Dying Gasp Page 10

  “Tell me more about this woman, Rosélia. You say she recruits girls from all over. How about Recife?”

  “Why are you interested in Recife?”

  “Sorry. I can’t tell you that.”

  Father Vitorio reached for the bottle and uncorked it. “Last chance,” he said.

  Arnaldo nodded. The priest divided what remained in the bottle, doing the Christian thing by giving Arnaldo a few extra drops.

  “Recife?” Arnaldo prompted.

  “Maybe,” Father Vitorio said.

  “You think this Goat might be capable of making a snuff video?”

  The priest brushed the air. It might have been an impatient gesture, or he might have been swatting at one of the moths.

  “I’ve already told you, Agente, snuff videos don’t exist. They’re—”

  “An urban legend. Yes, you told me. Let me put it another way: do you think The Goat would be capable of killing someone in cold blood?”

  The priest didn’t hesitate. He shook his head.

  “No, Agente, I don’t. He’s bad, but he’s not that bad. He wouldn’t kill anyone unless he was severely provoked.”

  “You seem to know quite a bit about him. And that’s why you wanted to keep the photo. You’ve got a source. Who feeds you information?”

  The priest’s eyes sparkled. “Now, I’m the one,” he said, “who can’t tell you that.”

  ARNALDO RETURNED to his hotel to find the bedside lamp switched on and the window wide open. To air out the room, the note from the chambermaid said.

  By the time he’d closed the window and turned on the air-conditioning, he was covered with mosquito bites. He called housekeeping and got no answer. He went down to the lobby, and they directed him to the hotel’s shop.

  In the shop was an entire shelf of outrageously priced spray with which to kill mosquitoes and another of an even more outrageously priced cream to treat the bites.

  Even if Arnaldo had had a less-suspicious nature, he would have spotted the connection: somebody was making money out of “airing out” the guests’ rooms.

  While she was processing his credit card, the smiling sales clerk asked him if he was enjoying his visit to Manaus.

  When he left the shop, she was no longer smiling.

  THE FOLLOWING morning at breakfast Arnaldo, once burned, refused the bread and the rancid butter. The fruit plate came with a number of exotic fruits he couldn’t identify and a few that he could.

  So far, so good.

  But then he made the mistake of adding some thin, bluish milk to his coffee. The milk tasted like fish.

  After a futile attempt to remove the taste by strenuous brushing of his teeth, he went back to the archives. His none-too-cheerful greeting was met by sullen silence. The other clerks were taking a lead from their boss, Coimbra.

  Arnaldo grabbed an armful of files, propped a chair under the doorknob of the little room they’d set aside for him, and got back to work. Less than an hour later, he got his first hit. Eighty-five minutes after that, another. He took both rap sheets, put them into his briefcase, and went back to his hotel.

  In the restaurant, already the scene of several culinary disappointments, he thought he’d be safe with a salad. His first bite suggested that the lettuce had been in close contact with less-than-fresh fish. He dropped his fork and went back to the hotel’s shop. When the salesclerk from the previous evening saw him coming, she sent a teenager to wait on him and ran into the back.

  He bought a candy bar and some bottled water. Then he wandered around the hotel until he got a good signal for his cell phone.

  “OUR CUP runneth over,” he said when he had Silva on the line. “I got two hits.”

  “Cup runneth over, eh? Sounds like you’ve been spending time with that priest, Father Vitorio.”

  “How come you know about him? What are you? Psychic?”

  “He had someone checking on you,” Silva said. “It got back to me, so I decided to check on him. Other than being—and here I’m quoting the head of the Salesian Order in Brazil—‘a little too sure of being right, even if the rest of the world thinks he’s wrong,’ Vitorio has a good rep. Was he of any help?”

  “Not yet.”

  Arnaldo told Silva about his two conversations with the priest.

  “How come he’s being secretive?” Silva said when Arnaldo was done.

