Insects: Braga's Gold

by John Koloen

  The list of questions, asked in English, seemed endless, many of them redundant from the previous hearing. It wasn’t long before the questioning narrowed to the early morning hours when Duncan and his group escaped from their captors, thanks to an invading army of insects.

  Duncan outlined the event much as he’d done in his book. So, satisfied with his performance, he smiled at Montes and started to push himself up from his chair as if he’d been dismissed.

  “Please remain in your seat, Professor Duncan, we’re not finished,” Lima said.

  39

  Montes didn’t know what to make of the hearing. He was blindsided by Duncan’s admission that he had killed Luiz Cardoso.

  “You didn’t want me to lie, did you?” Duncan said in defense.

  Montes shook his head.

  “It wasn’t in your book.”

  “I didn’t think it was important at the time,” Duncan said.

  They’d retreated to a nearby cafe following the hearing, which Montes continued to denounce. As far as he was concerned, it was a setup and the prosecutor was in on it, though the latter had insisted he was little more than a moderator.

  “They bribed somebody,” Montes said angrily. “This country is going to hell. Everyone is either on the take or committing crimes with impunity. The police won’t go into certain neighborhoods and when they do they operate like a paramilitary.”

  “It can’t be that bad.”

  Montes shook his head and adjusted his black framed glasses. It was late morning, rain had started falling, and what he wanted more than anything was a stiff drink when all that was available were non-alcoholic beverages. He resisted an urge to pound the table.

  “It’s worse. You should’ve told me. I’m very disappointed in you.”

  Duncan lowered his head, his face reddened. He knew what he’d done and why he did it. The man was suffering. The insects had chomped out one eye and were eating his body from the inside out. He believed the man was begging to be killed. He’d even grabbed Duncan’s leg when he tried to move away. It was one swift jab to the chest with the heavy, long-bladed machete. It wasn’t as if anything could be done to save the man.

  “And don’t forget, he killed one of our guys and kidnapped us,” Duncan said. “They tied us up and as far as we were concerned if we didn’t do something they were going to kill us. What would you do?”

  “You don’t have to convince me, professor. I believe you. It’s just that they have two alleged witnesses who saw you kill the man.”

  “I don’t know how anyone could’ve seen anything. There were bodies everywhere and—”

  Montes leaned toward Duncan.

  “Have you told this to anyone?”

  “No,” Duncan responded emphatically. “Nobody.”

  “Which brings to mind the question of why you didn’t write about it.”

  Duncan sighed, sipped coffee, and lowered his head, as if expecting an explanation to appear on the polyester tablecloth.

  “I guess I’ve never thought about it like that,” he said, finally, raising his head. “So many bad things happened. So many people died or suffered horrible injuries that, I don’t know, it just seemed like I did something anyone else would do. It was just one really bad thing after another until, you know, it’s like one big thing with no one thing sticking out. You understand? Plus, the two expeditions kinda blended together.”

  “Not really,” Montes said. “I mean, yes, I can see how this would be like focusing on a particular house in a flood that destroyed a thousand homes, but, at the same time, you killed a man. I have to tell you, I don’t know where this is going and I’m not certain I can provide the assistance you need.”

  Duncan slumped in his chair, his face a portrait of disappointment. For the first time since arriving in Manaus, he was losing hope. The man he was depending on to help him through the legal entanglements was losing hope.

  “Can they charge me with a crime?”

  “They can do what they want,” the lawyer said cynically. “They can charge you and you’ll have to prove them wrong. We might be able to impugn the witnesses, given that they were kidnappers. But my understanding is that the family hired a forensics team to investigate, and there’s no telling what they’ve come up with.”

  “I’ll pay you more. Whatever you need. You’re the only person I can trust here, even if you only give me advice. You can bill me if you need to hire someone else. I’ll pay.”

  Montes smiled amiably and agreed to continue to represent Duncan, if only because he liked him. Nonetheless, Duncan lied. Maggie would pay, not him.

  40

  Carolyn McKenzie, who kept her maiden name, had reservations about her husband’s mission, as he called it. It took convincing for her to go along with it. But she didn’t like the risk. She knew about his previous trips to Brazil. She knew all about them. She’d read Howard Duncan’s book. The more she knew, the less she liked it. But he’d been persuasive. They’d have the down payment on a house while they were still young. They’d pay off their student loans while they were still young. The money would plant them firmly in the middle of their American dream. Boyd could taste it.

  She wanted to be sold on it, but everything her husband said led her back to losing him in the emptiness of the rainforest. But when all else failed, he prevaricated. It wasn’t a bold-faced lie. At the time, Boyd believed it could happen, that Howard Duncan would join him. Of all the senior scientists that she knew at Biodynamism, she thought Duncan to be among the most trustworthy and least obsessed with his work outside of the office. He was genial and accommodating at parties, and could carry on conversations that had nothing to do with his work.

  “I’m going to hook up with him in Manaus,” Boyd said.

  “What’s he doing down there? I thought he’d quit all that.”

