Copacabana: International Crime Noir: Liverpool - Rio de Janeiro

by Jack Rylance

  Six months into their friendship, Moyles put an exciting offer his way. He saw in Pete what Pete believed to be true – that he was smart, motivated, more than ready for a change; a man who was a little wild, but not as wild as once before; rather he had moderated this wildness, turned it to his own advantage, rendered it as a social skill.

  In other words, he was the kind of man who would make money for them both.

  The one condition attached to this offer of employment was inescapable. Before it could happen, Pete needed to secure the consent of Vincent and Totsy, as Moyles knew, and Pete knew, that there was no going behind their backs.

  He tried to take heart from the fact that he was underused, the certainty that he wouldn’t be missed, and went to put his case to both men on a muggy March afternoon.

  They continued to operate out of a lock-up under railway tracks, below the Northern Line, despite the frequent rumbles of the trains overhead. It was a perversely down at heel base of operations given their considerable wealth. Inside was a dim and cavernous space littered with repossessed office furniture; twenty, thirty, forty years old. All of it scattered about, facing different ways, as if at odds with any purpose. In the midst of this commercial junk, Vincent and Totsy commandeered a large desk apiece, the two tables set at right angles with mathematical precision.

  Entering that lock-up had always felt to Pete like stepping onto a stage. Never more so than that day, given how many times he had rehearsed his speech in advance. The one which was to secure him his freedom.

  Pete walked across the floor, his shoes clacking on the concrete, and came to a stop. They were both behind their desks, sat down in swivel chairs. Totsy had his feet up on the tabletop, Vincent was leant slightly forward, and both men were reading that day’s FT, hidden behind pink broadsheets. Pete knew what came next: the rigmarole, the old routine, the necessity for them to spend a few moments pretending he was not there.

  “Will you look at this, Totsy – trouble in the Asian bond market. I think we might have to think about diversifying again. ”

  “How about the mining sector?”

  “There’s a lot to be said for iron ore…”

  Suddenly Vincent’s paper came down. He looked at Pete. “Alright, Peter,” he said. “What can we do for you?”

  Pete began to explain. He had wondered whether to merely sketch his plans out or give them reasonable depth. It was hard to know whether to underplay his hand or spell it out for them. There could be no overplaying his desire, however. It was truly at fever pitch. He wanted desperately to resign.

  Within the first minute Pete could tell that Vincent and Totsy knew about the offer. This was how they spent a lot of their time – listening to what they already knew.

  After ten minutes he closed his argument and a short silence ensued.

  “So you want to run away to Ibiza and open up a nightclub?” Said Totsy finally, summarising Pete’s wish.

  “I won’t only be running it – Moyles is giving me a share.”

  “Merseyside’s answer to Pete Stringfellow. Yeh, I can see that,” said Vincent.

  “You can?”

  “Yeh.”

  “So does that mean I can do it?”

  “No, it means you can’t. We need you here, lad,” said Totsy.

  “What for?”

  “To be on hand,” Vincent said.

  “Come on, I deserve a better answer than that after all these years.” Pete’s voice was breaking up, warbling with indignity.

  “It’s not as if you don’t earn a decent wage,” said Totsy.

  “I know that, but I want to branch out, do my own thing. I’m thirty four years old for fuck’s sake.”

  “Maybe next year,” said Vincent. “Look at Stringfellow – he must be sixty odd. You’ve got plenty of time.”

  The sticking point, ultimately, was that he’d earned their trust several times over. And yet for all that, his position was symbolic, largely redundant, meaning that the decision to keep him close was a contemptuous waste of Pete’s time. None of these facts were worth airing, however, and he could only stand there, his heart aching, as the 16.12 to Kirkby rumbled overhead.

  The Ibizan position was soon filled by a lad from Cardiff, five years Pete’s junior. Pete watched his success from afar. He still stayed in touch with Moyles, but not too often. That boat had sailed. The one he most wanted to pilot.

