The Burning Hill

by A. D. Flint

  A halo of flame and something to get him cooking down below.

  “No, no, no,” Anjo murmured. Franjinha was putting the cart before the bull. The cutting came first. It was Anjo’s latest refinement. Franjinha should be making a show with the blade, terrorising Vilson, taunting him, until finally he sliced off what made him a man. Would he bellow, or shriek like a girl? You could never tell. Whatever, he wanted the screams to ring around the corrugated-iron roofs of the favela, and they hadn’t even chained Vilson to the tree yet. The fools were too strung out to remember even a simple sequence.

  Irritated, he was about to step in as Lagarto finally jerked the lid off the jerrycan and clumsily tipped it. A modest glug soaked the rag, trapped air stalling the flow before petrol spouted over Franjinha’s arms and the front of his shirt.

  No one was certain how it happened but, somewhere between Franjinha jumping up and cursing Lagarto, the petrol ignited. Flame licked prettily across the scrubby grass, a lazy, curling exhalation. Then it leapt to the rag and to Franjinha.

  The jerrycan exploded with a low whump, engulfing Lagarto in a coruscating spray of burning liquid. He fell to his knees, tipped sideways and rolled soundlessly onto his back. The flames whooshed in a muted roar, tracing the movement of his arms as they flailed mechanically.

  Anjo watched in astonishment as Franjinha stared goggle-eyed at his own flaming arms and chest, the cocaine dulling his pain response. A few of the really stoned soldiers guffawed. It was only when the repellent stink of burning hair and the first sickly whiff of roasting flesh reached Anjo’s nostrils that Franjinha started screaming.

  The tearing, high wail finally spurred them into action, but there was little at hand to smother the flames.

  Lagarto’s flailing arms slowed and then dropped to his chest, wrists and fingers bending into claws with the heat. There was nothing more.

  Anjo shouted ineffectual orders as Franjinha screamed, his hands flapping at his arms and chest, trying to turn his face away from the searing flames lashing up his throat.

  Scrabbling about in a nearby rubbish heap, a soldier named Drago got hold of a torn chunk of old floor lino. It took Anjo a moment before he understood Drago’s intention. “That’s right, smother him,” he shouted at Drago, wanting to regain command of the situation.

  “Get down on the ground,” Drago yelled at Franjinha, but he just screamed and flapped at himself more. Drago knocked Franjinha down and smothered him, rolling him and beating at the flames until they were eventually out.

  Smoke was rising from the burned shreds of Franjinha’s shirt and he was holding his arms up in front of his chest protectively, hands shaking uncontrollably. His arms and chest were a blackened crust with plasma oozing through the raw patches of flayed skin. His face wasn’t so bad, but the lank hair that his sister had once cut in an embarrassing fringe in his childhood, earning him the nickname Franjinha, had burned off up to his crown, leaving just a thin cap of crinkled hair against his reddened scalp.

  He was helped to his feet, yelping and squawking each time his injured flesh was touched. A soldier tried to take hold of an arm to support him.

  “Leave it! Leave it, you idiot, it’s agony,” Franjinha yelled, breaking down in a series of pitiful whimpers. Plasma was beginning to drip steadily from his skin.

  “Come on, man, let’s go,” Anjo said gently. “I’m going to give you a shitload of powder – the really good stuff – and then you won’t feel a damned thing. And I’m going to get a doctor, a real expensive one from the city, to fix you up.”

  Franjinha nodded. “It hurts, Christ it hurts.” He shuffled off with Anjo.

  “And bring Lagarto,” Anjo called over his shoulder. “I don’t leave any of my soldiers behind.”

  No one was eager to carry Lagarto, not least because they had only just managed to put him out and he was still hot. And when they tried to grab a wrist or ankle the sheaths of blackened crust came off in their hands to expose sticky, slippery flesh beneath.

  “Hey, boss,” a young voice called out behind Anjo. “What do we do with him?”

  Anjo had no patience for obtuse kids right now. He pulled the Beretta from his waistband, ready to make a statement. But the kid was pointing at Vilson, who was still standing in exactly the same position. He could have slipped away in the chaos, but there he was, wearing the same idiot expression of blank terror. Anjo despised it.

