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 are you 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.”
“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 the 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 Monza 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 her towel. “And that’s the way I want her.”
Gil made arrangements with the woman, then dropped Moreno at his apartamento on the Rua 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 with a marble obelisk centerpiece. “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’s 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 though the iron bars. Moreno ignored him, practicing his Portuguese instead with Sérgio, 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 arrived in a taxi, and Moreno paid the driver and received a wink from Sérgio before he led the woman up to his apartamento.
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, then uncorked the wine, a Brazilian Cabernet, himself. He poured the wine, and before he drank, he asked the woman her name. She touched a finger to a button on her blouse and said, “Cláudia.”
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 tasting 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 alone that night, 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 di
strict. 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 push-ups, 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.
He walked north on Setubal at a brisk pace, avoiding the large holes in the sidewalk and sidestepping the stacks of brick and cinder block used to repair the walls surrounding the estates. He passed his no-name café, where a rat crossed his path and dropped into the black slots of a sewer grate. He walked by people who did not meet his eyes and bums who held out their hands but did not speak.
After about a mile, he could see through the darkness to the lights of the commercial district, and then he was near the fruit stands. In the shadows he could see men sitting, quietly talking and laughing. He walked behind the largest of the stands. In the mouth of an alley, a boy stood leaning on a homemade crutch, one leg severely twisted at the shin, the callused toes of that leg pointed down and brushing the concrete. The boy looked up at Moreno and rubbed his fingers together, and Moreno fumbled in his pockets for some change, nervously dropping some bills to the sidewalk. Moreno stooped to pick up the bills, handing them to the boy, then entered the alley. He could hear ferro music playing up ahead.
He looked behind him and saw that the crippled boy was following him into the alley. Moreno quickened his step, passing vendors’ carts and brick walls whitewashed and covered with graffiti. He saw an arrow painted on a wall, and beneath the arrow the names of some boys, and an anarchy symbol, and to the right of that the words “Sonic Youth.” He followed the direction of the arrow, the music growing louder with each step.
Then he was in a wide-open area that was no longer an alley because it had ended with walls on three sides. There were four men waiting for him there.
One of the men was short and very dark and held a machete at his side. The crippled boy was leaning against one of the walls. Moreno said something with a stutter and tried to smile. He did not know if he had said it in Portuguese or English, or if it mattered, as the ferro music playing from the boom box on the cobblestones was very loud.
Moreno felt a wetness on his thigh and knew that this wetness was his own urine. The thing to do was simply to turn and run. But now he realized that one of the men was Sérgio, the guard at his condominium, whom he had not recognized out of his uniform.
Moreno laughed, and then all of the men laughed, including Sérgio, who walked toward Moreno with open arms to greet him.
The Brazilians are a touching people. Often men will hug for minutes on end, and women will walk arm in arm in the street.
Moreno allowed Sérgio to give him the hug. He felt the big muscled arms around him, and caught the stench of cheap wine on Sérgio’s breath. Sérgio smiled an unfamiliar smile, and Moreno tried to step back, but Sérgio did not release him. Then the other men were laughing again, the man with the machete and the crippled boy, too. Their laughter rose on the sound of the crazy music blaring in the alley.
Sérgio released Moreno.
A forearm from behind locked across Moreno’s neck. There was a hand on the back of his head, pressure, and a violent movement, then a sudden, unbelievable pain, a white pain but without light. For a brief moment, Moreno imagined that he was looking at his own chest from a very odd angle.
If John Moreno could have spoken later on, he could have told you that the arm that killed him smelled heavily of perspiration and cheap cologne.
Gil knocked on Guzman’s door late that night. The maid offered him a drink. He asked for aguardente straight up. She returned with it and served it in the living room, where Gil sat facing Guzman, and then she walked back to the kitchen to wash the dishes before she went to bed.
Guzman had his own drink, a Teacher’s over ice, on the marble table in front of him. He ran his fingers slowly through his lion’s head of silver hair.
“Where is your woman?” Gil said.
“She took a walk,” Guzman said. “Is it over?”
“Yes,” Gil said. “It is done.”
“All this killing,” Guzman said softly.
“You killed a man yourself. The one who took your place on the boat.”
“I had him killed. He was just a rummy from the boatyard.”
