The Ways of Evil Men (12 page)

“Sorry,” Silva said. “Just a few more quick questions. We’re expecting reinforcements. Have you got room to lodge three more?”

Osvaldo shook his head. “Only two vacancies. It would have been one if that reporter hadn’t checked out.”

“Two are a couple. Can they share?”

“Sure. Are they from down south?”

“They are.”

“So it’s beds, not hammocks?”

“You offer a choice?”

“Uh-huh. All hotels do in this part of the world. Lots of white folks have never slept on anything else, so I’ve got hooks in every room. When do they arrive?”

“This afternoon.”

“I’ll arrange it. Anything else? Really, guys, I gotta go lie down.”

“We’ll need cars.”

“No, you won’t. You’ll need jeeps. Once you get outside of town, the roads are shit. A vehicle without four-wheel drive is as good as useless.

“Thanks for the tip. Where’s the rental agency?”

“That would be me. There are no real rental vehicles in town, but there are folks who own jeeps and are looking to pick up a few extra Reais. I serve as intermediary. Their vehicles may not look good, but they’ll run. Tomorrow morning okay?”

“I was hoping we could go out to the Awana’s village this afternoon.”

“Forget it. You haven’t got time to get there and back before dark. And believe me, you do
not
want to get stuck in the rainforest at night.”

“How about we visit some of those
fazendas
?” Arnaldo asked. “Start working our way through the list of people we need to talk to?”

“
Some
,” Osvaldo said, “would be too ambitious. You might get in one, no more than that.”

“They’re that far apart?”

“They are. The holdings are huge and the roads are bad.”

Arnaldo muttered something. The days they were likely to spend in Azevedo were adding up.

“Then we’ll leave those visits for later,” Silva said. “Just as well. We’ll be here when our people arrive. Are you free tomorrow? Could you accompany us to the village?”

“To help communicate with the boy?”

“Yes.”

“Sure. Glad to.”

“And could you arrange for some men to dig for us?”

“You gonna unearth bodies?”

“Yes.”

“Have to be guys with strong stomachs.” The word stomach seemed to remind Osvaldo of his own. He ran the hand not holding the towel over his abdomen, and was looking more miserable by the moment, but he soldiered on. “How many do you want?”

“Six should do it.”

“Consider it done. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I really—”

“Just one more,” Arnaldo said. He put a hand on Silva’s arm. “You got enough people going out to that village with you. You don’t need me and Babyface, right?”

“I suppose not. Why?”

Arnaldo turned back Osvaldo. “How many ways are there to get from here to Belem?”

“By road? Only one. And you don’t want to drive it unless you have to.”

“I’m not thinking of driving it,” Arnaldo said. “I’m thinking of blocking it.”

T
HE TWO FEDERAL COPS
dedicated the remainder of the morning and the better part of the afternoon to interviewing the townsfolk. Arnaldo’s conversation with Carol Luz, a cashier in Cunha’s supermarket, and Silva’s with Renato Kassab were conducted with people from opposite ends of the social spectrum, but the information they gleaned—or rather the lack of it—was strikingly similar.

Arnaldo hadn’t been talking to Luz for more than five minutes before she began her attack.

“Are you dense, Agent Nunes, or are you trying to irritate me?”

“Neither one, Senhora. It’s a simple question. How can you justify a lynching as self-defense?”

The cashier, a blousy woman with black roots in her blonde hair, blew out a breath he could feel on his face. “Because my children could have been next, that’s how!”

“Assuming the Indian did it—killed Torres, I mean—what makes you think he’d go after your kids?”

Another breath. She could have benefitted from an oral disinfectant. “
Assuming he did it?
Are you serious? How much proof do you need? Do you know where they found him? What he had in his hand? He was a crazy, murdering savage. He was running around town with a knife the size of a stallion’s dick. Would you have taken a risk like that if it was
your
kids? What kind of a father are you?”

“You don’t like Indians, do you?”

“Oho. Well, a question like that shows where
you
stand, doesn’t it? Around here, we’ve got a name for people like you.”

“I don’t want to hear it. And I’d appreciate it if you’d stop doing that.”

