by James Abel
I told myself I would not steal things anymore, Mikaela thought.
With a backward glance at the package, and quick look at the broken security camera in the corner, she returned to the run-up area outside. For the next two hours she unloaded bags from other planes. But the package stayed in her mind. She knew that a few handlers stole things from expensive bags, owned, they figured, by people rich enough to afford losing a camera or a laptop computer or any valuables they’d been stupid enough to pack, uninsured.
Besides, expensive bags and artwork are usually insured, she thought, so no one loses money except insurance companies, and they’re crooks anyway, sucking the life out of hardworking people like me and Glenn, who these days sits around drinking my paycheck away. But when he’s working, he’s a good man: kind, generous, fun.
Without two incomes, Mikaela and Glenn were behind on the rent.
I promised not to do this anymore!
All unclaimed luggage, Mikaela knew, ended up at the national lost luggage center in Scottsboro, Alabama, where it was sold at bargain-basement prices to any stranger who showed up and took advantage.
I assured Father Neilly, and I will stick to my word!
Mikaela brought a lovely Samsonite bag that was supposed to be in Montreal to the lost luggage room. The Rio package was now in a corner, almost hidden behind duffel bags, valises, rolling suitcases, and a set of Ping golf clubs that should have been in Qatar. FestivaWest Airlines had the highest rate of lost baggage in the industry. That was one reason it was failing, due for a takeover any day.
Mikaela’s mood worsened when she got back outside. It was raining, and wind blew off the Gulf of Mexico, slanting sheets of water into her face and down her poncho, soaking her shirt. Some days out here it was nice and sunny, and others, today, the salary didn’t seem like enough for her to put up with the shit. Mikaela was a trim, strong woman who had no children. She and Glenn opted to have fun instead. They used Festiva’s free passes to travel on weekends. Last week they’d first-classed to Las Vegas, gotten the airline hotel rate, and lost this month’s food and clothing budget at the blackjack tables at the Venetian.
Maybe I could sell that little clay pot to the man who buys stolen computers and jewelry!
Mikaela unloaded a flight from Salt Lake City. There was a dog show at Minute Maid Park scheduled this weekend, and the animals coming down the ramp shivered with fear. Mikaela felt awful each time she had to unload a caged animal. She had grown up with four Labradors, and anyone who would lock up an animal in a loud, vibrating luggage bin had her contempt. The cages were filled with piss and shit. The howling was pitiful. She didn’t mind engine noise, but wore earplugs to keep out the suffering of poor, dumb animals.
Something about the callousness of pet owners—and travelers in general—made her feel justified in what she thought next.
I’ll just open that parcel and get a better look at what’s there.
Mikaela went into the lost luggage room. A flush lit her face, and she felt a quickening in the blood, just like the one she experienced at age eleven when she stole Snickers bars from a local candy store, in Galveston.
She made sure that the green light was off on the “broken” security camera. Last month ten baggage handlers in Tulsa had been caught in a sting, breaking open luggage, unaware that “broken” cameras recorded them. Mikaela carried the luggage to a corner that the camera didn’t cover for some reason even when it was on.
But when she pried open the package she cursed. The pot had broken. There were shards of pottery in there and bits of wood and lots of plastic and paper wrapping and . . . shit . . . all this fretting for no payoff. She rummaged quickly among the debris and—
Ouch!
Something had bitten her, goddamnit! An insect or spider must be in there and ouch—it came again and she yanked out her hand. There was a little red bump on her wrist. Two bumps. She peered into the mass of wrapping. She wondered what had bitten her.
She stuffed the paper back in and put the parcel on a shelf.
By the time her shift was over, three hours later, the bumps had reddened and swelled and kept itching. When she got home she smeared calamine lotion on the bumps. Almost instantly, the itching stopped. She felt better. Maybe, she thought wryly, the bites were a warning for me to stay on the straight and narrow and not steal anything anymore.
