by A. D. Flint
Lights were on inside homes in the favela. He didn’t hesitate at the junctions – the places where sentries might be posted. He was no longer fearful of the demons that might be lurking around a corner. He was the demon now.
In a small clearing amongst the dense greenery up behind his shack he had found a washed-out fire that some kids must have lit. Heavy rain had tamped down the ash into a crumbly grey paste and he had rubbed it into his skin and hair until he was streaked whitish–grey all over.
“Hey,” a young voice called out behind him. “Hey, you, I’m talking to you.”
Vilson hadn’t noticed the boy standing in the doorway of the rough, hollow-brick house. He had walked right past him. Vilson stopped and turned slowly. He felt nothing, no fear, and he stood his ground. It was one of Anjo’s kids, Tôca, the sentry kid who had raised the alarm the night Vilson had tried to escape the favela.
There was only a dim bulb in a rusty bracket over the doorway throwing a weak glow across the alley, but it made the ash on Vilson’s skin glow. Deathly white.
The kid frowned for an instant and then came recognition, and with that his knees wobbled and he crossed himself. “You. Oh my god.” He banged a small fist on the closed door behind him without taking his eyes from Vilson. “Hey, Franjinha, you need to get out here, man.” His voice quavered, so frightened that he hadn’t even pulled his gun.
A muffled shout came from inside. “Are you kidding me? I’m busy with a woman in here.”
“You have to see this.”
“You little prick. You wouldn’t be bothering me if your balls had dropped.”
“It’s – it’s Vilson.” He lowered his voice at Vilson’s name, seemingly fearful that saying it might somehow cause him harm.
“Who?”
The kid couldn’t even bring himself to say Vilson’s name this time. He was barely able to get any words out. “It’s – it’s the ghost, he’s out here.”
“You really think I’m gonna fall for that crap?”
“I’m not kidding. The old woman wasn’t lying.” The whisper had spread through the favela like an airborne disease, infecting people.
Vilson could hear Franjinha cursing and banging around inside. “You’ll find your joke less funny when I’m beating the living shit out of you.” He hauled the door open, Tôca falling inwards onto him, pushing him backwards. Franjinha was bare chested, his erection pressing against his hastily pulled-up shorts. A bandana hid his burned scalp and there were still expanses of angry, raw flesh across his arms and chest. He slapped Tôca around the head until he realised that the kid was taking no notice of the blows. His attention was elsewhere.
Franjinha looked up.
And Vilson saw fear in his eyes. For the first time in his life, Vilson was in control. He held the power.
Franjinha was rooted to the spot for several seconds. He finally jolted himself into action. “Give me your gun,” he commanded.
The kid handed it over, looking glad to be rid. Everyone knew that Franjinha liked the powder, but it wasn’t drugs making his hands shake as he fumbled and dropped the pistol with a clatter. He bent awkwardly to pick it up, scrabbling, unable to take his eyes from Vilson.
Vilson stepped forward and Franjinha yelped in terror, staggering back, forgetting the pistol. Vilson lifted his hand level with his shoulder and mimicked a pistol, his index finger the barrel, raising his thumb as the hammer. He dropped his thumb back down with a little kick of his hand as he mimed a shot.
Then he let his hand return slowly to his side and walked away.
*
Anjo
Anjo ordered his soldiers to leave their guns on a table just inside the reinforced-steel door before filing into the living room. They weren’t acting like soldiers. They were like frightened old women, gabbling and praying to God and to Our Lady and to the saints for protection.
They quietened to anxious whispers when they noticed the Beretta dangling from his hand. He took a small glass vial from the pocket of his shiny, baggy shorts and popped the plastic lid. Just a small hit to keep him sharp. He tapped a shaky line of white powder onto the back of his gun hand and snorted. He was trying to remember how many small hits he had done today. He had to stay in control of the powder. He had to stay in control of this. Of everything.
