“Aaaaaahhhhhhh!’ I felt the quake, unendurable, still screaming as he relaxed his hand to withdraw, and I squirted in a lewd stream over his hand and thigh. I had to lie there, panting for a long moment, and then excused myself to duck into the bathroom again.
When I came out, I was ready to devour him. I know what happens to me after I have an orgasm like that—the match is lit, and my body is in almost a blind frenzy for sex. I jumped on the bed laughing, pinning down his wrists. I slithered down to tease him, working my tongue around the base of his cock, driving him wild because I refused to lick upwards to the tip, at last my lips parting to take him in, sucking him and feeling him swell in my mouth. I had tricks of my own. Finding a rhythm to drive him wild, coming up to suck his nipple into my mouth as he easily slipped into me.
I gasped with the sudden fullness of him all at once, and then I was grinding my hips, wanting to take my vengeance on him with pleasure. We were so in tune, easily shifting from the languorous exploration and tenderness to this gymnastic expression of want. He rolled me so that I was still half on top of him, half falling onto the bed, and it allowed him to sink even deeper inside me from underneath. We kissed for what felt like minutes on end as he thrust away. I recognized how much I missed making love with a man. Yes, there had been Luis recently, but I had shared him with Helê, and his body had been boyish, a delicate fragility to his limbs so that I couldn’t even imagine him holding me without her embrace. There had been Todd, but he was jackhammer fucking, a dildo with abs. Fitz was technique, prowess, the two of us always in a dance of passion, but trying too often to impress each other with our moves. Graham made love. He took me with a quiet masculine dominance that didn’t come from muscles but assured style, and appreciation of my body and how his should fit with mine. And he had every confidence from the beginning that we fit perfectly.
He wanted to be on top. Draped in his body, my arms flung around his back and squeezing his ass, the two of us both in a sweat now, and he gently bent my legs and put my ankles on his shoulders. I watched his long brown penis slowly sink into my pussy, until I felt the tickle of black curly pubic hair, the gratifying touch of flesh at his base. Just stay in for a moment, I whispered. Just stay right there. He did. Kissed me deeply, the way he had in the club when we were shamelessly naked, broken glass at our feet and me perched on the table. I felt prowess, I felt curiosity and desire and every damn inch of hard cock. I felt enveloped in strong arms, under the gentle weight of a wide chest. I smelled him and drank him in, relished the sweet pressure of thighs and the tiniest pulse of his rod. Oh, baby, just stay in.
I felt a small distant orgasm, and as I looked into his eyes, he withdrew a little to start a rhythm. A slow rhythm that took me up until I came once more with tears in my eyes, me whispering I want you to come. Hearing myself chant it, I want you to come, as he withdrew and eased back in, still kissing me, my pussy muscles tightening their hold on his cock, a caress of his fingers along the back of my thigh, almost tickling me with my ankles still on his shoulders. Building, and a little faster, a little faster, and I want you to come, I want to feel the flood of you as your arms brace, and your torso rears up, cock so deep, and now baby, now, and as he pumped me with a fury and at last grunted and shook, the whole damn bed scraped an inch on the floor with our momentum. He shot and shot and shot, my nails digging into his ass.
♦
Beatriz sent a text to Graham’s cell phone that she had to talk to him. We finally got out of bed, had a meal, and drove over to see her in the Laranjeiras district.
We met her at Casa Rosa—the “Pink Room’—a hot spot, I was told, that used to be one of Rio’s famous brothels. As we sat down at a table at the large outdoor patio, Graham wasn’t perturbed at all by the men and women glowering our way. They wanted us to know who they were and that they were watching.
“Beatriz’s people,’ he whispered to me. “They’re more dangerous because they’re not professionals.’
“God, I keep wondering why they don’t want a quiet life after all they’ve been through,’ I whispered back.
