He raised his eyebrows.

“A wannabe gangster named Ernesto.”

His accent was thick Portuguese, his English broken. “Never hear of this man.”

“He’s kidnapped two associates of mine. He wants twenty thousand dollars for their return.”

“Is police matter. I not police.”

“I think you can help me more. I think you can guarantee my friends come home safe.”

He looked away.

“There’s forty thousand dollars in the bag.”

“I am not bank.”

“The money is for their safe return. And for protection in case this happens again. Here in Rio, and in São Paulo.”

With his head, he motioned to the two men. One opened the bag and began counting the money. The other jerked me up from my chair, frisked me, then reached inside my shirt, making sure I wasn’t wired. I wasn’t stupid enough to carry a gun into a meeting like this.

The man who frisked me nodded at O Mestre, who rose and left the room. I had held back on the fact that I spoke Portuguese, hoping it would provide an advantage, but these men seemed to have a language all their own, communicating entirely with their eyes and slight motions of their heads.

The man holding the bag took twenty thousand dollars out of it.

His associate said to me, in Portuguese, “The fee is twenty thousand dollars per year. You will return to this room next year on this day with payment.”

I nodded. So they knew more about me than I suspected.

“Tonight, you will go to the bus stop. Here is what will happen.”

Exactly two hours after the thugs had taken Yuri and Lin off the street and assaulted Sylvia, I stood in the drizzling rain, wearing a fedora and a black trench coat. Rio was hot year-round, but in August it was coldest, and rainy. The wind from the Atlantic carried a cold front from Antarctica into the city, past the cranes that were building skyscrapers by the dozen, erasing the old city, erecting a shiny new one.

People from Brazil’s countryside were pouring into Rio. Illegal immigrants came too, all in search of jobs and a better life. Large slums called favelas grew like ant colonies, seeming to spread overnight. In the glow of the streetlamp, I could see the shanties stretching up a green-forested mountainside, a pocket of poverty in the vast city. From my vantage point, they looked like tiny cardboard boxes stacked at the feet of the Christ the Redeemer statue, which towered over all the people below.