River of Eden

by Tara Janzen

  Will didn’t, either.

  “It’s got to be Vargas,” he said. “Fat Eddie only had one plane, and that was the one we left in pieces in Barcelos.”

  “That was Fat Eddie’s plane?”

  He nodded. “Luiz was his pilot.”

  “Does Fat Eddie know his organization is falling apart around him?” she asked, craning her head back to keep the plane in sight.

  “He’s got to be figuring it out by now. The power is shifting all along the river, and if Vargas has his way, it will all be coming to him. Guys like Fat Eddie are going to end up running numbers games on the streets.”

  “No way,” she said. “Fat Eddie Mano has owned Manaus for twenty years. He isn’t going to give it up without a fight.”

  “This from a woman who just stole a whole load of his guns.”

  She let out an unladylike snort. “He’s got plenty more where those came from, and let’s keep the record straight. I paid good money for what I got.”

  “But to the wrong person.”

  She shrugged. “Illegal arms sales are a bitch to keep aboveboard.”

  A classic bit of waterfront philosophy, Will thought, refraining from an incredulous snort of his own, and just the sort of thing that kept her in trouble. “So what was this thing Juanio kept saying?”

  She turned to face him, her eyes locking onto his, and he immediately realized she was far more tense than he’d thought, given her easy banter.

  “He kept saying noite do diabo, noite do diabo, night of the devil. Or sometimes he’d get it a little twisted around, and it would come out diabo noturno, night devil, but those few words and that one burning concept pretty much encompassed his whole vocabulary and every brainwave he generated. Noite do diabo.”

  Will swore softly under his breath. Maybe he didn’t have as much time as he’d thought. Maybe Vargas was moving his plans forward faster than expected.

  They waited a minute in silence as the plane passed them by and continued on down the river, its light sweeping the shoreline. When it was out of sight, he leaned around her and started the engine.

  “So what’s this noite do diabo?” she asked, stepping aside and letting him have the wheel.

  “It’s a superstition that’s taken hold in the goldfields along the border. The garimpeiros have gotten it in their heads that there’s going to be a Night of the Devil, a night when the devil comes down the river and destroys everything in his path, stealing souls and tearing up the rain forest. West of São Gabriel, people seem to think the demon will take the shape of a jaguar. East of São Gabriel, they say it’s going to be an anaconda.”

  “An anaconda? Like the one I saw in here.”

  “No,” he said. “No, not like that one. They’re talking cosmic proportions, like the ancestral anaconda, the one that brought the Indians here in the beginning and gave them this place and all the gold. In some ways, the miners see it as a purging of their sins. They poison the rivers with mercury, bring malaria and disease, steal women, enslave the Indians and caboclos with debt servitude, and this will be the forest’s retribution. You know the situation.”

  It was the other rape of the rain forest, the creation of hundreds of illegal mines in the Amazon Basin.

  “Yes, but a Night of the Devil? That seems a bit big for a bunch of garimpeiros to come up with on their own.”

  “Well, it has another side. Anyone who survives will be rich beyond their wildest dreams, cleansed of all their sins.”

  “By the devil?” She sounded highly skeptical, with good reason. It was a stretch for anyone with an ounce of catechism under their belt.

  “God and the devil share a lot of space down here.” He turned the wheel, taking them back out into the current.

  “So who’s the devil? Vargas?”

  “I think so.”

  “But Juanio thinks it’s you.”

  One of his eyebrows arched. “Did he say that?”

  She nodded. “On the dock at Barcelos. He said this was the devil’s boat, and Luiz said without you the boat was just a boat.”

  “Ah, that’s right,” he remembered. “But then he went on to talk about the true devil. I may get credit for being a minor demon, but I don’t think I have the necessary reputation to get tagged as the true devil.”

  Annie tended to agree, even after what she’d seen in the cabin.

  “I’m in trouble here, though, aren’t I?”

  “I think we established that fact the morning we left RBC.”

