Carioca Fletch

Seven

“Can you buy me a cup of coffee?”

Joan Collins Stanwyk.

She was waiting for him, smoking a cigarette, at a little table in the forecourt of The Hotel Yellow Parrot when he came back from his run. There were three crushed cigarette butts in the ashtray on the table.

Her eyes ran over the sweat gleaming on his shoulders, chest, stomach, even on his legs.

Having finished his run with a sprint, he was breathing heavily.

“That’s the least I can do for you,” he said.

Two miles up the beach there had been a crew of men dressed in orange jackets fanned out like a search party cleaning the beach, and Fletch had run to them, and back. As he ran barefoot, he avoided several macumba fires smoldering from the night before. And he passed many dead wallets, purloined, stripped and dropped. Even at that hour, many other people were running on the beach. And a group of Brazilian men easily in their sixties were playing a full game of soccer barefooted in the sand.

Coming back across Avenida Atlantica, the roadway was almost unbearably hot on his bare feet, and it was not yet seven o’clock in the morning.

The bar, which was the middle door at the front of The Hotel Yellow Parrot, of course was closed. Fletch pressed the service bell beside the door.

“Let’s see if that brings someone.” He sat across from Joan at the little table.

He folded his slippery arms across his slippery chest.

The forecourt, with thick green bushes headhigh on three sides, had brilliant streaks of morning sunlight in it.

This morning Joan Collins Stanwyk looked less the California empress. She was dressed in a light, tan slacks suit, white silk shirt, and sandals. Her hair was not in its usual impeccable order. Her face looked haggard; her eyes sleepless. She might still have been suffering jet lag; she might also have been suffering from her martinis and her cigarettes and, of course, from her recent widowhood.

“How are you?” he asked.

“I’ve been better.”

“Did you come here to find me? I mean, to Rio?”

“Of course.”

“How did you work it out? Where I went?”

“Did you forget Collins Aviation has its own security personnel? Mostly retired detectives who are very good at finding out things? Although, I admit, sometimes not fast enough.” There was no humor in the irony of her statement. “And did you forget that I was born, bred, and educated to do a job? And that I’m rather good at it?”

She was the daughter of John Collins, who had built a mammoth airplane company out of his own garage in California. Wife, now widow, of Alan Stanwyk, the late chief executive officer of that company. A famous socialite, executive hostess for both her father and her husband, famous blonde, long-legged, tennis-playing Californian beauty who had known her function in that world of fast cars and slow parties and had once, shortly before, surprised Fletch at how well she had performed, or tried to perform.

“I haven’t forgotten.”

A waiter appeared.

Fletch ordered coffee for Joan and guaraná for himself.

She said, “You’re absolutely gorgeous, wet with sweat. You have the same build as Alan had, but there is so much more light in your skin.”

He tried to shave the sweat off his chest and stomach with the side of his index finger. “I don’t have a towel. I’ve been running. I—”

A slight jerk of her head stopped him. There was something smoky about her eyes. He was looking at a woman whose life, whose whole world, had been deeply violated by circumstances, probably for the first time in her life.

“If you came here for a full explanation—”

She stopped him. “I need your help.” Her hand shook before she put her fingers against her cheek and stroked the area in front of her ear. “Let’s forget for now why I came here. Ironically enough, You’re the only person I know in Rio, and I have to ask you to help me.” Her voice was very soft.

She collected herself while the waiter set coffee in front of her, the can of guaraná and a glass in front of Fletch.

“I knew you were here,” Fletch said. “I saw you yesterday on the avenida. You were wearing a green silk dress. And carrying a handbag.”

“Oh, yes,” she said bitterly.

“I hid from you.” He poured his guaraná. “I was just so surprised to see you. How did you find out where I was staying?”

“I just called all the best hotels, and asked for Mister Irwin Maurice Fletcher. I knew, of course, you could afford the very best accommodations.” Again, naturally, there was no humor in her irony. “Just went down the list of first-class hotels. When I asked for you here, at The Yellow Parrot, they rang your room. No answer. So I knew where you were staying.”

“Why are you sitting in the forecourt waiting for me at six-thirty in the morning?”

“I had no choice. It was the next thing to do, the only thing do to. After the most horrible night… I walked down from the hotel. While I was still up the block I saw you starting out for your run, going across the street. I wasn’t about to run after you up the beach.”

“No.”

“I was robbed,” she said.

“Oh.”

“You say that with such aplomb. As if you knew it.”

“I guessed it.”

“How?”

“You don’t know about Rio?”

“I guess not enough.”

“It’s a marvelous place.”

“Terrific,” she said.

“You going to give me all the details?”

“You sound like you’ve already heard them.”

“I think I have.”

“Robbed twice.”

