Джеймс Паттерсон - The Games

“She’s around a lot of people,” Tavia explained. “She listens to street kids, who often see things adults don’t see, or don’t want to see.”

“If you say so, dear,” Lopes said. “How can I help you?”

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?”

Tavia did remember the Bear, and she was surprised to hear he was still alive.

“He doesn’t live in Alemão 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 Alemão?” Tavia asked.

“I’m not supposed to set foot in Alemão,” 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.

“There’d been threats to a church group. My men were volunteers.”

“See there?” the Bear said, looking to me. “Do-gooders getting killed. Always happens. It’s why I try never to do that much good.”

He translated, and his buddies broke up laughing and fist-bumped.

I said, “Two American girls went missing after the shooting. Twins.”

“That right?” He seemed surprised. “Hadn’t heard that.”

Tavia showed Urso a picture of Natalie and Alicia. The Bear whistled and held the photo out for his friends to see. They reacted with similar admiration.

Urso said, “We’d remember those two lindíssimas . You don’t see too many gorgeous americanas in Alemão or Spirit.”

“Will you ask around for us? There’d be real money in it if you came up with something strong,” Tavia said.

“Yeah? How much?”

“You put us onto them, I’ll give you fifty thousand reais .”

Urso snorted. “Make it worth my time. Make it dollars and I’m yours.”

Tavia glanced at me, and I nodded.

“All right, L.A.,” Urso said with that gold-capped grin, and he bumped my knuckles again. “Bear’s on it, and I’ll find you those girls, ’cept I need an advance for me and the boys to go to work.”

“Give him five,” I said to Tavia.

“Ten,” Urso said.

“Seven.”

The Bear winked and grinned lazily as if he’d just scratched his back against the bark of an old tree.

At three fifteen that same day, Tavia and I stood on the tarmac of a private jetport at the domestic airport on the Rio harbor front. We had a Mercedes-Benz armored limousine at our backs and four operators armed with H&K submachine guns nearby.

I still felt nervous as the Gulfstream appeared out of the sun.

“What are they like?” Tavia asked. “I mean, in person?”

“The mom, Cherie, can be intense, passionate, idealistic, and, at times, irrational,” I said. “Andy’s your typical engineering über-mind: brilliant, but socially awkward, probably two or three clicks along the autism spectrum.”

The Gulfstream landed, revealing the logo: WE. The jet taxied and rolled to a stop in front of us. Tavia signaled her guards. They moved in pairs, two men on each side of the exit ramp as it lowered.

Cherie Wise, a pale redhead in her early forties, came out wearing red capri pants, sandals, a blue Hamilton College sweatshirt, a straw hat, and oversize sunglasses. Andy Wise, a lanky, balding man with round wire-rimmed glasses, followed her. He wore Wranglers, a green polo shirt with the WE logo on the breast pocket, and running shoes, and he carried an iPad under one arm.