Raimundo Soares slapped his thigh and rolled on his little fishing stool. He was a squat, broad-featured man, his bare arms powerfully muscled, his hair black by artifice rather than nature, Marcelina suspected. The Dawn Fishers smiled and nodded. They had heard his hundred stories hundreds of times; they were litany now.

“Now that’s a great film.”

“Heitor Serra said you might be able to help me with a program idea.” Marcelina sat in the just-cool sand, knees pulled up to her chest. Raimundo Soares was right; this was the beach’s best time. She imagined herself joining the shameless old sag-titted men in their Speedos and Havaianas, chest hair grizzled white, and the chestnut-skinned, blonde-streaked women, of a certain age but still in full makeup, all sauntering down for their morning sun sea and swim. No better, truer way to start the day.

A sweet idea, but her world was a tapestry of sweet ideas, most of which had no legs. Coffee and cigarette in the roof garden watching them all dandering back from the sea, leaving patters of drips on the sidewalks of the Copacabana. The TV professional habitually overidentifies with the subject. On UFO-Hunt she’d wanted to run off and live in a yurt selling patûa amulets to seekers.

“So how is the man? Still convinced life’s brutal, stupid, and meaningless?”

Marcelina thought of how she had left Heitor; tiptoeing around his death-rattle snores, dressing by the lights from the lagoa that shone through the balcony window of the Rua Tabatingüera apartment. He liked her to walk around naked in front of that window, in stocking and boots or the sheer bodysuit he had bought her, that she didn’t want to say cut the booty off her. And she enjoyed the anonymous exhibitionism of it. The nearest neighbors were a kilometer away across the lagoon. Most balconies fringing the lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas bore tripods and telescopes: let them take their eyefuls. She would never meet them. Heitor was excited by the voyeurism of being voyeured: the watchers would never know that the apartment in which that short loira woman paraded around like a puta belonged to the man who daily told them of riots and robberies, tsunamis and suicide bombings.

He had rolled over heavily with a growl, then woke. He had made it the Cafe Barbosa. There had been beer for Celso and the rest of her development team, Agnetta and Cibele; vodka and guarana for Marcelina; and vodka martinis for Heitor. They hadn’t gone dancing, and she hadn’t fucked the ass off him.

“Where are you going what the hell time is it?”

’’I’m going to the beach,” Marcelina said. The buzz of the guarana glowed through the vodka murk like stormlight. “like you said, it’s best early. Give me a call later or something.”

Like soldiers and flight crew, newsmen have the ability to seize any opportunity for sleep. By the time Marcelina reached the front door Heitor was emitting that strange, gasping rattle that at any time might break into words or cries. The short hallway was where he kept his library. Shelves would have reduced the space to a squeeze too tight for a big man in a shiny suit, so the books — random titles like Keys to the Universe, The Long Tail and the New Economy, The Fluminense Year Book 2002, The Denial of Death — were stacked up title on title into towers, some wedged against the ceiling, others tottering as Marcelina tiptoed past. One particularly heavy door-slam, perhaps after a bad news day, they would all come down and crush him beneath their massed eruditions.

“And over much much too soon,” Marcelina said. “Heitor said you might be able to help me find Moaçir Barbosa.”

The Brotherhood of Dawn Fishers went quiet over their reels.

“Maybe you should just tell me what the idea is,” Raimundo Soares said.

“We think it’s high time he was forgiven for the Fateful Final,” Marcelina lied.

“There’s a fair few people would disagree with you still, but I think it’s years overdue. There’d be a lot of interest in a program about the Maracanaço, still. Of course, I was too young to properly remember it, but there are a lot of people still remember that night in July and a whole lot more who still believe the legend. There’s a journo down in Arpoador, João Luiz, my generation, he got a print of the original film and recut it so it looks like the ball hits the post, then cut in footage from another game of Bigode clearing it. There’s a guy younger than you made a short movie a couple of years back abour this futebol journalist — I think he was based on me — who goes back in time to try and change the Fateful Final, but whatever he does, the ball still goes past Barbosa into the back of the net. I even heard this guy talking on some science show on the Discovery Channel or something like that about that quantum theory and how there are all these parallel universes all around us. The metaphor he used was that there are hundreds, thousands of universes out there where Brazil won the Fateful Final. Still didn’t understand it, but I thought it was a nice allegory. There’s a great story about Barbosa: it’s a few years after the Maracanaço, before it got to him and he drifted away. He gets a few friends from the old team around — all the black players, you know what I mean — for a barbecue. There’s a lot of beer and talk abour soccer and then someone notices that the wood in the barbecue is flaring up and sputtering and giving off this smell, like burning paint. So he looks closer, and it is burning paint. There’s a bit of wood still unburned, and its covered in white paint. Barbosa’s only chopped up the goallposts from the Maracana and used them for firewood.”

“Is it true?” Marcelina slipped off her shoes and buried her feet in the cool sand, feeling the silky grains run between her toes.

“Does it matter?”

“Do you know where he is?”

“Barbosa? No. He disappeared completely abour ten, fifteen years ago. He might even be dead. People still claim to see him in shopping malls, like Elvis Presley. He’s an old man; he’s been an old man for fifty years. If I thought you were going to do some hatchet job on poor old Barbosa, I wouldn’t give you the time of day. The poor bastard’s suffered enough. But this…”

“No, we wouldn’t do anything like that,” Marcelina lied for the second time.

“Even Zizinho’s dead now… There’s one left who might know. Feijão. The Bean.”

“Who’s he, a player or something?”

“You really don’t know anything about this, do you? Feijão was the physiotherapist, the assistant physiotherapist. He was still in training, his dad was on the CBD, as it was then before it became the CBF, and got him a job on the team. Basically all he did was keep the sponges wet in the bucket, but he was like a lucky mascot to the team; they used to ruffle his hair before they went down to the tunnel. Lot of good he was. He ended up team physio with Fluminense and then opened a little health club. He sold it and retired about five years ago; I met him while I was researching the Ronaldo book and the Society of Sports Journalists. Did you know I ended up in court in a libel case over the length of Ronaldo’s dick?”

He’s right , murmured the irmãos of the rod.

“The judge found for me, of course. If anyone would know, Feijão would. He’s over in Niteroi now; this is his number.” Raimundo Soares took a little elastic-bound reporter’s notebook from the hip pocket of his Bermudas and scrawled down a number with a stub of pencil. “Tell him I sent you. That way he might talk to you.”

“Thank you, Mr. Soares.”

“Hey, you’ll need someone to present it; who better than one of Brazil’s best writers and the last professional carioca?”

That’s him , chorused the fisher kings. He’s the malandro.

“I’ll mention it to the commissioner,” Marcelina said, her third lie. No cock crowed, but the float on Raimundo’s line bobbed under.