The Best American Mystery Stories 1997

George Pelecanos When You’re Hungry from Unusual Suspects

The woman in the aisle seat to the right of John Moreno tapped him on the shoulder. Moreno swallowed the last of his Skol pilsner to wash down the food in his mouth. He laid his fork across the segmented plastic plate in front of him on a fold-down tray.

“Yes?” he said, taking her in fully for the first time. She was attractive, though one had to look for it, past the thick black eyebrows and the too-wide mouth painted a pale peach color that did no favor to her complexion.

“I don’t mean to be rude,” she said, in heavily accented English. “But you’ve been making a lot of noise with your food. Is everything all right?”

Moreno grinned, more to himself than to her. “Yes, I’m fine. You have to excuse me. I rushed out of the house this morning without breakfast, and then this flight was delayed. I suppose I didn’t realize how hungry I was.”

“No bother,” she said, smiling now, waving the manicured fingers of her long brown hand. “I’m not complaining. I’m a doctor, and I thought that something might be wrong.”

“Nothing that some food couldn’t take care of.” They looked each other over. Then he said. “You’re a doctor in what city?”

“A pediatrician,” she said. “In Bahia Salvador. Are you going to Bahia?”

Moreno shook his head. “Recife.”

So they would not meet again. Just as well. Moreno preferred to pay for his companionship while under contract.

“Recife is lovely,” the woman said, breathing out with a kind of relief, the suspense between them now broken. “Are you on a holiday?”

“Yes,” he said. “A holiday.”

“Illiana,” she said, extending her hand across the armrest.

“John Moreno.” He shook her hand, and took pleasure in the touch.

The stewardess came, a round woman with rigid red hair, and took their plates. Moreno locked the tray in place. He retrieved his guidebook from the knapsack under the seat, and read.

Moreno flipped past the rhetoric of the guidebook, went directly to the meat: currency, food and drink, and body language. Not that Brazil would pose any sort of problem for him; in his fifteen-odd years in the business, there were very few places in the world where he had not quickly adapted. This adaptability made him one of the most marketable independents in his field. And it was why, one week earlier, on the first Tuesday of September, he had been called to the downtown Miami office of Mr. Carlos Garcia, vice president of claims. United Casualty and Life.

Garcia was a trim man with closely cropped, tightly curled hair. He wore a wide-lapelled suit of charcoal gray, a somber color for Miami, and a gray and maroon tie with an orderly geometric design. A phone sat on his lacquered desk, along with a blank notepad, upon which rested a silver Cross pen.

Moreno sat in a leather chair with chrome arms across from Garcia’s desk. Garcia’s secretary served coffee, and after a few sips and the necessary exchange of pleasantries, Moreno asked Garcia to describe the business at hand.

Garcia told him about Guzman, a man in his fifties who had made and then lost some boom-years money in South Florida real estate. Guzman had taken his pleasure boat out of Key Largo one day in the summer of 1992. Two days later his wife reported him missing, and a week after that the remains of his boat were found, along with a body, two miles out to sea. Guzman and his vessel had been the victims of an unexplained explosion on board.

“Any crew?” asked Moreno.

“Just Guzman.”

“A positive identification on the body?”

“Well. The body was badly burned. Horribly burned. And most of what was left went to the fish.”

“How about his teeth?”

“Guzman wore dentures.” Garcia smiled wanly. “Interesting, no?”

The death benefits of Guzman’s term policy, a two-million-dollar payoff, went to the widow. United’s attorneys fought it to a point, but the effort from the outset was perfunctory. The company absorbed the loss.

Then, a year later, a neighbor of the Guzmans was vacationing in Recife, a city and resort on the northeast coast of Brazil, and spotted who she thought was Guzman. She saw this man twice in one week, on the same beach. By the time she returned to the States, she had convinced herself that she had in fact seen Guzman. She went with her suspicions to the widow, who seemed strangely unconcerned. Then she went to the police.

“And the police kicked it to you,” Moreno said.

“They don’t have the jurisdiction, or the time. We have a man on the force who keeps us informed in situations like this.”

“So the widow wasn’t too shook up by the news.”

“No,” Garcia said. “But that doesn’t prove or even indicate any kind of complicity. We see many different kinds of emotions in this, business upon the death of a spouse. The most common emotion that we see is relief.”

Moreno folded one leg over the other and tented his hands in his lap. “What have you done so far?”

“We sent a man down to Brazil, an investigator named Roberto Silva.”

“And?”

“Silva became very drunk one night. He left his apartment in Recife to buy a pack of cigarettes, stepped into an open elevator shaft, and fell eight stories to his death. He was found the next morning with a broken neck.”

“Accidents happen.”

Garcia spread his hands. “Silva was a good operative. I sent him because he was fluent in Portuguese, and because he had a history of success. But I knew that he had a very bad problem with alcohol. I had seen him fall down myself, on more than one occasion. This time, he simply fell a very long way.”

