by Mark Dawson
“Hey!”
The man with the cap released Paulo, and he fell to the cobbles.
Paulo looked up to see Marcos. He was brandishing a tyre iron.
Palito crouched down and took a fistful of Paulo’s shirt. He leaned in close. “My money,” he said, spitting into Paulo’s face. “Give me my money or I’ll kill you.”
Palito shoved him, and Paulo fell to the side, his face bouncing off the cobbles and sloshing through a puddle of dark, brackish run-off that had gathered there. He blinked his swollen eyelids and, in a moment of clarity, saw the feet of his three accosters disappear into the gloom of the alley, sent on their way with a bellowed threat from Marcos.
“Paulo,” Marcos said. He felt hands slide beneath his arms, and he was pulled up off the ground. “Paulo, can you hear me?”
He managed a feeble groan in response.
“Who were they?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Paulo mumbled.
“That was Palito.”
He didn’t answer.
“Do you owe him money?”
Paulo spat out blood.
“Jesus,” Marcos said. “He’s an animal. You borrowed money from him? What were you thinking?”
“It’s for Eloá,” Paulo mumbled. “I didn’t have a choice.”
“Come on,” Marcos said. “I’ll get you home.”
17
The stage was enormous. It comprised a series of large white blocks and loomed over everything around it. The blocks served as the canvas for a series of psychedelic light projections that flickered to and fro in time with the music that played out over the PA. There was a long platform that stretched out into the crowd and a tall riser for the drum kit that was now being checked over.
Sophia said that she would go to the bar to get more drinks before the start of the performance. Milton and Drake stayed where they were, but, as Milton was about to thank Drake for the day, Drake’s cellphone rang again. He apologised for taking it, put it to his ear, and turned away so that Milton couldn’t overhear the conversation. It lasted no more than thirty seconds, and, when he put the phone away and turned back to the stage, his expression was grim.
“Are you okay?” Milton asked.
“Sure,” he said, but it was evident that he was distracted. “Why?”
“You’ve got a face like thunder. Bad news?”
He laughed bitterly. “That obvious?”
Milton nodded. “What is it?”
“The business,” he said, sitting down on the grass. “It’s fucked.”
“You said you were doing well. The Porsche—”
“Rented,” Drake said, waving that away as if it was so obvious that a child should have realised.
“And the house?”
“I can barely afford the payments.”
“You said—”
“I know what I said,” Drake snapped and then, catching himself, he added, “Sorry. Lot of stress.”
“So get rid of the car and move somewhere else.”
He sighed and gazed over to the stage. “Can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because of her,” Drake said, gesturing toward Sophia. She was picking a path through the seated crowd, three drinks in her hands.
“She doesn’t know?”
“No,” he said. “She thinks I’m successful. If I tell her what things are like…” He let the sentence trail away.
“You have to tell her,” Milton said. “You can’t have a relationship based on a lie. She’ll find out.”
“Wait a minute—you’re lecturing me about women now?”
“No,” Milton said, aware that Drake’s mood was on a knife edge. “I’m saying that she strikes me as the kind of woman who’s more than smart enough to figure it out for herself. And that you might want to get out in front of it—she might not be as bothered as you think.”
“Can’t risk it,” he mumbled.
Milton looked over to make sure that Sophia wasn’t too close. She had paused on the way back to them and was engaged in conversation with a couple that she evidently knew.
“The business,” Milton pressed. “Is there something in particular?”
Drake emptied his bottle and dropped it next to its predecessor. “It’s one of my guys,” he said. “I can’t get hold of him.”
“Why’s that a problem?”
“Because I have a job tomorrow,” he said dismissively, as if Milton had just asked a particularly foolish question. “There’s this one client I have. A judge—Felipe Saverin. It’s not so much the money I get from him, it’s the connections he can make for me. He’s important.”
“Why does he need you?”
“He’s running an anti-corruption case and making a lot of enemies. Judges have been hit here before. It’s not uncommon. They get federal agents to protect them, but he’s paranoid; he keeps the feds for himself but pays me to provide extra cover for his wife and daughter. I promised him a team whenever they left the house. The only problem is I specifically told him that we’d need a four-man team to do the job properly, and, because I said that, he made sure that I put it in the contract.”
“And now you only have three?”
“Me and two others.” He nodded glumly. “We could keep them safe with three, but the wife is sharp and she’d notice. And that’s going to make me look bad.”
“So get someone else.”
Drake scoffed. “Find someone I can trust the day before a job? The gangs have men everywhere—I’d have to vet every candidate before I could even begin to consider them, and I don’t have time.”
“Then tell them that they have to stay home tomorrow.”
He shook his head. “Can’t do that either. The little girl has a recital. She’s been excited about it for weeks—she tells me every time I see her. I can’t call him now and tell him that she’s going to have to miss it. I might as well tear the contract up myself.”
