“It’s bad for me,” Arie had said, “and bad for you too. They get nabbed, sure as hell they’re going to squeal. They’re the only ones who don’t have deniability. What they’ve done is right there for all to see, and they’ll be looking for a deal with the prosecutors. You have to prevent that. You have to kill ’em all, or we don’t do business.”
He’d been right, of course. Just as he’d been right about covering the snuff in one continuous shot, without intercuts; right about the trick of opening up the aperture on the lens so the blood wouldn’t be underexposed and register as black, rather than a rich, full red; right about the value added of leaving the volume control on the microphone open to capture the victim’s dying gasp.
Arie was a man who knew his business, knew all the ins and outs, knew the technical side, knew what his clients liked. But she wouldn’t miss him. She could trust The Surinamer to come up with another distributor. The Surinamer could always get you anything you wanted, drugs, false papers, anything. He could have people killed, even Dutch cops. All you needed was the money to pay him. She could have used a man like The Surinamer right now, but he was far away, in Amsterdam. She’d have to make do with what she had.
She looked at her watch. It was still early enough to call Chief Pinto and invite him to lunch. Some good whiskey, a wad of banknotes handed across the table in a white envelope, and he’d get cracking, probably suggest someone suitable for testing within a day or two.
Her story to the chief was always the same: some friends of hers, friends in Europe, needed someone for a job, someone who could get tough, someone who could get very tough if the situation warranted it.
All the people the chief suggested wound up disappearing for good. He wasn’t stupid. He’d noted that. He’d even mentioned it once.
“Maybe they like it over there,” she’d said. “Maybe they finished the job and decided to stay.”
“All of them? Every last one of them?”
“You know how many illegal Brazilian immigrants there are in Europe?”
The chief had told her he had no idea and that he, frankly, didn’t give a shit.
“Good riddance,” he’d said. “They were all punks anyway.”
But since that conversation he’d never again fed her people whose services he might be able to use in future.
SAO PAULO
Decades earlier
The funeral Claudia Andrade’s parents planned to attend was that of a great-aunt, but they never made it. On the way, their car was broadsided by a truck. Both were killed instantly. It drew newspaper headlines at the time due to the irony of their being on the way to a funeral and winding up at their own.
But Claudia’s parents, owners of six fast-food franchises, were really nothing more than glorified shopkeepers. Nothing other than wealth distinguished them. Their case was soon forgotten.
Claudia had been seven, her brother, Omar, two years younger. He’d been a momma’s boy, deemed too young to attend the double burial, so Claudia, the one who’d always avoided her mother’s embraces, was the one who got lifted up over the coffin.
“Kiss your mother good-bye,” her uncle Leonardo told her.
Claudia did as she was told, dutifully pressing her lips against the dead woman’s cheek. Her mother’s flesh was cold. Claudia reacted by making spitting noises and rubbing her mouth. Everybody knew Claudia was a strange little girl. They didn’t blame her for making a scene. They blamed Leonardo. He shouldn’t have done what he did. The Andrade family hated scenes. They remembered the incident, but Claudia promptly forgot all about it. She hadn’t been particularly fond of either one of her parents. She hadn’t been particularly fond of anyone.
It was another five years before it occurred to her that death was worth thinking about. Then, two weeks before her thirteenth birthday, she had an epiphany. She was living, then, with her Aunt Tamara, her mother’s spinster sister. School was over for the day. She and her brother were walking home. Omar was running on ahead, holding his books in one arm and squeezing his crotch with the other. He was desperate to get to a bathroom before he peed in his pants.
He crossed the street in front of the house, flung open the gate, and ran up the steps, ignoring the family dog, a miniature dachshund named Gretel. Claudia had never once scratched Gretel behind her ears, never once given her food, and yet the animal lavished her with unrequited affection. The dachshund dashed out through the open gate and started to run across the street.
Her happy barks were cut off with a loud thump and a wail of pain. The car, a black Ford LTD with tinted windows, never slowed down. Whether the driver was a man or a woman would remain a mystery. The cops weren’t about to waste their time trying to hunt down someone who’d done a hit-and-run on a dog.
Gretel rolled over and over and came to rest in the gutter at Claudia’s feet. She was still alive-barely-but she was bleeding from the mouth and panting for breath. Claudia put a hand on the soft, reddish-brown fur. She could feel Gretel’s heart, fluttering, fluttering. Then, suddenly, it stopped.
Claudia shuddered. Her head began to spin. She sensed a shortness of breath, a sharpening of her senses, a wetness between her thighs.
It was… wonderful.
They buried Gretel in a corner of the back yard. Omar cried at the funeral and planted a cross of two sticks bound together with kite string.
Claudia squeezed out a tear or two, but more to make Omar feel guilty than from any sense of loss. Head down, hands over her eyes, she found herself thinking… thinking. Would they catch me if I killed the parakeet? How about our cat? How would it be to be present at the death of a human being, instead of a mere dog?
It was then and there, standing over that little mound of earth, that Claudia Andrade decided what she was going to do with her life.
She was going to preside over deaths.
Last moments, for thirteen-year-old Claudia Andrade, were profoundly exciting, more so than boys, toys, parties, pretty clothes, more so than anything.
She’d never, ever, be able to get enough of them.
MANAUS
Present Day
The door of the aircraft opened to suffocating heat, a strong smell of rotting vegetation, and a weaker one of decomposing fish.
Arnaldo was waiting in the shadow of the terminal building.
The three of them shook hands and started walking.
“It’s Hector’s first visit to Manaus,” Silva said.
“Lucky bastard,” Arnaldo said. “This is my fifth.”
Just ahead, facing them, was a tourist, snapping photographs. When the guy lowered the camera Silva caught a glimpse of deep bags under heavy-lidded eyes.
On the way to the hotel, Arnaldo reviewed his conversations with Father Vitorio. Then he handed them the original rap sheets of Carlos Queiroz and Nestor Porto, the ones he’d lifted from the archives of the Manaus PD.
The photographs were much more legible than on the faxes received in Brasilia. There was no mistake. They were the same men who’d been seen performing on two of the snuff videos.
Queiroz and Porto shared two common features: protuberant lower jaws and piglike eyes. They looked like members of some primitive tribe.
“You take Queiroz,” Silva said to Hector. “I’ll take Porto.” “How about me?” Arnaldo said.
“You hate those archives, don’t you?” Silva said. “The reception you got from Coimbra and his people, the dust, the heat?”
“Yeah, so what?”
“So stick with it. See what else you can come up with.”
Arnaldo let out a sigh. “This is penance for that Hotel Plaza business, isn’t it?” he said.
Number twenty-seven Rua da Independencia, Queiroz’s last known address, was five stories of mildewed brick with a shop window on the ground floor. Beyond the glass, which looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in Hector’s lifetime, were religious articles: bibles of all sizes, hymnals, plastic statues of saints, icons of the Virgin Mary, rosaries, portraits of the Pope.