The Martini Shot

by George Pelecanos

  For the first few days, Moreno stayed close to his condominium, spending his mornings at the beach working on his local’s tan, watching impromptu games of soccer, and practicing his Portuguese on the vendors selling oysters, nuts, and straw hats. At one o’clock, his maid, a pleasant but silent woman named Sonya, prepared him huge lunches: black beans and rice, salad, mashed potatoes, and pork roasted and seasoned with tiempero, a popular spice. In the evenings, Moreno would visit a no-name, roofless café, where a photograph of Madonna was taped over the bar. He would sit beneath a coconut palm and eat a wonderfully prepared filet of fish, washed down with a cold Brahma beer, sometimes with a shot of aguardente, the national rotgut that tasted of rail tequila but had a nice warm kick. After dinner he would stop at the Kiosk, a kind of bakery and convenience market, and buy a bottle of Brazilian Cabernet, have a glass or two of that on the balcony of his apartamento before going off to bed. The crow of a nearby rooster woke him every morning through his open window at dawn.

  Sometimes Moreno passed the time leaning on the tile rim of his balcony, looking down on the activity in the street below. There were high walls of brick and cinder block around all the neighboring condominiums and estates, and it seemed as if these walls were in a constant state of repair or decay. Occasionally, an old white mare, unaccompanied by cart or harness, would clomp down the street, stopping to graze on the patches of grass that sprouted along the edges of the sidewalk. And directly below his balcony, through the leaves of the black curaçao tree that grew in front of his building, Moreno saw children crawl into the great canvas Dumpster that sat by the curb and root through the garbage in search of something to eat.

  Moreno watched these children with a curious but detached eye. He had known poverty himself, but he had no sympathy for those who chose to remain within its grasp. If one was hungry, one worked. To be sure, there were different degrees of dignity in what one did to get by. But there was always work.

  As the son of migrant workers raised in various Tex-Mex border towns, Juan Moreno had vowed early on to escape the shackles of his lowly, inherited status. He left his parents at sixteen to work for a man in Austin so that he could attend the region’s best high school. By sticking to his schedule of classes during the day and studying and working diligently at night, he was able, with the help of government loans, to gain entrance to a moderately prestigious university in New England, where he quickly learned the value of lineage and presentation. He changed his name to John.

  Already fluent in Spanish, John Moreno got degrees in both French and criminology. After graduation, he moved south, briefly joining the Dade County sheriff’s office. Never one for violence and not particularly interested in carrying or using a firearm, Moreno took a job for a relatively well-known firm specializing in international retrievals. Two years later, having made the necessary connections and something of a reputation for himself, he struck out on his own.

  John Moreno liked his work. Most of all, whenever his plane left the runway and he settled into his first-class seat, he felt a kind of elusion, as if he were leaving the dust and squalor of his early years a thousand miles behind. Each new destination was another permanent move, one step farther away.

  The Brazilians are a touching people. Often men will hug for minutes on end, and women will walk arm in arm in the street.

  Moreno put down his guidebook on the morning of the fourth day, did his four sets of fifty push-ups, showered, and changed into a swimsuit. He packed his knapsack with some American dollars, ten dollars’ worth of Brazilian cruzeiros, his long-lensed Canon AE-1, and the Guzman photographs, and left the apartamento.

  Moreno was a lean man, a shade under six feet, with wavy black hair and a thick black mustache. His vaguely Latin appearance passed for both South American and southern Mediterranean, and with his newly enriched tan, he attracted no attention as he moved along the Avenida Boa Viagem toward the center of the resort, the area where Guzman had been spotted. The beach crowd grew denser: women in thong bathing suits and men in their Speedos, vendors, hustlers, and shills.

  Moreno claimed a striped folding chair near the beach wall, signaled a man behind a cooler, who brought him a tall Antarctica beer served in a Styrofoam thermos. He finished that one and had two more, drinking very slowly to pass away the afternoon. He was not watching for Guzman. Instead he watched the crowd and the few men who sat alone and unmoving on its periphery. By the end of the day, he had chosen two of those men: a brown Rasta with sun-bleached dreadlocks who sat by the vendors but did not appear to have goods to sell, and an old man with the leathery, angular face of an Indian who had not moved from his seat at the edge of the market across the street.

