Rubem Fonseca - Winning the Game and Other Stories

I was in the middle of Odontos Silva’s letter when I suddenly understood everything. Peçanha was Pedro Redgrave. Instead of returning the letter in which Pedro asked me to have a mass said for him and which I had given him together with my answer about Oscar Wilde, Peçanha had handed me a new letter, unfinished, surely by accident, and which was supposed to come into my hands by mail.

I got Pedro Redgrave’s letter and went to Peçanha’s office.

“May I come in?” I asked.

“What is it? Come in,” Peçanha said.

I handed him Pedro Redgrave’s letter. Peçanha read the letter and, seeing the mistake he had committed, turned pale, as was his wont. Nervously, he shuffled the papers on his desk.

“It was all a joke,” he said, trying to light a cigar. “Are you angry?”

“For real or a joke, it’s all the same to me,” I said.

“My life would make a novel …” Peçanha said. “Let’s keep this between the two of us, okay?”

I wasn’t sure what he wanted to keep between the two of us, his life making a novel or his being Pedro Redgrave. But I replied: “Of course, just between the two of us.”

“Thanks,” said Peçanha. And he breathed a sigh that would have broken the heart of anyone who wasn’t an ex-police reporter.

I WAS WHITE AND HAD FIANCHETTOED MY BISHOP. Berta was mounting a strong center pawn position.

“This is the office of Paulo Mendes,” my voice said on the answering machine, giving whoever had called thirty seconds to leave a message. The guy said his name was Cavalcante-Meier, as if there were a hyphen between the two names, and that they were trying to frame him for a crime but—click—his time ran out before he could say what he planned to do.

“Every time we’re in a close game some client calls,” Berta said. We were drinking Faísca wine.

The guy called back and asked me to call him at home. A number in the South Zone. An aged voice answered, its vocal cords reverential. It was the butler. He went to get the master.

“There’s a butler in the story. I already know whodunit.” Berta didn’t think it was funny. Besides being hooked on chess, she took everything seriously.

I recognized the voice from the answering machine: “What I have to say has to be in person. Can I come by your office?”

“I’m at home,” I explained, and gave the address.

“So much for the game, B.B. (Berta Bronstein),” I said, dialing.

“Hello, Dr. Medeiros, what’s the situation?”

Medeiros said the situation wasn’t serious but was no laughing matter either. Medeiros thought about nothing but politics. He’d held some position or other at the start of the revolution and, despite having the biggest office in town, had never shaken off the nostalgia of power. I asked if he knew a Cavalcante Meier.

“Everybody knows him.”

“I don’t. I even thought the name might be a phony.”

Medeiros said the man owned plantations in São Paulo and the North, exported coffee, sugar, and soybeans, and was an alternate senator for the state of Alagoas. A rich man.

“What else? Does he have any weaknesses, is he involved in any shady financial transactions, is he a sexual pervert as well as a landowner?”

“You think the whole world’s no good, don’t you? The senator is a very highly respected public figure, a business leader, a model citizen, unimpeachable.”

I reminded him that J. J. Santos, the banker, had also been unimpeachable and that I’d had to rescue him from the clutches of a crazed transvestite in a motel in the Barra.

“You got a Mercedes out of it. Is this how you show your gratitude?”

I hadn’t “got” the Mercedes, I had extorted it, the way bankers do with their interest rates and management fees.

Medeiros in a mellifluous voice: “What’s the problem with Cavalcante Meier?”

I said I didn’t know.

“Let’s finish the game,” Berta said.

“I can’t meet the guy naked, can I?” I said.

I was getting dressed when the bell rang, three times in ten seconds. An impatient man, accustomed to doors that opened quickly.

Cavalcante Meier was thin, elegant, fiftyish. His nose was slightly crooked. His eyes were deep-set, brownish green, and intense.

“I’m Rodolfo Cavalcante Meier. I don’t know if you know me.”

“I know you. I have your file.”

“My file?”

“Yes.” I saw him looking at the glass in my hand. “Care for some Faísca?”

“No thanks,” he said, evasively. “Wine gives me a headache. May I sit down?”

“Planter, exporter, alternate senator for Alagoas, services rendered to the revolution,” I said.

“Irrelevant,” he cut me off, sharply.

“Member of the Rotary Club,” I said, to rattle his cage.

“Just the Country Club.”

“A leader, a man of integrity, a patriot.”

He looked at me and said firmly, “Don’t joke with me.”

“I’m not joking. I’m a patriot too. In a different way. For example, I don’t want to declare war on Argentina.”

“I have your file too,” he said, imitating me. “Cynical, unscrupulous, competent. A specialist in extortion and fraud cases.”

He spoke like a recording; he reminded me of a laugh-box that you wind up and it makes a sound that’s neither animal nor human. Cavalcante Meier had wound himself up, his voice that of a plantation owner talking to a sharecropper.

“Competent yes, unscrupulous and cynical no. Just a man who lost his innocence,” I said.

He rewound the laugh-box. “Have you seen the papers?”

I answered that I never read newspapers, and he told me that a young woman had been found dead in the Barra, in her car. It had been in all the papers.

“That girl was, uh, my, er, connected to me, do you know what I mean?”

“Your lover?”

Cavalcante Meier said nothing.

“It was already over. I thought Marly should find someone her own age, get married, have children.”

We lapsed into silence. The telephone rang. “Hello, Mandrake?” I turned off the sound.

“Yes, and then?”

“Our relationship was very discreet, I’d even say secret. No one knew anything. She was found dead on Friday. Saturday I got a phone call, a man, threatening me, saying I had killed her and that he had proof we were lovers. Letters. I don’t know what letters they could be.”

Cavalcante Meier said he hadn’t gone to the police because he had political enemies who would take advantage of the scandal. Besides, he knew nothing that could help clear up the crime. And his only daughter was getting married that month.

“My going to the police would be a socially and ethically useless gesture. I’d like you to find that person for me, see what he wants, defend my interests in the best way possible. I’m willing to pay to avoid scandal.”

“What’s the guy’s name?”

“Márcio was the name he gave. He wants me to meet him tonight at ten at a place called Gordon’s, in Ipanema. He’ll be on a motorcycle, wearing a black shirt with ‘Jesus’ on the back.”

We agreed I’d keep the appointment with Márcio and negotiate the price of his silence. It could be worth a lot or worth nothing.

I asked where he’d heard about me.

“Dr. Medeiros,” he said, getting up. He left without shaking hands, with just a nod of his head.

I went to look for the laugh-box. I rummaged through the closet, the bookshelf, the drawers, until I found it in the kitchen. The maid loved to listen to the laughter.

I took it to the bedroom, lay down, and turned it on. A convulsive and disturbing guffaw, stuck in the glottis, purple, as of someone with a funnel stuck up his anus whose deadly laughter had gone through his body to come out his mouth, clogging lungs and brain. This called for a bit more Faísca. When I was a boy, a man sitting in front of me in the movie theater had a laughing fit so severe that he died. From time to time I remember that guy.