She shrugged. “It doesn’t make any difference. He has them. I thought they’d all been destroyed a long time ago, but he has them...”
“The man you wrote them to?”
“No, not him.”
“Who was the man you wrote them to?”
“It’s not important. He’s dead.”
“Then—”
“It was my brother-in-law,” she said suddenly. “I thought I was in love with him. I wrote letters. He’s dead, but my sister isn’t. The letters would hurt her, still. More, probably, now that Nilton is dead; it would scar her memories.”
“And who has these letters?”
“Him. The man on the telephone; he has them. I don’t know who he is. He called me that first time and said he had the letters, and he read some of them back to me to prove it, and he said I could get them back if I just did him a favor.” Her voice became bitter. “A little favor, he called it. He treated the whole thing lightly, as if it was just a joke. I asked him what he wanted and he said I was supposed to take this job as a manicurist in this barbershop; he said it would only be for a short time — a week at the most — and he said this man would come in and I was supposed to try and get him to pick me up. He said it wouldn’t be hard...”
Silence fell again. “I imagine a lot of men tried to pick you up,” Da Silva said, more to fill the gap than for any other reason, and felt a touch of unreasoning jealousy at the thought. The brother-in-law at least was dead, but the others were alive. Her hand found his again and pressed it tightly, as if reading his mind and understanding.
“They did,” she said, “but this one had been described to me on the telephone, and his name was Valadares, and the barber, Armando, called him that. It all worked out just the way the man on the telephone said it would. He said if I did exactly what he told me to do, the man would go to Paraíso with me...” She twisted her head in the darkness to look at him. “The same as you were supposed to do.”
“Why did he want the man to go to Paraíso?”
“He — the man on the telephone — said it was to pay Valadares back for something. He said Valadares was a criminal and deserved what he got, but he was laughing when he said it...”
“And what happened?”
“We went up there on the late plane. I was supposed to take this Valadares out on an old road near the lake there, a sort of lover’s lane. To make sure I’d know the place he told me to go up there a week before and take a taxi and ask for the lover’s lane near the lake; I was supposed to keep my eyes open and remember the way. It wasn’t hard; but I thought it was certainly a lot of trouble to go to just for a joke.”
It certainly was, Da Silva thought. “And?”
“I was supposed to go there with him and I was supposed to let him think I wanted him to make love to me, and then when he thought I was ready to give in to him, I was supposed to get out of the car. He said there would be another car out of sight off the road that would take me back to the Airport Hotel; he said there would be a reservation there for me and I could catch the first plane back in the morning. He sent me the tickets in the mail.” Her fingers closed on his convulsively. “But when I got out of the car, there were two men there and they — shot him...” She closed her eyes a moment and then opened them, as if the sight of Valadares dying lay behind the closed lids. Then she added, almost as an aside, “I found the letters in my mailbox when I got back. But he made Xerox copies and he still has them...”
Da Silva frowned. “Did you believe the man when he gave you that story?”
“You mean about the letters? I had no choice.”
“I mean about playing a joke on this Valadares?”
Isabela shrugged. “I don’t know. I suppose I really didn’t, but I didn’t want to think about anything except getting the letters back. I didn’t think they’d kill him.” Her face started to crumple; she brought herself under control with an effort. She went on, as if the telling might be a catharsis to the memory she had lived with since that terrible night. “They shot him. They brought him out and gave him one minute to say his prayers, and this one man kept watching his wrist watch, counting the seconds, and then they shot him. And then they shot him again...” She turned to Da Silva impulsively. “That’s what they wanted to do to you.”
Da Silva stared down at her, thinking. “How did they know you’d be there, and when?”
“I called a number they gave me from the Miracopa before we left and told them the flight we were taking.”
“I see.” Da Silva frowned. Whoever was running the show was certainly going to a lot of trouble and unnecessary complicated maneuvers to kill his victims. For the first time, his faith in his death squad theory began to waver; even a national organization devoted to killing criminals would scarcely invent a charade of this nature to get a man to a certain town just to kill him; it was easy enough to kill a man in any city or town in the country without all this senseless complexity. Still, if it wasn’t a death squad, what was it? What else made sense?
“Isabela,” he said, “do you know — or did you know — a man named Torres? Manuel Torres? Or Valdir Limeira? Or Leopoldo Bethencourt? Or George Chaney?”
“No. Why?”
“Nothing,” Da Silva said, and went back to considering what the girl had told him. He tried to fit Isabela’s experience into a pattern that made sense, but the story was more or less what they had already assumed. Each person was brought to Paraíso by a different means, although Isabela had been used in two. He knew, at least, her motivation for leading Valadares to Paraíso, and he knew Wilson’s story of what had brought Chaney there; what was still damnably missing was the motivation of the man who had sent Isabela.
“One question,” he said suddenly. “Why Paraíso? Why did your man on the telephone want Valadares brought there? Did he say?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I asked him that question once and he just said ‘Why not Paraíso?’” The import of their discussion returned to her; her voice became almost frantic. “Where will you go? Where he won’t be able to find you.”
“Go?” Da Silva stared down at her. For a moment he had forgotten he was José Maria Carvalho, Criminal Stealer from Docks. “What would happen to you if we don’t appear in Paraíso on schedule?”
She stared at him. “I don’t care.”
“What about the letters? Or your sister?”
“I don’t care. They’re not important any more.”
He smiled at her. “They’re still important, but thanks for the sentiment.” He dropped back onto his pillow, thinking. The proper procedure would be to contact Ruy or Perreira — or even the Minister — and arrange sufficient men to surround that lover’s lane. Except that one slip and their quarry would be long gone. No; the best way was the simplest way, to do it alone. He turned to face the girl. “I know we have all day tomorrow to have fun, but we still ought to get some rest. I have to build up my courage for that flight tomorrow night, remember.”
She returned his look, a slightly puzzled frown on her face. “What flight tomorrow night?”
“To Paraíso, of course. I don’t like nasty people blackmailing my friends. Not to mention trying to kill me.”
She sat erect in bed, the sheet sliding from her body revealingly. “Zé! You’re not going to Paraíso. They will kill you, you know!”
“My sweet Isabela,” Da Silva said patiently. “People keep trying to kill me constantly. It’s a normal hazard of my trade. And usually,” he added, thinking about it, “I’m not forewarned. It’s a lot easier to kill a man who walks into a trap unsuspectingly, than it is a man who’s expecting somebody to try.” He leaned over and kissed her. “Now, go to sleep.”