The Street Angel

by Robert Gollagher

  “Let’s go,” Sollo ordered.

  Twenty soldiers quietly dismounted from the vehicles.

  “You and you, come with me,” said Sollo. “The rest of you, spread out and secure the area. The kid we’re looking for is tall, with dark hair. But don’t let any of the little bastards escape from the area.”

  The soldiers dispersed efficiently into the slum. Sollo and only two of his men walked directly up the road to the warehouse. Sollo knew that the fewer witnesses there were, the better things would go for him. The military police was a powerful force but it was not totally immune to prosecution for its actions. It was best that no one saw what they did not have to see.

  Susan was annoyed to be sitting inside the little shack listening to the sound of gunfire. The family had insisted she come inside, where it was safe, and that she leave her car. Only a few minutes earlier she had been handing out fruit and clean T-shirts to the local children. There had been a crowd of two dozen kids following her little car down the twisting dirt roads of the slum, shouting happily, “It’s Susinha! It’s Susinha!” The nickname had been given to her by some of the parents when Susan had first started showing up at the slum with bundles of fresh food and clothing donated by the church. Susan had found the people to be reluctant to accept charity but always ready to welcome her and to assist her in filming life in the slum with her portable video camera. They respected the fact that she worked for the church and that she cared for the orphans she came across.

  Pedro da Sousa was an assistant in a hardware store. His wife Silvia was a maid, but nowadays she mostly stayed at home to take care of her three young children. Silvia could read a little, and she was eager for her kids to go to a church school. Susan had met Silvia one day at the orphanage when she had come to make enquires. Now Silvia was repaying the favour to Susan. The young mother looked worried.

  “Susinha, they are shooting. You must stay inside.”

  “I didn’t come here to stay inside the houses,” Susan struggled to say in her broken Portuguese. “I came to do my work, to give the food.”

  “No, no, Susinha,” Silvia repeated. “These street kids are bad. They are shooting again. You must not go near them.”

  “Silvia is right,” said Pedro da Sousa. “It is dangerous, Senhora.”

  “Why the children are shooting?” said Susan.

  Silvia corrected her. “Why are the children shooting? Because they are crazy in the head. Because they are just mad about nothing. They put cans next to the warehouse and shoot them. To practise their killing.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Susan replied. “Really, Silvia, I don’t.”

  “What else are guns for, Senhora, but killing?” said Pedro.

  “It is true, Susinha,” said Silvia. “They are killers. That is why the military police have come today. Have you not seen the trucks?”

  “Yes, I saw the trucks.”

  “The police have come for the street kids, Senhora,” said Pedro. “They have heard the shooting and come to take these boys away.”

  Susan looked at Pedro’s calm face. “What will happen with them?”

  “It is best you do not ask,” said Pedro.

  “It is best I do not ask? Will they kill them?”

  “You must not ask these questions, Senhora,” Pedro repeated. “The military police are bad. But these street kids are worse. They are all killers.”

  Susan was horrified. She struggled to find the words in Portuguese. “But I cannot do nothing ... as the police kill them.”

  “There is nothing you can do, Susinha,” said Silvia. “Look, come here to the window and I will open the shutter. You can see the old warehouse where the street kids stay. I worry one of their bullets will come here.”

  Susan followed Silvia to the far wall of the little brick-and-iron shack. There was a tiny window, about one foot square, with a wooden panel jammed in it as a shutter. Silvia dislodged the panel and put it aside. The little window was set low into the wall, about waist high. Silvia stood back. Susan kneeled on the floor and peered out.

  “Oh yes, Silvia, I see them. I can see them.” Susan could make out several children standing around at the side of the warehouse, about forty yards away, beyond the last row of shanty houses. She saw that the tallest boy had a pistol. It was his shooting she must have heard. “What are they doing? What for do they stand there?”

  “I told you, Susinha,” said Silvia. “They shoot at cans. They practise their killing. You must not go there.”

  Susan watched carefully as the tall boy raised his pistol and took careful aim, then fired. A tin can flew crazily off a low wall. He was a good shot. “All right, Silvia. I believe you. I can see the boy. He fires his gun.”

  “Then you will stay inside with us, Senhora?” said Pedro.

  Susan answered him without looking away from the window. “Yes. Yes, you are right, Pedro. I will stay.”

  “Thanks be to God,” Silvia exclaimed. “Thanks be to God, Susinha.”

  “I will stay. I will use my ... my moving camera.”

  “What, Senhora?” said Pedro, confused.

  “My camera, my camcorder. It’s on the table.”

  Pedro went to the table and retrieved the little video camera. “You mean this, Senhora? You want to take pictures?”

  Susan took the camera. “Yes, thank you, Pedro. I will take pictures. This is a ... video camera. It takes pictures ... that move. It is a gift to me from the church. They want me to take pictures of the children.”

  “I do not think this is good,” said Silvia. “What if they see you?”

  “The window is very small. No one can see me. Here it is dark inside.”

  “Ai, Susinha,” Silvia replied. “Always something strange.”

