Soylent Green is People!

Carlos Orsi

When the police finally knocked over the garage door and found Raul’s body inside the car, after the smoke subsided, everything pointed to a sad but reasonably simple case of suicide. It was only when the authorities began the always hard process of locating the victim’s next of kin to give them the news that the plot, as they say in crime novels, thickened.

Raul Gonçalves da Nóbrega was an engineer at DNArt & Tech. You certainly have some product of theirs in the bathroom, whether it’s a culture of bacteria to rub on the skin (DNArt holds the patent for an organism that uses UV rays for photosynthesis and secretes a golden pigment, acting as a sun block and suntan lotion at the same time), or the popular depilator-aphrodisiac hormone.

But I was talking about the next of kin. Raul was an only child, and even though he was over fifty years old, he still lived with his mother, a disabled lady of over ninety who, strangely, was not found in the house by the police officers who attended the incident. The house in which they lived had no employees, and residential automation was minimal and “dumb.”

Now, I suppose some eyebrows have risen when the word “disabled” appeared in the paragraph above.

In fact, it is hard to imagine a condition, short of death pure and simple, that can’t be greatly mitigated by some combination of gene therapy and cybernetics, and that these therapies are out of reach for a successful, single, childless engineer.

Besides, of course, ninety years is a long way from being a terminal age or something like that.

The reader probably already has the answer: Albertina Gonçalves was a member of the Church of the Puritans. Her faith allowed her to accept external aid to overcome physical weaknesses—glasses and wheelchair, for example—but no more direct interference in the Inviolable Temple of the Holy Spirit that was her body.

Not even the replacement of her opaque crystallines did she allow, preferring the milky semiblindness of the cataracts; medicine and supplements, from a certain degree of technological complexity, had to be discreetly “smuggled” into her food, which the son lovingly prepared and served, every day.

For months Albertina simply had not had lunch: she hoped Raul would come back from work so that he would make her a more substantial dinner and they could eat together, she in her bed, he sitting at the headboard.

The wheelchair (actually a maglev) was found in the room, floating beside the bed, but empty. There was a thin layer of dust on the seat, suggesting that it had not been used in ages. Her platinum-rimmed glasses, virtually useless because of the cataracts, but preserved as an icon of vanity, lay on a lavender piece of flannel on the bedside table. There were signs that someone had lain down and then got up—the bed was messed up, the cover pulled. There was a thin layer of dust on the sheets.

“Did she walk out there?” one of the two researchers there joked.

“Only if she was barefoot,” the other replied, pointing to the slippers under the bed.

The search of the house showed no sign of the old lady. The garage contained only the car. Inside the car, an off-road biodiesel-powered model, just Raul’s body. The wardrobes were full of Albertina’s clothes, with few empty hangers. If she had decided to travel, she had left with little more than the clothes on her body. There were also three suitcases, open and empty.

Other rooms of the property, which was small and functional but still managed to be luxurious, also revealed few clues. Raul’s room was in a better state than his mother’s: neat bedding, the sheet stretched out like that of a barrack cot.

The kitchen was just a kitchen, albeit on a large scale: built-in cupboards, a solitary glass in the center of the sink with an inch of juice in it, a huge fridge-cellar-freezer complex connected to a hybrid solar/wind system on the roof.

The stove, a thing of brushed steel and synthetic ivory, connected to a biodigestor tank in the service area, a cylinder the size of an adult Labrador dog where patented bacteria turned potato and banana peels plus used soybean oil into fuel.

The service area looked out onto a narrow, but long, lush garden, where, in the middle of walkways paved with aged pink marble, there were some empty cages and bird feeders that did not seem to attract a large audience. One of the policemen noted in his report that he smelled beer somewhere between mulberry trees and ornamental bromeliads, but the observation did not catch anyone’s attention.

* * *

That’s where I came in.

Like the faithful Puritans, in her will and testament Albertina had left all her possessions to the Church if Raul was not alive when she died. The combination of a relatively long life, closed after decades past at the expense of a wealthy relative, and compound interest, is powerful. Therefore, to establish that the mother was dead and her son had preceded her into the Great Mystery became a matter of the utmost interest to the supreme leader of the denomination, the Archpriest Sérvio, who quickly put the considerable legal machinery of the Church to work toward this end.

I suppose the Archpriest would not have had any excuses to hire me right away—I can imagine him listing the various precedents of unworthy men called to serve the Lord’s cause, such as disobedient Jonah, the adulterer David, or the cowardly Peter—but my agency certainly came into the case still well below the radar of his lawyers. Although my participation has ended up tied to the Church’s demand, the fact is that I entered the investigation via another source entirely.

Sabrina was a tall, long-haired brunette, with brown eyes and skin a color between light brown and deep red, the exact shade of my favorite brand of bitter ale. Her lips and nose were too thin for the fashion of the time; her nose, without being protruding, was narrow like a razor, which gave her a cruel appearance that, honestly, did not bother me at all. I was sitting when she walked into the office in a short white dress. Her knees mesmerized me.

“Your secretary said I could come in.”

My silence had probably made her uncertain. I shook my head a little to get back on the ground, smiled and pointed to one of the two empty seats I reserved for clients.

“My secretary” was a mediocre system of commercial automation that basically scanned visitors for hidden weapons or incompatible biological material (some types of mouthwash don’t interact well with the bacteria I use to prevent oily skin, and dribbling splutters during the conversation is kind of boring), also making an anthropometric survey of the visitor in the social networks and in the Military Police and Federal Police files.

So, in the three seconds that Sabrina took to sit elegantly in the armchair, my desktop showed me her personal page on FaceSpace, her Currículo Lattes, and a “nothing” from the Public Security Bureau. To get a credit analysis I would need her Social Security number, which she would give me if I took her case, whatever it was.

According to “my secretary,” her name was Sabrina Toledo, 48 years old, half a dozen PhDs in areas such as medicine, genetics, organic chemistry, biophysics, and agrotechnology. She was an employee of DNArt & Tech’s R & D department.

“Dr. Toledo.” I leaned my elbows on the desk and steepled my hands right below my chin. “How can I help you?”

There was no more insecurity in her eyes, only a cold skepticism. I could almost see the glow of her brain cells firing as she tried to decide whether I was serious or a fraud, whether to tell me everything, or maybe just a little, or turn around and leave without opening her mouth.

“My husband.” For some reason, she decided I deserved a vote of confidence. “He’s dead.”

“My condolences.”

Sabrina reacted with a faint smile, as pasteurized and meaningless as my mechanical expression of sympathy.

“I would like to receive the inheritance he left.”

“That’s a matter for lawyers, isn’t it? Why do you need a detective?”

“We were not really married.” She sighed. “He made a point of keeping it a secret, because his mother depended on him, she had only him. Anyway, no one knew that we were married, and so the natural heiress is the mother, not me.”

“Do you need to prove that there was a stable union?” That would also be a more appropriate case for a lawyer…

“His mother is missing.”

It was my turn to take a deep breath and let it out in a long breath.

“Tell me everything.”

* * *

She told me. It was there that I learned of Raul’s death, the disappearance of Albertina, the movement of tectonic plates triggered by Sérvio in the forensic media. In addition to his mother’s savings, the son’s considerable fortune was also at stake, since Albertina was the natural heir of the engineer’s estate, who officially died single and childless.

“I have lawyers working to prove that Raul and I had a relationship of the kind that guarantees me inheritance rights. For me, we were married.”

She paused. I waited. Clearly she still had more to say.

“But the Church is sabotaging me. Some witnesses, co-workers who knew how Raul and I were…intimate, now refuse to speak in court. They’re getting threats.”

I let the expression on my face betray my disbelief. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you, right, but still…

Sabrina read correctly what was happening behind my eyes and gave me a smile both sad and sarcastic.

