The Goat had mellowed down through the years. These days, girls in his house were seldom summoned to service the boss. And he seldom mistreated them, which is to say he was never more violent than he had to be. Occasionally, it was true, he beat one of them with a rubber hose. But he only did it because he felt they deserved it, not because he enjoyed it. He was generally even-tempered. He had friends. He had money. He had a stable business. It was a business that most women in town didn’t approve of, but the vast majority of men did. He was, therefore, not stigmatized, but rather enjoyed a limited degree of celebrity. He had a nice house, and a fishing boat, and a loyal subordinate in Roselia. He should have been a happy man, and he was, in every respect but one: he could never shake free from a morbid fear that some day he was going to wake up and find himself back in that shack on stilts. He was deathly afraid of being propelled back into the poverty and misery of his youth. He wouldn’t be able to tolerate that. Not anymore. He’d do anything to prevent it. Anything.
“When are you leaving?” The Goat asked. He was in his office, tucked in behind the boate, gazing through the window at the Rio Negro.
His boat was down there, not fifty meters away, moored to the dock. Beyond it, in midriver, a large ship was making a turn. The ship moved slowly at first, but then the current caught the bow, swung it over and started to sweep the vessel downstream. Intent on watching it pick up speed, The Goat hadn’t bothered to turn around when he’d asked the question.
Instead of responding, Roselia posed a question of her own. “How’s your hand?”
He’d been holding Marta with his left hand while he beat her with the right. She’d twisted under the blows, and he’d inadvertently struck his own knuckles. He flexed them, studied the discolored flesh, and grunted.
“When are you leaving?” he repeated.
“I don’t think I should go at all,” she said. “Not while a federal cop is sniffing around.”
She’d been planning a trip downriver to Santarem to troll for new girls.
“Pinto says all the guy’s doing is hanging around the delegacia and looking at rap sheets,” The Goat said.
Pinto had just left, having traded the information for the services of a girl who was eleven years old and a bottle of Scotch that was twelve. He’d sampled the Scotch on the spot and taken the rest of the bottle away with him.
The Goat didn’t care about the girl, a renewable resource, but he did care about the whiskey. He’d bought it from a contrabandista, but it had still set him back almost eighty dollars, American, and gone was gone.
“Maybe it has nothing to do with us,” Roselia said.
The Goat had a feeling that it did, but he wasn’t ready to admit it.
“Maybe it has something to do with Carla Antunes,” she said. “She’s sending girls to European brothels. That’s international trafficking, a federal rap. And most of those girls used to be our girls. What if they nail her, and she talks?”
The Goat thought for a moment. “I could have a talk with her,” he said. “Make it clear it would be… unhealthy if her business fucked up our business.”
“Why don’t you?”
“Okay. I was planning on talking to her anyway.”
“About what?”
“About this Marta Malan.”
“What about her?”
“I’m ready to give up.”
“You? Give up?”
“Christ, Roselia, I’ve gone about as far as I can go. I don’t want to kill her.”
“Of course not. But are you really ready to give up? It’d be the first time.”
“You know what she did this morning after I gave her the treatment with the hose?”
“What?”
“She spit in my face. There she was, with bruises all over her, and a broken tooth, and she spits in my face. Starving her didn’t make any difference. Giving her the solitary treatment didn’t make any difference. Letting her talk to the other girls didn’t make any difference. We let her loose on a customer, she’s gonna bite him and scratch him. Either he’s gonna run out of the room and create a scene, or he’s gonna kill her. Either way, it’s bad for business.”
“So you’re going to sell her?”
“To Carla. It’s the best way. At least we get some money out of it. Then she’s not around to talk to the other girls, she’s not in the country to talk to the federal cops, and she’s somebody else’s problem.”
“Seems like a nice, clean solution,” Roselia said.
The house was in the old colonial style with a red-tiled roof, whitewashed walls and blue trim. The Sao Paulo industrialist who’d built it told his wife it was a fishing lodge.
His wife told him he was full of shit. She knew it was underage whores, not fish, that drew this paulistano to Manaus. But she could never prove it.
On those rare occasions when she tried to stage a surprise visit (the paulistano always knew when one was coming because his pilot had strict instructions to advise him if she commandeered the plane), he’d board the seventeen-meter motor yacht he kept tied up at the bottom of the garden and come back late in the evening, surrounded by his so-called fishing buddies, ostensibly delighted to discover her there.
The Goat, as Manaus’s premier supplier of underage whores, had been a frequent visitor to the lodge, but he’d only been there on three occasions since the death of the man who’d built it.
The first of those occasions was in response to a telephone call from a fourteen-year-old whore named Geralda Mendes. Geralda had been leaning over an armchair, letting the pau-listano fuck her doggy fashion, when the magnate suffered a massive coronary and collapsed on Geralda’s back. As soon as she realized he wasn’t simply gathering energy for a final assault, she wriggled out from under him and grabbed the telephone next to the bed. Fifteen minutes later, The Goat showed up to give advice. After a quick evaluation of the situation, he suggested that the paulistano’s fishing buddies wash his genitals, clothe his naked body, and haul it onto the yacht before calling the police.
They’d agreed, except for the washing part. They made Geralda do that.
The true circumstances of her husband’s death never became known to the widow in Sao Paulo, but the story was told and retold in the bars and boates of Manaus.
One of the people who got considerable mileage out of it was a well-known raconteur named Miguel Marcus. It was Marcus who started calling Geralda “The Kiss of Death.” The nickname stuck, and for some months thereafter The Kiss’s services were in great demand. Some people said it was bravado on the part of the older customers, others that any girl who could bring on a heart attack in an otherwise healthy man of fifty-seven must be very hot stuff indeed and had to be tried. But the novelty didn’t last. After six months of constant attention, the first four by reservation only, The Kiss’s popularity began to decline. The Goat, ever attentive to the needs of his customers, promptly sold her to Hercules, a friend of his who owned a boate in Santarem.
Within a week of his demise, the paulistano’s widow put his house and yacht up for sale. The yacht wasn’t a problem. It was bought within a week. The house remained empty for almost six months, and six months is a long time to weather in the Amazon: paint peels; termites and other insects bore into wood; bats take up residence under rafters; snakes and rats creep into drains.
The widow was getting fed up with the cost and aggravation of maintaining the property by the time a woman who styled herself Carla Antunes came along.
Selva Macieira, the real estate agent who handled the transaction, was more than a little surprised when Carla declared an intention to make her home in Manaus.
Selva, an Amazonense herself, knew as well as anyone that Manaus was a cesspool of filth, that it suffered from a dreadful climate, that the inhabitants were mostly limited in their intellectual capacity and that they were overwhelmingly lethargic.