“Yes.” In his saying just “yes,” Fletch heard an echo of Otavio Cavalcanti. Yes. Of course. What is there to understand?
“My wallet was gone. All my cash. My credit cards.” Tears now were in both her eyes. “My passport.”
“It happens to everyone I have heard of,” he said.
“My necklace was gone!” She seemed astounded. “A diamond pin I was wearing on my dress!”
“Yes.”
“What bothers me most is that pictures of Alan in my wallet are gone. Of Alan and Julia.” Julia was her young daughter. “No matter what you may think, I wanted those pictures of Alan. They’re irreplaceable.”
Tears rolled down her cheeks.
Fletch said: “Yes.”
She reached for a purse that wasn’t there. “Damn! I don’t even have a handkerchief.”
Fletch shrugged his bare shoulders. “I don’t even have a sleeve.”
She sniffed.
“I explained to the waiter as best I could that I couldn’t pay him. I’d been robbed. That I would come back and pay him today.” Joan Collins Stanwyk sniffed again. “I swear, Fletch, all during my walk, nobody even touched me. No one bumped into me. How did they get my necklace? The pin off my dress? There wasn’t even a tear in my dress. I felt nothing!”
“The future of Brazil,” said Fletch, “is in surgery.”
“I went back to my hotel.”
“And your room had been burglarized.”
“How did you know?”
“You said you’d been robbed twice.”
“Everything!” she said. “Everything except my clothes. My jewel case, my traveler’s checks.”
“Everything.”
“Everything. I haven’t a thing. This morning I don’t have a dollar, a cruzeiro, a credit card, a piece of jewelry.”
Fletch said: “Yes.”
“I went downstairs to the hotel manager immediately. The assistant manager, that time of night. He came to the room with me, clucked and hissed and t’ched like a barnyard, figured the thieves must have come in over the balcony, scolded me for leaving the balcony door unlocked—Good heavens, I’m on the ninth floor. It was a warm night.”
“Took no responsibility.”
“I spent hours with him in his office. He said I should have left all my valuables in the hotel safe. Apparently they handed me a slip of paper when I checked in with that written on it. He took me back to my room and showed me the sign on the inside of the door advising me to lock the balcony doors, to put my valuables in the hotel safe. We went back to his office. I filled out lists of things that are missing. I kept asking him to call the police. For some reason, he never called the police.”
“No reason for disturbing them.”
“What do you mean?”
“They’ve heard the story, too.”
“Fletch, I was robbed. Of thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of things. Money, jewelry, my credit cards.”
Again Joan Collins Stanwyk sniffed.
“The police would know all that.”
“Will you help me?”
“Of course.”
She clutched her hands in her lap. “I feel so violated.”
“Disoriented?”
“Yes.”
“Stripped naked?”
“Yes!”
“Totally lost without all your possessions?”
“Yes, yes!”
Fletch sat back in his chair. His sweat had dried in the air. “I think that’s part of the idea.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Who are you?”
“I am Joan Collins Stanwyk.”
“Can you prove it?”
Her eyes searched the stone floor of the forecourt. “As a matter of fact, I can’t. No credit cards. No checkbooks. No passport.”
“How does it feel?”
“How does what feel?”
“To be whatever you are right now.”
Her eyes narrowed. “I did not come to you for psychological therapy, Mister I. M. Fletcher.”
“Thought I’d throw it in. No extra charge.”
“I need money.”
“Why?”
“I want to get out of that damned hotel. I want to pay my bill and get out of that damned hotel. I don’t even have taxi fare.”
“Okay. But why don’t you call home? To California? Your father?”
“He’s on his yacht. The Colette. Trying to recuperate from Alan’s—”
“And you came here, to look for me.”
She shrugged. “Recuperation.”
“Doing your job. As you see it.”
“Yes.”
“Striving. Being Joan Collins Stanwyk, come hell or high water.”
“Are you going to help me? I want to go—”
“Tell me. Your family has offices stuffed with people looking out for you. Security personnel. Lawyers. Accountants. Why haven’t you called them?”
Her head lowered. After a moment, she said, softly, “It’s Saturday. In California, it’s before dawn Saturday morning.”
He laughed. “And you can’t wait? You’d rather come to me, whom you pursued to Rio de Janeiro, than wait until your daddy’s offices open?”
“I want to get out of that hotel. That man made me so angry.”
“It is essential to you, under the circumstances, that you talk to someone who knows who you are.”
She blinked at him. “What?”
He put his forearms on the table. “I was robbed. Wallet, cash, driver’s license. Not my passport. My watch. My Timex watch.”
“Within the first twenty-four hours you were here?”
“Within the first six hours. People warn you, but you cannot believe it. You have to go through it yourself. It’s a baptism.”
“What do you mean, baptism?”
“You learn to use the hotel safe, carry what money you need immediately in your shoe. And to not wear jewelry. Not even a watch.”
“Fletcher, I lost thousands of dollars, everything I have with me.”
“You lost your identity.”
“Yes. I did.”
“You lost your past.”
“Yes.” Joan Collins Stanwyk was frowning at the bushes.
“Do you feel more free?”
Now she was frowning at him. “What?”
“Now you are equal, you see.”
“The people who stole my possessions aren’t equal.”
“Oh, sure. That’s widely dispersed. Come here a moment, will you?”
He got up from the table and stood in the opening of the hedge.
After a moment, she got up and came to him.
Together they looked across the city sidewalk where people were beginning to go about their daily business, across the wide city avenue filling up with taxis and commuters, to the beach, beginning to fill up with people of all ages walking, running, jumping, doing pull-ups, swimming.
Drums could be heard from down the road.
“There’s not a pair of long trousers in sight, is there?” he asked.
“Very few shirts,” she said.
“No wallets. No identities. No class paraphernalia: no jewelry.” He looked at her tan slacks suit, silk blouse, high-heeled open-toed sandals. “They have their bodies. Their eyes, their arms, their legs, their backs.”
“Their fingers, damn them.”
“I think we’re being told something.”
“Have you gone Brazilian? In just a month?”
“Naw. I won’t be carioca until I can walk across the avenida in bare feet at high noon.”
She turned to go back to the table. “Sounds to me like you’re giving some fantastic intellectual, political rationale for their out-and-out thievery.” She sat down at the table. “But I guess you have every reason to.”
“To what?”
“To understand.”