After a futile attempt to remove the taste by strenuous brushing of his teeth, he went back to the archives. His none-too-cheerful greeting was met by sullen silence. The other clerks were taking a lead from their boss, Coimbra.
Arnaldo grabbed an armful of files, propped a chair under the doorknob of the little room they’d set aside for him, and got back to work. Less than an hour later, he got his first hit. Eighty-five minutes after that, another. He took both rap sheets, put them into his briefcase, and went back to his hotel.
In the restaurant, already the scene of several culinary disappointments, he thought he’d be safe with a salad. His first bite suggested that the lettuce had been in close contact with less-than-fresh fish. He dropped his fork and went back to the hotel’s shop. When the salesclerk from the previous evening saw him coming, she sent a teenager to wait on him and ran into the back.
He bought a candy bar and some bottled water. Then he wandered around the hotel until he got a good signal for his cell phone.
“Our cup runneth over,” he said when he had Silva on the line. “I got two hits.”
“Cup runneth over, eh? Sounds like you’ve been spending time with that priest, Father Vitorio.”
“How come you know about him? What are you? Psychic?”
“He had someone checking on you,” Silva said. “It got back to me, so I decided to check on him. Other than being-and here I’m quoting the head of the Salesian Order in Brazil-‘a little too sure of being right, even if the rest of the world thinks he’s wrong,’ Vitorio has a good rep. Was he of any help?”
“Not yet.”
Arnaldo told Silva about his two conversations with the priest.
“How come he’s being secretive?” Silva said when Arnaldo was done.
“Could be he’s just playing games. He wanted to have a name to go along with Marta Malan’s photo. I wouldn’t give him one. He wanted to know why I asked about Recife. I wouldn’t tell him. He wanted to know if she was somebody important. I wouldn’t tell him that either.”
“Tit for tat, huh?”
“Maybe. Or maybe he made a promise to his contact to keep his or her name out of it, or maybe he’s just being cautious.”
“When are you seeing him again?”
“He’ll call me if he comes up with anything.”
“How about that archives clerk, the guy who sent us the E-mail?”
“Bento Rosario. Still missing.”
“Speaking of missing, how are you going to make sure those rap sheets don’t disappear like Damiao’s did?”
“No chance. They’re in a safe place.”
“Don’t tell me you stole records from their archives?”
“Okay, I won’t tell you.”
“But you did, didn’t you?”
“You told me not to tell you. By the way, this town is the worst-”
“You’re not going to start that again, are you?”
“Seriously, Mario. Listen. All the food in this town tastes like fish. The salads, the meat, the butter, the cheese, the milk: it all tastes like fish.”
“You hate fish.”
“Exactly. I’m starving to death.”
“Wouldn’t hurt you to lose a few kilos.”
“A few kilos? Hell, by the time I get out of here, I’m gonna be so thin my wife isn’t going to recognize me.”
“Should be a treat for her. She’ll probably ask me to send you back twice a year. What about those rap sheets?”
“I’ll fax them.”
“From the hotel? Probably not a good idea.”
“I’ll do it myself, tell them I want to be left alone while I’m at it.”
“Names?”
“Carlos Queiroz and Nestor Porto, both pistoleiros, both natives of this hellhole.”
“You add Damiao Rodrigues, and we’ve got three from the same hellhole.”
“Not likely to be a coincidence, huh?”
“No. Sounds like you localized the infection. It jibes with what the Dutch cops told us. The woman phoned Amsterdam from Manaus.”
“How about some help tracking her down? We could try to find that clerk, Rosario, while we’re at it.”
Silva was silent for a moment, thinking.
“I don’t want to open this up any further,” he said; “not yet, anyway. I’ll come myself, and I’ll bring Hector. It’ll take a day or two to clear my schedule. I’ll E-mail you with my travel plans. Meanwhile, watch your back.”
Chapter Fifteen
The name on his birth certificate was Jose Luis Ignacio Braga, but nobody called him that. The people who’d known him as a child nicknamed him Lula, and that’s what they still called him. The whores who worked for him called him Senhor, and sometimes Senhor Braga; but most people called him The Goat, or simply Goat.
He’d grown up in a little shack on stilts, wedged in among several hundred other shacks on stilts, all of them lining the banks of the Rio Negro, and sometimes, during the rainy season, in the Rio Negro.
The rainy season was both a curse and a blessing.
It was a curse, because you couldn’t get out of your shack unless you had a boat. And if you did, there was always someone trying to steal it. It was a curse, too, because the river could kill you, creep up on you at night like some stealthy beast and knock the stilts away, and carry you and your whole family out into midstream, where the current was swift, and the water a hundred meters deep.
But the rainy season was also a blessing, because it was then that the water covered the garbage-strewn, human-waste-littered mud that held up the stilts and supported the shacks. The noxious odors arising from that mud changed so often you could never get used to the smells. They got into your hair and your pores, and wherever you went people wrinkled their noses and knew exactly where you came from.
Only the poorest people smelled like little Lula. Anyone who had a bit of money to spare built his home well above the high-water line. It was still a slum, but it was a cut above the houses on stilts.
There were places, farther upstream and down, where higher ground made it possible to live on the river without occasionally having to live in the river, but those places were prime real estate. There were big houses there, and docks for boats, and gardeners tending lawns of grass. But in little Lula’s neighborhood, there was no high ground, only gently shelving flats of black mud, even blacker than the water itself. The mud got its color from raw sewage. The water got it from tannins leached out of leaves farther upstream. The mud was filthy, but the water wasn’t. You could put an oar into it and still see the tip, even if you held it upright.
Little Lula’s family consisted of his mother, three older sisters, and himself. The mother and the sisters were whores, but they doted on him, and that, for little Lula, had been the greatest blessing of all. They’d worked to send him to school, recognizing that education was the key to financial success, hoping he’d support them in their old age, when they got to be forty or forty-five and could no longer attract even the poorest customers. So The Goat had gotten his start in life from prostitution. Now, more than forty years on, he still drew sustenance from it.
His education lasted through eight grades of primary school. That had been enough to get him into the municipal police. He’d never had a shot at being a delegado, of course. But he’d attained the respectable rank of sergeant before leaving the force and dedicating himself to running a string of girls full-time. There had only been three of them in the beginning, friends of his sisters in need of protection.
Protection was a concern of all the girls. If you worked the streets, you had to have a strong man to watch your back, to assure you didn’t get stiffed for your fees, to assure that, if you got beat up, it was only a little. It was a job cut out for The Goat. He was a head taller than most of the men he had to deal with, and he was adept at wielding a truncheon, something his police training had taught him. He was adept at wielding something else too. Back in those days, he was sexually insatiable. One of his whoring buddies, a reprobate carioca with a serious drinking problem and a classical education, once remarked that there was only one difference between Lula and a satyr: a satyr, being only half-goat, wouldn’t fuck just anything, but a goat would. And so would Lula. Thus was his new nickname born.