Bento Rosario screwed off the cap and took a tiny sip of water. It loosened his tongue from the roof of his mouth, but did nothing to assuage the dryness in his throat. Still, he had to conserve the little he had. There was less than a centimeter left in the bottle, barely enough for a healthy swallow.
If Silva doesn’t show up sometime soon, he thought, I’m gonna have to decide between thirst and a bullet.
Just then, a mosquito bit him behind the right ear. He reacted instinctively.
Slap.
A mistake. One of the taxi drivers heard the noise and looked toward the bushes where he was hiding. Bento forced himself to lie perfectly still. After a while, the taxi driver went back to his newspaper.
A tour group, headed by a woman with a name tag pinned to the lapel of her bush shirt, came out of the Hotel Tropical. She passed between two taxis and led her charges toward the pier, where the excursion boats were docked.
He wiped his forehead. Partly, it was because of the heat, but he would have been sweating even if the day had been cooler. Bento Rosario was scared to death.
The turnaround in Bento’s life had come with dizzying speed. It was his own fault. It would never have happened if he’d followed his uncle Tarcio’s advice.
“Working for the city is like being in the army,” Tarcio had said.
Bento had never been in the army. He’d escaped compulsory military service because of his flat feet. He had to ask Tarcio for clarification.
“You keep your head down,” Tarcio had explained, “do what you’re told to do, never take initiatives, and never, ever, volunteer for anything.”
Tarcio knew what he was talking about. In the army he’d risen to the rank of master sergeant, and now he’d been on the city payroll for almost three decades. Currently, he had a cushy sinecure in the sewer department, which gave him contacts throughout municipal government. But you needed more than contacts to get a job in Manaus. Contacts only put you in touch with the people who had jobs to give. You still had to bribe them to get one.
When Tarcio told him about the opening, Bento had been anything but enthusiastic.
“Clerk for the municipal police?” he’d said to his uncle. “Sounds boring.”
Tarcio hadn’t liked that. Hell, Bento knew for a fact that he didn’t even like him. He thought his nephew was a prissy little pain in the ass, had told him so more than once. He wouldn’t have lifted a finger to help if Bento’s mother, Tarcio’s kid sister, Arlette, hadn’t bullied him into it.
“It’s the only thing going,” Tarcio said, “and it’s a hell of a lot better than mucking around in other people’s shit, which is where I got my start. Take it or leave it.”
Bento knew what his mother would say if he didn’t take it. He didn’t want to put up with that.
So Tarcio had pulled the strings, and Arlette had paid the bribes, and the next thing Bento knew he had his very own seat behind one of three identical desks in the cellar of the delegacia central.
Alberto Coimbra, his new boss and the head clerk, was a benevolent despot who didn’t look too closely at the time Bento started in the morning and seldom complained if Bento came back half an hour late from lunch, both of which were big pluses. Bento had always found it difficult to wake up early, and he loved long lunches.
Another plus was that Coimbra generally left everybody to do their own thing. He didn’t go hanging over your shoulder, double-checking every damned piece of paper and file. The last thing Bento had expected was that he’d incur Coimbra’s wrath by taking a bit of initiative. Tarcio had clearly told him initiative was a no-no, but what did Tarcio know? There was a considerable difference between the sewer department and the municipal police, right?
Wrong. Coimbra had been furious.
“Why didn’t you talk to me first?” he’d said, his face so close to Bento’s that Bento could feel little drops of spittle while Coimbra was shouting at him. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
“I just answered a query. I thought you’d be pleased. I thought-”
“You’re not paid to think. You’re paid to do. I’m paid to think.”
Bento didn’t get it at first. All he’d done was respond to an E-mail from the federal police in Brasilia. The E-mail had a photo attached. The federals wanted to know if they had a file on anyone who looked like the man in the photo.
Simple.
And easy for Bento, who had a good eye for faces.
He’d started with the “A’s” and, within minutes, he’d come up with a match. The guy’s name was Damiao Rodrigues, but somebody had misfiled his jacket under the A’s instead of under the R’s where it belonged.
By the time Coimbra got back from his afternoon coffee break, which usually involved cachaca instead of coffee and generally went on for an hour or more, Bento had already shot off a reply to the federal cops and put a copy of that reply onto Coimbra’s desk. Coimbra’s reaction had been swift and terrible.
First, he looked at the E-mail. Next, he unlocked a drawer of his desk, took out a piece of paper and ran his finger down the page. Then his face turned red.
He sprang to his feet and came storming over.
After Coimbra spat all over him, Bento took the wise course and apologized for thinking. But Coimbra wasn’t having it.
“Apologies don’t cut it,” he said. “This is more serious than you know. I have to see the chief. Don’t move until I get back.”
Bento hadn’t moved.
Five minutes later, Coimbra swept back into the room, took him by the arm and led him up to the chief’s office.
“We already got an answer to your fucking E-mail,” the chief said.
Those were the first words the chief had ever spoken to him. Bento had never even been introduced to Chief Pinto, much less seen the inside of his office. He didn’t get much of a chance to see it that day either. The chief didn’t tell him to sit down.
“You, Rosario, are a first-class fuckup. I should fire your ass right now.”
“But… why?”
The chief looked at Coimbra.
“He wants to know why,” he said. “Jesus.”
“Jesus,” Coimbra echoed.
The chief looked back at Bento.
“Because you fucking ignored your instructions, that’s why!”
“You’re supposed to come to me first,” Coimbra said. “You’re supposed to come to me whenever any outsider asks for information from our archives. You’ve been told that.”
