“She said it was their life’s savings,” Hector reported to his uncle two hours later.
“And pigs have wings,” Silva said.
“When I asked her why she didn’t keep the money in a bank, she said they didn’t trust banks. Not after Collor.”
“Oh, please,” Silva said.
Fernando Collor had assumed the presidency of Brazil in 1989, a time of economic turmoil. His first significant act in office had been to freeze withdrawals from private bank accounts in an attempt to contain hyperinflation. People eventually got most of their money back, but it took a year. It took much longer for them to get over the fear of it hap-pening again.
But hyperinflation was now a thing of the past. Faith in the fiscal responsibility of government had been restored. Anyone who could justify where their money came from, and who wasn’t earning interest on it, was a fool. Tanaka hadn’t struck Silva as a fool.
“She’s a piece of work,” Hector went on, still somewhat shaken by his confrontation with Tanaka’s wife. “For a moment, I thought she was going to jump me. She outweighs me by God knows how many kilos. I started wishing I’d brought Arnaldo.”
“I fail to understand why you went over there on your own. You know you’re not supposed to do things like that.”
“I had no idea of what I was getting into,” Hector said, his tone defensive. “I’d pictured a visit to a bereaved widow, not an angry rhinoceros.”
“You should have brought Babyface.”
“If she’d wanted to, she could have snapped Babyface like a matchstick. Even Arnaldo would have had trouble if she’d decided to make a fight of it.”
“But she didn’t.”
“In the end, she didn’t. When I found the cash, she just collapsed. It was like letting air out of a balloon. But then she started thinking about how she’s gonna get it back.”
“And you know that because?”
“She started yelping about a receipt, made me count it twice, sat there watching me like a hawk while I did it. Before we even started, she called the office to verify my identity, make sure I was who I said I was. Then she put me on the line to talk to Babyface.”
“Why Babyface?”
“He was the guy I told her to ask for. She got me to talk to him, and then she took the phone back so she could hear his reaction to my voice. She made him give her a question that only Hector Costa would know the answer to.”
“What was the question?”
“That’s not important.”
“What was the question?”
“Okay, okay. The question was, what is the eye color of the assistant medical examiner who works with Dr. Couto?”
“I seem to recall that Babyface is the office expert on peo-ple’s love lives. You think he was suggesting something?”
Hector didn’t deign to respond to that. “Senhora Tanaka wouldn’t take my word for the office’s number, either. She looked it up in her telephone book.”
“What kind of money are we talking about here?”
“Ninety-four thousand American dollars. Rosa and Danusa are ranking the serial numbers as I speak, but there doesn’t appear to be any sequence. All the bills are old. Chances of tracing them are about nil.”
“So there’s no way we can prove ill-gotten gains? The lady is going to get it all back?”
“So it appears, deserving creature that she is. A hundred thousand dollars in the closet, and in the beginning of our conversation all she did was bitch about her paltry pension. You know what I think?”
“What?”
“Between being married to that woman, and being where he is now, Tanaka is better off dead.”