by Jason Kasper
“We didn’t set up the signal anywhere near his shop.”
“What about a tracking device?” I offered. “We took the driver’s gun.”
“If there was a tracking device, they would have followed us here, not to the other roof.”
Gabriel sounded fearful. “Maybe they got lucky.”
“There’s no way they found that rooftop that quickly by accident. We’ve only been in the favela for a few hours.”
I looked up. “I know how they found us.”
“How?” Parvaneh asked.
“They’ve got an aircraft searching for our signal just like our guys have been. Whoever’s trying to kill us just found it sooner. Come on, Micah, I thought you were the bodyguard here. Why do I have to think all this shit up?”
“There’s no way,” Parvaneh objected. “That’s too—”
I cut her off. “Think about it. First, we drove into a police ambush, and then the landlines and cell towers get knocked out. Now the cops have barricaded us in the favela, and a kill team arrives at our beacon almost as soon as we get it lit. Someone besides the Handler has a surveillance plane overhead looking for us.”
“Could they know what our signal was?” she asked Micah.
He frowned. “Not unless they had an inside man, and even then, very few people know what the recovery signal would be for any given mission.”
“That’s beside the point,” I said. “We can’t leave the favela, we can’t signal our plane, and three men are hunting us with automatic weapons, and that’s before we take the local criminals into account. We’re going to need more than one pistol to defend ourselves—we need better guns.”
“What we need is a radio,” Micah said. “If we can get our hands on an advanced civilian or military-grade radio, I can raise the Complex shooters on the emergency frequency. We’ve got plenty of cash. Where can we get both, Gabriel?”
He shook his head mournfully. “Drug traffickers. High-level guys will definitely have guns, maybe radios.”
“How do we find them?”
“The lieutenants are living as extravagantly as they can. Finding them won’t be the hard part.”
“What will?”
Gabriel helplessly shrugged. “Being able to state our request before they kill us.”
I pounded three times on the metal door, the noise reverberating until it echoed to silence.
After a few seconds without response, I pounded on the door again.
“Patience,” Gabriel scolded. “These are serious people.”
I took a long breath, the rising sun’s first rays providing a circadian reprieve from the exhaustion of a mostly sleepless night. Turning to look at Gabriel, I observed the downside of sunrise: it exposed how ridiculous he looked. He wore a mishmash of hastily purchased clothes: ill-fitting tennis shoes, shorts, and a sleeveless athletic shirt that revealed arms that hadn’t seen the inside of a gym since his last day of high school tennis.
My appearance wasn’t much better, I supposed, between my shaved head and the pièce de résistance of my favela wardrobe, a thin white windbreaker that I hoped could partially conceal newly acquired weapons. I’d have to talk my way through a black-market negotiation before being able to test the jacket’s efficacy—we’d left our sole pistol with Micah and Parvaneh.
I pointed at the letters ADA spray-painted on the door. “What does that mean?”
“Amigos dos Amigos,” he whispered. “Friends of Friends.”
“Not very sinister. What are you so worked up about?”
“They will kill for nothing. Their justice is lead, David. Or worse, the microondas.”
“Microondas, eh? Sounds innocent enough.”
“This means ‘microwave.’ They place men within a stack of tires, soak them in gasoline, and then set them on—”
A crudely welded slot in the door slid open, and beyond it a pair of dark eyes watched us.
“Fire?” I guessed.
Gabriel smiled at the slot, and then said quickly, “Bom dia, senhor—”
“O que que tu quer,” a voice responded in a thick Brazilian accent.
They launched into a back-and-forth exchange in Portuguese, and I didn’t need a native fluency to tell that Gabriel was losing.
“Enough,” I said. “What’s he saying?”
“He says we can get guns anywhere. He wants to know why we came here.”
“We’re looking for real hardware. Submachine guns, something we can conceal under a jacket. And radios. We’ve got enough cash to make it worth his boss’s while, and he can tell by my skin and accent that I’m not a fucking cop. Tell him.”
