Blood of the Wicked

by Leighton Gage

  “Why discredit him at all? All Muniz wanted to do was to get rid of him.”

  “Hmm.”

  “So that leads me to believe that what was made to look like an attack by Muniz and his capangas was, in reality, something else.”

  “Which was?”

  “An attempt to lay blame for the death of Vicenza.”

  “I see. Go on.”

  “So then I have to ask myself who would have had a reason to kill Vicenza and blame it on Muniz?”

  “And you think you know?”

  “Ah, yes, Senhor Pillar. I think I know. But I can’t prove it.”

  “Who?”

  Silva considered for a moment, and then decided to trust him.

  “Colonel Emerson Ferraz.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s involved in some dirty business and Vicenza Pelosi found out about it.”

  “How?”

  “By interviewing a street kid.”

  “That whatshisname? Edson? The one she mentioned a couple of times in her broadcasts? The one she asked to contact her?”

  “Him. He did contact her. They spoke. Immediately after that, she was murdered.”

  There was a long silence on the other end of the line.

  “Senhor Pillar? Are you there?”

  “I’m here. So why trust me with all this?” Pillar asked suspiciously.

  “Because I want your help. We’ve got no friends in this town, but you do, and I need to find that kid before Ferraz does.”

  Another silence, and then, “All right, Chief Inspector, I’ll do what I can. What’s that boy’s full name?”

  “Souza. Edson Souza. And I don’t want it known why we’re looking for him. All the rest of what I’ve just told you is confidential.”

  “Understood. You think Ferraz killed Diana Poli too? Her and that girlfriend of hers?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “The son of a bitch. If ever anybody deserved killing, it’s him.”

  “There’s no death penalty in this country, Senhor Pillar.”

  “For people like him, there should be.”

  This time it was Silva who remained silent.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  SILVA REMAINED CONVINCED THAT Father Brouwer knew more than he was telling. After breakfast the next morning, he decided to pay him a surprise visit. They drove to the cottage, arriving a little after nine o’clock.

  Methuselah was on the front porch with his head between his paws. When he saw them coming, he rose painfully to his feet and started to whine.

  Arnaldo bent over to scratch his neck. The dog nuzzled his leg but the whining didn’t stop.

  Hector rapped on the doorjamb, got no response, and opened the screen door.

  The dog brushed by him, went to the naked body on the living room floor and began to lick at the blood that had pooled from a massive wound in the corpse’s neck.

  Silva knelt down for a closer look. Arnaldo picked up the phone and started dialing. Hector took Methuselah by his collar and dragged him outside.

  Father Brouwer’s eyelids and genitals, and the soles of his feet, showed circular burns, some mere blisters, others much worse. In some cases, the flesh was actually charred.

  “Too big for cigarettes,” Hector said, coming back and squatting down next to his uncle.

  “Yes,” Silva agreed. “Cigars.”

  Arnaldo had the telephone against his ear. He put his hand over the mouthpiece and opened his mouth to say something, then dropped it again and spoke into the phone. “This is Agente Arnaldo Nunes, Federal Police. I’m calling to report a murder.”

  There was a squeak of hinges. All three cops turned to look. Father Angelo was standing in the doorway, his eyes fixed on his old friend’s body.

  Methuselah pushed past him and made a beeline for the blood, his tongue hanging out.

  Hector headed the dog off and put him back on the porch.

  Father Angelo walked forward until he reached the corpse and then dropped to his knees, as if he’d reached an altar.

  For a while, no one spoke. Silva became aware of the distant chatter of a cicada, punctuated by the faint whining of the dog. He let a decent interval pass, and then cleared his throat.

  “Father?”

  The priest didn’t answer.

  “Father Angelo?”

  The old man raised his head and spat out a single word. “Ferraz.”

  “Move away from him, Father,” Silva said. “There might be some trace evidence. We don’t want to contaminate it.”

  Father Angelo got slowly to his feet, turned, and took two steps toward them. There were tears in his eyes. “A lifetime of service,” he said, “and this is the way he ends up. I should have . . .”

