Fiduciary Duty Page 3

  The cabbie soon returned with a nifty little phone that had three “chips” – that is, three separate SMS cards, meaning the phone itself had service through three of four major telephone operators in the country. That would keep most of my phone calls at a manageable rate.

  “Where to now, sir?” the cabbie asked.

  “Take me somewhere I can meet girls,” I said with a wink, “Clean girls.”

  He brought me to a nondescript building, “Here you are, Mr. Fernandez. If you still have a headache I can take care of this too.”

  I laughed, and tipped him a hundred dollars in American currency, confident that if he remembered anything about me in a few weeks, it would be for being asked to meet girls and the tip, not my face and perhaps not even the phone. After I got out, the cabbie remained parked at the curb. He seemed to be writing something on a clipboard. I had no choice, so I walked into the establishment. It was early in the day, too early for the ladies of the evening to be at work. However, a well dressed older woman was seated at a table, apparently doing books. She looked up and asked if she could help me.

  “Do you serve feijoada?” I asked in English, “The cab driver said you have best feijoada in town.”

  Feijoada, made with black beans and pork products and served with a delicious toasted manioc flour called farofa, is Brazil’s national dish. Clearly, this tourist was in the wrong place. The madam didn’t miss a beat and replied in perfect English, “You are mistaken. Feijoada is only to be eaten on Friday or Saturday nights.”

  I sighed audibly. Then I asked to see a menu.

  “I am sorry, sir. We will not be open for lunch today,” she said.

  “Oh,” I replied, “That’s too bad. I’ll be back Friday evening for the feijoada.”

  She looked amused at the statement but let it go uncorrected. When I stepped back outside into the sunlight, the cab I had arrived in was gone. As I walked, I put my wedding ring back on. I was glad to be me again, but it brought back, unbidden, the reason I was on this quest, so far from H and Jeremy.

  I walked for a bit. Eventually I hailed another cab which took me back to the Marriot, and from there I walked to my car.

  Once on the open road outside the city, there are several ways to get to Ternos. Neither the little Fiat nor I were in any hurry, so we took the scenic route – through the mountains to the Port of Santos, where Pelé, the King of Soccer had grown up and gotten his start. In Santos, I bought a second hand surfboard in Brazil’s national colors, yellow and green. From there, Ternos was straight up the coast for about 3 hours. I drove right through Ternos, and kept driving for another thirty miles, stopping at the delightfully named town of Ubatuba, pronounced “Ooba Tooba” in English. Ubatuba is nicknamed the Brazilian Surf Capital, which provided me with some protective coloration for being there.

  The hotel where I had made reservations in my own name was two blocks from the beach. I checked in, unpacked, and came downstairs. In the small lobby, I had the concierge make reservations for me to take surfing lessons the next morning. I made sure to speak English with everyone. I didn’t want anyone in Ubatuba to remember anything unusual about this particular American tourist.

  Since it was still early afternoon, I went for a walk. I picked up a few maps and a couple of tour books at a newspaper stand. Half a block later, I stopped at small sidewalk café and bought some finger food – fried shrimp and fried clams. I hadn’t felt hungry in months, but all of a sudden I was famished. After almost inhaling the food, I added a steak and fries to my order. The steak was a poor cut, and unevenly fried, but it tasted heavenly to me. The fries, which sopped up the steak juice, were even better.

  While I ate, I realized I was more than hungry, I was elated. For the first time in a long while, I was alive, and I had purpose. The dark cloud in which I had lived since H and Jeremy had died had cleared significantly while I was focused on my mission.

  I settled my bill and started walking back to the hotel. Along the way, it started to pour and I sprinted back the rest of the way. I arrived drenched.

  The concierge grinned, and said, “You start your lesson of surf early, Mr. Reynolds.” He pronounced “surf” as “soorf.”

