by Rogue Angel
She laughed. “How sententious is that? Listen to me. I’ve never even been to the place. I just read the news on-line a lot.”
“We’re still going to be bloody tourists,” Aidan muttered. She noticed his knuckles gleaming blue-white on the back of the hand that gripped the armrest. He was a nervous flier. She had to suppress a giggle. It seemed incongruous given how calmly he had faced terrible danger and soul-wrenching horror. As usual, it seemed to be the smaller things he had trouble coping with in equanimity.
“Hardly that,” she said. “Too bad, too. Although I understand Rio’s like Mexico City—too big and crowded, not really representative of the country as a whole. Although it’s not as big as São Paulo. Or as polluted.” She shrugged. “Still, it’s a city named after an imaginary river—January River, in fact. That’s got to stand for something.”
Having allowed Annja to take the window seat, either gallantly or because he was afraid of flying, Aidan sat in the center seat of the row. The third party was a plump, benign-looking German woman who spent the whole tedious trip across the Atlantic bobbing her gray head in response to whatever was being piped through the iPod earbuds she wore.
Annja noticed Aidan craning his head to follow the flight attendant, a willowy young woman with ebony skin, gleaming white smile and brilliant green eyes who had just spoken briefly to their seatmate in what sounded to Annja like flawless German. At the moment she was speaking very good French to a portly gentleman in a rumpled blue suit in the central seat section of the wide-body aircraft. She had several times during the flight spoken in effortless, lightly accented English to Annja and Aidan.
“She’s certainly an eyeful,” Annja said with more irritation than she intended.
Aidan turned his eyes forward with a shrug. “I don’t mean to be impolite. But ye gods! I’m a heterosexual male, after all.”
Annja nodded with what she hoped was understanding.
“Anyway, I admit I’m still trying to assimilate a Brazilian woman named Gretchen. What’s up with all these German Brazilian women?” he asked.
Annja was wondering what was up not just with German Brazilians, but with women who were taller than she was. Even without the heels the attendant must have stood six feet, like the late Eliete von Hauptstark.
“Santa Catarina,” she said. “A state south down the coast a ways, next door to Paraguay. It’s full of Germans and Italians.”
“Good Lord. Was it settled entirely by Axis fugitives fleeing World War II?” Pascoe asked.
She shrugged. “Not all of them. There are other groups, too, like the descendants of Confederate soldiers who came here after the American Civil War. I understand they enjoy reenacting antebellum Southern life.”
Aidan frowned. “What in hell’s that?” he asked, leaning forward and pointing out the window. “And I mean that a lot more literally than I might have a fortnight ago.”
As the airplane banked toward Galeão-Antonio Carlos Jobim International Airport on Governador Island, the brown haze overlying the city and the hills beyond was underlit by an evil orange color. Scores of individual lights glowed red like gaping wounds bleeding fire.
“Usinas,” Annja said. “Metal foundries. They use a lot of open-furnace and crucible techniques down here that are outmoded in most Western countries, if not outlawed.” At Aidan’s surprised glance she smiled. “I cheated and checked on-line from the hotel in Milano. They do look like vents from hell, don’t they?”
Her expression sobered. “Appropriately enough,” she said, “they’re our destination.”
“IT’S A LITTLE BIT like a sauna, isn’t it?” Annja said as they walked back from dinner at a restaurant near their hotel. Around them it was very dark. Lights shone brightly all around them and well up the hills of the affluent São Conrado neighborhood, near the southern shore peninsula that jutted into the Atlantic. It had all the subtle restraint of a black velvet painting. Around them music blared from a hundred places, nightclubs, restaurants, even the balconies of exclusive apartment complexes. A thousand beats were vying with each other and the noise of the traffic surging past. While she could make out plenty of Brazilian traditional and popular tunes, Annja was somewhat disappointed that thumping rock and hip hop seemed to be winning the volume battle.
“Too right,” Aidan said. “Even after the Mediterranean the heat and humidity is a bit stunning.”
