by Mark Dawson
It was fear, too. Marcos had called him last night with the news that a body had been found on the Hill. Two kids had walked up beyond Rua Um to the spot where the favela ended and the rainforest began. There was a spot there that they called Terreirão, or the Big Ground, where they played soccer and basketball. Terreirão was also a dumping ground for the dismembered body parts of those who crossed the gang. A head and a collection of butchered limbs had been found there last night.
It was Palito.
Paulo had forgotten Garanhão’s promise that he would take care of the loan shark, but the don, self-evidently, had not. And this was how the don went about his business. Paulo had struggled to stop his imagination from picturing the scene.
He heard a buzzing noise. It took him a moment to realise what it was.
His phone was on silent, and it was vibrating with an incoming call.
“What time is it?” Rafaela mumbled next to him.
Paulo fumbled for the phone and squinted at it until his eyesight cleared. “Six,” he said.
“Who’s calling you at six in the morning?”
“I don’t know.”
“Answer it before it wakes Eloá.”
He took the call and put the phone to his ear. “Yes?” he said quietly. “Who is it?”
“Alessandro.”
“What do you want? It’s—”
“I need you.”
“It’s six in the morning.”
“I don’t care what time it is. Get up here. You’ve got thirty minutes.”
Paulo lay back on the bed and felt his heart race. Was it Alícia? Had something happened? Why else would they need him on short notice?
“What?” Rafaela asked him. “Who was that?”
“Work,” he said, trying to regulate the racing of his heart. He had to lie. How could he possibly tell Rafaela the truth?
“Marcos? Why is he calling now?”
He closed his eyes and exhaled. “I have to go in. He’s got a big job, and Jose has let him down.”
He flinched, expecting her to press; his lies were so painfully obvious now that they were almost insulting, yet the moment passed and she said nothing. He was about to get out of bed when she reached across and laid her hand on his arm.
“Be careful,” she said. “I know, whatever you’ve done, that you’ve done it for Eloá. For us. But the money means nothing if she doesn’t have her father.”
Paulo wanted to reply, but he found that his throat was suddenly clogged with emotion. Rafaela was upstanding and moral, and he hated that he had put her into a situation where she had persuaded herself to put her ethics to one side. He had co-opted her into his foolish scheme; what kind of soulless monster had he become?
“I’m always careful,” he said, leaning over to kiss her on the forehead. “Everything’s fine.” He added, “We can talk about it later,” even though that was the last thing that he wanted to do.
He got up before she could say anything else, washed his face with cold water, and dressed quickly, careful to be as quiet as he could so as not to wake Eloá. He opened the door, looked back into the flat and saw that Rafaela was leaning on one elbow and watching him. He would have given a lot to have ignored the summons and to have gone back to his wife and held her until their daughter awoke. He couldn’t do that, though. Garanhão owned him, and he had no choice but to do whatever was asked of him.
He opened the door and stepped out into the dingy passageway beyond. It was already a quarter past six, and Alessandro had said that he was needed at half past.
He was running late.
54
Paulo was out of breath by the time he reached the top of the Hill. Alessandro and Junior were waiting for him in the empty warehouse: the former was sitting on a picnic chair, smoking a joint, his feet up on a matching white plastic table; the latter was pacing back and forth, his injured shoulder suspended in a sling. Paulo drew closer and saw that there were two pistols and a scattering of bullets on the table. Both men were agitated, and their eyes were bloodshot and lined with red. The smell of burnt plastic hung in the air; it was the smell of meth. It looked as if both men had been partying all night.
“I told you six thirty,” Alessandro snapped as Paulo climbed the steps to the dock. “Not six forty.”
“You only called me—”
“No excuses,” Alessandro said, cutting him off. “You come when I tell you to come. What do you think Garanhão would say if I said you weren’t taking your obligations seriously?”
“I am taking them seriously,” Paulo protested, very aware that it sounded like he was whining.
Alessandro snorted. A muscle twitched in his cheek, and his fingers clasped and unclasped seemingly without him noticing; he looked very, very wired. Alessandro was usually more measured than Junior, and, until now, Paulo had relied on him to moderate Junior’s more intemperate requests. The fact that he was unhinged now changed the dynamic, and that frightened him.
“What do you need?” he asked them. “Is it the girl? Is she okay?”
“Who cares?” Alessandro said. “Nothing to do with her.”
Paulo felt a moment of relief. “So what are we doing?”
“You’re driving us into the city,” he said.
“What for?”
“Enough questions,” Junior snapped. “Just do as you’re fucking told.”
Paulo was about to rise to that, but both of them were wound tight, and he didn’t want a confrontation.
He stepped around them and started for the basement. Alessandro grabbed his arm. “What are you doing?”
“Going to see her,” he said.
“Are you listening to me? We’re going to the city.”
“It’ll just take a moment.”
“You’re a dumb fuck,” Alessandro said. “What, you got a soft spot for her?”
“She’s six years old,” Paulo said. “She’s scared.”