  “He’s giving testimony or something. He told me he was trying to close the book on the past.”

  None of this was a distortion of the facts, and she had no reason to doubt what he said.

  “Why would he go with you? He hates the company, doesn’t he?”

  “Well, yeah. So do I. For a quarter mil I can live with it. But he wouldn’t be helping them. He’d be helping me.”

  Boyd wasn’t just spitballing the conversation. He had a strategy. The conversation had been ongoing for a week and it had gotten to the point where he felt he had addressed her most important objections. It was a battle of attrition since what she needed was reassurance that he would come back the same as he had left. It was not an unsupported fear. She’d worked in Nolan Thomas’s lab and was well aware of the awful disfigurement he’d suffered when a handful of the insects attacked him.

  “This is totally different,” he’d told her. “We’re hundreds of miles away from where that happened. There’s a town not too far away. It’s a different geography. Besides, we don’t know for sure we’ll find the bugs. We’re not going to be kidnapped, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “How do you know that?” she asked.

  “Nobody gets kidnapped twice. Plus, we’ll have security,” he said, leaving out the fact that security would be provided by a former employee.

  “There’ll be four of us with Howard,” he said. “Besides, we know where we’re going. We’ve got a guide and we’re not just feeling our way at night. This is way different than the last time.”

  He showed her the maps.

  “More than likely, we won’t even find the bugs.”

  McKenzie jumped on this.

  “Then why go at all? If you don’t think you’ll find anything—”

  Boyd saw that his attempt to minimize the risk was backfiring.

  “What can I say? Even if I don’t find them, I’m still getting paid plenty for a week’s work, way more than I’d get working on a video, and there’s a chance I could earn the quarter mil. That’s what people do. Why do anything when you don’t know how things will work out? Everything in life is iffy. There’s no gu
arantees.”

  By the time Boyd left for Brazil, McKenzie wasn’t convinced but could plainly see that it was something he badly wanted to do. What else could she do? If she insisted that he not go, he might resent it for the rest of his life. Worse, he might go anyway, and she’d resent him for the rest of her life. There was no good option, which is why she hugged him for a half-minute and, as he walked out the door, shouted, “Call me when you get there.”

  41

  Montes adjusted his approach to the hearings after several days pondering whether he could continue to represent Duncan. Since the Cardosos had interviewed Duncan, he would interview the men who the family claimed had seen his client kill their relative. Previously, he had thought of the hearing as the final chapter of a drawn-out process aimed at resolving discrepancies. He believed what the prosecutor had told him. Now he saw it more as a trial, even though there would be no judgment or indictment. He suspected that the hearings would lead to costly civil proceedings. He would no longer simply play along. He’d mount a counteroffensive, confident that two men engaged in criminal activity would prove to be untrustworthy witnesses. He re-read the chapters from Duncan’s book that related to the kidnapping and escape, and then made certain from Duncan himself that what he wrote was true and accurate and, especially, insisted that Duncan describe anything else he had left out of the narrative.

  “Tell you the truth, I don’t know why I did it. I’ve thought about it a lot. It’s not in my nature to do something like that. Or at least it wasn’t,” Duncan said as they met at Montes’s office, a cramped space in a musty building filled with cramped offices, with a restroom near one end of a narrow hallway. The furnishings were mid-century modern. His diplomas and certificate hung on the wall behind his desk, framing a George Nelson Ball Clock.

  “From what you’ve said, if he hadn’t grabbed your leg, you wouldn’t have done it. You were moving away from him.”

  “Exactly!” Duncan said, slapping his hand on the desk. “What choice did I have?”

  “You did the merciful thing. Your book makes clear the horrible death caused by these insects. No one would want to die like that. No one.”

  Duncan explained that he’d left the incident out of his book, thinking at the time that it had nothing to do with the escape, the expedition itself or the insects. But it was also something that had buried itself in the back of his mind.

  “I think it’s going to come down to credibility, yours versus the two admitted criminals. I’ve already spoken with the prosecutor about this and he agreed to schedule another hearing. I am confident that once I start asking questions they will show themselves to be liars. I can’t imagine that anyone would be waiting around such a place of death.”

  “Yes, yes,” Duncan agreed ardently. “Everyone took off, except me. Me and Cody. We stayed, of course, to capture specimens. No, no. I stayed to find something to carry the specimens in. We had them in a glass jar, but I needed a pack or bag or something to carry it. You can ask Cody, he was there.”

  Duncan grew silent, his mind reaching back years to that chaotic place to recapture the details that he had never written about that were now important.

  “I remember several of them on the ground, moaning, and this one guy asking for agua. I found some bottled water and gave it to him, but then the guy started saying something in Portuguese. You don’t have to understand the language to know what he was saying. There was no hope for him.”

  “What was he saying?”

  “Me mate. I remember it like it was yesterday.”

  Montes nodded knowingly.

  “Kill me,” he said.

  “Yes, exactly,” Duncan said. “I knew what it meant.”

  Montes, who had been jotting notes on a legal pad, smiled.

