The Street Angel

by Robert Gollagher

  Richards hoped fervently that the whole thing didn’t turn into a media circus. The Brazilian tabloid media was a sensational affair. During live feeds, television reporters actually screamed their lines, jumping around and waving madly at events happening on camera. The serious media hardly rated at all by comparison. Millions of illiterate viewers sat every night in front of their TVs and laughed, clapped, shouted and gasped at the exciting, largely fictitious news. Richards dreaded the thought.

  He had spent most of the day stewing over how to find the necklace, but had come to the sad conclusion there was nothing he could do but hope the military police came across it – and hope they did so without bloodshed. Richards hated violence. Other than a few schoolyard brawls as a kid, he had never physically hurt another person in his life and he never wanted to, either. He had always refused to have any part in shady business deals which were going to involve intimidation, violence, or even murder. He was appalled that a simple jewellery sale had suddenly turned into a catalogue of brutality. Ricardo Fuentes was right. Richards should have listened to him that night at the club. He should have had more sense than to try and do business with General Fernando del Campo. And now it might cost him his own life. It was a simple mistake.

  Richards tried to stop thinking about it. Susan would be arriving any minute. She was driving from the orphanage to spend the evening with him. The minutes passed slowly until she arrived. He actually missed her.

  “Hello,” she said brightly, when he opened the door.

  “Hi. Come in.”

  Susan kissed him, then walked into his living room. “So this is your swinging bachelor pad? Am I safe in here, unchaperoned?”

  “Depends on whether you want to be safe.”

  Susan stopped looking around and hugged Richards. “Definitely not.”

  Eventually, Richards pulled himself away from her kiss. “I wouldn’t want to subject you to my cooking, but I bought a cake. Want some coffee?”

  “Love some.”

  “Have a seat. It’s a chocolate cake, with ... strawberry liqueur icing.”

  “Sounds wonderfully decadent. I won’t say no.”

  Susan looked closely at the old sofa she was sitting on. The blue fabric was threadbare and there were a few small holes. She could actually see the stuffing. But the apartment was clean and neat. A multicoloured rug covered much of the wooden floor. There was an American flag on one wall, and a leather mural on another, which was a simple map of Brazil. The view from the large windows at the front of the long apartment was of the next apartment building – another of the countless ugly concrete towers that made up this part of the city. She could hear car horns and engines from the street below, and also the televisions of neighbours. It was all so different from her home with Adrian. Bob Richards had so little money and yet she felt so happy and safe to be with him, so far away from England.

  Richards brought the coffee and cake and sat next to her.

  “You seem quiet,” said Susan.

  “No, it’s nothing. I’ve just had a long day. Have some cake.”

  “I mean it, you look worried.”

  “It’s better we don’t talk about it.”

  Susan put a hand on his knee. “Why is it better?”

  “It just is. Believe me. It’s safer you don’t ask.” Richards felt uneasy. He was well used to picking up on the moods of his lady friends, but he wasn’t used to one of them knowing him just as easily.

  “Safer? What are you talking about, Bob? Are you in trouble?”

  “No more than usual.”

  “Bob, come on. Tell me. You’ve got me worried, now.”

  Richards put his face in his hands for a moment. “Okay. I’ll tell you. You remember I told you I was the broker for a jewellery deal at the Golden Beach Hotel? Well, something went wrong. There was an armed robbery the night before the deal was supposed to happen. The dealer lost everything.”

  “Oh, God. I see.”

  “It gets worse. The customer is a very influential man, a military man. His name is General Fernando del Campo.”

  “Del Campo? The head of the military police?”

  “Right. Well, he’s pretty pissed about not getting the necklace he ordered. And he’s blaming me for the robbery. He thinks I’m an informant, that I tipped off the thieves the dealer would be in the hotel.”

  “Well, tell him you didn’t. Get a lawyer. If you need money, I can ...”

  “No, Sue. This isn’t about the law. Del Campo is judge and jury around here. And the sentence for crossing him is death.”