“You think she’s going to see seven?” Junior said with a smirk.
Paulo felt a knot of fear in his gut. He said, “What does that mean?” although he knew very well exactly what it meant.
“It means she’s seen all of us,” Junior slurred. “You think Garanhão is just going to send her back down the Hill to Mummy and Daddy?”
“She wouldn’t be able to say who we were,” Paulo protested.
Alessandro picked up one of the pistols and racked the slide. “You don’t get where he is if you take chances. She stays up here for as long as it keeps her old man in line.”
“And once it doesn’t matter…” Junior didn’t finish the sentence, but another smirk made his meaning obvious.
Alessandro got up out of the chair, lifted his shirt to reveal his skinny chest, and shoved the pistol into the waistband of his jeans. “You keep your eye on her, like the don said, but that’s it. You got your own kid to worry about, right?”
“It’s Eloá, isn’t it?” Junior said, his smirk still fixed to his face. Paulo hated the sound of her name on Junior’s lips, and he knew that the man was making a clumsy threat. The don was subtler when he did it, but the effect was the same.
Alessandro put his hand on Paulo’s shoulder and gave it a firm squeeze. “You want a bit of advice?” He didn’t wait for Paulo to answer. “Don’t get too attached to the girl.”
55
Milton took Marks’s BMW and drove west. The address that Sophia had given him was located between Rio Comprido and Cosme Velho, a fifteen-minute drive from the safe house in Laranjeiras. It was nine in the morning, and this part of the city was still sleepy. Milton was pleased about that.
Marks had put in a flash request to GCHQ for as much information as they could find on Xavier de Oliveira: a full-spectrum sweep, including his history in the police, his family, anything that might suggest he was vulnerable to blackmail or extortion. Cheltenham had responded at three in the morning with a dossier of information. Most of it was irrelevant, but his bank account was heavily overdrawn, and there were debi
ts to a local casino that suggested that the man had a gambling problem. It was beginning to look very much as if Drake’s man had been compromised by his weaknesses and had compromised his employer as a result.
Milton followed the satnav’s directions to Rua Professor Olinto de Oliveira. It was evidently a reasonably well-heeled neighbourhood. The road was cobbled, with walled properties on either side. The whole area looked as if it had been scrubbed clean: the roads were well maintained; the sidewalks were neat and tidy, lined with palm trees and verges that were watered by automatic sprinklers. A quick check with a realtor’s website had suggested that the properties here would start at half a million dollars, with plenty going for two or three times that. Milton had doubted that a policeman in Rio would be able to afford a house up here without help, and now, after seeing the BMWs and Audis lined up with their wheels on the kerbs, his suspicions deepened.
The road bent around to the left. Milton parked the car, took the rucksack that Marks had given him from the passenger seat, and got out. The address was just ahead. The sun was beating down, and he was perspiring by the time he reached the house. He observed it as he approached: it was set back from the road, separated from the sidewalk by a well-kept garden. There was a gate and, behind that, a flight of stone stairs leading up to a veranda. Milton couldn’t see any more from the street, but it appeared that the entrance would be found up there.
Milton walked on, looking for any sign that he had been noticed, but there was nothing that stood out to him. The street was quiet: he could hear the sound of children splashing in a pool around the back of a house on the other side of the street, and a maid was carrying dry-cleaning from her car into the house next door, but, save that, there was nothing else of note.
He turned at the end of the street and walked back toward the house again, but, instead of continuing, this time he opened the gate and climbed the steps. The veranda was enclosed by a fence; the space led back beneath the main bulk of the property, which was suspended on stilts. There was a pool with crystal-clear water, and dancing shards of light reflected against the walls of the property. There was a barbecue and, next to the pool, a sun lounger. Milton walked around the pool to the lounger. A novel had been left there, splayed open, its pages warped from being soaked by rain and then allowed to cook in the sun. There was a glass on the table next to the lounger; it had filled to the brim with rainwater.
Milton started to get a bad feeling.
The few windows that he could see were closed, but the curtains were not drawn, and he was able to see inside a little. There was no sign of anyone at home.
Milton reached around and took the suppressed Walther from his waistband.
There was a sliding door that offered access to the interior of the house. There was a blind behind the door, and it had been pulled all the way across. Milton put his face to the glass and looked to see if there was a gap in any of the slats, but there was not. He couldn’t see beyond it. He examined the door. There were two glass panels: one was fixed and the other was designed to slide on tracks at the top and bottom of the frame. The sliding panel was on the outside of the fixed panel; that would make it easier to open. Although he couldn’t see it, Milton knew that the catch on the frame would be nothing more than a hole or brace. The L-shaped latch on the door connected with the bracket, pivoting up from the bottom to lock the door. Milton took off his rucksack, opened it and took out the things that he would need. He pulled on a pair of latex gloves and stepped into similar latex overshoes. Marks had provided him with a small pry bar and, working quickly and carefully, he inserted the bar between the bottom of the door frame and the door about six inches from the corner, diagonal from the latch. He pried upward and tilted the door. The latch lowered, releasing it from the bracket, and Milton was able to slide the panel back. It took him less than twenty seconds.