“Doing what?”

“Turning the conversation around. I don’t want to talk about me. I’m here to talk about what
you
saw, what
you
heard, what
you
think.”

A third exasperated breath. Arnaldo almost raised a hand and waved it in front of his nose, but caught himself before he did.

“What I think?” she said, and then repeated, “What I think? I think you should drop this stupid investigation of yours, go back to wherever you came from, and leave us alone. Whatever you say, those masked men, whoever they were, did this town a favor.”

“
Whoever they were
, eh?”

“You heard me. And there’s nothing you can say that will ever make me change my mind about that.”

“You watched the lynching from the time they hustled him out of the front door of the
delegacia
until the time he was swinging from a tree, and yet you can stand there and tell me you didn’t recognize a single one of the perpetrators?”

“I can, and I just did.”

“And I still find it hard to believe.”

“Too bad. You’ve got my answer.”

“This is a small town, the kind of a place where everybody knows everybody else—”

“It
is
a small town. We
do
know each other. And we stick together.” She crossed her forefinger with her middle finger and held them up scant centimeters from his face. “Like that.”

“All the time?”

“When it comes to outsiders like you, and that FUNAI woman, yes.”

“What do you have against the FUNAI woman?”

She threw up her hands and expelled another one of those pungent breaths of hers. “I’ve said all I’m going to say.”

And it was. He couldn’t get another word out of her.

B
ACK WHEN
Silva was a two-pack-a-day man, cigarette smoke never bothered him, and he couldn’t understand why nonsmokers objected to it. For a year after he quit, people used to ask him if he minded when they smoked in his company. He’d always told them he didn’t.

These days, he did. He wanted, however, to put Renato Kassab at his ease, so he didn’t utter a word of protest when the lawyer ignited his second unfiltered
Caballero
in the space of fifteen minutes.

“It’s my understanding,” he said, rubbing his irritated eyes and hoping that Kassab would notice, “that Jade was here, talking to you, when they broke into Amati’s cell.”

“Indeed she was,” Kassab said, ignoring or oblivious to the eye rubbing. “I heard a gunshot. Later, I discovered it was Delegado Borges, firing his shotgun into the air to dissuade them. Unfortunately, it did little good.”

“
No good at all
might be a better way to put it.”

“Quite right, Chief Inspector. I stand corrected.”

“Before you spoke to Jade, you went outside and talked to the people who’d followed her down the street. Is that correct?”

“It is.”

“And you managed to convince them to disperse.”

“I did.”

“What did you say to them?”

“I don’t recall.”

“I see.”

What Silva saw was that Kassab was lying, but there wasn’t a chance in hell he’d admit it. He let it drop. “There seems to be a consensus that the Indian killed Omar Torres,” he said.

“Do you doubt it?”

“I do.”

“Why?”

“We have forensic evidence to the contrary.”

“Do you mind sharing it?”

“It would be a bit premature at the moment. As a lawyer, I’m sure you understand.”

“Perfectly. But it’s a revelation. We’ve all been operating under the assumption that the Indian was guilty.”

If Silva had been interrogating a criminal, he would have pounced upon the words ‘all’ and ‘operating,’ both indicators, in his opinion, of collusion. Instead he said, “What did Jade do when she heard the shot?”

“Took off as if the devil was after her.”

“Did you follow her?”

“No.”

“Were you close to the murdered man?”

“Torres? I knew him. We weren’t close. I thought he was a brute, a womanizer, and a braggart. I won’t miss him.”

“A brute, a womanizer, and a braggart—and yet the whole town stepped up to avenge him?”

Kassab picked a fragment of tobacco off his tongue with the tips of his thumb and forefinger. “They were acting out of a conditioned response as much as anything else. This is a frontier community. The people of Azevedo have been defending themselves against Indians ever since the town was built.”

“So there have been cases, in the past, where the Indians have proven themselves to be a threat?”

“Look at any history book.”

“I’m not talking, Senhor Kassab, about incidents out of history books. I’m talking about instances here in Azevedo.”

“Well … no. Not that I recall.”

