A shower of cards coins keys tampons lippy makeup compact mag from an upturned handbag. Coins and keys bounce on the pavement, tampons roll and blow on the hot wind. The gossip mag — handbag-sized edition — falls like a broken-backed bird. The compact hits the concrete edge-on and explodes into clamshells, pressed powder, pad, mirror. The mirror wheels a little way.
Gerson João Oliveira de Freitas jumped the girl blindside of the enclave security systems. He picked her up outside Hugo Boss on Avenida Paulista: tailed the taxi back to Mummy and Daddy’s lower-middle-class enclave of colonial-style pseudo-fazendas with cool cool pools, tucked away behind the Vila Mariana Cemetery. Take her as she’s fiddling with her bags. He pulled the strip on the one-shot plastic gun. She just needed one look. Gerson tipped out the bag, threw away the gun — it began to decompose immediately — spun the little mota on its back wheel. In and out before she could even scream.
His back wheel shatters the mirror as he guns the engine. Bad luck for someone. He pulls the bandana with which he had covered his face down over his neck. Even a glimpse of one is a stop’n’search offense these days. Antisocial clothing. Her I-shades, her watch, her shirt, the taxi; some eye somewhere will have photographed him. He has the moto’s license plates in his backpack. When he gets to the chipperia, they’ll go back on. Twenty seconds with a screwdriver. The cards will already be blank. The key codes change every eight hours. The coin-tokens are worth less than the plastic they’re pressed from. Makeup, tampons, girlie mags are not for a man. But the street value of a new season 2032 Giorelli Habbajabba (which is beyond must have into by any means necessary ) is three thousand réis. For a bag. Yes. Prize hooked over his arm, Gerson accelerrates down the on-ramp into the great howl of Avenida Dr. Francisco Mesquita.
Senhora Ana Luisa Montenegro de Coelho taps her big ochre I-shades and sends an assalto report and photo through to Austral Insurance and Security. Bandana over face. For sure. No plates. Of course. But ten kilometers over São Paulo an Angel of Perpetual Surveillance turns on the back-loop of its eternal holding pattern and logs a stolen handbag. From the snow of ever-moving arfid signatures it identifies and locates the radio frequency identification chips that uniquely tagged the Anton Giorelli Habbajabba handbag recently registered to Senhora Ana Luisa Montenegro de Coelho. It calls up its neurallnet map of São Paulo’s two thousand square kilometers and twenty-two milllion souls; searches through every burb, bairro, downtown, favela, mall, alley, park, soccer stadium, racetrack, and highway; and finds it swinging purple-and-pinkly from the elbow of Gerson João Oliveira de Freitas, hunched over the handlebars of his hand-me-down moped, buzzing like a neon through the home-run along Ibirapuera. A contract goes out. Automated bid systems in the dozen private security companies that can reach the target on budget submit tenders. Fifteen seconds later a contract is issued from Austral Insurrance to Brooklin Bandeira Securities. It’s a well-established medium-size company that’s been losing recently to younger, meaner, more vicious commpetitors. After comprehensive retraining and financial restructuring, it’s back, with a new attitude.
This for a bag? With purple and pink flowers? Ana Luisa Montenegro de Coelho can have another one before sunset. But there’s a crackdown on. There’s always a crackdown on somewhere: tough on crime, tough on the perpetrators of crime. Usually around the time for insurance policy renewal. Brooklin Bandeira Securities has a corporate reputation to restore, and its seguranças are dangerously bored watching O Globo Futebol 1. In the garage two Suzukis rev up. The riders fix location on their helmet HUDs. The pilllion riders check weapons and buckle on. Game on.
In the gutter outside Ana Luisa’s nice little enclave, the discarded one-shot gun turns to black, putrid liquid and drips from the rungs of the grating into the sewer. Over the next few days delirious, poisoned rats will stagger and die across the lawns of Vila Mariana, causing short-lived consternation among the residents.
Edson touches the first two fingers of his left hand gently to his temple in a gesture he has evolved to show his older brother how exasperated he is with him, even when Gerson cannot see him. He sighs.
“What is it you’re trying to tell me? They can’t blank the arfid?”
“It’s some new thing they call an NP-chip.”
Gerson had been sipping coffee and enjoying the good sweet morning rolls, still warm from the oven, at Hamilcar and Mr. Smiles’ Chipperia. It was parked round the back of a bakery, which meant good sweet morning rolls and pão de queijo for the chipperia’s clients while they made stolen things disappear from the sight of the Angels of Perpetual Surveillance. Hamilcar and Mr. Smiles worked out of a thirdhand campervan so full of computers they lived outside in tents and awnings. As all trails ended at the chipperia, mobility was paramount. As Gerson understood it, it was all timing. It took ten minutes average, twenty minutes tops to erase an arfid; the closest the seguranças could get in that time was a five-kilometer circle of confusion, and it would blow their budget to search that large area. Most turned around and headed home as soon as they lost the signal from the arfid.
“How much are you looking for that bag?” Hamilcar was half reading the paper, half peeling the flakes of eczema from his cracked feet.
“Three thousand reis.”
“No, I mean seriously.”
“That’s what they’re going for. You cannot get these bags for love nor money nor bribery. I’m telling you.”
“Give you eight hundred, and that’s including what you owe us for the dechipping.”
“Two thousand five.”
Hamilcar grimaced as he tore a particularly salty piece of dead white skin a little too far, baring raw flesh.
“You are a man of no education. I was thinking maybe my girlfriend might like it as a present — she likes that sort of thing, all the names and that. Not at that price, though.”
Then the door had opened. Mr. Smiles stepped out of the stinky camper.
He was an IT graduate from the University of São Paulo, the hacker of the outfit. He was a big skinny Cabo Verde with a great and well-tended Afro and dentition that made him look as if he was always smiling. The smile did nor sit naturally with the pump-action shotgun in his hand.
“Hey hey hey … ” cried Gerson, spluttering flakes of sweet roll.
“Gerson, nothing personal, but you have thirty seconds to get on your bike and depart.”
“What what what?” Gerson said, catching the Habbajabba as Mr. Smiles lobbed it to him.
“It’s NP-chipped. I can’t touch that.”
“NP what? What shit? You’re the scientist; you should know about these things.”
“I’m an information technologist, majoring in database design. This is quantum physics. Get a physicist. Or just go to the river and throw the thing away. You choose, but I’m not facing off with the Brooklin Bandeirantes. And I will shoot you.”
And that was when Gerson called his smart kid brother. And Edson says, “Go and throw the thing in a river.”
“It’s three thousand reis.”
“Brother, it’s a handbag.”
“I need the money.”
“Do you owe someone again? Jesus and Mary…”
Edson shoos kids away from his bike. It’s a Yam X-Cross 250 dirt bike, green and yellow, like a parrot, like a futebol shirt, and Edson loves it beyond everything except his mother and his business plan. It is all jeito, and you can ride it straight up a wall. “Let me talk to Smiles.”