Carioca Fletch (16 page)

Marilia, a slim, trim woman, surprised Fletch by ordering one of the bigger, more sugary pastries.

Fletch said, “You know, once you make prophecies about someone, there is the instinct to help them become fulfilled.”

“Fernando said someone would take a knife to Janio and kill him, and it wasn’t happening fast enough to satisfy Fernando, so he did the job himself?”

“I suppose prophets have to work at their reputations, as much as anyone else.”

“Mmmmm. So what will you do, Fletcher? What will you tell these people?”

“I don’t know. I’m not about to point the finger at a monk. Or at the grandfather of the family. Or at the memory of some other deceased citizen whose daughter was deflowered by the victim. Any one of hundreds of people could have done in Janio.”

“Now that you’ve heard the story, will you be able to sleep?”

“Will I?”

They finished their pastries in silence.

Fletch said, “Marilia, tell me about that bracelet you’re wearing.”

Self-consciously she touched it with the fingers of her other hand. “Oh, that.”

“I see many people, men and women, wearing these cloth, braided bracelets.”

“Just a superstition, I guess.” Her face flushed. “You make a wish, you know, for something you hope will come true. As you make the wish, you put on this braided bracelet. You wear it until what you wished for comes true.”

“Supposing what you wish for doesn’t come true?”

Slightly red-faced, she laughed. “Then you wear in until it falls off.”

“You believe in such a thing?”

“No,” she said quickly.

“But you’re wearing such a bracelet.”

“Why not?” she asked, resettling it on her wrist. “It does no harm to act as if you believe in such a thing, just in case it is true.”

Outside the restaurant they stopped at a kiosk. Marilia bought
Jornal do Brasil
and Fletch bought
Brazil Herald
and the
Latin America Daily Post
.

A healthy-seeming curly-haired man of about thirty was leaning against Fletch’s MP. It appeared he was waiting for them.

He spoke rapidly, happily to Fletch.

Then, seeing he wasn’t being understood, he spoke to Marilia.

She answered him, happily enough. While talking with him, she opened the small purse tied to her wrist, took out some money, and gave it to him.

The man stuffed the money into his shoe.

Then he leaned against the next car, a Volkswagen bug.

In the car, Fletch asked, “What did he want?”

“Ohhhh. He said he had been taking care of the car for us while we were away. It is for him to take care of the cars along this section of curb, he said.”

“Is it?”

“He says so.”

“Who gave him charge of this section of curb?”

“No one. It is just something he says.”

Fletch started the car. “If it is just something he says, then why did you give him money? Why didn’t you just tell him to get lost?”

Flustered, Marilia was looking into her handbag, perhaps rearranging the interior. “I suppose I owe it to him because I just had such a nice lunch.”

“Fletch?”

“Yes?”

“Toninho Braga, Fletch. Look what time it is.”

“Shortly after noon.”

“That’s right. And so far no one has reported finding Norival’s body.”

Over the phone, Toninho’s voice sounded more hushed than alarmed.

Fletch had driven Marilia Diniz to her home in Leblon, thanked her for accompanying him to the
favela
, repeated he still had no way of solving a forty-seven-year-old murder mystery, but he would return to the hotel to try to sleep.

His room at The Hotel Yellow Parrot had been cleaned. The unslept-in bed had been freshly made up.

He telephoned The Hotel Jangada and asked for Joan Collins Stanwyk in Room 912.

No answer.

Across the utility area, the man was still painting the room.

He was about to strip, to shower, to darken the room, to get into bed again, to try to sleep, when the phone rang.

“Toninho,” he said. “It’s Sunday. A big day of Carnival. Communication is slow.”

“That’s exactly it, Fletch. There would have been hundreds, thousands of people on that beach, shortly after dawn.”

“Finding a body—”

“Norival is not just a body. He is a Passarinho. That would be news.”

“First the police have to be summoned—”

“Yes, the police would be summoned. But we left plenty of identification on Norival’s body. The people who found the body would be quick to tell the Passarinho family, the radio stations. The police would be even quicker. They would compete
for the attention of the Passarinho family.”

