Manolo Nabuco dropped the nose of his ancient Cessna 310B and leveled off at nine thousand feet. It was a moonless night, with an unlimited ceiling and thousands of stars above. Below, on the black mass of the firmament, there wasn’t a single light. The pitch-blackness down there wouldn’t last much longer. Once they’d cleared the reserva-tion, there’d be the occasional glimmer of light from an iso-lated farm. And then the lights would multiply, and the illu-mination build, until they finally reached a crescendo. By then, they’d be on their final approach to Congonhas airport in Sao Paulo.
Manolo was anxious to roll into the hangar and cut the engines. He needed a snort. Not because of his nerves. His nerves were fine. Ask anybody. They’d tell you. Manolo Nabuco was a stand-up guy with nerves of steel. He wasn’t like most of the other coke smugglers, the ones that only found their courage after they’d snorted a line or two.
Yeah, okay, he snorted. Maybe he snorted a lot. But who didn’t these days? One thing about him, though: he never snorted when he was working, never got behind the controls when he was high on cocaine. Sometimes he did it when he was a little drunk, but high on the white stuff? Never.
Manolo Nabuco wasn’t addicted. Not him. Ask anybody. They’d tell you. They’d tell you Manolo Nabuco just used it because he wanted to, not because he had to. There’d been times when he was alone, high above the pitch-blackness of the Amazon rain forest, heading south with a full cargo of snow on board. It would have been easy to put the Cessna on autopilot, climb back there, cut into one of the bundles, and help himself to a healthy snort. He’d been tempted, but he’d never done it. Not once.
Hell, who wouldn’t have been tempted? Since the fucking air force got permission to shoot down unidentified aircraft, you never knew what might be coming at you. The radar coverage had gotten better, too, so no matter how low you were, there was always a chance you could show up on some-body’s screen. It was scary. But despite all that, he’d always stayed in his seat, never once taken out his knife. Not once.
Sometimes he wondered, though, how much it could hurt if he-
“How much longer?” the little wimp in the backseat said, interrupting the pilot’s musings.
Annoying little bastard! Manolo thought.
For some reason, he was on a short fuse. Funny, he’d always been kind of laid-back and good-tempered, but recently he’d been flying off the handle for no reason. What he wanted to do at the moment was to turn around and bust the little wimp in the mouth. But he didn’t. He just gritted his teeth and suppressed a sigh.
The wimp must have thought he hadn’t heard him, because he went and asked the same question again, using exactly the same words and in the same tone of voice. Merda! They hadn’t been in the air for more than fifteen minutes, and the little prick was already asking when they were going to land.
“You mean, like, are we there yet?” Manolo said, raising the pitch of his voice on the last four words, doing what he thought was a pretty good imitation of a whiny kid.
Roberto Ribeiro, sitting next to Manolo in the copilot’s seat, must have thought the imitation was pretty good as well. The big carioca’s lips curled back in a smile.
Manolo turned his head and glanced into the rear of the aircraft. The wimp had been staring at the back of his head, but as soon as they locked eyes, he turned his gaze away, crossed his arms, and leaned his forehead against the window.
Manolo set the automatic pilot, let his eyes sweep over the instrument panel, and addressed Roberto. “Where did you get him from?” he asked, cocking a thumb over his shoulder.
“Friend of the boss,” Roberto said.
“I’m not your boss’s friend,” the wimp said,
“I’m not any-body’s friend. I don’t want to be. I don’t even want to be here.
Who the fuck was talking to you?” Roberto said.
“I’m only doing it for my son,” the wimp persisted, “to save his life.”
Manolo adjusted one of the trim tabs and studied the effect. He figured that by bringing up the subject of his sick kid, the nervous little asshole was going for sympathy.
But Manolo Nabuco didn’t do sympathy, and he didn’t give a shit about the wimp’s kid, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to give the wimp the satisfaction of asking him any questions.
But he did turn around.
The wimp’s lower lip was trembling and he looked like he was going to burst into tears again. He’d actually been doing just that, bawling like a baby, when he and Roberto had bro-ken out of the jungle, the carioca running ahead and carry-ing a bundle under each arm. When they mounted the wing to climb inside, Manolo had seen big, wet tears rolling down the wimp’s face.
Roberto had handed in the bundles, which turned out to be babies, one after the other. The little bastards were also crying, squalling and red-faced, making a hell of a lot more noise than the wimp.
“Didn’t you bring anything to shut ’em up?” he’d asked Roberto.
He’d been thinking of something in the nature of a gag, or maybe an injection. Roberto worked with doctors. They could have given him something to knock the little bastards out.
