JOHNNY GONE DOWN (16 page)

More quick judgment was meted out while I watched silently from the side. I realized with a pang that I would miss Marco despite everything. He had given me a new lease of life, just as David had - and I was deserting him too. Suddenly, I was tired. How many more times would I have to do this, I wondered. Building, destroying, building, destroying, and building again. I had been a nomad for too long. I craved permanence, a community to call my own, someone to love, even children, although I didn’t have much to teach them except, perhaps, how not to live.

‘I need to leave,’ I said when Marco and I were finally alone in the room.

Marco’s face fell, or at least I imagined it did. ‘Okay, bye,’ he said nonchalantly.

‘Is that all you have to say?’ I asked.

‘What else do you want me to say? Anyway,
thanks for saving my life and for handling the accounts and all that.’

I knew he didn’t care a rat’s arse about either. In his own strange way, he was more of a monk than I had ever been. He didn’t care about the physical shell of his body or the inevitability of death, and craved little financial or material gain for himself. Contradictions, I thought, everywhere I went I saw contradictions.

‘You can still get out of the drug business,’ I said earnestly. ‘I have collected all the money-laundering information in the account register. Once the money is white, you can invest in - ‘

The blast of a gunshot cut me short. He had fired at my feet and the bullet had narrowly missed my toes. I stared at him in surprise, not because he had fired, but because he never missed.

‘Get out, paneleiro,’ he said. ‘You are a fucking ungrateful faggot.’

I went back to my room to pack my belongings before realizing I had nothing to pack. Since I’d come here, I had bought nothing. Everything - the clothes I wore, the books I read, the food I ate, the stuff I used - had been given to me by Marco.

Another unfinished chapter, I thought as I walked out the door, another incomplete journey from nowhere to nowhere.

I was walking down the stairs, lost in thought, when there was a sudden commotion outside.

‘He was shot,’ Alex shouted, running into the house.

Marco, looking lifeless and dripping blood from his face, was being carried into the house, suspended from the shoulders of Maki and the others.

‘Take him upstairs,’ Alex told the gang. ‘I will call Doctor José.’ He sped off.

I watched as the men dragged Marco to his room and stretched him out on the bed. Blood spilled onto the patterned bedsheet. He had been shot in the middle of his head.

‘Is he dead?’ I croaked out.

The men stared at me, as uncertain as I was. For a moment, I considered running away. I didn’t need to be involved. If I walked out now, I could start my life afresh without skipping a beat. I was meant to be a cubicle rat, not a drug dealer.

‘What came over him?’ said Maki. ‘He never leaves the house without a gun. We weren’t even around. One moment he is in his room, the next he is smoking a cigarette in broad daylight without a gun in his hand. What the hell was he thinking?’

Probably about my betrayal, I thought with a sinking sensation.

Marco mumbled something and tried to move. The blood flowed from his face in a steady stream.

‘He is alive,’ said Maki.

‘Don’t move,’ I said. ‘Just stay still.’

A foolish comment, if ever there was one. He couldn’t move if he tried. His face was shattered, just blood and bone; any move to stem the blood flow would probably make it worse. He won’t make it, I thought suddenly. Just as Ishmael didn’t.

‘It wasn’t even a planned attack. I think someone from Jocinha saw him standing alone and took a shot,’ said Maki. ‘They want to take over Jakeira. Thankfully, a runt spotted them and we got there in time.’

‘Isn’t Jocinha a part of the Comando Vermelho? Aren’t Donos in different favelas forbidden from killing each other?’ I asked.

They looked at each other as if they had never considered this question before.

Their surprise made sense. I should have figured it out earlier. The Red Command wasn’t set up like a sugared water company with a chief executive in charge; it was a loose confederate of Donos across different favelas, who tried to set boundaries where they could, but ultimately, everyone had to watch out for themselves.

Alex and the doctor, a fair-skinned gentleman who had probably been persuaded to come from a city clinic, rushed into the room. The doctor stared at Marco and went closer to inspect him. He touched the gooey flesh on his forehead and Marco screamed.

‘I can try to fix him but I need blood immediately.
Do you know his blood group? Does it match anyone’s here?’ he said.

The thugs looked at one another. Of course, they hadn’t ever found out their blood groups.

‘I am O positive,’ I said, remembering the results from my US visa application. ‘Universal donor, right?’

Another thought had entered my mind which made me volunteer like an idiot. Whether they knew it or not, I was sure most of these thugs had HIV or some other deadly STD. For no other reason than that they all loved to go bareback and alternately called me a pussy and a faggot for insisting on a condom.

‘I will need to test both of you first since this is a live transfusion,’ said the doctor. ‘His blood may show an adverse reaction to the antibodies in your blood, which could kill him - or you.’