  “Could be he’s just playing games. He wanted to have a name to go along with Marta Malan’s photo. I wouldn’t give him one. He wanted to know why I asked about Recife. I wouldn’t tell him. He wanted to know if she was somebody important. I wouldn’t tell him that either.”

  “Tit for tat, huh?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe he made a promise to his contact to keep his or her name out of it, or maybe he’s just being cautious.”

  “When are you seeing him again?”

  “He’ll call me if he comes up with anything.”

  “How about that archives clerk, the guy who sent us the E-mail?”

  “Bento Rosário. Still missing.”

  “Speaking of missing, how are you going to make sure those rap sheets don’t disappear like Damião’s did?”

  “No chance. They’re in a safe place.”

  “Don’t tell me you stole records from their archives?”

  “Okay, I won’t tell you.”

  “But you did, didn’t you?”

  “You told me not to tell you. By the way, this town is the worst—”

  “You’re not going to start that again, are you?”

  “Seriously, Mario. Listen. All the food in this town tastes like fish. The salads, the meat, the butter, the cheese, the milk: it all tastes like fish.”

  “You hate fish.”

  “Exactly. I’m starving to death.”

  “Wouldn’t hurt you to lose a few kilos.”

  “A few kilos? Hell, by the time I get out of here, I’m gonna be so thin my wife isn’t going to recognize me.”

  “Should be a treat for her. She’ll probably ask me to send you back twice a year. What about those rap sheets?”

  “I’ll fax them.”

  “From the hotel? Probably not a good idea.”

  “I’ll do it myself, tell them I want to be left alone while I’m at it.”

  “Names?”

  “Carlos Queiroz and Nestor Porto, both pistoleiros, both natives of this hellhole.”

  “You add Damião Rodrigues, and we’ve got three from the same hellhole.”

  “Not likely to be a coincidence, huh?”

  “No. Sounds like you localized the infection. It jibes with what the Dutch cops told us. The woman phoned Amsterdam from Manaus.”

  “How about some help tracking her down? We could try to find that clerk, Rosário, while we’re at it.”

  Silva was silent for a moment, thinking.

  “I don’t want to open this up any further,” he said; “not yet, anyway. I’ll come myself, and I’ll bring Hector. It’ll take a day or two to clear my schedule. I’ll E-mail you with my travel plans. Meanwhile, watch your back.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  THE NAME ON HIS birth certificate was José Luis Ignácio Braga, but nobody called him that. The people who’d known him as a child nicknamed him Lula, and that’s what they still called him. The whores who worked for him called him Senhor, and sometimes Senhor Braga; but most people called him The Goat, or simply Goat.

  He’d grown up in a little shack on stilts, wedged in among several hundred other shacks on stilts, all of them lining the banks of the Rio Negro, and sometimes, during the rainy season, in the Rio Negro.

  The rainy season was both a curse and a blessing.

  It was a curse, because you couldn’t get out of your shack unless you had a boat. And if you did, there was always someone trying to steal it. It was a curse, too, because the river could kill you, creep up on you at night like some stealthy beast and knock the stilts away, and carry you and your whole family out into midstream, where the current was swift,
and the water a hundred meters deep.

  But the rainy season was also a blessing, because it was then that the water covered the garbage-strewn, human-waste-littered mud that held up the stilts and supported the shacks. The noxious odors arising from that mud changed so often you could never get used to the smells. They got into your hair and your pores, and wherever you went people wrinkled their noses and knew exactly where you came from.

  Only the poorest people smelled like little Lula. Anyone who had a bit of money to spare built his home well above the high-water line. It was still a slum, but it was a cut above the houses on stilts.

  There were places, farther upstream and down, where higher ground made it possible to live on the river without occasionally having to live in the river, but those places were prime real estate. There were big houses there, and docks for boats, and gardeners tending lawns of grass. But in little Lula’s neighborhood, there was no high ground, only gently shelving flats of black mud, even blacker than the water itself. The mud got its color from raw sewage. The water got it from tannins leached out of leaves farther upstream. The mud was filthy, but the water wasn’t. You could put an oar into it and still see the tip, even if you held it upright.