  “Should have what?”

  “Nothing, Chief Inspector, nothing. You must have questions for me. Go ahead and ask them.”

  “Thank you, Father. Did you spend the night at home?”

  “No. I spent the night at the league encampment. Ever since the massacre, Anton—” His voice caught in his throat. He cleared it and repeated the name, “Anton and I have been alternating, each of us staying there for twelve hours at a time.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “At around nine, last night. We always made it a point to have breakfast and dinner together. He came home, we dined, and I left.” He shook his head as if to clear it, looked again at the body, ran a hand over his bald spot.

  “I always try to search for a meaning in things,” he said, “but this . . .”

  His shook his head.

  “You mentioned Ferraz,” Silva said.

  The priest nodded. “Anton Brouwer, was my closest friend, Chief Inspector. We had no secrets from each other. I know about Ferraz’s activities, and I know about the conversation Anton had with you. Look at those burns. Look how he was killed. Tell me frankly, do you really believe that someone else could have done this?”

  “No, Father, I don’t, but we have no proof, and without that . . .”

  “Yes. I know. I know.”

  “Do you have any idea what Ferraz might have been trying to learn?”

  The old priest reached for his cigarettes, put one into his mouth, and lit it. “Do you?” he said.

  “My guess is that Ferraz was trying to find Edson Souza. He probably thought your friend knew where he was hiding.”

  “Perhaps. But if that was it, Anton didn’t tell them.”

  “No?”

  The old priest took another drag on his cigarette and reflexively looked around for a place to tip the ash. His gaze swept past, then returned to, the body of his dead companion. He sighed and flicked the ash directly onto the floor.

  “No,” he said. “Because, if Anton had cracked under Ferraz’s torture, you would have found two bodies here instead of one.”

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  THE “BOLTHOLE,” AS FATHER Angelo called it, was directly in front of the fireplace.

  “We built this,” he said, rolling back the carpet that covered the entrance, “back in the days of the dictatorship. I told you we were tortured?”

  “Yes, you did.”

  Father Angelo set the carpet aside and dusted his hands. “We were fearful they might come again. We set to thinking about how we could escape them if they did.”

  He inserted the tips of his fingers into a gap in the rough wooden flooring and started to pull, raising an oblong section about seventy-five centimeters long by fifty centimeters wide. “This was the solution. Anton’s idea, inspired by the hiding places built for English priests in the time of the Tudors.”

  He set the section of floor aside, revealing a wooden ladder descending into a dark shaft. “We did all the work ourselves,” he continued. “It took us seven months. We kept the earth we’d removed in baskets and spread it around the garden during the night. Those baskets were heavy, to say the least. Fortunately, I was younger and stronger then.”

  “Did you ever have occasi
on to use it?”

  “Not until Edson came along.”

  “Edson? Edson Souza? He’s down there?” Silva pointed at the shaft.

  Father Angelo bent over and stuck his head into the hole.

  “Yes,” he said. “Thanks to Anton, he’s still there. Come up, my boy. Come up and meet the people from the Federal Police.

  Chapter Forty

  EDSON SOUZA WAS A kid with shoulder-length hair and doelike eyes, more like a girl’s than a boy’s. He was dressed, as Father Brouwer had often been, in a pair of jeans and a red T-shirt bearing the logotype of the league.

  When he saw Father Brouwer’s body, a solitary tear escaped his right eye and rolled down his cheek. Silva had the impression he was looking at a kid who’d already done most of the crying he’d do in his entire lifetime.

  Father Angelo put his arm around Edson’s shoulders and gave him a comforting squeeze. Edson leaned into him like a dog seeking affection.

  “We’ve been looking for you, son,” Silva said. “We want to protect you.”

  Edson looked at him with contempt. “Yeah, I heard. And while you were looking, Father Brouwer got killed, and Senhorita Pelosi, and all those people from the league, and Diana and her friend Lori. Some cop you are. Protect me? What a joke! Go fuck yourself.”