Moreno stared through the window at the Miami skyline. After a while he said, “This looks to be a fairly simple case. There is a man in a particular area of Recife who either is or is not Guzman. I will bring you this man’s fingerprints. It should take no more than two weeks.”

“What do you require?”

“I get four hundred a day, plus expenses.”

“Your terms are reasonable,” Garcia said.

“There’s more,” Moreno said, holding up his hand. “My expenses are unlimited, and not to be questioned. I fly first class, and require an apartment with a live-in maid to cook and to clean my clothes. And, I get two and one half percent of the amount recovered.”

“That’s fifty thousand dollars.”

“Correct,” Moreno said, standing out of his seat. “I’ll need a half-dozen wallet-sized photographs of Guzman, taken as close to his death date as possible. You can send them along with my contract and travel arrangements to my home address.”

John Moreno shook Garcia’s hand, and walked away from the desk.

Garcia said to Moreno’s back. “It used to be ‘Juan,’ didn’t it? Funny how the simple change of a name can open so many doors in this country.”

“I can leave for Brazil at any time,” Moreno said. “You know where to reach me.”

Moreno opened Mr. Garcia’s door and walked from the office. The next morning, a package was messengered to John Moreno’s home address.

And now Moreno’s plane neared the Brasilia airport. He closed the guidebook he had been reading, and turned to Illiana.

“I have a question for you. Doctor,” Moreno said. “A friend married a first-generation American of Brazilian descent. Their children, both of them, were born with blue-black spots above their buttocks.”

Illiana smiled. “Brazil is a land whose people come from many colors,” she said, sounding very much like the voice of the guidebook. “Black, white, brown, and many colors in between. Those spots that you saw” — and here Illiana winked — “it was simply the nigger in them.”

So much for the ideal of Racial Democracy, Moreno thought, as the plane began its descent.

Moreno caught a ride from the airport with a man named Eduardo who divided his time as an importer/exporter between Brasilia and Miami. They had struck up a conversation as they waited in line to use the plane’s lavatory during the flight. They were met at the airport by someone named Val, who Eduardo introduced as his attorney, a title which Moreno doubled, as Val was a giggly and rather silly young man. Still, he accepted a lift in Val’s VW Santana, and after a seventy-mile-per-hour ride through the flat treeless landscape that was Brasilia, Moreno was dropped at the Hotel Dos Nachos, a place Eduardo had described with enthusiasm as “two and one half stars.”

The lobby of the Hotel Dos Nachos contained several potted plants and four high-backed chairs occupied by two taxicab drivers, an aging tout in a shiny gray suit, and a bearded man smoking a meerschaum pipe. A drunken businessman accompanied by a mulatto hooker in a red leather skirt entered the lobby and walked up the stairs while Moreno negotiated the room rate. The hotel bellman stood sleeping against the wall. Moreno carried his own bags through the elevator doors.

Moreno opened the windows of his small brown room and stuck his head out. Below, in an empty lot, a man sat beneath a Pepsi-Cola billboard with his face buried in his hands, a mangy dog asleep at his feet. Moreno closed the window to a crack, stripped to his shorts, did four sets of fifty pushups, showered, and went to bed.

The next morning he caught an early flight to Recife. At the airport he hailed a taxi. Several foul-smelling children begged Moreno for change as he sat in the passenger seat of the cab, waiting for the driver to stow his bags. Moreno stared straight ahead as the children reached in his window, rubbing their thumbs and forefingers together in front of his face. Before the cab pulled away, one of the children, a dark boy with matted blond hair, cursed under his breath and dropped one American penny in Moreno’s lap.

Moreno had the cab driver pass through Boa Viagem, Recife’s resort center, to get his bearings. When Moreno had a general idea of the layout, the driver dropped him at his apartamento in the nine hundred block of Rua Setubal, one street back from the beach. A uniformed guard stood behind the glassed-in gatehouse at the ten-story condominium; Moreno tipped him straight off, and carried his own bags through the patio of hibiscus and standing palm to the small lift.

Moreno’s apartamento was on the ninth floor, a serviceable arrangement of one large living and dining room, two bedrooms, two baths, a dimly lit kitchen, and a windowless sleeper porch on the west wall where clothes were hung to dry in the afternoon sun. The east wall consisted of sliding glass doors that opened to a concrete balcony finished in green tile. The balcony gave to an unobstructed view of the beach and the aquamarine and emerald swells of the south Atlantic, and to the north and south the palm-lined beach road, Avenida Boa Viagem. I he sliding glass doors were kept open at all times: a tropical breeze blew constantly through the apartamento, and the breeze ensured the absence of bugs.

