It wasn’t. The cab showed up five minutes later. Arnaldo, the bulkiest of the four, took the seat in front. The others crowded into the back.
“Heard about the lynching?” were the first words the driver said after he’d greeted them.
“What lynching?” Silva asked.
“Where to?”
“The Grand Hotel. What lynching?”
“An Indian killed a white man. They stormed the jail, took him out, and strung him up.”
“No kidding?” the pilot said. He sounded interested.
“No kidding. It was one hell of a show.”
“Show?” Arnaldo grumbled. “Where do you get off, calling a lynching a show?”
The guy behind the wheel shot him a sour look. “You ever see one?”
“No.”
“Then the way I figure it, I’m the expert, not you. It was a show.”
“When?” Silva said.
The driver glanced in the rear view mirror. “Just a few hours ago,” he said. “You guys going to smoke, or should I turn on the air conditioning?”
“Turn on the air conditioning,” Silva said. “Where were the police?”
“The Delegado came out with a shotgun and waved it around a bit.”
“But?”
“Well, hell, everybody knew he’d never shoot anybody with it. He fired it in the air a couple of times. Then they took it away from him.”
“Anybody else try to stop it?” Arnaldo asked.
“The half-breed who owns the hotel came running up and tried to interfere. Ha! A lot of good that did him.”
“And then?”
“They hustled the Indian down the street to the square.”
Silva again: “Why the square?”
The driver was into it now, relishing the story he had to tell. He kept one hand on the wheel and started waving the other in the air.
“It’s the only place in town that’s got tall trees. I don’t think the poor bastard knew what they had in mind even then. What would a savage know about hanging? They want to kill somebody, they use a knife, or an arrow, or a blowgun, right? A rope? That’s white man’s justice.”
“Or injustice,” Maura said.
“What? What did you say, Senhora?”
“Never mind. Go on.”
“He was screaming and shouting, but nobody could understand what he was saying. Then Father Castori—”
“Who’s Father Castori?” Maura asked.
“The parish priest. He gave him last rites, but was the savage grateful? Like hell he was! He just stood there, staring him down. Then he said something, and Castori got all red in the face. He shouted at the Indian, and the Indian shouted back, but it was all in Indian lingo, so nobody but the priest, the Indian, and the half-breed understood it. Then Castori switched back to English and started haranguing the crowd.”
“To try to get them to stop?”
“No way. He talked about ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,’ that kind of shit, but it was all the Word of God, and you don’t dick around with the Word of God, so folks quieted down and heard him out. It took him about five minutes to run out of steam. Meanwhile, they got the rope around the Indian’s neck, and threw the other end over a limb.”
Silva was unable to keep the disgust out of his voice. “Did you recognize any of the people who were doing this?”
The driver narrowed his eyes in suspicion. “What are you? A cop or something?”
“Yes, I’m a cop,” Silva said. “And so is he.” He pointed to Arnaldo. “Answer the question.”
The driver, suddenly cautious, backpedaled. “I didn’t recognize anybody. They were wearing masks.”
“Everybody?”
“Not everybody. Just the ones who strung him up.”
“And we’re supposed to believe that?” Arnaldo said.
“Believe whatever you want. I got to live in this town. You guys don’t.”
Maura was busily scribbling notes. “I’m not a cop,” she said. “I’m a reporter. What’s your name?”
“Chico Lyra,” the driver said sullenly.
“Please tell us the rest of the story, Senhor Lyra.”
“Ask someone else.”
“She’s asking you,” Arnaldo said, digging the driver in the ribs.
He was at least a head taller than the man behind the wheel. The driver’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down before he went on. “They were just fixing to hoist him up when this FUNAI lady comes running down the street and tells them to leave the savage alone, that he didn’t do it, that he was innocent. Yeah, right. Damned Indian is found dead drunk in an alley, covered in blood, with a machete in his hand and the man he murdered right next to him, and he’s innocent?” He shook his head. “Damned FUNAI people. I swear—”
“This FUNAI woman,” Silva said. “Was it Jade Calmon?”
“She’s the only one we’ve got. Thank God.”
“Did they hurt her?”
“Of course not. They just held her arms so she couldn’t interfere. You think we’re savages?”
“No,” Silva said drily. “I’m sure you’re all perfectly civilized.”
“Damn right.”
“Tell us the rest.”
“What rest? There isn’t any rest. They hung him, that’s all. He went up like an elevator. There must have been a dozen people dragging on that rope. So there he is, kicking his feet, his tongue out, his face turning blue, pissing into his white man’s shorts, and the FUNAI woman has her eyes closed, and is turning her back on it so she won’t see what’s happening to him, and she’s screaming, and the half-breed is shouting, and everybody else is cheering. All of a sudden, the half-breed got loose somehow, and he made a break for the lamppost where they’d tied off the rope. Mind you, I didn’t see that part of it myself. There were too many people between me and him, but they told me about it later.”
“He didn’t make it though, did he?”
“Of course he didn’t make it. It was stupid of him even to try.”
“Did they hurt him?”
“Nah! Just slapped him around a bit. You want to see where it happened? It’s just a short detour, but I’ll have to charge you an extra two Reais.”
