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 cachaca 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 cachaca. “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. All cops look for ways to supplement their income. The Goat is their ultimate success story.”
Arnaldo took another sip of his cachaca. The stuff was making his tongue feel thick.
“He works alone?”
“He has an associate, a woman by the name of Roselia 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 Roselia. 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 Belem and Santarem, 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.”
“Tell me more about this woman, Roselia. You say she recruits girls from all over. How about Recife?”
“Why are you interested in Recife?”
“Sorry. I can’t tell you that.”
Father Vitorio reached for the bottle and uncorked it. “Last chance,” he said.
Arnaldo nodded. The priest divided what remained in the bottle, doing the Christian thing by giving Arnaldo a few extra drops.
“Recife?” Arnaldo prompted.
“Maybe,” Father Vitorio said.
“You think this Goat might be capable of making a snuff video?”
The priest brushed the air. It might have been an impatient gesture, or he might have been swatting at one of the moths.
“I’ve already told you, Agente, snuff videos don’t exist. They’re-”
“An urban legend. Yes, you told me. Let me put it another way: do you think The Goat would be capable of killing someone in cold blood?”
The priest didn’t hesitate. He shook his head.
“No, Agente, I don’t. He’s bad, but he’s not that bad. He wouldn’t kill anyone unless he was severely provoked.”
“You seem to know quite a bit about him. And that’s why you wanted to keep the photo. You’ve got a source. Who feeds you information?”
The priest’s eyes sparkled. “Now, I’m the one,” he said, “who can’t tell you that.”
Arnaldo returned to his hotel to find the bedside lamp switched on and the window wide open. To air out the room, the note from the chambermaid said.
By the time he’d closed the window and turned on the air-conditioning, he was covered with mosquito bites. He called housekeeping and got no answer. He went down to the lobby, and they directed him to the hotel’s shop.
In the shop was an entire shelf of outrageously priced spray with which to kill mosquitoes and another of an even more outrageously priced cream to treat the bites.
Even if Arnaldo had had a less-suspicious nature, he would have spotted the connection: somebody was making money out of “airing out” the guests’ rooms.
While she was processing his credit card, the smiling sales clerk asked him if he was enjoying his visit to Manaus.
When he left the shop, she was no longer smiling.
The following morning at breakfast Arnaldo, once burned, refused the bread and the rancid butter. The fruit plate came with a number of exotic fruits he couldn’t identify and a few that he could.
So far, so good.
But then he made the mistake of adding some thin, bluish milk to his coffee. The milk tasted like fish.