  “You’ve given me a lot to work with,” he said reassuringly.

  “Like what?”

  “For one thing, if these two bandits were there watching you, why didn’t they help their leader? They knew he was there, correct?"

  Duncan shrugged.

  “I don’t see how they could miss him if they were there. He was screaming. It was painful to listen to. It was like his throat was tearing itself apart.”

  42

  Entering his third week in what Duncan was coming to regard as his captivity, his lawyer Andre Montes had revealed the hearings as a sham and the case against his client a house of cards. The American was happy, sitting in the hotel patio sipping a mojito and regaling himself over the phone with Maggie Cross, who could hardly get a word in. Duncan was full of himself. The prosecutor ended the proceedings as soon as it became clear that the Cardosos’ witnesses had seen nothing and, even if they were there, they were among the first to flee.

  “You should’ve seen it,” Duncan said, leaning toward his phone, which he’d set on the table. From inside the hotel it looked like he was talking to the table.

  “Should’ve seen what?”

  “The hearing. Haven’t you been listening? I’ve been telling you all about it. I almost started laughing at one point. I mean, for the parts that I could understand, mostly what Andre translated for me. I know he felt good about it, like it made up for all the shit we had to put up with.”

  “Howard,” she scolded. “You know how I don’t like it when you swear.”

  “Sorry, sorry. I’m excited,” Duncan said apologetically. “I wish I had a video of it. Andre got one of the idiots to admit that their lawyer told them what to say. He asked the guy if he believed in God and reminded him he took an oath on the Bible. The man never looks up, just nods and then crosses his heart. And then he tells what he was told to say and admits he didn’t see anything. And get this, Andre asks him if he was paid to say what he did and the guy says ainda não, that’s not yet in Portuguese. I knew what it meant. They didn’t bother with the second guy after that. It was great.”

  “So, it’s over and you’ll be coming home?”

  “Andre said I’ll get my passport back tomorrow. He said he’d come with me to make sure I get it.”

  “And then you’ll be on your way home?”

  “Like yesterday. I will never come back to Brazil. Never.”

  “And you think it’s all behind you now?”

  “I don’t even care,” Duncan said adamantly. “I’m finished with it even if it’s not finished with me.”

  Maggie liked what her boyfriend was saying. He’d been blowing hot and cold for years on what had happened, at times insisting that he did everything he could to keep people safe, while at other times admitting that he could have done better, though he was at a loss as to how. Yes, he was the leader on both expeditions. No, he wasn’t prepared for what had happened. On the first expedition he had no idea about the lethality of the ferocious swarms of Reptilus blaberus. Nobody did. Everyone knew about it on the second expedition. That’s why they brought a flamethrower. But who expects to be kidnapped by gangsters?

  “You know, you just can’t plan for everything,” he said as the conversation wound down. “The older I get, the more I realize that I think I’m in control of events but I’m just kidding myself.”

  “It’s what people do to get through the day,” she said.

  “Yeah, but I never understood that. Even when things were at their worst, I never thought I wouldn’t figure out a way.”

  “That’s one of the things I love about you,” Maggie said tenderly. “One of the many things.”

  Duncan paused, his mind racing to find an appropriate response. He was still in a celebratory mood and all he could think of was getting the hell out of Brazil.

  “I love you too,” he said, “And I wish I had listened to you about not coming down here.”

  “Don’t be too hard on yourself.”

  “Oh, I’m not,” he said confidently. “I’m just glad to be going home. And I promise, I will never do anything like this again.”

  43

  Cody Boyd wasn’t sure exactly when things started to go haywire. It was well afte
r they’d crossed the Tapajós River. Cooper didn’t like anything about the ATV, which started out as a Polaris Ranger 800 Crew that had seen better days sometime during the previous decade. The rear seats had been replaced with a poorly reupholstered home made bench seat. The roof had been replaced with sheet metal and the tires had cracks in the sidewalls. But it had recent forest green paint on the engine cowling, amateurishly applied with a brush, and a crucifix dangling from the front roll bar. Unknown to his passengers, Josias had removed the spare tire, tools and various parts from the cargo box so that their gear would fit.

  The original muffler had been replaced with ill-fitting parts from a tractor, the ear-splitting wail leading the three Americans to don ear plugs. Josias, apparently unbothered by the noise, seemed to be carrying on a conversation in English mixed with Portuguese that none of his passengers could understand, though he occasionally looked at Boyd in the shotgun seat as if to ascertain whether he agreed with what he was saying. Boyd smiled in return.

  Using his handheld GPS to record their route, Harden watched the screen momentarily as it drew a meandering line over a topographic overlay before feeling queasy from the constant slow-speed bouncing. Then he lost the signal not long after entering the rainforest, thick with Brazil nut, rosewoods, mahogany and dozens of species of towering hardwoods. Even as the clouds scattered, the ATV traveled in the shade of the forest. By the second hour the three had given up on becoming comfortable with the noise or the bucking of the vehicle that challenged its barely functioning shock absorbers and springs.