Rio Noir

Argentine Taxi by Arthur Dapieve

Cosme Velho

Down below, for the moment there is nothing but filth, darkness, and cold. There is still an hour, half an hour at least, until the sun, dissipating the mist, washes away the night, bathes the buildings with light, and heats up this rock. At times the wind blows, and I can see a piece of the bridge over the bay. At times I am enveloped in the clouds that shroud the head and outspread arms of the gigantic statue at my back. The sky is silent, empty.

I have arrived before everyone else. I came in my car, which struck me as making more sense. The shift was about to end when a buddy of mine, a watchman at the monument, called. In the twilight, as the wind grew stronger, he had approached the wall, looked down expecting to see the lake, and spotted the body. A woman, blond, between thirty and forty years old. The location indicated a fall not short enough that she could escape injury nor high enough that she would be killed instantly. When I got there, my friend told me that the wind had “muffled her moans.” A lovely image for a damned ugly thing. I wait for the woman to show any signs of life.

More people than one imagines climb this mountain to practice free-falling, especially in seasons other than summer, to reduce the chances that some benevolent soul will grab them and chain them to this great and cruel stone. The press doesn’t publish anything so as not to give crazy people ideas and to avoid offending the church. Imagine the headline: “Adolescent Virgin Commits Suicide at the Christ Statue.” Blasphemy? The work of the devil? No, a guy doesn’t believe a fucking thing anymore, not even in the devil, to jump from a height of over seven hundred meters. In my profession, you either believe in everything or nothing at all. My own modus operandi would be a bullet in the brain. If the angle is right, there’s no way to miss. Bye bye.

The wind taunts me, opening holes in the clouds but in the wrong places. Another piece of the bay. The hill over there. A group of soulless buildings. Even a block of the cemetery. But the body, which would be good to catch a glimpse of, doesn’t materialize, remaining invisible to me. I’m no expert, but for lack of anything better I examine the wall. There’s no mark to suggest that anyone had stood there before jumping. If she was wearing high heels, would she have removed them before carrying out the act? They might be there, just beyond the wall. The fog prevents me from seeing whether their shoes are there or not. Maybe they’re hidden, tossed into a bush. Or else she jumped without taking off her shoes. In that case, would they have come off midair? Were they flat shoes? What kind of women wears flats? A very tall woman?

Then, as if they had tapped into my thoughts, the clouds call a truce. I stretch my neck and glimpse the body. Even at twenty, twenty-five meters I can see that, yes, she is very tall. Long-boned. Really large. The sight is interrupted before I can comprehend what seems wrong about her position. But I can already tell that something went very wrong. Besides, of course, all the other things that had gone wrong earlier and thrust the creature from this world. Instead of plummeting, the body evidently hit the rock, perhaps because of a gust of wind, and got caught in the low vegetation of an outcropping from the nearly vertical wall.

I continue looking down, grieving, for some ten minutes, even after the blanket of fog has closed in again. I regret leaving my sunglasses in the drawer. The low sun blinds me. I should have played dead and let my morning counterpart handle it. Shit, what would it matter? Is there still time to sneak away? No, there isn’t.

Aguiar, from Forensics, a thin guy with a ridiculous mustache, appears at my side, taps me on the shoulder, and asks: “Too early or too late?”

“Too late. I should already be home, taking a shower, resting my head on a pillow. There—” I say, and make a vague gesture with my chin.

“Bad luck.”

“Not as bad as the woman down there.”

He looks beyond the wall. Mutters, “Can’t see a damn thing. You sure it’s a woman?”

Of course not. At night all cats are gray. The day didn’t dawn right, with the fog. The body lies in a purgatory between yesterday and today. The woman, or whatever it may have been, didn’t see the sun rise on the other side of the ocean.

“Of course. Blond, a short black dress.”

“You’ve just described an Argentine taxi.”

“Or a short brown dress, dark blue, I don’t know. It’s impossible to tell at this distance and in this lighting—”

“Argentine taxi!” he laughs.

“Okay, Aguiar, what’s so funny? What if it’s an Argentine taxi? Shit, you know that 90 percent of the women in this city dye their hair blond. Why wouldn’t this one be yellow on top and black underneath? Even black women are blond these days, like Beyoncé.”

“Beyonwhat?”

“A brand of hair dye,” I say, dispirited.

Forensics people live in a bubble of blood that Beyoncé, Kelly Key, no hottie penetrates. That’s a lie. Once in a while they find a recently deceased chick appealing, some poor thing killed in bed in an embarrassing pose, her pussy spread open, and ask each other, “Would you do her like that?” None of them would reject her. “She’s English!” they say, laughing. A warped sense of humor.

“Years ago I arrived at the most disgusting crime scene I’ve ever witnessed,” I begin, recalling more for myself than for Aguiar. “Someone had quartered a middle-aged bachelor with a large knife, the kind butchers use, and a pair of shears for cutting up poultry. Any butcher or surgeon was a priori excluded from the list of suspects. The job had been really sloppy, a shitload of blows that ignored the body’s joints and practically sought out the hardest bones to sever. That kitchen on Soares Cabral... Jesus Christ, not a single tile that wasn’t stained with blood. Or something more foul-smelling.”

Aguiar emits a muffled laugh. QED.

“The dead man had soiled and pissed himself, probably when he took the first hack to the back of the neck,” I continue. “There were three. And he probably didn’t die until the third one, which finally separated his head from his body. Afterward, the murderer made cuts more or less at random until he tired of the game, sometimes using the shears to cut a more resistant tendon. It’s likely he ate pieces of the body. Neither your team nor the morgue’s could locate certain basic items like the kidneys. Nobody can live without at least one kidney, can they?”

Aguiar shook his head.

“To confirm the thesis, floating in butter in a frying pan, browned but still intact, were the victim’s dick and balls. I backed away to keep from vomiting, but your colleagues on the scene, Ramiro and the late Fontes, were having a filthy punning contest involving sausage and eggs. They sounded like they were recording the laugh track for some American TV sitcom. The next day, the editor of a tabloid topped them both. He zapped them with the headline ‘Fried Food Causes Impotence.’ Genius.”

“Genius.”

“Genius.” I paused. “We never discovered who the killer was. I was sure it was a man. You needed strength to cut a femur in half with a single blow. The neighbors had never seen a woman visiting the victim, a loser named Oswaldo who’d lived there for ten years. And they hadn’t seen any male visitors either, but then the guy wasn’t dumb enough to make a show of the uglies he brought home, was he? If there weren’t women, there had to be a man involved, sneaking up the stairs. Besides which, women like money and romance. It’s queers who like dick. I concluded that anyone who hated dick that much had to be a fag. And a powerfully built fag. Am I wrong?”

Aguiar remains silent. I prolong the pause.

“Nothing was stolen as far as we could tell. No postmortem withdrawal on his bank card, no heirloom porcelain dishes in the hands of a fence. This was some three, four years ago.”

Aguiar turns and leans against the wall, looking upward at the statue. At that moment, his ugliness is completely exposed. I continue gazing at the great milky emptiness below. When the blonde finally reappears, I nudge Aguiar. He agrees: definitely a woman. We contemplate the body until one of the last sheets of mist covers it, respectfully. When this happens, we remain standing there, smelling the fog. At times it’s possible to hear the traffic sounds down below, which render the monument even more silent. Tourists won’t be allowed to come up until the corpse is removed. The official excuse is “operational problems with the train.” It always is. They would prefer that people waiting in line think maintenance is even crappier than it actually is to having them find out that somebody jumped headfirst. And glimpse the solution for whatever afflicts them: drug debts, betrayal in love, incurable disease... the Werther effect, I read about it in college. Death by imitation. Kind of crazy shit. It’s enough for someone to demonstrate, through action, that life isn’t worth living and someone else, not necessarily related to that first someone, reflects and says, That’s it, he’s right, it’s not worth it, I’m going to kill myself too.

I light a cigarette and offer one to Aguiar.

He shakes his head. “That stuff’ll kill you.”

All I had done was come down hard without any real consequences on three shitheel potheads caught with a trifling amount of grass by cops with nothing better to do. I gave a speech about how cigarettes get you hooked, I think I even used the expression “the devil’s weed,” and let the kids go before they peed on my carpet. Other than that, boredom. It was shortly after midnight when the Special Ops patrol brought in the cute little couple. The guy was fat, wore glasses with dark green rims, had reddish skin, and, despite the cold of August, was soaked in sweat. He looked like an accountant wrestling with a particularly deceptive tax form, trying to make the numbers work. The other guy was much larger than him and wore red shoes with high heels — along with a blond wig, a tight black dress, and two hundred milliliters of silicone in each breast. In spite of the broad shoulders and muscular legs, he appeared feminine. After all, the concept of what’s feminine has changed a lot in this city.

There was a tribe of ripped women, like girlfriends of country singers and soccer players, pumping iron and taking steroids to resemble strong men. This, in fact, would be the predictable defense of the guy in the glasses. He thought he was renting the services of a very buff woman, on the cutting edge of style, and had changed his mind when he felt that business underneath the skirt. Perfectly plausible. I thought, but didn’t say, that nowadays the bulge under the skirt doesn’t prove anything. The male hormones they take increase the size of the clit tremendously. There are samba school dancers who need to cut off a slice to be able to put on the cache-sexe without looking like they are on the rag or, worse, that they have a shlong. Many heterosexuals get turned on by those baby wee-wees and midfielder legs. That’s why they go for a cross-dresser...

The citizen before me didn’t understand that the question wasn’t exactly that. I couldn’t care less if he got off on women, men, or canned sardines. I didn’t give a damn about prostitution by either sex. Fighting prostitution in this city is more or less like asking the scorpion not to sting the frog in the middle of a river. It would be going against its nature. No, the question there was quite different. Public decorum. Apparently the two had started arguing over a longstanding relationship far from the drag queen’s work, which was in the Glória district. Normally it’s best not to mix things. Except that the imbeciles had gone to Guinle Park, an upper-middle-class residential area just below the governor’s mansion and, a worse fuck-up still, the road leading to BOPE, the Special Operations Battalion of the military police.

For whatever reason — I don’t want to take it in the ass anymore, I just want to screw, I want to get an operation and become a tranny, blah-blah-blah, those fag dramas — the pair started a fight and began trading blows just as a Special Operations patrol was returning from an action in one of the poor people districts in the outskirts, an action in which they had sent two more underfed but well-armed blacks to the boneyard. The soldiers in the truck were exhausted but couldn’t pretend they weren’t witnessing that love scene. Duty first, then rest. They banged on the side of the vehicle for the driver to stop. Before the two lovebirds realized it, they were surrounded by seven unpleasant-looking guys in black uniforms with skull patches on the shoulder. That was when the fake blonde produced a razor blade from inside her painted mouth and made an ugly gash in the accountant’s right hand. Then a certain lack of control set in. The corporal leading the patrol aimed his HK at the drag queen’s forehead and shouted, “Drop that shit! Drop that shit!”

By then half the neighborhood was at their windows, enjoying the circus. Antônio Sérgio Lemos de Alcântara — that was the name on his ID card — was strong, but he wasn’t crazy. He dropped the razor blade and was put in a chokehold by a soldier. Another soldier applied a bandage to the hand of the accountant — Felipe Krauss Barreto, according to his ID — and the patrol brought everybody in, along with the crime weapon in a small plastic bag. When the group came into the precinct I guessed the nature of the shit, but what I said, smiling, was: “How can I help you?”

The sergeant sensed the irony, and I thought he was about to tell me to shove it up my ass, but he reconsidered, understood he was playing on my field, and related the incident in general terms, in a flat monotone. Then I listened to what the corporal and the soldiers had to say in order to release the patrol. The inspectors on duty could handle any other flesh wound from Antônio Sérgio.

Felipe’s hand was bleeding a little under the bandage, and he looked at it, distressed. If his friend had AIDS, that wound was going to complicate his life. It wouldn’t put an end to it, as it would have twenty years ago, before the cocktails. But it would complicate it, even if the incident never went beyond the precinct. If it did, then yes, Felipe Krauss Barreto was in for a shitload of problems. People in his office were going to look cross-eyed at him, disinfect chairs, a bunch of stupid and shitty things. Therefore it was neither startling nor even surprising when, as soon as the BOPE left, he declared he wouldn’t file a complaint. The volume under the skirt had come as a surprise, the blows in the park had been unplanned, and the razor blade attack was an impulse that, God willing, would have no greater consequences than requiring five or six stitches.

“God willing,” I repeated mechanically.

The silence in the room carried the implications of that observation.

“All of this is a nightmare, and the best thing is to wake up from it,” said Felipe, half to himself, without taking his eyes from the bandaged hand.

The drag queen was quiet, crossing and uncrossing thick legs free of cellulite, exuding charm toward the audience, because queens always draw a crowd in the precinct, but when he heard this he couldn’t hold back: “Nightmare?! Felipe Barreto, you fucker! When it’s suck time—”

All Hudson had to do was squeeze the creature’s clavicle lightly for him to stop roaring, moan weakly, and compose himself. The big black guy looked at me and smiled, satisfied with his physical authority. Good show. His mistake was not being able to resist a wisecrack.

“Look, boss, the doll’s got an off button,” he said, to guffaws from his colleagues.

But I didn’t laugh. “My dear inspector, you must respect every citizen,” I said in as bureaucratic a tone as possible, picking up one of the IDs from my desk. “It’s no different with the citizen Antônio Sérgio Lemos de Alcântara. Or whatever name he, or she, prefers to be known by.”

“Candy. Candy Spears.”

It struck me that it was the first time the transvestite had spoken. Really spoken, without bellowing. A woman’s voice, not that husky mewing that seemed to be the national language of poor cocksuckers. The story from the accountant — who, incidentally, wasn’t an accountant but “a salesman in the field of auto parts” — became more and more consistent. Not that I cared in the least, of course, but under the influence of drugs it was possible to confuse Antônio Sérgio with a bodybuilding woman. The guy’s high, hears that voice, squeezes that thigh, he wants to fuck any which way.

“Candy Spears then,” I agreed.

The pissed-off expression that Hudson made just reminded me that I didn’t like his kisser all that much. That pose of his of the case-hardened cop who disdains police academy graduates. I didn’t think twice before insisting on my line of reasoning. If I had thought twice, I wouldn’t have insisted. What good would come from that playacting? Too bad.

“My dear Hudson,” I said, “apologize to citizen Candy Spears.”

Hudson wasn’t the only one astonished. Paulinho, César Franco, Tião, the pseudo-accountant, and the fake blonde were too.

“Apologize to Candy Spears,” I pressed, before adding, with a gentleness that only further increased the ignominy of the scene, “please.”

Hudson skewered me with his eyes and stomped off, puffing, toward the interior of the precinct. The sound of a fist punching a metal filing cabinet was heard. I felt I had fucked up, but I couldn’t lose face.

“I apologize in the name of the entire precinct, my dear Candy. Just because the citizen, whether male or female, committed an infraction does not give the police the right to put him, or her, down. We must treat everyone with due respect.”

Candy smiled shyly, nodding in agreement. The pseudo-accountant repeated that he didn’t want to lodge a complaint against the fake blonde. I looked at the fat, sweaty face, trying to think of at least one good reason for him to register the incident. Nothing came to mind, but I wasn’t going to let him off the hook so easily. I knew how to play good cop and bad cop at the same time.

“The blotter guards against future problems, my dear citizen. We’re taking you to Forensics for a corpus delicti examination. It covers bodily harm, it doesn’t have to be attempted homicide. Later you can sue Candy Spears, our friends from the BOPE will testify... She’ll do three months in the slammer, for sure, but unfortunately in a men’s prison. Besides, let’s be frank, you were both disturbing the peace.”

Felipe Krauss Barreto didn’t understand, or pretended he didn’t understand, my threat. I couldn’t sell ice in the desert with that palaver. The phony accountant must have envisioned the scene of the fake blonde providing favors to a long line of locked-up traffickers who hadn’t seen an ass in weeks. He displayed a painful expression. Ah, love.

“So, it’s up to you...” I sighed and left this in the air.

If it was up to him, then that settled it. “Thank you very much, detective, but I really prefer to end the matter here. I don’t want to lodge any complaint. Let’s agree, all of us, that this nightmare...” he said cautiously, looking sideways at Candy, but now she was calm, inspecting her nails. “Thank you very much for your time, your patience, and your courtesy.”

He extended his right hand to me. I didn’t take it. We stood there looking at the blood on his bandage. I gave him two pats on the shoulder, meaning, Hang in there, friend. We accompanied Felipe and Candy to the precinct door to make sure they were heading in opposite directions. We kept the false accountant for a few minutes longer, until the fake blonde disappeared from sight. As if that meant anything, but damnit, there was a ritual to observe. Paulinho, César Franco, and Tião avoided any mention of the case. It was obvious they were pissed at me too. I felt even worse, but I still wasn’t convinced that I’d ever have to apologize to Hudson.

I had just gone back to my chair when two drivers, definitely sober, came in to report a fender bender — petty stuff, no one injured, but the insurance companies were going to demand an accident report. When I finished, I went outside to smoke. I was distracted, thinking about what I’d do on my day off, probably sleep and wake up just for the pleasure of going back to sleep, when Candy Spears appeared from behind the trees whose roots I was using as an ashtray. Crap, what if she was carrying another razor blade? I regretted leaving my revolver in my desk. Candy was larger than Felipe and also bigger than me. I threw the cigarette away so as to have both hands free and planted my feet in a defensive stance. She came around the flower bed, without the exaggerated female flourishes. If Antônio Sérgio had been born ten centimeters shorter and fifteen less around, maybe seventeen less between his legs, he would be a woman. Nature plays tricks on us.

“Detective,” she said.

“Yes, Dona Candy?”

“I just wanted to thank you for the treatment you gave me there inside. You can imagine it’s not the first time I’ve been in a police station, but it was the first time that I didn’t feel attacked just for being... who I am.”

I remained silent.

“Your sensitive treatment was super important for me to get out of that mega-embarrassing situation.” The four hundred milliliters of silicone heaved beneath the black mesh. “Although young, you’re a man of experience. You surely saw that Lipe wasn’t some casual client who was disappointed when he found out I had... that extra something that you men are ashamed to admit you like. The two of us have had a serious relationship for seven months, see? I think he’s the man of my life.”

At this point my silence must have been quite eloquent, because she felt the need to reply.

“It’s serious! And I think he feels the same way about me. So mentioning a men’s penitentiary was a masterful stroke on your part. He must not have been able to bear the thought. I’m not a woman to tolerate all that.”

Candy made a significant pause.

“He loves me, but he still doesn’t have the psychological strength to come out — you know what lower-middle-class families are like. And he also doesn’t have the financial fortitude to support me. So I go on having to hook to pay for a tiny place on Laranjeiras, near Rua Alice, you know it? Much better than the tenement in Lapa that, praise God, I managed to get away from. But Lipe goes crazy with jealousy about me sleeping with other men.”

Candy Spears paused again. I asked myself whether she actually was a believer or merely invoked His holy name in vain.

“Would he be bothered if I went to bed with a woman?” she wondered aloud.

I reinforced my silence. The whole thing seemed like more information than I would ever need to know. I have to admit that sometimes smoking is bad for one’s health.

“Anyway,” she continued, “I noticed a pack of cigarettes on your desk and so I waited here till you came out to smoke, just to say thank you. I don’t think I can even dream of someday repaying your kindness, but who knows? Keep my phone number and address. I don’t know, maybe I can be your informant. We see everything that goes on at night in the streets... Ciao.”

Candy Spears came closer, stuck a folded piece of paper in the pocket of my jacket, kissed me gently on the cheek, and walked away, without swinging her hips much, in the direction of Glória. I looked to both sides. The door to the precinct was empty, the cold light falling on the sidewalk. If anyone had witnessed that, I was fucked. I’d be mocked to death.

The cigarette is almost burning the filter, and Aguiar is nearly asleep, sitting on a step, when we hear the dragging of chains, as if the ghosts who lost their lives on this mountain were returning from hell — or on their way to hell — and had come to avenge themselves with the first survivors they met. We turn around, but it’s just the firemen tasked with retrieving the body of the blonde. Soldiers drag ropes, belts, snap hooks, harnesses, a stretcher. Behind them comes a lieutenant.

“Lieutenant Vaz, at your command.” He shakes our hands.

Although they’re military, I’m in charge of the operation. But Aguiar takes the lead and complains about the delay. The lieutenant replies that it wouldn’t have helped to come before the fog dissipated. Aguiar grumbles something that’s muffled by the noise of the soldiers setting up the materials for the rappel. I bring the lieutenant up to speed on the situation, take him to the wall and point to the body, now fully exposed, at the edge of an almost cloudless sky. He asks if we plan to descend. Aguiar breaks in again and says no, that it’s a matter of suicide and that our presence down there would make no difference to the case.

The lieutenant agrees and goes to join the troop, while I again contemplate the cadaver of the blond woman in the black dress. Her shoes can’t be seen from this angle, though it’s unlikely she ascended the mountain barefoot. Only if it was to honor a vow, but obviously there was no grace achieved there to be grateful for. Then I finally understand what bothered me from the first moment I saw her there. Not the most obvious thing, the thick legs in an impossible position even for a boneless ballerina. It’s something else, a bit more subtle. I call Aguiar, who is watching the firemen. I point to the cadaver again.

“Look, could hitting the rock leave her head twisted like that?”

“You think it’s weird? Maybe the impact broke her neck and turned it a bit... Maybe she wears a wig that came off in the fall... Hard to say without examining it up close. Let’s wait for them to bring her up.”

I think about all the possible consequences of what Aguiar, the forensics expert, has just told me. Now he contemplates the landscape, glorious in the pristine light of winter.

“I’m going down,” I say.

It takes a moment for Aguiar to digest the information. “Are you nuts, man? What for?!”

“The scene of death wasn’t up here. It was down there. Or not. But we’re only going to find out if we go down. Letting the firemen get the body, strap it to the stretcher, and hoist it vertically can displace things even further. And displacement can completely change the direction of our investigation.”

“Shit, these guys are profes—” Aguiar starts to argue, but then notices the we in my previous sentence. I take his silence as consent. If I descend he’s obliged to do the same.

I go to the team of firemen and announce I’ve changed my mind. Not only changed my mind but that we want to descend before any of them. Lieutenant Vaz doesn’t attempt to conceal his surprise, but orders are orders, and orders come down the chain of command, however circumstantial. He orders a soldier to give me one of the safety harnesses. Aguiar also accepts one, wordlessly. A second soldier hands us helmets and gloves. A third checks the equipment and gives us rapid instructions. I take a deep breath. The smell of smoke is still in the air, though the mist has dissipated. I touch the folded paper in the pocket of my jacket. I begin the descent.

Blind Spot by Victoria Saramago

Tijuca Forest

Annie was recovering. Slowly, said some friends who obviously had no idea how much time a long and painful recovery process takes. Precisely because they thought Annie’s world should have the same smell and texture as before, she found no solution other than to leave her life in Kansas and go somewhere far away. A place not totally unknown and that had some appeal for what others understood as tourism, perhaps, but that didn’t recall the snow, the open fields where you could walk for hours without seeing a tree. Some city, maybe one in South America, about which she knew very little — I’ll always be a foreigner, she reminded herself — but a city that would welcome her anyway. A place whose language I’m not going to speak, because that will be easier, a city full of trees. Like those long-ago days of childhood walks in Central Park where certain dense areas of bushes gave the impression of being far, far away in some forgotten land where the horizon of New York buildings could no longer be seen.

So Annie, upon arriving in Rio, had rented a room very close to the Tijuca Forest and indulged in long walks to the lakes and peaks. People passed by the trails and cascades with children and bottles of water, appearing to not have a care in the world. Annie envied them: they would return home after a few hours and not have some scowling guy offering them more blow.

But what Annie saw in front of her now was a coati. Not very small and probably old, the coati, like all the inhabitants of the urban forest, was obsessed with a trash can. With its hind legs at the base and its tiny hands stuck into the opening that might be hiding the remains of cookies and sandwiches, the animal let its long, striped tail slide along the base of the trash can while it impatiently slipped into the orange box. Of course, the children and the tourists nearby didn’t miss the opportunity. “A coati in the trash,” they said, and smiled, though slightly perturbed by the intrusion of all that street garbage into the routine of a wild animal. As if they weren’t precisely the ones, Annie thought, who made the trash can what it is. The coati, dizzy now, with a final effort succeeded in grabbing the contents out of the top part of the trash can — that is, an enormous wad of plastic bags, cups, and bottles smelling like a rotting picnic — which exploded and scattered onto the ground. The children clapped and the tourists accelerated their picture taking until the animal left with its morsel and the audience dispersed in boredom.

Annie was disturbed. They’re amused by the mess the coati makes and never think about the fact that it’s not the coati who’s going to clean it up. They find it reasonable, as long as they don’t have to bother with anything besides transferring the photos to their computers. Because some things had survived from the years Annie lived in Oregon, and this was one — walking angrily to the mess, she began picking it up item by item and depositing it back into the trash can. The cups with the remains of orange juice and the napkins with scraps of ham disgusted her, naturally, but caused nothing close to the shock she experienced when she discovered a human finger wrapped in a piece of paper that had fallen from a plastic bag.

She’d opened the paper carefully and, realizing that a new phase was beginning for her, observed the relatively fresh, though purplish, index finger with its dark nail and the stump of bone emerging from the other end. Some dried bloodstains were interrupted by the folds of skin, as if the finger, after being covered in its own blood, were still able to move. Annie lightly nudged one of the stains, and the dark red skin came off in her hand, occupying a small area of her own index finger as if it had come from there. It was fascinating. She would never again see, for no reason, by sheer luck — or not exactly luck, but chance, improbability — what she was seeing now. A finger that no longer belonged to any human being, that would remain there, among the coati’s paws and the remains of food, until garbagemen hauled it away and made it disappear. This finger doesn’t have an owner anymore, she thought, and it will be mine. She rewrapped it in the paper and threw the rest of the refuse into the trash can. Walking with determination, holding the object between her fingers, with a challenging expression for any forest ranger who might have witnessed her actions, she headed for the park exit and then to Jonas’s house.

“Want some more, Annie?”

It was almost ready when she arrived. Jonas was putting the finishing touches on the lines on the glass table and was rolling a ten-dollar bill to offer to the girl. Happy at the coincidence — “You always show up when I’m ready to take a hit,” said Jonas, “you sense it” — Annie placed the finger on the other end of the table to avoid getting powder on it. She positioned the bill to snort the first line at the same time that Jonas noticed that finger in the napkin and wondered what the hell he was doing fucking and providing cocaine to a crazy gringa like her.

Deep in concentration, it was only after the second line that Annie perceived the puzzled gaze of the man before her. She smiled slightly, kissed him, and took the finger from him.

“I found it this morning on my walk,” she said, while caressing the bloodstains on the dry skin and then Jonas’s still-cool skin. “It was in a trash can.”

The man listened to the rest of the story with a degree of skepticism. It was inconceivable that she actually wanted to keep the finger in the refrigerator. “Annie, that’s part of someone’s body.”

She didn’t seem very shocked. She wanted to find out whose finger it was, that was all. A nut job. Jonas hugged her tightly because after all she was sexy, though crazy, and he asked her to wash her hands before taking hold of his dick.

Annie agreed to this request, but she couldn’t accept throwing the finger away. She preferred to find a plastic container for it and place it in the freezer. Then she commented that Jonas was a good person.

“I was very lucky to run into someone like you for this.”

He felt it better not to ask whether “this” was primarily the amount of cocaine he had been supplying her in recent weeks, or the sex, or something else that he would never discover. In any case, Annie was well supplied with coke for the day, and with the finger comfortably in the freezer she felt at ease to pay with what might be the best blow job in Jonas’s life. They learn quickly, he thought, and know how to use it to their advantage. Because Annie, seeing the right moment to repeat the question of half an hour earlier, swallowed the rest of the cum and began to speak as serenely as her state of lethargy would allow.

“You really don’t know anyone who might know where the finger came from?” she asked craftily as if she were going to suck it again, and he had no way out but to sigh, stroke her hair, and reply: “There’s a guy missing a finger who sells me blow. But it’s his pinky, and yours is an index finger.”

Even so, she seemed sufficiently interested, and before Jonas knew it he had promised to take her with him to the favela on his next buy.

He usually went up the hillside a few times a week. He tried to organize orders so he could go less often, but new orders could appear suddenly and he never wanted to miss the chance to make a quick deal. Especially now that Annie, having come into his life out of nowhere, consumed nearly as much as the powder ought to be generating.

But Annie was worth it. A bit weird with that talk about always recovering, true, but goddamn, what a body, and she knew how to use what she had, knew how to rub her hard nipples against him until he said, “Of course, sweetheart, we’ll go up the hill together so you can see a man missing a finger while you hide your pet finger in your pocket.”

It was a house like any other. As if at any moment a kindly grandmother would appear in the living room with a bowl of beans and chicken. Instead of that, two powerfully built men with all their fingers offered Jonas a taste of the new shipment. If he had been a gentleman and ceded the offer to Annie, she would have accepted. But he was the one who had to judge what he was about to buy, and she made an effort to keep quiet and concentrate on the fingers of the men in front of her while grasping the finger in her pocket. Smiling, one of the men came over and asked Annie if she loved Jonas. Because she didn’t understand a word he said, she just smiled back as if she in fact did love him. Jonas, even with his back turned at the moment, was surprised by the question, and the sudden reminder of the blow jobs in recent weeks lightly stiffened his cock. The man then asked if she was afraid of losing him. Annie smiled again in her easy ignorance, but Jonas, distracted, didn’t hear the question.

In the final analysis, it wasn’t a good idea to stay in that country without speaking a single word of the language, and that was why Jonas brought up the subject when they were back at home and she was sucking him again.

“Are you sure you don’t want to learn to speak Portuguese?”

His expression was too serious for Annie to simply smile and go wash the cum out of her mouth as if she didn’t have to speak anything, not even Portuguese. So she became serious too and, a bit tired of so many blow jobs, replied: “I’m not going to take any classes.”

And that was all. She could learn by immersion, of course. After years living in a country, even Hungarian can be learned, and Jonas hadn’t needed to live in an English-speaking country to master the language and make himself understood so well with Annie. But it was an effort even for him. At that pace, in several months she wouldn’t learn more than half a dozen key words which, if the necessity arose, wouldn’t be enough for her to get by.

But Annie needed no rescue. What she needed was rest and the forgetfulness she found in those daily walks in Tijuca Forest. She needed to walk a lot, as much as possible, and take different trails every time, as if each one could neutralize, if only for a few hours, the wear and tear of that city, of the cocaine, of Jonas, and all the rest. Which is why she was anxious as she walked, because deep down nothing could any longer provide the initial relief and restore the feeling that, despite everything, she was recovering. Neither coatis nor severed fingers — even though that finger specifically had achieved its effect, like the rush the powder had afforded her weeks before when she met Jonas, and which had less and less effect after that first time. She walked faster and faster, aware of the animals and the trash cans, curious to return to the Borel favela, so near to the edge of the park, determined to find out how the hell that finger had ended up in the trash can. That was when she bumped into the park ranger.

He was a tall black man, and he was nervous when he came up to Annie to ask her not to walk by herself on those trails, it could be dangerous. Annie thought about smiling but remained serious. The man, not knowing what to do with the foreign woman, improvised with sign language while he went on explaining that she was a woman by herself, attractive, and the forest was large, too large — we do what we can to keep everything safe, but there are areas that can’t be monitored, and if a man with bad intentions shows up (and here his pantomime was especially direct), he couldn’t promise she would come out of the episode unscathed. After all, she was young and pretty and attractive, and Annie, seeing the man making those gestures, wondered whether she should take off her clothes right there and hope, when it was over, that maybe he had a bit of coke.

But no. She needed the solitude that one more random screw wouldn’t give her. She approached him and, touching his arm, explained in English that she hadn’t understood anything he’d said but that she didn’t want sex. The man wouldn’t have had to understand her words for his work responsibility to prevent him from grabbing the beautiful woman who, ignoring all his warnings, was approaching him. Even if it was difficult to contain himself. If they had met in some other setting, of course he would have taken advantage of the situation; and if she had the courage to let him see the severed finger, perhaps he could have even indicated to her where to look for its former owner. For there were many things in that apparently docile and cozy park of which Annie was unaware. And one of them was still the danger of walking alone on those trails during hours when few people were around, repeated the ranger dejectedly, until she grew tired and left.

At least it was Friday night and the weekend awaited them. Not that this dramatically changed Annie’s situation, as she had nothing to do anyway, but it was pleasant to think that Jonas would be free the next day.

“I’m going to make a quick run up there for a last-minute order,” he had said, “and then we can do a line and leave. Maybe we can go see those gringo friends from the bar we met a couple of weeks ago.”

Annie wasn’t good at meeting people in random situations and Jonas’s friends didn’t amuse her. Considering the few chances she had to speak with strangers, it was almost surprising that she had managed to even meet those gringos. It’s worthwhile to invest in friendships, her mother had said a day earlier via Skype, concerned, and it was with that spirit that Annie decided to send them a message asking if they were up for a beer.

Jonas had left about fifty minutes before. According to what he said, he wouldn’t be more than half an hour — his missions usually took about that long. Something unforeseen, maybe; it happens. I don’t want to have to worry about anything, she said when they first met. Worry exhausted her, and she wasn’t willing to be exhausted, never again.

“I’ve already exhausted everything I had, understand?”

Jonas didn’t have to understand. He gave her what she wanted, in exchange for what he wanted, and things were fine. With her, he spoke the English she was accustomed to hearing. With others, he spoke the Portuguese that she would never speak. Annie continued to be amazed at her luck in finding this available neighbor right after arriving in Rio, when she still hadn’t known how to adapt to the city — but knew she was unwilling to do so.

An hour and twenty minutes waiting for him. The last line had been on Thursday, and all day Friday she’d been clean. She had tried calling, and nothing, not even a text message — even their friends hadn’t answered. Should she go out looking for him? Brazilian men are fickle, she had heard someone say when she chose Rio. It wasn’t enough. Not that he loved her and needed to keep her close at all times; he just wasn’t the type of person to abandon her, especially after having agreed to a snort and her spending all day waiting for him to complete the routine.

Her cell phone chimed, announcing a message, and Annie jumped to open it. The friends: they couldn’t make it that night, maybe tomorrow. The idea of the next night was still somewhat cloudy for Annie, who, without Jonas’s arrival with more blow, couldn’t visualize much beyond the next twenty minutes. The old house where she rented a room was empty, and if there were anyone to complain about the noise, Annie surely wouldn’t listen to The Killers at such a high volume as she was doing right now. Running out, running out was an old song. She had now been waiting an hour and forty minutes, perhaps in vain, because Jonas might not be coming back. Our time, she repeated, imitating many others besides the vocalist, and how many others must have left the comfort of their beds to look for someone who, bearing something of value, doesn’t come?

She waited another fifteen minutes before deciding. She got her purse, took the finger from the freezer and put it in her skirt pocket, slammed the door behind her, and walked to the mototaxi stand. It couldn’t be all that difficult to find him, and maybe she would discover the ex-owner of the finger as a bonus. The driver there wasn’t one of the guys recommended by Jonas. She approached him nevertheless — she still remembered the name of the luncheonette at the top of the favela and with luck would recognize the spot. The driver left her at the exact spot she requested, but she didn’t know which alleyway to take. Many people passed by, among them mothers bringing their children from school and bricklayers returning from work, and it was sheer luck that she recognized the man who days before had asked her if she loved Jonas and was afraid of losing him. The man seemed surprised at being approached by the gringa with her sign language and the few key words she knew in Portuguese: cocaine and Jonas. Guffawing at something, the man took her arm and led her to the house where she had been before.

There were lots of people. The guys from the previous visit and some others, women who seemed to be girlfriends, random visitors. If he was still there, Jonas was nowhere visible. The man Annie had met led her to a corner of the room and asked what she wanted. This time, she didn’t have the strength to smile. The man spoke more slowly and she remained impassive, murmuring, Jonas, cocaína, Jonas, cocaína, enough for the man to at least imagine what she was after. He asked her to stay there and left for a moment. Even without understanding, Annie stayed. Her right hand in her pocket brushed against the loose finger. After a few minutes, the man brought another, precisely the one who, as Jonas had said, was missing his pinky. Surprised, she squeezed the finger in her pocket, and squeezed it more when asked something that she didn’t understand, and went on with her sequence of cocaine, Jonas, and so on.

The man smiled at length. She wanted cocaine. The other told him that she was Jonas’s girlfriend, and Annie didn’t realize that this was the cause of the man suddenly raising his eyebrows, as if he smelled something wrong, and sending the other one away. Facing her, he gently took her two arms and asked her something incomprehensible. Immobile and still peering at him, she could feel, in place of his missing finger, the stump of skin caressing her. She would give a great deal to know how he had lost his finger, and even more to know to whom the finger she had found belonged. She almost took it from her pocket, to show it to the trafficker and wait for him to draw his own conclusions. Instead, she simply stared at him and repeated cocaine, cocaine, cocaine. There was no way he couldn’t understand, and who knows why he decided to humor her.

After a signal to a third man, Annie within minutes had in front of her three lines of the best cocaine she had ever done. The boss was generous — he could only want something in return. At her first snort Annie saw it was a fine, very white powder, and it had an unusually good smell. So different from what Jonas normally supplied her with day to day, though a little more like what she snorted on the nights they had sex. Feeling her body move as if responding involuntarily, it was as if she were reconstituted to return to a situation now very far away in her life, the situation before everything happened. As if she no longer needed to recover, as if her life in Rio had magically worked out, as if the past could be expunged to make way for a present both solid and very fleeting, a present over which she would have the control she’d never had: she felt her bones restoring themselves, the world regaining its colors, people moving about, and the extremely dark eyes of the man without a finger staring at her. What do you want? he seemed to ask and perhaps did ask. Annie would have so much to reply, but for now she thought of Jonas. Where was he? You understand me, her eyes said, I know you understand me, and he seemed undecided whether to take her at that moment, whether she was worth all the trouble she seemed to bring with her.

But no, perhaps he wasn’t pondering anything, and Annie for the first time paid attention to her surroundings. On a bureau in the corner a forgotten cell phone was vibrating, announcing a message, a cell phone exactly like Jonas’s. Whether or not it would be suicide for Annie to break through the blockade of the man’s eyes and go to check who was sending the message, it no longer mattered to her — after all, she could do anything now. Determined, she went over and picked up the phone and opened it. The screen was scratched like Jonas’s, and there were new messages. Since some of them could be the very ones she had sent hours before, she opened the first one: it was in Portuguese and therefore said nothing. She didn’t have time to see the second one because the man with the dark eyes and missing finger grabbed the device and angrily shouted something that certainly wasn’t an authorization for her to keep snooping. At that moment, Annie realized that nothing would be as easy as giving up for good. As calmly as if she had done this before, she took the finger from her pocket and almost rubbed it in the man’s face. “Whose is it?”

His reaction only indicated that she had gone too far. He yanked the finger out of her hands and stared at it, looking a bit sad. He glanced at the finger in one hand, the cell phone in the other, at Annie’s face, then back at the finger, mulling over his next steps. He wasn’t furious but a little melancholy, and above all, startled: how the fuck had that finger ended up in the hands of that goddamn gringa who couldn’t speak and didn’t know anything about anything? Or maybe she knew and was trying to threaten him? Just let her try.

Grumbling, the man called one of the others. He was older, very skinny, and slightly bent over. Upon hearing the orders of the boss without a finger, he began smiling and Annie saw he was missing two front teeth. Still smiling, he took her by the hand, and she asked for the first time what she should have tried to discover from the beginning: “Doesn’t anybody here speak English?” But those there who spoke at least at a basic level weren’t the ones who heard Annie before she was taken to another alleyway and placed without resistance on the passenger seat of a motorcycle by the old man, who a few minutes later started the engine.

“Where’s Jonas?” she shouted again. It was as if he were deaf. He drove at high speed through the forest and the sound of the engine drowned out the words, “Where is Jonas? Where are you taking me? Why?”

Without answers, they rode deeper into the forest. Little by little Annie could feel the air grow cooler, humid, like in the carefree mornings when she wandered the trails. The houses gave way to trees and finally to dense vegetation on both sides of the asphalt. She knew that many of the roads in the forest were outside the limits of the park itself and therefore remained open after visiting hours, even though it was all the same woods. The question was where the man was taking her. They could emerge in another favela on the other side of the city. They could stop right there, or in some other spot, God knows where. Annie tried to keep calm. She might never find out what had happened to Jonas or to the owner of the finger. Things of the past, like all the rest. She would have to recover from them like from everything else, like from herself if she were spared that night.

“Are you going to spare me?” she asked. The man grunted; it was useless.

If they could at least communicate. The park ranger had warned her. If she at least spoke Portuguese, she could find out what was going on, could have a history, cause and effect. If she had listened to Jonas, to the ranger, and later to the traffickers. If she listened. The bike’s engine didn’t completely drown out the crickets, a few night fowl that she had never heard before. In the Kansas fields so long ago she would know how to listen to them. In New York she hadn’t heard anything, but that had been a long time ago. She could understand; if she spoke, if she listened, she might take off the blindfold.

A car passed by, its engine approaching and retreating. She could yell for help, in some form, throw herself from the motorcycle and run as best she could toward whoever had just crossed her path. She could throw herself from the motorcycle at any moment; what kept her tied there? She would come out a bit banged up, true, but it wouldn’t be the first accident in her life. The man kept on driving, impassively. Annie yelled one last time, “Why?” And without reply they continued through the forest, deeper and deeper, the lampposts were becoming farther apart and the darkness of the trees, once so welcoming, was now only the darkness in which no one could see, speak, or investigate anything. The curves came one after the other and the roadway disappeared behind them in seconds, until they rounded one that suddenly ended in a small square. In the square was a car with its headlights off and some people inside who were surely having sex.