He was keeping the windows and metal shutters closed at all times these days, and with his soldiers all squeezed in the temperature was beginning to climb, even with the rattling air-con unit and the big floor fan.
Get it done and get them out.
He sniffed and rubbed his nose. “Shut up, all of you.” They went silent immediately. That was good. They still respected him.
He waved the Beretta at Tôca. “You. Tell me what you saw.”
Tôca was a confident kid, a leader amongst his age group, maybe even a future boss. But Anjo had seen that he was scared stiff even before he had lifted the Beretta to him. Tôca was trying to find some sense in his scrambled head, mumbling, trying to find the right words. The kid wasn’t playing a game, but someone was definitely fucking with him. And Anjo didn’t let anyone fuck with him. He kept the Beretta loosely trained around the kid’s belly, finger resting on the trigger.
A space appeared around Tôca. Anjo’s soldiers knew from bitter experience that he didn’t always bother with the safety catch.
Franjinha pushed through the crowd and lay on the sofa by Anjo, trying to show he was relaxed. “Come on, boss,” he said, “he told you already. I told you.”
Anjo nodded, weighing up what Franjinha had said, and then waved the Beretta at Tôca again. “Speak.”
“I don’t know what to say.” Tôca finally got some halting words out. “His skin was grey, like a dead body, except it kind of shone, you have to believe me. I’m sure it was him, he looked the same, he walked the same, and he had that old Flamengo shirt on.”
Soldiers were crossing themselves.
Anjo snorted. He wanted to show derision, that he didn’t believe. “And he would be the only one on the hill wearing a Flamengo shirt?”
“I’m sure it was him too,” Franjinha said quietly. “Listen, we’ve known that kid our whole life, it couldn’t be anyone else. But something was different, apart from his skin. His eyes. They were dead. There was nothing there, not from this world anyway. I swear it. And he wasn’t scared of us – that kid was always scared of his own shadow. It was creepy as hell.”
More soldiers crossed themselves and mumbled prayers.
“I put bullets in him. I saw his burned body,” Anjo said, trying to keep a hard edge, swallowing down the panic.
Franjinha shook his head. “I know it sounds crazy but I know what I saw and then he was gone. In a second. Just disappeared.”
“Too quick for you two gangsters to shoot him?” Anjo asked.
“Come on, man, are you forgetting that I was on the job when he turned up? He was gone before I had a chance to even pull up my shorts.”
Anjo turned back on the kid. “And what about you, soldier? Didn’t think to see if a bullet might stop this ghost?”
Tears were beginning to well up in Tôca’s eyes. He clasped and unclasped his hands in front of him wretchedly. He looked like what he was. A child. “You had to see him, boss, it was so scary.”
Anjo shivered involuntarily. He didn’t know whether it was the powder or tiredness or this crazy ghost shit making it happen, but he had to keep a lid on it. He couldn’t show any sign of weakness.
He pointed the Beretta at the kid’s chest. “You failed me.”
Tôca’s knees buckled slightly and he held his hands out in front of his chest protectively. “It won’t happen again, I swear it.”
“You swear it?” Anjo cocked his head. He could be a merciful boss. Sometimes that was the way to play it.
Tôca put a hand over his heart. “On my mother’s life.”
Anjo strung his performance out, pursing his lips, showing that he was mulling it over. Finally, he nodded, satisfied. The kid
dropped his hands and giggled with nervous relief.
“That’s the right thing to do, man. Tôca’s cool,” Franjinha said from the sofa, the tension going from his body. “It’d take more than a ghost to take down the Ants – you get me?”
The shot was deafening in the confined space. It made the soldiers jump, mouths open in an O of shock.
Tôca’s eyes went wide and he grabbed at his neck, staggering back before his legs folded beneath him. Blood squirted through his fingers in vigorous pulses. He stared at the soldiers around him in terror, reaching out for help with his other hand. They shrank away as the blood sprayed across the floor and up the wall.
