by Simon Ings
A short man with a dwarfish face emerged from the sedan and trotted over. ‘Dias Fo!’ he greeted them. ‘Captain, second class, Special Services. Not bad for a first response, eh?’
Ajay wasn’t sure whether he referred to his greeting, his men’s efforts to hold back the enraged crowd, or the young would-be vigilantes themselves, screaming their heads off scant yards away. ‘We are besieged,’ Captain Fo admitted. ‘But never fear, we are becoming more assertive with the unrestful elements without!’
‘I invited them here,’ said Herazo, acidly.
The eager captain was not listening. ‘It is a necessary thing, to become assertive with people who have adopted the mentality of the herd. It is necessary to be strict and clear. We are containing the unrest in a swift and surgical manner.’
Herazo stared at Fo, nonplussed.
Fo said, ‘Everything here is clear-eyed, direct and surgical!’
‘Good,’ said Ajay: there was no point arguing with him.
‘And good,’ Fo insisted, ‘very good!’
‘And you will of course be able to guide the media safely through the riot you’ve made?’ said Herazo, unwilling to let the little man off the hook.
‘Media?’ Fo’s eyes widened. ‘Where are they? They will be summarily ejected, of course!’
‘Captain,’ Herazo sighed, ‘this is a media event. Please don’t tell me you weren’t informed.’
‘It’s way too late for all of that,’ Gloria said, gazing glumly at the masses at the gate. ‘We’ll have to relocate.’
‘Get helicopters,’ said Herazo, the command in his voice tinged with desperation. ‘We’ll fly the press in, posthaste. See to it.’
‘Forget it, Hez,’ said Ajay. ‘Look. It’s madness out there.’
‘But I’ve good news for them,’ Herazo protested.
‘I don’t think they’re in much of a mood to listen.’
‘I’ve got a podium and a speech and everything!’
Above the chants of the crowd came the unmistakable crack of gunfire. The men turned as one, watching tracers light up the sky.
‘Your doing?’
‘No!’ Fo exclaimed. ‘Of course we shall take steps immediately to . . .’
But they were not listening to him.
‘All right,’ Herazo sighed, ‘that’s enough. Get the car.’
Gloria pressed the side of his neck where the wire was and mumbled the order. Ajay meantime stepped forward to shield Herazo from the crowd’s line of sight.
The pastel-suited PR team edged out the doors and clustered nervously under the lobby awning. ‘Sir?’
Herazo turned. ‘We reconvene,’ he shouted. ‘See to it. Reschedule. All’s been skewered by this prick.’ He pointed at the empty space where Fo had been; the captain was already halfway to his sedan.
‘One way on the Buenos Aires red-eye please,’ Gloria mimicked, chuckling. ‘Better do it now, little man.’
‘By the way, who let the Specials in on this event?’ Herazo asked, dangerously calm: ‘Your responsibility I think, Gloria?’
Ajay tried not to smile.
‘What about the piv— Sir, what of the homeless child?’ the PR woman shouted. ‘We need pictures—’
‘That TVGlobo team around?’ Ajay called back.
The pastel-suited woman trotted down the steps to join them. Cowering behind Gloria she said, ‘They went among the rioters, a good half hour ago. We were watching their transmissions, but they got trashed bare minutes since. Leastways, their gear did. We had live pictures for a while.’
‘You place them anywhere worthwhile?’ Herazo demanded.
‘Franchised as far as Hispanamerica.’
‘Any context with the pics?’
She glanced uneasily at the mayor. ‘“Government Corruption Provokes The People’s Wrath.”’
‘Fuck!’ Herazo spat.
‘It’s just a riff, sir.’
‘I know that, you silly bitch! It’s not being mine’s the point.’
Ajay winced: Hez was forgetting just how much he’d paid to have this ‘bitch’ in tow. But she was too overawed by the screaming crowd to take much note of Hez’s temper. ‘Not yours but a hostile channel’s, true,’ she said. ‘The fault’s not ours. Expert systems write their commentary. The night monads refused us newsfeed access. They didn’t want to be filled in.’
‘Corrupt indeed. Of all the baleful shit,’ Herazo muttered, lost in deep resentment of the press.
