Romário splashed his suntanned face with water from the pool.
“You take good care of this water, Zéu. It’s nice and clean . . . I’m going to honor my agreement with you: the woman will be here tomorrow. And after that I don’t owe you anything more.”
He left carrying his sneakers, and Robocop grabbed his arm. But Zéu intervened: “Let him go.”
* * *
The next day, Friday, at three forty-five in the afternoon, Romário received an urgent call. It was Nareba, Narguilê’s brother and an employee of RJ-171, who was taking Laura Furtado to the meeting with the trafficker. The news couldn’t be worse: police security at the entrances to Rocinha was being increased, and everyone going through was being searched. There was no way the socialite could take that chance.
And Roma couldn’t take the chance of not delivering Laura to Zéu. It was certain death. He could abort the plan and hope for Zéu to be killed in the raid. But he didn’t want to see Zéu dead. And he also didn’t want to betray the crazy woman who had opened the way to the governor. That’s how Roma was—principled, as his mother said affectionately; full of tricks, as his colleagues in the favela said affectionately.
Romário told his emissary to abandon the socialite’s car and go up the hill on foot. Halfway up they would catch a mototaxi. To get by the police, she would have to disguise herself as a washerwoman, wearing old clothes and carrying a bundle on her head. Roma prayed the woman would agree to the plan. She not only agreed but became even more excited. Nareba informed Robocop that Laura would be a little—or perhaps a lot—delayed.
* * *
It was late afternoon when the socialite arrived, sweaty and unkempt, at Zéu’s bunker. But the sultan of love was acting as general, readying the troop’s resistance to the invasion—which Laura didn’t know would take place. She was cordially greeted by Robocop, who informed her that the chief would see her in half an hour. Fascinated by the gladiator’s size, she asked if he could give her a massage, as the climb had been exhausting. Robocop broke into a cold sweat at the thought of what would happen to him if he did that—and sent Laura to the sauna.
When the trafficker entered his living quarters, the socialite was already on the bed, in a silk robe that emphasized her figure and a glass of champagne in her hand. Zéu stripped without saying a word. As he was about to touch her, he heard the sound of a helicopter, followed by a burst of rifle fire. The police had merely waited till nightfall to begin taking the favela.
“Goddamn shitass informant!” roared the trafficker, pulling on his pants and racing to find Robocop.
With gunfire drowning out Laura’s screams, the giant burst into the room and followed the chief’s orders: now with no sign of cordiality, he dragged the woman to a cubicle where he locked her in after telling her not to cry too much in order to conserve oxygen.
Despite the heavy firepower of Zéu’s men, the peak of the favela was quickly encircled. The army was providing cover for the elite police battalion. In other words, this time the business was truly serious.
Zéu played his trump card: he called Roma.
“It’s like this, Romário: I’m surrounded, but I got the entrepreneur’s wife right here. I’ll hand her over unharmed if the governor lets me get away. If you don’t wanna talk to him, okay. But then the broad is gonna die with me, and I won’t even be the one who kills her.”
A few seconds of silence ensued, until Roma replied, “I’ll call the governor.”
* * *
Half an hour later, standing by Robocop’s corpse, shredded by a bazooka blast, Zéu answered Roma’s call.
“Zéu, I spoke to the governor. And he talked personally with Mr. Furtado, Laura’s husband. The son of a bitch told the governor that he doesn’t need to give anything in exchange for his wife. And that if you want to, you can keep her.”
Zéu hung up without saying anything. He went to the cubicle, released the socialite, and said: “Run away through the woods behind here. If the Germans see me leavin’, they’ll shoot me. But maybe you can escape. If you stay here you’re gonna die.”
Laura Guimarães Furtado kissed the trafficker and ran toward the forest.
* * *
With the governor, Roma negotiated Zéu’s surrender and saved his life. He argued it was better having him as a prisoner than dead. “There’s always going to be crime, and it’s better for us to be familiar with its face,” philosophized Romário. The governor pretended not to understand, but he agreed.
