The Ways of Evil Men Read online

  ALSO BY LEIGHTON GAGE

  Blood of the Wicked

  Buried Strangers

  Dying Gasp

  Every Bitter Thing

  A Vine in the Blood

  Perfect Hatred

  Copyright © 2014 by Leighton Gage

  Published by

  Soho Press, Inc.

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gage, Leighton.

  The ways of evil men / Leighton Gage.

  p. cm

  ISBN 978-1-61695-272-3

  eISBN 978-1-61695-273-0

  1. Silva, Mario (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Police—Brazil—Fiction.

  3. Ava-Canoeiro Indians—Fiction. 4. Indigenous peoples—Crimes against—Fiction. 5. Brazil—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3607.A3575W39 2014

  813′.6—dc23 2013019793

  v3.1

  This one is for my grandchildren

  Jonathan, Fraukje, Fardou, Anner,

  Victoria–and any more to come.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Key Characters

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Author’s Notes

  Enter not into the path of the wicked, and go not in the way of evil men.

  —Proverbs 4:14

  Key Characters

  Alex Sanches—A Federal Police agent in Belem.

  Alexandra Santos—The housekeeper of Jade Calmon, FUNAI agent in Azevedo.

  Amanda Neto—The wife of Osvaldo Neto.

  Amati—An Indian of the Awana tribe.

  Arnaldo Nunes—An agent of Brazil’s Federal Police and Silva’s partner.

  Atuba—Raoni’s grandfather.

  Barbosa, Estevan—The head of the Federal Police’s field office in Belem.

  Ana, “Crazy”—A prostitute.

  Bonetti, Cesar—A wealthy landowner.

  Borges, Fernando—The head of the local police in Azevedo.

  Castori, Father Carlo—Parish priest in Azevedo, formerly a missionary.

  Cunha, Paulo—Azevedo’s wealthiest businessman.

  Frade, José—A wealthy landowner.

  Fred Vaz—A fishing guide.

  Fromes, Davi—The former IBAMA agent in Azevedo, now retired.

  Gilda Caropreso—An assistant medical examiner and Hector’s fiancée.

  Gonçalves, Haraldo, aka “Babyface”—An agent of Brazil’s Federal Police.

  Hector Costa—Gonçalves’s boss, in charge of the São Paulo field office.

  Jade Calmon—A FUNAI agent working in Azevedo

  Kassab, Renato—Azevedo’s only lawyer.

  Lana Nogueira—The niece of Nelson Sampaio, a friend of Jade and Maura.

  Leon Prado—Jade’s boss in Brasilia.

  Lisboa, Roberto—A wealthy landowner.

  Maria Bonetti—The wife of Cesar Bonetti.

  Maura Mandel—A journalist and Jade Calmon’s best friend.

  Mauricio Carvalho—Maura’s editor and boss in São Paulo.

  Max Gallo—A young pilot whose father owns an air charter service in Azevedo.

  Nataniel Eder—The Belem bureau chief of Maura’s newspaper.

  Nonato, Raul—The IBAMA agent in Azevedo.

  Osvaldo Neto—Husband of Amanda and owner of Azevedo’s Grand Hotel.

  Otto Cosmos—A truck driver.

  Pandolfo, Toni—Lisboa’s foreman and a dangerous gunman.

  Patricia Toledo—The wife of Hugo Toledo, mayor of Azevedo.

  Pinto, Doctor Antonio—A doctor and Azevedo’s part-time medical examiner.

  Raoni—An Indian boy of eight, member of the Awana tribe. Amati’s son.

  Rita Cunha—The wife of Paulo Cunha, Azevedo’s leading businessman.

  Sampaio, Nelson—The Director of Brazil’s Federal Police. Silva’s boss.

  Silva, Mario—A Chief Inspector of the Brazilian Federal Police.

  Sonia Frade—Wife of José Frade.

  Tinga—Raoni’s best friend.

  Toledo, Hugo—A wealthy landowner and the mayor of Azevedo.

  Torres, Omar—A wealthy landowner.

  Welinton Mendes—A prospector.

  Yara—Raoni’s grandmother.

  Chapter One

  SUNRISE IS A BRIEF affair in the rainforests of Pará. No more than a hundred heartbeats divide night from day, and it is within those hundred heartbeats that a hunter must seize his chance. Before the count begins, he is unable to detect his prey. By the time it ends, his prey will surely have detected him.

  The boy timed it perfectly. The dart flew true. A big male muriqui leaned to one side and tumbled out of the tree. The others screamed in alarm. The boughs began to heave, as if struck by a strong wind, and before Raoni could lower his blowgun, the remaining members of the monkey tribe were gone.

  THE WOOLY spider monkey, golden in color and almost a third of Raoni’s weight, was a heavy load for a little boy, but he was a hunter now. Right and duty dictated that he carry it.

