Strings Attached (33 page)

The dirty yellow-and-blue cab rolled to a stop at the curb, idling noisily.

“Are you sure about this?” the blond one asked his friend.

“Don’t be a dick, Ryan. We talked about this already. You said you wanted to do this, so let’s do it. We’ll just look around for a while, and then grab another cab outta here. I’ve got it with me,” he said as he patted his belt where the revolver was tucked, “so we’re safe. Everyone here’s fucked up on drugs anyhow, so what could happen?”

“Ten minutes,” Ryan demanded, staring him down. “We look around for ten minutes, and then we’re gone.”

“Twenty,” Kris replied.

They nodded at each other, and Ryan slipped a black ski cap over his yellow hair. Kris paid the driver and they scooted out of the car.

The city on the hill looked almost welcoming at night; the sparkling lights higher up, as well as the yellow glow coming from some of the nearby windows, beckoned the young men up from the street. And the darkness did a pretty good job of hiding the debris and the filth and the poverty and the ramshackle state of the shelters and cheap structures jammed together like some crazy urban jigsaw puzzle, as well as the suspicious stares of the dark faces that followed their trajectory up the stairs.

“I can’t believe people actually live like this,” Ryan nearly shouted over the din of Portuguese rap music, combined with dogs barking and people yelling and traffic honking in the street below.

“What the fuck is that smell?” Kris asked. “Jesus Christ, it smells like someone’s cookin’ shit for dinner.”

“Maybe they are.” Ryan laughed nervously. He glanced at his watch: they still had fifteen more minutes before they could flee. But then at least he could say that he’d been in the heart of a favela. He considered that for some American college students like himself, the exploration of the slums of Rio de Janeiro had become the bungee jumping of their generation. And he could see why. The fear he was experiencing at this moment was better than the thrill he got watching some slasher movie; his heart pounded and his flesh was crawling and every sense—especially his sight, hearing, and sense of touch—was heightened. It was like those few times in high school when he’d done meth, but without the phantom skin bugs.

He felt as terrified as he was giddy.

The unmistakable
thump-diddi-thump-diddi-thump
of faraway reggae music met their ears, as well as some raucous laughter. The boys turned to each other.

“Ever been to a party in Rio, my friend?” Kris asked.

“I’m not so sure if we should—” Ryan began to protest.

“Life is short,” Kris cut him off. “We’ll stick our heads in and say hi, smoke some ganja, and then leave. Just so we can say we did.”

“You are so fuckin’ crazy,” Ryan told him. And with that, they began picking their way along the labyrinth of paths toward the music.

Thump-diddi-thump-diddi-thump.
It grew louder and louder until they could tell that the party was just over a wall.

“How do we get over that?” Kris asked, pointing to the peeling plaster with the broken bottles set into cement on its ridge. “There’s no fuckin’ way.”

Ryan looked at his watch. They were already way past their agreed-upon twenty minutes. “Kris, let’s go.”

“No way, man. We’ve come this far. Let’s go back how we came and see if we can find a way around this wall.”

They made a U-turn and began their descent down a flight of stairs, where Kris discovered a path leading off to the right.

“Let’s try this one.” He pointed excitedly into the darkness.

“I’m leaving,” Ryan replied. “You do whatever the fuck you want, but I’m outta here.”

“Ryan,
come on!
”

He shook his head and began making his way down to the street, walking at first and then nearly running.

“Ryan!” Kris yelled after him, but when his friend didn’t turn around he began following him down. “OK, OK—just slow up!”

Ryan kept running.

“Wait! It’s not that way; it’s over this way!”

Ryan sprinted, terrified—there were no thrilling goose bumps or mild euphoria or anything even remotely good about this; he felt like a lost dog with its tail down running along a busy highway.

And then something tripped him. He flew chin first through the air, landed with a
whump
on his chest, and skidded headfirst along the ground, coming to a stop just as something sharp dug into his forearm. He couldn’t breathe.
Wind knocked out
, one part of his scrambled brain reported to the other. And in a moment, Kris was behind him, kneeling down.

