“Crush us? Senor, you people have about as much chance of-”
Arnaldo gripped Goncalves’s arm.
“This isn’t getting us anywhere,” he said. “Ask the question.”
Federico took another sip of wine and ran a finger along his moustache. “What question?” he said.
Goncalves disengaged his arm from Arnaldo’s grip and took a deep breath.
“How about this: how about a group of Argentineans snatched the Artist’s mother so your country would have some chance of winning? How about that?”
“Ridiculous,” Jose said, and laughed.
“Absurd.”
That was from the Argentinean who’d called Goncalves deluded.
“Listen to this guy,” Federico said, addressing his countrymen. And then, to Goncalves, “Wishing won’t make it so, young man. You people are going to have your asses kicked. But, since you’ve given all of us a good laugh, how about we buy you a drink?”
“And how about you all go fuck yourselves,” Goncalves said, and stormed out.
I N THE parking lot, Arnaldo caught up with him.
“If you’re about to tell me I told you so,” Goncalves said, “you can just keep your damned mouth shut.”
“I was about to tell you a couple of Argentinean jokes. I thought they might drive home the lesson.”
“I don’t want to hear any Argentinean jokes.” Goncalves kicked a stone. “Open the damned car.”
“You know the one about how to make a fortune?”
Goncalves paused, his hand extended toward the door handle. “No,” he said.
“You buy an Argentinean for what he’s worth and sell him for what he thinks he’s worth.”
Goncalves wasn’t amused.
“That’s not funny,” he said.
“You know what an ego is?”
“No.”
“It’s a tiny Argentinean who lives in all of us.”
“That’s not funny either.”
“Argentinean jokes aren’t made to be funny. They’re made to be instructive.”
“Get in the car and drive,” Goncalves said.
Chapter Five
Rodolfo Sa, Juraci’s neighbor, was a florid-faced man with a big belly. His wife, Angela, was a petite woman a head shorter than her husband.
They sat Hector at their dining room table, offered him coffee and tried to pump him for information.
He fended off their questions, accepted a second cup and launched into his questions.
“Tell me about Juraci Santos.”
“What do you want to know?” Rodolfo said.
“Start with her character. What kind of a lady is she?”
Rodolfo’s horn-rimmed glasses had slipped down his nose. He used a finger to push them back into place, and then looked at his wife.
“You want to answer that one?”
“Not me,” she said. “You go ahead.”
After a pause to consider his words, Rodolfo said, “To begin with, Juraci Santos isn’t a lady at all. She doesn’t belong here in Granja Viana, she belongs in a slum.”
“Back where she came from, is that what you’re saying?”
“It sounds bigoted, I know, but you try living next door to someone like that.” Rodolfo pointed to a set of French doors. “Our deck overlooks her back yard. Go out there and have a look. You’ll see what I mean.”
Through the glass, Hector could see patio furniture, a wooden rail and some greenery. He couldn’t see Juraci’s home.
“Why don’t you just tell me?” he said.
“Garbage, that’s what you’ll see. When she and her friends party out there, and they party a lot, they don’t throw their paper cups, and paper plates, and chicken bones, and rib bones in the trash. They simply toss them onto the ground. We never had a rat problem before Juraci moved in, but we’ve sure as hell got one now. I had to put out poison, and Adolph ate some of it-”
“Adolph’s your dog?”
“Yeah. He’s a Doberman. It was all the vet could do to save him, and he hasn’t been the same since. Intestinal problems. Believe me, you don’t want to hear the details.”
Angela had put a dish of bite-sized cookies on the table. Her husband put one in his mouth, masticated it and washed it down with coffee before continuing.
“Then there were the parrots,” he said. “She used to have two of them over there, Macaws, a red one and a blue one. They’d squawk at dawn, and they’d squawk when the sun went down, and they were even noisier than the damned rooster she used to keep. Which, by the way, checked in every morning about half an hour before the parrots did.”
“Noisy, huh?”
Rodolfo snagged another cookie.
“Noisy is an understatement. And her former menagerie isn’t the half of it. She’s got lousy taste in music, and she recently invested in the biggest amplifier and loudspeaker system known to man. She plays musica sertaneja every goddamned day, the same crap over and over again, and she plays it so loud that the glasses in our china cupboards rattle. She’s got a little toy poodle that barks all night long. Which, of course, sets off Adolph, who always used to sleep through the night until she moved in. And then there are her goddamned hens.”
“Hens?”
“Hens. No coop. They just wander around the yard.”
“Every now and then,” Angela put in, “one of them gets over the fence and goes straight for my roses.”
“You’ve spoken to her about all of this?”
Rodolfo threw up his hands in a gesture of frustration. “Repeatedly. Nothing I say makes any difference. When I go over there to complain, she either won’t answer the door, or she shuts it in my face. Juraci Santos is the neighbor from Hell. We built this house ourselves. I spent three years getting it done. It was our dream. We had great neighbors, and we were happy. And then Tiago Serra divorced his wife, and he needed to get rid of the house, and Juraci Santos moved in. Now we’re thinking of selling out and leaving Granja Viana altogether. All because of that woman.”
Goncalves took a sip of his coffee. “How about her other neighbors? Do they share your opinions about the lady?”
“They sure as hell do. They don’t have to put up with her eyesore of a back yard, or her hens, but all of them hear her noise. We’re in a valley here. The racket carries clear over to the other side. And then there are the thefts.”
“Thefts?”
“There’s been a spate of thefts. I’m not accusing Juraci personally, but you gotta admit it’s a hell of a coincidence that all the incidents occurred since she moved in. Nothing big, mind you. Not yet. But clothes have been stolen off clotheslines, radios and CD players ripped out of cars, TV sets stolen from houses.” Rodolfo took another cookie and waved it in Goncalves’s direction. “They talk to her, the security guys do, and she claims she knows nothing about it. Maybe she doesn’t. But she isn’t willing to recognize that it might be the people she invites to her home, all those old friends of hers from her favela days.” He popped the cookie in his mouth.
“Go easy on those cookies,” Angela said. “You’re supposed to be on a diet, remember?” Then, to Goncalves, “More coffee?” Goncalves shook his head. “It was delicious, but, no, thanks. How about the Artist?”
“What about him?”
“Does he put in an appearance every now and then?”