For the first few days Moreno stayed close to his condominium, spending his mornings at the beach working on his local’s tan, watching impromptu games of soccer, and practicing his Portuguese on the vendors selling oysters, nuts, and straw hats. At one o’clock his maid, a pleasant but silent woman named Sonya, prepared him huge lunches, black beans and rice, salad, mashed potatoes, and pork roasted and seasoned with tiempero, a popular spice. In the evenings Moreno would visit a no-name, roofless café, where a photograph of Madonna was taped over the bar. He would sit beneath a coconut palm and eat a wonderfully prepared filet of fish, washed down with a cold Brahma beer, sometimes with a shot of aguardente, the national rotgut that tasted of rail tequila but had a nice warm kick. After dinner he would stop at the Kiosk, a kind of bakery and convenience market, and buy a bottle of Brazilian cabernet, have a glass or two of that on the balcony of his apartamento before going off to bed. The crow of a nearby rooster woke him every morning through his open window at dawn.

Sometimes Moreno passed the time leaning on the tile rim of his balcony, looking down on the activity in the street below. There were high walls of brick and cinderblock around all the neighboring condominiums and estates, and it seemed as if these walls were in a constant state of repair or decay. Occasionally an old while mare, unaccompanied by cart or harness, would clomp down the street, stopping to graze on the patches of grass that sprouted along the edges of the sidewalk. And directly below his balcony, through the leaves of the black curasao that grew in front of his building, Moreno saw children crawl into the gray canvas Dumpster that sat by the curb, and root through the garbage in search of something to eat.

Moreno watched these children with a curious but detached eye. He had known poverty himself, but he had no sympathy for those who chose to remain within its grasp. If one was hungry, one worked. To be sure, there were different degrees of dignity in what one did to get by. But there was always work.

As the son of migrant workers raised in various Tex/Mex border towns, Juan Moreno had vowed early on to escape the shackles of his own lowly, inherited status. He left his parents at sixteen to work for a man in Austin, so that he could attend the region’s best high school. By sticking to his schedule of classes during the day and studying and working diligently at night, he was able, with the help of government loans, to gain entrance to a moderately prestigious university in New England, where he quickly learned the value of lineage and presentation. He changed his name to John.

Already fluent in Spanish,John Moreno became degreed in both French and criminology. After graduation he moved south, briefly joining the Dade County sheriff’s office. Never one for violence and not particularly interested in carrying or using a firearm, Moreno took a job for a relatively prestigious firm specializing in international retrievals. Two years later, haring made the necessary connections and something of a reputation for himself, he struck out on his own.

John Moreno liked his work. Most of all, whenever his plane left the runway and he settled into his first-class seat, he felt a kind of illusion, as if he were leaving the dust and squalor of his early years a thousand miles behind. Each new destination was another permanent move, one step farther away.

Moreno put down his guidebook on the morning of the fourth day, did his four sets of fifty pushups, showered, and changed into a swimsuit. He packed his knapsack with some American dollars, ten dollars worth of Brazilian cruzeiros, his long-lensed Canon AE-I, and the Guzman photographs, and left the apartamento.

Moreno was a lean man a shade under six feel, with wavy black hair and a thick black mustache. His vaguely Latin appearance passed for both South American and southern Mediterranean, and with his newly enriched tan he received scarcely a look as he moved along the Avenida Boa Viagem toward the center of the resort, the area where Guzman had been spotted. The beach crowd grew denser, women in thong bathing suits and men in their Speedos, vendors, hustlers, and shills.

Moreno claimed a striped folding chair near the beach wall, signaled a man behind a cooler who brought him a tall Antarctica beer served in a Styrofoam thermos. He finished that one and had two more, drinking very slowly to pass away the afternoon. He was not watching for Guzman. Instead he watched the crowd, and the few men who sat alone and unmoving on its periphery. By the end of the day he had chosen two of those men: a brown Rasta with sun-bleached dreadlocks who sat by the vendors but did not appear to have goods to sell, and an old man with the leathery, angular face of an Indian who had not moved from his seat at the edge of the market across the street.

As the sun dropped behind the condominiums and the beach draped in shadow, Moreno walked over to the Rasta on the wall and handed him a photograph of Guzman. The Rasta smiled a mouthful of stained teeth and rubbed two fingers together. Moreno gave him ten American dollars, holding out another ten immediately and quickly replacing it in his own pocket. He touched the photograph, then pointed to the striped folding chair near the wall to let the Rasta know where he could find him. The Rasta nodded, then smiled again, making a “V” with his fingers and touching his lips, blowing out with an exaggerated exhale.

“Fumo?” the Rasta said.

“Não fumo,” Moreno said, jabbing his finger at the photograph once more before he left.

Moreno crossed the road and found the old man at the edge of the market. He replayed the same proposition with the man. The man never looked at Moreno, though he accepted the ten and slid it and the photograph into the breast pocket of his eggplant-colored shirt. Moreno could not read a thing in the man’s black pupils in the dying afternoon light.

As Moreno turned to cross the street, the old man said in Portuguese, “You will return?”

Moreno said, “Amanha,” and walked away.

