The Burning Hill

by A. D. Flint

  He had found no real sign of Vilson. He was going to have to venture into the favela with the benefit of daylight, with the danger that daylight brought. He tried to make his search around the top part of the favela as systematic as possible, looking in the undergrowth, in the ditches, around the homes, hoping that he would somehow stumble across some sign of Vilson, or Vilson himself. Rounding a corner of a small block of homes, he saw a young couple and immediately started reeling from side to side, head hanging down, getting a decent string of drool hanging from his mouth. They were startled initially and then called out an insult once they had passed him. It was working. Hide in plain sight. He carried on looking, daring himself to venture further into the favela.

  He heard angry shouts below him and then the approach of Anjo’s gang. The drunken, staggering hobo wasn’t going to work in the face of that.

  Jake ran for the ditch. He only managed to force himself a short way into the thick layer of lacerating thorns on the other side and then had to lie absolutely still.

  As Pato stood over him, the feeling of vulnerability had every fibre in him screaming to jump up and run. But he lay still, waiting for the hot stab of a bullet. When the kick in the ribs came it was almost a relief. But when Pato offered to shoot him, time slowed and the whistle of the millions of insects around dropped in tone, it seemed to him.

  After they had moved on a good minute ticked by, with Jake remaining absolutely still, before he started to notice the thorns snagging the delicate flesh of his healing scars and stabbing at him from beneath. His hand was stinging like crazy from something, and flecks of disturbed plant litter were getting in his eyes.

  He extracted himself slowly, having to unhook thorns from his skin, one by one, resisting the urge to jump up and sprint away. He moved along the ditch until he found a less thorny area of leafy shrubs and long grass. He crossed the ditch and moved into cover, careful not to flatten the grass and give himself away. He found a hollow behind a stubby tree and tucked himself in.

  He heard a series of gunshots, counting eight in all. Then a momentary lull in the insect chorus following them, and then he heard Anjo’s gang coming down the hill shortly afterward. The mosquitoes bit at the already bitten and swollen skin exposed where the crusts of mud had dropped off. The bottle of cachaça was all he had to quench his thirst. He wasn’t that desperate yet.

  He jumped. Another shot from somewhere below him in the favela. He waited it out until dark and then made his way back to Vilson’s shack. He took another look around with the torch and then sat on the floor inside, cross-legged, facing the open doorway. It seemed as good a bet for finding Vilson as aimlessly wandering the alleyways of the favela.

  His nose had become mostly inured to the majority of what was covering his clothes and body, but the assaults of the nauseating shit smell seemed to come more regularly the longer he sat there.

  He reached for the box of matches he’d found beneath the sacks in the corner and lit the three stubs of candle amongst the offerings that were poking out from the pool of hardened red wax and burned-out wicks. He stared into the little flames. He found comfort there, let the flames draw him in, mesmerise him. Let them pass the time.

  Chapter 48

  Jake

  In the last of the dark hours before dawn, only one of the candle stubs was still burning in Vilson’s shack, the flame guttering. Jake felt a buzz in the pocket of his shorts. He pulled out the mobile phone Eliane had given him and took it out of the plastic sandwich bag he had rolled it up in.

  A text from Eliane read, “Any sign?”

  “Not yet.”

  “They’ve taken my dad.”

  “Don’t understand.”

  “Kidnapped.”

  He blew out the candle and raced down through the deserted favela.

  Back at Padre Francisco’s place by mid-morning, he got cleaned up, all the while trying to get hold of Eliane, but her mobile was going straight to voicemail. Finally, he got a text from her telling him to meet her at Marinho’s fight venue in the evening.

  Padre Francisco rustled up another set of clothes for Jake that was an improvement on his first selection.

  *

  The fight venue was a rambling old sports complex near the city centre, an area Jake didn’t really know. It wouldn’t feature on any tourist to-do list. He queued up in a rowdy line in the lobby and bought his ticket.