“I know,’ he said. “I don’t like the number she does on them. If you want to rescue somebody, you don’t treat ‘em as a potential convert to your politics. Well, maybe ‘politics’ is being too generous. Her vigilante band or—’
He stopped because Beatriz glided up to our table, wearing a brown leather jacket zipped all the way up and dark trousers, looking oddly severe. Her curt nod told me everything she felt, all her resentment towards me. She had let me go away with Graham, perhaps hoping he would put me on a plane and get rid of me. The gringa who was inconvenient—for Marinho, for Ferreira, for her. Well, I was still here. Too bad.
“I thought you cared for me,’ she said, her tone intimate as if I weren’t there at all. “I call you, and you say yes, you’ll come—you help free those girls.’
Graham was incredulous. “I helped free those women because they needed freeing.’
“I see,’ said Beatriz, dropping her eyes to the table. “This helps decide things. I knew tonight would. You’ve brought her, so I guess my people were right. It’s time I opened my eyes.’
“And just why did you bring them along?’ he asked. Under the table he reached for my hand. I don’t know if he needed the strength of contact or thought I did.
“They are here to watch me,’ Beatriz answered. “They’re here to witness me tell you something. You need to go away, Graham. Take her with you. We have operations planned, and you make things complicated with your presence. This is not your country or your struggle.’
“Beatriz, do you even know why you do what you do any more? You showed up late for your own rescue mission. You were too busy blasting holes in Marinho’s men in the favela.’
“If I hadn’t gone into the favela, your new girlfriend wouldn’t be with you tonight.’
I knew better than to open my mouth this time. In this, she was correct.
I listened to them, and at first I thought this had the sound of two exes squabbling, but as they argued, I saw how Graham had been accurate about their relationship. Maybe I had doubted him because I was looking for a flaw, having too good a time with him to believe he was real. Talking to Beatriz, he kept his voice soft and his words were reasonable. But hers were growing sharper, more defensive.
“Those women in that storage shed—’
“Could wait,’ snapped Beatriz.
Whoa.
“Maybe they have time to think how stupid they are to get trapped like that! Don’t give me such a look—I know I was stupid, too, once. This whole country teaches women they have to be whores and it tells men to treat them with no respect! A nation of hypocrites! And you’re no different. I open my legs for you and think it’s a way to express gratitude. Me, a fool again! And you sit there now and ask do we know why? Believe me, we are quite tired of cleaning up, here, there, wherever—shooting down one of Marinho’s men when we get a chance. Some ways, okay—you think how can you blame him? He sees the fool, he take advantage. He looks out on the beach, and he see a free meal—the sheep can’t wait to be sheared.’ Flecks of spit flew from her mouth, and she pointed at two of her group at a far table. “But I still owe them vengeance! I owe them!’
Graham looked mildly bewildered. “What the hell are you talking about?’ he asked gently.
I couldn’t blame him. Disconnected thoughts and free-floating anger. She stood up, and her seat tipped back and clattered to the ground.
“I am saying go home, Graham! Go save Africa or Britain or somewhere else and take her with you. I am saying I forgive you that you make me a fool—’
“I did not lead you on,’ he cut in.
“But I cannot do my work running into you in the favelas or the city.’
“You called me today, remember?’
“Well, no more.’
Graham flipped his eyebrows with a shrug that said fair enough, downed his drink, and gave me a look. Time to go. Boy, was I ready. I
wasn’t sure what had happened here, but I understood even more now why he considered her a liability.
But what was also disturbing was the behavior of her followers. They didn’t appear ruffled at all by her outburst. Maybe they had been questioning her judgment—and they had wanted her to demonstrate she could tell him off. Or maybe they were simply used to her volatile nature. Me, I thought it wasn’t the kind of emotional display that inspires the troops.
And I wondered how long you could run on the fuel of outrage over your trauma. I suppose if anyone questions the inflexibility of your resolve, your eyes would darken and burn with the intent to shame—just as hers had tried with Graham. To his credit, he wasn’t buying it.
