Installment 1 Continued
“Johnny Fong, alias Chen Lu Chang, at your service.” I removed my hand from his quickly, as if I had touched something dirty and soiled. My face fell. This Asian American was the notorius Chang. I cleared my throat.
“You have a girl, an American girl for sale.” I said. My brows knit together.
I noticed his change in manner, just as surely as he had noted mine. He spoke again, with clenched fists, the amusement abandoning his face in an instant.
“You’re the reporter, ain’t ya?” He continued before I could answer. “You’re goddamn right I do. Found her in the Cidade Do Lixo last week." He had found her wandering in what Rio residents called 'Trash City.' He continued his tirade.
"You want her? It’s gunna cost. And you ain’t scaring me- you call es polícias, I will disappear, em um minuto…” He snapped his sharply filed fingernails to illustrate his point.
Disgust filled my throat like bile. This man, who had been an American at some point in time, was trafficking in small children, selling them into lives of sex and servitude, degradation. My throat cracked.
“I want to see her. Now.”
“Follow me. But I didn’t do that shit to her. I found her like that.” Jonny Fong drew back the Turkish carpet and led me through to a back room behind the curtain.
Inside the back room, the air was fetid. Sticks of burning incense, placed all in intervals around the small room, did nothing to cover up the smell. The entire space was filled with the stench of human fecal matter. I leaned heavily against the wall, forcing the vomit back down into my stomach.
Backed into a corner, clothed only in filthy rags that had once been an undershirt and white panties, sat the child. Awful bruises, in strange but discernable circular patterns, covered every visible inch of flesh. The child cowered violently, trying to climb closer into the corner when we looked in her direction.
Her hair, long and most likely a beautiful blonde when clean and brushed, was a tangled mess. Bits of refuse, leaves and twigs were apparent from across the room. As I slowly approached the girl, I could see fleas and lice crawling in the hair. Dried blood was crusted in the corners of her mouth and nose, trailing down her neck to pool in rusty red patch on the front of her undershirt. Excrement was pasted in thick globs on her legs and upper thighs, leftovers from the raw, uncovered sewers in Cidade do Lixo, the Trash City.
I reached my hand out to her, slowly, still a few feet away. I heard a sharp intake of breath from behind, from my expatriate Johnny Fong. I turned my head to look in his direction and screamed out as the child bit my outstretched hand.
I drew back my bleeding hand. A large chunk of flesh was missing between my pointer finger and thumb. Blood flowed copiously. The girl began to scream; not wail but scream in sheer, unadulterated terror, her eyes rolling white, insane.
“I didn’t do that to her.” Johnny Fong was afraid, too. “She was like that when I found her. I didn’t put those bruises on her, shit, I ain’t even touched her, I can’t get near her. Can’t clean her up.” Johnny raised his long robe to reveal a putrid, infected bite on his thigh just above his knee on the right leg. “She did that to me when I found her. Why you think no one else picked her up, man? She’s gone wild, like a dog.”
Fong motioned me to the other corner, where there was a small sink with running water. I used the filthy cake of soap, hoping it was better than nothing, wondering if my hand would end up looking like his leg. I needed to go to the hospital. But first the girl.
“What's wrong with her?” I asked aloud, more to my self, as I wondered if a few days abandoned in a city build of trash could turn a child ferral. Johnny answered.
“Look, man, something got to that little girl. When I first saw her, I called out to her. In Portuguese. She ran away. I chased after her, called using English. Nothing. Do you hear me?” His voice had risen. "Three oclock in the morning and that little girl didn't want nothing to do with me, even though I was tellin her we were gonna go and find her mommy and daddy- and I was yelling all this shit in English."
“She didn’t respond to English. She still won’t. The only reason I know for sure she's American is because, when she sleeps, which isn’t often, she talks.
“Down do Lixo," he continued, "they been talking about her for weeks now, about two weeks before I picked her up. They talk about her, and they whisper, ‘Espírito do sangue da noite.’ They make the sign of the cross.”
“Blood Spirit of the Night.” I translated.
