Rio Noir

Tangerine Tango by Marcelo Ferroni

Barra da Tijuca

I could have called it a premonition, but I don’t believe in that, or in luck; in fact I believed in few things other than some money at the end of the month and a decent place to sleep, maybe someone beside me and a bit of happiness. I believed in what I didn’t have and laughed at myself at the counter of that hotel made of plaster and granite, of plywood with a veneer imitating hardwood, plastic plants in cement pots, lustless leather sofas. A steady bureaucratic rain was falling; I leaned against the counter and observed the curtain of thick drops that descended the narrow roof of glass a few feet beyond the automatic door. This city sucked up my air, this city of false appearances and low ceilings, this city whose buildings were neoclassical aberrations under a leaden gray sky, a São Paulo simulacrum of hell, while the receptionist — braces, the face of a kid — waited on the phone for my author to answer. I didn’t hate just the city, I hated my job, and before I could go back to cursing myself she passed slowly by outside. The automatic door opened and closed while she moved along the sidewalk without coming into the lobby. She had yellowish-beige skin, and her slightly flaccid arms emerged from a modest black dress that descended a little below the knee. Black shoes with medium heels, discreet legs. She rested her cheek on the phone in her left hand and in the right balanced an umbrella, which suddenly swept my senses into a celestial premonition (but I don’t believe in that), each of the umbrella’s colorful segments a portrait of Rio de Janeiro — Christ the Redeemer, Sugar Loaf, another showing Maracanã, still another the beach and the wave-patterned sidewalks — and I thought I could be in a better place, warmer, where people smiled like that girl with large white teeth. She continued to the edge of my field of vision and disappeared into a service entrance.

“What did you say your name is?” the receptionist asked me.

“Mariconda. Humberto Mariconda.”

I waited a bit more. My author sent word that he’d be down any moment, but the moment didn’t come. Behind the receptionist hung a panel with the name of the hotel, and farther back, in the rear, where the office must be, she reappeared, without the umbrella or the phone, but still displaying her teeth in a half-smile, and only then did I notice how round her eyes were, and she raised them and looked at me. She was plump and diminutive at the same time, her dark hair tied in a bun, bare shoulders with small variations in color, and my God I smiled at her and her entire face opened up. She was about to say something but saw that her colleague was already taking care of me, then lowered her eyes to the computer monitor and started typing.

I could have said so many things to her. If she were alone. If the guy beside her weren’t looking at me the way I was looking at her. If the elevator bell hadn’t dinged and a man as shapeless as melted Camembert hadn’t emerged, accompanied by a blond woman who seemed like a collage of several faces, new and old, put together by a child in an art class. They didn’t notice me when I stepped forward with my best smile to escort them to the taxi waiting in the street. I started to help him, but he grunted, pulling his cane away.

That was what I was doing lately, greeting authors who didn’t want to be greeted by me, who would like to be successful with another publishing house, lionized by more relevant people, selling out entire printings of their tired novels, but who one way or another had fallen into the well and felt it was our fault, always our fault.

Natsume, my editor, assigned me the unpleasant duties only because my behavior was more stable than that of Rose, the publicist — a lady as old as our dot matrix printer — and because I was the only one there who could manage more than three sentences in English.

Seven months later, there I was again, playing the same role in another city, imparting concrete form to my premonition (though I don’t believe in that), leaning against a slightly larger counter in a more spacious lobby, monumental without having anything to be proud of, the salmon-colored walls with high-relief plaster waves, uncomfortable sofas, old palms, and carpets that made an effort to instill a warmer atmosphere in that third-rate Persian temple. I could be in the outskirts of anywhere in the world, except for the strip of ultramarine blue beyond the avenue, which merged with the turquoise sky at the horizon whenever the smoked-glass double doors opened to admit the fitful service of the porters.

Hours earlier, from the window of the plane, I had seen that same sea, camouflaged by a diffuse fog, and the images of a distant umbrella: Christ the Redeemer, Sugar Loaf, the whitish Maracanã Stadium, and the circular shores of foam, sand, and buildings. All of that dissipated in the heat at the airport, the chaotic wait to get a cab, where the attendants laughed among themselves or spoke on cell phones while men in suits broke in line. I left in an old Santana with dark windows and damp seats, clutching my backpack, and we plunged into the other end of the city, in heat that would strip the bark off trees (the air-conditioning went out today, the driver said, without the slightest effort to sound convincing), stuck on the congested highway on the way to Barra, amid nightmarish hovels and prisonlike walls that reminded me of the stories of people from São Paulo who get lost upon arriving in Rio and end up in a favela where they’re robbed and ultimately shot.

I wasn’t shot; I didn’t go where I shouldn’t; I didn’t flee from gunfire or have a gun stuck in my face, and yet a day later there I was, with an enigmatic girl, sandwiched between sun and cement in an enormous parking lot in Barra, with our author still missing in some part of Rio, and her and me fleeing hand in hand from a police car, with her sweaty and leading the way, without listening to my pleas, until she stopped suddenly and let go of my hand, took three steps, and stopped again, as if in a trance, her straw-colored hair tousled around her freckled face, squinting against the brightness, she began to rock lightly, panting, more whirling than turning now, among the white stripes like ancient inscriptions on the scorched pavement. Then she opened her trinket-colored eyes that glowed against the sun, she moaned, and my heart almost burst. With quick steps I covered the distance that separated me from her and caught her before she could fall, near a concrete gutter. She held onto me as best she could — her thin arms had almost no strength — and stuck her face in the hollow of my shoulder and I ran my hands over her tangled hair, she made an effort not to faint and then whispered in my ear, I know what happened to him, I know.

It took me some time to identify the color of her eyes, and what they seemed to be saying when she stared at me with dry lips and an expression of discontent. She paid no attention to me, or pretended not to, the first time I saw her, coming out of the elevator in dark glasses, tapping disinterestedly on a cell phone. She came just behind the person I was really there to greet. She vanished, probably accustomed to his small displays, as soon as he stepped forward and occupied all the available space, agitating the air molecules around him. His name was Greg Nicholas, MD, and he was in every sense just who he appeared to be. Compact, tanned, with dark hair clinging to his scalp like a new doormat. He wore beige pants, hitched a little above the waist, and a blue shirt that emphasized his well-defined pecs. A small silver chain hugged his powerful neck. He had a square chin, hard professional eyes that shone mechanically when he saw me. He extended his hand, which I shook, but it was like grasping a stone, a stone that in turn shook back. He gave me a lingering look. “How are you?” he said, and took from his pocket a blue pen, which he presented to me as a gift. Greg Nicholas Institute of Positive Knowledge. I smiled, looked at the pen again, got confused a bit at the greeting, the sweat running down my back wetting the waistband of my loose-fitting jeans.

With the nervous muffling of my ears I didn’t notice that there were others with me: two onlookers, the manager, a very young journalist, and a platinum-blonde in dark glasses with her likely driver, a scowling unshaven guy in a suit too big for him. The blonde advanced and to the sound of tinkling jewelry extended her slender fingers, which Greg took delicately. “How are you?” he said, with slightly more warmth, and a sly smile appeared in the right-hand corner of his mouth. He handed her a pink pen, without breaking eye contact. I began to explain that I was from the publishing company, that I — the blond woman had started talking over me, in Portuguese (while I was getting tangled up in schoolboy English), about how honored she was by his presence and how she was sure he wouldn’t be so unkind as to decline the invitation to dine at her house that evening.

Greg Nicholas enjoyed considerable success in Brazil with his method of losing weight: You Can Do It — How to Lose Those Extra Pounds by the Power of Thought. It had been launched by our publishing house without much fanfare — marketing was an alien concept to Natsume — and no one could explain how it had been successful here when that hadn’t been the case anywhere else in the world. Two months after publication, among our other random titles (The Ten Cruelest Leaders in History, 101 Microwave Cupcake Recipes), Greg’s book had slowly begun climbing the list of best sellers, settled into a solid sixth place in the self-help category, and stayed there. His method, according to the website of the Greg Nicholas Institute of Positive Knowledge, had been adopted by the rich and famous, among them the actress Lindsay Lohan and one Mimi Lesseos, a longtime wrestling star and stunt double for the protagonist in Million Dollar Baby.

I know this because I wrote the text for the book’s flaps, and both names were important to sweeten the press release. To cite the lead paragraph of my text:

Greg currently lived in Belize, where he conducted cutting-edge research at his institute. I didn’t know anything more, and I wouldn’t have access to him during his stay in Brazil. His schedule was rigidly controlled by the girl who, while Greg was led by the hand through the lobby, stared at me with anger and incomprehension. It took me some time, lost in those eyes, but I was finally able to identify their hue. They were amber-colored, a bit yellowish. Her name was Ellie.

She had scheduled three heavily packed days for Greg Nicholas. That afternoon he would give his first interview. Afterward, he would take part in a fitness and health program and continue, in early evening, to the main event: a debate in the grand salon of the book fair with Tatá Mourinho, a journalist and student of female behavior; Laura Ruiz, nutritionist to the stars; and the retired judge Gilberto Mendes Albuquerque (Mendes Albuquerque had written a folkloric saga with spicy elements). Later Greg would sign copies in our tiny booth, with me beside him preventing access from the fans. In the days following, he would have two more interviews; visit the TV Globo studios, where he would demonstrate live one of his mentalization recipes — as he called them — and give an exclusive talk for subscribers to the newspaper O Globo; climb up Rocinha with a TV crew, where he would watch a show of children’s capoeira; eat feijoada in the company of a society columnist; and conclude by autographing his book at a shopping center in Barra before embarking for Belize, with connections in Panama.