On the way back to his place Moreno slopped at a food stand — little more than a screened-in shack on the beach road — and drank a cold Brahma beer. Afterward he walked back along the beach, now lit by streetlamps in the dusk. A girl of less than twenty with a lovely mouth smiled as she passed his way, her hair fanning out in the wind. Moreno felt a brief pulse in his breastbone, remembering just then that he had not been with a woman for a very long time.

It was this forgotten need for a woman, Moreno decided, as he watched his maid Sonya prepare breakfast the next morning in her surf shorts and T-shirt, that had thrown off his rhythms in Brazil. He would have to remedy that, while of course expending as little energy as possible in the hunt. First things first, which was to check on his informants in the center of Boa Viagem.

He was there within the hour, seated on his striped folding chair, on a day when the sun came through high, rapidly moving clouds. His men were there too, the Rasta on the wall and the old man at the edge of the market. Moreno had an active swim in the warm Atlantic early in the afternoon, going out beyond the reef, then returned to his seat and ordered a beer. By the time the vendor served it the old man with the Indian features was moving across the sand toward Moreno’s chair.

“Boa tarde,” Moreno said, squinting up in the sun.

The old man pointed across the road, toward an outdoor café that led to an enclosed bar and restaurant. A middle-aged man and a young woman were walking across the patio toward the open glass doors of the bar.

“Bom,” Moreno said, handing the old man the promised ten from his knapsack. He left one hundred and twenty thousand cruzeiros beneath the full bottle of beer, gestured to the old man to sit and drink it, put his knapsack over his shoulder, and took the stone steps from the beach up to the street. The old man sat in the striped folding chair without a word.

Moreno crossed the street with caution, looking back to catch a glimpse of the brown Rasta sitting on the wall. The Rasta stared unsmiling at Moreno, knowing he had lost. Moreno was secretly glad it had been the old man, who had reminded him of his own father. Moreno had not thought of his long-dead lather or even seen him in his dreams for some time.

Moreno entered the restaurant. There were few patrons, and all of them, including the middle-aged man and his woman, sat at a long mahogany bar. Moreno took a chair near an open window. He leaned his elbow on the ledge of the window and drummed his fingers against wood to the florid music coming from the restaurant. The bartender, a stocky man with a great belly that plunged over the belt of his trousers, came from behind the bar and walked towards Moreno’s table.

“Cervejas,” Moreno said, holding up three fingers pressed together to signify a tall one. The bartender stopped in his tracks, turned, and headed back behind the bar.

Moreno drank his beer slowly, studying the couple seated at the bar. He considered taking some photographs, seeing that this could be done easily, but he decided that it was not necessary, as he was certain now that he had found Guzman. The man had ordered his second drink, a Teacher’s rocks, in English, drinking his first hurriedly and without apparent pleasure. He was tanned and seemed fit, with a full head of silvery hair and the natural girth of age. The woman was in her twenties, quite beautiful in a lush way, with the stone perfect but bloodless look of a photograph in a magazine. She wore a bathing suit top, two triangles of red cloth really, with a brightly dyed sarong wrapped around the bottoms. Occasionally the man would nod in response to something she had said; on those occasions, the two of them did not look in each other’s eyes.

Eventually the other patrons finished their drinks and left, and for a while it was just the stocky bartender, the man and his woman, and Moreno. A very tall, lanky young man with long curly hair walked into the bar and with wide strides went directly to the man and whispered in his ear. The man finished his drink in one gulp, tossed bills on the bar, and got off his stool. He, the woman, and the young man walked from the establishment without even a glance in Moreno’s direction. Moreno knew he had been made but in a practical sense did not care. He opened his knapsack, rose from his seat, and headed for the bar.

Moreno stopped in the area where the party had been seated and ordered another beer. As the bartender turned his back to reach into a cooler, Moreno grabbed some bar napkins, wrapped them around the base of Guzman’s empty glass, and began to place the glass in his knapsack.

A hand grabbed Moreno’s wrist.

The hand gripped him firmly. Moreno smelled perspiration, partly masked by a rather obvious men’s cologne. He turned his head. It was the lanky young man, who had reentered the bar.

“You shouldn’t do that,” the young man said in accented English. “My friend João here might think you are trying to steal his glass.”

Moreno placed the glass back on the bar. The young man spoke rapidly in Portuguese, and João the bartender look the glass and ran it over the brush in the soap sink. Then João served Moreno the beer that he had ordered, along with a clean glass. Moreno took a sip. The young man did not look more than twenty. His skin had the color of coffee beans, with hard bright eyes the color of the skin. Moreno put down his glass.

“You’ve been following my boss,” the young man said.

“Really,” Moreno said.

“Yes, really.” The young man grinned. “Your Rastaman friend, the one you showed the pictures to. He don’t like you so good no more.”

Moreno looked out at the road through the open glass doors. “What now?”

“Maybe me and a couple of my friends,” the young man said, “now we’re going to kick your ass.”