It took a few moments for Franjinha to blink away the disbelief before he dived from the sofa and went to Tôca, cradling his head. The boy was already on his last choking breaths. The blood subsided and he made a final gasp, eyes rolling. He was dead.
On the other side of the room one of Tôca’s friends, probably even a year or two younger, doubled over and threw up.
“You call yourself a soldier?” Anjo yelled at him. “A Red Ant? Pathetic.”
Franjinha laid Tôca’s head gently on the floor and got to his feet. He was covered in his blood. “Jesus Christ. You didn’t need to do that, you crazy fuck. He was just a kid.”
Anjo let the Beretta hang at his side, but his black eyes were glittering. Ready.
Not even Franjinha was safe when Anjo had that look. It pleased Anjo to see him forcing his expression back to its customary blankness and dialling his voice down. “He was just a kid, man.”
Anjo looked around at his soldiers. “And I will avenge his death.” Hit by an emotional rush of parental protectiveness, he welled up, a single tear rolling down a shiny cheek. “I will rid us of this ghost.”
Chapter 43
Vilson
He rinsed the ash from his hair and skin, and came down through the favela while it was still dark. The favela was deserted now at night, people shuttered in their homes, terrified of the ghost.
There was no stirring of the spirits as he approached the Candelária church, and the shot of religious awe that had always hit him on entering didn’t come. Not this time; he was finally immune. Even though he was a ghost in the favela, it felt like he was as far from the spirit world as it was possible to be. He was inhabiting some strange in-between world, but he knew what he had to do there. He walked past the rows of empty pews, the only other movement the flickering of the votive candles beside the altar. There was scarcely one row lit; it was still early in the morning.
He went to the door of Padre Francisco’s office, tucked away behind the stone column, and knocked.
“Enter.”
Padre Francisco was sitting behind the scratched-up desk in his tiny office, wearing his plain black shirt and dog collar. It seemed as if he was expecting the visit. He looked very tired.
“Vilson. Please sit down,” he said, his voice heavy.
Vilson stayed on his feet. “It was you who wrote those letters, wasn’t it?”
Padre Francisco leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes for a moment. “Yes, it was me. I made a terrible mistake, with the best intentions, but a mistake that has caused you terrible pain and I am so very sorry. I have such a clear picture of you in my mind as a small child, playing with Gabriel, happy, but after your mother left a light seemed to go out. I remember it like it was yesterday. It was Gabriel in his innocence who asked me to write a letter from your mother. I should never have agreed, I should have known better, but it made you so happy, you kept asking when the next one was coming. I should have told you. And I should never have let you go off to find your mother without telling you.”
“And you knew that it was the young cop who shot Babão?”
Padre Francisco bowed his head. “Yes.”
“Why would you keep that from me?”
“Because I knew you wouldn’t have let Marinho help you, and you needed his help.”
“You were the only one left that I trusted. The only one. And you lied about everything.”
“Did you come here to kill me?” Padre Francisco was looking him in the eye now.
There was a time when a question like that would have shamed Vilson, his shoulders would have hunched and he would have hugged himself. But now he stood straight, holding the priest’s gaze, the old revolver tucked in the back of his shorts.
The priest was calm; he seemed resigned to his fate. “I won’t beg for my life, but I will beg your forgiveness.”
There was nothing in Vilson. He felt nothing.
“Something changed in you as a child,” Padre Francisco said, “and I see that something has changed again. Life has been hard for you, people have taken advantage of your nature, but always remember that Christ said the meek shall inherit the earth.”
“The meek die, and the powerful,” Vilson searched his mind for a moment, “well, the powerful are just dead inside. That’s all there is.”
“No, my son, you mustn’t believe that, it’s not true.”
“When bad things keep on happening you can’t just pretend you can make a fresh start every time and put an end to the bad things. Sometimes it’s just the end.”
“We must always have hope. If we have hope we are never lost.”
