The acupuncturist turns on the light and orders him to wait. The gunfire comes closer and closer. Now cries can be heard. Even though he’s accustomed to the confrontations that have become routine in Rio de Janeiro, Otto is on the verge of losing control. The war is out of synch. Saturday mornings there are children running around everywhere. His stepdaughter Rafaela, who is seven, went out early to play. Otto takes the pistol from his pochette, slips on his Bermudas, and dashes barefooted to the stairs. As he reaches the last steps, the sound of gunfire continues, deafening. Otto is familiar with this experience: it feels like the shots are vibrating in his body and echoing inside his skull. The policeman creeps from the stairway to the reception area. Doormen and attendants have taken refuge behind anything that acts as a shield. Breathing raggedly, they remain on the floor, some minutes after the final burst of bullets. They ask one another if the criminals have left. Otto is the only one standing, his eyes sweeping the immediate surroundings, gun in hand, his carotid artery throbbing, sweat burning his eyes, his mouth dry.
The space between the buildings of the condominium is silent; men, women, and children are too frightened to yell. They don’t want to draw attention. Here and there whirling dust is visible, probably heated by fragments of gunpowder. Bullet casings everywhere. The walls of the buildings are perforated, windows shattered. A few cars parked beside the entrance gate have suffered major damage. No one is wounded. A near miracle considering the number of shots. Otto finds Rafaela and two friends hugging each other on the grass, beside overturned bicycles, behind the walnut trees that separate the tennis courts and the pools. He breathes, relaxing at last. He feels like crying with them and hugs them. Slowly, his blood pressure returns to a tolerable level. He needs to reassure Francisca.
“Run home, Rafa, tell your mother everything’s all right. You too.” The girl hates it when she’s called Rafa, because it’s a man’s name, she says, but this time she doesn’t censure her stepfather. All her neurons are concentrated on her rebirth and jumping into her mother’s arms.
Doormen and residents begin to move about, haltingly. They shout words of comfort to one another, speaking nonstop, repeating in unison what they all witnessed as if relating for the first time an unlikely story to an incredulous and amazed audience: the flight of the criminal army that crossed the condo toward Rocinha, firing their rifles behind them, indifferent to both residents and circumstances.
Nervous chatter and the sudden sound of children crying announce the end of the scene of terror, whose meaning is soon explained in the tangle of recounting. Francisca has come down in the elevator with a few neighbors and reaches out to Rafa as soon as she sees her daughter running toward her.
Little by little, heads cautiously appear in the windows of the twenty-story towers. Otto identifies himself. He recommends that everyone go back to their apartments and stay away from the windows. He instructs the condo workers to return to the inside areas and check the security camera tapes. He calls Harley: “Sorry, man, you must’ve been sleeping since your shift was yesterday, but this looks like a dress rehearsal for the end of the world and it doesn’t smell good at all.”
The cops in the area, both civil and military, have to be alerted immediately. Detective Harley Davidson da Silva is his only childhood friend who’s neither in prison, dead, nor on the take.
What the doormen whisper among themselves, inhabitants of working-class districts and favelas, including Rocinha, is obvious: the police have tried to increase the “bundle”—the bribe paid by the drug traffickers to be left alone. Since the boss trafficker refused, the cops involved in the negotiation decided to do something unprecedented: “Hit head-on the packed streetcar coming back from Vidigal.” The phrase, from one of the workers interrogated by Otto, meant the following: late every Saturday night, or early the next morning, the ringleaders of the Rocinha drug trade would come home after spending the evening at the dance sponsored by their partners in the Vidigal favela, situated between Leblon and São Conrado. The Rocinha traffickers customarily traveled together, in two or three vans, armed with rifles and grenades to discourage any repressive intervention; the precautions were not actually very rigorous given that the route, the date, and the approximate schedule were widely known. That morning, frustrated by the refusal to increase the size of the bribe, the police decided to scare the traffickers, without any actual intention of carrying out arrests. They didn’t want to overwhelm the predictable armed resistance, because that would necessitate greater support than was available and involve risks they were unwilling to take. They had waited for the traffickers’ vans at a street corner near the condo and staged an initial confrontation which they did not follow up on, content with the dispersal they’d incited. The ambush, if for real, would never have taken place on a sunny Saturday morning, in an upper-middle-class neighborhood, amid dozens of women and children. As outlined in the script of the farce, the traffickers fled and the police withdrew. It was enough; the message had been sent. If the new amount wasn’t accepted, the traffickers would have problems.
Internal communication among the various doormen in the condominium and the narrative of pedestrians seeking shelter in enclosed spots paints the picture that a call from Harley Davidson da Silva confirms: police reinforcements have no way of getting there because the traffickers have shut down the tunnels connecting São Conrado and neighboring districts. They have also blocked alternative routes via Tijuca Forest and the oceanfront. By the time the first shock troops manage to break through, the traffickers’ leader and his henchmen will have escaped. Everything indicates that avoiding arrest is the sole motive for his acts. The subsequent sequence of events will confirm the hypothesis. The tunnels remain blocked, police troops are slow to clear the roadway and get to São Conrado, traffic is interrupted, and drivers abandon their vehicles on the freeway.