“Come on, Detective. You are familiar with ‘crying and gnashing teeth’ tactics, aren’t you?”

This was the name given to a purported network of intimidation created by the followers of the archpriest and dedicated to essentially pestering—or terrifying, depending on the case—the Church’s adversaries. Journalists who wrote articles ridiculing its puritanism had their blogs hacked, or found dead rats in their mailboxes; politicians who refused to approve laws of interest to the Church suddenly became the target of ludicrous accusations of sexual harassment, or watched helplessly as long forgotten misdemeanors—bribes received decades ago, illegal campaign donations early in their careers—were brought ruthlessly to light.

A physician who had written a book denouncing the evils of the doctrine of the “inviolable temple” to public health was simultaneously prosecuted in twenty states. The work was seized the day after it left the presses. The digital edition, made available by a major international bookstore, had been contaminated by a virus.

“I know that urban legend,” I said. “But it has never been proven.”

Sabrina started to get up.

“If that’s what you think, being a detective…”

Alarmed by the sudden movement of her knees and by the appalling prospect of them being taken away from me so soon, I gestured for her to stop.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Find his mother.”

I made a face, as if I didn’t understand. After all, if his mother was alive, the inheritance would continue to be open for dispute and Sabrina would still risk being left with nothing.

“Dona Albertina’s body was not found,” my client explained. “The case of the Puritans depends on two things: one, that she is dead, and second, that she died after her son. I want you to prove that she’s alive.

“Really?”

My cynicism was rewarded with yet another sad-sarcastic smile. Apparently, her stock of those was inexhaustible.

“Or at least set a reasonable doubt that my lawyers can use.”

I understood.

“To raise hell with the Church. To distract it. To create confusion in the enemy field while you move forward towards the recognition of the stable union.”

She pursed her lips.

“Right.”

Then we started to discuss the details.

* * *

The first thing I did after Sabrina left was search for Albertina Gonçalves on FaceSpace. Puritans can be radically against cybernetic implants and recombinant DNA, but there is nothing in their credo that forbids interaction in social networks. From what my client had said, I knew that her mother-in-law was practically blind, but…

And the lady had a presence on the social network all right. Modest, as it were: she quoted her deceased husband, the executive son, posted a few sober and chaste pictures, Bible verses, and a calendar of religious activities that hadn’t been updated in six months.

Even in the conservative pictures, I could see that Albertina had been beautiful, perhaps almost to the end. At 87, she still showed a vigorous face, where her (few) wrinkles looked more like marks of character than of age.

Curiously enough, the page was still active. It hadn’t been converted into a memorial one. Maybe, I thought, only her son had the access level necessary to make the fateful update. That would be ironic, in a sort of paradoxical way.

Out of curiosity, I visited Raul’s page. He had not yet taken the colors of mourning. He was “in a relationship”, but Sabrina wasn’t in the followers list and his “partner” link was inactive.

Among very lonely people, religious fervor is often linked to the need for companionship and social interaction: submission to doctrine is the “price” of having friends, support, and companionship. So, I wasn’t surprised to see that, with the exception of Raul, all of Albertina’s other followers were members of Sérvio’s flock. I wrote down the three or four of the names and addresses that seemed most promising to my good old intuition and went out into the street.

Many people imagine that, in this world of networks, e-mails, and telepresence, all the detective work can be done from a desk. I’m not denying that much can be done like this. It’s possible to learn and deduce a lot from virtual presence alone. But when it comes to interviewing reluctant witnesses, nothing beats the moral weight of physical presence.

And I had the impression that my Church-related sources would all be, at best, highly reluctant. If not hostile.

That said, I must say my conversation with the first person on my list was a pleasant surprise. I had decided to start with Olavo Pereira because he was the man who most often appeared in photos alongside Albertina in FaceSpace, was very close to her age (93, to be precise) and, incidentally, very similar in appearance to the late Raul.

Following the recommendation of my lawyer, I hasten to add that I’m not implying that Olavo was the true father of the alleged suicide. But if the son is like the father (which is a reasonable inference, actually), and after becoming a widow, the mother approaches a man like her son, this may indicate that, in fact, she is looking for a substitute for her dead husband.

Olavo was a tall man—more than a foot taller than me—and thin, but with an Olympic swimmer’s chest. His skin had the exact leather texture and color of the boots I use when mountain trekking on the weekends. Under a pair of thick white eyebrows, intense blue eyes watched me as he opened the door to his apartment, a property that was comfortable without being luxurious, located near downtown.

It was in an old building that, I supposed, must have chronic problems with pipes and waste recycling, having been built before the era of urban biodigesters.

Before I appeared, I had sent an SMS explaining the reason for my visit—an investigation into Albertina’s fate—and he had responded by making himself available. After a strong handshake, Olavo invited me in, and I made a generic comment about his healthy appearance.

He laughed, shaking his head.

“People tend to think that we Puritans are a lot of human carcasses, living ruins, because we refuse to allow technology to interfere with the physical abode that God has thought fit to grant our spirits, but the truth is just the opposite. We take care of the temple. Food and exercise, an active life. If people really cared about the health God gave them, prostheses and genetic implants wouldn’t be necessary.”

I thought about mentioning cases of hereditary cancer, type I diabetes, amputations, and, in general, the innumerable neonatal diagnoses of low life expectancy and other problems that could only be healed or circumvented through gene therapy or prostheses, but I stopped myself short of it. I had nothing to gain by harassing a source who was willing to speak.

“Did Albertina have a life as active as yours? You seem to spend a lot of time outdoors.”

“I look like tanned leather, don’t I?” He laughed again. “There’s no denying it. As far as I’m concerned, this apartment is just a place where I spend the breaks between my outings and outdoor activities. My life is really in the mountains.”

I nodded in acknowledgment that I understood him perfectly. The city lay in what could be described as the bottom of a bowl. The rim, encircling us on all sides, was the mountain range, a complex of gently sloping mountains covered by (almost) virgin forest, interspersed by streams and waterfalls, marked here and there by riverine pebble beaches and cut by parks and trails for trekkers.

“Answering your question,” Olavo continued, “Albertina was as active as I was, even more, until about six months ago.”

“But she was practically blind from the cataracts, and the wheelchair…”

“It’s true that her legs no longer worked, but that ‘wheelchair’ levitated on rocks, rivers, grass, whatever there was! As for blindness, she was never alone and you have no idea what radar and sonar systems are capable of today. Albertina loved the countryside, the open space, the wind in her hair…”

“‘Loved’? What happened?”

He shrugged.

“Suddenly, nothing else seemed to interest her. Things she considered easy to do became challenges that weren’t worth facing. She was afraid to leave the house with her chair, as if the sonar in the machine was no more precise than the eyes of a guide dog. She…she…”

His eyes were wet. He brought the glass of orange juice in his hands with full force onto the tabletop. The noise was loud, disconcerting, but the glass top stood strong.

“I shouldn’t tell you that,” he spoke at last, his bombastic voice suddenly assuming an almost confidential tone. “But it’s not exactly a secret. We almost had a fight about it in the Church. Before she quit going.”

“Yes?”

“It was as if Albertina had decided to be an invalid. Just like that.”

After an interval of silence, I asked, “She never talked about running away? Going dark? Going away?”

He shook his head.

“And leave her son? No way. The boy was her life.”

“But what if she was to run away? If she suddenly got tired of her son, or if her son died? Who would she run away with?”

“With me. And I’m still here.”

I thanked him and left.

* * *

Putting the car on autopilot, I called my client.

“Did your husband have friends at the firm?”

“Friends?”