Another exchange in Portuguese. The sun was rising and the streets grew more crowded by the second, but the door remained closed as they continued to talk.
I interrupted, “Tell him we walk in five seconds. He can have our money, or his competitors can.”
Gabriel spoke quickly. The set of eyes behind the door shifted from Gabriel to me, then back again, before the slot closed. The rusty shriek of metal on metal sounded from within before the door swung open on creaking hinges.
In the short distance between the door and an inner building encapsulated by the perimeter wall stood four skinny, shirtless teenage boys with red handkerchiefs tied below their eyes. I looked from weapon to weapon in their hands—two AK-47 assault rifles, an MP-5 submachine gun, and a pump-action shotgun.
“Good,” I concluded. “Looks like we came to the right place.”
Small hands frisked us with a thoroughness that surprised me before the child sentries closed the gate and led us through an open doorway.
The building’s interior was a bizarrely clean and modern space, the destitution of the slum suspended amid a micro-universe of ersatz wealth. Clean white walls surrounded us as we walked atop gleaming floor tiles, passing between glass coffee tables and ample furniture overlooking giant flat-screen televisions with speakers wired in every direction. The wall beside us held a mural-sized painting of a woman I presumed to be a Brazilian pop star, her crudely painted face marred by a bullet hole in the cheek.
We passed into an open courtyard to the sound of a woman shrieking.
I looked over in alarm only to see one bikini-clad teenage girl violently shoving another in the early morning light. The victim fell backward, splashing into the waist-deep water of a swimming pool. Her impact disturbed a flotilla of empty liquor bottles that clanked against the plastic boundaries of a pool that would have been comically small in any other setting, but at present seemed an ostentatious display of incalculable wealth.
Over the roof at the edge of the courtyard, I caught my first close-up, daylight view of a hilltop steeped with shanties. Their dilapidated surfaces were layered with an ingenuity that was almost hard to perceive with the untrained eye. What appeared at first to be total chaos was, in the next second, ordered into an imaginative array of vertical expansion, the collective mass clinging to hills that most occupants of the civilized world would consider too steep to walk.
Before I could consider this further, the prod of a barrel in my spine pushed me forward into an open room bordering the courtyard. As we entered, three boys who had been lounging on sofas leapt to their feet and snatched rifles from the seat beside them. Across a coffee table, in a recliner from which he didn’t stand, was a black man of twenty years at best, no shirt and not an ounce of fat on his body, with a Glock stuffed in the waistband of his shorts and a walkie-talkie on the table to his front. His feet bore brand-new red sneakers, one of which was propped up against the edge of the table as he watched us, unimpressed.
“Senta,” one of the armed boys said, shoving Gabriel and me onto a sofa whose fabric surfaces smelled like they’d been marinated in pot. The ringleader’s eyes looked on edge, and the others took their cue from him, mirroring a vague anxiety that seemed unrelated to our arrival.
The ringleader began speaking in rapid-fire Portuguese, his words translated in a low murmur by Gabriel. “I am Enzo, and
I have authority for this district straight from the Mestre—this means Master, the ADA drug lord that controls most of Rocinha—and I don’t need permission to kill you for coming here. Do we have an understanding?”
I nodded.
Enzo leaned back in his chair and spoke as Gabriel continued translating, his eyes fixed on Enzo’s mouth. “Last night we lost all phone service and an army of cops blocked off the entrances to my favela. I’ve got product I can’t move, and I’m talking to my people on this piece of shit.” Enzo picked up the walkie-talkie and flung it into my chest as I struggled to catch it. “This morning a gringo and a Brazilian pussy show up trying to buy guns. I do not believe in coincidence. I do believe that I have the source of all my problems sitting in front of me.”
I held up the walkie-talkie and leaned forward. “Do you have bigger radios? Military, police-style.”
Gabriel swung his pointed nose to me and translated Enzo’s response. “If I had military radios I’d be using them. If there’s a reason I should not kill you for coming here, it must be escaping my mind.”
