by Jack Rylance
He took one out and handed it over to her. She stood there, the cigarette between her fingers, and only after several moments did John realize that she was waiting for a light. He scrambled for his matches, struck one up, guided it in front of her face and sheltered it with his other hand. She bent down slightly, took the first drag, blew that smoke out. “You are English?” she asked.
“Yeh.”
“Alone?”
“I am, yeh.”
“So your friend is not coming?”
“Pete? No.”
“May I sit?”
“Yeh, alright.”
John was relieved to have her pull up a chair. He was suddenly less prominent, a part of the crowd. She placed herself directly opposite him, smiled again. “What’s your name?”
“John.”
“I am Alessandra.” She had small breasts, nipples that appeared to stick out. “Will you buy me a drink?”
“What do you want?” he asked.
She pointed to his caipirinha. Before John could agree, she had already turned and made a kind of shushing noise with her lips – sufficient to claim a waiter’s attention at ten paces – and signalled for her drink. Then Alessandra turned back round and gave John her full attention. “This is your first time in Rio?”
“Yeh.”
“You like it here?”
“It’s great.” This was true. The place had become enjoyable in a matter of minutes. John could thank his cocktail for this, along with the sudden appearance of Alessandra herself. He felt normalised, having misplaced all those earlier feelings of dread. He reflected on what Pete had said last night: She’d eat you for breakfast. Now John smiled at the very idea. The dangers were dissipating. He was succumbing to that sense of security which befalls the drunken soul, as if it were perfectly safe to experiment on his own life.
The waiter brought over Alessandra’s drink and she raised her glass and John clinked his own against it. She gave him her smile again, knowing it to be a great success, then launched into the same conversation which she got to practise every night.
Some twenty minutes later, after John had finished his caipirinha, he set it aside with real satisfaction. “Let’s go over the road,” he said.
“You want to go the kiosk?” Alessandra asked.
“Yeh.”
“Why?”
“It’s good over there. Come on, let’s go.” He stood up to leave.
“You pay first,” Alessandra explained. “Pay for these drinks.”
After settling the bill John set off across the road, not seeming to care whether or not Alessandra kept up. She’d had a little sympathy for him to begin with – the boy was clearly wet behind the ears – but that sympathy had been fragile and brittle and now it was gone, done away by John’s increasing swagger, no matter how meaningless and desperate that swagger was. She could tell that he was trying to model himself on his crazy friend, to follow in Pete’s erratic footsteps, but it was no kind of likeness and John’s failure was secure.
John approached the counter and knocked on it with his right hand as if it were a door. The kiosk owner looked down at John’s hand and then up at John himself, while John turned and addressed Alessandra. “What do you want?”
“Another caipirinha, no?”
“Yeh.” He turned back to the kiosk’s proprietor. “Two of them. Two cocktails.”
“Caipirinhas,” Alessandra said.
They sat themselves down. Tonight it was quiet again. There was only one other customer present, sitting alone five metres away, his feet up on another chair. He was absorbed by his mobile phone, tapping a message into it. He wore a blue baseball cap, a thin black moustache.
Alessandra smiled and traced a hand up John’s thigh to claim his attention back. John stared at the hand calmly. He had shown her no real sexual interest, she thought. Most likely he would only stagger off to his hotel or apartment an hour from now after buying her a couple more drinks. Increasingly, the youngster was looking like a waste of Alessandra’s time. “You want to sniff?” she asked him, conspiratorially.
“Sniff?” John asked.
“Cocaine.”
John thought about it for a moment and then shrugged his shoulders. “Yeh all right.”
“Ok. You give me fifty reais now. I go buy, I come back.”
“And how do I know you won’t fuck off with my money?”
“I don’t understand.”
“You get the cocaine, you come back, and then I’ll sort you out. I’m not paying you upfront.”
Alessandra understood. The knowledge made her haughty. It was amazing how these drunkards pulled themselves together suddenly whenever money was involved. “OK. You wait here ten minutes.”
“Sound,” he answered. Then John watched her get up and walk off, pleased with the transaction and the way in which he’d handled it. He imagined Pete approving and took a drink from his plastic cup. This present caipirinha was rough and ready and tasted much stronger than the first, but it was hardly disagreeable. John stared out at the mesmerising surf, the darkness that lay behind it, until interrupted by a tap on his left shoulder. He turned round and looked up at the man who’d been sitting alone before.
“Hey, my friend!” The man issued his greeting with explosive warmth, as if the two of them were long lost amigos reunited against the odds.
“Alright, lad,” John countered, nodding once.
“You buy cocaine from this girl?”
“Yeh. Why?” John spoke up with assurance. He felt like nothing could hurt him now, not even the God’s honest truth.
The man shook his head and sat down at John’s table, exhibiting the disgust of a business competitor. “No good. Fraco. Weak.”
“What? You’re saying her gear is shit?”
“Shit. Yes.” He nodded emphatically.