By the time Glenn got home from another day of failed job hunting, she’d forgotten about the bites, and she certainly wasn’t going to tell him about breaking into the parcel. They ate a low-budget spaghetti dinner. In the morning the bites were down.
That afternoon, she felt slight pain in her knees and elbows when she went to work, and attributed the throbbing to the strain of carrying luggage. Perhaps she had twisted the wrong way.
By that evening, there was a tight bandlike sensation in her abdomen, pressing in, like fists pushing her intestines together. As if the muscles were coiling, sending bile back up into her belly, and making her nauseous from pain in her chest.
She must have twisted her neck, too, while carrying luggage, because it throbbed. Eva, another baggage handler, gave her a massage in the locker room. A couple of the guys offered massages also, but she called them perverts and they laughed and went back to work.
The pains got worse that night.
Summer flu, she thought.
The apartment got cold. The air-conditioning system must be turned down low, she figured, but when she looked, it was set to the usual seventy-two degrees. So she took her temperature. It was down to ninety-six. That’s why she was cold. So cold that she’d begun shivering. Mikaela piled on more blankets. But the blankets did no good. The cold seemed to be working its way into her knees and elbows. Man, this is the flu.
At 3 A.M. she went into convulsions, bouncing on the bed, heels slamming mattress, arms flailing. She had never been so cold in her life. Glenn woke, frightened, and he made her hot tea. She couldn’t hold it in. Her stomach seemed to close in on itself. She felt twisting knives in there. As she lurched toward the bathroom she was losing vision at the edges, and she had to use the wall for balance. She made it to the toilet, at least, and for a long time, whatever she had eaten over the last day seemed to come out everywhere it could.
By 4 A.M. everything had switched and she was hot, drenched with sweat, like she was a human rag and gigantic fists squeezed liquid from her forehead, face, armpits. Sweat soaked the blankets. She threw them off. She tried to stand and fell. She was going to be sick again.
“I’m turning yellow,” she said in horror, looking at her shaking hands.
That did it. Glenn got her to the car and drove fast to Houston Methodist Hospital. He told her not to worry when she’d voided her bowels on the way. He’d clean the car. But she was horrified in the emergency room when they got her clothes off and her urine was red, dripping on the floor. The nurse looked hazy. Mikaela’s throat was hot and the pain was in her spine now, flowing up and down, like razor blades skimming nerves.
She screamed when a doctor touched her.
The doctor looked small and tiny, and she saw him from far off through a tube.
It was now thirty-eight hours after the threat had been made to the Deputy Assistant National Security Advisor, outside the New Post Pub, in the capital. Mikaela’s accidental infection might have given authorities time to prepare for what was coming had they connected it to the threat, but no one did.
Mikaela was passing out.
A voice above her was saying, “The disease doesn’t happen this fast. It doesn’t! It’s impossible!”
“Yeah? Then you tell me what this is, Doctor. It’s bad. I’ve never seen it this bad, but it’s not impossible.”
Glenn was screaming, “That monitor! Look at the lines! What’s wrong with her heart!”
Later, blood tests confirmed the cause of death, and a notation was made beside the
name of Mikaela Dehlman and forwarded to the city health department. Under the national security advisory, suspicious outbreaks were to be reported immediately to Homeland Security and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in Atlanta. But this case was not considered related to the advisory, so officials were not notified.
After all, Houston is a tropical city. It lies near many bodies of fresh water that can breed insects. In the summer, Houston is rife with mosquitoes. Over 30 percent of the city is foreign-born, many from tropical countries, and Mikaela worked at an airport, exposing her to foreign travelers. So what she had contracted was considered, quite logically, to be extremely rare but natural, conceivable, in this warm, humid place.
The parcel was transported to Alabama and locked away in a dark corner. Ninety days would have to pass before, by law, it could be opened or sold.
Mikaela’s death, doctors thought, was a tragic rarity. They certainly did not regard it as a harbinger of things to come.
In their reports, notations read, “Hemolysis, burst blood vessels in the urine. Acute kidney failure. Death from a lethal, unusual malaria.”
