Crimes of August: A Novel: 5 (Brazilian Literature in Translation Series) (13 page)

“I never told you to kill the guy.”

“You faggot, I did the dirty work you didn’t have the courage to do, and now you want to wash your hands of it and toss me into the fire? I’ll take you down with me.”

“I don’t want to hear it. Shut up.”

The old man lived alone. After killing him Clemente had turned the place upside down so that the police would think the crime had been committed by a robber. He had taken the man’s Bible with him, filled with notes in the margins. When he got home he had urinated on the book’s pages, for several days, until the ink of the words scribbled by the pastor had become illegible blots. Clemente’s father, whom he hated in life and went on hating after he was dead, had also been a Protestant pastor.

“I still have the super’s Bible, all shitty. I’m going to bring it here and rub your nose in it.”

“You’re a blasphemer, a nihilist, a monster.”

“That’s not what you said that day. You took my hands and said I had strong hands, and then you kissed and licked my hands like a bitch. I let you do it in spite of the disgust I felt: the pleasure of witnessing your debasement was greater than my repugnance.”

“That’s enough, Clemente, please, I’m going to end up fighting with you.”

Along with the spilled drink, sweat was soaking Freitas’s shirt. His flushed face had taken on a grayish pallor. “We have to kill that inspector. You can do that, I know you can.”

“The super was an old man of eighty. It was easy. That son of a bitch, besides being a cop, is probably younger than I am.”

“Younger? Then he’s still a boy . . .”

“Suck-up.”

“You look like a teenager . . . I swear it! You don’t have a wrinkle in your face.”

Clemente went to the bar, served himself a liqueur of pitanga, a specialty sent from the North by a rancher, boss of the senator’s largest bloc of voters. He took a small mirror from his pocket and looked at his face, enraptured.

“Don’t exaggerate . . . Teenager is overdoing it . . .”

Freitas rose from the sofa with difficulty, walked unsteadily to the bar. He tried to hug Clemente, who with a movement of his body evaded his embrace, causing Freitas to fall.

The senator rolled on the floor, his eyes closed, seeking a less uncomfortable position. In a short time he was snoring with his mouth open, before the disapproving gaze of his adviser.

AT EXACTLY THAT HOUR
, 2:15 a.m., when Senator Vitor Freitas was starting his alcoholic sleep on the floor of his residence, the journalist Carlos Lacerda was arriving at the Cavalry Regiment of the Military Police, on Rua Salvador da Sá, accompanied by an enormous retinue that included lawyers, reporters, the chief of police, Inspector Pastor, and various army, naval, and air force officers. Army Colonel Florêncio Lessa, commanding officer of the regiment, was waiting for Lacerda and his group.

Lacerda was there to identity his attacker from among the members of the personal guard. Or attackers, as he stated, contradicting Inspector Pastor’s conclusions. Lacerda disliked Pastor and had written in his newspaper that the police, and the inspector himself, who headed the investigation, had floated the hypothesis that it had been he, Lacerda, who killed Major Vaz. One of the questions the inspector had asked the garage man at the building was whether there had been an argument between Major Vaz and Lacerda. To the journalist, the authority leading the inquiry was duty-bound to examine all hypotheses, but given the evidence of the crime having been perpetrated by third parties, with witnesses and strong clues, such “monstrous speculation” was unnecessary and the inspector’s suspicion was incomprehensible.

Pastor also disliked Lacerda. The tense relationship between the two was ceremonious but hostile.

At 2:30 a.m., forty-six members of the presidential personal guard arrived at the barracks.

“The full complement of the guard is eighty-three men,” said Major Enio Garcez dos Reis, chief of the Catete Palace police, who accompanied the president’s personal guards. “But given the sudden call-up asked of me, I was only able to locate forty-seven men.”

Someone questioned whether the number making up the personal guard was two hundred and not eighty-three, as Major Enio claimed.

Faced with these affirmations, the major explained that the number of effectives was eighty-three, but admitted the existence of a supplementary contingent of an additional one hundred and seventeen men.

In groups of five, the guards paraded in front of Lacerda and the authorities who had accompanied him.

It was four a.m. when the inspection ended. Two guards had been called aside by Lacerda.

“I recognized in Antonio Fortes Filho,” said the journalist, “the physical type that most resembled the short, fat individual who was posted at the corner of Paula Freitas and Tonelero. And in José Pombo Pereira, known as Pombo Manso, the individual most resembling the one who shot the major.”

