The Ways of Evil Men (15 page)

“How long did it take before he showed up?”

“He never did.”

“Disappeared?”

“Without a trace. Nobody has seen him from that day down to this.”

“Did he make it as far as Crazy Ana’s?”

“He did. People asked her, of course. She swore he left around midnight.”

“Is she still in town?”

Amanda nodded. “Still doing business at the same address. You think there’s a story in it for you?”

“Maybe. It wouldn’t hurt to talk to her, right?”

“Right.” Amanda looked at her watch. “And this would be a good time.”

“Why?”

“She’ll be alone. The women in this town won’t associate with her, and the men folk don’t like to be seen paying her a visit. They go after dark.”

C
RAZY
A
NA
was a surprise.

She turned out to be a matronly type, conservatively dressed and running to fat.

When she opened her door and found Maura standing
there, her smile of welcome faded. “I don’t do women,” she said, her tone far from friendly.

“I’m not here for that.” Maura handed her a card. “I’m a journalist. I want to talk to you about Welinton Mendes.”

Ana took the card and looked at it. “I charge for my time, Senhora Mandel.”

“It’s Senhorita. How much?”

“A hundred Reais. In advance. It will buy you an hour.”

“I don’t think I’ll need an hour.”

“It’s still a hundred Reais.”

“All right. A hundred Reais.”

Ana stepped aside. Her front door opened into a tiny parlor that smelled of floor wax and, faintly, of lavender. It was cozy and immaculately clean.

“Tea or coffee?” she asked, as any other hostess might have done.

“Coffee.”

“I’ve got some fresh. Make yourself comfortable. I’ll be right back.”

While she was gone, Maura put two fifty Real notes on the coffee table. When she returned, Ana put the tray on top. A rather elegant way, Maura thought, to get them out of sight.

“Why crazy?” she said. “You don’t strike me as crazy in the least.”

Ana sat on the couch next to Maura and started to pour the coffee. “Sugar?” she asked.

“Two,” Maura said. “And no milk.”

Ana handed her a cup before she answered. “Because I
was
crazy. Something bad happened to me.”

“But now you’re better?”

Ana sipped at her coffee and put down the cup. “Not the way I was before,” she said. “But better.”

“Want to tell me about it?”

She shrugged. “The whole damned town knows the story. So why not you? My husband worked for Paulo Cunha—”

“Cunha? Didn’t I see that name on the supermarket?”

“You did. You can also see it on the pharmacy, the hardware store, and a lumber business. He also owns a lot of buildings. Not this one. I wouldn’t live in any building owned by Paulo Cunha. Back then we did, though. My husband managed his ranch, and we lived in a nice little house on the property. Cunha charged us rent, and we had to buy everything we needed in his store, so we never managed to put any money aside.”

“So he had your services for free?”

“He did.”

“That’s terrible.”

“No,
querida
, it wasn’t terrible at all. Terrible is what came next.” She took a sip of her coffee and stared at the wall, remembering. “It was the day before Christmas. Everybody was celebrating. Cunha told my husband to take the truck, go into town and pick up a case of whiskey. I asked if I could go along. Cunha agreed. We decided to take the kids. At Christmas, some people put up colored lights, and we thought the girls would like to see them. And then …”

She fell silent. It went on for so long, Maura felt she had to prompt her.

“And then?”

“About halfway there, on a deserted part of the road, another car came around a curve and headed straight at us. He was on our side, and he was speeding. My husband swerved into a tree. He died in the crash. So did my two daughters. They were four and five.”

“No!”

Ana nodded.

“And the other driver?”

“Kept going.”

“Was he drunk?”

“He was the mayor’s brother-in-law, driving one of the mayor’s cars. He’d come up from Curitiba for a Christmas visit. He swore, on oath, he hadn’t been drunk at the time of the accident, but that the steering and the brakes had given out on him at the same time. He couldn’t get out of the way, and he couldn’t stop, so he had to keep going.”

“Both sets of brakes? The foot brake
and
the hand brake?”

