Rubem Fonseca - Winning the Game and Other Stories

“You want to screw every woman in the world,” Wexler said in recrimination.

“That’s true.”

It was true. I had the soul of a sultan out of the thousand and one nights; when I was a boy, at least once a month I would fall in love and cry myself to sleep. As an adolescent, I began dedicating my life to screwing. The daughters of friends, the wives of friends, women I knew, and women I didn’t know—I screwed everybody. The only one I didn’t screw was my mother.

“There’s a girl in the outer office who wants to speak to you,” Dona Gertrudes, the secretary, told me. Dona Gertrudes was becoming uglier by the day. She was starting to get a humpback and mustache, and I had the impression that she looked cross-eyed at me, one eye in each direction. A saintly woman. On second thought, was she really?

Eve, in the outer office. We stood there reading each other’s expression.

“Do you play chess?” I asked.

“No. Bridge.”

“Will you teach me?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I held myself in check so I wouldn’t fly around the room like a June bug.

“It wasn’t my father, I know it wasn’t.”

“I love you,” I said. “From the first day I met you.” Her look was like a blowtorch.

“I was pretty shaken myself that day.”

We were holding hands when Wexler came into the room.

“Raul is here. I told him you were busy. You want to talk to him?”

“It must be something to do with the Marly case. Yes, I’ll talk to him. Wait here,” I told Eve.

I was at the door when Eve said, “Save my father.”

I turned. “You have to help me do that.”

“How?”

“You can begin by not lying to me any more.”

“I won’t lie again.”

“What did you say to Márcio the Suzuki at your house? Where did you know him from?”

“Márcio supplied cocaine for my cousin Lilly. But she kicked the habit about six months ago. That day I asked Márcio if Lilly had gone back to snorting, and he said no. I was afraid he was there to bring drugs for her.”

“Where did Lilly get the money to buy the stuff?”

“Daddy gives Lilly anything she asks for. She’s the daughter of his brother who died when Lilly was a child. Her mother remarried and wanted nothing to do with her, so Lilly came to live with us when she was eight.”

“Why did you say you know your father didn’t kill Marly and Márcio?”

“My father couldn’t kill anyone.”

“So it’s just a feeling, a simple assumption?”

“Yes,” she said, refusing to meet my eyes.

Raul was pacing back and forth in Wexler’s office.

“Guedes says he’s going to publicly name the senator as the murderer and that he doesn’t care what happens.”

“Guedes is crazy,” I said. “We can’t let him make that blunder.”

Raul and I went looking for Guedes. Eve went home. I promised to call her later.

Guedes was at the morgue, talking to a technician friend of his. He was working on his statement to the press.

“Cavalcante Meier didn’t do it,” I said.

“Two days ago you didn’t know the first thing about the case, now you show up with total insight.”

I told him part of what I knew.

“If it wasn’t Cavalcante Meier, who was it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a drug dealer.”

“I went through Marly Moreira’s life with a fine-tooth comb. There’s not the slightest chance she was involved in dealing drugs. And both were killed by the same person. Your reasoning is full of holes.”

I attempted to defend my point of view. I mentioned Cavalcante Meier’s alibi. After all, the testimony of the Governor couldn’t be ignored.

“They’re all corrupt. Just wait, when the Governor leaves office he’ll become a partner in one of Cavalcante Meier’s businesses.”

“Guedes, you’re going to come out of this looking real bad.”

“It doesn’t matter. What’ve I got to lose—my job? I’m sick of being a cop.”

“Accusing an innocent man is slander; it’s a crime.”

“He isn’t innocent. I have my proof.” Guedes’s eyes blazed with rectitude, justice, integrity, and probity. “Did you know that Senator Cavalcante Meier is the registered owner of a .38 Taurus revolver, the same caliber as the bullets that caused the deaths of Marly and Márcio?”

“Lots of people keep a .38 in their house. When’s the press conference?”

“Tomorrow at ten a.m.”

I arrived at the house in Gávea just as night was falling.

“What happened?” Eve asked. “The look on your face—”

“Where’s your father?”

“In his bedroom. He’s not feeling well.”

“I have to speak to him. It’s important.”

I got a surprise when I saw Cavalcante Meier. His hair was uncombed, he hadn’t shaved, and his eyes were red, as if he’d been drinking too much, or crying. The look of Jannings, Professor Rath, in The Blue Angel, struggling to hide his shame, surprised by the world’s incomprehension. Lilly was at his side, her face paler than ever, her skin looking as if it had been whitewashed. She held a purse in her hand. Her black dress heightened her phantasmagoric beauty.

“I did it,” Cavalcante Meier said.

“Daddy!” Eve exclaimed.

Cavalcante Meier didn’t ring true. I’ve been to enough movies to know a bad actor when I see one.

“I did it, I already said I did. Tell your policeman friend to come pick me up. Get out of my house!”

He came toward me as if to attack. Eve held him back.

“Go away, please go away,” Eve begged.

As I left, Lilly went with me. She stopped next to my car.

“Okay if I come along?”

“Sure.”

Lilly sat beside me. I drove slowly through the dark tree-lined gardens and toward the entrance.

“He’s lying,” I said. “It must be to protect someone. Maybe Eve.”

Lilly’s body began to tremble, but no sound came from her throat. As we passed a lamppost I saw that her face was wet with tears.

“It wasn’t him. Or Eve,” Lilly said, so low I could barely make out the words.

So that was it. I already knew the truth, and what the hell good did it do me? Is there really any such thing as guilty and innocent?

“I’m listening, you can begin,” I said.

“I discovered I loved Uncle Rodolfo two years ago, not as an uncle, or father, which is what he’d been to me till then, but as one loves a lover.”

I said nothing. I know when a person is about to bare their soul.

“We’ve been lovers for six months. He’s everything in my life, and I’m everything in his.”

“Is that why you killed Marly?”

“Yes.”

“Did he know?”

“No. I told him today. He tried to protect me. He loves me as much as I love him.”

In the half-darkness of the car she looked like a fluorescent statue bathed in black light.

“I can tell you how it happened.”

“Tell me.”

“My uncle told me he was having problems with a girl he’d had an affair with and who worked for one of his firms. She was threatening to cause a scandal, to tell my aunt everything. My aunt is a very sick woman, and I love her as if she were my mother.”

I had never seen her. Rich families have inviolable secrets, private faces, dark complicities.

“She never leaves her room. There’s always a nurse at her side; she could die at any time.”

“Go on.”

“My uncle received the letter, on a Monday I think. Every night, around eleven, I would go to his room, then leave early the next morning before the maids came to straighten up.”

“Did Eve know about this?”

“Yes.”

“Go on,” I said.

“That day Uncle Rodolfo was very nervous. He showed me the letter, said that Marly was crazy, that the scandal could kill Aunt Nora and ruin him politically. Uncle Rodolfo is a very good man, he doesn’t deserve anything like that.”