In the few minutes he was unaccompanied in the VIP section at the book fair, Greg sat at a small table and ate compulsively from a bowl of colored peanuts while his assistant was stern, very stern with me. She wanted to know who the devil that woman was who had spoken to Greg earlier, and what was that dinner invitation that Greg had been forced to accept, and said Greg didn’t like being harassed by unauthorized individuals, Greg needed his rest, Greg wasn’t comfortable with the pillows at the hotel, Greg’s towels weren’t as she had specified (one of the things Natsume had cut from the budget), Greg needed a neutral room to radiate his positivity before the talk, Greg found it very annoying not to be able to use his PowerPoint presentation, and Greg was upset at having to share the stage with three other people. I merely looked at the horde of uniformed schoolchildren down below, sweeping through the booths like termites, asking myself why I had accepted such a job.

“And I haven’t seen our book displayed anywhere till now.”

She said something else that I didn’t entirely catch. That accent of hers — which was perhaps only the English spoken by a native — was sometimes impenetrable for me. Nor did she understand what I was saying, and we stood there looking at each other, not understanding, frustrated.

I phoned my boss. Natsume was one of those diabetics who drink out of foolhardiness, and I knew that at six o’clock, with whiskey fermenting his brain, he would be mildly ill-humored.

“The assistant complained about the towels,” I said.

“What towels?”

“I think she’s going to notice the car we rented this morning isn’t armored.”

“What car?”

“A platinum-blonde intruded into our conversation and invited Greg to dinner.”

“What blonde?”

The panel, needless to say, was a mess, the way events tend to be in my presence. They put Greg at the end of a long table with a white cloth, and it was obvious that the ladies and teenage girls in the audience of two hundred — more packed than I’d ever seen at a book fair — were only there to see Greg. The moderator was an environmental journalist and insisted that each panelist, himself included, say a few autobiographical words before Greg. Greg fidgeted so much that his legs made the table shake — he was a veritable reservoir of positivity. When he finally took the microphone, he leaped up because he was incapable of giving a talk sitting down. What happened next was monumental. Racing from side to side, interacting with the audience, which didn’t understand a word he was saying, Greg told his story of self-awareness, of how he had been a poor child with no prospects, and how early on he discovered the gift of channeling positive energies to overcome barriers. Greg questioned people, Greg made them laugh, Greg summoned a woman from the audience, Greg did push-ups, Greg threw out fistfuls of colored pens, Greg drew applause that raised the temperature of that enormous sardine can by several degrees. The other panelists were as astonished as I was. At the end of his talk the stage was invaded, and only Ellie’s brute force allowed him to be led down the crowded corridors to our booth where, I should add, a plywood wall was knocked over during the autograph session.

I was wiped out, I needed a shower, I cursed our publicist for having learned English on cassette tapes. Only one other person didn’t try to get closer: the platinum-blonde, all in white, fiery lipstick, heavy eye shadow, whose gaze focused unwaveringly on Greg’s every action as he signed copies on the plastic table. Her and the unshaven guy in the overly large suit. Two people, then. Three, actually, because another guy was there, a guy with a foreign air about him, now I remember: tall and thin, very straight caramel-colored hair parted in the middle, prescription glasses with round frames, beige linen jacket. Standing a bit away from us, as motionless as a lizard.

We would see him again a few hours later, at the dinner in Greg’s honor, which I was forced to take part in. Ellie was nervous about anything outside the schedule, too nervous, and I had to spend a few hours in the lobby of the Windsor Barra, wearing the same clothes from the afternoon, still with my backpack because I hadn’t had time to check in to my own hotel, which was apparently a long way from there — more of Natsume’s stupid penny-pinching. In fact, it was so far away that the cabbie laughed when I gave him the address: Aterro do Flamengo. Even if Greg pumped iron, took a bubble bath, clipped his nails, and fixed his hair, there was no way I could go and be back in time to meet them.

We left at ten p.m. Ellie had tied her hair in a bun, light makeup, black silk pants, and a white blouse, and Greg was wearing the same beige-blue combination immortalized in his photo on the book jacket. The taxi driver passed through dark, empty treelined streets with high fences in what could well have been São Paulo and turned onto an avenue with unfinished buildings, colored posters advertising something of low quality, and fallen boarding swollen from humidity that revealed machines and rusted girders. Instead of taking the tunnel, the driver hung a right onto a narrow street and stopped at an iron-gated entrance whose green bars rose in waves to form a design of delicate leaves. We waited for a reply. Greg fidgeted every time he shifted on the vinyl seats, and he didn’t fidget just a little. The gate opened. Then we began going up.

The houses got larger the farther we went, and we stopped near the summit, in front of a two-story mansion that attracted attention not because it was imposing, nor because of the lights or the palm trees at the entrance, but because of the colors. Dark green, grenadine red, dark green, grenadine red, grenadine red, grenadine red, dark green, every wall, every window, every balcony painted with the colors of Fluminense’s jersey as if the owner was obsessed with it, or honoring a vow. Nothing else could explain such absence of taste.

I left my backpack with an attendant. The house was full. Greg was immediately surrounded by four women of indeterminate ages and was in his element, gesticulating, communicating with winks. He distributed a few colored pens, the women laughed, one of them raised her dress to show a muscular thigh compact as a chicken drumstick, and I recognized the hostess because she was talking the loudest; this time she was wearing a vivid orange miniskirt and a pink, brown, and gold leopard-patterned blouse. The battle between colors in such a short expanse of cloth was terrible.

“Try the caipirinha,” I told Ellie, who had been forgotten in a corner. I had already gotten a drink, sake with red fruit, and was amused to see the same guy with the oversized suit behind the fruit table, grinding sugar in a glass. “I thought you were the driver,” I said.

He filled the glass with booze and stuck a colored straw in it without looking at me. “And I thought real men didn’t drink sake caipirinhas with red fruit,” he replied.

The blonde followed Greg wherever he went. When Ellie returned, I commented that I hadn’t seen Mr. Platinum-Blonde anywhere. It was obvious, I said, that a house with those colors demanded a man. A rich, truculent man. Ellie didn’t hear me, or didn’t understand. She was looking a bit paler. She held her untouched caipirinha in both hands, which were now shaking. She said, “We need to get out of here. Now.” That was when I saw the guy again, leaning against one of the plaster Greek pillars. The same hair parted in the middle, the same linen jacket. The same lizard-like eyes, which he kept glued on Greg.

She pushed through the guests to pull Greg away and in a short time had disappeared. I finished my caipirinha, grabbed a beer, and went out a glass door into the night. The pool and terrace were on a level below the house. I descended the metal steps, crossed the lighted patio, and headed to the glass parapet. My God, the view was magnificent. To the left, a concrete elevated roadway lit by car headlights followed the curve of the mountain and hovered over the sea. Even at night it was possible to see the violent crest of waves crashing against the rocks down below. I looked at the dark water. Looked directly at the cliff beneath my feet. The ground disappeared suddenly amidst roiling black treetops and a chilling discharge rose between my legs. I moved away from the parapet, which suddenly seemed too low. I turned back toward the house, three stories above, also painted in the insistent dark greens and grenadines. In the brightness of the glass door I recognized the spare silhouette of Ellie.

We took a cab back, in silence, Greg with a smile trapped on his lips, squirming as he did on the earlier trip. His yawns didn’t convince me. I left them at the door of the Windsor Barra, Ellie and I reviewed the itinerary for the next morning, and Greg went through the automatic door without waiting for her. It was the last time I saw him.

I found out that he had disappeared the next morning when I answered the third or fourth call on my phone. It was ten thirty and I had ridiculously lost track of time. To be expected, since I had gotten to my hotel, the Mengo Palace, at almost three a.m. after crossing the city in a ride that cost over a hundred reais, which I had to pay out of my own pocket. I entered the mirrored lobby, with its slight smell of must, and realized I had left my backpack at the home of the platinum-blonde. I got under the poor electric shower, lay down on the bed with my underwear inside out. The air conditioner rattled like a jalopy, someone laughed loudly all night, and the sound of buses cutting across the Aterro seemed to materialize itself directly over my bed.

It was Ellie on the phone, and from what little I understood she was saying that Greg hadn’t come down for breakfast, wasn’t answering calls, hadn’t gone to the gym or left for a run on the beach. The manager had just opened the door to his room, and Greg’s bed hadn’t been slept in.

On the way to Barra I called Natsume.

“Greg has disappeared.”

“Did he sell a lot of books at the talk?”

“You don’t understand. Greg has disappeared.”

“Rose asked for five autographed copies, for us to promote on radio.”

“You don’t understand.”

I was escorted into the Windsor Barra, through the lobby to a sliding door in the rear that opened onto the Emerald Room. They had pushed back the chairs and she was in the middle, among unfriendly types. She was blowing her nose into a tissue and her eyes were puffy. One of the guys, tall and paunchy, with gray hair forming small greasy waves on his shirt collar, came up to me. He wanted to know my name and what I did, and the way he asked the questions made me want to confess to anything. My hands were shaking.

I needed to sit down; I pulled up a chair beside Ellie. She had already tried to explain what she knew. Greg’s real name was Gregor Nikolaidis. “Did you know that?” the policeman asked me with a sarcastic smile. No, I didn’t. My head hurt. Greg, or Gregor, was in Belize because he was being investigated by the IRS in the US. Greg, or Gregor, could no longer live in Europe, wanted on a series of charges. The cop turned to his colleague, who was eating cupcakes from the hotel buffet.

“Macedo, can you remind us what he is accused of?”

Macedo swallowed quickly, wiped his mouth, and took a small notebook from his pocket. He read before speaking: “A bit of everything. Use of false identity, larceny. He swindled a rich widow, the family found out, and he can’t set foot in Italy anymore.”

“A rich widow, huh?” said the other, feigning interest.

“That’s what it says,” replied Macedo.

“How do you say estelionato in English?” asked the gray cop.

“I used to know, but I forget.”

The gray cop turned to me. “Right. Swindling, tax evasion, extortion, and a lot more, my friend. Heavy stuff. So it’s better for you to tell us.”

I described our trip to the green-and-red house; the cop said he already knew that part. “This woman here can’t stop talking about the house and the people there, but I want to know what happened afterward.”

“Maybe she doesn’t know,” I said.

“You think I’m a fool?”

