The Fifth Vial

by Michael Palmer

  Certain that the way things were going, the nurse she sought would be out of the hospital, too, Natalie made her way up to the second-floor surgical intensive care unit—the SIC-U, it would have been called in most hospitals in the States. Following the removal of her lung in one of Santa Teresa’s twenty-one operating rooms, she would have been taken there.

  Please be here, Natalie begged as she stepped through the automatic glass doors. Please be here….

  She scanned what she could see of the busy unit and felt her spirit begin to sink. The SIC-U was state-of-the-art—ten high-tech, glass-enclosed cubicles, arranged around a central core nursing-monitoring station. Slowly, nonchalantly, nodding and smiling at anyone who made eye contact, Natalie strolled around the circle. She shouldn’t have come during lunchtime, she was thinking. She shouldn’t have—

  Wearing blue scrubs, writing in a red looseleaf notebook, the woman she was seeking emerged from the last cubicle and headed away from her. Her bulk and her pronounced limp left no doubt that she was the one from the street. Her pulse racing, Natalie caught up with the woman at the nursing station. Her face was cherubic and quite pretty. She wore a thin gold necklace, but no other jewelry, and no wedding ring. Her ID read DORA CABRAL.

  “Excuse me, Senhorita Cabral,” Natalie said softly in Portuguese.

  The woman, smiling, looked up at her. Instantly, her expression tightened. Her gaze darted nervously about. For Natalie, her reaction eliminated what little doubt remained.

  “Yes?” Dora asked.

  “I am sorry to come here like this, senhorita, but I am desperate,” Natalie said, worried that her Portuguese might not be up to the task. “I believe that you are the person who spoke to me on the street yesterday afternoon. If you are, please help me know who Dom Angelo is. I have tried to learn who he is, but I have failed.”

  “Not who,” Dora said in a harsh whisper. “Where. It is a village. It is—”

  The nurse stopped abruptly, scribbled something on the margin of a sheet of paper, pushed it an inch or so toward Natalie, rose clumsily, and lurched into the corridor toward the cubicle where she had been working.

  Totally flustered, Natalie was about to reach for the paper when something made her turn toward the entrance. A man wearing the uniform of the Military Police had stepped into the unit and was just turning toward where she was standing. His arrival was clearly what had driven Dora away.

  Natalie didn’t dare reach for the paper, but did risk a glance at it.

  8 P.M. 16 R.D. FELIX #13

  By the time she turned back, the police officer was coming toward her, grinning. With a dense, sickening sensation, she immediately recognized him. It was Vargas, the one-man welcoming committee who had approached her at the Pasmado Overlook.

  Even though they had met in Botafogo, the same section of the city as the hospital, and likely where Vargas was stationed, Natalie felt virtually certain this second meeting was no coincidence. She also felt frantic to get the policeman away from the desk in the nurses’ station where Dora had written her address.

  “Why, you’re Officer Vargas, aren’t you?” she gushed, hurrying over to him. “The policeman with the wonderful English. I recognized you immediately.”

  “From the park at Pasmado, yes?”

  “Exactly. Thank you for remembering.”

  He asked her name, and she told him, although she had little doubt he already knew. Had he seen Dora writing? The desk was five feet behind where they were standing. She somehow had to move him in the other direction.

  “Senhorita Natalie,” he said charmingly, “pardon me for saying so, but Santa Teresa Hospital isn’t on the usual tourist itinerary.”

  Natalie’s mind was swirling. What was he doing here? If he had been following her since Pasmado, he knew that she had lied about staying at the Inter-Continental. If he had been following her since her landing at the Jobim Airport, something very terrible was going on.

  Natalie had never had much patience for flirts—men or women—and had proudly never considered herself very proficient at it. But now seemed like a good time to try.

  “The last time I was here in your city,” she said, “I had the misfortune to run into an unscrupulous cab driver.”