Abandoned cars, people in flight—everything conspires to increase the climate of terror that sweeps through the district. Radio stations interrupt their regular broadcasts to announce that their reporters are unable to get to São Conrado and that the police so far have nothing to say. They interview residents by telephone. The frantic tone of the live statements does nothing to calm spirits. What Otto knows at the moment is that traffickers coming from Vidigal to Rocinha were ambushed by police and escaped, splitting up. One group, which included the leader, ran toward Rocinha, cutting through the condominium and crossing the freeway. Another group fled in the opposite direction, probably to confuse the police, making the leader’s escape easier. That was the group that invaded the international hotel, located between the condo and a shopping center, and took some of the guests hostage. The sequence of events suggests that the intent was to concentrate the cops’ efforts on hostage negotiations until the leader was far away, and safe. The police broke through the barricade of burning tires and had no problem obtaining the surrender of the men who invaded the hotel. They gave up without resistance, sacrificing themselves for their boss. They had accomplished their mission. The next day, the attack on a five-star hotel full of foreign tourists, in the rich and cosmopolitan heart of Rio de Janeiro, would be a worldwide headline in the media. The violent and provincial Rio was winning one more battle against the symbolic construction for the coming Olympics, the pole of business and entertainment.
* * *
Otto returns to the acupuncture room, dons his T-shirt, puts on his sandals, goes up to Francisca’s apartment to make sure she and Rafa are okay, and cancels the plans for Saturday—the beach, feijoada, children’s theater at the shopping center, and a frugal night of films on TV. It is impossible to guess when he will be back. Even though it’s his day off, he considers it his duty to assist his colleagues in the actions still in progress at the hotel. He says this to his girlfriend. What he doesn’t say is more important. He will take advantage of the meeting with the cops to gather information about that irresponsible ambush. What unit of the military police could have done that? Who was in command? The corr
ect adjective that occurs to him is not irresponsible. He has no words to describe an ambush that could have resulted in the death of dozens of innocent people including children, including Rafa. He adores the little girl, but that doesn’t matter, he thinks. The action of the police was criminal, even if the motivation had been just. The doorman didn’t believe in the virtue of the motivation. Nor does he. Otto knows police institutions very well, both the military and his own, the civil. He has experienced intensely the lacerating anguish of being and not being part of a corps that degrades itself day by day, spilling into the gutter the blood that so many honorable professionals shed in the line of duty. After all, his father’s heroic death could not have been in vain. If the institutions of the police and his work stop making sense, what will remain of the memory of Elton Mursa? Will Elton be remembered as a fool who believed in the illusion of the democratic rule of law? A poor naïve fool who took pride in his office, whose mandate he always had at the tip of his tongue: to guarantee the rights of citizens, by performing a public service of the utmost necessity? A deceived democrat, resigned to his humiliating salary, who refused bribes and rejected the usual patterns of police brutality? Elton was black, militantly antiracist, and Otto insisted on identifying himself as black despite his light skin inherited from his mother’s side of the family. He knew, however, that his appearance was a passport for circulating freely in places frequented by the middle class and the elite of Rio de Janeiro. His father taught him from an early age how cunning and perverse Brazilian racism was.
At the hotel, he doesn’t discover much. Everyone is occupied freeing the hostages and avoiding a tragedy. He learns that a young woman did in fact die in the exchange of gunfire. She was said to be part of the criminal gang. Even so, the news is no less deplorable. Just the opposite—the fact only increases the burden of guilt for whoever conceived and carried out the ambush. Two questions are in the air: why did the police act that way, and why didn’t they take measures to arrest the traffickers, especially the leader, if the date, the time, and the route were common knowledge and repeated weekly? It seems obvious that the doormen’s interpretation is the only reasonable one, although the authorities, playing out their melancholy role, talk about an unexpected and surprise encounter between the traffickers’ vans and the military police patrol. In the first official statement the police spokesman had mentioned an ambush. The repercussion was so negative that he disappeared, taking the original explanation with him, which was quickly replaced by the fable of the accidental encounter.
The farce mixes the worst in the police force and its promiscuous relationship with politics: extreme irresponsibility toward the suffering of people and blatant corruption. All of that in contrast with the bigwigs’ rhetoric that covers up police misconduct under the pretext that it is necessary to preserve the image of the institution, even if those to blame are investigated and punished, as if there were any real image to protect and as if punishment of the guilty individuals ended the moral epidemic. Contemplating the circus put together for the media, Otto’s blood boils. He looks upon the sham as a personal insult.
“Harley, wake up, man, and come over here. This shit can’t end like this.”
His partner is more phlegmatic than Captain Nemo and as refined as David Niven in the role of ambassador of the British Empire. He is black, tall, and thin. The two friends plan to celebrate their fortieth birthday together. Their having been born on the same day meant something. The two were the target of homophobic jokes at the precinct. The relationship was symbiotic, yes, but Otto had never felt himself attracted to men, nor was he disturbed by the preferences of Harley, who knew very clearly how to keep work and love life separate.
