Pinto stopped in front of Arnaldo.
“What the fuck is going on?” he said.
“And good morning to you too, Chief,” Arnaldo said.
“Who’s this?” He pointed at Silva.
“My boss, Chief Inspector Mario Silva.”
Pinto turned his back on Arnaldo.
“So maybe you’re the one who can tell me what the fuck happened here?”
“A couple of thugs killed Father Vitorio Barone,” Silva said, “and a young friend of his, name of Lauro Tadesco.”
“What a shame,” the chief said, without a trace of regret. “Who did it?”
“The Almeida brothers.”
“Luis and Joaquim? They’re scum. If both of them were dead, this town would be better off.”
“Then it’s half better off already,” Arnaldo said.
Pinto blinked, but he didn’t turn his head. “You killed one?”
“Luis,” Silva said. “Shot while resisting arrest.”
“Where’s the other one?” Pinto said.
“Down the road a bit, in a car.”
“Hand him over,” the chief said. “He’s mine.”
“In your dreams,” Silva said. “We’re holding on to him.”
“The hell you are. Murder is state, not federal. You can’t hold him. I can.”
“We’re charging him with something else.”
The chief’s features drew together, as if he’d just tasted something nasty.
“What?”
“I can’t tell you. It’s confidential.”
“Confidential? That’s a load of crap.”
“Is it?”
“You’re gonna need a place to keep him.”
“We have a place to keep him. The Tropical.”
“You’re gonna put a scumbag like Joaquim Almeida in the Hotel Tropical?”
“We’re thinking of getting him the Presidential suite,” Arnaldo said.
“Something else,” Silva said. “According to Joaquim this was a contract hit. The woman who hired them calls herself Carla something, has a house down by the river, lives there with a couple of capangas, big guys from down south. Ring any bells?” “Not a one,” the chief said.
“We’re going over there to arrest them, gonna need some of your men.”
“Yeah? Well, you can’t have any. Any arresting has to be done, we’ll do it ourselves.”
Arnaldo said, “You recall getting calls from the mayor and the governor? Something about full cooperation?”
The chief glared at him.
Arnaldo pulled out his cell phone.
“Maybe a call would help,” he said. “Who do you want to hear it from? The governor, or the mayor?”
Pinto ignored Arnaldo, addressed Silva.
“How many men you need?”
“Ten should do it,” Silva said. “Ten with automatic weapons and a forensic team. Have you got one?”
“Of course we’ve got one. This isn’t the sticks, Silva.”
“Could have fooled me,” Arnaldo said.
If looks could kill, Joaquim would have been dead the minute the chief set eyes on him. He cringed to one side of the back seat, keeping Hector between himself and Pinto. The chief spoke to him through the open window.
“Where’s this house, you little shit?”
Joaquim played along, just as the federals told him he should, acting as if he hadn’t spilled his guts about the chief and as if the chief wasn’t the prick who’d dropped him into all this shit in the first place.
Like everything else in Manaus, the assault team took a while to assemble. But when they got there they turned out to be surprisingly well-equipped. They also looked like people who knew what they were about. Silva was impressed.
The house, too, impressed him. It was reminiscent of something built in colonial times: thick walls, small windows, a red tile roof. It stood in the middle of a clearing, providing a clear field of fire on all sides. If defended, it would be a hard nut to crack. The federal cops stood well back and let the team get on with it.
They hit the main door in a frontal assault, blowing it off the hinges with a small explosive charge and tossing in some flash-bangs before they went in themselves. It was all over in less than a minute.
The leader of the assault team appeared in the doorway and motioned the others forward.
“Clear,” he said.
The federal cops crossed the threshold, dragging the surviving Almeida brother with them. It only took two minutes to confirm that the place was empty.
“Where did they go, Joaquim?” Silva said.
“How the fuck should I know? I told you, I only seen her once.” Arnaldo was already balling his fists when the punk added, “But her boat’s gone.”
“Boat?”
“Yeah, she had a big fucking boat tied up to that dock behind the house.”
“She might have taken her boat,” Silva said to the chief. “Have one of your men check with the navy. Maybe they can get us the registration number and a description.”
“If she isn’t really stupid,” the chief said, “she’s gonna paint over the number, maybe even paint the whole goddamned boat.”
“But maybe not yet,” Silva said. “She doesn’t know we’ve nailed Joaquim. She might just be out for a cruise on the river. Get your men out of sight in case she comes back.”
The chief turned and gave some orders to a guy with a little moustache and sweat stains under the arms of his shirt. The guy ran off toward the house, shouting instructions, being self-important.
“Then too,” Silva said, “maybe she didn’t take the boat at all. There are only two roads out of this town, right?”
“Wrong,” Pinto said. “There are three. You got one road that runs north, up to Roraima and on to Venezuela. You got another road on the other side of the river. That one runs from Careiro down to Porto Velho in Rondonia. The third one, the short one, is on this side of the river. It goes to Itacoatiara.”
“Okay, three roads. That’s it?”
“Christ, Silva, in case you hadn’t noticed, that’s the Amazon jungle out there.” The chief threw out his hand like he was grabbing a piece of it. “Three is pretty impressive, if you ask me.”
“The road to Itacoatiara, where’s it go from there?”
“Nowhere. But it’s a road. Anybody trying to get out of town could use it, then switch to a boat.”
“And they’d also need a boat to get to Careiro and go south, right?”
“Right.”
“So we have to cover the river.”
“Forget the fucking river. We only got three boats. We’ll never be able to stop everybody. You got any idea how much traffic there is, how many boats are out there?”
“A good reason not to try, right?”
“Don’t put words in my mouth.”
“I want people covering the airport as well.”
“We can’t go stopping every woman in a car, on a boat, or getting ready to board an airplane.”
“You don’t have to. You only have to stop one. I’ve got a picture of her. I’ll let you copy it. I want it back.”
“Where did you get a-”
Silva didn’t let him finish.
“She might be traveling in the company of a fifteen-year-old girl. I’ve got a picture of her too. You gonna get on board with this, or you want to hear from the mayor and the governor?”
The chief gritted his teeth.
“Give me the goddamned pictures,” he said.
Manaus’s chief crime-scene investigator was Caio Lefkowitz, but nobody called him Caio, only Lefkowitz. A paulista resident of the state of Sao Paulo-from Campinas, he had curly black hair, ears that stuck out like a chimpanzee’s, and thick eyeglasses. The glasses made him look like a studious monkey.
“Pleased to meet you, Chief Inspector.”
Unlike almost everyone else Silva had met in Manaus, Lefkowitz sounded like he meant it. They were standing in the front yard, watching the assault team pack up their gear. “Lefkowitz?” Silva said, rubbing his chin. “You have a brother who’s a federal cop?”
“Uh huh. Jaime. Two years older than I am. Works out of Rio de Janeiro.”