The Ways of Evil Men (5 page)

“I think it’s more a question of fearing his sister.”

“If we rely on a local doctor in a little town in the middle of nowhere it’s gonna be hit or miss. And probably more miss than hit.”

“Which is why we’re going to bring Gilda. I talked him into paying her as a consultant.”

Arnaldo managed to look relieved and anxious at the same time. “You think Paulo will collaborate? Give her some time off?”

Gilda Caropreso was an assistant medical examiner in São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city. Her boss, Doctor Paulo Couto, was a childhood friend of Silva’s.

“He will if I beg him,” Silva said. “And I’m going to beg him.”

Arnaldo’s anxiety vanished. “Good. Great. Who else?”

“Hector. That’s why I thought of Gilda. If she goes, he’ll complain less.”

Hector Costa headed the São Paulo field office. He was Gilda’s fiancé—and Silva’s nephew.

“You were ever devious,” Arnaldo said.

“And have not changed an iota since my youth.”

“Anyone else?”

“Babyface.”

Haraldo “Babyface” Gonçalves, looked to be in his early twenties, but was, in actuality, well into his thirties. Younger
women often fell for him, while the more mature ones tended to want to coddle him. For both reasons, he was regarded as the federal police’s “soft” expert on interrogating members of the fair sex.

“Not Mara?”

“No, not Mara. Not on this one.”

Mara Carta was Hector’s intelligence chief. She was the one they called in when the interrogation had to be hard. Women knew they couldn’t charm her. They couldn’t charm Gonçalves either, but few figured that out in time to do them any good.

“Anything else you want me to do?”

“Call that lazy swine, Barbosa. Tell him we’ll be dropping in.”

“Why? All he’s going to do is gloat.”

“True. But it’ll only be a short detour, and maybe he can tell us a thing or two about Azevedo.”

A
FTER
A
RNALDO
left, Silva called his wife.

“Two o’clock in the morning?” Irene asked. “You’re leaving at two o’clock in the morning?”

“The flight is at two. I’ll have to leave the house around midnight.”

“But you’ll be back by Sunday?”

It was the question he’d been dreading. “I’m afraid I won’t,” he said.

She responded with silence.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

More silence.

“Truly,” he said. “It can’t be helped. I have to go.”

She didn’t reply to that either.

After a while, he said, “Let me talk to Maria Lourdes.”

Sunday, four days away, was their son’s birthday. Leukemia
had killed little Mario at the age of eight. Had he lived, he would have been turning twenty-nine. It would be the first time in twenty-one years that Silva wouldn’t be there to hold Irene’s hand.

And he knew the consequences.

Irene had seldom touched alcohol in the first nine years of their marriage, but she’d turned to it for solace in the aftermath of their son’s death.

In the beginning, it had been no more than a cocktail or two before dinner. Now it was half a liter of vodka every night. And, if he wasn’t there on Sunday, it would probably be closer to a liter. She’d drink herself into oblivion, undoubtedly starting shortly after getting up in the morning. He’d have to call her well before lunchtime if he expected any coherent words out of her.

Maria Lourdes, Irene’s constant companion since the day Silva arrived from work to find his wife dead drunk and unconscious on the kitchen floor, came on the line.

“
Senhor
?”

He told her about the trip.

“But you’ll be back on Sunday?”

“I’m afraid not. Look, Maria Lourdes, I know it’s your day off—”

“Don’t worry, Senhor. You can count on me. I won’t leave her alone. Not for a moment. Shall we pack you a bag?”

O
MAR
T
ORRES ONCE REMARKED
that he preferred the Grand to the rainforest because there were “no snakes to bite you in the ass when you drop your pants at the Grand.” That was true, as far as it went, but he had another reason as well—a far more important one: Omar Torres slept with other men’s wives, and
that
, in the State of Pará, was a dangerous thing to do.

Some of the men he cuckolded hadn’t had sexual relations with their spouses in years, but that didn’t diminish Omar’s risk. If the husbands in question were to discover what he was up to, they’d be obliged to kill him. It was as simple as that: a question of honor.

And, although the rainforest in the vicinity of the town was the usual place for dalliance, it wasn’t the impenetrable tangle of vegetation occasional visitors thought it to be. There were paths. There were hunters. There were people out there at all hours of the day and night getting their asses bitten. The risk of someone stumbling across a copulating couple in the jungle was small, but it was real, and it was a risk that Omar, given his supercharged libido and the high frequency of his trysts, assessed as being too great.