‘All will be straight by morning, sir,’ the girl assured him. ‘We’re in dialogue already, angling for correct replay at oh-five-hundred hours.’
‘All right by morning! Whose morning, eh? It’s worldwide coverage I want. Europe’s seven hours ahead! Another couple hours and we’ll have missed their lunchtime slots.’
‘Evening magazines alone will access us and that only with luck. We’ve plenty time to prime them as seen fit.’
‘It’s not enough.’
But she had done with politesse: ‘What do you expect?’ she snapped back: ‘So far this is not news!’
‘You got them ready for my speech?’
‘Speech is one thing: delivery’s another. When the pivete’s Lazarised – when she walks down these steps and speaks to cheering crowds – that’s international. All preluding is so much chaff, as we’ve told you many times.’
The strictness in her voice got through at last. Herazo rubbed his hands together. He was trying, belatedly, to conceal his irritation.
‘Be patient, this will make the grade in time,’ she urged, seductively. ‘Made new from deathly clay, this child! The first to walk the Southern hemisphere, transformed . . . redeemed.’
‘Yeah,’ muttered Herazo, ‘and some nut will blow her head off, things go like they went tonight.’
‘Best not leach the power of that moment, sir, is what I mean.’
‘I don’t need persuasion now: you think I want the foreign press to see this shambles?’
‘By all means talk to them. Tell them about the murder, the injustice, your redemptive gesture. Just don’t expect them to bulletin it is all.’
‘I hear you. Yeah, okay.’
The mayoral car pulled up in front: an old Silver Shadow mounted on truck suspension, the passenger cage hardened and boobied by successive incumbents of the mayoral seat. Herazo’s flotilla of grey-shirted men formed a human screen between him and the doors. Herazo beckoned to the girl to follow him. ‘How’ve you rescheduled?’
‘We’re heliporting TVGlobo into the hospital for pictures of the homeless little one—’
‘We know who she is yet?’
‘No one does, especially not the mob. TVGlobo heard five different girl’s names chanted before their crew were trashed.’
‘But she’s from Vidigal?’
‘Not necessarily. Vidigal’s being nearest us may be all that brought them here. That and Vidigal’s been abused most by vigilantes these years past, and so most sensitive.’
Herazo waved the matter off. ‘What’s set for me?’
‘We’ve conference facilities in parliament; police briefings in half an hour. Your announcement shortly after. Coffee, biscuits, one-to-ones until six-thirty, you can stand it.’
‘I can stand it. Can they? Will they bother?’
‘Maybe no, but your concern will register regardless. Be last out of the room is all.’
Herazo gave a curt nod. ‘Gloria, you drive. Make cripples if you have to. We don’t have much time.’
The silent grey-shirts clustered round and helped lift Hez into the cab. He settled into the back seat, patted the leather beside him. The woman climbed in. He put his hand on her knee.
Ajay rode shotgun, wire-miked and armed. The stubby assault gun he held had a sight but no barrel. A remote merely, commanding fire-arms concealed in the car’s underside.
Ajay’s hands felt sweaty. Killing the pivete had loosened him up, and the sights and sounds of the riot were waking his old responses. Afraid of what he might do,
he examined the gun, making sure all the safeties were on.
Gloria slid the car through the hospital gates with the smooth, careless gestures of an arcade-game wizard. He swerved smoothly between the police lines and into the street. A gang of boys, seizing their chance in the confusion, ran towards the car, brandishing sticks. Gloria immediately gunned towards them. They scrambled out the way as best they could but the crush held them back. The rear right wheel crunched something. Ajay looked back but could see nothing clearly through the small, heavily tinted rear window. Herazo’s hand had risen halfway up the PR woman’s thigh. ‘Eyes on the road,’ he snarled.
Soon they were through the irate crust of the crowd. Progress through the confused inner layer was more gentle. Gloria slowed, letting the crowds cram together to make them a path down the street. The mayor’s car was famous: fear and trembling accompanied it wherever it went.
When the crush was past, Gloria piled on the gas. The car tossed from side to side as they threaded through the riot’s hinterland, past overturned cars, trash fires, shadowy minefields of weeping women.
Men fled to the sidewalks shaking their fists and jeering.
