by Tara Janzen
Will slipped into the trees, and Annie followed, until the river came into view. Five boats were moored on the beach. She knew there had been exactly twenty-three Indians in Tutanji’s group, and there looked to be half again as many garimpeiros. There were a ragged bunch in ragged clothes ordered about by a few men wearing the uniform of the Brazilian army. Vargas, for all his grand schemes, was still exercising his commission, which made the Brazilians culpable in the forthcoming massacre—unless she and Will could somehow stop it.
With a touch on her arm to stay, Will left her, disappearing into the forest.
Annie looked down at the machete and the bow. Even given his blowgun, they were woefully underequipped for the task ahead.
A fire was started on the white sand beach for the miners to cook their food, while the Indians were herded into a makeshift compound guarded by the soldiers with the automatic weapons.
Standing silent and still behind the buttressed roots of a strangler fig, she concentrated on her breathing, keeping it gentle and even, keeping herself calm. Whatever Will was going to do, she needed to be ready.
Down by the river two of the garimpeiros walked up to the compound and tried to take a woman, her friend from the morning, Ajaju. The other Indians immediately became excited, objecting loudly and scrambling to keep Ajaju with them. Ajaju screamed, her face stark with fear, but the miners kept pulling at her, hitting the Indians who were holding on to her. Her children began to cry, and for a minute, Annie feared the garimpeiros would succeed, but finally, one of the soldiers interceded, threatening the miners with his rifle.
Angry grumbling ran through the other garimpeiros. Rape was their expected reward.
Annie grew even more still, her breath even softer as she witnessed the further rough treatment of the Indians, the garimpeiros throwing things, the soldiers ignoring them. Up until Yavareté, she’d lived a sheltered life. She’d seen hardship and poverty, had experienced a little poverty herself on the ranch, at least compared to the other kids at school who’d had new clothes instead of Mad Jack’s way too big hand-me-downs to wear. In South America, she’d seen real poverty, the kind that crushed people, the kind perpetuated by ineffective governments run by people whose sense of privilege far outstripped their sense of justice.
But in Yavareté, she’d witnessed brutality, psychotic brutality. She’d experienced it for herself, and it had changed her more profoundly than she’d thought.
She had come back for vengeance, an unarticulated vengeance that nonetheless had compelled her to buy guns. Standing in the trees, her body no more than another living, growing part of the forest, her breath no different from the transpiration of the leaves, she quietly came to the realization that she could kill.
The knowledge shifted her awareness of the world around her. She was no longer carefully apart, separated from the people in front of her by virtue of her intelligence and her education, or by her culture and her passport. She was no different from any of them, soldier, miner, Indian. Her hand went to the quartzite crystal and the jaguar fangs hanging around her neck. She was no different from Will.
She knew where he was, to her left, about fifty yards away near the far end of the beach, and she knew what he was doing—waiting like a jaguar with his curare-tipped darts. He had eight, and she knew eight men would die.
She was a jaguar now, too. Like a cat, she kept herself still, waiting, and when her chance came, she would not hesitate.
Vargas’s men had eaten and were breaking their quick camp, when a cloud passed over the sun, laying a shadow on the river.
That’s when the first man died. No one else saw, but Annie had watched the garimpeiro wander into the edge of the forest at the far end of the beach and unzip his pants. Then his hand had come up to his throat, and he’d crumpled, falling into the forest vegetation and disappearing.
Another garimpeiro followed blindly in the first one’s footsteps, heading to the edge of the forest to relieve himself, and meeting an instant, silent death.
Dusk had fallen with the shadows of the clouds. Night would come quickly. Annie felt her muscles tense in readiness. The Indians were already being put on the boats. The fires were doused. Someone hollered a name into the deepening darkness and shouted louder when he didn’t get a response.
“Jose! Agora mesmo!”
“Um momento!” An answer finally came from the forest, and Annie recognized Will’s voice.