“Pretty thin, isn’t it? He went on to say that, when the car lost forward momentum, he was some distance away and the road was deserted. It took him some time to find a telephone. When he did, he called both an ambulance and the mayor. The mayor backed him up. Said he was stone-cold sober, but that they stopped off at his place before they went back to the scene of the accident.”

“Where he insisted that his brother-in-law have a few drinks to fortify himself?”

“ ‘Calm him down’ was the term he used.”

“How about the car?” Maura asked in disbelief. She was still trying to absorb the extent of the tragedy. “Wasn’t it ever examined?”

“Oh, it was,” Ana said sadly. “But the mayor is the mayor, so the mechanic backed him up.”

“The bastard!” Indignation dripped from Maura’s voice, but the reaction she got surprised her. Ana laughed, actually laughed.

“You have no idea what it means to be poor in Pará, do you? Or what it means to be rich?”

“No. But I can tell you one thing: it isn’t only Pará.”

“Yes, it’s all over Brazil. I know.”

“Not only Brazil. All over the world. There was a young man once, a
wealthy
young man, in the United States. He
got drunk and caused an accident that resulted in the death of a young woman. But his brother had been the president, another brother their minister of justice, and he was a senator, so he wound up being sentenced to two months in jail, but the sentence was suspended, so he never spent a day behind bars. He kept getting re-elected, too, year after year, for the next forty years.”

“In the United States? That’s hard to believe.”

“It happened. People forget. What about the man who killed your husband and daughters? What became of him?”

“Nothing. No charges were ever made. He went home a week later. He still comes every year for Christmas, and I see him on the street, but he doesn’t recognize me. I … I look different now.”

“Look, I don’t mean to pry, but—”

“I know what you’re going to ask, and I’m about to tell you. My parents were dead. I have no brothers or sisters. My husband and his family never got along, and they’d dropped us out of their lives. I had no job and no money. Julio and our girls weren’t in their graves for a week when Cunha told me he needed our house for his new manager.”

“Cunha threw you out? Just like that?”

She laughed a bitter laugh. “No,
querida
, not
just like that
. There were no honest jobs for single women in this town, and I had no other place to stay, no money, no food. But I was pretty good-looking back then—”

“You’re pretty good-looking now.”

“It’s kind of you to say so, but I know I’m not. I was never a great beauty, and it’s only been eight years, but they’ve been hard years.”

“So you turned to … entertaining men?”

“Not right away. That came later. Back then, it was just a proposition from Cunha.”

“To sleep with him?”

“Not to
sleep
with him. Just to fuck him. He made it clear from the outset that he’d never be spending the night. He has a wife, and she’s a real bitch. She would have cut off his balls if she’d found out.”

“And in exchange for that—”

“I could stay in the house, and he’d feed me. And he did. For as long as it took him to get tired of me.”

“How long was that?”

“Three weeks.”

“
Three weeks
?”

She nodded. “I was lousy company. I cried a lot. He didn’t like that, said I’d goddamned well better stop, or I’d be history. But I couldn’t. So I
was
history.”

“And then?”

She shrugged. “I went from man to man until all the ones with money got tired of me, too. I went from wife, to mistress, to everybody’s whore in about six months. But by that time, I’d learned to hide my feelings and be a good-time girl, or act like one anyway. In reality, I was dead inside, and in some ways, I still am.”

Maura reached out and put a hand on her arm. She liked this woman, felt an urge to comfort her. “You seem fine to me. I mean, after all you went through …”

“I’ve been saving my money. It won’t be long before I can make a fresh start somewhere. Maybe I’ll even meet a decent man. Other whores have done it. Why not me?”

“Indeed,” Maura said. “Why not you?”

“And that’s my story. What do you want to know about Welinton?”

“Anything you can remember. What kind of a guy was he?”

“That’s a hard question.”

“Is it? I thought it was pretty simple.”

“Not really. Think about it. What kind of people are any of us? Take you, for example.”

“Me?”

“Sure. Some people think of you as interesting, others as boring. Your parents see you one way, the people you work with, another. You follow what I mean?”

“Yes, I suppose I do.”

