Dying Gasp Read online

  “I didn’t say that,” the priest snapped.

  “No, Padre, you didn’t.”

  Arnaldo looked around the room, seeking something to defuse the tension. His eye fell on some children’s drawings that were spiked onto nails driven into the unpainted wall. “What’s this?” he said, walking over to have a closer look.

  “My art class.”

  The priest followed Arnaldo and stood at his shoulder.

  “I get discarded computer paper from an office in the duty-free zone,” he said. “The children make their drawings on the back. For the crayons . . . I accept contributions.”

  Arnaldo could take a hint when he heard one. He reached for his wallet.

  The priest performed a vanishing trick with Arnaldo’s ten-Real note. Then he gestured at the drawings.

  “As you can see,” he said, “there’s a definite preference for gray, brown, and black. I offer them all the colors of the rainbow, but they choose gray, brown, and black.”

  Arnaldo studied the kids’ pictures: stick figures holding guns, stick figures lying on the ground, houses with bullet holes in the walls. None of the kids showed any talent, and Father Vitorio, whatever else his abilities might have been, didn’t seem to have a vocation for teaching technique.

  “They don’t draw bogeymen or monsters,” the priest said. “The things that frighten them are real. Take this one, for example.”

  He put his finger on the drawing of a truck. Armed figures were leaning out of the windows. The figures were drawn in gray, the same gray as the uniforms worn by Chief Pinto and his men.

  “Cops?” Arnaldo asked.

  “Cops,” the priest confirmed. “Some say they’re trying to take over the city’s drug trade. Until a year or so ago, they were fighting for it with pistols. These days, they use assault rifles. The bullets go through the walls of the houses and kill innocent people. That, Agente, is the children’s experience of the men who are supposed to be protecting them. And it’s mine, too. So I ask you again, what do you want?”

  Arnaldo reached into his breast pocket and took out two enhanced blowups cropped as head shots. One was of Andrea de Castro, the other of the man he believed to be Damião Rodrigues. Both had been lifted from the DVD Hector brought back from Amsterdam.

  “You know these people?” he asked.

  The priest studied the photos. “Why are you interested?” “You know what a snuff video is?”

  “I’m not altogether ignorant, Agente. But snuff videos don’t exist. They’re an urban legend.”

  “You’re wrong, Padre.”

  “I don’t think so. But what do these people have to do with these so-called snuff videos?”

  “The girl was snuffed. The man did it.”

  “Special effects,” the priest said. “These days, anything’s possible.”

  “All right, Padre, have it your way. Do you know them? Have you ever seen either one of them?”

  “No,” the priest said. “And, now, if you’ll excuse me . . .” “Wait.”

  Arnaldo took a card out of his wallet, clicked his ballpoint, and scrawled some numbers.

  “This is my cell phone,” he said. “I’m at the Hotel Tropical. If you hear, see, or remember something that might help me, please call.”

  The priest hesitated for a moment, then performed the same vanishing trick with the card as he had with the ten-Real note.

  Chapter Fourteen

  IT DIDN’T MATTER WHAT the girls said. They could talk until they were blue in the face. It wouldn’t change a thing. And they talk. They talked all through the long afternoon.

  And they did talk. They talked all through the long afternoon. They badgered, they cajoled, and one even threatened her.

  But it didn’t do them a damned bit of good. How could it? She wasn’t like them. They were poor, she was rich. They were frightened of The Goat, she wasn’t—well, not as much as they were, obviously. They were nobodies, she was somebody. She was Marta Malan, of the Pernambuco Malans, granddaughter to one of the most influential men in the republic. She’d always had fine clothes, lived in a big house, had enough food to eat, had people to wait on her.

  But a lifetime of privilege hadn’t made her weak. If The Goat thought that, he had another think coming. She’d resist even if he starved her, beat her, kept her locked up. She’d show him she was made of better, stronger stuff than the lower-class riffraff he was accustomed to dealing with, girls who’d never even heard of the perfumes she wore, didn’t know the proper forks to use at a formal dinner, and wouldn’t be able to name a single brand of designer jeans.

