So, no more weeping for me. They had dried my lifeforce altogether with the substance of my tears.
But not my courage. Not my courage.
Paulo Pinto, noticing despair, said “I’m coming in, Mrs. Bennett. Let me take care of you.” That was a moment of victory for him. A pervaded beast, who actually mimicked what Renato had said days before. The will to protect. But from Pinto’s mouth those words assumed another meaning. To capture, to conceal, the will to cuff and to gag.
From that moment on the predator would take on its prey. Paulo Pinto had won the fight. He and all those under bribery had thrived. Because now they would have an uncontested criminal before them.
And the whole world would be able to notice it through the eyes of the helicopter.
When I touched my face, confused, and my eyes scurried side to side fetching pieces of my faulty memory, Paulo Pinto stepped ahead to enter the car. He would be the one to touch the asset before anyone else. And the hand that would touch the asset would not as much be the one of a corrupted cop as it would be of a dead one.
I mustered my energy to heave the pistol from the ground. The Glock seemed heavier, my quivering hands struggling to raise it from the blood puddle.
Paulo Pinto noticed my intention, he knew I would draw the gun and aim it at him. But he was stuck trying to get into the car. To come inside, he had to squeeze himself through the crack between the sliding doors. His left shoulder came in first, next his head, I raised the Glock, he tried to reach for his gun, but it was tucked into his hip still outside the car.
He didn’t make any sounds. From his throat only the gurgling of fear came out. He rammed himself through the door, metal rattling, and attempted to set his body free from that momentary prison. His shrunken retinas stared at me as my arm borrowed blood from other limbs so as to steady its fibers.
The G17 came to the point of firing. Its barrel swayed sideways as I tried to lock target on Paulo Pinto. And suddenly his size diminished. He was not a menacing man anymore. Wiggling through the crack of the door, his swollen belly clogging up the passage, he resembled a harmless seal who had been entangled in fishing nets, unable to set itself free, moaning and writhing underwater until its lungs got drowned by the cold sea.
Except that a seal’s death would be a pity.
There was no time for words. At the tip of the Glock barrel I witnessed Paulo Pinto outstretching his hand towards me, his body stuck at the door, forcing its way through. He faced his death, and that put him in a state of despair which I thought a beast like him would never enter. But that didn’t matter, not for me.
I’m not an asset. I pulled the trigger.
Instead of the hissing of a bullet gashing the air, the explosion of a concealed hammer, the sliding of a barrel, what I heard was a click. A click.
I squeezed it once again, but the trigger locked back, empty rounds in the magazine. Since I picked up the pistol the first time, I assumed its magazine had been fully loaded. Since then, I shot it seven or eight times at most, but now it was empty. Seventeen bullets gone from the cartridge. Unless it was not full to begin with. Was it?
So I dropped the gun back to the blood puddle. Paulo Pinto went back using his throat, bellowing in Portuguese, his eyes reddened in a bulge that evoked anger. Other cops hurried toward him, rifles pointed at me from outside the car, as some of them helped pluck the man out from the door.
And then my trip to Rio was over. A trip without a single sheet of paper written, where instead of getting stained with ink I got my clothes tarnished with blood, and instead of non-lethal weapons all I encountered was death.
The policeman pushed the sliding door open, certainly breaking some inner gears. Paulo Pinto, down to his knees, hand dipped in the red of the floor, got heaved up. Boots banged against the steel floor, rippling waves around as the steel plank deformed under the weight of the uniformed bandits.
Next I was face down against thick blood, a knee pressing my cheek against the floor, another hammering at my ribs as coarse hands turned my arms around to cuff my wrists. And now all I wanted was to faint, to sleep away, to be taken aback from the moment where unfairness and sheer violence prevailed. I closed my eyes, my body a sack of bones being pushed around, my nostrils smelling the iron from the floor, the iron from the blood, the iron from those hands and those guns, as I tried to pass away from that nightmare into the softer reality of dreams.
But I failed, because even though I wanted to preserve my mind from taking in the cowardice, the fraud of my surroundings, my nerves wanted me fully awake to react against potential threats, even though react I could no more. All because nerves can’t see the cuffs in the wrists, the threadbareness of limbs.
They carried my body out of the cable car. Four fully armed police officers hoisted my body across the cable car platform to the outskirts of Gloria Santa. My eyes depicted the scene in sparse frames, connected to each other through winks. The turnstile at the entrance of the platform. The crowd staring at me with curious yet oblivious eyes. The popcorn cart being fed with