“Is the man they killed still hanging there?”
“The Indian? Nope. They already cut him down.”
“Then no,” Silva said.
Chapter Fifteen
WHEN THEY ARRIVED AT the Grand Hotel, Silva tried calling Jade. He got no answer. Then he asked to speak to Osvaldo, the hotelkeeper, and discovered he’d taken to his bed with a bottle of cachaça.
“If you expect to get anything coherent out of him,” his wife told them, “you’d best wait until tomorrow morning.”
As a last resort, and so the evening wouldn’t be a total waste, Silva tried Delegado Borges, finally reaching him on his home number. In the background, Silva could hear a couple of kids fighting. And there was a crying baby situated somewhere close to the phone. Silva asked him about the lynching.
“Terrible thing,” Borges said, raising his voice to make himself heard. “I tried to stop it, but I didn’t want to kill anyone, and I sure as hell didn’t want them to kill me, so—”
“So you just let them do it.”
The implied criticism stung him. “Hey, you think you could have done any better?”
“Maybe.”
“Easy for you to say. You weren’t there.”
“Did you recognize anyone?”
“No.”
“Where’s the morgue?”
“You want to see the body?”
“I want to see both bodies.”
“We don’t have a morgue as such. Doctor Pinto’s place used to be a butcher shop. It’s got a walk-in meat locker. They’re in there.”
“This Doctor Pinto is your medical examiner, right?”
“Part-time.”
“I want him there.”
“Okay. I’ll set it up for first thing tomorrow morn—”
“Not tomorrow, Delegado. Now.”
“Tonight? Hell, Chief Inspector, this is the night Lucilla is going to tell us who the father of her baby is. Can’t it wait until morning? It’s not like those corpses are going anywhere.”
It took Silva a moment to realize that the Lucilla in question was a character in a popular television novela. He suggested the delegado record it.
DOCTOR PINTO’S office was less than a five-minute walk from the Grand. The delegado and the doctor arrived simultaneously. The delegado was wearing a T-shirt with something on the shoulder that looked like a baby’s vomit—and smelled like it too. The doctor was emanating an odor more agreeable: Scotch whiskey. And feeling the effects of it, Silva thought as he watched the medical man fumble with his keys.
Pinto led them down the hall and through a door lined with stainless steel. The cool air inside would have been pleasant after the heat and humidity of the street had it not been tinged with the pervasive smell of decomposing corpses.
The bodies were nude and lying side by side. The Indian’s penis was enlarged and protruded from his groin. Doctor Pinto pointed to it.
“It’s shrinking now as his blood seeps out. But you should have seen it when they brought him in. Lest you think, however, that he was, in life, as well-endowed as he appears to be at this moment, let me explain that when a human being is hanged—”
“He can get a death erection,” Arnaldo said. “Also called angel lust.”
“Errr, yes.” The doctor was disappointed to have his grandstanding curtailed.
The Indian’s complexion was blue. His tongue, even bluer, was protruding from his mouth. Silva had never seen a corpse that made such a horrible impression on him—and he’d seen a lot of them.
“So it wasn’t a long drop?” he said. “He choked to death?”
“He did. And his execution was ghastly, even for me, a medical man.”
“You were there?”
“I was indeed.”
“You got no call to be looking at the doctor that way,” Borges said. “There was nothing he could have done. There was nothing anybody could have done. The people who did it were out for blood. If I or the doc had attempted to interfere, they would have strung us up right next to the Indian.”
“It’s our understanding,” Silva said, “that Osvaldo Neto, the hotelkeeper, made just such an attempt.”
“And they didn’t string him up,” Arnaldo said.
“Well, no, but—”
Silva cut him off. “Go on, Doctor. What were you about to say?”
“Scientific curiosity is part of my makeup. I’d never seen a hanging before, and when he first appeared over the heads of the crowd I made a point of glancing at my watch. From that moment until he stopped moving, seventeen minutes and twenty-three seconds elapsed. Mind you, I’m not saying he was dead by then, just that he stopped twitching.”
Silva pulled a pair of surgical gloves out of his pocket, snapped them on and stepped in for a closer examination of the Indian’s body. He’d expected the ligature mark left by the rope and the petechiae under the corpse’s eyelids. What he hadn’t expected was the bruise on Amati’s forehead just below the hairline.
“What can you tell me about this?” he asked, pointing it out.
“Pre-mortem,” the doctor said promptly.
“Yes. But by how much?”
“Several hours at least.”
“Could it have been inflicted at about the time he’s supposed to have killed his victim?”
“Yes.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“He spun us a story,” Borges said, “about being in his bed and being knocked out. A half-assed alibi if ever I heard one. And believe me, I’ve heard a lot of them.”
“Hmm,” Silva muttered. He transferred his attention to the other corpse. After a minute inspection of the wounds in Torres’s neck, he said, “It’s my understanding that the Indian was found drunk.”
“Dead drunk,” Borges said. “We couldn’t wake him. Why?”
Silva turned to the doctor. “Did you take fingernail scrapings?”
Doctor Pinto raised his chin. “I didn’t deem it necessary.”
“I do,” Silva said. “Do it. And fingerprint them as well.”
“Scraping’s a waste of time,” Borges said, “unless you guys are willing to pay for the DNA testing. My budget is too small to afford it. And what do you need fingerprints for? We know who they are. And there isn’t going to be anything on file for that Indian anyway.”
“How about their clothing? And the murder weapon? Where are they?”
“The clothing is over there in those plastic bags,” the doctor said.
“And I got the Indian’s knife in the trunk of my car,” Borges said.
He didn’t like having his questions ignored. He sounded peeved. Silva didn’t care.
“Go get it,” he said.
Chapter Sixteen
MAURA AND THE PILOT were seated in the bar. Maura seemed pleased to see them. The pilot didn’t. He stood up as soon as Silva and Arnaldo sat down.
“Gotta get some shut-eye.”
“Hold on a second,” Silva said.
“What?”
Arnaldo handed him a package. The pilot turned it over in his hands and felt the contents through the plastic bag they’d wrapped it in.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“A fellow by the name of Sanches will be waiting for you when you land in Belem. Give it to him.”
“We charge extra for deliveries.”
“I’ll be sure to tell him.”
The pilot grunted and left.
“Hitting on you, was he?” Arnaldo said.
“Big time,” Maura said.
Amanda, Osvaldo’s wife, arrived to take their order.
“Your husband still indisposed?” Silva asked.
“Nice word for it,” she said. “And yes.”
Both men ordered whiskies.
“I’ll nurse this one,” the journalist said.
Amanda left to fetch their drinks.
Maura switched to professional mode. “You discover anything by looking at the bodies?”
“Maybe,” Silva said.
“Maybe? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means, Senhorita Mandel, that to tell you anything further at this point would be premature.”
Before she could respond, Maura’s telephone rang. She retrieved it from her purse. “There’s our girl now,” she said, glancing at the caller ID.
The conversation was a short one.
“On her way?” Silva asked when she hung up.
“Uh-huh. She’ll be here in five minutes.”
JADE WAS an athletic type with short blonde hair and deeply tanned skin. Maura, knowing her preferences, ordered her a caipirinha. It was waiting for her when she arrived, but she dropped heavily into a chair, left the sweating glass untouched and began to speak with barely contained fury.
She told them about her conversation with her housekeeper, her call to Borges, her visit to the delegacia, her frustrating consultation with Kassab, and, finally, about the lynching.
“I couldn’t watch. I turned around and faced away. Everyone else, everyone in the crowd, just stood there and drank it in. Even the priest and the doctor. The only person who lifted a finger to stop it was Osvaldo.” She looked around. “Where is he, by the way?”
“Drunk,” Silva said shortly. “Tell me, Senhorita Calmon, other than what he told you, do you have any hard facts that might substantiate the Indian’s innocence?”
“The alcohol. That was pure crap! Amati didn’t like the stuff.”
“Sure of that, are you?”
“Absolutely sure. Ask Osvaldo, if you don’t believe me. He was there. He heard—”
“Please calm down, Senhorita Calmon. I’m not saying I don’t believe you.”
“There was something else, too.”
“Oh? And that was?”
“He had a br
uise on his forehead.”
“Yes, we saw it.”
“Saw it?”
“Arnaldo and I have already made a cursory examination of the bodies.”
“Well, do you think he could have inflicted that wound on himself?”
“No. I do not.”
“You see? So the story he told us makes sense. Something else, too: Amati had no reason to suspect Omar, no reason to attack him, and when we spoke to him at the delegacia, he didn’t even know the man was dead.”
“He said that, did he?”
“Yes, and I believe him. But there’s one reason that trumps all the others.”
“Which is?”
“Amati loved his son. And he wasn’t stupid. If he murdered a white man and was murdered in turn, it would put the boy’s future in jeopardy. He knew that.”
“So he’d never do it?”
“Never!”
“How old is the child?”
“Eight.”
“Eight,” Silva echoed. He kept his face impassive, but it was as if she’d put a knife into his gut and twisted it. Amati’s son was the same age as his own son had been when they’d lost him.
“What is the boy’s name?” he asked.
“Raoni.”
“Where is he?”
“In his village.”
“You left an eight-year-old alone in the rainforest?”
“It was Amati’s decision to make, not mine.”
“You didn’t try to argue him out of it?”
“The Awana, Chief Inspector, speak—make that spoke—a language unique in all the world. I only know a few words of it.”
“How, then, did you get his story, the one you told me on the telephone?”
“There’s a priest here in town, a man by the name of Carlo Castori. I got him to translate for me.”
“Yes,” Arnaldo said. “We’ve heard of him.”
“Anything good?”
“No.”
“Then you’ve been well-informed. Castori is a drunk and a hypocrite. When he lived with the tribe, he professed to care about them, but he never made a single convert, so now he hates them. These days, he spends more time ingratiating himself with the people who pay his bar bills than he does ministering to the needs of his flock. What his patrons want, he wants. And today they wanted Amati’s blood.”
The Ways of Evil Men Page 8