  She, Marta Malan, had not been born to work in a brothel.

  Finally, just before dark, that filthy pig with the broken nose, Osvaldo, came to fetch her. After the pressures of the afternoon, she was almost relieved at the thought of going back to her cell. But she remained resolved never to give in. She told Osvaldo that, just as he was slamming the door.

  She could hear him laughing as he strolled away.

  WHEN HER door opened on the following morning, it wasn’t Osvaldo, it was Rosélia. She came in and closed the door behind her.

  “We need to talk,” she said.

  “About what?” Marta didn’t try to keep the insolence out of her voice.

  Rosélia took a seat on the bed. She wasn’t carrying her club, but there was something threatening about her all the same.

  “About your attitude,” she said. “We’re fed up with it. It has to stop. You’re setting a poor example for the other girls. You’re giving them ideas.”

  “Really?” Marta felt a glow of satisfaction.

  “Last night, after you spent the afternoon shooting your mouth off, Jociane told a customer she wasn’t going to let him have her. There was never a single problem with her, but, now, all of a sudden, she’s telling us what she will and won’t do. She said he stank, and he was too old. We can’t have that, querida. How can we run a business if we let the girls decide who can have them and who can’t?”

  “I don’t care about your business,” Marta said, raising her voice, hoping that at least one of the other girls would hear that she wasn’t afraid to talk back. “It has nothing to do with me. It’s your problem, not mine.”

  Rosélia didn’t get red in the face, or show any other sign of losing her temper.

  “No, querida,” she said. “It isn’t just my problem. Now it’s your problem too.”

  She stood up, walked to the door, and opened it. The Goat was waiting on the other side.

  And in his hand there was a length of rubber hose.

  “I THINK we should get together and talk,” Father Vitorio said.

  Arnaldo moved his cell phone to his other ear, shoved aside his breakfast and leaned back in his chair.

  “Why the change of heart, Padre?”

  “The Church, Agente, has informal links in virtually every field of endeavor. I took the trouble to make a few inquiries.”

  “You checked up on me?”

  “I did.”

  “Hell, Padre, I could have made it easy for you. All you had to do was—”

  “Do you want to meet, or not?”

  “When and where?”

  “It wouldn’t be wise for us to be seen together. I suggest this evening at my home, sometime after dark, say nine o’clock? I live above the classroom. Knock on the front door. I’ll come down and let you in.”

  THE PRIEST’S apartment consisted of a single room. A shower and a toilet shared one corner, a sink and a tiny refrigerator another. There was no closet. His clothing and other personal effects were stuffed into stacked wooden crates. The remaining space was just large enough for a bed, a small table, and two wooden chairs.

  A bulb, unfrosted and dim, was suspended from the ceiling, the cord looped to allow it to hang just above the table. Every now and then a moth would blunder into it. Sometimes they’d drop making a soft pat as they hit the table. Sometimes they’d fly away. Those that did soon came back.

  Ou
tside, someone was frying fish. The odor drifted through the shutters, as did the voices of some kids having an argument about whether Ronaldo Fenômeno played better futebol than Ronaldo Gaúcho.

  “How about a drink?” Father Vitorio offered.

  “I wouldn’t mind,” Arnaldo said.

  The heat was damned near unbearable. While the priest fetched a half-empty bottle of cachaça from the top of the refrigerator, Arnaldo stood up, removed his jacket, and hung it over the back of his chair.

  The priest brushed a couple of dead moths aside and poured straw-colored liquid.

  “Saude,” he said, to your health, and downed his glass in one gulp.

  Arnaldo took a cautious sip. The cachaça was mellow, probably five or six years old. He nodded in approval.

  “Back home in Italy,” the priest said, “I was brought up on wine. My father used to make his own. Vino nero, he used to call it. Black wine. Not rosso, red, but nero, black, it was that dark, almost like ink. Strong too. More than fourteen percent. I really miss it. Not just my father’s wine, any kind of wine. But it’s too expensive here, even the Chilean and the Argentinean varieties. Every Real I spend on myself is a Real less to spend on the children, so I make do with this. More?”