“Otto, out of respect for you, for decades of friendship, my father’s esteem for your father, the marvelous Saturday that spreads its wings over us, and last but not least in honor of a dear friend with whom I share a glorious breakfast, I’ll leave out the curse words. Is that enough, or you want some more?”
Otto is the most practical of men: “You have no idea, man. You at home or in a motel? If you’re at home, turn on the TV. My cell phone will be waiting for your call. Turn on the TV.”
Harley replies patiently: “You and me are assigned to Del Castilho. Our precinct doesn’t have jurisdiction to act in São Conrado. Besides which, noble colleague, our precinct belongs to a district, not a specialization. Kidnapping isn’t something we deal with. Neither is drug trafficking. Did you get the chief’s okay? Does the Cyrano de Bergerac of the Rio suburbs, the venerable Mr. Costinha, know that the restless spirit of Inspector Otto is contemplating sticking his nose where it shouldn’t go?”
Otto cuts the conversation short: “Turn on the TV. I’m waiting for you.”
* * *
Two o’clock. On the Rocinha hillside peace reigns. Seen from up there, the pacific panorama would suggest that nothing happened. But the community is still shaken up. Tension fills the air, vying with the dueling kites, amid the antennae and the tangle of wires diverting unmetered electricity.
Otto and Harley are leaning against the low wall on the terrace at the home of Hamilton, a courageous Northeasterner brought up in the community. In the local vocabulary, the small platform jutting out over the abyss is called a slab and sticks out from the house like so many other ingenious add-ons, work of the labyrinthine architecture nurtured by the ingenuity of the people. There the baroque is not a style but the involuntary result of maximizing the use of space. The three men share a beer and recall the afternoons of soccer from their adolescence. Hamilton does freight work—that is, he transports whatever will fit in his old VW station wagon. He knows the favela from one end to the other. He gets along with all types of people, including the owners of the hillside, the traffickers. As is inevitable, he also knows who’s who among the police, because the payment of bribes and the agreements take place in the light of day. The “bundle,” the agreement between traffickers and cops, has become institutionalized as part of the collective imagination, part of Rio tradition, as honorable as the illegal and ubiquitous lottery known as the “animal game.” Hamilton has found that adaptability is necessary to survive. Among his virtues, discretion is foremost. “Anybody who blabs ends up with ants coming out of his mouth, pushing up daisies, in the grave.” No sin is more serious and dangerous than informing. Therefore, being an informant—X9, in the common parlance—is fatal. There is no accusation more damning. An X9 works for the police, infiltrating the suspects. Once identified, he is summarily condemned to death by the traffickers. But it’s no different on the other side. If someone without backing—read poor, an inhabitant of the outskirts or a favela—denounces a policeman, he runs the risk of being executed. So prudence and the instinct of self-preservation demand obsequious silence. The rule of the favela can be summed up thus: No one saw, heard, or knows anything about anything whatsoever.
Harley and Otto have never gotten involved with informants. Besides being likely targets of violence, they seem drawn by a moral curse that contaminates everyone around them. When a cop pays an X9 and benefits from his information, deep down he reviles the individual serving him. In addition, he considers him unreliable, a potential double agent. Everything happens as if betrayal is an addiction, a sick and irresistible obsession. Otto and Harley prefer to keep their distance from those actors so frequently found in the police universe. Therefore, whenever they need information they contact people proven to be reliable, with whom they enjoy sufficient credibility to share what they know. Friends of that kind, especially those knowledgeable about territories in conflict, represent an extraordinary asset to investigators. Yet it’s also important not to overdo it, because the feeling of being used is discomfiting. They fear losing precious sources by going too far. And they demonstrate absolute loyalty at every opportunity.
Hamilton is one of those partners. As Otto and Harley are not known in Rocinha, they see no problem in going to their friend’s residence. Before asking the question that brough
t them to visit him, they talk about their respective families and soccer, the lingua franca among Brazilians.
After the second bottle, they are not spared their host’s bitterness: “When safety in the neighborhood becomes a headline, the government’s reaction is only a matter of time, and it’s the favela that pays the price. Armed invasion is usually the political response to the media’s complaints. And in a raid, when the walls are fragile and the weapons military-grade, no one is safe, not even inside their homes.”
Otto agrees, adding, “If such an operation occurred even once in an upper-class part of the city, everybody would be out of a job: the secretary of public safety, the chief of the military police, the head of the civil police, even the governor.”
The elder Mursa would repeat the same phrase at the dinner table. He didn’t raise his son to be a policeman. Despite his love of the institution, he eventually yielded to skepticism. He hoped that the end of the dictatorship and the new constitution in 1988 would change the police, the mind-set, the approaches, priorities, and practices. He died frustrated, a decade later, assassinated by criminals in revenge for extralegal executions. A tragic irony. There had been no one more radical than Elton Mursa in his opposition to police brutality. Otto inherited that skepticism and never fully overcame the desire for vengeance, whether against the murderers of his father or the fellow officers who acted like criminals and ended up provoking Elton’s death.
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