City of Brick and Shadow Read online

  CITY OF BRICK

  AND SHADOW

  Tim Wirkus

  I like a look of Agony,

  Because I know it’s true—

  Men do not sham Convulsion,

  Nor simulate, a Throe—

  The Eyes glaze once—and that is Death—

  Impossible to feign

  The Beads opon the Forehead

  By homely Anguish strung.

  —EMILY DICKINSON

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  Years later, when he was no longer a missionary, no longer living in Vila Barbosa or anywhere near the sprawling behemoth of a city that contained it, Mike Schwartz often wondered if there was anything that he and Elder Toronto could have done to prevent the disappearance of Marco Aurélio. Surely there must have been signs suggesting that the man they had baptized was on the brink of vanishing, or, by all indications, simply ceasing to exist. On the not-infrequent nights that he had trouble sleeping, Mike sat at his dining room table nursing a glass of warm milk and composing mental laundry lists of, not excuses, but factors that had stood in their way. Topping each night’s list was Vila Barbosa, the dreaded neighborhood itself.

  Even before he was transferred there, Vila Barbosa terrified the young Elder Schwartz. A mere mention of the neighborhood’s name caused his young missionary heart to speed up, his palms to sweat, his bowels to tighten and groan. As the city’s most notorious slum, the neighborhood enjoyed an almost mythic status. Everyone—both Elder Schwartz’s fellow missionaries and the residents of the city’s other neighborhoods—had a favorite story about Vila Barbosa.

  For instance: An evangelical preacher denounced a handful of local criminals over the pulpit one morning around Christmastime; the next day, the dead, mutilated bodies of the pastor, his wife, two older children, and baby were found in front of the church, arranged in a gory Nativity scene.

  Or this one: Over the course of a decade, a popular churrasqueiro kidnapped the neighborhood’s poorest children, cooked them up, and served them as pork from his grilled meat cart.

  Or this: One hot, sweaty summer, the neighborhood’s stray dogs banded together into one massive, snarling pack that roamed the dusty streets with impunity, driving the human residents into their cramped homes for three days until, just as suddenly as they had joined together, the dogs disbanded and returned to their usual vagabond ways.

  Even if these stories were exaggerations, Elder Schwartz knew they must contain some grim truth of the terrible neighborhood. In his nightly prayers, he asked earnestly and often not to be sent to Vila Barbosa. He had only been working in his second area—a downtrodden but friendly neighborhood—for three months when he got a phone call from headquarters telling him he was being transferred. As requested, he showed up the next morning at the mission office, luggage in tow.

  “Any guesses where you’re headed?” asked Elder Pelourinho, his then-companion, as they stepped into the tiled upstairs chapel of the building.

  “I don’t know,” said Elder Schwartz.

  He knew where he didn’t want to go, but the possibility had nagged at him since the phone call the night before.

  “I bet you’re heading to the interior,” said Elder Pelourinho. “You’ve been in the city for a while.”

  “Maybe,” said Elder Schwartz.

  He hoped so. The two of them sat down in one of the hard, wooden pews and waited for the transfer meeting to begin. The chapel was about half full of missionaries engaged in similar conversations—Where will I go? Who will I work with?—in the usual blend of Portuguese and English. The missionaries were all young, at the end of their teens or the start of their twenties. With their scuffed dress shoes, their frayed slacks, their stained ties, and their graying white shirts, they looked like a mangy, nervous convention of junior accountants. On a morning like this, they all tried with varying degrees of success not to fixate on the amount of time they had left before their two years were up and they could return home to civilian life and the relative freedoms it offered. For his part, Elder Schwartz grew more and more nervous the longer he sat, increasingly convinced that Vila Barbosa and all its attendant horrors awaited him.

  At nine-thirty, President Madvig, the leader of the mission, entered the chapel and the room went silent. A blond, fleshy former football player, he towered over the podium as he welcomed the elders to the transfer meeting. As President Madvig spoke, Elder Schwartz fought back the urge to vomit with fear, concentrating so intently on controlling his stomach that he didn’t listen to the president’s words of welcome, or to the opening prayer, or the opening hymn. He didn’t listen to where the other elders were being sent, and he barely listened when President Madvig said that in Vila Barbosa, Elder Toronto would remain as senior companion, and would be joined by Elder Schwartz.