Another scream from a girl outside, followed by the splash of water and clanking of bottles as one of the boys snatched the walkie-talkie from me and returned it to the table. Enzo watched me intently.
I said, “We only want to buy a few guns and be on our way. We’ll pay well.”
“I take money anytime I want. I could make even more by slinging dust, until last night.”
“We’ve got the keys to a Mercedes parked down the road.”
“I can steal a Merc anytime I want.”
I reached into my pocket, then froze as the guards in the room flinched to attention. Holding my free hand open, I slowly pulled out the driver’s billfold, its surface crusted with his dried brown blood.
As the room collectively relaxed, I flipped it open to show the identification to Enzo. “Can you transport merchandise past police checkpoints with diplomatic immunity? Because this will allow you to do that.”
One of the boys grabbed the billfold from me and handed it to Enzo, who examined the card with a poorly concealed expression of interest.
Then he tossed the billfold on the table, and Gabriel translated with an increasingly fearful voice, “I can kill you and take it, you get me? Know what? I’m going to do just that. Put these pussies in a microwave—”
Gabriel and I were jerked to our feet by the sentries around us. I threw a set of hands off me, and before the offending boy could raise his AK-47 I darted forward a step, and with lightning speed, slapped him hard across the face.
The boys grabbed me from behind as I yelled to Enzo, “You don’t want to do that, jefe. Whatever happens to us happens to you.”
He leapt to his feet and strode over to me, stopping a few feet away before barking a string of words.
Gabriel translated, “Too late to show your balls, gringo.”
“You’ve got an American with diplomatic credentials. What do you think happens if I go missing?”
Enzo shook his head, and Gabriel translated, “Do not eat the meat where you earn your bread. This means that—”
“Don’t shit where you eat,” I cut Gabriel off. “What’s his point?”
“We will not go missing. He can dump our bodies ‘on the pavement’ so we are found in the city.”
I shook my head. “We didn’t come here without insurance. We’re desperate, not stupid. And our boss is neither.”
Enzo’s eyes were ablaze. “In this part of Rocinha, I am the boss.”
I replied, “It’s a wide world beyond the hills. That’s the world that sent us, and that’s where we’ll return.”
“You return nowhere unless I say you do. Who do you claim your boss to be?”
I thought of the Handler’s golden eyes, his skewed nose hovering before me as I sat in the electric chair with water from the sponge dripping over my bare scalp and down my spine.
“If you don’t know his name by now, I’d do my best to keep it that way. Now you’ll get the money and the credentials whether you kill us or not. But a few guns that mean nothing to you will be the difference between whether you go to bed tonight as the ruler of your kingdom or whether you lie awake wondering if I was bluffing. And by the time you find out that I was not, it will be too late to save you. Or,” I added, throwing my head toward the guards holding me from behind, “any of your people.”
He fell under not just my stare, but also those of everyone around him, all looking to him to make sense of these events. The sum total of odd occurrences was too much for Enzo to ignore without some nagging suspicion that I wasn’t completely lying. My sheer desperation in appearing in the first place indicated that there were unknown things beyond his realm that he shouldn’t risk trifling with.
And in that moment of standoff, Gabriel displayed an untapped reserve of strength. His normally jumpy eyes were steady, the cartoonish features of his face frozen in solidarity with my effort to force Enzo’s hand.
“Let me see the money,” Enzo said at last.
His men released me, and I quickly handed over our prepared payment before Enzo could change his mind. The wad of bills represented the majority of our collective funds. Micah retained a small balance in the event we didn’t return, along with our pistol, and I kept just enough stashed in my sock to procure food and water on our way back, should we live that long.
Enzo flipped through the equivalent of several thousand US dollars. His face indicated that he sensed something was amiss, though he remained uncertain whether to call my bluff. Either way, he wasn’t going to lose face with his men by showing fear.
At last, he gave a nod at the amount of money we’d proffered, flicking his eyes toward a door in the corner.
