“Who was that?’
She paused a second, as if measuring whether I would let it go. I wouldn’t. “His name is Qabbani. He’s our gunrunner, our weapons man. We can’t kill Marinho with bad language.’
“I’ve seen your stash of guns. You’ve got enough for an army.’
Beatriz smiled as if it were a big joke. “We need more. Qabbani’s professional, and he is reliable. We do favors for each other, and now I’ve said enough.’
“Favors like what?’ I asked.
The little bandit queen blew air from her cheeks and said irritably, “Like we test Qabbani’s weapons on somebody Qabbani don’t like! If a favela gangster rip him off for payment, he would like very much that creep to be dead! Oof, you ask so many questions, gringa. This is our world, and you cannot learn it in a day.’
I didn’t bother to tell her I’m a quick study.
More dancing, more partying, and when we got back to the house, the party atmosphere continued for a little while, with Beatriz’s people sitting around and drinking in the glow of candlelight. I plonked down on the uneven floor and took in the bits of sad furniture, the low, chipped table and wicker chairs with ratty holes in them, guessing that no one bothered to fix the place up since it might have to be abandoned at a moment’s notice if they were attacked—whether by the Brazilian cops, Marinho’s people, or another enemy. Then Beatriz showed me where I would sleep for the night: a nearby room with a modest futon mattress laid on the floor of rough unfinished plywood boards. I’ve slept on worse, but I felt like a child abruptly sent off to bed. Part of me wanted to surrender to oblivion, collapse right there after the long day, but I heard sounds and murmurs from back in the lounge area.
I tiptoed up to take a look from the hall.
A young boy with fuzz on his upper lip pretending it could be a mustache and a black girl with freckles, people who didn’t betray knowing each other at all earlier in the day, were passionately making out on a futon couch. They were like small animals, clinging to each other and wild in their petting, the girl already topless, holding her man tight, rocking back and forth as they seemed to devour each other. But more interesting was the scene in front of them. Beatriz knelt on the floor before the couple, and for a moment it looked like she was doing yoga or something. She stretched and offered her arms forward, and one of the other men gripped her by the wrists. Beatriz barked something in a whisper, a single word that I could only assume meant tighter.
Suddenly, she broke from his grasp, her arms flailing as if she were on fire, eaten by mosquitoes, something that drove her to strip off her shirt and all but tear off her bra. Her full breasts spilling out with large and dark areolae, thick erect nipples, breasts like overripe fruit. She bleated a command to have her arms gripped again, and a muscular guy behind her yanked off her trousers and panties. Beatriz never looked back at him, looking down once at the floor, up again hungrily at the couple as the guy behind her opened his trousers and guided his uncircumcised cock into her pussy.
Amazing. The soft-swinging phenomenon had been around since we discovered sex was fun in caves, just went by a new name with the Internet, and here out of sexual frustration or maybe boredom, Beatriz and her followers had created their own incestuous little club. The guy fucked her. There was no other word for it. She wanted to be roughly taken, and in the candlelight flicker, the shadows on her muscles changed with each pounding thrust, lit up his six-pack and his pecs, defined his hip bone … and made me wet my lips. It seemed he fucked her for his own pleasure rather than hers, but I would be proved wrong soon. When at last he came, he pulled out of her and let his spunk fly along her back. This only made her tug harder on the arms gripping her. A second guy, skinny with six o’clock shadow, took himself out as well and penetrated her—with a quick rude jab of his stubby cock. He rammed her as if to inflict hurt, and while Beatriz gritted her teeth, her eyes widened, and only now did I see any betrayal of mounting arousal. But the guy inside her…fucking her, but taking no joy in it. He pulled out and a spatter of semen struck Beatriz’s calves.
On the futon the boy with the peach fuzz had graduated to missionary position inside the black girl, her knees up and one arm holding her breasts from jiggling uncomfortably with his momentum. Beatriz watched them, and a third guy knelt in front of her, took out his dick and pushed it into her face. She went through a kind of ritual of refusal before she gobbled him into her mouth to suck him, her lips slurping and urgently tonguing his shaft, all as a fourth guy took his turn with her from behind, his curved dick eliciting a groan. When the guy in her mouth let out a cry, she let him go, and he, too, ejaculated on her back.
