The Burning Hill

by A. D. Flint

  The joy in that moment was every bit as intense as any fear Anjo had previously felt in his short life. He was able to just walk away, and those boys never came after him again. No one did. Over time, the boy with the cut face had grown to like his scar. It was a badge of honour, made him look like a tough guy, and he started to tell a different story about how he had got the scar. A few years later Anjo shot him. His first kill.

  Anjo had grown up telling himself that his mother’s curse was the blessing that had made him strong. He still told himself that. Sometimes he believed those words. Sometimes the fear of dying badly, dying in agony, dying alone was overwhelming. When he was unable to contain it, when it threatened to suck him into the abyss, he took cocaine. He was taking more and more these days. Only the powder though, he never did crack. That was for the customers, the addicts.

  Even in the enveloping comfort of his beanbag, sleep still would not come. He looked down at his bony chest, his heart racing and stuttering in turn with frightening palpitations. He could see his heart pulsing beneath his sweating skin, rippling the thin material of his shirt. It felt like it was about to burst. He was desperate for the oblivion of sleep, resisting the urge to do more coke to rid himself of the crushing headache and the insistent whine in his ears, piqued by the hum of the large upright fan that shuddered and ticked as it made ungainly sweeps to and fro.

  His body twitched and he noticed the weight of the gun in his hand. He almost broke into a smile, turning it over affectionately. Just a tool, easily replaced, but in his hand it was an extension of him, part of his identity. Most of his higher-ranking soldiers ran with Glocks; he went for the elegance of his Beretta.

  He lifted it and squinted down the barrel as he swept it across the room, over his snoring and fidgety soldiers, keeping pace with the fan, amusing himself. He came to a juddering halt on Franjinha, his second in command.

  He wondered.

  They had come so far and now they had reached a crossroads. Anjo was ambitious. He needed to strike out, seize more territory, break the shackles of the cops. He paid the cops to leave him alone, but now they were trying to tell him how to run his own show. And they had raided the hill without his consent. That was a step too far. He was the law here. He would bring them a war if he had to.

  And always he had Franjinha at his shoulder, the calm in a storm, always canny, weighing up the odds.

  Franjinha snorted and rolled over on the thin sofa, burrowing his head in a cushion, an arm flopping to the floor and knocking over a beer bottle. The ring of glass on the tile floor disturbed the others for a few moments, before the broken rhythm of snoring struck up again.

  Anjo’s hand began to shake with the heaviness of the Beretta. He let it drop away from Franjinha. They had been through so much together.

  And still he wondered.

  Chapter 11

  Jake

  His place was just a block back from Ipanema Beach and a couple of hundred metres from the bar where Tom Jobin had watched a beautiful girl walk by and then written a song for her that became a worldwide hit.

  Jake’s apartment was on the ground floor of an old house making up two sides of a courtyard, with another house divided into apartments on the other side. The courtyard was paved with tiny grey and white cobbles arranged in an obscure pattern, and pointy enough to make walking over them in bare feet an ordeal. It was planted with stunted trees and vines and flowers, and closed off from the road by a tall gate with ugly spikes and sheets of welded-on metal painted prison grey. It felt isolated from the busy avenue that ran parallel to the beach; calm. The apartment was small and modestly furnished, with a few cockroaches for company and scrolled wrought-iron bars on the windows, which were pretty but had a purpose.

  While trying to avoid looking too far into the future, Jake had at least decided that this little patch of the city was home. The beach was just a short stroll. There was a smoothie bar on the corner around the block where he got his granola with pulped açai fruit and guarana syrup in the morning – the breakfast of champions, according to the garrulous man behind the counter. Jake liked the smells in the little supermarket where he picked things to try out, not always sure what they were even after he’d eaten them.

  He had always fantasised about escaping to Rio. Escaping. Like an old-school bank robber. He had never taken much interest in finding things to spend his money on and he’d banked a lot of his army salary. It had given him something to fall back on in Brazil.

  The cab Jake had taken from the hospital dropped him outside his apartment and he scurried in. He was home. It felt safe back inside. But only inside. In the afternoon he had to force himself out into the harsh sunlight. He needed to snap the thick cord of choking dread. The vibrant city that had so beguiled him now seemed distorted and alien. It didn’t look right, it didn’t sound right.

  The duty doctor had been furious when he had discharged himself. With good reason. The right side of his face was a lumpy mess, scored with purplish–red scars. He was off the morphine, but the painkillers he was popping were playing havoc with his emotional state and even minor physical exertion left him drained.

  He bought a mango smoothie at his regular place and perched on one of the stools lining the front of the bar on the street corner, watching people walk by. People stared at him. Then he made a stop at the barber to get his head shaved on the other side. At least he had a proper Mohican now, close-cropped, although it wasn’t a great improvement. He put his baseball cap back on gingerly.

  He picked up his stride as he headed toward the beach, determined to shake off the timidity, trying to recalibrate.

