JOHNNY GONE DOWN (15 page)

‘It means hens… like Maria,’ he said with a wink.

I hesitated, recalling last night. ‘I don’t think I should go,’ I told him.

He laughed. ‘What’s left to hide?’

Despite the unpredictable turn life had taken, things soon slipped into a predictable pattern. Mornings were spent in exercising and target practice, afternoons in piecing together the messy accounts. Evenings were spent dancing to baile
funk and nights in the company of some girl or the other. I still woke up every morning fighting a strange sense of the surreal, but I no longer lived with the crippling guilt that I had divorced myself from the Buddha’s teachings. The longer I stayed with Marco, the more I began to think that morality
was
ambiguous, contradictions made us human and eventually, the only tenets you could live by were the ones that felt right to you.

Casual sex, for instance, was wrong, but what if a culture treated it - as the easygoing Brazilians seemed to - purely as physical ecstasy that came without any emotional baggage? Wasn’t joy without accompanying sorrow the broader goal of the spiritual life, after all? Working as an accountant for a drug lord was wrong, but what if you owed him a tribal allegiance for giving you the confidence to thrive in society after your long hiatus from it? Eventually, I thought, I would have to choose the answers that were right for me and chart my own middle path. Or so I thought when I barged into Marco’s office one day.

‘Marco!’ I said excitedly as I entered the room. ‘Donos,’ I corrected myself hastily. As a mark of respect, I never called him by his name in front of the others.

‘One minute,’ he said.

He was pulling a plastic bag over the face of someone kneeling in front of him. Alex and Maki
stood behind him, egging him on while the children continued to mix coke, unconcerned about the man about to be killed a few feet away.

‘We don’t shoot in the house because it gets too messy. This way, it is clean,’ Marco said in explanation.

The man began to gag as Marco pulled the cord tighter, and his eyes bulged out.

This was the first execution I was being witness to, and it made me feel wretched. Was I any different from the mild-looking guards in that horrendous Phnom Penh school building? Day in and day out, they had seen us die slowly in our cells, but had probably been too afraid, or too indifferent, to say a word.

‘What did he do?’ I asked as Marco tightened the plastic bag.

‘He is a rat,’ Marco said in disgust.

‘Don’t kill him,’ I said suddenly.

‘Why?’

‘Bad karma,’ I mumbled.

He laughed his big laugh and loosened his grip on the man. ‘It will be worse karma if I let him go.’

I didn’t know what to say. In his own way, Marco was right. This was the life he had chosen or that had been chosen for him; his first duty was to save himself.

Sensing a moment of weakness, the man started
blabbering incoherently with the plastic still tied around his face, looking unintentionally comic.

Perhaps it was my weak plea, or perhaps it was the unwitting humour in the situation, but Marco softened. He loosened the plastic bag. The man, his moustache drenched in tears, fell at Marco’s feet, begging forgiveness. Marco shot him in both thighs and one arm for good measure, and let him go. He crawled away, leaving behind a trail of blood.

Marco shook his head in disgust.

‘That’s why I don’t like to shoot in the house,’ he said to the boys, pointing at the stains on the sparkling marble floor.

One of them had stopped mixing the cocaine and was staring at Marco, wide-eyed in fear.

‘You haven’t seen anyone shot before, kid?’ Marco said calmly.

The boy, eight, maybe ten years old, quivered.

‘It doesn’t hurt that bad,’ Marco said. ‘See.’

I watched in horror as Marco shot the boy in his thigh. The child yelped in pain and hobbled out of the room. The other children busied themselves with mixing.

‘From time to time you need to remind them about the business they are in,’ said Marco to no one in particular.

I couldn’t be complicit to this mindless violence any more, I thought. If what I had in mind didn’t work, I would get out of here at once.

Marco turned to me. ‘You had something to talk to me about, men?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Will you come to the other room?’

He nodded. ‘One second,’ he said and took a pinch of pinkish-white powder from one of the piles and held it against his nose. ‘Fresh stock. Pure pink coke crystals from Peru.’

‘Heaven,’ he said, snorting it in. ‘Try some.’

I shook my head.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘It’s completely harmless in little doses.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Once I start something, I don’t stop.’

We went to my room.

‘Do you know how much cash you have in hand?’ I asked as I handed him the balance sheets I had prepared.

‘Enough to receive the shipment from Colombia this week,’ he said.

‘How much is the shipment worth?’

‘Fifteen, maybe twenty thousand dollars.’

‘But your accounts show thirty thousand dollars in cash.’

‘Thirty thousand dollars?’ he said in surprise. ‘That’s a lot of money.’

‘You’re telling me! I am broke as a spoke,’ I said. ‘Where is the rest?’

‘Must be here and there,’ he said. ‘Some went for the baile you attended last week. I gave some to the gang - they’ve been working hard these last
few weeks. Some went to the favela school for the football field, some to… well, here and there. I can’t remember everything.’

‘Ten thousand dollars is a lot to give away in one month,’ I told him.

‘Money comes and goes in this business, men.’

He played with the gun in his hand, his fingers stroking its shiny surface.

‘A new Glock from America,’ he said admiringly. ‘Do you want this one instead?’

‘Shouldn’t you invest the money instead of blowing it up like this?’

‘In our life…’ he began.