  I smiled, encouraging him, and he continued, “You know, Ubatuba has more than one, how you say, nickname. Not just surf capital. Also it calls self ‘Ubachuva.’ Chuva means rain.”

  For the rest of the day, I read through the tour books and watched TV. I kept an ear out for the Caipira accents similar to those I used to be able to imitate. I knew I would need that skill again. Later, I had an early dinner at a family-owned restaurant down the block from the hotel. The meal was a pleasant mix of exotic and ordinary: some sort of smoked fish with peas and potatoes and a mango juice to wash it down. Afterwards, I felt completely beat. I went to sleep as soon as the sun went down.

  During the night, I had the same dream I always did. In the dream I am at my computer, applying for yet another job. H walks into the room holding Jeremy and says, “I have a couple errands to run. Why don’t we eat the leftover lasagna when I get back?”

  I respond, “In restaurants they call it twice baked. They charge extra for it like that.” I grin, thinking of Jeremy’s tendency to end up with strings of tomato sauce-covered cheese hanging from his chin.

  H puts Jeremy down, and they walk toward the door. For an instant, before they walk out, both of them turn around and smile at me. Jeremy says, “Bye bye, Daddy.”

  I smile back, and say “Bye bye, Jeremy. Bye bye, H.”

  In the dream, even as I say “Bye bye” I always feel a sense of foreboding, and I try to warn H but cannot. Every night, at that same point, I would wake up with a feeling of despair pitted in my stomach. But that night was different. The dream felt almost bittersweet, as if I had distant memories of H and Jeremy actually coming back a few hours later and the three of us having lasagna for lunch. In real life, of course, I was at the coroner’s office a few hours later to identify their bodies.

  The bittersweet feeling from the dream was still with me when I woke up at the crack of dawn. After puttering around in the bathroom, I found my running shoes and shorts and went out for run. The tour books said there are 92 different beaches in the Ubatuba area and I found a semi-deserted one on which to start my jog. I hadn’t given up jogging since H and Jeremy died, but it had simply become another mindless thing I had to do, like brushing my teeth, shaving or cleaning out the cats’ litter box. Since my late teens, if I didn’t jog and do stomach crunches regularly, I would get excruciating back pains. As long as maintained the regimen and kept my weight below a hundred and seventy pounds, I could usually keep the back pains at bay.

  What I hadn’t been doing for the past few months was eating or sleeping properly. As a result, I had lost about ten pounds. That was on top of ten pounds I had lost earlier from stress when I first became unemployed. I was down to the same weight I had in my freshman year in college, but it didn’t feel good.

  But that morning, that morning I did feel good. In fact, I was elated. My sense of purpose from the day before was still there, and I had always enjoyed jogging on sand, especially the wet sand at the water’s edge. As I ran along the sand and the occasional rocks and past a lagoon, I kept thinking about how much H would have loved Ubatuba – she thought she loved sunbathing but could never stay out more than twenty minutes before getting too hot– and how much fun Jeremy would have had in the water. Normally, at that point I would have broken down, but not this morning. I realized, as I was having those thoughts, something in me had changed. The bittersweet feeling was still there. I felt like traces of H and Jeremy were with me.

  An hour later, I got back, took a shower, and changed into swim trunks and a t-shirt. I went down to the first floor – labeled “T” (for “terreo” or ground) on the elevator, since the first floor to Brazilians is what we Americans call the
second. Even modest Brazilian hotels typically have a nice spread for breakfast, and this one was no exception. I enjoyed a hearty meal of fruit, bread, and doce de leite, a milk-based spread exactly like the “dulce de leche” I had eaten so frequently as a child in Argentina and Uruguay. Americans somehow mistake it for caramel, but it is actually made from condensed milk and tastes so much better.

  Later, I went for my surf lessons. I had surfed a bit in California but I wasn’t any good at it. I immediately noticed a big difference between the water in Ubatuba and the water off the coast of Malibu or Santa Cruz – you don’t need a wetsuit in Brazil because the water was warm even though it was still early spring. And unlike in Santa Cruz, you didn’t have to worry about being mistaken for a sea lion by a shark, making it that much easier to concentrate on surfing.

