It's the tumultuous 1970s, and Truman DeVoto has had it with America. A failed marriage, a two-faced brother, the Nixon presidency, the Vietnam War-the country is going down the drain and he's bailing. With a pouch of stolen money, he sets out for Brazil, expecting to buy a cozy beach house from a Brazilian friend, blend into a fishing village and work on his tan. But the country is under the control of a military dictatorship. Even his fishing village may not be a perfect fit. Then he discovers a secret about his Brazilian friend and his sister and, because of them, Truman abandons his dream of a peaceful retirement, and becomes involved in a movement to take down the government of his new home. Although modern Brazil is an exuberantly democratic, successful, country, in the 1970s, it was overrun with poverty, illiteracy, and one of the world's worst distributions of wealth. A Small, Perfect Place is a fictional account of this turbulent period, when Brazil regained its soul through the long struggle of its revolutionaries, many of whom are presently the country's political leaders.
A Small, Perfect Place
A Novel of BrazilBy Arnold GordensteiniUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2011 Arnold Gordenstein
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4620-2093-5Chapter One
Truman DeVoto lugged his suitcase into Arrivals, looking for pilots. He wasn't worried. Not him. He'd tighten the pouches around his waist, get his face right, walk briskly to the line for crew, diplomats, and travel professionals, chat up the pilots, and just blend in. At the gate, he'd smile so the dimples would show. He'd treat the cop to a nice phrase of neighborhood Portuguese, show his passport, glance at his watch, lift his bag—and flee into the city. Piece of cake. They never patted you down in the crew line.
But there was no line for crew, diplomats, and travel professionals, only one for diplomats. They must have ended that when they ended elections and political parties, he thought. A drooping sign read, "Bem-vindo ao Rio de Janeiro." Welcome to Rio, right. He wasn't nervous yet, but he needed water and his tongue tasted like pennies. It was the graduate student in him, watching himself think.
Breathing deeply and smoothly, Truman headed across the big room, bending under canvas ropes and knocking over a post that clanged on the marble floor. He stood it up and looked around. People politely looked away. He joined the cabin class line and pushed his battered suitcase forward with his foot.
Sixteen, fifteen, fourteen people ahead of him, and then the line split before two guards. They looked like twins. Big mustaches hid their lips; aviator sunglasses hid their eyes. The one on the left opened every third bag and plunged long, stiletto fingers between socks and underwear and passed everything. The one on the right randomly dumped whole suitcases on his table. He had muscles, like Moe. Truman calculated his position—thirteen, twelve, eleven—and shuffled left. Safe.
The pouches hung from his waist like salamis, and his Nikon rode on top of them. He crumpled the customs declaration in his pocket, reading its message through his fingers: Absolutely forbidden ... something something ... import equivalent ten thousand U.S. dollars ... blah blah blah ... into sovereign state of Brazil ... severest penalties of law. Severest. No one had heard a word from Wild Bill Buckham, Truman's favorite steward, in two years. Truman had been chatting with him in the Singapore customs line the day the police hauled him away, playing catch with the wallet of emeralds they'd found in his hat. "Get a load of this guy," they'd said, "wearing a crush cap in this weather." That was two years ago. Severest.
Truman felt the sweat trickle down his back along his spine. They might ask, wasn't he warm in that zipped sweatsuit in Rio de Janeiro? They might ask, was he carrying all those dollars to buy his own airplane? They might ask, was he planning to finance a revolution against the government, or was he simply planning to buy the government? They might ask if the U.S. customs knew he had a small fortune strapped to his stomach when he left or if he planned to pay taxes on it in Brazil. They would certainly ask if he was transferring all this money in this unusual way because of the way he got it or because of the way he planned to spend it. They might even have Moe waiting in some back office. Moe would love to explain how all that money wound up in Truman's pouch. At best—at best!—they'd require a generous gorjeta for looking away. He didn't want to contemplate the worst.
Suddenly breathless, Truman looked for Teo. Teo would brazen him through. Teo had that kick-ass arrogance. Teo was connected. Behind the glass wall, people waved and hoisted silent babies. But no Teo. Teo wasn't much with clocks.
Beside Truman's line was a door marked Area Servico. He might kill time in there until Teo showed. He might strap the pouches to his thighs or stuff them in his roomy jockeys. The door opened, and two cleanup men emerged. One hugged mops and squeegees; the other rolled a wheeled bucket before him, bowling over a child who sat abruptly on the floor, looked up in surprise, and wailed.
Truman stepped quickly from the line and lifted the child, his palm spreading beneath damp baby bottom, his cheek rasping tender baby cheek. The child clutched Truman's Nikon with one hand and slid the other arm into Truman's waist, where it probed his pouches and wailed again. A frowning man stepped from the line and faced Truman, his fists down, his face dark with blood.
Truman thrust the baby into his hands, seized his suitcase, and slipped inside the Area Servico door.
