Ian McDonald - Brasyl

“And it’s not Rocinha,” Souza said, pulling out past a tanker-train. “What else is down there? Vila Canoas, maybe. Whoa.”

Marcelina looked up from her monitor, where she was already planning her edit. Something in Souza’s voice.

“You’re scaring me, man.”

“They just threw a three-sixty right across the road.”

“Where are they?”

“Coming right at us.”

“Hey, Canal Quatro.” Malhação was grinning into the sun-visor cam. He had very good, white big teeth. “I think there’s a flaw in your format. You see, there’s no motivation for me to risk jail just for a shit secondhand Merc. On the other hand, something with a bit of retail potential…”

The Mercedes came sliding across the central strip, shedding graphics’ loving pimp job all over the highway. Souza stood on the antilocks. The SUV stopped a spit from the Mercedes. Malhação, América, and O Clono were already out, guns held sideways in that way that had become fashionable since City of God .

“Out out out out out.” Marcelina and crew piled onto the road, traffic blaring past.

“I need the hard drive. If I haven’t got the hard drive I haven’t got a show, at least leave me that.”

América was already behind the wheel.

“This is sweet,” he declared.

“Okay, take it,” Malhação said, handing monitor and terabyte LaCie to Marcelina.

“You know, you kinda have hair like Gisele Bundchen,” O Clono called from the rear seat. “But curlier, and you’re a lot smaller.”

Engine cries, tires smoked, América hand braked the SUV around Marcelina and burned out west. Seconds later police cars flashed.

“Now that,” said João-Batista, “is what I call great TV.”

The Black Plumed Bird smoked in the edit suite. Marcelina hated that. She hated most things about the Black Plumed Bird, starting with the 195Os clothes she wore unironically in defiance of trend and fashion (there is no fashion without personal style, querida) and that nevertheless looked fantastic, from the real nylon stockings, with seams — never pantyhose, bad bad thrush — to the Coco Chanel jacket. If she could have worn sunglasses and a headscarf in the edit suite, she would have. She hated a woman so manifestly confident in her mode, and so correct in it. She hated that the Black Plumed Bird could exist on a diet of import vodka and Hollywood cigarettes, had never been seen taking a single stroke of exercise and yet would have emerged from an all-night edit radiating Grace Kelly charm and not skull-fucked on full-sugar guaraná. Most of all she hated that, for all her studious retro and grace, the Black Plumed Bird had graduated from media school one year ahead of Marcelina Hoffman and was her senior commissioning editor. Marcelina had bored so many researchers and development producers over Friday cocktails at Cafe Barbosa about the stunts and deviations the Black Plumed Bird had pulled to get head of Factual Entertainment at Canal Quatro that they could recite them now like Mass. She didn’t know the mike was still live and the guys in the scanner heard her say … (All together) Fuck me till I fart …

“The soundtrack is a key USP; we’re going for Grand Theft Auto/Eighties retro. That’s that English new romantic band who did that song about Rio but the video was shot in Sri Lanka.”

“I thought that one was ‘Save a Prayer,’’’ said Leandro, moving a terracotta ashtray with an inverted flowerpot for a lid toward the Black Plumed Bird. He was the only editor in the building not to have banned Marcelina from his suite and was considered as imperturbable as the Dalai Lama, even after an all-nighter ‘Rio’ was shot in Rio. Stands to reason.”

“Are you like some ninja master of early eighties English new romantic music?” Marcelina sniped. “Were you even born in 1984?”

“I think you’ll find that particular Duran Duran track was 1982,” the Black Plumed Bird said, carefully stubbing her cigarette out in the proffered ashtray and replacing the lid. “And the video was shot in Antigua, actually. Marcelina, what happened to the crew car?”

“The police found it stripped to the subframe on the edge of Mangueira. The insurance will cover it. But it shows it works; I mean, the format needs a little tweaking, but the premise is strong. It’s good TV.”

The Black Plumed Bird lit another cigarette. Marcelina fretted around the door to the edit suite. Give me it give me it give it just give me the series.

“It is good TV. I’m interested in this.” That was as good as you ever got from the Black Plumed Bird. Marcelina’s heart misfired, but that was likely the stimulants. Come down slowly, all say, and then a normal night’s bed; that, in her experience, was the best descent path out of an all-nighter. Of course if it was a commission, she might just go straight down to Cafe Barbosa, bang on Augusto’s door with the special Masonic Knock, and spend the rest of the day on the champagne watching roller boys with peachlike asses blade past. “It’s clever and it’s sharp and it hits all our demographics, but it’s not going to happen.” The Black Plumed Bird held up a lace-gloved hand to forestall Marcelina’s protests. “We can’t do it.” She tapped at the wireless control pad and called up the Quatro news channel. Ausiria Menendes was on the morning shift. Heitor would probably call her midday for a little lunch hour. The scuttling fears and anxieties of a middle-aged news anchor were the very un-thing she needed this day. A fragment seemed to have fallen out of her brain onto the screen: Police cars pulled in around a vehicle on the side of a big highway. São Paulo , said the caption. Cut to a helicopter shot of military cruisers and riot-control vehicles parked up outside the gate of Guarulhos Main Penitentiary. Smoke spiraled up from inside the compound; figures occupied the half-stripped roof with a bedsheet banner, words sprayed in red.

“The PCC has declared war with the police,” said the Black Plumed Bird. “There are at least a dozen cops dead already. They’ve got hostages in the jail. Benfica will start next and then … No, we can’t do it.”

Marcelina hung by the door, blinking softly as the television screen receded into a tiny jiggling mote at the end of a long, dim tunnel buzzing with cans of Kuat and amphetamines, Leandro and the Black Plumed Bird strange limousines playing bumper-tag with her. She heard her voice say, as if from a fold-back speaker, “We’re supposed to be edgy and noisy.”

“There’s edgy and noisy and there’s not getting our broadcast license renewed.” The Black Plumed Bird stood up, dusted cigarette ash from her lovely gloves. “Sorry, Marcelina.” Her nylon-hosed calves brushed electrically as she opened the edit suite door. The light was blinding, the Black Plumed Bird an amorphous umbra in the center of the radiance, as if she had stepped into the heart of the sun.

“It’ll blow over, it always does … ” But Marcelina had contravened her own law: Never protest never question never plead. You must love it enough to make it but not so much you cannot let it fall. Her chosen genre — factual entertainment — had a hit rate of a bends-inducing 2 percent, and she had grown the skin, she had learned the kung-fu: never trust it until the ink was on the contract, and even then the scheduler giveth and the scheduler taketh away. But each knock-back robbed of a little energy and impetus, like stopping a supertanker by kicking footballs at it. She could not remember when she had last loved it.

Leandro was closing down the pilot and archiving the edit-decision list.

“Don’t want to rush you, but I’ve got Lisandra in on Lunch-Hour Plastic Surgery. ”

Marcelina scooped up her files and hard drive and thought that it might be very very good to cry. Not here, never here, not in front of Lisandra.