Marta’s mouth was dry, and it wasn’t only because she was afraid. The handkerchief they’d stuffed into it was sucking up her saliva like a sponge.
It was obvious, now, what they were up to, as obvious as the tears streaming down her cheeks. Her captors would be thinking they were tears of fear, about which they’d be right, and tears of resignation, about which they’d be totally wrong. There was no way she was going to give in to rape that easily. She wasn’t some simple country girl from the backwaters of the Amazon. She was a Malan. She’d resist them every centimeter of the way. She’d punch, and kick, and scratch. If they took out the handkerchief, she’d sink her teeth into the animal’s ear. With luck, she’d get it clean off before he knocked her senseless.
Claudia beckoned to Delfin.
“Here,” she said, and dropped a glittering thing into his palm.
“Put it in your mouth,” she said. “Keep it in your cheek.” Delfin stared at the little brass key, bright against his skin. “What’s it for?”
“The cuff on her ankle.”
“What about the-”
He would have said cord I use to strangle her with, but Claudia cut him off. The girl was right next to them, listening.
“You’re going use the one wrapped around her wrists,” she said. “It’s silk. Now, pay attention. I’m going to say ‘action’-”
“What?”
“Action,” she repeated. “I’m going to say the word ‘action,’ and when I do, you step into the shot-”
“What’s that mean, step into the shot?”
“You go over to her,” the woman said, “and you start cutting her clothes off.”
“With what?”
“With this.” The guy with the bags under his eyes handed him a knife. It was one of those commando things, sharp all the way down the front and halfway down the back.
“Last thing you do with it,” she said, “you cut through the cord and free her hands. Just cut one loop. Unwind the rest. When you’re done with the knife, drop it on the floor. Otto here”-she tilted her head toward the guy with the bags under his eyes-“will pick it up, so she doesn’t get her hands on it. Can you remember all of this?”
“Sure,” he said. “You think I’m stupid?”
She blinked her eyes at him and paused for a beat before she went on. “Once you free her hands, she’ll probably try to scratch you. Don’t worry about it. We cut her nails. Just make sure she doesn’t poke out an eye.”
“Okay.”
“When her hands are free, hold her wrists, or sit on her, while you spit out the key and unlock the handcuffs. Make sure she never gets off that bunk. If she does, we have to start all over again.”
“Can we do that?” he said.
“Of course we can, but try to get it right the first time. Once I turn those lights on, it’s going to get very hot. None of us are going to enjoy being in here any longer than we have to.”
“Okay. So once I get the handcuffs off her ankle, what’s next?”
“You do what we discussed. Any questions?”
“No.”
“Good. Otto, give me that camera.”
The camera wasn’t one of those little dinky things Delfin had seen the tourists use. It was almost as long as the woman’s arm and had a pad on the bottom so she could rest it on her shoulder.
“Otto,” she said, “lights.”
Delfin was looking at the largest of them when it came to life. He looked away, but a blue spot persisted in his vision. It started to fade, but it was there when Claudia’s European client came down the companionway and settled into the bunk opposite him. And it was still there when she said “action.”
Quartz halogen lamps are hot, and they seem hotter still when they’re switched on in a confined space. Twenty-two minutes into the recording, and despite the air-conditioning working flat out, the ambient temperature in the cabin was up to a hundred and eighteen degrees Fahrenheit, fully five degrees hotter than in the blazing sun.
The smells made their discomfort worse. The acrid smell of sweat. The steely smell of blood. The smells of excrement and urine.
Claudia held on long enough to get a shot of Delfin disemboweling Marta with the same knife he’d used to cut her clothes off-proof for any viewer that the girl was really dead-then she made a sudden dash for the deck.
She found a place in the shade under the awning, put the camera on one of the seats, and took a deep breath of the muggy air. It was heavy with the odor of rotting vegetation, but a damned sight more agreeable than the aromas down below.
The next person out of the cabin was Delfin, nude, one eye turning black, holding Marta’s panties against his ear to stanch the flow of blood.
“Bitch,” he said and sat down.
Claudia wrinkled her nose. She didn’t like having his sweating, filthy ass on her cushions. She made a mental note to have Otto scrub them clean after he’d flushed out the cabin.
Otto was already at it. Hans too. She could hear the splash of the hose, the trickle of water flowing into the bilge, the whir as the bilge pump kicked in. She leaned over the side and saw a pink stream gushing out of the hull.
Delfin was so dumb he still hadn’t tipped to the fact a European customer wouldn’t be down there in the cabin helping with the cleanup.
Hans came on deck, carrying Marta. He’d wrapped her corpse in a piece of black plastic sheeting.