Macedo answered his cell phone, whispered something out of the corner of his mouth, and hung up. “A representative from the American consulate is on his way.”

“Shit,” said Gray. “Bucetinha said he’s going to take over the case. What he wants is to get on TV. This time he’s not going to.” They exited the Emerald Room hurriedly, leaving us in the custody of Rejane, a dyed-blonde, her huge ass stuffed into white jeans under which I could see the outline of her thong. She sat across from us, leaning against the back of her chair, her legs apart, and said she still needed to clarify a few things.

Ellie’s chilly fingers found my hand. An electric shock ran through my body. Those fingers, those gnawed nails.

Rejane wanted to know: “Does this visualization really work? I mean, do people lose weight by the power of thought?”

My boss to me: “The Internet is saying our author disappeared.”

“Can’t talk now.”

“Our book orders are doubling. Keep him disappeared awhile longer.”

“Look, I don’t think you understand—”

“We’re going to hit number one. It’s you who doesn’t understand.”

Lindsay Lohan, from house arrest, had just sent word that she didn’t know Greg Nicholas, had never been treated by him, was unfamiliar with his method, and had never been in Belize. A similar statement from Mimi Lesseos was expected at any moment.

Rejane spoke for a long time on a pink phone, pacing around the Emerald Room. Then she took a black automatic from her purse and checked to make sure it was loaded. We proceeded down dark corridors, crossed through the kitchen, and found ourselves before a side door. “Why are we leaving out the back?” I asked, but she didn’t answer. Belatedly I understood that we were throwing the representative from the consulate and that Bucetinha guy off the scent, while Gray and Macedo tried to solve the case.

We took the same busy avenue as the night before, in the opposite direction, and got stuck in traffic. The air-conditioning wasn’t working, and Ellie began saying she wasn’t feeling well. She asked Rejane where we were going, and the woman, in mirrored sunglasses, simply looked at her in the rearview mirror. We inched our way through a collection of shopping centers that ended in epic fashion with the Statue of Liberty pressed between bluish glass and beige mortar. Ellie stared like a blind person who has recovered her sight. Rejane spoke again on her pink cell phone. No, no one had seen her leaving the hotel; yes, she had turned off the radio and the vehicle’s GPS. Yes, she would keep moving, but they didn’t have much time. “Macedo, where are you guys?” she said. “No, I think the victim was only supposed to go to Rocinha this afternoon or tomorrow. You shot at who? How? What’re you doing there?”

We slowly made our way through an endless traffic circle where a huge concrete box, at least five stories high, was being constructed, a mixture of Trojan horse and smokehouse. We passed by neoclassical-style buildings, like those I saw in São Paulo, in the middle of empty lots that in a matter of months would be occupied by new neoclassical buildings. “I need to get out of here,” said Ellie, turning the door handle. Rejane looked at us again and said she would stop. She drummed on the steering wheel. She picked up her phone but wasn’t able to complete the call. She sighed, thought. We crossed under red pennants at the entrance to Makro and pulled into its parking lot, almost empty at that time of day. Rejane hesitated about which space to choose and stopped between two of them. She left the windows half rolled down and took the car key. She told us to stay there and abandoned us like children.

That was when Ellie began to cough and clutch her neck — “Air, air, air” — and tumbled out the door.

I held her as we kneeled on the hot concrete, and I could feel her breath warming my shirt. She repeated that she knew what had happened to him. I asked if he was being hunted, whether he had gotten into something bigger that not even he, Greg, understood. She shook her head. No, no, no. She said I had to go back to that dark-colored house at the top of the hill. Then I remembered the strange guy and his glasses, his straight hair. I tried to describe him to Ellie, as I held her tighter. A security guard came by on a motor scooter, but we didn’t move. I tried to kiss her but Ellie said, “No,” then added that she had been trying to explain something to those cops from the beginning. The man, the man with the caipirinhas—

“A bit ill-humored,” I said.

“Didn’t you see the gun under his jacket?”

Only then did she look directly at me with those startled amber-colored eyes. In the distance I saw Rejane lugging a large package on her shoulders. Halfway to the car she stopped, noticing our flight. She put down the box, looked around, took out her phone. We didn’t have much time. Ellie squeezed my shoulders and looked at me intensely. She said I had to go there, to that house. That I had to find out. I pressed her about the snakelike guy with the parted hair, who seemed to be working for someone, who hadn’t taken his eyes off Greg.

“He may be from some criminal organization,” I said.

That somehow broke the spell that bound us. She dried her nose on the sleeve of her shirt and got up. When she spoke, she radiated disappointment.

“No, Humberto, he’s not after Greg. He’s not violent. He’s not a gangster. He’s an editor, like you.”

The policewoman had spotted us. She waved, ordering us to come back.

“Another editor?”

“Your competitor. With whom Greg was going to sign for his next book.”

“Next book?”

“I’m sorry.”

I heard only the silence of heated concrete. Ellie called to me. Ellie tried to touch me. I was just a shadow moving on the ground to the car, to the open trunk, where Rejane was attempting to insert a monstrous box. I looked and didn’t understand. A portable barbecue grill.

“My boyfriend’s has a hole in it,” was all she said.

Betrayed. That was how I felt when I rang the doorbell of the house at the top of the hill. The sun was starting to go down, but it still burned my neck. I was tired from the interrogations in the afternoon, tired of the police. Our arrival at the 16th precinct hadn’t been pretty, to say the least. Jostling and pushing. The gray detective, bandaged, arguing with another investigator. No sign of Macedo. Some guy with a pink little mouth shining in a curly goatee was giving an interview on TV. They had placed a coat over Ellie’s head and pushed her down a hallway filled with photographers as if she were a suspect. And still no sign of Greg. I just wanted to get my backpack and take a shower before returning to São Paulo.

I explained on the intercom what I had come for. I explained it again to a uniformed maid who led me to the empty grand ballroom, said that madam had just woken up, and left me there. Only then did I observe the room in detail. A spiral staircase rose right in the middle of the windows, blocking the view outside. Greek pillars led nowhere. On the wall, a framed jersey from the Fluminense football team vied for space with an abstract canvas of childish bad taste. In the photos on the chest of drawers (Bariloche, yachting, carnival) I finally saw Mr. Platinum-Blonde. Gray-haired, stocky, he could have been her grandfather. Since the servant hadn’t returned, I decided to go down to the swimming pool.

The view was even more impressive at twilight. She was in a lounge chair down below.

The light blinded me momentarily. Her wavy hair shone. She was wearing a white beach skirt over a white bathing suit and white sandals with ruffles and heel. She was lying on her side, her languid legs resting on each other. Her eyes disappeared behind very dark glasses. She looked at me, I think, but said nothing. I sat in the lounge chair opposite her. She removed the cigarette holder from her lips and blew smoke into the air, framed by the indecent blue of the sea.

“Ah, the messenger boy.”

“The name is Mariconda. Humberto Mariconda.”

“Do you like the house? Is that why you came back?”

I looked around, blinking my eyes. “To tell you the truth, the colors don’t go very well with this little paradise you have here.”

She raised the holder to her mouth, examined me for a moment. “My husband, Mariconda. He’s a fanatic.”

“Is that why he’s never around? Traveling with the team? Does he visit the dressing rooms? Young men changing clothes?”

She smiled as if not smiling. “The police were already here trying to intimidate me. You’re not going to do it.”

“Ah.”

She released the smoke. I spoke again.

“And where can I find Mr. Platinum-Blonde?”

She thought a bit. Making the connection with the name was difficult. She smoked. She understood. “That’s none of your business, darling. That’s a problem between him and me.”

I got up and walked around her lounger. The sea was calling me, the trees clamored down below. I felt the same chill as the night before. Something gleamed through the foliage. In the indirect light of sunset little colored streaks striped the grass, emerged among the rocks. The hot wind whistled in my ear. I realized I was alone, completely alone, and that Ellie was right. I needed to hold on tight to the glass parapet.

“I noticed your gunman isn’t here.”

“He’s not my gunman.”

“Where is he?”

“Ask my husband, if you find him.”

She seemed to be in a bad mood. I looked at the abyss again, then at her. “You thought you’d have the night just for yourself, with your husband away.”

Now she showed a hint of a smile mixed with impatience. I went up to her again and sat down with difficulty. My back tingled. She shuffled her funereal legs. She was facing a terrific hangover, I now realized.

“Greg came back here late that night and you thought you’d have a great time. But the guy making the caipirinhas spoiled everything, didn’t he?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, looking bored.

I pointed to the parapet. “He should have removed the pens from Greg’s pockets before throwing him down there.”

She touched her hair. Sighed. At no time did she make a move to rise, or look behind her. She said I was being a bit ridiculous.

“What’s ridiculous is this house. Those colors,” I said.

She sighed and laughed. I stood up, feeling a chill in my spine. I suddenly felt fragile, exposed; thousands of needles pricked the nape of my neck. Then she spoke.

“Don’t worry. He doesn’t own me, and he’ll get what’s coming to him.”

“Are you going to bring in the police?”

“What do the police have to do with this? Much worse, dear. In a week all this will be a different color.”

“Color?” I said between my teeth. I couldn’t say anything else.

“Tangerine tango. The color for next summer. It will go well with the palms.”

The maid descended the stairs with a tray of drinks. My backpack wasn’t anywhere, and the sea had taken on a carnivorous blue tone. I looked at her again in the lounge chair. I understood that she had just planned that revenge, and her body emanated an opaque glow of satisfaction. I barely remembered why I was there, and she had no intention of reminding me.

The Wait by Flávio Carneiro

Downtown

It was an ordinary day, a Monday like any other, even the hangover was the same. It was a little past noon and the sun seemed to flood its full intensity on my head as I entered the old building on Rua da Relação.

“It’s not working. I already called maintenance,” said the doorman without taking his eyes from his newspaper.

“That thing ought to be retired for good,” I replied, looking at the elevator, which was always out of order.