  “Death? You can’t be serious.”

  “Does it look like I’m joking?”

  “But you’re not an informant, Bob.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then he can’t prove it.”

  “He doesn’t have to. He’s so pissed about not getting the diamond necklace he wanted for his mistress, he just wants somebody’s head. Mine.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Hope like hell his goons find that necklace. If it turns up, maybe the general will forget about me and things will get back to normal. If it doesn’t turn up ... I’d rather not think about it.”

  “Bob, I’m so sorry.” Susan hugged him tightly.

  Richards wasn’t used to a woman caring about him. “Uh, thanks,” he said stupidly. After a few seconds, he continued, “But don’t worry. It’ll turn out all right. I shouldn’t have told you.”

  Susan looked at him seriously. “Yes, you should.”

  I really like this woman, Richards thought. “Okay,” he said at last.

  “I’ll pray for you, Bob. I’ll pray for that necklace to be found.”

  “Well, thanks. But I think it might take a little more than a prayer.”

  “I’ll pray for you, anyway.”

  “Okay,” Richards said softly. Maybe a prayer couldn’t hurt.

  An hour later, they were in bed. There were no military police. There were no jewellery deals. There were no murders, no beatings. There was no IRS. There was no Adrian, no perfect boring life in London. There was no loneliness. There was just the gentle lovemaking, the two of them riding on the endless waves of sensation their bodies generated, the waves of passion and beauty, the waves celebrating the happy discovery that they had each other, that they were not entirely alone any more in their separate lives. They realised, that long night, they were in love.

  Neither of them dared say it.

  Chapter 11

  It was a large slum, but it had no particular name. The people who lived there took good care of their makeshift homes, they spoke to each other of their endless problems, helped each other in times of trouble, lit bonfires and danced to celebrate the festival of St John, and always, always kept an eye out for trouble. The rusty dirt roads ran in a crazy pattern, a town planner’s nightmare. It was a community which had exploded in every direction like a monstrous chain reaction, devouring every piece of open space in its path. The roofs of the houses were made of corrugated iron, or tin, or even tiles, for the lucky ones. The walls were wooden, painted in dirty colours, or roughly fashioned out of large bricks. Some of the smaller huts had only blankets of canvas where a wall should be. There were holes in the wood, or in the brick walls, for windows, often without glass. Sometimes wooden shutters plugged these holes to keep out the rain. There were dogs and children in the streets, there was a highway on the edge of the slum which constantly filled the air with smog and noise, and, a few blocks away, there was an open sewerage channel that reeked of decomposing human excrement. The rank stench drifted equally through the slum and the middle-class suburbs nearby. Sometimes mothers would take their children to the sewerage channel to wash tools and rags, or just to play. Most of the people here would never read or write. Hundreds of ordinary people survived in this place, they came home to these ramshackle huts every night after long days at honest work that paid the equivalent of a few dollars a day. Here was survival at its most basic. The slum.
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br />   Strangely enough, while sometimes there might not be enough food on the table or clean clothes to wear, there were still televisions in many of the houses in the better part of the slum, the part which was closer to the highway and which had electricity. People here would buy the biggest television that they could find the cash for, no matter how hard times were. Television was bright, it was loud, it was exciting, and it connected the people to the rest of the country, to worlds they could hardly even imagine. Sometimes children from families who had no television were allowed to visit the houses of those who had. Even some of the street kids, the ones who were not violent, were occasionally permitted to stand by an open window and gaze in wonder at the magical television inside, laugh at cartoons or soap operas, and maybe, if times were good, be given a little food. There was a basic kindness in the people here. Kindness in a place of survival.

  There were many good people in the slum, honest people trying to make a living and feed their children. But there was also the crime that came from desperation, the muggers, the burglars, the small-time pushers and pimps, the thugs-for-hire, and even a few truly crazy people, the rapists and the killers. The slum was like anywhere else, there was much good and there was bad, but the poverty magnified the bad. It was an extreme place. And so the good people stuck together. They watched out for their streets, for their meagre possessions, for their children. They talked sadly of the women who had been forced to turn to prostitution to survive. And they were wary of outsiders, wary of strangers, and wary, above all, of the military police.

  This particular slum was also home to a group of street kids led by a tall boy known to the locals only as Paulo. At the end of the slum furthest from the highway the shacks were the worst of all. Paulo’s group stayed here, not in the shacks but in a derelict warehouse bordering the slum. Part of the roof had collapsed, but beneath where the roof was still intact there were the rags, blankets and miscellaneous effects of a dozen children that squatted here when they were not out sleeping in alleyways. The security guards had stopped throwing them out ever since the building had been condemned as unsafe, but the rest of the warehouses, which were still in use, remained off-limits to the children. There was a chain-link fence and several Doberman guard dogs to discourage anyone from stealing from these buildings, as if the threat of being caught and shot were not enough. Paulo was not stupid enough to try it. The street kids merely slept in the decrepit warehouse and never went beyond the fence.

  It was in a corner of this warehouse that one of the newest boys, Junio, liked to sleep. Paulo was his leader, his hero, the strongest, oldest boy, and the only one with a gun – two guns, now that he had taken the fancy pistol from the man he shot in the alley. Junio wanted to be as strong and confident as Paulo, as unafraid of life, as bold. But Paulo also shocked him, revolted him with his violence, violence which Junio himself had never perpetrated. Junio was in the warehouse alone, this particular afternoon. It was very hot. He was sitting on his filthy blanket, listening to the gunshots from Paulo’s target practise outside. They sounded like the firecrackers Junio’s mother had bought for him at the festival of St John three years before, when he was nine. Junio loved firecrackers, but he hated guns. It was a gun that had taken his mother from him.

  Junio had seen guns on the television shows many times. Senhora Vientes, a kind lady in one of the slum houses, often let him watch her television. She said he was too dirty to come inside with her own children, who were always scrubbed clean, but she let him watch through the window. Senhora Vientes would open the shutters and let him lean on the bricks that framed the glassless window. He would lean all the way in and laugh with delight at cartoons, whoop with terror and amazement at the action shows. She even gave him food. He liked Senhora Vientes. And he had never let Paulo know that he went to visit her. It was his special secret, not for the others. It reminded him of when he lived with his mother, in her little shack in another slum in another city. It was so much the same.

  Junio rarely thought of his mother, other than when he was outside Senhora Vientes’ house. Somehow he knew it was better not to think of her. The priest had told him that she had gone to God, and that one day he would see her again by the side of God, where good people go when they die. Junio had no father, that was what his mother had always told him. It was just the two of them, she used to say. That was three years ago, when he was just a little boy of nine. And now he was a big boy, that was what Senhora Vientes always called him, “My big boy.” Junio was proud to be twelve. He wanted to be fifteen, like Paulo. Then all the other boys would look up to him. He would be just as brave as Paulo, just as strong, and never cry. Paulo said he was a crybaby. Junio wanted never to cry, but sometimes he still did. He had hated it when the people at the orphanage saw him cry.

  When his mother was alive, she used to call him her little angel. “You’re my little angel, Junio. That’s what you are, an angel that God has given to me. And never forget that, no matter what anyone says, Junio. You’re my little angel.” No one else ever called him that, except his mother. He remembered the way she used to tell him about the future. “All I do is clean houses and wash clothes, Junio. But you are my little angel, and one day you are going to have a better life than me. You are going to go to school. They will teach you everything. And I think you will grow up to be a teacher too, my little angel, because you have such a good heart.” He loved the way she smelled. She was always clean, and she wore a simple rose perfume which he would never forget. It was her smell.

  Junio never saw his mother get shot. He only knew what the priest had told him, that there had been some kind of accident, that a bad man had shot her and when the police had found her she was already dead. Junio never understood what death was, before that time. Now he knew what it was. It was when someone went away and never came back. It was when they went to be with God.