“But it is true, is it not, that certain townsfolk have had their eye on the Indian’s land? They’d like to have the reservation declassified and sold off?”

“Yes. There’s a certain … conflict of interest between the Indians and the townsfolk. I admit that.”

“And where do you stand on that issue?”

“I’m a citizen of this town, Chief Inspector. I make my living here. These people are my friends and my neighbors, my colleagues and my clients. You could hardly expect me to take a position against them. But I don’t want you thinking, even for a moment, that I’m a racist or a bigot. I don’t believe, as some do, that Indians are dirty or diseased.” He waved his forefinger. “That said, it’s undeniable that they stand in the way of progress. Look at a map, Chief Inspector. Look at a map.”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow you.”

Kassab ground out his cigarette into an overflowing ashtray, swiveled his chair around and opened the drawer of a credenza. He took out a topographical map protected by a transparent plastic envelope and put it on the table.

“This is the reservation,” he said, stabbing a finger at an area hatched in red. “This here”—he ran the same finger along an irregular black line—“is the Jagunami River. It’s the border. Private land on this side, and the reservation on the other.”

“Except for here,” Silva said, putting his own forefinger on the map. “Why is that?”

“Historical precedent,” the lawyer said. “That used to be the founder’s land, and he built a bridge. Out of
consideration for what he’d done in colonizing the region, the government let him keep it, that part of the land
and
the bridge. These days, it all belongs to the mayor. His father doubled the size of his
fazenda
by buying this whole area here”—Kassab circumscribed it with his forefinger—“from Azevedo’s heirs.”

Silva continued to study the map. “Cunha’s piece looks rather small in camparison to the others.”

“Cunha is more of a businessman than he is a
fazendeiro
. He owns the pharmacy, the supermarket, and a few other establishments.”

“Does the reservation border on any land
not
owned by a citizen of Azevedo? Any public land?”

“Only on the far side.”

“Who are the others with property adjoining the reservation?”

“Roberto Lisboa, José Frade, and Cesar Bonetti.” Kassab pointed out the properties, one by one. “And this one belonged to Omar Torres.”

Silva leaned forward for a closer look. “So, on the side of the town, the sole access to the reservation is through the property of the men you’ve just mentioned.”

“At the moment, yes. If, however, a road were to be cut around this way—” Kassab traced a great circle around Lisboa’s
fazenda
, the one situated farthest from the town.

“But that road doesn’t exist, does it?” Silva leaned back in his chair.

“No,” Kassab said.

“Nor would there be any reason to cut it if the declassification were to occur sometime soon.”

“True. And if you’re implying our great landowners would benefit from a declassification of the reservation—”

“I am.”

“—then you’d be right. But indirectly, it would benefit almost everyone else in this town as well.”

“A rising tide floats all ships, eh?”

“I couldn’t have put it better myself.”

S
ILVA LOOKED UP WHEN
he heard an aircraft heading toward the airport. It prompted him to return to the Grand, where Osvaldo greeted them with a thumbs-up. He looked much improved from their conversation earlier in the day.

“I heard it, too,” he said. “I expect it’s the people you were waiting for.”

“I hope so. Seen my colleague?”

“He’s in the bar, came in about fifteen minutes ago. He got stonewalled. He isn’t happy.”

“Neither am I,” Silva said.

“If it helps, I can give you a list of people I saw at the lynching.”

“It won’t. They’ll all give me a list of people who’ll swear they were somewhere else. We all set up for tomorrow?”

“I got the jeeps, and I recruited six guys to dig. They’ve got their own tools and their own truck.”

“Truck?”

“With four-wheel drive. You’re going to need it to bring the bodies back.”

“So we are. Good thinking.”

“They’ll be here at eight.”

S
ILVA GAVE
the new arrivals half an hour to freshen up. Then he briefed them and handed out assignments. First, he addressed Gilda Caropreso, their medical examiner and Hector’s fiancée. “Gilda?”

“Senhor?”

“Go examine the bodies. Pay particular attention to the wounds in the
fazendeiro
’s neck. We’ll talk about them later.”

“I’ll go get my kit. Where are they?”