“Well, it is the tropics.”
“I’d think you’d be used to it, though. I thought you’d spent time down here before getting involved in all this jar madness,” he said.
“That was in the high Amazon basin,” she said. “Pretty much the foothills of the Andes. Higher, dryer. Cooler.”
They came to a stretch of relative darkness, though the street itself was still broad, well lit and traveled. Inland a series of hills rose, their sides encrusted with lights. “Pretty,” Aidan murmured.
“By night,” Annja said. “That’s Roçinha. The largest slum in Latin America. They call them favelas here. That term’s politically incorrect now, supposedly, but as far as I can tell it’s what everybody actually says.”
Aidan shook his head. “I should have known,” he said. “Rio’s slums are legendary. Do you think we’re safe? All the guidebooks are filled with masterful understatements about the risks of being out on the streets. Especially at night.”
Annja grinned at him. “Do you really think we have anything to worry about?”
He sucked in his lips. “Well…they might have guns.”
She continued to look at him.
“I guess you’d be a bad choice for victimization, even at that.”
She laughed.
“I keep forgetting you have all these abilities. You’re harmless enough looking. For a strikingly beautiful young woman, that is.”
“Flatterer,” Annja said smiling.
He shook his head briskly. “Not so. I don’t flatter.”
“I’m not beautiful. I’m too tall, gangly. Plain,” Annja said.
He laughed so loudly a couple of men walking by turned to stare at them. “Nonsense,” he said.
“No. really. Don’t make fun of me,” Annja said seriously.
He looked at her with his head tipped to the side and one eyebrow raised. His eyes were so pale they seemed to glow in the shine of stars and streetlights. “Quite without vanity, are you?”
“About my looks. I guess.”
“Then why do you keep fishing for compliments?” And he whooped with laughter again.
“You bastard.” Annja laughed as she said it.
Ahead their hotel, the InterContinental Rio, rose from the parking lot and huge swimming pools the way Sugarloaf Mountain did from the sea off nearby Urca. All lit up by floodlights it looked to Annja like a heavily striated cut face of sandstone or limestone, one of those with the history of aeons laid out for anyone with the requisite geological knowledge to read.
She said so.
“You’re such a romantic,” Aidan said. “Of course, I was thinking much the same thing.”
“Let’s face it,” Annja said. “We’re archaeology dorks.”
Laughing, they ran to the light blaze of the great covered entrance.
WITH GREAT RELIEF Annja sat on the foot of her bed to take off her shoes. Their room was spacious, clean and much like any fine hotel room anywhere. Not that Annja had spent much time in hotel rooms as nice as this one. She had been actively uncomfortable with the notion of staying in a five-star establishment. Also it was in the Zona Sul, the South Zone, on the other end of town from their objective of the next morning, as well as from the international airport where they’d landed and from which they’d depart.
If they survived the trip.
But Aidan had insisted. After what they’d been through, including the series of adequate but shabby rooms in Mediterranean motels and down-at-heels pensiones they’d shared the past few nights since he fished her out of the water off Jaffa, he said they deserved a luxury break. Besides,
he paid.
He stood in his sock feet, gazing out the floor-to-ceiling window at Pepino Beach. Despite their elevation on the ninth floor there wasn’t much to see beyond the bright lights of the parking lot except the tiny lights of some vessels well out on the water.
“You can go out on the balcony,” Annja said.
“If I open the door it will be like being hit in the face with a wet woolen blanket,” he said. “I think I’ll avail myself of the wonders of modern air conditioning a while longer.”
He turned and dropped into a recliner chair with a sigh. Annja lay back on the bed with her own feet, now bare, resting on the carpet. She rolled her eyes to look at him. With only the lamp between the beds lit it wasn’t too bright in the room. Despite that she thought he looked troubled, in his posture if not expression.
“Something’s bothering you,” she said.
He shook his head. “No, no.”