“I got something,” Roberto said, and surprised Manolo by taking a couple of pacifiers out of the pocket of his bush shirt. He stuffed one into a baby’s mouth, and the kid started suck-ing on it and immediately shut up. The other baby refused the rubber nipple, kept spitting it out, kept on howling.
“There’s a roll of electrical tape in that locker,” Manolo said, offering his knife. “Hack off a piece and tape his fucking little mouth shut.”
Roberto shook his head. “Can’t,” he said.
He’d gone on to explain that taping their mouths shut could suffocate them and that he had strict instructions to deliver them alive. Now, almost twenty minutes later, the first kid had spit out his pacifier, and both of them were squalling again.
They were lying right next to each other, and next to the wimp, but he didn’t reach out to try to shut them up, not once. It was like they were contaminated or something, like he was afraid of touching them. The constant bawling was starting to give Manolo a headache.
Other than that, it had been a pretty good night, prof-itable as hell, and with almost no risk. The Brazilian Air Force didn’t give a shit about who flew in and out of the Xingu. They were only concerned about flights coming in from places like Colombia and Bolivia.
“How’d you manage to snatch them?” Nabuco asked Roberto. Not because he was interested, or because it was any of his business, but just to pass the time.
“You don’t want to know,” Roberto said.
“He killed their mothers,” the wimp said, “He cut their throats and threw them in the river. He didn’t have to do that. He didn’t have to kill them. He told me he was going to take the mothers along.”
“Yeah, you asshole,” Roberto said, “and you wanted to believe it, didn’t you? You trying to tell me you’re so stupid you didn’t notice there’s no goddamned room in this thing, no room for anybody besides us and those two brats?”
“I didn’t. I didn’t notice. I thought you were going to put them into the luggage compartment or something. And I’m not the one who’s stupid. You’re stupid.”
“Me stupid? I should wring your fucking little neck. I would, too, if the boss hadn’t told me to take care of you.”
“You want to know why you’re stupid? You didn’t ask me before you did it! You didn’t ask me about what to do with the bodies. You had me next to you all the time and you never asked.”
“Why the fuck should I ask you anything?”
“Here’s why: Indians never pollute a river. Never. They don’t urinate in them, they don’t defecate in them, and no Indian would ever use a river to dispose of a body. Once they find those women, and they will, they’re going to know they weren’t murdered by another tribe. They’re going to know it was white men who did it. They’ll complain for sure.”
“Shut up,” Roberto said, and made a gesture with his fist.
The wimp looked at the fist, almost half the size of his head, and did what Roberto had told him to do. He shut up.
The murders were news to Manolo, but the news didn’t bother him. He’d done his share of killing. He waited until the wimp had lapsed into silence and nudged Roberto. “What’s your boss gonna do with the little buggers?”
Roberto shook his head. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Try me.”
“He’s gonna cut out their hearts.”
Manolo’s only visible reaction was to raise his eyebrows slightly. The answer was a surprise, but he figured that play-ing it cool was what a guy like Roberto would expect from a guy like him.
“You’re shitting me,” he said.
Roberto waved a finger back and forth. “I shit you not. That’s the boss’s business, taking out hearts and giving them to people who can afford to pay for them.”
“I’m not paying him,” the little fairy in the backseat said.
Both of them ignored him.
“So he does, what the fuck do you call it?” Manolo said.
“Heart transplants.”
“Yeah, that’s it. Heart transplants. What do you figure he gets for an operation like that?”
“Six hundred thousand,” Roberto said.
“Reais?”
“Dollars.”
Manolo whistled. “Fuck me,” he said. “I shoulda asked for more money.”
“You shoulda,” Roberto agreed. Then he leaned in closer so that the wimp couldn’t hear him above the sound of the engines. “Next time,” he said, “you hold the old bastard up for another twenty grand. Half of it’s mine, okay?”
“A quarter,” the pilot said.
Roberto pursed his lips and thought about that for a moment. Then he extended a hand, and the pilot shook it. “Five grand,” Manolo said, quantifying the deal, making sure there wouldn’t be a misunderstanding later. “But what makes you think he’ll agree?”
“You’re on board now. You’re part of the club. You know how he earns his money. Not many people do, and he wants to keep it that way. He’ll take it.”
“So you figure there’ll be more jobs? Like this one?”
“I can virtually guarantee it.”
“What are you guys talking about?” the wimp asked.
Manolo turned around and stared at him again. “Why don’t you just shut up?” he said.
Roberto didn’t even bother to turn his head. “Yeah,” he said. “Shut the fuck up.”
The wimp started crying again. And he kept on crying, all the way back to Sao Paulo.