Lockdown

by Drauzio Varella

  ‘What’s this, Miguel, have you gone crazy?’

  At first, he didn’t even answer, but she insisted, saying she had the right to know what it was all about. If he was in love with someone else, she would leave, because she wasn’t the kind of woman to share her man with some slut. Then she complained that the neighbours could hear everything and he opened the door.

  In the living room, she saw her husband was shaking and was surprised. She took the glass of alcohol that was in front of him and tipped it down the sink. In a low voice, she tried to calm him down until he was able to speak:

  ‘You’re a whore, a slut. I gave up my wife and kids for you, I’ve given you a comfortable life, affection and friendship and you repay me by cheatin’ on me. I know about the cop you’ve been meetin’ at the motel behind the petrol station on Raposo Tavares for over a year, while the idiot here was out riskin’ his hide to fill up your wardrobe.’

  Marli listened impassively, then asked: ‘Who told you?’

  ‘None of your business.’

  ‘Course it is. Someone tells you a story that wrecks our home and I don’t have the right to know who it is?’

  He refused, saying that she was a worthless slut and that she was lucky he was a good man, otherwise he might have done something crazy. She ignored the verbal assault.

  ‘Who told you?’ she insisted, and kept on asking until Miguel confessed:

  ‘It was Antônio Carlos. Why?’

  ‘Well, you’re gonna make him repeat it in front of me. Then I’ll get my bag and go to my mother’s.’

  Antônio Carlos repeated the whole story in front of Marli and Miguel, and even mentioned details that he had spared his friend: ‘I saw you nibblin’ his earlobe in the police car!’

  She listened quietly, sitting on the couch, until he had finished. There was another silence, which she broke:

  ‘You forgot the best part.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Marli, who had been staring at the trinkets in the crystal cabinet as she listened to the story, got up from the couch, stood in front of Antônio Carlos and, looking him straight in the eye, said:

  ‘You didn’t tell him that you asked me to leave Miguel and run away with you. And that I refused because I love my husband and I’m friends with your wife.’

  Antônio Carlos called her a liar and said that if it weren’t for his respect for his friend, he’d smash her face in. He said she had a diabolical mind. She didn’t answer and just stood there like a statue, then got her bag and left.

  Antônio Carlos turned to his friend:

  ‘Miguel, you didn’t believe that lyin’ bitch, did you? We’ve been friends for four years and I’ve never done nothing behind your back.’

  ‘Forget it, Antônio Carlos.’

  Antônio Carlos noticed a certain hesitation in his voice.

  While this conversation was going on, Marli went and rang Antônio Carlos’s doorbell. A platinum blonde appeared in the window. It was Dina, his wife.

  They talked in the living room, standing up.

  ‘Dina, is Antônio Carlos a faggot?’

  ‘What a question, Marli!’

  ‘Sorry, but he went to Miguel with some story about me seein’ a cop, which is a complete lie. He’s tryin’ to destroy my marriage. So it got me wondering: either he wants me to leave so he can have Miguel to himself or he wants Miguel to leave so he can have me to himself.’

  ‘What you talkin’ about? Antônio Carlos can’t stand faggots.’

  ‘Well then, darlin’, it’s me he’s got the hots for.’

  She took the bus to her mother’s house.

  Antônio Carlos was something of a ladies’ man and Dina was the jealous sort. She had once come to blows with a prostitute that he knew, and it had taken two men and a woman to separate them. When Antônio Carlos got home, Dina sunk her fingernails into his face:

  ‘You bastard, I always said you had a thing for her. And you always said I was crazy. Can’t you even stay away from your friend’s wife, asshole?’

  The next morning, Antônio Carlos knocked on Miguel’s door.

  ‘Did you sleep with a cat?’ asked Miguel, when he saw the scratches on his face.

  ‘You won’t believe this. When your wife left here, she went to my place and put it into Dina’s head that I’ve got the hots for her. When I got home, Dina flew at me.’