“I don’t see what you’re saying. You put Norival’s body in the water. He was dead. He has to come ashore somewhere, sometime, if you were right about the tides.”

“I was right about the tides. Where’s Norival?”

“How would I know?”

Fletch looked down at the soft, smooth countenance of the bed.

“Fletch, we must go make sure someone finds the body of Norival.”

“Toninho, I’m not sure I can take many more disappearances today, of persons dead and alive.”

“You must come help us look, Fletch. That will make four of us. We can comb the beach.”

“You want to go beachcombing for a corpse?”

“What else can we do? We put Norival’s body there to be found, not to be lost. What if he were lost forever? There would be no Funeral Mass. He would not be properly buried. His family might think he ran away?.”

“His boat would be missing.”

“Sailed away. To Argentina! Think of his poor mother!”

“His poor mother.”

“Such a thing would kill her. Not to know what happened to her son.”

“Toninho … I still have not slept.”

“That’s all right.”

“‘All right’?”

“You must help us. Four searching is better than three searching. It is a long beach.”

“Toninho…”

“We’ll pick you up in ten minutes.”

The phone line died.

“Perhaps we should check with Eva,” Tito said. “Norival might have gone back to her.”

“Norival was happy with Eva,” Orlando said.

Of the four young men walking along the beach, only Fletch wore sandals. He knew himself not sufficiently
carioca
to walk along a beach in the midday sun in bare feet.

Toninho, Tito, and Orlando had picked Fletch up in the black four-door Galaxie.

On the sidewalk in front of the hotel, the youngest Janio Barreto on a wooden leg silently watched Fletch get into the car and be driven away.

The drive to the beach where Orlando was scheduled to appear had been as fast as possible through the Carnival crowds.

At one place on Avenida Atlantica perhaps as many as a thousand people in tattery costumes jumped up and down around a big samba band moving forward only a few meters an hour on the back of a flatbed truck. Never had he seen so much human energy spent in so little forward motion.

On the way to the beach they listened silently to the loud car radio.

The discovery of Norival Passarinho’s body was not yet news.

The beach was filled with bright umbrellas, mats. Families and other groups picnicked and played.

Orlando said to Fletch: “It is said if a person dies copulating, he is guaranteed to return to life soon.”

“For Norival, the process might have been very quick,” said Tito.

Spread apart only somewhat, they walked along the water’s edge, looking for Norival perhaps washed up dead but thought asleep, some crowd of gossips with news of something unusual
having happened, the corpse of the Passarinho boy being found, police barriers, markers, something, anything.

“Do people say the same thing in the United States of North America?” Orlando asked.

“I don’t think so,” Fletch said. “I never heard it.”

“People in the United States of North America don’t die while copulating,” Toninho said. “They die while talking about it.”

“They die while talking to their psychiatrists about it,” Orlando laughed.

“Yes, yes,” said Toninho. “They die worrying about copulating.”

“People of the United States of North America,” Tito scoffed. “This is how they walk.”

Tito began to move hurriedly over the sand, his head and shoulders forward of his body, legs straight, not pivoting his hips at all, his hands dangling loosely beside him like a couple of cow udders, his eyes staring straight ahead, an expectant grin on his face, each foot landing flat on the sand. The impression was of a body being pushed at the shoulders, falling forward, each foot coming out and landing at the last second to keep the body from falling flat on its face.

Fletch stopped walking and laughed.

For a while, then, he walked slightly behind his friends.

“Yes,” Tito said. “Norival may have revived.”

Fletch asked, “Is it true everyone goes slightly crazy during Carnival?”

Toninho said, “Slightly.”

“If the way to life eternal,” Fletch asked, “is to die copulating, then why don’t people just copulate constantly?”

Orlando sniffed. “I do my best.”

A man carrying two metal cylinders containing iced maté passed them. Each container easily weighed one hundred pounds. He would sell the maté in little cups to people on the beach. The man was in his sixties and he was walking rapidly enough to pass the four young men. His legs looked like the roots of trees hardened by time.

