Pursuit

Prologue On that hot December afternoon, his long strides and fixed stare didn't make it any easier to weave through all the pedestrians. To avoid bumping into people, and to maintain his steady rhythm, Espinosa found himself walking long stretches with one foot on the curb and the other in the street. He wasn't late for anything and he wasn't heading anywhere in particular. On the Rua da Quitanda, he had planned to turn onto the Rua do Carmo in order to check out the used-book store he'd visited since his law school days. But at the quick pace he was going, the Rua do Carmo and the bookstore were forgotten. Whenever possible, Espinosa took advantage of quiet afternoons at the station to examine a new bookstore or revisit one of his old haunts in the colonial buildings downtown. That was when he was working, but this afternoon he was just trying to enjoy one of his last days of vacation. The previous days hadn't differed much from the one that was already halfway over. Things had started going south a week before the beginning of his vacation, when Irene had received an invitation to a two-week seminar at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It came, out of the blue, from the museum itself, extended to foreign professionals who had distinguished themselves in some way over the last few years. So their own holiday, a trip to a beach in the Northeast, had had no choice but to relocate to Rio, which, after all, had beaches too. Great for Irene, a disaster for him. Great, too, for highlighting the difference between a graphic designer and a police chief, he thought, picking up the pace even more. He'd been wandering through the downtown streets for almost two hours. In one of his hands he carried a small bag with two books he'd bought that afternoon, but he no longer remembered their titles, or even where he'd bought them. He didn't have much interest either in the snack he'd planned to enjoy at the Confeitaria Colombo. It was Thursday and he didn't have to be back at work until Monday. He headed to the nearest subway station and returned home. The phone rang for the first time at seven-twenty that evening. Over the next fifteen minutes, it rang twice more. But nobody spoke on the other end of the line. Espinosa hesitated before picking up the fourth time, and when he did he met the same silence he'd encountered the first three times. He was about to hang up when he heard a man's voice. "Chief Espinosa?" "Yes." "I'm sorry to be calling you at home, but at the station they said you were on vacation." "That's true." "My name is Artur Nesse. I'm a doctor. . . . A colleague at the hospital gave me your name. . . . You helped him . . ." ". . . and now you need my help." "Right. . . . Well, not me, exactly . . . somebody else. . . . But I really don't know what to do. Excuse me, Officer, I'm feeling reallyGarcia-Roza, Luiz Alfredo is the author of 'Pursuit ', published 2006 under ISBN 9780805074390 and ISBN 0805074392.