  The other missionaries in the room applauded heartily, likely offering up silent prayers of gratitude that they had avoided this dreaded assignment. Elder Schwartz stared straight ahead, marshaling control of his terrified guts. He stood up, his fingers white as they clutched the bench in front of him. The other missionaries continued to applaud. As if Vila Barbosa itself wasn’t bad enough, he would be working with Elder Toronto.

  Everybody knew Elder Toronto but nobody knew what to do with him. He was one of the mission’s most seasoned elders—almost twenty-one years old and nearing the tail end of his twenty-four months of service. A vocal presence at mission conferences, he compulsively disagreed not only with the comments of his fellow missionaries, but also with those of President Madvig himself. Elder Toronto would raise his hand, his face scrunched into a this-hurts-me-as-much-as-it-hurts-you expression of faux apology, and then systematically explain the flaws in the articulation, reasoning, or underlying motives of whomever had spoken before him.

  While President Madvig clearly had an exasperated respect for Elder Toronto—he made him the senior companion in all of his pairings, listened carefully to his frequent objections, even solicited his opinion from time to time—the same could not be said for the various church authorities who occasionally visited the mission. At a conference a few months earlier, a visiting Seventy had presented a new method for soliciting teaching referrals from church members. His plan involved a pocket-sized picture of Joseph Smith, a few carefully selected scriptures, and the same techniques of salesmanship that had made this man his millions in the private sector. Following his presentation, the Seventy cold-called on a few missionaries in the audience and, utilizing the commitment pattern, asked them to implement his method.

  “Elder,” said the Seventy to the first elder, “will you use this plan to ask the members in your area for referrals?”

  “Yes,” said the first elder.

  The Seventy called on a second elder and asked the same question.

  “Yes,” said the second elder.

  The Seventy called on a third elder—Elder Toronto—and asked the same question.

  “No,” said Elder Toronto.

  The other missionaries in the audience watched the Seventy’s face adjust unpleasantly to this unexpected, unacceptable response.

  “Elder,” he said, “you won’t use this plan to ask the members in your area for referrals?”

  “No,” said Elder Toronto, scrunch-faced. “It’s manipulative and it’s doctrinally unsound.”

  After Elder Toronto elaborated further, the Seventy, clearly gobsmacked by this insubordination, spent forty minutes lecturing the roomful of elders on the importance of humility and obedience.

  Under different circumstances, a missionary like that might become a folk hero among his comrades. But Elder Toronto treated not only authority figures, but also his fellow missionaries, with condescension bordering on disdain.
Regardless of the company, he couldn’t resist correcting even the slightest error in the reasoning, behavior, or attitudes of those around him. His junior companions quickly learned to either take these corrections in stride, or expend considerable time and energy mounting doomed resistance to Elder Toronto’s formidable powers of reason. And although Elder Toronto claimed an impersonal love of truth as his driving motivation, whenever the recipient of his arguments inevitably conceded the point, Elder Toronto’s eyes gleamed with unmistakable self-satisfaction.

  Elder Schwartz’s trainer, Elder Amorim, had worked with Elder Toronto for a trying three months near the beginning of his mission. The experience had made an impression. Elder Amorim and Elder Schwartz might be walking down the street in companionable silence, when, out of the blue, Elder Amorim would emerge from a quiet train of thought with an angry recollection from his time with Elder Toronto.

  “He corrected my grammar,” Elder Amorim might say to Elder Schwartz, still indignant months after the fact. “My grammar. I’m a native speaker, it’s his second language, and he’s correcting my grammar. Can you believe that?”