  The octagon was lit up by a large rig of spotlights suspended from the ceiling. All that kit looked new. Everything outside the island of bright light in the centre of the big sports hall was in a dingy half-light and looked well past its best. There were rows of plastic chairs surrounding the octagon and two sets of tiered benches against opposite walls. Most of the chairs around the octagon were taken, as was much of the standing room to the rear. The male-dominated crowd was noisy and boisterous, a makeshift bar of folding tables selling bottles of cold beer from huge cool boxes.

  Wearing a surfer’s bucket hat, the frayed brim low over his eyes, most of Jake’s face was in shade. He noticed several fight fans milling around who looked nearly as beaten up as he did. No one was paying him any attention. Even so, he found himself a spot high up on one of the tiered benches, overlooking the main entrance from the lobby.

  From his vantage point, he could see the brightly lit canvas of the octagon, walled in by chain-link fencing hung on a padded frame. The canvas was covered in logos for MMA brands and Brahma Beer, with rusty patches of long-dried blood that they hadn’t quite managed to scrub away.

  A gaggle of promoters, announcers and hangers-on trooped in ahead of the first two fighters and their trainers. A couple of girls in sparkly bikini tops and hot pants sashayed around the octagon. The placards they were waving above their spray-on hairdos stated the obvious – Round 1.

  Jake had picked up through his TV viewing that the popularity of Brazilian jujitsu had originally been adopted in the sport of Vale Tudo – Anything Goes, literally. Brazilians had then introduced their effective fighting style to the nascent MMA scene – mixed martial arts – in the USA. Packaged up with some made-for-TV gloss, it had exploded in popularity, inevitably getting exported back to Brazil.

  Some of the fighters went for Lycra shorts, others for baggies, but they all wore fingerless, leather grappling gloves with light padding over the knuckles.

  The first bout looked like a mismatch to Jake. It was between a rangy athletic young guy announced as a kick-boxing specialist and a shorter, pudgy, Brazilian jujitsu fighter, who looked very much the wrong side of thirty. Blowing out his cheeks even before the first bell went, he wouldn’t have the gas to go the full distance. The crowd knew it, his opponent knew it, he knew it. He would have to finish it quickly with a takedown and a submission choke or lock.

  When the referee waved them on to fight, the pudgy fighter tried to keep his distance from the elaborate strikes of the kick-boxer, lumbering around the canvas. He fended shots to his body and legs, before lunging with a messy rugby tackle, staggering his opponent against the chain-link wall.

  The kick-boxer recovered quickly, taking advantage of his opponent’s low position. He brought his knee up hard into his face, snapping his head back.

  The pudgy fighter took another knee to his midriff before the blood exploded from his broken nose. He turned away instinctively to protect his nose. The crowd roared. Attack his exposed back. Choke him out.

  He came to his senses just as the kick-boxer was looping an arm around his neck. The panic in his eyes was clear, even as they swelled around his smashed nose. He flicked his head back, catching the corner of the kick-boxer’s brow.

  Beat your opponent unconscious. Choke him unconscious. Dislocate his elbow or shoulder, blow out his knee. It was all fine. Headbutts were not.

  The crowd howled its fury, the referee stepping in to break them up and warn the pudgy fighter.

  The kick-boxer dabbed his fingers at the cut in his brow, a thin stream of blood running into the sweat on his face. He was
incensed, breathing in the fury of the crowd. When the referee waved them on again, he switched up a few gears. He kept moving the pudgy fighter with feints and lunges.

  He put him off balance with a half-formed front kick, then planted that leg to spring-load the other for a vicious roundhouse kick. It caught the pudgy guy in his floating ribs, driving the air from his lungs.

  The kick-boxer was on him, pummelling him into the octagon wall with a flurry of punches to his face, each one finding its mark. The pudgy fighter ducked to make a desperate grab for his body, trying to tie up his arms, trying to hook a leg around the kick-boxer’s leg to unbalance him.

  They went to the floor in a flailing heap. Even with the punches he’d taken, the pudgy guy was quickest to recover, working to get his weight over the kick-boxer’s body to pin him and put a quick lock on an arm.