  “I’m not talking about Fat Eddie. I mean with you, with the tattoo, with the snake rising up out of this place when Juanio and I boarded without you.”

  He eased the Sucuri a little farther from shore, piloting around a downed tree.

  “That wasn’t for you, Annie. I can’t say that I exactly understand what happened, but I know the warning was for Juanio. I won’t hurt you, and I’ve been doing my best to make sure nobody else does, either, but the spot you’re in seems to get tighter every time I turn around.”

  “What about your spot?”

  “My spot hasn’t changed that much. I half suspected somebody might try to get Eddie’s cache, but they never would have found me in Barcelos or anywhere else if...”

  “It hadn’t been for me,” she finished for him, when his voice trailed off.

  He shrugged. “I don’t need anybody’s help to find trouble.”

  She seemed to accept his exoneration, her gaze drifting back to the river. She looked exhausted, and the fact made him feel guilty as hell. He remembered how soft she’d been to hold in the cantina, how she’d held on to him, her mouth hot and sweet, and she’d known about his tattoo then. Of course, she hadn’t yet seen the sucuri.

  Damn snake.

  Moonlight and tiredness gave her a starker look, turning the warm blond of her hair to cool silver, drawing a tightness at the corners of her mouth, smudging the skin beneath her eyes.

  “Why don’t you get some sleep. I’ll wake you when we get to the mission.”

  “Can’t. Too scared,” she said bluntly.

  “Of me?” He should never have stopped kissing her, Juanio and Luiz be damned. Should never have let her board the Sucuri with Juanio, except she’d been safer on the boat than with Luiz—or so he’d thought before he’d known about her Vulcan death grip. She could have handled the garimpeiro, just like she’d handled the others.

  “No. Of dreaming about the snake I saw when I opened the door, a green anaconda, upward to thirty feet or more and five hundred pounds, a real mother of a Eunectes murinus, huge, almost took up the whole damn cabin—definitely female, so it’s not you.”

  There was a compliment in there somewhere, if he worked at it hard enough.

  “It was pretty dark in here,” he said. “Even an expert herpetologist would have needed a better look than you could have gotten to sex a snake, any kind of a snake.”

  She let out a weary laugh and dragged her hand back through her hair, shaking her head. “No. I recognized her. She’s the snake from my dreams. She’s been with me on the blackwater rivers since I first stepped foot in the Vaupes three years ago. What I can’t figure out is what she was doing on your boat while I was awake.” She laughed again, tremulously. “God, I’m not sure I even want to know why she was on your boat.”

  Every now and then, something happened that made Will think he’d been in the Amazon for too long, way too long. It was an enormously big place, the river a thousand-headed hydra draining an area of almost three million square miles, and it was forest, endless forest, living and breathing, eating the equatorial light and turning it green—deep, lush, full of spirits and demons, who were often one and the same. Sorcery abounded, a place where invisible darts were secreted in the wrists of shamans who could send them flying through the dark to pierce an enemy’s skin. A place where people were descended from jaguars, the proof in their blue tattoos and the palm spine whiskers arcing gracefully from above their upper lips. A place of sympathetic magic where there were
no gods, only beings, some seen, some unseen, and man was not separate, but moved within the same stream of breath as every creature, every plant, every living thing in this world and the other. It was a fluid place, geographically and within the mind’s consciousness.

  He’d been lost in it, been found, and once been close to death, wrapped in the coils and held by the daggerlike teeth of a snake that was also the sucuri on his boat. He should have died. Instead, he’d killed the snake, Tutanji’s anaconda, an act of survival he had yet to escape, and he had to wonder what in the hell the old shaman’s spirit-serpent was doing in Annie Parrish’s dreams. That’s what made him think he’d been in the Amazon too long.

  Three years ago, she’d entered the land of the blackwater rivers and had her first anaconda dream. Three years ago, he’d killed a giant anaconda while journeying up another blackwater river in the northwestern frontier of Brazil. Hell. He had been in the Amazon too long.