A month later, Zéu was murdered in prison. His place in the command was taken by an evangelical preacher much more violent and dark, and the NGO RJ-171 began to suffer attacks.
The NGO headquarters soon had to leave Rocinha for Leblon.
“Okay, now we’re in Greater Rocinha,” stated Roma, drawing laughter from Laura Furtado, who had quickly joined RJ-171 and married a former trafficker (whose only defect, according to her, was not having more blow).
Lizard and his sister Keitte also went to work for the NGO, as juggler and dancer.
Saying he was facing death threats, Roma handed the presidency over to Nareba and went to live in Los Angeles with a female executive of the bank that sponsored him. Among other things, he discovered that Los Angeles too was part of Greater Rocinha.
PART III
Murmuring Fountains
Argentine Taxi
by Arthur Dapieve
Cosme Velho
Down below, for the moment there is nothing but filth, darkness, and cold. There is still an hour, half an hour at least, until the sun, dissipating the mist, washes away the night, bathes the buildings with light, and heats up this rock. At times the wind blows, and I can see a piece of the bridge over the bay. At times I am enveloped in the clouds that shroud the head and outspread arms of the gigantic statue at my back. The sky is silent, empty.
I have arrived before everyone else. I came in my car, which struck me as making more sense. The shift was about to end when a buddy of mine, a watchman at the monument, called. In the twilight, as the wind grew stronger, he had approached the wall, looked down expecting to see the lake, and spotted the body. A woman, blond, between thirty and forty years old. The location indicated a fall not short enough that she could escape injury nor high enough that she would be killed instantly. When I got there, my friend told me that the wind had “muffled her moans.” A lovely image for a damned ugly thing. I wait for the woman to show any signs of life.
More people than one imagines climb this mountain to practice free-falling, especially in seasons other than summer, to reduce the chances that some benevolent soul will grab them and chain them to this great and cruel stone. The press doesn’t publish anything so as not to give crazy people ideas and to avoid offending the church. Imagine the headline: “Adolescent Virgin Commits Suicide at the Christ Statue.” Blasphemy? The work of the devil? No, a guy doesn’t believe a fucking thing anymore, not even in the devil, to jump from a height of over seven hundred meters. In my profession, you either believe in everything or nothing at all. My own modus operandi would be a bullet in the brain. If the angle is right, there’s no way to miss. Bye bye.
The wind taunts me, opening holes in the clouds but in the wrong places. Another piece of the bay. The hill over there. A group of soulless buildings. Even a block of the cemetery. But the body, which would be good to catch a glimpse of, doesn’t materialize, remaining invisible to me. I’m no expert, but for lack of anything better I examine the wall. There’s no mark to suggest that anyone had stood there before jumping. If she was wearing high heels, would she have removed them before carrying out the act? They might be there, just beyond the wall. The fog prevents me from seeing whether their shoes are there or not. Maybe they’re hidden, tossed into a bush. Or else she jumped without taking off her shoes. In that case, would they have come off midair? Were they flat shoes? What kind of women wears flats? A very tall woman?
Then, as if they had tapped into my thoughts, the clouds call a truce. I stre
tch my neck and glimpse the body. Even at twenty, twenty-five meters I can see that, yes, she is very tall. Long-boned. Really large. The sight is interrupted before I can comprehend what seems wrong about her position. But I can already tell that something went very wrong. Besides, of course, all the other things that had gone wrong earlier and thrust the creature from this world. Instead of plummeting, the body evidently hit the rock, perhaps because of a gust of wind, and got caught in the low vegetation of an outcropping from the nearly vertical wall.
I continue looking down, grieving, for some ten minutes, even after the blanket of fog has closed in again. I regret leaving my sunglasses in the drawer. The low sun blinds me. I should have played dead and let my morning counterpart handle it. Shit, what would it matter? Is there still time to sneak away? No, there isn’t.
Aguiar, from Forensics, a thin guy with a ridiculous mustache, appears at my side, taps me on the shoulder, and asks: “Too early or too late?”
