by Leon, Judith
Another security guard sat beside two elevator doors reading a comic book. He beamed at Leila, who was now lugging a hefty lawyer’s briefcase while Nova toted her overnighter. When he looked at Nova, the guard kissed the back of his hand.
Inside Leila’s condo, the view of Rio from the tenth floor at night, with the chains of lights stretching along the beach and the huge lit-up Christ and the dark patches that Nova knew were the favelas—dangerous slums housing abject poverty—was nothing short of spectacular.
But what took her breath away were all the butterflies. Butterfly lamps, butterfly pictures, butterfly images on rugs, coffee mugs and telephone notepads. “Go ahead,” Leila said, “ask about the butterflies. Everyone does.”
“I do get the feeling the condo might lift off any moment, but you don’t need to explain. I’ve got my own fetish.”
Leila smiled. “Good. I said I was a great judge of character.”
While Leila showed Nova the guest bedroom, she explained that Manaus was now crawling with Brazilian authorities, not only from Manaus but down from La Paz as well. “Ten very high-profile Americans kidnapped on Brazilian soil, one for certain killed. Big scandal. Bad news all around and a political hot potato, as the English slang puts it.”
“I will appear to be working alone, pretending to be the rich sister of one of the victims.”
“You’re alone!” Leila said, her eyebrows lifting elegantly.
“No, no. Of course I have a backup, but he stays deep. Seeming to be alone works well for me. I’ve done most of my ops that way.” The German and Italian missions, when she’d worked as a photographic team with Joe as her assistant had been exceptional…in a lot of ways. Soon she would see him. She licked suddenly dry lips. What if he was still angry? What if he was cold to her?
She pushed her fears away. “The bad guys tend to underestimate me. And because I’m a woman who comes off as rather gentle—”
Leila laughed. “Yeah, I make you for gentle. I was a bit surprised when you said you were Ms. Smith. Not at all what I expected.”
“Well, I can safely say I don’t live up to that image. But it serves me well because people tend to trust me and often divulge secrets they ordinarily wouldn’t.”
Leila chuckled again. “I guess I fit in that category with everyone else. I rarely bring an agent to my digs.” She put her arm around Nova’s shoulder. “Want something to eat or drink?”
“If you have a diet drink or iced tea or just ice water, I’ll be happy. I need to start to work on the Brazilian files in that big black briefcase of yours. See what you guys have on terrorists and gangs that we don’t. Any action in the Amazon, in particular.”
Leila set Nova up at the small dining-room table and then said, “I’m off to bed. It’s after ten and I like my eight hours of sleep. Do you think you’ll be up long?”
“I don’t need much sleep. Three or four hours is my regular dose.”
“Really!”
“Reading these files will also be good for me. I don’t read or speak Portuguese all too well. This will jump-start me into speaking and thinking in the local language.”
“Well then, I’ll see you early tomorrow. We need to get up about six to make it to the airport in time.”
“Obrigada,” Nova said.
“My pleasure,” her hostess replied, strolling down the hall.
Nova’s fully-booked flight to Manaus took off thirty minutes late. For the first ten minutes of waiting, she fantasized about Joe, who, if he had accepted the mission and was on schedule, was already there, waiting for her. Only two, two-and-a-half hours at the most, and she’d see him.
Surely he wouldn’t have agreed to come if he were still angry. She imagined the strong muscles in his arms and shoulders. She knew every part of that body. The first time she’d seen him naked, on Capri, was after their visit to Rome’s central jail. She’d delivered a message to a terrorist from the man’s son. In Amalfi, she’d caught the terrorist behind the unleashing of a killer virus that, ironically in the end, had killed the bastard’s own son.
On Capri she and Joe had made passionate, hot love for virtually all of their two-day rest and recreation, if you counted sweet talk and petting part of making love. Even eating had been a sort of devouring of food while devouring each other with their eyes. They ate every meal in her room, stark naked.
