The Ways of Evil Men

by Leighton Gage

The Awana tribe, who live in the remote Amazon jungle in the Brazilian state of Pará, have dwindled to only 41 members—and now 39 of them have dropped dead of what looks like poison. The neighboring white townsfolk don’t seem to be mourning the genocide much—in fact, the only person who seems to care at all is Jade Calmon, the official tribal relations agent assigned to the area. She wants justice for the two survivors, a father and his 8-year-old son. But racism is deeply entrenched and no one is going to help her get to the truth.

Unfortunately, this is far from the first time the Brazilian federal police have had a tribal genocide to investigate. Chief Inspector Mario Silva and his team are sent in from Brasilia to try to solve the increasingly complex case just as a local white man is discovered murdered. Someone has done their best to frame the surviving Awana man, and the town is about to erupt.

“A final gift from Leighton to his readers… His voice, his portrayal of vital fictional characters and stories, his outrage at injustices in Brazil and beyond, and his lively participation in the on-line crime fiction community will remain as his testament.”
—Glenn Harper, International Noir Fiction

“The late Gage (1942–2013) weaves an engaging plot and psychologically complex characters together with a sharp-edged social commentary on the Brazilian class system; his voice will be greatly missed in the crime fiction community.”
—Publishers Weekly, STARRED Review

No one writes the cold glint of evil in bright sunlight the way Leighton Gage does. And there’s enough evil here—and heroism, too—for three lesser books.”
—Timothy Hallinan, author of Crashed

Read an Excerpt

Jade Calmon parked her jeep, uncapped her canteen, and took a mouthful of water. It tasted metallic and was far too warm, but she swallowed it anyway. One did not drink for pleasure in the rainforest. One drank for survival. Constant hydration was a necessity.

The perspiration drenching Jade’s skin had washed away a good deal of her insect repellent. She dried her face and forearms and smeared on more of the oily and foul-smelling fluid. Then she returned the little flask to the pocket of her bush shirt, hung the wet towel over the seat to dry, and retrieved her knapsack. Inside were her PLB and GPS, both cushioned to protect them from the jogs and jolts of the journey.

The PLB, or personal locator beacon, was a transmitter that sent out a signal that could be picked up by satellites and aircraft, and homed-in upon by search teams.

“You call us before you go into the jungle,” her boss had told her when he’d given it to her. “Then you call again when you come out. It’s like making a flight plan. If you get into trouble, push the button. Then sit tight and wait to be rescued.”

Sit tight? In the middle of the biggest rainforest in the world? Easy to say. Not so easy to do.

She glanced back at the road.

How ironic, she thought. The damned loggers who scarred the land with their bulldozers actually did the tribespeople some good.Without that road, she would have had to cut her way through sixty-two kilometers of dense undergrowth to reach this spot. Even though the rains had turned much of it to mud and even though new vegetation was quickly erasing the scars of the white men’s predations, she could still cover the entire distance from Azevedo to this, the end point, in a little less than two hours.

And, because of that, and that alone, she was able to look in on the tribe twice a month instead of six times a year.

She clipped the PLB to the belt of her khaki shorts, switched on the GPS, and punched in the coordinates of the village. Then she hoisted her knapsack to her shoulders and set off.

Someone or something stepped on a twig. It broke with a loud snap.

A tapir or a man, Amati thought. Nothing else could have done it. He grabbed his bow.

“Stay close,” he said to his son.

The arrow he chose was tipped with poison. If it was a tapir, he’d kill it for the meat. If a white man . . . well, let it not be a white man. Not after what those monsters had done.

But the figure that emerged from the forest was neither tapir nor man. It was a woman, one he knew, but white just the same. And she was coming toward him with a smile on her face.

A smile!

Consumed with a towering anger, Amati lowered the bow. Why should he waste poison on a creature such as this? Poison was precious, time-consuming to extract. He’d kill her with his knife.

Perplexed, Jade came to a stop. She’d been expecting to find dozens of people. Instead, there were only two: Amati and Raoni, and both were staring at her in the strangest sort of way.

It was true that Amati had always been a bit distant, and Raoni a bit shy, but now their body language and grim faces were making an entirely different impression. Hatred.

If she could have spoken to them she might have been able to defuse it, but speaking was a problem. Raoni’s grandmother, Yara, was the only person in the entire village with whom Jade could actually converse.

Yara hadn’t been born of the tribe. Her native language was a dialect of Tupi, a tongue Jade already spoke, but the language of the Awana was unique. Since the tribe was small and recently contacted, no one else in Jade’s organization had ever attempted to master it. Not before Jade. Not until now.

