Brazil (16 page)

Too late.

The informer wasn’t old – possibly the same age as Luiz. His fists were still bunched up in a defensive posture. Blood was pouring out from a stab wound in his left-hand side and his eyes were lifeless. But worst of all, someone had taken a knife to the corpse’s back, tearing off flaps of skin to reveal a bloodied message to anyone with enough stomach to make out the two letters.

A ‘C’ and an ‘N’. The initials of the Comando Negro.

19. Old Friends

Dazed, Luiz allowed Oliveira to lead him out of the prison’s hellish labyrinth and into the late-afternoon fresh air. In the car park, he tore off his balaclava and was suddenly and violently sick. The policeman waited until Luiz’s stomach was emptied, then wordlessly handed him a tissue.

‘Sorry,’ Luiz muttered, wiping his mouth. ‘Wasn’t prepared for that.’ He retched again.

‘Nothing to apologize for,’ Oliveira said calmly. ‘I’m sorry you had to see it. If we had got there five minutes earlier, maybe we could have stopped it.’

‘Who do you think did it? It had to be one of the guys in the cage with him.’

Oliveira shrugged. ‘Doubt we’ll ever know for sure. All the guys in the cage were Comando Negro and you saw what happens to gang members who talk to the police. As soon as they found out the guy was an informer, he was a dead man walking. No one’s going to tell us who stabbed him.’

‘Do you think he really did know who the Doctor is?’ asked Luiz.

‘Doesn’t matter either way now,’ replied the policeman. ‘That’s between him and God. Listen, I’ve got to go back to the station. You want a lift anywhere?’

Luiz shook his head. ‘I still feel pretty sick. I’m going to walk back to Santa Marta.’

‘OK, then.’ Oliveira patted him on the shoulder. ‘Take care of yourself, Luiz. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t.’

The policeman climbed into his car and drove away. As the vehicle exited the prison car park, Luiz had an irrational urge to call Oliveira back. He kept silent, however, standing alone in the prison car park as the shadows began to lengthen around him.

Luiz trudged through the streets of the Zona Sul, not caring which direction he was going. Dusk had fallen over Rio and the city was beginning to come alive with people looking to party through the night. The streets were lit up with neon signs and flashing lights, thumping beats emanating from the bars and nightclubs. Somewhere a live samba band was playing, the drummer beating out a hypnotic rhythm.

Walking past the rows of souvenir shops and fast-food restaurants, Luiz passed a skinny young girl walking hand in hand with a sweaty American man old enough to be her grandfather. Luiz had lived in Rio long enough to recognize a sex tourist when he saw one. Whenever they started pawing at under-age girls in the middle of the street he had to fight the urge to punch them. The foreign tourists always talked about how exotic and exciting Rio was, but they never seemed to mention the children on the street corners and in the saunas, selling their bodies for whatever they could get. In this city – where most of the girls were skinny not because they were dieting, but because they didn’t have enough to eat – the glamour was only skin-deep.

Down at the beach, queues were forming by the volleyball courts as kids lined up to play
futevolei
. On the courts themselves, the players were heading and volleying the ball back and forth across the net, the ball never threatening to touch the ground. Briefly, Luiz wondered whether Gui would be among them, laughing and joking with their other friends, chatting up the girls as they walked past.

Amid all the hustle and bustle, Luiz felt lost and alone. He couldn’t get the memory of the corpse’s blank eyes out of his mind, nor the gaping wounds hacked into his flesh.
That’s what happens to gang members who talk to the police
, Oliveira had told him. If that was the case, what would happen to Luiz if he was unmasked? Would someone find him lying face-down in the mud, letters carved into his back?

His mobile phone began vibrating in his shorts’ pocket. Glancing down at the caller ID, Luiz saw that it was his foster parents. He was about to answer, when he suddenly put the phone away. The way Luiz felt right now, he would probably break down if he heard the sound of his mum’s or his dad’s voice. Then they wouldn’t stop until they’d got the truth out of him, and it would all be for nothing. After all, it probably wouldn’t be long now before they came home…

Luiz stopped in his tracks, people jostling his shoulders like waves around an iceberg. With everything that was going on, he had completely lost track of what day it was. He had been back in the
favela
for nearly a week now. It was Tuesday – and his parents were supposed to be coming back on Friday. That meant he had only three days left to uncover the identity of the Doctor and get Ana out of jail. Three days? It seemed impossible.

