“So why is this road in such good condition?”
“It was graded, leveled, and extended by a gang of loggers. Until Davi Fromes put a stop to it, they were running heavy trucks into and out of the reservation.”
“Who is Davi Fromes?”
“The former IBAMA agent, now retired. He would have as soon shot himself in the foot as kill a tree. Gilda?”
“Yes?”
“I’m going to have to arrange for Amati’s burial. There isn’t anyone else to do it. Are you finished with …”
“Studying his corpse? Yes, I am. You can take him whenever you like.”
“I’ll make the arrangements for tomorrow then. I think the most appropriate place to lay him to rest would be next to his family and the other members of his tribe. I’m sure it’s what he would have liked.”
“You wouldn’t consider cremation?”
“Cremation? No. The Awana don’t cremate. Why?”
“Well … you saw the hanging, didn’t you?”
“No,” Jade said. “When they started hoisting him up, I turned my back. I didn’t want to see him die.”
Gilda wanted to make sure: “And you never once laid eyes on him after he was dead?”
She shook her head. “I preferred to remember him alive.”
“Quite right. And that’s the way his son should remember him as well. Not like he is now.”
“What if Raoni insists? It’s his father, after all.”
“Refuse.”
“Couldn’t you—”
“Do something cosmetic? Make his father look presentable? That’s what you’re asking?”
Jade nodded.
“No, I can’t. Nobody can.”
“Why not?”
“He was suspended.”
“Can you explain the significance of that without getting into grisly details?”
“No.”
“All right then. Explain it anyway.”
Gilda looked out at the monotonous wall of vegetation hemming them in, no flowers, no animals, nothing but green. After a while, she said, “You’re sure you want to hear it?”
“I don’t want to hear it. I think it’s my duty to hear it. I need to know what I’m dealing with.”
“Very well.” Gilda leaned back in her seat and switched to didactic mode. “What it comes down to is this: there are three ways to hang someone.” She counted them off on her fingers. “The long drop, the short drop, and suspension. The short drop is the traditional method. You stand the victim on a chair, or a cart, put a rope around his neck and remove whatever is under him. For hundreds of years, that was the most common method. Back in the day, hangings were public, and killing someone was a spectacle. It was entertainment. Have you ever been in London?”
“London? As in London, England?”
Gilda nodded.
“Once. Why?”
“Did you see that big Marble Arch near Hyde Park?”
“Yes.”
“Not far away was the Tyburn Tree, the public gallows. They hung people there for over two hundred years. A crowd of thirty thousand wasn’t uncommon. They put up stands, charged admission. People came from all over the continent to watch. The English were regarded as Europe’s greatest hangmen, and to watch them at work was considered an educational experience.”
“Educational?”
“It was a different time. The values were different. The hangmen were celebrities. But then, as refinement grew, they decided to transfer the executions beyond prison walls.”
“A step forward at least.”
“Yes, but one that created problems. Hanging people in front of just a few witnesses, it turned out, was harder on the warders and jailers. Without the crowds to cheer them on, they started having psychological problems. They quit by the score. The turnover became too great. Something had to be done. By then, it was the scientific age, so they studied the problem scientifically. The solution they came up with was the long drop. At the time, they viewed it as a great leap forward.”
“Why?”
“Because it was considered more humane.”
“Humane?”
“Not for the victims. For the wardens and jailers.”
“So what is it? What’s a long drop?”
“You stand the condemned person on a trap door, open it, and let them fall between one and three meters before they’re brought up short by a pre-stretched rope. The distance, in each case, is calculated on the basis of tables that take into account body weight, bone structure, and the thickness of the victim’s neck. Most of the time, it works. Sometimes, it doesn’t. If the drop is too long, it decapitates the victim. If it’s too short, it’s no different from the short drop. But if it’s done right, it snaps at least two cervical vertebrae, which causes instant paralysis, immobilization, and in most cases, unconsciousness. The victim still dies of asphyxia, but with less suffering, and without the … physical manifestations that display in the other two systems.”
“And suspension?”
“You put a rope around the victim’s neck and hoist him up. The English excelled at that, too. In their Royal Navy, they’d execute mutineers by running a rope through a pulley attached to a yardarm. One end went around the victim’s neck, and the other was given to sailors who’d haul away. The suspended man kicks, and jerks, and thrashes, and chokes to death. It can take twenty minutes, sometimes even more, to kill him. Meanwhile, he turns blue, the capillaries in his eyes and face burst, his tongue protrudes—”
“And that’s the sort of thing you saw when you examined Amati’s body?”
“Yes. It’s just about the most horrible way to go that there is. You do not want that kid to see what they did to his father.”
TWO 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.
Chapter Twenty-One
MAURA WAS FURIOUS. FOR 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.”
SILVA 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.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“THERE 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?”
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