Joaquim, in contrast, was clean-shaven and round-faced. The few front teeth he had left were stained with tobacco. He only showed them when he smiled, which wasn’t often, but he was smiling now, even after hearing that three of the people they were being asked to kill were federal cops.
Or maybe because of it. It wasn’t every day that somebody asked you to kill a federal cop. A “service” like that was worth a bundle.
“I’ll give you a group rate,” he said, “twelve thousand for all three of them.”
“Four thousand each,” Claudia said. “The cops might be worth that but a priest and a kid aren’t.”
“Wait a minute,” Joaquim said. “The chief didn’t say anything about a priest and a kid.”
“I’m saying it now,” she said. It had always been her intention to kill Father Vitorio and Lauro Tadesco as well, but Chief Pinto didn’t have to know that. If he did, he’d ask for more money. “A priest and a kid. How much?”
Joaquim ran a hand over his chin. “Three thousand sounds about right for a priest,” Joaquim said. “How old is the kid?”
“I don’t know. Eighteen? Nineteen, maybe. But he isn’t going to give you any trouble. I have the impression he’s rather naïve.”
“Okay. A thousand for him. How much is that altogether?” “Sixteen thousand,” Claudia said. “I’ll give you thirteen.” “Make it fifteen and you got a deal,” Joaquim said.
“Fourteen, or you can go back to jail.”
Joaquim’s eyes hardened.
“Chief Pinto wants half,” he said. “So how much does that leave for us?”
“Seven,” Claudia said, “but since he doesn’t know about the priest and the kid, you can tell him I’m only paying you twelve. You give the chief six. That way you’ll walk away with eight.”
Joaquim might have been lousy at math, but the idea of screwing Chief Pinto obviously appealed to him.
“Done,” he said. “How do you want to do it?”
“We have to get them away somewhere. Not too far from town, but isolated enough not to attract any attention while you’re busy.”
Joaquim smiled. “I got just the place,” he said. “Little house off the main road. Dirt road to get to it. Brush and banana trees all around. Deserted.”
“Deserted?”
“Used to be owned by a couple of old farts named Mainardi, but they’re dead now.”
“All right. Now, do you know the favela of São Lazaro?”
“Yeah. That slum? What’s that got to do with the federals?”
“If you shut up and listen, I might tell you.” She waited for him to look suitably chastened, but it didn’t happen. He just kept staring at her out of those emotionless eyes of his.
“You go there,” she said. “You ask around until you find a school run by a priest by the name of Vitorio Barone.”
“Barone. That’s the priest you want dead?”
“That’s him. You want to write it down?”
“Uh . . . yeah. Maybe I’d better.”
She pushed a pad and a pencil across the table. He licked the point of the pencil and made a careful note.
“Okay,” he said. “Then what?”
“As soon as you find out where the school is, knock on some of the neighbors’ doors. Tell people you’re looking for a kid named Lauro Tadesco. And, before you ask, yeah, that’s the kid I want dead.”
“Wait.”
He wrote that name down too, pursing his lips as he spelled it out. “Okay. So, we find this Tadesco guy. How do we get him, and the priest, and the federals out to the Mainardi’s place?”
“You find a girl who works the streets, somebody who can tell a good story.”
“Shouldn’t be too difficult,” he said. “Most whores are pretty good liars. What story?”
“Pay attention,” Claudia said.
Chapter Twenty-one
ARNALDO’S CELL PHONE RANG while they were picking at their dinner, a fish stew larded with coconut milk and dende oil. Arnaldo put down his spoon to take the call, but he didn’t pick it up again after he hung up. He shoved the half-empty plate aside, put the phone back into his pocket, and braced his elbows on the table.
“The Goat’s back,” he said.
Silva stopped chewing. “Who says so?”
“Father Vitorio.”
“And how does he know?”
Arnaldo shrugged.
“He didn’t say. I didn’t ask.”