  The next year came and went, as did the one after that, and Pete continued to go along with his employers. He didn’t want to make enemies of either of them and he saw enough benefits to keep him in check. It was a form of stalemate nourished by cowardice and greed.

  Now Pete cut out on his thoughts regarding Vincent and Totsy before they reached their inevitable conclusion. He turned instead to the international news and seized on a bold economic prediction, there in black and white. Brazil was set to overtake the United Kingdom as the world’s sixth biggest economy.

  The news almost cheered him up.

  During the course of his exile, Pete had completely written off his own country. He had become its outspoken critic. Only now could he see what a shit-hole it was. There was a kind of unity to Pete’s contempt in that he believed they all deserved one another: the public, their politicians; the politicians, the public’s disdain; the viewers, their moronic television; the readerships, their idiotic rags.

  Pete was not alone in this militancy and when he visited Cabral in the afternoon with the rest of that gang, much of their energy and wit was reserved for attacking their own origins. It was not enough to enjoy Rio De Janeiro and all it had to offer, it was also necessary to denigrate the well-worn alternatives. You could tell by looking at each of these men as they talked – the way in which they became animated – that each of them had suffered some profound injury on home soil. Maybe this injury was unspecified, and you couldn’t quite put your finger on it, but it was nonetheless present, powering their tirades.

  Pete was amongst the most vehement and insistent of these accusers. He cribbed from the newspapers online. He could give you the statistics to satisfy his disgust. This was how Pete busied himself with the internet when he wasn’t watching English football – by reading about Britain, and what a fucking mess it was. It was one of his principle pleasures. The country’s failures he relished and its successes he lampooned. As for Rio De Janeiro, Pete glorified the city, despite its serious flaws.

  It was true that he owed this place a debt. He had been proven right in his original assumption – that it would prove a huge distraction to him – and Pete remained thankful for that. Also he had never felt more alive in his life than he did here, although there remained something dreamlike about his day to day existence. A degree of unreality had kicked in.

  Pete had renewed his visa after three months in Rio, and received three more, but that was his limit. Subsequently he’d outlasted this official welcome and stayed on in the country illegally. Then an amnesty had been offered last year for cases such as his, and Pete had availed himself of this arrangement, meaning that he was entitled to stay on indefinitely.

  His desire to remain in Rio owed much to Vincent and Totsy. Whatever apathy they possessed – and Pete knew that this was not much – he had wanted to encourage by making it difficult for them to reach him. In order to do so, they would be required to board a plane and cross the ocean.

  Never before had they possessed such reasons for doing so as now.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “What do you tell the wife?” Asked Carter.

  “That he died in a valiant attempt to stop a mugging with no thought for his personal safety,” Frank Delaney said.

  “An act of heroism.”

  “It’s better than fornication.”

  “What do you think, Thor?” Pete asked. “Would that get you entry into Valhalla? Dropping dead on the job like that?”

  Thor, an ex merchant marine in his late fifties, nodded slowly. “Yes, I’m sure his ancestors would be satisfied with this death.�
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  “Wasn’t there a yank this happened to last year?” Carter added.

  At that moment they were sat outside Cabral, talking about an Italian who had died in a brothel the day before, keeling over during the act of love. In this way, the district always kept them going. A constant stream of misadventures filtered back to the table for their general interest, amusement, or, more rarely, disapproval. It pleased them all to find these things out, proving once again that the urban myth was redundant in Rio de Janeiro. The truth so rampant that it outstripped the imagination at every turn. People were continually trying to make their fantasies a reality and inevitably coming up short and it was always a great source of comedy and fascination.

  “So where did all these American servicemen come from?” Carter was referring to four young men sat a table across the way, feasting on fried chicken pieces.

  “The USS Ronald Reagan just got into town.”

  “What’s that exactly?”

  “A Nimitz class nuclear powered aircraft carrier.”

  “That’s pretty exact.”

  “It docked this morning. It’s in port for three days.”

