checkbooks. No passport.”
“How does it feel?”
“How does what feel?”
“To be whatever you are right now.”
Her eyes narrowed. “I did not come to you for psychological therapy, Mister I. M. Fletcher.”
“Thought I’d throw it in. No extra charge.”
“I need money.”
“Why?”
“I want to get out of that damned hotel. I want to pay my bill and get out of that damned hotel. I don’t even have taxi fare.”
“Okay. But why don’t you call home? To California? Your father?”
“He’s on his yacht. The
“And you came here, to look for me.”
She shrugged. “Recuperation.”
“Doing your job. As you see it.”
“Yes.”
“Striving. Being Joan Collins Stanwyk, come hell or high water.”
“Are you going to help me? I want to go—”
“Tell me. Your family has offices stuffed with people looking out for you. Security personnel. Lawyers. Accountants. Why haven’t you called them?”
Her head lowered. After a moment, she said, softly, “It’s Saturday. In California, it’s before dawn Saturday morning.”
He laughed. “And you can’t wait? You’d rather come to me, whom you pursued to Rio de Janeiro, than wait until your daddy’s offices open?”
“I want to get out of that hotel. That man made me so angry.”
“It is essential to you, under the circumstances, that you talk to someone who knows who you are.”
She blinked at him. “What?”
He put his forearms on the table. “I was robbed. Wallet, cash, driver’s license. Not my passport. My watch. My Timex watch.”
“Within the first twenty-four hours you were here?”
“Within the first six hours. People warn you, but you cannot believe it. You have to go through it yourself. It’s a baptism.”
“What do you mean,
“You learn to use the hotel safe, carry what money you need immediately in your shoe. And to not wear jewelry. Not even a watch.”
“Fletcher, I lost thousands of dollars, everything I have with me.”
“You lost your identity.”
“Yes. I did.”
“You lost your past.”
“Yes.” Joan Collins Stanwyk was frowning at the bushes.
“Do you feel more free?”
Now she was frowning at him. “What?”
“Now you are equal, you see.”
“The people who stole my possessions aren’t equal.”
“Oh, sure. That’s widely dispersed. Come here a moment, will you?”
He got up from the table and stood in the opening of the hedge.
After a moment, she got up and came to him.
Together they looked across the city sidewalk where people were beginning to go about their daily business, across the wide city avenue filling up with taxis and commuters, to the beach, beginning to fill up with people of all ages walking, running, jumping, doing pull-ups, swimming.
Drums could be heard from down the road.
“There’s not a pair of long trousers in sight, is there?” he asked.
“Very few shirts,” she said.
“No wallets. No identities. No class paraphernalia: no jewelry.” He looked at her tan slacks suit, silk blouse, high-heeled open-toed sandals. “They have their bodies. Their eyes, their arms, their legs, their backs.”
“Their fingers, damn them.”
“I think we’re being told something.”
“Have you gone Brazilian? In just a month?”
“Naw. I won’t be
She turned to go back to the table. “Sounds to me like you’re giving some fantastic intellectual, political rationale for their out-and-out thievery.” She sat down at the table. “But I guess you have every reason to.”
“To what?”
“To understand.”
“This lady I know …” Fletch too sat down at the table. “She writes novels. I doubt I’ve got it straight, but she told me there is some ancient ritual here, a religious ritual, for which the food, in order to be acceptable by the ritual-masters, must be stolen.”
Joan Collins Stanwyk sighed. “Enough of this. I’ve been robbed. I need help. If I weren’t desperate, I wouldn’t have come to you.”
“I guess so.”
“Will you please come to the police station with me?”
“If that’s what you want.”
“I must report this.”
“It won’t do any good.”
“Fletcher, I’ve been robbed, of thousands of dollars—”
“You have to pay a fee.”
“What?”
“To report a robbery to the police, you have to pay a fee.”
“You have to pay the police money to tell them you were robbed?”
“It’s a lot of paperwork for them.”
She swallowed. “Is that all it is? Paperwork?”
“Yes. I think so. In most cases.” He scraped his chairlegs on the stone pavement. “You are warned, you see. Robbery here is not uncommon. No one can deny that. It is also common in New York, Mexico City, and Paris.”
She was beginning to have to squint into the sunlight to see him. A beam of sunlight was coming through a break in the hedge. “But here, you say, they’re doing you a favour to rob you.”
“You might as well think that.”
“They rob you with philosophy.”
“It’s not considered such a bad thing to relieve you of your possessions, your identity, your past. What is yours is theirs is mine is ours…”
Her white face was stonelike. Her jaw was tight.
He said, “I’m just trying to make you feel better.”
“Fletcher, are you going to let me have some money? Right away?” Her fingers gripped her temples. Her whole head shivered. “At the moment, we won’t go into the source of that money.”
“Of course. I’ll bring some to your hotel. I have to get out of these wet shorts and shower and get them to open the hotel safe.”
“Very well.”
When she stood, she looked very pale and she seemed to sway on her feet. She closed her eyes a moment.
“You all right?”
