The Ways of Evil Men (6 page)

“And besides,” Bonetti said, “Jade lives all by herself. Taking some savage under her roof is something I don’t think that even an Indian lover like her would be crazy enough to do. He’d have his dick in her five minutes after the door was closed.”

“See your two thousand and raise you another two thousand,” Torres said.

Everybody looked at him, then at Lisboa.

“Too rich for my blood,” the priest said. “I’m out.”

So was everyone else, except for Lisboa. “Call, you
filho da puta
,” he said and started counting out the chips.

Pandolfo looked at him in alarm. “Boss, maybe you shouldn’t—”

“Shut up, Toni, I know what I’m doing.” Lisboa threw his chips on the pile.

“I doubt it,” Torres said.

Pandolfo sprung to his feet.

Lisboa, seated next to him, grabbed his belt and pulled him back into his chair. “Don’t you dare fuck this up.” He tossed a full house on the table. “Read those, you prick!” He reached forward to rake in the pot.

“Not so fast,” Torres said and showed four queens.

Lisboa gaped. Pandolfo fumed. Torres laughed and pulled the pile of chips toward him.

The mayor cleared his throat and went on as if nothing had happened. “I think you’re right, Cesar,” he said. “Jade is unlikely to have given the savage shelter in her own home.”

“Here, maybe?” Frade said.

“Here?” Bonetti echoed. “In a room some white man may wind up sleeping in? Using the same goddamned toilet? You think Osvaldo would do that?”

“His mother was an Indian, wasn’t she?” Frade said. “Next time he comes back here, I’m going to ask him.”

“And you think he’d tell you?” Torres said. “Not likely.”

“You got that right,” Bonetti said. “If he’s got him squirreled away somewhere, there’s no way he’d come clean about it.”

“Rita would,” Torres said. “She’d know, and she’d tell. She doesn’t like Indians any more than the rest of us do.”

“Who’s Rita?” Pandolfo asked.

“One of the chambermaids. I fucked her once.”

“So has half the town,” Toledo said, shuffling the cards. “Let’s move along, shall we? There’s a more important issue to discuss than what happened to the damned Indian.”

“Hold it until I get back,” José Frade said. “I gotta piss.” He got up and left the room.

Toledo offered the cards to Pandolfo to cut and turned to the priest. “Tell me, Father—” He stopped talking when the door opened. It was Osvaldo, coming in to serve the round.

“Anything else?” he asked when he was done.

“Not for me,” the mayor said.

The others shook their heads. Osvaldo left. Frade returned and resumed his seat. A little smile of satisfaction was crinkling his lips. While he was away something had happened to please him, but he said not a word about it.

“Same game again,” Toledo said. “Ante up.” He turned
back to the priest and continued where he’d left off. “How old did she say the boy was?”

“Eight or thereabouts.”

“Okay, gentleman, here’s what I’m thinking. Even those bleeding hearts in Brasilia are going to have to agree that a piece of land the size of that reservation is too big for one savage and his eight-year-old kid. At the moment, the whole tribe consists of only those two. And without women, they can’t reproduce, right?”

“Wrong,” Castori said. “The Indians steal their wives from other tribes. It’s their way, nature’s solution to inbreeding. As soon as that child is into puberty, he’ll be sniffing around the females of the other tribes.”

“There
are
no other tribes.” Frade said.

“So he finds some slut from around here,” Bonetti said, “some old whore who’s ready to give up the business. Or he goes to another reservation and brings one back. Or he lives there for the next forty years with his old man and maybe another twenty all by himself.”

“All possibilities,” Toledo said. “Unless—”

“How about we play cards?” Lisboa said.

Toledo ignored him. “Unless,” he repeated, “something bad happened to both.”

“Shhh!” Frade said. “Keep it down.”

Toledo dropped his voice a notch. When he did, even Lisboa leaned forward to listen. “Mind you, I’m not saying that one of us should take the initiative to do it.”

“Oh, no, not you,” Bonetti said. “We all know how fond of Indians you are.”

“But you have a point,” Torres said.

“I certainly do,” Toledo said. “If those two were to … disappear, we could petition the federal government to give up the whole of that reservation for development.”

