The Ways of Evil Men (14 page)

T
WO HOURS
of potholes, ruts, heat, and flies took them to the end of the road. The space, once sufficient to turn a
truck, had been reclaimed by the jungle, so the diggers set to work with axes and machetes to clear away the undergrowth. It took over an hour.

When it was done, and the vehicles had been positioned for the return to Azevedo, Gilda gathered the members of the expedition around her. “You’re all aware,” she said, “that we might be dealing with a mass poisoning. And if it
was
poison that killed the Awana, that same poison could kill us, so we have to approach the village with extreme caution.”

When she said ‘kill us,’ the diggers started looking at each other. She had the distinct impression they hadn’t considered what they were getting themselves into.

“To that end,” she continued, “I’d like to say a few words about poisons in general.” She had their full attention now. They were hanging on her every word. “The most dangerous are the so-called nerve agents developed by the Germans in the years just prior to the Second World War. Sarin is one you might have heard of. Sarin is absorbed through the skin. Think of it as insecticide for humans. It’s estimated to be five hundred times more toxic than cyanide. If you start to get a runny nose, feel any tightness in your chest, have trouble breathing, or experience nausea, come to me immediately.”

She held up a syringe with a plastic cap over the needle. “This is atropine. It’s an antidote, but it has to be administered quickly. And by quickly, I mean
very
quickly—no more than one minute after sensing the symptoms.”

“Jesus,” one of the diggers said.

“Now the good news: I doubt very much that we’re dealing with a nerve agent. If we were, it almost certainly would have killed Amati, his son, Raoni, and Jade, all of whom were in the village after the disaster.”

Another digger, a wiry little man with weathered skin and
a wart next to his right nostril, held up a hand. “So what do you figure it was?”

“I have no idea. I’m no expert. If I had to guess, I’d say it was something they ingested, something without a disagreeable taste or smell. That rules out a lot of options. Strychnine, for example, is very bitter, so it’s unlikely to be that. And it would have been fast-acting, because no one had time to take to their beds. Heavy metals, like arsenic, act too slowly to drop people in their tracks, so those, too, we can rule out.”

“How about some kind of gas?” Jade said.

“Unlikely,” Gilda said. “Gas is tricky to control. It disperses. It can’t move upwind. If they’d used gas, there would have been survivors.”

“But we shouldn’t rule it out? Is that what you’re saying?”

“It would be premature to rule anything out, and that brings me to my next point. Gases leave residues; contact poisons can kill for weeks. Don’t touch anything in that village with ungloved hands.”

She put the syringe into the canvas bag slung across her shoulder, fished out a box of surgical gloves, and held them up for all to see.

“I have plenty. Put on a pair before you enter the village. If one rips, come to me and get a replacement.” She put the box back in the bag. “I guess that’s all. Any questions?”

Jade and the cops shook their heads. The diggers drew apart from the group and started talking to each other in low voices. The others waited. After a while, the group of men seemed to come to some kind of conclusion. The guy with the wart stepped forward as their spokesman.

“Our price just went up,” he said.

M
AURA WAS FURIOUS
. F
OR
all of about a minute after the caravan left, she considered packing her bag and going home. But then, in her mind’s eye, she saw herself marching into the office of Mauricio Carvalho, her editor, and telling him she’d come back without a story. He’d never let her forget it. And he’d go ballistic when she turned in her expenses with nothing to show for them.

No. That option was off the table. She had to stay, and she had to come up with a story. But how could she do that if the damned Federal Police wouldn’t collaborate? Racking her brain for a solution, she went to the bar, sat down, and ordered a
café com leche
.

“First time?” Amanda asked, putting a little glass on the bar in front of her.

“Huh?” Maura said, still distracted.

“First trip to Pará, I mean.”

“Second,” Maura said, focusing on the twin spouts pouring white milk and black coffee.

“And that first time, was it business or pleasure?”

There were no other customers in the bar. Amanda was fishing for a chat. Maura, having nothing better to do, elected to indulge her.

“Business,” she said. “Want to join me?”

“Glad to. It’s not like I’m overwhelmed at the moment.” She fetched another glass.