  Tôca was the kid who had noticed, the same one who had spotted Vilson trying to escape the favela. A good kid. Anjo nodded approval, lifting the Beretta and taking casual aim. He fired three shots in quick succession. Vilson crumpled to the ground.

  Anjo tilted his head in satisfaction. He had shown them he was decisive. A man of action.

  Chapter 13

  Jake

  Going along with Marinho, Jake had agreed to hang back beneath the trees at the corner of the road. Marinho hadn’t wanted to spook Vilson.

  Jake had remained hidden, watching as Vilson’s fleeting salvation was snatched from him. The world had slowed horribly when the gangster kid had started waving his gun around. Jake was transported back to the beach with the gun in his face, but it was worse somehow, fear sucking the life from him, breath by shortening breath. He fought the overload of flashing alarms that seemed to want to shut down his body. He had never felt anything like it before, not even in that bad time out in the desert. All the terrors, all that stuff that he couldn’t forget, smashed together into a lump and rammed down his throat.

  Marinho came back to him, shaking his head. He took a deep breath, composing himself. “Okay, friend, show’s over. Let’s get you home.”

  “We can’t just leave him.” The words were catching on Jake’s taught, snatched breaths. “We’ve got to help him.”

  “Don’t talk crazy, you shouldn’t even be here. Look at you, you’re shaking.”

  Only now did Jake realise that he was gripping the iron railings so hard his fingers were cramping, sweat pasting his shirt onto his skin.

  “Let’s go,” Marinho said.

  Jake heaved himself off toward the favela.

  “Not that way,” Marinho hissed.

  “I’ve got to help him.”

  “Help him what? The kid that took him away, he’s the right-hand man to the favela boss. I’m lucky it was dark enough and he was high enough not to recognise me.”

  “You know him?”

  “My boss has a deal with them – I met that kid once on a cash drop. Look, Vilson is a dead man, and I’m sorry for that, but we walk away with our lives tonight.”

  He steered Jake past the entrance to the favela and across the road, but Jake came to a stubborn halt by some grubby unlit shop windows at the corner of the street.

  Marinho was remonstrating in a coarse whisper. Jake wasn’t really hearing, the dark entrance of the favela hoovering up his consciousness, dizzying, hypnotic.

  He had no idea how much time had passed before he realised that Marinho was no longer speaking. The last of the energy holding Jake up drained away and he had to sit down on the kerb. “I just need a minute,” he said.

  His backside was aching before he felt ready to get to his feet again.

  “You okay?” Marinho asked, helping him up.

  Jake nodded.

  “Come on, man, let’s go, there’s nothing you can do,” Marinho said, coaxing now.

  There it was. He couldn’t do anything. They wouldn’t let him. They would destroy him. Finally, a surge of anger. That’s what they had said. Well, screw them. Screw them all.

  He was just about in touch enough to realise that rationality was shorting out, stripping him of the capacity to deal with whatever might play out on that hillside.

  But he found himself starting back toward the alley anyway.

  Pop, pop, pop. The reports of pistol shots up in the favela.

  Marinho caught him by the arm. “That’s the end. He’s gone.” The same gentle tone.

  Jake was transfixed, staring so hard that t
he black mouth of the alley became a flickering, shifting spot. It seemed to have a substance, an offer of rebalancing the scales, maybe even an escape from all the noise in his head. Its pull was as irresistible as it was terrifying.

  He broke away from Marinho and entered.

  “Fuck,” Marinho rasped. “Stupid. Fucking. Gringo.”

  Jake turned and saw Marinho pulling his handgun from the waistband at the back of his jeans.

  “You stay behind me,” Marinho said, pushing past. “I’ll be less tempted to shoot you that way.”

  They crept up the alley, flattening themselves into the deepest of the shadows.

  The favela was quiet, holding its breath in the aftermath of the shots. Jake fought to control the harsh whistle of his own breathing. Every shuffle and cough that came through the windows of the homes they passed froze the sweat on his skin. And then, in an instant, his mind was clear. He burst through the dark cloud into bright sky. He was in the zone.