  He was almost there when the kick-boxer responded to the screams from his cornermen. He bridged, launching his hips upward and rolling his shoulder as he thrust his hands as flat blades into his opponent’s armpits, flinging him off. He went with the momentum to reverse their positions, scrambling to get on top of the pudgy fighter. He had control now, moving his weight over his opponent’s chest, sitting with knees straddled to prevent getting flipped.

  The pudgy fighter’s arms were still free but they were rendered almost powerless by the kick-boxer’s position over him. He could do no more than flap at the incoming fists that rained merciless blows into his face.

  His arms dropped as he lost consciousness. The baying of the crowd was undercut with gasps of horror as the kick-boxer carried on using his opponent’s lolling head as a punchbag, bouncing it off the canvas. It took maybe a second or two before the referee dived in and got a protective arm in front of the kick-boxer, dragging him away. By then his opponent’s face was mush, a gory mask of blood.

  The pudgy fighter’s body remained limp until a doctor waved smelling salts under his nose. He came round with a shudder, confused and frightened. His cornermen towelled some of the blood from his face and got him up. Hanging between the two of them, he managed wobbling steps across the canvas, the strength in his legs gone. A bucket and brush were brought in to scrub the blood from the canvas.

  The next two fights weren’t much less brutal. Halfway through a round, Jake spotted Eliane entering the hall and made his way down the aisle in the tiered benches.

  She was checking her mobile when he got to her. She looked pale, scared.

  “Have you heard anything?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “They must have grabbed him from the apartment when my mum was out. They left a note saying if we speak to the media I’ll never see him again. This is Nogueira. God knows how he got wind of the Globo thing. It’s all over, Jake. I can’t beat this guy.”

  Jake didn’t want to tell her that the media were no respecter of threats of dead bodies. “And nothing more?”

  “Just that they would call me with more instructions. It’s why I couldn’t speak on the phone. But I’ve heard nothing. Have you had anything on Vilson?”

  He shook his head. “No. I don’t know whether he would try to come here tonight, but I think Marinho is in danger even if he doesn’t. We need to try and get him out of here before the fight.” He took her hand and led her through the crowd to the door where the fighters made their entrance to the hall. There were steel crash barriers around it and a whole crowd of burly security guys. Even if he put his crazy head on, Jake wasn’t getting through that lot.

  He had a look around and thought for a moment. “They must come in a different way,” he said to her, backtracking out to the lobby. The only doors were for the box office and toilets, but there was a set of stairs on the opposite side. They led down to a maze of corridors. The only one of significance was long, dimly lit, and at its end there was a small group of men and women smoking, chatting and drinking. Beyond them, two older guys in plain clothes were guarding a double door. They didn’t have the look of bouncers. More like cops.

  “Okay,” Jake said, “about turn. Nogueira’s got the place nailed down.”

  They tried the other corridors but found nothing other than padlocked doors, storerooms and dead ends.

  By the time they got back to the main hall, they were announcing Marinho’s fight as next up.

  Chapter 49

  Marinho

  It was a pokey room in the bowels of the building, metal shelves lined with cleaning products in economy-sized plastic containers. There were no windows and no ventilation. It wasn’t the worst dressing room Marinho had seen.

  Beneath the single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, he was sweating, even in just his fighting shorts. He was jogging on the spot, starting his warm-up routine.

  There was a knock at the door and it immediately opened. Nogueira.

  “Your opponent has dropped out at the last minute,” he said. “But don’t worry, we’ve got you a stand-in.”

  Marinho knew instantly that it was a set-up. Nogueira was always going to pull some trick or other.

  Marinho had his game face on; there was no point in giving Nogueira a reaction. “What do we know about the stand-in?” He needed to know about his opponent’s fighting style. Was he a boxer? Did he have a good kick? Was he a groundwork specialist?

  Nogueira shrugged. “Never heard of him, never seen him. You’ll work him out when you see him.”