  As the sun dropped behind the condominiums and the beach draped into shadow, Moreno walked over to the Rasta on the wall and handed him a photograph of Guzman. The Rasta smiled a mouthful of stained teeth and rubbed two fingers together. Moreno gave him ten American dollars, holding out another ten immediately and quickly replacing it in his own pocket. He touched the photograph, then pointed to the striped folding chair near the wall to let the Rasta know where he could find him. The Rasta nodded, then smiled again, making a V with his fingers and touching his lips, blowing out with an exaggerated exhale.

  “Fumo?” the Rasta said.

  “Não fumo,” Moreno said, jabbing his finger at the photograph once more before he left.

  Moreno crossed the road and found the old man at the edge of the market. He replayed the same proposition with the man. The man never looked at Moreno, though he accepted the ten and slid it and the photograph into the breast pocket of his eggplant-colored shirt. In the dying afternoon light, Moreno could not read a thing in the man’s black pupils.

  As Moreno turned to cross the street, the old man said in Portuguese, “You will return?”

  Moreno said, “Amanhã,” and walked away.

  On the way back to his place, Moreno stopped at a food stand—little more than a screened-in shack on the beach road—and drank a cold Brahma beer. Afterward, he walked back along the beach, now lit by streetlamps in the dusk. A girl of less than twenty with a lovely mouth smiled as she passed his way, her hair fanning out in the wind. Moreno felt a brief pulse in his breastbone, remembering just then that he had not been with a woman for a very long time.

  It was this forgotten need for a woman, Moreno decided, as he watched his maid, Sonya, prepare breakfast the next morning in her surf shorts and T-shirt, that had thrown off his rhythms in Brazil. He would have to remedy that, while of course expending as little energy as possible in the hunt. First things first, which was to check on his informants in the center of Boa Viagem.

  He was there within the hour, seated on his striped folding chair, on a day when the sun came through high, rapidly moving clouds. His men were there, too: the Rasta on the wall and the old man at the edge of the market. Moreno had an active swim in the warm Atlantic early in the afternoon, going out beyond the reef, then returned to his seat and ordered a beer. By the time the vendor served it, the old man with the Indian features was moving across the sand toward Moreno’s chair.

  “Boa tarde,” Moreno said, squinting up in the sun.

  The old man pointed across the road, toward an outdoor café that led to an enclosed bar and restaurant. A middle-aged man and a young woman were walking across the patio toward the open glass doors of the bar.

  “Bom,” Moreno said, handing the old man the promised ten from his knapsack. He left one hundred and twenty thousand cruzeiros beneath the full bottle of beer, gestured to the old man to sit and drink it, put his knapsack over his shoulder, and took the stone steps from the beach up to the street. The old man sat in the striped folding chair without a word.

  Moreno crossed the street with caution, looking back to catch a glimpse of the brown Rasta sitting on the wall. The Rasta stared unsmiling at Moreno, knowing he had lost. Moreno was secretly glad it had been the old man, who had reminded him of his own father. Moreno had not thought of his long
-dead father or even seen him in his dreams for some time.

  Moreno entered the restaurant. There were few patrons, and all of them, including the middle-aged man and this woman, sat at a long mahogany bar. Moreno took a chair near an open window. He leaned his elbow on the ledge of the window and drummed his fingers against the wood to the florid music coming from the restaurant. The bartender, a stocky man with a great belly that plunged over the belt of his trousers, came from behind the bar and walked toward Moreno’s table.

  “Cervejas,” Moreno said, holding up three fingers pressed together to signify a tall one. The bartender stopped in his tracks, turned, and headed back behind the bar.

