“Please, Todd,” she whispered, so he sighed.
“I don’t know,” he answered.
“Well, you see?”
“I don’t see, either. I’m not going to lie to you, Holly. From what I think I know, they could easily pitch him over the side of the boat. I’m sorry, but they might do that. And if they did, and I’d still find witnesses down in the city who saw him arrive, and swore he left on the red-eye plane.”
“They could also be telling the truth,” Holly said.
“Yes, they could. The other thing they do, when they suspect a sexual crime, is cut off the guy’s genitals. That’s possible as well.”
Holly took a deep breath. “You’re right, it’s better not to lie. But I also don’t want the boys to suspect any part of it. If they ask, I want you to be able to look them in the eyes and say the man’s all right. Can you do that?”
“Of course I will. What do you think? And maybe he is. Probably he is. What the hell do I know?” Todd looked exhausted. “I’ll always be the foreigner. Half of what they tell me is probably just rumour, and the rest they saw on a TV cop show. That’s the problem with things up here, Holly. It’s all like bad TV reception. You stare at the screen. It goes clear for a moment, then fuzzy. What was that? What’s really going on here? Damned if I know.”
Todd shook his head.
“Some guy sidles up to me in a bar. This is the sort of thing I have to deal with. We’re in the bar this last long trip, me and the concerned academics. Doutor Eduardo finally leaves, so this guy decides to risk it. He tells me what I really need to do is find the doutor’s mistress in Rio. She’s the one who can help me.”
“Help you what?”
“I don’t know. I can’t find her. Not that I didn’t look. But of course no one’s heard of a mistress. A mistress? Sei la. Which is typical. I know nothing, I find nothing, and I’ve spent eight months of my life here.”
“Eight months isn’t very long,” Holly said. “A day is, but not eight months.”
From the hammocks came the sound of Evan’s faint snores. Todd smiled, but as his smile faded, he shook his head skeptically.
“I can look the boys in the eye and say anything you like, Holly, but nothing’s going to make me trust Doutor Eduardo. He lies through his teeth. Saying the tribe fired arrows at some Indian agents. What he doesn’t know is that I went up there with an agent. We were trying very quietly to make contact with the people after reports of a fight. Maybe they weren’t fighting prospectors, but it wasn’t anyone from the bureau, either. In which case, who was it? My God, I hate to think what he’s covering up. Because the entire tribe has disappeared. They’re gone, Holly. They’re just not there.”
“I’m sorry, Todd. But thanks for finally telling me what’s going on.”
“We’re even?” he asked.
“Just let my babies be all right.”
They listened to Evan snore. A soothing sound. It made Holly remember how late it was, and wonder if they ought to sleep in shifts.
“If I could honestly tell them Powell survived, Holly.”
She closed her eyes, opening them to see that Todd was aching to ask if he could send her home with the boys while he stayed behind in the Amazon. He was desperate to search for Powell, or the uncontacted tribe. Maybe both, maybe neither. Redemption, really.
“What point have I been making this whole trip, Todd?”
“Fine. Fine. If you’re sure you can live without knowing what really happened. If it wouldn’t just eat away at you. Because Conor would sense that, even if Evan didn’t.”
Holly sighed. Maybe he was right.
.“Stay,” she told him.
“I shouldn’t.”
“No, you shouldn’t,” she agreed.
But he’d already begun to sketch the logistics, proposing that they leave together on the first flight, that he get off at the next big town, that he look for a priest who might be there. He was very concerned about the details of their flight, planning a route that would give them smooth connections all the way home. Todd’s definition of a good father: one who arranged the right connections. Unfair of her, but it was true. It was also the most he’d ever got from his own father. Poor Todd. The poor boys. Conor groaning, Evan snoring.
“I’ll be back in a couple of days.”
“Please just that,” Holly said. “Just find out and leave.”
“And give him a shock, if he made it,” Todd said. “I got a quick look at his specimens, and I think what he’s found is the juvenile of a type of ant wren. He didn’t recognize the markings because it was only just described. But someone’s beat him to the punch. I saw a letter in a journal a couple of weeks ago, and it sounds identical to what Powell found. The previously undescribed juvenile of a particular type of ant wren. Now which one was it?”
He pursed his lips.
“If he made it,” he said.
Shooting juveniles. Sitting in the airplane, Holly shivered, even though the door was thrown open on a hot afternoon. The smell of fuel was strong, the tarmac steamy, the airport anxious and loud. She wished she hadn’t agreed that Todd should stay, not least because she had more questions. Who was the priest he wanted to find? He had never mentioned a priest before, nor the name of the town where he’d disembarked, although he seemed to know it well. The town was on the same river as the city where Powell ought to have been taken. One of the few things Todd had said was that he and the priest could boat back to investigate. Holly pictured a churning, milky river. She seemed to hear the roar of a boat, then realized it was the sound of a small plane taxiing to a stop beside them on the tarmac. She watched it idly as the pilot cut his motor and the passenger door swung open.
Seu José was the first one out.
Seu José? Holly couldn’t believe it. But when she looked more closely, her heart beating fast, she found it was indeed Seu José, and that he was followed out the door by Powell.
