A healthy-seeming curly-haired man of about thirty was leaning against Fletch’s MP. It appeared he was waiting for them.
He spoke rapidly, happily to Fletch.
Then, seeing he wasn’t being understood, he spoke to Marilia.
She answered him, happily enough. While talking with him, she opened the small purse tied to her wrist, took out some money, and gave it to him.
The man stuffed the money into his shoe.
Then he leaned against the next car, a Volkswagen bug.
In the car, Fletch asked, “What did he want?”
“Ohhhh. He said he had been taking care of the car for us while we were away. It is for him to take care of the cars along this section of curb, he said.”
“Is it?”
“He says so.”
“Who gave him charge of this section of curb?”
“No one. It is just something he says.”
Fletch started the car. “If it is just something he says, then why did you give him money? Why didn’t you just tell him to get lost?”
Flustered, Marilia was looking into her handbag, perhaps rearranging the interior. “I suppose I owe it to him because I just had such a nice lunch.”
Twenty-five
“Fletch?”
“Yes?”
“Toninho Braga, Fletch. Look what time it is.”
“Shortly after noon.”
“That’s right. And so far no one has reported finding Norival’s body.”
Over the phone, Toninho’s voice sounded more hushed than alarmed.
Fletch had driven Marilia Diniz to her home in Leblon, thanked her for accompanying him to the favela, repeated he still had no way of solving a forty-seven-year-old murder mystery, but he would return to the hotel to try to sleep.
His room at The Hotel Yellow Parrot had been cleaned. The unslept-in bed had been freshly made up.
He telephoned The Hotel Jangada and asked for Joan Collins Stanwyk in Room 912.
No answer.
Across the utility area, the man was still painting the room.
He was about to strip, to shower, to darken the room, to get into bed again, to try to sleep, when the phone rang.
“Toninho,” he said. “It’s Sunday. A big day of Carnival. Communication is slow.”
“That’s exactly it, Fletch. There would have been hundreds, thousands of people on that beach, shortly after dawn.”
“Finding a body—”
“Norival is not just a body. He is a Passarinho. That would be news.”
“First the police have to be summoned—”
“Yes, the police would be summoned. But we left plenty of identification on Norival’s body. The people who found the body would be quick to tell the Passarinho family, the radio stations. The police would be even quicker. They would compete for the attention of the Passarinho family.”
“I don’t see what you’re saying. You put Norival’s body in the water. He was dead. He has to come ashore somewhere, sometime, if you were right about the tides.”
“I was right about the tides. Where’s Norival?”
“How would I know?”
Fletch looked down at the soft, smooth countenance of the bed.
“Fletch, we must go make sure someone finds the body of Norival.”
“Toninho, I’m not sure I can take many more disappearances today, of persons dead and alive.”
“You must come help us look, Fletch. That will make four of us. We can comb the beach.”
“You want to go beachcombing for a corpse?”
“What else can we do? We put Norival’s body there to be found, not to be lost. What if he were lost forever? There would be no Funeral Mass. He would not be properly buried. His family might think he ran away?.”
“His boat would be missing.”
“Sailed away. To Argentina! Think of his poor mother!”
“His poor mother.”
“Such a thing would kill her. Not to know what happened to her son.”
“Toninho … I still have not slept.”
“That’s all right.”
“‘All right’?”
“You must help us. Four searching is better than three searching. It is a long beach.”
“Toninho…”
“We’ll pick you up in ten minutes.”
The phone line died.
Twenty-six
“Perhaps we should check with Eva,” Tito said. “Norival might have gone back to her.”
“Norival was happy with Eva,” Orlando said.
Of the four young men walking along the beach, only Fletch wore sandals. He knew himself not sufficiently carioca to walk along a beach in the midday sun in bare feet.
Toninho, Tito, and Orlando had picked Fletch up in the black four-door Galaxie.
On the sidewalk in front of the hotel, the youngest Janio Barreto on a wooden leg silently watched Fletch get into the car and be driven away.
The drive to the beach where Orlando was scheduled to appear had been as fast as possible through the Carnival crowds.
At one place on Avenida Atlantica perhaps as many as a thousand people in tattery costumes jumped up and down around a big samba band moving forward only a few meters an hour on the back of a flatbed truck. Never had he seen so much human energy spent in so little forward motion.
On the way to the beach they listened silently to the loud car radio.
The discovery of Norival Passarinho’s body was not yet news.
The beach was filled with bright umbrellas, mats. Families and other groups picnicked and played.
Orlando said to Fletch: “It is said if a person dies copulating, he is guaranteed to return to life soon.”
“For Norival, the process might have been very quick,” said Tito.
Spread apart only somewhat, they walked along the water’s edge, looking for Norival perhaps washed up dead but thought asleep, some crowd of gossips with news of something unusual having happened, the corpse of the Passarinho boy being found, police barriers, markers, something, anything.
“Do people say the same thing in the United States of North America?” Orlando asked.
“I don’t think so,” Fletch said. “I never heard it.”
“People in the United States of North America don’t die while copulating,” Toninho said. “They die while talking about it.”
“They die while talking to their psychiatrists about it,” Orlando laughed.
“Yes, yes,” said Toninho. “They die worrying about copulating.”
“People of the United States of North America,” Tito scoffed. “This is how they walk.”
Tito began to move hurriedly over the sand, his head and shoulders forward of his body, legs straight, not pivoting his hips at all, his hands dangling loosely beside him like a couple of cow udders, his eyes staring straight ahead, an expectant grin on his face, each foot landing flat on the sand. The impression was of a body being pushed at the shoulders, falling forward, each foot coming out and landing at the last second to keep the body from falling flat on its face.
Fletch stopped walking and laughed.
For a while, then, he walked slightly behind his friends.
“Yes,” Tito said. “Norival may have revived.”
Fletch asked, “Is it true everyone goes slightly crazy during Carnival?”
Toninho said, “Slightly.”
“If the way to life eternal,” Fletch asked, “is to die copulating, then why don’t people just copulate constantly?”
Orlando sniffed. “I do my best.”
A man carrying two metal cylinders containing iced maté passed them. Each container easily weighed one hundred pounds. He would sell the maté in little cups to people on the beach. The man was in his sixties and he was walking rapidly enough to pass the four young men. His legs looked like the roots of trees hardened by time.