“Still some pieces of her on the bunk,” he said. “I’ll have to shovel them into a bucket. Most are too big to wash into the bilge; they might clog the pump.”
Delfin blinked. It was the first time he’d heard the guy speak. Claudia envisioned wheels churning in his head as he tried to figure out how some Euro freak came to speak Portuguese with a Gaucho accent. He opened his mouth, maybe to ask, shut it, opened it again.
“Who woulda thought a little package like her could be so much trouble?” he finally said.
“You gonna just sit there and spout deep thoughts,” Hans said, all pretense gone, “or you gonna help me get her into the river?”
“Help? Hell, no. I already did my part.”
“Help him,” Claudia said. The coaming around the cockpit was solid mahogany, and she didn’t want bullet holes in it.
“Fuck,” Delfin said, “Look what the bitch did to my ear.”
He uncovered his ear and pointed to the place where Marta had mangled it with her teeth.
“It’s stopped bleeding,” Claudia said. “Just leave it alone.”
He tried to assess the damage with his fingers.
“Leave it alone, I said.”
“What are you, a fucking doctor?” he said, sarcastically.
“As a matter of fact,” she said, “I am.”
“Yeah, right.”
By then, Hans had laid his burden on the foredeck and was grasping a length of chain.
“Go help him,” she said again.
Delfin gave her an exasperated look and mumbled something, but he got up and moved forward.
Claudia watched the little drama play out on the foredeck: Hans telling Delfin to hold up her body so he could get the length of chain under it, Delfin doing it, Hans whipping out his pistol and putting two quick ones into Delfin’s head. Pam! Pam!
Down below, the sound of the cleanup continued unabated. Otto must have heard the shots, but he didn’t bother to stick his head out of the cabin.
Hans finished wrapping Marta and turned to Delfin. He’d already prepared a second length of chain, had it up there on the foredeck ready to use. He didn’t bother to wrap Delfin in plastic. The deck was fiberglass, easy to clean, and Otto would hose it down when he finished in the cabin.
Claudia rewound the tape, and started reviewing it in the viewfinder: no dropouts, a little jumpy in some places, a few lapses of focus, but all in all, a good job, different from all of the others because the girl fought like a wildcat. It lent a degree of piquancy to the work.
She hadn’t yet gotten to the point where Delfin was wrapping the silken cord around Marta’s neck when she heard a splash up near the bow. She stopped the playback and took the viewfinder away from her eye just in time to see Hans push Delfin’s body between two of the stanchions.
Another splash.
Hans came aft, toward the cockpit, discontent written on his face.
“I’m not gonna do this no more,” he said, “not unless we get to do her first. You’re a woman. You don’t know how it is, having to stand there, and watch it, and not get any. I woulda had her when she was still warm,” he said, “if you hadn’t told that fuck to open her belly.”
“Had to be done,” she said. “That’s what the customers want. Proof it isn’t faked.”
“Speaking of the fuck,” he said. “How about the money you gave him? The fuck locked it in the trunk of his car. You want to go back and get it?”
Claudia nodded.
“But, first, let’s make sure we haven’t had any visitors while we’ve been away. Joaquim and Luis are probably back at the house by now.”
Her cell phone was in a little compartment near the wheel. She pulled it out and dialed Joaquim’s number. Someone picked up on the third ring.
But it wasn’t Joaquim. Maybe a wrong number.
She hung up and tried again.
Joaquim Almeida’s cell phone rang for the second time. Silva glanced at the screen.
“Same caller,” he said to Joaquim and handed him the phone. “This time, you answer. If it’s Carla, you tell her no one showed up for your little party. If she asks if it’s safe to come back here, you say it is.”
Another ring.
“We gotta talk,” Joaquim said, “about what you’re gonna do for me if I cooperate.”
Another ring.
Arnaldo poked Joaquim’s ribs with his forefinger.
“Take the fucking call,” he said.
Joaquim winced and pushed the button.
“Yeah,” he said.
Silva grabbed Joaquim’s wrist and pulled the telephone a centimeter away from the thug’s ear.
“Joaquim?”
Silva had heard the voice twice before: on the recording made by the Dutch police and on the video showing the death and dismemberment of Andrea. The hairs rose on the back of his neck.
“It’s me,” Joaquim said.
“Your voice sounds strange. Anything wrong?”
“No. Nothing.”
“You wouldn’t lie to me, would you, Joaquim?”
“Lie? Why would I lie?”
The woman had taken control of the conversation. Joaquim wasn’t up to wresting it back.
“Where’s that brother of yours?”
“He’s around here someplace.”
Silva and Arnaldo exchanged exasperated looks.
“Put him on,” the woman said.
