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.
“Oi, Urso,” Tavia said.
He tugged down his glasses to look at her, said in English, “Octavia Reynaldo. Where you been, girl?”
The other gangsters began to leer openly at Tavia, who flipped them the bird, said, “Got a new job. Hadn’t you heard?”
“Can’t say I did,” Urso said. “Who’s the surfer boy?”
“My boss,” she said. “Jack Morgan, the head of Private. From L.A.”
Surfer boy aside, the fact that I was from Los Angeles seemed to impress the Bear because he broke into that gold and stained-enamel smile and reached out a giant tattooed fist to bump mine.
“Where’s your crib for real, man?” he asked.
“Pacific Palisades, you know it?”
“Up toward Malibu.”
“You’ve been to L.A.?”
“Lived there four years,” Urso said. “South Central–Compton line.”
“Rough place.”
“No, man, this is rough. South Central’s paradise compared to Spirit.”
“Why didn’t you stay in L.A.?”
The Bear shrugged. “Shit happens. Even in paradise.”
“You hear about the shooting and the riot at that food giveaway in Alem?o?” Tavia asked.
“I’m not supposed to set foot in Alem?o,” Urso said. “Ever.”
“But you’ve still got friends inside, right?”
The Bear gestured at the other four watching us. “My friends are all right here. Backs against the jungle, just holding our own. Know what I’m saying?”
“Did you or your friends hear anything about the shooting?”
Urso hesitated and then spoke to the men in Portuguese. The four gangsters shook their heads.
“They don’t know nothing. I don’t know nothing.”
“I can’t believe the Bear wouldn’t hear about a shooting on his old turf,” Tavia said.
Urso acted insulted, said, “If you’re not a cop anymore, Reynaldo, why you so interested?”
“The guys who died worked for us,” Tavia said. “They had families.”
“That right? Now, why would Private bodyguards be in a favela?” he asked her.