  “Look, you little—”

  Silva held up a hand, stopping Arnaldo in mid-sentence.

  “Listen to me,” Silva said. “The State Police are going to be here any minute and Ferraz might be with them.” At the mention of Ferraz’s name, Edson’s eyes rounded in fear. “Arnaldo, get a cover from the bedroom. Put Edson on the floor in the back of the car, conceal him under it, and come back. Someone has to stay here until the State Police arrive.”

  “I’ll stay,” Father Angelo offered.

  Silva waited until Arnaldo and Edson had gone outside, then said, “I’d prefer it, Father, if Arnaldo were to do that. Stay here, I mean. It would be better if you’d come with us. We might need your help with the boy.”

  “As you wish.”

  “And while Edson is out of earshot, let me say this: It was a stupid thing you did, hiding him like that. Look at the damage you’ve done. There are people who might be alive today if it hadn’t been for that. One of them is your friend there.”

  Father Angelo’s eyes flashed in anger. “It’s easy enough for you to say that, Chief Inspect—”

  “No, it’s not, Father. It’s damned hard to say, but it’s the truth.”

  “Will you let me finish?”

  “Make it quick. We have to get out of here.”

  “I understand that, but this will only take a minute, and it’s important that you understand. Our concern, Anton’s and mine, was for the life of the boy. We didn’t know to what degree we could trust you, but there was one thing we knew for sure: As long as Ferraz was on the loose, Edson’s life would be in danger. It still is.”

  “But—”

  Father Angelo ignored Silva’s interruption.

  “Try to follow my reasoning. In order to put Ferraz and his colleagues away, you’re going to need proof, isn’t that true?”

  “Of course it—”

  “But you don’t have any do you? Not even now.”

  “That’s not true. Now it’s different. Now we have a witness.”

  “I’m not a fool, Chief Inspector. I’ll tell you what you have, and it’s the only thing you have: The word of a street kid, nothing more.”

  “All right. I admit it’s not much—”

  “It’s nothing at all. Edson’s word against the word of a colonel in the State Police is nothing at all, and you know it.”

  In the silence that followed, there was the sound of a distant siren.

  “State Police are coming,” Hector said.

  “Put that trapdoor back in place and cover it with the carpet,” his uncle told him.

  Hector had barely finished when a vehicle pulled up outside. The siren slid down the musical scale and died out. Car doors slammed. They heard Arnaldo’s voice, and then heavy footsteps on the porch followed by the squeak of the screen door. Two state policemen entered the room.

  “Father,” one of the cops said, acknowledging Angelo’s presence. Both of them seemed to know him. He nodded a greeting.

  “Guy outside told us what happened,” the other cop said, addressing Silva. “We saw his ID. How about showing us yours?”

  Silva and Hector produced their wallets. The eyebrows of the cop who checked their warrant cards went up when he saw that he was in the presence of the Federal Police’s Chief Inspector for Criminal Matters. Apparently, Arnaldo hadn’t mentioned it.

  “Father Angelo came in after we did,” Silva said. “We found Father Brouwer’s body just as it is. Nothing has been touched. There’s no reason for us to stay here. If you want a statement, send an escrivante to my hotel and I’ll give him one.”

  “Sim, senhor,” one of the cops said with a sideways glance at Anton Brouwer’s mutilated corpse. “You’re at the Excelsior?”

  “Yes, the Excelsior. Let’s go, Padre.”

  THE TRIP to the hotel took them about fifteen minutes. Father Angelo kept one window open and smoked all the way.

  They drove into the subterranean parking garage and succeeded in getting Edson up to Silva’s suite without encountering anyone.

  The kid tried not to show it, but he was impressed. A rather normal hotel suite was high luxury for him. He ran his hand over the fabric covering the couch and asked if he could use the bathroom. Hector showed him where it was. On his way back, Edson spotted the bottles behind the bar. “How about a whiskey?”