Moreno studied the young man’s face, went past the theatrical menace, found light play in the dark brown eyes. “I don’t think so. There’s no buck in it for you, that way.”

The young man laughed shortly, pointed at Moreno. “That’s right!” His expression grew earnest again. “Listen, I tell you what. We’ve had plenty excitement today, plenty enough. How about you and me, we sleep on top of things, think it over, see what we’re going to do. Okay?”

“Sure,” Moreno said.

“I’ll pick you up in the morning, we’ll go for a ride, away from here, where we can talk. Sound good?”

Moreno wrote his address on a bar napkin. The young man took it, and extended his hand.

“Guilherme,” he said. “Gil.”

“Moreno.”

They shook hands, and Gil began to walk away.

“You speak good American,” Moreno said.

Gil stopped at the doors, grinned, and held up two fingers. “New York,” he said. “Astoria. Two years.” And then he was out the door.

Moreno finished his beer, left money on the bar. He walked back to his apartamento in the gathering darkness.

Moreno stood drinking coffee on his balcony the next morning, waiting for Gil to arrive. He realized that this involvement with the young man was going to cost him money, but it would speed things along. And he was not surprised that Guzman had been located with such ease. In his experience those who fled their old lives merely settled for an equally monotonous one in a different place, and rarely moved after that. The beachfront hut in Pago Pago becomes as stifling as the center hall colonial in Bridgeport.

Gil pulled over to the curb in his blue sedan. He got out and greeted the guard at the gate, a man Moreno had come to know as Sergio, who buzzed Gil through. Sergio left the glassed-in guardhouse then and approached Gil on the patio. Sergio broke suddenly into some sort of cartwheel, and Gil stepped away from his spinning feet, moved around Sergio fluidly and got him into a headlock. They were doing some sort of local martial art, which Moreno had seen practiced widely by young men on the beach. Sergio and Gil broke away laughing, Gil giving Sergio the thumbs-up before looking up toward Moreno’s balcony and catching his eye. Moreno shouted that he’d be down in a minute, handing his coffee cup to Sonya. Moreno liked this kid Gil, though he was not sure why.

They drove out of Boa Viagem in Gil’s Chevrolet Monsa, into downtown Recife, where the breeze stopped and the temperature rose an abrupt ten degrees. Then they were along a sewage canal near the docks, and across the canal a kind of shantytown of tar paper, fallen cinderblock, and chicken wire, where Moreno could make out a sampling of the residents: horribly poor families, morning drunks, two-dollar prostitutes, men with murderous eyes, criminals festering inside of children.

“It’s pretty bad here now,” Gil said, “though not so bad like in Rio. In Rio they cut your hand off just to get your watch. Not even think about it.”

“The Miami Herald says your government kills street kids in Rio.”

Gil chuckled. “You Americans are so righteous.”

“Self-righteous,” Moreno said.

“Yes, self-righteous. I lived in New York City, remember? I’ve seen the blacks and the Latins, the things that are kept from them. There are many ways for a government to kill the children it does not want, no?”

“I suppose so.”

Gil studied Moreno at the stoplight as the stench of raw sewage rode in on the heat through their open windows. “Moreno, eh? You’re some sort of Latino, aren’t you?”

“I’m an American.”

“Sure, American. Maybe you want to forget.” Gil jerked his thumb across the canal, toward the shantytown. “Me, I don’t forget. I come from a favela just like that, in the south. Still, I don’t believe in being poor. There is always a way to get out, if one works. You know?”

Moreno knew now why he liked this kid Gil.

They drove over a bridge that spanned the inlet to the ocean, then took a gradual rise to the old city of Olinda, settled and burned by the Dutch in the fifteenth century. Gil parked on cobblestone near a row of shops and vendors, where Moreno bought a piece of local art carved from wood for his mother. Moreno would send the gift along to her in Nogales, a custom that made him feel generous, despite the fact that he rarely phoned her, and it had been three Christmases since he had seen her last. Afterward Moreno visited a bleached church, five hundred years old, and was greeted at the door by an old nun dressed completely in white. Moreno left cruzeiros near the simple altar, then absently did his cross. He was not a religious man, but he was a superstitious one, a remnant of his youth spent in Mexico, though he would deny all that.

Gil and Moreno took a table shaded by palms near a grille set on a patio across from the church. They ordered one tall beer and two plastic cups. A boy approached them selling spices, and Gil dismissed him, shouting something as an afterthought to his back. The boy returned with one cigarette, which he lit on the embers of the grille before handing it to Gil. Gil gave the boy some coins and waved him away.

“So,” Gil said, “what are we going to talk about today?”

“The name of your boss,” Moreno said. “It’s Guzman, isn’t it?”

Gil dragged on his cigarette, exhaled slowly. “His name, it’s not important. But if you want to call him Guzman, it’s okay.”

“What do you do for him?”