When she got to Manaus she would look first for his dark brown wavy hair and then those big, dark, chocolate-colored eyes. He virtually always had a deep tan.
This bloody longing she had for Joe felt as if something was burning slowly under her skin. The hours between them would not go fast enough.
She questioned again her decision to refuse to marry him. Had that been a truly stupid mistake? When Star had said Nova was crazy to let a great man get away, actually drive him away, Nova had countered with, “I’ve created a life I’m comfortable with, Star. I don’t know who I’d be if I married anyone, not just Joe. I need to be me. Not Mrs. Someone Else. I didn’t want to split up. He just wouldn’t settle for anything less than marriage.”
Star had snipped back with, “You’re just afraid to give up even a teeny bit of control.”
The businessman seated next to her finished skimming the paper he’d brought along. He folded it, stuffed it in the pocket in front of him, stroked his mustache and interrupted her gloomy thoughts, asking in Portuguese, “Have you been to Manaus before?”
“No. And I fear I don’t speak Portuguese very well.”
“Then let us speak English,” he said without missing a beat.
In this case it was perfectly true that her Portuguese was lame, but even when she was using one of the nine languages in which she was fluent, when she engaged the public on an operation she usually pretended language ignorance, another often effective way to trick people into divulging things they shouldn’t.
He continued. “Business or pleasure?”
“Quite honestly, I’m here to find my sister. She’s been kidnapped.”
He jerked in surprise and stared at her. “I’ve been following it in the paper and on the television. I’m so sorry.”
“I told her not to come. I told her Brazil was dangerous.”
“I can understand your distress, but this is quite exceptional.” He stroked his mustache again, a quick, nervous gesture. “We do have a lot of crime, especially in Rio and São Paulo. But certainly nothing in Manaus like an attack on so many foreigners.”
“My husband was a policeman. And I’ll admit, I’m the suspicious type. I wanted to see for myself what they’re doing to find her.”
He sighed. “I’m sure the Brazilian authorities are doing everything they can to help.”
The flight attendant, a petite, pouty-lipped woman with the same honey-colored skin as Leila, stopped at their seat. Handing out juices and sweet rolls, she had undoubtedly overheard Nova’s cover story.
Nova pointed to an orange juice on the attendant’s tray, and as the attendant handed it to her, the attendant said, “The men four rows back, in the tan linen suits, are American FBI. You might want to talk to them.”
Nova smiled. “I sure will.”
For a while her seatmate chatted about business. He was trying to make a success out of coffee but grown in the shade of trees. That method, he assured her, was less environmentally harmful than just tearing out the trees and planting fields of coffee plants. “It’s a bit more expensive, but coffee grown in shade is of superior quality.”
She already knew that Brazil grew some of the finest coffee in the world.
As they were landing, she made a mental note to ask for shade-grown coffee at Starbucks in the future and accepted his help with her overnighter.
The second they left the plane’s air-conditioned enclosure and she strode down the loading ramp, the heat and humidity slapped her like a hot, wet rag. Once again inside the air-conditioned terminal she felt better, but that little walk had been a reminder. This was summer in the tropics; the temperature
here yesterday had been one hundred and four degrees Fahrenheit, the humidity was the customary ninety-five percent, and this was a poor city where air conditioning was a luxury.
The Manaus terminal, although small, resembled international terminals around the world. The hamburger concession was a McDonald’s knockoff. She caught up to the four men the stewardess had fingered as FBI. “May I talk to you a moment?” she said.
All four looked her over, crown to sole. Although there was nothing particularly sexy about her khaki slacks and red cotton top, short of wearing granny clothes or a burka there was no way to hide the nice curves of her hips and breasts.
“My name is Nora Smith and I’m Linda Stokes’s sister. The flight attendant said you’re FBI. You must be here because of Linda.”
Maybe it was just her imagination, but she felt emotional and mental barriers go up with a solid bang. “We really can’t talk about the investigation,” said the one with the least, and grayest, hair.
“I intend to find my sister. I do not intend to leave here without her.”