She couldn’t remember ever having stood so still for so long, so painlessly. She could have waited hours longer, if necessary, being a jaguar.
Another movement at the far end of the beach caught her eye, someone coming out of the tent. Food had been brought to him there, but now two soldiers were standing by, ready to strike the canvas. It was time to go.
At first Annie thought two people were coming out at once, and was quickly revising her and Will’s odds in her head, but as the two came farther out on the beach, their bodies remaining in perfect synchronization, the truth dawned on her with growing distress.
It wasn’t two people. It was one very large man, a six-foot-eight-inch giant with a huge barrel chest and trunk-like legs.
It was Fernando.
Her instinct was to flee, her breath instantly becoming ragged and fast, and she actually moved, before she stopped herself.
She was a jaguar. A cat. Even a giant was no match for her. She believed it, but she couldn’t stop trembling, and she couldn’t take her eyes off him. He was dressed as an officer, something she hadn’t known about him before, and he was carrying an assault rifle.
He went to the lead boat out of the five moored on the beach. There was one armed soldier for each boat, and two garimpeiros to guard the Indians. Darkness fell with the sudden swiftness of the tropics, and one by one the boats took off up the river, leaving the last soldier to holler for dead men. As the fourth boat turned into the current, Will struck with uncanny accuracy, hitting the soldier, who slumped over the wheel. The man’s rifle went clattering into the bottom of the boat. The bound Indians reacted instantly, jumping into the shallows and onto the beach, but no more instantly than she did. She broke into a run, bursting out of the trees the same time that Will hit the beach.
With her knife free, she cut the Indians loose. Neither Tutanji nor Ajaju were among the five. Will spoke quickly, and in seconds the freed man nodded. Gesturing for the two women and the children to follow, he took off into the forest.
Annie was already on the boat, firing it up, when Will jumped on board. In the darkness up ahead, someone shouted back at them, and Will answered, saying something that made the other soldier laugh.
“Take the wheel,” he told her. “I’ll put the dead man overboard.”
She guided the boat out into the river and heard the body hit the water with a splash.
Will came back to her side and leaned close to her ear to be heard above the sound of the outboard engines. “Try to get some sleep. We’ve got a few hours to the mines.”
She nodded. “You saw the giant come out of the tent?”
“Yes.” He took the wheel from her.
“Fernando,” she said.
He nodded silently and touched his hand to the feathers in her hair. “You look like a bird, but you’re really a jaguar. I saw you in the forest, waiting.”
She held his gaze for a moment, the wind whipping at their hair, the stars shining above.
“Yes,” she said. “That was me.”
He grinned, a flash of white in the dark night. “Get some sleep.”
She was too tired to object, and when her head rested on the wooden bench running the length of the starboard side, it was like settling into a down-filled pillow.
~ * ~
Hours later, it was the silence that woke her, the silence and the chill of early morning, before dawn had broken the sky.
Will had cut the engines and the lights, and they were drifting down the shoreline. Branches and leaves slapped at the boat. He grabbed for them as they pass
ed, holding on just long enough to keep the boat from slipping farther into the current.
Annie raised her head to a startling sight—Reino Novo, as she’d never imagined it. In the middle of thousands of miles of unremitting darkness, it was a city of lights, ballpark lights illuminating the gouged and gaping holes of the mines, the yellow and orange hoses of the pumps and generators snaking out of their black depths like miles of intestines.
All along the scarred faces of the mines, miners scurried like formigas, ants. Some manned the hoses, blasting away at the earth with high-powered jets of water. It was a twenty-four-hours-a-day operation awash in water and mud and misery, a cacophony of noise and violence within the great womb of the forest.
She’d seen gold mines before, but never anything on such a scale. There were open pits on both sides of the river, each as horrible as the other.
“Are we still on the Cauaburi?” she asked.
“No.” Will stopped them by tying off on a sturdy branch. “We came off the main river a couple of hours ago. This is a tributary off to the west.”
“Where are the other boats?”
