“I liked him, Helê. I did. I wouldn’t hurt him. Listen. About Matilde…’
“You must understand, Teresa, in some ways Luis could be so naïve. He thought he could walk with the devil for a while and then say goodbye. He heard the rumors of these nasty DVDs made by this Ladrão Films, and he knew Silky was a front for it in Rio, for Marinho. But he said, ‘If I do not mix what we do here with that, it will be all right. We will make enough that we buy our way out.’ You remember a shoot Duncan had with Victoria a couple of weeks ago?’
“Vaguely,’ I said. “Redhead, right? Didn’t she cancel?’
“Yes. She did cancel. Luis e-mailed Rio and mentioned in passing how production on one feature was a day behind schedule, and the other girls were booked up. The word came back there was a girl available locally who could fill in.’
“Matilde.’
“I happened to see the picture of her and recognized her,’ explained Helê. “So Luis said why don’t we go see her personally, since she lives in Richmond and she’s an old acquaintance of yours? It’s close by, and we were both curious about how she had got out of the favela.’
That must have been the night I tailed them and saw the commotion at the mansion’s front door.
“I was wondering if she lived with a new husband or something,’ Helê went on. “We were horrified by what we saw. Matilde is working as a domestic in the house, and she’s beaten and not allowed to leave. She’s nanny to the children, mistress for the husband, and he and the wife both beat her—he struck her right in front of us! It was because Matilde let out a cry when she saw me. She said she was kept in a basement. The husband put his hand out, telling Luis you want to use her, you pay me. Luis wrote an e-mail to Henrique Marinho that night, saying he was cutting off all ties with them and would buy out their share in the London operation. I don’t know what Marinho’s answer was, but it was just after that when Luis became very afraid, when he talked about going to France and Italy for a while.’
“What about Matilde?’
“I do not know,’ said Helê. “Luis said we couldn’t do anything right that minute. I was so cross with him, but he explained later that if I showed my outrage, he couldn’t get her out. He wanted to play along and then phone the police, and when they came to the house in Richmond, the family would be caught red-handed and not be—how you say? Tipped off? Yes, tipped off to move Matilde elsewhere for a while. What? Why do you frown like that?’
“Because,’ I said, knowing that I shouldn’t upset her further, but that I had already shown what I was thinking, “it doesn’t add up. They wouldn’t kill Luis over one girl smuggled into Britain as a slave. And not because he threatened to buy them out of the corporate arrangement.’
There was more going on here than either of us knew.
Helê shook her head at me and said, “I see now you didn’t kill Luis. You couldn’t… But you must give yourself up, Teresa. Or run. I am sorry, but it is over for you.’
Like hell, I thought.
“What happened to Matilde?’ I asked.
“I don’t know. I think Luis made the phone call to the police, but after his e-mail to Rio, perhaps the couple knew they’d be in trouble and hid Matilde away for a while. For all I know, she’s still working at that house.’
“Give me the address in Richmond.’
“You should be thinking of yourself! They are looking for you.’
“I’ll be fine,’ I told her. “If I can get her, Helê, I’m going to bring her here, all right? She can stay with you a couple of days. A good friend of mine—a woman called Helena Willoughby—will contact a solicitor. With luck, the police won’t add to the girl’s trauma by deporting her straightaway.’
“Teresa, I think you are a friend. And I am saying you have no time for this!’
“I’m not in prison yet,’ I said. “That girl is.’
“What if this married couple come looking for her here? If they bought Matilde from Marinho’s gangsters in Brazil, then—’
“Don’t worry about that couple, I’ll take care of them. Listen, Helê. Isn’t Matilde your friend? You can’t just leave it at one phone call by Luis and hope for the best! He rescued you, now it’s your turn to rescue someone else.’
She offered a little-girl nod. “You make me ashamed.’
“I don’t want you ashamed,’ I said. “I want you useful. This husband and wife don’t know me from Adam, so they’ll have no reason to think I brought Matilde here. And my guess is these gangsters will cut them loose and let them fend for themselves.’