FIVE
“You know what you need? A woman,” Anasasio said.
We were in the mining union Land Cruiser, heading back to town on the Amazon highway, the air-conditioning cranked up to arctic level, the world fractured and nonsensical.
Four more hours until eleven, and the secret meeting. I never even felt Rooster shove that note in my pocket, I thought.
The highway extended across a continent from Brazil’s megalopolis of São Paulo over a thousand miles east, to Peru and the Pacific Ocean, over a thousand miles west. Porto Velho was in the middle. The two-lane road was new but already crumbling. We passed a new fifteen-foot-high overpass, except it was unconnected to the road, just plopped down as if from a spaceship, in the jungle.
Better drivers wove back and forth insanely, avoiding two-foot-deep holes. Anasasio steered around an enormous semi truck piled high with tropical hardwoods. “Cut illegally,” he announced. He passed a refrigerated cattle truck, swaying like an accordion. “Yum! Meat!” We carried sloshing fuel in plastic jugs in back, as “gasoline sold on the highway is watered.” The windshield wipers smeared mosquitoes. Eight P.M. was mosquito cocktail hour.
Three hours left until my meeting with Rooster.
“I wish we could have tracked Eddie through his phone,” I said.
“It is probably at the bottom of the Madeira.”
I thought, Rooster’s note in my pocket said, 11 P.M. 32 Rondon Street. Do not bring Anasasio!
“You know the poem. A woman and cocaine dull all pain,” Anasasio said. His hand was on my knee.
If Rooster is the liar, the meeting will be a trap.
Traffic thickened as we entered the Rondônia state capital. Twenty years ago it was a sleepy backwater. Now the road widened to four lanes, and we slowed into a traffic jam of old metro busses and smoke-belching trucks and new Mercedes cars. The outlying shantytowns, once rain forest, were masses of one-story-high tin-roofed shacks where trees were memories, the sky crisscrossed by pirated power lines: copper, TV wiring, anything that carried electricity. Anasasio laughed at the lawbreaking. “What do you do in your country when a law is stupid? You ignore it, of course.”
I told him that I did not need him this evening as a translator. I lied and said that I’d stay at the hotel. We passed into the newer business area, banks, glass office buildings, even a “museum of nature”—museums being where civilized people like to keep nature—and paved residential streets lined with ranch-style, white-walled, stucco-roofed homes. Richer properties came with alarm systems. The difference between first-world and developing countries is the attention given public places versus privately owned ones.
“My friend, Joe. Let me take you along tonight. I know an excellent place on Rondon Street.”
I tried not to show surprise on my face. I hoped the place on Rondon Street was not the same one where I was to meet Rooster. That Porto Velho was one of those towns where saloons, brothels, and gambling dens are located in a row.
“Just the hotel, Anasasio.”
“No! Let us make another tour of the malaria hospitals. Perhaps your friend checked in while we were away! We must keep trying! You are right! Maybe he did not drown!”
Ninety minutes to go.
The “hospitals” were one-room clinics where dozens of victims lay looking half dead in beds beneath mosquito netting. Intravenous lines ran blue medicines into their arms. Malaria patients exhibit the rag doll attitude of the dead, when they are not shivering.
Suddenly I straightened and joy filled me! I saw Eddie, in a bed in the corner!
It wasn’t Eddie. My spirits plunged.
Anasasio put his arm around my shoulder as we arrived at the hotel and main plaza. “The hotel of lost causes is well named. I’ll see you in the morning. Sleep is what you need, Joe. Then a trip home. Good night.”
• • •
The hotel of lost causes—the Ecológica—lay across the plaza from the Governor’s mansion and cathedral and two-story-high barracks that served as state headquarters for the National Police. I’d been grilled there for hours when I’d reported Eddie gone.
Why are you really here, Doctor?