“Why can’t we petition for a piece of it right now?” Lisboa said. “It’s already far too big for just two savages.”

“Bravo!” Torres said. “I want a piece.”

“All of us do,” Frade said. “All except for the padre here.”

Castori sniffed. “I see no reason why the Church should be excluded.”

Pandolfo opened his mouth to put in a bid of his own, but Toledo forestalled him.

“You’ve got a point, Roberto. A piece is better than none. So we might as well get started. We’ll find some equitable way to split it up, but first we have to pry it loose. Tomorrow morning, first thing, I’ll have a chat with Renato Kassab; get him to check for precedents.”

“That shyster’s going to want a piece of it, too,” Frade grumbled.

“What if he does?” Toledo said. “Let’s not be greedy. There’s plenty for all. But I’ve just come into possession of some additional information, and it presents a complication.”

“What kind of information?”

“Just before I came over here tonight, I got a call from our friend, Delegado Borges.”

“You got a call? I thought the goddamned tower was down again.”

“It’s back up,” Bonetti said. “Been up for hours. What did he want?”

“Our keeper of the peace got a call from a fishing buddy of his, a fellow by the name of Estevan Barbosa. Ring any bells?”

“He’s a federal cop,” Frade said. “Lives in Belem, comes here every now and then to fish. So?”

“It seems our friend Jade called him.”

Bonetti narrowed his eyes. “Called him? About the fucking Indians?”

Toledo nodded. “Exactly.”

“Bitch! What did he tell her?”

“That he was too busy to look into it.”

Bonetti smiled. “Good,” he said.

“That part of it, yes, but what happened next wasn’t good at all. He doesn’t know how she did it, but she managed to get his boss to send some guy from Brasilia, a Chief Inspector by the name of Silva. He arrives in Belem tomorrow morning.”

Bonetti flushed an angry red. “Somebody should teach that woman to keep her mouth shut,” he said.

“Who?” Torres asked. “You?”

“Maybe me,” Pandolfo said, “if you guys want to chip in and make it worth my while. A piece of that Indian land, maybe?”

They all ignored him.

“According to what Barbosa told Borges,” Toledo said, “this Silva is persistent. If he gets his teeth into something, he never lets go.”

“Bad news,” Frade said.

“It gets worse. Apparently, he can’t be bought, and—”

“That, I gotta see,” Torres said. “A cop who can’t be bought.”

“
And
he’s bringing his own medical examiner.”

“What?” Bonetti said. “Why? Pinto not good enough for him?”

“Apparently not.”

“I need another drink,” Lisboa said. He reached over to push the button.

“Guilty conscience?” Torres asked.

“You shut up, Torres. You just shut up. How do we know it wasn’t you? You’ve got as much to gain as the rest of us.”

“You’d love to pin this one on me, wouldn’t you Lisboa? With all the notes of yours I’m holding. Take me out of the
picture, and you might just be able to keep that
fazenda
of yours.”

The door opened. Osvaldo came in with a tray. “How’s that for quick service?” he said. “This time I had it ready.” No one responded. His smile faded as his gaze scanned the table. “What’s with you guys?” he asked. “Somebody just fart?”

“Put down the tray and give us some privacy,” Toledo snapped.

Osvaldo did as he was bidden.

“So what are we going to do about this Silva guy?” Bonetti asked when he was gone.

“
I’m
not going to do anything,” Torres said, reaching for his drink. “
I’ve
got nothing to hide.”

“Nor I,” the priest said.

“Who does or doesn’t isn’t the point,” Toledo said. “Finger-pointing is counterproductive. Those people are dead, and nothing is going to bring them back. Whoever killed them is immaterial.”

“Immaterial?” Castori said uncertainly.

“Yes, Father. Entirely immaterial. But no one at this table can deny that their deaths bring us benefits. So here’s my suggestion: from here on in, we present a united front, stick together.”

“In other words, stonewall the fucking cop,” Frade said.

Toledo smiled. “José, I couldn’t have put it better myself.”