THE BEGGAR RUSSO
, arrested by officers of the air force, indicated the person who had bought the revolver he had found on Avenida Beira Mar on the day of the assassination, an employee of Standard Esso. He and the beggar were brought face to face in the offices of the national aviation authority. The weapon was confiscated.

ten

DAY WAS BEGINNING TO BREAK
when Climerio abandoned his small place in the country, Happy Refuge, carrying a small suitcase with clothes, a few papers, a revolver with six bullets, and the fifty-three thousand cruzeiros Soares had given him two days earlier when he met with him in Republic Square downtown, beside the Campo de Santana. The money had been picked up by Valente from Gregório’s drawer in the Catete Palace, following the orders of the head of the personal guard himself. Valente had charged Soares with getting the money to the fugitive.

Before leaving, he watered his fruit trees and the small garden where he grew kale, tomatoes, pumpkins, and manioc. Whenever he visited the farm, he watered the plantings daily, even on days when atmospheric conditions presaged rain.

He fed the three hogs.

He arrived, exhausted, at nightfall, at the farm of his friend Oscar Barbosa, on Taboleiro Hill, in the Tinguá mountain range.

Oscar and his wife Honorina were sitting at the table, having dinner, when they were surprised by the arrival of Climerio.

Climerio said he’d got into some trouble in the capital and needed a place to hide.

Oscar didn’t ask what his friend’s troubles were and invited him to sit and share with them the corn mush and beef they were eating.

After eating, Oscar told Climerio that the following day he would take him to hide out in a shack in the middle of a banana grove in the mountains. In the shack was only an old mattress, but he would be safe there and no one would find him. Daily, either Oscar or Honorina would take food to him.

FREITAS WOKE UP ON THE FLOOR
to a light touch on his shoulders. The pantryman, bending over, asked: “Are you all right, sir?”

The senator looked at his wristwatch. Half past noon.

“I’m fine. Go run my bath.”

The pantryman, whose name was Severino, a poor young man of twenty-two, accepted the senator’s rude treatment without complaining. His salary and the tips he got when the senator was in a good mood helped to support his widowed mother and his eight younger brothers and sisters back in Caruaru, Pernambuco.

He ran the hot bath, dipping his elbow in the water in the tub to check that the temperature was as the senator demanded. He placed two large fluffy towels and the newspapers on a small bench next to the bathtub.

The senator himself sprinkled aromatic bath salts into the water. “If there are any calls, tell them I left for the Senate.”

The hot water enveloping his body gave him a feeling of well-being. He clutched between his fingers the rolls of fat of his belly. He had to do something to get rid of those undesirable accumulations of adipose. Exercise, diet, anything. He would like to have a belly like Lomagno’s, hard-muscled and well defined. Clemente, his adviser, had once had such a belly, but the sedentary life he was leading had left his body more and more flaccid. He made a mental note that he needed to get rid of Clemente. The adviser had gone from merely impertinent and inopportune to dangerous. But it was necessary to carry out the operation with great skill in order to avoid irritating him and provoking an unreasonable reaction.

He picked up the newspapers. No confirmation of the rumors circulating in the Senate, that Getúlio Vargas, in an effort to divide the armed forces, had named General Zenóbio da Costa to replace Air Force Secretary Nero Moura, who had waffled on the open insubordination of those under his command. Secretary Nero Moura had emphatically denied the phrase attributed to him in
Última Hora
that Major Vaz had not been killed as an officer of the air force. The secretary was obliged to deny this, whether he had said it or not, and could not repeat what supporters of Getúlio were spreading around the city, that Vaz was a kind of hired gun for Lacerda and had been killed as such. In the Chamber, Deputy Ivete Vargas, grandniece of the president, had asked, “Why are those guarding the president called gunmen and those guarding Lacerda called friends?”

Cardinal Jaime de Barros Câmara had sent a message to Brigadier Eduardo Gomes. It said: “With the thought of the generous traditions of the Brazilian people, formed by the stimulus of Christian civilization, it is directed to priests of all Brazil, through their most excellent bishops, the request that on the same day and hour they unite in prayer for the soul of the sacrificed aviator, a sincere Catholic, raising prayers to God for the conciliation and peace of the Brazilian family.”