  Amati helped his son hoist the creature onto his narrow shoulders. To make sure it didn’t fall, he made what he called a hunter’s necklace, binding its long arms to its almost equally-long legs by a length of vine.

  The hunt had taken them far. The sun was already approaching its zenith when they waded through the cold water of the stream, stepped onto the well-worn path that led from the fishing-place to the heart of their village, and heard the sound that chilled their hearts: the squabbling of King Vultures, those great and ugly birds, half the size of a man, that feed exclusively on carrion.

  * * *

  When Raoni’s father was a boy, the tribe had numbered more than a hundred, but that was before a white man’s disease had reduced them by half. In the years that followed, one girl after another had been born. Girls, however, didn’t stay. They married and moved on. It was the way of the Awana, the way of all the tribes. If the spirits saw fit to give them boys, the tribe grew; if girls were their lot, the tribe sh
rank. And if it shrank too much, it died.

  The Awana were doomed, they all knew it, but for the end to have come so suddenly was a horrible and unexpected blow.

  Yara was lying in front of their hut, little Tota wrapped in her arms, while vultures pecked out their eyes.

  Yara’s husband, Raoni’s grandfather, Atuba, had fallen across the fire, felled in his tracks as if by a poison dart. His midriff was charred and blackened. The smell of his flesh permeated the air.

  The tribe’s pajé lay face-down below a post from which a joint of roast meat was suspended. The tools of his rituals were spread about him: a rattle, a string of beads, some herbs—clear signs he’d been making magic.

  But his magic had failed.

  The father and his son went from corpse to corpse, kneeling by each. Signs of life, there were none.

  They came to the body of Raoni’s closest friend, Tinga. The little boy’s favorite possession, his bow, was tightly clutched in his hand—as if he couldn’t bear to abandon it, as if he planned to bring it with him into the afterworld.

  Raoni was overcome with fury. He picked up a stone and flung it at one of the vultures. Then another. And another. But the birds were swift and wary. He didn’t hit a single one, nor could he dissuade them. They simply jumped aside and settled, greedily, upon another corpse.

  The anger passed as quickly as it had come, replaced by a sense of loss and an emptiness that weakened his legs to the point where he could no longer stand. When they collapsed under him, he threw himself full-length upon the pounded red earth and cried.

  Chapter Two

  JADE CALMON PARKED HER jeep, uncapped her canteen, and took a mouthful of water. It tasted metallic and was far too warm, but she swallowed it anyway. One did not drink for pleasure in the rainforest. One drank for survival. Constant hydration was a necessity.

  The perspiration drenching Jade’s skin had washed away a good deal of her insect repellent. She dried her face and forearms and smeared on more of the oily and foul-smelling fluid. Then she returned the little flask to the pocket of her bush shirt, hung the wet towel over the seat to dry, and retrieved her knapsack. Inside were her PLB and GPS, both cushioned to protect them from the jogs and jolts of the journey.

  The PLB, or personal locator beacon, was a transmitter that sent out a signal that could be picked up by satellites and aircraft, and homed-in upon by search teams.

  “You call us before you go into the jungle,” her boss had told her when he’d given it to her. “Then you call again when you come out. It’s like making a flight plan. If you get into trouble, push the button. Then sit tight and wait to be rescued.”

  Sit tight? In the middle of the biggest rainforest in the world? Easy to say. Not so easy to do.

  She glanced back at the road.

  How ironic, she thought. The damned loggers who scarred the land with their bulldozers actually did the tribespeople some good. Without that road, she would have had to cut her way through sixty-two kilometers of dense undergrowth to reach this spot. Even though the rains had turned much of it to mud and even though new vegetation was quickly erasing the scars of the white men’s predations, she could still cover the entire distance from Azevedo to this, the end point, in a little less than two hours.

  And, because of that, and that alone, she was able to look in on the tribe twice a month instead of six times a year.

  She clipped the PLB to the belt of her khaki shorts, switched on the GPS, and punched in the coordinates of the village. Then she hoisted her knapsack to her shoulders and set off.

  SOMEONE OR something stepped on a twig. It broke with a loud snap.

  A tapir or a man, Amati thought. Nothing else could have done it. He grabbed his bow.

  “Stay close,” he said to his son.

  The arrow he chose was tipped with poison. If it was a tapir, he’d kill it for the meat. If a white man … well, let it not be a white man. Not after what those monsters had done.

  But the figure that emerged from the forest was neither tapir nor man. It was a woman, one he knew, but white just the same. And she was coming toward him with a smile on her face.

  A smile!

  Consumed with a towering anger, Amati lowered the bow. Why should he waste poison on a creature such as this? Poison was precious, time-consuming to extract. He’d kill her with his knife.

