“He must be a very old man by now,” the Black Plumed Bird said. “Eighty-five,” said Celso at once.

“It’s an interesting idea, but is it Canal Quatro to hold an old man up to ridicule and humiliation? Is this just pelourinho by television?”

Yes , Marcelina wanted to scream. Nothing is more Canal Quatro than the whipping post, the pillory, the branding iron. It’s what we love most, the suffering of others, the freak show. Give us torment and madness, give us public dissections and disgust, give us girls taking their clothes off. We are a prurient, beastly species. They knew it in the eighteenth century; they knew the joy of public disgrace. If there were public executions, Canal Quatro would run them prime time and rule the ratings.

“It’s a chance for us to get closure on something that still festers, fifty years on. We’ve won since, but not when it really mattered, on our own soil, in our own stadium, in front of our own people.”

Adriano nodded. Lisandra had folded a page from her origami book into two red rabbits, fucking. She jiggled them in the edge of Marcelina’s vision.

“No, I like this,” the director of programming announced. “It’s edgy, noisy, divisive — we’d run an SMS guilty/innocent vote. It’s absolutely Canal Quatro. IPTRB.”

It presses the right buttons , Marcelina guessed.

“List shows have always performed well for us,” the Black Plumed Bird said, inclining her head a degree toward Lisandra. “All-Time Greatest Seleção would get people talking.” Celso had folded a sheet from his book into a green penis, which he slowly erected in Lisandra’s direction.

“No, thank you all,” Adriano said, pushing himself back a fraction from the glass table. Anticipation cracked around the room like indoor lightning. “I knew you’d do it. Okay, IRTAMD.”

I’m Ready to Announce My Decision.

“The universe has ten to the one hundred and twenty calculations left to perform,” said Heitor, feet on his desk in his corner office, gazing out at the traffic headed beach-ward and the rectangle of gold and blue on blue at its end, like a flag of jubilee. “Then it all stops and everything ends and it’s dark and cold and it goes on expanding forever until everything is infinitely far apart from everything else. You know, I am sure I’m developing a wheat allergy.”

“You could say, ‘Well done, Marcelina, congratulations, Marcelina, killer pitch, Marcelina, I’ll take you out and buy you champagne at the Cafe Barrbosa, Marcelina.’’’

The newsroom was accustomed to Marcelina Hoffman bursting out of scruffy, bitchy Popular Factual into their clean, focused atmosphere of serious journalism like a cracked exhaust muffler, striding thunder-faced between the rows of hotdesks to Heitor’s little sanctum where he contemplated his role as the bringer of bad tidings to millions and the futility of the news media in general. The door would close, the rants would start, the stringers would put their heads down or look up holidays online. So when she came in grinning as if she had done six lines off a toilet seat, small tits pushed out and golden curls bouncing, the newsroomers were momentarily flustered. No yells from Heitor’s office. Everyone in the building, let alone the eighth floor, knew they were occasionally fucking; the mystery was why. A few understood that a relationship can be born out of a necessity not to have sex with anyone who needed to have sex with you. They kept the insight to themselves. They feared they would have to play that card themselves someday.

“Fully funded development and a complete proposal in two weeks moving to a commission green light before the end of the month. Am I fucking hot or what?”

Heitor took his feet off his desk and turned toward Marcelina, seemingly filling two-thirds of his office, capoeira queen, haloed in success.

“Well done, Marcelina.”

He did not hug her to his big, bear body in its gray suit. It was not that kind of relationship.

“What are your shifts like this afternoon?” Cafe Barbosa: always a sign somewhere. Thank you, Our Lady of Production Values.

“Early evening bulletin and the main seven o’clock.”

Heitor the depressive news reader was a media joke far beyond Canal Quatro, but Marcelina knew that his sweet, contemplative melancholy was not caused by the constant rain of sensationalist, violent, celebrity-obsessed news that blew through his life, but because he felt responsible for it. He was Death invited to a nation’s TV dinners. Marcelina, in contrast, was quite happy to pursue a career of insignificant triviality.

“Here’s what going to happen. I have an appointment with a needle. I go to the Cafe Barbosa with my team, my alt dot family and anyone else who wants to buy me a beer. You come round, we go on to Lapa. We go back to yours. I fuck the ass off you. Bur first, I need you to help me.”

“I thought there’d be a price.”

“The commission’s dependent on finding Barbosa. Do you know how I might go about that?”

“Well, I don’t … ”

“But you know someone who might.” The standard joke of journalists and lawyers.

“Try this guy.” Heitor inscribed a pink Post-it. “He can be a bit hard to find, but he knows Rio like no one else. Try catching him on Flamengo Beach, early.”

“How early?”

“Whatever you call early, earlier than that. He says it’s the beach’s best time.” Heitor turned away and grimaced as e-mail flurried into his in-box. “It’s bread, definitely. I’m going to give it up. You should read this.” A harddback book lay prone, praying on the desk. Heitor read aggressively, trying to find in printed pages ideas he might weave into an excuse for this mad world he found himself presenting twice a day. He pressed a book a week on Marcelina, who passed them on unread to Dona Bebel. Reading text was so static, so last century. “It’s about information theory, which is the latest theory of everything. It says the universe is just one huge quantum computer, and we are all programs running on it. I find that very comforting, don’t you?”

“Try and make it, Heitor. You need a lot of beer and hot hot sex.” He lifted a hand, absorbed with the incoming world.

Her car was not waiting outside on Rua Muniz Barreto. Marcelina looked up, Marcelina looked down, then went into reception.

“Did you call my taxi?”

“Called, came, went,” said Robson on the door, who was a glorious creature, tall, killer cheekbones, swimmer’s muscles, so black he glowed, and regularly voted Most Lickable in the Christmas Awards. Marcelina could not believe he was natural.

“What do you mean, went?”

“You tell me. You went off in it.”

“I went off in the taxi? I only just got here now.”

Robson looked at his hands in that way that people do when confronted by the publicly insane.

“Well, you came out of the elevator and said just what you said to me there now, ‘Did you call my taxi?’ And I said, yes, there it is outside, and you got in it and drove off.”

“I think that one of us is on very strong drugs.” It could be her. This could all be a guarana and speed flashback from the all-nighter. The pressure is off, you get the result of results, and your brain geysers like Mentos in Diet Coke.

“Well, I know what I saw.” The people who voted Robson Most Lickable had never spoken to him when riled, when a tone of camp petulance entered his voice.

“What was I wearing?” Marcelina said. Time was ticking. “Aw, fuck it, I’ll walk.”

Mysteries could wait. She had an appointment with the thin steel needle of love.

“Black suit,” Robson called after her. “You were in a black suit, and killer shoes.”