by Andy Maslen
“Fuck. I fold,” he said, slamming the cards down.
“Yeah, me too. Again,” Nico said.
Evan wasn’t giving up though.
“See your twenty and raise you forty,” he said.
“See your forty, raise you another forty,” Gabriel said.
The betting between the two remaining players continued until the pile of Reals between them was almost six inches high.
“Come on, Evan,” Josh said, “take him to the cleaners”.
“You tell him, Josh,” Gabriel said, with a smile, pushing the word ‘tell’ just a little.
He waited.
Began counting.
Looked Evan in the eye.
Evan blinked.
And folded.
As Gabriel was gathering up the cash and stuffing the bills into his pockets, Josh spoke. This time there was a nasty edge in his voice. A cruel tone. A tone that said, “I come from money, I’ll have more money, and you’re not supposed to have my money”.
“Nobody plays that well. What are you up to?”
“Me? Nothing. Why, are you not used to losing? You know what Rudyard Kipling wrote. ‘If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same …’”
“Fuck Rudyard Kipling! And fuck you! Marcus, stop the van. He’s getting out.”
“Yeah, yeah, Josh, fine. I’m getting tired of all of you in the back, bitching like a bar full of queens.”
Marcus pulled over onto the gritty hard shoulder and killed the engine.
Josh stood and squeezed past Gabriel to open the door then jerked his thumb at the gap.
“OK, you, out.”
Gabriel stood and stepped towards the door, but as he reached the opening, Josh stuck his foot out to trip him and shoved him hard in the back. It was a clumsy move, and one Gabriel was expecting. He rolled as he hit the ground and was back on the balls of his feet a second later, just as Josh jumped down, fists up, teeth bared.
Gabriel didn’t feel good about putting the college kid down, but there was more at stake than the kid would ever know.
As Josh hit the ground, bleeding from a split lip, there was a shout from inside the van.
“He decked Josh!”
Nico bailed out next, followed by Evan. In seconds, they’d joined Josh, moaning for breath and winded after hard punches to the solar plexus. That just left the two men from the front seats. David was out next, and Marcus rounded the front of the van almost at the same time. They both charged him, apparently aiming to grapple him to the ground rather than engage in any Queensbury rules-style boxing. It did them no good. Gabriel simply seized them by the necks and slammed their heads together with a noise like two blocks of wood meeting at speed. “Stay down!” Gabriel shouted, pointing at Josh, who was struggling to his knees, “Or I’ll put you down.”
Josh subsided, but to judge from his high colour, his fury at being bested in a fight as well as a card game was about to detonate something deep inside his brain.
“What are you going to do?” he asked.
“I’m going to take the van. You guys look fit enough to walk back to the last town we passed. I’ll leave it somewhere conspicuous with a note saying it belongs to five entitled American frat boys. I’m sure it’ll find its way back to you.”
As he climbed into the driver’s seat, it was to a background chorus of most un-Yale-like oaths. He twisted the key, blipped the throttle then took off, pushing the engine right up to the red line in every gear. When the camper van was almost flying, he eased off a little and held it at a steady one-twenty as he powered down the highway towards his flight to Eden.
55
Filhos de Satan
AFTER BLOWING THROUGH A COUPLE of towns, each consisting of little more than a bar, a few shacks, and a petrol station, Gabriel felt his own fuel levels dipping dangerously low. He pushed on for another ten miles until he came to another of the ribbon-like settlements strung out like beads on the straight concrete thread of the highway. This one was called Castelo do Norte.
He pulled in to a petrol station, fuelled up, then went inside to pay. While he was waiting for his burrito to heat up in the microwave thoughtfully provided by the owner, he heard the roar of motorcycle engines from the road. He looked over to the window, which was partly obscured by posters advertising a nearby festival. Five or six bikers had pulled in at the pumps.
The microwave pinged. He grabbed his burrito and a can of Coke from the next-door cooler. He paid at the till with one of the crumpled bills he’d taken from the frat boys. The woman behind the till looked the motherly type. She was plump, with dyed black hair, big gold hoop earrings, and a smudge of rouge on each cheek. She nodded at Gabriel then inclined her head towards the window and frowned. She spoke one word as she handed him his change.