  Moreno drank his beer slowly, studying the couple seated at the bar. He considered taking some photographs, seeing that this could be done easily, but he decided that it was not necessary, as he was certain now that he had found Guzman. The man had ordered his second drink, a Teacher’s rocks, in English, drinking his first hurriedly and without apparent pleasure. He was tanned and seemed fit, with a full head of silvery hair and the natural girth of age. The woman was in her twenties, quite beautiful in a lush way, with the stone perfect but bloodless look of a photograph in a magazine. She wore a bathing suit top, two triangles of red cloth really, with a brightly dyed sarong wrapped around her waist. Occasionally the man would nod in response to something she had said; on those occasions, the two of them did not look in each other’s eyes.

  Eventually, the other patrons finished their drinks and left, and for a while it was just the stocky bartender, the man and his woman, and Moreno. A very tall, lanky young man with long, curly hair walked into the bar and with wide strides went directly to the man and whispered in his ear. The man finished his drink in one gulp, tossed bills on the bar, and got off his stool. He, the woman, and the young man walked from the establishment without even a glance in Moreno’s direction. Moreno knew he had been made but in a practical sense did not care. He opened his knapsack, rose from his seat, and headed for the bar.

  Moreno stopped in the area where the party had been seated and ordered another beer. As the bartender turned his back to reach into the cooler, Moreno grabbed some bar napkins, wrapped them around the base of Guzman’s empty glass, and began to place the glass in his knapsack.

  A hand grabbed Moreno’s wrist.

  The hand gripped him firmly. Moreno smelled perspiration, partly masked by a rather obvious men’s cologne. He turned his head. It was the lanky young man, who had reentered the bar.

  “You shouldn’t do that,” the young man said in accented English. “My friend João here might think you are trying to steal his glass.”

  Moreno placed the glass back on the bar. The young man spoke rapidly in Portuguese, and João the bartender took the glass and ran it over the brush in the soap sink. Then João served Moreno the beer that he had ordered, along with a clean glass. Moreno took a sip. The young man did not look more than twenty. His skin and his hard, bright eyes were the color of coffee beans. Moreno put down his glass.

  “You’ve been following my boss,” the young man said.

  “Really,” Moreno said.

  “Yes, really.” The young man grinned. “Your Rastaman friend, the one you showed the pictures to. He don’t like you so good no more.”

  Moreno looked out at the road through the open glass doors. “What now?”

  “Maybe me and a couple of my friends,” the young man said, “now we’re going to kick your ass.”

  Moreno studied the young man’s face, went past the theatrical menace, found light play in the dark brown eyes. “I don’t think so. There’s no buck in it for you that way.”

  The young man laughed shortly, pointed at Moreno. “That’s right!” His expression grew earnest again. “Listen, I tell you what. We’ve had plenty of excitement today, plenty enough. How about you and me, we sleep on top of things, think it over, see what we’re going to do. Okay?”

  “Sure,” Moreno said.

  “I’ll pick you up in the morning, we’ll go for a ride, away from here, where we can talk. Sound good?”

  Moreno wrote his address on a bar napkin. The young man took it and extended his hand.

  “Guilherme,” he said. “Gil.”

  “Moreno.”

  They shook hands, and Gil began to walk away.

  “You speak good American,” Moreno said.

  Gil stopped at the doors, grinned, and held up two fingers. “New York,” he said. “Astoria. Two years.” And then he was out the door.

  Moreno finished his beer, left money on the bar. He walked back to his apartamento in the gathering darkness.

  Moreno stood drinking coffee on his balcony the next morning, waiting for Gil to arrive. He realized that this involvement with the young man was going to cost him money, but it would speed things along. And he was not surprised that Guzman had been located with such ease. In his experience, those who fled their old lives merely settled for an equally monotonous one in a different place and rarely moved after that. The beachfront hut in Pago Pago becomes as stifling as the center-hall Colonial in Bridgeport.