  “Unfortunately, we still have a number of those,” Vargas replied, “although we at the Military Police are trying to stamp them out.”

  “Well, this man took me to this alley and…I-I just can’t talk about it very easily. I came here to the hospital to straighten out some insurance matters and to thank the staff for taking such good care of me when I was a patient here.”

  “I see.”

  Natalie took a small step forward and looked up at him, trying for an expression that was soft and vulnerable.

  “Officer Vargas, if I was away from here, I think I could talk to you about what happened.”

  “Oh?”

  “Do you have a few minutes, perhaps for a cup of coffee?”

  “For you, I would gladly make time.”

  “Thank you.” She touched his arm and sighed. “Something horrible has happened to me, and I would do anything to get to the bottom of it. Anything. Perhaps it is a blessing that you have dropped into my life not once, but twice.”

  “Perhaps,” the policeman said as she led him out the doors and toward the café. “Or perhaps I am the one who is blessed.”

  Dom Angelo, state of Rio de Janeiro, population 213.

  The Botafogo branch library had that much information on the village, but little more. On some maps, it was located seventy-five miles north and west of the city, in what the reference librarian told her was the eastern part of the Rio de Janeiro rain forest. On other maps it wasn’t listed at all. After an hour and a half of searching, Natalie had drawn a map that it seemed would guide her there—or at least close to there. Hopefully, at eight this evening, Dora Cabral would have more information on the place and what sort of answers Natalie could hope to find there.

  It took most of an hour for her to disconnect from Rodrigo Vargas, a decorated veteran, he said, of fifteen years in the Military Police, long separated from his wife, but active in the lives of his two children. He knew Detective Perreira well, and described him as a man who spent far too much time sitting down. Throughout their conversation, during which Natalie said nothing of Dora Cabral or Dom Angelo, the policeman gave no indication that his appearance in the SIC-U while she just happened to be there was anything other than coincidence.

  In the end, he said that given her unpleasant experience in Rio, he understood why she might have been reluctant to give the name of her hotel out just because a man was wearing a uniform and claimed to be a policeman. He then promised to go over some of the ground covered by Perreira, and gave her the name of a bistro where the two of them could meet tomorrow for lunch to update each other.

  “I hope this is the beginning of a special friendship, Senhorita Natalie,” he said earnestly as they stood to go.

  “So do I, Rodrigo,” she said, trying for a come-hither smile, and holding on for an extra beat when they shook hands. “So do I.”

  They parted inside the hospital, and Natalie got directions to the library from the information desk. She left, praying that Dora had taken advantage of the chance to destroy what she had written. Once on the street, she began moving through the city with absolute attention to whether she was being followed, employing every maneuver she had ever seen on TV or in the movies, plus a few she made up on the spot. She had four hours before she was expected at Dora’s—four hours and a lengthy list of things she needed to get if she was going to drive into the rain forest.

  By six thirty she had been to the library, hardware and outdoor gear stores, and several clothing outlets, taking some purchases with her, and promising to return for the rest once she had her car. If there was someone watching the Jeep, there would be no way she could retrieve it without being seen and probably followed, but she had no choice. A bigger fear was that the car would be gone, or in some wa
y disabled, but it was right where she had left it, in a small garage two blocks from her hotel.

  16 R.D. FELIX #13

  With help from the reference librarian, she located Rua de Felix in the Gávea section of the city, three miles west of Botafogo. She loaded up the Jeep, covering everything with a canvas. Then, wishing it were darker, she began a serpentine drive from the shore to the hills and back again, racing through red lights, driving up alleys and through parking lots, and making any number of U-turns, always with an eye on the rearview mirror.

  When she was reasonably certain she wasn’t being followed, she locked up the Jeep in a well-lit spot, and with an unpleasant tension in her chest, flagged down a yellow cab. Gratefully, the driver was a weathered, gum-chewing woman, who reminded her not at all of the cabbie from the airport. Using a map, and ad-libbing when it seemed right to do so, she directed the woman up streets and back down, around blocks and through alleys. Finally, she asked to be dropped off a block from Rua de Felix. It was an indescribable relief when the driver simply complied.

