Lockdown

by Drauzio Varella

  A short time later, two others arrived and leaned against either side of the door frame. Then the first one came back and stood between them, his weight on one leg, the other casually cast out to the side. The three of them didn’t say a word. I was afraid, alone in the dark with the deafening storm outside.

  I lost track of time. The inmate in the white T-shirt started walking slowly towards me with a criminal’s swagger. The other two remained in the doorway. When he was half way across the cinema, I gave up trying to pretend nothing was out of the ordinary and turned to face him.

  He lifted his chin at me. I did the same with a racing heart and waited for him to reach me. When he was closer, I shifted my weight and put my hands on my hips, facing him, chin up, matching the expression on his face, which I was now able to see.

  When he was two steps away from me he smiled and held out his hand.

  ‘How’s it goin’, Doctor?’

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘It’s like this, Doctor. I’d like to help you out here in the cinema. I admire what you’re doin’!’

  ‘Do you know how to work sound equipment?’

  ‘I can get by, Doctor. On the outside, I used to deal in electronics.’

  We arranged that he would start the following week. He shook my hand vigorously and smiled again. I asked how I could find him.

  ‘Just ask for Santão, everyone knows me.’

  Women, Motels and Partying

  Santão started helping set up the sound equipment. One day, after a talk, he came over to me and said:

  ‘Doctor, I don’t want to take advantage of the prestige your friendship brings me, but do you think it’d be possible to take a look at Ezequiel, a mate of mine who’s got a problem with his lungs, over in Eight?’

  Ezequiel’s cell was lined with colourful women. There were so many that they merged into one, forming a mosaic that covered the wall and door. He was lying in the lowest bed on a bunk, his front teeth missing, dehydrated, with a high fever, pain in his chest and sweat running down his face.

  Ezequiel told me he had done time in a penitentiary in the interior of the state for trafficking and receiving stolen goods. One night, in the penitentiary, he saw two warders remove an inmate from his cell. The next day, the guy was found dead. They claimed he had tried to escape. Ezequiel couldn’t accept it and reported the warders to the prison director. Years later, when he had been transferred to a semi-open prison, Ezequiel came face to face with the same warders, who had been relocated there as a result of the case he had reported. ‘Open isn’t a bed of roses like they say,’ he said regretfully.

  Anticipating the worst, seven days later, Ezequiel left for work and didn’t return to the prison afterwards, as he was supposed to. ‘I thought one thing, but fate had somethin’ else in mind for me.’

  He found his family struggling to get by, living in a house vulnerable to flooding, on the banks of a creek in a poor district of São Paulo. His parents were aging and his older sister had moved in together with her four children after being abandoned by her husband. He took charge of the family. Because he was on the run he kept no fixed address, but would show up at his parent’s house for lunch or dinner. He would have barely finished eating when he’d be back on the streets again: ‘There’s one thing I know how to do well: I’ve been in crime for a long time and the cops have never busted my home. I don’t give ‘em the chance.’

  To help him start over again, a friend lent him 200 grams of cocaine. He quickly found his feet as a dealer and only had to sleep in downtown hotels with low-class prostitutes on a few occasions; most of the time he spent his nights in the homes of female cocaine users in the cities of São Paulo, Santos and São Vicente. ‘Life on the run is busy: women, motels and partyin’. In the middle of the night, you’re in a club having a drink and you hear a siren in the distance and think it’s the cops. Or you’re in the city centre and a police car goes past and you get a shiver down your spine. Some men’ll run and get caught for something silly when they weren’t even after them. You’re always on edge.’

  He made good money. He’d buy a gram for 250 and resell it for 600 or 700. He delivered it by motorbike, personally. His customers would invite him in and offer him expensive imported drinks. They trusted him so much that they even paid him with cheques. Ezequiel deposited them in a bank account belonging to his sister, who had looked out for him ever since he was a child. He slowly raised his family’s standard of living, with a little house on higher ground, a stocked pantry and good clothes for his sister’s children. To spare them any worry, he told them he was in the business of buying and selling automobiles.

