“Classy. No dummy. Nice tits and ass. Black hair. Good-looking, except for a big nose.”
The nose part brought Silva up short. He fished out his wallet, rifled through it, took out the photo he carried of Claudia Andrade, held it under Joaquim’s nose.
“Is this her?” he asked. “Is this Carla?”
Joaquim squinted as if he needed glasses. Then he looked up at Silva.
“Yeah,” he said.
Delfin Figueiredo didn’t trust boats. One little hole, that’s all it took. One little hole, and the damned thing would fill up with water and sink. Then where’d he be? At the bottom of the Rio Negro, that’s where.
Somebody had once told him that this part of the river was a hundred meters deep. He didn’t know if it was true, but he knew it didn’t have to be more than two meters deep to drown him. Delfin wasn’t a little guy, far from it. He stood exactly one meter ninety in his bare feet and weighed almost ninety-five kilograms, only a little of it fat. But the one meter ninety wouldn’t do him a damned bit of good in a hundred meters of water, and the absence of fat would only make him sink faster.
Problem was, Delfin didn’t know how to swim. He’d been raised on the river, but it had been farther downstream, below where the Rio Solimoes flowed in, and where the water was as dark as chocolate. He’d seen the things with teeth that fisherman pulled out of that water, things longer than he was tall and with mouths that could engulf his head.
Just the thought of one of those creatures lying under the surface, waiting there in the dark, had always petrified him. Neither his family nor the kids he’d grown up with had ever been able to lure him, or to taunt him, into immersing himself in that water.
So, when the woman told him the video was going to be shot on a boat, he’d balked.
“Fuck her, okay,” he’d said. “Kill her, okay. But no boat. There’s no way I’m gonna do it on a boat.”
“Why not?” the woman said. “What difference does it make?”
“It just does.”
“Big guy like you, afraid of boats?”
“Afraid? Me, afraid? Hell, no. I just don’t like them, that’s all.”
But then she’d offered him more money, and more money, and finally they were up to double the price he’d agreed upon in the first place. It was more than he’d ask if somebody wanted him to kill the mayor, or a senator. And how often did he get asked to kill the mayor or a senator? Never, that’s how often. The truth was, Delfin Figueiredo had never been paid more than three thousand Reais to kill anyone in his entire life.
Delfin was a man of modest tastes. With what she was offering he could live for a year, screwing all the whores he wanted, drinking all the cachaca he wanted, only climbing out of a hammock to get another smoke, or another drink, or something to eat.
It was just too tempting.
It wasn’t like she wanted him to get into the water. He didn’t have to get his feet wet at all. All he had to do was get into a fucking boat. And the boat looked pretty solid, and there was another little boat she was going to tow behind, meaning they’d all have someplace to go if the big one sank, and the day, like most days in the dry season, was all sunshine and just a few fleecy clouds. There weren’t going to be waves. There wasn’t going to be wind. So Delfin had agreed, and he told her he wanted half the money in advance, and she’d said no problem, and he’d stuffed it into the trunk of his car near the spare tire, and here he was, out on the river in the cabin of a fucking boat.
Delfin looked across at the girl he was expected to kill. She had one ankle fastened to a brass ring. They were using a pair of handcuffs for that. The rest of her was trussed up like a tapir ready for roasting. She was gagged, too, which was a good thing, because she had a mouth on her like a sewer. Delfin had heard her spouting off before they left the house, before the guy with the bags under his eyes stuffed a handkerchief in her mouth and secured it in place with another one. Delfin wondered where a girl with a classy accent learned language like that. Maybe in one of those fancy schools, maybe all the girls talked like that when they were in the bathroom. Now that would be the beginning of a good porno movie, girls in a bathroom talking dirty. Not this, not being out on a fucking boat.
The girl didn’t know about the killing, of course, but she must have figured out the rest. Funny thing was, she didn’t look scared. She looked angry. They’d warned him she was going to fight him. Well, as far he was concerned, that was fine. Delfin liked the rough stuff, but they wouldn’t let him get away with it in the boates, so it’d been a while since he’d had a chance to beat a woman into submission. Not that this was a woman. She didn’t look to be more than sixteen. She was a virgin, too, or so they said. Delfin found it hard to believe. Most of the girls he knew didn’t carry their virginity beyond the age of eleven, twelve at the most.
He tried to concentrate on what was coming, not on the sloshing of the water outside.
And found himself getting hard.
While she was setting up the lights, Claudia kept one eye on Delfin, studying him, as he studied Marta. He’d started out the trip nervous as a scalded cat, and she’d been worried about his ability to perform, but now he seemed to have adjusted to the situation. Claudia gave a little smile of satisfaction when she saw him open his legs and rub his crotch, displaying for the girl like the animal he was.
Marta turned her head aside in disgust.
“Getting close,” Otto said, his voice coming through the companionway.
Claudia clambered on deck and looked over the bow. Hans was already up there, seated on the cabin roof, one hand on the anchor. The shoreline was about a hundred meters away. She relieved Otto at the wheel, took a ninety-degree turn and steered parallel to the bank. Over here on this side of the river there wasn’t much to see, just the occasional fisherman’s shack, surrounded by dense vegetation. Now and then, they heard the screech and saw the flash of a passing macaw. Occasionally they caught sight of a monkey leaping from branch to branch.
Claudia couldn’t anchor in midriver. It was too deep, the current too swift. But she didn’t need the middle of the river. Here, in the shallower water near the shore, they were thoroughly isolated and unlikely to be disturbed. It would have been a different matter if there’d been a bridge. Then the city would have spilled over to this side. But there was no bridge, not here, not for eight hundred kilometers upstream, not for more than sixteen hundred kilometers downstream all the way to the sea.
She motored along until she came to a little cove. The cove had a high bank shielding it on three sides and thick vegetation growing right down to the water. Above the scrub, above the high-water line of the rainy season, trees, some with trunks as high as thirty meters, towered upward and spread their branches to form a canopy. The land rose beyond that and the canopy seemed to go on forever.
Claudia threw the twin throttles into neutral, waited until the forward motion had stopped and told Hans to heave the anchor overboard. She put the boat into reverse, and he paid out line. Thirty meters from shore, she cut the engine and told him to snub the line on the cleat. The boat stopped with a gentle jerk, the nylon cord rising from the water like a long white snake as the hull adjusted to the wind and current. When she thought the process was complete, Claudia took a step forward, lined up a stanchion with a tree on shore, and verified that the anchor was holding. Then she went below and started to unpack her camera from its padded case.
Chapter Twenty-four
“ Look who’s here,” Arnaldo said, pointing toward the driveway.
Silva turned his head. A uniformed man with a protruding stomach was strutting in their direction.
“The chief?” Silva asked.
“In the flesh,” Arnaldo confirmed. “Kindly note how much of it there is. Is that guy fat, or what?”
Summoned by a telephone call from the federals, half a dozen local cops were already on the scene. The senior man, a sergeant, had attempted to assume jurisdiction and confiscate their weapons, but Silva had told him to go to hell. He figured him for the one who’d called the chief.