Moreno looked out at the road through the open glass doors. “What now?”
“Maybe me and a couple of my friends,” the young man said, “now we’re going to kick your ass.”
Moreno studied the young man’s face, went past the theatrical menace, found light play in the dark brown eyes. “I don’t think so. There’s no buck in it for you, that way.”
The young man laughed shortly, pointed at Moreno. “That’s right!” His expression grew earnest again. “Listen, I tell you what. We’ve had plenty excitement today, plenty enough. How about you and me, we sleep on top of things, think it over, see what we’re going to do. Okay?”
“Sure,” Moreno said.
“I’ll pick you up in the morning, we’ll go for a ride, away from here, where we can talk. Sound good?”
Moreno wrote his address on a bar napkin. The young man took it, and extended his hand.
“Guilherme,” he said. “Gil.”
“Moreno.”
They shook hands, and Gil began to walk away.
“You speak good American,” Moreno said.
Gil stopped at the doors, grinned, and held up two fingers. “New York,” he said. “Astoria. Two years.” And then he was out the door.
Moreno finished his beer, left money on the bar. He walked back to his apartamento in the gathering darkness.
Moreno stood drinking coffee on his balcony the next morning, waiting for Gil to arrive. He realized that this involvement with the young man was going to cost him money, but it would speed things along. And he was not surprised that Guzman had been located with such ease. In his experience those who fled their old lives merely settled for an equally monotonous one in a different place, and rarely moved after that. The beachfront hut in Pago Pago becomes as stifling as the center hall colonial in Bridgeport.
Gil pulled over to the curb in his blue sedan. He got out and greeted the guard at the gate, a man Moreno had come to know as Sergio, who buzzed Gil through. Sergio left the glassed-in guardhouse then and approached Gil on the patio. Sergio broke suddenly into some sort of cartwheel, and Gil stepped away from his spinning feet, moved around Sergio fluidly and got him into a headlock. They were doing some sort of local martial art, which Moreno had seen practiced widely by young men on the beach. Sergio and Gil broke away laughing, Gil giving Sergio the thumbs-up before looking up toward Moreno’s balcony and catching his eye. Moreno shouted that he’d be down in a minute, handing his coffee cup to Sonya. Moreno liked this kid Gil, though he was not sure why.
They drove out of Boa Viagem in Gil’s Chevrolet Monsa, into downtown Recife, where the breeze stopped and the temperature rose an abrupt ten degrees. Then they were along a sewage canal near the docks, and across the canal a kind of shantytown of tar paper, fallen cinderblock, and chicken wire, where Moreno could make out a sampling of the residents: horribly poor families, morning drunks, two-dollar prostitutes, men with murderous eyes, criminals festering inside of children.
“It’s pretty bad here now,” Gil said, “though not so bad like in Rio. In Rio they cut your hand off just to get your watch. Not even think about it.”
“The Miami Herald says your government kills street kids in Rio.”
Gil chuckled. “You Americans are so righteous.”
“Self-righteous,” Moreno said.
“Yes, self-righteous. I lived in New York City, remember? I’ve seen the blacks and the Latins, the things that are kept from them. There are many ways for a government to kill the children it does not want, no?”
“I suppose so.”
Gil studied Moreno at the stoplight as the stench of raw sewage rode in on the heat through their open windows. “Moreno, eh? You’re some sort of Latino, aren’t you?”
“I’m an American.”
“Sure, American. Maybe you want to forget.” Gil jerked his thumb across the canal, toward the shantytown. “Me, I don’t forget. I come from a favela just like that, in the south. Still, I don’t believe in being poor. There is always a way to get out, if one works. You know?”
Moreno knew now why he liked this kid Gil.
They drove over a bridge that spanned the inlet to the ocean, then took a gradual rise to the old city of Olinda, settled and burned by the Dutch in the fifteenth century. Gil parked on cobblestone near a row of shops and vendors, where Moreno bought a piece of local art carved from wood for his mother. Moreno would send the gift along to her in Nogales, a custom that made him feel generous, despite the fact that he rarely phoned her, and it had been three Christmases since he had seen her last. Afterward Moreno visited a bleached church, five hundred years old, and was greeted at the door by an old nun dressed completely in white. Moreno left cruzeiros near the simple altar, then absently did his cross. He was not a religious man, but he was a superstitious one, a remnant of his youth spent in Mexico, though he would deny all that.
Gil and Moreno took a table shaded by palms near a grille set on a patio across from the church. They ordered one tall beer and two plastic cups. A boy approached them selling spices, and Gil dismissed him, shouting something as an afterthought to his back. The boy returned with one cigarette, which he lit on the embers of the grille before handing it to Gil. Gil gave the boy some coins and waved him away.
“So,” Gil said, “what are we going to talk about today?”
“The name of your boss,” Moreno said. “It’s Guzman, isn’t it?”
Gil dragged on his cigarette, exhaled slowly. “His name, it’s not important. But if you want to call him Guzman, it’s okay.”
“What do you do for him?”
“I’m his driver, and his interpreter. This is what I do in Recife. I hang around Boa Viagem and I watch for the wealthy tourists having trouble with the money and the language. The Americans, they have the most trouble of all. Then. I make my pitch. Sometimes it works out for me pretty good.”
“You learned English in New York?”
“Yeah. A friend brought me over, got me a job as a driver for this limo service he worked for. You know, the guys who stand at the airport, holding signs. I learned the language fast, and real good. The business, too. In one year I showed the man how to cut his costs by thirty percent. The man put me in charge. I even had to fire my friend, too. Anyway, the man finally offered me half the company to run it all the way. I turned him down, you know? His offer, it was too low. That’s when I came back to Brazil.”
Moreno watched the palm shadows wave dreamily across Gil’s face. “What about Guzman’s woman?”
“She’s some kinda woman, no?”
“Yes,” Moreno said. “When I was a child I spotted a coral snake and thought it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I started to follow it into the brush when my mother slapped me very hard across the face.”
“So now you are careful around pretty things.” Gil took some smoke from his cigarette. “It’s a good story. But this woman is not a poisonous snake. She is just a woman.” Gil shrugged. “Anyway, I don’t know her. So she cannot help us.”
Moreno said. “Can you get me Guzman’s fingerprints?”
“Sure,” Gil said. “It’s not a problem. But what you are going to get me?”
“Go ahead and call it,” Moreno said.
“I was thinking, fifty-fifty, what you get.”
Moreno frowned. “For two weeks, you know, I’m only going to make a couple thousand dollars. But I’ll tell you what — you get me Guzman’s fingerprints, and I’ll give you one thousand American.”
Gil wrinkled his forehead. “It’s not much, you know?”
“For this country, I think that it’s a lot.”