“Problema.”
“Obrigado,” he said with a smile.
“De nada, senhor.”
He took a bite of the hot burrito, savouring the flavours of chicken and chilli sauce, as he stepped out onto the gravel surrounding the pumps. Clustered around their machines were half a dozen leather-jacketed bikers, skin tones ranging from pale caramel to a brown so dark as to be almost black, with tattoos, gold earrings like the petrol station woman, and deep brown, hooded eyes, which he could still read. Their leathers were adorned with patches advertising oil companies and bike parts makers. Two of the men had their backs to him. Their jackets bore shoulder-to-shoulder patches with a winged skull and the legend, Filhos de Satan.
The camper van was on the other side of the pumps. Gabriel strolled over and reached into his pocket for the key. Getting in meant squeezing between the side of the van and the pump. It also brought him within an arm’s length of the nearest biker. As he climbed in, the man turned and looked him straight in the eye. He was an ugly brute. Short, thickset, and with piggy eyes set close together in a face pockmarked with acne scars. Gabriel stared back.
“Bom dia,” he said. Might as well be polite.
The biker said nothing. He did grin though, exposing snaggled dentition with at least as many gaps as teeth. Time to be on my way. The others were also watching, and their conversation proceeded in Portuguese too rapid for Gabriel to understand fully. He did catch one phrase, and it didn’t fill him with optimism: “mata lo e despejaremos.” It was close enough to the Spanish for him to translate it perfectly. “Kill and dump him”. Sorry boys, not going to happen. And what is it with bikers? Why are you always so fucking hostile? Gabriel had had dealings with Hells Angels, these bikers’ cousins in upstate Michigan on a previous excursion to the Americas. It hadn’t ended well. For the bikers.
He started the engine and peeled out of the forecourt, changing up through the gears and flooring the throttle each time. The Porsche engine did what it had been designed to do, and soon the town was a blur in the heat haze coming off the tarmac.
Unlike the Harley Davidsons favoured by their North American counterparts, the Sons of Satan were mounted on faster, nimbler machinery. As he’d left the shop, Gabriel had checked them out: British-made Triumphs and Japanese Suzukis and Kawasakis. Each with an engine displacement of at least nine hundred cubic centimetres and a kerb weight well under a quarter of a tonne, their power-to-weight ratio dwarfed the camper van’s.
That disparity explained why, five minutes later, he clocked a tight group of six mainly vertical silhouettes growing steadily larger in his wing mirror. He drove the throttle down, but the van maxed out at a hundred and thirty. It felt like it was about to shake itself to pieces anyway. Maybe the boy’s old man had the mechanics install a limiter.
Inside the cabin, the noise made thinking difficult. Tyre roar and wind noise added to the blare from the exhausts and the engine’s thrashy bark. Gabriel made a decision.
A minute or two later, the leading bike pulled away from his lieutenants and accelerated up alongside the camper van until he was level with the driver’s window. Gabriel glanced left. The big man was smiling, revealing
a mouthful of gold teeth. Then he pulled a sawn-off shotgun from a scabbard strapped to the bike’s frame and swung it around until the black figure eight of its side-by-side barrels was pointing directly at Gabriel’s face.
Gabriel smiled back and touched the brakes. Then, as the man matched him to keep level with the front of the van, he jabbed the throttle at the same time as he swung the steering wheel hard over to the left. With a bang, the front wing smashed against the bike’s rear wheel.
It doesn’t take much to upset the equilibrium on a fast-moving motorcycle. A tap will do it. This was more like a roundhouse from a super-heavyweight. The front forks turned through ninety-degrees and the tyre dug in, catapulting the bike and its rider ten feet into the air. By the time they crash-landed on the tarmac, Gabriel was accelerating down the road. The distance gave him a great view of the bike in his rear-view mirror as its tank exploded, covering its former rider in burning petrol.
Now he had the remaining five to deal with. Would they stop to try and extinguish their leader or come after him? No honour amongst thieves, apparently. They spread out and accelerated hard, three to the left, two in single file to the right, trying to come between Gabriel and the hard shoulder. Fine, we’ll do it your way, boys.