  Miguel inspected his friend’s injuries and said, ceremoniously: ‘Antônio Carlos, the hand of suspicion’s come to rest on our friendship. It’s time each of us went his own way.’

  His friend tried arguing, saying that their partnership was advantageous for both of them, but it was no good. The next day, Miguel went to get Marli at her mother’s house. She agreed to come back on the condition that they forget the entire episode and go back to the harmony they had enjoyed before. He promised and kept his word, in part. He began to follow her; he would tell her he had to leave town, then return home in the middle of the night; and eventually he hired someone to trail her: nothing. Her behaviour was exemplary.

  A year later, with business going well, they moved into a bigger house, which they put in Marli’s name because Miguel couldn’t have anything in his name. He was no longer suspicious of her. As for his partner, they didn’t see each other anymore. Antônio Carlos had been arrested and was doing time in the Casa de Detenção.

  Around this time, Miguel raised $40,000 in a kidnapping and decided to triple his money. He told his wife that they’d buy a house in the countryside afterwards.

  He took a coach to Santa Cruz de la Sierra, in Bolivia. From there, he took a smaller bus – the sort which people get on carrying crates of chickens – and alighted in the main square of the town, in front of the hotel that belonged to his cocaine supplier’s mother.

  Miguel made a 50 per cent down payment and the Bolivian sent his cocaine off for refining. It took two days, but he didn’t mind. He took the opportunity to go fishing with the producer’s brother, who was fond of telling funny tales. Once in possession of his order, Miguel headed back, avoiding the most heavily policed route. Instead, he took a bus to Brasilia, then to Belo Horizonte, São Paulo and Santos, where he sold the cocaine. He wore a navy-blue suit and shirt buttoned up to the top and carried a Bible, which he read the whole way back: ‘As a disguise.’

  He arrived home with almost $100,000. He opened the door and walked down the dark corridor. The dog barked and wagged its tail. He drank some water from the filter and headed for the bedroom. Marli was asleep in her underwear and a skimpy top. He lay down beside her warm body and nibbled delicately on her neck. Miguel was happy again.

  The next morning, she woke up early and went to the bakery to buy some bread. She made a call from the public phone at the bakery: ‘The bird’s come back to the cage. He’s brought a bag of birdseed.’

  The police surprised Miguel on the toilet. Marli’s lover headed up the operation. Then he took her on a holiday to the Northeast of Brazil.

  Miguel arrived in the Casa de Detenção and wallowed in crack. He caught tuberculosis, didn’t treat it properly and died in the infirmary. From sadness, said Antônio Carlos, who looked after his friend until the end.

  Disappearing Act

  Claudiomiro said the only reason he was caught was because he had a wife and child. The chief of police had investigated the city’s health clinics and found his son’s vaccination records, with his mother’s address on them. He had her followed. One night, she took a bus to the town of Leme, in the interior, with the boy and went to stay at her aunt’s place. The police set up an observation post in the district. Three days later Claudiomiro showed up, having been missing his family.

  I met him due to a procedural requirement of the Casa: every prisoner summoned to testify at a police station had to have been examined by a doctor before he left. I asked him to remove his clothes. He had a strong body, with three old scars and no signs of recent violence. I asked if he had been beaten up.

  ‘Not here.
Let’s see what happens now down at DEPATRI.’6

  ‘What are you facing down there?’

  ‘They want to pin sixteen bank and eight armoured car robberies on me.’

  ‘How many are you going to plead guilty to?’

  ‘None, Doctor. I can’t. I’ve already got more than fifteen years to serve.’

  Two days later on the news, I saw that a group had attempted to escape from DEPATRI. Claudiomiro was one of the leaders and was sent back to the Casa the same night. I ran into him on the path between pavilions.

  ‘So how many did you plead guilty to down at DEPATRI?’

  ‘They didn’t get around to interrogating me.’

  ‘Can you make good money doing banks and armoured cars?’

  ‘You can, but it’s only worth half, sometimes less.’

  This enigmatic reply was followed by a conversation about his profession.