Luiz walked on, his steps taking him away from the centre of the Zona Sul and into the quiet backstreets that led back to Santa Marta. It was no use feeling sorry for himself, he thought sternly. Self-pity wasn’t going to set Ana free. He decided that he would try to talk to Angel that night. Perhaps if he mentioned Councillor Cruz, the
dono
might let something slip, especially if the two of them had just met in the Casa Bahia. Trojan had been right from the start – Angel was the key to everything. Now that he had finally accepted Luiz as a member of the Comando Negro, perhaps he would be more open around him.

With a plan forming in his head, Luiz strode along with renewed vigour. He cut down a narrow alleyway, the Santa Marta hillside suddenly emerging out of the night above his head. The exuberant noise of the Zona Sul had faded away into the background. Somewhere close by, a police siren wailed. Ahead of him a mangy dog was pawing through an overturned dustbin. Its head snapped up at the sound of Luiz approaching – with a yelp, it scuttled away.

Luiz was in the darkest depths of the alleyway when he heard a noise behind him.

‘Luiz!’ a voice called out, in a mocking, childlike tone. ‘I can see you!’

Luiz whirled round. ‘Who’s there?’

There was a movement in the alleyway shadows; a shock of bleached-blond hair in the darkness.

It was Stripe.

The chief
soldado
of the Comando Negro swaggered towards him, a faint smile on his face. His eyes – never clear at the best of times – were bleary, his pupils dilated. As he looked at Luiz, Stripe frowned, as though he was having difficulty focusing. He had clearly been snorting line after line of coke. In his trembling hands, he was carrying his beloved AK-47 assault rifle. The safety catch was off.

‘Stripe!’ said Luiz, desperate to sound friendly. ‘What are you doing here?’

The boy waved his hand around vaguely. ‘You know,’ he said. ‘What about you?’

‘I… went shopping downtown,’ Luiz stammered. ‘Wanted to get some clothes and shit like that.’

Stripe tapped his finger thoughtfully against his cheek. ‘Didn’t do so well, did you?’

‘What?’

‘Your hands are empty,’ said Stripe, gesturing at him with his gun. ‘Guess you didn’t buy anything.’

‘Oh, er, no,’ Luiz said hastily. ‘Couldn’t find anything I liked the look of.’ He tried to change the subject. ‘I haven’t seen you for ages. What have you been up to?’

Stripe sniffed, pinching the end of his nose. ‘Following you.’

Luiz’s blood froze. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I
mean
,’ Stripe said deliberately, ‘that ever since that argument with Angel, I’ve been keeping an eye on you. And you’ve been a busy boy today, haven’t you? First of all you spy on Angel, then you go to Polinter with that new buddy of yours.’ He chuckled. ‘You know, it’s funny, but the way that guy flashed his badge at the prison guards, I could have sworn he was a cop. But then, you’re in the Comando Negro, aren’t you, Luiz? And no gang member would ever hang out with a cop, would they?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Luiz said weakly, backing up against a wire fence. ‘Angel’s right – you do too much coke. It’s making you crazy.’

Stripe leaned forward. ‘Crazy?’ he hissed. ‘Me? I knew you were bullshitting from day one. That’s why I tried to take care of you during the initiation. But Livio, Joker, even Angel, man, they all fell for it. They’re the crazy ones, Luiz, not me. And now I’m going to do what they should have done a week ago.’

As Stripe levelled his gun, Luiz leaped at him, fists swinging. Catching the boy with a glancing blow on the side of the head, he knocked the gun from Stripe’s hands, sending it skittering down the alleyway. Stripe responded by headbutting Luiz in the temple. He was smiling, as though delighted by the opportunity to cause him pain.

For a couple of minutes the two boys wrestled with one another, grappling with headlocks as though they were having a playground scuffle. Luiz was strong and quick, but Stripe had been killing people for years. When Luiz dropped to the floor to deliver a sweeping kick, the
soldado
saw it coming. Hurdling the leg, he volleyed Luiz viciously in the groin. Luiz screamed in agony, stars of pain exploding in front of his eyes. Stripe kicked him again, in the head this time, forcing Luiz to curl up in a defensive bundle.

As kicks rained down upon his body, Luiz clutched at his neck, blindly searching for the crucifix with the distress button, only to discover it was no longer hanging there. It must have been ripped off in the struggle. Even if they could have got here in time, no one from Trojan was going to be coming to save him.