He waited until they’d drawn level, like a vicious-minded escort, semi-auto pistols drawn and held in their left hands aiming in at the windows. Then he stamped on the brakes, almost standing the camper van on its nose. Relative to his position on the road, the five bikers hurtled ahead. Two of the three to his right were trigger happy. They were still shooting as he disappeared from their field of fire. The shooters’ gang-mates on Gabriel’s left took rounds to the body that punched them off their bikes and out of the game. Careless. Now it’s three to one. But I’m in an armoured truck compared to your rides.
Dropping down a couple of gears, Gabriel floored the throttle once more and barged straight into the back of two of the bikers. He was close enough to read the script on their leathers before their bikes shook violently like bucking broncos and threw their riders off to skid and tumble down the road at close to ninety miles per hour.
The final rider had finally wised up to the fact that he was in trouble. But he still had his pistol. He braked suddenly and pulled in behind Gabriel then loosed off three shots that shattered the back windows. Gabriel suspected that the man would have been able to shoot him clean through the back of the head under ideal conditions. But these weren’t ideal conditions. Not even close. Pulling behind had probably seemed a clever move. And it was, until Gabriel repeated the trick with his own brakes, which clearly had been upgraded at the same time as the engine.
With a satisfyingly loud, crunching bang, the last remaining bike smashed itself against the rear of the van, spun off sideways, and deposited its rider into the scrub at the side of the road.
In all, the chase had lasted no more than three minutes. For Gabriel, time had slowed down until it felt like hours were ticking by, each collision a slow-motion scene in a movie. His heart was pumping, but not particularly quickly. He inhaled deeply then let it out in a great sigh.
“I really hate biker gangs.”
56
Rumbled. Again.
GABRIEL DROVE ONTO THE AIRFIELD at Nova Cidade. His arms were sore from holding the vibrating steering wheel for hundreds of miles. Without sunglasses, his eyes felt rough inside their sockets from squinting into the sun for so long. He rolled up to the hangar, switched off the engine and climbed out of the van. Stretching and leaning over, first to the left then the right, feeling rather than hearing the muted pops as his spine unkinked itself, he could see the office was shut for the night. That was OK. He could wait until morning.
Well, you don’t have much choice do you, Old Sport?
Funny how Don’s voice would pop into his head at moments like these, reminding him that sometimes, what felt like a decision was just force of circumstance.
With nothing to do until morning, he turned around, climbed into the camper van, and drove back into the nearby town, aiming for food and drink. Then he’d simply drive back to the airfield, pull the curtains and sleep in the van.
Compared to the tiny settlements he’d driven through since meeting up with Marcus and his friends, Nova Cidade was a hive of activity. The bees were certainly buzzing when he got out of the van after parking on the street outside a bar called Cantina Moravia. Smartly dressed office workers were milling about outside drinking tall glasses of foamy amber beer, dewed glasses of white wine, and the odd Mojito, mint leaves crushed amongst the ice cubes.
He pushed through the swing doors into a blessedly air-conditioned interior where a band were warming up in a corner. As they vamped a few jazzy chords, Gabriel walked to the bar, which was free apart from a couple of young women drinking caipirinhas.
The barman wandered over, clearly more interested in the girls than in serving a gringo. He lifted his chin. Gabriel pointed at the girls’ drinks and held up a finger. They turned as he ordered and bestowed smiles on him: white teeth, beautiful dark skin, deep brown eyes fringed with heavy lashes. Any other day, any other time, he would have enjoyed making conversation, or trying to, but he was shattered from the day’s events. He nodded at them and stared at the bottles behind the bar while the barman made his drink. It arrived a minute or two later. Gabriel put a ten-Real note on the bar and downed the drink in one.
The cold hit of sugar and lime mixed with the fiery sugarcane spirit revived him almost at once and he let the last few drips fall from the rim of the glass into his open mouth, holding the ice cubes and lime wedges in place with the edge of his thumb. He signalled the barman for another and watched as the man, buff-bodied and clearly proud of it in a skin-tight white vest and white jeans, repeated the process, smashing sugar and limes together in the bottom of the heavy glass tumbler before adding the clear cachaça.