“Not a record.”

“Robbed of everything.” A tear appeared in the corner of her eye.

“Baptized,” he said.

“Last night, after I found out which hotel you were in, I considered coming and camping out in the lobby until you showed up, but from what I’ve heard of Rio nightlife, that didn’t make much sense.”

“No.”

“At least not for such a healthy, wealthy, attractive young man.”

At first Fletch thought he would let this irony pass over him. Then he said, “I wasn’t in.”

“So I went out myself. I went for a walk. Right along here.” She indicated the avenida beyond the hedge. “Sat in a café, had a drink, watched the people, listened to the drums. Walked further, to another café, had a drink. Couldn’t pay the bill. My purse was gone.”

“Yes.” In his saying just “yes,” Fletch heard an echo of Otavio Cavalcanti. Yes. Of course. What is there to understand?

“My wallet was gone. All my cash. My credit cards.” Tears now were in both her eyes. “My passport.”

“It happens to everyone I have heard of,” he said.

“My necklace was gone!” She seemed astounded. “A diamond pin I was wearing on my dress!”

“Yes.”

“What bothers me most is that pictures of Alan in my wallet are gone. Of Alan and Julia.” Julia was her young daughter. “No matter what you may think, I wanted those pictures of Alan. They’re irreplaceable.”

Tears rolled down her cheeks.

Fletch said: “Yes.”

She reached for a purse that wasn’t there. “Damn! I don’t even have a handkerchief.”

Fletch shrugged his bare shoulders. “I don’t even have a sleeve.”

She sniffed.

“I explained to the waiter as best I could that I couldn’t pay him. I’d been robbed. That I would come back and pay him today.” Joan Collins Stanwyk sniffed again. “I swear, Fletch, all during my walk, nobody even touched me. No one bumped into me. How did they get my necklace? The pin off my dress? There wasn’t even a tear in my dress. I felt nothing!”

“The future of Brazil,” said Fletch, “is in surgery.”

“I went back to my hotel.”

“And your room had been burglarized.”

“How did you know?”

“You said you’d been robbed twice.”

“Everything!” she said. “Everything except my clothes. My jewel case, my traveler’s checks.”

“Everything.”

“Everything. I haven’t a thing. This morning I don’t have a dollar, a cruzeiro, a credit card, a piece of jewelry.”

Fletch said: “Yes.”

“I went downstairs to the hotel manager immediately. The assistant manager, that time of night. He came to the room with me, clucked and hissed and t’ched like a barnyard, figured the thieves must have come in over the balcony, scolded me for leaving the balcony door unlocked—Good heavens, I’m on the ninth floor. It was a warm night.”

“Took no responsibility.”

“I spent hours with him in his office. He said I should have left all my valuables in the hotel safe. Apparently they handed me a slip of paper when I checked in with that written on it. He took me back to my room and showed me the sign on the inside of the door advising me to lock the balcony doors, to put my valuables in the hotel safe. We went back to his office. I filled out lists of things that are missing. I kept asking him to call the police. For some reason, he never called the police.”

“No reason for disturbing them.”

“What do you mean?”

“They’ve heard the story, too.”

“Fletch, I was robbed. Of thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of things. Money, jewelry, my credit cards.”

Again Joan Collins Stanwyk sniffed.

“The police would know all that.”

“Will you help me?”

“Of course.”

She clutched her hands in her lap. “I feel so violated.”

“Disoriented?”

“Yes.”

“Stripped naked?”

“Yes!”

“Totally lost without all your possessions?”

“Yes, yes!”

Fletch sat back in his chair. His sweat had dried in the air. “I think that’s part of the idea.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Who are you?”

“I am Joan Collins Stanwyk.”

“Can you prove it?”

Her eyes searched the stone floor of the forecourt. “As a matter of fact, I can’t. No credit cards. No checkbooks. No passport.”

“How does it feel?”

“How does what feel?”

“To be whatever you are right now.”

Her eyes narrowed. “I did not come to you for psychological therapy, Mister I. M. Fletcher.”

“Thought I’d throw it in. No extra charge.”

“I need money.”

“Why?”

“I want to get out of that damned hotel. I want to pay my bill and get out of that damned hotel. I don’t even have taxi fare.”

“Okay. But why don’t you call home? To California? Your father?”

“He’s on his yacht. The Colette. Trying to recuperate from Alan’s—”

“And you came here, to look for me.”

She shrugged. “Recuperation.”

“Doing your job. As you see it.”

“Yes.”

“Striving. Being Joan Collins Stanwyk, come hell or high water.”

“Are you going to help me? I want to go—”

“Tell me. Your family has offices stuffed with people looking out for you. Security personnel. Lawyers. Accountants. Why haven’t you called them?”

