City of Brick and Shadow

by Tim Wirkus

  The other people who witnessed that first interaction—two men playing dominoes on a barrel of rice, a woman buying a box of salt—later remembered that the whole exchange had played like an odd joke, an encounter staged solely for the foreigner’s perverse, personal delight.

  They couldn’t place the man’s accent, foreign certainly, but from where? The incident would likely have been forgotten if, a few days later, Fernando the pig farmer and store owner hadn’t been found lying face-down in a muddy pond at the edge of the neighborhood.

  They pulled the body from the water, cleaned it up as best they could, and found a long, deep slit running across Fernando’s neck, the sliced edges of skin puckered and white from soaking in the pond. While the neighborhood had been prepared to write this death off as the accidental result of an uncharacteristic night of drunkenness on the erstwhile store owner’s part, the slit in Fernando’s throat cast the situation in an altogether different light. They remembered the odd scene with the foreigner a few days earlier, remembered the foreigner’s cryptic, possibly threatening statement.

  On noting that a light was on at the general store, the neighborhood’s self-appointed sheriff, a wiry, tenacious man with a bushy moustache and a bulldog glare, deputized the two strongest men in the area and the three of them marched up Vila Barbosa’s highest hill to the little general store that sat atop it. Inside, they found the foreigner standing behind the counter wearing Fernando’s canvas shopkeeper’s apron over his crisp, three-piece suit.

  “What can I do for you gentlemen today?” said the foreigner.

  The self-appointed sheriff told the man he was under arrest for killing Fernando to gain possession of the general store. The foreigner reached under the counter. The sheriff told him not to try anything funny. The foreigner pulled out a piece of paper. He said that it was the deed to the store, that Fernando had signed it over to him, that he had paid Fernando a fair price for it, and the whole thing was all very above board. The three men from the neighborhood looked the paper over, but as none of them could read, they could neither confirm nor deny the foreigner’s claims. They handed the paper back to him.

  “You’re under arrest,” repeated the sheriff. “You and I both know that you killed Fernando.”

  The foreigner shrugged.

  “How do you intend to arrest me?” he said. “Where is your badge? Where are your handcuffs and gun?”

  The sheriff shook his finger at the foreigner. He said they’d be back and then the foreigner would have to pay for what he had done. On leaving the store, the three men spread word among the scattered shacks that there would be a meeting that evening to decide what to do with the murderous foreigner.

  At sundown, the residents of Vila Barbosa gathered behind the sheriff’s house. They agreed that the foreigner was clearly to blame for Fernando’s murder, and that he must be brought to justice. Some of the more hotheaded residents proposed storming up the hill right then, tearing the foreigner from his ill-gotten home, and hanging him from the nearest standing structure. There were shouts of agreement. The self-appointed sheriff waved his arms in the air and yelled at the crowd to quiet down. When they had stopped shouting, the sheriff said that it would be wrong to answer lawlessness with lawlessness. He said the proper course of action would be to detain the foreigner and transport him to the city where he could be tried and sentenced by an actual judge. After some debate, the people agreed that this was the right thing to do and the sheriff and his two deputies set off with a shotgun and a length of rope to restrain the lawless foreigner.

  The next morning, the residents of Vila Barbosa found the sheriff and one of his deputies dead at the base of the hill. Both men had been clubbed to death, their bodies a mushy, purpled mess. A few brave souls hiked up the hill where they discovered the foreigner and the other deputy playing dominoes inside the store. The foreigner didn’t look up at them.

  He said, “Tell the rest of the neighborhood we’ll be holding another meeting tonight. Tell them to be up here in front of my store by sundown.”

  He laid down a domino and smiled at them.

  At sundown, as ordered, the residents of the neighborhood congregated on top of the hill. Men, women, and children murmured nervously, their eyes fixed on the entrance to the little general store. They wondered aloud if this wasn’t a mistake, if they shouldn’t have taken some time to organize themselves, to make the foreigner meet them on their own terms. For all their hotheadedness the evening before, when confronted with the intimidating reality of their opponent, the residents of Vila Barbosa had to admit that they just wanted to avoid trouble. They were afraid of this stranger, certainly, but if he didn’t plan to kill any more of them, it made sense to leave well enough alone.

  As the sun touched the horizon, the foreigner emerged from the entrance of the store, the brawny deputy lurking a few steps behind him. The foreigner had abandoned his three-piece suit in favor of the simple clothes of the region. He still wore the shopkeeper’s apron, his hands thrust into its large front pockets. He crossed in front of the gathered crowd until he stood just to the side of the little store, the sun directly behind him, silhouetting his person. The residents of Vila Barbosa squinted and shielded their eyes as they watched him, waiting for him to speak. Finally, he addressed them. He said he was so pleased to see them gathered by his store. He said that he looked forward to doing business with them, that he imagined they could have a long, profitable relationship together. He said that he hoped the string of terrible accidents—Fernando, the sheriff, and his deputy—would end soon and the people of Vila Barbosa would learn to be a little more careful. And then he smiled, revealing his thick, white teeth, thanked them again for coming, and wished them all a pleasant evening.