Enter the Grand, Azevedo’s epicenter of discretion. Opening onto an alley in the rear of the hotel was a stairway that led to the rooms on the second floor. The alley was unlit. Omar left a flashlight in the glove compartment of his jeep to help him get the key into the lock, and the key was his own, issued to him so he never had to be seen asking for one
at the front desk. A room set aside for his exclusive use, and the fact that Osvaldo let him pay by the month completed the arrangement.

But Omar wasn’t the only one who loved the Grand. Many of the town’s other leading citizens did as well. The Grand stocked imported beverages, even a few wines. The Grand served decent, if simple, food. The cleanliness of the toilets was, by Azevedo standards, remarkable and often commented upon. A
faxineira
was always on hand to wipe away the near (and sometimes not-so-near) misses around the urinals, and vomit seldom stayed on the floors for more than ten minutes.

Osvaldo’s establishment, the good citizens of Azevedo were fond of assuring each other, had
class
. The classy activity on Mondays and Fridays was bingo. The classy activity on Tuesdays and Thursdays was the playing of cards. In the bar, the game was
buraco
and the drink was cachaça. In a private room, maintained for the use of the town’s notables, the game was poker and the drink, Scotch whiskey. Women were welcome in the bar, but they were never invited to the private room.

On the evening of Jade’s return to town, the notables numbered seven, and they were seated around a circular table. Omar Torres and the priest, Father Castori, had been drunk when they arrived. The mayor, Hugo Toledo, the
fazendeiros
José Frade, Cesar Bonetti, and Roberto Lisboa were drinking steadily, intent upon achieving the same state of grace. Lisboa’s foreman, the
pistoleiro
, Toni Pandolfo, wasn’t drinking at all. He seldom did. And that, in the opinion of most of the townsfolk, was a good thing, because he was dangerous enough when he was sober.

“That Calmon woman,” Torres remarked, chewing an unlit cigar because he knew the others would object if he
set a match to it, “is a bitch.” Jade had brushed him off more than once. He’d never been able to forgive her for it.

“Not the word I would have used to describe her,” Father Castori said. “But I agree with the sentiment.” His lengthy recounting of Amati’s story had made him hoarse, a condition he was attempting to rectify by drinking twice as fast as usual.

“Bitch is
exactly
the word,” Bonetti said, shuffling the cards. He generally got into town only once a week. And when he did, he was anxious to enjoy the time he was spending there. The enjoyment consisted of drinking to excess, gossip and card-playing. He took a deep pull from his glass and added, “Why the fuck couldn’t she have left well-enough alone? Huh? Answer me that! Ante up.”

“Because she’s a goddamned Indian lover, that’s why,” Frade said, making his contribution to the pile of chips. He was a man with a temper, a fact that the regular bruises on his wife’s face and arms served to substantiate.

Bonetti slid the deck in front of him. “Cut,” he said.

Frade cut the cards.

“They all are,” Pandolfo said. “All those fucking FUNAI people.”

“Draw poker,” Bonetti said and dealt them each five cards.

Lisboa looked at his cards and tried, unsuccessfully, to suppress a smile. He’d been losing throughout the night. The big winner, despite the alcohol he’d consumed, was Torres. He was a first-rate poker player, which Lisboa was not. Pandolfo, Lisboa’s protector, had taken to fixing Azevedo’s Greatest Cocksman with threatening stares, but they appeared to be having no effect whatsoever.

He gave it up and opened with a hundred Reais. When the game got to his boss, Lisboa raised with five. The others followed suit.

“Not all the agents are like that,” Bonetti said. “Her predecessor was a good deal more reasonable.”

“How about you deal the fucking cards?” Pandolfo said. “Give me three.”

Bonetti gave him three cards, but he took his time about it, demonstrating he was another person Pandolfo couldn’t intimidate.

Toledo, the mayor, had been awaiting his moment. Now, he chimed in. “The problem isn’t just the FUNAI,” he began. “It’s that cabal of bleeding-heart liberals in Brasilia. Get them out of there and their so-called ‘Indian land’ will disappear just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “See if it doesn’t. Three cards.”

