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“Who is she?”

“The woman in the green dress we saw on the avenida.”

“You didn’t want to see her.”

“I do now. Her name is Joan Collins Stanwyk. She’s from California.”

“That was clear, from looking at her. Her eyes looked as if she were watching a movie.”

“She’s disappeared.”

“People disappear in Brazil, Fletch.” Laura didn’t seem to want to hear about that, either. “What time are we to arrive at Carnival Parade?”

“Teo suggested about ten o’clock. I doubt he’ll be there much earlier than that.”

“I’ve never watched Carnival Parade from a box before.”

“I think he suspects this is the only year I’ll be here for it.”

Laura said nothing.

For a moment, Fletch watched her finish her cherry tart.

Then Fletch gazed through the window at the macumba fires on the moonless beach. A cheer was sent up from a samba crowd on the avenida.

He said, “Carnival…”

“The point of it is to remember that things are not always as they appear.”

Twenty-eight

“Welcome to the Samba School Parade!” Teodomiro da Costa said in the tone of a ring-master. He stood just inside the door of his box overlooking the parade route. He wore jeans and a T-shirt. On front of the T-shirt were printed a black bow tie and ruffles. In a more personal tone, he asked, “Have you eaten?”

“At the hotel.”

He looked into Fletch’s eyes and spoke just loudly enough for Fletch to hear him over the fantastic noise. “You have not slept.”

“Not yet.”

“Have a drink.”

Guaraná, please.”

Teo repeated the order to the barman.

“Laura!” Teo hugged her to his chest. “Did Otavio get home all right?”

“Of course. He just pretended to need help.”

“I think that’s what you do with daughters. You pretend to need their help when, actually, you do.”

The box was bigger than Fletch had expected, big enough for twenty people to move around in comfortably, to see, even dance, plus room for the sandwiches and drinks table, the barman.

Adrian Fawcett, the writer for The Times, was there, the Vianas, the da Silvas, the London broker and his wife, the Italian racing car driver and his girl friend. Jetta looked at Fletch with the resentment of someone who had been danced with but not loved. She did not look at Laura at all.

Everyone marveled at everyone else’s costumes, of course. Laura was dressed as an eighteenth-century musician, in breeches and knee socks, ruffled shirt front, gray wig. The Viana woman asked Laura if she had brought her piano to accompany her costume.

As Fletch moved forward in the box, glass of guaraná in hand, he had the sensation that Rio’s volume knob was being turned up. Thousands of drums were being played in the area. Hundreds of thousands of people were singing and chattering and cheering.

Across the parade route, the stands were a sea of faces inclined toward the sky. Above the bright lights aimed on the route, thick, hot, smoky air visibly rolled up the stands and formed a thin gray cloud overhead.

“Rio de Janeiro’s Carnival Parade Class One-A is the biggest, most amazing human spectacle in the world,” Teodomiro da Costa had said, inviting Fletch. “Except war.”

The parade starts at six o’clock Sunday afternoon and continues until past noon Monday. About twelve samba schools, of more than three thousand costumed people each, compete in the parade.

I’m not sure I can stand three more days of Carnival.” Even speaking over the noise, Adrian Fawcett’s voice was a deep rumbling chuckle. “Days of elation or depression have the same effect on people, you know. I’m drained already.”

“It’s a mark of character to be able to survive Carnival intact,” Laura answered. “It’s a matter of having the right attitudes.”

She beamed at Fletch.

Fletch said: “It’s all beyond belief.”

“Next is Escola Guarnieri.” Teo peered over the rail at the bateria in the bull pen. “Yes, that’s Guarnieri.” Then he said to Fletch, “After that comes Escola Santos Lima.”

The parade route, on Avenida Marques de Sapucai, is only a mile long.

To the left along the parade route are the stands, built as high as most buildings, crammed with tens of thousands of people. They arrive in the stands, take and protect their seats, bake in the sun, eat their sandwiches, hold their bladders, chatter and sing beginning at noon, a full six hours before the parade starts. Almost all stay in their seats for the full twenty-four hours.

To the right along the parade route are the boxes, vastly expensive vantage points, some done up in bunting. In the boxes are government dignitaries, Brazilian and foreign celebrities, and people who are simply rich.

The parade route between its two sides is as wide as a three-lane road.

It is as wide as the line between shade and sun, sickness and health, tin and gold.

Also along the right-hand side of the route, ten meters high in the air, are the watchtowers where sit the various parade judges, one for costumes, one for floats, one for music, one for dancing, etc. They sit immobile, expressionless, alone, many behind dark sunglasses so that not even a flicker of an eye may be a subject of comment and controversy. Their names are not released to the public until the day of the parade. And so complicated and controversial is their task that the results of their judging are not announced until four days later, on Thursday.

Diagonally across the parade route from da Costa’s box, to the left, is the bull pen filled with hundreds of costumed ritmistas, the bateria of drummers of Escola Guarnieri. Their drums are of all sizes and tones. It takes the drummers up to an hour to put themselves into their proper places in regard to each other, to get their rhythms up, their sound up. Now their rhythm and their sound are full, and fill everyone at the parade, fill their ears, their brains, their entire nervous systems, control the beatings of their hearts, make their eyes flush with blood, their hands and feet move involuntarily, their bones to vibrate. This is total sound, amplified only by human will, as primitive a sound as Man ever made, the sound of drums, calling from every human, direct, immediate response, equalizing them in their numbness before the sound.

Everyone in da Costa’s box is standing at the rail. Laura has taken off her wig and opened the collar of her eighteenth-century-styled shirt. The faces of everyone at the rail shine with sweat. Their eyes, their lips protrude slightly, as if the sound of the drums reverberating within them were seeking a way to burst out of them. The veins at their temples throb visibly to the beat of the drums. Being host, Teo stands back behind the people at the rail. Being tall, he can still see everything.

Down the parade route from the left, passing the bateria in the bull pen like the top of a T comes the Abre-Alas, the opening wing of Guarnieri’s presentation. This group of sambistas, moving of course to the sound of the drums, wear bright, ornate, slightly exaggerated costumes presenting a hint of the time and place of the samba school’s theme, in this case nineteenth-century Amazon plantation ball gowns, their hoop skirts a little too wide, the bodices a little too grand, the bouffants a little too high; for the men, spats a little too long, frock coats a little too wide in the shoulders, top hats a little too high. This is the slave’s view of plantation life. The exaggeration is a making fun. The exaggeration also expresses victory over such a life.