Ana smiled, pleased to have gotten her point across. She paused a moment to let it sink in even further, then continued: “So when I talk to you about Welinton, I can only tell you about
my
Welinton. I’d be willing to bet no one else in this town saw him the way I did. Not even close. Most folks, up until the day he made his strike, thought he was crazy. As far as they were concerned, it was crazy to think there was any gold around here, and crazy for him to spend all his days searching for it. And then he found it. But did they stop thinking he was crazy? No. To them, he was still crazy, but he was crazy in a different way. They thought he’d have to be crazy to throw his wealth away like that, going into a bar and dropping a couple of thousand Reais buying drinks for a bunch of people he hardly knew. There wasn’t a single person in this town who could relate to that, although they accepted his charity readily enough.”

“And you, Ana? What did you think?”

“I thought he was a man with a dream, a dream that made him happy. Even though he was as poor as anything, and spent most of his days sleeping rough, he was convinced a big strike was in his future. It wasn’t a question of
if
; it was a question of
when
. He’d get up every morning thinking,
this may be it, this may be the day
. It wasn’t the gold he cared about so much as just
finding
the gold. That was what he was going to measure his success by, not by the wealth it was going to bring him.”

“It sounds as if you liked him.”

“I did. He was a better man than almost anyone in this town. And I don’t say that just because he was nice to me. He was nice to everybody. He had a mule and a dog, and he was nice to them, too. You know what he always said?”

“What?”

“That when he struck it rich, he was going to pay for all of my time, take me somewhere nice.”

“He proposed to you?”

“Not in so many words. He was talking about … well … buying my services. But he’d never married. He was a simple man, and that was the only way he knew how to relate to a woman, so that’s what it came down to: a proposal.”

“What do you remember of your last night together? What did you talk about?”

“Us. We talked about us. He wanted to take me to Portugal. Imagine that. Portugal.”

“Why Portugal?”

“He’d seen a book when he was a kid, a book with photos of castles and things. He could describe every photo, and he hadn’t seen that book for forty years, maybe fifty.”

“Did he talk about the whereabouts of the strike?”

“Now
that
,” she said, “is the first question anybody asks me about Welinton. But think about it,
querida
, if I knew where that gold was, would I still be here in this town turning tricks?”

“No, of course not. But that’s not what I meant.”

“Then what did you mean?”

“Did he happen to mention if it was on Indian land?”

“He was too cautious for that. Even with me. That night …” She hesitated.

“Yes?”

“Well, I could tell that he was just dying to tell me. But
as drunk as he was, he didn’t. And I didn’t push him. I knew that if he talked, he’d hate himself in the morning. And he was too nice for me to want him to feel that way. But you know, this is all water under the bridge. He must have carried the secret with him to the grave. Otherwise, someone would be exploiting it by now, don’t you think?”

“Maybe they are, and we just don’t know about it. Maybe they want to keep it secret. You remember what happened in Serra Pelada?”

“All those people flocking there? Everyone trying to get a piece of it?”

“Yes, and then the government coming in and regulating it all and trying to buy the gold officially. You can make a good deal more money if you mine it in secret. Let me ask you this: did Welinton ever tell you what he planned to do next?”

She blinked. “Next?”

“Yes. Did he talk about working the mine on his own?”

“Oh, I see what you mean. No. No, he didn’t. As a matter of fact …”

“What?”

“He said exactly the opposite.”

“Tell me.”

“It came just after that conversation I told you about. The one about Portugal. He was pretty lit up, so I decided to have a few drinks myself, and I wound up getting enthusiastic about the idea. I asked him when we could go, told him I wanted to leave right away. And he said he’d like to do that, too, but we couldn’t. That it was going to take a little time.”

“Did he say why?”

“He did. But, like I said, I was drinking. And I’m not technical anyway. It had something to do with needing some kind of special equipment.”

“What kind of equipment?”

“Equipment he didn’t have the money to buy.”

“A sluice?”

“Not a sluice. Something else. Something with gasoline.”

Maura racked her brain, trying to remember the technical details she’d learned when she was researching the Serra Pelada story. “A gasoline-powered dredge?”