  Little Lula’s family consisted of his mother, three older sisters, and himself. The mother and the sisters were whores, but they doted on him, and that, for little Lula, had been the greatest blessing of all. They’d worked to send him to school, recognizing that education was the key to financial success, hoping he’d support them in their old age, when they got to be forty or forty-five and could no longer attract even the poorest customers. So The Goat had gotten his start in life from prostitution. Now, more than forty years on, he still drew sustenance from it.

  His education lasted through eight grades of primary school. That had been enough to get him into the municipal police. He’d never had a shot at being a delegado, of course. But he’d attained the respectable rank of sergeant before leaving the force and dedicating himself to running a string of girls full-time. There had only been three of them in the beginning, friends of his sisters in need of protection.

  Protection was a concern of all the girls. If you worked the streets, you had to have a strong man to watch your back, to assure you didn’t get stiffed for your fees, to assure that, if you got beat up, it was only a little. It was a job cut out for The Goat. He was a head taller than most of the men he had to deal with, and he was adept at wielding a truncheon, something his police training had taught him. He was adept at wielding something else too. Back in those days, he was sexually insatiable. One of his whoring buddies, a reprobate carioca with a serious drinking problem and a classical education, once remarked that there was only one difference between Lula and a satyr: a satyr, being only half-goat, wouldn’t fuck just anything, but a goat would. And so would Lula. Thus was his new nickname born.

  The Goat had mellowed down through the years. These days, girls in his house were seldom summoned to service the boss. And he seldom mistreated them, which is to say he was never more violent than he had to be. Occasionally, it was true, he beat one of them with a rubber hose. But he only did it because he felt they deserved it, not because he enjoyed it. He was generally even-tempered. He had friends. He had money. He had a stable business. It was a business that most women in town didn’t approve of, but the vast majority of men did. He was, therefore, not stigmatized, but rather enjoyed a limited degree of celebrity. He had a nice house, and a fishing boat, and a loyal subordinate in Rosélia. He should have been a happy man, and he was, in every respect but one: he could never shake free from a morbid fear that some day he was going to wake up and find himself back in that shack on stilts. He was deathly afraid of being propelled back into the poverty and misery of his youth. He wouldn’t be able to tolerate that. Not anymore. He’d do anything to prevent it. Anything.

  “WHEN ARE you leaving?” The Goat asked. He was in his office, tucked in behind the boate, gazing through the window at the Rio Negro.

  His boat was down there, not fifty meters away, moored to the dock. Beyond it, in midriver, a large ship was making a turn. The ship moved slowly at first, but then the current caught the bow, swung it over and started to sweep the vessel downstream. Intent on watching it pick up speed, The Goat hadn’t bothered to turn around when he’d asked the question.

  Instead of responding, Rosélia posed a question of her own. “How’s your hand?”

  He’d been holding Marta with his left hand while he beat her with the right. She’d twisted under the blows, and he’d inadvertently struck his own knuckles. He flexed them, studied the discolored flesh, and grunted.

  “When are you leaving?” he repeated.

  “I don’t think I should go at all,” she said. “Not while a federal cop is sniffing around.”

  She’d been planning a trip downriver to Santarém to troll for new girls.

  “Pinto says all the guy’s doing is hanging around the delegacia and looking at rap sheets,” The Goat said.

  Pinto had just left, having traded the information for the services of a girl who was eleven years old and a bottle of Scotch that was twelve. He’d sampled the Scotch on the spot and taken the rest of the bottle away with him.

  The Goat didn’t care about the girl, a renewable resource, but he did care about the whiskey. He’d bought it from a contrabandista, but it had still set him back almost eighty dollars, American, and gone was gone.

  “Maybe it has nothing to do with us,” Rosélia said.

  The Goat had a feeling that it did, but he wasn’t ready to admit it.

