“I’d rather do it myself,” Arnaldo said.
“And I’d rather you didn’t,” Coimbra said.
They glared at each other.
“I’ve got an idea,” Chief Pinto said, as if it had just occurred to him. “Alberto here can help you. You can do it together.”
Arnaldo shook his head.
“I’m gonna do it alone,” he said.
Arnaldo was a believer in the adage “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
After an unsuccessful morning in the archives, and an equally unsuccessful attempt to get a decent lunch in the padaria across the street, he was ready for a break. He decided to use it to locate the man the chief had called “that fucking priest.” A Salesian, Pinto had said. By inquiring at the first church he came to, Arnaldo discovered there was only one Salesian in Manaus: Father Vitorio Barone, who ran a school in the Sao Lazaro district. The parish priest was even able to furnish him with an address: number fourteen Rua de Caxias.
The Rua do Caxias turned out to be a narrow lane bisected by a filthy canal, more of an open drain than a waterway. A smell of raw sewage assailed Arnaldo’s nose. A mangy brown dog with visible ribs was tearing into a plastic sack of garbage in front of number twelve, a shack built of scrap lumber.
The neighboring building, number fourteen, was a mansion by comparison. Anywhere else it would have been categorized as a dump. Two stories tall, and twice as wide as any other house on the street, it was a haphazard pile of gray cinder block. An ancient pickup truck, painted yellow, but flaking in places to reveal the original blue, was parked in front. Arnaldo could hear children’s voices, getting louder, as he approached.
The door was open. He stood on the threshold, waiting for his eyes to adjust from sunlight to shade. A gang of kids became visible. They were seated on the cement floor, singing the alphabet. One of them caught sight of the figure in the doorway and whispered something to the child next to him. That one whispered to another and soon seventeen pairs of brown eyes and one pair of blue were turned in Arnaldo’s direction.
The blue eyes belonged to a priest in a black cassock. The singing faltered. The priest frowned. One of the kids saw the frown and elbowed his neighbor. The singing swelled. The priest stopped frowning.
They sang the alphabet through to the end. Then they sang it over again. When they finished for the second time, the priest clapped his hands.
“Dismissed,” he said.
The kids streamed out, walking past Arnaldo, giving him the once-over. The priest came forward.
Something about him, perhaps his long legs, perhaps the way he kept his neck erect when he walked, reminded Arnaldo of a flamingo. A shock of unruly black hair capped his high forehead. The hair was cut as a man might cut it himself if he didn’t care how looked.
“Father Barone?” Arnaldo asked.
He got a curt nod, then a question. “And you are?”
“Agente Arnaldo Nunes, federal police.”
Father Vitorio’s expression shifted from neutral to hostile.
“What do you want?”
“Your name came up at the police station,” Arnaldo said. “The chief referred to you as ‘that fucking priest,’ or words to that effect.”
The priest didn’t blanch. “So?” he said.
“So right now they’re probably referring to me as ‘that fucking federal cop.’ I figured we two fuckers should get acquainted.”
“The chief,” Father Vitorio said, “thinks I’m a pain in the ass.”
“And the feeling is mutual, eh?”
“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 Damiao 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.