“And your gear is sound?”
He gave John the thumbs up. “You are a friend of Pete’s, no?”
“Yeh! You know him?”
“Of course I know Pete. Everybody knows Pete. Pete is crazy. Doidão.”
“He’s my friend.”
“Yes, he is my friend also. I like him very much. You want some good coke, I have it for you. A special price because you are a friend of Pete.”
“Alright, nice one.”
“How much you pay her?”
“I don’t know, fifty or something”
“So you have fifty reais for me?”
John wasn’t sure. He went in his pocket and fumbled about and pulled out a number of creased bank notes which meant nothing to him. One of them dropped on the floor. His new friend was first to it and picked it up on John’s behalf. “This is twenty,” he said. “You have thirty more?”
Once the question of payment had been resolved, the man led John to the back of the kiosk and the spot where Pete had disappeared to last night. There he took a wrap from his pocket, picked it open with his teeth, and shook out the whole contents onto the flat wooden surface. “You do this quick,” he said, head swivelling about, on the lookout for trouble. He took the twenty that John had just paid him and quickly fashioned it into a straw before handing it back. John put his nose to the bank note and stuck it against the powder and did his best to snort the drug up, but his best was not good enough and he ingested a mere fraction. The rest of it dropped out of his nostrils and onto the counter or else the ground. It was as though his nose was blocked solid.
The man shook his head. “No. Not like this. I show you. Watch…” He pressed a finger against his redundant nostril and made a sweeping pass at the powder with the active one. Half of it was gone in an instant, simple as you like. “Now you try again.”
This time John was a little more successful, but not much. It had happened before on the few occasions he’d tried the drug. Resigned to failure, he looked down at the rest of the cocaine and said, “That’ll do me. Go ahead; help yourself.”
“You finished?”
“Yeh. I’m buzzing off that as it is.�
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Afterwards they went and sat back down together. “Is good, no?” The man asked.
“Yeh, sound.” John felt thirsty. Instead of a sip he took a gulp of his remaining drink.
“Any time you want good coke,” the man said, “you talk to me.”
“I’m gonna have another cocktail,” said John, decisively. “You want one?”
A couple of minutes later John noticed Alessandra crossing the main road, heading back towards the kiosk. “Here we go,” he said, as if relishing what was to come.
Alessandra sat down at their table without a word and carefully looked around. She held something in her fist under the table, and knocked that fist against John’s knee, ready for the exchange. “You give me the money now,” she said quietly.
“You’re alright. I’ve changed my mind.”
Alessandra did not appear to understand. “Here, I have the cocaine.”
“No thanks.”
“No? I go to the favela for you and I come back with something to sniff.”
“So what. That’s not my problem.”
She shook her head. “Now you pay me.”
“Do you think I’m a fucking knobhead?” John asked.
“You pay me now.”
“You can fuck off,” John said. He had become bold, ignorant, twitchy. He failed to see what she could possibly do to him. He felt like staying there and revelling in her impotence. By way of reply, Alessandra stood up and took out her phone and activated a number before speaking calmly into the handset. What she did not do was take her eyes off John the whole time.
John told himself this was all a bluff. He looked at the other dealer to see what he made of these developments, but this supposed friend of Pete’s had suddenly become uncommunicative, a lot less familiar. He was turning away to the best of his ability, pretending that John did not exist.
“Oi, lad. Listen, will you have a word with her. Hey…” The dealer turned round reluctantly at the sound of John’s persistent voice. He looked surprised at being addressed and flung up his hands as if it was none of his business and there was nothing he could do to help. At last John realised that he was in trouble. As the thought occurred to him, he stood up and turned to face homewards and saw that a police car was already there at the curb side, standing between himself and escape.
While he stared at the red flashing light, two officers got out of the vehicle and walked over and Alessandra began talking to them rapidly. She appeared to be their guide. As she spoke, the police looked John up and down, up and down again. When she’d said her piece, one of them took hold of John by the elbow and started guiding him out of his seat and towards the beach. “Where are we going?” He said.
They led him to the back of the kiosk, out of the way, to the spot where he had failed to snort cocaine not ten minutes before. Alessandra followed behind them. One of the police pulled on both his elbows in order to bring John to a stop, then, very quickly, Alessandra placed something in the right hand pocket of John’s jeans. He was slow to react and when he did eventually reach for the same pocket to see what was there, one of the policemen restrained his arm; the other officer then rifled the pocket in question and pulled out a wrap of cocaine and dangled it in front of his face.
“You’ve got to be fucking joking,” John said.
“Now you pay,” Alessandra said. “You have a card for ATM?”
“Fuck off.”
“How much money you have?”
“This is fucking ridiculous. You can all kiss my arse.” At the same time he spoke up, John felt very very scared. The policemen looked bored and brutal and it was clear that they were not playing by any rules. One of them barked in his face so that the spittle landed on John’s cheek.
“They want to know if you have a card for the ATM,” Alessandra explained. “You tell them now.”