She’d been learning with Yara’s help. The two women had been working together on a Tupi/Awana dictionary, one that Jade intended to turn into a Portuguese/Awana dictionary as soon as she completed it. But the work was in the early stages, and Jade’s entire vocabulary, at the moment, numbered less than two hundred words.

She remembered advice she’d once received from an expert on the tribes: “When words fail, offer a present. It’s the Indian way.”

The gifts she’d brought, a little concave mirror about nine centimeters across, the strings of beads, and a little aluminum pot, were all in her backpack. But this was no time to go looking for them.

Get closer, she thought. Smile. Give the child your knife. So she did just that, walked toward them, smiled through her fear, and started unbuckling her belt. The muscles in Amati’s arms and legs went taut. She freed the leather scabbard suspended next to her PLB, taking care not to put a hand to the hilt.

The Indian had no such compunction. Slitting his eyes, he bared the steel of his weapon.

She stopped in front of the boy, knelt down and made the offer. Solemnly, he accepted it. In her peripheral vision she could see Amati’s hand lowering his knife. She turned her head and looked up at him, still smiling. He didn’t return the smile, but he was no longer scowling. He waited for her to speak.

But of course, she couldn’t. Silently, she cursed Carlo Castori. Castori was the parish priest back in Azevedo. Once a missionary, he claimed to have lived among the Awana for more than a year. He’d told her he’d attained fluency in their language, but denied ever having made a dictionary—a claim she found difficult to believe. Who tries to learn a language without making a dictionary?

But, true or not, the man had never been of any help to her, and she’d given up trying to extract anything useful from him. Sign language had become her only option—and she was getting rather good at it. She began by pointing around her and simulating a mystified expression, as if to say, What happened?

Amati grabbed her wrist. His grip was strong, and it frightened her. She gave a little whimper and stood her ground. Exasperated, he released her, pointed, and took her wrist again, this time more gently. She realized then that he was trying to lead her somewhere, and she went.

With Raoni trailing behind, they passed through the heart of the village, exited the other side, and arrived in a glade occupied by mound after mound of loosely-packed soil. At the head of one of the mounds, the trunk of a sacred Kam´ywá tree had been embedded into the red earth. Kuarups, the Indians called them. They personified the spirits of the dead.

Jade’s mouth opened in surprise. Then she closed it and began to count. The mounds totaled thirty-nine, and they were divided into three neat rows of thirteen each. At last count, there had been forty-one members of the tribe. Two, the man and the boy, were standing next to her.

“All Awana,” he said. And then, in case she failed to understand, added the word “Dead.”

“How?”

“Men kill.”

More words exploded from his mouth, angry words, but Jade was unable to understand a single one. While he spoke, she tried to piece together what might have happened. There hadn’t been a war among the tribes in this part of Pará in living memory. It could have been disease, of course, but what kind of disease could have killed so many so quickly? And, if disease had been the cause, how was it possible that neither the man nor the boy were showing signs of sickness?

A horrible suspicion came over her.

“Rainforest men?” she asked.

“No rainforest men,” he said shaking his head emphatically.

“White men.” He stabbed a finger into her breastbone and repeated it. “White men.”

“When?”

He pointed to the sun and held up seven fingers. A week ago. If he and his son had been doing the burying themselves, they must have been digging graves and cutting kuarups ever since.

“You come,” she said. “I help. We talk. Hurt bad men.”

“Come where?” he asked. “Talk how? Hurt how?”

“Come,” she said and then pointed to her chest and made a pillow with her hands as if she was going to sleep. She hoped he understood what she was trying to tell him. She wanted to take him to the place where she slept, to her home, to the little city of Azevedo. She pointed at him, then back at herself. “Talk. Father Carlo Castori help.”

He gave a contemptuous snort, said something she couldn’t understand, and made a sign as if he were drinking. Yes, he knows who I’m talking about. Castori is a drunk. She made a beckoning gesture. He seemed to think it over.

At last he nodded. Then he said, “How long?” She pointed to the sun and held up one finger. Again, he nodded. “I come. Not Raoni. Your place bad for Raoni.”

She couldn’t argue. Considering the contempt in which the townsfolk held the people of the rainforest Azevedo was a bad place for him.

But how will he cope if we leave him for twenty-four hours on his own?

She concluded he’d cope well. Indian boys grew up fast.

“Good,” she said. “You come. Boy stay.”

Leighton Gage (1942-2013) wrote six other books in the Mario Silva series: Blood of the Wicked, Buried Strangers, Dying Gasp, Every Bitter Thing, A Vine in the Blood, and Perfect Hatred. Since 1973, he spent part of each year in Santana do Parnaiba, Brazil, where he met his wife, Eide. His books have been translated into French, Italian, Finnish, and Dutch.

Published January 2014
ISBN: 9781616952723
Order Here

© Soho Press, Inc.
853 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
www.sohopress.com