Inside, a clutter of mops, buckets, chemical drums, police barriers, folded tables, and stacked chairs filled a long room that went to an intersection that split, left and right. One branch went to a roaring air conditioner and a wall; the other went past a tiny workers' bathroom. When you come to a fork in the road, said Yogi, you should take it.
Truman entered the bathroom, squeezed his suitcase inside, latched the door, and listened. Silence. Water filled the flush tank; someone had recently used the place. He breathed shallowly. He didn't want to stay here very long. He peeked out the small window into a service corridor. His boxy suitcase would never fit through there. Were his dirty socks, bent books, jockey shorts, and jelly doughnuts worth more than his freedom? He'd dumped a lot of past lately. Truman stood on the toilet seat, hung the Nikon out the window, and leaned out. It was a tight fit with his pouches. He squirmed like an aquarium seal and sprawled out into the corridor, banging his chin.
Down the hall, a worker leaned his chair out of a tiny office.
"Olha!" he said. `Look at this one!'
Another worker peered out and roared with laughter.
"Hey, man, you going the wrong way."
"Naturally, he is going the wrong way," said the first. "This is because he is a gringo."
"Eu nao, porra," said Truman, moving toward them. `Not me, stud.'
"Sombitch," said the second. "You sure don't look it, man."
"Never mind my look. Which way is the lobby? Man needs a coffee."
"Sure," said the first. "Lobby's down that way. Plenty a coffee there. Other way is the cops' station."
"You wouldn't shit me, man?" said Truman.
Truman squinted at them: two workers dogging it. Down one way, he heard airplane engines. The other way, he smelled olive oil and coffee and sausage. It seemed true.
"You want to stay in Rio, it's your problem, man. You know what you want."
Yes, I do, Truman thought. He tightened the pouches around his waist and hurried down the hall into a kitchen, slid between big stoves, bumped against tall-hatted cooks who saluted him with wooden spoons and cooking forks, backed out through heavy, swinging doors, and entered a restaurant where diners looked up from papaya and baguettes. A head waiter, pressing menus against his side, hustled his way. Truman retreated around a horseshoe bar, lifted an abandoned in-flight magazine off a table, and stepped out into a busy corridor where people wheeled suitcases and stood at coffee stands. Reading his magazine, Truman joined a group scanning an Arrivals board, and then, waving goodbye to a phantom friend, heart thumping, he hurried out the door into the humid Rio morning.
On the sidewalk, a circle of cabbies beat a batucada rhythm on hubcaps and drums and upended olive oil tins. Within the circle, a compliant coffee lady danced samba, and a bald drummer oiled his skins with alternate passes over his own gleaming crown. By the curb, a soldier herded travelers into a taxi line and checked tickets and identity cards. Truman hurried down a long curve of exit road. Behind an island of palmettos, the rogue taxis lurked, the cabbies silently inviting passengers with a glance and a nod. Truman slipped in a back door.
"Got some bags?" asked the driver.
"No bags," he said. He felt for the pouches: still there. "Zona Sul," he said, peering out the back window. `South Zone.'
A policeman chased the cab down the driveway and then gave it up and turned back. Truman stared, his stomach sinking. The officer ran heavy-legged, knees high, like Moe.
Behind the front seat, he pinched out a U.S. bill for the cabby. You didn't open a pouch as full as his while the whole world gawked. He rifled through the compressed, bound bills—Benjamin Franklin and Grover Cleveland, a founding father and a mother fucker. He watched the airport recede as dazzling sunlight filled the back window. A rising, not a setting, sun, brother Benjamin had said. He had escaped Moe. Now he had to find Teo.
On the median of the road lay a cannibalized Fiat, a crumpled bicycle, and a dead horse. By the roadside, shacks on stilts wobbled over black water. The favelas were creeping down from the hills, surrounding the airport. At a traffic light, boys wiped the taxi's windshield and hubcaps, and Truman lowered his window an inch and fingered American quarters out the opening.
"Esqueca os sinais," he told the driver. "Forget the lights. Just don't get us killed."
At the next light, the cabby glanced left, glanced right, and careened through the cross street past an oncoming car, scattering the boys who pounded on his hood.
"Hey, how you talk so good?" said the cabby. "You sure look like a gringo."
"I'm no gringo," Truman lied. "I'm from here."
"You don't look like here."
"That's 'cause I'm from the interior."
"How interior?"
"Way interior. Amazonas."
"Could have fooled me. You sure look like a gringo, with that camera and all."
The cabby's hand slid up his meter, and he lowered the surcharge flag.
Through the hot, heavy air, Truman saw the Jesus statue, arms spread wide, breaststroking on its mountaintop.
"You know what he's doing with his arms out like that?" said the cabby.
"Certo. He's waiting to clap," said Truman.
"Nah. He's saying when you going to grow up? Get it? With his hands out like that."
When they reached the expressway to South Zone, there were no more lights. A body dressed in rags lay in the highway, and cars swerved to avoid it.
"What the hell was that?" said Truman.
"Aw, they do that so you'll stop. Then they rob you."
