They planned their departure for two thirty in the morning. Any earlier, and they’d find themselves among the islands in the dark.
Marta awoke to the ringing of an alarm clock. It was on the other side of the wall, and it wasn’t very loud, but she’d always been a light sleeper. She threw off her sheet, got out of bed, and walked to the window. The moon was still high in the sky, almost full. With her cheek against the side of the glass she could see it sparkling on the river, a thin band of silver painted on the black water.
A light in the neighboring bedroom went on, illuminating the grass. She heard a toilet flush and footsteps in the corridor. She put an ear against the door.
“I don’t know how long it’s going to take to locate the damned boat.” Carla’s voice. “Don’t expect us back before dark, and don’t forget to feed the girl.”
“Feed the girl. Feed the girl. Caralho, Carla, how many times you got to say it? You think I’m stupid or something?” That was the one with the bags under his eyes. He sounded sleepy, maybe a little drunk.
“Don’t be impudent with me, you imbecile.”
Still sniping at each other, they moved off in the direction of the kitchen.
What they were saying became indistinct, but she could hear the rattle of cutlery. A little while later she smelled coffee. When the back door slammed, she returned to the window. Carla and the big man were walking toward the boat. Just before they vanished from her line of sight, she heard Carla say something about picking up The Goat at his dock. A minute or so later, the boat’s engines came to life, loud at first, then fading, fading until they were gone. The house was silent again, the only sound the nightly chorus of insects in the nearby jungle.
It was the chance she’d been hoping for. She didn’t think she’d get a better one. For a while, she sat on the edge of the bed, getting up her courage. All that time she could feel her heart pounding, feel the sweat on her palms. She tried controlled breathing, taking the air in through her nose, four seconds for every breath.
Finally, when the moon was down, and the darkness as deep as it was going to get, she stood up, put on her clothes and attacked the door. She left the middle pin for last, broke a nail getting it out. There was a squeak, then a thump when the door disengaged from the frame. She caught it on her shoulder, got a hand on either side, and lowered it gently to the floor. Once it was down, she paused to listen. The thug was still snoring.
Her instinct was to run, but she suppressed it. She stood there, breathing heavily, looking at the gaping black hole that led to the corridor and freedom. The snoring seemed much louder now, and it was coming from the left, the direction she’d have to go to get to the front door.
She crept down the corridor, wincing with each creak of floorboard. The snoring persisted, deep, steady, and getting louder. She eased her head around the corner and looked into the room it was coming from.
There were three windows along one wall, all hung with heavy curtains, but the curtains were pulled back. In the glow of dim starlight, she could see equipment strewn around the floor, the kind of stuff she’d once seen in a photographer’s studio: tripods, small lights with little flaps mounted on the front, big lights that looked like scoops. In the center of the clutter was a single piece of furniture: a king-sized bed. The snoring man was stretched out on top of it, fully clothed, lying on his back with one arm across his eyes. His mouth was open.
Marta continued creeping toward the front door. She took a cautious step and listened, another cautious step and listened, forcing herself not to hurry.
The key was dangling from the lock. She turned it, stepped out into the night, and gently closed the door behind her.
Only then did she break into a run.
Chapter Twenty
The world’s largest freshwater archipelago, the Anavilhanas, begins some seventy kilometers upstream from Manaus. At that point, the Rio Negro is almost twenty kilometers wide.
During the rainy season, about two hundred of the islands lie submerged, but the vegetation covering them continues to protrude above the surface of the water. Clinging to the tops of the trees, seeking refuge from the flood, are monkeys half the size of a man and snakes as thick as telephone poles.
But it wasn’t the rainy season. Beaches had appeared. Channels had opened between the islands. The snakes and monkeys were crawling around at ground level.
The low water demanded careful navigation and made the search for The Goat’s boat all the more difficult. It took Claudia and her companions all morning and the better part of the afternoon to locate Osvaldo and his cargo.
Osvaldo had chosen his hiding place well, anchoring in a little cove, largely concealed behind a neighboring island. The boat was surrounded on three sides by dense rain forest.
Osvaldo wasn’t pleased to see them arrive, but he was downright delighted when The Goat told him they weren’t going to stay.
The Goat had him row the girls ashore and line them up on the beach. He addressed them as a group, holding a piece of rubber hose, slapping it against his thigh for emphasis.
“I know for a fact,” he said, “that somebody was in the house asking about Marta.” Slap. “I also know, for a fact, that someone shot off her mouth and said we were keeping her.” Slap.
Silence.
“I want to know who it was.” Slap.
The girls started looking at each other.
“If whoever it was tells me all about it,” Slap “nobody’s gonna get hurt. But if she doesn’t step forward right now,” Slap “and I mean right now,” Slap Slap “all of you are in for the beating of your lives.”
Now they were looking at one girl in particular, Vileini Rabelo, the girl who called herself Topaz.
Vileini put her hands over her face and started to cry.
“It’s that priest,” The Goat said when they were on their way back to Manaus. “He’s behind all this. Got to be him.”
“What priest?” Claudia said.
“Vitorio Barone. He runs a school for slum kids in Sao Lazaro. When he’s not in the school, or sleeping, Barone is shooting his mouth off. He’s got a thing about young girls.”
“He likes to fuck young girls?” Hans asked.
“Hell, no,” The Goat said. “Just the opposite. Barone doesn’t want anybody to fuck them.”
“Fucking Nazi. What’s it to him?”
“He’s tried bitching to Chief Pinto, the mayor, and the governor. They all blew him off. Now, he musta gotten into bed with the federals.”
“How do you figure?” Claudia said.
“This Lauro kid, what did Topaz say his last name was?”
“Tadesco.”
“Tadesco. Yeah, that’s it. Lauro Tadesco. He’s too young to be a cop himself, right?”
“Right.”
“And he’s a local. He has the accent, knows the town. Topaz said so. How could they recruit him? Tell me that. They couldn’t start asking around for someone to take a risk like that without Chief Pinto hearing all about it. But Barone, the priest, he’d know a kid like that.”
“Hmmm,” Claudia said.
“Something else too,” The Goat said. “Lauro didn’t want to fuck, he only wanted to talk. He coulda done both, fucked and talked, but he only talked. And he let Topaz wrap him around her little finger. If that doesn’t smell like priest, I don’t know what does.”
Claudia recalled Topaz’s tearful confession.
The kid had asked Topaz if that was her real name. She’d told him it was. Then she’d asked him for his.
“Lauro,” he’d said.
He wasn’t bad-looking, she’d said, so she played the coquette, fished for a return visit, said she didn’t believe his name was really Lauro, said that a lot of guys lied to the girls they met in boates.
And just like that, the kid pulled out his identity card.
