva got up from the table and went to the attache case he’d left on the kitchen counter. Maria de Lourdes looked up when she heard the snap-snap of the latches, watched him as he took out a yellow legal pad, and followed him with her eyes as he returned to the table.
“What’s his name?” he said when he’d resumed his seat.
“Norberto. Norberto Krups.”
“No middle name?”
“No.”
“Age?”
“Nineteen.”
“Father’s name?”
Maria de Lourdes drew her mouth into a thin line and shook her head.
“Unknown,” Silva said, making a note, as he had when she’d responded to the other questions.
“I’ll need a picture,” he said.
She opened the hand that wasn’t gripping Irene’s and revealed a small photo, passport sized, the type that could be obtained from machines in bus stations. Damp with her per-spiration, the paper had begun to curl. She offered it to him. He studied the image.
Norberto Krups’s skin was lighter than his mother’s, more milk than coffee in the cafe com leite. The kid’s hair was so badly cut that, if there were penalties for such things, his bar-ber would have been sitting in a cell somewhere. He was wearing a baseball cap with what Silva recognized as the logotype of the New York Yankees baseball team over his uneven shaggy hair. On his T-shirt a red heart acted as a sub-stitute for the English word “love,” and what Norberto Krups loved was New York.
“Can I keep this?” he asked.
Maria de Lourdes nodded.
“I brought it for you. Dona Irene said you’d need one.”
That confirmed Silva’s suspicion that the meeting with him had been some time in the making, but Irene hadn’t said a word about it. He shot a glance at his wife. She appeared to be studying a defect on the stem of her coffee spoon.
He put the photo between two pages of his legal pad and waited for Maria de Lourdes to go on.
She didn’t. She, too, seemed to have taken a sudden interest in Irene’s coffee spoon.
Silva thought he knew why.
“What Norberto did,” he said, “isn’t a crime. We wouldn’t put him in jail for trying to get into the United States. Your son has nothing to fear from Brazilian law.”
That seemed to reassure her. She truly met his eyes for the first time and her voice became more confident.
“There’s a travel agency in Sao Paulo,” she said. “They charged him five thousand dollars. Dollars, not reais.”
“Five thousand dollars? Where did your son get that kind of money?”
“He lived like a monk for over three years, saving every centavo, scraping it together. Worked seventeen, eighteen hours a day. Worked weekends and holidays. Never went to bars. Stopped buying cigarettes.”
“I’m assuming the Americans refused him a visa?”
She nodded.
It was the usual story. The Americans always denied visas to Brazil’s undereducated poor. They were convinced that, as soon as the Norberto Krupses of the world got over their bor-der, they were going to stay. And the Americans didn’t want any more people like Norberto Krups.
“This tourist agency,” Silva asked, “they proposed to smug-gle him through Mexico?”
It was the normal route: a flight to Mexico City, a truck-load of immigrants up to the border to hide for a day, then a mad dash across in the wee hours of the morning.
“I don’t know the details,” she said, toying with her empty cup. “He wouldn’t tell me, said he didn’t want me to worry.”
“What does he do for a living, this son of yours?”
She brightened. “Norberto’s a carpenter,” she said. “Every-body says he’s very good and very fast. He said they need good carpenters in America. He said he could earn twenty dollars an hour.”
The way she said it made twenty dollars an hour sound like a princely sum and as if she didn’t quite believe it.
“You have an address for this travel agency?”
Maria de Lourdes bobbed her head and reached for her purse, old and showing signs of many repairs. Covered with all of those L’s and V’s that were the designer’s trademark, it was an obvious castoff from one of her clients. She fumbled around inside the bag and removed a piece of paper.
“He left this,” she said.
Silva unfolded it, found it to be a receipt from the travel agency. The address was on the Rua Sete de Abril, a busy shopping street in the heart of Sao Paulo.
“May I keep this?”
She nodded.
“Any news of him since he left? Anything at all?”
Again, she reached into her purse. This time she handed him a postcard.
“All going well,” someone had written. “I’ll call you soon.”
An incomprehensible scrawl followed the short message. Silva put a finger on it.
“This is his signature?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
The photograph on the card showed three models in skimpy bathing suits. The legend above them informed the reader that they (and presumably the sender) were having “A Great Time on South Beach.”
Silva was still wearing his jacket. He reached into his breast pocket, retrieved his reading glasses, and subjected both sides of the card to closer scrutiny. The stamp had been canceled in Miami.
“He was going to Miami?”
Maria de Lourdes shook her head.
“He never mentioned Miami,” she said. “He was going to Boston. He has a friend there. Well, not really a friend, but someone he knew, someone he could stay with until he found a job.”
“Do you have the man’s address?”
“No.” Then added quickly, “He said I wouldn’t need it, that he wouldn’t be staying long. He expected to be set up on his own in no time.”
Silva waved the postcard as if he were fanning himself. “No other cards? No letters?”
“No.”
“And the call he refers to?”
“Never came. But. .”
“But what?”
“I don’t have a telephone at home,” she said, “only a cell phone, and it’s new. Somebody stole my other one, took it out of my pocket in the bus. When I went to get a new one, I found a place that was cheaper, but I had to change the number.”
“It’s one of those prepaid things?”
“Yes.”
“So your son would have nowhere to turn if he wanted to discover your new number.”
“I didn’t think about that at the time. But then, when he didn’t write and he didn’t call, I tried to get my old number back. They wouldn’t give it to me.”
“Why not?”
“Someone else had it.”
“Have you tried calling that new number? Telling whoever answers that you’re worried about your son? Telling them he might try to get in touch?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“The first few times the man was nice. Then he got impa-tient. Now he hangs up whenever he hears my voice.”
Probably called him a hundred times, Silva thought, probably drove the guy nuts.
“He could have been picked up by the Americans,” he said. “If that’s the case, they’ll hold him for a while and deport him. They never keep illegal aliens for long. If they did, they wouldn’t have enough room in their detention cen-ters. I suggest you give your son a couple of weeks, maybe a month, to reestablish contact. If he doesn’t, we can talk again.”
He made to rise from the table, but Irene put a hand on his arm, gently pulling him back into his seat.
“Tell him how long it’s been since Norberto left,” she said, looking at Maria de Lourdes.
Maria de Lourdes looked at her, then at Silva.
“Two months,” she said. “It was two months last Tuesday.”