Otto Penzler - The Best American Crime Writing 2003

Peter Blake lay at the foot of the stairs, bleeding from twin holes in his back. The boat was quieter now, and the movement of water was audible. At its mouth, the Amazon is tidal, and the river was now flowing backward, raising the Seamaster five feet an hour. Sefton found Blake with his head cocked awkwardly to the side. He straightened it and watched as Blake took a few labored breaths. One bullet had traveled through his left lung and superior vena cava and come to rest just under the skin of his armpit; the other had pierced his lungs and aorta, and remained in his upper right chest. Either one would have been enough to kill him, says Dr. Carlos Marcos Santos, who arrived on the Seamaster at 10:40 and tried to resuscitate him. He estimates that it took Blake about fifteen minutes to die. He says that Blake had alcohol on his breath (though the crew says he wasn’t drinking on the boat), and that the others seemed very drunk-unsteady on their feet, bleary-eyed, slurring.

“When I got there, Mr. Blake was faceup, below deck,” Dr. Marco says. “He was wearing shorts, either blue or khaki, I can’t remember. And no shirt. You could tell he had a great deal of strength for a man his age. But he was out of shape. He had a prominent belly. His face had seen the sun, you could tell that. There were many deep, permanent lines around the eyes.”

At near 11:00 P.M., Marcos pronounced Blake dead. As they were taking the body off the boat, Rizaldo, the cook, said to the doctor, “These guys have no idea what they have done. He is a national hero, like Pelé is to this country. Everybody loves him. They have no idea what they’ve done.”

The news of Blake’s death reached the rest of the world in the morning. In England, where Blake had been knighted for his accomplishments, The Daily Telegraph wrote that “Blake towered over the sport” of sailing. In New Zealand, Parliament was canceled for the day and the government flew at half-staff a pair of red socks-Blake had worn red socks nearly every time he raced. The prime minister, Helen Clark, speaking at a memorial two weeks later, said, “He put New Zealand on the map.”

I asked Robertson if he had any regrets about the way things happened that night in Macapá. “No. There’s no way any of us can replay the scenario and say, Well, we were responsible, or, We could have done more. Or could’ve done less. I’m sure people must have horrible experiences when somebody dies and the last thing they remember is that they had an argument. But we were having such a good time.”

One well-known character in the yachting world, who didn’t want his name used, says, “Blake was a tough guy. A very tough guy. The kind who wouldn’t have handed over his wallet without a fight. Hearing the circumstances, it wasn’t surprising. Like a lot of Kiwis, he didn’t take a lot of crap. It was part of his skill as a leader, but it was also part of his downfall.”

A week after the murder, when all six suspects have been arrested, Marcelo, the translator, takes me driving through the neighborhoods where they grew up. They are suburbs that have evolved organically, small wooden houses with which the electric/water/civil-service grid is struggling to keep up. The men are mostly in flip-flops and soccer shorts. But the women wear very stylish and sexy clothes. One girl looks particularly elegant, sitting sidesaddle on the back of a bike in a sheer black skirt, black shirt, and black stilettos, heading down a dirt road under the waning equatorial sun.

Another thing you notice is the kites. Big red kites and little black kites and even those cheap plastic bags dispensed at every shop the world over. Telephone wires holding the skeletons of old kites, frozen in their death like inmates zapped while trying to climb the electric fence. Maybe it’s just that the conditions are perfect: It’s always sunny, warm, and windy, and there are always plenty of little kids and plastic bags to go around.

José, one of the two so-called pirates who didn’t have a record, lived in one of the better neighborhoods. His parents’ house is just a few blocks from his, and they’ve agreed to be interviewed because they don’t want people to think José is a hardened criminal.

We sit on the concrete patio in front of their house. There’s a little plastic Christmas tree on a table in the corner, and the family Volkswagen has been pulled up onto the patio, blocking the front door. José’s parents, a teacher and a retired government worker, sit on metal rocking chairs. His wife, Milene, leans against the car, holding their two daughters, Isadora, one, and Isabela, five, who has drawn a rainbow tattoo on her forearm. Across the street, some neighbors are building a brick wall around their house because someone keeps stealing the light fixtures on their porch. José’s mother says she will not discuss anything about the case, because she is afraid of saying the wrong thing, but that she’d like to talk about José as a regular person.

“He treasured the motorbike his father gave him,” his mother says. “And his collection of Conan the Barbarian comic books.” Isabela runs inside and returns with a Conan the Barbarian comic book written in Portuguese. “No one was allowed to touch them,” his mother goes on. “And he had over a hundred magazines.” On the cover of the comic book, Conan is swinging onto the deck of a ship with a sword between his teeth.

José, Ricardo, and Reney were arrested on December 6 after they were given up by Isael, who was the first to be picked up, since he was walking around with two stumps where fingers should have been and was easy to identify. They found Josué and Rubens the following day, hiding out at a house in the jungle. At Ricardo’s mother’s home, in the ceiling, they found a Canon camera, an Omega Seamaster watch, a pistol with a fitting for a silencer, a.38 revolver, a bulletproof vest, and, as the police report indicates, thirty-seven “foreign music” CDs. José was arrested while having sex with his wife, dragged naked out into the street, and beaten in front of the neighbors. They discovered another of the watches at his home, where he’d shoved it inside a little red teddy bear in Isadora’s room.

The first four, as well as three others who were eventually released, were arrested by the local police before being turned over to the federal authorities. While still in local-police custody, these four were beaten in the presence of one of their lawyers (though the police denied this). Later, in a cell, José claims, the officers played a game called telephone, which involved smacking both his ears simultaneously. A man named Jânio, a suspect who was later released, says that they put a bag over his head until he almost passed out, and then took it off. “And when we were in the car, the policeman, he put a bullet in the gun and spun it,” Jânio says, “then pulled the trigger right in front of my face. I could see the bullet, that it wasn’t yet in the chamber, but I was still scared. They were saying, The president of Brazil told us he doesn’t care if you’re alive or dead. He said, “Do whatever you want to them.”

“I shit my pants.”

In the few hours after they were arrested, the pirates came to realize that they’d been involved in an event of completely different proportions from what they’d thought. They left the boat having robbed and murdered a tourist, an anonymous victim, but they soon discovered they’d killed a person who might inspire large-scale consequences. And realizing this was, they all say, pretty bewildering.

“If this had been some regular guy,” one of their lawyers says, “they wouldn’t have even made arrests at this point.”

The Amapá State Prison is on the outskirts of town. It’s not a hulking, high-tech campus, like American prisons are. There are no monolithic sliding gates or remote locks or video cameras. It’s just a few single-story buildings separated from the highway by a series of concrete walls. Between the buildings are a couple of bald fields where prisoners play soccer.