  ‘Meanwhile, I got myself a girlfriend who worked for a phone company and knew society people, lawyers, doctors, a stock market manager and a guy who did adverts on TV, first-world people who liked me ‘cause I only sold the purest, uncut merchandise. One client of mine, the biggest lottery man in the south of the city, whose name I can’t name, used to say that I was a very honest guy.’

  One day, one of his customers was arrested and things got complicated: ‘They must have given him such a workin’ over that he gave them my name as his dealer. He even gave them the licence plate of my motorbike, which was in my dad’s name. They investigated who his children were and my name came up, with a debt to the justice system and all.’

  A few days later, he was sitting on his motorbike eating an ice cream, when two revolvers appeared behind him: ‘Hey, Ezequiel dos Santos, how’s our fugitive doing?’

  One of the police officers, wearing a pair of dark sunglasses, searched him, while his bearded partner kept a distance. Ezequiel was unarmed.

  Once he’d got over the initial shock, he asked if there was any way they could come to an understanding: ‘They wanted 800 or I’d be back inside. I told them I’d already done ten years, I’d seen hard times, the oldies depended on me and so on, plus my sister and her children. I said they weren’t gonna gain nothing by arresting me and that I wasn’t doin’ society no harm, since I only sold to people who wanted to buy. So, we cut a deal where they took the motorbike, which was worth 400, in exchange for my freedom.’

  Without his motorbike, it was harder for him to service his clientele and sales fell. He went into debt with his supplier who brought him cocaine from Bolivia.

  The solution to his crisis came through the stock market manager, in a São Paulo nightclub. The man snorted a fresh line, stretched, placed his arm round Ezequiel’s shoulders and whispered: ‘You’re a good guy, you only bring me the purest snow. Know what? I’m going to give you an opportunity worth half a million dollars. You deserve it!’

  He told Ezequiel that his girlfriend was secretary to a money changer in the district of Jardins who kept $500,000 in a safe in his home. The broker gave him the money changer’s address, told him he had three children and that his wife was bound to a wheelchair because of an accident. ‘I decided to do a really good job plannin’ the heist. I spent ten days followin’ the guy.’

  He discovered that the money changer left his office at six p.m. every day and went straight home. At first, he thought he’d grab him as he was leaving, take him home and force him to open the safe. He abandoned the idea, however, as he thought it would be complicated to kidnap someone on the busy Avenida Faria Lima at rush hour. He decided it would be more prudent to enter his future victim’s residence late in the afternoon, take his wife, children and two maids hostage and wait for the money changer, who would have no alternative but to open the safe for him.

  To carry out the robbery, he needed a partner and a fast car. He remembered Alcindo, from the city of Santo André, who had done time with him in a prison in the city of Presidente Wenceslau. ‘Alcindo was known as the best driver around. He was even nicknamed Ayrton Senna.’

  They arranged everything for a Thursday. The day before they would steal the getaway car, which they’d keep hidden at Alcindo’s house. They would paint ‘Rosa Gardênia Florist’ in white letters on the door of the ve
hicle, and, at the scheduled hour, would go to the money changer’s house to deliver flowers. They rehearsed everything several times. It was all perfect. They were already planning what they were going to do with the money. As at the open prison, however, fate had something else in store for him.

  On the Tuesday, they went car-hunting. It wasn’t easy. Alcindo was demanding about the quality of the vehicle. After a lot of walking, they found a couple arguing in a car that Alcindo considered adequate for the job. They each appeared with a revolver at the front windows. The man didn’t react in any way; he only asked that they leave his fiancée alone. They explained that they were only interested in the car and drove away.

  They turned three or four corners and, as they were about to give a sigh of relief, a police car appeared from nowhere with a wailing siren and squealing tires. The chase began: ‘The cops were hangin’ out of the windows with their guns pointed. The only reason they didn’t fire was because there were lots of cars around them. Then I found out that Alcindo didn’t have a drop of Ayrton Senna in him. He was all over the place like a headless chicken. The other cars were makin’ way because of the siren and he kept bumpin’ into them. He was a bundle of nerves and whiter than an ambulance.’

