by Jack Rylance
“I don’t know about that.” It was clear that John did not consider it an honour to be known as ‘an old hand’. In fact the title openly concerned him. Pete could see John gearing himself up, and he already knew the question that was coming. The one which had long weighed heavily on the boy’s mind. “Have you heard anything from Vincent and Totsy?”
“Not a word. They mustn’t know you’re here,” Pete said.
“And how long do you reckon that’ll last?”
“I don’t see why it can’t last for good. If they had a mind to explore the possibility of your being in Rio then they would have acted on it before today.”
John smiled by way of reply. It was clearly fake. The only thing worth celebrating, in all honesty, would have been his ability to go back home. His survival was a mere consolation.
Finishing their last drinks, Pete called Antonio over and made to settle the bill. He looked at his watch. It was three in the morning already. The hours, as they often did in Copacabana, had raced on by.
“I thought we’d try the other end of town for a change. Head down to Posto 2.”
“Alright,” John answered.
They got up and started to amble along the front of Atlantic Avenue, following the slow, lazy curve of its bay. In this they were not alone. There was also movement from a number of those hookers who had not met with any success outside of HELP and were now migrating to the bars down by Prado Junior in their ones, twos, and threes, wearing looks of sullen tenacity, heading for the so called inferninhos.
The little hells, the last chance saloons.
With a mile covered, Pete and John passed The Excelsior on their left. This was the hotel Pete had stayed at on his first visit to Copacabana – a two week holiday, taken alone. It was not long after his resignation had been refused by Vincent and Totsy and his chance to work for Bobby Moyles had gone begging. This helped explain why Pete had thrown himself into every one of those fourteen nights with the utmost abandon. He gave himself over to the district entirely and in return it quashed his grievances for a while. It was a glorious surrender, just what he’d needed.
Pete realised now that this first holiday had amounted to a test-run. He’d been looking around already, a prospective resident, preparing the way for his eventual arrival.
Escape on the brain.
And Rio de Janeiro was just the place for such an escape. It was where you went to forget, deny, avoid your former life. There was a long and fine tradition of doing just that and Pete was aware of following in those nimble, hurried, hectic footsteps that had landed here before him after taking illicit flight, thinking that nobody would look for or find them in this city, hoping to thereby lift the threats issued against their person, or at least sit these threats out. And yet Rio amounted to a curious sanctuary, for it was not a locale where the story usually ended and it boasted definite risks of its own.
None of these risks was enough to dissuade Pete however. He had drawn a line underneath the United Kingdom and set about becoming a determined non-resident, knowing full well he would never set foot in Liverpool again. This geographic cure was final. He had severed himself totally from his birthplace and breeding ground; the scene of countless triumphs, inviolable defeat.
The more he thought about it, the more it made sense to Pete that Vincent and Totsy had chosen to come here in person. It was largely out of boredom. It certainly had nothing to do with revenge. Neither of them owed him any such thing. They had already charged Pete with far more than he’d ever deserved.
They could have sent other men in their place to do this job: the latest able recruits, the Class of 07, the ones who reminded Vincent and Totsy of their younger selves and who they were understandably wary of. Instead they’d insisted on dealing with the situation personally because this is what they loved. It was not enough for them to hand down the verdict, they also wanted to dramatise Pete’s fate.
Now they expected him to improve on the last time and go one step further. It was not sufficient for Pete to stand still while they beat a man to death – he was expected to hand John over to them in the certain knowledge that he’d be led to his doom. He was to wash his hands of the boy, stain them with John’s blood.
They wanted everybody to fail spectacularly.
*
Their walk had lasted the best part of forty minutes when Pete put an end to it. “Let’s cross over,” he said, “and check out that kiosk over there.”
“Alright.”
Up close, it looked exactly the same as Pete’s regular beach-side haunt, except for a small video monitor resting precariously on the wooden bar, its screen glowing electric blue. A compact amplifier stood next to the monitor with a couple of microphones trailing off, hanging down from their leads.
The barman mixed a caipirinha for Pete, handed John a can of beer. “What’s this?” Pete asked, alluding to the set-up.
“Karaoke,” the barman replied.
“Karaoke, eh…” Pete looked at John pointedly. “Now you don’t get that up at Posto 5.”
John shook his head. “You can count me out.”
“How do I choose a song?” Pete asked.
The barman flicked a switch behind the counter and booted up the system and then handed Pete the remote control. After a couple of false starts, Pete figured out how to run through the menu. About half of the titles were in English, the other half in Portuguese. One option finally arrested him. “That’s the one,” he said, referring to ‘My Way’. He told the barman to power the song up.
The machine slowly processed the request, chugged into action, and a cheap musical arrangement started to blare out from the speakers. Pete picked up the second microphone and held it out for John to take hold of. “Come on, lad. Why do you think there’s two of them? Time for our duet.”
“I don’t know this one.”
“Just follow the words on the screen.”
“Nah, I’m alright.”
“Don’t let me down here, I’m counting on you.” Clearly, an outright refusal threatened to spoil his friend’s good mood, and it was this factor that made John step forwards against his will and take hold of the mic and stand by Pete’s side in time for the opening bars.
