Silva called Hector when they were passing the Carrefour.
“Just keep coming until you see the sign,” Hector said. “It’s blue and white, and it flashes. You can’t miss it.”
Indeed, they couldn’t. The huge sign was on a concrete pillar ten meters high. Sky blue and white are the Argentinean national colors. The Bariloche for which the motel had been named is an Argentinean winter resort where much of the architecture appears to be Swiss, or German. The motel, doing its best not to look out of place on a subtropical hillside, and failing miserably in the attempt, consisted of about thirty small chalets surrounded by a cinder-block wall. They went through the untended main gate and found themselves surrounded by uniformed cops, technicians, detectives with badges dangling from lanyards, gawkers, and the ladies and gentlemen of the press.
Silva got out of the car. Goncalves went off to face the challenge of finding a place to park.
Silva was immediately set upon. Hector, springing forward to rescue his uncle from the gang of reporters, took him by the arm. A uniformed cop lifted the yellow crime-scene tape so they could pass under it. That brought them out of the crush, but not beyond the cacophony of shouted questions. The journalists wanted to know who the victim was, whether there was more than one of them, how he, she, or they had been killed, when Silva was going to be available for comment.
The tenor of their questions indicated that they were being kept in the dark, for which Silva gave silent thanks.
“Show me,” he said.
“That’s the garage,” Hector said, pointing it out.
Most high-turnover establishments had garages. Clients didn’t want to run the risk of having their vehicles spotted by spouses, acquaintances, or private detectives.
Brazilian motels, by and large, are not places where one stops with one’s family to spend a night. You can do so in a pinch, but you’re still going to have to pay by the hour and put up with a lot of squeaking, banging, and groaning from your neighbors.
The higher-class places offered such amenities as in-room saunas and whirlpool baths. The Bariloche was at the other end of the scale, a no-frills establishment, designed to provide the basics and appeal to the frugal.
“The ME has only been here for about twenty minutes,” Hector said. “He’s still at it.”
“Paulo?” Silva was hoping it would be his friend, Paulo Couto, Sao Paulo’s chief medical examiner.
Hector shook his head. “Plinio Setubal, a friend of Gilda’s.”
“Don’t know him.”
“Young, but good.”
“Who’s here from the civil police?”
“The man himself.”
“Janus Prado?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
Unlike Goncalves, both Silva and his nephew liked Sao Paulo’s head of Homicide.
“He’s agreed to keep it quiet,” Hector said, “until we can tell Sampaio. But he wants it to be soon.”
“Understandable. Let’s get to it.”
Inside the ersatz chalet, a couple of uniformed cops were watching a video on the TV. The sound were turned down, but you didn’t need sound to follow the action. It was that kind of video.
Near the far wall, a guy in green scrubs had Luis Mansur’s pants down to his ankles and was removing a thermometer from the corpse’s rectum.
Between the body and the door, Janus Prado was talking to a man with an unruly mop of hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and a paunch.
Prado spotted Silva and came over to extend a hand. The other man trotted along behind, as if he were Janus’s pet.
“Mario,” the civil cop said, nodding agreeably.
“Janus. How’s life?”
“People ask me that all the time. You know what I tell them? Life is fragile. Life is a question of luck. Some filho da puta could come along and snuff you just like that.” He snapped his fingers.
“If Arnaldo was here,” Silva said, “he’d call you a philosopher.”
“No,” Prado said, “he wouldn’t. If Nunes was here, he’d call me a bullshit artist. I ever tell you I threw a party when he left Sao Paulo?”
“ You threw a party for Arnaldo?”
“ He wasn’t invited. The party was for the rest of us. I still owe you one for hauling him off to Brasilia and getting him out of my hair.”
“I’ll tell him you sent your regards.”
“I didn’t.” Prado took the arm of the man behind him and brought him forward. “This is Gabriel Rocha,” he said. “He has a story to tell. Gabriel, this is Chief Inspector Silva of the Federal Police. Tell the nice man what you saw.”
Rocha, who wasn’t sure how he was supposed to react to the preceding exchange and consequently had kept his eyes on Silva’s left earlobe, now looked him full in the face.
“I tried to tell him,” he said, his Portuguese thick with the cadences of the Northeast, “but he wouldn’t listen.”
“Tried to tell who what?” Silva asked.
“That dead guy,”-Rocha inclined his head in the direction of Mansur’s body-“I tried to tell him. But would he listen? No, he wouldn’t. ‘You got room?’ he says. ‘Yeah,’ I says, ‘I got plenty of room. But are you sure you want to come in here with that?’ And I point at Eudoxia. And she puts out her claws and damned near spits at me. ‘And what the fuck business is it of yours?’ the dead guy says. ‘You got any idea,’ I says, ‘what she-’ I was gonna say what she is, but would he let me explain? No, he wouldn’t. Too fucking drunk, that’s what. He wanted two hours, and he wanted to pay cash. So I took the money and I gave him the key. That’s it. That’s all I know.”
“Wait,” Silva said. “Slow down. Go back to the beginning. The guy over there drove up to the gate, and he had this girl in the car, and-”
“No. No! That’s just the point. He didn’t have no girl in the car. He had Eudoxia!”
“And if Eudoxia isn’t a girl, what is she?”