The girls beside him were giggling and stealing glances in his direction, whispering behind their hands. He added another ten-Real note to its sister and took a sip of the new drink. He hooked a tall barstool over with his foot and took a seat, resting his elbows on the zinc surface.
One of the girls touched his left arm and spoke in halting but good English.
“Hello. You’re American?”
“Hi. No, sorry. English.”
“Oh. That’s OK, we like Englishmen.”
“Your English is very good.”
“We’re students. International business.”
“Well, you have no idea how nice it is to hear a friendly voice. It’s been a very long and trying day.”
The girls swivelled and slid their stools to face his, and the three of them exchanged names and clinked glasses to their newfound friendship.
They were called Mariana and Beatriz and were eager to try out their English on Gabriel. That suited him just fine; he didn’t have a lot of energy left for foreign language conversation. After ten minutes or so, Mariana, the girl who’d touched his arm in the first place, checked her phone. She looked up at Gabriel and pouted her disappointment.
“It’s my boyfriend. I have to leave. We’re going to the movies. It’s been lovely to meet you, Gabriel.”
She leaned towards him and they kissed on each cheek. Gabriel was almost overwhelmed by the fresh floral scent of her perfume. Suddenly he wanted to be out of Brazil and back home. Back home with Britta Falskog, curled up in front of an open fire, preferably not wearing very many clothes. Then she—and the vision of his Swedish on-off-but-mostly-off girlfriend—was gone.
“That outfit,” Beatriz said, plucking at his shirt. “I see Enrique isn’t the only one around here who goes for all white. But yours looks like it could do with a wash.”
He looked down. The shirt and trousers were smeared and grimy with road dust and sweat.
“God, I look a mess, don’t I?”
“I’m sure God doesn’t mind. And Père Christophe probably doesn’t either.”
Gabriel had often read in books about peo
ple’s hearts skipping beats. He’d always assumed it was a writerly cliché. That was, until his own pump did a kind of jerk in his chest, sending a spike of adrenaline coursing through his bloodstream.
“Père who?”
She winked at him. “Very good. So you’re not a member of the Children of Heaven? You don’t know about a place in the rainforest called Eden? And you don’t have a leader who calls himself Père Christophe?”
57
Passport, Ticket, Money
CHRISTOPHE JARDIN, BORDERLINE PSYCHOPATH, CULT leader, serial rapist, murderer, terrorist, and narcissist prepared to leave his jungle paradise. He stood in the middle of his living room and turned through a full circle, taking in the gracious proportions of the house he’d had his slaves build for him all those years ago. It was a monument to his ego, as was the entire Eden complex, from the generator room to the vegetable gardens, the laundry to the temple. There was cash enough in the numbered accounts held in his name in a trio of Swiss banks, but when was it ever about money? Look at his mother and father—avowed Marxists for their entire adult lives, yet living off interest from inherited wealth and spending freely on that most bourgeois of all commodities, fine art.
He stalked over to a bookshelf and swept his right arm along the top, scattering tribal artefacts he’d bought in the early days, crude clay figurines of pregnant women with grossly exaggerated breasts and buttocks, priapic males with erections that threatened to poke them in the eye. Worthless now. Utterly without value. He’d been betrayed by one he’d assumed would be his to command. He could feel it. And that smug, self-satisfied politician he’d watched on the TV, pointing at him and threatening him with shutdown. Cunts! All of them. They neither saw his genius nor cared for it. Yet here he was, forced to run like a rat down a sewer while these, these pygmies crowed about their prowess and their rectitude. Who the fuck do you think’s paving our way north, you idiots? A bundle of cash here, a tumble with a fresh-faced female follower there. It’s all corruption, however you look at it. At least he, Christophe Jardin, was honest about the process. You take what you want, and one way or another you pay for it. Just don’t preach about “the war on drugs” before you return to your campaign headquarters to open a bottle of wine or chop a few lines of coke for your hardworking “team”. Jesus! It was enough to turn a man to God.