Brasyl (20 page)

''I'm sorry, Ms. Hoffman, that you've had a wasted journey."

"Feijão said he had been involved with this church some
years ago."

"Feijão says too much. As you've probably guessed, Feijão
and I do not see eye-to-eye on many things."

Marcelina's investigative senses raced: some scandal between the
former Fluminense physio and the leader of a successful,
middle-class, and assuredly wealthy Daime church? The feeling of
ideas spinning around her like a storm of leaves was an old demon,
Saci Pererê with his one leg and red hat and pipe, the imp of
perverse and inverse of Nossa Senhora da Valiosa Producão:
every time an idea was bounced her mind would race in compensation,
leaping, snatching whatever idea came within her grasp to prove to
herself that she was still creative, that she still had it.

"Do you know where he might have gone?" The bença
was gray stone.

"At least could you tell me if he's alive or dead?"

"Ms. Hoffman, we're finishing up here."

Teams of ekedis tackled the futsal court with mops and buckets.

Marcelina fantasized coercing the information from Bença
Bento.
You lie, old man, tell me where he is
. She could
probably take the Bucket Brigade, but girls with pants tucked into
boots and light automatic weapons were a league apart. Heitor's first
rule of television: never get killed for a TV show.

She wasn't beaten.

She could hear the high song in her inner ear of near tears, that she
had not heard since the first time she went into the roda full of
jizz and jeito and was humiliated in front of the fundação
by a sixteen-year-old.

She would find a way around. She would find Barbosa.

Her malicia and the taxi driver's professional jeito jerked at the
same moment on Avenida Sernambetiba: her glance over her shoulder;
his lingering look in the mirror. There is a sick vertigo when the
pattern of traffic resolves into the certainty that you are being
followed. Innocence becomes stupidity; every action is potential
treachery. You feel those headlights like thumbs at the base of your
skull. In the backseat of your cab you have anywhere to go and
nowhere to arrive because they will be behind you. You don't look—you
daren't look, but you begin to impute character and motivation. Who
are you, what do you want, where do you expect me to lead you? You
enter an almost telepathic communication, a hunter's empathy: Do you
know that I know! If you did, would that be enough to make you peel
out and go away?

Marcelina had been followed once before, tailgated in a crew car on
the
Love Trials: Test Your Fiance
shoot by a jealous
bride-to-be of one of the conntestants. Production security had
pulled her in, but Marcelina had shivered for hours afterward, her
city suddenly full of eyes. There had been nothing remotely Miami
Vice about it.

"Can you see who's driving?" Marcelina asked.

"It's a cab," the driver said. She could see his eyes
scanning in the rearview mirror. She knew every driver in the Canal
Quatro taxi firm by his or her eyes.

"Give me the number. I'll call them and tell them one of their
drivers is harassing me."

"He'd get fired."

"And I care?"

"I can't see the number anyway," the driver muttered.
"There's someone in the back."

"Man or woman?"

"I am trying to drive this thing as well, you know."

Marcelina was convulsed by a sudden shiver. The boys down in SFX had
once turned a wing of the Canal Quatro building into a haunted house
for a Halloween party. Her flesh had crawled; she had been seized by
inexplicable, disabling anxiety. She had feared what was in the
locked storeroom at the end of the corridor. It had all been a clever
trick of infrasound, air currents, and subtly distorting
perspectives. But this was the pure shudder of irrational dread. In
that car was the thing that haunted her, all her sins drawn out of
the hills and beaches, the bays and curving avenues of her city and
made flesh. In that taxi was the anti-Marcelina, and when they met,
they would annihilate each other.

Stop it. You're still flashing back to the herbal tea. Or maybe
they put something into the air at the terreiro.

"How far back is he?" she asked the driver.

"About five cars."

"Head up into Rocinha."

The driver drifted across lanes onto the Auto-Estrada Lagoa-Barra.