Only then did Joaquim recognize his mistake. He started to stammer.
“I… well… he’s…”
Click.
She disconnected without even bothering to tell Joaquim he was a lying sonofabitch.
“Some of them could be broken. I’d need an X-ray to confirm it,” the doctor said, slipping off his stethoscope and dropping it into his bag.
It was an hour later. They’d taken Joaquim Almeida back to the Hotel Tropical. The concierge had summoned a physician.
“See,” Joaquim said, “I told you I needed a hospital.”
“Shut up,” Arnaldo said.
“On the other hand,” the doctor said, looking at Joaquim like he was something he’d found sticking to the bottom of his shoe, “fractured or bruised, the treatment’s the same. You can’t splint ribs. I’ll prescribe something for the pain.”
“Something strong,” Joaquim said. “Give me something really strong.”
Silva cut in. “Will you certify he can travel?” he asked.
“You promise to get this piece of trash out of Manaus,” the doctor said, “and I’ll sign anything you want.”
In death, Father Vitorio Barone achieved the notoriety he’d coveted in life. The next morning, Rede Mundo led its eight o’clock news with the story of his murder.
The news anchor, an attractive brunette with an overbite, dished up the details with a shiver of delight. And she didn’t know the half of it. If the brunette had been aware that both a deputado’s granddaughter and Claudia Andrade were involved, she would have had, as Arnaldo put it, a triple orgasm right there on camera.
But she wasn’t aware, and Silva had no intention of enlightening her.
Chief Pinto, on the other hand, made a show of being totally forthcoming. He might not have known the whole story, but he knew how to make the best of what he had. His well-rehearsed sound bite went on for almost fifty seconds.
The chief described the priest’s grisly demise in graphic detail, told how one of the murderers had been shot dead by the cops and informed viewers the other had been captured. But he didn’t say which cops had done the shooting and the capturing.
When asked why the priest was at the Mainardi home in the first place, Pinto frankly admitted that he didn’t know. And as to Lauro Tadesco’s role in the affair, that was still under investigation.
The chief’s performance was followed by a series of reactions to the murder.
A spokesman for the National Association of Bishops said Father Vitorio’s death was a tragic loss and so forth and so on, the usual nil nisi bonum.
This was followed by a montage of comments from some of Father Vitorio’s former students, none of whom seemed to have acquired a turn-the-other-cheek attitude from associating with their former mentor, and all of whom expressed satisfaction that at least one of the killers had paid with his life.
The next face to appear on the television screen caused Arnaldo to choke on his breakfast coffee.
Roberto Malan wasn’t a Catholic, didn’t represent the State of Amazonas in the chamber of deputies, and had nothing to do with the death of a priest in Manaus. But there he was, in a tight close-up, speaking from his office in Brasilia.
“ Rede Mundo wouldn’t have gone to him,” Hector said. “He must have-”
He stopped short when Silva held up a hand.
“… not of my faith,” Malan was saying, “but Father Vitorio was a man whose service to the poor demanded respect. Certainly, he had mine.”
“Five will get you ten Malan never heard of him before he got knifed,” Arnaldo put in.
“No bet,” Silva said. “Now will the two of you kindly shut up?”
Malan paused and continued. “Brazil has, this day, lost a good shepherd. It’s not only a loss to his flock, it’s a loss to our country as a whole.”
“Does he talk like that in person?” Arnaldo asked.
“No,” Silva said.
The deputado leaned forward. He looked straight into the lens. His skin began to redden in anger. His voice took on a tone of righteous indignation.
“His death,” he said, “is an outrage, made all the more outrageous because it was entirely avoidable. Yes, avoidable! So who, in the end, are we to blame for Father Vitorio’s demise?”
Malan left viewers in no doubt he had the answer to that, but he took another pause, building up the expectation.
“The Almeida brothers, certainly,” he said, “and the nefarious-”
“Nefarious? Oh, please,” Hector said sotto voce, and raised his eyes to the ceiling.
“-person or persons who employed them. But they’re not the only ones. Others contributed to Father Vitorio’s death. They didn’t contribute by shooting him, or ordering him to be shot, but they’re guilty just the same. They’re guilty of gross negligence.”
“Here it comes,” Arnaldo said.
“And who are these negligent incompetents? My fellow Brazilians, they are the federal police! Yes, the federal police! Those same federal police who let the mass murderer, Claudia Andrade, slip through their fingers not twenty months ago. If the federal police had been truly zealous in their efforts, dedicated in their comportment, efficient in their methods, they would have apprehended Claudia Andrade long ago. And if they had taken the initiative to suppress the dastardly exploitation of minors, with which the death of Father Vitorio Barone is undoubtedly linked, he would be alive today instead of-”
Click.
