by Tim Wirkus
“I have allergies,” said Elder Schwartz, louder than he intended to. The old man across the aisle looked over at them. Elder Schwartz dropped his voice. “I think something in the pillow makes me—”
“It’s fine,” said Elder Toronto. “What we do is hard. I don’t think any missionary in his right mind finds this easy. But still. I mean, a greenie might cry every morning, but you’ve been out nearly a year, and I wonder—”
“I said I have allergies.”
The bus hit a bump and the baby a few rows up started yelling again.
“Okay,” said Elder Toronto. “But even generally, you seem pretty miserable. And I wonder, if you’re that miserable all the time, why you don’t just go home. It really doesn’t make sense to me. I mean, what driving force gets you through the day?”
Elder Schwartz was reminded suddenly of a lazy summer day back home in Arizona a couple of years before he left for his mission. His sister Karen was home from college and had been fighting with their parents for days—he couldn’t remember what about, only that things were tense. It was morning, and he was at the kitchen table eating breakfast. Karen and their mom were both at the table as well, ignoring each other.
“Hey, Mike,” said Karen in a stagy voice. “Have you been thinking much about what you’re going to do after high school?”
“I don’t know,” said Mike, mouth full of frosted flakes.
“No, really,” she said. “How are you planning on disappointing Mom and Dad?”
Their mom glanced up from the paper but didn’t take the bait.
“Seriously, though,” said Karen. “What are you planning on doing?”
“I don’t know,” said Mike. “I’ll go on a mission, I guess. Then come home and go to ASU if I can get in. Probably study accounting. Something safe.”
“That’s your greatest dream,” she said.
“It’s my plan,” he said.
“You don’t have any sort of grand, secret hopes for your future?” she said, her voice tenser.
“I guess I’m just a pretty sensible person,” he said.
This set Karen off.
“You have no ambition whatsoever,” she said, or rather yelled at him. “It’s pathetic.”
“You leave him out of this,” said their mom, taking the bait this time. She threw down the newspaper, and a new argument began. Mike left the room.
Karen wasn’t completely wrong. He disagreed about the pathetic part, but it was true that he had no great aspirations. Generally speaking, he found the path of least resistance to be the path to contentment, and his lifestyle to date reflected that philosophy. In school, his grades were good, but unremarkable. He played tennis and sang with the Mesa View High Singers, neither distinguishing nor embarrassing himself in either venture. He was well-liked but not especially popular among his peers. When he needed money, which wasn’t often, he did light landscaping work for his neighbors, waking just after dawn to beat the punishing Arizona sun. With the exception of Karen, he got along well with the other members of his family. All things considered, his life to that point had been mildly, persistently pleasant, and if he had any ambition, it was to keep that easy contentment going. Sure, he had no grand plans, but the less he asked from life, the more likely he’d be to find satisfaction. Was there anything wrong with that?
The mission proved to be the first major hiccup in this plan. He had never given much thought to being a missionary. Which is to say, he had always planned on going on a mission—it’s what you did after high school—but he hadn’t given much thought to what the on-the-ground experience of missionary work might be like. In any case, he figured a well-mannered, well-meaning boy like himself would do just fine.
He couldn’t have been more wrong. If his life before the mission had been a steady stream of mild contentment, his life on the mission was a constant barrage of acute discomfort. Each new day brought a fresh, overwhelming batch of humiliations and perils, and each night he went to bed unsure of how he’d manage to survive the next day. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt comfortable.
Although calling it quits and flying back home seemed like a reasonable solution, Elder Schwartz never considered it a viable option. If he went home early, his reasoning ran, this gnawing discomfort might never leave him. His uncompleted mission would be an open sore, festering away for the rest of his life and contaminating any source of contentment that might otherwise await him. If, on the other hand, he stuck it out for the full two years, he could go home and forget about the whole thing. It would be like none of this ever happened. That was what got him through the day, and what business was it of Elder Toronto’s?
“I’m asking as a friend,” said Elder Toronto when Elder Schwartz didn’t respond. “I just want to know.”
“All I want is to keep my head above water,” said Elder Schwartz, “until my two years are up.”
“And that’s how you get yourself through the day?”
“That’s right,” said Elder Schwartz.
Elder Toronto shook his head, lips pursed in concern.
“See, that’s what worries me,” he said. “You’ve told me that before, and when you say it, you make it sound like it’s a brave way to think. But the thing is, it’s actually an incredibly selfish approach to missionary work. And to life, really.”
“Hey, listen,” said Elder Schwartz, louder, once again, than he intended. The old man across the aisle glared at them until the wails of the baby drew his attention away.
“No, just a second,” said Elder Toronto. “Here’s what I’m saying: If you wake up crying every morning, that may be a good indication that your current approach isn’t working. So what do you have to lose by trying something new, a different approach?”
Elder Toronto paused, waiting for him to respond. As much as he wanted to, Elder Schwartz knew he couldn’t disagree; he had walked right into the trap. He said nothing, and Elder Toronto continued.
“What I’m proposing is that you try a different strategy and focus on helping somebody else. Because that’s exactly what this is—a chance to help somebody. Right?”
By this point, Elder Schwartz was too tired to resist.
“I guess so,” he said.
“Right,” said Elder Toronto. “And like I explained earlier, this is something we have to do ourselves. So we’re not going to tell anyone at district meeting what’s going on, and we’re not going to call President Madvig, right?”
Elder Schwartz nodded.
“Right?” said Elder Toronto.
“Right,” said Elder Schwartz, and a wave of exhaustion swept over him.
“Great,” said Elder Toronto, and patted him on the shoulder. “I’m glad you’re on board with this.”
Elder Toronto grinned and Elder Schwartz smiled weakly in return.
“So, let’s review what we know,” said Elder Toronto. “And, by the way, I’ll have to apologize for doubting you last week—it seemed unlikely at the time, but the evidence we’ve come across since then suggests otherwise. Now tell me again what you saw that morning at the market.”
“I’ve told you already.”
“I know, but I’d like to hear it again.”
“Okay,” said Elder Schwartz. He had no remaining energy to slow his companion’s momentum. “You were talking to that woman, and I was just kind of looking around, and then I saw Marco Aurélio. I yelled his name and when he saw me, he ran. He looked like he had been beat up. His forehead was bleeding and he might have had a black eye. Also, he was really dressed up—a nice-looking suit, much newer than his normal clothes. He was sweating a lot. I don’t know. That’s all I remember.”
“When he ran off,” said Elder Toronto, “did you see anyone follow him?”
Elder Schwartz thought about this.
“No,” he said. “We followed him a minute later, but I didn’t see anyone else go after him.”
“Fascinating,” said Elder Toronto, his fingers tented at his mouth. “This is what we
know, then. Thursday morning, an unusually well-dressed, sweaty, and beaten Marco Aurélio shows up at the street market. He sees us and he runs away. We can’t find him at home that day, or the next, or the next. At church on Sunday, we learn that nobody else has seen him for days. Then, the meeting is interrupted by a stranger in a brown suit, one Ulisses Galvão, who—”
“Wait, he never told us his name, did he?”
“No,” said Elder Toronto.
“Then how do you know that his name was—what was it?”
“Ulisses Galvão.”
“Yeah. How do you know his name?”
“I’ll get to that in a minute,” said Elder Toronto. “So Ulisses Galvão makes an appointment with us for eight o’clock that evening at an out-of-the-way address near the river. He tells us he’d like to discuss Marco Aurélio. We arrive at the address soon after eight. We knock on the door. We wait. We look inside. We find the brutally murdered body of Mr. Galvão and we run away. After calling the police we wait, probably for several hours. When the police finally arrive, they take us to the scene of the crime, but not before examining it themselves and telling us they found nothing. Back inside the little shack, while looking for traces of blood, I see something under the table. I pretend to drop my pen and then I crawl under the table to find this—”
Elder Toronto reached into his pants pocket and with a flourish produced a small, black notebook.
“You found this at the crime scene and you didn’t show it to the police?” said Elder Schwartz.
“Are you being serious?” said Elder Toronto.
“Well,” said Elder Schwartz.
“No, I didn’t show it to the police,” said Elder Toronto. “Do you honestly think I should have?”
“No,” said Elder Schwartz.
Elder Toronto opened the notebook and leafed through its pages. He said it belonged to the tall, thin man in the brown suit.
“Remember? The paper he gave us with the address came from a black notebook.”
“Oh yeah,” said Elder Schwartz.
“And look at this,” said Elder Toronto flipping to the first page of the notebook.
In neat, slanted handwriting was the following bulleted list:
Marco Aurélio Veríssimo de Camões, alias Aureliano Ribeiro, alias Marcos Mêlo
Mormons—Rua Santos Dumont, #143. 9 am.
R$55000
the Argentine
“What—” began Elder Schwartz.
“Hang on,” said Elder Toronto.
He flipped to the back of the notebook. He reached into the envelope attached to the inside cover and pulled out a folded photograph and a few business cards. The cards advertised the services of Ulisses Galvão, private detective.
“So that’s the man in the brown suit,” said Elder Schwartz.
“Right.”
Elder Toronto unfolded the photograph. To the right of the crease was a young, smiling Marco Aurélio. He wore a tan suit and stood on a balcony overlooking a stunning ocean sunset. His hair was thick and his face was smooth. Next to him, on the left side of the crease, stood a man several years his senior, arms folded. He had a thick, pointed beard graying around the mouth. He was missing most of his left ear.
“Who is this with Marco Aurélio?” said Elder Schwartz, pointing to the bearded man in the photograph.
“Wait,” said Elder Toronto. He refolded the photograph and put it and the notebook back into his pocket. “No questions yet. We still need to finish discussing what we know for sure. This all has to be done as systematically as possible.”
“Fine,” said Elder Schwartz.
The bus stopped again and the woman with the baby got off.
“About time,” said the bearded old man in the fedora as she passed. She glared back at him.
“So,” said Elder Toronto when the bus started moving again, “I slipped the notebook into my pocket without those two fine officers of the law noticing what I’d done. After some more bluster, they left us alone, and we walked home to our apartment without further incident. Is there anything you’d like to add?”
“No,” said Elder Schwartz. “That was very thorough.”
Elder Toronto nodded.
“Now,” he said, “on to questions. Keep in mind, I won’t be bringing up every single question that’s occurred to me. That would take hours. But I will hit the most important ones, because I’d like you to be at least near to the same page that I’m on.”
“Of course,” said Elder Schwartz.
“Good. So first of all we need—Wait. No. let’s do it this way instead. You tell me what you think the most important questions are. That could be interesting.”
“Okay,” said Elder Schwartz.
At the next stop, the old man got off. Elder Toronto waved and wished him a good morning. The old man ignored him. The bus started moving.
“So with the notebook,” said Elder Schwartz, “I wonder—”
Elder Toronto held up his hand.
“Sorry,” he said, “hang on. Let me clarify. We should start at the beginning. Start at the street market and we’ll go from there.”
“Okay,” said Elder Schwartz.
He thought about what happened at the street market.
“Well,” he said, “to start with, why did Marco Aurélio run when he saw us? That’s the first question, I think.”
“Good,” said Elder Toronto. “And there are a few fundamental sub-questions I’d add to that: Did he run because we posed a threat to him? Or could it be that he, by association, posed a threat to us? There are more possibilities, but I won’t get into them right now. Go on.”
“Okay. The next thing is that detective—Galvão, right?”
“Right.”
“So how did he know where to find us? And what information did he have about Marco Aurélio?”
“If he had any, right?” said Elder Toronto. “There’s also the question of why he’d come to us, specifically. But go on.”
“Then there’s the big question. Who murdered Galvão?”
“Yes,” said Elder Toronto, “that’s a big one, but I think there are some smaller questions we’ll have to answer before we can get to that one: Why would someone kill Galvão? In other words, what could be accomplished by killing Galvão and who stands to benefit? Also, as I brought up before, was it important to whoever killed Galvão that we were the ones who found the body?”
“Like, was it a message?”
“Exactly,” said Elder Toronto. “This is also a good place to start connecting the dots. Somebody beat up Marco Aurélio and somebody was chasing him. Could that somebody, or either of those somebodies, be the same person who killed Galvão?”
“And if so,” said Elder Schwartz, “then what’s the connection?”
“Yes,” said Elder Toronto. “Go on.”
“So, now to the notebook, I think.”
“Not quite,” said Elder Toronto. “What about the police?”
“The police?” said Elder Schwartz. “I don’t know.”
“Think about it,” said Elder Toronto.
He thought about it.
“Well,” he said, “why was the body gone when we went back?”
“Good,” said Elder Toronto. “And the timeline is very important on this one. Was the body already gone when the police first got there? If so, who moved it? If not, why did the police get rid of it?”
At the front of the bus, a woman spilled a cup of caldo de cana into the aisle and the cobrador yelled at her that there was no food or drink allowed.
“You saw me bring it on,” she said, and the cobrador rolled his eyes. Everyone on the bus laughed.
“Okay,” said Elder Schwartz. “Now the notebook.”
“Sure,” said Elder Toronto. “Let’s talk about the notebook.”
“Who’s the guy in the picture?” said Elder Schwartz. “The guy who’s missing part of his ear.”
“Right,” said Elder Toronto. “Any other questions with the notebook?”
“That’s the biggest one I could think of.”
“It is an important question. And it ties in, I think, to a question we haven’t brought up yet—who hired Galvão? He’s a detective, remember. And I suspect that whoever hired him either took this picture or is in it.”
In spite of himself, Elder Schwartz felt drawn into the puzzle, beset by a growing desire to make sense of the increasingly strange situation. By daylight, all of the previous night’s dangers seemed almost hypothetical.
“So we need to find the guy with the missing ear,” he said.
“That would sure help,” said Elder Toronto. “Look, we have to wrap this up—we’re almost to our stop.”
The missionaries got up from their seats and stood by the door.
Elder Toronto said, “I think it’s a travesty we have to waste two hours at an inane district meeting, but I couldn’t think of a good way out of it. If we didn’t show up, it would set off alarm bells, and even if we called with an excuse, someone would come around to follow up on it. But as soon as it’s over, we make a beeline back to Vila Barbosa, and we start knocking on some doors and asking some questions. Right?”
“Right,” said Elder Schwartz.
“And we don’t mention any of this to anyone at the meeting,” said Elder Toronto.
“Right.”
The bus’s brakes screeched softly as it pulled up to the curb and the hydraulic doors hissed open. The two missionaries stepped off the bus and, still running late, started jogging toward their meeting. As they bounded along the broken sidewalk, Elder Schwartz realized that neither one of them had brought up one essential question: What did they really know about Marco Aurélio?
CHAPTER 7
Two months earlier, on the night of his baptismal interview, Marco Aurélio sat with Elder Toronto and Elder Schwartz in the foyer of the Parque Laranjeira ward house, waiting for Elder J. da Silva to arrive. Unlike the Vila Barbosa ward, the Mormons in Parque Laranjeira had a building of their own, a spacious, tiled monument to the steady growth of their congregation. In a room down the hall, a group of youths assembled hygiene kits for needy families. In the building’s administrative offices, the bishop of Parque Laranjeira discussed with his counselors how the ward might raise its profile in the community. In the chapel, the women of the Relief Society listened attentively to a lecture on time management. The building crackled with optimistic energy.