  After the lesson, I walked back to the hotel, showered, and changed into Bermuda cargo shorts, a t-shirt, and flip-flops. It was an outfit that loudly proclaimed “American tourist in an exotic beach town.” There was a fine line to be walked. I wanted to be remembered, if at all, as a tourist on vacation, but I didn’t want to fall victim to Brazil’s national sport of pick pocketing. Had I been in Rio or São Paulo I would have taken my mugger’s wallet – a billfold with a handful of small denomination bills and expired credit cards to be worn conspicuously, but where I was I didn’t expect any problems. I hopped into my little Fiat and we headed down the coast to Ternos to get a feel for the area.

  According to the tour-books, Ternos had a population of 9,837 people, but it was hard to see where they were all hiding. The entire town appeared to sit on a single beautiful half-moon beach about a mile long with the most perfect white sand I had ever seen. Torrimpietra Castle was easy to find – dead center of the beach, right across the street from the water. It turns out that in Brazil, unlike in the US, you can’t build on the beach side of the street. That policy guarantees that would-be beachgoers can get to and enjoy the ocean, rather than being faced with a wall of homes, as they would in parts of Malibu, say, or Naples, Florida.

  To my unprofessional eye, it seemed that the town of Ternos wasn’t conducive to a killing. Leaving aside a twisty and treacherous mountain road, there was only one road into and out of town, and that road led onto BR-101. BR-101 is the longest highway in Brazil, running about 3,000 miles along the country’s coast. Police, to say nothing of the Prince’s own security team, could block off any escape attempt with ease. The town was also too small to have many effective hiding places. On the plus side, the half-moon shape of the beach meant that many of the condos provided a direct line of sight to the entrance of the castle.

  Since I hadn’t spent much time with guns, I was at best a decent shot with a rifle. I could probably hit a man-sized target, if it wasn’t moving, at 50 yards. I certainly could not take a kill-shot from further away, but even at that range I didn’t have the skill to guarantee results. And shooting from closer would surely be suicide. Of course, all that was a moot point. I had no idea how to procure an unregistered rifle in Brazil or how to smuggle one into the country. I had a random thought that killing powerful figures is easier in fiction, largely because the hero has excellent training and an organization to back him up. I couldn’t count on anything except myself. But I was confident. H had always trusted me, and so did Jeremy. The job ahead wasn’t going to be easy, but if I was careful, if I planned it well, I would pull it off.

  Then I considered how the Prince would get to the castle. The problem for me was the large number of unknowns. Would he stay the night in Ternos? Would he sleep on his boat, and if so, where would it dock, or would it even dock at all? Would he arrive by car, or by helicopter, or would he land one of his smaller planes at the small airport nearby? The Prince had more transportation options than I could cover and I would only get one shot at the title.

  The only thing I knew with certainty was that he would be at the Castle, on a Monday at midnight some weeks hence. That meant that I had to find a way to kill him at the Castle itself. I walked to the front of the building whose façade was mostly covered by scaffolding, and in a few places, plastic sheeting. Still, the distinctive look of the building was fairly evident. Despite the construction, the gift shop was open and I walked in.

  Chapter 4. The Castle

  The gift shop was empty, other than a bored looking twenty-something clerk and me. The clerk didn’t even look up when I walked in. It was clear the renovation the entire building was undergoing hadn’t yet extended to the gift shop. The carpet was old and in some places threadbare. The shelves with knickknacks – mostly cheap looking “alchemy sets” and other gee-gaws – were dingy and covered with dust from the renovation. And the ceiling fan creaked and shook so much I was surprised it remained attached to the ceiling. It seemed safest not to walk underneath it.

