The Games (Private #11)(69)
“The way things are going, I just imagined the worst-case scenario and threw it out there.”
Chapter 84
DR. CASTRO DROVE southwest through Rio, using every little trick he knew to avoid the strangling traffic, but then it started to rain and that mucked up everything and he was stuck again in the midst of bumper-to-bumper vehicles. To pass the time, he tuned to an all-news radio station and listened intently to the description of the government raid on the Favela Justice terrorists.
Billionaire Andrew Wise had been rescued, and Amelia Lopes, aka Rayssa, was dead, along with a dozen of her followers, including a notorious gangster named Urso who’d used a rocket launcher to take down a BOPE helicopter. Several people had died in the crash, among them Octavia Reynaldo, head of Private Rio.
Wise had gone out in front of cameras and microphones and announced his intention to spend the rest of his life figuring out how to better the lives of the poorest of the poor. A reporter asked if his daughters were in custody, and he’d said they were under arrest.
Amelia Lopes and the Wise twins, Castro thought. Kindred spirits. I would have liked to have known them. Daughter of a saint, product of poverty, Lopes saw the inequities and acted. Guilty rich girls confronted with the inequities of life joined her. It made sense to him, and in many ways he agreed with their goals.
But Amelia Lopes had thought about the gap between rich and poor in entirely economic terms, the benefits and losses, the income, the greed, the want. To Castro, the biggest gap was in health care. The richest had access to the best medical care and a sanitary environment conducive to long human life. The poorest had feces flowing past their doors, pestilence, and recurrent plagues. The richest couldn’t see that a simple rise in the living standards of the poor would lead to fewer crippling diseases and fewer early deaths.
Why? Because the rich were ignorant of what it was like to live at the mercy of a parasite, a disease, or a virus. So they have to be taught, the doctor thought as traffic began to ease and he picked up speed. They have to be shown.
Forty minutes behind schedule, at eleven a.m., Dr. Castro finally drove into Laranjeiras, a largely residential neighborhood in south Rio with a funky street vibe. Little cafés, nice parks, lots of vendors. And the base station for the cog railway that climbed to the top of Corcovado Mountain.
The rain lightened to a drizzle. Castro went past the rail station, slowed along a high wall, and then turned through a pair of iron gates into a cobblestoned courtyard in front of the shambles of a palace built in the early 1800s by the dethroned king of Portugal’s doctor. The palace must have been grand and glamorous once.
Squatters lived there now; the limestone walls were slick with moss, and the wooden shutters hung off their hinges and moldered. Castro had seen the palace many times. The building had been one of his wife’s favorites. Sophie always thought it should have been in a movie, that it was the perfect place for a vampire to await sundown. Castro sat there a moment after he parked, swearing he could see Sophie right there, entranced by the decrepit building.
Then he shook the memory off and got out, confident that this was the perfect place to leave his car. After dark, the squatters would strip it, take it apart, and sell the pieces. Nothing would go to waste.
Castro got the backpack out of the trunk, threw his keys inside, and shut it. He felt eyes watching him, looked up three stories, and saw a boy looking down at him through the lightly falling rain. The kid was shirtless and eating something, but he was also clearly watching the doctor.
That pleased Castro as he walked back through the gates. If the kid saw him toss the keys in the trunk, the car would be gone within the hour. He walked away, heading west and uphill past the Museum of Native Art and onto Rua Cosme Velho, a twisting, climbing road.
The rain stopped and behind it came a breeze from the northeast, from the equator, bringing equatorial heat to Rio. Castro reached the entrance to the sports complex at the College of St. Vincent de Paul, where he had been doing a weekly clinic for athletes the past six months. The security guard recognized him, asked him what was in the pack.
“Sand, mostly,” Castro replied. “I’m going climbing in the Andes in December and getting into shape. Walking everywhere I can with this on.”
The guard looked at him like he was kind of nuts but nodded and let him pass through. Castro headed to the athletic department building.
But when he got there, he cut back to his right, out of sight of the guard, and made his way across a practice field and around grandstands to the rear corner of the college grounds.
Castro went to a heavy iron gate, pulled the cotter pin that held the latch tight, and opened the gate, praying that the squealing it made would not attract attention. He exited, shut the gate, and breathed a sigh of relief.
The doctor was in the dripping, steaming jungle now, safe from all prying eyes. He just had to be careful and stick to a route he’d plotted for months. He had a brutal series of climbs and traverses ahead of him. There were other ways, some of them probably easier, but Castro had chosen this approach because from above he would be invisible, and because he wanted to suffer.
Chapter 85
Friday, August 5, 2016
12:30 p.m.
Six and a Half Hours Before the Olympic Games Open
JUSTINE AND I climbed from a taxi outside a long steel building in a light-industrial complex in Rio’s Esta??o District.