They had stopped off in the bar downstairs to sample the national drink, caipirinha, made with sugarcane liquor, called cachaça, mixed with lemon and ice. Unlike many of their colleagues, neither was much of a drinker. Annja felt more than a little elevated.
“Not a bit of it,” Aidan said somewhat grandly.
Rather than keep her from feeling anxious about her companion’s mood, her slight buzz seemed to sharpen her anxiety. She wondered at the phenomenon without knowing what to do about it.
“Come on,” she said. “Please don’t fence me out.”
“For some reason I’ve been thinking about those Greek fishermen who braced us on the beach in Corfu,” he said.
“What about them?”
“You didn’t kill them?”
She frowned. “Would you prefer I had?”
“No. I was wondering, why not? You killed some of those men attacking me in Jerusalem.”
She sat up. “They attacked me, too, if you’ll recall.”
“Sure. But so did the Greeks. What makes the difference, who lives, who dies?”
He frowned. “It couldn’t have made any difference that those men in Jerusalem were Jewish…could it?”
Annja stood up quickly. “You can’t seriously believe that about me. And don’t you think charges of anti-Semitism are being tossed about just a bit too freely these days? That kind of thing is unworthy of you.”
She loomed over him. She was seriously angry.
He held up defensive hands. “Sorry. Sorry, love. I don’t know what made me say that. But it’s a question that’s…been bothering me. That’s all. Some men die, some live, and you have the power to make that decision.”
Annja turned away. His use of the word love had struck her like the jab of a baton in the belly. She knew it was casual, an English turn of phrase. No doubt it signified little more than he was slightly inebriated, enough to have disregarded the political correctness of using a word that might be deemed sexist. But still—
Nothing gets a girl worked up like reminding her how isolated she really is, she thought. She remembered Tsipporah’s prediction or prophecy on taking leave of her in Jerusalem. The fact that the wise woman’s other prognostication, that their paths would never cross again, hadn’t panned out was small consolation right now.
Aidan was standing behind her. “Look, I know you do the best you can,” he told her. “I can’t really judge you, because I’ve no way of sharing your burden. And you saved my life twice, if memory serves. I’m a bloody ingrate and a twice-bloody fool. Please, just forget I spoke.”
“No,” she said. “It’s true. Not that it made any difference to me that those men in Jerusalem were Jewish, if they even were—I have no way of knowing that. Not really. But what is true is that I used the sword without much hesitation and I couldn’t make myself use it on those men on the beach. I couldn’t have summoned the sword. My will was…clouded. I didn’t feel in the right.”
She felt him standing behind her. His breath stirred the hair at the back of her neck, where she’d tied it up to keep cooler in the muggy heat.
“I understand. I think I do. It was the intent,” he said.
She shook her head. “Their intent was to kill us, those fishermen. I mean, I thought that their motives were purer—they were doing it to avenge their dead friends, and also to protect their living one. But what if the men who attacked you in the Old City thought they were doing the right thing, too? They must have, after all.”
“Isn’t that the burden you have to bear?” he said softly. “Trying as best you can, with imperfect knowledge and poor old human fallibility, to judge what’s good and what isn’t? We all have to make those decisions, I suppose. But with you there tend to be harsher consequences.”
She raised her head and looked out into darkness. “You don’t think I’m delusional? Some kind of psychopath, a serial killer who imagines she has a mission to cleanse the world of evil?”
“The sword is a pretty convincing delusion, Annja. And I haven’t seen you execute anybody in cold blood, only defend yourself—and me. I don’t pretend to understand all the moral ramifications of this mission of yours. Which I guess, now that I step back, makes me understand the pressure you’re under even more.”
She shook her head. “I wish I understood better. Sometimes I don’t think I’m suited to this new life. It just sounds impossibly grandiose even to say. I don’t know if anybody’s up to a role like that. How can I possibly live up to it?”
Her eyes stung, filled with warm tears. Self-pity? a merciless voice reproached her in her head. Too much alcohol?
She felt his hand on her shoulder, firm, gentle. “Perhaps that’s why you were chosen,” he said softly. “Because you have the strength and integrity to ask questions.”
