Carioca Fletch

“Teodomiro da Costa is my good friend. In fact, I understand I will see you both at dinner at his house tonight.”

“Good.”

“Teodomiro da Costa makes a good business changing hard currencies, like dollars, into cruzeiros, into hard commodities, like emeralds, gold. He has become very rich doing so.”

At the word cruzeiros, the pixies around Fletch stepped even closer and raised the pitch of their imploring whispers.

Fletch said, “I thought he drove a taxi.”

“Teodomiro da Costa does not drive a taxi.”

Fletch took more money from his sneaker and gave it to Laura to pay the waiter. When Laura paid, speaking Brazilian Portuguese, the bill was sometimes as much as ninety percent less. He gave some cruzeiros to the smallest begging child.

“Marilia,” Laura said. “In Brazil, a man’s past is burned.”

“You may burn Fletcher’s past,” Marilia said. “That is all right. Laura, I do not want to see you burn your future.”

“There is no future, either,” said Laura. “There is the piano.”

“The Brazilians wish for a future,” Marilia said.

“Past … future,” Fletch muttered.

“I said something wrong,” Laura said.

“You are staying at The Yellow Parrot?” Marilia asked.

The Hotel Yellow Parrot was an Avenida Atlantica and known to be among the most expensive.

“Yellow Parrot,” said Fletch. “You must admit some things in Brazil do not make sense.”

“Fletch is okay,” Laura said. Then she said something rapidly in Portuguese. “My father loves him.”

Down the sidewalk to the right, stepping warily around the samba band sweating in canary yellow shorts, through the dancers, came a North American woman, clearly from the United States, clearly newly arrived, in a light green silk dress moving on her body as she moved, green high-heeled shoes, wearing sunglasses and stupidly carrying her purse like a symbol of rank dangling from her forearm: the California empress.

Laura put her hand on Fletch’s forearm. “You okay, Fletch?”

“My God! I mean, why not?”

“Suddenly you turned white.”

“Let go of me.” Fletch flung off her hand.

He ducked beneath the table and began retying his sneakers.

Instantly there were the seven or eight heads of the pixies under the table with him, to see what he was doing.

Laura’s head joined him under the table, too. “Fletch! What’s the matter?”

“Estou com dor de estomago!”

The pixies groaned in sympathy for him: “Ooooooohh!”

“You are not sick from the stomach!” Laura said.

“Estou com dor de cabeca!”

“Ooooooohh!”

“You are not sick from the head!”

“Febre… nausea… uma insolacao….”

“Ooooooohh!”

Seen relaxed in the shade under the table, Laura’s legs were great to look at. Marilia’s, although pale, were not so bad either. The sight made him feel better.

“Fletcher! What is the matter with you? Why are you so suddenly under the table?”

“That woman. That woman in green passing by. Don’t look now.”

The heads of the pixies looked back and forth from Fletch to Laura intelligently, as if they understood.

“So? What about her?”

“She probably thinks I murdered her husband.”

Two

“Janio!” With a frightening rush of long white dress through heavy green leaves, the old hag emerged from the bushes in front of them in the small forecourt of The Hotel Yellow Parrot. She was pointing her arm, her arthritically bent index finger at Fletch’s face. “Janio Barreto!”

Fletch took a step back. His hand gripped Laura’s arm.

The hag took a step forward, her finger in Fletch’s face. “Janio Barreto!”

He thought they had done quite well. They had left Marilia at the cafe, walked half a block to their right, through the samba band on that corner, ignoring the gestures to stay and dance for a while, turned right, right again on Avenida Copacabana, along that a few blocks, turning right again at the street just beyond The Hotel Yellow Parrot, carefully, looking first, hurried around the corner and the short way along the sidewalk and into the forecourt of the hotel. They were to use the beach entrance to the hotel, as Fletch was not wearing a shirt.

He had forgotten about the hag.

Now she was blocking their way into the hotel entrance.

“Janio Barreto!” she accused, wagging her bent finger in his face. “Janio Barreto!”

Laura stepped forward. She put her hand on the old woman’s sleeve and spoke in a soothing voice. Fletch recognized the Portuguese word for mother in what Laura said.

“Janio Barreto!” the hag insisted, pointing at him.

Laura spoke quietly to the woman some more.

The uniformed doorman appeared through the main door of the hotel and came through the forecourt to Fletch. “Is there a problem, sir?”

“No. I don’t think so. I don’t know.”

The two women were talking quietly.

“Give her some money,” the doorman said. “For charity.”

The hag was speaking rapidly now, to Laura.

The old woman kept glancing at Fletch. She was fairly tall and fairly slim, and clearly she could move fast to have gotten to the hotel before them, to have caught them. The leanness of her hands made her fingers seem all the more misshapen. Her brown eyes were huge, clear and intense; her face more wrinkled than drying, caked earth. Thin, iron-gray hair fell from her head like photographed lightning. Her high, cracked voice came through a few blackened teeth.

Now Fletch was hearing the Portuguese words for wife, husband, father, sons, daughter, boat.

Listening to the old woman, Laura began taking long, surmising looks at Fletch. Her looks seemed unsure— not of what the old woman was saying, but somehow of Fletch. She was looking at him as if she had never seen him before, or seen him in quite this way.

His face politely averted, the doorman was listening too.

“What is she saying?” Fletch asked.

Laura waited until the old woman finished her sentence.

“She says you are Janio Barreto.”

“Who? What?”

“Janio Barreto.”

“Well, I’m not … whatever. Whoever. Let’s go.”

Laura’s chin came forward a few centimeters. “She says you are.”

The hag spoke some more, clearly repeating what she had said before, something about a boat.

Looking into Fletch’s eyes, not smiling, Laura said, “She says you are her husband.”

“Her husband. Ayuh.”