She couldn’t help a laugh, incredulous at my reasoning. “What do you know of such criminals?’
“I know they cheat to win.’ I started heading for the door. “So do I.’
♦
With a little coaxing, Helê loaned me her car. I broke into the house in Richmond as easily as the Antunes mansion in Twickenham (it’s surprising how often the rich don’t invest in proper locks). What I saw there made me sick.
Electronic lock on the basement door—on the outside, to keep somebody in. I found the fuse box and switched the breaker for it. I didn’t switch all the breakers because I needed the element of surprise. When the lights go out, the first thing you do is check your power, right? So I hit the single one and snuck downstairs. And discovered Helê was right.
“Are you Matilde?’ I asked.
Eyes wide, small mouth open in astonishment. Up close, she looked a couple of years younger than Helê. I don’t know if she understood English, but she could understand her own name, slowly nodding an affirmative. Shivering under a blanket. It was clearly uninsulated and unfinished down here. She was in a corner past tools and dusty wood shelves, and had been provided with only a space heater. Unbelievable.
I took her hand, trying to make her understand that I was taking her away from this place, and she rose nude, with just a pair of tatty panties on. I guessed they took away her clothes at night, perhaps to inhibit her from sneaking out a window or something. When she turned, I saw her back and buttocks were a canvas of welts and bruises. There are organizations in Sudan trying to eradicate slavery, and here it was within reach of the District Line.
She was indeed, I learned later, expected to be nanny and mistress on twenty-four-hour call. Even with the baby requiring attention at night, the couple didn’t deem her worthy of having a bed in the nursery. Instead, they had the electronic door wired so the lazy creeps only had to roll over and hit a button. Matilde was then freed and expected to come upstairs, feed the child, and, once the baby was settled, return to this fucking cot in the damp, dark bowels of the house.
I led the girl up into the kitchen and fetched a butcher’s knife. It didn’t take impressive miming skills for stay put and use this if you need it. I doubted the girl had many belongings here but she would need her clothes. We both nearly jumped out of our skins as we heard—
“Who the hell are you?’ demanded the husband. It was natural he was angry. I had invaded his home.
Unfortunately for him, I was far more pissed off. It was the first time I think I’d ever hit somebody first. I sent a side-thrust kick into his gut, and he collapsed into a fetal position, wind knocked out of him, scared to death.
“I’m here to collect Matilde.’
“Who?’ he coughed.
“This girl!’ I said. “This girl you keep in your basement!’
“We don’t call her that. She’s Dora.’
“Really? You renamed her? Like a dog.’ I kicked him again. Hard.
“Who the hell are you?’ More whimper than bark now. “We’ll call her what we like! She works for us!’
“You don’t pay her. That’s not a good thing.’
“What is this?’ he asked, his own outrage returning despite his pain. “What the fuck do you care?’
“Unbelievable,’ I muttered.
It took all of my self-control not to mark him some way with the knife, to leave him a shaming scar. I mimed to Matilde for her to sh
ow me the phone. She may not have been allowed to use it, but she would at least know where it was. I dialed the Antunes house. I was informing Helê that her friend was safe and I’d be back with her in fifteen minutes when the creep’s wife picked up the line.
“Who is this? Jonathan? Jonathan!’
“Come down and say hello,’ I told her sweetly. Then I ripped the line out of the wall. That was more to inspire her to come downstairs than because of any concern about the police. I really wanted the cops to get a good look at the dungeon this pair had rigged up.
I kicked the husband before he could cry out to warn his wife, and her footsteps went boom-boom-boom-boom down the stairs as she flew into the room with an imperious rage. “Jonathan, what is going on? You don’t bother to tell me someone’s here, and now the phone line’s gone dead and—’
I held out my hand politely, throwing her off guard. Her own lifted in automatic reflex to shake it in greeting, and that’s when I put a joint lock on it that sent her to her knees.
