Crimes of August: A Novel

One

[1] one The night doorman of the Deauville Building heard the sound of footsteps stealthily descending the stairs. It was one a.m. and the building was enveloped in silence. “Well, Raimundo?” “Let’s wait a little,” the doorman replied. “Nobody else is coming. Everybody’s already asleep.” “One more hour.” “I gotta get up early tomorrow.” The doorman went to the glass door and looked out at the empty, silent street. “All right. But I can’t take very long.” On the eighth floor. The death took place in a discharge of pleasure and release, expelling excremental and glandular residue—sperm,saliva,urine,feces.He backed away in disgust from the lifeless body on the bed, sensing his own body polluted by the filth excreted from the other man’s dying flesh. He went into the bathroom and carefully washed under the shower.A bite in his chest was bleeding a little. In the medicine cabinet on the wall were iodine and cotton, which he used to make a quick bandage. He picked up his clothes from the chair and dressed without looking at the dead man, acutely aware of his presence on the bed. No one was at the reception desk when he left. [2] The man known to his enemies as the Black Angel entered the small elevator,which he filled completely with his voluminous body,and got out on thethirdfloorof thepresidentialresidence,the Catete Palace.He walked some ten steps in the dimly lit hallway and stopped in front of a door. Inside the modest bedroom, wearing striped pajamas, sitting on the bed, his shoulders bowed, his feet several inches from the floor, was the person he protected, an insomniac,pensive,fragile old man:GetúlioVargas,president of the Republic. The Black Angel, after listening to detect any sound coming from the bedroom, withdrew, resting against one of the Corinthian columns laid out symmetrically on the iron tetragonal balustrade that surrounded the central area of the palace hall, silent and dark at that hour. He must be sleeping, he thought. After making sure there was nothing abnormal on the residential floor of the palace, Gregório Fortunato, the Black Angel, head of president Getúlio Vargas’s personal guard, descended the stairs toward the military advisers’ office on the ground floor, checking en route that the guards were at their posts and that all was peaceful in the palace. Major Dornelles was chatting with Major Fitipaldi,another adviser,when Gregório entered the room. After examining the security plan for the president’s visit to the Jockey Club on Sunday, the day of the Brazilian Grand Prix, with the two military advisers, the head of the personal guard went to his room. He removed the revolver and dagger he always carried,placed them on the small table,and sat down on the bed,where several newspapers were strewn. Apprehensively, he read the headlines. The year had begun badly. In February , eighty-two colonels, supported by the then secretary of war, General Ciro do Espírito Santo Cardoso, had issued a reactionary manifesto backing a coup, criticizing the workers’ strikes and speaking craftily about the cost of living. The president had fired the treacherous secretary, without having a trustworthy replacement. Gregório knew the president didn’t believe in the loyalty of anyone in the armed forces since General Cordeiro de Farias, who had always eaten out his hand like a puppy, had stabbed him in the back, figuratively, in 1945. But he had ended up having to appoint as secretary of war a man in whom he also had no confidence, General Zenóbio da Costa, accepted unconditionally by the military because he had been one of the [3] commanders in the FEB, the Brazilian Expeditionary Force that fought beside the Americans in World War II. To appease the military, he had been obliged to remove his friend João Goulart as labor secretary. All of that had happened before the end of February.Yes, the year had begun badly, thought Gregório.In May the conspirators had tried to impeach the president,and the traitor João Neves had helped spread lies about a secret agreement between Perón and Getúlio. Gregório hadn’t forgotten what Neves, when he was still secretary of foreign affairs, had told him: “Don’t stick your nose in where you don’t belong,you dirty nigger...