She turned. Her breath seemed to catch in her chest. His eyes were fixed on hers. They seemed to glow.
She grabbed him by the head, almost roughly. She pressed her mouth to his. A frozen moment, in which her mind wheeled with fear and embarrassment. I’ve pushed it too far. I’ll scare him off—
Then his hand was behind her neck. A quick, smooth gesture and he had plucked the long pin she used to tie up her hair. It fell in a cascade to her shoulders. Their tongues twined, their faces pressed together so hard her lips were numbed by unaccustomed pressure.
In a sudden adolescent frenzy their hands were in motion, undressing themselves, undressing each other.
By the time they had finished gracelessly hopping free of their undergarments and landed on the bed together, naked, they both were laughing.
24
“Admiral Cochrane’s Forge,” Annja said.
Peering through lush green underbrush, Aidan said, “The place itself is a great deal less prepossessing than the name, I have to say.” He muttered a curse and swatted some kind of big green fly that had lit on his bare forearm to sink a probe.
They had parked their rented Toyota on the side of a track off the main road, crossing their fingers it wouldn’t got bogged down on uncertain ground. Then they had hiked a quarter mile or so through the woods to reach the outskirts of the foundry.
Though she was in superb shape, and used to hiking cross-country, the humid heat and swarming bugs had Annja wondering if they were being paranoid in their approach. The forge, after all, had a marked blacktop road leading, they now saw, to a lot graded out of the surrounding forest. But even though the occasional dark look and scowl from her companion told her his thoughts ran down the same track she was just as glad they had taken a roundabout route. After what they’d experienced the past week or so, too paranoid might just prove barely paranoid enough.
The smelter was a sprawling rectangular building and seemed to be mostly metal post and rusty sheet metal in construction. Even in the bright daylight the fiery glare was visibly spilling out the front. They could feel heat on their faces a hundred yards off.
“Charming place to work,” Aidan said.
“I’m sure their safety standards are as up-to-date as their equipment, too,” Annja said. “Still, I guess the
heat is easier to endure than starvation—even if you throw in the risk from the occasional splash of molten metal.”
A few cars stood parked by the building’s rust-streaked flank, several foreign sedans and a battered white Range Rover. They probably belonged to the technical staff and foremen. Annja guessed the workers probably walked.
“I don’t see any sign of trouble,” Aidan said. “Maybe we did hike all this way for nothing.” He took off his bush hat and wiped sweat from his face with a handkerchief. He wore a light blue cotton short-sleeved shirt, now with big half moons of sweat beneath the arms, and his customary blue jeans.
Annja wore a cheap panama hat and her usual field garb of white man’s shirt and khaki cargo pants. She had the sleeves rolled down for the same reason she avoided shorts in the heat—to discourage the plentiful and insolent Brazilian insect life.
“I wonder what it’s like in the bloody Amazon, with all these bloody bugs they have down here,” Aidan said, slapping his bare arm again. It left a smear of red against his pale skin.
“Worse in the Lower Amazon, I imagine. The Upper Amazon where I’ve been was not quite so bad. Close call, though,” Annja said.
She studied him. She wasn’t sure how she felt about the previous night. At breakfast, in one of the hotel’s restaurants Aidan had been his usual self, not so much bubbling over with humor as voluble about his interests and passions with a dry backing of humor. She thought there had been an extra flush to his normally pink cheeks, but perhaps she’d imagined that. She felt as if her cheeks were a bit rosier, though. She had, however, studiously avoided letting herself think about what had happened between them. Or what it might portend.
“What do you think?” he asked. One thing you could say for him was that he seemed to have little trouble deferring to a woman in a potentially dangerous situation.
She smiled. “I say we go. Race you?”
He touched two fingers to her arm. “Won’t it be less obtrusive if we just walk?”
She looked at him a moment. Then she nodded. “Good point.” And that’s what I get for getting cocky about my action-babe pose.