Two of them shifted their briefcases to their other hand, clearly put out that she was taking up their valuable time. Still, all of them except the senior man were smiling in that way men did when sizing up female flesh.
The balding guy with gray hair said, “I wish you well. I think you’ll find it very difficult here, trying to deal with authorities in a foreign country. In a foreign language. I assure you that we will be doing absolutely everything we can to find your sister.”
And that was it. As one, like a tiny school of tan fish, they shifted away from her and headed toward the nearest exit.
Smiling inside, she followed.
Leila had reserved a hotel room, but Nova didn’t scan first for a taxi. She looked for a tall man, broad shoulders and brown wavy hair.
Ankles and arms crossed, Joe was leaning against a nondescript, white four-door Toyota parked in a public parking lot on the other side of two feeder lanes of traffic. He was scanning everyone coming out of the terminal.
Her breath stopped as he caught sight of her. Neither of them moved. For Nova it seemed like the longest time before she took another breath.
What will he say? She would soon see him in the hotel.
The rest of the world fell away—no heat, no traffic, no taxis, no people.
She swallowed hard, amazed that she had the ridiculous urge to cry. Forcing her eyes to the line of waiting taxis, she marched toward the one at the front.
Chapter 12
“The Gioconda,” Nova said to the taxi driver who had hopped right out of his cab to help her put her overnighter in the trunk. She clutched her beautiful, specially crafted woven bag like it held her most valuable possessions, which, for the purposes of this op, it did.
In Portuguese, she added, “Downtown Manaus.”
The humidity already hung on her like a wet wool suit. Perspiration trickled down her temples. She’d braided her hair into a French twist and pinned it up in back, but she knew the back of her neck had to be drenched anyway.
The trip into the city usually took about twenty minutes along a mostly four-lane highway. She turned around once to check for the white Toyota. Joe was well behind them but definitely following.
From leading several trips to or through Manaus, she knew its checkered history by heart. Around 1890 it had boomed into the richest city in the world. Macintosh had made the first raincoat, and someone had found out that latex erased pencil marks. Goodyear had found a way to keep latex soft and pliable in cold weather, and when Henry Ford needed tires for those cars he was building, the boom was on. Rubber, extracted from rubber trees by slave labor, was king, and rubber was shipped out of Manaus.
The city’s elite had even built an opera house to rival any in Europe. Everything in the building that wasn’t made of exquisite Brazilian wood had been laboriously shipped from Europe and brought upriver: French roof tiles, staircases from England, stages and the enormous painted curtain from Paris, chandeliers and porcelains from Italy. La Gioconda had been its premier performance, and Enrico Caruso had once been scheduled to appear. To everyone’s disappointment, he didn’t make it because a cholera epidemic raged through the city at the time and the troupe refused to get off the ship.
The old town proper looked as seedy as she remembered: uncollected trash, broken pavement and curbs, graffiti-marked buildings alongside shops and businesses you might see in any third world country. No honking of horns, though, a welcome blessing.
On earlier trips, she’d stayed at two very different accommodations. One trip had been strictly jungle oriented and their hotel modest and on the edge of Manaus because they’d spent one night’s sleep there. The next day they’d moved on into the jungle with a local guide and had slept in hammocks—whether it rained or not. It had rained two nights out of three for the entire two weeks, but they had been rewarded with two jaguar sightings, an anaconda, sloths, parrots, army ants on a rampage and, her favorite memory, a howler monkey nursing her baby.
On two other trips, her group spent nights in the five-star, luxury Tropical Hotel forty minutes outside of town. It lay on a bank of the Rio Negro, just past a neighborhood of mansions for the big shots in Manaus: the heads of the Brazilian military’s jungle warfare unit and owners of the city’s bigger businesses.
