“Narguilê is history,” Zéu interrupts.
Now it’s Roma who’s speechless. He looks at Robocop, who averts his eyes, then at the chief again. “I can’t believe you did that, Zéu.”
The outlaw becomes irritated: “You got your methods, I got mine. Don’t fuck with me!”
Roma starts to answer but Zéu talks over him: “Here’s the thing: the police, your buddies, have a plan to raid the favela. Not just to roust us out and get in the papers. They wanna occupy the hill.”
“I know.”
Robocop stares at Zéu in fury, revolted by the level of information Roma has about the police.
Zéu feels the same way but tries to stay cooclass="underline" “Great, you know. Then you oughta know too there’s gonna be war. And starting right now nobody in the community can talk to the police — not merchants, not mototaxis, or the owner of a band, or NGOs, no-fucking-body. You know the way our operation works here — when the shit hits the fan the pigs are gonna flay you and you’ll tell ’em everything.”
Now it’s Roma who avoids everyone’s eyes. He speaks looking at the floor, his voice muffled. “I can’t promise you that. I can’t just stop talking to the chief of police.”
Robocop loses his cooclass="underline" “Let’s burn this guy right now, Zéu! The fucker’s a snitch! He’s sellin’ you out! Let’s waste this asshole right here and now, before he fucks everything up!”
This time Zéu doesn’t look at Robocop, despite the soldier’s exasperation, which the chief tolerates only because his adrenaline has also gone through the roof. His dead-fish gaze foretells the order in a low voice: “Kill him.”
The room service attendant went to check with the kitchen on whether the bottle of Dom Pérignon had been sent to room 901. When he learned it had been, he confirmed this with the guest on the telephone. But she replied at the top of her lungs that the attendant was an idiot. After a moment, the man understood that she wasn’t complaining about the bottle that had already been sent up but the other one, which hadn’t yet arrived — more precisely, the third one, ordered a little less than two hours after the first.
“I’m the one who’s drinking and you lose track? Shit,” ridiculed the guest.
When the waiter arrived at 901 with the new bottle, no one came to the door. The employee heard female cries coming from inside the room. He thought about calling the manager. Then he heard giggles among the shouts and did an about-face.
Tall and slim at forty-three, with slightly exaggerated fake breasts and lips, but elegant even so, Laura Guimarães Furtado was a hurricane. Often mentioned on gossip sites, the Rio socialite overshadowed many a TV actress. A well-known newspaper editor even said he regretted the demise of the society page because of Laura. “Her adventures alone kept Zózimo’s column going,” murmured the old editor, citing the father of Rio society column — writing in the seventies and eighties. Now Laura Furtado was unconscious on the floor of a suite in the Sheraton.
Upon being put back on the bed, she opened her eyes and spoke, still in the arms of her younger lover: “Oh, you’re still here?”
The consort was a bit confused. “Yes... wasn’t I supposed to be?”
“Uh-huh. I don’t know. I blacked out, and you had just screwed me... Most of them go away when that happens.”
Her lover replied rather awkwardly, “It’s that I still got a thing to discuss with you.”
“A thing? How sweet... Let’s ask about that bottle of champagne that’s missing, and you tell me about your thing.”
“It’s serious, Dona Laura.”
Laura had an attack of nervous laughter. “Dona Laura? You want me to jump from the ninth floor now or after we have a toast?”
“Excuse me — Laura. That comes from my family there in the favela. We usually call a married woman Dona.”
“Oh, how nice of you to remind me I’m married. By the way, mind if I make a quick phone call to my husband?”
“It’s about him that I wanted to talk to you.”
Laura was taken aback. “Oh no! Three is too many. And my husband doesn’t go for that. He’d kill me!”
“It’s nothing like that! I already told you the thing is serious. Isn’t your husband close to the governor?”
“My husband tells the governor what to do.”
Laura saw her partner’s eyes flash — as much or more than when she undressed for him. She even felt jealous of her husband with the lover, which was a crazy inversion of the situation. The young man then asked her to arrange an audience for him with the governor.
Irritated, the socialite cut him short: “Impossible! Who are you, boy, to be received by the governor?!”
The youth from the favela was obstinate and said that the governor knew him. Naturally, Laura Furtado didn’t believe him.
“You people from the hillside are funny. You come down here to the streets and just because you’re sexy you start to think you own the place, as if Leblon were the outskirts of Greater Rocinha. Back up, kid.”
The young man found “Greater Rocinha” amusing and picked up on the game: “You people here on the outskirts are very prejudiced... Why can’t the governor know me?”
“In the first place, I said you people think that Leblon is the outskirts. This here is São Conrado.”
“Oh... Leblon, São Conrado... it’s all the same. It’s all Greater Rocinha,” he retorted with a sly smile.
The spirited charm of the dark, muscular youth melted Laura’s defenses, and she laughed and pulled him on top of her. Their tongues intertwined, but the able negotiator moved away and played his trump card.
“Hold on. First we have to decide the matter of the governor.”
Laura was furious at this blackmaiclass="underline" “Governor my ass! Take a look at yourself, you nobody! If you go to the governor’s palace you’ll probably leave the place in handcuffs!”
The youth didn’t take offense; he knew what he wanted. He remained serene and tried to convince the socialite that the governor really did know who he was and admired his sociocultural work with the band he had formed with a group of ex-traffickers — the RJ-171, whose name referred to the statute of the Brazilian penal code dealing with fraud. Laura was a fan of the band and had met her lover several months back at a show he had given for wealthy people on Delfim Moreira Avenue. Even so, she remained unmoved.
“It won’t work, Roma. If I ask my husband to take you to the governor, he’ll suspect something.”
Romário felt it was time to play the ace up his sleeve: “What if I get you a meeting with Zéu?”
The feared chief of Rocinha was the terror of cougars from Rio’s South Zone. With the exacerbation of the confrontation with the police, however, a visit to Zéu’s bunker atop the hill could turn into a ghost-train, and the trafficker himself had begun avoiding that type of operation. But Laura knew that Roma was familiar with the geopolitics of the favela and would be able to take her safely to a tryst with the outlaw.
What the socialite didn’t know was what Romário had promised Zéu in exchange for his life. That was how he had escaped being shot. He knew the chief of the hillside was crazy about Laura, despite knowing her only through Google and YouTube. A second before Robocop was about to pull the trigger, Roma had sworn to the chief that, if he didn’t kill him, the coveted socialite would be his.
Zéu was going to kill Romário more from depravity than as a tactic. Roma had offended the New Order (zero contact with the police), but the boss of the hill didn’t actually believe the leader of the RJ-171 band had been informing the enemy. And when he promised him Laura Furtado, Robocop had been told to lower his weapon immediately. Roma had managed what was almost a miracle in Zéu’s territory: negotiation. The trafficker was aware that Romário knew Laura and had even seen photos of the two together after a show. He didn’t imagine just how closely they knew each other — if he had, he might have shot him simply from jealousy.