  “Here,” he said, removing the crystal on its cord from around his neck. “Wear this, and I promise you, you won’t dream, at least not about snakes.”

  She looked over at him, surprised, and for a moment, he thought she would refuse. Then she took the necklace, and he helped her slip it over her head, the backs of his fingers grazing the silky strands of her hair, the jaguar teeth clinking softly against the clear chunk of quartz.

  “Thanks,” she said when it settled on her chest. “I... uh, know you aren’t in a position to cast doubts on my sanity.” How very generous of her, he thought, thoroughly put in his place. “But I know what I saw. I’m just not sure why I saw it, or if it was real or not. I have a friend who did his research down here, and Gerhardt always said that sometimes the metaphor isn’t a metaphor at all in the Amazon.”

  “Anthropologist, right?”

  “Yeah,” she admitted with a look as if to say who else but a soft-science anthropologist would have come up with such an idea. “Gerhardt would say a giant snake looming up out of the dark and then disappearing might be exactly that and not a fear-induced hallucination imposed on a susceptible mind, and maybe he’s right. Maybe science simply hasn’t caught up to this place yet.”

  “Maybe,” he agreed, because of course, science hadn’t caught up to him in the last three years, either.

  “That doesn’t mean what I saw doesn’t scare me.”

  “It just doesn’t scare you off.” He was beginning to figure her out.

  “No,” she said softly, fingering her shaman’s crystal, her gaze slipping ever so artlessly to his mouth.

  His reaction was swift and mysteriously profound, something deep inside him shifting, an emotion he couldn’t name beyond surprise. He hadn’t expected her to want a kiss, his kiss.

  Without a word, he closed the distance between them and pressed his mouth to her brow. He knew the comfort of a kiss, the reassurance to be found in a simple act of contact. Her hand came up to his waist, and he moved his mouth to her cheek, skirting the golden fan of her lashes with his lips, inhaling the lovely scent of her skin. Sliding his nose down the length of hers, he felt her soften even more deeply into his arms, and he wanted to say, Stay with me, Annie Parrish, open your mouth for me, make love with me.

  But she wasn’t just softening in his arms, she was falling asleep on her feet.

  “Hold on,” he said, releasing her long enough to unhook his hammock from the wall and string it across the cabin. “Sleep here tonight. Then if anything happens, I won’t have to go looking for you.”

  It was a polite excuse to keep her close, and to keep her from having to ask. He was sure she didn’t want to be alone in the aft cabin any more than he wanted her to be back there by herself.

  Once she settled in, she drifted off to sleep almost immediately, an overly tousled, strung-out botanist curled up in a pool of moonlight with her arms wrapped around his pillow and her little black fanny pack snug around her waist.

  It really was the only thing she owned that he hadn’t gone through, and it wasn’t where she kept her passport. He’d found all her papers in her green backpack.

  He hesitated, but for no more than a few seconds, before he gave in to his common sense and reached for her pack. He couldn’t afford for her to have secrets, any secrets. With a few deft moves, he unsnapped the pack and slipped it from around her waist. She didn’t so much as sigh in her sleep.

  Carrying it back to the helm, he adjusted the boat’s course, before unzipping the top. Inside was another zippered bag, this one also black. He took it out and immediately realized there was a specimen jar inside. Aganisia cyanea, he figured, the blue orchid she was so intent on collecting again up on the Marauiá. Considering that she’d been gone a year, he didn’t expect the flower to be in very good shape.

  Neither did he expect it to glow—but the moment he unzipped the bag, light leaked out and bathed his hand.

  Carefully, he lifted the jar out, and a sense of wonder slowly infused his senses. My God, he thought, turning the container over in his hand. No wonder she’d come back. No wonder she was so damned determined to stay.

  The orchid inside the jar was not Aganisia cyanea. He didn’t know what it was other than exquisite, a biological anomaly. Bioluminescence in and of itself was not so unusual, but the quality of light coming off the orchid was remarkable. It wasn’t static, but vacillating in waves, creamily golden waves tinged with green. The petals were midnight-blue with a cream-colored frill, the sepals pure midnight-blue, elongate and twisting, the whole perianth dusted with gold flecks. He’d never seen anything like it.