Pete Murphy’s original intention was to sing the song for laughs, but this did not last very long. He soon lapsed into drunken sincerity, spurred on by the lyrics. They appealed to him now with their intimations of death and the lordly defiance of it. They suggested that life is fiercely determined and that you shouldn’t flinch from this fact. They spoke of no quarter being given or required. No clemency either. A life entirely consummated and facing its end with no little pride. Pete was belting the song out now, trying to muster some courage, consider himself a hero in waiting.
He threw one arm around John’s shoulder and drew him in close. John, for his part, was concentrating on reading the lyrics on the small monitor and trying to keep pace with them as they filled with colour. They were not at all familiar to him. Also, he was drunk, which meant he found himself slurring. His rendition sounded like a travesty of the song, but it wasn’t a travesty. John’s heart was in the right place, after everything. But sometimes this isn’t enough. Most of the time in fact.
An early morning jogger passed them by – a middle aged lady in a green tracksuit using the nearby lane reserved for runners, skaters, cyclists. Pete and John attracted her keen curiosity with their antics and she threw them a look of outright disgust as she trotted by. Pete saluted the woman as he delivered the last verse, dragging out the final two words of the song with one long breath as if he never wanted them to end. Afterwards, he turned to the bar and picked up the caipirinha that was waiting for him and drank a good third of it through his straw. Pete was hopped up on glory, more than ready to do the right thing, impatient for battle. He was going to put his recklessness to good use for a change. Instead of attacking his past, he would seek to answer for it.
Pete turned and looked out at Guanabara Bay as he had done so ofte
n before at this time of the morning. He faced out to sea and ran the rule over this latest glorious sunrise as it broke across the water, shaking his head at its magnificence, staring first at the shimmering horizon, and then at the mountain ridges to his left, admiring their soft dun outlines and the growing profusion of colours which rose all about them: pink, turquoise, tangerine. He was not being contemplative. He was highly engaged with the view. It was a type of exhortation, as if he was trying to haul in the scenery with his eyes and possess it somehow.
A short while later, as Pete and John walked back home along Atlantic Avenue, they were approached by a skinny street kid, maybe eight years old, wielding a large piece of wood with obvious difficulty. The wood had nails jutting from its top end. “Give me your money or I’ll kill you,” he said to Pete calmly. “And your watch,” the boy added, after a pause. He was playing at being dangerous. It was comical, admirable, depressing. Something he was likely to grow into if he ever lived that long.
“I’ve got no money, kid. But I’ve got a piece of chewing gum,” Pete answered.
The boy looked at Pete thoughtfully. “Then give me your chewing gum.” Pete duly obeyed. The boy stayed put, unwrapped the gum, placed it in his mouth solemnly. “Thank you,” he said and started to walk off.
They watched him go. “Hey, kid,” Pete called after him. The boy stopped and turned round. “Come back here.”
The boy did as he was told. Pete went to his pocket again, took out its notes and coins, and handed him everything so that the child had to cup his hands together to collect it all. “Thank you,” he said again. He was dead tired, disinterested in his own good fortune. It was not sufficient to alleviate the life that he was leading, the life that he had led.
Chapter Nineteen
When John woke the next morning, he felt seriously troubled and set about justifying this great unease by referring back to the night before. He pushed back the bed sheet, swivelled round, and planted his feet on the tiled floor. It was Pete’s actions which began to bother him after the fact. He felt compelled to summarize them. Now that John’s drunkenness was lifting, they made a disturbing kind of sense.
There was the way Pete had talked about himself at Sobre As Ondas, recounting stories which John had never heard before and that Pete claimed never to have told. It was a breathless bout of nostalgia, as if he was handing these stories down for John to preserve. Then there was his rendition of the song ‘My Way’, and the way he’d sang the words with a booming sincerity, as if ringing them true.
And now the end is near,
And so I face the final curtain…
In a way, this performance reminded John of his first night in Copacabana when Pete had lost the plot, slumped on the white sofa at five in the morning stuffing cocaine up his nose. The time when he’d said repeatedly, “I don’t give a fuck. Seriously, I do not give a fuck. I don’t give a fuck at all.” It was as if Pete had channelled these same feelings into the lyrics, only they were even more advanced now, as if he was perfectly sure of having reached the end of the line.
Lastly, there was his demand that John stay away from the apartment today because Ester was coming round. John suspected this prohibition had nothing to do with Ester. He concluded that it was an outright lie.
Now John attacked himself for ignoring these signs as they’d occurred, his perception blunted by booze. He realised that Pete’s whole conduct had looked and sounded like goodbye. It was not clear where he was going or what kind of distance was involved, but it seemed obvious that John would not be accompanying him. He was to be abandoned here and for that reason he felt a keen sense of dread.