“Friends. People whom he could confidently go out with at night to get drunk…”

“He had me. And in any case, in recent months his mother consumed most of his spare time.”

Women. I took a deep breath before going on.

“There are things a man tells a bar mate he wouldn’t tell his wife. Bride. Girlfriend. Mother. Whatever.”

The line was quiet for a moment. I wondered if the call had dropped. Then Sabrina’s voice came back, a little cooler than at first.

“We did not work together. Our areas were different; he was an engineer and I was working on pure research. But he was talking about this guy… Antonio something. From his department. Applications of Biofuel. They had beer sometimes. At least, that’s what Raul told me.”

“Did you mention him as a witness?”

“No. My witnesses are basically my friends and the HR and security people who record all the relationships in the company and…”

“Thank you. Can you give me the contact of one of these friends?”

She hesitated a bit—thinking that the Puritans had already made the “girls”s lives sheer hell, so on and so forth—but not much, and ended up giving me the data. In the end I thanked her and hung up.

* * *

It wasn’t too difficult to use the net to gather some basic facts about a certain “Antônio somethingsomething” (Kobaiashi de Toledo, actually), biofuel engineer for DNArt & Tech. We exchanged a few instant messages and he agreed to meet me for drinks and olives early in the evening.

It was almost noon, which left me with the lunch issue open. I called my police contact. It would be interesting to know what direction the official inquiry into the fate of Albertina was taking. But we were only able to arrange a meeting for the next day.

Then, unwilling to face other sources from within the Church before listening to the “other side” and, purely for lack of choice, I called Sabrina’s friend. She answered right at the first ring. Her name was Cláudia, and she also had her half dozen PhDs.

After some reluctance and having me explain my reasons and goals in five different ways, she accepted my invitation to lunch, but made a point of choosing the restaurant and the time: Piccolo Cuoco at one-thirty. Stifling a grunt, I agreed.

The city had been developing quite a lot in recent years—hey, it was big enough for half a dozen private detectives already!—but among the pains of growth there were the inevitable fruits of the clash between ingrained provincialism and the desire for sophistication.

The Piccolo Cuoco was one of those fruits. Supposedly a traditional Italian family restaurant, it was actually owned by a Spanish man with an obscure past. The place had, on the outside, all the trappings of an upscale cantina—from the imported mortadella chunks hanging from the ceiling to the checkered tablecloth and the mezzo cheeky wait staff with a heavy accent—but the food was awful.

The last time I had been there for supper I had asked for a penne with cod slivers that had forced me to stay up until dawn, plucking fish bones from the gums and the roof of my mouth with pincers.

Despite her surname, Cláudia Abdala was blond and blue-eyed. Nothing that looked artificial, but so what? Nowadays, a good doctor can reprogram virtually any gene, including those responsible for pigmentation. There is an endless debate about the “futile” use ethics of retroviral therapy, but whoever has the money to pay does not usually pay attention to these things.

She was also a tall, beautiful, and elegant woman. Nowadays, however, they are all, except for some Puritans and others who choose to use their bodies as the basis for some kind of statement—though, even in those cases, the situation is ambiguous: I once met a poet who had a single eye, red, right in the middle of her forehead, and yet, or even because of it, she was sexy as hell.

But I was sure Cláudia would never do anything so unconventional. Her lips were full and her nose well-rounded, exactly what fashion dictated. In a crowd, surrounded by other women of the same age, income range, and social position, it would be impossible to tell her from the others. They would all be accidental clones.

I could see that, in a restaurant whose clientele consisted of dozens of other birds of a feather, the anonymity that her aesthetic options guaranteed didn’t seem enough. My client’s friend walked into the restaurant wearing a wide-brimmed hat and mirrorshades. She looked from time to time over her shoulder, like a bad actress in a bad spy flick. Her body language was confused and erratic.

I could only see her eyes, bloodshot and a bit yellow-tinged, when she finally sat down across me and took off her glasses with a dramatic gesture. She was late: I was already enjoying my second glass of fernet.

I wrote that she sat down, but the most correct word would have been “collapsed.” Her weight fell on the chair like an intolerable burden.

“You have no idea what they did to me.” She emphasized the words “idea” and “me.” “You really don’t.”

And she launched into a long soliloquy about indignities, real or imagined, suffered at the hands of the conspiracy of the Puritans. Her transgenic intestinal microbiota refill, essential for weight control, had been sabotaged, hence the swollen eyes and impaired motor coordination; her car had been stopped by a police officer exactly one day after the license expired, but before she had time to pay it, and the officer had been particularly insensitive as well as surprisingly honest. Finally, the only credit card in her bag to pay the cab fare, after her vehicle was towed away, was exactly the one maxed out.

“All this,” she finished, pulling a handkerchief from her bag to wipe a tear trapped in a dimple strategically placed over the left corner of her mouth, “in the morning of the day I went to the notary office to file my testimony, you know, about Sabrina’s relationship with that engineer.”

I raised my left hand and counted off the events:

“Microbiota, police officer, card.” I paused to thank the waiter who put a jug of sangria on the table and continued. “It would have to be a job for someone with access to your medicine cabinet, your documents, to find out the license expired and to tell the police, and your wallet, to make sure that only the maxed out card was inside.

“And to my electronic correspondence, to see, on the invoice, which card has maxed out,” she finished with a look of contempt on her face. “What a great detective you are. Do you really think I hadn’t thought of all this?”

“Oh well. So who was it?”

“My personal secretary.” Pause. “I keep a human secretary,” she added, incapable of resisting the opportunity to flaunt her status. “She’s a Puritan. I hired her because of that: these religious fanatics usually work hard and…”

“…settle for little?”

Could the brief pause that followed be read as a symptom of guilt?

“More or less,” Cláudia conceded at last.

“And the guard, was he a Puritan too?”

“I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure I do. She must have called him directly. Just imagine, collecting my car because of…”

“And you fired her?”

Cláudia gave me a look of sheer horror:

“How could I live without her?”

“Then your assistant knows you’re here.”

“No.” For the first time since the beginning of our conversation, something like a smile appeared on her face. The dimple grew larger, not without a certain charm. “Now I have a secret agenda.”

The food arrived. No seafood for me this time.

“But you were afraid of being followed,” I pointed out to her.

“The agenda might be secret, but my movements…”

“Right.” I had a forkful of spaghetti, and then I decided it was business time. “So, what can you tell me about Raul and Sabrina’s relationship? How long were they together?”

“Years,” she answered without hesitating. “Not many, but at least a couple. They even talked about marriage, I think, about seven or eight months ago, but it didn’t go well.”

“Did they break up?”

“Oh, no. They just stopped talking about living together.”

I chewed my pasta thoughtfully, digesting the information. Her food arrived next, a thing full of purple leaves and smelling of smoked fish. Silently, I hoped she was luckier with her salmon or tuna than I with my cod before.

“And what was it like ‘being together’ or ‘staying together’ for them?”

Cláudia gestured vaguely, turning the knife and resting the fork on the edge of the plate. It was as if she wanted to say, “Gee, I don’t know, you know what I mean?” without opening her mouth. After reflecting a little and taking two short sips of sparkling water, she tried to explain:

“Well, they worked in different sectors of the industry. I think they met when Raul was instructed to try to create a process that gave commercial viability to a new yeast she had invented. They had a few meetings, he went to her lab, she went to his workshop, they started to meet at the cafeteria and, well… You know how it is. Birds and bees. The course of nature. Where do babies come from? Et cetera.”

“Their dating was public knowledge, then?”

“Not exactly. The board certainly knew, with the kind of pattern recognition software that security cameras have today, that even say if the person who is going to the bathroom really needs it or it’s just to kill time. But among colleagues, it was all very discreet. Sabrina is super quiet, she used to talk stuff with her friends… with me… but it seems to me that Raul wasn’t like this. No one in his sector knew he was engaged. The two made a trip together to Europe last year, after much effort to synchronize some time off of work to which they were entitled, but the engineering team thought that Raul was on a working trip.”