“You honestly believe that for someone like me, Father?”
“Of course. Absolutely,” said Padre Francisco, but his eyes gave him away.
Chapter 44
Jake
It was a plate of rice and beans with a few strips of curled-up, reheated beef. There were two big pots on the stove. The meal was probably either leftovers from the night before or it would be making a leftovers dinner later. Lunch and dinner, dinner and lunch. He had gone off the Brazilian staples of boiled rice and black beans after his first few weeks in the country. Even chilli sauce hadn’t been enough to break the monotony. But now, at Padre Francisco’s tiny kitchen table, he closed his eyes with every mouthful, in ecstasy. He hoped the memory of eating this meal would stay with him a long time.
Padre Francisco came to sit opposite him, watching him eat. Padre Francisco’s place setting was empty.
“Good?” asked Padre Francisco.
Jake nodded vigorously. “You not eating, Father?”
“Perhaps later.”
Jake suspected he was the reason for the priest’s lack of appetite.
The shower that followed lunch also felt like one of life’s great experiences. In the tiled cubicle with a cracked plastic curtain, he watched the scummy brown swirl going down the plughole start to turn into something more acceptable by the third soaping. He had one more go with the soap after that just for the feel of the suds, to see them sliding off clean skin and to feel the squeak of rinsed, clean hair under his fingers.
Without Eliane’s new address, not knowing exactly where Marinho lived, and with no place of his own and no money, going to the Candelária church to find Padre Francisco had been his only option.
Jake would never have squeezed into any of the priest’s clothes, so Padre Francisco had dug out a few things from the church’s charity pile for him. He checked himself in the small hallway mirror. It wasn’t a great selection and he looked like a double-glazing salesman going on holiday.
Padre Francisco looked at the mouldering heap of dirty clothes. “Would you like me to put them in the trash?”
Jake shook his head. “I’ll take them with me, Father, if you have a bag?”
Padre Francisco dug a plastic carrier bag from a kitchen drawer stuffed with them, and watched as Jake dropped his dirty clothes into the bag. “If you want to keep them I can at least have them washed.”
“It might be better to keep them like this.”
“If you are thinking of going into the favela, I urge you to reconsider. I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you how dangerous it would be for you in there. And, as for Vilson, he is not himself at the moment. I am praying for him, but I don’t know that he’ll ever be himself again. I belie
ve he came to the church intent on killing me, I’m not sure why he didn’t – maybe shooting a priest is a step he can’t quite yet take. I don’t think he would have so much difficulty shooting an English tourist.”
*
In early evening, at the far end of Leblon Beach, the sun was dropping toward the dog’s tooth and shark’s fin that made the twin peaks of Morro Dois Irmãos – the Two Brothers Hill, part of Rio’s famous skyline. The sunset was starting to fire up behind knots of cloud, and lights would soon be twinkling along the strip from Leblon to Ipanema and Arpoador.
Apart from food and shelter, Padre Francisco was a man in possession of phone numbers, and Jake was strolling along the wide mosaic pavement by the beach with Eliane. They were moving with the main flow of people, joggers weaving through them, skateboarders and cyclists rolling along the cycle path beside them.
“How does a lowlife corrupt cop have that much pull?” she wondered aloud. She had just told Jake that she had driven back from Cruzeiro in a fog of exhaustion, going straight into work to save her job. She was too late. Nogueira hadn’t made direct contact, but he had somehow found a way to turn the screw with her CEO tight enough for her to go from annoyance to outright liability.
“I went home from getting fired to find my dad packing up the apartment,” she said. “I thought it was going to be one of the worst conversations of my life. But he had already made the decision that we should move out to find a cheaper place.”
“That must have been bad though?”
She shook her head. “The funny thing is that he said he was glad to move out. He said he finally realised that he had let that place become a prison to him. He said he had realised a lot of things, and he’s adamant that he wants me to take the fight to Nogueira.”