  Marinho headed left at each junction and they came to a break in the low buildings, the fringe of the favela. There was a dirt path working up the hill through thick, tall grass and brush.

  “Somewhere up there is the gang’s execution ground,” Marinho whispered. “I don’t know exactly where but this place is famous.”

  The grass hissed in the breeze and a half-moon poked through the clouds, the unwelcome light pressing them into a crouch as they laboured upward. Jake sucked in lungful after lungful of air, his leg muscles burning.

  He smelled the paraffin before he saw the lapping yellowish glow of the torches. They tucked into thick brush and scoped the area, letting the minutes grind by.

  It wasn’t until they broke cover that Jake spotted Vilson’s body by the tree. The flickering light of the torches gave no hint of what horrors the outline held. Dread crawled through Jake’s skin as he reached down to touch his fingers to Vilson’s neck to confirm the obvious.

  Jake flinched as if from an electric shock. Vilson jerked his head and gasped. He was suddenly breathing hard, very much alive.

  “What the fuck, man?” Jake whispered hoarsely. “I thought you were dead.” He caught a flash as Vilson’s eyes rolled back. The kid was in shock.

  “I thought I was.” Vilson looked at Jake, wide-eyed, recognising him by his scars. Then he noticed Marinho and recoiled. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Marinho, you fool, it was me who came to meet you earlier.”

  “You let them take me away,” Vilson said, “to kill me.”

  “And we came for you,” Marinho said. “Although you’d need to ask your saviour here why. How badly are you hurt?”

  “I’m not hurt.”

  “Then what the hell happened here? Actually, save it – we have to move.”

  Marinho got Vilson to his feet, bustling him away from the exposed ground. And then his shoulders sagged. “Shit. My boss and the boss of this place have to believe you’re dead.”

  Just under the waft of warm paraffin was the faint but cloying smell of decaying flesh, the flesh of victims of less formal executions out in the undergrowth.

  Marinho pursed his lips. “We need a body.”

  Jake followed his lead. He felt squeamish, the nerve endings in his hands jangling, hoping not to touch slimy flesh as he groped around in the dark gaps and unidentified lumps and blobs amongst the hissing grass. He was better at dealing with the known quantity, however grim.

  Vilson hung back, constantly looking around to see if anyone was coming and shuffling from one foot to the other. “We need to go,” he said. “Those guys could be back any minute.”

  It probably made sense for Vilson to keep a lookout rather than get his hands dirty, but that didn’t stop Jake putting a bit of resentment to boil.

  Marinho was the first to locate a body, tugging gingerly at a leg. Jake stepped in, steeled himself, and hauled on the other.

  Something gave way, sending out a bigger wave, an overpowering stench of putrefied flesh. Jake tried breathing in through his mouth in little gasps but still it infiltrated and he retched again and again. Quietly. Eyes running, slimy ropes of saliva and vomit hanging from his lips as the spasms hunched him over.

  The torchlight in the clearing confirmed what their noses had already told them. The body was heaving with maggots.

  “This is no good.” Marinho’s voice was edgy. “It’s too far gone. We can’t pass this body off as his.”

  Chapter 14

  Anjo

  Franjinha had persuaded the TV news crew to come for the interview through an established contact in the favela, a fixer. They had only agreed because it was a slow-news day – a throwaway remark from the female reporter over the phone, Franjinha had told Anjo. His black eyes had glittered at that.

  Franjinha was coming back up the hill now. “They’re all set up and ready down there,” he said to Anjo. “Pretty chilled out.”

  There was an unwritten code of conduct for these things: the gangsters got their platform and no one misbehaved. Anjo knew this was why the reporter and her cameraman felt safe. They might also say that they were only here because there was nothing better for them to do, and they would feign boredom – that was guaranteed with these people. But Anjo also knew that gangsters excited them. All the folks down in the city wanted that close-up experience, a bit of danger without real danger. It was like those people he had seen on a TV show who went down in cages to see the Great Whites swim up and nudge the bars. Anjo wanted to see the change in their expressions when they realised he was coming through the bars.