I raised my eyebrows slightly.

“And how do you know that?”

“I heard the boys talking then. It’s the kind of thing that tends to catch your attention, even more to me, since I knew the truth.

“And they talked about getting married and living together.”

“Yes.”

“Did that happen right after the trip?”

“Good question. Yes, I heard Sabrina mention it a day or two after they came back, I guess.”

“Are you still going to testify about her relationship?”

Since the beginning of the meal, Cláudia had calmed down quite a bit. The fact that she had arrived at the restaurant safe and sound and the food apparently hadn’t been poisoned or sabotaged somehow was quickly rebuilding her sense of self-confidence.

“I’m thinking of going from here straight to the notary’s office. As soon as we finish the dessert, I’ll call the lawyer.” The dimple grew large again, malicious, but then a look of fear formed on her doll face. “You were not followed here, were you?” If they know you’re working for her and see us together…”

I thought about it a little. My previous interview had been with a Puritan. A nice fellow, but nothing prevented him from calling the church right after I left, passing them the coordinates.

I shrugged. It was unlikely that some amateur could follow me without my noticing. And if Cláudia really had misjudged the secretary, I couldn’t see we had anything to fear.

“I wasn’t followed,” I answered, sounding just a little more confident than I actually felt.

* * *

The fact is that I was not even taking seriously the idea of a “shock and awe” campaign against my client. Cláudia had described a sequence of unfortunate events—problems with her microbiota, her car, her bank account—but it was nothing that couldn’t be attributed to an unfortunate confluence of coincidences.

Fiction is full of researchers who live by repeating things like “there are no coincidences” or “I don’t believe in coincidences,” but chance is a far more powerful influence than most people are willing to admit. Randomness and incompetence kill far more people than professional murderers and crime geniuses.

My predisposition to blame stupid, cruel fate, as opposed to hidden rational forces, for the vicissitudes of life was shaken, however, when I returned to the office after lunch, for there were still a few hours left before the interview with Raul’s friend, and my secretary said to me, “Good morning.”

It was a very simple part of the program, the machine saying “good morning”, “good afternoon” or “good night” whenever the door opened, depending of the time of the day. Twentieth-century devices were already able to do this without difficulty. My software was cheap but not so cheap as to confuse the mid-afternoon with the morning period.

And that might just be my impression, but the synthetic voice was kind of creepy.

“Any messages?” I asked. Like everyone else, I walk with a phone plugged into my ear and I have a passive media screen in the lens of my glasses, but my number or privilege of access are off-limits to the general public. The desktop has a filter that defines when to pass the call to me when alerting me to the appearance of something interesting in FaceSpace.

Or when, simply, to jot down the message.

“Only a gentleman came here. He was identified as ‘Archimandrite Serapião’, speaking on behalf of the Puritan Church. Online search confirmed the identity and revealed that ‘archimandrite’ is a title reserved, by this denomination, to celibate brothers in the early stages of the priesthood…”

“Right,” I cut her short. “Did he say what he wanted?”

“He just asked you to call as soon as possible. He left a phone number.”

“Right.”

“Shall I make the call?”

“In a while.”

Leaving the antechamber and going to the office proper, I stopped by the coffee machine. The lunch drinks were starting to take their toll and the cafezinho in the restaurant hadn’t been much more than hot water dyed black.

Looking at the machine, I felt a pang of guilt for not offering Sabrina a shot when she came here to hire me. Those knees had mesmerized me, no doubt about it. I missed a great chance to impress her.

The variety of bean I use is particularly good, and my obsession with keeping the machine well regulated is comparable to some guys with their car engines. It’s no use having the best coffee beans in the world if the roasting point is wrong or, even worse, if the water pressure and temperature aren’t well calibrated.

I set the machine for a ristretto and waited as usual. I was getting ready to put the cup in the base where the coffee should fall, when something made my eyes widen. I stepped back immediately.

I don’t know exactly where the warning came from. It’s possible that, almost unconsciously, I had sensed a faint, abnormal vibration of the great golden cylinder that formed the main body of the machine. Whatever the cause of my instinctive retreat, however, the device began to hiss like an angry snake. The sound came in a crescendo until it became a high gurgling that ended in a spurt of boiling water and steam, which jumped in my direction.

Scheduled to have my safety as top priority, the secretary remained silent. A few spatters had hit the sleeve of my shirt and the hem of my jacket. Where wet, the fabric produced a fine white smoke, small lint clouds.

It was water, only water, but at an absurdly high temperature, obtained thanks to the pressure inside the machine. If I were holding the cup under the spout of the coffeepot at the instant of the jet, my skin would probably now be loosening from my flesh. Nothing that a few days with restorative cream could not repair, but the pain would have been …

Just imagining the intensity of the pain sent a chill down my spine and I felt a cold wind on the back of my neck. The cup—I use the foam ones, which I prefer to old porcelain cups, not only because they diffuse the heat better, but also because they don’t cut my hands when I crush them—was forgotten, in the clenched fist of my right hand. I suppose if I had a mirror in front of me at that moment, I would have seen a purple face of rage.

“Diagnostic mode,” I commanded in a surprisingly calm voice. “Foreground.” In response to the instruction, which deactivated all the functions of the secretary while the software was searching for defects or viruses, I heard some notes of classical music and the lights of the office suddenly became more intense, since, without the secretary, there was no one to control the smart dimmer.

Then I called Cid, a systems security specialist with whom I used to exchange favors now and then. He remotely accessed the secretary’s program and gave me the preliminary report in less than fifteen minutes:

“Whoever did it was a smart guy.”

“Did what?”

“Your secretary was disoriented with a data overload. Remember an old episode of a TV series, when the computer is disabled because they ask it to determine the ‘last digit of pi’?”

“Don’t think I saw it.”

“Well, it was something like that. Your secretary seemed distracted and inattentive because she was inattentive, and had been distracted.”

“By whom?”

“By someone who read the user manual of this model much better than you, I guess. Well enough to know how to use voice commands to define a high-level priority activity, capable of mobilizing most computing resources and leaving all other priorities behind.”

“Including taking care of my safety and preventing tampering with the coffee machine.”

“For example, yes, that. The origin of that order has been erased, but the order itself is still here: an analysis of the energy flow in M.C. Escher’s Waterfall.”

I was familiar with the image. There was, in fact, a reproduction on the wall of the antechamber. And I knew the task given to the secretary was impossible, since the water in the picture seems to rise and fall at the same time (I like Escher precisely because of the graphic paradoxes). Whoever the hacker was, he had worked quickly and with the material at hand.

“How long? How much money?”

“It’s already done,” he replied, laughing. “As I said, anyone familiar with the manual would know how to create the problem and also how to solve it. As soon as the secretary returns from diagnostic mode, it’ll work fine. But I would give it an upgrade. As for the price, you buy me a beer later and we’re even.”

After thanking him and saying goodbye, I started to adjust the coffeemaker. As in the case of the secretary, the cause of the problem itself was not complex—a mere, so to speak, malicious valve manipulation—but, unlike the case of the program, the damage would cost me high: there were sealing rings to change, and at least one bronze tube was slightly deformed.

Then, my share of “unfortunate coincidences” already filled up for the rest of the week, I called the likely author of all the chaos around, the Archimandrite Serapião. Before freaking out, the secretary had printed the number and left the strip of paper stuck to my desk.

I was careful to keep the video off, so as not to give the bastard the pleasure of seeing my face purple with anger.

