Carioca Fletch Read Online Free PDF Page A

it.”
    “Come, Teo!” Toninho exclaimed. “The paintings! We came to see your new paintings!”
    One by one, Teo placed the paintings on the easel and let his guests study, enjoy them. They were by Marcier, Bianco, Portinari, Teruz, di Cavalcanti, Virgulino. For the most part they were clear, even bold, in the bright, solid earth colors. Especially did Fletch like one of a mother and child, another of a child with a cage. All the rhythms and colors and feelings and mysteries of Brazil were in the paintings, to Fletch.
    Later, Fletch sat on the divan next to the sleepy Otavio Cavalcanti.
    “You like the paintings?” Otavio asked.
    “Very much.”
    “Better than the museum building?” Otavio smiled. “You are a North American. Everyone expects your passion to be for buildings and computers and other machines.”
    “Yes.”
    “Teo perhaps has the best collection, now that the museum is just a wonderful building again.”
    “He must be careful of fire.”
    To that, Otavio did not respond.
    “Perhaps you can tell me this,” Fletch said to Otavio. “Getting dressed tonight, looking for a shoe, I discovered a small carved stone under my bed.”
    Otavio raised one eyebrow.
    “A small stone. It was carved into a toad. A frog.”
    Otavia sighed.
    “Why would the maid put a stone toad under my bed?”
    Slowly, heavily, Otavio Cavalcanti lifted himself off the divan. He went to the bar and got himself a Scotch and water.
    “Come on.” Laura samba-walked across the room, holding her hands out to Fletch. He sat alone on the divan, thinking of
Ilha dos Caicaras
. He was thinking of himself as
Ilha dos Caicaras
, asmall island in the lagoon. “I worked enough. I played a little concert. Let’s go with the Tap Dancers.”
    “Where are they going?”
    Otavio was drinking alone at the bar.
    “Seven-oh-six. Toninho wants us to go with them. To hear the music. To dance.”
    “Everyone?”
    “Just you and me. And the Tap Dancers.”
    Fletch got up from the divan. “Why do I keep asking your father questions? Great scholar. I have never gotten an answer yet.”
    Laura glanced at her father at the bar. “Come on. If you have foolish questions, the Tap Dancers will have foolish answers for you. You’ll get along fine together.”

Five
    “Toninho must always make an entrance,” Laura said in the dark nightclub. “I think he does so on purpose.”
    “Do you really think so?” Fletch mocked.
    Fletch and Laura had driven in his yellow two-seater MP convertible directly from the sidewalk in front of da Costa’s house to the sidewalk in front of 706.
    The Tap Dancers had disappeared in their own black four-door Galaxie.
    At the door, Laura spoke to a young waiter, and instantly three tables for two were pushed together for them. Of course the band in the club was playing. The music would be nonstop. As soon as Laura and Fletch sat at the table, a waiter brought a bottle of whiskey with a marked strip of tape down its side, a pitcher of water, a bucket of ice and many glasses.
    “What did you tell the waiter?” Fletch asked through the sound of the drums.
    “That the Tap Dancers are coming.”
    “They are that famous?”
    “Everyone loves the Tap Dancers.”
    “They’re sleek.”
    “Yes. They’re sleek.”
    In a moment, they appeared in the door. Each wore the mask of a cat over his face. There were four girls with them.
    Even without making noise, they soon had everyone’s attention. They began to sniff up and down the walls, along the tables, through a foreign lady’s bouffant, curious about everything, until they found their own table.
    Even the man who was singing at the moment laughed. The sound of his laughter through the amplifier in the middle of a song was delightful.
    As the catlike Tap Dancers found their table and sat down, even those who were dancing applauded them.
    One squeezed in beside Fletch and took off his mask. Toninho. Fletch expressed the appreciation of having been tricked that he had