  Flanked by a select guard of soldiers, Anjo wrapped a thin scarf round his head and face, just his eyes showing. When he was given the signal that they were filming, he strode down the hill to the entrance of the favela where the crew was set up on a corner.

  Ticking, twitching, he got to the reporter and waved his Beretta in her face. She backed out of shot, forgetting her cues. Terrified.

  Anjo thrust his face into the camera lens, launching into a tirade. “I am boss of Morro da Babilônia. I am the police up on that hill. Justice up there is quick and fair, not like you have down here.”

  He turned to another three soldiers bringing up the rear, dragging a heavy blue tarpaulin down the hill. He beckoned them on with the Beretta. “There is no corruption on the hill, no one gets robbed. Everyone is safe. Why? Because of me. And if one of my people comes into your city and does something bad, I take care of it.”

  He had to pause for a moment, the words were outrunning his brain. He had to make sure he said it all right. Franjinha had run through this speech with him but he wasn’t here to prompt.

  Anjo’s black, glittering eyes narrowed and the reporter went absolutely still. She maybe thought he was going to shoot her. Maybe he should. He had his words lined up again now. “When a gringo gets robbed and shot on Copacabana your cops can only catch one guy, and then they somehow forget what they did with him. The second I found out those guys come from my hill I began hunting down the other bad guy. I never rest until I find him. I am judge and jury. And executioner.”

  He snapped his hand down, the signal for the three soldiers. Moving uphill of the tarpaulin, they let go of the top edge and hauled on the bottom. The heavy lump within slid and flopped onto the cracked concrete.

  It was a charred body, the limbs bent up and stiff. The death grin of the skull beneath the blackened crust.

  “Oh my god,” the reporter gasped.

  “And I don’t lose the body. I am justice, I am order,” Anjo shouted, thumping his chest. “Me.”

  Chapter 15

  Jake

  Vilson was sitting on the thin rug laid over the tiled floor of Jake’s small living room, hugging his legs, his chin resting on his knees.

  Jake switched on the early-evening news ahead of Uga Uga. In the two days since they had pulled Vilson off the hill the novela was the only thing that had half raised the kid out of a kind of resentful, skulking daze.

  He glanced at Vilson as they watched
the news report. Vilson’s eyes widened and he hugged himself closer. The footage cut away as the body was rolled out of the tarpaulin, but there was no doubting what it was.

  Up on the favela hilltop, with Marinho despairing as they had stood over the stinking unknown corpse, Vilson had conjured a jerrycan of petrol. With the corpse alight, they had torn down the hillside as quickly as Jake’s feeble stamina allowed with the yellow glow from the billowing flames at their back. In that moment Vilson had gone from being no use to anyone, from zero-a-esquerda – a zero-on-the-left – up to a one, as Marinho sarcastically put it. That had been the high point. Figuratively as well as literally.

  Jake turned off the TV.

  “Why did you do that? The novela is going to start,” Vilson said. He avoided eye contact most of the time and when Jake did catch him looking at him it was with something between mistrust, fear and hatred. Right now it seemed like outright hatred. It was time to start talking. Properly.

  “What happened up there with that gangster – you said he shot at you?”

  Vilson looked at the floor. “I just want to watch the novela.”

  “Me too, but I want you to answer me first.”

  Vilson shook his head in frustration and stared at the floor for a few moments. “Most people think his eyes are not too good and he can’t shoot straight. Most people he kills are close-up, you know, like executions.” He shivered involuntarily and scoped the room like it might be bugged.

  “Not a great reputation for a badass gangster.”

  Vilson shrugged. “He still scares people.”

  Jake turned the TV back on. Vilson was immediately lost in the opening credits for Uga Uga.

  Experience had taught Jake that it was in the intense, scary moments that the unbreakable bonds were made. That theory wasn’t sticking here. It looked like this was as good as it was going to get. He had pulled the kid off the hill either because it was the right thing to do, or because Nogueira had needled him into it. Or something in-between. He hadn’t really given much thought to what he might be supposed to feel afterwards or what would happen. It wasn’t the first time he had had to deal with the fallout from a lack of foresight.