He picked up the phone on the first ring and then greeted me before I told him who he was. The archimandrite seemed to suppose that this foolish sleight of hand with the caller ID would baffle me.

“I suppose you have received…my message.”

The way he uttered “my message” reminded me of Bela Lugosi’s inflection in saying “wine” in “I don’t drink…wine” in the early scenes of Dracula. I had to hold back the urge to laugh. The guy really thought he was intimidating me. What kind of people are his kind used to dealing with anyway?

Olavo, the only Puritan faithful I had interviewed so far, didn’t seem to me to be a complete idiot, but if he took people like Archimandrite Serapião seriously…

“My secretary told me that you called. What can I do for you?”

“Are you all right? Your health? How’s business?”

“Very well, thank you.”

An embarrassing silence. On his part. What did he expect me to say? “Actually, I just burned myself a bit…” or “How awful, my secretary fritzed”?

“Glad to know. May your future conduct allow you to continue like this.”

And then I remembered something I had read long ago somewhere, how the original archimandrites—monks of the time of the Byzantine Empire—refused to bathe because they considered the concern with personal hygiene an unforgivable form of vanity. “The unspeakable filth of the saints covered several blocks in Alexandria, in an emanation of spiritual purity that offended the vultures of the sky,” someone had written.

It wasn’t that hard to imagine Serapião sweating and stinking a lot in some medieval alley.

“Thank you for your concern,” I said in a neutral tone. “How can I help you?”

“Ah. Yes.” He sounded rather mortified, perhaps for giving up the veiled threat game without scoring any point. “The Church would like to hire you.”

“Ah, yes?”

“It has come to our attention that you are conducting a private inquiry into the passing of one of our faithful…”

“Disappearance.”

“Beg your pardon?”

“It’s not ‘passing’, it’s ‘disappearance’. There’s no concrete evidence that the lady in question is dead.”

“So you confirm your involvement in the case?”

I had to smile. The old man—the call was audio only, but I could only imagine him as an old man, and fat too—thought that by Machiavellian means he had extracted important information from me.

“Well, since at least one member of your church has talked to me about it, there’s no reason to deny it, is there?”

“Indeed.”

I noticed, once again, the mortified tone. My “at least one” had puzzled him. Perhaps there were relapsed Puritans out there, ignominious to the point of not communicating to the hierarchy the contact with this infidel sleuth? Oh, cruel doubt.

Cruelty, by the way, was something I was beginning to feel in the back of my throat, a metallic taste that leaves the saliva bitter. That fucker had sabotaged my office to intimidate me and, belatedly acknowledging the strategic error, was now appealing for indirect threats and childish charades. It wouldn’t be long before he came to the bribe offer. I decided to encourage him.

“Since we have established, to our mutual satisfaction, my involvement in the case of Dona Albertina’s disappearance, what, pray tell, can I do for you?” I made a point of giving an impudent tone to you.

To my surprise, the Archimandrite ignored the provocation.

“The Church would like to follow your efforts. I was allowed to mention the possibility of an incentive, a reward, so to speak, if the body was located.”

“What if it can’t be located?”

“Well, I suppose, for a man of your talent and creativity, it really should not be at all impossible to find a solution.”

My patience was running scarce by the second.

“Is that so? And what solution would that be?”

I had a good idea of what that worm had in mind: that I should steal a suitable corpse or even kill a lady of reasonable likeness. It should be enough that the body was properly mutilated as to be unrecognizable, and they would surely know who to bribe for the DNA tests to provide the desired result. But my wish was to hear the son of a bitch say it. Request a crime. Deliver the body.

Of course, my anger had surpassed good sense: however rudimentary the means and techniques of the old Serapião, even he was too smart to propose a crime, explicitly, in a conversation that could have been recorded. As indeed was the case.

“If we here in the Church knew how to do that, sir, we would not need to offer incentives or rewards to professionals of your caliber,” he answered in a glacial tone.

“Any idea of the value of the reward?”

“The archpriest’s generosity is well known. Imagine your usual fees for dealing with a missing person case…”

“I don’t need to imagine. I have the fee table here in front of me.”

“…and multiply said value by ten.”

It was good money. Not enough to guarantee me an early retirement, but still very good money indeed. There was the ethical question of acting in the same case having two clients with opposite purposes, Sabrina being infinitely more pleasant and, most importantly, Serapião having destroyed my coffee machine. Getting a piece of brass at a reasonable price to replace the deformed pipe would take weeks, maybe even months, in this world where everything is made of polymer and biomass.

“Up yours!” I said, hanging up.

* * *

Feeling lighter and spry, I decided to walk home. The plan for the rest of the afternoon was to ponder the information I had already obtained and put on a clean shirt before leaving for the bar where I would have a chat with Antonio, Raul’s former co-worker, that night.

I lived in an apartment not far from the office, though most of the time I preferred to use the Light Rail Vehicle to get around. The place was only two stations away.

I was passing through the station door where I used to take the tram when I noticed a guy standing out from a small crowd that was watching a bipedal dancing dog show (hadn’t such a modification been forbidden?) and started to walk in the same direction, but keeping some distance. I noticed he had put something in his mouth and, as he walked, he was chewing it vigorously. I had the feeling that it wasn’t gum.

I started to walk faster, entered a bakery where the owner and the staff knew me and, without saying a word, asking for permission and apologizing by means of gestures and mimicry, ran to the back where there was a loading and unloading exit.

Outside, I walked in the opposite direction of my house until the first corner, and then I circled the block back, returning to the same stretch of sidewalk I had used when I left the office.

Then I saw the back of the gum-chewing guy a little farther on, standing at the entrance to the bakery, pretending to study the pastries in the display. He was obviously trying to find me in the middle of the confusion of customers jostling at the counter, balancing themselves on the poor little tables and making a noisy row at the cash register.

I had to admit that the chaotic interior of the establishment, the reflection of the sun in the window, the general smoke of fried bacon and water vapor that filled the bakery, all of this added to the fact that I was no longer there, made the task a bit hard.

I crossed the street and sat down on one of the small tables in a Japanese self-service restaurant that occupied part of the sidewalk, watching my poor stalker. He still stood, in a way that seemed pathetic to me, pretending to pay attention to the window for a few more minutes—trying to read omens and portents in the contours of the beaten egg cream and sugar covering the donuts, perhaps?—but then, with an attempt not at all happy to show dignity and indifference, he turned and walked away.

For a moment I was afraid he’d go straight to where I was, but instead he continued to walk in the general direction of my house. Interested, I followed him.

If my stalker really sucked in practice, at least someone had bothered to teach him the stakeout theory. Once you have lost sight of the person you should follow, the old masters say, it’s best to go to a place where the target will be forced to go sooner or later and, if possible, resume the job from there.

The alternative is to close shop for today and try again the next day, but my mysterious chewer wasn’t keen on doing tomorrow what he could do today. Following him I saw that he stopped very close to the building where I live, but at an angle that allowed me to observe the three broad steps of the main entrance without being picked up by the biometric camera of the electronic doorman. And he stood there, left shoulder barely resting on a light pole, waiting for me to appear.

I stood thirty feet behind him, and then I began to walk, fast and determined, in his direction.

I had a reasonable idea of what was going on. If I was wrong, however, what I intended to do with the imbecile would end up giving me a lawsuit for assault, maybe even bodily injury, if the D.A. had a migraine. But then I thought, so what? What’s one more wound for a leper, after all?

As soon as I saw myself two feet away from his back, I raised my arm and, without slowing down, grabbed him by the shoulder, twisting him violently around the pole. Before he had time to recover from the surprise and loss of balance, I punched him really good with a left hook.