  When they got on a viaduct, they collided head-on with another car, in which a man was taking his pregnant wife to the doctor. The impact knocked Ezequiel unconscious. ‘I woke up at the door of the hospital, but they clouted me across the chin with a nine-millimetre Luger and I blacked out again.’

  He was released that same night. When he got to the police station, he was told that the owner of the stolen car worked for ROTA, a military police tactical force, and had called in the theft himself, initiating the chase. To make matters worse, the man whose car they had crashed into, with his pregnant wife in it, was an investigator with the State Department of Criminal Investigation. The double coincidence made his punishment even worse: ‘I lost seven teeth and then had to pull out the only one I had left in the front. They strung me up on the pau-de-arara and kicked me so many times in the back with their boots that I still have problems in the cold weather.’

  The police kicked him and one said: ‘If that man’s child dies, we’re gonna finish you off good, you useless piece of shit!’ He swore that he loved children, that he was crazy about his nieces and nephews, especially the youngest, his godson, and that he’d never intended to kill an innocent in its mother’s belly. It was no use. He was kicked in the mouth, in the ribs, and they used a stun gun to give his wet body electric shocks.

  ‘It was an unlucky day, Doctor. Stealing the wheels for the getaway from a ROTA officer; crashing into the investigator’s car, with his pregnant wife in it to boot; and the only thing Alcindo had in common with Ayrton was his nickname. My fault for believing it. How can a guy raised in a favela be a good driver at the age of twenty-two? He’s never even had a car!’

  His past successes were no consolation: ‘It’s hard, Doctor. I get out of breath climbin’ the pavilion stairs, doubled over like an old man, and I feel horrible knowin’ my family’s suffering without me, experiencin’ hardship.’

  Maria-Louca

  Ezequiel recovered from his tuberculosis and we became friends. He was the most highly respected maria-louca distiller in Pavilion Eight, and his famous product attracted customers from the entire prison.

  Maria-louca was the prison’s traditional bootleg cachaça. According to the older prisoners, it was as old as the Brazilian penal system itself. Despite the punishment in Solitary if one was caught, large-scale production persisted. The high alcohol content made the men violent. They would fight, knife one another and disrespect the warders who tried to keep them in line.

  Ezequiel wasn’t exactly modest about his art: ‘I only sell the very best. If you put my cachaça on a spoon and light a match in the dark, it’ll give off the purest blue flame. Lots of blokes make it, but it doesn’t even catch fire; it’s a kind of vinegar. I make whisky.’

  The popping corn that his mother would bring him, unaware of its intended use, was Ezequiel’s raw material: he would pour five kilos of corn, with sugar and the peels of fruits such as honeydew melons, papayas, oranges and apples into a large drum he had bought in the general kitchen. He would then cover the top of the drum with a clean cloth and put the lid on tight: ‘That’s the secret! If it leaks, the smell creeps out into the gallery and the screws come after it, ‘cause they have it in for cachaça. They say the men are rude to them when they drink. The way I close it, Doctor, a squadron can march down the corridor with their noses in the air and they won’t know what goes on in this cell from the smell.’

  The mixture would ferment for seven days. ‘On the seventh, it’s so fermented that the drum’ll sometimes move on its own. It looks like it’s alive.’

  Due to the internal pressure, one could not be careful enough when opening it. Once open, its contents were strained through a cloth and the solids thrown away. At this point, the solution tasted like beer or a dry wine. One sip of it would numb your oesophagus and send a shiver through you. Every five litres would become one litre of cachaça, after the mixture had been distilled.