Her head lowered. After a moment, she said, softly, “It’s Saturday. In California, it’s before dawn Saturday morning.”

He laughed. “And you can’t wait? You’d rather come to me, whom you pursued to Rio de Janeiro, than wait until your daddy’s offices open?”

“I want to get out of that hotel. That man made me so angry.”

“It is essential to you, under the circumstances, that you talk to someone who knows who you are.”

She blinked at him. “What?”

He put his forearms on the table. “I was robbed. Wallet, cash, driver’s license. Not my passport. My watch. My Timex watch.”

“Within the first twenty-four hours you were here?”

“Within the first six hours. People warn you, but you cannot believe it. You have to go through it yourself. It’s a baptism.”

“What do you mean, baptism?”

“You learn to use the hotel safe, carry what money you need immediately in your shoe. And to not wear jewelry. Not even a watch.”

“Fletcher, I lost thousands of dollars, everything I have with me.”

“You lost your identity.”

“Yes. I did.”

“You lost your past.”

“Yes.” Joan Collins Stanwyk was frowning at the bushes.

“Do you feel more free?”

Now she was frowning at him. “What?”

“Now you are equal, you see.”

“The people who stole my possessions aren’t equal.”

“Oh, sure. That’s widely dispersed. Come here a moment, will you?”

He got up from the table and stood in the opening of the hedge.

After a moment, she got up and came to him.

Together they looked across the city sidewalk where people were beginning to go about their daily business, across the wide city avenue filling up with taxis and commuters, to the beach, beginning to fill up with people of all ages walking, running, jumping, doing pull-ups, swimming.

Drums could be heard from down the road.

“There’s not a pair of long trousers in sight, is there?” he asked.

“Very few shirts,” she said.

“No wallets. No identities. No class paraphernalia: no jewelry.” He looked at her tan slacks suit, silk blouse, high-heeled open-toed sandals. “They have their bodies. Their eyes, their arms, their legs, their backs.”

“Their fingers, damn them.”

“I think we’re being told something.”

“Have you gone Brazilian? In just a month?”

“Naw. I won’t be carioca until I can walk across the avenida in bare feet at high noon.”

She turned to go back to the table. “Sounds to me like you’re giving some fantastic intellectual, political rationale for their out-and-out thievery.” She sat down at the table. “But I guess you have every reason to.”

“To what?”

“To understand.”

“This lady I know …” Fletch too sat down at the table. “She writes novels. I doubt I’ve got it straight, but she told me there is some ancient ritual here, a religious ritual, for which the food, in order to be acceptable by the ritual-masters, must be stolen.”

Joan Collins Stanwyk sighed. “Enough of this. I’ve been robbed. I need help. If I weren’t desperate, I wouldn’t have come to you.”

“I guess so.”

“Will you please come to the police station with me?”

“If that’s what you want.”

“I must report this.”

“It won’t do any good.”

“Fletcher, I’ve been robbed, of thousands of dollars—”

“You have to pay a fee.”

“What?”

“To report a robbery to the police, you have to pay a fee.”

“You have to pay the police money to tell them you were robbed?”

“It’s a lot of paperwork for them.”

She swallowed. “Is that all it is? Paperwork?”

“Yes. I think so. In most cases.” He scraped his chairlegs on the stone pavement. “You are warned, you see. Robbery here is not uncommon. No one can deny that. It is also common in New York, Mexico City, and Paris.”

She was beginning to have to squint into the sunlight to see him. A beam of sunlight was coming through a break in the hedge. “But here, you say, they’re doing you a favour to rob you.”

“You might as well think that.”

“They rob you with philosophy.”

“It’s not considered such a bad thing to relieve you of your possessions, your identity, your past. What is yours is theirs is mine is ours…”

Her white face was stonelike. Her jaw was tight.

He said, “I’m just trying to make you feel better.”

“Fletcher, are you going to let me have some money? Right away?” Her fingers gripped her temples. Her whole head shivered. “At the moment, we won’t go into the source of that money.”

“Of course. I’ll bring some to your hotel. I have to get out of these wet shorts and shower and get them to open the hotel safe.”

“Very well.”

When she stood, she looked very pale and she seemed to sway on her feet. She closed her eyes a moment.

“You all right?”

“I’ll be all right.”

“What hotel are you in?”

“The Jangada.”

“Very posh.”

“Bring lots of money.”

“We’ll have breakfast together. At your hotel.”

“Yes,” she said. “Come straight to my room with the money. Room nine-twelve.”

“Right.” He had been in a bedroom of hers before.

He walked with her to the break in the hedge.

“I’d send you back in a taxi,” he chuckled, “but I’m not wearing shoes.”

Distantly, she said, “I’d rather walk.”