Situated between the largest favela in Latin America and Barra da Tijuca, the tacky homeland of the nouveau riche, São Conrado is a valley with a few kilometers of beach, one or two rows of buildings, and a freeway that cuts the district from end to end and divides the two sides, sea and mountain. Houses and mansions ascend Tijuca Forest to the summit. At the far extreme from the vertical clamor of Rocinha stands the Gávea stone, solemn and silent. In the middle of the route, cutting across the landscape, the golf club — exclusive, aristocratic. Seen from above, one would say the district serves as its frame and adornment. The Global Golf Club isn’t situated inside the neighborhood; rather, the neighborhood marks its outline.
It is 8:09. Otto is there, hovering between sleep and tension, exorcizing the bothersome expectation that his nose is going to itch, that a sneeze is inevitable, that something is going to make his survival totally irreconcilable with this ridiculous position. He imagines himself a porcupine, paralyzed by some kind of moral blackmail only intelligible to the mind of a porcupine. He goes back to staring at the green floor, the dark stripes. At 8:10, rifle fire shakes body and soul, table and floor. More than that. The reports explode close enough to make the building vibrate. The walls seem to tremble. The needles shock as if electrified. In Otto’s mind, two instincts fight for command: the provoked cop and the pierced patient. Antagonistic mental forces launch him upward and downward at the same time, calling him to action and forcing him to immobility. He rises to his knees on the table and shouts for Nakano. He pulls out the accessible needles but feels others burying themselves in his flesh when he moves.
The acupuncturist turns on the light and orders him to wait. The gunfire comes closer and closer. Now cries can be heard. Even though he’s accustomed to the confrontations that have become routine in Rio de Janeiro, Otto is on the verge of losing control. The war is out of synch. Saturday mornings there are children running around everywhere. His stepdaughter Rafaela, who is seven, went out early to play. Otto takes the pistol from his pochette, slips on his Bermudas, and dashes barefooted to the stairs. As he reaches the last steps, the sound of gunfire continues, deafening. Otto is familiar with this experience: it feels like the shots are vibrating in his body and echoing inside his skull. The policeman creeps from the stairway to the reception area. Doormen and attendants have taken refuge behind anything that acts as a shield. Breathing raggedly, they remain on the floor, some minutes after the final burst of bullets. They ask one another if the criminals have left. Otto is the only one standing, his eyes sweeping the immediate surroundings, gun in hand, his carotid artery throbbing, sweat burning his eyes, his mouth dry.
The space between the buildings of the condominium is silent; men, women, and children are too frightened to yell. They don’t want to draw attention. Here and there whirling dust is visible, probably heated by fragments of gunpowder. Bullet casings everywhere. The walls of the buildings are perforated, windows shattered. A few cars parked beside the entrance gate have suffered major damage. No one is wounded. A near miracle considering the number of shots. Otto finds Rafaela and two friends hugging each other on the grass, beside overturned bicycles, behind the walnut trees that separate the tennis courts and the pools. He breathes, relaxing at last. He feels like crying with them and hugs them. Slowly, his blood pressure returns to a tolerable level. He needs to reassure Francisca.
“Run home, Rafa, tell your mother everything’s all right. You too.” The girl hates it when she’s called Rafa, because it’s a man’s name, she says, but this time she doesn’t censure her stepfather. All her neurons are concentrated on her rebirth and jumping into her mother’s arms.
Doormen and residents begin to move about, haltingly. They shout words of comfort to one another, speaking nonstop, repeating in unison what they all witnessed as if relating for the first time an unlikely story to an incredulous and amazed audience: the flight of the criminal army that crossed the condo toward Rocinha, firing their rifles behind them, indifferent to both residents and circumstances.
Nervous chatter and the sudden sound of children crying announce the end of the scene of terror, whose meaning is soon explained in the tangle of recounting. Francisca has come down in the elevator with a few neighbors and reaches out to Rafa as soon as she sees her daughter running toward her.
Little by little, heads cautiously appear in the windows of the twenty-story towers. Otto identifies himself. He recommends that everyone go back to their apartments and stay away from the windows. He instructs the condo workers to return to the inside areas and check the security camera tapes. He calls Harley: “Sorry, man, you must’ve been sleeping since your shift was yesterday, but this looks like a dress rehearsal for the end of the world and it doesn’t smell good at all.”
The cops in the area, both civil and military, have to be alerted immediately. Detective Harley Davidson da Silva is his only childhood friend who’s neither in prison, dead, nor on the take.
What the doormen whisper among themselves, inhabitants of working-class districts and favelas, including Rocinha, is obvious: the police have tried to increase the “bundle” — the bribe paid by the drug traffickers to be left alone. Since the boss trafficker refused, the cops involved in the negotiation decided to do something unprecedented: “Hit head-on the packed streetcar coming back from Vidigal.” The phrase, from one of the workers interrogated by Otto, meant the following: late every Saturday night, or early the next morning, the ringleaders of the Rocinha drug trade would come home after spending the evening at the dance sponsored by their partners in the Vidigal favela, situated between Leblon and São Conrado. The Rocinha traffickers customarily traveled together, in two or three vans, armed with rifles and grenades to discourage any repressive intervention; the precautions were not actually very rigorous given that the route, the date, and the approximate schedule were widely known. That morning, frustrated by the refusal to increase the size of the bribe, the police decided to scare the traffickers, without any actual intention of carrying out arrests. They didn’t want to overwhelm the predictable armed resistance, because that would necessitate greater support than was available and involve risks they were unwilling to take. They had waited for the traffickers’ vans at a street corner near the condo and staged an initial confrontation which they did not follow up on, content with the dispersal they’d incited. The ambush, if for real, would never have taken place on a sunny Saturday morning, in an upper-middle-class neighborhood, amid dozens of women and children. As outlined in the script of the farce, the traffickers fled and the police withdrew. It was enough; the message had been sent. If the new amount wasn’t accepted, the traffickers would have problems.
Internal communication among the various doormen in the condominium and the narrative of pedestrians seeking shelter in enclosed spots paints the picture that a call from Harley Davidson da Silva confirms: police reinforcements have no way of getting there because the traffickers have shut down the tunnels connecting São Conrado and neighboring districts. They have also blocked alternative routes via Tijuca Forest and the oceanfront. By the time the first shock troops manage to break through, the traffickers’ leader and his henchmen will have escaped. Everything indicates that avoiding arrest is the sole motive for his acts. The subsequent sequence of events will confirm the hypothesis. The tunnels remain blocked, police troops are slow to clear the roadway and get to São Conrado, traffic is interrupted, and drivers abandon their vehicles on the freeway.