He put the pry bar back into his bag, collected the pistol once more, and moved the blind aside so that he could step into the house.
Milton smelled it right away.
Death.
He gripped the pistol and crept into the gloom, treading carefully and listening intently.
Nothing.
Everything was quiet, but the smell was unmistakeable.
He reached back and moved the blind aside, leaving enough of a gap for the sun to shine a shaft into the room. Milton looked around: it was a kitchen-diner, longer than it was wide, with a cream sofa against the wall to his right and a breakfast bar to his left. There were kitchen counters on the left wall, a large oven, and an American-style fridge. The room had been designed to be clean and contemporary, but the effect was ruined by the detritus that had been scattered across the white-tiled floor. A bookshelf had been upended, and the books tossed here and there; the vases that might once have been placed on the breakfast bar lay in fragments on the floor. Milton stepped deeper into the room and glanced down to the sofa; two ring-binders had been left open on the cushions, papers ripped out and left to twitch in the gentle breeze that blew in through the open door.
Milton made his way carefully through the room. He led with his pistol, pivoting left and right as he took each fresh step, making sure that the room was clear.
He reached the door at the other end. It opened into a hallway. The light from the kitchen-diner was meagre, and Milton reached into his bag for the pencil flashlight that Marks had provided. He switched it on, held it against the pistol, and swept the room. It was empty; coats and jackets that had once hung from a row of hooks in the wall had been pulled down and left on the floor. There was nothing else of note save two more doors. One of them was a bathroom; it was small, and Milton was able to clear it quickly.
He went back to the hall and approached the other door. The door looked thin and cheap, and it was ajar; he pushed it with the fingertips of his left hand, the pistol ready in his right.
It was a bedroom.
He saw it at once: there was a body on the bed. It was a man. He was on his back, lying at ninety degrees to the headboard. His arms were spread, and his head had fallen to the side so that he was looking straight at Milton. He recognised him from the photo that Sophia had shown him. It was Xavier de Oliveira.
Milton froze.
Had he heard something?
He closed his eyes, held his breath and concentrated.
He heard a car passing outside, the voices of the kids still playing in the pool on the other side of the street, a dog barking in a nearby garden.
And then he heard it again.
The crunch of footsteps across glass.
Someone else was inside the house.
56
Milton thought quickly: the door from the kitchen-diner to the hall was open, and he would be seen if he tried to retrace his steps.
He looked around the bedroom for somewhere to hide. It was a small room with a fitted cupboard to the left of the bed, a bedside table to the right, and a desk with a chair beneath the window on the opposite side of the room to the door. The bed was on a platform that brought it up to the same height as his thighs; the platform was solid, with no space for him to slide beneath it. There was no space for him to hide behind the door. He went to the cupboard, opened it, pushed the clothes aside so that he had a little space, and pressed himself all the way to the back. Some of the clothes were wrapped in plastic dry-cleaning sheaths, and they rustled as they rubbed up against each other. Other clothes had not been cleaned, and Milton could smell the odour of stale cigarette smoke coming off them.
He pulled the door almost all the way closed, leaving a crack so that he could see back into the bedroom.
He held his breath. He could still hear the footsteps. Whoever it was, he or she was trying very hard to make as little noise as possible. The footsteps were barely audible, but now that he knew they were there, he could hear them. The steps padded through the kitchen toward the door to the hall.
The door to the bedroom was slowly pushed open.
Milton gripped the Walther fir
mly.
A man stepped into the doorway. There was almost no light, and Milton could make out very little save that the man was of average height and that there was a pistol in his left hand.
The man stood still; Milton couldn’t see his face, but he could tell that the man was listening.
Milton could still hear movement.
There was at least one more of them.
Milton waited, his finger on the trigger of the pistol.
The man came fully inside the bedroom and turned a little. Milton saw that his right arm was in a sling and that he held his pistol in his left hand in an awkward, uncomfortable grip. He walked with slow, careful steps, his feet silent now that he was on the deeply piled carpet. He went over to the bed. He didn’t register any sign of surprise at the dead body that was sprawled out on it. Milton assumed that the man had known the body was there; perhaps he was responsible for it himself.
Milton had surprise on his side, but that wouldn’t last for much longer. He needed to know how many other people were in the house. A two-man team seemed most likely. He tried to work out what they might know: they would have seen the forced door to the veranda, so they would have been certain that someone had been in the house before them, and that the person might still be inside now. Milton didn’t think that he had been seen as he had arrived, but it was unlikely that they were coincidentally here at the same time as he was. Milton gritted his teeth in annoyance. Had he been seen? Someone must have been watching, and he had missed them.
The man walked around the bed. Milton had only dared open the door a crack, and the angle became too acute now for him to see the man. He held the pistol and maintained his breathing, nice and easy, slow and even, keeping his pulse steady. He controlled the urge to kick the door open and shoot, waiting for just the right moment.