Carioca Fletch

by Gregory Mcdonald

  “Yes.” Accented by war paint, Toninho’s eyes crossed. “Norival is one to die trying.”

  “Norival is not coming to the ball at all?” Harlequin asked.

  “He went sailing,” Toninho said lamely. “To come to some conclusion…”

  “Ah, what a son!” Papai Noel said. “Probably drunk somewhere! These tickets cost three hundred North American dollars each! Norival, Adroaldo … Why does a man have sons? As soon as they grow as big as he is, they ignore him! They take, but do not give!”

  Fletch was introduced to Senhora Passarinho, who sat aside, watching the dancers on the floor. A lady with mild, vague eyes, she was dressed as a circus clown.

  “Ah!” she said. “Norival went sailing! Of course, he never was one for parties! A quiet, sensitive boy, always. He wrote poetry, you know, when he was younger. I remember one poem of his, where the cockatoo bird was meant to represent his school principal…”

  “You see,” Tito said aside to Fletch. “We could not disappoint that lady with the truth.”

  “Clearly.”

  “It would kill her.”

  “Have a drink!” ordered Harlequin. “Cachaça?”

  Toninho grinned broadly. The worst was over. “Nao, Senhor. We must go find girls.”

  “Of course you must!” boomed Papai Noel. “The night is as young as you!”

  “Just make sure they’re not men disguised surgically!” Harlequin warned.

  “If I find someone special, I shall bring her to you,” Toninho said, “to check out.”

  Harlequin roared in laughter.

  Outside the box, Fletch said, Toninho, are you going back to the beach in the morning to make sure Norival came ashore?”

  “Oh, no.” Toninho adjusted the top of his boot against the bare calf of his leg. “Today is Sunday. We must go to Mass.”

  Teodomiro da Costa was standing at the little bar at the back of his box.

  “Who is this?” he exclaimed. “I don’t recognize you!”

  Fletch stared at him the appropriate time through his mask.

  Everyone else in the box was facing forward, listening intently to the singer of the moment.

  What was left of the Tap Dancers had gone looking for girls.

  “You scare me, Senhor Gunslinger! What do you want?”

  “It’s me, Teo.”

  “Who?” Teo leaned forward, staring through the eyeholes of Fletch’s mask.

  “Fletch!”

  “Ah!” Teo feigned a look of great relief. “Then come have a drink.”

  The barman Teo had brought from his house began to make Fletch a screwdriver.

  “It’s so late,” Teo said. “It is nearly three o’clock in the morning. Did you fall asleep?”

  “No.”

  “I thought not.”

  “Without Laura, I went for a tour of the suburbs. Got back late.”

  “In a bus?”

  “Something like that. A big car.”

  The singer stopped singing.

  “Oh, Fletch! Beautiful costume!” the Viana woman said. “Where did you get it?”

  “I mugged someone on my television set.”

  “It fits you …” She looked below his waist. “… handsomely.”

  “Frankly, I feel like I’m walking behind myself.”

  “You are, darling. You are.”

  Teo introduced Fletch to his other guests. Besides the Vianas and the da Silvas, there was a famous Brazilian soccer player who could not stop dancing around the box by himself; his wife, who was taller than he, and probably heavier; a broker and his wife from London, who put on their Wegman—Man Ray masks for Fletch; Adrian Fawcett, who wrote about music for The New York Times; an Italian racing car driver and his girl friend, who was very young indeed; and the young French film star Jetta.

  Everyone marveled at Fletch’s costume, and he at everyone’s. Teo was dressed somewhat as a tiger, with a short tail. His tiger head rested on the bar table. Staring unblinkingly through glass eyes, the tiger head reminded Fletch somewhat of Norival in his last moment. But Norival’s eyes were much happier.

  Jetta was dressed in a nurse’s cap and costume, white shoes. Her nurse’s skirt was not even as long as the Tap Dancers’ breechclouts.

  In films, he had seen more of Jetta.

  Fletch took off his mask and movie cowboy hat and stood at the rail and watched the swirl of color and flesh below him.

  A few of the drummers were going off the stage; others were coming on. The music would never stop.