He pointed toward the mines, and Annie saw a series of docks jutting out into the river from both sides. Four boats were pulling up to the docks on the south bank, their side, and a commotion was being made.
“Come on. We have to hurry, if we’re going to keep up.”
She was glad he hadn’t asked her to stay with the boat. She could see the Indians being herded off onto the docks, and she could sense their fear and confusion. Reino Novo had changed to the point of being unrecognizable compared to what she’d seen a year ago. It was huge, completely contained. Fires from a smelter belched smoke and soot into the sky, laying an added pall of stench over the area.
On the north bank, a town had risen up, muddy streets of whorehouses and cantinas. Farther upriver, hundred-gallon tanks of the gas and oil needed to run the generators lined both shores, the iridescent smear of leaks making a glossy coat on the water. The smell of the place alone was enough to terrify the forest people. It was enough to terrify her.
“This place is unbelievable,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said. “Take this.” He handed her the rifle and the extra rounds of ammunition he’d taken off the dead soldier. “It’s about a thousand times bigger than I expected. We’ll try to keep out of sight, until we can see where they’re taking the Dakú. Hopefully, it’ll be near the cages. Our first priority is to get as many people out as possible. Secondly, if we can”—he pulled a duffel bag out from under the wheel—“we’ll try to use this stuff to blow the place.” He unzipped the bag, revealing a cache of dynamite.
“Vargas’s guys like to travel prepared for anything, don’t they,” she said, stuffing a stick in each pocket.
“Yes.” He smiled. “Come on. Let’s go.”
CHAPTER ~ 25
Fat Eddie slowly motored up the river, nearing Reino Novo, his swivel spotlight swinging from side to side in smooth, battery-powered arcs. It had been a long night with little to eat, and he wasn’t in the best mood. He’d been on the rivers of the northwest for a solid week. Unbelievable for a man who prided himself on never having to leave the Praça de Matriz in his beloved city of Manaus.
The woman, she was a demon to have done this to him. He’d been trapped for hours, days, in his speedboat, sneered at by the likes of Corisco Vargas, lost his plane, ten pounds if he’d lost an ounce, and the woman, by the blood of Christ, for about the hundredth time.
What was it with her? he wondered. What made the little cat so hard to hold on to? So hard to catch?
He’d like to know how Vargas had held her for three days in the Yavareté jail. Or maybe that’s what it took, a jail, to keep her in her place. He’d completely changed his mind about her head, and was damn close to changing it about turning her in to Vargas. She was a smart woman, a damned smart woman, like Guillermo was a smart man. The two of them together, working on his side, maybe could make him the richest man in Brazil.
Vargas still had to be dealt with, possibly killed.
Eddie mused the idea over for a minute, his hand easy on the wheel.
Yes, he decided in the end. There was no doubt. Corisco Vargas had to be killed. The man was a menace.
He’d never gotten another radio transmission from Marcos and Eddie had a sneaking suspicion it wasn’t because his captain had suddenly dropped dead in the forest.
No, he figured it had to do with the size of Marcos’s balls, which must have shrunk up into his brain by now. The man had been taking the diabo do noite far too seriously.
“Night of the Devil. Night of the Devil,” all the river people were whispering.
Night of the Devil, his ass, Eddie thought. Like everything else this last year that had been going to hell, the Night of the Devil was really the Night of Corisco Vargas.
Cristo, but he was really starting to hate that man.
Vargas had those Indians and those caboclos. Eddie would bet every ounce of fat on his body on the fact. What the hell Vargas was going to do with them, Eddie didn’t have a clue, except to figure it would probably be pretty sick, and the Indians and caboclos would probably end up dead. Everything Vargas touched ended up dead, like this whole huge stretch of forest.
Eddie had seen plenty of mines in the north, and worked deals with the donos, the mine bosses, when he could. But he’d never seen anything like Reino Novo. It was no New Kingdom, but it was damn big.