  Or maybe Elder Amorim would bring up the way Elder Toronto spent his p-day. On their one day off in the week, while Elder Amorim washed his clothes or wrote letters to his family or just lounged around the apartment, Elder Toronto sat at his desk in his tattered basketball shorts and faded green T-shirt reading books, magazines, and newspapers, none of whose titles appeared on the approved missionary reading list: A Field Guide to the Birds of South America, Analyzing Firearm Ballistics, Essential Writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Understanding Game Theory, The New Journal of World Dance History, The Calcutta Gazette, Cooking for a Crowd, Introduction to Logic, Bandeirantes: A Legacy of Discovery, The Joys of Organic Chemistry, An Advanced Training Manual for Interrogators, The Lusiads. He did this all day long, reading and reading, never uttering a word to his companion.

  One p-day, Elder Amorim, on spotting Elder Toronto’s current book of choice—The Psychology of Human Sexuality—called him on it.

  “Do you really think this is the best use of your time, Elder?” said Elder Amorim.

  Elder Toronto turned around in his chair, his eyes still on the book.

  “Trust me,” he said, “it’s not as interesting as it looks.”

  “I’m still not sure you should be reading it,” said Elder Amorim.

  Elder Toronto lowered the book, assuming as worldly wise a countenance as someone just out of his teens can muster.

  “Well,” he said, scratching at the stubble on his unshaven face, “maybe you’re right. Maybe I shouldn’t be reading this. Maybe we should go out and knock some doors instead.”

  This was not a bluff—Elder Toronto had scheduled teaching appointments before on their day off, much to the chagrin of his beleaguered junior companion.

  “No,” said Elder Amorim, “this is fine,” and he never brought it up again.

  At least twice a day during their time together, Elder Amorim would tell Elder Schwartz a story like this from his apparently boundless repertoire, the moral of each one being that Elder Toronto should be avoided if at all possible.

  Now, as the other missionaries continued to applaud President Madvig’s announcement, Elder Schwartz turned around to see Elder Toronto—a tall, skinny American whose boyish face, if it had resembled a cartoon turtle’s a little less, might have been pleasant—standing a few rows behind him. Elder Schwartz walked back to join him. They shook hands and sat down on the pew.

  “I don’t think I know anything about you,” said Elder Toronto.

  Elder Schwartz only nodded, scared that if he opened his mouth, he would lose all control of his stomach. He sweated out the rest of the meeting in silence.

  • • •

  Two months later, the trouble began in earnest.

  It was morning, the sun still low on the horizon, the air still cool at the already crowded Thursday street market. The two missionaries—Elder Toronto and Elder Schwartz—were looking for new people to teach, stopping anyone who could spare a minute, anyone who accidentally made eye contact with them.

  Elder Toronto had become embroiled in a conversation with a tenacious elderly woman, debating the theological implications of the miracle of the loaves and the fishes. Despite having nothing to contribute to the conversation, Elder Schwartz stood next to him, as per the unbending mission rule requiring each elder to stay at his companion’s side at all times. This tableau had become a familiar one—Elder Toronto deep in conversation with a new contact, Elder Schwartz standing next to him, arms folded, silent. With his slipshod spoken Portuguese skills, Elder Schwartz generally stayed quiet, preferring invisibility to the sometimes concerned, sometimes angry, sometimes pitying, but always uncomprehending reactions of the native speakers he attempted to address. As Elder Toronto’s dialogue with the elderly woman wandered down increasingly obscure and heated paths, Elder Schwartz looked around at the booths lining the crowded street. His eyes were sweeping over the various wares of the market—mangoes, homemade cleaning supplies, bananas, pirated CDs, nuts, spices, hand-sewn dresses, tangerines, apples—when he saw Marco Aurélio pushing his way through the crowd. He wore a new suit, the armpits of the gray jacket dark with sweat. His forehead was bruised and bleeding.

  “Marco Aurélio,” called Elder Schwartz, yelling to be heard above the noise of the crowd.

  Elder Schwartz yelled again and Marco Aurélio turned from several yards away. When he saw Elder Schwartz, he didn’t smile or wave or come over to say hello. Instead, he turned and pushed his way in the opposite direction, bumping into a man carrying a crate of oranges, squeezing past two conversing nuns, ducking behind a booth that sold knockoff soccer jerseys, and then disappearing.

  Elder Toronto, deep in conversation with the elderly woman, had been oblivious to the whole thing.