“It’s all the same,” Gil said. “But maybe you have told yourself that it is not.”
Guzman took his scotch and walked to the open glass doors near the balcony, where it was cooler and there was not the smell that was coming off Gil.
“You broke his neck, I take it. Like the other one.”
“He has no neck,” Gil said. “We cut his head off and threw it in the garbage. The rest of him we cut to pieces.”
Guzman closed his eyes. “But they’ll come now. Two of their people have disappeared.”
“Yes,” Gil said. “They’ll come. You have maybe a week. Argentina would be good for you, I think. I could get you a new passport, make the arrangements—”
“For a price.”
“Of course.”
Guzman turned and stared at the lanky young man. Then he said, “I’ll get your money.”
“You split the two million with your wife, and there have been many others to pay.” Gil shrugged. “It costs a lot to become a new man, you know? Anyway, I’ll see you later.”
Gil headed for the door, and Guzman stopped him.
“I’m curious,” Guzman said. “Why did this Moreno die, instead of me?”
“He bid very low,” Gil said. “Goodnight, Boss.”
Gil walked from the room.
Down on the Avenida Boa Viagem, Gil walked to his Chevrolet Monza and got behind the wheel. Guzman’s woman, who was called Elena, was in the passenger’s seat, waiting for Gil to arrive. She leaned across the center console and kissed Gil on the lips, holding the kiss for a very long while. It was Gil who finally broke away.
“Did you get the money?” Elena said.
“Yes,” Gil said. “I got it.” He spoke without emotion. He looked up through the windshield to the yellow light spilling onto Guzman’s balcony.
“We are rich,” Elena said, forcing herself to smile and pinching Gil’s arm.
“There’s more up there,” Gil said. “You know?”
Elena said, “You scare me a little bit, Gil.”
She went into her purse, found a cigarette, and fired the cigarette off the lighter from the dash. After a couple of drags, she passed the cigarette to Gil.
“What was it like?” Elena said.
“What’s that?”
“When you killed this one,” she said. “When his neck was broken, did it make a sound?”
Gil dragged on the cigarette, squinted against the smoke that rose off the ash.
“You know how it is when you eat a chicken,” he said. “You have to break many bones if you want to get the meat. But you don’t hear the sound, you know?
“You don’t hear it,” Gil said, looking up at Guzman’s balcony, “when you’re hungry.”
Miss Mary’s Room
I was always cool with Mrs. Sullivan. I been knowing her son, Pat, si
nce we were in the same kindergarten class. His mom had one of those houses that were open to the kids in the neighborhood, and me, Pat, and some of the other fellas around our way hung out there often. Playing Xbox, going on Facebook to check out the females, shit like that. I spent the night a few times, and when I’d wake up in the morning, a blanket had been put on top of me by Pat’s mom. She always asked after my mother, and when she talked about my younger brother, she knew what grade he was in. She was thoughtful like that.
I called her Miss Mary, which is how we do around here to adults when we want to show respect. My name is Tim, but she called me Sleepy, the street name I got on account of my half-mast eyes. I guess I thought of Miss Mary like family. I mean that in a good way, not in the way that I think of family when I think of my own situation at home.
We had free rein in the Sullivan house. I mean, we knew our boundaries, but still. Miss Mary trusted us boys so much that she left her open purse and wallet on the kitchen counter when she visited a neighbor or went for a walk. I know for a fact that none of us ever took a dollar. A couple of times we snagged a little liquor from that rolling cart she had and swiped beers out the refrigerator, but there was certain lines we wouldn’t cross. Another one was, none of Pat’s friends would ever go in her bedroom.
I remember it, though. From the hall, up on the second floor, I sometimes looked through her open door.
It was small bedroom. It had a double bed, which seemed to take up most of the space. I don’t recall seeing no dresser. The wallpaper was busy with some old-timey pattern, looked like those ink tests the shrink gave me that time I set a trash can on fire in our middle school. What I remember most, beside the bed, was a fireplace mantel with no fireplace underneath it. It was just sort of mounted on the wall, framing the wallpaper. On top of the mantel was some kind of candle holder thing, a snow globe, and what looked like a painted rock. Above the candle holder was a crucifix that had been mounted on the wall. Also on the wall, two icons: Madonna and the baby Jesus, and Jesus grown up.