River of Eden

by Tara Janzen

  Will had gotten the point, however unnecessary. He had no intention of stealing the contraband Fat Eddie had given him in Pancha’s. For Will, meeting with Corisco Vargas face to face to deliver the goods was far more important than the bag of gemstones Fat Eddie had entrusted in his care. The map was what he’d come to Manaus to get, not a clutch of rough-cut diamonds and emeralds.

  He carefully slipped his hand into the front pocket of his pants, felt the folds of paper and told himself the end had justified the means—a reasoning he usually found spurious at best.

  His body told him it was still damn spurious thinking. Everything inside his skull had congealed into one, big, giant throb of hangover pain. His mouth felt as if a hundred pistoleiros in dusty, old leather boots had tromped through it, and he and Eddie had been drinking the good stuff.

  “It’s seven-thirty,” Miss Bright Eyes said with an edge to her voice. “I’ve been here since five, and this is the first time you’ve budged.”

  Definitely irritated, he thought.

  “I thought maybe you’d died.”

  Close, he could have told her, and still in critical condition.

  “Can you get up? Or do I need to go get Carlos?”

  He was tempted to tell her yes, go get Carlos. Not because he couldn’t get up, but because running back to the hacienda might help her work off some energy. She sounded pretty keyed up and a little on the bitchy side, and with his head pounding, what he needed was a smooth slide into the day, a nice quiet unmooring and a slow drift into the current.

  Yeah, he thought. That’s what he needed, a nice and easy slide into consciousness—or back into oblivion. There was no reason to hurry, now that he had the map. Hell wasn’t going anywhere without him. It would still be up on the Cauaburi, whether it took him a week or two weeks to get there. With the hangover he’d made out of two bottles of rotgut and less sleep last night, his money was on the two weeks.

  “Are we going to make it out of here before noon, or not?” she demanded to know. “I am on a schedule. A tight... very tight schedule.”

  He snorted in disbelief—and damn near blew his head off. A groan of pure pain lodged in his throat, right behind a foul curse. Tight schedule? There was no such thing in the Amazon. A person had their choice of two speeds on the river, slow crawl and dead stop, with reverse a possible third. Nobody ever went anywhere on a schedule, tight or not. Anybody who tried was destined for the loony bin.

  Then he remembered something Gabriela had said.

  “Peach palms,” he muttered under his breath. Annie Parrish was supposed to research the peach palm harvest around Santa Maria—something he could have done in his sleep.

  No, he thought, remembering a little more of the conversation. The peach palm thing was just a cover for something else, but he’d be damned if he could remember what.

  “You oughta just go home,” he mumbled, too hungover to sort through the mess.

  “I beg your pardon?” she said, her voice reaching a new note of stridency.

  Merda, he swore to himself, oblivion forgotten. Where was that kitteny, soft-looking woman he’d met yesterday in Pancha’s? And who had let this sanctimonious alley cat into his cabin?

  “How did you get in here?” he asked, working to raise his voice above a hoarse whisper. With Fat Eddie’s gems on board, Will had felt compelled to take a few precautions. Locking the door had been one. The pistol digging into his rib cage was the other.

  “I picked the lock,” she said without even a trace of apology in her voice.

  So much for sanctimony, he thought. She was just plain angry with him and not afraid to show it.

  Once again, he could hardly blame her. He could have told her there was a law against breaking and entering, even on a boat, but he was getting the idea she wouldn’t give a damn. He was also beginning to think Gabriela was right. Annie Parrish was a woman on a mission—and her mission didn’t have a damn thing to do with peach palms. That’s what Gabriela had said, or rather, implied. Dr. Oliveira didn’t really know what Dr. Parrish was up to any more than he did.

  And he was stuck with her on his boat.

  “Go get Carlos,” he suggested, every word grating across his aching brain. “And coffee.” If she wanted to leave before noon, he was going to need Carlos, and coffee wouldn’t hurt.

