Stella Manhattan.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara

Exuberant, sensuous, and beautiful, with "south-of-the-boarder odalisque eyes" and smooth mulatto skin, Stella Manhattan is ready to take New York by storm. She sees herself dressed in rhinestones, sequins, and plumes, the queen of the burlesque review - Stella Manhattan, the Star of Manhattan. In the meantime, though, she spends a lot of time picking up men and shooting the breeze with her warm, funny neighbor, Paco, a vehemently anti-communist Cuban refugee.

But Stella exists only at night and on the weekends. On workdays she is Eduardo da Costa e Silva, clerk at the Brazilian consulate.

Embarrassed by his son's homosexuality, Eduardo's father used his contacts with an old friend, the powerful Colonel Valdevinos Vianna, to get the boy a job in the passport section of the Brazilian consulate in New York. However, Vianna himself turns out to be gay. He enlists Eduardo to rent an apartment to serve as a base of operation for his alter ego, a leather-clad, sadomasochistic queen known as the Black Widow, who roams the dives of New York looking for prey.

A respectably married, impeccably dressed charmer in his fifties, Vianna is the Brazilian military attache in New York and a known torturer with links to the brutally repressive junta then in power. Vianna's weekly lunches with Eduardo arouse the suspicions of a walter in the restaurant, a spy for a Brazilian communist insurgent group in New York. The activists working to overthrow the dictatorship try to recruit Eduardo to help them trap Vianna, and that's when Eduardo's troubles begin.

Marcelo, a gay communist friend of Eduardo's, tries to warn him of the danger of associating with Vianna and has a comrade telephone him. However, the call only serves to rattle Eduardo. The communists break into and ransack the Black Widow's apartment, leaving anti-junta graffiti on the walls, and the FBI agents investigating the case trace the lease back to Eduardo. Tipped off by the junta, the American agents interview Professor Anibal, a paralytic Brazilian...