The impact caused him to spit a milky, rosy mass on the post, and with my right hand I grabbed him tightly by the nape of his neck and pushed his head up to rub his nose, brow and cheeks in the ooze. When I let him go, he hesitated for a moment, and I wondered if he would sit down, but no: he stood. Hysterically, he rubbed his face clean with his shirt. But it was too late.

In the meantime, I’d stepped back and watched, knowing what to expect. It didn’t take long for the effects of the paste to manifest, as the saliva holding the virus inert evaporated: huge, grotesque and somewhat painful bubbles—judging by the moans and screams—began to erupt in his forehead and around his eyes. If any formed inside the nostrils, he would need medical help. If my mood improved, I might feel compelled to call someone.

The street wasn’t very busy and anyway people in my neighborhood know the value of giving ample space and privacy to their neighbor, especially when said neighbor seems to be of the violent kind and the victim is no one you know.

I felt a rather morbid satisfaction as I saw the face of my pursuer getting disfigured at high speed. Much of this satisfaction came from the fact that I had been right in my conjecture: what the imbecile had been chewing on was a “Punk’d,” a concoction made from a modified version of the papilloma virus, the same one that causes common warts. Punk’d is much faster, and creates much bigger and more fragile warts. It’s also non-contagious and its effects usually disappear in ten days tops.

This is not to say that an attack using this biological version of cream pie on the face isn’t humiliating, uncomfortable, and embarrassing to the victim, which is the whole point of the trick.

The product itself is illegal, but any anarchist with access to a backyard lab, any high school student with a penchant for bio-hacking is able to synthesize a few tens of milliliters in a few hours, like many snobbish It Girls, TV celebrities, police officers and even some especially photogenic senators have already discovered.

Noticing that he could still breathe, the stranger screamed in a soprano voice and ran.

“Tell Serapião I still owe him a kick in the ass!” I shouted at the fugitive, who was already turning the corner. Crying and gnashing my teeth. Bunch of jerks!

* * *

Antonio Kobaiashi de Toledo was a tall, thin man in navy blue trousers and a mustard-colored jacket full of pockets with buttons on his chest, sides, forearms, just as fashion dictated. His skin was dark like polished onyx. There wasn’t a single hair on his head above his ears, but beneath it he sported a long, bushy white beard.

The overall effect of this appearance, supplemented by a pair of round gold-rimmed spectacles, was that of an old person, conventional enough to be trustworthy, but endowed with deep wells of wisdom. Which must have been exactly the first impression Antonio wanted to plant in the unconscious of all those who came into his orbit.

He was already sitting at the counter when I arrived. There was a mug of amber-colored beer next to his elbow and a plate of olives in front of him. I introduced myself, asked for a mug for myself, and sat down. We began talking.

The first thing Antonio told me was that it was his call to the authorities that had led the police to break down Raul’s garage door.

“The guy hadn’t been coming to work for a week, he wasn’t even answering the phone. There had to be something wrong. Raul didn’t miss a day, even if he was working at home, investing his free time in some new project.

“Busting down the door struck me as a bit radical,” I pondered. “They had no employees or a virtual butler who could recognize the police credentials and open the garage?”

Antonio shook his head.

“The automation in the house was minimal, vestigial, even. The system washed and ironed the clothes, managed the water heating and vacuumed the floor, just that. His mother was virtually a Luddite, she didn’t trust machines to cook or wash the dishes. On top of that, Raul was paranoid regarding intelligent automation. He was afraid of being hacked, especially when he was taking important projects home.”

“And what project was that? If you can comment on it…”

He smiled.

“I don’t think I could, if I was officially involved, but since it was something between him and his girlfriend, Sabrina’s from the laboratory, I guess…”

That surprised me.

“Girlfriend?” I hadn’t told anyone that Sabrina, who claimed to be Raul’s fiancé, had hired me, but only that she was working for “interested parties” in the disappearance of his mother. And from what Sabrina’s friend, Cláudia, had said, their relationship was kept secret.

Antonio swallowed two olives and gave me a look of amusement and guilt, more or less like married men exchanging glances as they enter a whorehouse.

“I bet a little bird told you that the lovebirds’ courtship was highly classified, right?” He laughed. “Well, in a way, it was, but a bit clumsy. The rest of the engineering crew probably would have noticed if they’d bothered to pay attention. As for me, how could I not notice? Raul had invited me to be the best man.”

“Best man,” I repeated, attesting my mental slowness.

“Best man. For the wedding. They hadn’t set a date yet, but they had decided on a kind of window of opportunity, an ideal period to tie the knot. They should have swapped vows a couple of months ago, but they gave up four months before that. When he told me my best man ‘services’ wouldn’t be necessary anymore, Raul was very embarrassed…”

“Did he give you a reason?”

“He just said that the right moment hadn’t come yet, something like that.”

“Did he mention his mother?”

Antonio paused for one moment.

“No,” he finally said. “I don’t think so. At least not in that context.”

I finished my mug and ordered another. While waiting, I commented:

“So he didn’t show for a week, and then you called the police.”

“Yes. I knew he was doing some informal testings off business hours, but as I explained, Raul was a straight arrow, and even if he was deep into some project at home, from midnight to 6 AM, he would never think of compensating overtime jumping out of normal business hours. He was dumb like that.”

My draft beer arrived and the high foam collar smudged the tip of my nose. I wiped the beer off it and asked him again about the project. Antonio replied pointing to my glass:

“This very beer you are drinking is made of yeast that turns the barley’s natural sugar into alcohol and releases carbon dioxide in the process.”

“Okay.”

“Much of the energy we use today in transportation, biodiesel, bio-kerosene, ethanol, is made in the same way. Yeast, or bacteria sometimes, turn biomass into precursor molecules that are then converted into the type of fuel that each specific vehicle requires. The old oil refineries turned into big breweries.”

“Because of global warming,” I suggested.

“Partly, yes. But the price of oil also had something to do with it.” The mischievous grin of the father caught in the brothel reappeared on his face. “Planting cane is still cheaper than drilling the continental shelf. But it won’t last forever. Because of the income.”

“Income?”

He paused to swap the empty mug for a full, then went on:

“Generally speaking, more energy is extracted from a liter of oil than from a kilo of cane. And the global demand only increases. Soon we will reach a point where it will again make sense, economic sense, at least to extract and refine oil, as it was done in the twentieth century. Unless we can extract more energy from plants.”

“Cellulose?”

“Cellulose, yes. Plants are made of things other than sugar, such as cellulose, fat, and protein, and there are biological pathways to convert all of those into fuel. The point is only about price and unwanted waste. Cellulose started to be a part of the scene in the beginning of the century. Animal fat has been used for decades to produce aviation kerosene. Protein is the new frontier, mainly because of waste.”

“Waste?”

“Ammonia. Nitrates. In the old days, people thought that this wouldn’t be a problem, that after yeast and bacteria finished turning the protein into fuel, the part with the nitrogen could be reused as fertilizer. A closed cycle: nitrates for soil, soil for plant, plant for nitrates. But then… Have you ever heard of nitrogen pollution?”

I shook my head. He swallowed three more olives.

“Bottom line, having loose nitrogen compounds in the soil, air, and water is not a good idea. Acid rain. Pollution of lakes and oceans. Bad, really bad. Not at first, but over time… Synthetic fertilizers had to be regulated almost to extinction some ten years ago. Hence, the golden dream of the protein biofuel was sent to the compost heap.”

“Unless someone invented a process that could neutralize nitrogen,” I added. “Which was what Raul and Sabrina were working on.”

“Yes, this. She developed the organism, he was working on the reactor, digester or whatever the type of device he had built at home. If it had worked out, it would have been fantastic.”

“Because the plants then would be fully exploited?”

“The animals too.”