  Arnaldo held a hand over his glass.

  “Not just yet,” he said.

  The priest poured for himself.

  “All right, Agente, let’s start all over again. I have nothing to offer you at the moment, no answers to the questions you posed, but I want to apologize for having been so abrupt the first time we met. I didn’t know you. You arrived without references. I have to be careful.”

  “Careful of what?”

  “Not pushing Chief Pinto and his associates too far.”

  “You think they’re out to get you?”

  “I think they’ve considered it. I’m not paranoid, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “That’s not what I’m thinking. What have you done to get on the bad side of the chief?”

  “I’ve been very vocal about the exploitation of minors for sexual purposes. It’s made me . . . unpopular, not only with the chief, but also with the mayor and the governor.”

  “The governor? Hell, Padre, you don’t fool around, do you? How did you get to him?”

  The priest smiled a sardonic smile. “He didn’t want to talk to me at first. The mayor or Chief Pinto must have complained about me. But I was insistent. I asked my bishop to intercede. The bishop is . . . a realist. He told me it was a waste of my time, but he was willing to let me try. He called the governor on my behalf and set up an appointment.”

  Another moth fell, this time onto Father Vitorio’s cassock. He brushed it aside with a practiced gesture.

  “The bishop was right, of course. It was a waste of time. I think I knew that going in, but I felt I had to try.”

  “Let me get this straight. You tried to talk to the governor about the sexual exploitation of minors, and he brushed you off?”

  “He did.”

  “It’s a crime, for Christ’s sake!”

  The priest took another swallow of cachaça, only half the glass this time.

  “You want to know what he told me? He said that not everyone has the strength to lead a life of celibacy, or even to maintain a monogamous relationship. He said I had to understand that the brothels contributed to a lowering in the indices of sex crimes and that they’re perfectly legal.”

  “As long as the girls are eighteen or older.”

  The priest took a deep breath and another gulp of cachaça.

  “I conceded the point. I told him I wasn’t there to talk about brothels or prostitution per se, but rather to call his attention to the exploitation of children.”

  “And what did he say to that?”

  “He said that Amazonas is a poor state, that we can’t afford to turn tourists away, that having sexual congress with minors—that’s not the way he put it, but that’s what he meant—was something that brought in the foreigners. You must have seen them, Agente, planeloads of them, Germans, Dutch, French, Americans. . . .”

  “I’ve seen them,” Arnaldo said. “It’s not the first time I’ve passed through this town’s shitty airport.” He took another sip. The fiery liquid was making him sweat even more.

  “They say they come here to see the river and the jungle,” the priest went on. “Sometimes that’s true. Mostly, it’s just sex tourism, pure and simple. But it isn’t only the foreigners. They’re just the tip of the iceberg. A man like The Goat doesn’t earn his money from the foreigners. His customers are all locals. I told the governor that, and he just smiled. It made me furious. I lost my temper. I told him what was happening was against the laws of God and man, told him economic gains couldn’t be allowed to cloud the moral issue, told him that, by the time most of those girls are twenty, they’re burned out and sick with every venereal disease there is. I begged him to help me put a stop to it. I told him God would surely punish him if he didn’t.”

  The priest’s face was flushed, and not just from anger and heat. He upended his glass, swallowed, uncorked the bottle, and poured another.

  “And then?” Arnaldo asked.

  Father Vitorio took another gulp of cachaça and looked down at his shabby tennis shoes. “And then,” he said, “the governor called in two of his security people. They threw me out.”