“Cheeky bastard,” Hector said, then added, “The Goat, I mean, not Father Vitorio. You want to go over there now?”
“Unless you gentlemen want to finish this first,” Silva said, pointing to the bowl in the middle of the table.
The three of them stood up.
THE MUSIC in The Goat’s boate was loud, too loud: a Daniela Mercury axé tune, distorted by high volume and cheap speakers. The light was dim, the smell of perfume stronger than on Silva’s last visit. A tired-looking whore was shuffling around the dance floor with a customer. Three men were grouped together at a table. They were drinking beer and leering at the remaining merchandise, consisting of five brunettes, who’d probably been born that way, and one blonde, who definitely hadn’t. The Goat had them displayed with their backs to the wall, one girl to a table. The whores recognized the federal cops, and each of them found somewhere else to look.
The Goat might have noticed if he hadn’t been beaming at Silva and his companions, whom he took to be new customers. He continued beaming as they approached the bar. Silva took a seat in front of him.
“Bem vindo,” The Goat said, raising his voice so Silva could hear him over the music.
“You the guy they call The Goat?” Silva asked.
“That’s me,” The Goat said, a gold incisor catching a pinpoint of light from the candle that stood between them.
Before Silva could produce his badge, something over his shoulder caught The Goat’s attention. Silva turned around to see what it was.
Rosélia was standing in the doorway that led to the bedrooms making frantic signs to The Goat. She stopped when Silva caught sight of her, took a step backward and closed the door.
The Goat wasn’t smiling anymore. “You’re cops,” he said accusingly, as if they’d intentionally deceived him.
“Yeah,” Silva said, “cops. I’m Chief Inspector Silva, federal police. This is Agente Nunes, and this is Delegado Costa. You want to talk here, or you want to go someplace quiet?”
“Here,” The Goat said. “I gotta take care of my customers.” “So turn down the music.”
The Goat complied.
“Hey,” one of the guys sitting at the table said. “Turn the fucking music back up.”
Silva swiveled his barstool, leaned his elbows on the counter behind him, and fixed the man with a look.
“Shut up,” he said.
The man narrowed his eyes and looked to his friends for support. Both of them suddenly discovered something interesting in their beers. After a second or two, the music lover decided there might be something interesting in his beer too.
Silva turned back to The Goat.
“Your boat around back?” he asked, remembering his last visit.
The Goat shook his head sadly.
“Sunk.”
“Sunk, huh?”
“I was going upriver,” The Goat said, “running flat out, when I got hit by a tree trunk coming the other way. Big bastard, maybe twenty meters long, with the branches pointing the other way. Musta been almost as heavy as the water, because it was hardly floating at all. Went right through my hull. My boat went down in minutes. I was lucky to get to shore alive.”
“Right,” Silva said. “Lucky. And where did this unfortunate accident happen?”
The Goat pointed in the general direction of the river. “Upstream,” he said, “maybe three or four kilometers that way, right in the middle. It’s a damned good thing I was towing my dinghy, because the water there is eighty meters deep, maybe more, and the current is so fast it drags
things along the bottom. The hulk could be anywhere by now. Not a chance of salvage. It’s a bitch. I wasn’t insured.”
“Uh-huh. And you reported this disaster to the naval authorities, right?”
“Not yet. It only happened yesterday. I was pretty shook up. I’m gonna go down there tomorrow.”
The guy who’d been dancing leaned across the bar, brushing shoulders with Silva and Arnaldo and enveloping them in a cloud of cachaça fumes. “Give me a ficha,” he said, throwing a handful of notes on the bar.
The Goat counted the banknotes, nodded to himself, and put them in his pocket. Then he produced an old cigar box. He put the box on the bar. The contents rattled like coins.
“Just one?” The Goat asked. “For two fichas you get a whole hour.”
“What do I need an hour for?” the man said. “Fifteen minutes is plenty. She’s been rubbing my cock right out there on the dance floor.”
