Fletch laughed.
The man waved his paintbrush again.
Across the utility area the two men laughed together.
Fletch gave the man the thumbs-up sign, then went back into his room.
He telephoned The Hotel Jangada.
Room 912 did not answer.
Mrs Joan Collins Stanwyk had not checked out.
Yes, there was a message awaiting her in her mail slot.
Drinking mineral water from a plastic liter bottle, Fletch read Laura’s note a third time.
Then he called Teodomiro da Costa and arranged to meet with him that night. He would be late, Fletch said, as he intended to drive to the village of Botelho and back.
Teo recommended the seafood restaurant there.
Reluctantly, Fletch knelt. His cuts and bruises protesting, he leaned over until his head was only a few centimeters from the floor.
He peered under the bed.
The small, carved stone frog was gone.
Thirty-six
“What are you doing here?”
Joan Collins Stanwyk, dressed in shorts which were too big and a T-shirt which had some slogan on it in Portuguese, stood across the rough restaurant table from Fletch.
“Eating.”
“But how do you come to be here?”
“I was hungry.” He continued eating.
“Really,” she said. “How did you find me?”
Her eyes were round in amazement.
“Brazilian police apparently are not always as casual as they like to appear.”
The restaurant was a patio with a roof over it on the beach.
“Can you join me?” Fletch asked. “Or aren’t the help allowed to sit with the customers.”
“I can buy you a cup of coffee,” she said.
In sandals, she went across the restaurant to the serving tables.
He had enjoyed the drive through Rio’s suburbs, through the Brazilian countryside down the coast. He enjoyed sucking in good air and seeing the real things of the countryside, real rocks and trees, real cows and goats. Good roads had been laid out against the day Brazil’s past would catch up with her future. As he drove farther, most of the traffic he passed was on foot.
It had not taken him long to tour the village of Botelho. A short dock poked into a long ocean. The fish warehouse was no more than a shed. In the tiny church was a powerful, crude crucifixion. Less than a dozen fisherfolk bungalows facing the sea dozed in the shade of their own groves.
At the entrance to the open-air seafood restaurant he spotted Joan. Standing with her back to him in the kitchen area, Joan Collins Stanwyk, Mrs Alan Stanwyk, was placing plates and glasses in a vat of steaming water. He watched her dry her hands and begin shelving clean plates.
It was early for dinner. The only other customers in the restaurant were five fishermen at one table chatting over chopinhos. A young waiter gave Fletch a menu and understood as Fletch pointed to a soup and a fish entrée.
Brown paper sack on the bench beside him, Fletch gazed out over the beach to the ocean. Sooner or later, Joan Collins Stanwyk would turn, look through the serving apparatus, see him. He left her the option of ignoring his presence. He would go away again without speaking, if that was what she wanted.
The fish chowder was the best he’d ever had.
He was halfway through his fish entrée when Joan crossed the restaurant and spoke to him.
Now she sat across from him at the long, rough table. She had placed a cup of coffee before each of them.
“I’m glad you’re all right,” he said, still eating.
“Have an accident?”
“No, thanks. Just had one.”
They both laughed nervously.
“You look like someone really beat on you.” Especially did her eyes fasten on the small scar on his throat.
“I ran into an enraged nanny goat.” Her face put on patience. “That is the story I have decided to tell, to say is the past.”
Joan’s face looked better than when he saw her Saturday morning. There was good color in her skin and her eyes were clear. So far, she had not lit a cigarette, which was unusual for her. She was wearing no makeup at all. It was also obvious her hair had received little attention in the previous four days.
“It really was good of you to seek me out,” Joan said. “Have I been much trouble?”
“I was worried about you. I’ve been stood up for dinner before, often, but seldom for breakfast.”
“Not very nice of me.”
“It’s okay. I had breakfast anyway.”
“Well.” She looked into her coffee cup.
“The food here is very good.”
“Isn’t it? I love it.”
“Very good indeed. You wash dishes in this establishment?”
“Yes.”
“Didn’t think you knew how.”
“It’s not one of the more artful skills.” She showed him her hands. “Aren’t they beautiful?” They were red and wrinkled.
“They look honest.”
She fluttered her hands and put them in her lap. “I feel like a schoolgirl who’s been caught playing hookey.”
“It’s just nice to know you’re alive.”
“Any questions I might have had about you and Alan’s death …” She looked into Fletch’s face, then at the scar on his neck, then into her own lap. “… I don’t have now. The money—”
“I’m willing to do my best to try to explain.”
In truth, Fletch wondered if Joan, in her extreme competence, was making some sort of a bargain with him.
“Not necessary,” she said. “I know as much as I want to know. I pursued you to Brazil out of some sense of duty.” Numbly, she repeated, “Some sense of duty.”
He pushed his empty plate away. He realized Joan Collins Stanwyk was expected to wash it.
He sat silently, gazing out to sea. He waited until she understood that he was not questioning her.
She was sitting on her bench, her back straight, leaning on nothing. “I walked away from you that morning, Saturday morning, away from your hotel, to walk to my own hotel. You had said some things I had never heard before. I became angry in a way I had never been angry before.
“Suddenly I realized that here I was, a grown woman, stumbling along in the morning sunlight in tears because someone had stolen my little pins. My pinky rings! Little plastic cards with my name on them!”
Fletch said, “Also irreplaceable photographs of your husband, Alan, and your daughter, Julie.”
“Yes. That profoundly bothers me. But I realized what a spoiled brat I was. I am. Skinny little beggar children were dancing all around me as I walked along, their hands out, whispering at me. I waved my arm at them, and through tight jaws shouted, Oh, go away! Couldn’t they understand that I had lost a few of my diamonds, my credit cards, to me a negligible amount of cash? How dare they bother me at seven o’clock in the morning for money for food?
“I became truly angry at myself. What a superficial, supercilious bitch. What a hollow person. I had spent the night whining at the poor assistant manager at the hotel. I rushed to you at first light, to whine to you. And here I was virtually swinging at hungry kids.”
She said, “Joanie Collins had lost a few pins.”
Fletch sipped his coffee.
“Then I had a second thought, based on what you had said.” Her index finger was feeling along a short crack in the table. “In a most peculiar way, I was free. I had been relieved of my identity. My credit cards had been stolen, my passport. It almost meant nothing that I was Joan Collins Stanwyk. At least, I couldn’t prove it immediately to anybody. I couldn’t go up to anybody, in a store or something, and say, ‘I’m Joan Collins Stanwyk,’ and make it mean anything. As you said, I was just arms and legs: one more person walking naked in the world.