Carioca Fletch Read Online Free Page A

if it is a scam.”
    “A what?”
    “A swindle. Some sort of confidence trick.”
    “Ah, yes. Trick.”
    “This afternoon Laura and I were accosted by an old woman, a
macumbeira
of some sort, maybe, dressed in a long white gown, an old woman. She said her name is Idalina Barreto.”
    From the terrace the samba drums could be heard only faintly.
    “Yes?”
    “She said I was her husband.”
    Otavio turned his head to look at Fletch.
    “Her dead husband. Janio Barreto. A sailor. Father of her children.”
    “Yes…”
    “That Janio was murdered when he was young, at my age, forty-seven years ago.”
    “Yes.”
    “Are you hearing me?”
    “Naturally.”
    “She demands that I tell her who murdered me.”
    Otavio was looking at Fletch as had Laura, as had the doorman at The Hotel Yellow Parrot. Then his eyes shifted in a circle around Fletch’s head.
    “Will you help me to understand this?”
    Then Otavio took a drink. “What’s there to understand?”
    At the long table at dinner they talked of the magic in muchBrazilian food which provides so much energy, the masses of sugar usually placed in the coffee, in the
cachaça
, the sweetness of
cachaça
anyway, the
dende
oil in the
vatapa
they were having for dinner. The drink,
guaraná
, is without alcohol and also gives energy. It was said by the Indians that it cleared the blood channels going to and coming from the heart. Fletch had discovered that it relieved tiredness.
    Down the table, Laura said, “Bananas are good for you, too. There is potassium in bananas.”
    Then Marilia asked about the paintings Teo had bought.
    “I’ll show them to you after dinner. Perhaps, first, Laura will play for us.”
    “Please,” said the Viana woman.
    “Certainly.”
    “Then I will show them to you,” Teo said.
    Aloisio da Silva asked Fletch, “Have you visited the Museu de Arte Moderna?”
    “Yes.”
    “I should think you’d be very interested in that building.”
    “I am very interested in the building. It is a wonderful building. And I had a splendid lunch there.” The people at table became silent. “There were few paintings in the museum when I was there.”
    “Ah, yes,” Marilia said.
    “I was thinking of the building,” Aloisio said.
    “There was a fire …” Teo said.
    “All the paintings were burned up,” the Viana woman said. “Very sad.”
    “Not all. A few were left,” Viana said.
    Aloisio blinked at his plate. “I was thinking the building would interest you.”
    Fletch said, “The paintings in the museum got burned. Is this another case of
queima de arquivo
?”
    The silence at the table was complete.
    From the head of the table, Teodomiro da Costa looked down at Fletch. A virus a few years before had given da Costa’s lefteye a permanent hooded effect, which became worse when he was tired, or wished to use it on someone. He was now using it on Fletch.
    “It is a good thing, I think,” Fletch said into the silence, “for the artists of each generation to destroy the past, to begin again. I think perhaps it is necessary for them.”
    It was many moments, then, before conversation flowed smoothly again.
    “You have Laura, I see. I am glad.” Viana sat next to Fletch on the divan in the living room. They were waiting for Laura Soares to play the piano. “You must be very careful of women in Rio.”
    “You must be very careful of women everywhere.”
    “That is true. But women in Rio.” He sipped his coffee. “Even I. Late at night. Have found myself dancing with one of them. A man, you know. An operated-on man. It is more easy than you think to be tricked.”
    “Not anything is as it seems in Brazil,” Fletch said.
    “It is easy to be tricked.”
    Laura played first some Villa Lobos, of course, then some of her own arrangements of the compositions of Milton Nascimento, somehow keeping in balance his romantic sweetness, his folkloric virility, his always progressing, complicated, mysterious melodic lines. At the side of the room,