Perfect Hatred (20 page)

flight would take him to his
fazenda
near Cascatas do Pontal. He had twenty-seven employees there, twenty-seven people who depended upon him for their livelihood. And, because they knew damned well what would happen to them if they didn’t, they could all be made to swear he hadn’t left the place all week. When it came right down to it, it was only the word of the federal cops against his—and the numbers would be on his side.

He’d have to get rid of Roque, of course. But that was easily done.
Muniz’s breathing slowed. He began to feel better. It was a cock-up, but cock-ups happened, and there was always a next time. He’d kill the bastard yet.
When they screeched to a stop, the road behind them was still in darkness, and the lantern still glowing on the Argentinean shore. They hurried aboard. The boat’s engine started immediately.
Muniz took it as a sign that luck was with them.
Roque cast-off the mooring line and rammed the throttle home. He hadn’t said a single word since they’d turned to run.
But Muniz knew his
capangas
.
Right now,
he thought,
the greedy bastard is trying to workout a way to turn this situation to his advantage.
Roque was. But thinking was not his strong suit, and it took him almost a full minute.
“Donato and Virgilio had families,” he said at last. “I am thinking, Senhor, of their wives and children.”
He was like hell. Muniz saw through the subterfuge at once, but it wouldn’t be prudent to tell that to a killer. Not on a boat, during a dark night, in the middle of a river.
“The wives,” Roque said, as if the thought had just occurred to him, “should receive their husbands’ shares of what you’d planned to pay us.”
“They should,” Muniz agreed. Then, before Roque could suggest it, “I’ll give the money to you. You can pass it on to them.”
“Of course, Senhor. You can trust me.”
He couldn’t, of course. The wives, if they existed at all, wouldn’t see a
centavo
. But, then, neither would Roque.
The wind had risen since they’d crossed from the Argentinean side, and it had changed direction. Now, it was blowing downriver.
Wind and current were conspiring to push the boat closer to the falls. Roque perceived the danger and corrected his course to steer further upstream. And, if fate hadn’t taken a hand, they would have landed only meters from where they’d left the pickup.
But then, without warning, disaster struck.
A tree, many times larger than the boat and adrift on the river, appeared out of nowhere and smashed into their port side.
“Get away from it! Get away from it!” Muniz shouted, in a panic.
“I can’t. I can’t turn!” Roque shouted back.
He had the tiller hard over, trying to open space between the tree and the boat, but the water was moving too fast. The rough bark remained in contact with the stern, slamming the bow backward at every attempt to turn away. Meanwhile, the whirling prop was carrying them further along the trunk.
“My God,” Muniz said, pointing ahead at a massive shape looming out of the dark “What’s that?”
It proved to be a ball of roots protruding a full two meters from the base of the tree. The boat was headed straight for it. Roque threw the motor into reverse.
“Backward,” Muniz shouted. “Go backward!”
“I’m trying, damn it!” Roque said, all subservience gone.
They gathered sternway slowly, had just passed their original point of impact, when a sharp
thud
was followed instantly by a metallic
snap
—and the motor began to run wild.
The whirling prop had struck something under the surface, probably a projecting limb. The shear pin had given way. The drive shaft was turning, but the propeller wasn’t. The boat was dead in the water.

Arnaldo found the pilot in the bar, seated at one of the tables, drinking guaraná and chatting up one of the female tourists. It was the work of only a moment to flash a badge and explain the urgency.

The engine on the aircraft still hadn’t cooled from the afternoon flights, and was already up to operating temperature when Silva joined them on the pad.

Arnaldo saw the expression on his partner’s face, and the question he was about to ask died on his lips.
Less than thirty seconds later, they were airborne.

“This thing have a spotlight?” Silva asked, as their pilot turned the nose of the helicopter toward the river. “This thing has the mother of all spotlights,” the pilot said.
His name, he’d told them, was André, and he was no spring chicken, closer to sixty than fifty. He handled his machine with the easy familiarity of someone who’d been doing it for a very long time.
“Turn it on.”
André threw a switch. He hadn’t exaggerated. The spotlight was incredibly effective at turning night into day.
“Eighty million candlepower,” he said, responding to Silva’s appreciative grunt. “Okay, we’re over water. Where to now?”
“Cross over,” Silva said, pointing toward Argentina.
It took less than a minute.
They saw a blue pickup, a boat trailer, and a light hanging in a tree, but no fugitives.
“Go back to midstream,” Silva said. “Follow the current.”

The closer they got to the lip of the precipice, the shallower the river became. Below the surface of the foaming brown water, Muniz felt and heard the limbs scraping along the bottom, their branches clawing at every rock, every irregularity, as if the tree had become a live thing desperate to arrest its plunge to final destruction.
And then, with a shudder, their forward motion stopped. The huge trunk slowly twirled into a position where it

offered the least resistance to the current. The base was now pointing directly at the Devil’s Throat, but the trunk was moving no closer.

