“So,” Mestre Ginga said. “What did you notice about the book?”

The car had taken off like a jet from the side of the street, and in the daze and confusion and the shock but above all the single, searing icon of her face, her face, her own face behind the knife, all Marcelina could think to say was, “I didn’t know you owned a car.”

“I don’t,” said Mestre Ginga, crashing gears. “I stole it.” It soon became clear that he didn’t drive either, blazing a course of grace and havoc between the taxis on Rua Barata Ribeiro, scraping paint-thin to the walls of the Tunel Novo, leaping out in a blare of horns into the lilac twilight of Botafogo. “I mean, how hard can driving be if taxi drivers do it?”

Marcelina saw the glowing blue free-form sculpture that crowned Canal Quatro appear above the build-line. It was a reassurance and a sorrowing psalm, a promised land from which she was exiled. She breathed deep, hard, the calming, powering intake of air that gave her such burning strength in the roda or the pitching room.

“I need a few things explained to me.”

Into Laranjeiras now, under the knees of the mountain.

“Yes, you do,” said Mestre Ginga, leaning back in his seat and steering one-handed. “It’s knowing where to start. We’d hoped that you wouldn’t get involved, that we could handle the admonitory before you learned anything, but when the bença was murdered, we couldn’t hold off.”

“That was you at the terreiro.”

“You always were too clever to be really smart,” Mestre Ginga said.

Familiar streets around Marcelina, they were heading up to the fundação. And you still have a Yoda complex. “I’ve been keeping an eye on you ever since that clown Raimundo Soares sent you to Feijão. If he’d kept his mouth shut … But after the split with the bença he felt aggrieved. It should have been him got cut up; then we wouldn’t have been in this mess.”

“Wait wait, what is this mess anyway?”

Onto the corkscrew road, scraping the ochre and yellow-painted walls of the compounds.

“You want to be down a gear,” Marcelina said, troubled by the knocking, laboring engine. “You’re taking it too low.”

“And since when have you been Rubens Barrichello?”

“I watch my taxi drivers. So; that woman with the knife, who was she?”

“Who did it look like she was?”

“Me.”

“Then that’s who she was. There’s a way to explaining this that makes sense. Otherwise, trust me, in this game nothing is coincidence.”

Then the stolen Ford drew up before the graffitied walls of the fundação with its brightly colored, rumbling, happy capoeiristas; and Mestre Ginga, with a haste and tension Marcelina had never seen in him before, unlocked the gates and showed her round the back into the patriotic kitchen.

“The book’s some kind of expedition journal by an eighteenth-century French explorer on the Amazon. I didn’t read very much of it; I find that old stuff kind of hard to read.”

“I didn’t ask what it was. I asked you, what did you notice?”

“Well, it’s been rebound several times, and the contents are handwritten but they’re not original, I suspect; the illustrations inside the cover had coded wtiting on them, and knowing the way Brazil was in the eighteenth century, I reckon it’s a good guess that it was originally written in code as well.”

“Good guess. Anything else.”

“Like I said, I didn’t read much of it. Now, I’m sure this old eighteenth-century book has something to do with my evil double trying to kill me, but it might be a whole lot simpler if you just got to the point.”

“Anything else.”

Marcelina shrugged; then a realization of strange, a sense of cold wonder, shivered through her. In the blossom-perfumed heat of Mestre Ginga’s kitchen, she saw the gooseflesh lift the fine, blonde hairs on her forearm.

“There was a plague, a plague of horses.” She knew the look on Mestre Ginga’s face; so many times she had seen it in the roda as he squatted in the ring, leaning on his stick. Go on, my daughter, go on. “All the horses, the donnkeys, even the oxen, they were wiped out by the plague. That never happpened. It’s fiction, it’s a story.”

“No, it’s true. It’s a history. It’s just not our history.”

“This is insane.”

“Lick the book,” Mestre Ginga ordered. “Pick it up and just touch the tip of your tongue to it.”

Sense of cold wonder became vertiginous fear. Favors and privileges had flowed around the Organ Queen of the Beija-Flor, one of them free and unlimmited access to the private pool and beach of the Ilha Grande Hotel at Arpoador, the rocky point between the golden curves of Copacabana and Ipanema. Dalliances and liaisons blew through the airy corridors and cloisters, but the children who splashed round the rocks were as oblivious to this as they were to satellites. The big thrill was the Leaping Point, a five-meter rock that overhung a Yemanja-blue plunge pool: a hold of the nose, a quick cross, and down like a harpoon into the clear cold water. Marcelina — age eight — had always envied the bigger girls who filled their swimsuits and the gawky boys who could make the leap. For hot holiday weeks she had tried to call up the courage to go up on to the Leaping Point, and then at the last day of summer before school resumed she had worked up sufficient force of soul to climb up the rock. Her mother and sisters, racked out on the wooden sun loungers, waved and cheered, Go on go on go on! She crossed herself. She looked down. The deep blue water looked back up into her soul. And she couldn’t do it. There was swallowing madness down there. The climb back down the rock-cut steps, backward, feeling her way one hand, one foot at a time, was the longest walk of her life.

Marcelina looked into the book. The golden eye of the frog held her.

Where would the walk back down from this painted sanctuary take her? Not back to any life she could recognize. The old capoeiristas, the great mestres and corda vermelhas, taunted her with their jeito. Our Lady of Production Values, who is our Lady of Jeito, aid me.

Marcelina lifted the book to her face and touched the eye of the golden frog with the tip of her tongue. And the book opened the room opened the city opened the world opened.

Marcelina lifted a hand. A thousand hands bled off that, like the feedback echo of visual dub. The table was a Church of All Tables, the green and blue cabinets a Picasso of unfolding cubes. And Mestre Ginga was a host of ghosts, an Indian god of moving limbs and heads. The book in her hand unfolded into pages upon pages within pages, endless origami. Voices, a choir of voices, a million voices, a million cities roaring and singing and jabbering at once. Marcelina reached for the table — which table, which hands — and rose to her feet through a blur of images. Then Mestre Ginga was at her side, prising open her mouth, pouring strong, hot, startling black coffee down her throat. Marcelina coughed, retched up bile black cafezinho and was herself again, lone, isolate, entire. She dropped into the aluminum kitchen chair.

“What did you do to me?”

Mestre Ginga ducked his head apologetically.

“I showed you the order of the universe.”

Marcelina slung the book across the table. Mestre Ginga caught it, squared it neat to the end of the galvanised tin top.

“You drugged me!” She accused him with a finger.

“Yes. No. You know my methods. Your body teaches.” Mestre Ginga sat back in his chair and laughed. “And you accuse me?”

“There’s a difference. That was a spiked book.”

“The book is bound in the skin of the curupairá, the sacred golden frog.” Marcelina had been to the Amazon to research Twenty Secret Ways to Kill Someone and had seen the murderous power of brightly colored forest frogs.

“You could have killed me.”

“Why should I do that? Marcelina, I know what you think of me — you don’t have anywhere near as much malicia as you think, but believe me when I say, what you do have, you are going to need. Every last drop of it. So stop thinking stupid and start acting like a malandro, because stupid is going to get not just you killed but everyone else around you.”