He picked up a pencil and started to toy with it. Sampaio fumbled with pencils when he was about to say something his listener wouldn’t like. This time, he appeared to be going for the world record.

Silva braced himself.

“How can I put this?” Sampaio said, temporizing.

Silva glanced around Sampaio’s recently redecorated office. His boss had retained his big wooden desk and the two flags that flanked it. There was still a portrait of the president of the republic to the left of the window, but now it was lower and situated off to one side, ceding precedence to an image of Jesus.

Jesus held his right hand in the air, as if he were administering the Boy Scout oath. From Silva’s perspective, it looked like He was administering it to Nelson Sampaio.

The director was, of course, anything but a Boy Scout. The oath he’d set his sights upon was of an entirely different nature. For almost three years, Sampaio had been angling to secure himself a seat in the Chamber of Deputies, and now he’d hatched a scheme to do it. That scheme involved embracing a new religion; but for a man with as much ambition as Sampaio, that was no obstacle.

It hinged on a statistic: since the previous election, Evangelicals in Brazil had been multiplying like rabbits. They now formed a very significant voting bloc. Given a choice, Evangelicals voted for other Evangelicals, and there was no Evangelical running in Sampaio’s home district. With the election only five months away, the votes in Sao Paulo were still up for grabs. All Sampaio had to do was to declare that he’d been born again in Jesus-and make sure he made the announcement early enough to get the word out.

He’d already made the declaration.

Hence the redecoration of his office. Devotional plaques with excerpts from the Scriptures were a feature of the decor, beginning with the Ten Commandments and running through the Twenty-Third chapter of Luke: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”