  The neighborhood was more run-down than Natalie had expected given Dora Cabral’s occupation. Tenements, most three stories high, and few of them well maintained, were packed along dimly lit, narrow hillside streets, along with scattered, larger apartment buildings. Dusk was giving way rapidly to night, but there were a fair number of people on the streets, so Natalie did not feel particularly anxious about being alone.

  It was exactly eight when she arrived at a featureless, four-story apartment building flanked by two alleyways, each about ten feet wide and modestly littered with newspapers, cardboard, and cans. The number 16 was painted in white on the red-brick facing.

  There were two panels of fairly new mailboxes in the enclosed foyer, and a vertical row of doorbells. D. CABRAL was near the top. Natalie pushed the button once, then again. She peered through the glass of the inside door. There was a short staircase going up to the first floor. She rang the bell a third time. Then, sensing the first nugget of apprehension, she tried the door, which swung open without resistance. So much for security. Number 13, identified by gold numerals nailed to the center of the dark wood door, was on the right, at the far end of the hall. Natalie listened intently, then knocked—at first softly, then sharply. Silence.

  8 P.M. 16 R.D. FELIX #13

  There was no doubt in her mind that she had interpreted the written message correctly. It was now ten after. The nugget was growing with each second. Dora’s plea on the street that Natalie not look back, and her reaction in the SIC-U to the arrival of the Military Police officer, underscored the woman’s fear, but sharing the name Dom Angelo and the scribbled note suggested that she wanted to help.

  “Come on…come on….”

  Natalie knocked again, then returned to the front hallway and tried the bell one last time. Her mind was racing through possible responses to this latest turn. One thing was certain—she wasn’t leaving until she had done everything possible to ensure that Dora Cabral was all right.

  Eight fifteen.

  Natalie debated knocking on a neighbor’s door to see if any of them might have a key to apartment 13. Instead, she went outside and, suddenly wary, walked to the end of the block and turned the corner before swinging around abruptly and heading back. Nothing looked suspicious, so she went to the edge of the alley and ducked in. Assuming the apartments were approximately the same size, the fifth and sixth windows on her left would be Dora’s, but because the first floor was up four stairs, they were two feet or so above Natalie’s head. There was dim light behind each of them.

  Eight twenty.

  The lights were not what Natalie wanted to see. A dark apartment could have meant that Dora had been delayed somewhere. Lights made the possibility less likely. Grimly, Natalie raced as best she could down the alley to a single, half-filled galvanized metal trash can. She carried it back, turned it over, and clambered up so that the lower sill was now at the level of her chest.

  She was looking into a neatly kept bedroom with two twin beds. The light was coming from beyond—from the kitchen, it seemed. She blinked twice to assist her eyes in adjusting to the gloom. Now she could make out the sink in the kitchen and the back of a chair and part of the kitchen table. It took several seconds for her to realize that hanging off the side of the table was an arm.

  “Oh, God, no!” she cried out softly.

  Without hesitation, she slammed her elbow viciously into the pane, exploding nearly all the glass into the bedroom. There were several large shards still protruding from the frame. Rather than try to remove them, she reached up and unlatched the window, pushed it up, and found the strength to hoist herself up and inside. Mindless of the blood flowing from a gash just below her elbow, she raced to the kitchen.

  Dora Cabral was slumped on the table, dead. Her head rested peacefully on one cheek. Her mouth was agape, her lips pulled back in a disturbing rictus, exposing her teeth. Natalie checked the carotid pulse in her neck and the radial pulse at her wrist, but knew there would be none. Then she noticed the syringe on the table, next to an empty multidose vial of what she felt certain was a powerful, injectable narcotic.