  Muttering something about it taking more than coffee to get his sorry hide moving—to which he could only agree—she turned and walked out the door.

  Blessed silence descended, and every cell in Will’s body begged him to go back to sleep. He ignored them. Putting one hand on his brow to keep his head from exploding, he carefully swung his legs over the side of the hammock and put his feet on the floor. Whether hell was going to wait for him or not, he would be better off out of Manaus.

  But twenty minutes later, when Dr. Parrish returned with Carlos, he hadn’t gotten so much as an inch closer to leaving. He was still sitting on the side of the hammock, his head in his hands.

  “Como vai, Guillermo?” the old man asked, shuffling into the cabin and over to the small gas stove sitting on the counter. Carlos was part Indian, about five feet two, and as wizened as an old tobacco leaf.

  “Vou bem,” he answered, his voice little more than a croak. I’m well.

  The old man cackled at his obvious lie, showing blackened teeth, then set about getting some water on to boil.

  Stationing herself by the door, Annie watched as Carlos pulled handful after handful of vegetal whatnot out of a cloth bag slung over his shoulder. Most of the debris went into the pot. Some went directly into a tin cup. Considering the shape the specimens were in, she wasn’t surprised not to recognize anything, but she trusted Carlos to know what he was doing. Every grad student who had ever worked for RBC knew about Carlos’s famous hangover remedies—and William Sanchez Travers was undeniably, colossally hungover.

  The man had practically paralyzed himself, she thought with disgust. She’d purposely kept her expectations and qualifications for a boat captain low, but as of five o’clock that morning, he’d bottomed out below any base minimum requirements. She didn’t mind that he’d gotten drunk. In fact, after yesterday’s confusing conclusions, she took some small comfort in the verification of his cheap and easy character—but his timing sucked. Dawn, he’d said. She did a quick check of her watch, and her lips thinned. They’d be lucky to cast off by ten o’clock.

  The last thing Carlos pulled out of his bag was a sheaf of wild Piperacea leaves, hi shinki-shinki. He began shaking it over Travers’s head and shoulders, and her expectations slipped even lower. When the old witch doctor started to chant, Annie knew they were sunk.

  Noon, she groaned inwardly. If Carlos thought Travers needed a full-blown healing ritual, they were going to miss half the day.

  This was what she got for depending on a down-on-his-luck river rat given to drink and waterfront alliances not so very different from the one making it necessary for her to get the hell out of Manaus.

  Yet there she stood, not five feet from shore with the day bearing down on her and a crumpled piece of sweat-stained paper in her pocket telling her she was doomed.

  “Could you speed this up a little, Carlos?” she muttered to the old man in a whispered aside.

  “Yeah, Carlos,” Travers mumbled in Portuguese, slanting her a wry glance from beneath his lashes. “The lady is on a schedule, a tight schedule.”

  Annie didn’t deign to respond. She obviously hadn’t spoken softly enough, but she hardly cared. The important thing was to get under way.

  “Tight schedule,” Travers repeated, a grin flickering across his mouth, and she dared to hope. He could drink himself into a coma after he got her to Santa Maria, and he probably would, but his grin was an undeniable sign of life.

  He was coming around.

  “I was on a schedule,” she said doggedly and watched his grin broaden before he turned away and buried his face behind his hands with another soft groan. Long swaths of sun-streaked hair fell ov
er his fingers. For a moment, she feared he’d peaked and was heading back down. Then he let out another soft sound and dragged his hands back through his hair.

  Relief flooded through her. He was definitely coming around.

  Three days, she told herself, that’s as long as she needed him to stay on course. Three days if everything went as planned, which of course it never did on the river. She knew that as well as he, but she was working with a schedule anyway, a tight, year-long schedule with only one goal—to get herself back to the exact spot where she’d been standing when that woolly monkey had fallen out of the sky and landed in her arms.