“Hello. Don’t worry, I won’t stay long.’
“You’re…you’re hurting me!’
“A lot?’
“Ye…yes!’
“Good. I’m glad. You two like cages, don’t you? Lucky you, you’ll get to be inside one! Oh, not like Matilde’s here—your experience will come with an arrest and a trial. Now stay still—I want to tie you up nice and tight so the blood gets cut off at your wrists.’
♦
I drove Matilde back to the Antunes house. I considered ringing Helena to get her help right away, perhaps have her drive out, but no. I was really paranoid by now, and between the spies and getting followed on the street, it occurred to me her phone might be tapped just in case I did call. Better that Helê contact her the next day.
There was an hour of bittersweet girlfriend chatter, Helê explaining that Luis had been murdered, Matilde crying several times and kissing both our hands that she was saved, and Helê fed her a meal, ran her a bath, and put the exhausted girl to bed. I worried she might need a doctor, but she probably needed a good night’s sleep in a real bed first.
When Helê came back downstairs, she embraced me like a sister. “I’m sorry I ever thought…’
“It’s okay.’
“You must understand. It’s not only what the police said. A woman did try to kill Luis once.’
“What? Why? When?’
“Back in Brazil,’ said Helê. “He told me about it. He made a big joke out of it at the time, but I think it shook him up, and maybe it’s one of the reasons why he wanted us to come to London. She used a sniper rifle from a rooftop. Luis said she nearly shot him because he was walking with Henrique Marinho that day.’
“Who was she?’
“Luis said—well, he was told—that her name is Beatriz. Marinho claimed she was crazy, a bitch—all kinds of wild things, that she is angry over a contract dispute. Luis suspected there was more to it. He suspected her life in these movies had been like mine, maybe worse. That was when he started to see them for what they were. He wanted to disentangle us from them and move far away, take what he could from them and escape.’
“You say he started to see them for what they were. What were they?’
“I told you: gangsters. I grew up in Rocinha. They plucked me like a cherry to use in their films. There are thousands of girls like Matilde and me in the favelas. The gangs run things there. They are the parallel power.’
“I know how men can seem to have a lot of power—’
“Teresa, you do not listen. We call them this. The ‘parallel power.’ They are criminals who are in groups so organized, you would not believe. They control whole favelas. The Comando Verhelmo, the Terceiro Comando, Amigos dos Amigos. The Primeiro Comando da Capital in São Paulo. I told you: Luis thought he could walk with the devil and say goodbye. After he sent his e-mail to Henrique Marinho over Matilde, he called up people working for a man named José Ferreira. He was trying to play one devil against the other.’
“What do you mean?’
“Ferreira runs one of the biggest gangs in Rio.’
Good God, I thought.
“This is mad,’ I said after a moment. “You’re saying Silky Pictures is run by a favela crime lord, and Luis and you moved to London to get away from him. But then he makes an appeal to another gangster in Brazil to ask for help?’ I shook my head in disbelief. “And we’ve got, of all things, a documentary on Muslims…’
“Who knows if this documentary has anything to do with it?’ said Helê. “I don’t know anything anymore. I only know Marinho and his bastards killed my man. They must have! And you cannot fight them, Teresa. They are based way over there in Brazil, and their empires are like nothing you can imagine. No one here will believe their reach can be so far—and no one will believe me. A former whore and trophy wife of a porn merchant.’
I’ll make them believe you, I thought.
“Helê, I’m afraid we need to take a look at some porn.’
I hadn’t forgotten about the two Ladrão DVDs Luis had zeroed in on, but I had needed to rescue Matilde first and gain Helê‘s trust before I told her, oh, by the way, the night we all made love? I was rifling through your husband’s desk. She was ready now to accept that I was an investigator on her side. We took the DVDs into Luis’s editing suite, and I said, “He must have had a reason for keeping these.’
“He didn’t tell me,’ she protested gently.