  No one ever had—except for Annie Parrish. She’d offered him money, told him he could set his own price to take her to Santa Maria, and she’d been right. She had a fortune’s worth of orchid in her pack, if she could find more.

  He glanced over at her, knowing now what had driven her to return, no matter what had happened in Yavareté.

  She’d lied to him, though, and a wry smile curved his mouth at the realization. Facing off with him in the Barcelos cantina, thinking the plane was coming to take her away and having nothing else to lose, she’d still lied to him about what she was after.

  He couldn’t say he blamed her. At any other time in his life, a botanical specimen of such stunning genetic rarity would have demanded his full attention and commitment—and caution. It was an unprecedented find.

  She was good. He had to give her that, and she was bloody single-minded, but orchid or no orchid, by the time she finally got frightened enough to be scared off, he was afraid Fat Eddie would already have her under his knife with Corisco standing in line.

  Anybody else would have bailed out in Manaus, or after they’d seen Johnny Chang’s head, or after seeing the snake in the cabin.

  Okay, he thought, remembering. She had tried to bail out after the snake, and he hadn’t let her, but hell, Barcelos had not been the place to leave her. Still, nobody else had walked the Vaupes or earned the damned nickname of Amazon Annie, and nobody else had a damned Vulcan death grip.

  Hell, he was scared, but he had to go up the Cauaburi. He had to stop Vargas or the last three years and his deal with Tutanji all meant nothing. He could not fail, not for his own sake, not for anybody’s—which still didn’t tell him what in the hell he was going to do with Annie Parrish or what he was going to do about her amazing orchid.

  He turned his gaze back to the jar in his hand and again felt a sense of wonder flow through him. The light was magical, curiously mesmerizing, the pulsing brightness like a beacon.

  Glancing up, he checked the boat’s position, before allowing his attention to return to the orchid. The light moved in drifting waves along the edge of the petals, cresting on gold and falling off into troughs of deeper green, and the longer he watched, the more intrigued he became.

  Hours and miles of river later, he carefully put the specimen jar back into her fanny pack, then stood for a long time staring out into the night, watching the river ebb and flow beneath a shimmering cast of moonlight, looking upward int
o the sky and tracking the course of the Milky Way across the depths of deep space, millions and billions of bright points of light layered into infinity.

  Plants had always fascinated him, how they turned sunlight into food, the sheer, unbelievable variety of them, and their colors, from the most amazing shades of blues, reds, and yellows to everything in between and their thousands of shades of green. He’d spent his life studying plants, appreciating them and being in awe of their delicate complexity, from the giant Sequoia sempervirens of the Pacific Northwest to a single blade of grass in any backyard lawn. He’d collected plants, held them, dissected them, classified and contemplated them for hours on end, and he’d talked about them ad nauseum in lecture halls and during fieldwork. But never, not once in all his years of research, had he ever felt even the remotest possibility of a plant talking back—not until tonight.

  CHAPTER ~ 15

  Fernando hauled the chubby garimpeiro into the courtyard by the scruff of his neck and let him drop like a stone at Corisco’s feet.

  “The message from Losas,” the hulking man said. “And one from Manaus.” He held out an envelope.

  “Interesting,” Corisco drawled, looking the man over while taking another sip of his morning coffee. He held out his other hand for the envelope, and Fernando carefully laid it in his palm. A servant girl dressed in yellow set a plate of fresh rolls on the table and gave a slight curtsy before retreating back into the house. Four soldiers guarded the perimeter of the patio—four ramrod-straight, well-armed men standing beneath the lush palms shading the breakfast table from the tropical sun. The fountain bubbled and babbled in the background, helping to disguise, if not drown out, the noise of the generators and hydraulic pumps used in the mining pit down at the river’s edge.