by Tim Wirkus
Around this time, a wave of kidnappings hit her parents’ social circle, and Sílvia no longer had to be so surreptitious in seeking out accounts of local crime. The kidnappings were all anybody ever talked about, and Sílvia followed the developments in each case with the same passion, the same attention to detail, with which the boys her age followed the exploits of their favorite soccer teams. She listened in whenever her parents discussed the most recent kidnapping, taking careful note of the details. For each case, she knew how much ransom money the kidnappers demanded. She knew which officer from the anti-kidnapping squad was taking point on the case. She knew the exact time the kidnapping took place. She knew when the kidnappers used heavy weaponry to penetrate the victim’s armored car, or when they snatched the victim in one of the rare moments when he or she was not in a car, a helicopter, or a highly secure building. She knew how the kidnappers had shown the family they meant business—a severed finger, or, more probably, a severed ear. Back in the privacy of her own room, Sílvia pored over the details she had recorded. Noting the similarities and differences among the various cases, Sílvia speculated with reasonable confidence as to which kidnappings were carried out by the same gang, which families were likely to pay the ransom, which victims were likely to emerge relatively unscathed from the ordeal. Of course, she worried over the fates of those who had been kidnapped—feared being kidnapped herself, even—but what interested her more were the kidnappers themselves. She wondered with that familiar sweaty, dizzy feeling who these people were.
Then at dinner one evening, Sílvia’s father, who rarely spoke at meals, said he had something important to discuss with them. Sílvia and her mother both lay down their silverware and gave him their full attention. Clearing his throat, he pulled a folded paper from the pocket of his suit jacket:
“As you are probably aware,” he began, “kidnapping is becoming a greater and greater concern for the wealthy residents of our city. Up until this morning, my feelings were that we ought to stick things out, count on the police to take care of the problem, and not let those bandits scare us into leaving our home. But this morning, my longtime friend and business partner, António Lamy, was killed while trying to evade a gang of kidnappers on his way to work. For me, this death represents a tipping point—the city is no longer safe, and I have decided to move our family to a small town several hundred miles to the south of here called Santa Branca. This town is very small, very safe, and populated mainly by wealthy refugees from the city such as ourselves. Crime in Santa Branca is practically nonexistent. Our new home will be near the beach, and it’s my opinion that we’ll all like living there very much.
“I don’t want to risk any more time than we have to here in the city, and so after dinner, I would like the two of you to pack your most important things and be ready to go. I’ve ordered a helicopter to pick us up; we can have the rest of our things sent down to us later.”
He thanked them for their attention and returned the paper to his jacket pocket. After dinner, they each packed a suitcase and took the stairs up to the roof where a helicopter waited to take them away from the city and all of its crime.
• • •
It was in Santa Branca several years later—at a fundraiser for the incumbent mayor’s reelection campaign—where she first met Marco Aurélio. The event was held at the Santa Branca Ballroom, an art deco-inspired historic space where all the town’s most magnificent parties took place. The night of the fundraiser, the room bustled with women in flowing evening gowns and men in black-tie formalwear. On the ballroom’s stage, a swing band played decades-old samba hits while a handful of couples danced with elegant abandon. The rest of the crowd mostly ignored the music, talking over the sound of it, applauding distractedly at the end of each number.
Sílvia normally didn’t attend these black-tie events that her parents thrived on, but when her mother asked her to come, Sílvia couldn’t summon even a flimsy excuse not to. She was home from university on summer break and, three days in, already wishing she was back at school. Having just changed her major for the third time in as many years—this time from pre-law to forensic archaeology—she was eager to dive into the new courses she would be taking.
Here she was instead, though, mingling with high school acquaintances and friends of her parents, answering the same set of questions again and again. No, she didn’t have a boyfriend. Yes, she had changed majors several times. Yes, she had considered becoming a lawyer. No, she really didn’t have a boyfriend right now.
After a long, circuitous conversation with a doggedly persistent friend of her mother’s, Sílvia grabbed the elbow of a young man she vaguely recognized as having been in her year in school.
“Hey, grab me another drink, will you?” she said.
With an obliging smile, he took her empty champagne flute and told her he’d be right back. As soon as he walked away, Sílvia realized she had actually never seen the young man before in her life. When he returned, glass in hand, she apologized and said that normally she wasn’t that forward, that she had thought they had gone to school together.
“I’ve just got one of those faces,” he said.
Sílvia nodded, but as she looked at him, she still couldn’t shake that deep feeling of familiarity. It wasn’t that he resembled any one boy she had gone to school with. Rather, he resembled them categorically; he seemed, implicitly, to belong to their exclusive caste. He was dressed the part—tuxedo exquisitely tailored; the quality of his various accessories—watch, shoes, cufflinks—even greater than that of his suit; hair expertly cut, and equally carefully tousled to convey that certain boyish nonchalance. His face, neither handsome nor ugly, held an expression of relaxed confidence that suggested a deeply ingrained and fully justified assumption that his wants and needs, whether physical, social, or emotional, would be met as soon as he felt them. In a way, he looked more like the young men that Sílvia had grown up with than the young men themselves.