  Since none of Vila Barbosa’s residents felt a pressing desire to stick their necks out, they all decided to let the foreigner go about his business, as long as he allowed them to go about theirs. Yes, he had doubled, and then tripled the prices of the items he sold in the little grocery store, necessary items that the people couldn’t do without, but ultimately they decided that this was a small price to pay for their personal safety.

  When addressing the foreigner, they called him simply, “Sir,” which seemed to please him. He never offered his name, and the residents of Vila Barbosa never asked. When they referred to him among themselves, they took to calling him the Argentine, not because he had revealed the country of his nativity, but because Argentina seemed as likely a point of origin as any. Furthermore, any homeland, even an invented one, lessened the aura of sinister blankness that surrounded the foreigner.

  Over time, the Argentine became a fixture at community events, implicitly bestowing his approval on the proceedings through his presence at weddings, funerals, christenings, festivals. Nobody in Vila Barbosa dared make any major decision without first consulting the Argentine. When new squatters arrived in the area, they were told that they needed to secure the Argentine’s blessing in settling there, otherwise the consequences could be dire. The new arrivals were told of his history, of the three unfortunate deaths, of the spoken agreement between the Argentine and the residents of the neighborhood. The new arrivals came to fear the man as much as, if not more than, the original residents did. And so, as Vila Barbosa grew, so did the Argentine’s power.

  CHAPTER 2

  When the two missionaries arrived at church the next Sunday morning, they found Bishop Claudemir, the congregation’s leader, and his wife, Fátima, setting up a row of folding chairs. Their four children ran back and forth across the room in a game whose apparent object was to transfer all of the dust and grime from the floor and the walls to their faces and their clothes. Elder Toronto and Elder Schwartz each grabbed an armload of chairs and began setting them up in a row behind the first one.

  “I appreciate the gesture, elders,” said Bishop Claudemir, “but I think a second row of chairs would be overly optimistic.”

  The elders leaned the chairs back up against the wall. Before th
ey had arrived, Elder Toronto had instructed Elder Schwartz not to mention what he had seen—or thought he had seen—at the market that Thursday. He said there was no reason to worry anyone yet until they knew a little bit more. Marco Aurélio was probably fine, and the little congregation had enough problems already.

  The Vila Barbosa ward met in a small rented apartment above a butcher shop in the neighborhood’s business center. They held sacrament meeting in the living room, primary in the kitchen, and elders quorum and Relief Society in the two respective bedrooms. The smell of blood and raw meat permeated their meetings from below, and when the butcher got into an argument with a customer, which happened frequently, the church members had to yell to be heard above the shouting from downstairs.

  The ward hadn’t always been so small. In years past, they had met in a spacious rented dance hall, the last of Saturday night’s revelers often still lingering when the church leaders arrived early Sunday morning for their weekly planning meetings. Back then—and this wasn’t so long ago—there had been serious talk of growing large enough to have their very own building. The congregation was still a branch then, but growing quickly. Around that time, in an act of overoptimistic generosity, a visiting General Authority had upgraded the branch to ward status, even though the congregation’s size didn’t quite merit the change. He said it would give them the last push they needed to find just a few more families. Rather than spur a boost to membership, however, this moment marked the beginning of the Vila Barbosa ward’s slow decline.

  Just when they had been on the cusp of having a large enough congregation to get a building of their own, a counselor in the bishopric—a mousy eyeglass repairman—had absconded with several thousand reaís that he had embezzled from the ward’s funds and tithing donations over the past several years. On hearing of the theft, many ward members had become furious at the incompetence that could allow something like that to happen, asking how a church that supposedly functioned by revelation didn’t discover one of its own leaders stealing from the congregation. Several people had requested to have their names removed from the records of the church, and they had never returned.

  Not long after that, the other counselor in the bishopric had been seen exiting a nautical-themed love motel with a woman who was not his wife, who, as it later came out, was the matriarch of the largest family in the ward. The ensuing fallout—with ward members picking sides, lobbing accusations, and resurrecting past grudges—had resulted in the excommunication of several members, the permanent disillusionment of many others, and ultimately, a decimation of Vila Barbosa’s once-promising congregation.

  During those dark times, there had been problems with the missionaries working in the ward as well. One set of elders had become so overwhelmed by life in Vila Barbosa that they had spent their days holed up in their apartment concocting convincing but bogus work reports to send in to the mission office each Sunday night, and passing the rest of their time playing two-handed pinochle. Their ruse had been discovered when the mission president, pleased with the progress he saw in their reports, had sent his assistants out to Vila Barbosa to observe the missionaries there and discover the secret to their success. The assistants had found the two elders unshaven, dressed in gym shorts and T-shirts, and disputing whether or not the senior companion had been cheating at pinochle by marking the playing cards to compensate for his massive inadequacies at the game.

  Another Vila Barbosa missionary had proposed marriage after church one day to one of the ward’s young women, slipping a plastic glitter ring he had bought at a papelaria onto her finger and telling her to think it over. He had been immediately transferred to another area and, after further complications, sent home.

  Elder Hanson, the missionary whom Elder Toronto replaced, had suffered a nervous breakdown. One morning he had refused to leave the shower, explaining to his companion, Elder de Assis, through the locked bathroom door that the shower was the only place where he felt safe anymore. Morning had turned to afternoon and then evening, and Elder Hanson still hadn’t left the shower. Finally, Elder de Assis had called President Madvig, who, after a couple of hours, had coaxed the distraught missionary out of the shower with assurances that he wasn’t in any kind of trouble, that they just needed to talk. Elder Hanson had exited the bathroom, towel around his waist, skin wrinkled from its lengthy soaking, and explained that he had had it, that he was ready to go home. President Madvig had said that seemed like a good idea, and had arranged a flight home for the badly shaken elder later that week.

  With so much internal strife, and so many problematic missionaries, the ward had never quite recovered from its various traumas. It was a tough area. However, where most missionaries, Elder Schwartz included, would despair at such a bleak assignment, Elder Toronto relished it.

  “You actually enjoy it here?” Elder Schwartz asked on more than one occasion.

  “Who said anything about enjoying?” said Elder Toronto with a patronizing frown. “I find the work engaging here. Every day is a challenge. There’s something to that.”

  At eight-fifty, Bishop Claudemir took his seat in the folding chair next to the makeshift podium at the front of the rented living room. He faced the congregation, which at this point consisted of Fátima, his four squirming children, and the two missionaries. Although she often tried to put a cheerful face on things, Fátima seemed to Elder Schwartz to be frustration personified. As a younger woman, she had had a promising career as a singer, performing bossa nova standards and torch songs at some of the city’s finest nightclubs. On the strength of her growing reputation, a big jazz label had even offered her a recording contract, but before she had been able to set foot in the studio, her voice had been destroyed by—depending on which account was to be believed—either a horribly botched tonsillectomy or a gruesome car crash. Whatever the case, the loss of her voice had put an immediate end to her singing career, and now here she was in Vila Barbosa with her foiled ambitions, her four rowdy children, and a husband she never saw.

  In her raspy voice, she asked, “How many investigators are we expecting this week, elders?”

  Elder Toronto shook his head. The same answer as every week. Fátima sighed, and Bishop Claudemir nodded his head at this news, the bags under his eyes seeming heavier with each movement of his head.

  “What about Marco Aurélio?” asked Claudemir. “I wanted to talk with him about giving him the priesthood, but I could never catch him at home.”

  Elder Toronto shot Elder Schwartz a warning glance.

  “We haven’t had a chance to talk to him this week,” said Elder Toronto. “He must be busy.”

  Bishop Claudemir ran a hand through his prematurely graying hair and mumbled something that neither missionary could quite make out. Everyone in the ward had been so excited when Marco Aurélio was baptized—the first person to join their congregation in ages. They dreaded the day when, like so many others, he might become disillusioned, or discouraged, or angry, and stop coming. Avoiding both church meetings and the missionaries was not a good sign.

  Claudemir sighed and said that one of these Sundays he wouldn’t be at all surprised if everyone disappeared completely—his wife, his children, Abelardo and Beatrice, the missionaries. He would show up to this stinking room at the same time he did every Sunday, set up a single chair, and hold sacrament meeting, Sunday school, and priesthood meeting all by himself. He said that even then, the stake president wouldn’t release him from this calling, that he would be stuck as the bishop of the sorriest ward in the church until the day he died. He shook his head and put his face in his hands.

  The two elders looked to Fátima for a clue as to whether her husband was joking or not, but she was so busy untangling the children from one another that she clearly hadn’t heard any of it. Elder Toronto said that Marco Aurélio had probably just left town for the weekend. He must be visiting family and would be back as usual next week. Things were going to turn around for the Vila Barbosa ward. Bishop Claudemir didn’t respond
. With his face still in his hands, he began to snore softly, his shoulders rising and falling with each extended breath.

  Claudemir worked as an electrician in a cosmetics factory that was located a couple of hours outside the city. At five o’clock every weekday morning, he boarded the company bus that stopped just a few blocks from his house. The bus made its way through the city, gathering Claudemir’s fellow factory workers until it hit the freeway and the hilly countryside that surrounded the city. It delivered the employees to the factory at seven-thirty and then parked in a garage until it was time to take them home. Claudemir spent his twelve-hour shift troubleshooting, repairing, and revamping the intricate electrical systems of the factory’s complex machinery. His main human interaction was with his direct superior, and the rest of his attention was given to the various indicator lights, solenoids, thermocouples, limit switches, selsyns, fuses, and circuit breakers that demanded his attention each day.

  At seven-thirty every evening, Claudemir and his fellow employees loaded onto the same bus and traveled the same route in reverse, a mirror image of their morning commute. Claudemir usually made it home around ten, ate a light dinner, and sat up talking with Fátima until his eyes closed of their own accord and his body slept.

  He was occasionally given a stretch of days or even a week off in an elaborate scheduling system that was never quite clear to the missionaries no matter how many times Claudemir explained it to them. This time off was mostly consumed by household repairs and church business that had been left unattended for weeks.