  A gaggle of young favela kids came around a corner, walking in his direction, and his chest ratcheted to a crushing tightness around his heart and lungs. Slewing away from them, his legs folded and he slumped to the pavement, craving maximum contact with the ground. It was the same sickly vertigo that had taken hold of him as he lay bleeding into the sand that night.

  Anger was usually on hand to burn away the fear, but he couldn’t get the sparks to catch.

  Light, running footsteps came up behind him.

  “Hey, are you all right?”

  It was the lawyer.

  She was early.

  “Uh, yeah,” he said. “I’m fine. Just a dizzy spell. I get them.”

  “I think you should have stayed in hospital.”

  “You’re not the first to say that,” he said with his new, lopsided half smile.

  She helped him up and they crossed the road. The bar where they were supposed to meet was on the distinctive Ipanema pattern of the paving at the edge of the beach.

  The lawyer. Eliane. Was she part of the reason he was here? He took a moment to think. No. There was something about her that flagged a warning to him, but it was Nogueira and his own-brand justice that had lit the touchpaper. Jake wasn’t going to let him put a line through a kid’s life for the sake of neat paperwork.

  At Eliane’s insistence, he seated himself beneath a yellow Skol beer umbrella with matching plastic table and chairs. The roof of the kiosk alongside the seating area was done in the same yellow.

  “What can I get you?” she asked.

  A cascade of big green coconuts hung down the front of the kiosk. “One of those, I think.”

  The bartender retrieved two cold ones from a cool box. Hacking with a short, broad machete, he spun it expertly in his other hand between each cut until he had parted a lid. Eliane came to the table with a straw poking out of each.

  Jake ate the fresh, cold jelly coating the inside of the lid before he drank the sweet liquid inside. “Man, they don’t come like this in England,” he said, enjoying the moment.

  “You feel better?”

  “Better.”

  Out on the sand there was a set of iron parallel bars and a high bar concreted into the beach. There were a handful of bare-chested guys working out on and around them. Most were preening as much as sweating, and the vainest of them had stopped altogether.
Pulling off his shorts to reveal tight Speedos, he held his arms out and started turning slowly on the spot like a rotisserie chicken, trying to crisp his skin evenly.

  But it was another guy who really stood out in the group. He was more dedicated, lean and strong, no pumped-up gym bunny. He was an athlete.

  It was Marinho. Dips, chin-ups, hanging from the high bar and pulling up his knees to one side and then the other. Energy-sapping sprints in the soft sand.

  Padre Francisco had fixed the meeting.

  “You really think we can trust this guy?” Eliane asked.

  “I honestly don’t know. This priest thinks he’s straight up.”

  “Has anything more come back to you from the night on the beach?” Eliane asked.

  “Only enough to put my word against Nogueira’s.”

  She rubbed at her temple. “They’d play on your injury – even if we could get him to court – and question the reliability of your memory.”

  “But he completely made up my statement.”

  She shrugged. “He’ll wriggle out with lost in translation, lost paperwork, lost something.”

  “What about getting him on the lost body?”

  “They can make that another paperwork error. It would make them look stupid, but that wouldn’t bother them too much and it wouldn’t count for much.” She rubbed her temple some more and looked at him sideways. “The point is, Nogueira is covered because the city wants to keep a lid on shot tourists. The only way to make them squirm is through the media and you are the lead into that.”

  “I already said I can’t do that, not even as a sideshow.”

  “But if the media lean hard enough on the police department, Nogueira’s bosses might cut their losses and sell him out.”

  “Look, I’ve been there before. I know it will backfire, trust me.”

  “What happened?”

  “Uh. Another time, maybe.” He wasn’t going to rake over that one. He looked over at Marinho. “What about him? He told the priest he saw what happened in the back of that police truck.”

  “We can’t use him. If he is straight he’d be dead before anyone even thought about setting a trial date.” She puffed out her cheeks and put her head in her hands.

  “Are you sure you really want to do this?” he asked, managing to avoid making it sound like a challenge.

  It seemed as though she had to wrestle with a decision before she looked at him again. “I live not far from here with my parents. It’s a nice place. I’ve never lived anywhere else. Out in the world, I’m that regular middle-class young woman from a comfortable middle-class family, carving out a successful career. On the other side of the door to the apartment there’s not so much certainty.”

  She looked like she couldn’t quite get enough oxygen, that she couldn’t quite fill her lungs. The brusque lawyer veneer was falling away in front of Jake’s eyes, and it was clear that it wasn’t an easy transformation for her to make. She indicated Marinho out on the beach. “You tell him nothing of this, okay?”

  “Of course.”

