Despite the heavy firepower of Zéu’s men, the peak of the favela was quickly encircled. The army was providing cover for the elite police battalion. In other words, this time the business was truly serious.
Zéu played his trump card: he called Roma.
“It’s like this, Romário: I’m surrounded, but I got the entrepreneur’s wife right here. I’ll hand her over unharmed if the governor lets me get away. If you don’t wanna talk to him, okay. But then the broad is gonna die with me, and I won’t even be the one who kills her.”
A few seconds of silence ensued, until Roma replied, “I’ll call the governor.”
Half an hour later, standing by Robocop’s corpse, shredded by a bazooka blast, Zéu answered Roma’s call.
“Zéu, I spoke to the governor. And he talked personally with Mr. Furtado, Laura’s husband. The son of a bitch told the governor that he doesn’t need to give anything in exchange for his wife. And that if you want to, you can keep her.”
Zéu hung up without saying anything. He went to the cubicle, released the socialite, and said: “Run away through the woods behind here. If the Germans see me leavin’, they’ll shoot me. But maybe you can escape. If you stay here you’re gonna die.”
Laura Guimarães Furtado kissed the trafficker and ran toward the forest.
With the governor, Roma negotiated Zéu’s surrender and saved his life. He argued it was better having him as a prisoner than dead. “There’s always going to be crime, and it’s better for us to be familiar with its face,” philosophized Romário. The governor pretended not to understand, but he agreed.
A month later, Zéu was murdered in prison. His place in the command was taken by an evangelical preacher much more violent and dark, and the NGO RJ-171 began to suffer attacks.
The NGO headquarters soon had to leave Rocinha for Leblon.
“Okay, now we’re in Greater Rocinha,” stated Roma, drawing laughter from Laura Furtado, who had quickly joined RJ-171 and married a former trafficker (whose only defect, according to her, was not having more blow).
Lizard and his sister Keitte also went to work for the NGO, as juggler and dancer.
Saying he was facing death threats, Roma handed the presidency over to Nareba and went to live in Los Angeles with a female executive of the bank that sponsored him. Among other things, he discovered that Los Angeles too was part of Greater Rocinha.
Part III
Murmuring Fountains
Argentine Taxi
by Arthur Dapieve
Cosme Velho
Down below, for the moment there is nothing but filth, darkness, and cold. There is still an hour, half an hour at least, until the sun, dissipating the mist, washes away the night, bathes the buildings with light, and heats up this rock. At times the wind blows, and I can see a piece of the bridge over the bay. At times I am enveloped in the clouds that shroud the head and outspread arms of the gigantic statue at my back. The sky is silent, empty.
I have arrived before everyone else. I came in my car, which struck me as making more sense. The shift was about to end when a buddy of mine, a watchman at the monument, called. In the twilight, as the wind grew stronger, he had approached the wall, looked down expecting to see the lake, and spotted the body. A woman, blond, between thirty and forty years old. The location indicated a fall not short enough that she could escape injury nor high enough that she would be killed instantly. When I got there, my friend told me that the wind had “muffled her moans.” A lovely image for a damned ugly thing. I wait for the woman to show any signs of life.
More people than one imagines climb this mountain to practice free-falling, especially in seasons other than summer, to reduce the chances that some benevolent soul will grab them and chain them to this great and cruel stone. The press doesn’t publish anything so as not to give crazy people ideas and to avoid offending the church. Imagine the headline: “Adolescent Virgin Commits Suicide at the Christ Statue.” Blasphemy? The work of the devil? No, a guy doesn’t believe a fucking thing anymore, not even in the devil, to jump from a height of over seven hundred meters. In my profession, you either believe in everything or nothing at all. My own modus operandi would be a bullet in the brain. If the angle is right, there’s no way to miss. Bye bye.
The wind taunts me, opening holes in the clouds but in the wrong places. Another piece of the bay. The hill over there. A group of soulless buildings. Even a block of the cemetery. But the body, which would be good to catch a glimpse of, doesn’t materialize, remaining invisible to me. I’m no expert, but for lack of anything better I examine the wall. There’s no mark to suggest that anyone had stood there before jumping. If she was wearing high heels, would she have removed them before carrying out the act? They might be there, just beyond the wall. The fog prevents me from seeing whether their shoes are there or not. Maybe they’re hidden, tossed into a bush. Or else she jumped without taking off her shoes. In that case, would they have come off midair? Were they flat shoes? What kind of women wears flats? A very tall woman?
Then, as if they had tapped into my thoughts, the clouds call a truce. I stretch my neck and glimpse the body. Even at twenty, twenty-five meters I can see that, yes, she is very tall. Long-boned. Really large. The sight is interrupted before I can comprehend what seems wrong about her position. But I can already tell that something went very wrong. Besides, of course, all the other things that had gone wrong earlier and thrust the creature from this world. Instead of plummeting, the body evidently hit the rock, perhaps because of a gust of wind, and got caught in the low vegetation of an outcropping from the nearly vertical wall.
I continue looking down, grieving, for some ten minutes, even after the blanket of fog has closed in again. I regret leaving my sunglasses in the drawer. The low sun blinds me. I should have played dead and let my morning counterpart handle it. Shit, what would it matter? Is there still time to sneak away? No, there isn’t.
Aguiar, from Forensics, a thin guy with a ridiculous mustache, appears at my side, taps me on the shoulder, and asks: “Too early or too late?”
“Too late. I should already be home, taking a shower, resting my head on a pillow. There—” I say, and make a vague gesture with my chin.
“Bad luck.”
“Not as bad as the woman down there.”
He looks beyond the wall. Mutters, “Can’t see a damn thing. You sure it’s a woman?”
Of course not. At night all cats are gray. The day didn’t dawn right, with the fog. The body lies in a purgatory between yesterday and today. The woman, or whatever it may have been, didn’t see the sun rise on the other side of the ocean.
“Of course. Blond, a short black dress.”
“You’ve just described an Argentine taxi.”
“Or a short brown dress, dark blue, I don’t know. It’s impossible to tell at this distance and in this lighting—”
“Argentine taxi!” he laughs.
“Okay, Aguiar, what’s so funny? What if it’s an Argentine taxi? Shit, you know that 90 percent of the women in this city dye their hair blond. Why wouldn’t this one be yellow on top and black underneath? Even black women are blond these days, like Beyoncé.”
“Beyonwhat?”
“A brand of hair dye,” I say, dispirited.
Forensics people live in a bubble of blood that Beyoncé, Kelly Key, no hottie penetrates. That’s a lie. Once in a while they find a recently deceased chick appealing, some poor thing killed in bed in an embarrassing pose, her pussy spread open, and ask each other, “Would you do her like that?” None of them would reject her. “She’s English!” they say, laughing. A warped sense of humor.