“Too late. I should already be home, taking a shower, resting my head on a pillow. There—” I say, and make a vague gesture with my chin.
“Bad luck.”
“Not as bad as the woman down there.”
He looks beyond the wall. Mutters, “Can’t see a damn thing. You sure it’s a woman?”
Of course not. At night all cats are gray. The day didn’t dawn right, with the fog. The body lies in a purgatory between yesterday and today. The woman, or whatever it may have been, didn’t see the sun rise on the other side of the ocean.
“Of course. Blond, a short black dress.”
“You’ve just described an Argentine taxi.”
“Or a short brown dress, dark blue, I don’t know. It’s impossible to tell at this distance and in this lighting—”
“Argentine taxi!” he laughs.
“Okay, Aguiar, what’s so funny? What if it’s an Argentine taxi? Shit, you know that 90 percent of the women in this city dye their hair blond. Why wouldn’t this one be yellow on top and black underneath? Even black women are blond these days, like Beyoncé.”
“Beyonwhat?”
“A brand of hair dye,” I say, dispirited.
Forensics people live in a bubble of blood that Beyoncé, Kelly Key, no hottie penetrates. That’s a lie. Once in a while they find a recently deceased chick appealing, some poor thing killed in bed in an embarrassing pose, her pussy spread open, and ask each other, “Would you do her like that?” None of them would reject her. “She’s English!” they say, laughing. A warped sense of humor.
“Years ago I arrived at the most disgusting crime scene I’ve ever witnessed,” I begin, recalling more for myself than for Aguiar. “Someone had quartered a middle-aged bachelor with a large knife, the kind butchers use, and a pair of shears for cutting up poultry. Any butcher or surgeon was a priori excluded from the list of suspects. The job had been really sloppy, a shitload of blows that ignored the body’s joints and practically sought out the hardest bones to sever. That kitchen on Soares Cabral . . . Jesus Christ, not a single tile that wasn’t stained with blood. Or something more foul-smelling.”
Aguiar emits a muffled laugh. QED.
“The dead man had soiled and pissed himself, probably when he took the first hack to the back of the neck,” I continue. “There were three. And he probably didn’t die until the third one, which finally separated his head from his body. Afterward, the murderer made cuts more or less at random until he tired of the game, sometimes using the shears to cut a more resistant tendon. It’s likely he ate pieces of the body. Neither your team nor the morgue’s could locate certain basic items like the kidneys. Nobody can live without at least one kidney, can they?”
Aguiar shook his head.
“To confirm the thesis, floating in butter in a frying pan, browned but still intact, were the victim’s dick and balls. I backed away to keep from vomiting, but your colleagues on the scene, Ramiro and the late Fontes, were having a filthy punning contest involving sausage and eggs. They sounded like they were recording the laugh track for some American TV sitcom. The next day, the editor of a tabloid topped them both. He zapped them with the headline ‘Fried Food Causes Impotence.’ Genius.”
“Genius.”
“Genius.” I paused. “We never discovered who the killer was. I was sure it was a man. You needed strength to cut a femur in half with a single blow. The neighbors had never seen a woman visiting the victim, a loser named Oswaldo who’d lived there for ten years. And they hadn’t seen any male visitors either, but then the guy wasn’t dumb enough to make a show of the uglies he brought home, was he? If there weren’t women, there had to be a man involved, sneaking up the stairs. Besides which, women like money and romance. It’s queers who like dick. I concluded that anyone who hated dick that much had to be a fag. And a powerfully built fag. Am I wrong?”
Aguiar remains silent. I prolong the pause.
“Nothing was stolen as far as we could tell. No postmortem withdrawal on his bank card, no heirloom porcelain dishes in the hands of a fence. This was some three, four years ago.”