The Goat shrugged and handed over a brass disk with a number on it.
“Give it to the girl when you’re done,” he said.
“I know how it works,” the man said.
He took the girl by her arm and led her toward the bedrooms. She shuffled along next to him as if she were half asleep.
“What happened to the girls?” Silva said.
“What girls?”
“Your underage girls, the ones you had on the boat. What happened to them?”
“Nothing happened to them because there weren’t any. I was alone.”
“Alone, huh?”
“Yeah, all alone.”
“Where’s Marta Malan?”
“Marta who?”
“Malan.”
The Goat shook his head.
“Never heard of her.”
“Or her friend Andrea either, I suppose.”
“You suppose right.”
Silva leaned over the bar, getting into The Goat’s face.
“You had a girl working here,” he said, “who called herself Topaz.”
The Goat recoiled slightly. “No,” he said.
“Where is she?”
“I run a legitimate business here. I don’t employ minors—” “Who said Topaz was a minor?”
The Goat swallowed.
“You did,” he said.
“No, I didn’t,” Silva said. “Listen to me, you piece of garbage. I know you’re running a house with underage girls. I know you kidnap them and make them prostitute themselves, and I think that’s disgusting, but I’m after an even bigger fish. You help me, and I might be inclined to overlook a few things.”
“What do you mean by an even bigger fish?”
“I mean a psychopath. I mean somebody who makes videos of people being murdered.”
“Yeah, Rosélia said you guys were looking for somebody like that. But I’m not him.”
“I didn’t say you were. Matter of fact, I just said you weren’t. How about it? Are you going to help me or not?”
“I got no idea what you’re talking about,” The Goat said. “Yes, you do,” Silva said.
He took a card out of his pocket and put it on the bar. “I’m at the Hotel Tropical,” he said. “If I get some cooperation, I’ll see what I can do for you. If not, I’m going to make sure they throw the book at you. Think about it.”
The Goat wet his lips. For a moment, Silva thought he was going to say something, but then he shook his head.
Silva gave it up for the moment.
The door to the boate had barely closed behind them when the music reverted to its original volume.
“PSYCHOPATH?” CLAUDIA SAID.
The Goat nodded. Once again, they were in her kitchen. It was two o’clock in the morning. She’d been sleeping soundly when he’d pounded on the door, but now she was wide awake. The Goat took another belt of Claudia’s cachaça.
“Or maybe it was sociopath. I don’t remember. One or the other. Anyway, he said that anybody who makes videos like that has to be crazy. And you know what? I agree with him.” Claudia thought The Goat was sounding more and more like someone who was about to spill his guts to the federals. The temptation to call Hans and have him put a bullet in The Goat’s head right then and there was strong. They could weight him down and throw him in the river, just as they’d done with Andrea, just as they’d done with so many others. Out near the end of the dock, the bottom was twenty meters down. They’d been feeding the fish there for more than a year. Dorsal fins converged on the spot whenever there was a splash.
But, no.
Rosélia knew as much as The Goat did, and if anything happened to him she’d be pissed. To keep her quiet, they’d have to kill her as well. And if she disappeared, there’d be no one to make sure the girls kept their mouths shut. There was no telling what they knew, so, to be safe, they’d all have to be killed as well. And there was no way she could get away with a massacre like that. It would attract far too much attention.
Claudia bit her lip. “So what are you going to do?” she asked.
“I’m going to make myself scarce for a while.”
“Where are you going?”
“You don’t have to know that. But Rosélia will. If you need to get in touch with me, send a message through her. My suggestion is that you get out too, keep your head down until all this blows over.”
“Maybe I will,” she said.
“The Malan girl. You still got her?”
“Only for another day or two,” Claudia said.
Chapter Twenty-two
NONE OF FATHER VITORIO’S neighbors had ever heard of a kid called Lauro Tadesco, and his name wasn’t in the telephone book. No surprise there. Telephones were expensive. Most poor people didn’t have them.