“I’m his driver, and his interpreter. This is what I do in Recife. I hang around Boa Viagem and I watch for the wealthy tourists having trouble with the money and the language. The Americans, they have the most trouble of all. Then. I make my pitch. Sometimes it works out for me pretty good.”

“You learned English in New York?”

“Yeah. A friend brought me over, got me a job as a driver for this limo service he worked for. You know, the guys who stand at the airport, holding signs. I learned the language fast, and real good. The business, too. In one year I showed the man how to cut his costs by thirty percent. The man put me in charge. I even had to fire my friend, too. Anyway, the man finally offered me half the company to run it all the way. I turned him down, you know? His offer, it was too low. That’s when I came back to Brazil.”

Moreno watched the palm shadows wave dreamily across Gil’s face. “What about Guzman’s woman?”

“She’s some kinda woman, no?”

“Yes,” Moreno said. “When I was a child I spotted a coral snake and thought it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I started to follow it into the brush when my mother slapped me very hard across the face.”

“So now you are careful around pretty things.” Gil took some smoke from his cigarette. “It’s a good story. But this woman is not a poisonous snake. She is just a woman.” Gil shrugged. “Anyway, I don’t know her. So she cannot help us.”

Moreno said. “Can you get me Guzman’s fingerprints?”

“Sure,” Gil said. “It’s not a problem. But what you are going to get me?”

“Go ahead and call it,” Moreno said.

“I was thinking, fifty-fifty, what you get.”

Moreno frowned. “For two weeks, you know, I’m only going to make a couple thousand dollars. But I’ll tell you what — you get me Guzman’s fingerprints, and I’ll give you one thousand American.”

Gil wrinkled his forehead. “It’s not much, you know?”

“For this country, I think that it’s a lot.”

“And,” Gil continued quickly, “you got to consider. You, or the people you work for, maybe they’re going to come down and take my boss and his money away. And then Gil, he’s going to be out of a job.”

Moreno sat back and had a swig of beer and let Gil chew things over. After a while Gil leaned forward.

“Okay,” Gil said. “So let me ask you something. Have you reported back to your people that you think you have spotted this man Guzman?”

“No,” Moreno said. “It’s not the way I work. Why?”

“I was thinking. Maybe my boss, it’s worth a lot of money to him that you don’t go home and tell anyone you saw him down here. So I’m going to talk to him, you know? And then I’m going to call you tomorrow morning. Okay?”

Moreno nodded slowly. “Okay.”

Gil touched his plastic cup to Moreno’s and drank. “I guess now,” Gil said, “I work for you too.”

“I guess you do.”

“So anything I can get you. Boss?”

Moreno thought about it, and smiled. “Yes,” he said. “There is one thing.”

They drove back down from Olinda into Recife where the heat and Gil’s cologne briefly nauseated Moreno, then on into Boa Viagem where things were cooler and brighter and the people looked healthy and there were not so many poor. Gil parked the Monsa a few miles north of the center, near a playground set directly on the beach.

“There is one,” Gil said, pointing to a woman, young and lovely in denim shorts, pushing a child on a swing. “And there is another.” This time he pointed to the beach, where a plainer woman, brown and finely figured in her thong bathing suit, shook her blanket out on the sand.

Moreno wiped some sweat from his brow and nodded his chin toward the woman in the bathing suit. “That’s the one I want,” he said, as the woman bent over to smooth out her towel. “And that’s the way I want her.”

Gil made the arrangements with the woman, then dropped Moreno at his apartamento on the Rue Setubal. After that he met some friends on the beach for a game of soccer, and when the game was done he bathed in the ocean. He let the sun dry him, then drove to Guzman’s place, an exclusive condominium called Des Viennes on the Avenida Boa Viagem. Gil knew the guard on duty, who buzzed him through.

Ten minutes later he sat in Guzman’s living room overlooking the Atlantic where today a group of sailboats tacked back and forth while a helicopter from a television station circled overhead. Guzman and Gil sat facing each other in heavily cushioned armchairs, while Guzman’s woman sat in an identical armchair but facing out toward the ocean. Guzman’s maid served them three aguardentes with fresh lime and sugar over crushed ice. Guzman and Gil touched glasses and drank.

“It s too much sugar and not enough lime,” Guzman said to no one in particular.

“No.” Gil said. “I think it’s okay.”

Guzman set down his drink on a marble table whose centerpiece was a marble obelisk. “How did it go this morning with the American?”

But Gil was now talking in Portuguese to Guzman’s woman, who answered him contemptuously without turning her head. Gil laughed sharply and sipped from his drink.

“She’s beautiful,” Guzman said. “But I don’t think you can afford her.”

“She is not my woman,” Gil said cheerfully. “And anyway, the beach is very wide.” Gil’s smile turned down and he said to Guzman. “Dismiss her. Okay, Boss?”

Guzman put the words together in butchered Portuguese, and the woman got out of her seat and walked glacially from the room.