  Arnaldo shared the priest’s outrage, but he had no help to offer. The Brazilian Federal Police was a smaller organization than the police departments of many major cities. He and his colleagues couldn’t be expected to right all of the wrongs in a country larger than the continental United States. Besides, the Ministry of Justice had long ago determined that the federal police’s limited resources were not to be expended on helping girls whose families mostly didn’t give a damn about them and who weren’t old enough to vote. The politicians in Brasilia claimed they were engaged in a major effort to curb the sexual exploitation of children, but in practice they weren’t doing anything. So he didn’t attempt to respond to the priest’s remarks. Instead, he retrieved the cropped photo of Marta Malan from the breast pocket of his jacket.

  “I’d like you to have a look at this,” he said.

  “Another photo?” Father Vitorio said.

  “Yes. A different girl. Recognize her?”

  The priest leaned over for a better look and shook his head.

  “Who is she?”

  “Sorry, Padre, I can’t tell you that.”

  The priest picked up the photo and held it closer to the light.

  “Would I be correct in assuming she’s a person of some importance?”

  “Can’t tell you that either.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  Father Vitorio went back to studying the photo. Arnaldo could smell the pungent cane spirit on his breath.

  “Nice clothes,” the priest said. “Pearl earrings. The chain on her crucifix looks like gold. She’s from a wealthy family.” Arnaldo remained silent.

  “Can I keep this? I’d like to show it to someone.”

  Arnaldo nodded and took another sip of his cachaça. “You mentioned The Goat,” he said. “Who’s he?”

  “Surely you’ve heard of The Goat?”

  “I wouldn’t be asking if I had.”

  “He’s a whoremaster of the worst type. He runs a house specialized in offering adolescent girls.”

  “And the police know about this?”

  “He’s a former policeman himself. Many of the younger ones on the force take him as a role model.”

  “A role model?”

  “They want to grow up to be just like him. He makes a lot of money, they don’t. The base salary for a policeman in Manaus, Agente, is less than five hundred Reais a month.”

  “Don’t ever mention that to my boss. I keep telling him I’m badly paid.”

  The priest didn’t crack a smile.

  “Obviously,” he said, “you can’t support a family on five hundred Reais a month. Al
l cops look for ways to supplement their income. The Goat is their ultimate success story.”

  Arnaldo took another sip of his cachaça. The stuff was making his tongue feel thick.

  “He works alone?”

  “He has an associate, a woman by the name of Rosélia Fagundes.”

  “A whore?”

  “You’d expect that, wouldn’t you? But, no. She studied to be a nun. She worked as a schoolteacher.”

  “A nun, and a schoolteacher, and now she works with a pimp? What happened?”

  Father Vitorio shook his head.

  “I can’t say. I don’t know that anyone can, perhaps not even Rosélia. Some girls, some women, are attracted to evil. The Goat seduced her, I know that much. Why she stays with him”—he threw up his hands—“who can tell?”

  “What’s her part in the deal? What does she do for him?”

  “Recruitment, mostly. She also helps manage the girls.”

  “Recruitment?”

  Father Vitorio uncorked the bottle and waved it in Arnaldo’s direction. Arnaldo shook his head. The priest poured himself another hefty dose. This time he drank half of it down like water.

  “She travels,” he said. “She goes to towns like Belém and Santarém, seeks out girls from the poorer classes. She makes promises, offers them jobs in bistros, shops, restaurants, that sort of thing.”

  “And they believe her?”

  “They believe her, and they come back with her. I told you, Agente, she’s not a whore. She dresses well, speaks well. They take her for a businesswoman, and I suppose she is, in a way.”

  “Then, when the girls get here, it’s the old story? They’re told they owe money for their passage and for their food along the way?”

  The priest nodded glumly. “I see you’ve heard it all before,” he said, and drained his glass.

  “Yeah,” Arnaldo said. “No bistros, no shop, no restaurant, just a puteiro.”

  “Sometimes,” Father Vitorio said, “the girls go to the police. Sometimes they try to run away. But The Goat and others like him pay for protection. If a girl files a complaint, the authorities tear it up and tell the owner of the brothel. If a girl tries to run away, Chief Pinto and his men track her down. Once she’s back, the whoremaster beats her. He does it in front of the other girls to set an example, to send a message: there is no escape, so it’s healthier not to try.”