‘My people,’ Herazo sneered back.
Gloria swung the car onto Rua Jardim.
A cigar stub struck the rear window. Sparks showered the toughened glass. Herazo flinched, but his hand remained firmly clasped to the PR’s silk-clad thigh.
The conference ended around five thirty. Ajay left the parliament and took a government car down Avenida Princesa Isobel and through the white-tiled tunnel to Botafogo. Cruising past the yacht club and the university, he felt almost pleased with himself. However outlandish his duties, he was nevertheless someone the mayor of a world-class city relied on, and the perks were steadily building as he was taken more and more into Herazo’s confidence.
In Milan it had been his fearsome reputation which had saved him. Afraid he would come after her, unstoppable as some Gothic golem, Lucia Cecère had bought him off. He could not help but admire the way Lucia had handled him. Knowing he’d want vengeance on her she’d paid him off, giving him information so valuable, so hot, he’d had to flee the country then and there, all vengeful thoughts abandoned. He had no reason to be bitter. It was the information she had traded him, after all, which had got him onto Herazo’s staff, and the way things were going it was almost possible to hope—
He shook the fantasy off. The times were increasingly unpredictable, and Ajay, in common with most people, was learning not to take his ambitions for granted.
The uniformed driver slowed as Ajay gave him directions. They approached Acuçar – the Sugarloaf. At its foot, armed and helmeted police stood guard at the gates of a military base. They stiffened and presented arms when they saw the car. Yards away, oblivious, coach-loads of Israeli turistas were crossing the Praça Vermelha on their way to the cable car.
Ajay’s driver knew the area well. He fed the car into the narrow ancient lanes with ease. This was Urca, Rio’s oldest, most homely quarter. Genteel, predominantly black, it was the nearest Rio got to Parisian living, a tight web of alleys boasting bakeries and butchers’ shops and corner cafés, their tables spilling into the cobbled streets. But it lacked the self-consciousness of a Montmartre or an Isle de St Louis, and there was an edge of real poverty to it, so that the ragged, ostentatious mosaics which paved the rest of Rio gave way here to rough stone flags, loose cobbles, and, in the unofficial streets, mud and wooden planks.
There was no beach along the shoreline here, just a low stone parapet and a yard or two of rocks. It was a favourite place for lovers. From the tree-lined sidewalk they gazed across the harbour to the little-used Flamengo beach and beyond it to the towers of Downtown, and watched the business flights launch and land at the local airstrip. The runway, reclaimed from the harbour, was pointed straight at Acuçar. The second they were airborne the little planes banked sharply southwards, heading for Sao Paulo, or circled west to Belo Horizonte, bellies near to scraping the Sugarloaf’s sheer sides.
Ajay turned the cabin light on, blotting out the street and the huddled shapes of lovers by the water. The erotic camaraderie of this street, so full of caresses, disturbed him. It connected poorly to his own life, spent with his sister in a top-floor apartment overlooking the harbour.
The Sugarloaf was so sheer, its eruption from the soft earth so abrupt, houses were built a mere stone’s throw away from its sides. Ajay had proved the literal truth of this the day he and Shama had moved in, throwing empty cans through an open window at the mountain’s rain-smoothed surface.
In rainstorms the rock was so black and so polished, the runoff so heavy, looking out the window was like looking straight down from the air on a big black river. The effect was dizzying.
Tonight was dry. The rock was just rock, dull and immense and depressing. But he knew even before he entered the apartment that Shama would be sitting there, long-legged, long-necked, tapping cool, silky, finely-worked fingers on the arms of her favourite wicker chair, and staring at the rock-face with unblinking eyes. For a start she was scared of the dark; she never slept at night without him. And though the window on the other side of the apartment had a view of water, lovers, wheeling planes, he knew Shama preferred the rock. Examining the minutiae of its worn fissures and soft lines – like a gigantic mound of butter, scraped by a serrated knife – was her favourite pastime, day or night.
‘You’re late,’ she said, without inflection.
‘I know,’ he said, in her general direction, unable to see her for clutter.