The hotel was the sort of remote bastion of idealism that Stuart usually booked for researchers: bright, clean, and filled with underdogs from the world over; German environmentalists trying to save the rain forest, New York Botanical Garden scientists seeking cancer cures in the treetops, leftist journalists chronicling rich ranchers fighting poor rubber tappers, and Indians, who got a cut rate at the Ecológica, discounts being the only benefit of contact, since half the Indians had been wiped out by “civilized” disease. The common cold.
There are many interesting foreign stamps in your passport, Federal Police Major Rubens Lemos had said.
The Hilton got the mining company execs, the Ecológica the miners. The Marriott got the hydroelectric dam builders, the Ecológica the grad students studying forest to be drowned when waters rose up, a year from now.
I walked in after Anasasio dropped me off, dreading the upcoming phone call to Eddie’s family. The owner’s son shook his head at me from behind the reception desk, Sorry, no Eddie, and held up a finger, meaning he had something to tell me, probably tonight’s menu. I kept going. I was in no mood for food. Ignoring him would prove to be a mistake.
The lobby was sunny with arched doorways and smelled of fresh coffee. It was tastefully decorated with Indian spears, baskets, and potted Brazil nut trees. Everywhere hung leftist political posters, in Portuguese, but between the clenched fists, marching peasants, and smiling spider monkeys, it was easy to get the messages. Save the Forest!
In my second-floor room—sunny, usually, balcony overlooking the plaza, rotating ceiling fan, latched door/windows—I called FBI Assistant Director Ray Havlicek, hoping that the new information might help. He listened, but seemed dubious. “An Indian? A bar? A rumor?”
“As I recall, Ray, you asked us to listen for rumors.”
“Don’t you think you’re reaching for answers?”
“What happened to call me anytime?”
I hung up and called our summer intern Aya Vekey, in New York. She was a brilliant high school senior whose youth had nothing to do with her abilities. Adults underestimated Aya because of her age. Sometimes when I phoned her I felt as if there was a forty-year-old professor on the other end, and at other times, a kid. But I owed my life to Aya, and she was as much a member of the team as Eddie. She knew Eddie was missing, but didn’t know the secret part of our mission.
“I’ve been reading more on Rondônia, Joe. Stay away from the police. Last year there was this report in O Globo about police helping cocaine smugglers there.”
“Good work. Meanwhile, keep learning more about this place. Issu
es. Factions. Medical studies. Check the journals.”
“Medical studies? Why?”
Because if someone is kidnapping sick people, I want to know why. “Just do it,” I said.
“But why?”
“Aya, you’re the intern. I’m the boss.”
“I’ll tell Mom to put pressure on Ray Havlicek. She’ll make him help Eddie. He does what she wants.”
“No. Not that way.”
“Why? This is about Eddie, not you! She doesn’t even love Ray! She only landed up with him because you wouldn’t—”
I relented. The kid was right. If Chris could pressure Ray to act, if that would help Eddie, why the hell not?
I dreaded the last call, to Eddie’s wife and daughters. I’d known Johanna Nakamura for over twenty years, since Eddie had met her after boot camp. I’d attended birthday parties for Renee Nakamura, seventeen, and India Nakamura, eighteen, since they were toddlers. When I called, the receiver was snatched up after half a ring. I envisioned the women on extension phones, in Boston. Johanna and Renee accepted the risks of Eddie’s profession. India’s childhood affection for me had soured. She blamed me for Eddie’s absences.
“I’ve got a lead,” I exaggerated.
Technology made their voices seem two feet away.
“Stop lying, Joe,” India snapped.
“India! Please,” Johanna said.
“If it wasn’t for him, Dad would be here.”
I heard a sob and click, which would be Renee hanging up, hating arguments. India had been right, though. Eddie came because of me. Johanna tried to make it better, said she knew I was doing all I could, said that she knew I loved her husband as much as they did. She was going crazy, but still tried to make me feel better. She’s that way.
“I have a feeling, Joe. He’s alive.”
I hung up feeling exhausted. It was time to go meet Rooster, but without a weapon, and in a place where my foreign language skills would be useless.