Silva put down the remote control. “I give him fifteen minutes,” he said.
Hector scratched his head. “Who?” he said. “Who do you give fifteen minutes?”
Nelson Sampaio was on the line in less than ten.
“Did you see Roberto Malan’s interview on Rede Mundo?” His voice was higher-pitched than usual. He sounded, Silva thought, like someone was squeezing his scrotum.
“Yes, Director, I did. Grandstanding, I think they call it.” Sampaio, who was prone to doing quite a bit of grandstanding himself, glossed over Silva’s critique.
“Why, Mario? Why would he go and do a thing like that?”
“I assume,” Silva said, “the deputado has become impatient with us in general and with me in particular. I’ve kept him waiting for news about his granddaughter. He can’t go public with that, so he chose another opportunity to make us the whipping boy. He knows the escape of the Andrade woman still galls us. He knows it would be painful to reopen the wound. What he doesn’t know is it’s all connected: the death of Father Vitorio, the disappearance of his granddaughter, Claudia Andrade, they’re all tied together.”
“Claudia Andrade? She’s involved?”
Sampaio was silent for a moment. Silva thought the director was going to insist on more details.
But he didn’t.
“Shouldn’t we tell Malan what we already know?”
“Not yet.”
“Why not?”
“The only way to appease him is to tell him something concrete about the whereabouts of his granddaughter. I’m not yet in a position to do that.”
Just before lunchtime, Lefkowitz came to call. He settled into a chair in Silva’s suite, and while he mopped his brow Hector went to fetch him a guarana from the little refrigerator.
“I didn’t want to use the telephone,” Lefkowitz said, removing his glasses and wiping off sweat with his handkerchief. “The chief has a tap on it. I know that for a fact, because I’m the one who put it there. He’s also instructed that all contact with you guys is to go through him. He’s going to be pissed if he finds out I was here.”
“If he does, it won’t be from us,” Arnaldo said. “We’re giving the chief the mushroom treatment.”
“Keeping him in the dark and feeding him a lot of shit, huh?”
“You know them all, don’t you, Lefkowitz?”
“Just the really old ones. Has he told you about the prints?” “Not a word,” Silva said.
“I figured as much.”
“Was I right?”
“Yes, Chief Inspector, you were. That Andrade woman left her prints all over the house.”
He took a long draught of his guarana.
“Anything else?”
Lefkowitz smacked his lips and nodded.
“There were three cars on the street near Carla’s, sorry, Claudia’s place. One was registered to a lowlife by the name of Delfin Figueiredo. Soon as you left, the chief and his buddies were all over it.”
“You and your people weren’t invited to participate?”
“Nope. The story’s going around there was money found. They split it among themselves. Lion’s share for the chief, of course.”
“Of course,” Silva said. “You see him do it?”
Lefkowitz shook his head.
“And nobody else would be willing to testify they did. The chief scares people. Now as to the blood, it’s gonna take a while to get the DNA results.”
“So you can’t tell us how many victims there were?”
“Not yet, but I can make an educated guess.”
“So, guess.”
“At least a dozen.”
The package arrived about an hour after Lefkowitz left. It was wrapped in brown paper, bore no stamps, no return address. Silva’s name was on the front, neatly written with a felt-tipped marker.
“Dropped off at reception by some kid,” Arnaldo said. “Desk clerk never saw him before.”
The package contained a single VHS tape, no note, no label.
The hotel’s convention center had a VCR, but it was broken. In the end, Arnaldo had to go out and buy one. It was almost six in the evening before they had it hooked up. The tape opened with a close-up of Claudia Andrade and maintained that visual all the way to the end. The composition was so tight that her pores were prominent, so tight that no clue to her surroundings was visible. The recording could have been made anywhere. The camera captured her head-on, foreshortening her prominent nose. There was a smile on her face. She looked quite attractive.
“Sorry I missed you,” she said. She paused to let the significance of the remark sink in. Missed killing them, she meant. “It’s so difficult to hire decent help these days.”
Her smile faded and her eyes turned hard. “Your attentions are getting tiresome. You need something else to worry about, so I’ve arranged it. Deputado Roberto Malan is going to get a little package. After what I saw on Rede Mundo, I’d hazard a guess that he dislikes you almost as much as I do. What I’ve sent him is going to make him dislike you even more.”
The screen went black.
“Bitch scored another goal.” Arnaldo said, his face grim.
“Game’s not over,” Silva said, hitting the stop button.
Hector looked from one to the other. “What the hell was she talking about?”
“She killed Marta,” Silva said. “She killed her, made a video of it, and mailed the damned thing to Marta’s grandfather.”