Crimes of August: A Novel

Twenty-one

[245] twenty-one Among the papers Colonel Adyl de Oliveira had found upon breaking into Gregório Fortunato’s drawers and files when he invaded the Catete Palace were documents relating to the crooked deals in the Cexim, brokered by Gregório along with Arquimedes Manhães and Luiz Magalhães,the lover of Salete Rodrigues,Inspector Mattos’s girlfriend.According to the documents, as intermediaries in those deals,Manhães and his associates earned more than fifty-two million cruzeiros. Luiz Magalhães was not located by those in charge of the inquiry. Manh ães, however, was arrested and taken to the Galeão air base when he made his statement. Manhães declared that he had been a guest at the Catete at the beginning of theVargasadministrationbuthaddistancedhimself fromthe palace following a deal for buying and selling cotton, made with financing from the Bank of Brazil,in partnership with RobertoAlves,ex-secretary of the president.Asked how much he had realized in that transaction,he answered that he couldn’t say exactly, since quite some time had gone by since the operation had occurred. To the good fortune of the investigators, the man with whom Manhães worked in Marília, São Paulo, went to Galeão, accompanied by a lawyer, to try to effect the prisoner’s release. Manhães’s patron, the Japanese Iassuro Matsubara, was immediately arrested by the military men. Manhães stated that Matsubara had financed the campaigns of candidates to the Chamber and Senate. Matsubara had contributed half a million cruzeiros to the campaign of Roberto Alves for federal senator from São Paulo. That money had been diverted by Gregório to deliver to Climerio for his [246] escape. In exchange for his contributions, Matsubara received financing and special privileges from the Bank of Brazil and other public entities, as well as favorable treatment from state government for the purchase of land in São Paulo and Mato Grosso. All day long,wherever he went Lomagno heard the rumors that were flying around the city.There was talk of a military coup deposing the president; of the scabrous scandals discovered in Gregório’s secret files—Vargas’s cellar was said to be like the Borgias’; all the military garrisons were supposedly at the ready,the tanks at the military compound were prepared to go into action; it was claimed that Café Filho had been called to the Catete Palace to take the oath of office.To Lomagno the comments he heard from rumormongers seemed little different,in mood and confusion,from those generated months earlier by the lubricious details of the murder,out of jealousy,of the bank teller Arsênio by Air Force Lieutenant Bandeira.To him, the prestige of President Vargas and his government had for months been suffering a continuous process of attrition and had, in that month of August, hit its lowest level of popular approval. And Getúlio Vargas being deposed by the armed forces was not exactly anything new. Lomagno had reasons to worry. In the secret files taken from the Catete, on the list of import firms that bribed Gregório with twenty percent of the value of the import licenses obtained from the Cexim without providing the hard currency reserves required by law, was the name of Lomagno & Co., along with that of other firms, like Brasfesa, Cemtex, and Corpax. The news was in all the papers. Only the Diário Carioca mentioned the circumstance of the president of Cemtex, Paulo Gomes Aguiar, having been murdered at the start of the month, saying that the police seemed to have given up finding the killer.Lomagno had reasons to worry about revelations that involved his firm, but he didn’t. Lomagno had reasons to worry in case a military coup deposed the president.But he didn’t.His father,in a hospital bed days before his death, probably recalling the failures he had suffered thinking he could change the country by working as a militant in the fascist Integralist Party, had told him: “Son, don’t think you can change Brazil. The French, an intelligent people, invented the perfect maxim, which becomes more true the older it gets: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” [247] But his lack of concern with developments resulted mainly from the fact that a greater anxiety occupied his mind. It included a plan...