I climbed the stairs thinking that my life wasn’t going very well. An aching head, the heat, and that infernal din from the building, half commercial, half residential. I went from the first to the fifth floor hearing children crying, neighbors arguing, loud music, and the irritating sound of some idiot drilling into a wall.

My office door needed serious repainting. I stood there for an instant, the plaque in front of me reading, Detective André — Investigations.

I don’t really know if what I felt was what mystics call an epiphany, I don’t understand such things, but maybe it actually was that, an epiphany, a revelation. As I looked at the plaque it was as if a voice was telling me in an ironic, slightly diabolical tone: Wake up, brother, get out of this morass.

I solved problems for everyone, recorded adulterers in the act, uncovered insurance fraud, assisted cuckolds and lovers with equal competence, and was still down in the dumps, living in a matchbox in Copacabana and working in a horrific office in a horrible building in the center of a city that seemed more and more hostile.

“Excuse me, are you Detective André?”

I turned toward the voice. “Yes.”

“Can we talk?”

I opened the door and motioned the woman inside. I went in immediately after her, offered her an armchair, and opened the window.

Sunlight illuminated the spot where she was sitting. My desk was in shadow. I could turn on the light but I preferred it like that. I had read in a story by Machado de Assis that it was the way a certain card reader received her clients. The fortune teller in the shade, the client in a kind of spotlight like in a theater. The card reader could judge the customer’s face while shuffling the cards, without letting herself be seen clearly.

“How can I help you?”

She was a beautiful woman. I had noticed her perfect body when I saw her from behind, slowly entering the office. She was wearing a short knit dress, dark red, almost wine-colored, contrasting with her very white skin. Her small dark eyes took on a glow when she started to speak.

“Forgive me, I don’t know where to begin, I’ve never been in a detective’s office.”

“There’s always a first time.”

She smiled, with a somewhat forced shyness.

“You can begin by telling me your name.”

“Marina.”

The office door opened suddenly and she was startled by the noise.

“Am I intruding?”

A rhetorical question. Whatever my response, Fats was going to come in and remain in the room. An old friend, he knew all there was to know about crime fiction. He owned a used-book store on Rua do Lavradio and in his free time helped me with investigations. Though he didn’t call it helping. He called it advising.

I introduced the two. He greeted her with a smile. I knew that smile; Fats is a perv, and I believe he thinks the same about me.

He pulled up a chair, turned it around, and sat down, resting his arms. It was a studied move to impress the woman, as if he were one of those hard-boiled types in a gangster flick. All that was missing was to chew on a toothpick and spit on the floor. Marina ignored him.

“I came here because I’d like you to locate a person.”

“A person.”

“Yes. A man.”

I waited. She lowered her eyes and crossed her legs. She rested one hand on a knee. She had long, delicate fingers, a pianist’s fingers. I noticed the wedding ring.

“Your husband?” I let fly.

“No, it’s not my husband. My husband knows nothing about it. And he must not know.”

“I understand.”

She fell silent again.

“Want something to drink, dear? Water, soda, beer?” Fats asked.

“Water, please.”

Fats went to the minibar and opened a bottle of mineral water. He poured it into a glass and handed it to her.

Marina looked at the bookcase that occupied the back wall of the office. “You enjoy reading, I see.”

“Yes.”

She got up and went to the bookcase. She had long, straight black hair and was wearing high heels and walked as if she were barefoot, light as a feather.

She ran her eyes over the books’ spines. “There’s nothing but crime stories here!”

“Anything wrong with that?” I asked in a joking tone.

“No, of course not. It goes well with the office of a private detective.”

“Most real detectives don’t like to read. I think I’m an exception.”

Fats went up to her. “Let me show you something,” he said, picking up a book and handing it to Marina.

“The Maltese Falcon.”

“Have you read it?”

“I don’t like crime stories. And Hammett is far from my favorite writer.”

“You know there’s a character in this novel, a woman, who’s very much like you?”

“Is she?”

“Her name is Brigid. Her real name, I mean. She uses other names as well.”

“Hmm.”

“Don’t you want to know why she resembles you?”

“No,” she replied in a dry tone, and sat down again.

“Who’s the man you want to find?” I asked, making no effort to conceal my impatience.

“Actually, I don’t know him. I don’t know his name or what he does in life. I’ve never spoken with him. He must be five-eleven or a little less, short black hair. Dark skin, I think.”

“You think?”

“I’ve never seen him up close, only some distance away, and at night without much light.”

Fats looked at me and raised his eyebrows.

“It all started two weeks ago. One night as I was leaving work, I sensed someone was following me.”

“Where do you work?”

“At the National Library, in the rare books section.”

“And where do you live?”

“Right here in downtown. On Avenida Calógeras, on top of the Villarino. Are you familiar with it?”

“The Pan América Building. I had a client who lived there.”

“Quite a coincidence.”

“Yes, it is.”

She paused, her gaze a bit distant. I would have liked to know what she was thinking at that moment. It was a brief pause, just a few seconds, then she looked at me again and resumed her account.

“I always walk home and nothing had ever happened to me. You know, it’s nearby, a ten-minute walk. But that night I felt something odd, I was certain I was being followed. And I admit I was afraid to stop and look back.”

“What did you think might happen if you looked back?”

“I don’t know. Obviously nothing was going to happen, the street was full of people, but I was scared. I walked a bit farther, and when I was near my house, I had to stop at a traffic light. Then I looked, and there he was.” She took another sip of water. “He had a newspaper under his arm. He was wearing jeans and a white short-sleeve shirt. He stared at me.”

“Was he a hunk?” asked Fats.

“What?”

“Was he good-looking?”

“He wasn’t ugly.”

“Was he good-looking or just not ugly? They’re two different things.”

She didn’t answer.

“And what happened after that?” I asked.

“I kept on walking, fast, until I entered my building. I don’t even think I said hello to the doorman, I went straight upstairs with a flutter in my chest. I got into my apartment and lay on the sofa for a few minutes, without turning on the lights. Then I went to the window, opened it, looked down, and there he was, on the sidewalk.”

“Looking at you.”

“Exactly. He was leaning against a lamppost, the newspaper under his arm, looking at me. I noticed he was carrying a leather pouch on a strap. He didn’t seem scary and he wasn’t smiling, just looking at me. I closed the window. I took a shower and after dressing went back to look at the sidewalk. He wasn’t there anymore.”

“But he came back the next night,” Fats said.

“How do you know?”

He smiled.

“Yes, the next day he followed me again. I didn’t even need to look back to know he was following me, my intuition told me he was there. In the middle of the street I turned around and stared at him. He was still in jeans and a short-sleeve shirt, blue this time. The scene was almost the same as the first night, and I was impressed. The same neutral expression, the pouch, the newspaper under his arm, not moving a muscle, just standing there.”

“This time you took a long look at the guy, it wasn’t as rushed as the first time,” I said.

“I didn’t feel any fear, you understand? The first night I was a little frightened, but not this time. He had a serene expression, calm. He didn’t look like a criminal. He seemed to have something to tell me but he didn’t say anything.”

“Did it enter your mind that he might be interested in you?”

“Of course. But then why didn’t he come closer, speak to me? I turned my back and went home. And the same thing happened again.”

“You opened the window and he was on the sidewalk.”

“Yes. Leaning against the same lamppost, with the same demeanor, the same expression.”

“Did you see when he left?”

“No. As long as I stayed at the window he remained on the sidewalk, in that same spot.”

“With the newspaper under his arm.”

“Always with the newspaper under his arm. I closed the curtains and when I went back to the window, later, I didn’t see anyone on the sidewalk.”

“Let me see if I can guess,” Fats said, pouring a cup of coffee. “On the third night, everything happened again, the same script: he followed you, you stared at each other, afterward he stood on the sidewalk contemplating you.”

“I don’t know if contemplating is the right word. He was looking at me.”

“No, my dear, he didn’t look at you. There’s a big difference between looking and contemplating. That guy’s not one for looking at a beautiful woman. He contemplates. He’s the sophisticated type. Sick, maybe, but who isn’t?”

She laughed for the first time. She had a lovely smile. “You’re kind of crazy yourself, aren’t you?”

“Could be. But I’ve got that guy’s number. I know what he’s like.”

“I don’t think so,” she said with a touch of irony. “I haven’t told you everything yet. He continued to follow me for several nights. More than once I felt like going up to him and just asking what he wanted from me.”

“And why didn’t you?”

She took a deep breath. Then she said in a soft voice, almost a whisper: “Because I was enjoying it.”

Fats and I looked at the woman sitting before us. I should say, rather, not that we looked but that we contemplated the woman.

“I was afraid of what might happen if I went up to him. I don’t know, I thought he might get scared and run away.”

She looked like she was about to cry. Marina straightened her body, sat up erect in the chair, and held back the tears.

“One day, at the library, a girlfriend showed me a book. By a French writer, Roland Barthes. You surely don’t know him, he never wrote a crime novel,” she said with a small smile.

I chose not to respond.

“I took the book home. It was a book of fragments, notes about things relating to love. And there was a very lovely story in it, about a mandarin who falls in love with a courtesan. The mandarin declares his love and the courtesan tells him: I will be yours if you wait for me a hundred evenings in my garden, beneath my window. For ninety-eight evenings he waits for her, in the garden. On the ninety-ninth evening, when she is ready to give herself to him, he leaves and never returns.”

“Dirty trick,” says Fats.

“I think I will accept a beer.”

“Coming up,” I said, getting two. I gave one to Fats. I didn’t want to drink, not just yet.

“I copied the story of the mandarin from the book. I copied it on a sheet of paper, put it in an envelope, and one night when the man was following me, I dropped the envelope on purpose. And hoped he had seen it.”

“You dropped the envelope the way a woman in love drops a handkerchief,” Fats said, and it didn’t strike me as a provocation.

“I went on walking, following the nightly ritual. I went up, waited a bit inside, opened the window, and saw him on the sidewalk looking at me as always. Except that this time there was a small difference, a new detail. He took the envelope from the pouch and held it up, as if to say: Here it is, I got it.” She drank the beer, slowly. Then she placed the glass on the table and said in a firm voice, “It was the last time I saw him.”