Unable to resist, the man braked, turned off the motor, and peeked in. Annie peeked as well and would never forget the two pairs of eyes suddenly staring through the glass, observing them in return, planning their defense. The woman’s breasts, very large and sagging for her young age, swung lightly while the man, still in his shirt, kicked open the door and, holding an iron bar, came toward them. The old, toothless man was lost: he had to fight. With tears in her eyes, petrified, the woman opened the rear window to scream for help and gestured to the man who had been fucking her to let it go, get in the car, and flee. Because the stranger on the motorcycle could be armed, and was. Old, yes, but his criminal appearance left no doubt. The man who had been fucking the woman nevertheless advanced, and before seeing the old man take out his gun, Annie realized she wouldn’t have another chance to get away. She ran into the woods before hearing the first shot.

The woods became thicker and opened briefly, only to close again. Annie tripped over a root, got up, and continued onward. Go on, she repeated to herself, advancing little by little. Faster at first to be sure she wouldn’t be found, then more slowly because she had been walking for such a long time with no sign of the man after her, almost an hour, perhaps, moving aimlessly wherever it seemed easiest to walk, tripping again, getting scratched here and there, but what did it matter because it was what would continue to save her. It was obvious, she told herself, it was the dense woods that would welcome her once again, hide her and let her stay there, silent and covered with scratches, for as long as she wished. The treetops closed off the sky and cut her off from all sound, from the motorcycle and the footsteps of the man, yes, the trees shielded her from the two gunshots she had heard when still near the square; she had tripped over a rock and tumbled down a ravine, until a tree trunk stopped the weight of her body and she suspected that she had a broken arm. But no, she could still move it, along with her legs and all her bones. Only her forehead and shoulders were bleeding, and the rest ached. She rose carefully and saw she was in an area the man could get to quickly if he was crazy enough to jump. And if she knew a little about men, she knew this one wasn’t the kind to plunge headlong into impenetrable woods. Even so, she walked faster and faster, without the courage to turn on the flashlight of her cell phone for fear it would give her away.

She only turned it on much later, having walked for a good length of time and wondering how long she would stay there, whether for a few hours more or for days or for the rest of her life, for the forest was the size of a forest, even if it was in the middle of a city, and she was the size of a person even if she wished at that moment to be the size of an ant or a coati digging its lair. The cell phone couldn’t get a signal and the battery was almost dead, but its light helped a little, especially to tell the time: approximately three fifteen. Soon it would be dawn, and if the man didn’t suddenly appear, she would have a better idea of where she was and what to do.

She stopped for a moment, sat on a rock, took a deep breath. If she only knew about Jonas. If she only had more coke. She needed to pull herself together. An opening in the canopy of trees admitted the sky and a few stars. A little bit of coke, just a sniff. It was tough thinking about it. She would get home and Jonas wouldn’t be in the neighboring house, waiting for her with the lines already laid out. Jonas had to appear, and the thought that he might be dead or at least missing a finger impelled her to stand up and resume the trek.

It was beginning to dawn and her phone had died some time ago. Maybe she was exaggerating things. Jonas might already have texted her, might be waiting at home for her. But she might take days to locate him, even if she found a clearing soon, some open space in the vegetation. She quickened her pace, she was getting close. She almost didn’t believe it. If she could get back to the park she was almost certain she would know how to get to her house. She knew the area well enough, every belvedere, every square, every nook. True, she could be a long way from the entrance, but it didn’t matter. She walked farther and farther, almost ran, and finally spotted the square with the stone knee wall with its drawings of balloons, facing the city. It had to be the Excelsior belvedere, one of those she had visited most during the last several weeks. It was her territory and only a forty-minute walk to where she lived.

It had been a long time since Annie felt like crying. She did so at that moment, but controlled herself. She went to the wall and caught sight of the city from above; a light mist covered the peaks of Tijuca Mountain and the smaller Tijuca Mirim. Below, the start of morning merged with the lights of night, dotting the bay and the bridge to Niterói. The favelas were sparsely lit and Maracanã Stadium was visible. The streets were filling little by little with cars that would not come through those remote roadways in the heights of the forest, and the city began to revive, distant from the gringa covered with dirt and blood, her arm twisted and her skin gashed, the arrogant gringa who now wanted to speak Portuguese, understand what had happened, and, for the love of God, snort a little coke.

In the future she would understand. For now, she allowed the city to follow its routine after admiring it and grasping it as the city that would never be hers in its beauty and its small monstrosities, but no, Annie was exhausted and needed to sleep. Turning her back on the belvedere, she began slowly walking home. She ignored the calls from the guard at the entrance gate to the woman with blotted makeup and wearing a miniskirt who looked as if she had been raped by tree roots, who eventually climbed the steps of her own porch, opened the door, dragged herself to her bedroom, collapsed onto the bed, and closed her eyes.

She couldn’t sleep, however. With her phone turned on and charging, there was no message from Jonas, no message of any kind. She thought of going to his house and ringing the doorbell, but he lived with his parents and she didn’t have the strength to take a shower, tend to her wounds, and make herself minimally presentable for a possible encounter with his mother.

Instead, she telephoned. One call, two, nothing. On the third, someone answered and hung up immediately. That was suspicious, but Annie lacked the energy to try to do anything about it. She just sent him a message, U alright? At home already? Pls tell me everything is okay, and closed her eyes. She must have dozed, for she awoke with a small start to see a recently arrived message: is good. i arrive my house. i love you.

Annie refused to investigate. She could have wondered why Jonas had sent a message instead of answering the phone. She could have wondered why his almost native English had become transformed into that grammatical horror show. And why would he speak to her of something as alien to the two of them as love? But Annie didn’t want to, couldn’t investigate. She was spent. Satisfied with the rough draft of a reply, she ignored the scratches burning her aching arm. She couldn’t do anything more, she could only ignore them just as she ignored everything else about Jonas, as she ignored the fate of the old man and the finger kept by the man without a pinky, the couple screwing in the car and her next snort, ignored everything because her body wouldn’t let her anymore, and calm like the fields of Kansas after a snow, she closed her eyes and slept.

The Enigma of the Victrola by Arnaldo Bloch