Sílvia realized that she was staring and apologized again, introducing herself.
“Felipe,” the young man replied by way of introduction, and then without any further pleasantries, spent nearly an hour regaling her with anecdotes reflecting his extravagant life as a wealthy young playboy whose chief skills lay in spending his father’s money as irresponsibly as possible—exotic restaurants, rare luxury cars, expensive women. After a few more drinks, he told her he was in the area on business for his father, Cândido Costa, a powerful oil magnate—maybe she had heard of him?—who had received a tip about some nearby land that might prove profitable, oil-wise.
There was something not quite right about the way the young man spoke. He used the bored, affected tone of the young men Sílvia had grown up with, the fluid, lilting accent of the wealthy, but as he drank more champagne, something else leaked through in the way he spoke, something she couldn’t put her finger on. There was also the conspicuous display of shallowness that didn’t quite ring true—most of her male contemporaries spent inordinate amounts of effort trying to convince people of their substance, that they were more than just flighty playboys skilled at spending their parents’ money. They made a show of reading massive philosophical tomes, or enlisting in scientific expeditions to exotic locales around the globe, or punctuating accounts of their prodigal exploits with damp-eyed speeches about the deplorable plight of the poor in this country. But this young man seemed to revel in his shallowness.
“I’m sure I’m boring you,” he said. “I shouldn’t monopolize you like this.”
“It’s fine,” said Sílvia. “I want to figure out what your game is.”
“Excuse me?” he said.
“I don’t think you are who you say you are.”
He giggled at this, assuming a drunken expression of bafflement.
“I’m still not sure what you mean.”
“First of all, you’re not as drunk as you’re pretending to be,” she said, “and second of all, you’re not a wealthy playboy.”
He
slapped her shoulder in amusement. He told her she was very funny. His words slurred together perfectly, a spot-on mimicry of wealthy drunkenness. It could be the real thing if it weren’t for the over-perfectness of it.
“Who am I then?” he asked with a smirk.
“You tell me,” she said.
This inspired another fit of laughter.
“Really,” she said, “who are you?”
He looked around and then leaned in close to her, their cheeks brushing against each other.
“Do you want to get out of here?” he said.
“I want you to tell me who you are.”
He took a step closer to her, their bodies touching.
“My father could buy and sell anyone in this room,” he said. “Do you find that exciting?”
He kissed her cheek. She pushed him away.
“No,” she said, “that’s not going to work. The only thing I’m interested in is finding out who you really are.”
Felipe frowned thoughtfully.
“I don’t plan to leave this party alone tonight,” he said. “I was hoping I might leave with you, but if that’s not going to happen, I’d better be moving on.”
“You haven’t fooled me,” she said.
He smiled in a way that could pass for genuine. “It was very nice to meet you.”
He kissed her hand with a smirk and walked away. As soon as he had gone, Sílvia’s mother sidled up next to her.
“So you’ve met Felipe,” she said to her daughter. “What did you think?”
She watched him introduce himself to a cluster of women across the room. Observing him from a distance, he still gave her the distinct impression of someone playing a part—just a little too deliberate in his gestures, his body language, his dress.
“What do you know about him?” said Sílvia. “He strikes me as odd.”
“I imagine he should,” said Sílvia’s mother. “Coming from that much money must have some effect on a boy.”
Although the citizens of Santa Branca were, to a person, absurdly wealthy, Cândido Costa, the man Felipe claimed as his father, possessed such astronomical riches that he inhabited a rarified level all his own. Though not well known to the general populace, the Costa name was whispered among the nation’s most affluent citizens with the kind of awe-filled reverence normally reserved for pagan deities. Felipe’s presence in the town brought its residents that much closer to the man’s greatness, and the vicarious proximity thrilled them.
Sílvia’s mother’s voice dropped to a whisper. She told Sílvia that this wasn’t common knowledge, but Felipe’s father was interested in some land in the area.
“You don’t say,” said Sílvia.
“Yes,” said her mother, “but he told me I’m to keep it an absolute secret.”
“I see.”
Felipe looked in their direction and smiled boozily. Sílvia didn’t smile back, and just a few minutes later watched him leave the party arm-in-arm with Sandy Nascimento, a young woman Sílvia’s age whose primary goal in life was to land a husband even wealthier than her father.
“We should have Felipe over for dinner,” said Sílvia. “I’d like to get to know him better.”
This proved impossible. Over the following weeks, Sílvia watched Felipe become the darling of Santa Branca, his every minute booked with social engagements. His visit presented the transplanted urbanites with the rare opportunity of trying to impress someone much, much wealthier than themselves. The townspeople rose to the occasion with enthusiasm. The men took him shark fishing on their sonar-equipped boats; flew him over the region’s rolling countryside in their private planes; served him the finest cuts from the finest Japanese cattle at their beachside barbecues. They told him that their homes were his homes, their cigars his cigars, their imported alcohol his imported alcohol. The women of Santa Branca matched their husbands’ efforts with élan. They bombarded Felipe with invitations to brunches, lunches, teas, dinners, auctions, cotillions, fundraisers, cocktail parties. Any time he dined with their families, the women sent their cooks out with instructions to discover what he had been served the night before, and then to do whatever necessary to eclipse that meal.
Sílvia watched all of this with alternating feelings of amusement and disgust. She had never seen her parents and their friends—normally so careful not to seem impressed by anyone or anything—so starstruck. And what none of them seemed to notice was the thorough unremarkability of the young man they fawned over so gratuitously. After those initial few days spent dropping unsubtle hints regarding his ultra-wealthy father, Felipe had gradually clammed up and now rarely said a word. He had subtly transformed himself into a nondescript vessel for the loving attentions of the town.
During this time, for lack of anything better to do, Sílvia devoted herself to discovering Felipe’s true identity. She became a fixture at the town library, digging through stacks of yellowing newspapers and skimming ghostly microfiche to cull every bit of information she could find concerning Felipe’s supposed father. To her great chagrin, she could find nothing to either confirm or debunk any of the young man’s claims. From what she could ascertain, Cândido Costa did indeed have a son named Felipe who would be about the age of this young man. The younger Costa was known for his womanizing and his profligate spending habits, for circling the globe in his leisurely, city-hopping escapades. In spite of his high profile—or more likely because of the silence his father’s money could buy—few concrete news stories about the young man existed. He was mentioned only in passing in articles about his father, the reporters alluding to a reputation that readers were clearly assumed to already know. The only picture of Felipe Costa that she managed to unearth was five years old and taken from behind; the adolescent in the picture had the same hair color and the same general body type of the young man masquerading as Felipe. This imposter had clearly done his homework. If Sílvia had been hoping to find some damning tidbit that would contradict the counterfeit Felipe’s story, she was foiled by the dearth of any kind of substantiating information about the young heir’s life. This lack of evidence did not dissuade her, however, from her belief that their Felipe was a fraud. If she kept at it, she was bound to discover who this young man really was and what he wanted from the citizens of Santa Branca.
The answer to the latter question became clear soon enough. She came home from the library one evening to find her father in his office, huddled over a calculator and surrounded by stacks of financial statements. Sílvia leaned against the doorframe. He didn’t seem to notice her there.
“What’s going on?” said Sílvia.
Her father punched the keys of the calculator and wrote something down on one of his ledgers before looking up and replying.
“I’m figuring out how much money we could potentially afford to invest in a new enterprise,” he said.
“What kind of enterprise?” said Sílvia.
Her father removed his half-moon reading glasses and gave her a pleased smile. He said that the night before, at a bull session with the men of the town, Felipe had let slip that if the land he was checking out for his father proved promising, there might be opportunities for investment. And if there were opportunities, he had told the other men, he wanted to let them in on the ground floor as an expression of gratitude for the hospitality they had shown him. Of course, he had made it clear that none of that information could leave the room.
“You’re not seriously thinking of giving him money, are you?” said Sílvia.
Her father gave a short bark of incredulity.
“And why shouldn’t I be?” he said. “Cândido Costa is the greatest business mind of our generation. It would be foolish not to.”
Sílvia crossed the room and sat in the chair across the desk from her father.
“This guy isn’t really Cândido Costa’s son,” she said.
“Of course he is,” said her father.
“How do you know?” she said, leaning her elbows on the desk.
�
�I’ve looked into it,” said her father.
“Really?” said Sílvia. “So you can prove that this guy is Felipe Costa?”
“Can you prove that he’s not?” said her father. “And anyway, who else would he be?”
“He’s a con man,” said Sílvia.
“And you have concrete evidence to support this claim?”
“Not exactly,” said Sílvia, “but—”
“Trust me,” said her father. “I’ve looked into it. You can rest assured that this young man is exactly who he claims to be.”
“I don’t think so,” said Sílvia.
“If I understand correctly, then,” said her father, “you’re saying that I should trust your hunch over the proof I’ve seen that this young man is Cândido Costa’s son?”
“I’d like to see the proof you’re talking about,” said Sílvia.
Her father shook his head.
“I don’t have time for this now,” he said, replacing his half-moon glasses.
He stared at her with stern expectancy until she got up from the chair.
“Okay,” said Sílvia, “good luck,” and left her father with his calculator and his books.
