Across the room Marcelina’s cellular sang “Don’cha Wish Your Girlfriend Was Hot Like Me,” Brasiliero remix.

“Aren’t you going to get that?” A bone-deep media-ista, Heitor could be driven to high anxiety by an unanswered telephone.

“It’ll be the Black Plumed Bird.”

“I’ll get it for you.”

“No!” Then, gently, “I don’t want her to know you’re here. The papers … ”

“I can see the papers. You have to talk to her sometime.”

The SMS alert jabbered, a recording of a very high travesti raving at the Copa carnaval party about his upcoming surgery.

“Give me a sweatshirt or something, then.”

On the balcony Marcelina strode up and down in panties and a holey old hoodie. Across the lagoon the apartment blocks were a holy city of silver and gold; the last rags of early mist burned off the green hills, and fit girls were running on the lakeside loop. Heitor tried to read Marcelina’s hands.

“So?”

Marcelina dropped onto the leather sofa.

“Bad enough. She told me to take some unofficial leave; basically, I’m suspended on full pay.”

“They could have fired you on the spot.”

“She talked Adriano down from that. She’s giving me the benefit of the doubt that I didn’t send the e-mail, that it was some kind of industrial espionage or someone hacked my computer. I think I may have got it wrong about the Black Plumed Bird.”

“And the show?”

“Adriano thinks it may have done us some good. APRIGPR.”

“We don’t get his text speak down in News and Current Affairs.”

“All PR Is Good PR. He’ll wait until he sees if there’s a ratings backlash against Rede Gobo. I may get it yet.”

“There’s another call you need to make.” Heitor’s espresso machine filled the kitchen zone with shriekings and roarings.

“I know. Oh, I know.” Her mother would be drunk, would have been drinking slowly, steadily all night, one slow little vodka at a time, watching the mesh of headlights along the rainy avenues of Leblon. Frank Sinatra had turned away. It had always been nothing more than reflections from a glitterball. Your self shattered into a thousand spangles and mirrored back to you. “And I will make it. But I can’t stay here, Heitor.”

“Oswaldo has hinted that it might not be the best thing for my professsional objectivity. Stay as long as you need. I’m not Jesus.”

“It’s not about you. Can you understand that? It’s not about you. It’s just that, while she’s still out there, I need you to be able to trust me, and that can only happen if you know that if I call or e-mail or drop round, it won’t be me. It’ll be her and whatever she says will be a lie.”

“I’d know her. I interviewed a policeman once who worked with forged banknotes. I asked him how he learned to spot the fakes and he said, by looking at the originals. I’d know you anywhere.”

“Did Raimundo Soares know? Did any of the people she sambaed past at Canal Quatro know? Did my sisters and my own mother know? No, it’s safer this way.”

“And how will I know when it’s over?”

“I haven’t worked that out yet!” Marcelina snapped. “Why are you making this harder for me? I don’t know how any of this is going to work, but I do know that I am a very, very good researcher and it’s time for me to stop being the hunted and turn it all around and become the hunter. What am I hunting? Myself. That’s all I can say about it. Something that looks like me, sounds like me, thinks like me, knows what I’m going to do before I do it, and is absolutely dedicated to destroying me. Why, I don’t know. I’ll find that out. But I do know that if it looks like me and thinks like me and talks like me, then it is me. How, I don’t know either. You tell me — you’ve shelffuls of books out there on everything under the sun. You’ve got a theory for everything: give me one, anyone that makes any sense.”

“Nothing does make any sense.” Heitor sat heavily on the opposing creaking leather minimalist sofa-cube across the glass coffee table.

“That doesn’t matter. Do you want to see the DVD again and tell me that isn’t rea!?”

“Some error of timing?”

“Ask my entire development team. They were smoking my blow at the time.”

“Well, if your evil twin is barefaced enough to get deliberately caught on camera at Canal Quatro, why did she disguise herself at terreiro?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t her. Maybe there’s another player. I’ll find out.” Marcelina fiddled with her coffee cup. “Do you think I have an evil twin? Do you think my mother… ? She had her glittering career — she was Queen of Beija-Flor — and I always felt I was inconvenient. Could she have … no. Not even her at her most fucked up.…”

But it seduced, a great archetype: the twins separated at birth, one spun into the neon and sequins of the Copacabana; the other to obscurity hungry, and now she had returned to claim her birthright. Had she seen this in a telenovela once?

“Ask her,” Heitor said.

Perhaps the coffee, perhaps the psychotherapeutic arrangement of the sofas, perhaps just the bell-like clarity of a friend listening and asking the one quesstion that made it fall apart into brilliant facets. Suddenly the face in the freezeeframe, the papers scattered across the floor, were clear and simple. Of course there was no spirit-Marcelina woven out of stress and wisps of axé blowing between the morros. There was no magic in the hills or in the city: Heitor’s bleak philosophy allowed no magic into the world at all. No ghosts no Saci Pererés no doppelgangers no parallel universes. Just an old family secret come to take her due. But you don’t know Marcelina Hoffman. She is the capoeirista; she takes down the smart boys with jeito and malicia: she is the malandra.

She had dried her clothes at midnight in Heitor’s tumble dryer-his cleaner believed in laundry on a Monday and it was no use asking Heitor; white goods hated him. He could not even properly operate his microwave and certainly his oven had never been used. Her jeans were tight and stiff as she forced her way into them, the top shrunken to overclinginess and her shoes still damp, the insoles stained. She swung her bag over her shoulder.

“Where will you go?”

“I’ll find somewhere. Not home.”

“How will you let me know when you’ve done whatever it is you need to do?”

“You’ll know, newsboy.” She stood up on tiptoes to kiss Heitor, old big growly bear-man. So easy to stay among the books and the minimalist leather, the picture glass and the slinky little playsuits, so easy to drop everyything onto him and burrow down into his mass and depth. So dangerous. No one was safe until she had the mystery under her foot in the roda. “How exactly do you go about asking you mother, ‘Mum, do I have a secret twin sister you gave away at birth?’”

Heitor’s Blackberry chirruped. It was not the first time sex had been interrupted by his RSS headline feed. She felt him tighten against her, muscle armoring.

“What is it, big bear?”

“That guy you went to see at the terreiro.”

“Bença Bento?”

“He’s been found dead. Murdered. Cut to pieces in the night.” Heitor hugged her to him, that strong-gentle crush-fearful delicacy of big men. “You be careful, oh so careful.”

The hat was shaped like an enormous upturned shoe, the sole brimming low over the kiss-curl, the heel — solid, chunky, Cubano even — a brave crest. Marcelina lifted it with the reverence of the host.

“Go on, try it,” Vitor urged, his face silver-screen brilliant.

Marcelina almost laughed at her reflection in the long mirror, put her hands on her hips and struck vampish, Carmen Mirandaesque poses, pout pout. Mwah. Then the light shifted, as it did dramatically in this old dream-theater, and in the sudden chiaroscuro she saw the Marcelina Hoffman her mother had dreamed: a silvery, powered night-moth, the toast of the Copacabana stepping out of the deep dark of the mirror. Marcelina shivered and snatched off the hat, but the sun grew strong again through the glass roof and she saw in the flaking silvering a pair of silver wings, and silver muscle-armor — pecced and abbed and burnished — and there a bloated, chinoiserie horror-baby mask.