  Carlos had given a slight nod in answer to her question and was shaking his shinki-shinki a bit faster. When the old man handed her a cigar out of his pocket, she didn’t hesitate to take it. She bit off the end, spit it out the porthole, and bent toward the stove. With a few good puffs, she had the cigar glowing and smoking.

  Good God, Will thought, squinting over his linked fingers and watching her blow a smoke ring into the air. Carlos cackled behind him, and Will could imagine that the old man would get a kick out of smoke rings, the drama of them if nothing else.

  At Carlos’s direction, Annie Parrish applied her healing witchery to him, wreathing him in cloud after diaphanous cloud of tobacco smoke, following a path set by the shaman’s sheaf of leaves. The gringa doctor’s help seemed to inspire the old man to new heights of singing. Carlos’s voice rose higher, the words of the chant filling the small cabin, bound by smoke and the underlying shhh-shhh-whoosh of the Piperacea leaves.

  It was at times like these when Will really began to wonder what had happened to his life. He’d had such a promising future. He could have eventually left the tropics and gone back to a professorship at Harvard. He could have written more books, done a lecture tour, become the director of some famous botanical garden, and in his waning years, dictated his biography to some eager graduate student. God knows, the possibilities had seemed endless.

  But here he was, his head splitting in two, hungover in a hammock hanging inside a bucket of a boat, going up the Black River one more time, maybe for the last time. He barely had two hundred reais to his name, including Annie Parrish’s fare, and didn’t need the bare two hundred he had. Sometimes he felt as if he’d disappeared, a feeling Tutanji would only confirm. Dr. William Sanchez Travers had disappeared. Tutanji had called him into the rain forest, and there in the green twilight of a lost glade he’d been devoured by the old shaman’s spirit anaconda.

  At least that was Tutanji’s story. As Will remembered it, there had been way too much blood for the snake to have been a spirit.

  Another wreath of smoke settled about his head, and Will realized he was feeling better. Carlos was no Tutanji, and a store-bought cigar was not a forest shaman’s roughly rolled sheaf of green tobacco, but the healing ritual was working. He’d expected it to work. He’d been in the forest too long not to take comfort where it was offered, and too long to underestimate the power of a shaman’s spells—even a citified, acculturated shaman like Carlos.

  When the old man offered him the cup of the steeped brew, he downed it in one foul, bitter-tasting, leaf-laden swallow. Instantly, a trembling seized him, and all Will could do was hold on for the ride.

  Jamming the cigar between her teeth, Annie put one hand on his shoulder to help hold him steady and lifted her other arm to check her watch through the clouds of smoke—eight o’clock. Great, she thought. Carlos was moving at record speed. Will Travers was shaking like a wet dog, and if he didn’t fall out of his hammock and knock himself out, they should be on the river within the hour.

  A flash on the water drew her gaze to the window, and she swore, one crude word filled with all the frustration of the morning. A boat was approaching the dock from downstream, coming around the point that separated RBC from Manaus.

  “We’ve got company,” she said, looking around for a pair of binoculars, knowing down to the marrow of her bones that her luck had just run out.

  “I’m not in the mood,” Travers grumbled, his body slowly settling into a state of calmness beneath her hand, stage two of Carlos’s mystery cure.

  There wasn’t a botanist or biochemist at RBC who hadn’t tried to analyze the ingredients in the hangover infusion. All they’d ever come up with was a few innocuous plants that could never elicit such a dramatic, but brief, physical reaction. The secret had to be in the old man’s well-guarded admixtures.

  “Then maybe you should fire this tub up and get us out of here, before we get boarded by—” She paused and reached for the binoculars she spotted hanging above the wheel. Putting them to her eyes, she let out another curse. “By the police.”

  “No one boards the Sucuri,” he told her simply, and at the sound of the words, an ill-omened trickle of fear wound down her spine.

  Lowering the binoculars, she turned to face him, her mind coming to a slow halt, the police forgotten.

  “Sucuri?” she repeated. “That’s the name of this boat?”

