Fiduciary Duty by Tim Michaels

be added to the order. He also asked for some heavy-duty batteries. Unfortunately for the store clerk, the Caipira insisted on telling the oxen story on the second phone call as well.
    The supposed car-alarm casing and the two capacitors would be ready within a week. Knowing the South American tendency to guarantee much and deliver late, the Caipira promised a 25% bonus if the items were ready on-time.
    After Lincoln made his calls, he took the hat off and I placed it on the dresser in the hotel room. Then I took a cab to Ibirapuera Park and spent a few hours walking around. It was a nice day despite the smog and I felt good. I was getting things done, moving the ball forward. I sat next to a lake and watched some kids playing with a kite. It would be a few years before Jeremy was old enough for me to take him out kite flying, but if he had been there, I knew he would have been delighted just to watch.
    Later in the afternoon, I got back to the hotel and went to the business center. It was empty. After checking my e-mail, I called my parents and my sister online. It was nice to speak to family after two weeks on the road. I also called my real-estate agent. Nothing to report on the house. Not surprisingly, she hadn’t even scheduled an open house yet.
    The next morning, after a jog (on the treadmill, alas), a shower and breakfast, I changed into the one suit I had brought with me on the trip. I made a note to buy a few more before the end of the day. Then I carefully examined one of the stylized tourist maps and found the location of two highly regarded hotels in the city. My little Fiat and I drove over to one of them, the Hilton. I left the small car in a nearby parking garage and walked into the hotel. I loitered around for five minutes and took off my wedding band. With my ring in his pocket, Francisco Fernandez, the Argentine businessman, came outside and hailed a cab.
    “Do you understand Spanish?” Fernandez asked the cabbie, in heavily accented Portuguese.
    “Yes, sir, a little,” the cab driver responded in Portuguese. There wasn’t a Brazilian alive who wasn’t convinced they could understand at least a bit of Spanish, even when they couldn’t.
    “Excellent,” Fernandez said in Spanish, “Take me to the Maksoud Plaza just off Avenida Paulista.”
    “Of course, sir” the cabbie said.
    Fernandez did most of the talking as the cabbie drove. The cabbie learned Fernandez was an Argentine businessman originally from the province of Cordoba but now working out of Rio. Fernandez had been fleshed out since he had asked another cabbie to bring him to a whorehouse over a week ago. His employer was a Swedish medical device company for whom he ran the company’s operations in Rio de Janeiro. Rio was one of three locations around the world where surgeons came for training on the latest generation of the company’s equipment. Since the new models were usually virtually identical to the old models, training was essentially a joke, or rather, an excuse to be in a world-class vacation destination with the tab going on someone else’s dime. The other two locations where Fernandez’ employer provided training were Agadir in Morocco and Phuket in Thailand.
    The whole thing made perfect sense since the devices cost tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars per unit, and the surgeons, though they were the ones deciding which equipment would be used, were not the people paying for the bill. As a result, Fernandez made sure to cater to their wishes. Some of the surgeons wanted to try scuba diving, some of them hang-gliding, and so forth. The Argentine arranged for all of the above, and occasionally hookers and blow, too.
    “Sure, it’s a scam, but what can you do?” he asked, shrugging.
    Fernandez was, in his way, as talkative as the Caipira, but even so, he did ask a few questions. He learned that the cabbie had four children and was always up for more work. The cabbie also seemed reasonably honest and willing