Bento hadn’t been told any such thing. Coimbra was covering his ass. Bento opened his mouth to defend himself, but when he saw the way Coimbra was looking at him, he shut it again. If he lost his job, it was going to reflect on his uncle Tarcio, which meant his uncle Tarcio was going to be pissed. And not only that, his mother’s hard-earned money would be right down the drain. It was time to eat crow, and he did.
“I… forgot,” he said.
Again, the chief looked at Coimbra. “He forgot. He fucking forgot.”
Coimbra shot his eyes toward the ceiling as if asking God for patience.
Pinto shifted his attention back to Bento. “Clean out your desk,” he said. “Don’t leave anything behind. You’re on unpaid leave until further notice.”
“Unpaid-”
“Leave. Something wrong with your ears?”
“No, Senhor. Ah…”
“What?”
“May I ask the chief when I might be permitted to come back?”
He’d addressed the chief, but used his title, like he’d seen in war movies. You piss anybody off, for any reason, you act like you’re in the army, Tarcio had told him.
Coimbra and the chief exchanged a glance. The chief hesitated then said, “You never heard of Damiao Rodrigues, and there was no file, right?”
“ Sim, Senhor,” Bento said, smartly. “Unknown name. No file.”
The chief grunted.
“All right,” he said. “Find someplace where you can stay. Don’t tell anybody where it is. I don’t want those federals to go looking for you, but if they do, I sure as hell don’t want them to find you. Call Coimbra in a week or so. If everything has blown over by then, you can come back. If not, you stay away longer.”
Bento tried to be a good cop. He may have been only a clerk, but he liked to think of himself as a cop, and a cop followed orders. He went to his desk, cleaned it out and left the building. Joel Lopes, his new best friend, tried to ask him what happened, but Bento told him he wasn’t allowed to talk about it.
Only later did he realize what it all meant. It meant there were felons to whom the chief was extending his protection. It meant, in short, that the chief was a crook. But, at the time, Bento was so shocked he didn’t take time to think. He simply went home, packed a bag, and told his mother he had orders directly from the chief. He wasn’t permitted to tell her where he was going.
She wouldn’t have approved if he had.
He went to Samuel, his mother’s ex-husband, Bento’s stepfather for almost five years. Samuel had no children of his own-none he could be sure of, anyway. But it wasn’t from lack of distributing his seed. Samuel was a man who couldn’t be content with one woman, so he always had several at a time. When Arlette, Bento’s mother, found out about what she thought was Samuel’s second extramarital affair, although it was really more like his fifteenth, she’d thrown him out. Literally.
Samuel worked in a fish shop, and never lifted anything heavier than a pacu. Arlette worked in the central market, shifting wooden boxes of vegetables. She was half a head taller than Samuel and thirty kilograms heavier. The night she evicted him, he went flying from the front door of the house and halfway across the street, hit his head on the cobblestones, and lay there, stunned, while she threw the contents of his dresser drawers on top of him.
Bento had been fourteen at the time. He’d adopted Samuel as a father figure and was sorry to see him go. So sorry, in fact, that within a month he’d gone to the fish shop, discovered where Samuel was living, and had been clandestinely visiting him ever since. So when Bento was ordered to go underground, Samuel’s home was the logical choice. It was a little cramped because Samuel was living with a widow and her five children, but the widow was a friendly soul, and she did her best to make Bento feel welcome.
Bento was twenty-one years old, an only child, and had never lived anywhere except with his mother. After a week of being away, he’d come to miss her a great deal. He crept back to her house in the middle of the night and was about to tap on the door when a bullet smashed into the doorjamb above his head. Nobody had ever fired a shot at Bento Rosario. He didn’t, at first, realize what it was. Then another shot rang out. That one missed as well, probably because the street was dark, and the shooter couldn’t draw a proper bead over his sights.
Bento took off like a gazelle. He knew every alley, every back street of his neighborhood, which his pursuer apparently didn’t, so it wasn’t long before he’d gotten clean away. He hadn’t dared to go back that night, or even the next. Bento couldn’t think of a reason why anyone would want to kill him. He concluded that the assault had been a robbery attempt. But that was before Samuel brought the newspaper home.
On the morning of the third day after the shooting incident, Samuel had been using a sheet of two-day-old newsprint from the Diario de Manaus to wrap a fish for a waiting customer. He’d just about finished the job, when an article less than ten centimeters high caught his eye.
Woman murdered, the headline read.
Samuel read further and his jaw dropped. He wrapped the fish in another sheet, took off his apron, and asked one of his colleagues to cover for him. It was less than a five-minute run to the widow’s place. Samuel found his erstwhile stepson watching a cartoon show on television and shoved the article, now reeking strongly of fish, under his nose.
Below the headline, and after giving Bento’s mother’s name and stating her age, the journalist went on to write:
… was tortured and murdered sometime in the early hours of the morning, probably in an attempt to get her to reveal the whereabouts of her valuables.
Bento was devastated. What kind of valuables could thieves hope to find in the shack of a box-shifter who worked in the Municipal Market? It didn’t add up.
But there was another explanation that made sense: that they’d been trying to get her to reveal Bento’s whereabouts. Originally, the chief had wanted him to go away for a while. Now, it looked as if he wanted him to go away permanently. Bento was frightened, so frightened that he was staring at another article on the page for at least a minute before it registered: Mario Silva, the well-known Chief Inspector of the Federal Police was in town and staying at the Hotel Tropical. And right then and there, in the midst of his fear and grief, Bento experienced an epiphany: the federal police had dropped him in the shit; the federal police were the ones who were going to pull him out of it. He needed protection. He needed to get to Silva.