Milton folded his arms and gazed back to the stage. Roadies were finishing up with the preparation and, as Drake stared glumly up at them, the drum tech stomped on the kick drum, each beat throbbing in the air around them.
“It’s an easy job?” Milton said, raising his voice a little to be heard over the beat.
“Cakewalk,” Drake said. “Pick them up from their apartment, take them to her school, keep an eye on them there, take them home again.”
“So I’ll stand in.”
“Don’t be daft,” Drake scoffed.
“Why not?”
“You said it yourself, Milton—you’re a cook.”
“I keep in shape.”
“Come on, John.”
Milton deadpanned. “I could still take you.”
“The fuck you could,” Drake said.
Milton looked over and winked.
“What about the drinking?”
“What about it?”
“You said you had a problem.”
“I do,” Milton said patiently. “That’s why I don’t drink anymore. I’ll promise you one thing: I’ll be sharper and clearer-eyed than you will be in the morning.”
“Maybe.”
“I’m serious,” Milton said. “You’re in a spot. Let me help.”
Drake sighed and shook his head. Milton had made his offer, but he wasn’t going to press. He couldn’t tell Drake just how qualified he was for this kind of work. His friend had no idea about Group Fifteen, and Milton was not about to tell him about it, but he had conducted close protection assignments during his government employment in places that made Rio look like a walk in the park. And, during those times when Milton had been poacher rather than gamekeeper, he had tested and ultimately breached the security of high-value targets around the world. That kind of experience did not fade away; a simple job like this, protecting a mother and her child, would be easy.
“I’d have to tell Saverin,” Drake said. “He’d probably want to meet you, too. He’s paranoid. You wouldn’t believe how paranoid he is.”
&
nbsp; “Fine. I’m happy to do it if it’ll help you out. Least I can do.”
Milton saw that Sophia was on her way over again. “She’s coming back,” he said.
The crowd screamed as the lights on the vast stage went out. It was dusk, and they could make out the shadows of the band as they took up their positions.
Sophia handed a fresh beer to Drake and another bottle of water to Milton. Drake’s mood had rapidly improved, and he grinned widely as he raised his bottle for a toast.
“To old friends,” he said.
Milton touched his bottle to Drake’s and then to Sophia’s.
“Old friends.”
The kick drum boomed again, and then a single chord thrummed out from the speaker stack. Cellphones were held aloft, a thousand screens glowing like fireflies.
“Rio!” the emcee boomed. “Thanks for coming. Please welcome, from Hollywood, Guns N’ Roses!”
Part III
The Third Day
18
Milton woke at six and went out for another early morning run, following the same route as yesterday. He settled into the rhythm of his steps and allowed his thoughts to drift back to the night before.
The concert had been amazing, even better than he could have hoped for. The band had gone on stage at eleven and played all their hits plus a reworking of Pink Floyd’s ‘Wish You Were Here’ and a cover of Derek and the Dominos’ ‘Layla’ that segued perfectly into ‘November Rain.’ Drake and Sophia had accelerated their drinking and had been thoroughly drunk by the time the final encore was finished and the lights came back up. Milton had navigated their way through the crowd to the bus terminal and led them from the stop back to the house in Santa Teresa. It was very late by the time they finally returned, and Drake had persuaded Sophia to stay up to drink a bottle of wine with him. Milton had tried to dissuade him, reminding him that he had work later that day, but Drake had dismissed his concern with a theatrical flourish of his hand and a reminder that it was a simple job and that it wasn’t until midday; he had plenty of time to sleep off his hangover. Milton had heard the two of them talking as he lay on the bed and willed himself to sleep.
It had bothered him then and it bothered him as he ran: Drake had work, and it was not the kind of work where you would roll into an office after a few hours’ sleep and a bellyful of alcohol without consequences. Close protection was dangerous work that required clear thinking and fast reactions. Milton had started coming to work drunk toward the end of his time with the Group, but he had been good at hiding it. If Control had noticed, then he had never commented upon it. But Milton had known, and it had been one of the reasons—together with the towering guilt that he could no longer ignore—that had forced him to quit both the bottle and his employment.
He returned to the house and let himself in, pausing to run a glass of cold water and then sinking it in one draught. He could hear the sound of stirring in the bedroom that Drake shared with Sophia. He made his way past the door to his own room, where he changed out of his sodden gear and put himself under a cool shower for ten minutes. He stood in front of the mirror as he dried himself down, looking absently at the tattoos on his arms, the IX on his breast to signify the ninth step of the Fellowship and, across his back, the angel wings that he had drunkenly commissioned during a lost night years earlier.
Times had changed since then.
Milton had travelled light, with just a change of underwear and a second plain black T-shirt in his pack. He dressed in the T-shirt and his jeans and pulled on the Red Wing boots that he had found in a thrift store in Brighton Beach.
Sophia and Drake were waiting for him in the kitchen.
“Morning, John,” Sophia said. “How did you sleep?”
“Very well,” Milton said.
“You know what I said to you when you told me to stop drinking?” Drake said.