Now that John had explained this unease to his own satisfaction, it exploded into a feeling of panic, and he hurried over to the chair and scrambled into last night’s clothes. Once dressed, and out of the building, he took off for Pete’s place, sprinting recklessly, darting past pedestrians. There were three roads for John to cross and in doing so he paid little attention to the oncoming traffic. At the last of these junctions a taxi nearly clipped him, its speeding front bumper missing his legs by an inch, the driver screaming curses in John’s wake which he took no time to acknowledge.
John stopped before the gates to Pete’s apartment and rang the buzzer long and hard. The porteiro looked out from his post just behind the front door and considered the distraught young gringo. “Pete,” John said. The porteiro shook his head. Meaning Pete was not there.
“Where is he? Do you know where he is?”
The porteiro shrugged.
As John tried to catch his breath, he racked his brain, wondering what to do next. He was not spoilt for choices. There was only one place he might turn as far as John could tell – towards Frank Delaney, Pete’s American friend. Pete had given him Delaney’s contact details just in case there was ever a time when he himself could not be reached. Now John took out his mobile and accessed the American’s number and Frank answered on the fourth ring.
“Yeh?”
“Frank?”
“Yes, who is this?”
“It’s John.”
“John. Hey…”
“Do you know where Pete is?”
“I haven’t seen him since last week.”
“Do you know where he might be?”
“No. Why?”
“I think something’s going on.”
There was a pause. “Why don’t you come here.”
“Where’s that?”
“Have you got a pen?”
“Hang on.”
John turned round and rang the buzzer again and waited for the porteiro’s begrudging assistance.
A taxi delivered him to Frank’s. It took a right out of Miguel Lemos and joined the inevitable traffic jam on Nossa Senhora – the clogged main artery that ran the length of Copacabana. Progress was slow and miserable. There was also the noon heat to contend with. It played havoc with John’s growing impatience and he sat there stewing in it, the sweat dripping off his brow.
John found himself wondering if it had been Pete’s intention to give himself away. Maybe, on some level, he was waiting for John to surprise him and intervene. He had certainly been generous enough with his clues. You could not say he’d kept his cards close to his chest. Did he really think John so stupid as to suspect nothing under these circumstances?
Maybe that was the price John had paid for calling on Pete time and time again: to be so easily dismissed. For years he had exploited Pete’s name to the full, brandishing it like a weapon in order to repel all-comers. He’d used it to change people’s minds so that they left him alone. It countered everyone who thought badly of John. It had kept him safe from harm.
Now, as the taxi jostled with cars and buses in order to crawl forward another yard, John recalled one particular scene back in The Marsden, their local pub. His assailant that day was a lad called Corkish – somebody he’d gone to school with and who’d been working away in Brighton for the last couple of years. This meant that Corkish knew nothing of the protection which John enjoyed and that was why he reintroduced himself to his former schoolmate with a dig to the ribs while John was playing the fruit machine. It was a punch which brought John low and took his breath away, but even as he sunk to the floor it struck him that Pete was at the bar buying them both a pint, and that he would be over shortly to correct matters. It was a beautiful realisation that made a nonsense of the physical pain.
Pete duly strode over and stepped in. John looked up and watched from his crouching position as justice was delivered. “You don’t fucking touch him. Do you understand? If you touch him again then you have to walk through me. Do you really see that happening, lad?”
Corkish allowed himself a brief pause, a petty bravado, but nothing more. “No.”
“Good,” Pete said. “You’re just lucky I have better things to do today than fuck you up badly – because that’s the only reason why you’re still on your feet.”
Even as it was happening, John appreciated the wonde
rful significance of this confrontation. Word was destined to spread. This would become one of those nuggets of information that did the rounds, something you needed to know as it concerned how you went about your everyday business. It would smash those lingering doubts that anyone might still have: you did not want to fuck with John Mullan. He was connected to Pete Murphy, and everybody knew who Pete Murphy was tied in with.
All this meant that John was not without power.
“I owe you one, Pete. I fucking owe you one, man,” John had told him.
“I’ll hold you to that,” Pete had said.
“You can. I’m not messing.”
Finally, the taxi driver pulled over and pointed out the address that John had written down. He paid the man and leapt out. It had taken them twenty minutes to travel four miles.
John buzzed the fancy bronze bell to the apartment building. It was an impressive edifice of clean white stone. Similarly, the porteiro was well-dressed, official-looking, also suspicious. He eyed John up from behind his desk and spoke through the intercom. “Sim?”
“Frank,” said John. “I’m here to see Frank.”
The porteiro rang the American to confirm that this was true and then grudgingly allowed John to enter. An ornate lift carried him up to the sixth floor. John stepped out and turned right and saw Frank standing just outside his front door, beckoning him forward.
The apartment was a lot bigger than John’s or Pete’s own, and a hell of a lot brighter. The windows were large, welcoming sunlight into the long room. On the pale walls hung a series of vibrant paintings portraying Rio de Janeiro. They were colourful, slapdash, as if they’d been composed gleefully in a race against the clock.
“Can I get you a drink?” Frank asked.
“I’m alright.”
“You mind if I have one?”
John gave a testy shrug.
“So what’s the problem?” Frank asked, disappearing into the kitchen.