Aguiar turns and leans against the wall, looking upward at the statue. At that moment, his ugliness is completely exposed. I continue gazing at the great milky emptiness below. When the blonde finally reappears, I nudge Aguiar. He agrees: definitely a woman. We contemplate the body until one of the last sheets of mist covers it, respectfully. When this happens, we remain standing there, smelling the fog. At times it’s possible to hear the traffic sounds down below, which render the monument even more silent. Tourists won’t be allowed to come up until the corpse is removed. The official excuse is “operational problems with the train.” It always is. They would prefer that people waiting in line think maintenance is even crappier than it actually is to having them find out that somebody jumped headfirst. And glimpse the solution for whatever afflicts them: drug debts, betrayal in love, incurable disease . . . the Werther effect, I read about it in college. Death by imitation. Kind of crazy shit. It’s enough for someone to demonstrate, through action, that life isn’t worth living and someone else, not necessarily related to that first someone, reflects and says, That’s it, he’s right, it’s not worth it, I’m going to kill myself too.
I light a cigarette and offer one to Aguiar.
He shakes his head. “That stuff’ll kill you.”
* * *
All I had done was come down hard without any real consequences on three shitheel potheads caught with a trifling amount of grass by cops with nothing better to do. I gave a speech about how cigarettes get you hooked, I think I even used the expression “the devil’s weed,” and let the kids go before they peed on my carpet. Other than that, boredom. It was shortly after midnight when the Special Ops patrol brought in the cute little couple. The guy was fat, wore glasses with dark green rims, had reddish skin, and, despite the cold of August, was soaked in sweat. He looked like an accountant wrestling with a particularly deceptive tax form, trying to make the numbers work. The other guy was much larger than him and wore red shoes with high heels—along with a blond wig, a tight black dress, and two hundred milliliters of silicone in each breast. In spite of the broad shoulders and muscular legs, he appeared feminine. After all, the concept of what’s feminine has changed a lot in this city.
There was a tribe of ripped women, like girlfriends of country singers and soccer players, pumping iron and taking steroids to resemble strong men. This, in fact, would be the predictable defense of the guy in the glasses. He thought he was renting the services of a very buff woman, on the cutting edge of style, and had changed his mind when he felt that business underneath the skirt. Perfectly plausible. I thought, but didn’t say, that nowadays the bulge under the skirt doesn’t prove anything. The male hormones they take increase the size of the clit tremendously. There are samba school dancers who need to cut off a slice to be able to put on the cache-sexe without looking like they are on the rag or, worse, that they have a shlong. Many heterosexuals get turned on by those baby wee-wees and midfi
elder legs. That’s why they go for a cross-dresser . . .
The citizen before me didn’t understand that the question wasn’t exactly that. I couldn’t care less if he got off on women, men, or canned sardines. I didn’t give a damn about prostitution by either sex. Fighting prostitution in this city is more or less like asking the scorpion not to sting the frog in the middle of a river. It would be going against its nature. No, the question there was quite different. Public decorum. Apparently the two had started arguing over a longstanding relationship far from the drag queen’s work, which was in the Glória district. Normally it’s best not to mix things. Except that the imbeciles had gone to Guinle Park, an upper-middle-class residential area just below the governor’s mansion and, a worse fuck-up still, the road leading to BOPE, the Special Operations Battalion of the military police.
For whatever reason—I don’t want to take it in the ass anymore, I just want to screw, I want to get an operation and become a tranny, blah-blah-blah, those fag dramas—the pair started a fight and began trading blows just as a Special Operations patrol was returning from an action in one of the poor people districts in the outskirts, an action in which they had sent two more underfed but well-armed blacks to the boneyard. The soldiers in the truck were exhausted but couldn’t pretend they weren’t witnessing that love scene. Duty first, then rest. They banged on the side of the vehicle for the driver to stop. Before the two lovebirds realized it, they were surrounded by seven unpleasant-looking guys in black uniforms with skull patches on the shoulder. That was when the fake blonde produced a razor blade from inside her painted mouth and made an ugly gash in the accountant’s right hand. Then a certain lack of control set in. The corporal leading the patrol aimed his HK at the drag queen’s forehead and shouted, “Drop that shit! Drop that shit!”
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