Kuipers asked Hector how he liked Amsterdam. Hector said he liked Amsterdam very much. Montsma asked him if the conference on the suppression of the drug trade had been useful. Hector said it had. Then, unlike Brazil where the pleasantries would have gone on for at least another five minutes, they got down to business.
“You heard about that bomb, the one set off by a group calling itself Justice for Islam?” Kuipers asked.
Hector nodded. “Terrible thing,” he said, wondering why they wanted to talk to him.
“The bomb,” Kuipers said, “also took out a mail truck. The explosion blew mail all over the street.” He paused.
Hector waited for him to get to the point.
“Among the scattered envelopes,” Kuipers continued, “were a number of DVDs. The newspapers are calling them ‘videos that are pornographic in nature’, but that’s not the half of it. They were snuff videos. The action was all covered in one shot, no cuts, and at the end there was something… convincing. Proof that the action wasn’t faked.”
Hector frowned. “Proof? What kind of proof?”
“After the murderer strangled her,” Kuipers said, “he cut off her head with an ax.”
Chapter Seven
MANAUS
Marta awoke to find her door ajar, a crack of light spilling in from the corridor. At first, she was too wary to approach it. What if they were toying with her, what if someone, maybe The Goat, was standing on the other side?
She sat up, legs together, fighting the urge to urinate. After a while she could stand it no more. She stood, reached for the knob and drew the door toward her.
No Goat.
She stuck her head into the corridor.
Nobody.
She went to the bucket and used it.
No one disturbed her.
She pulled up her panties, washed her hands at the sink, and resumed her seat on the bed.
Reason told her the open door was no accident, no mistake. But it might have been, and so she’d be foolish not to take advantage of it.
When they’d brought her in, there’d been a dusty burlap sack over her head. She hadn’t seen anything of the building, and had little idea of its floor plan, except for the location of the shower. That was about ten meters down the corridor to the right. Roselia took her there every other day in the small hours of the morning when the rest of the house was asleep. The soap was brown and smelled like medicine. The water was lukewarm, never hot. She only got two minutes, and she was expected to dry herself with a rough fragment of terrycloth; but after the grinding monotony of her prison, every shower felt like a holiday.
When it was over, Roselia would throw some clean clothing at her and push her back to her cell where she was permitted to dress.
But it wasn’t the bathroom she was thinking of at the moment. She was thinking about another door she’d seen in the corridor, bigger and heavier than all the others. She just knew it led to the outside.
Gingerly, she stepped through the doorway. To her left, she could hear voices. Except for the choice of words, they could have been coming from the playground of an all-girls’ school
One girl said, “I told her she could kiss my ass.”
Another was saying she didn’t care about how many other girls he’d done it to, there was no way she was going to let him do it to her.
Still another exclaimed “… three hundred Reais. Can you imagine? Three hundred Reais?” As if that was a fortune, when it wasn’t even half of what Marta used to pay for one of her dresses.
The whores. It had to be them.
Marta turned the other way, to the right, toward the bathroom, toward the door that led to freedom. As she scurried along, a random thought popped into her head: her uncle had once given her a pair of hamsters for Christmas. By Easter, they were dead, but she remembered how there’d been a maze inside their cage. They’d scurry back and forth along the corridors of that maze. They’d gone on scurrying, every waking hour, until they died.
Her heart gave a leap. She’d been right about the door. It did lead to the outside. She could see daylight shining through a gap at the bottom.
Cautiously, she reached out a hand and turned the knob. The door didn’t budge, but a loud bell began ringing with an ear-splitting clang.
She ran back to her cell and sat on the bed. A moment later, she heard a door open and a woman’s unhurried steps coming along the corridor to her left. The steps paused. The ringing stopped. The girls, too, had fallen silent.
Roselia appeared in the doorway.
“Tomorrow,” she said, with a triumphant grin, “try going the other way.”
She slammed the door, and Marta heard the key turning in the lock.
Chapter Eight
BRASILIA
The day after her delivery, Irene Silva’s obstetrician came into her hospital room, sat down in the chair next to her bed and gently told her she’d have no more children. She and Mario had planned on two. They were disappointed, but not devastated. Their newborn son got a clean bill of health from the pediatrician. They knew couples who didn’t have any children at all. One baby was surely enough to make their happiness complete. And he did, for the next eight years.
There was a photograph from that happy time: all of them crowded together on a couch. On the far left was Irene, radiant and smiling with her arm around little Mario. Next to her was the youngster himself, proud of his new school uniform, pointing at the crest on his white shirt. Next to him, leaning against his shoulder, Clara’s son Hector, five years older than little Mario, his face serious, as if he could look into the future and see the trouble lurking there. Lastly, on the far right, Mario Silva himself, his hair and moustache still black, without a sign of gray.
In the photo his son had a grin from ear to ear. He looked robust and healthy, but the sickness had been in him even then. Four months later he was dead, struck down by leukemia thirteen days before his ninth birthday. He died on the eighth of May, 1989.
The next day Silva put the photo into his desk drawer, and there it sat.
When he’d become a chief inspector, they’d offered him a modern glass desk, with an accompanying credenza, and no drawers. He’d turned it down, just so he could have the photo close to him, but in a place where no one could see it.
And what he did with the photo, he did with his memories: locked them away, never discussed them with anyone.
It hurt too much when he did.
Irene handled her grief in a different way.
She drank.
Most days she’d sleep until noon. Then she’d get up and spend a few hours working at the orphanage to which Silva sent twenty percent of his salary. That, too, was something he never discussed.
Sometimes the children at the orphanage could coax a smile from Irene’s lips, just a smile, never a deep, full-throated laugh like the ones that bubbled out of her in the old days. When he could, Silva would take an
