by A. D. Flint
Maybe something else would change. Maybe Vilson’s mother would have a change of heart when she saw him. Could be, that with Jake’s low expectations of people, he had misjudged her. Whatever was happening out on that farm with the zombie workers and his mother, Vilson needed to find out for himself. The way Jake saw it, he was the only one who could get him there in any kind of a hurry.
The sun was setting by the time they reached the larger roads and signs for areas of the city that Jake recognised. Pavements were few and far between, and a lot of the time they were stumbling along scrubby banks, trying not to fall into the traffic that was screaming past.
“Hey, I need to stop for a bit,” he shouted ahead to Vilson when they reached a major junction. The straps of his flip-flops had rubbed his skin raw. He was dehydrated and even the green sludge in the storm drains was starting to look tempting.
Vilson didn’t break stride.
“Ipanema’s the other way,” he shouted. The traffic was noisy but not that noisy. “You shit.”
He loped painfully up to Vilson, catching him by the shoulder. “I know you heard me. You’re heading in the wrong direction.”
Vilson slapped his hand away. “I’m going to the bus station.”
“Look, unless you’ve got money for a bus ticket, you’re stuck with me for now, so we might as well do it the right way. We go back to my place, get something to eat, get some money and then we can go to the bus station.”
Vilson stared at the pavement, weighing it up, and then set off in the direction of Ipanema without a word.
*
It was evening when they finally reached a section of street that Jake recognised as home. He could see the grey metal gate to his apartment. He picked up the pace to draw level with Vilson.
A few metres down from the apartment there was a car pulled up by one of the trees lining the kerb. Its headlights flashed. Vilson didn’t seem to notice. Jake was trying not to notice.
The headlights flashed again.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Jake said to himself. He couldn’t do any more of this gangster crap today. They’d just have to shoot him and he’d deal with it in the morning.
The driver’s door opened. It was Eliane.
“Thank Christ for that,” Jake mumbled.
He could see that it wasn’t just the unhealthy pallor of the street lights that was making her look drained. Her eyes were puffy, dark circles beneath them.
“Get in,” she said.
“I really need to rest – come into the apartment.”
“You haven’t got one any more. Your landlady dumped your stuff outside in a plastic sack. She’s thrown you out.”
“She can’t do that.”
“Nogueira must have told her she could,” she said.
Jake sighed, beaten. “Man, he’s been busy today.”
“Yeah, tell me about it,” she said bitterly. “He’s been stirring things up with my boss – there’s a good chance I’m going to lose my job over this. And to top it all, he paid a visit to my dad this morning. My parents are furious with me.”
Eliane had rescued his bin-liner of belongings and put them in her boot. There were some clothes in it and his cards and cash were still in his wallet. But his mobile and passport were gone. Going back to England wasn’t an option now, even if he’d wanted to.
Eliane pointed Vilson to the passenger seat and then handed out bottles of water. Jake drained his. It was the first good thing that day. And he was so grateful for the comfort of the pokey back seat of her VW Polo that it didn’t even occur to him to ask where they were going.
He nodded off with the warm night breeze blowing through the window, only coming to when she pulled up and tooted the horn. They were in some low-rise residential area he didn’t recognise.
“Where are we?” Jake asked, peering across the dimly lit street.
“Jardim Botânico,” she answered.
The door on the other side of the car opened and Marinho got in. He was wearing running gear. “Go,” he told Eliane.
Vilson spun around in the passenger seat as the car pulled away. Back pressed up to the dashboard, like a frightened animal.
Jake shot out his hand to grab Marinho’s throat.
“Calm down,” Marinho gasped, his hands raised, placating, but ready to defend himself.
“Calm down? You’re joking, right?”
“Shut up, Jake,” Eliane said. “Let him speak.”
Jake released his grip but kept his hand on Marinho’s throat. “You don’t know where he was a few hours ago.”
“Yes I do,” she said.
“I bet he didn’t tell you he was about a second away from beating us to death with a pick handle.”
“And you’d have been the glorious hero, right?” Marinho asked. “Three dead idiots in the forest instead of two. Sound better to you?”
“I wouldn’t have sold someone out, that’s for sure,” Jake said.
“You think I told Nogueira about you going to Cruzeiro? No, gringo, you made that happen all by yourself. The cops who arrested you out there called him up.”
That shut Jake up. He took his hand away from Marinho’s throat. He felt like the token twat in the car now. And he resented it, given the company.
Marinho handed him a cheap mobile phone. “There’s a number on here for Eliane and one for me,” he showed Jake the screen, “but not with our names obviously. Don’t make calls to anyone else on it and don’t pick up calls from anyone else. Understand?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
“You can drop me off just up here,” Marinho said to Eliane, pointing ahead. “I can run home.”
“And then to the bus station,” Vilson instructed.
“You can’t go anywhere near the bus station,” Marinho said. “Nogueira has cops staked out there.”
“Meu Deus,” Vilson murmured, head dropping, “what do I have to do?”