“She’s a man, that’s what she is! A whaddayacallit.”
“Transvestite?”
“Yeah, a transvestite. Anybody who isn’t a complete asshole, or who isn’t completely smashed, is gonna spot it right away. We got bright lights over there at the entrance. Eudoxia uses lotsa powder on her face, and she shaves close, but you can still see her beard. And that voice of hers! Deep, really deep, not a bass, mind you, but certainly not a tenor, more like a baritone. Hey, you like opera?”
“You’re saying she doesn’t sound like a woman?”
“I guess you didn’t hear me the first time, so I’ll say it again: Eudoxia has a voice like an opera singer, a male opera singer. I guess you didn’t hear my question either: you like opera?”
“Yes, I like opera, but-”
“Listen to this, then,” Rocha said. And then, to everyone’s amazement, he sang the first stanza of “La donna e mobile.” He could have passed for the Duke of Mantua in a second-rate company, which was still pretty good for a guy who kept the gate in a motel.
When he finished, there was a slight pattering of applause from everyone, including the two cops who’d been absorbed by the video.
Basking in the attention, he opened his mouth to continue. Before he could, Silva put a hand on his arm.
“Very nice,” he said, “but we’re investigating a murder here. Tell me more about this Eudoxia. You’ve obviously seen her before.”
“Lotsa times,” Rocha said, not pleased to have been cut off in mid-performance. “She hangs out with all those whores near the Jockey Club. It’s like camouflage, being surrounded by real women. It helps fool the guys who pick her up. Mind you, they’re generally drunk or they wouldn’t be taken in so easy. Like I say, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out she’s really a man.”
“It must be disconcerting when they find out.”
“It’s funny, that’s what it is. They’re all hot to trot, and they can’t wait to get into the room and get her clothes off. Then, generally about two minutes later, they’re outside again, the guy all red-faced and nervous and Eudoxia with a smile on her face. I guess she makes them pay her in advance. Most whores do. Must be a shock, reaching down between her legs and finding a cock. Sometimes, though, sometimes they stay for a while. Those are the sick bastards. But I didn’t peg the dead guy for one of those. You think she killed him?”
“Do you?”
“See? That’s what I can’t figure out. Eudoxia’s weird, but I don’t think she’s violent. One time, a john beat her up pretty bad. He was a single guy, and he didn’t give a damn who found out she’d fooled him. He just wanted to make sure nobody thought he was a fag. He kicked the shit out of her, and then he called us to clean up. Eudoxia was lying there on the floor all black and blue. She’d just curled herself up into a ball and let him beat her. We asked her if she wanted us to call the cops, and she said no, just call a cab. It arrived, and off she went.”
“Maybe this time she decided to fight back.”
“Maybe she’d fight back,” Rocha said, “but she’d never do it like that.” He pointed at the body. “Look at that poor bastard.”
Rocha had a point. Luis Mansur was a mess, every bit as much of a mess as Juan Rivas had been.
“Who discovered the body?” Silva asked.
“I did,” Rocha said. “I told you, he only paid for two hours. Part of my job is to make sure nobody gets something for nothing. When he didn’t leave, I came over here. There’s this sign I put on the gate, ‘Back in five minutes,’ it says. If the guy who owns this place wasn’t such a cheapskate, he’d hire somebody else. Friday and Saturday nights I have to work my ass off running between the gate and one chalet or another. The chambermaids won’t do it. They say people give them too much lip. It has to be a man that does it.”
“The customers complain when you remind them their time is up?”
“What am I telling you? You speak Portuguese?”
In fact, Silva’s Portuguese was a good deal better than Rocha’s; but all he said was, “Go on.”
“People give me lip, I don’t take it personal. I mean, there you are, humping away, and some guy knocks on the door and asks you when you’re gonna be done. I wouldn’t want it happening to me either. Kinda breaks the mood, you know what I mean?”
“I can imagine,” Silva said dryly. “What happened when you knocked?”
“No answer. I did it again. Still, no answer. I called out, said I was from the portaria, told the guy his two hours were up. Nothing.”
“And then?”
“And then I used my passkey and opened the door.”
“You do that often? Use your passkey?”
Rocha shook his head. “Hardly ever. People can get out of this place by climbing over the wall. It’s not so high, comes down to less than two meters where the ground rises out there at the back. But they can’t rent a room unless they drive in with a car, and they can’t get the car out without driving through the gate. Makes no sense to pretend they’re not in the room, so they generally don’t.”
“What do you normally expect to find?”
Rocha blinked. “Whaddya mean?”
“Just what I said. When you use your passkey, and you go in, what do you expect to find?”
“I expect to find people asleep. Sometimes I get a shot of some hot broad’s crotch. Sometimes I get an earful from her boyfriend, or client, or whatever. I never found a body before.”
“How about Eudoxia?”
“What about her?”
“Where was she?”
“Gone.”
“Gone where?”
“How the fuck should I know?”
“Was the door to the bathroom closed?”
Rocha considered for a moment. “Yeah,” he said, “yeah, it was.”
“But you didn’t look inside?”
“I took one look at that mess over there and ran off to call the cops. I didn’t even get halfway across the room.”
Silva turned to Prado. “Any blood in the bathroom?”
Prado shook his head. “Not a drop,” he said.