  The wan flash of his grin as he rose to his feet was hardly reassuring, and Annie had to wonder why a woman with a morbid fear of snakes would stay on a boat named after the biggest, most powerfully gargantuan serpent to ever thrash a path through the Amazon—and contrary to what people thought, snakes did thrash, especially giant anacondas, sucuri, especially when they had something big in their coils, something about the size of a female Wyoming botanist.

  She knew it all for a fact.

  She’d seen it a thousand times in her dreams.

  CHAPTER ~ 6

  The shrill blast of an airhorn drew her attention back to the open window and the boat bearing down on them. Dropping the cigar into the empty pot, she gripped the sill with her hands and leaned forward. Even without the binoculars, she could now see the insignia of the Manaus police painted on the small speedboat, and she didn’t know which was worse, the launch headed toward her, or the one she was standing on.

  Sucuri. Who in the hell would name their boat after the world’s biggest snake? Herpetologists could argue all day long about which was longer, anacondas or reticulated pythons, but pound for pound, there was more snake per foot of an anaconda than any other animal in the suborder Serpentes. Big and muscular, and uncommonly aggressive, they defied comparison in the snake world. Annie had never seen one in the wild, and for that she could only thank God.

  On the other hand, she’d had more than her fair share of encounters with the Brazilian police, particularly in Yavareté, and she’d be damned if she was ready for another one.

  The airhorn blew again, and she whirled to face Travers. She didn’t have a choice, it was the Sucuri or nothing.

  “You know, getting involved with the police could really slow us down,” she said as calmly as she could.

  “I’m not planning on getting involved,” Travers said around a yawn.

  Of course he wasn’t, she silently snapped, about to tell him he wasn’t going to have much choice if he didn’t get moving. Then he lifted his arms above his head in a long, languorous stretch, and Annie could only stare, not sure what held her attention more, the sheer nonchalance of his movement in the face of disaster—or the pistol shoved into the waistband of his pants.

  One thing she did know for sure: she hadn’t thought everything through nearly as well as she should have.

  “Son of a bitch,” Travers muttered in mid-stretch, his attention arrested by something through the window. In a single stride, he moved to where she was standing, half trapping her between the narrow counter and his large, warm body as he looked over her head to the river beyond—effortlessly breaching the barrier she’d set up around herself after Yavareté, getting closer to her than she’d allowed anyone in nearly a year.

  The macaw feathers were still in his hair, she noted from somewhere close to the edge of panic, the quills tied into the dark strands behind his ear with a strip of red cloth. The genipa paint had been washed off in the rain, or maybe in a shower. Amazingly, even
in the smoke-filled cabin, he smelled faintly of soap.

  “Tchau, Carlos. Obrigado,” he said gruffly, turning to the old man and moving away from her toward the helm after no more than a few seconds of contact.

  It was a few seconds too many. She’d once canoed over two hundred miles of the Javari River in a dugout with three Indian guides and two Carmelite nuns and never once felt overcrowded—but she didn’t think Travers’s thirty-foot-long riverboat was going to be big enough for the two of them, and not because he took up too much room. Despite his size, lean and broad shouldered, and standing almost a foot taller than she did, she could have held him off, if she’d wanted to hold him off.

  That she hadn’t lifted a hand to do so was incomprehensible. Her instincts and reactions were honed for self-defense, and had been long before she’d gotten in over her head with Vargas in Yavareté.

  So what in the hell was going on? she wondered. He wasn’t harmless. She’d figured that much out in Pancha’s. And he wasn’t to be trusted, the drunken state she’d found him in that morning was proof enough of his unreliability. That only left one possibility, one she refused to entertain.

  Forcing herself to take a breath, she turned back to the window. What she saw made all her unsettling thoughts about Will Travers vanish.

  Her mouth fell open in astonishment. Never, ever had she seen such a sight. It was Jabba the Hut with a black ponytail and a flowing black mustache piloting a much too small speedboat and sending up a rooster tail of water as he rounded the point.