I got up and went to the window. There outside, people were moving hurriedly, car horns were blowing, a workman was trying to control a jackhammer. He was small and thin; they shouldn’t have given a guy like that a jackhammer, I thought.

It wasn’t the only odd thing in the city. Rio is an unusual place, full of surprises, and downtown is the best example of that. To start with, downtown isn’t in the center of the city, it’s at one end, along the oceanfront. If it were truly central it would be right in the middle, not on the edge of the beach.

“Do you have any idea where he waited for you to leave the library?” I asked, returning to my chair.

“He always waited for me at a sidewalk table, at Amarelinho. Every afternoon when I would leave the library, there he was. I would walk down the steps and head slowly toward home.”

“Slower each time.”

“That’s true, slower each time.”

She stared at me. The story she had to tell had been told and Marina awaited my reaction.

I lowered my head and shuffled some paper on my desk. Bills: lights, rent on the office, condo fees.

“All right. I’ll find that nutcase for you.”

After she left I didn’t stay in the office for long. I made some phone calls, saw a client, and around four o’clock closed down. I decided to focus on Marina’s case. She was paying well — Fats set the price this time. And it was hefty.

“Nothing like mixing work and pleasure,” he said as we sat at a sidewalk table at the Amarelinho, across from the National Library.

I thought that was where we should begin. Not that we expected to find the guy in the most obvious place. We knew he wouldn’t be at the Amarelinho. But Fats thought that, before anything else, we should try to better understand, or at least speculate about, what he was up to.

“We have to put ourselves in his position, right, André? It was from here that he watched Marina every day. Remember the lesson of a master, Chesterton’s Father Brown: it’s necessary to put oneself in the place of the criminal, it’s necessary to think like him to predict what he will do next.”

“The guy’s not a criminal. It’s no crime to follow a beautiful woman in the street.”

“He did more than that. The scoundrel broke the heart of a ravishing woman. And I should add: a ravishing married woman.”

“Pay attention, Fats, we’re at the Amarelinho, the way you wanted, and we’ve just ordered a fourth round of beers. Is that enough to put ourselves in the place of the guy or do we need to get completely plastered first?”

“It wouldn’t be a bad idea. But it won’t be necessary, since I know why he stayed here.”

“So talk.”

“The guy’s a professional observer.”

“Huh?”

“Just what I said. Remember that story by Poe, ‘The Man of the Crowd’? The guy in the story, the narrator, was methodical. He would sit in a café in London looking out at the street packed with people. And he cataloged each type: merchants, lawyers, public servants, prostitutes, pickpockets, noblemen, and loan sharks; he would classify everyone. Our man is like that too, he’s no amateur. He has a method. And like Poe’s character, he starts by carefully hiding his observation point. A café in downtown London, a table at a bar in downtown Rio. See the parallel?”

“Go on.”

“From here, maybe from this very table where we’re sitting, he could observe at will, without really being seen. People of every kind pass through this square; Cinelândia is a kaleidoscope of humanity, if you’ll permit me a poetic image. Tourists, beggars, politicians, artists, con men, professors, students, drunks of every kind, and of course beautiful women.”

“Like Marina.”

“Yes. Imagine the guy sitting here, right across from the library. At six in the afternoon he sees her descending the stairs, a beautiful young woman, tall, elegant, wonderful, a goddess. He follows her with his eyes, intently. And then he thinks: Tomorrow I’m going after that woman. The next day, at the same hour, he begins his game with Marina. And the rest, we already know how it was.”

“And why do you think he gave up?”

The waiter arrived with two more beers.

“Marina sent a message: she didn’t want him to act like the mandarin in the story. She was in love with him and hoped one day he’d speak to her. The waiting was proof of his passion. The guy understood that and chose to leave. He knew that if he continued the game, sooner or later he’d fall into the trap.”

“What trap?”

“The trap we all fall into, we romantics, those perpetually naïve about love. You, in fact, more than me.”

“What trap?” I asked, trying to sound bored.

“The same as ever, since Adam and Eve. The trap of commitment.”

“You think Marina acted hastily.”

“Of course. She didn’t know how to wait long enough. Marina scared the nutcase and he hit the road. When she copied the passage from the book and then purposely dropped it, she was telling him: Don’t be like the mandarin, don’t go away on the last night.”

“And he did.”

“Right. These things happen.”

From the Amarelinho we went to Marina’s building, following the route she said she took every day. We crossed Rio Branco, took Pedro Lessa to the end, turned onto Graça Aranha, which joins Calógeras, and after a ten-minute walk we were there. I remembered the Pan América well. The apartment of my former client faced Avenida Beira-Mar and had a dazzling view. Marina’s faced Calógeras.

“This is where he stood, contemplating Marina,” Fats said, leaning against the lamppost.

We stayed there for some minutes, looking for I don’t know what exactly. The doorman began regarding us suspiciously. I thought it best for us to leave.

We then began our rounds through the bars, as planned at the table at Amarelinho. That night and the following two nights we made our pilgrimage to the downtown bars in search of the man.

Rio is a city constantly inviting people into the street, and downtown is no different. I would meet Fats at the end of the day and we would hit the dozens of bars scattered along Rua do Lavradio, Lapa, the narrow streets leading to Cinelândia, the venerable Rua do Ouvidor and environs.

Those were long nights, I must say. And we didn’t find the guy.

“Patience, André, we have to be patient. I have the feeling we’ll find the man tonight.”

“You talk about method but don’t have one, you know that?”

“Trust me, little brother, today we’ll find that sly fox, trust me.”

It was eight at night when we entered Arco do Teles. I checked to see if our friend was in any of the bars.

“A change of plan, André,” Fats said, taking my arm. “Next stop: Bar Brasil.”

“You think he might be there?”

“No. But I urgently need to eat a kassler with potatoes.”

“You shouldn’t eat pork ribs. They’re fattening.”

“I’m already fat, have you forgotten?”

Deep down I knew my friend didn’t want to go to Bar Brasil just to devour his favorite dish. He had something in mind that he didn’t want to tell me just yet. Fats is like that; at times he thinks he’s Sherlock Holmes hiding some thought from Watson in order to enhance his brilliant deduction at the end. Watson in this case was me.

We walked to Rua Mem de Sá. I enjoyed walking at night in those streets. The infernal daytime bustle with people scurrying like ants gave way to a different lineage, the bohemians. And walking at night lets me see more calmly the old houses, the buildings from the time of the empire, the signs of another era written on the streets like a book open to whoever wants to read. I wanted to, I liked reading the city, especially downtown, where everything is written.

We got to Bar Brasil and chose a table at the rear. The waiter quickly brought our dishes. Fats went with kassler. I ordered meatballs.

“Okay, out with it. Why Bar Brasil?”

He pretended to be startled. Then he smiled. “Elementary, my dear boy. We’ve been roaming around for three days. We’ve been to practically every sidewalk bar in the area. If he’s not in any of them it’s because we’ve been looking in the wrong place, understand? It boils down to this: the creep doesn’t want to be found. He doesn’t know that Marina put a detective on his tail, but to be on the safe side he decided to change his strategy. No sidewalk bars now, no showing himself. I’m going to a quieter spot, where I can contemplate women without a lot of people around, my way. That’s what he thought.”

“Then why didn’t he change neighborhoods?”

Fats cut off a generous piece of rib and chewed on it.

“Get one thing through your head, André: the man is methodical. He likes this area and doesn’t want to leave it. It’s his territory, understand? The guy knows the streets, the alleys, and the bars downtown the way you and I know our own faces in a mirror. It’s his home. It’s not just the setting for his life story, it’s the story itself. And listen to what I’m about to say, listen carefully: it’s from the village that you see the universe. Learn from that, my friend, learn.”

“You read that somewhere.”

“No I didn’t.”

“Yes you did.”

“All right, it’s from Alberto Caeiro. I mean, I adapted it a little.”

We fell silent. The waiter brought two more beers.

“How is it you know so much about a guy you’ve never met?”

“They’re merely hypotheses. And don’t forget: What songs the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture. Sir Thomas Browne.”

“I think you chose the wrong profession. You should’ve been a literature professor.”

“If I’m going to starve to death, I prefer being the owner of a used-book store.”

“You’re not exactly starving. Not in the least.”

“A figure of speech, if you understand me.”

“What I understand is that everything’s very good — cold beer, tasty dishes — but where’s the guy?”

“He just came in.”

It was him. Medium height — Marina had said five-eleven or a little less — short black hair, dark skin. Jeans, white short-sleeve shirt, the newspaper under his arm. Even the leather pouch was there, on a strap. It could only be him.

“I don’t believe it, Fats!”

“Now you see. I told you to trust me, it was just a matter of time.”

The guy came in, took a look around, said something to the waiter, and chose a table near ours. He placed the pouch on a chair and sat down in the other. From where we were, we could see him in profile.

I called Marina.

“We found your friend, he’s just come into Bar Brasil, on Mem de Sá. Do you know it?”

“Yes. I’m on my way. Don’t let him leave.”

“Hurry up. I don’t know if he’s going to stay here for long.”

I hung up.

“Look, André. He’s pretending to read the menu.”

“He is reading the menu.”

“No he isn’t. I saw when he opened the menu without looking at it. He merely opened it for show. And he’s not turning the pages; he merely opened it and left it open, to fake it. See? He’s looking in our direction. At the table with the women.”

At a table across from us, three women were taking loudly and laughing.

“What can they be laughing so hard about?” I asked.

“They’re beautiful, young, and judging by their clothes they have money. Do you need any other reasons to laugh about nothing?”

“And which of them will he choose to follow?”

“He’s not thinking about that yet. He just got here, he’s analyzing the terrain. And it won’t depend solely on his choice. It’ll depend on how they leave the bar. They may leave together and get into a car nearby. That would be it for the loony. Or it may be that one of them leaves before the others, walking toward the subway, for example. That would be ideal for him.”

“I just saw him give the waiter his order.”

“Excellent, it means he’s going to stay for a while. At least until Marina gets here. Where was she — at home?”

“I don’t know.”

“With her husband?”

“I have no idea, Fats!”

“I was thinking: it would be funny if her husband followed her when she left.”

“The husband following his wife who’s following a stranger who was following her.”

“Yes, like those Russian dolls, one coming out of the other.”

“Look what the guy ordered: kassler with potatoes. What else do you two have in common?”

“I don’t know, but I’ll find out very soon.”

“Find out how?”

“I’m going to talk to him. Or rather, we’re both going to,” Fats said, standing up and taking his glass of beer.

“What? You’re going to spook the guy!”

“Come with me.”

I grabbed my beer and we went to the other table.

“Everything okay, boss? All right if we sit here?” Fats asked.

He raised his head and looked at Fats, then at me, without a word. “No,” he finally answered, returning to his food.

“Why do you follow women?” Fats demanded, sitting down at the table. I sat too.

He gestured to the waiter, asking for the check.

“Take it easy, we’re good people, we just want to talk.”

“Who are you two?”

“A female friend of yours hired us. We’re detectives.”

“From the police? I haven’t done anything wrong.”

“We know that. And we’re not cops.”

“I don’t have a female friend. You’re crazy.”

“We’re crazy? You go around following women in the street and run away when one of them wants to speak to you, and we’re the crazy ones?”

The waiter brought the check. Fats grabbed it.

“Leave this to me, I’m treating. And bring three more beers, please.”

I thought the guy was going to split, but he surprised me; he stared at Fats for an instant, then nodded and said: “This city is like an insane asylum.”

“May I?” I asked, pointing to the newspaper.

“Of course.”

I looked at the date on the front page: it was from last week. He understood.

“I don’t like reading newspapers.”

“Then why do you always have one under your arm?”

“To give the impression that I’m normal.”

I found that humorous. I got the impression that this nut was pretty cool. In different circumstances we might even have become friends.

The waiter brought the beers. We drank in silence for a bit.

“Who hired you?”

“Her name is Marina. The woman from Avenida Calógeras who you followed for a bunch of nights.”

“Marina. A beautiful name.”

“And a beautiful woman as well.”

“Without a doubt. A pity she’s so unhappy with her husband. She deserves something better.”

“How do you know she’s unhappy with her husband?”

“It’s just a hypothesis.”

Fats laughed. “Why do you follow women if you don’t want to be with them?” he asked.

“What makes you think that’s any of your business?”

“I know it’s none of my business, but you could tell me, couldn’t you?”

“No.”

“How do you choose them? What are your criteria?”

The guy finished his beer. He drank rapidly, and I took that as a sign he might bolt at any moment. Sitting down at his table had been a terrible idea. Curiosity is Fats’s weakness, and it would be to our detriment.

“I follow women who want to be followed. I can see it in their eyes, the clothes they wear, the way they walk — I know when they want a little adventure. Those three over at that table, for instance. None of them are any good.”

“Why not? Because they seem happily married?”

“No. They have lovers. They’re too happy to just have good marriages. They probably love their husbands, fine, but they have lovers. They don’t need another adventure.”

I was still thinking about what he had just said when the guy left. There was no way to stop him, it was all very sudden. He took the pouch and the newspaper and left.

Seconds later, Marina entered the bar.

“Where is he?”

“He just left.”

We went out onto the sidewalk. We could still see the guy, walking along Mem de Sá toward the Lapa Arches. Marina could catch up to him if she so desired.

“Now it’s up to you, angel.”

She kissed me on the cheek. And went after the crazy man.

“I don’t like happy endings,” Fats said, standing beside me.

“We don’t know what the ending will be.”

“Want me to tell you?”

“No.”

The Story of Georges Fullar by Raphael Montes

Copacabana

I didn’t know he lived in Copacabana. What I mean is that it wasn’t premeditated, you know? We moved in September of the year before last; my parents chose the apartment, I just went along. I don’t have much say there at home. If it were up to me we would’ve stayed in Méier, my friends are all from there. I studied for nineteen years in the Venceslau district, and I never liked the beach — I didn’t find the slightest attraction in living in Copacabana.

Our apartment is at the corner of Ministro Viveiros de Castro and Duvivier. My mother loves living in the South Zone, she talks about it all the time, how she’s come up in the world, how she struggled to get where she is, and how what she wants now more than anything is to be happy. The corner is near the Arcoverde subway station and she almost never uses the car — she hates to drive.

The street is treelined, quiet with a few hotels, quite attractive with their mirror-glass façade, that, according to her, provide greater security. And everything is nearby (as she says with pride): supermarket, luncheonette, flower shop, manicurist, cybercafé, a dance studio, a bakery, and three gyms. I even signed up for the cheapest one, though I definitely don’t have the patience to work out.

So... on Thursdays there is a street market with fruit, vegetables, and fish over on Ronald de Carvalho. I always have to go with my mother. It’s close, but she insists I keep her company and take the cart. We get there toward the end, to pick up the leftovers; my mother thinks she’s the world’s greatest negotiator when she buys four limes for a real. Be patient. I’m mentioning the market because it was there that I first saw Georges Fullar. It wasn’t until then that I found out he lived in Copacabana. When I laid eyes on him I was paralyzed — my mother was sticking a few grapes in my mouth to judge if they were sweet but I barely noticed. Hey man, put yourself in my place: you’re at an outdoor market and you see your idol a few feet away. Georges Fullar in Bermudas and slippers carrying a bag of bananas. Can you believe it?

What? You don’t know who Georges Fullar is? Only the greatest writer in the country. Sordid Harvest, you read it? A classic. He’s been mentioned for the Nobel Prize. Georges was a philosopher and an academic. That was back in the 1950s. During the dictatorship he fled to Europe and began to write in order to survive. He wrote a few unimportant detective novels under a gringo pseudonym. You know, the ones they sell at newsstands printed on cheap paper? Georges wrote dozens of them. Extremely hard to find nowadays. I bought three in a used-book store, written in French, but I don’t understand French. I keep them just to have them.

When he returned from Europe Georges published Sordid Harvest. It was a smash. It’s a political novel but also a work of suspense. You can’t stop reading it. It’s not shallow or pseudo-intellectual, you know? It has incredible profundity, a power I can’t explain. It’s told from the point of view of a political exile. It’s the best crime novel I’ve ever read. Sordid Harvest, make a note of it. Later you can look for it. It’s really good.

I had to go after Georges. At the market, I mean. He was tall, bony, and had a head of white hair, easy to follow. He moved somewhat aggressively through the crowd, and the funny thing is that no one recognized him. The greatest writer in Brazil buying half a kilo of fish like he was just another guy. I don’t know how long I watched him. I saw when he finished shopping and headed down Ministro toward our building. He entered the lobby. Jesus, beyond living in Copacabana he was my neighbor! Me on the fourth floor; him on the second. Only two floors between me and the baddest dude in Brazilian literature. I almost flipped.

I told you, didn’t I? I’m a writer too. I’ve got a couple of novels put away in a drawer somewhere. I’ve never tried to publish because I feel I’m too young. A writer’s got to be old, you know? Have experience. I like my work, but nobody writes anything of value in their early twenties.

But what I was saying is that I couldn’t get Georges out of my head. I told my mother, and she insisted I call him on the intercom and explain my admiration for him and all the rest. I was against the idea, I didn’t want to be a nuisance. I tried to forget about him.

Copacabana is the world squeezed into a single district. Families, whores, street vendors, drunks, old ladies, nannies, gringos, lottery-ticket sellers, and actors are constantly rubbing elbows on the sidewalks of Portuguese mosaic stones. Some weeks later, I was returning from college when I saw Georges having lunch at Galeto Sat’s, right at the beginning of Barata Ribeiro. I wasn’t planning to eat out (actually, my mother was at home waiting for me for lunch), but I couldn’t resist and went in. I sat at the table next to him, ordered Cornish game hen, potatoes, farofa, and a beer. I ate slowly, watching Georges gnaw on chicken bones and thinking: Man, the greatest Brazilian writer gnawing chicken bones right in front of me.

He had already finished eating when he started a conversation. You may not believe it, but that’s exactly how it happened: he started a conversation with me. “You’re the new people on the fourth floor, aren’t you?” I nodded and replied that he lived on the second. He smiled, even though his eyes remained very hard. Georges had grave, always deep eyes, a characteristic of a talented writer who is ever observing the world around him. He added some complaints about the building — he had lived there for thirty years and the new super, a woman, was a cow. A cow. I wasn’t expecting to hear Georges Fullar call someone a cow. I let him go on talking about water leaks, and the problem of having the subway station so close. In addition to being a talented writer, Georges was old and, you know, old people love to complain about life.

Soon afterward, he invited me to sit with him. He asked my name, and then I made a mistake: I introduced myself and confessed I knew who he was, that I had read Sordid Harvest and that it was my favorite book. Man, Georges’s expression changed immediately, and now it wasn’t only his eyes that were hard. Much later, after we became friends, I understood his reaction better: he didn’t like to talk about his work or his life. That was why he lived alone. He had no maids or servants, no children, not even a pet. Really solitary, Georges. It was only when he drank that he talked and opened up.

“Literature is like a steak,” he once told me, when I asked why he hadn’t written anything since Sordid Harvest. “Would you rather eat a steak or talk about a steak?”

“Eat a steak,” I answered.

“The same is true of literature,” he said. “Talking about literature doesn’t hold the slightest appeal.”

We spoke very little about it; he left no opening. There were nights when we drank wine or whiskey, and then there was a way to initiate a few conversations about literary criticism, methods of writing, theories (Georges detested rules), and literary festivals (he also hated literary festivals — a gathering of people to talk about steak).

From time to time a journalist or literature student would show up looking for an interview, an opinion, or even a photo with him. They were all shooed away. Georges wanted to be forgotten by the world. And little by little the world did forget him.

You must be wondering what we talked about. Georges loved talking about women. Beauty, gentleness, maternal devotion. He was enchanted by that and also by their scent. He was a bit of a pervert, Georges. As well as cultured, obviously. We would usually meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays; he would come down from his apartment and we would order sandwiches from Cervantes. It was one of Georges’s vices: the ham-and-pineapple sandwich from Cervantes. We would eat and gorge on wine. The guy knew a lot about wine. And sacred music. Cinema, cuisine, and sculpture too.

We visited the Drummond statue in those days, there at the end of Copacabana. He pointed to some tourists who were posing beside Drummond. “I’ll bet those sons of bitches have never read a single poem of Carlos’s,” he said. “Life is really shitty, you write and become a statue for a bunch of scumbags to take a picture with.” As we were leaving, some idiot tried to cornhole the statue and guffawed. Shitty, huh?

He never came to our home. I invited him once, he said no, and the subject died there. I also never asked him to autograph my books. Because writers are like that: the more adulated they are, the more they disdain people. He liked me because I didn’t pester him, didn’t ask questions, didn’t push. We met for months without my telling him that I also wrote. Understand, it’s not like I hid anything. I just didn’t think I had the right to talk about it with him.

But there came a night when I told him. It was a Thursday, I think. That was some time ago. Georges and I had killed two bottles of wine and several sandwiches. He was on the balcony of his apartment, sitting in the rocker, and began speaking of the period when he published Sordid Harvest. He told about the launching, the criticism in the media, the prizes, the glamour, and concluded: “The literary scene is so full of shit.” He used a lot of four-letter words, Georges.

That was when I came to feel at ease talking about his book, the impact it had on me, about violence, the honesty I saw in the protagonist’s voice... He interrupted me, agreed, and said that was why he had stopped writing. “I don’t know how to be honest anymore,” he confessed. He himself had experienced everything depicted in Sordid Harvest, which is the reason the book was so authentic and vibrant.

“The writer needs to live what he writes,” he said. “What am I going to write about? A decrepit old man who screws whores and strolls along the beach in Copacabana?”

He was talking about self-fiction, you know? It’s the latest thing. Nowadays almost every book has a writer as protagonist. It goes like this: writers writing about writers who don’t publish; university professors writing about university professors in midlife crises; scriptwriters writing about scriptwriters who work hard and earn little.

“They never stop that mutual masturbation,” Georges said. “Gravediggers, firemen, garbagemen, and cabinet makers should be characters too.”

It was then that I said I was writing a book. Four friends sharing an apartment in Copacabana. The main character was a food lover. And there was a hooker named Cora who was a strong female character. He loved the hooker. And loved the idea. In later meetings we didn’t even need to drink in order to talk about my book. He would show up and ask right away how it was progressing. He never offered to read a single page. He just liked to listen and put in his two cents’ worth.

Near the beginning of the book there’s a scene where the protagonist hires a hooker for his virgin friend. That part kind of stymied me. I didn’t know much about hookers. Georges understood right away. The next Tuesday, when I got to his place, he had company.

“This is Suellen,” he said. She was a short, busty woman with curly hair that smelled of shampoo. She was chewing bubble gum and wearing shorts that showed the panties up her ass. I wasn’t taken with Suellen in the least. She was sexy, but her style didn’t turn me on at all.

Georges told me to make some caipirinhas in the kitchen because Suellen only drank caipirinhas. As I was squeezing the limes, he came in and said I was going to screw her. I was against the idea, but he said it was already paid for and I needed to screw a whore to write the scene authoritatively. Did I want to be a decent writer or a hack? He was forceful, Georges.

The truth is, I had never screwed anyone. It was very bad, I almost couldn’t get it up. Suellen was on the rough side and was impatient; she looked at my dick with that I’ve-seen-bigger expression. When it was over, I lay in bed, dead tired, and Suellen got up, slipped on her shorts, and left without a word. I thought I would never see her again — and didn’t want to. Georges asked no questions; he was discreet. Weeks later, in the middle of a conversation, he asked if I had written the scene. I said yes. The fuck was fucking great.

I may be mistaken, but it was during this time that he mentioned having begun a new novel. Goddamn, after two decades without a line, Georges Fullar was writing again. I was crazy curious to know everything, but held back. I knew he would shut down at the first sign of intrusion. I changed the subject, we spoke of women and even soccer — I don’t know the first thing about soccer. That night we had Japanese food instead of sandwiches from Cervantes (I couldn’t take any more ham with pineapple). We drank half a bottle of sake. He started rattling on about rare poisons, he was interested in the topic, doing research, reading books; colorless poisons, tasteless and odorless, you with me? And that same night he spoke for the first time about mecicitronine. He was familiar with all the properties of the compound, all its effects and characteristics. A poison with an acid taste, slightly bitter, but colorless and lethal, that leaves no trace in the body. He was fascinated by it. Mecicitronine dissolves in the bloodstream and the guy has a heart attack. Weird, huh? At the time, I didn’t understand why he had such interest. I figured it was for the book.

In subsequent meetings he didn’t mention poison, nor did he talk about the book. I also stopped telling him about mine. I can’t explain it, but I think knowing that Georges was writing a new novel made me uneasy... I kind of went into a tailspin. I was an idiot writing my paltry little book while a genius was crafting a masterpiece two floors below me. All I could think about was his book; all I wanted was to find out about it. Does what I’m saying make sense?

There came a night when I couldn’t resist. He was in the kitchen making pasta. I said I was going to pee and snuck into his office. I was looking for a rough draft, a page from the book, a block of notes, anything. Okay, I was being kind of obsessive, but when you read Georges Fullar you’ll understand. I needed to do it. I saw the typewriter, the mahogany chair, the desk, books about poison, some blank sheets of paper scattered around. No text. I went back to the living room disappointed, a bit suspicious. Was the old man lying to me?

I don’t know if he noticed I had gone into the office, but he cut me off for two or three months after that dinner. He started canceling one plan after another, and telling me that the following week he also couldn’t hang out, and didn’t even make up excuses. He could have said he was writing or that he wanted to be by himself, whatever. I found it highly offensive of him to just disappear like that.

This period was hell for me. My parents were separating and those weekly meetings with Georges were like my therapy. Besides which, as I already said, I was no longer able to work on my own book. I reread it and found it to be a piece of crap. I became depressed, and that’s no laughing matter. Then one day, a Wednesday, he called me on the building’s intercom and invited me down to his apartment. He never called me on Wednesdays because he liked watching soccer on TV. I found it strange, but I went.

When I opened the door, it was another Georges. He had aged ten years in those months. Exhausted, without any strength. We made small talk, but his sense of humor was gone. He didn’t use profanity anymore. I asked what was happening and he said he had come to a crucial part of his book, a part in which... in which the character killed a woman. With poison. “And I’ve never killed anyone,” he said, anguished. “I don’t know what the feeling is like.”

I said that he could imagine it, that he was creative and brilliant enough to describe the feelings of committing a murder, but he wasn’t listening, he didn’t want to listen. He kept repeating that he had tried to write but felt drained. Shit.

“Suellen,” he said finally. “Would you help me kill Suellen?”

I thought he was joking. But he kept those hard eyes on me and asked again. He took a small vial from his pocket. Mecicitronine. “Boy, I need your help,” he said. And he did. He was on his last legs, Georges.

I never thought about killing anybody, you know? But at the time the idea didn’t seem so absurd. I took the vial of poison from his hand. It was a white powder that looked harmless, like talcum powder. I envisioned Suellen with the expression she wore when we had sex, and I thought it would be amusing to see her whore’s eyes lifeless, her cocksucking throat clogged with mucus and vomit.

I agreed. I wanted to know where and when, and he told me he had an appointment with her that night. I’d rather not go into detail.

Suellen arrived and was disappointed when she saw me. She went straight to Georges and kissed him, to show she wanted nothing to do with me. He took my hand, slipping me the vial, and told me to go to the kitchen and make a caipirinha for her. I closed my hand around the vial. Suellen was a true whore; she immediately sat on Georges’s lap.

In the kitchen I mixed ice, lime, sugar, cachaça, and some of the mecicitronine. I handed Suellen the caipirinha. She drank it while talking about a series on Brazilian TV about prostitutes. Georges watched her very attentively, saw when she lost control of her speech, lost control of her body — in a word, died. We took the corpse out through the back door, placed Suellen in the trunk of my car, and left her on a bench in Lido Square. By then it was late at night.

In the days that followed, nothing appeared in the newspapers. Lots of people are murdered in Rio de Janeiro. And a whore who suffered a heart attack isn’t news. Georges told me I could call him if I had a problem, if I felt any remorse or guilt. To tell the truth, I felt fine. I didn’t like Suellen. And there was still Georges’s book to consider. One day he called me to say he had finally written the passage in question. “Goddamn good,” he said. He was excited, Georges. Obviously I was proud of having helped, of being part of it, you know?

Our meetings went back to being like they had been before. Sandwiches, wine, good conversation. Suellen never came up. Georges received lots of books from people and gave me almost all of them as gifts. He recommended some, but without explaining why I should read this one or that. He just handed them over and I accepted them. We didn’t talk anymore about our own books, as I already said. Actually, he didn’t speak about his and I ended up abandoning mine at the first of the year. It made no sense to go on. I knew I would only be able to write after reading Georges’s new novel, understand? It was like some invisible barrier, the grandeur of his creation.

One day, he called me to his apartment. He opened the door with a smile I had never seen. He was in ecstasy, Georges. He told me to sit down and handed me a brown package. “The finished manuscript,” he said. It was light but weighed heavy in my hands. You can imagine, I was very nervous. I started to open the package to look at some of the pages but he took it away and said it wasn’t for me to read. He just wanted to celebrate. I was really pissed. I insisted he at least let me see the title. But Georges was seductive and knew how to please. He said I was listed in the acknowledgments and changed the subject. We opened a bottle of wine and ordered sandwiches. No matter how much I talked about other things, all I wanted was to read the book. And there came a moment when I looked at him in the rocking chair and thought that I really wanted to be like him, that I wanted to publish a book as good as his. I would never be able to. We have to be aware of our limits. There is such a thing as talent, you know?