Not so the boat. Their little vessel was driven forward until it smashed into the ball of roots. A pressure wave arose at the stern. Water spilled over the transom, the cold of it contrasting sharply with the warm sensation in Muniz’s crotch as he pissed himself

But it was the only bucket, and there was nothing for Muniz to bail with. He flashed back to what his grandmother had said, to her prediction that he’d die in a boat. Terrified, he clambered toward the bow, putting as much distance as he could between himself and the incoming flood.

It was the right thing to do. Shifting weight forward lifted the stern. They stopped shipping water.
Muniz pulled himself upright, high enough, now, to look over the tangle of roots. Ahead, and not far ahead either, he could see swirling clouds of mist.
And then he couldn’t see much at all, because he was being dazzled by a light from above.

The pilot was the first to spot the fugitives.
“There!” he said, redirecting the light.
“Just a tree,” Silva said.
“No. There, with its nose up against the roots.” André was right. A boat with two men aboard was nestled

parallel to the trunk. The figure in the bow turned, shielded his eyes, and looked upward.
“That’s him, all right,” Arnaldo said. “That’s Muniz.”
“Whoever he is,” André said, “he’s in big trouble. I’ve seen this sort of thing before, trees as big as that one, some even bigger, adrift on the river. Right now, they’re hung up on the bottom, but it won’t last long. They’ll start moving again any minute. And then. . .”
He let the searchlight speak for him, using it to illuminate the lip of a precipice not fifty meters from the boat.
“Cool,” Arnaldo said. “So that’s settled. Can you position this thing so we’ll have a good view when they go over?”
“Not funny,” André said.
“He’s not joking,” Silva said.
But André continued to take it as such. “That,” he said, pointing to a microphone hanging from a hook on the control panel, “is the megaphone. Press to talk. I’m going to hover just above them. Tell them to grab the skids on opposite sides. Stress that. Opposite sides. We don’t want both of them to cling to one side of the aircraft. I won’t be able to compensate for that.”
Silva and Arnaldo exchanged a glance.
“Let me tell you,” Silva said, “what those people down there have just done.”
“Later,” the pilot said.
“Now.”
“We haven’t got a second to lose.”
“Now.”
“Jesus Christ, why does it have to be now?”
“Because when I finish,” Silva said, “you’ll understand why we’re not going to do a damned thing to help the bastards.”

Muniz, from his perch on the bow, whipped around to look at him. “What?” he screeched in panic “
What?
”
“We just moved!”
Roque was right. They were in movement again, no doubt about it. The tip of a boulder, smoothed by the river, appeared in the water beside them and then slowly slipped away into the darkness astern. Muniz caught his breath.
Up above, the helicopter came no closer.
“What are they waiting for?” Roque said. “Why are they just hovering there like that? They gotta come now, low, so we can reach up and grab on. It’s the only way we’re gonna get out of this.”

“They both sound like right bastards,” the pilot said, when Silva finished, “but I can’t just hover here and watch two guys go over the falls.”

“If they hadn’t tried to kill us,” Silva said, “it wouldn’t be happening.”
“I understand what you’re saying, I really do. But no one deserves to die like that. Come on, grab that microphone. I think that tree just started to move.”
“You haven’t heard all of it,” Silva said taking note of the little gold cross suspended from a chain around André’s neck. “That guy in the bow? He murdered a priest.”
“A priest?”
“A priest, an old man who never did any harm to anyone. Shot him. In cold blood.”
André took a hand off the controls and crossed himself.
“And it isn’t like we’d be killing them,” Arnaldo chippedin. “The river would be doing that. All we have to do is . . . nothing.”
And nothing is what they did.

The last few seconds of Muniz’s life came in a terrifying rush. He scrambled from the bow back toward the stern, trying
to stave off the final moment for as long as possible. Roque, in contrast, abandoned himself to the inevitable. He knelt down between the seats, clasped his hands, closed his eyes and, probably for the first time in many years, began to pray.

The boat went vertical when it reached the edge. Muniz and his companion were catapulted forward and thrown clear. Separated from the hull by a meter or so, they seemed to hang in the air for a moment before they began to plummet.

André followed them with the light. Muniz’s arms were flapping, flaying the air, as if he was trying to fly, while his legs moved back and forth, as if he was trying to run. He was still at it when he vanished into the swirling cauldron of water at the foot of the cliff.

“That was awful,” André said after a moment’s silence, and Silva could see he meant it.
But later, when Arnaldo related the story to Chagas and Hector, he described the scene he’d witnessed as “one of the funniest things I ever saw”.

