“And,” Gil continued quickly, “you got to consider. You, or the people you work for, maybe they’re going to come down and take my boss and his money away. And then Gil, he’s going to be out of a job.”
Moreno sat back and had a swig of beer and let Gil chew things over. After a while Gil leaned forward.
“Okay,” Gil said. “So let me ask you something. Have you reported back to your people that you think you have spotted this man Guzman?”
“No,” Moreno said. “It’s not the way I work. Why?”
“I was thinking. Maybe my boss, it’s worth a lot of money to him that you don’t go home and tell anyone you saw him down here. So I’m going to talk to him, you know? And then I’m going to call you tomorrow morning. Okay?”
Moreno nodded slowly. “Okay.”
Gil touched his plastic cup to Moreno’s and drank. “I guess now,” Gil said, “I work for you too.”
“I guess you do.”
“So anything I can get you. Boss?”
Moreno thought about it, and smiled. “Yes,” he said. “There is one thing.”
They drove back down from Olinda into Recife where the heat and Gil’s cologne briefly nauseated Moreno, then on into Boa Viagem where things were cooler and brighter and the people looked healthy and there were not so many poor. Gil parked the Monsa a few miles north of the center, near a playground set directly on the beach.
“There is one,” Gil said, pointing to a woman, young and lovely in denim shorts, pushing a child on a swing. “And there is another.” This time he pointed to the beach, where a plainer woman, brown and finely figured in her thong bathing suit, shook her blanket out on the sand.
Moreno wiped some sweat from his brow and nodded his chin toward the woman in the bathing suit. “That’s the one I want,” he said, as the woman bent over to smooth out her towel. “And that’s the way I want her.”
Gil made the arrangements with the woman, then dropped Moreno at his apartamento on the Rue Setubal. After that he met some friends on the beach for a game of soccer, and when the game was done he bathed in the ocean. He let the sun dry him, then drove to Guzman’s place, an exclusive condominium called Des Viennes on the Avenida Boa Viagem. Gil knew the guard on duty, who buzzed him through.
Ten minutes later he sat in Guzman’s living room overlooking the Atlantic where today a group of sailboats tacked back and forth while a helicopter from a television station circled overhead. Guzman and Gil sat facing each other in heavily cushioned armchairs, while Guzman’s woman sat in an identical armchair but facing out toward the ocean. Guzman’s maid served them three aguardentes with fresh lime and sugar over crushed ice. Guzman and Gil touched glasses and drank.
“It s too much sugar and not enough lime,” Guzman said to no one in particular.
“No.” Gil said. “I think it’s okay.”
Guzman set down his drink on a marble table whose centerpiece was a marble obelisk. “How did it go this morning with the American?”
But Gil was now talking in Portuguese to Guzman’s woman, who answered him contemptuously without turning her head. Gil laughed sharply and sipped from his drink.
“She’s beautiful,” Guzman said. “But I don’t think you can afford her.”
“She is not my woman,” Gil said cheerfully. “And anyway, the beach is very wide.” Gil’s smile turned down and he said to Guzman. “Dismiss her. Okay, Boss?”
Guzman put the words together in butchered Portuguese, and the woman got out of her seat and walked glacially from the room.
Guzman stood from his own seat and went to the end of the living room where the balcony began. He had the look of a man who is falling to sleep with the certain knowledge that his dreams will not be good.
“Tell me about the American.” Guzman said.
“His name is Moreno,” Gil said. “I think we need to talk.”
Moreno went down to the condominium patio after dark and waited for the woman on the beach to arrive. A shirtless boy with kinky brown hair walked by pushing a wooden cart, stopped, and put his hand through the iron bars. Moreno ignored him, practicing his Portuguese instead with Sergio, who was on duty that night behind the glass guardhouse. The shirtless boy left without complaint and climbed into the canvas Dumpster that sat by the curb, where he found a few scraps of wet garbage that he could chew and swallow and perhaps keep down. The woman from the beach ar-lived in a taxi, and Moreno paid the driver and received a wink from Sergio before he led the woman up to his apartamento.
Moreno’s maid, Sonya, served a meal of whole roasted chicken, black beans and rice, and salad, with a side of shrimp sautéed in coconut milk and spice. Moreno sent Sonya home with extra cruzeiros, and uncorked the wine, a Brazilian cabernet, himself. He poured the wine and before he drank asked the woman her name. She touched a finger to a button on her blouse and said, “Claudia.” Moreno knew the dinner was unnecessary but it pleased him to sit across the table from a woman and share a meal. Her rather flat, wide features did nothing to excite him, but the memory of her fullness on the beach kept his interest, and she laughed easily and seemed to enjoy the food, especially the chicken, which she cleaned to the bone.
After dinner Moreno reached across the table and undid the top two buttons of the woman’s blouse, and as she took the cue and began to undress he pointed her to the open glass doors that led to the balcony. He extinguished the lights and stepped out of his trousers as she walked naked across the room to the edge of the doors and stood with her palms pressed against the glass. He came behind her and moistened her with his fingers, then entered her, and kissed her cheek near the edge of her mouth, faintly Listing the grease that lingered from the chicken. The breeze came off the ocean and whipped her hair across his face. He closed his eyes.
Moreno fell to sleep that night alone, hearing from someplace very far away a woman’s voice, singing mournfully in Spanish.
Moreno met Gil the following morning at the screened-in food shack on the beach road. They sat at a cable-spool table, splitting a beer near a group of teenagers listening to accordion-drive ferro music from a transistor radio. The teenagers were drinking beer. Gil had come straight from the beach, his long curly hair still damp and touching his thin bare shoulders.
“So,” Gil said, tapping his index finger once on the wood of the table. “I think I got it all arranged.”
“You talked to Guzman?”
“Yes. I don’t know if he’s going to make a deal. But he has agreed to meet with you and talk.”
Moreno looked through the screen at the clouds and around the clouds the brilliant blue of the sky. “When and where?”
“Tonight,” Gil said. “Around nine o’clock. There’s a place off your street, Setubal, where it meets the commercial district. There are many fruit stands there—”
“I know the place.”
“Good. Behind the largest stand is an alley. The alley will take you to a bar that is not marked.”
“An alley.”
“Don’t worry,” Gil said, waving his hand. “Some friends of mine will be waiting for you to show you to the bar. I’ll bring Guzman, and we will meet you there.”
“Why that place?”
“I know the man, very well, who runs the bar. He will make sure that Guzman leaves his fingerprints for you. Just in case he doesn’t want to play football.”
“Play ball,” Moreno said.
“Yes. So either way we don’t lose.”
Moreno drank off the rest of his beer, placed the plastic cup on the cable-spool table. “Okay,” he said to Gil. “Your plan sounds pretty good.”
In the evening Moreno did four sets of fifty pushups, showered, and dressed in a black polo shirt tucked into jeans. He left his apartamento and took the lift down to the patio, where he waved to a guard he did not recognize before exiting the grounds of his condominium and hitting the street.