♦
In bed. Later. Lying beside each other.
“How does a guy like you wind up a spy?’
“I can’t be a spy?’ he demanded playfully.
“Okay, you can be a spy, Mr. Macho. It’s just… I don’t know. You don’t seem emotionally scarred with a need to flee home, or politically driven to strike fear into the hearts of evildoers. You don’t seem bored with comfortable middle-class life and looking for kicks. And yeah, okay, I haven’t seen you too much in action, but you don’t strike me as the ruthless type who gets off on liquefying people.’
“You mean liquidate, don’t you?’
“Liquidating people, right—’
“Liquefying!’ He laughed.
“Okay, okay, slip of the tongue.’
“You have some funny ideas. It’s like any job and can be just as dull.’
I doubted that.
There were familiar themes in our backgrounds: middle-class parents with high expectations of their children, siblings who were best friends—in his case, his sisters. He was the only son. But the differences were intriguing as well. My father had instilled in us a pride in our direct African lineage. For the Baileys, family pride was in the survivors’ tales of overcoming slavery by fighting on the side of the Loyalists in the American Revolutionary War. “I’ve got some long-lost ancestors here in Brazil too,’ he told me.
His father, he said, was an economist for one of the banks and had wanted him to go into law. Graham had other ideas. He studied languages and got his M.A. in International Studies at Cambridge. (I could hear Daddy now: “Oh, you mean he finished his degree?’) Rather than jump through the hoops of applications to think tanks and aid agencies, he drove a cab like my brother for a while, saved up, and took himself off to Africa. “When you’re right there, on the spot, they grab you and say he’ll do.’ He worked on pioneer microbanking investment projects in Kenya, bummed around South Africa for a bit, and found himself recruited in late 2000 into helping British forces in the Sierra Leone Civil War.
“Fighting the West End boys was the worst,’ remembered Graham. “Psychos all in one splinter faction. That movie Blood Diamond doesn’t even come close! You are in the bush, watching children made to torture their own parents, and you actually have to wait until everyone’s in position while some poor bastard gets his arm chopped off. You could jump the gun and save him, but then half your unit would get blown away.’
In recent days he’d flitted across Africa—from Abidjan, a city he fell in love with before its recent violence, to Johannesburg, to Dar es Salaam, to others. We compared notes on Lagos and the craziness of the Balogun Market.
In a strange way his work paralleled mine, hopscotch flights to foreign locations and putting together mysterious political jigsaws (though I suppose he worked for one “client,’ and I think he was more entitled to call what he did a career). I imagined him unpacking his collection of “airport art’ at each new destination and hanging his print, and I wondered if he ever honestly looked for love or just arms that offered temporary comfort.
“You love your work, don’t you?’ I asked.
“On good days. Don’t you? I’m surprised they never tried to recruit you before.’
“My language skills aren’t even close to yours.’
“Oh, you can learn. You’d be a natural at fieldwork.’
“I’d rather play detective.’
“Yeah, I guessed as much,’ he said. “When I—no.’ He broke off abruptly, and I nudged him with my hand to say what he was going to say. “Not sure you’ll like it.’
“What is it?’
“I sort of met you already in a way—I don’t mean for this op of bringing you in. They sent me your kids’ books to analyze. Keep in mind, we’re dealing with paranoid types, and since you were zipping around the Sudan and other places, they looked for hidden messages in innocuous publications.’
“You’re joking!’
I couldn’t believe it. They pegged me as a security risk because I wrote about little Nura in a fictional African village?
“That’s insane.’
“You’d be surprised at what’s used to pass ciphers or what-have-you. I know, I know. Ridiculous. Anyway, I reported that no, these are books for kids, you’re a bunch of nutters in your asylum on the Albert Embankment, please go away. Then I bought a couple of your books to give as birthday presents to my niece and nephew.’
“Excellent. I made a sale.’