Marcelina risked a glance behind her. The hunting taxi slid out of
the traffic onto their tail, still keeping a chaperoned distance of
five cars.
You are in your TV show now. This is Getaway: ultimate
reality television. But I will get you
, Marcelina thought.
Rocinha butted with the jarring abruptness of an artificial limb
against the million-real apartment towers of São Conrado. The
great favela unfolded like a fan of jeweled lights across the rocky
saddle between the great city forest of Tijuca and the sheer rock
peaks of Pedra Dois Irmãos. The cheek-to-cheek impromptu
apartment blocks, some several stories tall, were built to within
meters of the mouth of the Gavea Tunnel. The military police had a
permanent checkpoint at the flyover by the Largo da Macumba flyover:
two armored riot-control vehicles, a half dozen young people in the
light chestnut of the military police standing around eating fast
food from the bar across the road. Same expressions of boredom and
anger she had seen in the parking lot security at the Barguinha; same
pants tucked into boots. Much bigger guns.

"Pull in there."

They looked up as one as the cab drew in to the side of the road
ahead of the lead APC. Edgy times. They had only just succeeded in
pushing the favelados back into their slums. Construction machinery
lined the edge of the street, shuttered for the night with galvanized
plates over the glass and guarded by private security. Another favela
wall. A tall twenty-something male cradled his assault rifle and
sauntered toward the cab. Marcelina switched on her camera phone. A
photograph would prove it. Here it came. Here it came.

The taxi passed at speed, accelerating into the Gávea tunnel
that led under Rocinha to the Zona Sul. In the back, in the back,
there ... The camera phone flashed. In the electric flicker she saw a
figure with its head wrapped in a loose turban of white cloth. The
man from the terreiro. Marcelina felt a sob of relief burst inside
her. You are not mad. The universe is rational.
You've been
working too hard, to much pressure too much anxiety, that's all.

A rap at the window. The militar gestured for her to wind it down.
"Is there a problem here?" He stooped and peered into the
taxi. "No, Officer, no, no problem at all."

"Can I see some ID please?"

It was not quite a smell, but it inhabited the air; not quite a
sensation but it pricked like electricity; not quite a change but a
disturbance in the domestic order—nothing sensible yet she knew
it the moment she opened the door to her apartment. When she was an
underpaid and loving-it production runner straight off her Media
master's, Marcelina had shared a tatty little apartment by the
cemetery with a Fortaleza travesti come to seek his fortune in Rio.
He worked night shifts in a Lapa bar and drank Marcelina's beer, ate
her food, used her washing powder, watched her cable TV, broke her
Japanese tea-set bowl by bowl, and never paid a centavo toward the
rent but imagined that his innate colorfulness was ample recompense,
blithely disregarding the evidence of his own eyes, that travestis
were cheap as beans in Lapa. Marcelina would be returning when he was
leaving and thus never caught him in his violations, but she always
knew when he had been through her panty drawer. However carefully he
covered his crime there was always a sense, a ripple in the aether, a
linger of an alien but maddeningly familiar perfume.

She smelled it now in the small tiled lobby of her apartment.

Somebody had been in her home.

It was one of the mysteries of her alt dot family that, though their
lives were strewn all over Centro and Zona Sul, they always arrived
together and left together. Marcelina received them in her garden.
She customarily entertained up on the roof. Adriano himself had been
up here for her Stones Party, revolving with the rest of her guests
through the corner of the garden with the ocean view to peer through
the slot between the buildings at the tiny spider figure prancing and
kicking beneath orbit-visible lighting. There, that's Rick. I mean
Mick. The roof was her refuge and temple; the roof was air and the
lilac and pink evening light; the roof connected her to the ocean by
that parallelogram of beach, sea, and sky; the roof was the reason
she had bought this ugly, clattery, strange-smelling apartment with
its back to the morro as if it had been mugged by the street; and she
had been sleeping on the roof for the past three nights.

The apartment was infected.

She had gone straightaway to Gloria the concierge. She had seen
nothing. Mangueira samba school could have marched through the lobby
of Fonseca apartments in spangles, feathers, and skin with full
bateria and she would have chittered away on her cellular.