It was unmistakably Powell. He was pale, but he was laughing, his arm in a clean white sling. The left arm. Holly hadn’t seen which one before.
Doutor Eduardo was the third man out. Powell seemed to be laughing at something the doutor had said just before they left the plane. Holly could see both men clearly. She saw obsequiousness in the way Powell ducked his head, and contempt in the doutor’s bearing. He was wearing a beige linen suit, while Seu José, who did not look amused, wore a freshly-ironed pair of jeans, his paunch hanging over them.
“See, Mommy?” Conor said, holding out his colouring book. As Holly glanced over, the attendant slammed the door on their own plane, and by the time she looked outside again, Powell and his companions had gone. She helped the boys secure their tables as the plane taxied onto the runway and quickly took off. Watching the forest fall away beneath them, Holly felt Todd’s hold on her finally slip.
What have you done, Holly?
Too damn little now that you ask.
They landed in Rio late that night. The city was jewels beneath them, and the drive home from the airport a kaleidoscope of light.
“What do you mean, you’re not in a hurry?” the cabbie said. “Who’s driving? You’re driving? I’m driving.”
She couldn’t even feel frightened any more. At home, the maid, Cida, had fresh bread waiting, but Holly couldn’t eat it. The boys sprawled half asleep at the table, and dropped off the moment she got them in bed.
On the answering machine was a message from Tânia about a party she was holding the following week.
“Can you persuade Todd to come? Or is he a nervous wreck from taking too many days off?”
Holly didn’t know when Todd would be back, and didn’t really care. She wondered if Larkin was still in town. She seemed to remember his number and dialled it.
Larkin sounded surprised when she greeted him.
“If you like parties as much as I think yo
u do, there’s one at my friend’s place on Saturday night,” she said.
“I was planning to leave on Friday,” he told her. “But there’s no real reason I couldn’t stay. You think?”
“Why not?” Holly answered, and hung up before she could change her mind.
12
Tânia lived in a huge apartment near the crest of Rio, high in the cobbled neighbourhood of Santa Teresa. Her modern building overlooked the formal gardens of the governor’s palace, and during the day, the greenery crowding the smoky glass of her many windows made the apartment seem dim and aquatic. Holly always felt she was swimming through the filtered, greenish light, and when they were to have lunch, she preferred meeting Tânia at her studio, a few winding blocks away in a house that seemed to tumble down the mountain, each room leading onto a terrace that was really the roof of the room below; all of the rooms connected by an outside stair down which Holly would scramble, calling for Tânia at the door of each disconnected room until she’d find her at work with her back to the view, a gaunt, chic woman touched by fingers of sunlight reaching through the open terrace doors.
Holly would have abandoned the apartment to live in the studio, painting over the water stains on the walls and clipping a garden out of the wild disorder of grass and trees and vines outside. But that only showed Holly to be a foreigner, while Tânia was intricately connected here. Well connected, people said. She may have called herself the family rebel, but her family was as important as the rebellion, and she wouldn’t have dreamed of leaving the grand and gloomy apartment for a less exclusive address. Her cousins would have assumed she’d had to move, and Tânia never liked to admit she had to do anything, especially when there was an implication of money.
Besides, the apartment was perfect for parties. The old-fashioned sofas that looked so empty in the daylight filled up at night with her family and the demimonde of Rio, which seemed to be much the same thing. She’d introduced Holly to architects and designers, transvestites, the younger sons of the deposed Brazilian imperial family (both branches), photographers, painters, a deaf and dwindling great-aunt who’d had an affair with André Breton — she sometimes said Max Ophuls — the aunt’s pompous banker son, school friends, gay friends, very rich men and their soignée wives, art students, models, beauties of good family, a foreigner or two, cousins (actually, most of them seemed to be cousins), all four of her children, and lately even the second ex-husband, Ramsay the American, who had been staying in a back room of the labyrinthine apartment while paying an extended visit — four months, so far — with their teenage daughters.
“He’s a good father, Holly,” Tânia had said. “They like to see him. So he stays.”
“And you’ve known him so long at this point, he must seem like another cousin.”
“Like a table. Like a chair.”
Arriving at Larkin’s hotel, Holly was amused to find herself taking the same line with him. She was deliberately late, feeling that what she was planning to do was important, but also that it was not. It would have been perfectly acceptable if he had given up waiting for her and gone off on his own, although she quickly saw him at the lobby bar, playing with his glass.
Larkin caught her eye in the bar’s gilt mirror. “I would have sworn you said nine o’clock.”
But Holly was wearing a cocktail dress and black spike heels. As he caught the full effect, Larkin couldn’t help turning, glinting with satisfaction as the other men in the bar gave him the same respectful, envious glance he’d given Todd when they’d first met. “You haven’t noticed things start late here?” Holly asked.
He was instantly contrite. “Of course they do.”
Men accepted blame so readily if you played the game. It was just a matter of a strapless dress and precarious shoes, both promising a fall. Holly felt only contempt as Larkin fumbled with his bar bill.
“Are we ready?” she asked, and took him to her car.