  At three places on the huge floor, between the dancing area and the tables, were tall, raised, gilded cages. Inside, three or four magnificent women dressed only in G-strings and tall headgear writhed to the music. Outside, crawling around the cages, trying to attain sufficient footholds in their high-heeled shoes to writhe to the music, nine or ten women dressed in G-strings and tall headgear crawled around like big cats on their hind legs. Each of the gilded cages was a locus of writhing brown bare asses and huge, shaking brown bare breasts.

  Beside him, Teo said, “The floors of the cages are elevators; they go up and down so the women can get in and out without being accosted by the crowd.”

  “They must be seven feet tall,” Fletch said.

  “They are all over six feet.”

  “What about the women outside the cages?”

  “They were not women.” Teo sipped his drink.

  “They are.”

  Teo said, “They are exhibiting the superb work of their Brazilian surgeons.”

  From a distance, Fletch could see no difference between the women inside the cages and the women outside the cages.

  Once before, in New York, he had been fooled.

  “No one hardly ever accosts them,” Teo said. “Very sad, for them.”

  The music picked up, and all the people, those dancing, those at the tables, those in the boxes, began singing/chanting the song presented by Imperio Serrano that Carnival. Fletch stumbled over the lyrics. He could never make his Portuguese sibilant enough.

  All the tanned people, the brown people, the black people were moving to the rhythm and singing the lyrics of the song presented by a single samba school together, something about how indebted Brazilian people are to the coffee bean, and how they should respect the coffee bean like an uncle.

  Adrian Fawcett, drink in hand, stood at the rail to Fletch’s left. “Brazil is what the United States would like to think it is.”

  “I used to work for a newspaper,” Fletch said. “A reporter.”

  “What do you do now?”

  “Do? Why must I do? I am.”

  Jetta stood the other side of Fletch. After Eva, after watching the women in the gilded cages, Jetta-off-the-screen seemed small.

  “Really what do you do?” Adrian asked.

  Fletch said, “I don’t know.”

  Jetta said, “Teo said there would be someone young for me to dance with.”

  “I feel one hundred years old at the moment.”

  “I have heard that story,” she said. “You are someone who died, years ago, murdered, and has come back to life to reveal your murderer.”

  “Did you ever hear anything so crazy?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Will you dance?”

  Fletch wanted to crawl into a corner of the box, to sleep. He was sure he could do so, despite the drums, the horns, the guitars, the singing. “Of course.”

  Excusing themselves from the box, they went to the dance floor.

  The people swirling around them were dressed as rabbits and rodents, harlequins and harlots, grande dames and playschool children, villains and viscounts, convicts and cooks, pirates and priests.

  Surprising to Fletch, Jetta seemed a wooden dancer. She clung to Fletch as she might to a log in the middle of the sea. He suspected she resisted such music.

  A few meters away, Orlando, breechclout flapping, was dancing wildly with a woman in a blond wig. The concentration in his eyes as he danced put him in another world.
The woman’s dress exposed only one breast totally.

  At the edge of the dance floor, a dozen men stood absolutely still, staring up, their mouths agape. Above them was a woman sitting on the rail of a box, her bare buttocks hanging over the rail. The woman herself was not visible: just her bare buttocks hanging over the rail.

  Jetta followed Fletch’s gaze. “Brazilians are so relaxed about their bodies,” said the young French film star. “So practical.”

  Feeling almost intoxicated with sleeplessness, Fletch envisioned Tito and Toninho turning Norival upside down in the bushes, kicking the vomit out of his stomach; Tito and Orlando, naked, kick-dancing, then wrestling, laughing, on the burned-out grass; the magnificent Eva standing in the door of the small, dark room where Norival lay dead, clutching her left breast with both hands, looking mildly pleased with herself; harness and broomsticks and calculating where a corpse dropped into the tide would be by dawn….

  Jetta ran her hands up the smooth sleeves of Fletch’s shirt to his shoulders and said, “You were so late in coming.”

  Even though dancing, sleep passed through Fletch’s brain like a curtain dragging across a stage. “I had to sit up a sick friend.”

  Eighteen

  Alone in his room at The Hotel Yellow Parrot, Fletch first dialed The Hotel Jangada and asked for Room 912.

  There was no answer in Room 912.

  Not even taking off his movie cowboy suit, he fell on his bed. He thought he would sleep immediately. It was nearly seven o’clock in the morning. He was not used to going to sleep at seven o’clock in the morning.

  Getting up, he dropped his clothes on the floor. Then he crawled beneath the sheet.

  Even at that hour of the bright morning, the sound of a samba combo could be heard from somewhere in the street. He rolled onto his side and pulled the pillow over his ear. Eyes closed, flesh wavered everywhere in his mind: big, soft, pliant breasts with huge nipples swinging to the beat; long, smooth backs danced away from him; brown buttocks dimpled as they moved; gorgeous long legs bent and straightened as feet pressed gently against the earth, the dance floor in the rhythm of the melodic samba drums.

  Fletch got out of bed and called Room Service for breakfast.

  While he waited, he took a long, hot shower.

  Alone, a towel around his waist, he ate breakfast sitting in a corner of his room. Sunday morning. For once, the man across the utility area was not painting the room.

  He called The Hotel Jangada again, again asked for Mrs Joan Stanwyk in Room 912.

  Again there was no answer.

  He closed the drapes against the bright morning and got into bed.

  He tried lying like a statue on a crypt, like Norival dead on the bed at the old plantation house, flat on his back, his hands crossed on his stomach. He tried counting the members of a woman’s pole-vaulting team leaping over the barrier. At the nineteenth redhead taking her turn with the brunettes and blondes going over the barrier, he knew sleep was unattainable.

  He called The Hotel Jangada again.

  Heavily slogging around the room, he opened the window drapes.

  He pulled on clean shorts, a clean tennis shirt, socks, and sneakers.

  Outside the hotel, in the brilliant sunlight, the small boy, Idalina’s great-grandson Janio Barreto, was waiting for him.

  The boy grabbed Fletch’s arm. He hobbled along with Fletch, speaking rapidly, softly, insistently.

  Fletch shook the boy off and got into his MP.

  On his wooden leg, the ten-year-old Janio Barreto ran after Fletch’s car, calling to him.

  Nineteen

  “Bom dia,” Fletch said to the formally dressed desk clerk at The Hotel Jangada. “There is a problem.”

  Instantly, the man was solicitous. He put his forearms on the reception counter and folded his hands. “Are you a guest of this hotel?”

  “I am staying at The Hotel Yellow Parrot.”

  The desk clerk was only a little less solicitous. The Hotel Yellow Parrot was a good hotel, too, more traditional, not so flashy. All the good hotels in Rio de Janeiro exactly doubled their rates during Carnival.

  Fletch had already telephoned Room 912 on the house phone, gone to the door, checked out the breakfast and pool areas. No sign of Joan Collins Stanwyk. The note he had left for her was still in the Room 912 box behind the reception desk.

  He spoke slowly and distinctly: “Someone who is staying at your hotel, a North American woman named Mrs Joan Stanwyk, talked to me yesterday morning at about this time, at my hotel. We arranged to meet almost immediately here, for breakfast. She was to walk from there to here. All I had to do was to get something from the safe of The Hotel Yellow Parrot, shower, change clothes (I had been jogging), and follow her in my car. I left The Hotel Yellow Parrot about a half hour after her, and drove straight here. She did not answer the house phone. She did not answer when I knocked on her door. She was not in the breakfast room, the terraces, the swimming pool areas, the bar. She still doesn’t answer. I’m afraid something must have happened to her.”

  The desk clerk smiled faintly at this story of a jilted lover. “There is nothing we can do, Senhor. We must respect the privacy of our guests. If the lady does not wish to see you, or hear from you …” Raising his hands from the counter, he shrugged.

  “But, you see, she needs something from me. Money. She had been robbed of everything.”

  Again the man shrugged.

  “I left her a note.” Fletch pointed to the note still in its slot behind the man. ‘The note is still there.”

  “People change their plans rapidly in Rio during Carnival.” The man smiled. “Sometimes they change their whole characters.”

  “Will you let me into her room, please?” Fletch had already tried to jimmy the lock to Room 912. It was an advanced lock, designed for only the most advanced burglars. “I worry that something must have happened to her. She may need help.”

  “No, sir. We cannot do that.”

  “Will you go yourself?”

  “No, sir. I cannot do that.”

  “Will you send a maid in?”

  “It’s Carnival.” The desk clerk looked at the lobby clock. “It is early. People sleep odd hours. They do not want disturbance.”

  “She’s been missing twenty-four hours,” Fletch said. “It is now a police matter.”

  The man shrugged.

  Fletch said, “Onde é a delegacia?”

  “Is there a police officer who speaks English?”

  “Spik Onglish,” the police officer behind the tall desk said. “Quack, quack.”

  Fletch turned his head so a younger police officer down the counter could hear him. “Anyone here who can speak English?”

  Down the counter, the younger officer picked up a phone, dialed a short number, and spoke into it.

  After he hung up, he held the palm of his hand up to Fletch, either ordering him to stop or suggesting he wait.

  Fletch waited.

  The lobby of the police station was filled with regretful revelers. On the floor and along the bench sat and lay men and women of all shapes, sizes, colors, in nearly every state of dress and undress, sleeping, trying to sleep, blinking slowly, holding their heads. Some of the revelers were in Carnival costumes, now in tatters: a queen; a mouse; ironically, a magistrate. One hairy man, asleep with his mouth open, was dressed only in bra, panties, and garter belts. A fat woman, eating cookies from a bag, was dressed as the Queen of Sheba. Five or six of the men had cuts and bruises on their heads; one had a nasty long cut down the calf of his leg. Even with no glass in the windows, the room smelled putrid.

  While Fletch waited, a man dressed only in tank trunks entered. A long-handled knife stuck into the area between his chest and his shoulder. He walked perfectly well. With dignity, he said to the police officer at the high counter, “Perdi minha máquina fotográfica.”

  From the bottom of a flight of stone stairs, a heavy police officer beckoned Fletch to come to him.

  “My
name is Fletcher.”

  The man shook hands with him. “Barbosa,” the man said, “Sergeant Paulo Barbosa. Are you North American?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The sergeant heavily led Fletch up the stairs. “I have been to the United States. To New Bedford, Massachusetts.” He led Fletch into a little room with a desk and two chairs. The sergeant sat in the chair behind the desk. “I have cousins there, in New Bedford, Massachusetts.” He lit a cigarette. “Have you been to New Bedford, Massachusetts?”

  “No.” Fletch sat down.

  “It is very nice in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Very sealike. It is on the sea. Everyone there fishes. Everyone’s wife runs a gift shop. My cousin’s wife runs a gift shop. My cousin fishes.” The sergeant brushed cigarette ashes from his shirt when there were no cigarette ashes on his shirt. “I truly believe the Portuguese bread is better in New Bedford, Massachusetts than the Portuguese bread in Rio de Janeiro. Some of it. Ah, yes. New Bedford, Massachusetts. I was there almost a year. I helped my cousin fish. Too cold there. I could not stand the cold.”

  The man sat sideways to the desk, not looking at Fletch. “Are you enjoying Carnival?”

  “Very much.”

  “Ah, to be young, handsome, healthy in Rio during Carnival! Can you come closer to heaven? I remember.” Then he brushed cigarette ashes off his shirt which were truly there. “And rich, too, I suppose.”

  In a corner of the room behind the desk was a gray steel filing cabinet, with three drawers.

  “It must be a busy time for the police.”

  “It is,” the sergeant agreed. “We get to enjoy Carnival very little. Everything goes topsy-turvy, you see.” He smiled at Fletch, slyly proud of this idiom. “Topsy-turvy. Men become women; women become men; grown-ups become children; children become grown-ups; rich people pretend they’re poor; poor people, rich; sober people become drunkards; thieves become generous. Very topsy-turvy.”

  Fletch’s eyes examined the typewriter on the desk. It was a Remington, perhaps seventy-five years old.

  “You were robbed….” the sergeant guessed.

  “No,” Fletch said.

  “You were not robbed?”

  “Of course I was robbed,” Fletch said. “When I first came here.” The sergeant seemed to be relieved. “But I am not bothering you with such a small, personal matter.”