The Games (Private #11)(18)

“Police are not liked here,” I said after the eighth or ninth person questioned our roles.

Tavia said, “People of the favelas know that police corruption is rampant because the cops are paid so little. It’s very dangerous to be a cop in Rio. They die. Often. So the relationship between the police and the favela fluctuates between mutual admiration, suspicion, and outright war. One of the reasons I left to join Private.”

“Glad you did,” I said.

“Me too,” she said, and she smiled in a pleased and playful way.

We kept moving through the slum toward the kidnap site, talking to people, showing pictures. And getting nothing.

There had to be a better way to do this, I thought.

“So they don’t trust the cops,” I said. “Who do they trust? Who hears things? The priests?”

“Maybe priests, but I don’t know how we’d find…wait.”

“What?”

“I know someone who might know something. Not a priest. An old acquaintance of mine here in Alem?o. Why didn’t I think of her before?”

Twenty minutes later we entered a small crowded public medical clinic on the eastern edge of the slum. Tavia went to the window, identified herself, and asked to see Mariana.

The receptionist disappeared but quickly came back to open the door and lead us in. The hallway was crowded with supplies, and we had to squeeze past seriously ill people lying on gurneys.

“Wish I had a surgical mask,” I said as we rounded a corner and almost ran into a woman standing there.

“Good thinking,” the woman said, handing me one. A kind, grandmotherly type in her sixties, she wore her gray hair in a braid and had an earth-mother style to her clothes.

“Mariana Lopes,” Tavia said, throwing her arms around the woman, who hugged her back. “Long time.”

Tavia introduced me and said Lopes was something of a saint around the favelas, which caused the woman to blush and wave her off. Later I would learn that in addition to the medical clinic, Lopes ran an orphanage and an after-school program for favela kids, all on a shoestring budget.

“She’s around a lot of people,” Tavia explained. “She listens to street kids, who often see things adults don’t see, or don’t want to see.”

“If you say so, dear,” Lopes said. “How can I help you?”

Tavia explained what had happened the night before, the shooting and the kidnapping of two American church volunteers.

“I’d heard a rumor of gunshots up there,” she said. “But nothing concrete. It takes a few days before things like that trickle down to me.”

A nurse came up to talk to Lopes, who listened and frowned. She held up a finger, said, “I’m sorry. Crisis of the hour. Listen, Tavia, you know who might know something more recent?”

“Who?” Tavia said.

“The Bear,” she said. “Remember him?”





Chapter 17



TAVIA DID REMEMBER the Bear, and she was surprised to hear he was still alive.

“He doesn’t live in Alem?o anymore, does he?” Tavia asked.

“No, L’Esprit, Spirit,” Mariana Lopes said. “But they’re not far apart, you know?”

Tavia got directions and we started off again, skirting the German slum to where train tracks separated it from another smaller but no less decrepit favela.

We climbed through the maze up the steep side of the Spirit slum, where teens hung from doorways and men stood at bars the size of closets and televisions blared with the latest soccer highlights. There was music playing everywhere, and it seemed to throb louder as we climbed higher, almost to the top, where the favela met the jungle, bamboo and vine thickets not yet hacked away by someone eager for a newer home.

Drenched with sweat, I looked over my shoulder and was stunned by the view. There was Christ the Redeemer against a crystalline-blue sky, and I could see across the lower basins of Rio all the way to the beaches and the ocean, which looked impossibly aquamarine in the distance.

“Rio’s the only city in the world where the poor get the best views,” I said.

“True,” Tavia said. “But even that is changing.”

“People buying up the bottoms of the slums and putting up high-rises?”

“Happens almost every day. So the poor who can’t afford the high-rise will just go higher and higher up the mountain, and then down the other—”

Tavia stopped, said, “There’s Urso, the Bear.”

Urso reminded me of gangster chieftains I’d encountered in L.A. over the years. Big dude. Late twenties. Buff. Heavily tattooed. Cannon-barrel arms. A keg for a chest. Two jackhammers for legs. And bristly jet-black hair that matched the color of his wraparound shades.

At the moment I saw him, however, the Bear’s street cred seemed compromised by the fact that he was holding a baby in one arm while handing a woman a wad of cash. She got emotional and bowed her head in thanks.

Urso kissed the baby on the cheek and gave him back to his grateful mother, who bowed again and trotted off past four other gangstas leaning up against a concrete retaining wall just below the edge of the jungle.

As the woman walked away, the Bear smiled, revealing gold caps, two on his upper incisors and two on his lower canines. The grin and the gold caps disappeared when Urso spotted Tavia walking toward him.