Ilmar Penna Marinho Junior - The beast of a thousand years

When they were saying goodbye, with a long kiss by the elevator door, Lisa made him swear that he would never again think about his father’s outrageous anger, which had led her to a panic she had never felt before. And, before leaving, he, with an ardently seductive smile, made her promise that they would meet later at a motel, since his wife and son were absent from Rio in Itaipava and would not arrive until the following day. He was adamant that it had to be in a motel. Lisa accepted the offer, not knowing where she had found the courage to accept the great challenge of fate.

Chapter 3

LONG BEFORE HE MET LISA on the first consultation, Leonardo had already chosen to live in the shadows and duplicity. It wasn’t easy to maintain a seeming composure as an honest accountant. Those who knew him for his discreet looks, walking hurriedly on the streets, wouldn’t believe that, behind those steps, there was another man with secret things happening in his clandestine life. But this other identity, well hidden, hadn’t come up overnight, nor did it stem from the environment in which he had been raised, in the comfort of an upper-middle-class home, with a pampered childhood and good schools. He had always attributed to “circumstances” the fact that he did not follow his father’s politically correct example — a good man who died in ruin because he committed suicide.

As much as he liked Math and the magic of numbers, his father wanted him to be a lawyer. Not wanting to upset him, Leo got into Law School, but he also attended Accounting Sciences at night. At first, his father frowned upon this, but then accepted his adult son’s wish to fulfill his dream of registering the flow of money. At that time, he was unhappy, working as an intern at a law firm of a friend of the old man. He hated going to the forum.

After his father died and he graduated as an accountant, he decided to open an accounting office on the sixth floor of a shopping mall near Saens Peña Square. His clients were some condos managements and small shops in Tijuca. But, before that, Leonardo had already gotten involved in “petty crimes” and had things facilitated by chance, by the unavoidable, which made him interact with the worst kind of people. Through that scum, he embraced the unusual opportunities that made him powerful and respected for the simple fact that he made a lot of money, although he began to live on the razor’s edge.

He would give helpful aid on the accounting schemes, and then began to accept well-paid, unscrupulous “small tasks” from his close friend, the head of a drug-dealing group in the state of Rio de Janeiro. He had met him at a dive bar, which had a hidden room where people played truco. They soon got along when they won a hand in the game. When he realized it, he was up to his neck in the bookkeeping of the drug dealing ledger. That was not what he wanted from fate. He dreamt about being a corporate accountant who would give his father a lot of pride. The so-called “circumstances” and the bad influences gave life to the other Leo.

He walked on the street, wearing, as usual, a blue sweatshirt, white t-shirt, loose pants, and sneakers with six shock absorbers. No one suspected the quiet intern who had taken a leave of absence on the fourth year of Law School. After his father’s death, Leonardo would become known as “Big Head” on the sidelines of the gang run by the man also known as “Skull”.

In all those years, no one suspected the hard-working, skilled gang accountant. And, unlikely as it may seem, neither his family nor his girlfriend Ana, knew about his criminal activities and how he had become such close friends with one of the leaders of the drug dealing, whose longitudinal and cadaverous face did justice to the dreaded nickname, “Skull”.

The fact is that Leonard became the drug lord’s partner for the card game on Fridays. Throughout this gambling experience, he met his future mates: a killer called Runner, men who ran illegal gambling, drug dealers, gunmen, “friendly” policemen and military outsourced from the payroll, gigolos, prostitutes. The skinny Skull, who wore size 14 shoes, knew how to reward him for rendered services for the traffic bookkeeping and, even more royally, for perfectly executing the bribes to inspectors and authorities. Truth be told, it had been Leonardo, at a time when he was not yet taking huge amounts of aspirin, who organized the main “tip jars” for the bribes and “deals” that explained how Skull kept working without being arrested or exposed by law enforcement, coincidentally when the generalized impunity and urban violence in the city were widespread.

Leonardo never forgot how the definitive friendship between them was sealed. He kept the decisive dialogue in his memory.

“I’ve been wanting someone like you for a long time, man.”

“Hey, I’m not the only one around. There’s a shitload of guys.”

“It’s been hard to find an honest white dude. The dopeheads of the gang weren’t born rich, didn’t go to school and haven’t learned shit in life. They were born looking like trash. You have a good head on your shoulders, you’re cool. You command respect. You were already born different, prepared for thug life, you know?

“Different? What do you mean, different?”

“You know what you want from life, brother. You’re the only one I can trust”, said Skull, taking a drag from his cigarette.

He really could trust the helpful Leonardo, who hadn’t come from the streets, had always refused to distribute any kind of drug and considered it something that only “crazy” or “insane” people did. The tasks he agreed to do, a little reluctantly at first, but that he would later do with pleasure and talent, were being the gang’s accountant and the distributor of the “dough” in police stations, government departments, and “to the men on the top”, at a time when drug trafficking was taking over the slums in Rio, and Brazil became definitively a route for drugs as a distribution point to Europe.

Ana Magalhães Castro, whom Leonardo dated, came from a traditional family of Rio de Janeiro politicians. He won her over with the most childish of smiles, used to declare that only she existed in his solitary life. She believed so much in this that, after dating for a short period, she got married wearing white and a veil in the church where she would always go to pray. And on the walk down the aisle, her father whispered to her, saying he was sure that he was giving her to a “lucky man” to make her very happy, despite him being “a sad lad”. The girl was twenty-years-old when she dropped out of her Literature studies because she got pregnant. She never wrote her poems again; she traded them, during her pregnancy, for the embroidery on the baby’s layette.

Ana only learned about the office at Saens Peña Square on the day her son Lucca was born. She thought Leo was still a rookie lawyer. The accountant justified it saying that he hadn’t told her anything because it was a surprise. Nobody knew he had graduated in Accounting Sciences. At that time, Leonardo already had his underground secrets well-hidden. So much so that it was normal for him to become glum and vent with his wife during dinner, when his son Lucca was still a baby.

“I need money, a lot of money, to keep fighting.”

She never suspected this obsession, nor did she suspect the “circumstances”, the harmful friendships, let alone the demonic “hidden forces” that enthralled the greedy, vengeful Big Head.

Ana embroidered flowery pillowcases and tablecloths, delicate works of art, with patience and taste. She got used to seeing her husband, year in and year out, earning more and more money, thanks to his supposedly total dedication to Accounting Sciences. Their son Lucca grew up living in Andaraí, then in Grajaú, and, when he was already a teenager, he lived in Flamengo with a view to the park. Now they had just moved to a four-bedroom apartment in Barra. Oddly enough, Ana never had the curiosity to visit her husband in the old nor in the new office at Downtown Shopping Mall.