“It’s … ,” she said, wondering.

“The wrong Brazil,” Vitor said. “They were striking set after the shoot, and it was all a dreadful kerfuffle and someone thought it was the shipping destination. ”

Vitor was of a generation whose duties and obligations went beyond those of alt dot families and honored still the carioca tradition of providing a bed and a beer for a night or a year and asking no questions. He had flung open his little shop of kitscheries to Marcelina, blown up the air mattress for her in the box room cluttered with boxes of old movie magazines and soccer programs, and when she had asked if there was a place where she could see her apartment without being seen, had without a word unlocked the door at the end of kitchen and ushered her through into the only true magic that Rio still knew. Marcelina had always wondered where Vitor had found the art deco treasures that had so perfectly topped off the interiors in Kitsch and Bitch. His apartment, odd-proportioned, impractical rooms, strange staircases, and inteerior balconies, was the converted foyer of a lost cinema, a jewel box of the 1940s smothered in cheap, shoving blocks like a forest tree within a strangler fig. Beneath the vaulted ceiling all the old movies had come to die. Props, sets, flats, lighting rigs, and costumes, entire World War Two fighter aircraft, pieces of ocean liner, cafes, and casas were jammed and piled together.

“They put everything in here, just in case they ever needed it again,” Vitor said as he led Marcelina up to the top gallery. “And then someone locked the door and walked away and everyone forgot about it until I did a bit of digging into the Jornal records. Mind your step there, the damp’s got in.”

There’s a program idea in here somewhere, Marcelina had thought; and it was grounding, it was sanity, it was the ineluctable truth of the trivial. There was a sun still in the sky and Jesus on a mountain. Now, even as she laid down the surreal shoe-hat, she gave a little cry: perched on a polystyrene head, all waxén pineapples and bananas be-dusted, was the original tutti-frutti hat.

“Here’s a good place.” Vitor opened a door into blinking, blinding light; a small room one side of which was a great circular window, leaded as if with vines. He patted a wicker chair. “You can see everything from up here, and no one will see you because no ever looks up. I’ll bring you tea by and by.”

It was a fine belvedere, part of a former bar, Marcelina theorized, commanding a sweep of street life: the convenience store, the two bars, the kilometric restaurant and the dry cleaners, the video store and the Chinese restaurant, and the lobbies of thirty apartment blocks, her own among them. So near, so secret. How many times, she wondered, might Vitor have watched her comings and goings? A freeze of fear: might her enemy have watched from this very seat and noted down her routines? Vitor would not have known; Vitor had met her already, when she snubbed him on the street, and had not known the difference. Paranoia. Paranoia was understandable.

Once, twice, three times Marcelina jerked herself awake, nodding into a doze in the comfortable, dusty warmth of the cupola. Investigative work, surrveillance, had never been her thing. Running around with cameras and sound booms, PDAs and release forms; that was the game. Vitor brought tea, twice. He never asked what she was doing there, watching the silver door of her apartment, never once mentioned her brief notoriety in the Sundays — a proper World Cup scandal had swept her into the center pages on all but the Globo papers. The old men and women came back from the beach. The street vendors worked the intersection. The bars put out tables and lit up televisions, a steady line of home-shifting workers went into the 7-Eleven and came out with bottled water and beer and beans. She learned the timetables of the metro trains arriving at Copacabana Station by the pulses of pedestrians down the streets. She saw Vitor take his accustomed seat by the street, order his tea, and open his paper. Friends and acquaintances stopped to chat for a moment, a minute, an hour. That looks a good life , Marcelina thought. Uncomplicated, investing in relations, humane and civilized. Then she thought, You’d be bored bored bored within half an hour. Give me Supermodel Sex Secrets and How to Make Love Like a Porn Star.

She could procrastinate no longer. Marcelina called her mother.

“Hi. It’s me. Don’t hang up. Are you all right? Are you okay? Have you been, you know? Don’t hang up.”

“Iracema’s very hurt. I can’t even begin to say how hurt she is; Gloria too, and me, well I’m more disappointed than anything. Disappointed and surrprised; it’s not like you, why did you do a thing like that?” An edge of rasp in the voice, a three-day vodka hangover simmering off.

Ask her, ask her now; you have your opening. All the shadow-lengthening afternoon she had toyed with tactics, openings and moves, feints and concesssions, the edged tools from her box of professional instruments but ultimately hinging around the one strategic problem: to apologize and call later with the Hard Question, or to say it once and for all.

Marcelina decided.

“I know you won’t believe me if I say it wasn’t me — and I know I should just have apologized there and then. I don’t know why I started that arguument, bur I did and I’m sorry.” This much is true. Pleading guilty to a lesser charge. Another sharp little tool of the information trade. “You’ve probably seen the stuff in the paper by now.”

“Are you all right? Is everything okay?”

Are you a liar and a hypocrite? Marcelina asked herself. So long and so old and so tired it’s become truth?

“Mum, this is going to sound strange — maybe even the strangest thing I’ve ever said — but, am I the only one?”

Dead air.

“What, love? I don’t understand. What are you talking about?”

“I mean, is there…” The sentence hung unfinished. Marcelina heard her mother’s voice squawking, “What what what?” Standing in the open doorway of the apartment block applying lippy, closing a little Coco bag, the door swinging softly, heavily shut behind her. Her. The one. The evil twin. “Got to go Mum bye I love you.”

Marcelina dashed through the dark loom of the gallery knocking over dummies, sending costumes rocking on their rails. She jumped over the rotten woodwork, took the stairs two at a time. Lilac evening had poured into the streets; lights burned; people stared as she ran past them. Where where where? There. Marcelina ran the intersection; cars jolted to a halt, aggresssively sounded horns.

“Darling… ,” Vitor called after her.

Good suit. Good heels, confident heels — she can see them snapping at the sidewalk twenty, nineteen, eighteen people ahead of her. She walks like me. She is me. Left turn. Where are you going? Do you live within a spit of my home; have you lived here for years without my knowing, our paths and lives always that step out of synchronization; the two Marcelinas? Fifteen, fourteen people. Marcelina shouldered through the evening strollers, the dog-walkers, the power walkers. She could see her now. A little heavier? Hands a little broader, nails unsophisticated. Ten, nine, eight people. I’m behind you now, right behind you, if you looked around right now you would see me. Me. And Marcelina found that she wasn’t afraid. No fear at all. It was the game, the burn, the car lifted on the Rua Sacopa, the pictures coming together in the edit, the pitch when they get it, see it, when it all opens up in front of them; the moment when idea becomes incarnate as program.

I am behind you now.

Marcelina reached out to touch her twin’s shoulder. “Excuse me.”

The woman turned. Marcelina reeled back. This was no twin. A twin she would have known for its differences, its imperfections, the subtle variations spun out of the DNA. This was herself, precise to the moles, to the hair, to the slight scar on the upper lip, to the lines around the eyes.