It was only when the fourth guy inside her bellowed with his own orgasm and pulled out that she made a kind of wail of half protest, half pleasure. And the men… The men who had taken her and spilled themselves on her, they looked smaller for it. As if this gang-bang demeaned them, not her. One of them grabbed a towel and wiped off her back, but the game wasn’t over. She rose from the floor, stagger-stepping until she yanked the boy rudely off the black girl and sloppily kissed him, pushing him down. She was short but overpoweringly voluptuous, mounting him quickly and taking his hands to squeeze her large breasts.
She rode him hard, slapping his chest, and crying out with her teeth gritted, the left-behind spunk smeared on her back drying, but now fresh beads of perspiration between her tits and down her belly, her pussy fur matted with it. She exorcised her demons in a swirling storm that sucked the others into it. It captivated the room. And me. No tenderness, beyond even personality, just blind will to reach release and use this boy like a tool. I’ve seen women have sex in front of others before. I’ve seen women try to fuck to demonstrate how good they are, and I’ve seen them act on their own lust. I’ve seen women come from being whipped and love every second of it. It wasn’t how she was taken or how many partners that struck me as aberrant (and I’ve seen so much, I don’t know what you call aberrant anymore). No, this was different because it was the first time I had ever seen a woman fuck somebody as if she needed to burn rage like gasoline.
She came with her nails digging into the boy’s chest, her neck arched back and her mouth open in a silent cry, a grunt like a man’s. She slipped off him and, completely nude, walked out of the house into the wretched little gravel yard. There was a half-moon that painted her sticky and exhausted body white, and for a second I recognized the emotion that shuddered through her, that made her touch her breasts and caress her own belly. I had felt it back in those strange apartments, watching just as I watched tonight, felt it when the girl had her fingers inside me and when I was naked in the upstairs of the Scenarium with Graham. It was the first time I think I understood anything about Beatriz. It was the desire for oblivion, to extinguish yourself through exposure and complete vulnerability, no longer caring who saw you, forcing the world to see you in all your rawness. A kind of freedom, but a kind of death, too. I wondered which one she wanted.
♦
The next morning I woke to toddlers screaming outside from nearby households, playing naked and barefoot while banging tin. The favela was a parody of a city block, looking like a giant had stepped on its lumpy tiers, and from up here, the sound of Rio’s traffic was a distant growl. I bathed with cold water out of a bucket. Not fun, but at least I was clean again. In the primitive house, no indoor plumbing yet Beatriz’s gang had a television with an aerial, and she even had a laptop. I wolfed down a quick breakfast, grateful once again that they shared their food with me, and Beatriz and her followers behaved like nothing had happened last night. For them, maybe the sex games were not important.
I asked my hostess, “You have a modem?’
As she blinked at me, I added quickly, “Internet. Can you get Internet?’
“Yes, yes—of course, help yourself.’
I checked the special e-mail address I’d set up, and the government authority in Brasilia that oversaw corporations had gotten back to me on the tie between the Lemos Co
mpany and Silky Pictures. They sent PDF copies of the signed legal documents, including the list of the senior corporate officers. The managing director, the chief financial officer…
Oh, no. No, no, no.
No wonder. And now I had a picture to prove the revelation in these documents.
Jiro’s techie geeks had helped me with a freeze-frame blowup of a shot of film—one from the orgy yacht DVD. When I brought it up, I saw what had frightened Luis Antunes and what made him want to run away to Europe with Helê.
Reflected in the glass window of the door on the yacht— one of the party revelers looking on while the wild sex continued on the deck—was Andrade.
Ferreira’s lawyer.
Luis had recognized him in that briefest glimpse, had wanted to go over the time index frame to be absolutely sure. I could imagine his blood going cold, realizing that Andrade could only be on that ship because Ferreira and Marinho were working together.