  “Okay then,” she said. She gulped in some air. “I still remember the day they brought my dad home from the hospital – I was just a little kid. He was in a bad way. He had been beaten and left for dead but I didn’t know that, I was just told that he had had an accident at work. I think I knew even then that it wasn’t true. When they settled him on the sofa, he asked me to draw the blinds because the light was too harsh. You know, it feels like they were never fully opened again for him. My dad had a factory – a printing business – back then and he was attacked by some favela bad guys trying to rob the place. So.” She stopped for a moment, her guard down, and Jake could see she was searching for another memory. “My parents moved out of their bedroom at the back of the apartment so he wouldn’t have to look out onto the favela – it runs up the hill behind our block – and I swapped my bedroom for theirs. It always felt to me like the favela was almost close enough to touch. I think it maybe still does. From then on, I was the little girl staring into a different world from her bedroom window, but no one would talk to me about what happened in that world. I was never allowed to ask my father, and with my mother – well, she just always changed the subject until in the end I gave up asking.”

  She sighed and shook her head before continuing. “My dad was overjoyed when I told him I was going to study law. He assumed I would become a prosecutor. He didn’t speak to me for weeks when I told him I wanted to work on the defence side.”

  She told Jake that in the end she had opted for corporate law as an unhappy compromise. She had a duty. The once-successful printing business for which her father had nearly sacrificed his life to protect had drifted off course and eventually folded. Her father rarely left the apartment and had never worked again. There was very little money left after paying for her law degree and she was now the family breadwinner. “Getting involved in this is not good for my career,” she said. “My company likes its lawyers to be invisible. And what is not good for my career is not good for my family. And the last thing I can do is tell my family what I’m doing.” The steel came back into her eyes as she looked directly at Jake. “So to answer your question, no, I’m not sure I want to do this, but it’s something I have to do. Even if I am totally unqualified to go up against this police captain, even if I am totally out of my depth.”

  Jake said nothing. And he was glad that he had kept quiet about his experience back in England. It wouldn’t have made her feel any better. He watched as Marinho finished his circuit, cooling his head beneath a communal showerhead by the workout area. He soaked a small towel and put it over his shoulders. Walking past without acknowledging them, he bought a bottle of water at the bar and came back to sit at an adjacent table. Side on to them, he leaned forward, head dropping down. Sweat and water dripped from him. He rolled the ice-cold bottle around his neck and then took a drink. “The boss of the favela, Anjo, is throwing one of his big parties tomorrow night,” he said, staring out at the ocean. “It will be a distraction, and it’s the only chance I’ve got to pull this kid, Vilson, out. They are due to kill him the day after.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better for the priest to get him out?” Jake asked. He still wasn’t convinced about this young cop. With Marinho hunched over and Jake only able to see the side of his face, it was hard to read anything from him.

  “Throwing these parties is part of Anjo’s Godfather thing, you know. He likes to think he’s old school. He hands out sweets to kids and sometimes he even pays hospital bills for sick folks. But he’ll kill anyone he even suspects of crossing him. Priests included. Padre Francisco will be the prime suspect so he has to be somewhere public tomorrow night. He has to have an alibi.”

  “Then I’ll come,” said Jake. “I can help.”

  “Are you out of your mind?” Marinho said it with feeling but kept still. “You can barely put one foot in front of the other. No way.” Although his head was down as if he were staring at the ground, he was looking out the corner of his eye in Jake’s direction. He seemed determined to keep up the pretence of not knowing them if observed from afar.

  Jake drew breath, ready to kick off. But Eliane touched the back of his hand, giving the slightest shake of her head. This wasn’t the moment.

  “You understand it’s difficult for us to trust you given who you work for?” she asked Marinho.

  “You don’t know the half of it with my boss,” said Marinho, turning his head to look at her for the first time. “But I am not my boss. Call this a penance, if you like. I have one condition though.”

  “Which is?” she asked.

  “You stop coming after him.”

  “He murdered a boy.”

  “That happens every day in this town. Saving the other one is a win – why not just take that?”

  “I can’t.”

  “But you’re not even the right kind of lawyer for this, are you?” Marinho said.

  “Why would you protect him?” she asked.

&nbs
p; “That’s not what I’m doing. I just know it’s a fight you don’t want to have. Not unless your family is powerful.”

  Eliane glanced at Jake before looking away.

  Jake could see that Marinho had his confirmation from her lack of response. “Then what world are you living in?” Marinho said. “Even if you do take my boss down there’ll be another guy just like him to take his place, or maybe one even worse. There always is.”

  “And hopefully there’ll be another disillusioned corporate lawyer to take him down too, maybe even a proper lawyer.”

  “Leave my boss alone. I’m warning you,” said Marinho. “Otherwise I can’t be held responsible for what will happen.”

  “I can’t do that.” She was calm but said it firmly.

  Marinho looked down at the ground between his knees, head in his hands. “Goddamn,” he said. “If you only knew what you’re getting yourself into, I swear you’d be running as fast as you could in the opposite direction.”

  He stood and walked away without another word.

  Live with something on your conscience or risk not living at all. It struck Jake that most guys in Marinho’s position would be sorely tempted to go into the favela, grab the kid and turn him in. Get a pat on the head from the boss and put all this crap in a drawer.