A Vine in the Blood (33 page)

Except,
Silva thought,
for two young women, shot to death as
they kneeled in terror on a kitchen floor.

The Director was looking at him, waiting for a response to his question. Silva groped for something to say.

And then didn’t need one, because Sampaio’s telephone rang.

Author’s Notes

F
OOTBALL (CALLED SOCCER IN
the USA) is played by more people, in more places, than any other game in the world. The FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) the body that governs the sport internationally, is composed of 208 national associations, 16 more than there are countries represented in the United Nations, three more than in the International Olympic Committee.

The World Cup, a battle for the most-prized trophy in the history of sport, is played out every four years and always in a different country. In 2010, when the Cup was held in South Africa, 204 countries competed to fill 32 slots. Close to one billion people watched the final game live on television.

In 2014, for the first time in sixty years, the Cup will be held in Brazil, the only country to have participated in every Cup since its inception, and the only country to have won the trophy five times.

In Brazil, the kidnapping of a football star’s mother is, by no means, a rare occurrence. Three members of the Brazilian National Team who participated in the 2010 World Cup were so victimized (Robinho, Luis Fabiano and Grafite). All the players expressed their willingness to pay ransom, and all the victims were returned unharmed.

“The Artist”, Tico Santos, is a fictional character and should in no way be confused with “The Phenomenon”, Ronaldo Luís Nazário de Lima, one of the greatest players the sport has ever produced. It’s true that Ronaldo, like Tico, has had a number of problems with women, and that he once married a top-model, who took him for a bundle and initiated divorce proceedings within a week—but that’s purely coincidental.

Some readers might find it difficult to accept that a judge might be forced to take refuge in his own courthouse. It is, nevertheless, true. My character, Pedro Cataldo, is based on Odilon de Oliveira, a Brazilian federal judge. Oliveira, who, in a given year, brought more organized crime figures to justice than any other judge in the country, was condemned to death by the criminal elements he was sentencing and, at the time of this writing, has spent fifteen months living in a court house in the town of Ponta Porã, close to the frontier between Brazil and Paraguay. Oliveria, 56 years old, sleeps on the floor of his office and is under constant guard by the Federal Police. The price on his head has risen to half a million dollars.

The
jogo do bicho
also exists. It’s an enormously popular illegal lottery, a feature of Brazilian life for over 100 years.

Here’s how the game works: the numbers between 0 and 100 are divided into 25 ascending number groups, each corresponding to a different animal. (In Portuguese,
Jogo do bicho
means “animal game”.)

Numbering begins begin with the ostrich (01, 02, 03 and 04) and ends with the cow (97, 98, 99 and 00).

Let’s suppose you bet on the ostrich. The following day, to discover if you’ve won or lost, you open a newspaper and check some previously stipulated (and totally unpredictable) number. It might be, for example, the last two numbers of the total volume of the previous day’s trading on Rio de Janeiro’s stock exchange.

If those numbers are 01, 02, 03 or 04, you’ve won—as has everyone else who played the ostrich.

You can buy your tickets at news vendors, in stores that sell cigarettes, from thousands of different locations—and also from people who sell them on the street.

You cash-in the same way.

People trust the game because, when it comes to payouts at least, the mobsters who run it are scrupulously honest. They have to be. The continued success of their business depends on it.

And they are, indeed, the major patrons of Brazil’s great samba schools, something they have long regarded as a social obligation.

The game’s closest equivalent, in the United States, is the “numbers racket”, also referred to as the “policy racket”.

I have treated the two felons in Chapter Fifteen (the scene where Silva and his men raid the warehouse and liberate a Lear’s Macaw) rather lightheartedly, but the crime of animal smuggling is far from a joke. It is, in fact, one of the earth’s more serious environmental problems.

After habitat loss, animal smuggling is the biggest reason why one-third of the world’s wildlife is in danger of extinction. According to the World Wildlife Fund, the illicit trade in animals ranks just behind the illicit trade in drugs and firearms. No one knows how many animals are stolen from Brazil’s forests each year, but it is thought to be in the tens of millions.

Finally, the Lear’s Macaw is as rare as I have described it. They are to be found in captivity in various places around the world, but the Brazilian government has never issued an export license for a single one.