Eliane pulled the car over. “I’ll drive you to Cruzeiro,” she said.
“Now?” asked Vilson.
She nodded.
“Why not start out tomorrow?” Jake asked. “You look done in.”
“It has to be this weekend. I’ve made arrangements, and I must be back here on Monday,” she replied. It was Friday night.
Marinho got out, limbering up as he walked away.
“Hold on, I just remembered something,” Jake said. He needed to speak with Marinho alone.
Getting out of the car, he caught up. “Back up in the hills this afternoon, I was so pissed off that I was going to tell Vilson that it was you who shot his friend. I’m glad I didn’t. He still has no idea and it has to stay that way.”
“It will until Nogueira needs to play that card.”
Chapter 28
Vilson
At one of the coffee stops Vilson swapped with the gringo, taking the back seat.
He lay down, resting his head on his arm, pretending to sleep every time the gringo turned round to check on him.
The gringo read out the road signs and kept switching on the reading light to check the map. If he was trying to get onside with the lawyer, it wasn’t working.
When he was very small, before his mother had left, Vilson had a neighbour in the favela, a little girl. He had a memory of her walking around with a rag doll trailing from her hand. She was never without it. And then something terrible had happened to her family. Vilson’s mother wouldn’t say exactly what. And then more stuff happened. Everyone knew that it was more than just bad luck, and the family had gone to the old women in the favela who knew about these things. The women arranged one of their evenings for the family, dressing in their flowing white clothes, lighting their candles, burning their incense. They sang and they danced and they shook as they went into trances and spoke with the spirit world. They were told that the doll held a curse. They took it from the little girl and burned it.
Vilson’s mother had told him that the little girl had wailed and cried for her doll. He rememb
ered seeing her around the favela afterwards, always with a sullen look on her face. But things got better for her family. The curse had gone.
Something bad had latched onto that little girl’s doll, and there was something with the gringo that was bad. And he probably didn’t even know it. How fate had become so knotted up that he had become the key to finding his mother, Vilson couldn’t figure. But once he was back with his mother they could free themselves of the gringo and all the bad stuff wrapped up in him. Vilson didn’t know if that still meant killing him. He tried not to think about it.
Chapter 29
Jake
There were orange flashes behind his eyes and he could feel his breath getting rapid and panicky. One of the flashes picked out a silhouette. A faceless man. He didn’t see it, but Jake knew he had a gun. Another flash and a crack and he flinched.
The car jerked and his head slipped from the windowsill, waking him. Dropping off the jagged edge of the tarmac, the nearside wheels rumbled and shuddered on the gritty surface of the verge. What was she playing at?
He looked over at Eliane. Her head was lolling forward. Her eyes closed.
“Whoa,” he called out, making a grab for the wheel.
She gasped, head snapping up.
She pulled on the wheel, the car swerving back into the lip of the tarmac. The tyres bumped and rubbed against it before jumping back onto the relative smoothness of the road.
“Goddamn,” she said. “Goddamn it.”
“I meant to stay awake with you to stop that happening.”
She shrugged her shoulders and shook her head.
“Look,” he continued, “why don’t you let me drive for a bit so you can get some sleep?”
“You can’t drive this car,” she said.
“I don’t think you’re up to it either right now.”
But she was wide awake, stoked with adrenaline. She drove on into the dead hours before dawn, the road empty. Jake stared out into the darkness. The state of Goiás and the capital, Brasilia, were out there somewhere to the north-west of them, out in the vastness, halfway between the coast and Bolivia. And then she started rubbing her eyes, drinking water, shaking her head. The tiredness wrapping her up once again.
“Is there no way you can convince your dad that you’re doing the right thing?” Jake asked her. He wanted to get her talking, distract her from the inner battle to stay awake that she was losing.
She was immediately more alert, shaking her head. “No. And if you came to our apartment you would see that it’s stuck in time. Still the same things in it that I grew up with. My dad is still in that place. The fancy cars have gone now, though – he used to drive this big old BMW and I used to love going on trips with him to the factory.”
She described the smell of the leather, the air-con that made it cool to the touch. Her father’s successful printing business was a vibrant, noisy place, the workers nodding in respect when they saw her father, and smiling at Eliane. She loved the clatter of the machinery and the giant blocks of paper, moved around by the forklift trucks. And another smell. Hot ink on paper.
When Eliane was at home she used to watch the clock on the wall in the evening, hoping that her father would be home in time to read her a story. He was working late on his own one night, the factory floor silent, when the robbers came. His only sliver of good fortune was that it was the little VW saloon that Eliane’s mother drove that was in the car park – his BMW was in for a service. He had just enough time to set off the alarm. He then managed to convince the robbers that he was not the boss, that he couldn’t be the boss driving a little car like that. Just an office worker, with no ability to turn off the alarm and no access to the safe. There was a lot of money inside that safe. The business was successful but, like many, it was balanced on a knife-edge, always at the mercy of cash flow. If he opened the safe, he was ruined. The business would have sunk long before any insurance paid out. In her father’s head, the business was everything for the family.