‘Do we have time?’ I asked.

He shook his head.

‘Where will you test anyway?’ said Alex. ‘You know we can’t take him to a hospital.’

I paused for a moment. Heck, I thought. I am not a hero, I don’t want to be a hero, but here I am in the same no-win position once again. Hadn’t I learnt the last time round that there was no karmic justice? What goes around doesn’t come around. I had lost an arm the last time I’d tried to be bigger than I was. What would I lose this time?

‘Is there a chance I might lose the function of my other arm?’ I asked.

I wasn’t particularly concerned about death. I had nothing much to live for and not much to look forward to. What I feared was the thought of being fed like a baby and needing someone to wipe my arse. Not that I could even afford it if it came to that.

‘There is always a chance,’ said the doctor sagely.

Great, I thought. Now what? I looked at the door longingly. I could still get out of here and pursue my dream of becoming a corporate coolie.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Let’s do it.’

‘You are going to die a dog’s death,’ I said as Marco began to gain consciousness.

The doctor had cleaned his wound and we were now connected with the rickety transfusion equipment. My right wrist, attached to the catheter, hurt like hell, and I rotated it every few minutes to ensure that I hadn’t lost control of it. Not this arm, I prayed, anything but.

‘Shut up, you fag,’ he said through his pain and began to drift away.

‘You act cool, like a movie star, but you are as afraid to die as anyone else,’ I said, still smarting from being put in this position. ‘Why else would you keep moving from house to house every night to avoid getting shot?’

He made as if to reach for a gun and collapsed from the effort.

Slowly he got better, as did I.

‘Are you still going to go?’ he said when he had regained consciousness. I was standing by his bed, right arm intact, staring at his heavily bandaged head. He looked like Frankenstein and I felt a sudden wave of affection for him.

‘Yes,’ I said sadly. ‘I’ve nowhere to go but I can’t live this life any more. It is unnecessary and wrong.’

‘I chose this life,’ he said, sounding less stubborn than usual.

‘So did the people who came to kill you,’ I said. ‘Weren’t they from the Red Command as well? Everyone watches out for their own interest here. If you want to have principles, choose bigger ones. You are just a small-time dealer now, but you can become bigger and put an end to this stupid violence - at least in this favela.’

I expected protest but heard none.

‘What do you have in mind, men?’ he asked.

‘That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. We don’t need to do anything dramatic. We will just launder the drug money every month so that it’s clean. Once we have enough white money, we can invest in a variety of legal businesses. Money will bring more money.’

‘And how do you launder it?’

‘It should be pretty simple from what I’ve read,’ I said. ‘We need to start a small business with borrowed funds from which we get a regular inflow of clean cash. When we deposit that cash in the bank, we keep slipping in portions of your drug money; once the money is in the financial system, it’s clean. Within a few months, we should have enough clean money to start making significant legal investments in stocks and real estate, and soon you can get out of the drug trade entirely - if you want to.’

‘What small business do we start?’

‘Well, something like… retail, for instance,’ I said after a moment’s thought. ‘Thousands of legal transactions every day, lots of clean cash to be deposited in the banks, no one will notice if we slip in a few thousand dollars of drug money every week. What can we retail in?’

‘Guns,’ he replied at once.

I stared at him. ‘I think I liked you better when the only sound out of your mouth was a groan.’

‘Do you know any business yourself, fucker?’ he asked.

I paused. What did I know besides silence and loss, and mathematics and cocaine?

‘I understand sports pretty well,’ I said. ‘We could retail in apparel and equipment for basketball, soccer, running, etc. That’s a start.’

‘Just like that?’

‘Just like that.’

‘So you are going to stay then, aren’t you?’

Unknowingly, we had hit a gold mine. Just as we opened our first sporting goods store in Ipanema in 1990, a wave of international retail chains entered Brazil, and shopping at large stores became the vogue for the growing middle class. One store became two, two became ten, and in three years’ time we were operating three hundred stores in Sao Paolo and Rio, generating a few million dollars of profit every year, and growing. What had started as a front for laundering drug money soon became vastly more profitable than the drug business itself, and to further establish its legality, I created shell companies in Hong Kong, Moldova and Seychelles - all laundering havens with no bank-reporting requirements - where we repatriated all our profits. The shell companies, in turn, made profits on local investments that were then re-invested in our retail holdings in Brazil. So intricate was the financial web we spun that it would take years for even the most dedicated investigator to trace the origins of our empire to a coca farm in a small Colombian village. I could now face Marco with some measure of pride - our involvement with the drug business had reduced to a token amount for solidarity with the Comando Vermelho, and we had prospered beyond our highest estimations.