  ‘It takes a lot of discipline, Doctor. At eight p.m., I turn in. I don’t hang out at bars or nightclubs, because the police might pick me up in a routine bust. I go to bed early and, at my place, I’m the one who wakes up the rooster.’

  Claudiomiro helped his wife with the household chores and shopping, changed nappies and told his son bedtime stories. Whenever he was in hiding, not even his wife knew where he was. But he never fooled around behind her back during his absences: ‘There’s no shortage of women for bank robbers. Except that lots of them wind up inside or in a trap set by another con, ‘cause a woman whose pride has been hurt is cap able of evil things.’

  According to Claudiomiro, precise information was fundamental: what time the armoured car passed, how many thousand were in the bank safe, the number of guards, every last detail. He obtained this information cautiously from the guards themselves, who worked for security companies. ‘You can’t just walk up and say, “Hey, man, give us the rundown.” You’ve gotta approach them through a friend, a family member, in a bar, over a beer.’

  On one occasion he spent six months tracking down the information he wanted. ‘I became friends with the guy, lent him money; I even went to his son’s christening. You have to win their trust first, and raise their awareness later. You explain that he’s risking his life to protect other people’s money and makin’ peanuts, that these security companies exploit their employees, that if he dies on the job, his wife and children are gonna be hard up.’

  It was a slow indoctrination. ‘Until he spills the beans.’

  Weeks or months were then spent planning the heist. If it was a bank, a sketch would have to be made, showing the locations of the cashiers, the safe, the internal closed-circuit cameras and the guards. When it was an armoured car, they had to time its trajectory over a number of consecutive days, prepare a map of the nearby streets and determine the exact time they were going to make their move. It was slow, solitary work. ‘Just me and God. I wear a suit and tie, carry a leather briefcase, and in some cases I open an account at the branch with false ID, to justify my goin’ there every day.’

  With the plan in place, Claudiomiro would start looking for men to hire. This was the worst part, according to him. ‘You need to know how to deal with thieves.’ A robbery of that scale could require up to a dozen men and Claudiomiro didn’t work with a set gang, for security reasons. He felt it was more prudent to outsource certain tasks, with the exception of those carried out by two partners who had been with him for many years. ‘Even so, they don’t know where I live, or who I live with. When I have a job, I go find them. We meet early and I tell them the plan two days before the heist, but I don’t say where it is and they don’t ask. It is only on the day, half an hour before we set out, that everyone finds out.’

  The three of them would analyse the sketch and calculate how many men should be hired and for how much. Some were paid a set fee, others a percentage. The calculations had to be done well. ‘Otherwise it becomes a free-for-all; no one sets his eyes on the loot.’

  After the meeting, Claudiomiro would return home and the other two would put together the team and steal the getaway vehicles, which were later abandoned not far from the site of the robbery, because the occupants would change cars, sometimes even with normal people in them, as a disguise. ‘Some people will even put a fat old lady in the driver’s seat and a child in the back. I don’t put innocent people in danger, ‘cause when the police come after you, they don’t want to chat.’

  On the scheduled day, Claudiomiro would head out at four-thirty in the morning to pick up the weapons: repeating rifles, machine guns and imported revolvers. Only he knew where they were hidden. In the world of crime, weapons were power. ‘I generally leave ‘em with people who are above suspicion: a man of faith or a churchgoing widow.’

  The person would provide the service in exchange for rent money, groceries or help in a time of need. This complicity bred emotional ties: ‘At five o’clock in the morning, when I show up to get the tools, there’s an old lady who serves me coffee with boiled manioc and corn cake. The funny thing is that I show up without any warnin’, and the table’s set, with a clean tablecloth, cake and milk on the stove. As I’m leavin’ she says, “God protect you, my boy!” At that moment, it’s comfortin’ to hear those words from an old lady.’

  The most dangerous period was from five a.m. to ten a.m., with the weapons in the car. The police were familiar with the makes of cars that thieves preferred and knew when to move in. ‘After the job, in possession of the money, you’re a goner if they catch you.’