  Susan did not answer. She looked at the video camera. It was fitted with a zoom lens which she focussed all the way out. Then she looked through the viewfinder. It was much easier to see the boys now. She could even tell that the boy held an automatic pistol, not a revolver. She panned the camera around and checked all of the boys but none of them was Junio. She had heard nothing of Junio for nearly three months.

  “If anyone comes close to the house, Senhora, you must stop and close the window. We must not take any chances,” said Pedro.

  “All right, I will stop if anyone is near,” said Susan, speaking as quickly as her rudimentary Portuguese would allow. “But they will not come near here. They are far. We are here. It is dark inside the house. The window is very small. They will not see us.”

  “Ai, Senhora. All right, then. Use your camera. But there is nothing to see. All you will have is a lot of boring film. Boys shooting cans.”

  Susan turned around for a moment. “Thank you, Pedro. Thank you, Silvia, for letting me into your house and helping me.”

  “That’s all right,” said Silvia. “That’s all right, for sure, Susinha.”

  “Thank you,” said Susan. She turned back to the window and began to experiment with recording some footage. The camera made almost no sound at all, and it was quite dark inside the shack. There was no electric light. Anyone looking at the shack from the warehouse would not see her. Susan felt completely safe, although she hated to see children playing with guns. She didn’t believe for a moment that they could really be killers. They were just children and the gun was just a toy to them, she was sure of that.

  Junio was running again. He had regained his nerve, got up, and started running back to the warehouse. If the military police were here, he thought, they might be here to look for them, to look for Paulo and the others. Paulo had told him stories that the military police had sometimes shot at them, had tried to kill them, and that they had been forced to hide. Junio was scared, but he didn’t want to be a crybaby and do nothing. He wanted to be tough and warn Paulo that the police were coming. So he had decided to get up and run back to the warehouse. He had dropped his stick. There was nothing in his hands. He was running barefoot through the dirt roads of the slum, turning quickl
y down the familiar maze of alleys, taking the back way to the warehouse, so that he would not be following the trucks. His throat was dry and his heart beat fast, but at least he was not being a crybaby.

  Junio stopped running suddenly, when he saw two soldiers talking to each other across the next road. He stepped back behind a large, brick house and peered carefully around the corner at the soldiers. He could hear them talking, although he was still panting from his run. They had shotguns.

  “I don’t know why the captain’s so mad about these street kids.”

  “Me neither. They’re worthless little bastards. We’ve got better things to do.”

  “What are we supposed to do with them, anyway?”

  “Don’t ask, my friend. That’s up to the captain. Just ... do your job.”

  “Hmmm. Well, we won’t be seeing any of them. None of the little fuckers are going to come running out here. They’ll hide. You can’t catch them. They’re like animals.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What a waste of time this is, huh?”

  “Yeah. Come on, let’s move. We’re supposed to be looking.”

  “All right, all right.”

  The two soldiers started walking away. When Junio was sure they had their backs turned, he scurried across the road and continued on his way to the warehouse. His bare feet made little sound on the dirt as he ran.

  When he came at last to the little clearing by the warehouse, and the chain-link fence, he slowed to a walk, then dropped to the ground behind a tree and did not move. A few feet away, from behind a shack, the big soldier with the broken nose had suddenly walked out, with his back to Junio. There were two other soldiers with him, each carrying little machine guns.

  Junio waited until they had moved away, then he got up off the ground and knelt by the tree, waiting to see what they would do next.

  Captain Sollo was very pleased to see his quarry only thirty yards away. The tall boy with the pistol, and several other smaller boys with him, were in a dead end formed by the side of the warehouse on one side and the chain-link fence on the other. If Sollo blocked the entrance to the warehouse with gunfire, there would be no escape from the trap. It was all going to be far too easy, and this pleased Sollo immensely.

  “You, block the entrance to the warehouse. You, get those little bastards’ attention, but nobody shoots them. Understand?”

  “Yes, sir,” said the two soldiers, almost in unison. One of them set off running for the warehouse at high speed, while the other jogged forward and began firing his sub-machine gun in the air in one long continuous burst as he approached the children.

  The moment the first bullet came from the soldier’s gun, all of the children looked around from the cans on the wall and sprinted in different directions. Some of them were screaming. Most of them tried pathetically to scale the chain-link fence, but it was too high and topped with barbed wire. Paulo, the leader, thought more quickly. He made for the entrance to the warehouse, the only real route of escape. But he was too slow.

  “Stop or I shoot!” said the first soldier, who had arrived at the entrance of the warehouse. “Stop right now or I shoot!”

  Paulo stopped short of the warehouse but didn’t drop his pistol.

  The soldier yelled at him frantically, afraid that he was going to fire. The pistol wasn’t much compared to a sub-machine gun, but it was still enough to kill. “Drop the gun, you bastard, or I shoot you. Now!”

  Paulo was standing very still, frozen with terror and adrenalin. He was looking down the barrel of the soldier’s sub-machine gun, standing only ten feet or so from the muzzle. He pointed the pistol pathetically at the soldier, as if daring him to fire. “No. Drop yours.”

  The soldier screamed angrily. “Get on the ground! Now!”