  During the distilling process, the liquid was transferred to a large tin with a hole in the top, through which ran a little hose connected to a copper coil. The tin was placed on the cooker and its contents brought to a boil. The steam would rise through the hose and pass through the coil, which Ezequiel cooled constantly with a mug of cold water. When the steam came into contact with the cooled coil it would condense, a phenomenon of physics that impressed him: ‘The force of the thermal shock! The steam turns to liquid!’ After passing through the coil, the maria-louca would drip into a bottle. Five kilos of uncooked corn or rice and ten of sugar yielded nine litres of the drink. ‘It comes out clean and it’s absolutely divine. The best there is. My cachaça doesn’t make you thirsty in the middle of the night, or need to go to the toilet, and it doesn’t make your feet swell up.’

  When he started, Ezequiel was one of the few distillers in Eight. He worked hard, from eight o’clock at night until three-thirty in the morning, because it wasn’t the kind of work one did by the light of day. It earned him a reputation: ‘I used to sell it for ten a litre. Nowadays any old lazy arse can make it. They produce this bitter vinegar and it costs an arm and a leg: thirty, forty a litre. It’s abusive.’

  Ezequiel was very careful when practising his trade and was never caught due to negligence: ‘The three times I was found out, it was because someone had grassed.’ The first time, he spent ninety days in a cubicle with eight other inmates, in the heat of summer. The other two times, he only got thirty days.

  Proud of his work, Ezequiel only stopped producing maria-louca when he fell seriously ill. He was shrewd and never took an interest in the easy profits of cocaine: ‘Doctor, I’ve been convicted four times for 157: robbery. I’ve never been caught with drugs. If I got convicted of selling crack in here, I’d wind up in 12: traffickin’. It’s a completely different article, and even worse if you’re caught doin’ it on the inside. The judge could call it a continuous crime, he could say I glorified crime. He’d say I can’t be rehabilitated and deny me all benefits.’

  Eight, the repeat offenders’ pavilion, was traditionally the prison’s biggest maria-louca producer, followed by Five. In May of 1998, 1000 litres of it were found there in a single raid. I was surprised when I heard how much had been seized, but a warder reminded me: ‘It might seem like a lot, Doctor, but don’t forget there are 7000 inmates.’

  Indeed, those 1000 litres didn’t break the record of a previous raid: 1200 litres, distilled and ready for sale.

  Miguel

  Miguel used to carry out armed robberies with his partner, Antônio Carlos. They trusted each other so much that they agreed to look after each other’s families should one of them be arrested. They did well out of a supermarket job and invested the money in cocaine, which proved to be prosperous for them. They decided to stay in that line of
business, as small retailers in the municipality of Taboão da Serra, part of Greater São Paulo.

  One day, as they were travelling with two companions in the back of a truck loaded with furniture, with two kilos of cocaine hidden in a cupboard, they ran into a police barricade. In the ensuing shoot-out, one of the companions in the back of the truck was killed. Miguel went to break the news to his widow in person.

  Marli paled as she listened in silence, then burst into tears. Miguel said he was sad too. He gave her her husband’s cut from the job and told her to contact Antônio Carlos or himself if she needed anything.

  He left, enchanted by her beauty. He had never seen such beautiful legs, not even on TV, and dreamed of them at night. Miguel left his family for Marli and fell headlong in love for the first time in his life at the age of thirty-eight; she was twenty-two.

  One afternoon, when they had been together for almost two years, Antônio Carlos, who lived a block away, showed up at Miguel’s house. Marli had gone to visit her mother. The conversation was truncated and weird, until Miguel interrupted him:

  ‘What’s up, Antônio Carlos? Talk to me, what brought you here?’

  ‘Your wife’s fucking a cop.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  Antônio Carlos gave him the name of the motel where Marli and her lover met and said he’d seen them himself, fooling around in a police car in the centre of Taboão da Serra.

  Miguel felt as if he’d been stabbed in the heart. It occurred to him to kill the officer, but he discarded that idea; he’d have to skip town. Kill Marli? How? It isn’t easy to kill your beloved, he realised.

  He packed her clothes into a suitcase, put it on their doorstep and locked the door. When Marli got back, she knocked loudly: