by Tim Wirkus
“Alison, I can see you’re not totally convinced yet, but when we head out for California tomorrow, I’m going to leave a case of the juice with you guys, and I’d like you to try some. I’d really love it if you two just took some time to think it over.”
Jason’s face glowed in the sunlight permeating the closed blinds, and Mike found himself nodding, saying yes, that all sounded wonderful.
CHAPTER 2
To make it through the day, they’d all need to get out of the house. Too many warm bodies in a confined space. The water parks would be packed; more likely than not, they’d spend most of their time waiting in line under the vengeful sun. The shopping malls stayed cool, but were unlikely to occupy the kids’ attention for long. They decided a movie would be the best option, it didn’t matter which one. Something the kids would like. The theater would be air-conditioned, that’s what mattered. But first they needed to eat.
Earlier in the week, Mike had bought frozen pizzas for the occasion, but everyone agreed that turning on the oven would be a terrible idea. So Mike and Alison offered to drive over to the grocery store and pick up stuff for sandwiches. It would be easier than bringing everyone along.
As he and Alison crossed the sweltering parking lot toward the store’s main entrance, the asphalt soft beneath their feet, Mike looked up with his one good eye to see the blue sky filling with long, wispy cirrus clouds. A wind had picked up, hot and dry, and an empty paper bag blew across his feet.
With a cheerful whoosh, the automatic doors welcomed them into the cool interior of the grocery store. Mike found a cart, the metal chilly against his skin, and they began patrolling for supplies: rolls from the bakery; lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, and bean sprouts from the produce section. In the refrigerated dairy aisle, Mike broached the subject of the juice supplements Jason and Connie were selling—it sounded like an interesting venture, he said.
“I think it works for Jason and Connie,” said Alison. “Cheddar or mozzarella?”
She picked up a package of each, weighing them in her hands.
“Mozzarella’s the safe choice,” said Mike.
Alison dropped the brick of mozzarella into the cart.
“Seriously, though,” said Mike. “It sounds like a good opportunity.”
“Are you being serious about this?” said Alison, wheeling the cart toward the deli meats.
“I don’t know,” said Mike. “Even if Jason’s exaggerating a little—”
“You would hate selling things,” said Alison.
“Maybe,” said Mike.
They stopped the cart in front of a wide array of deli meat.
“Jason loves that kind of thing,” said Alison. “He loves it. You know that.”
“Yeah,” said Mike. “True.”
“Plus, it’s snake oil, Mike.”
“But still,” he said. “A ten-hour work week—think about that.”
Alison leaned in to examine a package of sliced ham.
“I mean, if you’re really serious about this, we could look into it.”
“Well,” said Mike.
He left it there, unsure what he wanted.
“What meats should we get?” said Alison. “We should get a few different kinds.”
“Turkey for sure,” said Mike. “And ham.”
Alison picked out one of each and put them in the cart.
“What else?” said Alison. “Beef?”
“What about another turkey?” said Mike. “I think everyone likes turkey.”
“Some variety would be nice, though,” said Alison.
They stood there side-by-side, basking in the cooler’s refrigerated drafts, contemplating the various meat options before them.
“Schwartz?” said a gravelly voice from Mike’s blind side, and Mike turned his head.
The man who addressed him wore a somber blue polo shirt and a slightly rumpled pair of slacks, neither of which fit him especially well, the pants cinched to bunching around his narrow waist, the shirt draped tent-like over his slender torso. His hair, just beginning to gray at the temples, was neatly combed in apparent compensation for the chaotic face below it, a rugged terrain of scar tissue and drooping skin. A series of pink scars crisscrossed the man’s throat. He had a scuffed leather bag slung over his shoulder and leaned heavily on a simple, wooden cane.
“Mike Schwartz?” repeated the man in his gravelly voice.
“Yeah,” said Mike. “Do I know you?”
“Sorry,” said the man, his hodgepodge of a face twisting into a smile. “I forget sometimes that people might not recognize me. They had to do a lot of work on my face.”
Mike shook his head, the man’s identity still not registering.
“It’s me,” said the man. “John Toronto.”
It took Mike several seconds to respond.
CHAPTER 3
Outside, the sky, so blindingly clear that morning, was now filled with dark clouds.
Inside the burger place, the two men ate for several minutes without speaking, the only sounds in their booth being the occasional crunch of a French fry or the rattle of ice in their paper cups. Both men focused their full attention on the apparently crucial task of eating their hamburgers: taking a bite and then staring at the burger as they chewed, mapping out with their eyes where the next bite would come from. Every so often, one of them might look out one of the restaurant’s plate-glass windows at the effects of the increasingly violent windstorm outside; garbage rolling down the sidewalk like tumbleweed, an elderly couple leaning dramatically into the gusts as they crossed the street, a magazine blowing out of the hands of a woman who was waiting for a bus. However, neither man made eye contact with the other, confining their gaze to their food and to the world outside.
At the grocery store, after introductions and a bit of small talk, Alison had offered to head back to the house alone to give Mike and John a chance to catch up—she could come pick Mike up a little later. Toronto had jumped on the offer, suggesting that he and Mike grab a bite to eat at the fast-food place across the street, and when they were done, he could give Mike a ride home himself. So it had been settled, and here they were.
When the burgers were gone, Toronto broke the silence with his gravelly voice, asking Mike how he had been and what he was up to. Mike ran through the vital statistics—married eleven years, three kids, a job in the city planner’s office. Toronto said that sounded terrific. He said that in his line of work, he saw so many dysfunctional marriages, so many people who cheated on their spouses, or maybe just couldn’t stand them, that it was nice to see a couple who obviously loved each other like Mike and Alison did. Mike thanked him.
“Are you a marriage counselor, then?”
“No,” said Toronto, scratching at his scar-ridden cheek, “I’m kind of an independent contractor. Nothing too glamorous.”
Mike nodded like he knew what Toronto meant.
A few yards away, a teenaged employee with surprisingly good skin pushed a mop in a rolling yellow bucket across the floor, humming softly, his eyes lingering on a nearby table of high school girls, who were now engaged in a heated discussion. As the boy passed the booth where the two men sat, the yellow bucket nearly snagged the dangling strap of Toronto’s leather bag. Toronto lifted the strap onto the bench and hugged the bag a little closer.
Mike had watched Toronto dote on this bag throughout their meal—he treated it like it was a well-behaved dog or a small child, resting his hand on it lovingly, stroking it reassuringly, and holding it as close as possible. Mike wouldn’t have been surprised to see Toronto drop a morsel of food into its obedient mouth. Mike wondered what the bag contained.
On the outside, it was nothing special, something between a satchel and an attaché case. The brown leather, scuffed along the bottom, was cracking in places. A buckle was missing and a deep scratch ran along the bag’s front. One of the handles was wrapped in electrical tape and the strap, several shades lighter than the rest of the leather, looked like it came from another
bag. Whatever was inside, there was a lot of it—the bag bulged with its hidden contents.
“So you’re in town on business?” said Mike.
“I’m actually just passing through.”
Mike nodded.
Toronto said, “I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m curious—is that a glass eye?”
Mike turned the eye in question away from Toronto.
“It’s not glass,” he said, “but it is prosthetic.”
Toronto said he wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t been looking for signs of lasting damage. He picked up his cup and took a drink.
“Apparently I was in a coma for a while,” said Toronto, his fingers gently patting the bag sitting next to him, “and then just in really bad shape. I don’t know, I really don’t remember. When I was finally stable enough to move, they shipped me back to the States and I spent months in the hospital. I was in physical therapy for a long time. I still have to walk with a cane.”
“I’m sorry,” said Mike. “It wasn’t as bad as that for me. Some internal bleeding, and a broken collarbone. And my eye.”
“Still,” said Toronto.
Mike shrugged.
“Things have worked out okay for me,” Mike said.
Toronto nodded. The nearby group of high school girls laughed at some private joke. Toronto hugged his bag closer. Mike looked outside at the darkening afternoon sky.
“Could you excuse me for a minute?” said Toronto, standing up from the booth, picking up his cane, and limping back to the restrooms.
His leather bag remained behind, alone on the bench.
The teenaged employee had struck up a conversation with the nearby table of girls and now leaned on his mop, chatting amiably. Outside, the wind continued to blow, the sky clouded and prematurely dark. Crossing the floor of the restaurant, a tired-looking manager in an ill-fitting uniform and a headset approached the young employee with the mop and told him he either needed to be mopping out here, or back behind the counter filling orders. Conversing with customers wasn’t included in either option. The boy nodded and the manager walked away. The boy rolled his eyes for the benefit of the girls and began to mop a few feet away from them in silence.
In his booth, Mike stared at the leather bag that Toronto had left behind. What was in there? He glanced up at the restroom doors, then at the table of girls engaged in conversation, then at the young employee mopping halfheartedly with his back to Mike. Nobody was watching. He looked back at the restroom one more time and then stood up, leaning over the table and lifting the bag over to his side of the booth.
Instead of finding, as he had expected, a chaotic space roiling with papers, Mike was surprised to see that the inside of the bag was organized into a neat assortment of pockets, dividers, and compartments. He saw a bundle of yellowing note cards in one pocket and pulled it out of the bag. He recognized the cards as the ones Toronto had made in their apartment in Vila Barbosa all that time ago. In the ensuing years, further information had been added in different colors of ink, but always in the same recognizable handwriting, information like “birth name: Sílvia Maria da Graça Meirelles Sousa” or “never actually served time” or “did have brother named Grillo” or “has tattoo of bleeding hummingbird on shoulder; usually keeps it hidden.”
Mike put the note cards back and pulled out a thick stack of photographs from a different compartment. They were separated into categories by tabbed dividers as follows:
Pictures of Places. Flipping through this section, Mike saw the apartment where the elders had lived, Marco Aurélio’s house, Sílvia’s lanchonete, the high-rise building where Cabral’s office was located, the cheery little house where Claudemir and Fátima lived, and several buildings, parks, and homes that Mike didn’t recognize.
Pictures of People (most of these images grainy, likely captured through a telephoto lens). Although this section contained pictures of many people Mike had never seen before, he did recognize several. Fake Grillo, for instance, sitting at a table outside a bar with a woman who pointed angrily toward his chest, her mouth open in accusation. Junior Cabral stepping out of an armored car. The policeman with no hair frisking a kid who stood, arms and legs spread, facing a cinderblock wall. Sister Beatrice pulling her wheeled grocery basket through a street market. Wanderley the cab driver sitting on a curb smoking a cigarette. The blurred face of a woman who could be Sílvia looking out the window of a bus.
Pictures of Their Personal Belongings. Mike didn’t know what to make of this section. He saw a wooden string of rosary beads peeking out from the pocket of a skirt; a diver’s knife sitting on a dresser; a small shelf of comic books; a battered cavaquinho resting against a painted cement wall; a makeup brush in someone’s hand; an open dictionary on a threadbare couch.
There were more categories and more pictures, but Mike returned the stack to its compartment.
He pulled a manila folder from the bag and found photocopies of various official documents inside, all of them written in Portuguese: birth certificates, marriage licenses, writs of divorce, criminal records, deeds, wills, affidavits, death certificates. He recognized very few of the names on the documents.
Another folder held a collection of maps, some of them hand-drawn, some of them torn at one edge, obviously removed from a larger atlas. The maps ranged in scale from streets to neighborhoods to cities, and in focus from utility lines to average annual income to historic landmarks. A picnicker’s map, yellowing at the edges, depicted Vila Barbosa before it was settled—a topographical view of its steep, grassy hills; of its cool, green eucalyptus groves; of its many winding streams. A crime map of the neighborhood featured dozens, maybe hundreds of multicolored flags, each one with a simple icon representing a different type of crime—a fractured car for a vehicle break-in, a cartoon ski mask for a robbery, a knife for an armed assault. The top of another map, this one hand-drawn in a blue, smudgy ink, proclaimed itself a key to the thirty-seven secret entrances to the Argentine’s system of tunnels. A simple black-and-white map so large that Mike couldn’t fully unfold it tracked the electrical lines that ran throughout Vila Barbosa. A minuscule map the size of a business card charted an elevated train system—never actually built—that connected the various points of the neighborhood.
Next to the folder of maps, Mike found a yellow legal pad, its dog-eared pages covered in handwritten, retrospective algorithms, a multitude of possibilities arranged into arrow-connected boxes, for example:
Did Marco Aurélio ever ask Abelardo about his connection to Luis?
if yes=>Did Abelardo tell him anything about their shared history?
if yes=>
if no=>
if no=>Was Marco Aurélio unaware of the connection?
if yes=>
if no=>
Another legal pad contained timeline after timeline, each one charting known events in the lives of Marco Aurélio and those connected to him. One timeline compared and contrasted events from the stories people told about the Argentine with known events in the life of Luis, owner of the little general store. Another timeline charted significant events in the development and decline of the Mormon congregation in Vila Barbosa. Still another timeline, stretching for pages, noted down to the minute everything that happened to the missionaries between Ulisses Galvão’s appearance at church on Sunday and their meeting with Luis just days later.
Behind the timelines, he found a manila folder marked “Audio Surveillance Transcripts.” He flipped through the pages and pages of meticulously recorded conversations, most of them in Portuguese. Mike’s skills in the language were rusty—beyond rusty—and so only the very occasional fragment of meaning popped out at him: . . . what kind of idiot do you think . . . not just the police . . . if she’s scared . . . how many times . . . that third cupboard . . . something I pride myself on . . . can’t stop thinking . . . Aurélio never . . . share of the money . . . regardless of how messy it was . . . not like she’s your wife . . . it’s what I keep telling you . . . those two
Mormons . . . not a gun . . . without . . . bound to find him . . .
Next to this, was a folder full of unlabeled statistical graphs, charting sets of data that Mike couldn’t decipher. There were box plots, line graphs, histograms, pie charts, pictographs, scatterplots, and bar graphs.
Another folder contained dozens of police-style sketches. At first glance, they seemed to be photocopies, each one an identical depiction of Marco Aurélio’s face. As he examined the sketches more carefully, though, Mike could see minor variations in each version—the ears a bit higher in this one, the jaw slightly firmer in that one, the cheekbones just sharper in another. Furthermore, no single depiction got it quite right. In fact, if Mike had been shown any one of these sketches in isolation, he may not have even guessed that it was supposed to be of Marco Aurélio. Strangely, though, all of the depictions put together somehow captured something that eluded any single sketch.
In a zippered compartment was a pouch filled with several small objects. Mike emptied its contents onto the table—a worn padlock key; a pair of women’s sunglasses with one lens missing; a dented policeman’s badge; a thin, gold wedding band; a brittle, creased bit of leather. Mike returned the objects to their pouch, and put the pouch back in the bag. There was so much more in the bag that he could look through—more unexplored pockets, compartments, and folders—but Mike saw the door of the men’s room begin to swing open. He closed the bag and returned it to its spot on the seat across from him.
Toronto stepped out of the bathroom, adjusting his ill-fitting pants. With the aid of his cane, he limped back to the booth and sat down. He held the leather bag close to his body and smiled apologetically. Mike smiled in return and folded his hands, which had begun to shake. The contents of the bag had left him unexpectedly enraged, his ears ringing with the physical reverberations of the anger, his muscles clenching, the vision in his one good eye blurring at the edges.
“I have to ask you before we go,” said Toronto.
The girls from the nearby table stood up with their trays in hand and Toronto waited until they had passed before continuing.