Two Graves p-12

by Douglas Preston

  Quickly, before he could recover his wits, she felt through the pockets of his coat and pants, found a heavy-caliber revolver, pulled it out, and pointed it at him.

  “So what the hell is really going on?” she asked.

  Foote was breathing heavily. “What do you think? A scam. Something a lot sweeter than skimming off a few interest points here and there. I can cut you and your dad in.”

  “Like hell. My dad probably started to smell a rat—that’s why you framed him.” She gestured with the gun. “I know you must have figured out where his cabin is. You probably got here early, cased the joint, and saw me emerge onto the main road.” She took a deep breath. “Now this is what’s going to happen. You’re going to drive up to the cabin. I’m going to have this gun trained on you the whole time. First, you’re going to tell my dad the whole story. Then we’re going to call the police. And you’re going to tell them the story. Understand?”

  For a moment, Foote remained motionless. Then he nodded.

  “Okay. Drive slow. And no funny business, or I’ll use this.” The fact was, she’d never shot a gun in her life. She wasn’t even sure the safety was off. But Foote didn’t know that.

  She kept well away from Foote, covering him with the handgun, as he eased off the shoulder onto Old Foundry Road, then made the turn onto Long Pine. Nothing was said as he made his way up the switchbacks.

  A hundred feet from the turnoff to the cabin, she gestured with the gun again. “Stop here.”

  Foote stopped.

  “Kill the engine and get out.”

  Foote complied.

  “Now. Walk toward the cabin. I’ll be right behind you. You know what’ll happen if you try anything.”

  Foote looked at her. His face was exceedingly pale, with beads of sweat despite the cold. Pale and angry. He began walking toward the cabin, dead twigs snapping beneath his feet.

  Corrie felt a hot rush of adrenaline coursing through her, and her heart was beating uncomfortably fast. But she’d managed to keep her voice calm, keep any quaver out of it. She kept telling herself she’d been in worse situations—a lot worse. Just stay cool. Stay cool and this will all turn out all right.

  Just as they came up to the cabin door, Corrie heard the latch turn. The door opened suddenly, hitting Corrie in the wrist. With a cry of pain, she dropped the gun.

  Her father stood in the doorway, looking from Foote to her and back again. “Corrie?” he asked, his face a mask of confusion. “I heard noises. What are you doing here? I thought you were going to town—”

  Corrie leapt for the gun, but Foote was quicker. He grabbed it, shoving her roughly back at the same time. Jack Swanson stared uncomprehendingly at the gun as Foote raised it toward him. Just at the last moment, Jack leapt back into the wooded area behind the cabin, but the gun roared and Corrie could tell from the way her father’s body twisted around that the bullet had hit home.

  “You bastard!” she screamed, running at Foote, the box cutter raised. But Foote wheeled around toward her, slamming the butt of the handgun into her temple, and abruptly the world shut down.

  She came to rapidly, her brain clearing. She had been hastily bound with plastic cuffs, hands and feet, and dumped unceremoniously in the backseat of Foote’s car, where she was propped sideways.

  She waited, unbearably tense, straining, listening. She had planned it all so carefully—and it had all unraveled in the space of fifteen seconds. What was she going to do now? What was going to happen? Oh, God, it was all her fault—she should have gone to the police instead of trying to handle it herself, but she was afraid they’d just arrest her father…

  Then she heard more shots—two of them in rapid succession. And then silence. It was broken eventually by a gust of wind that started the tree branches swaying, knocking, knocking, knocking.

  55

  THE NATURALIST WAITED IN THE SHADE, RESTING ON HIS pack, for Senhor Michael Jackson Mendonça to arrive. The man eventually made his appearance, with fanfare: a big, broad, brown, relatively young man with a gigantic smile, long curly hair tied with a bandanna, wearing a sleeveless shirt, shorts, and flip-flops. He bulled his way through the crowd, his loud, friendly voice urging one and all to make way. He extended his hand twenty yards before he even reached the naturalist, striding up and pumping the limp arm vigorously.

  “Michael Jackson Mendonça!” he said. “At your service!”

  The naturalist retrieved his much-shaken hand as quickly as he could. “I am Percival Fawcett,” he said, somewhat stiffly. At least Mendonça’s English was near perfect.

  “Percival! May I call you Percy?”

  This was permitted with another stiff nod.

  “Good, good! I myself am from New York. Queens! Twenty years in your great country of America. So… I hear you want to go to Nova Godói?”

  “Yes. Although it seems that it may be difficult.”

  “No, not at all!” cried Mendonça. “It’s a long journey, yes. And Nova Godói isn’t a real town, a public town, that is. It’s way up there in the forest. Off limits to outsiders. They’re not friendly. Not friendly.”

  “I’m not in need of friends,” said the naturalist. “I won’t bother anyone. If there are problems, I can pay. You see, I’m on the trail of the Queen Beatrice. Are you familiar with it?”

  Mendonça scrunched his face up in puzzlement. “No.”

  “No? It’s the rarest butterfly in the world. Only one specimen was ever collected—it’s now in the British Museum, specimen number 75935A1901.” His voice took on a reverent tone as he recited the number. “Everyone assumes it’s extinct… but I have reason to believe it’s not. You see—” he was now waxing eloquent on his subject—“from what my research tells me, the Nova Godói crater is a unique ecosystem, with special conditions all its own. The butterfly lived there and nowhere else. And that crater hasn’t seen a professional lepidopterist since the Second World War! So what do you expect? Of course no more have been sighted—because no entomologist has been there to see one! But now there is: me.”

  He fumbled in his pack and extracted a laminated photograph, showing a small brown butterfly pinned to a white card, with writing below it.

  Mendonça peered at the image. “That is the Queen Beatrice?”

  “Isn’t it magnificent?”

  “Esplêndido. Now we must talk about expense.”

  “That’s the specimen in the British Museum. You can see it’s sadly faded. The original is said to have a rich mahogany color.”

  “About the expense,” continued Mendonça.

  “Yes, yes. How much?”

  “Three thousand reals,” said Mendonça, trying to keep his voice nonchalant. “That includes four days. Plus cost of food and supplies.”

  “On top of the boat rental? Hmm. Well, if that’s what it costs, that’s what it costs.”

  “All up front,” he added quickly.

  A pause. “Half and half.”

  “Two thousand up front, a thousand when we arrive.”

  “Well, all right.”

  “When do we leave?” Mendonça asked.

  The naturalist looked surprised. “Right now, of course.” He began counting out the money.

  The naturalist sat in the bow with his backpack, reading a book by Vladimir Nabokov, while Mendonça loaded the boat with a cooler of food, along with dry foodstuffs, a tent, sleeping bags, and his own modest kit bag containing a change of clothes.

  In no time they were heading upstream, Mendonça at the tiller, the skiff cutting a creamy wake through the brown water. It was already late morning and Mendonça was thinking that they could reach the last town before the forest by nightfall. While there was no lodging there, they could at least get dinner and—especially—cold beer at a local fornecimento. They could camp in a field by the river. And there, he hoped to God, he could find out from someone how to get up the final leg of the Rio Itajaí do Sul to Nova Godói, a place that in truth he had never been to, although he had heard plenty of rumor
s about it.

  As the boat moved up the river, passing various fishermen and river travelers, a nice breeze came over the water, cooling them and keeping away the mosquitoes. They passed the last few houses of Alsdorf, green fields coming into view, some planted with crops, others pastures for cattle. Everything was very neat and tended; that was how things were in southern Brazil. Not like chaotic, criminal-ridden Rio de Janeiro.

  The naturalist put down his book. “Have you been to Nova Godói?” he asked pleasantly.

  “Well, not exactly,” said Mendonça. “But I know how to get there, of course.”

  “What do you know about the place?”

  Mendonça gave a little laugh, to cover up his nervousness. He’d been afraid the man might start asking questions like this. While he didn’t believe half the rumors he’d heard, he didn’t want to frighten a customer off.

  “I’ve heard some things.” Mendonça shook his head, steering the boat past a group of fishermen hauling in a net.

  “How many people live there?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not a real town, like I said. It’s on an old tobacco plantation, private property, closed to the public. It’s a German colony of the kind that used to exist all around here, only much more remote.”

  “And it used to be a tobacco plantation?”

  “Yes. Tobacco is one of our biggest agricultural products,” said Mendonça proudly. To underscore this he removed a pair of cigars from his pocket, offering one to the naturalist.

  “No, thank you. I don’t smoke coffin nails.”

  “Ha, ha,” said Mendonça, lighting his up. “You are funny.” He puffed. “Tobacco. The plantation was abandoned in the 1930s. After the war, Germans arrived and a small settlement sprang up. They live up there and hardly ever come to town. The Germans down here don’t like them, say they’re Nazis.” Mendonça laughed heartily.

  “But you don’t believe it.”

  “Here in Brazil, people think they see Nazis everywhere. It’s a national pastime. If there are five old Germans in a town, everyone says, They must be Nazis. No—the people of Nova Godói just keep to themselves, that’s all. They are like a… what is the word?… like a cult. Outsiders not welcome. Not welcome at all.”

  Another big puff of cigar smoke, then another, leaving two clouds drifting behind the boat.

  “Some people seem to think the murders in Alsdorf originate from Nova Godói,” the naturalist said, offhandedly.

  “Murders? Oh, you speak of the rumors going around town. People here are so provincial. You ask around in any town in Brazil, and they’ll tell you the next town is all bad people. I lived in Queens, so I don’t fall for that talk.” He laughed again, making light of the rumors. He was surprised the naturalist had picked up as much as he had. No point in spooking the man until he had collected his final thousand.

  “How about the other rumor? You know—that everyone up there in Nova Godói are twins?”

  At this, Mendonça froze. He had heard that rumor, but it was a deep one, only whispered about. How in the world had the naturalist heard of it?

  “I don’t know anything about that,” he said.

  “Surely you do. They say the town is freakishly populated with twins, mostly identical. They say there have been experiments, genetic experiments. Horrible genetic experiments.”

  “Where did you hear this?”

  “In a beer hall.”

  That seemed improbable. Mendonça felt a small chill. This naturalist was beginning to give him the creeps. “No, I don’t know anything about that. It’s not true.” He cast about, hoping to change the subject. “There’s an old ruin up there, though. A fort. Do you know the history of that?”

  “No.”

  “It was built by the Portuguese in the late seventeenth century.” Among many of his other jobs, Mendonça drove a tour bus in Blumenau; he knew almost everything. “A group of Franciscan missionaries built a monastery on an island in the middle of the Godói crater lake and converted the Aweikoma Indians. Or at least they thought they did!” He gave a belly laugh. “One day the Indians rose up. They were tired of taking care of the monks’ gardens. Killed them all. So the Portuguese military moved in, turned the monastery into a fortress, killed off or drove away the Indians. And when there were no more Indians, the soldiers left. Later, it was turned into a plantation.”

  “Why are there so many Germans in this region?” the naturalist asked.

  “In 1850, the Brazilian government started a program of German colonization. You know about that? Germany was overcrowded and nobody had any land, and Brazil had land that needed settling. So Brazil offered any Germans who wanted to come free land in remote areas of the country. That’s how Blumenau was settled, along with Alsdorf, Joinville, and several other cities in Santa Catarina. Thirty, maybe forty percent of our citizens here are of German descent.”

  “That is most interesting.”

  “Yes. The colonies were so isolated that they developed completely along German lines, with German language, architecture, culture—everything. That all changed completely in 1942, of course.”

  “What happened?”

  “That is when Brazil declared war on Germany.”

  “I never knew that.”