  “Hey,” said Elder Schwartz, pulling at Elder Toronto’s elbow.

  “What are you doing?” said Elder Toronto, brushing him away. He apologized to the elderly woman, who had already leaned her half-full grocery basket back onto its wheels and was pulling it toward one of the fruit stands.

  “Wait,” said Elder Toronto, but the woman just shook her head at him and kept walking, obviously appalled by the poor manners of the two young foreigners.

  “Come on,” said Elder Schwartz, already jogging in the direction that Marco Aurélio had taken.

  Elder Toronto followed after him.

  “What’s going on?” he said.

  They ran behind the booth selling soccer jerseys and found a narrow alleyway leading to the next street over. A kid with a battered cavaquinho in his lap sat against one wall of the alley, listlessly smoking a joint.

  “Did a man just run through here?” asked Elder Schwartz in his best attempt at Portuguese.

  Unsurprisingly, the kid looked at him blankly. Elder Toronto repeated Elder Schwartz’s question in his smooth, nearly native diction and the kid’s eyes lit up with comprehension.

  “No,” he said, sounding genuinely sad that he hadn’t. “No.”

  He picked absently at the strings of his cavaquinho, shaking his head as the two elders walked to the end of the alleyway.

  “What’s going on?” said Elder Toronto, wrinkling his round forehead.

  Elder Schwartz told him what he had seen—Marco Aurélio, beaten and sweaty, fleeing at the sight of the two elders.

  “I don’t think so,” said Elder Toronto, a patronizing smirk on his face. “That doesn’t sound like Marco Aurélio.”

  “It was him,” said Elder Schwartz.

  “If it was him, why didn’t he come over and talk to us? And why would he run away?” He asked the questions patiently, as if he were addressing a small child.

  “I don’t know,” said Elder Schwartz. “All I know is that when he saw us, he ran. And he looked like someone had beat him up.”

  Elder Toronto shook his head.

  “No, Elder Schwartz,” he said. “It wasn’t Ma
rco Aurélio you saw.” And then he started walking back toward the market, signaling the end of the discussion.

  Elder Schwartz wouldn’t leave it alone, though.

  “It was definitely him,” he said. “Something’s wrong.”

  “Fine,” said Elder Toronto. “We’ll go to his house and talk to him. But you’ll feel silly when he tells us he’s been home all morning.”

  If he had been home all morning, however, he wasn’t there by the time the elders arrived, a concerning fact, Elder Schwartz pointed out, considering Marco Aurélio’s near-hermitic tendencies.

  “Maybe,” said Elder Toronto.

  “I saw what I saw,” said Elder Schwartz.

  “We’ll see.”

  But when they checked back at his house later that afternoon, he still wasn’t there.

  And the next morning, nothing.

  “He never leaves his house,” said Elder Schwartz. “Something is up.”

  Elder Toronto creased his face at this, but didn’t respond.

  After another day of not finding Marco Aurélio at home, Elder Toronto finally acknowledged that something might be wrong, that Marco Aurélio might actually be missing. For Elder Schwartz, this rare concession from Elder Toronto inspired not satisfaction but a sour sense of dread.

  THE ARGENTINE

  They say that within a week of the Argentine’s arrival in Vila Barbosa, three people were dead and the Argentine was the most powerful man in the neighborhood. This was back when Vila Barbosa was still in its infancy, still just a few dozen squatters living in flimsy wooden shacks scattered over the area’s then green and rolling hills. They say it happened like this—that one day an enigmatic foreigner with square, white teeth and a three-piece suit showed up at the neighborhood’s little general store offering to buy the establishment from its owner at the time, a struggling pig farmer named Fernando. The amount of money the foreigner offered in exchange for the store was absurdly low, even by the neighborhood’s cash-poor standards, and Fernando told him so, asked the man if he was crazy or just stupid. The foreigner replied that he was neither, that this was the most attractive offer Fernando would get for the place, and that he would be foolish not to take him up on it. The man smiled, flashing his square, white teeth at Fernando. He said he would give Fernando some time to think the proposition over. He tipped his hat, wished Fernando a good morning, and walked out of the store.