The Gioconda turned out to be located only two blocks from the Opera House and seven blocks from the central market and long wharves that were the city’s beating heart and lifeblood. Her room, probably the best in the place, looked out from a postage-stamp second floor balcony onto the luxuriant green lawn of a plaza with pigeons and a few scattered wooden benches with wrought-iron legs and armrests. A gazebo dominated the plaza’s center. Nova imagined concerts played there in the evenings. Stores sold everything imaginable: shoes, clocks, bread, bridal gowns, photo equipment, cheap kitchen appliances, colorful pet tropical fish; and there was an Internet café.
She knew she should be thinking of how and when Oscar Chavez would contact her. Her instructions, relayed by Leila, were to go to the bar downstairs and wait. But maybe five percent of her thoughts were on Oscar and the op. God help her, ninety-five percent of her thoughts were on Joe. On seeing him and hearing him and touching him.
No! Not touching him. Touching him must be avoided at all costs.
She checked her makeup in the mirror over a dresser that looked old enough to have been brought over from France a century ago, and then headed downstairs.
The bar was no more than a small room with a few tiny tables, most but not all of them occupied. Behind a counter at the rear stood a skinny man with thinning, black hair.
He was leaning on his elbows, chatting softly with a pretty blonde of middle age who was sipping a tall beer. She wore a cheap dress with a pretty floral print and black pumps. No tennis shoes. None of the women in Brazil, not even the hot, teenage chicks with tight jeans and tank tops, wore tennis shoes. Flip-flops, wedgies, even heels were de rigueur. The woman’s beer was likely the coolest thing in the stifling, hot room.
Both sexes and all ages occupied the tables. The hum in the room gave off a pleasant sense. All eyes studied the unfamiliar gringa who had just walked in, but, with curiosity satisfied, they went back to their own affairs.
Booze of all kinds weighed down the shelves behind the counter along with what looked to be the fixings for caipirinha—a refreshing drink with sugar, lime and cachaça liquor. “A caipirinha,” she said, her voice trailing upward into a question.
The man gave her a gapped-tooth smile, nodded and set to work. Nova sat at the only remaining free table, her back to the wall so she could see the room. Joe walked in.
He wore jeans, brown jungle boots and a dark brown short-sleeved shirt. With his dark skin, hair and eyes, he blended in, although no one would be surprised to discover he was an American freelance journalist. He sauntered up to the counter and ordered. The bartender placed a tall brown beer bottle in front of him.
Bottle
in hand, Joe turned around and leaned his back against the counter and surveyed the room, oh so casually. His eyes passed over her like he’d never seen her before in his life. The bartender and woman took up chatting again.
A scruffily dressed little girl with walnut-colored skin, bright, black eyes and pink flip-flops bounded into the room, looked around and walked directly to Nova. She carried a piece of paper, holding it like a strange but valuable object. She said nothing, just held it out to Nova with a captivating smile.
“Obrigada,” Nova said.
The child curtsied, grinned like she’d never done a curtsey to anyone before but had always wanted to and then scampered out the door.
The note had been folded twice and sealed with Scotch tape. It was from Oscar. It directed her to sit on the park bench on the southwest corner of the plaza in front of her hotel within twenty minutes and start reading something. The international edition of The Wall Street Journal in her bag, something she’d read on the plane, would do just fine.
She stuffed the note into the bag as well and was gathering herself to stand when two men walked through the door and swaggered toward the counter. The sullen looks on their faces raised the hair on the back of her neck. The room froze. All chatter ceased.
One of the men spoke to the bartender in Portuguese, too softly for Nova to hear. The bartender, suddenly shrunken two sizes, shook his head and said he didn’t have it.
Nova’s immediate thought—they were gang members shaking the man down for protection money.
The blond woman straightened and in a loud voice told them, in Portuguese, to, “Get out.”
The gangster closest to her slapped her.
Joe, who had been amiably drinking his beer as if he had all the leisure time in the world, grabbed Mr. Ready-to-Slap-Women and, with his face now hooded and his eyes gone dead cold with anger, he slapped the bastard. In fluent Portuguese Joe repeated the woman’s demand for the men to get out and added, “I don’t like to mix beer with shit.”