“My first time,” Maura said, as Amanda settled into a high
stool she kept behind the bar, “was when I did a story about Serra Pelada.”

Amanda studied her with a critical eye. “You don’t look a day over twenty-five.”

“Thirty-one.”

“No kidding?”

“No kidding.”

“Like that young cop. He doesn’t look his age either.”

“If he doesn’t look it, how do you know it?”

“I heard one of the other cops referring to him as Babyface.”

“So you asked?”

“Yep. Apparently, they never call him that to his face. He hates it. Anyway, I’m thinking the two of you would be a good match. You could grow old, looking young, together.”

Maura smiled. She worried, sometimes, about being in her third decade and still unmarried. A comment like Amanda’s was balm for her soul. But work came first, and one never knew when chatting with one of the locals might lead to something. So she pursued it.

“The story wasn’t about the mine in its heyday,” she said. “It was about what happened to the town after the gold ran out.”

It had all been Mauricio’s idea, but Maura had won the prize—a “first in category” for ecological reporting. She’d always be grateful to him for that. She proudly displayed the little gold-plated statuette on her bookcase at home (fearing that someone would steal it if she left it in her office) and regarded the distinction as her greatest professional achievement.

Serra Pelada, Bald Mountain, had once been the site of the world’s largest open-pit gold mine. From 1979, when a child swimming in a local river had found a six-gram nugget, until 1986, when it closed, an estimated three hundred
and sixty tons of the yellow metal had been wrested from the ground—all but forty-four and a half tons of it “extra officially.”

Brazilian law requires prospected gold to be sold to the government at slightly under market price and the income to be taxed. Most small-scale operators, anxious to avoid that tax, declare as little of it as possible. Back then, Serra Pelada was composed
exclusively
of small-scale operators, almost one hundred thousand of them, all working tiny claims of just two by three meters, all moving the earth by hand.

The gold rush spawned a town of “stores and whores” where water sold for the equivalent of nine American dollars a liter, thousands of teenage girls sold their bodies for flakes of gold, and as many as eighty murders occurred every month.

The activities in the great pit had been immortalized in the brilliant black and white photographs of Sebastião Salgado, images that had become famous all over the world, but most of what he’d seen and shot was long gone by the time Maura arrived. She found a sleepy little town, where a few prospectors hung on in the hope of a strike. The huge hole, where once the mine had been, had become a lake.

“… without a fish or any other living creature in it,” she summed it up to Amanda, “and the water poisonous as hell.”

“Why poisonous?”

“Mercury. The miners used tons of the stuff.”

“For what?”

“Purification. If you bring mercury into contact with gold, the mercury draws it in.”

“Okay, it draws it in. But then how do you get rid of it?”

“You boil it off.”

“Boil it? Like water?”

“Like water, but with one critical difference: it’s toxic. It gets into the atmosphere. When it condenses, which it soon
does, it gets into the ground and, worst of all, into the rivers. The rivers carry it to the sea. And in the rivers, and in the sea, it gets into the fish. And people eat those fish.”

“It should be illegal.”

“It already is, and none of the big operators do it anymore, but almost all the small ones do. Some people think a gold strike is a blessing, but I’m here to tell you, Amanda, you can consider yourself lucky there’s no gold around here.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” Amanda said, swirling the remainder of her beverage.

“No?”

“No.” She drained her glass, put it on the bar and leaned closer. “Let me tell you a little story.”

S
ILVA FOUND
their hike through the rainforest more difficult than he’d expected. There was no real path. The GPS guided them in a straight line, but they often had to detour around towering trees or thick clumps of undergrowth. The heat was oppressive, and the humidity worse, but it was the flies, most of all, that made the journey sheer hell.

The repellent Jade had given them proved to be effective for only as long as it took to sweat it away, and while they were smearing on more, flies settled onto every bit of exposed skin. A slap from a single hand could kill as many as half a dozen at once, but it didn’t dissuade the others. They kept coming.

