Incident in a Nowhere Place (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine May 2002

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Incident in a Nowhere Place (Cont.)

THE PRATICAGEM IS A WOODEN SHACK at the edge of the Amazon where river pilots wait for vessels going upriver. In front of the shack a long wooden pier extends far out from shore, far enough beyond the mudflats at low tide to float the pilot launch in deepwater at its end.

In early January, when I came to Macapá to look into Blake's murder, two of the first people I met were Ozimael Mendes and José Mamede, who both work at the praticagem, handling the lines of boats, maintaining the shack, and watching traffic on the river. Through a translator, they told me they'd both been on night duty on December 5, and that they heard the gunfire.

"Pop-pop-pop!" said Mendes, with great animation. A man in his thirties, wearing only shorts, he was sitting in the shade of a great tree at the base of the pier. He stood as he spoke and spread his finger and thumb in the air like a pistol. "Four shots, very fast," he said.

"That's three shots," I said.

Mendes corrected himself. "Pop-pop-pop-pop!" "All the same sound? Or were the shots different?"

"Different. One series of shots from the thieves' pistol, and the other from Peter's rifle. Pop-pop-pop-boom!"

Mendes described how paramedics from the fire department came to the pier about 20 minutes later, and he took them out to Seamaster in a small motorboat. When they got there, Blake was near death. There was nothing they could do.

"You saw Blake alive?" I asked Mendes.

"Yes, he was alive," he said. "He was lying on his back, crying out in despair." Mendes said he couldn't understand what Blake was saying, and blood was everywhere. He leaned back and moaned, demonstrating.

"What time was this?" I asked.

Mendes said he heard the shooting at 8:30 p.m. and reached the boat with the paramedics about 20 or 30 minutes later.

Mendes excused himself for a moment and went into the praticagem shack. He came out holding a page ripped from one of Seamaster's logbooks, showing the assigned hours the crew had stood watch one night. It was speckled with blood.

"Peter's blood," said Mendes, pointing.

I asked where he'd gotten it. It was in the trash brought ashore from the yacht the next day, he said. How could he possibly know the blood wasn't someone else's, I asked. Mendes shook his head. No. He was sure it was Peter's blood.

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