A murmur of agreement went around the table, a murmur in which Lisboa didn’t participate. Bonetti gave Toledo his three cards.

“One,” Lisboa snapped, without the slightest trace of deference in his voice. Lisboa fancied himself an artist, and was normally a timid man, which was why he always had Pandolfo around to back him up. But when he got drunk, as he was now, all bets were off. He could be downright aggressive.

“One,” Torres said, unmoved. He grinned, showing the white, even teeth that so many women found attractive. It was a dead giveaway of the confidence he had in his hand, but Lisboa was too tipsy to notice it.

Pandolfo, the
pistoleiro
, and Toledo, the mayor, passed. The others took three each. Lisboa bet another five hundred Reais. Torres followed suit. Everyone else dropped out.

“Well, damn!” Lisboa said. “I finally get a good hand and everybody drops out.” And then, to Torres, “I raise you a thousand.”

“You can’t raise yourself,” Torres said. “What have you got?”

“A pair of tens.”

“Three of a kind,” Torres said, showing three fours. He raked in the pot.

“
Merda
,” Lisboa said.

“So, Padre,” Bonetti said to Castori. “What’s your opinion? Was that savage telling the truth?”

“I have no reason to doubt that all the other members of his tribe are dead,” Castori said. “As to their having been poisoned … well, who knows?”

He looked into his empty glass. Toledo took pity on him and pushed the button to summon service.

“Bless you,” the priest said. Castori never paid for his own drinks.

“What I’ve never been able to figure out,” Bonetti said, “is why you wasted a year of your life living with those people. What possessed you?”

“Not a year, Cesar,” the priest said. “Much more. Thirteen long months and four days. And the answer to your question is that it was God’s work. When I went to live among them, my most fervent desire was that I could convert them to the true faith.” He was speaking slowly, doing a pretty good job of keeping the slur out of his speech, a
tour de force
for anyone who’d drunk as much as he had. “But they rejected my teaching, made me the butt of their jokes. If I could have saved a single soul, I would have been content, but God chose to deny me that. He chose to make me suffer as Job suffered. And now he has chosen to root out the Awana like—”

Lisboa, impatient as well as drunk, cut him short. “Are we here to play cards or talk about fucking Indians?”

Torres ignored him. “You think it was God?” Another flash of his perfect teeth. “The way I figure it, God got a little help.”

“Maybe you should keep your voice down,” Frade grumbled.
He was a big man, bigger than everyone there, and he liked a fight.

But Torres was having a great night—and he was too drunk to care. “Why?” he said. “Nobody in this room gives a good goddamn about what happened to a few Indians. How about everybody ante up?”

Everyone did.

“Osvaldo cares,” Bonetti said. He belched. “His mother was one.”

“Osvaldo isn’t here.”

The door opened.

“Speak of the devil,” the priest said.

“You gentleman rang for service?” Osvaldo said.

“Same thing again,” the mayor said, not missing a beat.

“Not for me,” Lisboa said. “I gotta concentrate.”

“A double,” Torres said.

Pandolfo took it as more provocation directed at his boss and glared at him.

“I wonder what she did with the Indian,” Bonetti said when Osvaldo was gone.

“She who?” Torres said.

“Jade, of course.” He passed the cards to Pandolfo, who began to shuffle them.

“Probably staying at her place,” Frade said.

“An Indian? In her own home? I doubt it,”

“Why?”

“Her housekeeper,” Bonetti said, “is Alexandra Santos. A sensible woman. She’d never stand for it.”

The deck went to Bonetti, who cut. “Same game again,” Pandolfo said.

He dealt. Toledo passed. Lisboa opened with a hundred. The others went along. Everyone took three cards, except for Torres who took one, and Frade who dropped out. Again,
Toledo passed. Lisboa bet five hundred. Torres raised him a thousand.

“You’re bluffing,” Lisboa said.

“You think so? You’re gonna have to pay to find out.”

“You’re right there,” the mayor said. He wasn’t talking about the cards. He was responding to Bonetti’s comment about Jade’s housekeeper. “I know the woman well. She’d have a fit. I’m out.”

“I’ll see your thousand and raise you two thousand,” Lisboa said.

Torres kept him waiting, toying with his cards as if he hadn’t made up his mind about what to do.