  “No wonder they’re smiling. What a fucking break.”

  “It beats the shit out of visiting the Gulf, that’s for sure.”

  “These guys have won the armed forces lottery.”

  Earlier Pete had tried to use the Citibank ATM only to witness an enormous queue which had formed outside, at once orderly and impatient. Here was the age old tradition of shore leave with its modern trimmings, although the same desires remained. A good time was still of the essence. Money continued to catch fire and burn a hole in sailors’ pockets and here in Copacabana it would find any number of welcome homes.

  As Pete considered joining the queue of navy personnel, an armed van had pulled up and a couple of guards had got out. They went into the back of the vehicle and came away with bags of money in order to refill the cash machine and deal with this sudden sweeping demand. Meanwhile two young women with small babies had positioned themselves at the doors to the bank, holding out their hands, hoping to prick the servicemen’s consciences and have their palms crossed with bank notes.

  The four enlisted men dining at Cabral were all noticeably young, not yet in their twenties. They seemed to be getting high on the very foreignness of this excursion. This was the pure excitement they might have hoped for when they’d signed on; a rare glimpse of what they’d been promised to begin with. All of them had the same sheared skulls and stocky builds. They were younger than John, perhaps by as much as four years, but their obvious delight in being here led Pete to make an unfavourable comparison. He turned to his left and looked his compatriot over again. In contrast with these young Americans, this lad from Liverpool remained morose, hunkered low in his plastic chair as if the weather had turned.

  He refused to suffer Copacabana gladly.

  Pete found himself wondering if John would have benefited from some type of structured ordeal? The army, prison, anywhere that offered institutional lessons. He decided no. He considered John’s plight to be irredeemable. You would not be able to toughen him up, show him the ropes. If you tried, he would only break. Pete continued looking at John sternly until John looked back at him in turn, and then sat up straight in his chair as if he’d translated these thoughts in full and was attempting to put them in doubt.

  “Oh, oh, oh, look out, here they come,” said Carter. “Enemy combatants at three o clock.”

  “You call that the enemy? Look at those smiles. You try telling me they’re anything but sincere.”

  A few working girls had just opted for a table close to the sailors. Now they started looking over at the young men, determined to secure eye-contact, ready with the choice English phrases. ‘What’s your name?’, ‘Where you from?’ ‘America? I Love Americans!’

  As the Cabral regulars waited for the approach to be made – ready to offer further commentary – John leaned forward and put his forearms on the table and began talking, to everybody’s surprise: “I remember one time back home, me and this lad Bezzy were out in town and we bumped into this other lad, Mick. Mick was a mad fucker, you wouldn’t wanna’ mess with him, I’ll tell you that…So we bounced up to Matthew Street…”

  They all followed what John was saying with considerable interest – his voice was a novelty, they had hardly heard it speak – waiting for a point to be made. But it was clear to Pete from the start that this story lacked any such thing: John was making a last ditch effort to fit in, but his effort was plainly unsuccessful, inappropriate, embarrassing. He did not know how to practise the art of conversation. A subject arose and did its rounds of the table. You needed something relevant to add.

  “Anyway, the bouncer on the door was this lad called Wrighty…” On John went with his account of these Liverpool characters, names that meant nothing outside the city. He was sharing a profoundly localised knowledge. It was nowhere near as precious as John thought.

  Now, for the first time, John looked around the table, even as he continued speaking, and gauged the response of his audience and saw that it was not good. He could sense the amazed disinterest of all those present and his narrative faltered accordingly until he halted the story in mid-sentence, accepting total defeat. Without another word, the youngster rose up and took himself off to the toilet and the company all watched him go. A couple of them then turned to Pete and raised an eyebrow. It had been an outburst of nostalgia and longing. Liverpool was the centre of John’s universe and always would be. This was all he had to draw upon. It was nowhere near enough.

  “Poor kid,” Frank said. “He’s a long way from home. A hell of a lot further than the rest of us.”