  The second soldier was looking around anxiously at the other children, who were scattered around the perimeter of the chain-link fence, to see if any of them had guns. He couldn’t tell. It was not a good situation.

  Captain Sollo walked calmly over to Paulo and pointed his .44 calibre revolver at the boy’s head, stopping when he came about six feet away. He was standing to Paulo’s right. “Drop the gun, boy, or I kill you right now.”

  “If I drop the gun, you will kill me anyway,” Paulo replied, scared.

  “No. We just want to ask some questions. Now, put the gun down and we will talk. All right? Just put the gun down.” Sollo sounded sincere.

  Paulo knew he was beaten. With a last defiant look, he lowered the pistol and put it slowly on the ground. Then he stood up again and held up his hands. The soldier walked over quickly and frisked him, removing a revolver from the small of Paulo’s back, where it had been tucked in his belt.

  “He is disarmed, Captain,” said the soldier, stepping back but keeping his sub-machine gun trained carefully on Paulo.

  “Excellent, Corporal,” said Sollo. “In a moment, I will talk to this boy. So get the rest of these scum out of here, and leave us.”

  In a shack forty yards away, Susan’s hands trembled as she held the camera. Under her breath, quickly, over and over, she was saying a prayer. “Please God, let them live. Let the children live.” She ignored Silvia’s pleas to come away from the window, and kept filming. It took all her courage.

  Behind a tree, near the corner of the chain-link fence, Junio watched. He wanted to help Paulo but there was nothing he could do. He was scared.

  The two soldiers rounded up the rest of the children and marched them through the warehouse, then let them then run away into the slum.

  When they were gone, Sollo began his interrogation. It was unusually sloppy of him to interrogate a prisoner in the open, but the boy looked so scared that Sollo knew the interrogation would not take long. He kept his revolver trained on Paulo while he turned the nine-millilitre pistol over in his free hand, examining it quickly.

  “Where did scum like you get an expensive gun like this, huh?”

  Paulo said nothing. He looked defiantly into Sollo’s dark eyes.

  Sollo kicked at the street kid’s revolver, which was still lying in the dirt where the soldier had emptied it. “This rusty old revolver, I can understand. You probably paid some dealer for it, like a fool. I’m surprised it hasn’t blown up in your face. But this other gun is a different story. An expensive automatic, well oiled, in pristine condition. This is not the kind of gun that you little bastards could lay your hands on. Isn’t that right, boy?”

  “The gun is mine, Senhor,” said Paulo angrily.

  “It’s Captain, boy, not Senhor.”

  “The gun is mine, Captain,” Paulo repeated. “I bought it.”

  Sollo was walking in a small circle around Paulo, disappearing behind him and then reappearing, all the while keeping his .44 trained on him. “No, boy. You did not buy this gun. You stole it, didn’t you?”

  “No, Captain.”

  “I think you did. I think you stole it from a man you murdered behind the Golden Beach Hotel, the man you shot in the back. Isn’t that true?”

  “I bought it. I bought it at the Shopping.”

  Sollo laughed at this. “You? At the new shopping mall? They wouldn’t even let a grubby little bastard like you through the doors.”

  “I bought it at the gun shop at the Shopping, Captain. It is true.”

  Sollo dropped the nine-millimetre into the dirt. Then he reached out with his free hand and grabbed Paulo suddenly by the hair. He wrenched the boy’s head back until he was looking at the sky. “Open your mouth, boy. Open your mouth or I’ll blow your fucking head off.”

  “All right, Captain. All right.”

  Sollo put the steel barrel of his revolver into the boy’s mouth. Paulo drew his lips back in a desperate grimace, an expression one would find on a corpse, a grotesque grin which exposed his dark, broken teeth. He gasped down what he thought would be his last breath. Sollo drew back the hammer of the revolver with his thumb, making ready to fire. Then he spoke softly. “I am going to take this gun out of your mouth no
w, and you will tell me where you got the pistol. If you lie to me again, I will splatter your brains all over this warehouse wall. Don’t test me on this, boy, because I will kill you if you lie. Understand?”

  Paulo nodded his head very slightly.

  Sollo withdrew the gun.

  When he was able to speak again, Paulo said, “I stole it from the man I shot in the alley, Captain. That is the truth, I swear it by God. I swear it.”

  Sollo let go of the boy’s hair and stood back. “That is better. Now, this man you stole from, he was carrying jewels, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you took these jewels?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah, I see you are learning the benefits of telling the truth. Good. Now, one of these jewels was a diamond necklace, with two large red stones.”

  “Yes, Captain. I took it.”

  “Excellent. Now, you will give it to me. It belongs to a friend of mine.”

  “I do not have it, Captain. I swear by God, I do not have it.”

  “You just said you stole it, boy. Where is it?”

  “I swear by God, Captain, I gave it to the boy named Junio.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “He keeps it for me, until we can take it to the dealer.”

  Sollo raised the gun to Paulo’s throat and pressed it against his windpipe. “Are you sure you are not lying, boy? Hmmm?”

  “No, it is the truth. I will help you find him, Captain. He is here, in this slum. He is the one with the white hair, like the sand of the beach.”