  I picked up a couple books in English and one in Portuguese on the life of Torrimpietra and the building of the castle. Antonio Torrimpietra, whose original last name is lost to history, appears to have hailed from and, upon arrival in Brazil, adopted the name of the village of Torrimpietra, outside Rome. The village, whose name means “stone tower” in Italian, is itself named after a castle in the area. The Castle he built in Ternos bore no resemblance to its namesake in the village outside Rome.

  I brought the books to the counter. The clerk was delighted that someone was there, all the more so when she discovered that that someone was an American. It turned out she was studying English and hospitality at a local college and now that she was awake she had an opportunity to practice both.

  “How did you hear about Castelo Torrimpietra?” she asked.

  “I didn’t,” I said, “I am staying in Ubatuba and I was driving around. I saw this building and thought I had to stop because it is so unique.”

  She nodded. “The building, it is different, is it not? Dr. Torrimpietra, he designed it himself. He said it was from a dream.”

  “I’ll say. I’ve never seen anything like it,” I said.

  “You should see inside. In four weeks, the work on the building will be complete” she said.

  “Ah. I wish I could. I am going back next week.”

  Mentally I crossed my fingers, “Is there any way to see it this week?”

  I tapped the ring on my finger against the counter, subtly bringing it to her attention. I’ve found that many women, particularly younger ones, are more relaxed around middle aged men who are married than those who might be on the prowl. Sure enough, her eyes went to my wedding band. Then she stared straight at me, measuring me up. The message had gotten across: I was no threat.

  “OK.” It sounded more like “awww kay.”

  “In twenty minutes, the workers will go home. I will give you a tour of the castle for twenty dollars. American.”

  “Twenty dollars is a little steep,” I said.

  “Twenty dollars for a private tour of a place that is unique in all of the world. Dr. Torrimpietra was an architect. I will even show you the parts of the castle that nobody ever sees except people who work here. There are doors that have nada, nothing behind them. And stairs that go to walls, or to nothing.”

  She was giving me the hard sell, and I could tell she could use the money.

  “OK,” I said, “Twenty bucks, American. I’ll be back in about twenty minutes.”

  I came back just as the last workers were headed off the construction site. I handed the clerk a twenty dollar bill.

  “Thank you,” she said, “What is your name, by the way? My name is Rosaura.”

  “Mike,” I told her, making up a name. “Pleased to meet you.”

  “Prazer, Mike,” she said. “Prazer” meant “a pleasure.”

  We shook hands and I followed her through the door connecting the gift shop to the rest of the castle. We started by going up the parapet into the living quarters which doubled as a bell tower. The view of the
ocean was magnificent. The parapet also must have provided a great view of the town when the tower was first built. The rest of the castle was just as Rosaura had promised: there were doors opening onto walls, and staircases to nothing at all. There was even a windowless room which was accessible, if that’s the correct term, by a single door less than a foot high.

  While the tour was interesting, I kept trying to figure out why the Prince had bought the property. Sure, it had the “supernatural” connection he tended to like, but frankly, creating a high end restaurant and conference center in a tiny town like Ternos is a financially iffy proposition. Given its location and what he paid for it, the Castle would never make money. The Prince might not be the best businessman in the world, but he can’t have been that blind.

  So what was his motive? The Prince was an ostentatious man, and he liked to associate himself with famous things. Torrimpietra Castle, however odd, would never be a famous property. It was simply too far off the beaten path. Rosaura mentioned that real Prince had bought the Castle and was paying for its renovations.

  “Has he been here?” I asked.

  “No,” Rosaura replied, “But Dr. Rogerio, the director, he say the Prince might come.”

  And then we got to the main hall. It was a large, imposing space with stone floors, stone walls, and heavy stone columns holding up a stone ceiling. The hall was being converted into a restaurant that could easily accommodate ten or so tables with four to six seats apiece. At one end of the hall, raised on a stand, was an imposing gold and black throne.