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 Roselia. 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.
Roselia 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.”
Roselia 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.
Outside, someone was frying fish. The odor drifted through the shutters, as did the voices of some kids having an argument about whether Ronaldo Fenomeno played better futebol than Ronaldo Gaucho.
“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 cachaca 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 cachaca 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 cachaca, 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 cachaca.
“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.”