“Jesus, are you OK?” Kris asked, suddenly panicked.

“Ow, oh,” Ryan answered from the ground, rubbing his arm.

“He’ll be OK,” a woman’s voice advised.
Or was it a man’s?

Kris heard the flick of a lighter, and then at once a masculine face adorned in heavy drag makeup—painted arching eyebrows, spider’s legs eyelashes, darkly rouged cheeks, and scarlet lips—emerged from the darkness. She held the yellow flame to what looked like a cigarette, and then he caught a whiff and realized that she had just sucked down a huge toke, which she held in her lungs for what seemed an eternity, and then blew out in a foglike plume of smoke.

Ryan looked up from where he was sprawled to see what was clearly a frail man dressed in tight jeans and a halter top wearing a long, frizzled, black Disco Diva wig.
This is a nightmare
, he thought as he touched his forearm and felt the warm, sticky wetness of his blood emanating from the raw, throbbing skin.
This is a shittin’ nightmare.
“What do you want?” he demanded.

Kris leaned over and held out his hand. “Come on,
let’s go!
” he whispered. “
Get up! Now!
”

“
Meninos
?” it asked in its creepy, sultry voice. Ryan’s eyes made out the silhouettes of four young men as they emerged from the darkness.

“Stand back!” Kris turned and shouted at them, pulling the gun from his belt.

But he didn’t shoot—he intended only to scare them.

POP-POP-POP
—accompanied by triple flashes of light—issued from a gun held by one of the young men. Kris jerked and spasmed as the bullets tore tiny, ragged tunnels through his body.

He slumped down beside Ryan, and his head hit the cement with a sickening crack.

Ryan’s chest heaved and he nearly hyperventilated as he threw his hands in the air and yelled, “
Don’t shoot me! Please don’t shoot me! Don’t shoot me! Please, don’t!
”

“You have the gun?” the creature asked him gently.

“No, no, no!” he exclaimed, waving his hands wildly and shaking his head.

It held out its hand. “Then come with us,” it offered.

Ryan refused the hand, and shook his friend’s shoulder instead. “Kris? Kris!”

The boy’s head only jiggled limply; his blank eyes stared at nothing.

Jesus Christ, he’s dead!

Ryan pushed himself up off the ground. “Where are we going?”

“You are losing blood,” it answered. “You must not lose the blood.” It began to pick its way slowly down the path into the darkness, limping as if one of its high heels had broken off.

Ryan followed, his hand applying pressure to the wound on his arm, with the
meninos
—mumbling cheerfully in their velvety, completely unintelligible tongue—right behind.

“Where are you taking me?” Ryan asked the creature, trying not to sound panicked. “Please, I haven’t done anything to you. Just tell me what you’re gonna do.” He looked around for someone who might be able to help him, but anyone who materialized either ducked into a doorway or skittered away at their approach.

It laughed casually. “Do not worry, if you do what we say. You should be much honored to have been chosen.”

Chosen?

They made their way down a set of stairs, past a shack where some girls were screaming with laughter, and stepped out onto a busy street. There Ryan spotted a big white Mercedes amidst the tiny cars; it looked like a cruise ship amongst dinghies. Leaning against the car was a heavily muscled black man, bulging arms crossed over his massive chest. When they got closer, he jerked to life and pulled the doors open for them.

The gun pressed into Ryan’s back, as well as the image of Kris lying dead, forced his cooperation. He sidled into the rear seat between the creature and two of the boys. After the other two climbed in front, the driver pulled away and began threading his way into Rio’s crazed nighttime traffic.

“I’m so sorry,” it told Ryan at last, withdrawing some bandages from a purse and handing them over. “I am Rosa.” She held out her gloved hand and Ryan shook it weakly. She smiled at him disingenuously, and Ryan saw that she wore badly stained dentures. The exaggerated crust of makeup on her skin made her look half silent film star, half mummy. “What is your name?”

“Ryan,” he mumbled icily, peeling the paper cloth from the adhesive. He pressed the bandages carefully to his wrist.