Guzman stood from his own seat and went to the end of the living room where the balcony began. He had the look of a man who is falling to sleep with the certain knowledge that his dreams will not be good.

“Tell me about the American.” Guzman said.

“His name is Moreno,” Gil said. “I think we need to talk.”

Moreno went down to the condominium patio after dark and waited for the woman on the beach to arrive. A shirtless boy with kinky brown hair walked by pushing a wooden cart, stopped, and put his hand through the iron bars. Moreno ignored him, practicing his Portuguese instead with Sergio, who was on duty that night behind the glass guardhouse. The shirtless boy left without complaint and climbed into the canvas Dumpster that sat by the curb, where he found a few scraps of wet garbage that he could chew and swallow and perhaps keep down. The woman from the beach ar-lived in a taxi, and Moreno paid the driver and received a wink from Sergio before he led the woman up to his apartamento.

Moreno’s maid, Sonya, served a meal of whole roasted chicken, black beans and rice, and salad, with a side of shrimp sautéed in coconut milk and spice. Moreno sent Sonya home with extra cruzeiros, and uncorked the wine, a Brazilian cabernet, himself. He poured the wine and before he drank asked the woman her name. She touched a finger to a button on her blouse and said, “Claudia.” Moreno knew the dinner was unnecessary but it pleased him to sit across the table from a woman and share a meal. Her rather flat, wide features did nothing to excite him, but the memory of her fullness on the beach kept his interest, and she laughed easily and seemed to enjoy the food, especially the chicken, which she cleaned to the bone.

After dinner Moreno reached across the table and undid the top two buttons of the woman’s blouse, and as she took the cue and began to undress he pointed her to the open glass doors that led to the balcony. He extinguished the lights and stepped out of his trousers as she walked naked across the room to the edge of the doors and stood with her palms pressed against the glass. He came behind her and moistened her with his fingers, then entered her, and kissed her cheek near the edge of her mouth, faintly Listing the grease that lingered from the chicken. The breeze came off the ocean and whipped her hair across his face. He closed his eyes.

Moreno fell to sleep that night alone, hearing from someplace very far away a woman’s voice, singing mournfully in Spanish.

Moreno met Gil the following morning at the screened-in food shack on the beach road. They sat at a cable-spool table, splitting a beer near a group of teenagers listening to accordion-drive ferro music from a transistor radio. The teenagers were drinking beer. Gil had come straight from the beach, his long curly hair still damp and touching his thin bare shoulders.

“So,” Gil said, tapping his index finger once on the wood of the table. “I think I got it all arranged.”

“You talked to Guzman?”

“Yes. I don’t know if he’s going to make a deal. But he has agreed to meet with you and talk.”

Moreno looked through the screen at the clouds and around the clouds the brilliant blue of the sky. “When and where?”

“Tonight,” Gil said. “Around nine o’clock. There’s a place off your street, Setubal, where it meets the commercial district. There are many fruit stands there—”

“I know the place.”

“Good. Behind the largest stand is an alley. The alley will take you to a bar that is not marked.”

“An alley.”

“Don’t worry,” Gil said, waving his hand. “Some friends of mine will be waiting for you to show you to the bar. I’ll bring Guzman, and we will meet you there.”

“Why that place?”

“I know the man, very well, who runs the bar. He will make sure that Guzman leaves his fingerprints for you. Just in case he doesn’t want to play football.”

“Play ball,” Moreno said.

“Yes. So either way we don’t lose.”

Moreno drank off the rest of his beer, placed the plastic cup on the cable-spool table. “Okay,” he said to Gil. “Your plan sounds pretty good.”

In the evening Moreno did four sets of fifty pushups, showered, and dressed in a black polo shirt tucked into jeans. He left his apartamento and took the lift down to the patio, where he waved to a guard he did not recognize before exiting the grounds of his condominium and hitting the street.

He walked north on Setubal at a brisk pace, avoiding the large holes in the sidewalk and sidestepping the stacks of brick and cinderblock used to repair the walls surrounding the estates. He passed his no-name café, where a rat crossed his path and dropped into the black slots of a sewer grate. He walked by people who did not meet his eyes and bums who held out their hands but did not speak.

After about a mile he could see through the darkness to the lights of the commercial district, and then he was near the fruit stands. In the shadows he could see men sitting, quietly talking and laughing. He walked behind the largest of the stands. In the mouth of an alley a boy stood leaning on a homemade crutch, one badly polioed leg twisted at the shin, the callused toes of that leg pointed down and brushing the concrete. The boy looked up at Moreno and rubbed his fingers together, and Moreno fumbled in his pockets for some change, nervously dropping some bills to the sidewalk. Moreno stooped to pick up the bills, handing them to the boy, then he entered the alley. He could hear ferro music playing up ahead.