The robbers smashed everything heavy they could find on the immovable lump of metal. They barely chipped the green paint. They beat him and beat him but he stuck with his story. He never gave in. They went crazy with anger, and panicked in the din of the incessant alarm. Eventually, they dragged him to the little VW and bundled him into the boot, driving him out to the city dump.
“The robbers said stuff to my dad about a ransom,” Eliane said as she drove, “but they knew they weren’t going to get anything from him by then. They were just angry and frustrated, so they put his wrist against the door frame of the car and slammed the door on it. They kept doing that until he passed out, and then they shoved him in the boot and left him. He wasn’t found until the next day – heat exhaustion and dehydration almost killed him. His wrist wasn’t set properly in the hospital and we couldn’t afford to get it reset later on. It’s still crooked, even now. He went through all that for the business, for us, but he found it hard to go back to the factory. He went from being hardly ever in the apartment to always being there. Fortunately, he was at least aware enough to sell up before the business completely fell apart, but he never worked properly again.”
She had told Jake her story without emotion. “I’m pulling in at the next place, I need some sleep,” was all she said afterwards. The next place was a service station and they hunkered down in their seats at the dark end of the car park and got snatches of restless sleep.
The sun was coming up when she started the engine to drive over to the fuel pumps.
Jake was yawning non-stop as he went to the shop counter, putting the fuel on his card along with coffee, cans of Coke and pastries. They had breakfast standing around a tall table in the service station, no conversation as Jake chewed at his pastry, trying to avoid looking at Vilson. His mouth was a gaping cement mixer of churning dough as he poured Coke in, his blank stare focused anywhere but this place. Eliane was looking over the tops of their heads, swaying with exhaustion.
“Fuck me, this is depressing,” Jake mumbled in English.
“What?” Eliane asked.
He shook his head. “Nothing.”
“Okay then, let’s go,” she said, handing him her car key. “You can drive.”
*
The country rolled away along the endless, chipped-up roads, scorched by the sun. He was seeing more of the distinctive white cattle in fields, with their fleshy humps over the shoulder and heavy dewlaps. Standing there, chewing and enduring the heat and all the biting insects and parasitic worms and disease, whether with admirable stoicism or bovine stupidity, he couldn’t decide. And he wasn’t sure at which end of the spectrum he was either.
He flicked through the radio stations, keeping the volume low while Eliane slept in the passenger seat. There were a lot of shouty DJs playing salsa and grating pop and he didn’t last long on the stations playing Brazilian hip hop and heavy metal either. He kept flicking. It was something to do.
“You need to come off at the next town,” Eliane said quietly. She must have been awake for a while, but she was still curled in the seat, head resting on a rolled-up tee shirt against the door.
It was the last town before Cruzeiro, and much bigger. This was a proper town. He slowed at a roundabout coming into the outskirts.
Vilson popped upright on the back seat. “Is this Cruzeiro?”
“No, we’re about fifty kilometres away,” Jake replied.
“Why are you coming off here?” Vilson asked.
“I told him to,” said Eliane. “There’s an ILO office in town.”
“A what?” Jake asked.
“The agency that investigates human trafficking and forced labour. I called them yesterday.”
“But it’s Saturday,” Jake said.
“They said someone would be in the office.”
Vilson leaned forward. “Why are we doing this? We just need to go to the farm and get my mother.”
“Whatever is happening out there, we need to do it the right way, with the right backup
,” Eliane said.
“This farmer must be holding my mother against her will, like the workers,” Vilson said, more for himself than for anyone else.
“Which makes it all the more important we use the ILO.”
“They will go to the farm for my mother today, yes?”
“They’d better. I have to drive back to Rio tomorrow.”
Vilson sank back in his seat and tutted and shifted about and leaned forward and sank back all over again. He was going through the wringer. Jake gave him that.
They passed a pristine shopping mall with a giant car park of fresh black tarmac that was shimmering like a non-stick frying pan on high heat. The streets through the town were lined with trees and parked cars. There were boutiques and businesses and banks, everything broiling beneath the midday sun.
“Looks like the rodeo is in town,” said Jake.
There was a billboard featuring a mean-looking bull and a cowboy on a bucking horse.
The other two paid no attention.
It was the same rodeo that Jake had seen advertised on his previous visit to Cruzeiro, and it was on this weekend – it was on now. He imagined himself having a lot more fun at the rodeo than the gig he was lined up for.
It took a while but they found their way to the ILO office near the centre of town. Jake bagged a patch of shade beneath a clump of trees and parked up. Eliane was back within a couple of minutes.
“There is no one in the office at the moment,” she said, both resignation and irritation in her voice.
“When will they be here?” Vilson asked.
“I don’t know. We’ll just have to wait it out.”
Vilson put his hands to his head, like his team had just missed a goal. “We can’t hang around here waiting for something and nothing. We must go to the farm.”
“We have to do this the right way, Vilson,” she said. “Otherwise we could all end up in jail, or worse.”