“You are
very
handsome, Mr. Ryan,” she said. She withdrew a black, Spanish-style lace fan from her purse, unfurled it with a
zzziiip,
and began fanning herself exaggeratedly with it.

“Where’m I going?” he demanded once again.

She parted her lips in what had once been, centuries ago, a good imitation of a coquettish smile. “You will meet my good friend. He is very fond of such handsome boys like you.”

He squinted disgustedly at her. “I’m not a queer!”

She shrugged her shoulders. “It no matter,” she said, withdrawing her cigarettes and lighter from her purse. “You make everyone so, so happy.”

“
I’m an American!
You can’t do this to me!”

“We all
American
, Mr. Ryan,” she said, placing a cigarette between her lips. “You
North
, we
South
; no difference—we all laugh at the same Jim Carrey.”

The driver raced the Mercedes through the crush of nighttime traffic toward the outskirts of the city, where the favelas and apartment buildings and businesses and hotels gave way to high-rise condominiums, and then merged into sprawling houses behind gates reinforced by lush tropical overgrowth. Ryan felt the road begin to climb and twist and bank from side to side as they came to a place where the land dropped precipitously on one side all the way down to the water; on the other side only a tall stretch of iron fence ran parallel to the street in either direction as far he could see.

The Mercedes slowed before making a sharp left into a driveway, where three men holding Uzis stopped them. The driver lowered the back window; with a reassuring nod from Rosa, the twin gates parted for them.

As they motored upward, Ryan saw the shimmering September crescent moon reflected upon the black bay far away to his right, as well as the gargantuan Cristo Redentor lit up like a psychotic hallucination just beyond them on the mountain peak to the left. Finally an immense, bland white structure loomed, and the Mercedes ascended the last section of steeply inclined driveway before stopping at the top under a porte cochere.

Rosa opened her door and got out, as did the silent henchmen. But Ryan didn’t budge. “Come,” she demanded. Reluctantly, he scooted out of the seat and stood, secretly relieved to stretch his tension-cramped legs.

He looked around.

This mansion or compound or abandoned library reminded him of that place he’d visited once with his parents while on vacation in Los Angeles—what was it called? The Music Center. Those three huge white buildings: the Someone’s First-and-Last-Name Pavilion and that cool round forum place and then that other theater—with the fountains and the shallow reflecting pools and the brilliant uplights and those dizzying concrete colonnades that surrounded the place like a rectangular aerial racetrack. That’s kind of what this looked like. Only smaller.
And dirtier
. The reflecting pools were olive green with algae, and vines crept up the chipped white walls; where there were rows of lights at the base of the buildings, many were burned out; the concrete below his feet was buckled in places and weeds flourished between the cracks.

He could tell the place had been grand once. Elegant, even.

But now it just looked spooky.

He followed Rosa through a pair of glass doors into a great terrazzo-floored entry hall, where he saw a trio of dusty, half-lit chandeliers overhead. His eyes traced the ceiling over to a cantilevered stairway, which appeared to defy gravity as it zigzagged down three stories over a burbling indoor reflecting pool.

“Dear Rosa,” came a robust baritone from high up. Ryan craned his head to see, standing at the top of the staircase, a tall man in a white robe. He was overly tanned and perfectly bald and wore a series of gold chains with medallions around his neck. “I see that, once again, your unerring eye has found another treasure,” he said. And then he practically floated, smiling broadly, down the stairs.

Another treasure?

Ryan looked away, feigning casual disinterest. But as the man drew nearer, he found himself backing up—he was huge.

“Don’t be afraid, handsome one,” he told Ryan, grasping his chin and tipping his head back gently, so they were eye to eye.

Ryan tried to look away, but something about the man’s friendly, tobacco-colored eyes intrigued him.

“A blond?” he asked Rosa without taking his gaze from Ryan’s. “Never have we had a blond Januário.”

Rosa pulled at her own black hair. “The color is no problem, Dom Fabiano.”

“Then you must work quickly,” he instructed soothingly. “Our wonderful celebration is only hours away.”