The smells made their discomfort worse. The acrid smell of sweat. The steely smell of blood. The smells of excrement and urine.
Claudia held on long enough to get a shot of Delfin disemboweling Marta with the same knife he’d used to cut her clothes off-proof for any viewer that the girl was really dead-then she made a sudden dash for the deck.
She found a place in the shade under the awning, put the camera on one of the seats, and took a deep breath of the muggy air. It was heavy with the odor of rotting vegetation, but a damned sight more agreeable than the aromas down below.
The next person out of the cabin was Delfin, nude, one eye turning black, holding Marta’s panties against his ear to stanch the flow of blood.
“Bitch,” he said and sat down.
Claudia wrinkled her nose. She didn’t like having his sweating, filthy ass on her cushions. She made a mental note to have Otto scrub them clean after he’d flushed out the cabin.
Otto was already at it. Hans too. She could hear the splash of the hose, the trickle of water flowing into the bilge, the whir as the bilge pump kicked in. She leaned over the side and saw a pink stream gushing out of the hull.
Delfin was so dumb he still hadn’t tipped to the fact a European customer wouldn’t be down there in the cabin helping with the cleanup.
Hans came on deck, carrying Marta. He’d wrapped her corpse in a piece of black plastic sheeting.
“Still some pieces of her on the bunk,” he said. “I’ll have to shovel them into a bucket. Most are too big to wash into the bilge; they might clog the pump.”
Delfin blinked. It was the first time he’d heard the guy speak. Claudia envisioned wheels churning in his head as he tried to figure out how some Euro freak came to speak Portuguese with a Gaucho accent. He opened his mouth, maybe to ask, shut it, opened it again.
“Who woulda thought a little package like her could be so much trouble?” he finally said.
“You gonna just sit there and spout deep thoughts,” Hans said, all pretense gone, “or you gonna help me get her into the river?”
“Help? Hell, no. I already did my part.”
“Help him,” Claudia said. The coaming around the cockpit was solid mahogany, and she didn’t want bullet holes in it.
“Fuck,” Delfin said, “Look what the bitch did to my ear.”
He uncovered his ear and pointed to the place where Marta had mangled it with her teeth.
“It’s stopped bleeding,” Claudia said. “Just leave it alone.”
He tried to assess the damage with his fingers.
“Leave it alone, I said.”
“What are you, a fucking doctor?” he said, sarcastically.
“As a matter of fact,” she said, “I am.”
“Yeah, right.”
By then, Hans had laid his burden on the foredeck and was grasping a length of chain.
“Go help him,” she said again.
Delfin gave her an exasperated look and mumbled something, but he got up and moved forward.
Claudia watched the little drama play out on the foredeck: Hans telling Delfin to hold up her body so he could get the length of chain under it, Delfin doing it, Hans whipping out his pistol and putting two quick ones into Delfin’s head. Pam! Pam!
Down below, the sound of the cleanup continued unabated. Otto must have heard the shots, but he didn’t bother to stick his head out of the cabin.
Hans finished wrapping Marta and turned to Delfin. He’d already prepared a second length of chain, had it up there on the foredeck ready to use. He didn’t bother to wrap Delfin in plastic. The deck was fiberglass, easy to clean, and Otto would hose it down when he finished in the cabin.
Claudia rewound the tape, and started reviewing it in the viewfinder: no dropouts, a little jumpy in some places, a few lapses of focus, but all in all, a good job, different from all of the others because the girl fought like a wildcat. It lent a degree of piquancy to the work.
She hadn’t yet gotten to the point where Delfin was wrapping the silken cord around Marta’s neck when she heard a splash up near the bow. She stopped the playback and took the viewfinder away from her eye just in time to see Hans push Delfin’s body between two of the stanchions.
Another splash.
Hans came aft, toward the cockpit, discontent written on his face.
“I’m not gonna do this no more,” he said, “not unless we get to do her first. You’re a woman. You don’t know how it is, having to stand there, and watch it, and not get any. I woulda had her when she was still warm,” he said, “if you hadn’t told that fuck to open her belly.”
“Had to be done,” she said. “That’s what the customers want. Proof it isn’t faked.”
“Speaking of the fuck,” he said. “How about the money you gave him? The fuck locked it in the trunk of his car. You want to go back and get it?”
Claudia nodded.
“But, first, let’s make sure we haven’t had any visitors while we’ve been away. Joaquim and Luis are probably back at the house by now.”
Her cell phone was in a little compartment near the wheel. She pulled it out and dialed Joaquim’s number. Someone picked up on the third ring.
But it wasn’t Joaquim. Maybe a wrong number.
She hung up and tried again.
Joaquim Almeida’s cell phone rang for the second time. Silva glanced at the screen.
“Same caller,” he said to Joaquim and handed him the phone. “This time, you answer. If it’s Carla, you tell her no one showed up for your little party. If she asks if it’s safe to come back here, you say it is.”
Another ring.
“We gotta talk,” Joaquim said, “about what you’re gonna do for me if I cooperate.”
Another ring.
Arnaldo poked Joaquim’s ribs with his forefinger.
“Take the fucking call,” he said.
Joaquim winced and pushed the button.
“Yeah,” he said.
Silva grabbed Joaquim’s wrist and pulled the telephone a centimeter away from the thug’s ear.
“Joaquim?”
Silva had heard the voice twice before: on the recording made by the Dutch police and on the video showing the death and dismemberment of Andrea. The hairs rose on the back of his neck.
“It’s me,” Joaquim said.
“Your voice sounds strange. Anything wrong?”
“No. Nothing.”
“You wouldn’t lie to me, would you, Joaquim?”
“Lie? Why would I lie?”
The woman had taken control of the conversation. Joaquim wasn’t up to wresting it back.
“Where’s that brother of yours?”
“He’s around here someplace.”
Silva and Arnaldo exchanged exasperated looks.
“Put him on,” the woman said.
Only then did Joaquim recognize his mistake. He started to stammer.
“I… well… he’s…”
Click.
She disconnected without even bothering to tell Joaquim he was a lying sonofabitch.
“Some of them could be broken. I’d need an X-ray to confirm it,” the doctor said, slipping off his stethoscope and dropping it into his bag.
It was an hour later. They’d taken Joaquim Almeida back to the Hotel Tropical. The concierge had summoned a physician.
“See,” Joaquim said, “I told you I needed a hospital.”
“Shut up,” Arnaldo said.
“On the other hand,” the doctor said, looking at Joaquim like he was something he’d found sticking to the bottom of his shoe, “fractured or bruised, the treatment’s the same. You can’t splint ribs. I’ll prescribe something for the pain.”
“Something strong,” Joaquim said. “Give me something really strong.”
Silva cut in. “Will you certify he can travel?” he asked.
“You promise to get this piece of trash out of Manaus,” the doctor said, “and I’ll sign anything you want.”
In death, Father Vitorio Barone achieved the notoriety he’d coveted in life. The next morning, Rede Mundo led its eight o’clock news with the story of his murder.