In the kind of literature I usually read, the sentence “I felt an icy fist closing in around my heart” appears with a certain frequency, but I had never understood its meaning until that moment. Something was taking shape in the back of my mind and it was not good.

“Animals?”

“Of course.” The subject seemed to amuse my interlocutor. “Animals are fundamentally fat and protein. The fat processing is old stuff. In denser urban areas, restaurants can make good money by passing on leftover grease to mills. If you were to process the protein as well, it would be possible to reuse virtually all organic waste as a fuel source, the useless parts of animals slaughtered for consumption, carcasses of dogs and cats… In addition to creating a strong incentive for active pest control, such as rats and pigeons.”

“What about the bones?”

“Bone is also protein. Collagen, especially. We’d need filters to keep the minerals, calcium and everything else, but still…”

His eyes took on a distant, dreamy glow. It was the engineer’s brain, dwelling on speculation about an imaginary machine. I, on the other hand, could only think of the ending of a hundred-year-old movie, an old 2D production.

The protagonist, a famous actor of yore—not a good performer, but a fantastic screen presence all the same—ran down the streets shouting, “Soylent Green is people!”, referring to some green cookies that formed the basis of diet in his world. According to that plot, people were cannibals and did not know it.

“And why—” I forced myself, not without some effort, to put away my cinematic reverie. “—was he working on it at home?” The project would certainly be of interest to the company.

“It was something he was developing along with Sabrina. I believe it had begun as an official mission of the company, but it evolved into a pet project of the two. I think they wanted to present the technology to the board when it was ready, or at least when they already had a functional prototype. Or, well… Look, you didn’t hear that from me, but maybe they wanted to start a company. Their own company. If they could prove that all the development had been done outside office hours…”

“Got it.”

My stomach was upset. I couldn’t finish the second pint. An eloquent sign of declining health, in my case. After a few more lines of inconsequential dialogue, I excused myself and left.

On the way to the LRV station, hurriedly, I called my police contact. The voice exploded on the other side of the connection:

“Fuck, man, didn’t I tell you I had today off?”

Major Adriana of the Unified Metropolitan Police—my sweet little sister, born two years after me, always affectionate with her older brother.

“Shut that fucking filthy mouth of yours, Dri.” Whenever talking to Adriana, I always find it good to impose my authority right away. I can well imagine that anyone else trying to shut her up, including my brother-in-law, would end up with a nine-millimeter barrel stuck up in a nostril, or any other orifice. But being the big brother brings some atavistic privileges. “Shut up and listen to me. It’s important…”

She had said she wouldn’t have time to talk to me that day because of a party at my niece’s school, but the fact that Dri had answered the call with a loud “fuck” was a sign that, at least for now, she was alone and could speak freely.

But I knew that wasn’t going to last, so I quickly summed up the events of the day and the hypothesis that had come to me during the conversation with Antonio, who was still upsetting my stomach.

She listened to me with some exasperation at first, but, as the implications of each stage of the investigation became clear, she began to show a more pronounced interest. In the end, we engaged in a good talk about the case, and then I got a lot of the information I presented right at the beginning of this story.

As soon as we finished the conversation, I was already inside the train, and she promised to send me a team of experts to take a second look at Raul’s house. With special emphasis on the car, which had been left in the garage after the removal of the body, and in the part of the garden where the policemen had smelled beer.

* * *

To my disappointment, the Archimandrite Serapião was neither fat nor old. He didn’t even stink. The guy who came into my office the next afternoon was tall, thin, exuding a soft aroma of mahogany and citrus with a brief note of frankincense. He was dressed in a sleek chalkboard-gray suit with a jacket full of pockets (and epaulettes on his shoulders, something that anticipated the safari fashion of the next season), a Panama hat and, not to say that everything about him was beautiful and up-to-date, he had a curly goatee that looked like the tail of a dead sheep glued to his jaw with spit.

“Good afternoon, Your Reverence.” The soft voice of my secretary greeted the newcomer.

His expression, which never was really pleasant to begin with, crumpled completely. The sheep’s tail now looked like a storm cloud, ready to release lightning. As for me, I smiled the most beatific smile as I signaled for him to sit down.

“The system had a problem yesterday and hasn’t returned to normality yet,” I said, expressing a commiseration that, I hope, sounded as false as it really was. “She meant Reverend.”

He grunted something as he sat down and, once settled, said, “I was surprised by your phone call. After the abruptness with…”

“But you didn’t go, so nothing bad happened.”

“Didn’t I go?”

“Do as I suggested yesterday, before you disconnect the phone.”

The archimandrite became livid. With almost clinical interest, I watched as the blood drained from his face. He would have gotten up and out of the office at that very moment. He might have tried to attack me, had it not been for the orders he had received directly from the Archpriest Sérvio, with whom I had spoken the night before.

It had not been very difficult to gain personal access to the supreme leader of the Church of the Puritans after I had escaped, for one of the stooges that served as the archpriest’s shields in communication networks, my very good sister, UMP major, was interested in the Albertina affair.

The insinuation of the unlimited possibilities of manipulation of facts and testimonies through nepotism and traffic of influence within the police itself, which I had purposely left in the air, had intoxicated the Church. Enough, it seemed, to reduce the archimandrite to the most abject submission.

Exactly as expected: Before contacting the Church, I had spoken with my lawyer and he had told me that although it was possible in theory to untangle the Gonçalves da Nóbrega assets in the short term, the chances of that happening without Albertina’s body were scant at best.

Laws about heritage and inheritance had changed a great deal in the last twenty years because of new possibilities such as cloning, uploading of consciousness, and asexual human reproduction, but it was still not so easy to declare someone dead.

If the Puritans really wanted to get their hands on the whole family inheritance, they desperately needed good evidence that you were really dead, and they needed it before Sabrina could prove the stable union.

“Reverend,” I said with the happiness I always feel on the rare occasions when I know I have all the cards in my hand, “you had mentioned something like a payment of ten times my usual fees if a body were produced.”

He leaned forward in his chair, anxious.

“Take me to the body.”

“Pay me the money.”

Serapião stepped back, suspicious.

“Come on.” I felt so elated and lightweight I could almost feel my head floating above my shoulders. “I wouldn’t fool you. I don’t want pimps spitting papilloma in my face on every corner for the rest of my life.”

He gave that a little thought. Then he took a notebook out of his pocket, typed something, and two minutes later I saw, in the desk terminal, the credit bar of my bank account change color—from orange to green—and going up, up, up.

“The body?” The Archimandrite was impatient.

“Here.” I pushed a scrap of paper I had printed earlier across the desk. “This is the still unofficial content of the result of a detailed examination carried out on the automobile where Raul was found, and an experimental digester mounted secretly in the garden of the house. The police was there in the morning.

“Was the body in the car? Where? In the back? In the trunk? How these idiots did not notice that before…”

“No. It was in the tank.”

Serapião fell silent.

“The details are there. Calcium precipitation in the fuel filter. Indication of corrosion by ammonia in the hose. The laboratory even found traces of mitochondrial DNA in the reservoir, which allowed a positive identification.”

Adriana had passed me the preliminary forensic data shortly after ten o’clock. Slightly irregular, but blood is thicker than water. In addition, no one would have tried the tank if I had not suggested and, in the end, I also do my share of dirty services for the UMP, when the major whistles.

“I don’t get it…”

“Raul was working on a process to extract biodiesel from animal protein. Human beings are animals. Albertina was a human being. You want me to draw a diagram?”

“Did he use his mother to produce the smoke that smothered him to death?”

“His mother’s corpse. I don’t think she was still alive when he shoved her into the digester, where, by the way, the cops found fragments of a sweater and also a few strands of hair, still with traces of genetic material in the root. Aside from that, a good synthesis. That was it.”