  “Maybe it has something to do with Carla Antunes,” she said. “She’s sending girls to European brothels. That’s international trafficking, a federal rap. And most of those girls used to be our girls. What if they nail her, and she talks?”

  The Goat thought for a moment. “I could have a talk with her,” he said. “Make it clear it would be . . . unhealthy if her business fucked up our business.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “Okay. I was planning on talking to her anyway.”

  “About what?”

  “About this Marta Malan.”

  “What about her?”

  “I’m ready to give up.”

  “You? Give up?”

  “Christ, Rosélia, I’ve gone about as far as I can go. I don’t want to kill her.”

  “Of course not. But are you really ready to give up? It’d be the first time.”

  “You know what she did this morning after I gave her the treatment with the hose?”

  “What?”

  “She spit in my face. There she was, with bruises all over her, and a broken tooth, and she spits in my face. Starving her didn’t make any difference. Giving her the solitary treatment didn’t make any difference. Letting her talk to the other girls didn’t make any difference. We let her loose on a customer, she’s gonna bite him and scratch him. Either he’s gonna run out of the room and create a scene, or he’s gonna kill her. Either way, it’s bad for business.”

  “So you’re going to sell her?”

  “To Carla. It’s the best way. At least we get some money out of it. Then she’s not around to talk to the other girls, she’s not in the country to talk to the federal cops, and she’s somebody else’s problem.”

  “Seems like a nice, clean solution,” Rosélia said.

  THE HOUSE was in the old colonial style with a red-tiled roof, whitewashed walls and blue trim. The São Paulo industrialist who’d built it told his wife it was a fishing lodge.

  His wife told him he was full of shit. She knew it was underage whores, not fish, that drew this paulistano to Manaus. But she could never prove it.

  On those rare occasions when she tried to stage a surprise visit (the paulistano always knew when one was coming because his pilot had strict instructions to advise him if she commandeered the plane), he’d board the seventeen-meter motor yacht he kept tied up at the bottom of the garden and come back late in the evening, surro
unded by his so-called fishing buddies, ostensibly delighted to discover her there.

  The Goat, as Manaus’s premier supplier of underage whores, had been a frequent visitor to the lodge, but he’d only been there on three occasions since the death of the man who’d built it.

  The first of those occasions was in response to a telephone call from a fourteen-year-old whore named Geralda Mendes. Geralda had been leaning over an armchair, letting the pau-listano fuck her doggy fashion, when the magnate suffered a massive coronary and collapsed on Geralda’s back. As soon as she realized he wasn’t simply gathering energy for a final assault, she wriggled out from under him and grabbed the telephone next to the bed. Fifteen minutes later, The Goat showed up to give advice. After a quick evaluation of the situation, he suggested that the paulistano’s fishing buddies wash his genitals, clothe his naked body, and haul it onto the yacht before calling the police.

  They’d agreed, except for the washing part. They made Geralda do that.

  The true circumstances of her husband’s death never became known to the widow in São Paulo, but the story was told and retold in the bars and boates of Manaus.

  One of the people who got considerable mileage out of it was a well-known raconteur named Miguel Marcus. It was Marcus who started calling Geralda “The Kiss of Death.” The nickname stuck, and for some months thereafter The Kiss’s services were in great demand. Some people said it was bravado on the part of the older customers, others that any girl who could bring on a heart attack in an otherwise healthy man of fifty-seven must be very hot stuff indeed and had to be tried. But the novelty didn’t last. After six months of constant attention, the first four by reservation only, The Kiss’s popularity began to decline. The Goat, ever attentive to the needs of his customers, promptly sold her to Hercules, a friend of his who owned a boate in Santarém.

  Within a week of his demise, the paulistano’s widow put his house and yacht up for sale. The yacht wasn’t a problem. It was bought within a week. The house remained empty for almost six months, and six months is a long time to weather in the Amazon: paint peels; termites and other insects bore into wood; bats take up residence under rafters; snakes and rats creep into drains.