  “And I can’t see that distance getting any shorter, can you?” Pete asked.

  Frank Delaney shook his head.

  *

  Back in the day, when Pete was going out with John’s mother, he would stay over at Jeanette’s place most weekends. Then it was customary for him to rise at noon, an hour or two before his sleeping partner. By that time John would be up already, watching TV in the lounge, sat in the large battered red chair, balancing food and drink on its arms. He did not seem to distinguish between any of the programming on offer. There was nothing he did not watch with the same rapt attention, snacking absent-mindedly, guiding the food slowly into his mouth. This fascination made it all the easier for John to ignore Pete’s presence. Maybe that was where the television drew its power from – all the things in life it pushed away.

  If Pete continued looking over at the boy for long enough, he would be rewarded with a single reproachful stare. John was quick to drop this stare, and forgo the challenge of Pete’s own, but he had made his point and his sense of distaste lingered. Even Pete’s legendary smile didn’t work in this situation. The kid refused to be charmed, however Pete tried. Pete had never encountered such obstinacy before. It was immediate and profound and he took it upon himself to break this suspicion down.

  Jeanette had remained sceptical about his chances of success. “You can try all you like to butter him up, but there’s no getting round our John when he takes a dislike to somebody.”

  “And who does he like, apart from you?”

  “I don’t know that he’s all that keen on anyone.”

  It wasn’t because he saw a future for himself and Jeanette that Pete sought to rectify this situation, because he didn’t. He knew for certain that they weren’t built to last. He could already sense their relationship beginning to ebb, so why try and nurture the child’s affection? He still wasn’t sure. Perhaps it had included an element of superstition, enhanced by the fact he’d no children of his own. The notion that a little one can see clear and far and wide, meaning that this instant dislike of John’s was highly personal, discerning, legitimate. Certainly he wasn’t doing Jeanette any favours unless you counted all the free drugs he gave her. She even dealt for Pete, put him in touch with other buyers, and these leads accounted for five percent
of all Pete’s sales. And while it was true that Pete had not led Jeanette astray, nor had he done anything to dissuade her from her chosen path. They had been brought together by their joint decision to party all night long.

  Clearly none of this counted in Pete’s favour when it came to John, and he accepted this, but he also sought to try and counterbalance these wrongs. Over the coming weeks, he invested the time and trouble and patience to win the boy over. He was not deterred by John’s frequent rebuffs. He refused to accept defeat.

  Pete started to deploy John’s favourite things, trying to use them against him. Chocolate ice cream, Panini football stickers, even a coveted PlayStation. In the beginning all of these gifts were turned down with a silent shake of the head. You could tell that it was a pleasure for John to say no. A pleasure greater than submitting to the taste of ice cream, completing his sticker album, possessing a games console, or any other of these proffered delights. Pete had to admire the boy’s strength.

  It took him three months to make serious headway. There was no one defining moment. It was a gradual victory: slow and unspectacular. He grinded out a change in the boy until John started to accept these gifts coolly and enjoy them in private when Pete couldn’t see. He also started to enjoy Pete’s company and look forward to it, although you could sometimes tell that this went against the child’s better judgement.

  Finally John stopped considering Pete’s motives altogether. He allowed his mother’s boyfriend to place a hand on his shoulder or muss his hair or even stage mock fights. That these gestures became the best gifts of all was a clear sign of Pete’s success. Instead of resenting this man, John started to adore him. He sided with Pete in every instance. The boy’s admiration was unconditional, fierce, and represented a serious transformation.

  This was as close as Pete ever wanted to come to being a father. It was close enough. Too close, perhaps. The truth was that in breaking down John’s defences, Pete had encouraged him to open up, not only to Pete himself, but also to the rest of the world; and it was also true that in doing so he had disadvantaged the kid. It turned out that John’s taciturn nature had been sensible, measured, the one thing he could depend on. He’d been playing to his strengths all this time. Now that he’d started opening his mouth, John developed a habit of saying the wrong thing.