  PERPLEXED, JADE came to a stop. She’d been expecting to find dozens of people. Instead, there were only two: Amati and Raoni, and both were staring at her in the strangest sort of way.

  It was true that Amati had always been a bit distant, and Raoni a bit shy, but now their body language and grim faces were making an entirely different impression. Hatred.

  If she could have spoken to them she might have been able to defuse it, but speaking was a problem. Raoni’s grandmother, Yara, was the only person in the entire village with whom Jade could actually converse.

  Yara hadn’t been born of the tribe. Her native language was a dialect of Tupi, a tongue Jade already spoke, but the language of the Awana was unique. Since the tribe was small and recently contacted, no one else in Jade’s organization had ever attempted to master it. Not before Jade. Not until now.

  She’d been learning with Yara’s help. The two women had been working together on a Tupi/Awana dictionary, one that Jade intended to turn into a Portuguese/Awana dictionary as soon as she completed it. But the work was in the early stages, and Jade’s entire vocabulary, at the moment, numbered less than two hundred words.

  She remembered advice she’d once received from an expert on the tribes: “When words fail, offer a present. It’s the Indian way.”

  The gifts she’d brought, a little concave mirror about nine centimeters across, the strings of beads, and a little aluminum pot, were all in her backpack. But this was no time to go looking for them.

  Get closer, she thought. Smile. Give the child your knife.

  So she did just that, walked toward them, smiled through her fear, and started unbuckling her belt. The muscles in Amati’s arms and legs went taut. She freed the leather scabbard suspended next to her PLB, taking care not to put a hand to the hilt.

  The Indian had no such compunction. Slitting his eyes, he bared the steel of his weapon.

  She stopped in front of the boy, knelt down and made the offer. Solemnly, he accepted it. In her peripheral vision she could see Amati’s hand lowering his knife. She turned her head and looked up at him, still smiling. He didn’t return the smile, but he was no longer scowling. He waited for her to speak.

  But of course, she couldn’t. Silently, she cursed Carlo Castori. Castori was the parish priest back in Azevedo. Once a missionary, he claimed to have lived among the Awana for more than a year. He’d told her he’d attained fluency in their language, but denied ever having made a dictionary—a claim she found difficult to believe. Who tries to learn a language without making a dictionary?

  But, true or not, the man had never been of any help to her, and she’d given up trying to extract anything useful from him. Sign language had become her only option—and she was getting rather good at it. She began by pointing around her and simulating a mystified expression, as if to say, What happened?

  Amati grabbed her wrist. His grip was strong, and it frightened her. She gave a little whimper and stood her ground. Exasperated, he released her, pointed, and took her wrist again, this time more gently. She realized then that he was trying to lead her somewhere, and she went.

  With Raoni trailing behind, they passed through the heart of the village, exited the other side, and arrived in a glade occupied by mound after mound of loosely-packed soil. At the head of one of the mounds, the trunk of a sacred Kam’ywá tree had been embedded into the red earth. Kuarups, the Indians called them. They personified the spirits of the dead.

  Jade’s mouth opened in surprise. Then she closed it and began to count. The mounds totaled thirty-nine, and they were divided into three neat rows of thirteen each. At last count, there had been forty-one
members of the tribe. Two, the man and the boy, were standing next to her.

  “All Awana,” he said. And then, in case she failed to understand, added the word “Dead.”

  “How?”

  “Men kill.”

  More words exploded from his mouth, angry words, but Jade was unable to understand a single one. While he spoke, she tried to piece together what might have happened. There hadn’t been a war among the tribes in this part of Pará in living memory. It could have been disease, of course, but what kind of disease could have killed so many so quickly? And, if disease had been the cause, how was it possible that neither the man nor the boy were showing signs of sickness?

  A horrible suspicion came over her.

  “Rainforest men?” she asked.

  “No rainforest men,” he said shaking his head emphatically. “White men.” He stabbed a finger into her breastbone and repeated it. “White men.”

  “When?”

  He pointed to the sun and held up seven fingers. A week ago. If he and his son had been doing the burying themselves, they must have been digging graves and cutting kuarups ever since.

  “You come,” she said. “I help. We talk. Hurt bad men.”

  “Come where?” he asked. “Talk how? Hurt how?”

  “Come,” she said and then pointed to her chest and made a pillow with her hands as if she was going to sleep. She hoped he understood what she was trying to tell him. She wanted to take him to the place where she slept, to her home, to the little city of Azevedo. She pointed at him, then back at herself. “Talk. Father Carlo Castori help.”

  He gave a contemptuous snort, said something she couldn’t understand, and made a sign as if he were drinking. Yes, he knows who I’m talking about. Castori is a drunk. She made a beckoning gesture. He seemed to think it over.

  At last he nodded. Then he said, “How long?” She pointed to the sun and held up one finger. Again, he nodded. “I come. Not Raoni. Your place bad for Raoni.”