  Nothing she sensed about the woman encouraged the belief that she was a narcotics addict, but if she knew nothing else, she knew that was always a hard call to make. In her heart, she felt that Dora’s death was murder, and worse, that it had something to do with the two connections between them—the rain forest village of Dom Angelo and the Military Police officer Rodrigo Vargas.

  Still numb and not thinking with much clarity, Natalie glanced down and noticed the blood dripping off her hand and forming a small pool on the linoleum floor. The gash by her elbow was two inches long and fairly deep, but she knew pressure would take care of the bleeding and in time, provided there was no major infection, all she would be left with was another Rio scar. She took a dishcloth from the sink and managed to tie it tightly around the wound. At that moment, she heard sirens approaching.

  Was this a setup?

  Fueled by a massive adrenaline rush, she was thinking quite clearly again. She had to get away. Using her shirt to turn the knob, she hurried to the hallway and immediately opted against the front stairs. Instead, she took a narrow flight down to a pitch-black basement. Virtually blind, she felt along the wall for a light switch. At the moment she was about to give up and head back upstairs, she found one and flicked it on. Just ten feet away was a small set of concrete stairs, leading up to a door. Opening it cautiously, Natalie stepped out into an alleyway between the backs of buildings, scarcely six feet wide, and permeated by the pungent odor of urine.

  The sirens were close now, and she felt certain she heard heavy, running footsteps from someplace to her right. She had been set up. There was no doubt about it. It had to be Vargas. Sometime soon, very soon, she would be killed trying to escape arrest, and the loose ends surrounding Dom Angelo would be tied up.

  Mindless of her breathing, she dashed to the end of the alley farthest from the footsteps and then flattened against a wall as a uniformed policeman raced by. Finally, she slipped across the street and cut through another alley. Several more blocks, and she could go no farther. She was in an upper-middle-class neighborhood now, with single-family homes and lush gardens. Breathing heavily, and not all that successfully, she sank onto the ground behind a dense grove of palms, ferns, and huge yuccas, and allowed herself to cry—not so much out of fear for herself or even horror over the death of Dora Cabral, but rather out of sheer bewilderment.

  Somehow, she was either going to find some answers, or die trying.

  Her search had to begin, and would hopefully end, in Dom Angelo.

  Twenty-Six

  Have you never observed how invincible and unconquerable is spirit and how the presence of it makes the soul of any creature to be absolutely fearless and indomitable?

  —PLATO, The Republic, Book II

  Natalie spent the night in the back of the Jeep, parked in a public garage north of the city, us
ing a duffel bag for a pillow and a tarp for a blanket. For six hours her tension and confusion battled with her physical and emotional exhaustion for possession of her ability to sleep. In the end, the struggle was more or less of a draw, and she estimated two hours of decent rest, maybe even three.

  At five thirty, stiff and bleary, she climbed out of the Jeep and paced around level two of the garage. As far as she could tell, she was fifteen or twenty miles north of Rio, just a dozen or so miles from Route 44, a cutoff that would continue leading north and west, away from the coast. That two-lane would eventually become a winding, probably unpaved secondary road that snaked into the rain forest mountains for at least twenty miles before connecting, in some way, with a road to the village of Dom Angelo. It was going to be a hell of a trip, but that might be said for every inch her life had traveled since she stepped on board her initial flight to Rio.

  She had a dreadful ache in her soul for Dora Cabral, and what the woman might have gone through before her death. There didn’t seem to be any signs of torture on her body, but Natalie had little doubt that Rodrigo Vargas was skilled at the art of getting answers without leaving marks.

  Natalie felt totally alone—more so perhaps than at any time in her life. She thought fleetingly about calling Terry or even Veronica to ask if they might fly down and join her in the search for answers, but one person who had reached out to help her had already died. No, this was going to be her game to win or lose. Actually, she acknowledged bitterly, no matter what, she had already lost. The scimitar scar on her right side attested to that. So now, the rules had changed. The game was no longer about winning or losing—rather, it was all about answers and, if possible, vengeance.