John hated her passionately. He shook his head.
The other policeman spoke, a little more peaceably, and again Alessandra translated. “Then they will go to your apartment.”
“Why?”
Alessandra answered this question herself. “For your money.”
John glowered at the young woman, too cautious now to curse her out loud. He expected her to gloat because she had the upper hand, but instead she looked composed, neutral, as if this was still part and parcel of her night’s work.
Suddenly it dawned on John that they had actually done him a favour by hitting upon the best possible solution. He became enthusiastic all of a sudden, and started smiling, as if he was luring them into a trap. “Fine,” he said. “Let’s go then.”
The police escorted him to the squad car and placed John on the back seat before climbing up front. Then they turned as one to question him as to the whereabouts of the apartment. John understood that much, and started with his hand signals, and these proved sufficiently accurate that they were soon enough pulling up outside Pete’s residence.
At the entrance to the apartment building John realised that he had somehow lost his keys and conveyed this information to the officers by turning out his pockets and repeatedly cursing his fate. One of them then peered into the entrance hall and spotted the porteiro slumped in a chair, dead to the world. He rapped on the glass and brought the man back to life, but this rebirth was too slow for the officer’s liking and so he shouted through the door also, demanding greater haste. The porteiro leapt up accordingly, buzzed them in, and then stood back – soldierly, subservient – as the trio passed him by.
Upon reaching Pete’s apartment, John knocked loudly on the front door, praying that his friend was home. There was no reason why he shouldn’t be, but the growing impatience of the police disturbed him. One of the officers mimed the action of his opening the door with a key. “I haven’t got a key, I told you,” he said. “Just hang on, for fuck’s sake.”
At last John heard noise from inside: the sound of Pete shuffling towards the entrance, stopping to look through the spy-hole, and then cursing under his breath. He opened the door and squinted at his visitors, looking just as haggard as before. There were huge bags under his eyes. He blinked at what he was faced with, regarding it blearily, but clearly unsurprised. “Good evening, Sergeant Marcello,” Pete said, addressing the taller of the two policemen in his own language.
“Good evening Pete,” replied the officer in question, equally unsurprised. “So this boy is a friend of yours?”
“Yes he is. What has he done?”
“He has the same interests as you. We caught him sniffing at the kiosk.”
Pete regarded John malevolently. He gave him a cuff around back of the head. “He is an idiot and I apologise for this trouble he has caused. I hope that he did not show you any disrespect?”
“No.”
“Good. Please allow me to pay for your breakfast tomorrow. 100 is OK?”
“I think 200 is better, under the circumstances.”
“Alright. Give me a minute, I’ll go and get it. And thank you for your help, Sergeant.”
“I think you need to keep an eye on this boy.”
“Yes, I know.”
When the police had left, John rubbed the back of his head as if it genuinely hurt, trying to ward off any further punishment. “You didn’t need to give me a slap,” he said.
“Yes I did, soft lad, and now I’m going back to bed. We’ll talk about this tomorrow.” Pete closed and locked the front door and turned his back on John. John then strode purposefully towards the toilet. Now that his safety was assured, it was time for him to puke.
Chapter Five
They visited a restaurant called Cabral in the late afternoon. It was another place on Atlantic Avenue which offered a view of Copacabana beach and allowed you to look out across the bay. They walked over to a table of men who were sat out on the terrace beneath a bright yellow canopy and who turned as one to watch their approach.
“Gentleman,” Pete said.
“Pete,” one of them replied; a couple of the others grunted cordially
as he pulled up two chairs from an empty table, one for himself and one for John.
“This is my friend John, visiting from England,” Pete said.
John nodded at the men, hunched his shoulders, made a nervous throaty sound. A couple of the men nodded back. To John’s eyes, they all looked like seasoned card players. The kind you saw on the TV at one of the big Vegas tournaments: smart old-timers, experts in giving nothing away. Immediately he felt uncomfortable in their presence and decided to sit out this encounter in silence.
The man called Carter resumed telling his story. “So then, when Collins reaches São Paulo, this guy, whose life he’s just saved, turns round and informs him that he’s actually the chairman of a major Brazilian bank and says that he would like to do him a huge favour in return…” It was a story Pete had heard before. It was a story most of them had heard before, Pete suspected, and yet he doubted that anyone was sorry to hear it again. Listening to it now were Thor, James Allan, Jarvis, and Frank Delaney. These were all men with money in the bank. In a number of cases, Pete suspected that this money ran into the millions, although you would not know for sure. You rarely heard mention of their respective businesses, and the wealth these businesses generated was only spoken of in the broadest terms. The only one-upmanship here was in terms of intelligence, information, general knowledge.
A few of the men lived here full time; the others came and went. They might spend a month or three. There were some twenty or so affiliated members of this group which met at Cabral in the afternoon. They dropped in all of sudden and often left without a word. These were itinerant, enigmatic individuals.