“I know, Helê, but there must be something important on them.’
I zipped through to the time index code Luis had scribbled down, but there was nothing that jumped out. The film was crude—mostly hand-held video footage that bordered on amateur, no attempt at any story, just shots of an apparent orgy on a yacht. The guys were all in their mid-thirties, most of them pasty pale, a couple with red hair, and I heard a Midlands accent and then a Newcastle one in the vulgar comments between the girls’ moans. British. And the girls were Brazilian. The life jacket in the background was stamped Eurydice—the name of the yacht. Somebody’s pretentious, I grumbled to myself. The camera panned across the display of writhing bodies, and I saw a couple of ghostly reflections in the glass. Could that be it? What made him mark the time index? Too quick.
“Do you recognize the people there?’
Helê shook her head.
I zipped back over the footage. A millisecond to glimpse, and when I freeze-framed the shot, it wasn’t enough. Useless unless Helê knew anyone. Maybe Luis had. Or—
Maybe I was on the wrong track completely.
“Luis sailed. In fact, he sailed competitively. He’d know ships, boats.’
“He loved to sail,’ said Helê, her voice breaking.
I put my arm around her shoulder to comfort her. I hated making her view this ugly footage in the midst of her grief, but I needed her eyes, her memory.
If it wasn’t the people on the boat, maybe it was the boat itself. But I could see nothing in the time code that was important about the yacht.
So why had he cared enough to scribble down this point on the footage?
For editing purposes, you make notes of time codes when you need to make a cut. But Luis wouldn’t need to edit this footage, so—
Alteration. Special effects. That was another reason why you mark a time code. So that you can play with the shot. Change the light in it, use a filtering effect like a red or a blue tint for atmosphere, blow up a detail.
Luis had wanted to check something. He had wanted to be sure.
“Do you mind if I take these DVDs with me?’ I asked.
“Go ahead,’ she muttered. “I want this awful shit out of the house. I don’t want to think about this kind of stuff ever again.’
I pulled the DVD out of the drive.
My next step was to trawl the Internet, and with Helê translating the Portuguese pages, I got more of an idea who I was dealing with, that catalogue-browsing blond creep Marinho and this gang leader José Ferreira, who at the moment was, it seemed, in p
rison.
It was easy to see how they could loathe each other and be rivals. José Ferreira, according to one news report, had been a Jekyll who had devolved into a Hyde. He came from a middle-class background and had graduated as an engineer, specializing in hydraulics. He was no fool. He had worked at Brazil’s massive Itaipu Dam and gone to Syria as a consultant on a hydroelectric plant. But then he had gotten stupid and greedy and had experimented with a different kind of piping.
The general assumption was that he had made his criminal contacts during his engineering work in the Middle East. The heroin he smuggled came out of Afghanistan, and after it made its way through Lagos, Nigeria, where security was lax (something I can tell you myself), Ferreira arranged for it to be packed in shipments of industrial equipment. He was the acknowledged ringleader, but the evidence could only put him away for five years, which would soon be over. He was no model inmate either.
This accomplished engineer apparently discovered a taste for violence. No one could prove he shanked a rival in the prison exercise yard in broad daylight, nor would the guard he allegedly raped testify against him—the man resigned and moved to the distant city of Salvador. It was as if Ferreira’s conviction and imprisonment had revealed what he truly was, and under his intelligence was a beast of raw appetites and cunning.
The expansion of his empire, directed from behind bars, had run smack into the advancement of Henrique Marinho. According to Helê, the head of Silky Pictures in Brazil had charted a course in reverse. No wonder Marinho was quick to boil over from my taunting—I was right that he had come up from the streets. No university degree, limited education, and he had bought his way into fine restaurants and exclusive nightclubs, doing his best to hide that he was a predator. I imagined he had a degree of charm that ensnared naïve individuals like Luis, ones who didn’t realize who they’d gotten into bed with until it was too late.
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