One idea leads to another. Before I realized it, I had returned to my apartment with the excuse of taking some medication and now I had the vial of mecicitronine in my hand. I went back downstairs in time to open the bottle of wine with him and pay for the sandwich delivery from Cervantes. By now you’ve got the picture: Georges didn’t die of a heart attack; I killed him. I put the poison in his sandwich and he didn’t notice the bitter taste because of the pineapple. You can call it insanity, obsession, anything you like, but I needed to read that book. More than that, I needed to publish that book under my name and be successful, a fucking winner.

Georges was old, tired of life. I feel I did him a favor. And myself as well. Georges ate that last sandwich with gusto. He choked, hiccupped, died. In the rocking chair. The glass shattered on the floor. I saved the package from the pool of red wine and didn’t even wait for him to stop moaning. I took out the manuscript: The Story of Georges Fullar.

Chapter One: His name. My name. An elderly writer meets a younger one, full of dreams and ambition. The older writer is tired of life, thinks about suicide, but the youth’s vitality does him good.

Chapter Two: The two converse and become friends. The veteran decides to test the limits of the younger man: he sees if he is capable of killing a woman. And of course the two do kill the woman. This happens in Chapter Five and is beautiful, poetic, tense. Their friendship grows, but the old man stays interested in the ethical boundaries of his junior. The old man tells him that he has finished the book but denies him access to the text. The youth can’t resist and kills the old man. Kills from envy, from pity, to steal the work. People don’t need a motive for killing. He kills him with a knife, not with poison in a sandwich from Cervantes. Georges was wrong about that; I was smarter. At the end comes the letter. The letter in which the old man explains to the youth that he knew he would be murdered, that he knew the other couldn’t contain his curiosity, and that the younger man must do with the book what he considers appropriate now.

Do you realize what a stroke of genius this is? Metalanguage at its best. Well written, well structured, I’m never going to accomplish anything like that. I thought about it for days. I saw them take away Georges’s body. I even went to the funeral — there was hardly anyone there. Dead of a heart attack, said the newspapers. I wanted to publish his book under my name, but I can’t. I need to tell everything so people will know what really happened. It’s our story. He wrote our story. The truth is all there. You can arrest me, Detective Aquino. And release what I just told you to the press, to the world. I’m not doing it for myself; I’m not doing it for Georges either. I’m doing it for mystery writing. It’s one helluva book, and it needs to be read. Hopefully, that way the Brazilian crime novel can finally emerge from the shit.

The Woodsman by Luis Fernando Verissimo

Bangu

The dead man called late afternoon the “hour of long shadows.” That was the title of the manuscript I found in the apartment where he and the blond woman had been murdered. The Hour of Long Shadows. Poems, handwritten, in a pile on top of the living room table. One of the few things in the apartment not splattered with blood.

It didn’t surprise me that the guy wrote poetry. There are poets in Bangu too, why not? But everything about the dead man denied poetry. Everything about him was antipoetic, from his physical appearance to his biography, which Detective Friedrich gave me. Beginning with his name, Tadeu. But there it was, the manuscript, poems written in ballpoint pen. The Hour of Long Shadows and his signature, in a neat pile waiting to be found. But Detective Friedrich hadn’t noticed the pile. Police never notice poetry. I do. I even write some. I write my verses but don’t show them to anyone. They’re private musings. But that doesn’t matter. We’re not here to talk about the fleeting soul of a police reporter but about a double murder.

The two corpses lay on the sofa. The blonde in a nightgown. Beautiful. Even covered in blood she was still beautiful. He only had on underwear. Both had been stabbed to death. Deep cuts made — I don’t know why it immediately occurred to me — with a butcher knife. Or knives. So much carnage, both at the same time, it could only have been done by more than one butcher.

My editor, Mosquito, had asked me to take a look at that slaughter in Bangu. “It might lead somewhere.” My editor’s name is Mesquita, but he’s small and thin and is always buzzing in our ears, which is how he got the nickname Mosquito, but he doesn’t know. “It may lead somewhere” is Mosquito’s way of saying that the story may yield more than just another killing in a Rio suburb. Something extra behind the bloodshed to serve up to our readers.

“Look for Detective Friedrich,” Mosquito had instructed me. “He owes me a couple of favors.”

Detective Friedrich was a large, fat German with the expression of someone who had seen everything in life and had no wish to see it all again. He only said “Ha” when I told him I brought greetings from Mosquito. But he let me into the apartment before the bodies were removed and told me everything he knew about the victims. The dead man’s antipoetic name, the identity of the blonde, everything. The neighbors had said a lot, but Friedrich already knew the couple. He told me that the blonde, Cristina, never left the house by herself, only in the company of the man. The rest of the time she stayed locked up in the apartment. That was why the detective knew them. One day when the man wasn’t there, there was a fire in the kitchen. Friedrich had helped the firemen break down the door and rescue the woman. Afterward he had recommended that the man not leave the door locked like that, but the guy ignored him. He said nothing, just grunted. Maybe his species lacked the power of speech.

Friedrich invited me to have a beer at a bar near the scene of the crime. I asked if I could take the poetry manuscript with me and he consented with a gesture of indifference. At the bar he told me that after the fire he had begun an investigation. On his own.

“What led you to investigate that man?”

“Not the man, the woman.”

“Beautiful, huh?”

“And you saw her covered in blood. Imagine what she was like without the blood. Cristina...” The detective spoke the woman’s name reverently, as if summoning her to sit there with us. Her or her hologram. I could be mistaken, maybe fat Friedrich also had the soul of a poet. Bangu might be a hotbed of secret poets for all I knew...

“I discovered everything about the two of them. He already had a criminal record. Petty stuff. He was a nobody. Even his crimes were mediocre. She was the mistress of Nogueira, owner of a chain of butcher shops in the South Zone. Very rich. She lived in an apartment Nogueira had bought for her, in Laranjeiras. That was where they had their trysts. Everybody knew about the mistress in Laranjeiras, including Dona Santa, Nogueira’s wife, and their two sons. In the family, the code name for her was Laranjeira.”

“How did you discover all this?”

“It’s impressive how much people open up when they see a badge.”

“And?”

“And one day Nogueira has a major stroke and is at death’s door. And the suspicion emerges that the old man had made a will leaving everything, including the butcher shops, or a large part of his fortune, to Laranjeira.”

“So?”

“So right now it’s all conjecture. It’s my hypothesis. Which might be wrong, but I think it’s correct.” Friedrich took a dramatic pause, ordered another beer, and continued: “Here’s the hypothesis: this story is like Snow White.”

“Snow White?!”

“Remember the story? The evil queen is jealous of Snow White’s beauty. She asks the magic mirror who’s the fairest in the land, and the mirror, with the frankness that characterizes all mirrors, says, It’s not you, it’s Snow White. The evil queen then hires someone to kill Snow White. A woodsman.”

“A nobody.”

“Right. The woodsman is supposed to take Snow White to the forest, kill her, and bring her heart to the queen, as proof that he killed her. The woodsman takes Snow White to the forest, and what happens? He falls in love with her. He’s dazzled by her beauty. He decides that instead of killing her he’s going to let her go. Or, in the case of our woodsman, stay with her. Get it? The woodsman is a minor character in the story of Snow White. A mere detail, a supporting actor. But without him and without his decision to spare Snow White there would be no story. The woodsman ends up being the most important character of all. A simple woodsman.”

“How does he prove to the queen that he eliminated Snow White?”

“He takes her the heart of some animal or other, as if it were Snow White’s. In the case of our Tadeu, he could even buy a heart from one of Nogueira’s butcher shops; it’d be an ironic touch. Although Dona Santa, who had helped her husband in the butcher shop in the difficult early days, would inevitably recognize a cow’s heart. But our Tadeu doesn’t do any of that. He simply disappears with Laranjeira. Or with Snow White. And hides out in Bangu.”

“According to your hypothesis, then—”

“The evil queen is Dona Santa, who has nothing saintly about her. Snow White is Cristina. The woodsman is Tadeu, who brings Cristina to Bangu and keeps her locked in an apartment, certain they’ll never be discovered, until they are discovered. And executed, at the order of the evil queen. That will be the line of our investigation. I don’t foresee any difficulty in finding the killer. Or killers. Nogueira’s sons do whatever their mother orders. They’re terrified at the prospect of being left out of the will. And they had access to sharp knives. In short: for this story to match Snow White’s, all that’s missing are the dwarfs.”

“Did old Nogueira die after all?”

“Not yet. He’s in a coma. No one knows what’s in his will. He may have left everything to Laranjeira. Even the butcher shops.”

Several beers later Friedrich was relating what his father told him about Bangu, in the days when a famous textile factory and a soccer team that didn’t do badly in the Rio championships were there, where Zizinho, Parada, and even the great Domingos da Guia had played.

“Today people only come to Bangu to disappear,” said Friedrich. “Like me, who disappeared here six years ago and was never seen again.”

Mosquito had warned me that after a few beers Friedrich would start getting maudlin. I considered asking if he’d been the one who fingered the couple’s hideout to Dona Santa. Perhaps as a form of revenge, I don’t know. But I thought it best not to say anything.

I went back to the office, carrying the manuscript. Maybe there was something there I could use in my story. Something about impossible loves or the like. Readers like a bit of poetry with their bloodshed. I thought about Tadeu, the nobody, the mere woodsman, who one day finds himself the owner of the most beautiful woman in the world, who owes him her life but whom he must lock inside the house. I imagined how the break-in of the apartment by the butchers must have gone down. Perhaps they arrived in late afternoon, the time of long shadows. Perhaps Tadeu feared the time of long shadows every day, and what they could bring. Later I thought about what I would tell Mosquito.

“You were right, it did lead somewhere. It’s basically the story of Snow White. Minus the dwarfs.”