“Raimundo Soares. So how is that old bastard?”

“Doing a lot of fishing these days.”

Feijão poured herbal tea from a Japanese pot. It smelled of macerated forest.

“That’s the right answer. He called me, you know. He said you don’t know anything but you’re all right. I get a lot of media sniffing round after Barbosa — oh, you’re not the first by any means. I tell them he’s gone, he’s dead. I haven’t heard of him in ten years. Which is about right. But you’ve done it the right way.”

Our Lady of Production Values, whom Marcelina pictured as the Blessed Virgin crossed with a many-armed Hindu deity — those arms holding cammeras, sound booms, budgets, schedules — smiled from within her time-code halo. Feijão tapped a cigarette our of his pouch, an oddly sexual gesture.

“They all ended up here over the years, the black men of 1950. They’ll try and tell you that there’s no racism in Brazil; that’s shit. After the Maraacanaço, the blame fell heaviest on the black players; it always does. Juvenal, Bigode. Even Master Ziza himself, God be kind to him. Most of all, Barbosa. Niteroi is not Rio. That bay can be as wide as you want it.”

Feijão’s mezzanine-level apartment faced a view that only selling a successful business can afford. His walled patio was long and narrow, humid and riotous with flowering shrubs and vines tumbling over the walls. Jacarandas and a tumbling hibiscus framed Rio across the bay. Marcelina had reached around the planet in pursuit of the glittery and schlocky but had never been across the stilt-walking bridge to Niteroi. The Marvelous City seemed smaller, meaner, less certain; Niteroi the mirror to Rio’s preening narcissism.

Feijão sipped his tea.

“Great for the immune system. Raimundo Soares will tell you a hundred wonderful tales, but he’s full of shit. There’s only one of them true: fifteen years ago Barbosa went into a shop to buy some coffee and the woman beside him at the till turned around and shouted to all the customers, ‘Look! That’s the man who made all Brazil weep.’ I know that because I was there. After he retired he came to my gym because he wanted to stay in shape and because he knew me from the old days. Little by little he lost touch with all the others from 1950, but never me. Then he found religion.”

“What, like the Assembly of God?” It had become fashionable for sportsmen to turn crente, to thank the Lord Jesus for goals and medals and records they would previously have ascribed to saints and Mary.

“You didn’t listen.” Feijão ground out his cigarette butt under the sole of his Havaiana, immediately drew another. “I said found religion, not found God.”

In response to the cigarette, Marcelina drew her PDA.

“An umbanda terreiro?” The blacks were finding lily-white Jesus; the whites were finding Afro-Brazilian orixás. So Rio.

“You could try listening instead of rushing in with guestions. The Barquinha de Santo Daime.”

Marcelina held her breath. The Cursed Barbosa a convert to the Green Saint. The ratings would go into orbit.

“So Barbosa’s still alive,”

“Did I say that? You’re getting ahead of me again. He walked out of his apartment three years ago and no one has seen hide nor hair of him since, not even me.”

“But this Daime Church would know… I can find them.” Marcelina opened Google on her PDA. Feijão reached across the table and covered the screen with his hand.

“No no no. You don’t go rushing in like that. Barbosa has been in hell for longer than you’ve been alive, girl. There are few enough he trusted; you’re only sitting here in my garden because Raimundo Soares trusts you. I will talk to the Barquinha. I know the bença there. Then I will call you. But I tell you this, if you try and go around me, I will know.”

The thin, sun-beaten man drained his herbal tea and stubbed his cigaarette fiercely our in the porcelain bowl.

It was in the taxi as it arced back over the long, slender bowstring of the Niteroi Bridge that Marcelina, Googling images, realized she recognized the sacred vine. Psychotria viridis: it glossy oval leaves and clusters of red berries had set off Feijão’s view over the Marvelous City.

Aleijadão was riding an A-frame bicycle up the center of the Glass Menagerie, weaving in and out of the boxes of tapes and slumping pillars of celebrity magazines on wheels the size of industrial castors. He wobbled twice around Marcelina.

“What is that thing you’re on?”

“Do you like it? It’s the future of commuting.”

“On Rio’s hills? You want to try a tunnel at rush hour on that?”

“No, but it’s kind of cool. Folds up to the size of a laptop.” Aleijadão tried to throw and turn and almost came into the printer recycle box. His job was office monkey in the long, open-plan development office known as the Glass Menagerie. “Steering’s a bit tricky and it doesn’t half cut the ass off you. It’s the latest thing from that English guy, the one who invented the computer.”

Always: the latest thing. “Alan Turing? He’s — ”

“No, some other guy. Invented those things on wheels you sat in and pedaled: daleks? Hawking? Something like that?”

Days there were when Canal Quatro’s playfulness, its willingness to face into the breaking wave of the contemporary and ride it, thrilled and braced Marcelina; then there were the others when Canal Quatro’s relentless hunger for the new, for novelty, oppressed her, a shit-storm of plastic trivia; and knowingness and irony became grim and joyless.

Marcelina’s workplace Alt dot family looked up from their glass cubicles at the entrance of their iiber-boss. So much she could read from their lunches: at their desks, of course. Celso lifting sushi with the delicacy and deftness of professional rehearsal in private. Agnetta, as ever so completely dressed for the moment she had been known to have new shoes delivered to the office in order to wear them home that evening, chewed morosely on a diet lunch-replacement bar snack. Cibelle, the only one Marcelina respected in addition to fearing, picked apart a homemade bauru. She had been bringing them in every day. Homemade was the new sushi, she said. Cibelle understood how the trick was done, how to add your own little ripple to the crest of the hip and watch the chaotic mathematics of storms and power laws magnify it into a fashion wave. Already half of Lisandra’s production group were making their own lunches. Clever girl, but I know you.

“Oh my God, is this some thing like we’re all going to have to do now, change clothes at lunchtime?” Agnetta flapped.

“What are you talking about?”

“Like, when you were in just now you were in the suit and now you’re in the Capri pants.”

Marcelina shook her head. Eighty percent of what Agnetta said to her was incomprehensible.

“Any calls for me?”

“Same answer as five minutes ago,” Celso said, mixing wasabi. Marcelina held her hands out in a shrug of bafflement.

“What is this, National Freak Marcelina Hoffman Day?”

Then she saw Adriano break from his creative huddle with Lisandra and the Black Plumed Bird to beckon her with a lift of the finger, a raise of the eyebrows.

“That was a very funny e-mail. Someday someone will make a program like that and the ratings will be through the roof, but I don’t think it is Canal Quatro. In fact, if I thought you were seriously proposing a series where members of the public hunt down and assassinate favelados like some kind of Running Man show, I MBATC.”

Might Be a Tad Concerned.

“Ah, well, yeah…” Marcelina spluttered.

“In future, IMBAGI to pitch ideas through the regular creative channels.”

She returned blazing like a failed space-launch to her luv-cluster.

Lunches were set down in a flash.

“I don’t know whose idea of a joke that was, but nothing ever, ever goes out of this production team unless it’s cleared by me. Ever.”