  “Would you put some money on for me, Chief?” It would look odd if he didn’t bet on himself.

  “Sure, but you’d be throwing it away. You’re getting knocked out in Round 3.”

  “I’ve never taken a fall.”

  Nogueira pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and unfolded it. “It’s my letter of recommendation to BOPE, signed. I’ve set up your transfer. That’s my side of the bargain. Time to move on, uh?”

  He handed it to Marinho. It was all there in black and white, with Nogueira’s signature at the bottom. After years of waiting, his route into the elite police unit. This was his dream.

  “You hold onto that,” Nogueira said, “and I’ll get around the medical for you – that’s my guarantee. But only if you go down in the third. You make sure you hang in there until then, and make it look good. Let him break your face a little.”

  Marinho looked back at the letter, reading it over again.

  Nogueira shook his head. “Always the doubt, uh? Always the weakness. You know, I’m doing you a favour with this fight because although you’re good enough, with all the tools to make it, there’s one thing missing.”

  Nogueira pointed between Marinho’s eyes and drew a line down his body. “That mean streak in you is too faint. I can barely see it. To really make it in the fight game you need to be willing to destroy your opponent. Willing to kill him. I don’t know that you’ve enough mean in you to make it in BOPE either, but you’ll never even get the chance if you fluff your lines tonight. You won’t even make it home. And that’s not a threat from me. Other people have invested in this fight. Bad people. Understand?”

  Marinho locked eyes with Nogueira and gave him the faintest of nods.

  “Good,” said Nogueira. His tone softened. “We do what we have to do, always remember that. You for your family and I for mine. You know, it was my granddaughter’s prize-giving this evening – I missed it and I know she’ll be upset. We make the sacrifices, do the unpleasant things in the hope that our children and their children won’t have to.”

  There was another knock on the door. Time to go.

  Out beneath the harsh lights in the octagon, Marinho pulled the towel from around his neck and took off his big, loose hoodie. A few jumps – high – tucking his knees almost to his chest with each one. Then he whirled his arms and slapped alternating hands across his body onto his biceps, dipping his head from side to side to keep his neck loose.

  He had his mouthguard in and he had the face on, stone-cold ferocity. But Nogueira’s intervention in the dressing room had derailed his mental preparation.

 
; Marinho had to shut everything out: the noise, the lights. He focused, getting his head in the zone, seeing himself rising above his opponent, lifting his hands in triumph. He barely heard the announcement over the thumping entrance music and roar of the crowd, but he caught a word, campeão – champion. The champion climbed into the octagon and walked slowly and deliberately toward him. No jumps, no shaking out of limbs.

  Marinho kept his own routine going – mirroring the guy would show weakness – but his eyes never left his opponent’s. He recognised this champion of whatever but the name escaped him. The crowd was going nuts for this guy. They had put money on him.

  The champion stopped about six inches from Marinho’s face, filling his vision. He was maybe two inches shorter than Marinho with a good fifteen-kilo advantage. There was no fat in that extra weight, just slabs of carved muscle laid over heavy bone. Hair spread over his shoulders, down his arms and across his chest in a black haze. His ears were thickened with lumpy scar tissue, the gristle and bone of his nose pounded into something that looked like an impatient child’s attempt at making one with Play-Doh.

  Marinho tried to hold onto that image. Break this guy down bit by bit.

  He looked like a brawler and a grappler rolled up. Dangerous. Campeão. Marinho was a middleweight, his opponent looked a heavyweight. This wasn’t an officially sanctioned fight; they could get away with this ludicrous mismatch.

  Focus, focus, focus. Get back in the zone. Marinho stretched his neck from side to side. This guy had clearly soaked up a lot of punishment in his time, maybe too much. He might be a shot fighter and maybe didn’t like getting hit any more. Or, worse for him, he was maybe getting to like it too much. And, strong as he looked, he had a lot more weight to carry around. He would tire if Marinho kept him moving. Marinho had a reach advantage and he was quick. He would make him pay with that. This Campeão de Nada – this Champion of Nothing.