The apartment had never been much of a home, but rather Shama’s lair. She was an avid collector of all sorts of extraneous rubbish. With it she assembled redoubts in every room, arranging tables, pot plants, pottery, framed pictures, bags of old photographs, remnants, woodworking tools, broken toys and bits of old, heavy furniture so as to limit the eye, curtail the step, turn empty space into a infinitely recursive series of nooks and corners, and every corner a lair in which she could somehow insert some icon of herself; a lock of her hair, perhaps, taped under the lid of a chipped ornamental vase; or her name, scrawled with a pin across the leg of a plastic garden chair.
‘The radio spoke of a riot.’
‘The Specials again,’ he replied, ‘treating people like cattle.’
‘They say the “cleaners” are back.’
‘Street children die every week, one way or another.’
‘What did you do tonight?’
‘Just bodyguarded.’ He edged his way into the kitchen, filled the kettle, turned it on. He spooned instant tea into two mugs. His sister’s words might have troubled him, they were so close to the knuckle, but these self-appointed ‘cleaners’ – men like Jorge, sweeping the streets of human ‘trash’ – were an abiding concern of hers.
Thinking and behaving as though she herself were dead – not a whole person any longer but rather a concatenation of phrases, gestures and trivial domestic arrangements – she possessed a curious empathy for the dead, especially those who died young. It was the clearest indication of Ajay’s failure that while he had done everything he could to remove all outward signs of her rape and dismemberment, Shama herself should still be fascinated by it, tracing with terrible precision its echoes in the world outside.
‘The mayor said he will bring her back from the dead.’
‘He hasn’t the techniq,’ said Ajay.
‘What sort of mind will she have, I wonder?’
Ajay poured boiling water onto the grounds. His hands shook. ‘Not her own,’ he said, trying to match his sister’s objectivity. For a long time he had thought these little ironies of hers were aimed at him; that she was baiting him and punishing him. He knew better now. Shama enjoyed these conjunctions and equivalencies purely for themselves. It pleased her, who no longer had a self to please, to recognise parts of herself in others.
He said, ‘Anoxia wiped out her high-level CNS. She’s brain-dead.’
‘You know this?’
/> ‘I saw her at the hospital.’ He carried the tray out the kitchen and picked his way through the maze she had made of their flat. He turned and stepped backwards, elbowing aside a heavy green drape. The thick material fell quickly back into place, catching the edge of the tray. The cups rattled. Ajay waited a moment for the tea to settle, then turned to face her at last.
She was beautiful, her nose and cheekbones sharp as any Carioca. But her body was somehow sunken, as though inside her dark, flawless skin there lurked something unimaginably old and broken-backed. She was curled into her favourite chair, a broken-down wicker monstrosity with a high back and wings she’d dressed with decorative Italian lace napkins. Ajay squatted in front of her, lowering the tray to the floor. There was no room for a table in this cell of hers, with its walls of boxes and stacking chairs, standard lamps and rolled-up rugs propped upright in one corner.
‘The mayor says he will make all well with her.’ Shama spoke in such even, lethargic tones, her manner so laboured and precise, that her sarcasm was hard for anyone but Ajay to detect.
Ajay himself rarely rose to the bait. Now, for instance, he answered her plainly enough: ‘With HOTOL techniq it’s just possible. NMR resonance to map the axons, measuring the catecholamine levels at each synapse. Personality modelling software – Massive stuff, no human program’s a match for it. Nanotech infection through the meninges to rebuild damaged tissue. They’ll never do it with their own gear. They’ll be lucky to get a golem out of her.’
‘How hurt is she?’
Ajay described the pivete’s injuries, too tired to resist his sister’s strange appetites.
‘Fingers?’
‘Unbroken. Only bruises on her arms.’
‘Mouth?’
Ajay stared out the window.
Shama’s tongue had come in a blue case the size and shape of a shoe-box. Inside the box was a carpet of pink, rippled, undifferentiated flesh. Growing from its centre, the tongue weaved in the air like an underwater plant. It didn’t look in the least bit human. When they were ready to operate they took hold of the tongue and cut off the part they needed with a pair of curved scissors. There was a lot of blood. They painted nerve glue on the severed end – a green paste full of nanotechs troped to acetylcholine – and stiched it into his sister’s mouth.