The PDF documents showed that the managing director of the Lemos Company was José Ferreira. Marinho was actually working for him, funneling profits from the porn empire into the gangster’s company.
Luis. Poor Luis. When he first imagined the scope of whatever was going on, he had gone to Ferreira to enlist his help. And had given himself away to the enemy, shown his hand. By the time he noticed Andrade on the DVD and realized his fatal error, it was too late.
Beatriz came up behind me and looked over my shoulder. “I know him. He is that pig lawyer, Andrade.’
“On a yacht at a party held by Henrique Marinho,’ I said, and I told her quickly what I uncovered.
She looked at me in astonishment. “But Marinho and Ferreira are enemies!’
“Look at the corporate documents,’ I insisted. “I can show you the money transfers. There is no gang war between the two of them. There never was.’
“But that—that doesn’t make sense—’
“It makes perfect sense,’ I argued. “There are all kinds of prison gangs and favela crime lords out there, right? If Ferreira and Marinho pretend to be enemies, each operation can report back to each other on who might make a move. Maybe someone comes to Marinho and wants help so he can attack Ferreira. Great, Marinho tips Ferreira off— Ferreira gets an early warning. And the pipeline works the other way. Someone comes to Ferreira and says, ‘Help me get rid of Marinho’—so Ferreira picks up a phone, and Marinho finds out who’s after him. A secret alliance. It got Luis Antunes murdered. He was looking for help from the same people who wanted him dead.’
“With his reputation, I always think Ferreira worth killing,’ snapped Beatriz. “Now he give me good reason— working with that slime Marinho. I swear I’ll kill them both.’
Ferreira was the real big fish. And what a good laugh he must have had with his lawyer, Andrade, when I came to visit him in prison. What a wonderful performance he put on, with me stupidly trying to enlist his help. I was in the dark, just as Luis had been. Clever. Clever, clever bastard. He might be the smartest and most dangerous enemy I had faced. After all, he’d seen me coming from an ocean away.
Oh, but we’re not done yet, you and I, I thought to myself.
The trouble was that by now Ferreira had been released, probably already back in town and out on the streets of Rio. A free man. I was going after him on his home turf, and I still hadn’t figured out his spy connection or what he was truly after.
♦
In the afternoon, Beatriz and I piled back into the van, and she drove us to another obscure corner of the favela. I had no idea where I was again, even as we scrambled up one of the cracked streets. When she led me to a storage shed, I understood she hadn’t shot one of the gang just to steal the van.
But we didn’t need the goon’s keys for the shed. Some one else was already using bolt cutters to haul out the chain and quickly push up the door. As it slid up, light shone in, and the stench of thirty, perhaps even forty girls trapped inside hit us in a wave. They had barely been able to breathe. They couldn’t wash, and they’d been given a couple of buckets for toilets. Their eyes were blinded by the sunlight, and only a couple were able to stand. These were the ones, I was told, who would have been shipped overseas like Matilde. Marinho liked to stash them in a shed to break their will and their spirits first.
Oh, I wanted that son of a bitch to feel fear.
Graham helped the first one out as Beatriz called his name.
She rushed over to throw her arms around him and kiss him. Notice I wrote: She threw her arms around him. I watched as he yanked her hands off his neck and, to my astonishment, pushed her back. There were a few sharp exchanges in Portuguese, and it sounded like she was either apologizing or expecting a warmer reception. He was having none of it—quite angry with her, in fact.
With a huff, Beatriz went into the shed to help bring more girls out.
I walked over, and as he noticed me his face fell. “Teresa…’
“Way to go, poker face,’ I told him, folding my arms. “I could have believed you were her boyfriend—’
“I am not her boyfriend,’ he snapped. “Crazy bitch nearly got me killed once and—’
“And I could have believed you’re just doing the right thing, showing up to help these women.’
“But it’s too big a coincidence, isn’t it?’
“Yep.’