  Silva poured him one. The kid had probably put much worse things in his body, and it might help him to relax. While he was drinking it, Silva nodded to Arnaldo, who took out his cell phone.

  The agente dialed Riberão, got his sister on the line, and asked to speak to Marly Souza. The boy froze when he heard his mother’s name.

  When Arnaldo extended the telephone, Edson tossed off the rest of his whiskey and grabbed the instrument like he was afraid the agente was going to snatch it away again. The tough little street kid got a catch in his throat when he started to talk to his mother. He cleared it, then turned his back on them and talked for some time in a low voice. They didn’t hurry him. When he finally hung up the telephone almost twenty minutes later he asked for another whiskey, and got it.

  “Now talk to us,” Silva said.

  THERE’D BEEN a rumor on the street, Edson said, that Ferraz’s men were looking for him. He couldn’t think of another place to turn, so he’d sought refuge with the priests. He’d started out by sleeping on their couch, only bolting down into the hole if he heard a car stop or someone coming up the walk that led through the banana trees.

  Then, after a couple of days, the bad dreams started. He found himself waking up several times a night, always in a cold sweat. The priests wouldn’t give him anything stronger than chamomile tea, so he’d tried spending a night in the security of the hole. He slept so much better down there that he’d taken to doing it all the time.

  He didn’t exactly know when he’d become aware of the footsteps overhead, but it had been sometime in the middle of the night. It was dark in the hole, pitch dark, and he didn’t have a watch. After the footsteps there was the sound of a struggle, then the voice of Ferraz asking questions, and then the screams.

  “That filho da puta Palmas was there too,” Edson said. “I heard him. They hurt Father Brouwer bad, but he wouldn’t tell them a fucking thing. Sorry about the language, Father, but it’s the God’s honest truth. Not a fucking thing. You would have been proud of him. I sure as hell was.”

  Father Angelo didn’t comment. His hands were clenched in his lap. He was biting his lower lip.

  Now that he was talking, Edson required little prompting. Ferraz, he said, supplied drugs to the street kids of Cascatas. To pay for them, the kids had to get money from somewhere. The ensuing crime wave caused a public revolt. Many t
ownsfolk gave tacit support to what they thought was a death squad. In reality, it was Ferraz’s gang of enforcers, killing the kids who didn’t pay their drug debts.

  No matter what anybody might have told them, Edson said, he didn’t have a crack habit. And he’d never had a crack habit. He’d seen what the drug could do and it frightened him. But he was even more frightened of Ferraz, who demanded a regular purchase from every kid on the street. So he bought the stuff and pretended to use it. He didn’t sell it to anyone. He just threw it away.

  Then he lost one of his friends to an overdose and another to Ferraz’s gang of killers. He wanted to do something, but he didn’t know what. Finally he went to Father Brouwer and talked to him about it.

  While Edson talked and talked, Father Angelo smoked and smoked, adding butt after butt to an already overflowing ashtray and filling the air with a thin haze. When Silva asked Edson why he’d called the bishop, the old priest raised his head and looked directly at the kid. This, it seemed, was something new.

  Edson swallowed and looked down at the table. If his dark skin had been lighter they might have seen a blush.

  “You called Dom Felipe?” Father Angelo said. “You never told me that.”

  “No, Father.”

  The kid squirmed in his chair.

  “Was it something else about Ferraz?”

  “No, Father.”

  “What then?”

  Edson didn’t answer.

  “Immediately afterward,” Silva said, “the bishop called Gaspar Farias. Gaspar says he can’t remember what the bishop wanted to talk about.

  “The fuck, he can’t,” Edson exploded. “He knows all right, the filho da puta.”

  Father Angelo leaned back and opened his mouth in surprise. Edson didn’t notice. He was still looking down at the surface of the table.

  “So you know why the bishop called Gaspar,” Silva said.

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Father Angelo put a hand on the boy’s shoulder.

  Edson swallowed. “Please,” he said, and looked at the priest. “I don’t want to talk about it. Not to you. Not to him.”