Idra Novey - Ways to Disappear

WITH THE RED BICYCLE

ALONE.

Crushing the note, Rocha trembled. At well over a hundred kilos, it was not something his body did easily, but his legs were shaking beneath him and he could not stop them. Alessandro had warned him that once the book was released it would only be a matter of time before the loan shark figured out where the cash well was, who was dipping the bucket down and bringing it up full. But the loan shark was a brute and an ignorant fool. A loan shark didn’t know anything about literature, what an editor might be willing to do for an author who made all the days holed up in an office worth it.

Or it had been he who’d been the ignorant fool, thinking he could buy Marcus’s release and then retreat. But it was only the beginning. The preface to who knew how many other abductions — Alessandro this very afternoon, or tomorrow morning, every minute they spent on the street distorted with paranoia.

With Marcus still in the hospital, it seemed cruel to tell Raquel about this new threat. But she was an adult and it was her compulsive mother who had caused all this. The package still in his hand, Rocha reached into his pocket for his cell. The thoughts in his head were coming at such a furious clip that he had to pause and make an effort to focus, to rehearse his own controlled voice in his head.

Roberto here, he said when she answered.

Immediately, Raquel launched into a litany of details: how long it had taken the doctors to drain Marcus’s ear and all the blood tests, the various police figures who kept coming by. Some high-level inspector is in with him now, she said, but Marcus is not up to that kind of interrogation, Roberto. I tried to tell the inspector to let him rest. We can’t have reporters waiting for him outside the hospital and following us back to Rio. I mean, poor Marcus—

Raquel, it’s out of your hands now. You need to work with the police. And who knows? Maybe with all the media attention they’ll feel compelled to actually do something. In the meantime, I’ve received a package with a filthy knife in it. It’s crusted with blood I suspect may be your brother’s.

In the immaculate glass doors onto Delfim Moreira Avenue, opening onto the posh center of Leblon, he apprehended his broad reflection, how intimately it resembled that of his father, who had mostly ignored him after adolescence, except for initiating a few select conversations each year to remind Roberto that his inclinations would leave him diseased, or at the very least devastated and alone.

He heard Raquel start with her sobbing again on the other end of the phone, and told her he had to go but that he would take care of this. There were ways.

Inspector Lucio de Santos:I can tell you’re in no shape for questions, son, but you should know you’re actually a lucky guy. You’ve still got part of the skin there for a new ear. In six months, they’ll be able to sew on a new one, no problem. They’ll make it from your own rib — did you know that? Ever read about Adam and Eve?

Victim:[no response]

Inspector de Santos:I know I’m a stranger, but you’re going to have to give me something. You said you were blindfolded, but wasn’t there some point when they took it off?

Victim:When they hacked off my ear. I told you that already.

Inspector de Santos:But what happened then?

Victim:I saw the machete.

Inspector de Santos:So you must have seen the guy holding it, right? Could you identify him in a picture?

Victim:What for? There are always more hit men in Brazil.

Inspector de Santos:Well, we have a system of justice, son, and we are doing the best we can to address—

Victim:I’m tired.

Inspector de Santos:I have no doubt you are, son, but when they were bandaging your ear, maybe you saw—

Victim:They didn’t bandage it. They gave me some gauze and a bowl of dirty water and left the room.

Inspector de Santos:And when they came back in?

Victim:I passed out. I told you.

Inspector de Santos:Right. Well, after something like this, it’s hard to know whether you really didn’t see where you were or don’t want to see it again, you know what I’m saying?

Victim:[no response]

Inspector de Santos:Does your mother know what’s happened to you?

Victim:[no response]

Inspector de Santos:Do you have any idea where we could find her?

Victim:[no response]

On the pond beside Hospital Aliança da Bahia, a flock of white herons descended petal-like onto the water. It was the second day that Raquel had come to watch them. There was a bench on the other side of the pond, but a thin gray-haired man was already perched there with a book, and the last thing she wanted to do was get any closer to books and the people who bothered with them. When they got back to Rio, everyone she knew was going to be talking about what Rocha had published and — unless he could buy an end to Flamenguinho — the possible kidnapping of his partner.

To get the book printed in two days and into a handful of select stores, Rocha had paid an exorbitant sum. She didn’t think the title he’d chosen, After the Alley, was what her mother would have selected, but maybe it was better. Her mother’s titles had always embarrassed her with their intentional mistakes of the senses: Have You Tasted the Butterflies, The Warm Green Sound of Your Sleeve. As if her mother thought there was something beautiful about errors and being mistaken. But what was beautiful about accidentally shooting her brother in an alley, or her mother gambling money she didn’t have? What was beautiful about the scabbed-over hole on the side of Marcus’s head?

She wanted to call Thiago but didn’t feel up to hearing his jokes about her aim. Across the pond, the old man on the bench was hunched intently over his book, so absorbed that it was as if he had willed his whole being into the pages on his lap. Her mother had read with that kind of abandon. Raquel had never been able to. She’d had too many reservations about giving herself over that way, risking that some book might obliterate her carefully constructed sense of who she was.

Yet a book had done that anyway, and she’d been the one to print it off the computer. She’d put it into Rocha’s hands, and now everyone she’d ever met was going to know she wasn’t supposed to have happened. How long had it taken her mother to find that error beautiful, or at least the daughter who had come of it?

Raquel reached into her bag for her phone as if the right question might make it ring.

Alessandro had been sleeping beside him for hours, but Rocha was too nervous to sleep. He’d called the two illegal “elimination” services that his sister had insisted upon, though not before she’d berated him for putting their family in such a perilous position over some writer with a gambling problem. He didn’t offer an apology and his sister didn’t demand one. They were not that sort of family, though she was right that he had gone too far with this. His misstep had been with the translator in his hotel. When she told him Beatriz’s new manuscript was there in the room, he’d panted for it like a dog. He’d acted with as little forethought as an animal. Now his name, the love of his life, the full extent of his holdings — it was all exposed.