The senator was convinced there was a well organized campaign under way to discredit Vargas, in which participated the church, sectors of the armed forces, elements of the business community, opposition parties, and the press. The more mud thrown onto Vargas, the better. Earlier, it was shady dealings of members of the administration that were denounced. Now, it was crimes. In January 1920, according to newspaper reports, Getúlio Vargas, with his accomplice Soriano Serra, were said to have killed Tibúrcio Fongue, chief of the Inhacorá Indian tribe. The inquiry had been quashed. Facsimiles of pages from the various inquiries were reproduced in newspapers. In 1923, Vargas, still with the complicity of Soriano Serra, was alleged to have murdered the engineer Ildefonso Soares Pinto, the secretary of public works of the then governor, Borges de Medeiros. “Soriano was arrested, but the other assassin, Getúlio Vargas, remains free to this day.”

“Vargas’s past is marked by monstrous crimes. Still a boy, he had already committed homicide,” said the
Tribuna da Imprensa
. In Ouro Preto, in Rio Grande do Sul, three were said to have been “slaughtered by the Vargas men and their hired guns”: the student Almeida Prado, the medical doctor Benjamim Torres Filho, and Major Aureliano Morais Coutinho. “All were killed under conditions of treachery similar to the ambush on Rua Tonelero.” The Vargas gunmen, it was alleged, “ripped Major Coutinho apart in the middle of the street after a savage mutilation of his body.” All these accusations were corroborated by a mass of documents reproduced in the newspapers.

Ripped apart. Treacherous ambush. Savage mutilation. Lacerda knew the power of words, thought Freitas; he had a good schooling in the Communist Party, where he’d been the young leader of a group known as Red Aid. An interesting path from exalted sectarian communist to reactionary Host-eating
UDN
leader, even more fire-breathing. In both factions he had proven unequaled in the creation of incendiary slogans. Such as “the Rat Fiúza,” which had destroyed the aspirations of the Communist Party candidate in the 1946 presidential elections, and now the “sea of mud” catch phrase that had discredited the Vargas administration.

As always, Freitas read carefully what Lacerda wrote in his paper. General Ancora, previously accused by the journalist of trying to impede the uncovering of the facts of the attack, had been fired by Getúlio and was now seen by Lacerda as a man of honor. Ancora was characterized, in Lacerda’s version, as one sacrificed because of his righteous conduct. Ancora’s removal was deemed as one more example of the “monstrous deception commanded by Vargas to shield criminals.” Lacerda insinuated, between the lines, that those behind the assassination could be the president’s brother, Benjamim Vargas; his son, deputy Lutero Vergas; the all-powerful industrialist Euvaldo Lodi; and Vargas himself—the latter, in the best-case hypothesis, being an accessory after the fact.

At the same time it was now useful for him to praise General Ancora, in another part of the newspaper Lacerda praised the new head of the
DPS
. Lacerda was a master of intrigue, thought Freitas, he managed to conceal with the brilliance of his oratory the enormous, sometimes cynical, contradictions of his political opportunism. The journalist was running for federal deputy in the October elections; if his election was assured before, the attack would surely make him the biggest vote-getter in Rio, maybe in the entire country. Giving power, however little, to a man with that terrible eloquence was very dangerous. It would have been better if Lacerda was killed rather than his bodyguard. Getúlio Vargas, with his old-school, monotonous, and prudent oratory, had succeed in dominating the country for a long time; what wouldn’t Lacerda do with his incendiary intelligence and his ability to use words, like no other politician in Brazilian history, to persuade, deceive, excite, mobilize people? His newspaper articles and his radio talks in recent days had led the government to place thirty thousand soldiers on ready alert just in Rio de Janeiro.

In the paper was a picture of Colonel Paulo Torres, the new chief of police. Torres had commanded, till then, the Third Infantry Regiment, quartered in the São Gonçalo district. He was forty-two, had served with Zenóbio in the Brazilian Expeditionary Force in Italy during the Second World War, and had been awarded a metal for bravery. He had been a military attaché in Rome, Paris, and London. He also had a law degree. In Brazil, everybody has a law degree, thought Freitas, including himself.

Freitas was friends with the brothers of the new head of the
DPS
, Acúrcio Torres, majority leader in the Chamber of Deputies in the Dutra administration, and Alberto Torres, current leader of the
UDN
in the legislature of the state of Rio de Janeiro. Could appointing a chief of police with family ties to the
UDN
be a fainthearted concession by Getúlio? Or evidence that Capanema, when he said “the president of the Republic has no desire to see this crime go unpunished,” was speaking the truth? Or both? Getúlio both innocent and fearful? It would be interesting if true.