"He could get himself killed."
"Nah, he picked an easy place where you could see him. Besides, what's the difference to him? For him, it's die fast or die slow."
"That's a new one on me."
"You been in the interior too long. There's a new one every day."
Presently, the cab began the broad turn into Atlantic Avenue. Truman would spend a night in a hotel until he hooked up with Teo. He couldn't show up at the house of the minister of culture without the minister's son holding his hand. Tomorrow he'd send Teo to the airport to fetch his suitcase from the lost and found. Teo could go there. He was bulletproof.
Truman dropped his sunglasses from his hair to save his eyes from the glare off the hotels. Rio hadn't changed much. The life looked a little worse, but the jokes were a little better. It was probably the best you could hope for.
The Copacabana Palace Hotel was a colossal pink wedding cake of a building in the very center of the arc of Copacabana beach. Its twenty tiers of ornate balconies overhung the sidewalk where, in the evening, a platoon of stately mulatta whores patrolled; in its horseshoe driveway, street boys shined hubcaps, and helmeted soldiers clutched the bullet clips of Uzis and glared at Truman's taxi when it arrived.
At the front desk, a handsome, blonde manager wearing the hunting jacket of an English gamekeeper found for Senhor Truman of the well-regarded Wandering You Travel Company the very last room on the oceanfront.
"And Senhor Truman's bags?" he asked, clasping his hands in prayer.
"Misplaced in transit," said Truman.
"Then you must let us keep after the airline for you. You need only to leave the baggage checks with the concierge," he said, in English.
"But everything was lost," said Truman, in Portuguese. "The baggage checks, too."
"What a pity. Truly. But it would still be our pleasure to, you know, pester them until they are recovered," he went on, in English.
"You really must not to bother about that. But I do have fanny bags."
Truman unstrapped his loaded pouches, swung them up onto the counter, and kept a hand on them. "Precious little books. Could you, you know, safe-keep them in the vault? And of course, you utilize double keys?"
Truman sealed the pouches in a large Kraft envelope, double-locked them in a vault in the manager's office, pocketed the tiny jewel of a key, hardly larger than his thumbnail, handed over his passport, and started for the elevator.
"Ah, Senhor Truman, forgive me, but there is one more thing. We have been requested for you to contact Senhor Moses DeVoto himself, in Boston. Would Senhor Truman care to speak to Senhor Moses now?" The manager slid a phone halfway across the counter.
Truman studied the phone's reflection in the marble and then he shook his head and smiled wistfully. "Ah, this worrywart brother of mine. First, he worries that my plane will land softly; then he worries that I have not worn my suntan lotion and that I have eaten too many pasteis from the sidewalk venders. It's a wonder he ever lets me travel alone. Everyone should have such a brother. But you should not worry your head about him. How could I ever forget about Senhor Moses?"
Truman smiled his way to the elevator. Upstairs, he called Teo's number, kicked off his shoes, and walked the phone between the oriental rugs. While waiting, he looked for Teo's father's number in the big, floppy Rio phone book, but it wasn't listed. Of course.
He looked at the pictures in the magazine he'd lifted at the airport. There was Ronald Biggs, the retired train robber, pressing against a bare-breasted girl at a Carnival ball, a bottle in each hand. Blissful Ronald Biggs, Lord of the Royal Rail. He hadn't filled out any customs declaration when he hauled his booty to Brazil. Truman might even touch glasses with Railroad Ronald one festive night. Rio was a very small city if you had an influential friend.
Teo should be back from the airport by now. He'd be pissed that Truman had run out on him, but not too pissed to stop him from getting his gringo friend inside some difficult doors. Truman wanted to see Teo's reaction when he described how he'd emptied the company safe while Moe watched. Teo would congratulate him for ending his long career as his brother's sucker.
He paused before a big mirror and gazed at the face that faced him. Was that what a sucker looked like? Was it the pleading lines at the corners of the eyes? Was it the mouth, permanently curled into an apology, or the shoulders sloped for a burden? He searched the face for signs of a sucker, but it was planed, handsome, an Eagle Scout face, a cartoon Superman—dimples, fishhook curl, everything but the tights.
A woman answered the phone, speaking a rapid Portuguese. No, Senhor Teodoro was not at home. Teo was always at the university on such a day as today, but no, she was not allowed to say if he was at the airport or anywhere else. Would the gentleman give his name and state if he would be coming to lunch? Lunch was always exactly at twelve. You could set your clock to it. He suspected that, yes, he would probably be coming to lunch. Well, this was a free country but she thought he should ask Senhor Teodoro first before he invited himself to lunch like that. Teo once lived in the same room as the gentleman at college? Well, she didn't know about that, but if it was her, she would still ask Senhor Teodoro first. She was not tolerant of Truman's accented Portuguese, but she became more tolerant after Truman left her with his hotel and room number.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Small, Perfect Placeby Arnold Gordenstein Copyright © 2011 by Arnold Gordenstein. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