The newest and largest of São Paulo’s Jewish cemeteries is in São Paulo’s Butantã neighborhood, not far from the world-famous biomedical institute of that name. It was there that Danusa’s parents had been buried, and there that her uncle, Simão Marcus, arranged for her to be laid to rest.

Seventeen of her colleagues from the Federal Police attended the funeral. Nelson Sampaio, the director, confirmed his attendance—but failed to appear.

After the service, a tall man with piercing blue eyes tapped Silva on the shoulder.
“Chief Inspector? Might we have a word? In private?”
“I’d welcome it,” Silva said. He turned to Arnaldo. “Wait for me. I won’t be long.”
The tall man took Silva by an arm, as if they were old friends, and, like old friends, they began strolling between the graves.
“You seem to know who I am,” the blue-eyed man said with a frown.
“I do. Your name is Amzi Ben-Meir.”
The frown dissolved. “How, pray tell, do you know that?”
“I recognized you from your photographs.”
“You maintain a file on me?”
“We do.”
“So you already know I’m the cultural attaché at the Israeli embassy in Brasilia?”
“There’s no need to dissemble, Senhor Ben-Meir. You’re no cultural attaché.”
“No? What am I then?”
“You work for the Israeli intelligence service.”
“The Mossad? Really? Is that what you think? Should I be vexed or flattered?”
“Perhaps a little of both. I admire your department’s professionalism. I don’t like what you’re doing in my country.”
“Organizing concerts? Bringing in dance troupes?”
“Please, Senhor Ben-Meir, let’s be frank with one another. I think Danusa would have preferred it.”
The frown was back. “Why do you mention Danusa?”
“She left a message for you on the night she died.”
“What was the message?”
“She said,
tell Amzi I’m sorry
.”
“Only that?”
“Only that. At the time, your name was unfamiliar to me.”
“So you looked me up?”
“I did. And, once I had, I expected to see you here, so I waited until now to pass it on.”
“And now you have. And I thank you for it.”
Ben-Meir looked away, letting his gaze sweep across the monuments to the dead, dealing with an emotion he was finding hard to contain.
“Had she ever mentioned me before?” he said at last.
“Never.”
“She respected you a great deal,” Ben-Meir said. “She told me that.”
“It was kind of her to say so.”
“She meant it.” He stopped walking. “Danusa and I were engaged to be married.”
The catch in Ben-Meir’s throat took Silva by surprise. He took a step backward to focus on the man’s blue eyes.
“You have my heartfelt sympathy,” he said. “She was a lovely girl.”

Ben-Meir nodded. “Knowing of our relationship, of course, might cause you to question a possible conflict of interest. I mean, a Brazilian federal agent marrying an Israeli . . . cultural attaché, it wouldn’t have been acceptable to you, would it?”

“No, Senhor Ben-Meir, it would not have been acceptable.” “Brazil was the land of her birth, and the land in which her parents are buried. She loved it. She would never have acted against the interests of this country. I assure you of that.”

“Still, you can see my point.”
“Of course I can. That’s why I brought it up. She, too, was conflicted by the situation. She intended to tender her resignation upon the completion of the job in Foz do Iguaçu. I am about to be rotated back to Israel. She’d planned to accompany me.”
“Under the circumstances, I think she was making the right decision. Again, I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you. This, too, you should know: She made it clear to those of us in the . . . cultural section that, as long as she was serving with the federal police, she would do nothing in violation of Brazilian law. To my certain knowledge, she never did. She would have wanted you to know that. Given the chance, she would have told you herself.”
Silva extended a hand. “Thank you, Senhor Ben-Meir. I’m grateful you took the trouble to speak to me.”
Ben-Meir took Silva’s hand in a firm grip. “There’s something else you might like to know,” he said.
“And that is?”
Ben-Meir released him. “She spoke to me shortly before she died.”
“I’d been wondering whom she went inside to call. So it was you?”
“It was. She told me about your visit to Al-Fulan and also about that mullah in Foz do Iguaçu. She was quite convinced they were behind the two bombings, the one in Buenos Aires and the one here in São Paulo.”
“So am I, Senhor Ben-Meir, but I have no proof.”
“None at all?”
“None at all. The best I’ve been able to do is to trace the sale of the explosive to one of Al-Fulan’s henchmen, and the bomber to the mullah’s madrasa. Not enough, regrettably, to secure a conviction.”
“Thank you, I appreciate your candor.”
“I truly wish I could offer you more than candor.”
“Believe me, Chief Inspector, your candor is quite enough.” He looked at his watch. “And now,” he said, “I must take my leave. We’ll be speaking again before long.”
“Will we?”
“Yes, Chief Inspector. We will. I assure you, we will.”
With that, Amzi Ben-Meir turned on his heel and walked away between the graves.