The senator liked Capanema, an ingenuous sort who had been discredited by accepting the role of government leader in the Chamber. A man of integrity, cultured, unjustly accused of graft and stupidity: of stupidity because he had been secretary of education under the Vargas dictatorship. Every education secretary in Brazil, however intelligent, ended up being called stupid; it was a kind of curse. He, Freitas, would never accept that cabinet position.

One news item was read by Freitas with irony. The publishers of the newspapers—Elmano Cardim, of the
Jornal do Comércio
; Roberto Marinho, of
O Globo
; João Portela Ribeiro Dantas, of the
Diário de Notícias
; Carlos Rizzini, of
Diários Associados
; Chagas Freitas, of
A Notícia
; Othon Paulino, of
O Dia
; Paulo Bittencourt, of
Correio da Manhã
; Macedo Soares, Horácio de Carvalho Júnior, Danton Jobim and Pompeu de Souza, of the
Diário Carioca
—had obtained the right to have an accredited representative participate in the Rua Tonelero inquiry. Those scoundrels actually believed in the advantageous myth, which they themselves had invented, that the press was the fourth branch of government. Shrewd, the Crow—Freitas rarely referred to Lacerda by the nickname used by Vargas partisans, but that news item had turned him against all journalists—the Crow, even being the publisher of a newspaper, had refrained from signing the petition. But he didn’t need to do so; the military who now were in control of the police investigation of Rua Tonelero were all Lacerdists. Lacerda was running the inquiry. The name of Samuel Wainer, publisher of
Última Hora
, was also missing from the list. Perhaps he hadn’t been invited by his peers. As if the signers of the document were attempting to demonstrate by the exclusion of Wainer and Lacerda the independence of their proposal. Two factious, antagonistic currents were clashing, and the press had chosen its side.

Freitas imagined the success of Lacerda’s inflammatory phrases at the Lantern Club meeting scheduled for that evening at the Brazilian Press Association: “Only dictators and despots protect themselves with hoodlums and thugs; Vargas’s personal guard is an affront to legal order, a disrespect for our people; Vargas will be deposed for the blood he has shed.”

The newspapers said further that José Antonio Soares, the railroad worker and friend of the personal guard Climerio Euribes de Almeida, had disappeared from his residence at 29 Padre Nóbrega, in the Cascadura district, after receiving a package from his lover Nelly Gama. In fleeing, Soares, whom the police believed to be the gunman who had shot Major Vaz, had left behind nine thousand cruzeiros, which indicated his haste. The police, under the command of Commissioner Hermes Machado, had invaded Soares’s dwelling and found only his mother and the children, terrified at the police paraphernalia. The inspector had seized Soares’s correspondence with the famous Barreto, a notorious swindler locked up in the penitentiary. In one letter, Barreto authorized Soares to receive fifty percent as an advance on the sale of fifty jeeps.

Suddenly an item, almost at the end of Lacerda’s article, sent a tremor of cold and fear through Freitas and made him turn on the hot water faucet: “I called Inspector Pastor three times without having the honor of his visit.” Lacerda, alleging that his attackers were three rather than just one, as Pastor said, wanted to confront the inspector with his testimony. Pastor’s name brought to Freitas’s mind once again, in a disturbing association, another pastor, the nosy fundamentalist that had caught him in a vexing situation, and another cop, Inspector Mattos. He left the bathroom, feeling chilled. He was in danger and needed to do something. He dressed quickly and got into the official car awaiting him at the door of the Seabra Building.

He entered the Senate chamber at the moment the Brazilian Workers Party leader, Senator Carlos Gomes de Oliveira, was defending the government. What was lamentable in the Tonelero episode, the
PTB
leader said, was the desire of certain extreme elements, who, mixed with communist exploitation, sought to involve the armed forces in an attempt to have them depose the president of the Republic. It was an unfolding of events whose outcome no one could predict.

Getúlio was ill served by leaders like the
PTB
senator, Freitas thought. That same day he began to make contacts with the
PSD
congressional bloc with the objective of probing the opportunity and the advisability of a change of direction. Supporting a corrupt and weak government had yielded him much good business. But now it was time to jump ship.