The elevator doors opened directly onto the party. Taking in the crowd, the art, the circulating waiters, Larkin adjusted his jacket. The parties he’d been going to were probably more nouveau than this. Also more open. Holly had first been invited when she was studying with Tânia at the art school in Ipanema. She’d gone there straight out of language class, a month after arriving, determined to carry through with her plan of getting back to painting. As it turned out, her Portuguese still wasn’t good enough and she’d had to drop out. Yet by that time Tânia had written her onto the invitation list, and they were becoming friends.
Tânia’s parties were famous at the Faculdade. She asked her best students, introduced them to society. Holly knew that wasn’t why Tânia had first invited her, although as Larkin went to find her a drink, she could pick out a student she knew to be very talented standing near the doors to the terrace, shifting from one foot to the other, his white shirt so flat against his skinny ribs he looked like a gently stirring curtain. He was probably far too aware that the tight shirt and even tighter pants were wrong for the party, although there was also a suggestion of defensive scorn around his mouth which said that clothes were not important to the best sort of people. And while he was right, he was also a type. Young, hungry, caustic, edgy, susceptible and poor.
Sweet boy, Holly thought. She wondered if he understood that Tânia was giving him a chance. He could remain on the fringes, derisive and pure, and never have a real career. Or he could step into the room and learn how to talk to these people. He probably thought of this as selling out, and believed there were other roads to success. Unfortunately, there were not.
“So this is your mentor,” Larkin said, coming back with a couple of drinks.
“Not really,” Holly asked, keeping her eyes on the boy. “I think at first she just wanted to practice her English. She lived in New York for a long time. Now we get along.” Holly shrugged, and looked around for her friend.
“But she likes your work?” Larkin said.
“I think so.”
“You think? And you still get along?”
“She’s very good. If she were a man, she’d have a huge career by now. Instead the critics compare her to people. She’s supposed to do portraits like Lucian Freud, that sort of thing. Not that they’ve ever actually seen anything by Lucian Freud. They’re just trying to pay her a compliment.”
“And she’s no better at accepting compliments than you are.”
“She’s over there,” Holly said.
Tânia stood at the centre of a crowd — a tall, virile-looking woman in her late forties with a clever, probing, skeptical expression; thin lips, dark eyes, a knife-like nose. It occurred to Holly that Tânia might not like what was happening with Larkin. She liked Todd, or at least she’d approved of him the one time they’d met. She’d told Holly she didn’t care two straws about the environment, but Todd himself seemed to strike a chord, maybe because they came from the same type of family. While Larkin said his parents owned a hardware store.
Tânia finally turned from her group and smiled when she saw Holly.
“And so you’ve failed to lure your husband once again,” she said, coming over and kissing her on both cheeks. “What? Working on a Saturday night?”
“I’m afraid he’s still up in the Amazon.”
“And I still have to hear about your trip. Was it wonderful? You know, I was born in Manaus. Before this horrible expansion, of course, when it was a lovely, sleepy little town.”
“Yes, but we were quite far from there. The children are recovering.” Holly made a polite half turn. “Have you met Jay Larkin?”
Keeping her eyes on Holly, Tânia shook Larkin’s hand absent-mindedly. When he held her hand too long, Tânia gave him a cool glance, then turned back to Holly.
“But clearly we have to talk. The children, recovering? My dear, this is a cliff-hanger, when I have so many guests coming in. Tell me now that they’re all right.”
“It’s surprising. They’re doing well. Conor is a bit more thoughtful, and Evan a little clingy, but nothing major. One minor tantrum when Evan wanted some old stuffed toys he never really touched before. I didn’t even bother bringing them to Rio.”
Holly briefly closed her eyes. “We got lost in the forest,” she said, forcing herself to smile.
Larkin started to ask something, but Tânia stopped him.
“That was rather silly of you,” she said. “Their father wasn’t there, I would imagine.”
“We went looking for him. He’d gone off into the bush, leaving us alone.”
“So you were both naughty. However, you seem to have survived.”
One of her daughters came to lean on Tânia’s shoulder. Arianna: a tall, supple, languid girl of seventeen. Tânia put an arm around her. “But the important thing is that our children survive us, isn’t it, amor? Holly, you must get Evan stuffed animals, if that’s what he wants.”
“You can see we’re terribly spoiled,” Arianna said.
“These children were lost in Amazonas,” Tânia told her. “Think of all the creatures there. This way, he can hurt them back.”
“Poor things,” Arianna said. “I’ll give him some of mine.”
She felt sorry for the toys, and would give some to Evan. Holly felt uneasy, although Arianna smiled sleepily from her mother’s shoulder.
“When Jeni went up to Uncle Dudu’s camp, she was also frightened by the animals. But you see, nothing happened. It was only noise coming from the trees.”
Dudu. Eduardo. Brazil was a big country, but small and inter-related at this level of society.
“Doutor Eduardo is your uncle?” Holly asked.
“Did he let you get lost?” Tânia answered sharply. “That was careless of him. Does he think I’m supposed to let my girls go there now?”
Arianna stroked her mother’s hair. “It’s only noise,” she said gently. But Tânia seemed almost angry.
Drink the Sky Page 13