“Yeah, but I didn’t know that until later.”
“This woman. Describe her.”
“A lot younger than you guys.”
“How much younger?”
“I dunno.”
Silva closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Getting information out of this guy was like pulling teeth. “Thirty-five?” he said. “Forty?”
“Yeah, like that.”
“Like what?”
“Thirty-five.”
“What else?”
Tancredo took another puff. “What else do you want to know?”
“Hair? Was she pretty?”
“Brown hair. Kinda curly. Not bad looking.”
“How tall?”
Candido held up a hand, palm down, to indicate her height.
“Average,” Silva said. “Her eyes? What color?”
“Brown… I think.”
“How was she dressed?”
“Tight pants. Nice ass.”
“What else do you remember?”
“About how she looked?”
“Yes.”
“What’s to remember? She was normal. She had a nice ass, that’s all. And, oh yeah, she smelled good.”
“What do you mean she smelled good?”
“What I said. She smelled good.”
“Her soap? Her deodorant?”
“Yeah, her soap maybe. What’s deodorant?”
“Never mind. What happened next?”
“She tells me it’s a hobby of hers, raising these birds. She says she’s busy in town all week, and she’ll only visit on the weekends, and maybe not every weekend, so she wants my help.”
“What kind of help?”
“Feeding them, cleaning the cages, that kind of stuff. I tell her okay, I’ll do it. She asks me how much I want to earn. I tell her four hundred a month. She says she’ll pay two.”
“But you accepted?”
“Yeah. I never figured she’d pay four. I was just trying it on. A week later, she’s back with a van-”
“What kind of a van?”
Tancredo ground out his butt, getting ash on his fingers in the process. He wiped it off on his pants.
“One of those Volkswagen things,” he said. “White, like most of them are. In the van, she’s got all the stuff to hammer together a house for the birds. She stands around being bossy while I do it, and then she has me move the pigeons from the cages into their new house, which isn’t very difficult because they’re little, and they’re not flying yet.”
“And then?”
“And then she tells me to keep feeding them and to let them out when it looks like they’re about ready to fly. I ask her if she isn’t worried about losing them, and that’s when she tells me they’re homing pigeons, which means they’ll always come back as long as I keep feeding them. So I keep feeding them. Pretty soon they’re taking off, and flying around and coming back to their house to sleep.”
“And the woman?”
“I don’t see her for a while.”
“How long?”
Tancredo thought about it while he lit another cigarette. “More than a month. When she finally shows up, she stays just long enough to make sure the birds are doing their thing, coming back to their house at night. Some hobby, huh? You know what I thought?”
“What?”
“I thought she didn’t give a shit about those birds; she only cared about what they could do, which, as it turned out later, was absolutely right.”
“What happened next?”
“Four weeks or so later she’s back again. Just to have a look, make sure I’m feeding the birds. She does the same thing, maybe four or five weeks after that.”
“And then?”
“And then, on her next visit, she has me put all the birds in the cages she brought them in, but she leaves their little house right where it was. ‘They’ll be flying back,’ she says, ‘and, when they do, they’re going to have little bags tied on them.’ She tells me not to mess with those bags and, she says, if I do, she’ll have her husband cut my balls off. How about that, huh? Is that any way for a woman to talk? Cut my balls off!”
He took a puff and shook his head at the sad decline in the vocabulary of women.
“You believed her?”
He pointed at Silva with his cigarette. “You bet I did. You should see the bitch. She’s mean.”
“But, despite her warning, you messed with those bags anyway, didn’t you?”
He looked pained that Silva would ask. “One of them. Just one. I was curious. I mean, wouldn’t you be? Her making such a big deal of it and all?”
“Just curious?”
“Honest to God. Just curious. It wasn’t like I was planning anything ahead of time. I wasn’t. But, when I saw what was inside…”
“You started thinking how you could keep some of those diamonds for yourself.”
He sighed and extinguished the third cigarette. “Yeah. And I counted the birds, and I noticed one of them hadn’t made it back.”
“So you decided to make it two?”
“I did. I figured she’d have no way of knowing. And she did’t. She showed up, took the birds, had me break down the little house I’d set up and took that too. I haven’t seen her since. That’s the end of the story. I got nothing else to tell you.”
“Listen to me, Tancredo,” Silva said, “I really don’t care about you trying to nick those diamonds.”
Tancredo raised his eyebrows. “You don’t?”
“No, I don’t. We’ve got bigger fish to fry. So here’s what we’re going to do: if you cooperate, I’m not going to charge you.”
“You’re not?”
“No.”
Tancredo smiled, showing tobacco-stained teeth. “Right. Right. I’m your man. How do I cooperate?”
“First off, I’m going to send an artist from Sao Paulo. He’ll sit down with you and, based on your description, try to work up a sketch of what the woman looked like.”
Tancredo looked dubious. “I’ll try. But I got a lousy memory for faces.”
“Just try your best.”
“Sure. What else?”
“You’ll return the diamonds to us, you’ll stay here in safety for a few days, and then we’ll let you go back to that sitio of yours. That’s it. You’re off the hook.”
“If I’m gonna be off the hook, why do I have to stay here at all? And what’s with the in safety bit?”
“You know the Artist’s mother has been kidnapped?”
“Doesn’t everybody?”
“The diamonds were the ransom.”
