Marcelina had done Daime — something as like it as spit — two years ago in a co-pro for the National Geographic Channel: World’s Wackiest Religions. It sure beat Catholicism. She watched the Madonna wannabe and the two telenovela stars puke ecstatic jets onto the floor. It beat Kaballah too, for that matter. She wondered idly who had the cleaning contract. There was not enough money in Brazil to pay her to clean up hallucinogenic vomit.

She felt watched and looked over her shoulder to see Scary Eyes leave the court. Almost she seized it, demanded, “Hey, what gives?” She shivered. In this futsal court anything could happen: she had already experienced the power of the Daime. She hoped it was the Daime.

She waited until the mass had ended, the worshipers hauled to their feet, their soiled, fouled whites stripped off and stuffed into bin bags and the people sent into the world in peace. You’re going to let them drive in that condition? she thought. The police of Recreio dos Bandeirantes had more important tasks than hauling in cosmic white folk who could pay the jeitinho anyway: the task of keeping the favelas bottled up. Marcelina stepped over the plastic as the ekedis rolled the foul sheeting into the center of the court. The bateria packed its drums.

“Mr. Bento?”

The bença had heavy wizard’s eyebrows, which he flashed in genuine welcome.

“My name’s Marcelina Hoffman. I’m a producer with Canal Quatro.” She gave the bença a card; he passed it to an egun. “Feijão.”

A different eyebrow flash now.

“Ah, yes, of course. He called me to say you would call. I hadn’t thought it would be at a mass.”

“I’m trying to make a program where we find Moaçir Barbosa and forrgive him for the Maracanaço.” She almost believed the lie herself now. “Feijão told me that Barbosa had associations with this terreiro. I came along because I hoped I might run into him here.”

“You won’t find Barbosa here.”

Marcelina’s hope reeled as if it had taken a meia lua de compasso she had not the malicia to anticipate.

’’I’m sorry, Ms. Hoffman, that you’ve had a wasted journey.”

“Feijão said he had been involved with this church some years ago.”

“Feijão says too much. As you’ve probably guessed, Feijão and I do not see eye-to-eye on many things.”

Marcelina’s investigative senses raced: some scandal between the former Fluminense physio and the leader of a successful, middle-class, and assuredly wealthy Daime church? The feeling of ideas spinning around her like a storm of leaves was an old demon, Saci Pererê with his one leg and red hat and pipe, the imp of perverse and inverse of Nossa Senhora da Valiosa Producão: every time an idea was bounced her mind would race in compensation, leaping, snatching whatever idea came within her grasp to prove to herself that she was still creative, that she still had it.

“Do you know where he might have gone?” The bença was gray stone.

“At least could you tell me if he’s alive or dead?”

“Ms. Hoffman, we’re finishing up here.”

Teams of ekedis tackled the futsal court with mops and buckets.

Marcelina fantasized coercing the information from Bença Bento. You lie, old man, tell me where he is. She could probably take the Bucket Brigade, but girls with pants tucked into boots and light automatic weapons were a league apart. Heitor’s first rule of television: never get killed for a TV show.

She wasn’t beaten.

She could hear the high song in her inner ear of near tears, that she had not heard since the first time she went into the roda full of jizz and jeito and was humiliated in front of the fundação by a sixteen-year-old.

She would find a way around. She would find Barbosa.

Her malicia and the taxi driver’s professional jeito jerked at the same moment on Avenida Sernambetiba: her glance over her shoulder; his lingering look in the mirror. There is a sick vertigo when the pattern of traffic resolves into the certainty that you are being followed. Innocence becomes stupidity; every action is potential treachery. You feel those headlights like thumbs at the base of your skull. In the backseat of your cab you have anywhere to go and nowhere to arrive because they will be behind you. You don’t look — you daren’t look, but you begin to impute character and motivation. Who are you, what do you want, where do you expect me to lead you? You enter an almost telepathic communication, a hunter’s empathy: Do you know that I know! If you did, would that be enough to make you peel out and go away?

Marcelina had been followed once before, tailgated in a crew car on the Love Trials: Test Your Fiance shoot by a jealous bride-to-be of one of the conntestants. Production security had pulled her in, but Marcelina had shivered for hours afterward, her city suddenly full of eyes. There had been nothing remotely Miami Vice about it.

“Can you see who’s driving?” Marcelina asked.

“It’s a cab,” the driver said. She could see his eyes scanning in the rearview mirror. She knew every driver in the Canal Quatro taxi firm by his or her eyes.

“Give me the number. I’ll call them and tell them one of their drivers is harassing me.”

“He’d get fired.”

“And I care?”

“I can’t see the number anyway,” the driver muttered. “There’s someone in the back.”

“Man or woman?”

“I am trying to drive this thing as well, you know.”

Marcelina was convulsed by a sudden shiver. The boys down in SFX had once turned a wing of the Canal Quatro building into a haunted house for a Halloween party. Her flesh had crawled; she had been seized by inexplicable, disabling anxiety. She had feared what was in the locked storeroom at the end of the corridor. It had all been a clever trick of infrasound, air currents, and subtly distorting perspectives. But this was the pure shudder of irrational dread. In that car was the thing that haunted her, all her sins drawn out of the hills and beaches, the bays and curving avenues of her city and made flesh. In that taxi was the anti-Marcelina, and when they met, they would annihilate each other.

Stop it. You’re still flashing back to the herbal tea. Or maybe they put something into the air at the terreiro.

“How far back is he?” she asked the driver.

“About five cars.”

“Head up into Rocinha.”

The driver drifted across lanes onto the Auto-Estrada Lagoa-Barra.

Marcelina risked a glance behind her. The hunting taxi slid out of the traffic onto their tail, still keeping a chaperoned distance of five cars. You are in your TV show now. This is Getaway: ultimate reality television. But I will get you , Marcelina thought. Rocinha butted with the jarring abruptness of an artificial limb against the million-real apartment towers of São Conrado. The great favela unfolded like a fan of jeweled lights across the rocky saddle between the great city forest of Tijuca and the sheer rock peaks of Pedra Dois Irmãos. The cheek-to-cheek impromptu apartment blocks, some several stories tall, were built to within meters of the mouth of the Gavea Tunnel. The military police had a permanent checkpoint at the flyover by the Largo da Macumba flyover: two armored riot-control vehicles, a half dozen young people in the light chestnut of the military police standing around eating fast food from the bar across the road. Same expressions of boredom and anger she had seen in the parking lot security at the Barguinha; same pants tucked into boots. Much bigger guns.

“Pull in there.”

They looked up as one as the cab drew in to the side of the road ahead of the lead APC. Edgy times. They had only just succeeded in pushing the favelados back into their slums. Construction machinery lined the edge of the street, shuttered for the night with galvanized plates over the glass and guarded by private security. Another favela wall. A tall twenty-something male cradled his assault rifle and sauntered toward the cab. Marcelina switched on her camera phone. A photograph would prove it. Here it came. Here it came.