In those days, the country was under the Spanish yoke and subject to the Spanish Inquisition. Moorish blood was regarded as a sign of less than complete devotion to the true faith, and less than complete devotion to the true faith could be fatal. To escape distrustful inquisitors, the Silvas had left their native country and moved to Brazil, a melting pot where the prejudice against darker skin was less strong and the Inquisition less pervasive.
They chose Sao Paulo as their new home. It wasn’t a city then, not even a village, just a frontier outpost founded by the Jesuits for the express purpose of converting the Indians. The place grew little over the next one hundred and fifty years, remaining a sleepy hamlet well into the eighteenth century. That changed when the Europeans developed a passion for coffee. The soil and climate around Sao Paulo were found to be ideally suited to the new crop. The great coffee barons became cash-rich. They had money to invest, and many of them invested it in manufacturing. By the mid-twentieth century, the city had become the premier industrial center, the largest city in the country.
And the most dangerous.
Hector’s maternal grandfather had been shot to death by bandits in 1978, just two years after Hector was born. His grandmother, raped by the same individuals and forced to watch her husband’s murder, lost all interest in life and didn’t survive the year.
The incident motivated Mario, Hector’s uncle, to give up a promising career as a lawyer and join the federal police.
Nine years later, his nephew had been moved in the same direction.
On a sunny Saturday morning, Hector’s parents were driving to a shopping center. His father, Claudio Costa, was behind the wheel. Hector was in the back seat. He’d been playing with a toy, a Rubik’s cube, when he heard a voice.
“Hand over your watch.”
A man was standing just outside, pointing the barrel of a gun at his father’s head. They were stopped at a traffic light, locked in by other automobiles. The day was hot. The car had no air-conditioning. The windows were open.
The watch, his mother told him later, was a family heirloom. His father was reluctant to give it up. Twenty years on, as an experienced cop, Hector would have recognized the man with the gun as a drug addict, trying to gather enough money for his next fix. At the time, he just thought the man was scary. His mother folded the newspaper she’d been reading over her lap, thereby concealing her wedding ring. The ring was the only jewelry she ever wore on the street.
“Claudio,” she said, keeping her voice low and steady, “give him the watch.”
Almost everyone in the extended family had been robbed at one time or another. If it wasn’t some kid threatening you with a sliver of glass, or a gang with clubs and rocks, it was someone like this: a frightened little man with bloodshot eyes, a two-day growth of beard, and a revolver that was trembling in his hand.
Claudio took his hands off the steering wheel, as if he was going to unfasten the clasp on his watch, but then he swiveled to his left and made a grab for the revolver. The man stepped backward. There was a loud explosion, louder than any firecracker Hector had ever heard. His father flew backward, as if someone had given him a push.
Hector stared at the shooter, and for a moment they locked eyes. Then the man was putting the weapon into a canvas bag and backing away.
He looked down at his father. Blood covered the front of his shirt. Sucking noises were coming out of a hole in his chest. Hector’s mother was saying “Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God,” over and over. Hector leaned over the seat, buried his nose in his mother’s neck, and tried to comfort her.
The sucking noises stopped.
Kuipers asked Hector how he liked Amsterdam. Hector said he liked Amsterdam very much. Montsma asked him if the conference on the suppression of the drug trade had been useful. Hector said it had. Then, unlike Brazil where the pleasantries would have gone on for at least another five minutes, they got down to business.
“You heard about that bomb, the one set off by a group calling itself Justice for Islam?” Kuipers asked.
Hector nodded. “Terrible thing,” he said, wondering why they wanted to talk to him.
“The bomb,” Kuipers said, “also took out a mail truck. The explosion blew mail all over the street.” He paused.
Hector waited for him to get to the point.
“Among the scattered envelopes,” Kuipers continued, “were a number of DVDs. The newspapers are calling them ‘videos that are pornographic in nature’, but that’s not the half of it. They were snuff videos. The action was all covered in one shot, no cuts, and at the end there was something… convincing. Proof that the action wasn’t faked.”
Hector frowned. “Proof? What kind of proof?”
“After the murderer strangled her,” Kuipers said, “he cut off her head with an ax.”
Chapter Seven
MANAUS
Marta awoke to find her door ajar, a crack of light spilling in from the corridor. At first, she was too wary to approach it. What if they were toying with her, what if someone, maybe The Goat, was standing on the other side?
She sat up, legs together, fighting the urge to urinate. After a while she could stand it no more. She stood, reached for the knob and drew the door toward her.
No Goat.
She stuck her head into the corridor.
Nobody.
She went to the bucket and used it.
No one disturbed her.
She pulled up her panties, washed her hands at the sink, and resumed her seat on the bed.
Reason told her the open door was no accident, no mistake. But it might have been, and so she’d be foolish not to take advantage of it.
When they’d brought her in, there’d been a dusty burlap sack over her head. She hadn’t seen anything of the building, and had little idea of its floor plan, except for the location of the shower. That was about ten meters down the corridor to the right. Roselia took her there every other day in the small hours of the morning when the rest of the house was asleep. The soap was brown and smelled like medicine. The water was lukewarm, never hot. She only got two minutes, and she was expected to dry herself with a rough fragment of terrycloth; but after the grinding monotony of her prison, every shower felt like a holiday.
When it was over, Roselia would throw some clean clothing at her and push her back to her cell where she was permitted to dress.
But it wasn’t the bathroom she was thinking of at the moment. She was thinking about another door she’d seen in the corridor, bigger and heavier than all the others. She just knew it led to the outside.
Gingerly, she stepped through the doorway. To her left, she could hear voices. Except for the choice of words, they could have been coming from the playground of an all-girls’ school
One girl said, “I told her she could kiss my ass.”
Another was saying she didn’t care about how many other girls he’d done it to, there was no way she was going to let him do it to her.
Still another exclaimed “… three hundred Reais. Can you imagine? Three hundred Reais?” As if that was a fortune, when it wasn’t even half of what Marta used to pay for one of her dresses.
The whores. It had to be them.
Marta turned the other way, to the right, toward the bathroom, toward the door that led to freedom. As she scurried along, a random thought popped into her head: her uncle had once given her a pair of hamsters for Christmas. By Easter, they were dead, but she remembered how there’d been a maze inside their cage. They’d scurry back and forth along the corridors of that maze. They’d gone on scurrying, every waking hour, until they died.