“Good, now since I have the author, come on—spill. Tell me where Nura is supposed to be. The books never say. Where’s her village?’
I laughed. “It’s not a secret, Graham! I didn’t pin it down so I wouldn’t have to stick to details of one place.’
“Yeah, but you must have had one place in mind when you started, yes? Is it Sudan? It’s Sudan, isn’t it?’
He just wouldn’t take yes for an answer. “Trade secrets, my son. Can’t tell you.’
“We have ways of making you talk.’
“Show me …’
11
Listen,’ said Graham the next morning as we ate breakfast together. “Do you trust me?’ I trusted his eggs. Fluffy and with the right amount of basil, and I can’t cook eggs to save my life.
I let him steal my toast and said, “Hell of a time to ask. What do you want to know?’
“I only have bits and pieces, and I’m guessing you have a few more. It’s time we put them together. The bad guys started to make some fool documentary on Islam here, right? I saw a bit of the footage before you and I met.’
“Yes, but I don’t think it’s real,’ I said. “I saw that footage, too, but… it’s strange. There were no production schedules or notes or any paperwork on their computers. I think it’s a smokescreen for something else. Have you ever heard of an organization or something that goes by the acronym F-O-Z? Foz or something? Why the frown?’
“Teresa, how much of Brazil have you seen?’
“Just here. And a brief trip to a prison I’d rather forget.’
“Foz isn’t an acronym,’ explained Graham. “Foz is for Foz do Iguaçu! It’s the fourth-largest city in the Paraná state, and it’s got one of the largest Muslim populations in Brazil. Sits right on the borders with Paraguay and Argentina. What’s supposed to happen there?’
“I don’t know. My source wouldn’t—or couldn’t—give me any more.’
“Who tipped you off?’
I hesitated. But Simon was evading Graham’s bosses anyway, and it looked like Graham was quietly defying his orders. I decided the risk in telling the truth was minimal.
“Teresa?’
“Simon Highsmith,’ I answered, and took a long sip of my coffee. “He’s a friend. Of sorts.’
“Simon,’ he echoed, his voice gathering both the syllables into an impressive groan, his features settling on a scowl.
“I take it you two know each other?’
“He used to be a friend,’ replied Graham. “Of sorts. Let’s just say we had a falling-out, and I disapprove of his methods. If he’s mixed up in all this…’
“I don’t always approve of his methods either, but he hasn’t lied to me, and he came through when I needed help clearing myself. If he says the key is this Foz place, I’m inclined to believe him.’
> Graham didn’t speak for a long moment. I had a burst of telepathy. “He’s never lied to you either.’
“No…no, he hasn’t. I’ll give him that much.’
He cleared our plates, rinsed them, and stacked them in the small dishwasher. He poured us some more coffee as I waited in the silence, wondering how big a grudge had been left between these guys.
“Teresa, can you get in touch with him again? Have him cough up more details?’
“ Uh-uh. I think he’s got his own problems, wherever he is. It’s up to us. That’s why I blundered into Favela do Buraco. I wanted to tail Marinho, hoping he’d lead me to a few answers.’
“You’re gutsy, babe, I’ll give you that.’
“Why didn’t you ever nab him off the street before?’
He looked mildly embarrassed. “My last operations here, I didn’t have nearly as much discretionary freedom. I was sent to check out the Angolans here and their political connections to Africa. Marinho and Ferreira weren’t even on my radar until Beatriz came along. First she wanted one gang to help against Marinho, and when they didn’t oblige, she pretty much declared war on all of them. I told you the rest of that mess.’ He was quiet a moment, then said, “It keeps coming back to an Islamic connection. Simon telling you about Foz do Iguaçu, the documentary on Muslims in Brazil… And why does a porn maker do a documentary on Muslims anyway?’
“I keep asking myself the same question,’ I said. I went and fetched the USB flash drive from my bag. “Maybe we’re looking at things the wrong way.’
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