Gregory Mcdonald
Carioca Fletch
Gregory Mcdonald is the author of twenty-five books, including nine Fletch novels and three Flynn mysteries. He has twice won the Mystery Writers of America’s prestigious Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Mystery Novel, and was the first author to win for both a novel and its sequel. He lives in Tennessee.
Books by Gregory Mcdonald
Fletch
Fletch Won
Fletch, Too
Fletch and the Widow Bradley
Carioca Fletch
Confess, Fletch
Fletch’s Fortune
Fletch’s Moxie
Fletch and the Man Who
Son of Fletch
Fletch Reflected
Flynn
The Buck Passes Flynn
Flynn’s In
Skylar
Skylar in Yankeeland
Running Scared
The Brave
Safekeeping
Who Took Toby Rinaldi? (Snatched)
Love Among the Mashed Potatoes (Dear M.E.)
Exits and Entrances
Merely Players
A World Too Wide
The Education of Gregory Mcdonald
(Souvenirs of a Blown World)
Dedicated with affection and admiration
to Gloria and Alfredo Machado, their family
and friends
One
Naturally the samba drums were beating, rhythms beside rhythms on top of rhythms beneath rhythms. Especially just before Carnival did this modern city of nine million people on the South Atlantic reverberate with the ever-quickening rhythms of the drums. From all sides, every minute, day and night, came the beating of the drums.
“You cannot understand the future of the world without first understanding Brazil.” That was the way the trim, forty-year-old Brazilian novelist Marilia Diniz spoke. Informative. Instinctual. Indicative. The umbrella over the café table on Avenida Atlantica shaded her eyes, leaving her mouth in the afternoon sunlight. She shrugged her thin shoulders. “Unfortunately, Brazil is beyond anyone’s understanding.”
Marilia sat across from Fletch in a light dress with only straps over her pale shoulders. Marilia Diniz was the rare carioca who never went to the beach.
Laura Soares, more appropriately dressed in shorts, sandals, a halter, more appropriately tanned golden brown, sat to Fletch’s right. Laura would always go to the beach.
Fletch was dressed in the uniform he had learned to be innocent, egalitarian: shorts and sneakers.
In front of Marilia and Laura were glasses of beer, chope. Fletch had the drink he liked best in all the world: guaraná.
“Now that Fletch sees the Praia de Copacabana he will never go anywhere else,” Laura said. “Maybe I will never even be able to get him to come back to Bahia.”
“I’ll go back to Bahia anytime,” Fletch said. “If your father lets me.”
“He’ll embrace you. You know that.”
“I don’t know.”
“The first truth about Brazil,” Marilia said, “is its absolute tolerance.”
“Does Brazil tolerate intolerance?”
“I suppose so.” Marilia wrinkled her nose. “You see, you cannot understand.”
Across the avenida stretched the huge, dazzling Copacabana Beach, from the Morro do Leme to his left, to the peninsula separating Copacabana from the beaches of Arpoador, Ipanema and Leblon to his right.
On the beach, among the brightly colored umbrellas and blankets, were thousands of golden brown bodies, all ages, sexes, their swimsuits so small on them only their skin, really, was visible, exercising, taking turns at the provided chin-up bars, reclining on sit-up boards, running. Within sight on the beach, Fletch counted fourteen soccer games in progress. Small children played at the water’s edge, but most of the people in the water were doing disciplined swimming. Proportionately few on the beach were resting. The temperature was thirty-three degrees centigrade, about ninety degrees Fahrenheit; it was four o’clock in the afternoon, and the people’s energy shimmered up from the sand more positively than reflected the strong sunlight.
At street corners to the right and left of where they sat drummed samba bands. Boys, men, from fourteen years of age to whenever, beat on drums of various sizes, various tones as if this were their last chance to do so, ever. The band to the right wore canary yellow shorts; to the left, cardinal red shorts. Immediately around each band, pedestrians stayed to give in totally to the samba awhile, dancing on the sidewalk, up and down the curb, among the cars parked pridefully anywhere. One or two drummers might stop a moment to wipe the sweat from their chests, bellies, forearms, drink a chope to make more sweat, but a samba band itself never stops, when it moves, when it stays in one place. A samba band’s stopping is as fatal a thought as your own heart’s stopping.
And the people passing on the sidewalk in front of the café, the pedestrians, going from corner to corner, band to band, businessmen dressed only in shorts and sandals, sometimes shirts, carrying briefcases, women in bikinis lugging bags of groceries, barefoot children running with a soccer ball, walked, lugged, ran, keeping the beat of the drums in their feet, their legs, their hips, their shoulders. This moving to the samba instead of just moving gives Brazilians the most beautiful legs in the world, having a true balance, an ideal proportion between muscular calves and slim thighs. The groups of gap-mouthed begging children, the cloth of their shorts worn so it almost did not exist, kept their bare feet moving to the rhythm of the drums, making the stillness, the steadiness of their huge dark eyes the more shocking, imploring. To provide a deception of class difference for the tourists, the café waiters wore black long trousers and white open shirts and real shoes, but even in their brushing crumbs from the tables, begging children away from someone they had implored too long, they somberly kept the samba beat.
“Cidade maravilhosa!” In his chair, Fletch stretched his arms over his head.
“Mysterious city,” said Marilia. “Mysterious country.”
Fletch said: “The guidebook says something like, ‘At first sight of Rio de Janeiro instantly you forgive God for what’s visible of New Jersey.’”
“I like New Jersey,” said Laura. “Isn’t that where Pennsylvania is? I thought so.”
“If you cannot understand the future of the world without first understanding Brazil,” Fletch said, “I would like to understand more of Brazil’s past. Granted, I came to Brazil rather quickly, without really expecting to, without being prepared, but once here I can find out very little of Brazil’s history. Even Laura’s father—”