Better believe it. Right after I meet him breaking into Marinho’s production company? He was here freeing the girls, so I knew he wasn’t with that creep or Ferreira, which meant he could only be working for one other outfit.
“Doesn’t matter,’ said Graham. “We need to talk anyway. By the way, you made MI6 look very foolish slipping out like that.’
“So I guess you’ll be the class favorite if you bring me in. I thought you were a nice guy.’
“I thought you were going to call me.’
His eyes strayed to Marinho’s victims, many of them barely able to walk unassisted to Beatriz’s van. We both had other priorities for the moment.
10
We couldn’t help forty women escape in a single lorry, of course. Graham got on his mobile to a T T taxi company and soon had two more vehicles pulling up to drive the girls away. The young women all needed medical attention, but Beatriz—now exhausted with explaining everything to me in English and reverting to Portuguese to Graham—said it would be wiser to have a nurse or doctor tag along and move the girls out to a suburban clinic. From there, aid organizations could relocate some of the girls and help others return to their villages and towns.
Beatriz agreed to follow up with the shed girls and meet with us later. I think she meant just Graham, but he was the one who said she’ll meet us. Whatever was between them, he wanted it over. He led me down to his rusting Beetle, and I have no idea what made me go with him—he worked for the cloak-and-dagger types eager to put me in a cell. On the other hand, he had absolutely no jurisdiction here, and the Brazilian authorities would be just as chuffed to deport a foreign agent as to hold a suspected Islamic terrorist.
We rode in silence for a couple of minutes. Then I announced: “I need to get my things out of my hotel somehow. According to Beatriz, the bad guys will find out about it soon—if they’re not already there.’
Graham nodded. “I don’t know if you trust me enough to stay with me—but that is the safest place for you.’
“Oh, really?’ I laughed.
“It is, Teresa.’
“I wonder how that will go down with Beatriz.’
“I don’t give a damn.’
“What’s the deal with you two? You slept with her, didn’t you?’
“Hey, shall I ask about Luis Antunes?’ he shot back. “And his wife?’
I looked at him, not so much taken aback by this point but by the fact that he was so well informed. Huh. Maybe Helê had been forced to admit our dalliance to the cops or to MI6.
I suppose he did have a point. It’s not like he’d led me on—I had just seen for myself moments ago that he and Beatriz were
not together, at least not anymore.
“So that video of you with the girl? The one you had to retrieve from Silky Pictures? I suppose that was for my benefit.’
Graham kept his eyes on the road. “It was.’ I could see he wasn’t proud of his on-camera performance. “We’re not involved in any way. She’s an operative who usually works out of Lisbon. She—’
“I get it. I know how MI6 brings loving couples together.’
He didn’t reply to that. I guess he knew about Kim, too.
“Teresa, we needed a plausible scenario for how I could run into you. Here I am in this city, British, same as you, but before the high season starts and right after you escape trouble. We thought it would look a bit suspicious if I was on the prowl in a nightclub or walked up to you on the beach.’
“But we ended up in a nightclub just the same.’
“That wasn’t the job, that was us. I like you. We shared something special—at least it was special to me.’
“Was it? Special?’
“Yes. Hell, yes!’
“Because MI6 knows an awful lot about my sexual history,’ I said. “Maybe you were curious and wanted to confirm a few intimate details for them.’
He looked hard at me, willing me to recognize the sincerity in those large brown eyes. “Hey, that’s unfair. And think it through, Miss Detective. We arrange for you to accidentally walk in and see a sex tape of me. That doesn’t make me look very good, especially if my plan is to seduce you.’
It had been a special night.
But I wasn’t about to turn off my brain simply because I liked the guy. “I’d like to know how you could be so bloody sure I would come down the hall in that office to check you out! I mean you go to all that trouble, you have footage actually filmed of you having sex, you break into the office and plant yourself in that very spot—’
Graham made an embarrassed little wince that turned into a mischievous smile. “Well, er…We didn’t have to count on luck as much as you think.’
“Sorry?’
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