Now bells sounded from the basilica. The figures on the balcony moved with sudden activity, and a large canoe was pushed out from the line of mooring poles at the church-ship’s bow. Quinn read the inscription over the main portal, though he already knew what it must say: Ad maioram Dei Gloriam.

Silver rain woke Marcelina Hoffman. Her face and hair were dewed; her sleeping bag gleamed beneath a mist of fine droplets like the pupa of some extraordinary Luna moth. A ceiling of soft, ragged cloud raced above her face, seemingly low enough to lick. The morros were abruptly amputated, their tops invisible in the mist. Marcelina watched the streaming gray tear around the spines and quills of antennae and aerials that capped the taller apartment towers. She put out her tongue, a taste not a kiss, and let the warm drizzle settle on it. The noises from the street were subdued, baffled; car tires slushy on the wet, greasy blacktop. Gulls sobbed, hovering seen and unseen in the mist; the rain-sodden Copacabana lay beneath their yellow avaricious eyes. Raucous weather-prophets. Marcelina shivered in her bag; gulls calling had always disturbed her; the voice of the sea calling her out over its horizon: new worlds, new challenges.

Downstairs the apartment felt chill and abandoned. The furniture was cold to the touch, damp and unfamiliar; the clothes in the closets belonged to a previous, fled tenant. The apartment had reverted to its natural smell, that distinctive pheromone of place that had struck Marcelina with almost physical force the moment the agent had opened the door, that she had worked so hard to banish with scented candles and oil burners and coffee and maconha but that crept back, under doors through air-conditioning vents every time she left it for more than a few days. Marcelina made coffee and felt the kitchen watching her. Carpet-treading in your own house.

Her cellular, charging on the worktop, blinked. Message. Received 2:23. The number was familiar but evoked no name or face.

Bip.

A man’s voice raged at her. Marcelina almost threw the phone from her. It spun on the bare, almost surgically clean worktop, voice gabbling. Marcelina picked up the phone. Raimundo Soares, furious, more furious than she had thought possible for the Last Real Carioca. She killed the message and called back straightaway.

He recognized her number. Seven hours had not mellowed him; he was furious beyond even a hello good morning how are you?

“Wait wait wait wait, I understand you’re angry with me, but what is it you’re actually angry about?”

“What do you mean? Don’t you play any more stupid games with me. Bloody women you’re all the same, tricks and games, oh yes.”

“Wait wait wait wait.” How many times has she said these words in just seven days? “Pretend I don’t know anything, and start at the very beginning.” She could never hear those words without recalling her mother’s medley of hits from The Sound of Music , Samba-ized. Christ on crutches; it was Feijoada Saturday: feijoada and organ, the happy Annunciation of the blessed Iracema. But it was marvelous indeed how the mind reached for the ridiculous, the incongruous in dark and panic.

“Oh no, I’m not to fall for that soft-soap; I know how you reality TV people work. That e-mail; it’s all a joke at my expense, isn’t it? There’s probbably a camera over there watching me right now; you’ve probably even got one in my toilet so you can watch me scratching myself.”

“Mr. Soares, what e-mail are you talking about?”

“Don’t you mister me, don’t you ever mister me. I’ve heard of these things; people hit the wrong button and the e-mail goes out to someone it’s not supposed to; well, I saw it and I know your game. You may have made a fool out of me, but you won’t make a fool out of the people of Rio, oh no.”

“What was this e-mail?”

“You know, maybe you can sound all innocent, maybe you don’t know, seeing as how it was an accident. You wouldn’t deliberately have sent me the proposal for your Moaçir Barbosa show, would you?”

The native smell of her kitchen assaulted Marcelina, cloying and dizzying. There was no help in words here. She had done it. She had lied, she had betrayed, she had joyfully schemed to send an old man to the pillory to build her career. Our Lady of Production Values had averted her eyes. But there was mystery still.

“I didn’t send that e-mail.”

“Look, little girl, I’m no silver surfer, but even I can recognize a return e-mail address. You just think you’re so fucking clever, and we’re all so old and slow and you can just laugh at us. Well, I still know a few people in this town, you know’ You haven’t heard the last of this, not by a long long chalk. So you can fuck yourself and all your fucking TV people as well; I wouldn’t present your show for a million reis.”

“Mr. Soares, Mr. Soares, it’s important, what time…” Dead line. “What time did I send that e-mail?”

You never were going to present that show , Marcelina raged silently at the dead cellular. She knew it was a mealy little vice, her need to have the last word when her enemy had no possibility of reply. Not if you were the last fucking carioca on the planet. But it was bad, worse than she had ever known it. Christ Christ, Christ of Rio, Christ of the Hunchback Mountain with your arms held out the sea, Christ in the fog; help me now. Marcelina glanced at the clock on the microwave, perpetually eight minutes fast. She had just time to get to the office and then out to her mother’s.

Robson didn’t do Saturdays, and his replacement edgy-but-inclusive public-facing homosexual with the nickname Lampiao was new on the desk and asked Marcelina for her ID. She didn’t bite him in two. She would have need of him later.

The drizzle had steepened into full rain; streaks turned the Glass Menagerie into a strange tech jungle. The Sent Items folder on her workstation confirmed: proposal for Barbosa: Trial of the Century sent to raicariocao@wonderfish.br at 23:32 August fifth. While her alt dot family was singularly failing to comfort her. Proper passwords and logins and everything. Marcelina called up the security page and tabbed the change password button. One by one blobs vanished as she deleted them. New password? Her fingers halted over the keys halfway through mestreginga. She knows you. Every thought every reaction every detail and diary entry of your life. She knows you play capoeira. She knows your shoe size dress size playlists how many bottles of beer are in your fridge what kind of batteries you use in the Rabbit. In the streaming gray Marcelina hugged herself, suddenly chilled. That’s it, isn’t it? You’re in a program within a program; a pilot for an ultimate reality TV show: Make Marcelina Mad. Even now the cameras are swiveling to the direction of some dark control room. They’re all in on it: Ceiso and Cibelle and Agnetta, the Black Plumed Bird, even Adriano. They were never going to make your show; he just agreed at Blue Sky Friday because it’s part of the script: the clever clever comedy of a program maker who doesn’t realize she’s starring in her own show. The Girl Who Haunted Herself. Lisandra. That cow. She’d do it. She’d do anything to make it to CE. She’s laughing at you right now up in the gallery with a couple of APs and Leandro the editor.

It has to be all just a show. Any other theory is madness.

Marcelina pulled a book at random off her shelf, opened at page 113, typed the 113th word into the pulsing box. Testament. Good word. One unlikely to be stumbled upon at random in Canal Quatro.

Saturday Boy Lampião was SMSing in a blur of thumbs behind his desk. “Could you do me a favor?”