T
HE GAME
went on for another hour. Omar Torres, richer by almost nine thousand Reais, most of it out of Lisboa’s pocket, and about as drunk as he ever got, was the last to leave the bar. He managed to negotiate his way without incident from the table to the door, but on the porch he tripped, and would have gone down if he hadn’t struck his head on a post supporting the roof. The pain took a while to impact upon his
fuddled brain. He grasped the wooden pillar with both hands and stood there, blinking, waiting for it to pass. When it did, he realized that he had an overwhelming necessity to urinate.

He would have unzipped then and there had not two women emerged from the hotel, taken up a position two meters behind him, and started talking about the eight o’clock
telenovela
. He could feel their eyes boring into his back.
The alley
, he thought.

He stumbled down the three steps into the street, turned left, and made for the passageway between the hotel and Cunha’s pharmacy.

It was a moonless night with a cover of haze concealing the stars. A street lamp some twenty meters away shed only dim illumination on the hotel’s façade. The passageway was completely dark.

With his arm extended, and trailing his left hand along the wall as a guide, he rounded the corner and kept walking until he’d almost reached the back of the building. There he stopped, opened his pants, and in blessed relief, began to empty his bladder.

He was still at it when he heard a footstep behind him.

“T
HAT SAVAGE YOU BROUGHT
into town?”

It was more of an accusation than a question.

Jade, who had heard just about enough from Alexandra on the subject of Indians, buried her nose in her coffee cup and strove to keep her voice level. “Yes?”

“He killed a man last night.”

Jade put her cup aside and looked at her housekeeper in astonishment. “
What?
”

“Killed him in cold blood.”

“Who? Who did he kill?”

“Omar Torres. Your bloodthirsty Indian slaughtered him with a machete. And Senhor Torres was such a nice man.”

Nice?
Jade thought.
Omar Torres was anything but nice. Omar Torres was a pig
.

But she didn’t say it.

Instead she said, “Why do they think Amati did it?”

“Is that the savage’s name? Amati?”

“It’s his name, yes. Stop calling him a savage. I asked you a question: why do they think he did it?”

“They don’t
think
,” Alexandra said with satisfaction. “They
know
. The two of them were in that alley between the pharmacy and the Grand. Senhor Torres was dead, and the Indian was next to him, covered in blood and holding a machete.”

“Next to Torres’s body? How—”

“He was dead drunk. He slaughtered poor Senhor Torres, and then he passed out.”

“Who found them?”

“Tomas Piva.”

“Who’s Tomas Piva?”

“That
mulato
with a limp, the one without his two front teeth.” Alexandra tapped her incisors with a forefinger by way of illustration. Jade remembered him now. Piva collected garbage for the town.

“He told you himself?”

The housekeeper shook her head. “His mother told me.”

“When did you speak to her?”

“This morning in the
padaria
, when I went to buy bread.”

“Where’s Amati now? Did she say?”

“She did. He’s right where he deserves to be. In jail.”

J
ADE CALLED
and got Borges on the phone. The delegado was offhand about both the event and the arrest: “Omar Torres was playing with fire for a long time. Truth to tell, I would have taken a bet that someone would have killed him some day. I just never expected it to be an Indian.”

“And you’re sure it was?”

“Oh, I’m sure all right. Your pal was lying right next to him with the machete that killed Omar still in his hand. And he was so goddamned drunk that he hasn’t woken up from that time to this. Not when we cuffed him, not even when we carried him over here and tossed him into a cold shower.”

“He didn’t do it. He
couldn’t
have done it.”

“I’m sorry to have to tell you he did.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“No? Then come over here and have a look at him yourself. He’s still out. And he smells like a distillery.”

“That Indian doesn’t drink, Delegado.”

“Looks like last night he made an exception.”

“I don’t believe it. He doesn’t drink, I tell you, and he despises people who do. There is no way he would have
consumed cachaça of his own volition. Someone must have forced it down his throat.”

“Oh come on, Senhorita Calmon. I mean, how likely is that?”

“Where is he now?”

“In a cell about ten meters from where I’m sitting. We dragged him out of the shower, put him there, and called Doctor Pinto to come over and have a look. He just left.”

“What did he say?”

“To let him sleep it off.”

“So you still haven’t heard his side of the story?”

She heard him chuckle. “His side of the story? The savage gets found in an alley, holding a
facão
, covered in blood, next to a dead man, whose throat had been slashed, and you think there’s a
his side of the story?
”