“How about I try the churches?” Joaquim said to the woman he knew as Carla.
“Are you crazy?” Claudia said. “It would get right back to that priest. Do this: go back to Pinto. Ask him to trace the kid through his national identity card.”
“He’s gonna ask me why I want to know. He’s gonna want more money.”
“We need him. I’ll pay Pinto. It won’t come out of your pocket.”
So Joaquim contacted the chief, and the chief responded as predicted: “How come you want to know about this Tadesco guy?”
“That job of Carla’s. She added a couple of people.”
“How many is a couple?”
“A couple. Two.”
“Gonna cost her more. You too.”
“She’s only paying me thirteen all up.”
“Sure she is. You tell her to call me.”
“Uh, maybe it was fourteen she said. Fourteen or thirteen. I can’t remember.”
“Just tell her to call me.”
THE FIRST thing the chief said to Claudia when she got him on the phone was “You know who keeps those records? The federal cops, that’s who.”
“They get hundreds, maybe thousands, of requests like that every day,” she said. “Why should they notice one inquiry?”
“You’re not telling me anything I don’t know already,” he said, “but it’s extra work for me. How much you agree to pay Joaquim?”
She told him.
“Lying filho da puta,” he said. “Okay, you’re not gonna pay him anyway. Me you’re gonna pay an extra two thousand.”
“Two thousand? For something that’s gonna take one of your men no more than five minutes and isn’t costing you a centavo?”
“Maybe you know some other place you can get the information? Two thousand.”
Claudia sighed, but it wasn’t as if she hadn’t been expecting it. “I’ll send it over,” she said.
BY TEN o’clock the following morning, she knew that Lauro Alexandre Tadesco, age eighteen, son of Maria Lourdes Tadesco, father unknown, had listed his address as number thirteen, Rua Barbosa, in the bairro of São Conrado.
There was, of course, no guarantee that he still lived at the same address. But, according to one of the neighbors, he did. It turned out that Lauro was one of his mother’s seven chil
dren, neither the oldest nor the youngest, and they all lived at number thirteen, Rua Barbosa, in the bairro of São Conrado.
According to the same neighbor, a talkative old crone with only a few teeth, the mother took in washing, and the kids did all sorts of odd jobs to keep the family afloat. They were poor, but they were decent churchgoing folks, and they never caused anyone any trouble.
But if Joaquim was to follow Carla’s instructions to the letter, he still needed a visual of the kid. Fortunately for him, there was a bar just across the street. He settled in with a drink and watched the house.
About an hour later, when he was already feeling the effects of his sixth cachaça and was thinking of switching to Guaraná, a kid of about the right age came out of the front door of number thirteen and started walking purposefully toward a nearby bus stop. There was no one else in the bar, and the bartender and Joaquim had been having a spirited discussion about the national sport. If you wanted to bond with any male in Brazil, that’s how you did it, talking about futebol. Joaquim touched his new buddy on the arm.
“That kid,” he said, pointing. “You know him?”
The bartender turned around for a look.
“Yeah,” he said. “Why?”
“Looks like a guy I used to know,” Joaquim said, “name of João Catanga.”
“Nah,” the bartender said. “That’s Lauro Tadesco. He lives there.”
SILVA GAVE the whoremaster a decent interval, almost twenty-four hours, to ruminate upon what he’d said. Goat stew, Arnaldo dubbed the process. Then he went back to lean on him.
This time, Rosélia was behind the bar.
“Where is he?” Silva asked.
“Said he was going fishing.”
“Fishing? Where?”
“Where else does one fish, Chief Inspector? On the river, of course.”
“He told me his boat sank.”
“It did. He went with a friend.”
“What friend?”
“He didn’t say.”
“When’s he due back?”
“He didn’t say.”
“Goddamn it, what did he say?”
“Just that he was going fishing.”
“You’re lying.”
Dying Gasp Page 17