He looked behind him, and saw that the crippled boy was following him into the alley. Moreno quickened his step, passing vendors’ carts and brick walls whitewashed and covered with graffiti. He saw an arrow painted on a wall, and beneath the arrow the names of some boys, and an anarchy symbol, and to the right of that the words “Sonic Youth.” He followed the direction of the arrow, the music growing louder with each step.

Then he was in a wide open area that was no longer an alley because it had ended with walls on three sides. There were four men waiting for him there.

One of the men was short and very dark and held a machete at his side. The crippled boy was leaning against one of the walls. Moreno said something with a stutter and tried to smile. He did not know if he had said it in Portuguese or in English, or if it mattered, as the ferro music playing from a boombox on the cobblestones was very loud.

Moreno felt a wetness on his thigh and knew that this wetness was his own urine. The thing to do was to simply turn and run. But for the first time he saw that one of the men was Sergio, the guard at his condominium, who he had not recognized out of his uniform.

Moreno laughed, and then all of the men laughed, including Sergio, who walked toward Moreno with open arms to greet him.

Moreno allowed Sergio to give him the hug. He felt the big muscled arms around him, and caught the stench of cheap wine on Sergio’s breath. Sergio smiled an unfamiliar smile, and Moreno tried to step back, but Sergio did not release him. Then the other men were laughing again, the man with the machete and the crippled boy too. Their laughter rode on the sound of the crazy music blaring in the alley.

Sergio released Moreno.

A forearm from behind locked across Moreno’s neck. There was a hand on the back of his head, pressure, and a violent movement, then a sudden, unbelievable pain, a white pain but without light. For a brief moment Moreno imagined that he was looking at his own chest from a very odd angle.

If John Moreno could have spoken later on, he would have told you that the arm that killed him smelled heavily of perspiration and cheap cologne.

Gil knocked on Guzman’s door late that night. The maid offered him a drink. He asked for aguardente straight up. She returned with it and served it in the living room, where Gil sat facing Guzman, and then she walked back to the kitchen to wash the dishes before she went to bed.

Guzman had his own drink, a Teacher’s over ice, on the marble table in front of him. He ran his fingers slowly through his lion’s head of silver hair.

“Where is your woman?” Gil said.

“She took a walk,” Guzman said. “Is it over?”

“Yes,” Gil said. “It is done.”

“All this killing,” Guzman said softly.

“You killed a man yourself. The one who took your place on the boat.”

“I had him killed. He was just a rummy from the boatyard.”

“It’s all the same,” Gil said. “But maybe you have told yourself that it is not.”

Guzman took his scotch and walked to the open glass doors near the balcony, where it was cooler and there was not the smell that was coming off Gil.

“You broke his neck, I take it. Like the other one.”

“He has no neck,” Gil said. “We cut his head off and threw it in the garbage. The rest of him we cut to pieces.”

Guzman closed his eyes. “But they’ll come now. Two of their people have disappeared.”

“Yes,” Gil said. “They’ll come. You have maybe a week. Argentina would be good for you, I think. I could get you a new passport, make the arrangements—”

“For a price.”

“Of course.”

Guzman turned and stared at the lanky young man. Then he said, “I’ll get your money.”

When he returned, Gil was downing the last of his drink. Guzman handed him five banded slacks of American fifties. Gil slipped them into his trousers after a careless count.

“Twenty-five thousand,” Guzman said. “Now you’ve taken fifty thousand of my money.”

“You split the two million with your wife. And there have been many others to pay.” Gil shrugged. “It costs a lot to become a new man, you know? Anyway, I’ll see you later.”

Gil headed for the door, and Guzman stopped him.

“I’m curious,” Guzman said. “Why did this Moreno die, instead of me?”

“His bid was very low,” Gil said. “Goodnight, Boss.”

Gil walked from the room.

Down on the Avenida Boa Viagem, Gil walked to his Chevrolet Monsa and got behind the wheel. Guzman’s woman, who was called Elena, was in the passenger seat, waiting for Gil to arrive. She leaned across the center console and kissed Gil on the lips, holding the kiss for a very long while. It was Gil who finally broke away.

“Did you get the money?” Elena said.

“Yes,” Gil said. “I got it.” He spoke without emotion. He looked up through the windshield to the yellow light spilling onto Guzman’s balcony.

“We are rich,” Elena said, forcing herself to smile and pinching Gil’s arm.

“There’s more up there,” Gil said. “You know?”

Elena said, “You scare me a little bit, Gil.”

She went into her purse, found a cigarette, and fired the cigarette off the lighter from the dash. After a couple of drags she passed the cigarette to Gil.

“What was it like?” Elena said.

“What’s that?”

“When you killed this one,” she said. “When you broke his neck. Did it make a sound?”

Gil dragged on the cigarette, squinted against the smoke that rose off the ash.

“You know how it is when you eat a chicken,” he said. “You have to break many bones if you want to get the meat. But you don’t hear the sound, you know?”

“You don’t hear it,” Gil said, looking up at Guzman’s balcony, “when you’re hungry.”