“But that’s…obscene.”

“He lived with his mother to care for his mother. When she died…”

“She’s really dead, then.”

The bastard didn’t even have the decency to hide the triumphant edge in his voice.

“Well, that’s the good news,” I continued, preparing my firecracker. “The police have evidence that Albertina is dead. The bad news, at least to you Puritans, is that the same proof shows that she died before her son. Since her body was the weapon of his suicide, there seems to be no other way out, logically speaking, unless his lawyers can prove that Raul invented the time machine, and yet the story is still complicated.” I smiled, recycling my false pity. “Which means he’s the heir, not you. And without it, her fortune goes to… Well, to someone other than you. I’m terribly sorry.”

“No.” The Archimandrite jumped to his feet, gritting his teeth in anger. “You are not.”

“Yeah, I am not. And you know what I said about the papilloma urchins? It was a lie. I’ll love to punch their faces when they come after me. One at a time or all together, whatever.”

* * *

Sabrina came an hour after the man of the Church had gone. The coffee machine still had not been repaired. The work would have to be done by hand. Then I took out a bottle of bourbon from the drawer, two glasses the size of thimbles, and poured a dose for each of us.

She was wearing trousers and a turtleneck. Brown clothes, almost the color of her skin, but ample ones: the only notable curve was the elevation of her breasts, and yet more suggested than marked. No cleavage and knees this time.

I had sent her the police report in the morning. Now there was insecurity in her eyes: she wanted to know how much I had actually deduced on my own. If I’d hand her to the police.

“Raul stayed for a week without going to work, something totally averse to his character and his way of being,” I said as she sat down. “But it was a workmate who called the police, not his wife.”

“He called me, saying his mother was dead. And that he needed some time alone, to…to process what had happened, and then …”

“And then you left the man of your dreams utterly alone, in a minuscule house and the corpse of his mother, for seven days, without saying anything to anyone, is that it? Until he went crazy with pain and loneliness and decided to kill himself too, is that it?

“Saying it that way makes it sound so awful. But yes.”

“But why kill yourself like that, choking on the smoke from your mother’s body? Was it a sexual thing? Psychopathological? A message? What do you think?”

“I… I…”

She was scared. She knew that I knew.

“May I offer you an explanation?” Without waiting for an answer, I began. “Albertina was an obstacle. A hindrance. Even blind and paraplegic, she was an active, lively, almost independent lady…until her son began to speak of marriage. Of bringing another woman to live in the house, or leave the house and leave her too, whatever. Albertina couldn’t accept that. And what method did she choose to impose her will on her child? The time-honored method of mothers of only children: blackmail, no, emotional torture. Guilt.”

My client swallowed.

“All the people who knew of your plan to marry Raul also told me that they were canceled about six months ago. Around the same time that, in the words of a friend and probable boyfriend, Albertina decided to become an invalid, blocking her son’s escape route. But children of strong, assertive women tend to get involved with strong, assertive women, and I’ll bet you’re the type. Seeing that Raul would not marry while Albertina continued playing the role of disabled mother, you concluded that it was time to get rid of Albertina. I suspect that the idea of disposing of the body through the exhaust of the car was yours, was it not? With Albertina dissolved in the atmosphere, it would be possible to keep the illusion that she had recovered her good mood and decided to travel, go on vacation, move to another country. And you finally might be together.

“Interesting.” She gathered her strength to build a mask of impassivity. But her eyes remained tense, haunted. “A bit morbid, though.”

“The suitability of means and ends was so great,” I continued, as if I hadn’t been interrupted, “with the prototype installed in the garden of the house, and the fact that Albertina depended on Raul for her tonics and remedies made you forget the psychological factor of guilt. In the seven days Albertina’s body fermented in the digester, Raul was slowly feeling dilacerated from the inside out. Until, in the end, he decided to apply a form of justice to himself: since he had allowed his mother to be killed, he would now allow her to kill him. So he filled the tank, locked the doors, lowered the windows, sped up… I wonder what would have happened if Antonio had called the police one day, or even an hour, earlier.”

“I don’t think we’ll ever know, will we?” She was smiling. Not a fake smile, but something that accentuated the cruel aspect of her face: she had regained her composure. It’s usually what happens when someone sees their sins exposed and, immediately, nothing happens to them. We all harbor an atavistic fear that the ground will open under our feet when some villainy we commit is articulated clearly in words. But if there are no immediate consequences, we relax and lower our guard. Some people even take great pleasure, exultation, from the effect.

Which leaves them more vulnerable than they can possibly realize.

“There’s a glass,” I said. “A glass with just a trace of juice, left in the kitchen sink of Raul’s house. It must be in some police evidence cabinet now. I don’t know what tests the authorities have done on it, or what further tests may still be carried out. Certainly fingerprints were collected and the rim scanned for signs of genetic material. I wonder if it wasn’t your fingerprints, your DNA on it.”

She shrugged.

“What if it is? It only proves that I was there one day. And why wouldn’t I have been there? Raul and I were dating. In fact, there is no proof that Albertina’s death was not perfectly natural.”

“I wonder if there was poison in the glass.”

“Poison?” She laughed a nervous laugh.

“The house was in perfect order except for two details: Albertina’s bed and that glass. The bed where she slept for the last time, and the glass…maybe the glass from which she drank for the last time?”

Sabrina was shaking. The temperature in the room was 25° C.

“And if there’s poison in the background, Albertina’s DNA on the rim, and fingerprints… Would there be other fingerprints mixed with Raul’s, I wonder?”

“You weak, stupid, sentimental, childish, invertebrate, idiot… Damn fool, I can’t believe you didn’t wash the glass after I left!”

* * *

“A good bluff, mentioning the glass.”

I smiled. It’s not every day that Adriana recognizes the merits of her older brother. Somewhere in the distance, my niece screamed, clinging to her father’s neck. As far as I could understand, she feared being swallowed by a black hole, and the cervical spine of my poor brother-in-law was her last anchor in this universe.

As unlikely as it might have seemed, they were both having a good time.

“It was Raul’s last drink, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. He drank a mixture of milk, brandy, and mango juice before he got into the car and killed himself. He probably didn’t see why he should have to do the dishes, if he wouldn’t need them anymore.”

“Makes sense.”

“Totally.”

In the distance, the gravity of the black hole had dragged my brother-in-law to the ground, and now father and daughter rolled across the grass. It was a sunny morning in the Sierra Park, and the lawn was still soft with the dew of dawn.

“Those two will have a hell of an itching bout later,” I observed.

“It’s all in the game,” Adriana replied. “But how did you know that she had prepared the poison for Albertina?”

I shrugged.

“His mother wouldn’t take a glass of juice from anyone other than her son. She probably didn’t even know Sabrina was in the house. Raul had to bring the drink to her. But he could not have put the poison in his glass.”

“In her deposition, Sabrina said he just walked into the kitchen when the mix was ready.”

I nodded.

“Makes sense. So, without witnessing anything, he could keep the illusion that there was nothing wrong. Raul was the kind of man who would let a strong woman do whatever he wanted with him, but for that very reason he was incapable of doing anything against a strong woman.”

“Quite different from you, right, little brother?”

I looked up into the blue sky, pretending to think deeply.

“Fortunately, I don’t have strong women in my family.”

And I made myself scarce, running from the police as fast as I could.

* * *

Carlos Orsi is a writer and a journalist specializing in coverage of scientific topics from Jundiaí, São Paulo. He has published the story collections Medo, Mistério e Morte (1996) and Tempos de Fúria (2005), and the novels Nômade (2010) and Guerra Justa (2010). His works of fiction appear in anthologies such as Imaginarios v. 1 (2009), and in magazines and fanzines in Brazil and abroad.