The paper fell from Marcelina’s fingers. With a keening, animal cry she lay back among the tabloids and broadsheets scattered across Heitor’s floor, haloed in shouting headlines. HELP UU FIND BARBOSA FIRST! Rs 50,000 REWARD! SAVE BARBOSA. FIFTY YEARS IS ENOUGH.
Footsteps. Marcelina opened her eyes. Heitor stood over her like a Colossus, like the anticipation of water-sport sex, bizarrely foreshortened.
“I’m dead.”
Heitor kicked the papers across the room. “How long have you been here?”
“Forever. I couldn’t sleep, and when I could I dreamed I was awake. Do you have to get all the papers delivered?”
“It’s my job.”
Heitor had dropped back from the studio after the eleven thirty news update expecting Furaçao Marcelina to have blown through his apartment, strewing books, upturning tables, shattering glasses and fine china, shredding suits slashing paintings smashing the religious statues and images he had so adoringly collected over two decades of spiritual seeking. He had found something much more frightening: Marcelina seated in the middle of the floor, naked but for tanga, one knee pulled up to her breasts, the other folded around its ankle. She clutched her shin with both arms. Television cast the only light. When she looked up, Heitor saw a face so ghost-eaten, so alien that he had almost cried out, home invaded.
“Look.”
Marcelina had uncurled a fist holding the DVD remote, beeped it at the screen.
“What is it?”
“Don’t you see?” Marcelina had howled, and in her voice the hurricane broke. “It’s me.”
Heitor prised the remote out of her fingers, vanished the apparition paused in the act of looking up into the camera.
“In the morning.”
“No, not in the morning.”
“Get that down you.”
He had filled a glass from the refrigerator.
“What is it?”
“Just water.” Plus a capsule from his kitchen pharmacopoeia. “You need to rehydrate.”
“She wants rid of me,” Marcelina had said, sipping the water. “Who?”
“The me.”
The pill kicked in before she had finished the glass. Heitor lifted her into his bed. She was as small and light as a street dog. Heitor felt ashamed of all the times he had pinned her under his broad body; her thin, angular bones bending, her wiry thighs wrapped around his wide hairy back.
Ninety percent of Heitor’s cabinet of cures was out of date. Marcelina had come up out of the sleeping pill like a sea-launched missile. He snored; she padded into the living room to look again at the thing she could not commprehend. Again and again she watched the figure in the sweet black suit enter through the revolving door, go up to Lampião, and finally turn to look up into the camera for some clue, some truth. She had slowed the DVD down to a click through the individual frames. That was how she had found the tiny hint of a smile on her face, as if she-her-had intended that Marcelina see her grand imposture. Again and again and again, until the engine drone and brake-creak of the delivery boy’s LiteAce, the sound of feet on steps, and the thud of bundled papers against the back door.
Across the room Marcelina’s cellular sang “Don’cha Wish Your Girlfriend Was Hot Like Me,” Brasiliero remix.
“Aren’t you going to get that?” A bone-deep media-ista, Heitor could be driven to high anxiety by an unanswered telephone.
“It’ll be the Black Plumed Bird.”
“I’ll get it for you.”
“No!” Then, gently, “I don’t want her to know you’re here. The papers … ”
“I can see the papers. You have to talk to her sometime.”
The SMS alert jabbered, a recording of a very high travesti raving at the Copa carnaval party about his upcoming surgery.
“Give me a sweatshirt or something, then.”
On the balcony Marcelina strode up and down in panties and a holey old hoodie. Across the lagoon the apartment blocks were a holy city of silver and gold; the last rags of early mist burned off the green hills, and fit girls were running on the lakeside loop. Heitor tried to read Marcelina’s hands.
“So?”
Marcelina dropped onto the leather sofa.
“Bad enough. She told me to take some unofficial leave; basically, I’m suspended on full pay.”
“They could have fired you on the spot.”
“She talked Adriano down from that. She’s giving me the benefit of the doubt that I didn’t send the e-mail, that it was some kind of industrial espionage or someone hacked my computer. I think I may have got it wrong about the Black Plumed Bird.”
“And the show?”
“Adriano thinks it may have done us some good. APRIGPR.”
“We don’t get his text speak down in News and Current Affairs.”
“All PR Is Good PR. He’ll wait until he sees if there’s a ratings backlash against Rede Gobo. I may get it yet.”
“There’s another call you need to make.” Heitor’s espresso machine filled the kitchen zone with shriekings and roarings.
“I know. Oh, I know.” Her mother would be drunk, would have been drinking slowly, steadily all night, one slow little vodka at a time, watching the mesh of headlights along the rainy avenues of Leblon. Frank Sinatra had turned away. It had always been nothing more than reflections from a glitterball. Your self shattered into a thousand spangles and mirrored back to you. “And I will make it. But I can’t stay here, Heitor.”
“Oswaldo has hinted that it might not be the best thing for my professsional objectivity. Stay as long as you need. I’m not Jesus.”
“It’s not about you. Can you understand that? It’s not about you. It’s just that, while she’s still out there, I need you to be able to trust me, and that can only happen if you know that if I call or e-mail or drop round, it won’t be me. It’ll be her and whatever she says will be a lie.”
“I’d know her. I interviewed a policeman once who worked with forged banknotes. I asked him how he learned to spot the fakes and he said, by looking at the originals. I’d know you anywhere.”
“Did Raimundo Soares know? Did any of the people she sambaed past at Canal Quatro know? Did my sisters and my own mother know? No, it’s safer this way.”
“And how will I know when it’s over?”
“I haven’t worked that out yet!” Marcelina snapped. “Why are you making this harder for me? I don’t know how any of this is going to work, but I do know that I am a very, very good researcher and it’s time for me to stop being the hunted and turn it all around and become the hunter. What am I hunting? Myself. That’s all I can say about it. Something that looks like me, sounds like me, thinks like me, knows what I’m going to do before I do it, and is absolutely dedicated to destroying me. Why, I don’t know. I’ll find that out. But I do know that if it looks like me and thinks like me and talks like me, then it is me. How, I don’t know either. You tell me — you’ve shelffuls of books out there on everything under the sun. You’ve got a theory for everything: give me one, anyone that makes any sense.”