Джеймс Паттерсон - The Games

I’d come to Rio to interview Tavia about opening and heading a Private office in the Marvelous City during the World Cup and Olympic Games. She’d been a dynamo from the get-go, and I knew within an hour of meeting her that I’d give her the job.

But Tavia had put together a crash course of all that was Rio so I’d understand the security challenges of the city before making my decision. We’d been to several possible venue sites prior to boarding the boat, and I was starting to get dizzy from jet lag.

I got in and we pulled away from the docks and motored around Sugarloaf Mountain, through the harbor mouth, and out to sea. We stopped about a mile off Copacabana Beach, where we had a panoramic view of the remarkable landscape and design of the south side of Rio, from Leblon to Sugarloaf and the jungle mountains soaring in and behind the ever-growing city.

“Just breathtaking,” I said.

Tavia laughed and threw her arms wide as if trying to embrace it all.

“I think God was in the mood to celebrate when Rio de Janeiro was made,” Tavia said, and she laughed again. “God made Rio so crazy beautiful that it’s impossible not to be happy here. I love it. I’ll never leave. If I die, bring me to this spot so my spirit can look at her, love her, and be a part of her that washes ashore.”

She’d smiled at me and then gazed all around in wonder, as if she were lost in paradise.

That was the moment when I felt I could get lost in Tavia. That was the moment that stirred and sweetened my dreams now and for the next couple of hours until the real Tavia kissed my lips and woke me up for good.

“Time is it?” I grumbled.

“Quarter of five,” she said, getting out of bed. “We want to be in Alemão before everyone leaves for work.”

I groaned, rubbed my eyes, said, “I’ll phone room service for coffee.”

“I ordered it last night,” Tavia called from the bathroom. “Breakfast in fifteen minutes.”

“You’re a superwoman,” I said, entering to see her climb into the shower. “I saw that about you from the start.”

Tavia smiled sleepily. “What took you so long to say so?”

“A complicated life,” I said, and I climbed in after her.

I’d sworn never to get involved with an employee again. I had had a relationship with Justine Smith, a psychologist who works in the L.A. office. I still love Justine and believe she still loves me, but we both know it will never work for all sorts of reasons. Anyway, after we broke up, I’d vowed never again to mix business and love.

Because of that vow, a long time passed before I acted on the spark I felt constantly between Tavia and me. We had a special chemistry, as if we were always riffing on each other’s thoughts. And since I had to be in Rio for repeated, extended periods, first with the World Cup and then with the upcoming Olympics, we’d spent more and more time together.

It felt inevitable in a way. Tavia was smart, funny, experienced, and tough, and like most Brazilians, she genuinely loved life. Study after study has found the people of Brazil, and especially Rio, are among the happiest on earth.

That was certainly true of Tavia. Despite the difficult things she’d been forced to deal with in her early life, first as an orphan, then as a police officer, Tavia still went through every day thinking life was one miracle after another, which was refreshing, comforting, and, well, enjoyable.

Back in January, I’d flown in for a pre-Olympic security meeting and couldn’t believe how desperately happy I was to see her waiting at the gate. We’d gone out to eat and had a bottle of wine. It had been two months since we’d last seen each other. We caught up. We laughed. We talked shop. She looked fantastic.

About halfway through the evening, I realized that I wasn’t just smitten with her. She’d turned into a good friend, the kind of person I could and did confide in.

Someone very wise once told me that if you want love in your life, you have to go looking for it. So I broke my vow, and over a bottle of Malbec I’d let it slip that I loved working with her and, well, just being with her.

Tavia had cocked her head. “What are you saying, Jack?”

“I’m saying it’s wrong for all sorts of reasons, but I can’t tell you how much I’ve grown to hate being apart from you.”

Tavia hesitated for several beats, but her moistening eyes never looked away from mine before she said, “Then don’t be apart from me ever again.”

Now, standing in her shower, I looked at Tavia washing herself and felt happy and whole, ready to face any challenge. I could do anything my heart desired with this woman by my side.

Tavia rinsed off, looked at me, and smiled. “That’s quite the grin.”

“Is it?”

“Yes. What were you thinking about?”

“True love,” I said, and kissed her.

We walked up to the Alemão favela, rather than taking the gondola, shortly after dawn. The slum was wide awake and throbbing with life. Dads and moms heading off to work. Moms and dads cleaning clothes in buckets or lounging in their doorways to smoke and watch their children dart with the chickens along the haphazard paths.

After the surreal experience of seeing the slum from the sky at night, I was engulfed by it in the daylight. Yes, there was squalor, but the people seemed to make the most of their lives, and so many were smiling and genuinely happy that I kept having to remind myself that it was a dangerous place, the kind of place that could swallow two missing girls.

Everyone we stopped to speak with asked suspiciously if we were cops. Tavia explained again and again that we had been hired by the parents to look for their girls. We got people to look at photographs of the twins. No one recognized them in that part of the slum, more than a mile west of the school yard where my men had been murdered and the twins taken.

“Police are not liked here,” I said after the eighth or ninth person questioned our roles.

Tavia said, “People of the favelas know that police corruption is rampant because the cops are paid so little. It’s very dangerous to be a cop in Rio. They die. Often. So the relationship between the police and the favela fluctuates between mutual admiration, suspicion, and outright war. One of the reasons I left to join Private.”

“Glad you did,” I said.

“Me too,” she said, and she smiled in a pleased and playful way.

We kept moving through the slum toward the kidnap site, talking to people, showing pictures. And getting nothing.

There had to be a better way to do this, I thought.

“So they don’t trust the cops,” I said. “Who do they trust? Who hears things? The priests?”

“Maybe priests, but I don’t know how we’d find... wait.”

“What?”

“I know someone who might know something. Not a priest. An old acquaintance of mine here in Alemão. Why didn’t I think of her before?”

Twenty minutes later we entered a small crowded public medical clinic on the eastern edge of the slum. Tavia went to the window, identified herself, and asked to see Mariana.

The receptionist disappeared but quickly came back to open the door and lead us in. The hallway was crowded with supplies, and we had to squeeze past seriously ill people lying on gurneys.

“Wish I had a surgical mask,” I said as we rounded a corner and almost ran into a woman standing there.

“Good thinking,” the woman said, handing me one. A kind, grandmotherly type in her sixties, she wore her gray hair in a braid and had an earth-mother style to her clothes.

“Mariana Lopes,” Tavia said, throwing her arms around the woman, who hugged her back. “Long time.”

Tavia introduced me and said Lopes was something of a saint around the favelas, which caused the woman to blush and wave her off. Later I would learn that in addition to the medical clinic, Lopes ran an orphanage and an after-school program for favela kids, all on a shoestring budget.