“This is crazy,” Fletch said. Perhaps lying in the sun on the beach would make him drowsy enough to sleep.

Dead wallets, stolen and emptied, were on the beach like birds shot from the sky.

Toninho scanned the surface of the ocean. “There is not even a sign of his boat. That, too, should have come ashore.”

“The boat sank,” Tito said.

“Maybe Norival sank,” Orlando said.

“Maybe Norival is alive and we are dead,” Fletch said.

Orlando looked at him as if he had just offered a possibility worth consideration.

They were coming to the end of the beach.

Nearby was a group of very young teenage girls in bikinis. Five of the eight were pregnant.

Toninho said, “Absolutely, Norival was to come ashore somewhere along here.”

“Let’s ask,” Fletch said. “Let’s ask the people on the beach if they’ve noticed a Passarinho floating by without a boat.”

“It leaves only one thing to do,” Toninho said.

“Go home to bed,” Fletch said.

“Swim along the beach,” Toninho said.

“Oh, no,” Fletch said.

Toninho was looking into the water. “It is possible Norival is lurking somewhere just below the surface.”

“That would be just like Norival,” Orlando said. “Playing some trick.”

“
Arigó
,” Toninho said.

“I need sleep,” Fletch said. “Not a swim.”

“Yes,” Tito said, “Norival was apt to be a bit slow, sometimes, to show up.”

“Last night, when I swam into Norival,” Toninho said, “he was more under the surface than I would have expected.”

“Right,” said Tito. “We shall swim along the shore and see if we bump into Norival.”

“Oh, no,” said Fletch.

“Leave your sandals here,” said Orlando. “Not even a North American can swim well wearing sandals.”

On the way back in the car they listened to a long news broadcast. Mostly, it was about Carnival Parade that night, and certain controversies which had arisen concerning it. One samba school was insisting the theme they had chosen to present had been usurped a little bit by another samba school. At least, the themes of the two schools were believed by one school to be dangerously similar.

In all that long broadcast, the discovery of the corpse of Norival Passarinho was not reported.

“You’re not becoming a Brazilian,” Laura Soares said over the dinner table. “You’re becoming a Carnival Brazilian.”

When Fletch dragged himself back to his room at The Hotel Yellow Parrot, sunburned, caked with salt, the bottoms of his feet fried from just the walk up the beach from the ocean to the car, Laura was waiting for him, curled up in a chair studying sheet music, full of questions about where they would dine, full of enthusiasm for spending the night watching the Carnival Parade from Teodomiro da Costa’s box.

Tiredly, he greeted her. She helped him shower. On the bed he wanted to sleep. She teased him into giving her a warmer greeting than he thought possible in his sleepless condition. They showered again.

She was dressing when he came out of the bathroom.

On the white trousers and white shirt he had laid out to wear that night, she had placed a wide, bright red sash.

“Is this for me?” he asked.

“From Bahia.”

“Am I to wear it?”

“To the Carnival Parade. You will look very Brazilian.”

“I am to wear a red sash without a coat?”

“Why would anyone wear a coat over such a beautiful red sash?”

“Wow.” After he dressed, she helped him adjust it. “I feel like a Christmas present.”

“You are a Christmas present. A jolly Christmas present wrapped in a red ribbon for Laura.”

They decided to dine in the dining room which was on the second floor of The Hotel Yellow Parrot.

Through the floor-to-ceiling open windows they could see the
macumba
fires on
Praia de Copacabana
. Believers spend the night on the beach tending a fire, having written a wish, or the name of their illness, on a piece of paper which they launch in the first moments of the outgoing tide. On the first night of the year especially there are thousands of fires on the beach.

The hotel restaurant was said to be one of the best in the world. It was rare in that the restaurant’s kitchen was exactly twice as big as the seating area.

They ordered
moqueca
, another Bahian speciality.

“You did not even read Amado’s
Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands
while I was gone.”

“Tell me about it.”

“You said you could not sleep, of course, but you did not even read.”

“Somehow I kept busy.”

“Gambling with the Tap Dancers?”