  Gil pulled over to the curb in his blue sedan. He got out and greeted the guard at the gate, a man Moreno had come to know as Sérgio, who buzzed Gil through. Sérgio left the glassed-in guardhouse then and approached Gil on the patio. Sérgio broke suddenly into some sort of cartwheel, and Gil stepped away from his spinning feet, moved around Sérgio fluidly and got him into a headlock. They were doing some sort of local martial art, which Moreno had seen practiced widely by young men on the beach. Sérgio and Gil broke away laughing, Gil giving Sérgio the thumbs-up before looking up toward Moreno’s balcony and catching his eye. Moreno shouted that he’d be down in a minute, handing his coffee cup to Sonya. Moreno liked this kid Gil, though he was not sure why.

  They drove out of Boa Viagem in Gil’s Chevrolet Monza, into downtown Recife, where the breeze stopped and the temperature rose an abrupt ten degrees. Then they were driving along a sewage canal near the docks, and across the canal into a kind of shantytown of tar paper, fallen cinder block, and chicken wire, where Moreno could make out a sampling of the residents: horribly poor families, morning drunks, two-dollar prostitutes, men with murderous eyes, criminals festering inside of children.

  “It’s pretty bad here now,” Gil said, “though not so bad like in Rio. In Rio they cut your hand off just to get your watch. Not even think about it.”

  “The Miami Herald says your government kills street kids in Rio.”

  Gil chuckled. “You Americans are so righteous.”

  “Self-righteous,” Moreno said.

  “Yes, self-righteous. I lived in New York City, remember? I’ve seen the blacks and the Latins, the things that are kept from them. There are many ways for a government to kill the children it does not want, no?”

  “I suppose so.”

  Gil studied Moreno at the stoplight as the stench of raw sewage rode in on the heat through their open windows. “Moreno, eh? You’re some sort of Latino, aren’t you?”

  “I’m an American.”

  “Sure, American. Maybe you want to forget.” Gil jerked his thumb across the canal, toward the shantytown. “Me, I don’t forget. I come from a favela just like that, in the south. Still, I don’t believe in being poor. There is always a way to get out, if one works. You know?”

  Moreno knew now why he liked this kid Gil.

  They drove over a bridge that spanned the inlet to the ocean, then took a gradual rise to the old city of Olinda, settled and burned by the Dutch in the fifteenth century. Gil parked on cobblestone near a row of shops and vendors, where Moreno bought a piece of local art carved from wood for his mother. Moreno would send the gift along to her in Nogales, a custom that made him feel generous, despite the fact that he rarely phoned her, and it had been three Christmases since he had seen her last. Afterward, Moreno visited a bleached church, five hundred years old, and was greeted at the door by an old nun dressed completely in white. Moreno left
cruzeiros near the simple altar, then absently did his cross. He was not a religious man, but he was a superstitious one, a remnant of his youth spent in Mexico, though he would deny all that.

  Gil and Moreno took a table shaded by palms near a grill set on a patio across from the church. They ordered one tall beer and two plastic cups. A boy approached them selling spices, and Gil dismissed him, shouting something as an afterthought to his back. The boy returned with one cigarette, which he lit on the embers of the grill before handing it to Gil. Gil gave the boy some coins and waved him away.

  “So,” Gil said, “what are we going to talk about today?”

  “The name of your boss,” Moreno said. ‘It’s Guzman, isn’t it?”

  Gil dragged on his cigarette, exhaled slowly. “His name, it’s not important. But if you want to call him Guzman, it’s okay.”

  “What do you do for him?”

  “I’m his driver, and his interpreter. This is what I do in Recife. I hang around Boa Viagem and I watch for the wealthy tourists having trouble with the money and the language. The Americans, they have the most trouble of all. Then, I make my pitch. Sometimes it works out for me pretty good.”

  “You learned English in New York?”

  “Yeah. A friend brought me over, found me a job as a driver for this limo service he worked for. You know, the guys who stand at the airport, holding signs. I learned the language fast, and real good. The business, too. In one year I showed the man how to cut his costs by 30 percent. The man put me in charge. I even had to fire my friend. Anyway, the man finally offered me half the company to run it all the way. I turned him down, you know? His offer, it was too low. That’s when I came back to Brazil.”