‘Yes, yes, I know about the two roads,’ I said. ‘But it doesn’t have to be that way. You make a three hundred per cent profit in the drug business. I don’t know much about Brazil, but I think if you invested this money in a legal business - real estate, the stock market - you would soon have enough capital to get out of the illegal trade.’

He continued playing with the gun, paying scant attention to me. ‘Nothing in this country is legal,’ he said.

‘Just about everything is more legal than what you do.’

He looked at me with narrowed eyes. I wondered if he was going to shoot me. Instead, he talked to me seriously, without scoffing or laughing at me for a change.

‘You don’t know how things work here,’ he said.

‘Then tell me.’

‘Ten years ago, we had nothing, men, nothing. This favela was just a bunch of super pobre, wretched, miserable folk - no money, no hospitals, no schools. In the eyes of Rio’s rich, and the police and the government, we were rabid, unnecessary dogs and treated as such. I was in prison, thrown into a poky cell with forty other men, for no reason other than that I was sitting on Copacabana beach one night, drinking beer. I wouldn’t even get a trial for six months. At twenty, I was full of anger at the unfairness of the system that treated us this way from the moment we were born. Most folks in prison had similar stories and we would have gone our own separate ways after a few months of whining about the system had something funny not happened.’

I looked at him expectantly.

‘A bunch of college-educated political prisoners quoting Che Guevara, who had been fighting to form a communist party, were thrown into prison at the same time as us. They talked about Lenin and Marx, unity and revolution, and the need to be perpetrators and not victims if we wanted our rights. For the first time, we had an ideology, and that’s how the Comando Vermelho or the Red Command was formed. Over the last ten years, the movement has spread across all the favelas in Rio. We stand
united, and we play to our strengths. All of us have grown up as thugs on the street, so we control the businesses we know best - drugs, arms, kidnappings - and channel at least a portion of the money into the development of the favelas. Now we have a voice. We count. Politicians come begging for our vote. The police don’t dare to enter the favela unless something big happens. Our children have rights. And all this in ten years,’ he said proudly. ‘I am one of the founders of the Comando Vermelho.’

I paused, trying to take it all in.

‘The legal businesses will only help you grow,’ I said finally. ‘Right now, you earn a hundred thousand dollars a year. If we made the right investments, we could turn that into half a million, maybe a million, maybe even more. Won’t that help develop this favela even faster? I don’t see the problem.’

‘It’s a problem because it breaks the… the ritmo,’ he said. ‘There is a rhythm here. If I break that, others will, too. If I have side businesses, Donos in other favelas will also want side businesses. Then the infighting starts, people will measure each other’s wealth, they will want more, they will kill to get more. We won’t be united any longer and we’ll be back where we started.’

‘But…’ I began.

He raised his hand to silence me. ‘Besides, who will run it? You are here today, gone tomorrow. I’m illiterate. All I know is how to transport drugs from
the border, mix them, get them on the streets, and shoot anyone who’s in the way. Buy, mix, sell, shoot, kill, die - that’s the life of a Donos.’

‘I don’t know much either, but you’re smart. It’s not that difficult to learn.’

‘I don’t have time to learn new things,’ he said impatiently. ‘Do you think I’m having phone sex when I sit in that room talking to people all day? Every day there is a new problem. Last month, we had to sink our ship from Peru because a coastguard we hadn’t paid off materialized from nowhere; three days ago, a truck driver with the Colombian consignment went missing; today, I had problems with a wholesaler. It’s not easy running this operation.’

‘Legal stuff is easier to run,’ I said quietly.

‘Maybe in another life,’ he said. ‘I am okay for this life.’

‘Or whatever is left of it.’

He looked at me. I knew I was pushing it, and I almost expected to get shot at. Instead, he burst out laughing.

‘You are a cheeky motherfucker, aren’t you?’ he said.

It was good while it lasted, but a year later, I knew it was time to abandon the life I had built. By paying myself half of what Alex and the others earned, I
had managed to save enough money for a one-way ticket to the US by the end of the year. And though I felt a measure of regret for not having accomplished more in my time here, my conscience wouldn’t allow me to continue any longer. With my nights spent in illicit sex and days spent accounting for blood money, I could hardly claim to have a conscience, but I was walking a strange path where there was no black or white, just a sea of grey which I navigated based solely on what ‘felt’ right. Now, it felt right to end this chapter, though I couldn’t shake off a feeling of overwhelming sadness when I walked into Marco’s room one morning.

‘That motherfucker slept with my wife,’ a short, dark man was shouting as I entered. ‘I need your permission to kill both him and the slut.’

I had walked onto the usual scene of justice being meted out by the coke-snorting Donos, who showed extraordinary acuity in satisfying all the supplicants who came to his kingdom.

Marco laughed. ‘When did you last have sex with her?’

‘I don’t know. Early this week,’ the man said, his voice shaking with anger.

‘It’s not her fault then,’ Marco said. ‘She has a hot cunt. Shoot her once in the ass so she remembers it every time she is below or on top of anyone.’

‘What about Jopa then?’ he said. ‘He insulted me.’

‘I will take care of him,’ said Marco and the man walked away, satisfied with the verdict.

Alex brought in a local grocery store owner who had got into an argument with one of the runts for dealing in front of his shop and burst open his face in a fit of anger. Marco shot him in his left arm as a reminder not to hit children again, but spared his right so that his business wouldn’t suffer. The man went out, clutching his arm to prevent himself from losing too much blood and thanking Marco for his consideration.