  The work required a cool head. The tension didn’t let up even when everything went according to plan. The robbery would put the police on the streets and stir up other criminals. ‘When I get a decent sum, I evaporate. I move house, change cars, and I don’t have visitors over to show off my TV, my new fridge, the comfort my family enjoys. It’s better than hirin’ guards, as a lot of people do, and losin’ my family’s privacy.’

  The news could even travel as far as the prison: ‘So-and-so’s got a new car. He’s loaded now. Thinks he’s a big shot. He got lucky but he’s a fool. He won’t get far. What, a small-time thief like him with that kind of money? I can have a chat with my cop friend and get him arrested and he’ll be done for.’

  Claudiomiro was once approached by two armed men who searched him and demanded $30,000, for their boss, who would leave him in peace if he paid. Claudiomiro told them the money was in the safe at the bank and took them there. One of the blackmailers stayed outside with the revolvers and the other one waited in the bank foyer. Claudiomiro went to the safe and came back holding a package. He pumped three bullets into one of them and two into the other, without opening the package. The dead men never could have imagined that there was a revolver in the safe.

  Claudiomiro didn’t brag about his cunning; he hadn’t actually wanted to do it. ‘It would’ve been better to pay the thirty thou, since I’d made seventy-four in the heist, than to kill the two of them in the middle of that crowd, runnin’ the risk of being shot by a security guard or the police, who were all over the place in no time. Except that I don’t want to get known as easy pickings because then everyone’ll come knockin’, and I’ve got a wife and son to support.’

  Claudiomiro always kept $50,000 handy in case he was caught. If the police approached him, his first question was if there was any chance they could come to an agreement. ‘If I see that he hesitates, I point it out: look, you make 700 . . . 800 reais a month, you pay rent, and you can’t afford a toy for your son or support your mother or mother-in-law. What are you gonna get if you arrest me? For me, it’s cheaper to settle with you than pay a lawyer, who’ll get me off further down the track.’

  That was why he said his money was worth half.

  On another occasion he obtained a healthy figure robbing a branch of Bradesco. He rented a three-bedroom apartment in the São Paulo district of Bixiga, and furnished it according to his wife’s taste, with all the electrical appliances she wanted.

  ‘I didn’t even enjoy twenty days of comfort.’ One
afternoon, as he was leaving the supermarket after shopping for groceries, he noticed a man in a baseball cap at the news stand next door. Instead of crossing the street, Claudiomiro turned right. At the next set of traffic lights, before crossing the street, he glanced around: the man in the cap was coming in the same direction. Claudiomiro was certain:

  ‘Cops. I can smell ‘em from a distance.’

  He went home as if nothing had happened, changed into a pair of Bermuda shorts and flip-flops, got his wife, baby, pram, the bag with the baby’s bottles on top of the money, and they left. The man in the baseball cap was at the service station across the street. He must have thought they were taking the baby for a walk and waited for them to return, in vain. ‘As soon as we were around the corner, I hailed a taxi and we were out of there.’

  They left everything behind. ‘TV, video camera, double bed and all the rest. Even my new Ford Verona in the garage, properly registered and everything. My wife didn’t say a word. It wasn’t the first time we’d left everythin’ behind, nor would it be the last, but that day it broke my heart to see the tears on her face.’

  Months after I heard this story, Claudiomiro was transferred and escaped from prison. He continued his life of crime until he was brought down by bullets from a police car that happened to be passing in front of the bank he was robbing. He was thirty-five years old. He was survived by his pregnant wife and young son.

  Deusdete and Mané

  When I arrived in Pavilion Four one time, the sun was shining brightly on the ground-floor cage. Shorty was chatting with a warder by the stairs. I asked if the lift was working. He replied with his characteristic lisp:

  ‘As usual, no, Doctor. Have you seen the bodies?’

  In a bathtub-come-morgue, on the ground floor, lay the bodies of two young men. One of them, wearing Bermuda shorts, was horribly burned. His body was covered in blisters, especially his face and chest; some had burst, exposing deeper layers of dark, moist skin. The other was riddled with stab wounds.