What with the slapping, the cursing, and the birds and monkeys expressing their resentment at being disturbed, the expedition’s progress had been anything but silent. They were not surprised, therefore, to find Amati’s son waiting for them, bow and arrow at the ready.

He stood in a clearing surrounded by huts, each of a
different size, but similar in construction, rooftops slanting up to a sharp apex, vertical walls fashioned of reeds dried by the sun to a uniform gray.

Raoni scanned each new face as it appeared from the forest. That his father’s wasn’t among them visibly disappointed him, but when Jade held up a hand and waved, he lowered his weapon.

“Don’t dig,” Jade instructed the others. “Don’t do anything at all until I tell you to.”

She walked to one of the huts, dropped to her hands and knees to crawl through the low opening, and beckoned to the boy to follow. After a moment’s hesitation, he did.

“She’s going to need me,” Osvaldo said. And he entered as well. The others kept silent and waited.

After about a minute they heard a sound reminiscent of the cry of some small, wounded animal, not like the little boy’s voice at all. But it was.

About five minutes later, Jade left the hut with tears running down her face. “This way,” she said and led them to the graves.

“T
HERE WAS THIS OLD
coot who used to prospect around here,” Amanda Neto said. “Welinton was his name, Welinton Mendes. He kept finding little pieces of gold, enough to keep him in food and cachaça, but no more than that. Folks laughed when he’d go on and on about finding the mother lode, and go on and on he did, every single time he got drunk, which when he could afford it, was every Saturday night. After a while, some of the men folk started buying him drinks just so they could tell him he was crazy and watch him get riled up.”

“Sounds like there isn’t a hell of a lot to do around here on Saturday nights,” Maura said.

“You’ve got that right. But most of them were drunk themselves, and drunks find just about anything interesting. Anyway, one night he came in and slapped down a hundred-and-two-gram nugget right here.” She stabbed a finger at the bar in front of her.

“How did you know it was a hundred and two grams?”

“He told Osvaldo that if he’d buy it for cash, he’d order drinks for the house. Osvaldo jumped at the deal and sent me to fetch my scale out of the kitchen. I argued with him, said he didn’t know a damned thing about gold, couldn’t possibly have any idea about how pure it was or even if it was gold at all, but he kept telling me to let him handle it. So I did. In the end, he wound up offering old Welinton three thousand Reais for it. At the time I thought it was a foolish thing to do,
but Osvaldo had been drinking himself. There was no talking him out of it.”

“And was it? Foolish?”

“On the contrary. The nugget was worth three times that. Welinton knew it, too, but he laughed and said he didn’t give a damn. He wanted to celebrate, and there was a lot more gold where that came from.”

“Were there many people here that night?”

“The place was packed. And when word got around that the drinks were on Welinton, it turned into the best night we ever had. We went through our whole stock of imported whiskey and our only bottle of French cognac. Every time somebody would order cachaça or a beer, Welinton would tell them to order something better. Our Italian wine, our French champagne, we sold it all, the best of the best, and every drop of it on Welinton’s tab. Nobody who was here is ever going to forget it. They all got good and drunk, including my husband.”

“And including Welinton?”

“Especially Welinton. Then, around ten, he said he was going to share some of his good fortune with Crazy Ana, and he stumbled out the door.”

“Who’s Crazy Ana?”

“A whore, and she must be a good one.”

Amanda smiled, but Maura, curious, didn’t return it. “Why do you say that?”

Amanda waved a hand, palm upward, as if the answer was obvious. “I say it because she manages to make a living at it, which couldn’t be easy in a town where so many women are giving it away for free.”

Maura nodded. “Ah,” she said. “I see.”

“But you never heard me say that.”

“No. Of course I didn’t. So then?”

“So then, the next morning, people started looking for Welinton high and low. All of a sudden he’d become a popular guy, like someone who’d struck it big in the lottery. They’d heard him say there was more gold where that nugget had come from, and they were all hoping he’d repeat his performance of the night before. Not that he could have, mind you. It took us five days to get more of the good stuff shipped to us from Belem. In the interim, all we had to serve was beer and cachaça. As for Welinton, the consensus was that he’d gone back to his strike to fetch more gold.”