“Go left,” Tavia said into her lapel microphone. I heard her over my radio earpiece.
They were a good thirty yards ahead of us and entering one of the most choked spots in the entertainment district, a scene of controlled mayhem and unbridled fun, people drinking and singing and howling at the pitch-dark sky. The Wises disappeared around the corner.
“Pick up the pace,” I said into my lapel mike, and I turned my shoulders angular and narrow, tried to squeeze my way forward to cut the gap between us.
Fifteen feet from the corner, we heard a chant go up. Boys, ten or eleven of them, masked street urchins, were shouting and waving sticks in the faces of the partyers, who all surged back.
If you have ever been in a mob being turned, you know it can be a claustrophobic, tense, and frightening experience. The crowd pressed against us, pushed us hard to our left. Tables and chairs of sidewalk cafés began to tumble, and people started shouting in anger and alarm.
I fought against the wave of humanity, got around the corner, and saw the Wises being swept ahead of us down a wider street. We were still thirty yards apart, but the mob pressure was easing. Several of the boys with the sticks squirmed through the crowd like greased pigs and got past me.
“What the hell is going on, Tavia?” I said. “Who are those kids?”
“Pickpockets,” she said an instant before one of the boys dropped his stick, accelerated, and ran by Cherie Wise, bumping her and then darting to his right.
Cherie spun around, holding her purse strap in outrage. “My purse! He cut it off me!”
Her husband twisted and went after the boy, who was trying to get the heck out of Dodge. But I had a better angle on him and took off, Tavia right behind me.
The kid ran with uncanny moves, ducking, twisting, spinning off one surprised reveler after another while I bulled my way after him. He led me on a chase through a maze of streets I couldn’t name if you’d shown them to me on a map, zigzagging and using people like a skier uses slalom gates.
He was slight and dark, built like one of those Ethiopian distance runners, but his moves were quick, fluid, and precise. It wasn’t like the kid was born to run, more like he was born to flee, and it took every bit of my wind and strength to stay near enough to track him in the thinning crowd.
He kept looking back over his shoulder at intersections, hoping he’d shaken me, but I stayed on him, soaked with sweat. He darted to his right and up onto a brightly tiled red stair that led to another and another, a staircase that climbed steeply up the side of the hill to Santa Teresa.
I sprinted after him, knowing where I was. The Selarón Steps was an iconic place in Rio, an urban staircase with walls and doors flanking it and virtually every square inch of it tiled, up one side and down the other. Some tiles were simple, others ornate, but all of them were unique and yet part of the whole; the thousands of shiny snapshots and miniature paintings covered the entire staircase in a collage. Lanterns lit the steps, and tourists walked and lovers embraced along them as the kid holding Cherie Wise’s purse bounced up the stairs and through the crowds like the battery bunny gone mad.
I pounded after him and found his weakness. On the flats he was swift, but climbing slowed him, and I started to gain ground. When I was two flights behind him, nearing the top, the kid glanced back, saw me coming, looked startled, and threw the purse at me.
It was a great throw. I mean, he hit me square in the chest with the purse, and it pulled me up short and briefly stunned me.
He cursed me in Portuguese and sprang away, bounding up the remaining steps and onto the Santa Teresa road, where I lost sight of him. I didn’t care. I bent over, desperate for air but happy he hadn’t gotten away with the purse.
I found Tavia coming up the lower part of the Selarón Steps, showed her the purse, and told her what had happened. Fifteen minutes later, I handed it to a grateful Cherie Wise.
“Oh, thank you, Jack,” she said, taking the purse and hugging it. “It’s a favorite of mine. The girls had it made for me a couple of years…”
She looked worn out suddenly, said, “I really need to sleep. I’m getting dizzy.”
“Make sure he didn’t take anything out while he had it, and we’ll go back to the hotel,” Wise said, and then he looked at me. “No one tried to contact us.”
“I know,” I said, glancing back at Lapa and wondering if we should have them troll through again.
Cherie opened the purse, took one look, and let out a soft gasp.
“What?” Tavia asked.
She held the purse out and showed us. Inside, on top of her things, there was an unlabeled CD-ROM in a dirty plastic case.
“That’s not mine,” she said.
“I would hope not,” her husband said. “That technology’s a dinosaur.”
Chapter 38
Sunday, July 31, 2016
8:30 a.m.