Celso, Cibelle, Agnetta, Vitor up from his street-watching cafe,
Moises and Tito whom she had met on the
Gay Jungle
(elevator
pitch: can eleven gay men marooned in a stilt-house in the middle of
the Amazon turn the one straight guy gay!) series and recruited to
her alt dot family. Mediaistas and gay men. See who you run to in a
crisis. All her guests were welcomed with a spliff. When the real
estate agent had opened the rusting roof door, Marcelina had followed
him up into a sunlit field of waving maconha. "Is this included
in the price?" she'd asked. There was at least ten thousand
street-reis of shade-grown Moroccan beneath the water tanks and
satellite dishes. Dona Bebel had showed her how to dry it in the
airing cupboard. It would take her five years to smoke her way
through it.

"I've brought you all here tonight . . . " Laughs, cheers.

"You know what I mean. You're my urban family, my gay dads. I
tell you things I wouldn't tell my own flesh and blood."

Oohings, cooings.

"No seriously seriously, if I can't trust you, who can I trust?
And I'd like to think you could trust me as well-not just work stuff.
Other stuff." It was coming out wrong; it was coming out as
stupid and insincere as the night she tried to tell the guys who'd
lifted the Getaway car they were on TV. But she had never asked so
great a thing from them, never stripped herself so bare and pale.

"I need your help, guys. Some of you have noticed that I've been
acting a bit . . . distracted lately. Like I can't seem to remember
things I've done, and then I get really paranoid."

No one dared answer.

"I need you to tell me if there's other stuff that maybe I
haven't remembered; things I might have done or said."

Alt dot family looked at each other. Feet twisted, lips pursed.

"You walked right past me the other day," Vitor said. His
voice tightened, grew sharp and confident. "You didn't even look
round when I called after you. Mortified, I was. I almost didn't come
tonight, you know. I was this close."

"When was this?"

"Oh, I don't know, sometime around my time, you know the time I
keep. Tea o'clock."

"I do need to know, Vitor."

"About five, five thirty. It was Wednesday."

Marcelina touched her hands together, an almost-prayer, a particular
gesture her development team knew well, when she was trying to pin
down a part-baked idea.

"Vitor, you have to believe me when I tell you that at that time
I was in Niteroi getting a letter of introduction to the Barquinha
from Feijão. I can give you his number, you can call him."

"Well, you walked right past me. Cut to the bone, querida; to
the bone."

"What direction was I walking?"

"The same as always; from here down to the taxi rank."

Marcelina lifted her explaining hands to her mouth now.

"That wasn't me, Vitor. I wasn't there; I was in Niteroi,
believe me."

Everyone had stubbed out their spliffs now.

"Has anyone else experienced anything like this'"

Now Moises shuffled uncomfortably. He was a big fat sixty-something
queen who ran a series of mysterious objet d'arts emporia; a true
old-school carioca, he had an unrelenting if not always accurate wit,
but delivered in a voice like velvet-covered razors. Since
Gay
Jungle
, Marcelina had been looking for ways to get him his own
series.

"Well, you did call me the other night. I thought I was on the
Da Vinci Code
, all those mysterious coded messages and
everything."

Marcelina's head reeled. It had nothing to do with secondary maconha.
"When was this?"

"Well. I know I'm a night owl, but half past three in the
morning."

"Was it on the house phone or the cellular?"

"Oh the cellular, of course. Took me hours to get back to sleep,
everything buzzing round my head."

"Moises, could you tell me what I said?"

"Oh, weird stuff, honey, weird stuff. Time and the universe and
the order we see is not the true order. Are you in some kind of
conspiracy thing? How exciting."

"I'm trying to make a TV show about a World Cup goalkeeper, is
all" Marcelina sat down on the wall. "Guys, at work, has
there been anything else I don't know about?"

"Apart from the e-mail thing, no," Celso answered.

Agnetta said, "But you should know that the Black Plumed Bird
has bunged Lisandra a few K to develop her Ultimate Seleção
idea." Unraveling, detuning, melting like a wax votive baby
offered to a saint.

"Is everything all right?" Cibelle asked.

"There's stuff going on I can't explain," Marcelina said.
"All I can say is, if you know me, trust me: if it looks like me
but doesn't act like me, it isn't me. I know this makes no sense at
all, but it makes even less sense to me. I'm being haunted."