Cobra wasn't. That tattoo was his, his and nobody else's. The very next night, just as the artist was closing up shop, Cobra had gone back and slit the man's throat.
People in Sao Paulo, if they thought about it at all, figured that Cobra's nickname came from the tattoo. It wasn't true. The kids in the favela where he grew up were already calling him that before he was thirteen. The name fit, because little Joao Miranda, just like a snake, was quick to anger, quick to strike, and had eyes that showed no compassion at all.
By the time he was eighteen, he was already well known-too well known for his liking-to the cops in his native city of Salvador. Back in those days, he was just an ignorant kid, still learning how to steal and kill and get away with it. They'd busted him more times than he had years, even managed to keep him behind bars for a while, until his brothers raised enough money to buy him out. By that time, he'd learned that only chumps served out their sentences. And that was only if they were sentenced in the first place, which they generally weren't, because the cops and the judges were just as crooked as the prison guards.
The situation, he soon discovered, was no different in Sao Paulo. With one exception: the Municipal Police. They were real bastards, as bad as anybody working the street. They'd shake you down just because they didn't like the color of your skin, or the clothes you were wearing, or for no reason at all. But, he didn't let it bother him. He'd steal from others, and they'd steal from him. It was just a cost of doing business, right? One thing they hardly ever did was to put him away. It just didn't happen if you weren't stupid. This time, he'd been stupid.
He'd just smoked his last rock, and he was uptight about where he was going to get another one. Without the crack in his system, or if he hadn't been in such a hurry, he would have pegged the two guys sitting at the bar as the off-duty cops they were. Hell, one of them was even wearing the trousers that went with his uniform. There were red stripes on the outside seams, and they ran all the way up his legs. Who else wore that kind of pants? Answer: nobody. Just cops.
They had their pistols out less than a second after he'd pointed his own at the guy behind the cash register. He was lucky that the cachaca the cops had been drinking had made them mellow. Lucky, too, that he'd had the presence of mind, high on crack or not, to drop the gun the instant they told him to.
So here he sat, stuffed into an overcrowded cell packed with drunks, transvestites, and juveniles. It just took one kick to somebody's balls to communicate to his cellmates just where he stood in the pecking order. And when he went a little further, and smashed the guy in the face with his steeltipped workman's shoes, they even cleared a corner for him.
He'd hit the bar in the early hours of a Monday morning. Another mistake. There was bound to be a big backlog of cases from the weekend. It could be two days, maybe even three, before he'd be called up for arraignment. Three days in the stench and the shit. He didn't even want to think about it. God help him if he fell asleep.
Before they'd brought him to the cell, one of the cops showed an interest in his tattoo. Cobra didn't find it unusual. A lot of people were interested in that tattoo. After all, it was the only one like it in the whole world, at least as far as he knew. But what Cobra did find unusual was that the cop pulled out a measuring tape, measured the snake from head to tail, and wrote the measurements down in a little book.
"What the fuck are you doing that for?" he'd asked.
"Watch your mouth when you talk to me, you fucking punk," the cop said, and walked off.
Then, at around three o'clock on Tuesday morning, almost twenty-four hours after they'd locked him up, something else happened.
He wasn't asleep, not even dozing. He'd propped himself up with his back against the wall, and was keeping a wary eye on his cellmates, when he heard the jangling of keys in the corridor. He lifted his head and watched a guard insert one of those keys into the lock on the door of his cell. The guard was a young guy, somebody Cobra hadn't seen before, and he wasn't alone. The guy next to him was wearing a gray suit and had cold, black eyes and a thick mustache on his upper lip. Cobra pegged him for a detective.
"Where's Joao Miranda?" the cop called out.
It was a common name. Two men stood up. Cobra wasn't one of them.
The cop shook his head. "The Miranda with the tattoo," he said, impatiently. "The one with the snake."
Heads turned toward Cobra's corner.
"You," the cop said. "Get on your feet and get over here."
Cobra took his time about it. He figured to be back in the cell before long, and his cellmates would be all over him if he let a couple of cops intimidate him.
"Hurry up, you punk," the guard said.
When he reached the door, the man in the gray suit pulled out a pair of handcuffs and spoke for the first time. "Turn around. Put your hands behind you," he said, in an emotionless voice.
"For Christ's sake," Cobra said, "It's the middle of the night. Can't a guy get some sleep?"
"Shut up and turn around." This time the man let a bit of irritation show.
Cobra figured he'd done enough. He'd made a show for his cellmates, but he didn't want to wind up getting the shit kicked out of him. He turned and allowed the cop to shackle him, staring down the other men in the cell while it was happening. Most of them avoided his eyes, proof that he'd played it right. To solidify the impression of a tough guy, he didn't speak again until they'd gone through the steel door and into the corridor outside.
"Where you taking me?"
"Brasilia," the guard said.
"Brasilia? Why Brasilia?"
"You'll find out soon enough."
Silva was surprised when he saw the little man in the cell. For almost seven years he'd been imagining someone who was tall and strong. The punk who offered his wrists to be cuffed didn't even reach his chin, and Mario Silva wasn't a particularly tall man.
But the tattoo was there, and it was just as his mother had described it. There couldn't possibly be another one like it. Or could there? Doubt plagued him. He'd have to get the punk to open up. He'd have to be sure.
Getting Joao Miranda out of the delegacia was no problem. The military dictatorship had ended in January, but it had persisted for twenty years and old habits die hard. Silva was a federal cop. He'd come all the way from Brasilia. He had clout.
The SPPD was all too happy to deliver their charge, and even happier when Silva told them they could dispense with the paperwork. Someday, some bureaucrat might discover forms that showed they'd once had a punk by the name of Joao Miranda in one of their holding cells. Someday, someone might even remember that a federal cop had come in, given them some story about Miranda being a material witness in a drug case, and taken him away.
But, even so, nobody would give a damn, and in the unlikely event that they did, Silva had a story all worked out. There would be an escape report filed away in a place that no one would look for it unless he told them it was there.
Ostensibly, he'd been bringing Miranda over to the federal building for questioning in a drug case he was working on. They'd stopped at a light. He'd seen a couple of punks trying to assault an old couple. He'd hopped out of the car to help. When he got back the felon was gone. End of story.
Silva shackled the punk's thin ankles together with a second pair of handcuffs, tossed him into the back of his rental car, and started driving through the early morning streets. There was little traffic. The punk gave him the silent treatment for a while and then started to talk. By the time he did, they were already outside of town and climbing into the Serra de Cantareira.