Stripe had stopped kicking him and had retrieved his AK-47 from the other side of the alleyway. He stood over the bleeding figure of Luiz, a manic grin plastered across his face.

‘Don’t shoot,’ Luiz breathed. ‘Please.’

Stripe laughed harshly.

‘You know, sometimes I gotta put a cap in someone and it’s just business.’ He spat at Luiz, then trained his assault rifle at his forehead. ‘This one’s going to be pure pleasure.’

Luiz closed his eyes, as the sound of a gunshot exploded in his ears.

20. Turf Wars

He wasn’t dead.

Opening his eyes, Luiz saw that Stripe was still standing over him. There was a shocked expression on the boy’s face. His black T-shirt was stained with blood. Looking beyond Stripe, Luiz saw that there was another boy standing in the gloom behind him. As Stripe turned slowly round, the boy fired again. Stripe flinched, as though he had been stung. Another shot rang out, hitting Stripe in the face this time. The Comando Negro’s chief soldier collapsed to the floor, his face a broken red mess.

Luiz was too shocked to move. He lay there, covered in a mixture of Stripe’s blood and his own, as Dog stepped into the light and walked calmly over to him. The boy was holding a shotgun, which looked huge in his small hands. As he approached Stripe’s body, Dog fired another bullet into the corpse.

‘Bastard,’ he said, poking it with his toe. ‘Not so tough now, are you?’ He looked across at Luiz. ‘You OK?’

‘You saved me,’ Luiz croaked.

‘I guess. I owed you after what happened during the game anyway. No one else was going to step in. Stripe would have killed me. After that, I knew I was going to have to kill him.’

‘What’s Angel going to say? Stripe may have been a bastard, but he was Comando Negro.’

Dog shrugged. ‘Screw Angel. Screw them all. It was me who told the Quarto Comando about the deal at the hotel. I overheard Angel telling Joker about it.’

‘You?’ gasped Luiz. ‘But why?’

‘I had to tell them something to make them trust me. I’m joining the Quarto Comando.’

‘You’re leaving the Comando Negro?’

Dog nodded. ‘I’m sick of getting treated like a baby. Stripe was the worst, but none of you thought I could become a
soldado
. Now you’ll see.’

‘But you can’t just change gangs!’

‘Angel did, didn’t he? I’m going to be as big as him. You tell Angel, he comes for me and he’ll end up just like Stripe. He’s not the only one with a shotgun now. Pass it on.’

Luiz nodded slowly.

‘Good,’ Dog said confidently. ‘I always liked you. You’re not like the rest of them. See you, Luiz.’

As he made to leave, Dog noticed something on the floor of the alleyway. He bent down and picked it up.

‘This yours?’ he said. He held up the gleaming crucifix.

Luiz nodded. Dog tossed it over to him.

‘You’re going to need it. Can’t rely on me to save your ass any more. We’re even now, Luiz. You’d better hope you don’t see me again.’

As he watched the little boy walk away into the night, Luiz was suddenly less certain that Dog was going to spend the rest of his life as a whipping boy. Struggling to his feet, he began limping back in the direction of Santa Marta, leaving Stripe’s body in a pool of blood in the alleyway.

‘What the hell happened to you?’

Livio stared open-mouthed as Luiz walked wearily up the steps to his shack, his face caked with dried blood. The MC, with his feet up, was drinking and smoking while he listened to some
baile-funk
tunes belting out from a battered CD player.

‘I had a rough day,’ Luiz said drily. ‘Where’s Angel? I need to talk to him.’

Livio drained his beer and led Luiz across Santa Marta to Angel’s shack. The
dono
listened quietly as Luiz told him what had happened – careful to omit the fact that Stripe had been following him around all day. When he heard about Stripe’s death, Angel looked astonished; when he heard about Dog’s defection to the Quarto Comando, the
dono
exploded.

‘The little shit!’ he shouted. ‘I’m going to kill him! Him and his new gang!’

‘Right now?’ Livio said dubiously.

Angel flashed him a dangerous look. ‘What’s wrong, MC – not got the stomach for it?’

‘Hey, I run with you, you know that! It’s just that we’re taking on the Compadres, we’re taking on Quarto Comando, we’ve still got the cops sniffing round our asses, and we’ve just lost one of our best
soldados
. I don’t how much more we can take on,
dono
.’

Angel eyeballed Livio coldly.