Twenty minutes later, I was sitting in the back of a Portuguese restaurant, waiting for my host. He entered, sat without introducing himself, and stared at me with blank eyes. He was a corpulent man, with long, greasy black hair plastered to his scalp. Two men stood by the door to the private dining room, hands stuffed in their pockets, fingers no doubt curled around the triggers of snub-nosed revolvers pointed in my direction.
I knew the man by his alias—O Mestre—but I didn’t use the name to address him. I simply said, “We have a common enemy.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“A wannabe gangster named Ernesto.”
His accent was thick Portuguese, his English broken. “Never hear of this man.”
“He’s kidnapped two associates of mine. He wants twenty thousand dollars for their return.”
“Is police matter. I not police.”
“I think you can help me more. I think you can guarantee my friends come home safe.”
He looked away.
“There’s forty thousand dollars in the bag.”
“I am not bank.”
“The money is for their safe return. And for protection in case this happens again. Here in Rio, and in S?o Paulo.”
With his head, he motioned to the two men. One opened the bag and began counting the money. The other jerked me up from my chair, frisked me, then reached inside my shirt, making sure I wasn’t wired. I wasn’t stupid enough to carry a gun into a meeting like this.
The man who frisked me nodded at O Mestre, who rose and left the room. I had held back on the fact that I spoke Portuguese, hoping it would provide an advantage, but these men seemed to have a language all their own, communicating entirely with their eyes and slight motions of their heads.
The man holding the bag took twenty thousand dollars out of it.
His associate said to me, in Portuguese, “The fee is twenty thousand dollars per year. You will return to this room next year on this day with payment.”
I nodded. So they knew more about me than I suspected.
“Tonight, you will go to the bus stop. Here is what will happen.”
Exactly two hours after the thugs had taken Yuri and Lin off the street and assaulted Sylvia, I stood in the drizzling rain, wearing a fedora and a black trench coat. Rio was hot year-round, but in August it was coldest, and rainy. The wind from the Atlantic carried a cold front from Antarctica into the city, past the cranes that were building skyscrapers by the dozen, erasing the old city, erecting a shiny new one.
People from Brazil’s countryside were pouring into Rio. Illegal immigrants came too, all in search of jobs and a better life. Large slums called favelas grew like ant colonies, seeming to spread overnight. In the glow of the streetlamp, I could see the shanties stretching up a green-forested mountainside, a pocket of poverty in the vast city. From my vantage point, they looked like tiny cardboard boxes stacked at the feet of the Christ the Redeemer statue, which towered over all the people below.
The harsh quality of life in the favelas was a stark contrast to Copacabana Beach a few hundred yards away, where ritzy hotels, night clubs, bars, and restaurants glittered just off the Atlantic. Palm trees towered over the sandy beach and lined the promenade. Music thumped into the night, an out-of-tune anthem of the two worlds that existed here in Rio. I was about to descend into the other world, the underworld, where desperate people took desperate actions to survive—and just maybe lift themselves out of poverty. The situation had forced me to do something I didn’t like, but such was this world. My people were in danger. More than that: my friends were in danger. It was as simple as that.
The bus pulled away, puffing thick black smoke the rain couldn’t force down.
Beside me, Sylvia started to tremble. I knew it wasn’t because of the cold wind or the rain.
“It’s all right, Sylvia.”
I could tell she wanted to cry, but she resisted. One of my intelligence operatives was in the cafe behind us, the other in the adjacent alley.
A rattling Volkswagen pulled up, and a man wearing a bandanna over his mouth and a stained white tank top got out. In the back seat, another man pointed a handgun at Sylvia. Her cry broke forth then. I held my arm out, across her, and stepped in between the man and the trembling woman.
“The money!” he yelled.
“Give us our people first. Then we pay.”
He shook his head. He was high on amphetamines of some sort. His eyes were wide, darting back and forth. “No! You pay now. If I not back in five minutes, we kill one.”
I held my hands up. “All right. Fine. We’ll pay. But I want to see them first. Show me they’re alive, I make a call, and the money is delivered here.”
Bandanna Man made eye contact with the driver, who nodded. He grabbed my arm and shoved me in the back of the tiny car, between him and the thug who had the gun. The thug pressed his old revolver in my side. His friend searched me quickly, found no weapon, then jerked my hat off and tied the bandanna from his face around my eyes. It stank of sweat and cigarettes, forcing me to cough.
They bounced me around in the back seat for ten minutes; the roar of the German car’s engine was nearly deafening. I wondered if the divider between the back seat and engine compartment had been taken out.
Finally the car stopped, and they stood me up and perp-walked me down a cobblestone street. They were rough with me each time I tripped. I heard a wooden door scrape open and slam closed behind us. They walked me slower, then pulled the bandanna off in a room with a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling.