Carioca Fletch by Gregory McDonald Page A

Fletch to his other guests. Besides the Vianas and the da Silvas, there was a famous Brazilian soccer player who could not stop dancing around the box by himself; his wife, who was taller than he, and probably heavier; a broker and his wife from London, who put on their Wegman—Man Ray masks for Fletch; Adrian Fawcett, who wrote about music for
The New York Times;
an Italian racing car driver and his girl friend, who was very young indeed; and the young French film star Jetta.
    Everyone marveled at Fletch’s costume, and he at everyone’s. Teo was dressed somewhat as a tiger, with a short tail. His tiger head rested on the bar table. Staring unblinkingly through glass eyes, the tiger head reminded Fletch somewhat of Norival in his last moment. But Norival’s eyes were much happier.
    Jetta was dressed in a nurse’s cap and costume, white shoes. Her nurse’s skirt was not even as long as the Tap Dancers’ breechclouts.
    In films, he had seen more of Jetta.
    Fletch took off his mask and movie cowboy hat and stood at the rail and watched the swirl of color and flesh below him.
    A few of the drummers were going off the stage; others were coming on. The music would never stop.
    At three places on the huge floor, between the dancing area and the tables, were tall, raised, gilded cages. Inside, three or four magnificent women dressed only in G-strings and tall headgear writhed to the music. Outside, crawling around the cages, trying to attain sufficient footholds in their high-heeled shoes to writhe to the music, nine or ten women dressed in G-strings and tall headgear crawled around like big cats on their hind legs. Each of the gilded cages was a locus of writhing brown bare asses and huge, shaking brown bare breasts.
    Beside him, Teo said, “The floors of the cages are elevators; they go up and down so the women can get in and out without being accosted by the crowd.”
    “They must be seven feet tall,” Fletch said.
    “They are all over six feet.”
    “What about the women outside the cages?”
    “They were not women.” Teo sipped his drink.
    “They are.”
    Teo said, “They are exhibiting the superb work of their Brazilian surgeons.”
    From a distance, Fletch could see no difference between the women inside the cages and the women outside the cages.
    Once before, in New York, he had been fooled.
    “No one hardly ever accosts them,” Teo said. “Very sad, for them.”
    The music picked up, and all the people, those dancing, those at the tables, those in the boxes, began singing/chanting the song presented by
Imperio Serrano
that Carnival. Fletch stumbled over the lyrics. He could never make his Portuguese sibilant enough.
    All the tanned people, the brown people, the black people were moving to the rhythm and singing the lyrics of the song presented by a single samba school together, something about how indebted Brazilian people are to the coffee bean, and how they should respect the coffee bean like an uncle.
    Adrian Fawcett, drink in hand, stood at the rail to Fletch’s left. “Brazil is what the United States would like to think it is.”
    “I used to work for a newspaper,” Fletch said. “A reporter.”
    “What do you do now?”
    “Do? Why must I do? I am.”
    Jetta stood the other side of Fletch. After Eva, after watching the women in the gilded cages, Jetta-off-the-screen seemed small.
    “Really what do you do?” Adrian asked.
    Fletch said, “I don’t know.”
    Jetta said, “Teo said there would be someone young for me to dance with.”
    “I feel one hundred years old at the moment.”
    “I have heard that story,” she said. “You are someone who died, years ago, murdered, and has come back to life to reveal your murderer.”
    “Did you ever hear anything so crazy?”
    “Yes,” she said. “Will you dance?”
    Fletch wanted to crawl into a corner of the box, to sleep. He was sure he could do so, despite the drums, the horns, the guitars, the singing. “Of course.”
    Excusing themselves