“Of course, you do,” the little girl said impatiently. “You owe him for the airplane, and for the food you ate, and for anything he gives you, like perfume. Did he give you any perfume?”
“No. He didn’t give me any perfume. The only thing he gave me was a beating. I’d love to pay that back.”
The girl put one of her little fingers on Marta’s lips.
“Don’t say things like that,” she said. “If you say things like that, and he hears you, he’ll do it again.”
“Why does he get rid of the older girls?”
The little girl shrugged. “They aren’t chosen. If you don’t get chosen, you don’t earn him any money. The Goat doesn’t keep you unless you earn him money.”
The girl had smoked her cigarette almost down to the filter. She contemplated the ash for a moment and then ground it out in the empty margarine can she’d been using as an ashtray.
“How did you get here?” Marta asked.
“I tried living on the street, but it’s hard, you know. When you’re little, like me, they fuck you, but they don’t pay you. They say they’re going to, but when they’re finished they don’t care. I started asking for the money first, but then they’d pay me and take it back afterwards.”
“Why didn’t you go to the police?”
“Why? So they could fuck me too?”
“Why do you have to… fuck anybody? Are you an orphan?”
A cloud passed over the little girl’s face. “No, but we never had any money. When you’re really hungry, and you only have one thing to sell, you sell it. And it wasn’t like I was a virgin any more. My stepfather took care of that.”
“Don’t you just hate it? Being here?”
The girl shook her head. “It’s not so bad. There’s always food, and the men who come here, they like me.”
“ Like you?”
The little girl looked hurt. “It’s true,” she said, defensively. “You saw Osvaldo just now.”
“Osvaldo?”
“Osvaldo.” She pointed to her face. “The one with the broken nose. He chose me. He could have had any of the other girls, but he chose me.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean I didn’t believe you, I just meant-”
“What?”
“Well, that you’re so… young.”
“That’s what the other girls say, that I’m too young, too young to be their friend. You don’t want to be my friend either, do you?”
“I do want to be your friend. I didn’t mean too young for me. I meant for the men.”
The little girl shook her head.
“But that’s just it,” she said. “I’ve got something the other girls don’t have. Guess what it is.”
Marta looked at her. She wore a T-shirt that was so big on her, it served as a dress. She wasn’t particularly pretty, not even particularly clean. The stench of the man she’d been with still clung to her.
“I have no idea,” Marta said. “What?”
“This,” the girl said, lifting her T-shirt to expose her bare chest.
For a moment, Marta didn’t understand. Then she did.
The little girl’s breasts hadn’t yet begun to bud.
Chapter Ten
BRASILIA
Hector Costa looked like hell.
There were dark circles under his bloodshot eyes, and the long hours he’d spent inside windowless Dutch conference rooms had bleached his customary tan.
“You sure you want to do this now?” Silva said. “You could go over to my place and take a nap first, you know.”
“I told him the same thing,” Arnaldo said. “But he’s stubborn, like someone else I know.”
Silva raised an eyebrow. “And just who might that someone be, Agente Nunes?”
“My uncle Eustacio,” Arnaldo said, without missing a beat. “You haven’t got an uncle Eustacio.”
Arnaldo opened his mouth to refute that, but Hector interceded. “If I was going to sleep,” he said, “I would have done it in Sao Paulo and in the loving arms of my squeeze.”
“Squeeze, is it?” Arnaldo said. “Does Gilda know you call her that? And where did you pick up a word like ‘squeeze’?”
“She doesn’t know it, not yet, because I have yet to see her since I got back,” Hector said. “As to the word, it’s a bit of European sophistication that I learned from my new friend, Chief Inspector Lane of Scotland Yard.”
“That does it,” Arnaldo said to Silva. “You got to stop sending the kid off on conferences. Every time he gets back, I have to scrape the sophistication off. It smells bad, and it gets under my fingernails.”
“Is that what it is?” Silva said. “I always thought the stuff under your fingernails was a consequence of poor personal hygiene.”
There was a knock on the door of Silva’s office.
“Come,” Silva said.
A guy in a white lab coat appeared in the doorway.
“Where do you want it, Chief Inspector?”
“Over there, Soares,” Silva said. “Turn the screen toward us.”
Soares went out into the hallway and returned, wheeling a metal cart almost as tall as himself.
The top shelf of the cart was entirely occupied by a large TV monitor. The two shelves below it contained three tape players, VHS, Beta SP, and digital Beta. There was also a DVD player and a computer with a couple of disk drives.
“DVD, right?” Soares asked.
Silva looked at his nephew.
“DVD,” Hector confirmed.
The technician unplugged a cable, plugged in another one, toggled a switch, pressed a button and held out his hand for the DVD.
Hector didn’t surrender it.
“Confidential,” he said.
Soares shrugged, pushed another button. With a click and a whirr, the DVD player stuck its tongue out at the cops.
“Enjoy the movie,” Soares said. And left.
Hector put the DVD onto the extended tray, gave it a gentle push, and hit the PLAY button.
Fourteen minutes later, the girl’s severed head hit the floor with an audible clunk.
“Enough,” Silva said.
Hector reached out and pressed a button, stopping the DVD at almost exactly the same point where Marnix Gans, the Dutch postal inspector, had sprung to his feet and gone running into his bathroom to vomit.
“Fuck,” Arnaldo said unsteadily, his usual sarcasm momentarily suspended. “You hear that? The person calling the shots, the one behind the camera, was a woman.”
“I heard it,” Silva said.
“She’s some sick human being. She reminds me of-”
Silva said it for him. “Claudia Andrade.”
Nelson Sampaio, Silva’s boss, did not believe in sharing glory for success or in taking blame for defeat. When there were victories, they were always his victories. When there were debacles, he always looked for a scapegoat.