“He thought it was a big joke last night,” Sophia added.
“But not now?” Milton asked.
Drake chuckled. “Abstinence is much more attractive now than it was then.”
“Are you going to be okay to work?”
“I’m fine,” he said, waving away Milton’s concern. “A cup of coffee and pão francês—that’s all I need.” He indicated the pot of coffee. “You want a cup?”
“Thanks,” Milton said.
The coffee was strong and served with warm milk, and the pão francês—French bread—was toasted and came with cuts of cold ham, mortadella, a cheese from Minas Gerais called queijo prato, and slices of mozzarella that was processed and nearer to a mild cheddar than the Italian equivalent. Drake took his plate and went out onto the veranda; Milton followed him.
“You heard from your guy?” Milton said.
“No,” he said. “He’s completely AWOL.”
“Any reason to be worried about it?”
“No,” Drake said. “He’s not the most reliable man I’ve ever met. He drinks too much and disappears. Not the first time.”
Drake delivered the withering verdict with a lack of self-awareness that Milton recognised all too well.
“You still want me to help?” Milton asked him.
“You still okay to do it?”
“Of course.” Milton sipped his coffee and watched as a kiskadee landed on the back of an empty chair, eyeing up the crumbs on Drake’s plate. “Tell me more about the client.”
Drake shooed the bird away and sat down. “What do you know about PBN?”
“Nothing.”
“You don’t read the papers?”
Milton shrugged. “I try to avoid them as much as I can.”
“Petróleo Brasil Nacional—biggest oil and gas corporation in South America. The top executives are all corrupt. I mean, Jesus, the whole country is rotten, but this is as bad as it gets. You’ve got government officials colluding with people in business to overpay on contracts. Construction was the first one that went bad. All those new World Cup stadiums? You have a cartel fixing it so bids went in way above the real value of the work they were tendering for. Government takes the lowest bid, and the winning business skims off the top and passes that back to the politicians and the other executives in the cartel. The politicians get millions of reais, and then they send some of it back as bribes, put some of it toward their re-election campaigns, and pocket whatever’s left.”
“And no one noticed?”
“Like I said—Brazil’s rotten to the core. Not the country so much, but the government and institutions. Corruption’s a way of life. The government just opened up drilling rights to fields off the coast. Trillions of reais worth of oil. Same thing is happening, but in reverse—PBN pays over the market value; the corrupt officials get paid and then send some of it back. But that’s Brazil—everyone is involved, one way or another. Business, government, everyone. But if one domino goes down…” He let the words drift away.
“And has one gone down?”
Drake pressed two codeine tablets out of a blister pack and washed them down with the last of his coffee. “There was an election last year. They all promised to go after corruption. The democrats got in and gave the judiciary the power to go after anyone who had their snout in the trough—businessmen, politicians, anyone. And they kept it quarantined from Rio. The judges are from Curitiba, down in the south. It’s not like Rio down there; the people are much more…” He struggled for the word.
“Law-abiding?” Milton suggested.
“Less corrupt,” Drake qualified. “There were demonstrations against corruption before the World Cup. The president couldn’t ignore it after the campaign he ran, and certainly not with football about to start, so he fast-tracked reforms that made it easier to prosecute fraud. And, for the first time, the judges were allowed to offer plea bargains. It’s a whole new ball game for them now. New tactics. They start at the bottom, round up the small fish, and offer them deals so they can keep going up the chain.”
“And it’s worked?”
Drake nodded his head. “And one of
the judges is my client.”
“Saverin,” Milton said, remembering the name from last night.
“That’s right—Felipe Saverin. Him and his family—wife and kid. He’s decent. Serious. No bullshit, hence my problem.”
“You ever had any problems with him before?”
“Problems?”
“With his security?”
“No. It’s been easy. That’s why I—”
“Don’t mind me coming along,” Milton finished for him.
“You said that, not me.”
Milton smiled. “But still—he must have enemies. He wouldn’t need you otherwise.”
“Of course he does,” Drake said. “They all do. A private plane with a flight log from São Paulo to Rio crashed into the sea last month. It was a new Hawker-Beechcraft twin-prop, fresh off the line, and the pilot was in good health. They came down in the ocean near Paraty. Four people on board—all killed. Civil aircraft come down all the time in Brazil, but this one was different. One of the passengers was a judge called Garcia. He was working the case with Saverin. Scared the shit out of him. There are a lot of people who’d pay good money for him to be out of the way.”
Milton stood. “You said he’d want to meet me.”
“He does,” Drake said. “I called him to confirm they wanted us this afternoon, and I told him I might have a new man on the team. He wants you to come in with me when we pick them up.”
19
The first thing that Paulo was aware of as he awoke the next morning was a pounding headache. It was brutal: a thudding, jarring jackhammer that sent out constant throbs of pain. He lay in bed with his eyes closed. He remembered working late and what had happened after he had left: Palito and his thugs. They had threatened and beaten him.