His spotlight hit the top of its arc to the right and slowly swung back to the left, going from one riverbank to the next, and finally finding something of interest on the far shore. He grabbed the light, shining it full on the boat tied up to a branch.
Damned odd, he thought. There were five fully functional docks at Reino Novo not a hundred yards farther up the river. There was no reason on earth to tie a boat up to a tree.
He smelled a rat.
Or rather, he smelled a cat, a little cat. He smelled her like a feral dog.
“Jorge!” he called out, signaling the man piloting the next boat. When the man looked over, Fat Eddie lifted his arm and gestured toward the shore.
Possibly, just possibly, it wasn’t too damn late to turn a profit on this whole damn mess.
~ * ~
Will and Annie scrambled over the slag heaps rising like small mountains around the belching smelter. Once they were off the river, its fires could be seen glowing like the fires of hell on the south side of the camp. Between the smelter and the mines was a stretch of no-man’s-land, where hoses snaked, and water ran, and every makeshift walkway that had ever been tried was sinking into the mud. For all its riches, Reino Novo had not overcome the bane of rain-forest industry: once the thin layer of topsoil was gone, nothing would hold the rest of it together. The battle was always one of deterioration, with the rain always winning.
It was over the walkways that Fernando and his men were herding the Indians, past rows of shacks and burning piles of refuse.
Annie’s heart was in her throat. There were men everywhere, but most of them were too haggard and tired to do more than jeer at the captives, or to look dumbly as they went by. The miners were captives themselves, captured by a false promise of riches and held by a debt servitude they could never repay. The company store would always be charging just a little bit more than the garimpeiros made, and too much of their hard-earned share of the gold went right back into the donos’s pockets, spent on whores and cachaça, fleeting pleasures that few men could do without, but none could actually afford. To call their existence grim was almost naïve. The word “grim” didn’t begin to sum up the misery of the mines.
Once past the smelter, the rain forest reasserted its dominance, sending viney tendrils burrowing under the slag heaps to reemerge as a spot of green in the middle of a gray wasteland. Trees grew closer to the trail, adding the cover Will needed to get closer to the Indians, but he was behind them, and he needed to move ahead.
“Keep following them,
Annie,” he said, dropping back to check on her. “Stay on this side, and you’ll run right into me in about five minutes. If you don’t, make your way back to the boat and get the hell out of here. Promise me.”
“Promise,” she said without hesitation, but he wasn’t fooled. She was a terrible liar.
He kissed her hard, once, and slipped away, moving swiftly and silently through the perimeter of trees. He had five darts left.
Annie watched him disappear, an act that took him about two seconds flat. When the last soldier in line collapsed, she knew exactly where Will was—so did the Indians. The change in them was immediate. An alertness came over them, their faces turning to the forest. They knew they weren’t alone.
Will’s was a war of stealth, of hit and run with the darkness as cover. When the next soldier in line fell, his companions still oblivious to the carnage stalking them through the night, Annie thought they might have a chance at winning. The mines were behind them, the forest smelling greener, full of promise. If they could get the Indians released, they could melt into the trees as easily as Will.
Then she heard it, men’s voices behind her, coming not from the walkways and the trails, but from the forest. She speeded up her steps, breaking into a loping run, wondering who in the hell besides her and Will was out in the jungle on a near moonless night—and so help her God, she could only come up with one name.
Fat Eddie Mano.
~ * ~
Corisco sat in the dark in his office, the only light coming from the jungle-filled glass cage and the cylinder holding the orchid in his hand. He’d lost. Word had just come up from the docks. Fernando had arrived with the last cordeiros, and Annie Parrish was not among them. She would not be his to interrogate and torture one last time. Nor would she be his to sacrifice on El Mestre.
Perhaps he’d been wrong all these months. Perhaps she’d found the orchids elsewhere and was bypassing Reino Novo altogether.
Still recovering from his night of visions, brooding the loss was the limit of his energies at the moment. Later, he would take retribution.