Buried Strangers by Leighton Gage Page B

waiters, and installed a dentist and a doctor so members could get dental and medical care in exchange for their dues.”
    “Sounds like he did a good job.”
    Tarcisio scanned some more of the document and stroked his mustache. The mustache was a pygmy compared with Silva’s.
    “He played to the people who owned cantinas, roadside churrascarias, little inns in the countryside, surrounded him-self with yes-men, got to the point where he was running the joint like a fiefdom. In time, he turned into an egomaniac.”
    “Power corrupts . . .” Silva said.
    Tarcisio smiled. “And absolute power corrupts absolutely. Do you know who said that?”
    “No idea.”
    “An English lord, name of Acton. More than a hundred years ago.”
    “Not much has changed.”
    “I can attest to that. Anyway, getting back to your friend Cavalcante, a couple of years ago, the owners of some of the more elite restaurants and hotels got together and tried to topple him. They hired us.”
    “And?”
    “And we couldn’t find anything truly damaging.”
    “No sexual peccadillos? No corruption?”
    “No sexual peccadillos. Not recently, anyway. The guy’s seventy-six.”
    “Seventy-six? Jesus, he doesn’t look it.”
    “He lies about it. But so what? His health’s good for a man of his age. Nothing to impede him from doing the job he had then or the job he has now.”
    “And corruption?”
    “Not an easy thing to prove, corruption. Nepotism for sure. While he was running the association, he put his wife, all three sons, and one of his two daughters on the payroll. Various nieces and cousins as well, but the association mem-bers knew about it and nobody complained. He spent a lot of the association’s money flying back and forth between São Paulo and Brasilia and between São Paulo and Orlando in the American state of Florida. In the first case, he claims he was lobbying for the association—”
    “And probably himself, since he’s now the minister of tourism.”
    “And probably himself, since he’s now the minister of tourism,” Mello echoed.
    “And in the case of Orlando?”
    Mello referred again to the page he’d been reading.
    “He was going to open a branch office up there. That’s what he said, anyway. Claimed that Brazil had a lot to learn from the Americans in the hospitality area. He also just hap-pens to own a home there.”
    “Coincidence, eh?”
    “Amazing, isn’t it?”
    “And the branch office? Did it ever happen?’’
    “Nope.”
    “But on the surface, he’s pretty clean?”
    “Cleaner than many others in this town.”
    Silva snorted, frustrated. “Nothing else?”
    Tarcisio leafed through the remaining pages of the docu-ment. Silva would have liked to do that himself, but he didn’t want to ask. His friend had already bent confiden-tiality agreements to the limit.
    “His other daughter, the one that doesn’t work for the association, is a Wiccan.”
    “A Wiccan? What the hell is that?”
    Tarcisio scratched his head. “I haven’t the faintest idea,” he said.

Chapter Fourteen
    THE MANSION STOOD ATOP one of the high hills in the posh neighborhood of Morumbi. It had once been a wealthy family’s home, and the properties on either side of it still were. The building had come into being with a French name, a French architect, and a front gate designed by Eiffel himself.
    Back then, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, it had been called Sans Souci, French for carefree. The name might have been an apt description of the original owner’s state of spirit, and even of that of his son and grandson, but it had no longer applied to his great-grandson, who entered his adult life with many cares indeed, all of them rooted in a lack of money.
    The family’s coffee plantations had been sold when the boy was still an infant. They’d brought in millions at the time, but it took his father less than twenty years to drink and gamble most of it away. By the time the young man achieved his majority,