Barone.”
“Barone. That’s the priest you want dead?”
“That’s him. You want to write it down?”
“Uh… yeah. Maybe I’d better.”
She pushed a pad and a pencil across the table. He licked the point of the pencil and made a careful note.
“Okay,” he said. “Then what?”
“As soon as you find out where the school is, knock on some of the neighbors’ doors. Tell people you’re looking for a kid named Lauro Tadesco. And, before you ask, yeah, that’s the kid I want dead.”
“Wait.”
He wrote that name down too, pursing his lips as he spelled it out. “Okay. So, we find this Tadesco guy. How do we get him, and the priest, and the federals out to the Mainardi’s place?”
“You find a girl who works the streets, somebody who can tell a good story.”
“Shouldn’t be too difficult,” he said. “Most whores are pretty good liars. What story?”
“Pay attention,” Claudia said.
Chapter Twenty-one
Arnaldo’s cell phone rang while they were picking at their dinner, a fish stew larded with coconut milk and dende oil. Arnaldo put down his spoon to take the call, but he didn’t pick it up again after he hung up. He shoved the half-empty plate aside, put the phone back into his pocket, and braced his elbows on the table.
“The Goat’s back,” he said.
Silva stopped chewing. “Who says so?”
“Father Vitorio.”
“And how does he know?”
Arnaldo shrugged.
“He didn’t say. I didn’t ask.”
“Cheeky bastard,” Hector said, then added, “The Goat, I mean, not Father Vitorio. You want to go over there now?”
“Unless you gentlemen want to finish this first,” Silva said, pointing to the bowl in the middle of the table.
The three of them stood up.
T HE MUSIC in The Goat’s boate was loud, too loud: a Daniela Mercury axe tune, distorted by high volume and cheap speakers. The light was dim, the smell of perfume stronger than on Silva’s last visit. A tired-looking whore was shuffling around the dance floor with a customer. Three men were grouped together at a table. They were drinking beer and leering at the remaining merchandise, consisting of five brunettes, who’d probably been born that way, and one blonde, who definitely hadn’t. The Goat had them displayed with their backs to the wall, one girl to a table. The whores recognized the federal cops, and each of them found somewhere else to look.
The Goat might have noticed if he hadn’t been beaming at Silva and his companions, whom he took to be new customers. He continued beaming as they approached the bar. Silva took a seat in front of him.
“ Bem vindo,” The Goat said, raising his voice so Silva could hear him over the music.
“You the guy they call The Goat?” Silva asked.
“That’s me,” The Goat said, a gold incisor catching a pinpoint of light from the candle that stood between them.
Before Silva could produce his badge, something over his shoulder caught The Goat’s attention. Silva turned around to see what it was.
Roselia was standing in the doorway that led to the bedrooms making frantic signs to The Goat. She stopped when Silva caught sight of her, took a step backward and closed the door.
The Goat wasn’t smiling anymore. “You’re cops,” he said accusingly, as if they’d intentionally deceived him.
“Yeah,” Silva said, “cops. I’m Chief Inspector Silva, federal police. This is Agente Nunes, and this is Delegado Costa. You want to talk here, or you want to go someplace quiet?”
“Here,” The Goat said. “I gotta take care of my customers.” “So turn down the music.”
The Goat complied.
“Hey,” one of the guys sitting at the table said. “Turn the fucking music back up.”
Silva swiveled his barstool, leaned his elbows on the counter behind him, and fixed the man with a look.
“Shut up,” he said.
The man narrowed his eyes and looked to his friends for support. Both of them suddenly discovered something interesting in their beers. After a second or two, the music lover decided there might be something interesting in his beer too.
Silva turned back to The Goat.
“Your boat around back?” he asked, remembering his last visit.
The Goat shook his head sadly.
“Sunk.”
“Sunk, huh?”
“I was going upriver,” The Goat said, “running flat out, when I got hit by a tree trunk coming the other way. Big bastard, maybe twenty meters long, with the branches pointing the other way. Musta been almost as heavy as the water, because it was hardly floating at all. Went right through my hull. My boat went down in minutes. I was lucky to get to shore alive.”
“Right,” Silva said. “Lucky. And where did this unfortunate accident happen?”
The Goat pointed in the general direction of the river. “Upstream,” he said, “maybe three or four kilometers that way, right in the middle. It’s a damned good thing I was towing my dinghy, because the water there is eighty meters deep, maybe more, and the current is so fast it drags things along the bottom. The hulk could be anywhere by now. Not a chance of salvage. It’s a bitch. I wasn’t insured.”
“Uh-huh. And you reported this disaster to the naval authorities, right?”
“Not yet. It only happened yesterday. I was pretty shook up. I’m gonna go down there tomorrow.”
The guy who’d been dancing leaned across the bar, brushing shoulders with Silva and Arnaldo and enveloping them in a cloud of cachaca fumes. “Give me a ficha,” he said, throwing a handful of notes on the bar.
The Goat counted the banknotes, nodded to himself, and put them in his pocket. Then he produced an old cigar box. He put the box on the bar. The contents rattled like coins.
“Just one?” The Goat asked. “For two fichas you get a whole hour.”
“What do I need an hour for?” the man said. “Fifteen minutes is plenty. She’s been rubbing my cock right out there on the dance floor.”
The Goat shrugged and handed over a brass disk with a number on it.
“Give it to the girl when you’re done,” he said.
“I know how it works,” the man said.
He took the girl by her arm and led her toward the bedrooms. She shuffled along next to him as if she were half asleep.
“What happened to the girls?” Silva said.
“What girls?”
“Your underage girls, the ones you had on the boat. What happened to them?”
“Nothing happened to them because there weren’t any. I was alone.”
“Alone, huh?”
“Yeah, all alone.”
“Where’s Marta Malan?”
“Marta who?”
“Malan.”