  “Very few do. We joined with the Americans in World War Two. Brazil made it a law that these German colonists had to learn Portuguese and become Brazilian. Most of them did, but some in the remote areas did not. And a lot of Germans left Brazil to go back to Germany and fight for the Nazis. And then some came running back again, to hide from the Nuremberg courts. Or so people say. But that was a long time ago. They are all gone now. As we say in Portuguese, água debaixo da ponte: water under the bridge.”

  “No Nazis in Nova Godói?” The naturalist almost sounded disappointed.

  Mendonça shook his head vigorously. “No, no! That’s all a myth!” He underscored that with another series of vigorous puffs before jettisoning the chewed cigar stump overboard. Of course, the rumors about Nova Godói never seemed to end, all sorts of ridiculous, superstitious nonsense. But Mendonça had lived twenty years in Queens. He had seen the world. He knew the difference between rumor and fact.

  The boat continued on at a steady pace, the fields now disappearing completely, the araucaria forest closing in, casting a pall of darkness over the brown river. And despite having lived in Queens, Mendonça felt a distinct chill of fear creep down his spine.

  56

  THE FIRST SHOT HAD CAUGHT JACK SWANSON IN THE shoulder as he’d leapt for the cover of the shrubbery at the rear of the cabin. A second shot passed over his head.

  He lay on the ground for a moment, stunned, listening to the nearby sounds of struggling, a grunt of effort. Then came the slamming of a car door. And with that, Jack was up and running into the woods. The sky was dark and a wind rattled the branches, shaking the dense thickets of mountain laurel that formed the understory.

  He knew these woods. And the laurel, an evergreen shrub, made for perfect concealment. He charged into the laurel, bashing through the thicket, putting as much distance between himself and Foote as he could. When he felt he was deep enough, he dropped into a crouch and began moving laterally, zigzagging through the thickest stands, worming his way ever farther into the thicket. He already sensed, with growing relief, that he’d gotten away—Foote would never find him in this dense underbrush, riddled with low animal trails that formed many escape routes. But what had gone wrong? Why Foote? Foote was trying to help them…

  A voice rang out.

  “Jack!”

  He froze. It was Foote.

  “Jack! We need to talk!”

  He stopped, crouched, breathing hard. Reality began to rearrange itself in his mind. It was true, then—it had to be true. Foote was part of the scam. Everything he’d told them was a lie. And now Foote had Corrie.

  “Can you hear me, Jack? I’ve got your daughter! Hogtied in my car. So we’ve got a lot to talk about, right?”

  Jack could
hear Foote walking into the forest now, crunching through the thickets of mountain laurel. “Oh, Jackie! We need to ta-alk!”

  Jack moved laterally, away from the line that Foote was taking into the woods. Christ, he had to think, to collect his thoughts.

  Foote has Corrie.

  That thought threatened to undo what little rationality he had managed to gather. What was he going to do? He couldn’t run. Somehow he had to overcome Foote, save his daughter. Except that the bastard had a handgun, and he himself had nothing beyond a penknife. As he crouched, he realized with a certain sense of surprise, I’ve been shot. His shoulder was soaked in blood, his left arm dangling uselessly. Strange that there was no pain, only numbness. So he only had one arm, too.

  What was he going to do?

  Jack tried to think, but as he did so he could hear Foote getting closer, crashing through the brush.

  He began moving laterally again, as silently as possible, keeping low and threading his way through the bushes. The gusts of wind covered his movements, masking both the sound and the motion of the brush caused by his passage.

  “Jack, if you don’t come out now, I’m going back to my car and I’m going to kill her. Do you hear me? Talk to me or she dies.”

  Fear and paralysis gripped Jack. His hand slipped into his pocket and brought out the penknife, flicked open the blade, tested it with his thumb. Dull.

  “Talk to me!” Foote screamed.

  Jack tried to make his mouth work. “All right. I’ll talk.”

  He could hear Foote moving, triangulating on his voice. He shifted position, his mind racing. There had to be something. Something. He felt a stinging drop of icy rain, and another. The patter of rain—or was it sleet?—started to fill the woods.

  “Listen, Jack. We’ll work it out. Nothing’s going to happen to you or your daughter if you cooperate. Okay?”