  Junio hated the orphanage. He wasn’t interested in the lessons, in them trying to teach him to read and write. His mother promised she would send him to a special school. But now she was gone. The people at the orphanage pretended to be like his mother, they told him what to do, they made him pray every night before he slept, they told him that he was lucky to be here and not in the slum he had come from. But Junio was not from Recife. He was from Maceió. They had only sent him to Recife after his mother was shot. They said he would be safer there. But they had taken him away from all his friends, away from the slum he had grown up in.

  Junio didn’t know exactly why he had run away, why he had ended up in this new slum, sleeping on streets and in the warehouse. He only knew that he missed the place where he had grown up. But getting back to that place seemed impossible. He didn’t even know how far away it was. A long, long way, that is what the Sister at the orphanage had told him. A long, long way away. His favourite place in the world now was outside the window of Senhora Vientes, where he could watch the television. It was the closest place to home. And one day he would learn from Paulo how to be strong, how to be tough, and then he wouldn’t have to be afraid any more. He wanted to be like Paulo more than anything else in the world. Except for the guns.

  The noise outside had stopped. Paulo must be reloading the pistol, Junio thought. Paulo had asked Junio to go with him ten minutes earlier, asked him to come to the side of the warehouse and shoot cans, but Junio had told him that he didn’t like guns. His mother had been killed by guns. He would not play with guns. Paulo had called him a crybaby. The noise started again. Paulo must have reloaded the gun.

  All the other boys were outside, watching Paulo show off with his new pistol. Junio felt stupid to be sitting inside like a crybaby, so he got up and walked into the slum, away from the noise. He would watch television instead, he thought, while the other boys were busy. As he walked between the worst of the shacks, he hoped he would be lucky and find Senhora Vientes at home. She lived on the far side of the slum, near the highway. It would take him a few minutes to get there. Maybe there would be a cartoon. Maybe she would
give him food. As Junio walked, he ran a stick along the walls of the shacks he passed, just to make walking more fun. It rattled in his hand.

  By the time he was approaching the far side of the slum, he knew something was wrong. People were taking their children off the streets. Worried faces were looking out from the houses. There was hardly anyone around, hardly anyone standing on street corners talking. Things had gone quiet. This seemed strange to Junio, but he wanted to see the television, so he kept walking, humming to himself and scraping his stick on the ground.

  Then he saw the trucks. There were three military police vans in convoy, turning slowly onto the narrow road and driving towards him, kicking up clouds of red dust with their tyres. Sitting in the front of the first van was a huge soldier in a captain’s uniform and peaked cap. Junio thought it would look worse if he ran, so he stood still as the vans drew close to him. The big soldier looked straight at him. Junio could see the man’s nose was bent, as if it had been broken in a fight. For a horrible moment, Junio thought the vans were going to stop, that the soldier was going to interrogate him, but then the vans drove slowly past. Junio began to run, once he thought they were no longer looking at him. He was afraid. He found a quiet street, ran into it, and sat down beside one of the shacks, breathing heavily after his sprint away from the trucks. It would be more than fifteen minutes before he would find the courage to return to the warehouse. Junio was scared of the police, and of their guns. They had big guns, machine guns and shotguns, like he had seen in movies. He hated that they had seen him.

  Captain Sollo, in the lead van, scanned the streets carefully as they drove. His plan was to stop the trucks a hundred yards short of the warehouses and spread out his men, to be sure none of the street kids would escape. His sources in the slum had told him there was a group of children squatting in the warehouse, and that their leader was a tall boy named Paulo. This was the boy the captain wanted to find, the boy that his sources had said was buying ammunition for a nine-millimetre pistol. He wasn’t interested in the others. When he had heard the faint sound of pistol shots coming from the warehouse end of the slum, Sollo knew he was in luck. He knew he would find the boy he wanted. He told the driver to stop the van, checked his own sidearm, and stepped out onto the road.