The truth is, I had never screwed anyone. It was very bad, I almost couldn’t get it up. Suellen was on the rough side and was impatient; she looked at my dick with that I’ve-seen-bigger expression. When it was over, I lay in bed, dead tired, and Suellen got up, slipped on her shorts, and left without a word. I thought I would never see her again—and didn’t want to. Georges asked no questions; he was discreet. Weeks later, in the middle of a conversation, he asked if I had written the scene. I said yes. The fuck was fucking great.
I may be mistaken, but it was during this time that he mentioned having begun a new novel. Goddamn, after two decades without a line, Georges Fullar was writing again. I was crazy curious to know everything, but held back. I knew he would shut down at the first sign of intrusion. I changed the subject, we spoke of women and even soccer—I don’t know the first thing about soccer. That night we had Japanese food instead of sandwiches from Cervantes (I couldn’t take any more ham with pineapple). We drank half a bottle of sake. He started rattling on about rare poisons, he was interested in the topic, doing research, reading books; colorless poisons, tasteless and odorless, you with me? And that same night he spoke for the first time about mecicitronine. He was familiar with all the properties of the compound, all its effects and characteristics. A poison with an acid taste, slightly bitter, but colorless and lethal, that leaves no trace in the body. He was fascinated by it. Mecicitronine dissolves in the bloodstream and the guy has a heart attack. Weird, huh? At the time, I didn’t understand why he had such interest. I figured it was for the book.
In subsequent meetings he didn’t mention poison, nor did he talk about the book. I also stopped telling him about mine. I can’t explain it, but I think knowing that Georges was writing a new novel made me uneasy . . . I kind of went into a tailspin. I was an idiot writing my paltry little book while a genius was crafting a masterpiece two floors below me. All I could think about was his book; all I wanted was to find out about it. Does what I’m saying make sense?
There came a night when I couldn’t resist. He was in the kitchen making pasta. I said I was going to pee and snuck into his office. I was looking for a rough draft, a page from the book, a block of notes, anything. Okay, I was being kind of obsessive, but when you read Georges Fullar you’ll understand. I needed to do it. I saw the typewriter, the mahogany chair, the desk, books about poison, some blank sheets of paper scattered around. No text. I went back to the living room disappointed, a bit suspicious. Was the old man lying to me?
I don’t know if he noticed I had gone into the office, but he cut me off for two or three months after that dinner. He started canceling one plan after another, and telling me that the following week he also couldn’t hang out, and didn’t even make up excuses. He could have said he was writing or that he wanted to be by himself, whatever. I found it highly offensive of him to just disappear like that.
This period was hell for me. My parents were separating and those weekly meetings with Georges were like my therapy. Besides which, as I already said, I was no longer able to work on my own book. I reread it and found it to be a piece of crap. I became depressed, and that’s no laughing matter. Then one day, a Wednesday, he called me on the building’s intercom and invited me down to his apartment. He never called me on Wednesdays because he liked watching soccer on TV. I found it strange, but I went.
When I opened the door, it was another Georges. He had aged ten years in those months. Exhausted, without any strength. We made small talk, but his sense of humor was gone. He didn’t use profanity anymore. I asked what was happening and he said he had come to a crucial part of his book, a part in which . . . in which the character killed a woman. With poison. “And I’ve never killed anyone,” he said, anguished. “I don’t know what the feeling is like.”
I said that he could imagine it, that he was creative and brilliant enough to describe the feelings of committing a murder, but he wasn’t listening, he didn’t want to listen. He kept repeating that he had tried to write but felt drained. Shit.
“Suellen,” he said finally. “Would you help me kill Suellen?”
I thought he was joking. But he kept those hard eyes on me and asked again. He took a small vial from his pocket. Mecicitronine. “Boy, I need your help,” he said. And he did. He was on his last legs, Georges.
I never thought about killing anybody, you know? But at the time the idea didn’t seem so absurd. I took the vial of poison from his hand. It was a white powder that looked harmless, like talcum powder. I envisioned Suellen with the expression she wore when we had sex, and I thought it would be amusing to see her whore’s eyes lifeless, her cocksucking throat clogged with mucus and vomit.
I agreed. I wanted to know where and when, and he told me he had an appointment with her that night. I’d rather not go into detail.
* * *
Suellen arrived and was disappointed when she saw me. She went straight to Georges and kissed him, to show she wanted nothing to do with me. He took my hand, slipping me the vial, and told me to go to the kitchen and make a caipirinha for her. I closed my hand around the vial. Suellen was a true whore; she immediately sat on Georges’s lap.
In the kitchen I mixed ice, lime, sugar, cachaça, and some of the mecicitronine. I handed Suellen the caipirinha. She drank it while talking about a series on Brazilian TV about prostitutes. Georges watched her very attentively, saw when she lost control of her speech, lost control of her body—in a word, died. We took the corpse out through the back door, placed Suellen in the trunk of my car, and left her on a bench in Lido Square. By then it was late at night.
In the days that followed, nothing appeared in the newspapers. Lots of people are murdered in Rio de Janeiro. And a whore who suffered a heart attack isn’t news. Georges told me I could call him if I had a problem, if I felt any remorse or guilt. To tell the truth, I felt fine. I didn’t like Suellen. And there was still Georges’s book to consider. One day he called me to say he had finally written the passage in question. “Goddamn good,” he said. He was excited, Georges. Obviously I was proud of having helped, of being part of it, you know?
Our meetings went back to being like they had been before. Sandwiches, wine, good conversation. Suellen never came up. Georges received lots of books from people and gave me almost all of them as gifts. He recommended some, but without explaining why I should read this one or that. He just handed them over and I accepted them. We didn’t talk anymore about our own books, as I already said. Actually, he didn’t speak about his and I ended up abandoning mine at the first of the year. It made no sense to go on. I knew I would only be able to write after reading Georges’s new novel, understand? It was like some invisible barrier, the grandeur of his creation.
One day, he called me to his apartment. He opened the door with a smile I had never seen. He was in ecstasy, Georges. He told me to sit down and handed me a brown package. “The finished manuscript,” he said. It was light but weighed heavy in my hands. You can imagine, I was very nervous. I started to open the package to look at some of the pages but he took it away and said it wasn’t for me to read. He just wanted to celebrate. I was really pissed. I insisted he at least let me see the title. But Georges was seductive and knew how to please. He said I was listed in the acknowledgments and changed the subject. We opened a bottle of wine and ordered sandwiches. No matter how much I talked about other things, all I wanted was to read the book. And there came a moment when I looked at him in the rocking chair and thought that I really wanted to be like him, that I wanted to publish a book as good as his. I would never be able to. We have to be aware of our limits. There is such a thing as talent, you know?
One idea leads to another. Before I realized it, I had returned to my apartment with the excuse of taking some medication and now I had the vial of mecicitronine in my hand. I went back downstairs in time to open the bottle of wine with him and pay for the sandwich delivery from Cervantes. By now you’ve got the picture: Georges didn’t die of a heart attack; I killed him. I put the p
oison in his sandwich and he didn’t notice the bitter taste because of the pineapple. You can call it insanity, obsession, anything you like, but I needed to read that book. More than that, I needed to publish that book under my name and be successful, a fucking winner.
Georges was old, tired of life. I feel I did him a favor. And myself as well. Georges ate that last sandwich with gusto. He choked, hiccupped, died. In the rocking chair. The glass shattered on the floor. I saved the package from the pool of red wine and didn’t even wait for him to stop moaning. I took out the manuscript: The Story of Georges Fullar.
Chapter One: His name. My name. An elderly writer meets a younger one, full of dreams and ambition. The older writer is tired of life, thinks about suicide, but the youth’s vitality does him good.
Chapter Two: The two converse and become friends. The veteran decides to test the limits of the younger man: he sees if he is capable of killing a woman. And of course the two do kill the woman. This happens in Chapter Five and is beautiful, poetic, tense. Their friendship grows, but the old man stays interested in the ethical boundaries of his junior. The old man tells him that he has finished the book but denies him access to the text. The youth can’t resist and kills the old man. Kills from envy, from pity, to steal the work. People don’t need a motive for killing. He kills him with a knife, not with poison in a sandwich from Cervantes. Georges was wrong about that; I was smarter. At the end comes the letter. The letter in which the old man explains to the youth that he knew he would be murdered, that he knew the other couldn’t contain his curiosity, and that the younger man must do with the book what he considers appropriate now.
Do you realize what a stroke of genius this is? Metalanguage at its best. Well written, well structured, I’m never going to accomplish anything like that. I thought about it for days. I saw them take away Georges’s body. I even went to the funeral—there was hardly anyone there. Dead of a heart attack, said the newspapers. I wanted to publish his book under my name, but I can’t. I need to tell everything so people will know what really happened. It’s our story. He wrote our story. The truth is all there. You can arrest me, Detective Aquino. And release what I just told you to the press, to the world. I’m not doing it for myself; I’m not doing it for Georges either. I’m doing it for mystery writing. It’s one helluva book, and it needs to be read. Hopefully, that way the Brazilian crime novel can finally emerge from the shit.
The Woodsman
by Luis Fernando Verissimo
Bangu
The dead man called late afternoon the “hour of long shadows.” That was the title of the manuscript I found in the apartment where he and the blond woman had been murdered. The Hour of Long Shadows. Poems, handwritten, in a pile on top of the living room table. One of the few things in the apartment not splattered with blood.
It didn’t surprise me that the guy wrote poetry. There are poets in Bangu too, why not? But everything about the dead man denied poetry. Everything about him was antipoetic, from his physical appearance to his biography, which Detective Friedrich gave me. Beginning with his name, Tadeu. But there it was, the manuscript, poems written in ballpoint pen. The Hour of Long Shadows and his signature, in a neat pile waiting to be found. But Detective Friedrich hadn’t noticed the pile. Police never notice poetry. I do. I even write some. I write my verses but don’t show them to anyone. They’re private musings. But that doesn’t matter. We’re not here to talk about the fleeting soul of a police reporter but about a double murder.
The two corpses lay on the sofa. The blonde in a nightgown. Beautiful. Even covered in blood she was still beautiful. He only had on underwear. Both had been stabbed to death. Deep cuts made—I don’t know why it immediately occurred to me—with a butcher knife. Or knives. So much carnage, both at the same time, it could only have been done by more than one butcher.
My editor, Mosquito, had asked me to take a look at that slaughter in Bangu. “It might lead somewhere.” My editor’s name is Mesquita, but he’s small and thin and is always buzzing in our ears, which is how he got the nickname Mosquito, but he doesn’t know. “It may lead somewhere” is Mosquito’s way of saying that the story may yield more than just another killing in a Rio suburb. Something extra behind the bloodshed to serve up to our readers.
“Look for Detective Friedrich,” Mosquito had instructed me. “He owes me a couple of favors.”
Detective Friedrich was a large, fat German with the expression of someone who had seen everything in life and had no wish to see it all again. He only said “Ha” when I told him I brought greetings from Mosquito. But he let me into the apartment before the bodies were removed and told me everything he knew about the victims. The dead man’s antipoetic name, the identity of the blonde, everything. The neighbors had said a lot, but Friedrich already knew the couple. He told me that the blonde, Cristina, never left the house by herself, only in the company of the man. The rest of the time she stayed locked up in the apartment. That was why the detective knew them. One day when the man wasn’t there, there was a fire in the kitchen. Friedrich had helped the firemen break down the door and rescue the woman. Afterward he had recommended that the man not leave the door locked like that, but the guy ignored him. He said nothing, just grunted. Maybe his species lacked the power of speech.
Friedrich invited me to have a beer at a bar near the scene of the crime. I asked if I could take the poetry manuscript with me and he consented with a gesture of indifference. At the bar he told me that after the fire he had begun an investigation. On his own.
“What led you to investigate that man?”
“Not the man, the woman.”
“Beautiful, huh?”
“And you saw her covered in blood. Imagine what she was like without the blood. Cristina . . .” The detective spoke the woman’s name reverently, as if summoning her to sit there with us. Her or her hologram. I could be mistaken, maybe fat Friedrich also had the soul of a poet. Bangu might be a hotbed of secret poets for all I knew . . .
“I discovered everything about the two of them. He already had a criminal record. Petty stuff. He was a nobody. Even his crimes were mediocre. She was the mistress of Nogueira, owner of a chain of butcher shops in the South Zone. Very rich. She lived in an apartment Nogueira had bought for her, in Laranjeiras. That was where they had their trysts. Everybody knew about the mistress in Laranjeiras, including Dona Santa, Nogueira’s wife, and their two sons. In the family, the code name for her was Laranjeira.”
“How did you discover all this?”
“It’s impressive how much people open up when they see a badge.”
“And?”
“And one day Nogueira has a major stroke and is at death’s door. And the suspicion emerges that the old man had made a will leaving everything, including the butcher shops, or a large part of his fortune, to Laranjeira.”
“So?”
“So right now it’s all conjecture. It’s my hypothesis. Which might be wrong, but I think it’s correct.” Friedrich took a dramatic pause, ordered another beer, and continued: “Here’s the hypothesis: this story is like Snow White.”
“Snow White?!”
“Remember the story? The evil queen is jealous of Snow White’s beauty. She asks the magic mirror who’s the fairest in the land, and the mirror, with the frankness that characterizes all mirrors, says, It’s not you, it’s Snow White. The evil queen then hires someone to kill Snow White. A woodsman.”
“A nobody.”
“Right. The woodsman is supposed to take Snow White to the forest, kill her, and bring her heart to the queen, as proof that he killed her. The woodsman takes Snow White to the forest, and what happens? He falls in love with her. He’s dazzled by her beauty. He decides that instead of killing her he’s going to let her go. Or, in the case of our woodsman, stay with her. Get it? The woodsman is a minor character in the story of Snow White. A mere detail, a supporting actor. But without him and without his decision to spare Snow White there would be no story. The woodsman ends up
being the most important character of all. A simple woodsman.”
“How does he prove to the queen that he eliminated Snow White?”
“He takes her the heart of some animal or other, as if it were Snow White’s. In the case of our Tadeu, he could even buy a heart from one of Nogueira’s butcher shops; it’d be an ironic touch. Although Dona Santa, who had helped her husband in the butcher shop in the difficult early days, would inevitably recognize a cow’s heart. But our Tadeu doesn’t do any of that. He simply disappears with Laranjeira. Or with Snow White. And hides out in Bangu.”
“According to your hypothesis, then—”
“The evil queen is Dona Santa, who has nothing saintly about her. Snow White is Cristina. The woodsman is Tadeu, who brings Cristina to Bangu and keeps her locked in an apartment, certain they’ll never be discovered, until they are discovered. And executed, at the order of the evil queen. That will be the line of our investigation. I don’t foresee any difficulty in finding the killer. Or killers. Nogueira’s sons do whatever their mother orders. They’re terrified at the prospect of being left out of the will. And they had access to sharp knives. In short: for this story to match Snow White’s, all that’s missing are the dwarfs.”
“Did old Nogueira die after all?”
“Not yet. He’s in a coma. No one knows what’s in his will. He may have left everything to Laranjeira. Even the butcher shops.”
Several beers later Friedrich was relating what his father told him about Bangu, in the days when a famous textile factory and a soccer team that didn’t do badly in the Rio championships were there, where Zizinho, Parada, and even the great Domingos da Guia had played.
“Today people only come to Bangu to disappear,” said Friedrich. “Like me, who disappeared here six years ago and was never seen again.”
Mosquito had warned me that after a few beers Friedrich would start getting maudlin. I considered asking if he’d been the one who fingered the couple’s hideout to Dona Santa. Perhaps as a form of revenge, I don’t know. But I thought it best not to say anything.
Rio Noir Page 20