Gabriel translated, “Let’s go to the vault.”
His stockpile was contained in a twenty-foot shipping container set against the back of the house, having been emplaced in the impossibly tight space by some marvel of third-world ingenuity that I didn’t bother asking about. After removing a pair of locks and swinging the rusty doors open, his men aimed flashlights that cast indistinct shadows around the sweltering interior.
The back wall of the container was hidden behind a floor-to-ceiling mound of drugs packed into stuffed black trash bags and flat parcels wrapped with tape and cellophane of every color. Dozens of rifles and submachine guns leaned against the wall to my right, while a pile of pistols was heaped upon a small table.
My first glance revealed the vast majority of weapons to be useless to us. The variety of assault rifles had the range and accuracy suitable for ambushing a properly outfitted kill team, but I couldn’t have every person on the stoop seeing a gringo running by with a full-size M-16 or AK-47. The need for balance of firepower and concealment narrowed my options considerably.
I saw a trio of MP5 submachine guns with retractable stocks and picked up one for inspection. Its heavy metal construction dated to the 1980s, free of the lightweight polymers, rail systems, lasers, and optics of modern military weapons. It fell into my hands easily: a cold, German, utilitarian weapon with simple iron sights, an 8.9-inch barrel, and the ability to reliably fire 9mm bullets from its stock thirty-round magazines as quickly as you could pull the trigger. With no range and no recoil, it would be useless at a distance but delightfully controllable inside a room.
I said, “For starters, I’ll take all three of these.”
Enzo shook his head, replying through Gabriel, “Those are hard to come by. You get two.”
“The diplomatic identification alone is worth two. Together with the cash and the car, we should get all three MP5s and a fourth weapon. Plus some grenades.”
“We don’t have any grenades. The car is hot and no good outside the hills. You get two MP5s and an AK.”
Besides being too big for me to conceal, an AK would leave me no bartering room for a small pistol that I could attempt to smuggle toward the Handler. I performed a quick function check on two of the MP5s, manipulating the fire selector
and trigger in sequence to ensure they worked before slinging them over my shoulder, barrel down.
I spotted a Remington 870 breacher: a shortened, compact 12-gauge pump shotgun with a tactical sling.
It had certainly been a door-blasting tool for a police team, though I wasn’t about to ask if it had been purchased from a corrupt cop or taken off a dead one. Appallingly short, it had no stock beyond the handgrip and no barrel beyond the magazine cap. Besides being easy for me to hide, it was everything the MP5 wasn’t: dirt-cheap, difficult to control given its unmanageable recoil, and a leviathan of firepower. Its capacity was reduced from the full-sized version of the 870 in the interests of shortened size, but with three shells in the tube and one in the pipe, I felt good about its odds at close range.
I pointed to it. “This shotgun costs less than an AK. If I take this, I get a pistol too.”
“That will take your hand off.”
“That’s my problem.”
“The shotgun and a pistol. Then you’re done.” Enzo spoke to one of his men, who began filling a backpack with loaded magazines and shotgun shells.
I hastily checked that the shotgun was in working order and approached the table of pistols. Beside a pile of uselessly rusted automatics and revolvers was a taser which, I thought with a wry smile, could be put to good use when Micah went on his next self-righteous tirade. I sorted through the pistols, finding a Taurus clone of the Beretta 92 we’d gotten from our driver yesterday. The sight of it gave me a sense of relief bordering on rapture—it was spotless, waiting to be found among a cast of trash pistols like an old friend.
Picking it up, I saw the tiny grip of an automatic pistol beneath it. I set the Taurus aside and extracted the miniature gun from the pile.
It was a Beretta 3032 Tomcat, a pistol so small that to fire its .32 ACP bullets—each less than an inch long—you’d only have room on the handgrip for your middle and index fingers. Impossibly small, and paper-thin in comparison to any other firearm in the dark armory, such a pistol could practically be tossed into your pocket and then lost while you fumbled for spare change without noticing it was gone.
