Secret of the Slaves

by Alex Archer

The woman burst through a door to her right, into an apartment. Annja banished the sword and followed.

  The people in the little flat were frightened. A short, wiry woman stood with a disregarded cigarette endangering her ebony fingers. Her companion, a younger, taller woman, had just turned away from a pot on the stove. A wooden spoon was raised and dripping. Both stared out the open window.

  The two women turned to stare at Annja. They didn’t seem outraged at her intrusion, or even surprised.

  “What happened?” she asked in Portuguese.

  “She disappeared,” the wiry older woman said. She added a curse and wagged her hand as her cigarette stub finally scorched the sensitive skin between her fingers.

  “Disappeared?” Annja echoed lamely.

  The other woman nodded. “Out the window.”

  “Fell? Flew like a bird?”

  “Just disappeared,” the older woman said.

  Annja ran to the window and looked down. There was a small yard below, mostly a tangle of weeds and shrubs. But she saw no sign of a fallen body, nor any readily visible way to get down shy of jumping. At something over twenty feet from the ground, Annja would have expected to see her quarry limping off down the alley on a broken ankle at best, if not lying totally crippled in the greenery.

  She looked up. The roof came to a peak just above her head. Without pausing to think how ridiculously dangerous it was, she swarmed out, using minute fingerholds in some kind of wood-slatted air vent over the window to scramble onto the roof in defiance of sense, if not gravity.

  She found herself all alone on a pitched roof of warped green-painted shakes.

  The woman in the headdress had disappeared.

  DAN MET HER on the street two blocks from Mafalda’s shop. “Don’t go there,” he said, shaking his head. He was bruised, disheveled and limping.

  “What do you mean?” she asked. Then she saw dirty white smoke tumbling up past the rooftops into the sky behind him.

  “No,” she said. “The laser did that?”

  “Not exactly. It did set a couple of fires. But then when I was searching the shop the dead guy was suddenly enveloped in these roaring blue flames. It was like a blast furnace or something. Everything just boomed into flame for five or six feet around. I barely got out before the whole damn place went up.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Except for my pride? Sure. As well as can be expected after being thrown through various pieces of furniture by a woman. I mean, no sexism intended or anything.”

  “I was almost as surprised as you were.”

  “What about you?”

  She shook her head. “Vanished. I hate to use a cliché, but in this case ‘into thin air’ isn’t a metaphor.”

  She sighed and slumped. “So we got Mafalda murdered and came up dry. Not to mention set the building on fire. This is not shaping up as a successful day.”

  “Not as bad as it could be, though,” Dan said. “For one thing, they get a hundred inches of rain a year here, and we seemed to get about a quarter of it this morning before we left the hotel. I don’t think fires spread real easily here. For another—” he held up a hand to show a scrap of paper with an ugly rust-colored smear across it “—I searched her body and turned up this.”

  “Searched her body?” Annja echoed belatedly. “She seemed pretty naked. Where’d you find that? Or do I want to know?”

  “She had it clutched in her right fist.”

  He handed her the scrap of paper.

  “It’s a shipping invoice,” she said, reading it. “From what translates as River of Dreams Trading Company, way upriver in Manaus. That used to be the rubber capital pretty much of the whole world.”

  “A clue?” Dan asked.

  She shrugged. “The name’s suggestive, I have to admit. This also strikes me as just a bit convenient.”

  He showed her a lopsided grin. “Maybe we’re just due a break.” Sirens began to warble from what seemed like several directions. “The old street-protest instincts tell me that when you hear that sound, it’s time to go,” he said.

  She glanced around. The street was crowded. People were pointing to the smoke and talking excitedly.

  “What about witnesses?” she asked.

  “I don’t know much about this place,” he said, “and you’ve told me the slums are a whole lot heavier down in Rio. But I still don’t think these people are the sort to talk to police about anything at all.”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t hang around to be found here by the authorities,” Annja said.

  His grin got wide and feral. “Now you’re learning street wisdom, Grasshopper,” he said. “We’ll make an activist out of you yet!”

  10

  “Look up there,” Annja said. “They’re doing capoeira out in the street.”

  The sun had set low over the inland forest that grew hard up against the edges of the city. Lively music filled the lavender twilight. Two men sparred before colorfully dressed ranks of worshipers laughing and clapping their hands. A small band enthusiastically played a curious assortment of instruments, including a tambourine, a drum like a bongo, two dissimilar bells joined by a horseshoe-shaped handle, a rasp played against a stick and three different-sized contrivances like bows and arrows mated to dry gourds. The man playing the largest of these sang in a high-pitched chant.

  The combatants—or dancers—seemed to time their moves to the rhythm of the music.

  “Let’s watch,” Annja said, striding quickly forward.

  Dan hung back. “I don’t want to intrude on anybody’s religious rituals,” he said. “It can be bad for your health.”

  She turned to face him. “That’s true,” she said. “It can be rude, too. But why would these people be doing their ritual in public if they didn’t want people to watch? It’s part of the observance. They have private and secret rituals—trust me on that. The key being, we don’t know about them. They don’t hold those out on the street.”

  His forehead rumpled and his fists stuck deep in the pockets of his shorts, Dan shrugged. He seemed to be genuinely uncomfortable.

  “Come on,” she urged.

  They had spent an exhausting and dispiriting day hunting for further clues to the mystery of the hidden quilombo. An Internet search had turned up frustratingly little on the River of Dreams Trading Company. A good dinner of seafood and the superabundant tropical fruits available in the area had mellowed them somewhat after the jagged events of the day.

  Now Dan turned sullen, reminding Annja of the way he’d acted when Xia and Patrizinho had joined them at breakfast—had it only been the previous morning? It seemed a lifetime ago.

  Of course it was, Annja thought, for Mafalda.

  “We need to get back to the hotel,” he said, “set up a teleconference with Publico.”

  “What’s the hurry? We’ve hit a dead end.” As soon as the words left her mouth Annja winced at their choice. “Unless our employer has some information he’s been holding back and cares to share it with us, we might as well fly back to Miami.”

  “Don’t forget we’ve got that invoice scrap,” Dan said, “not to mention a dead woman.”

  “Jesus,” Annja hissed. “Be careful saying that out loud.”

  He gestured at the clapping, singing circle. “Nobody can hear us. Nobody’s listening. Nobody’ll say anything to the police, anyway.”

  “You don’t know that,” she said. “The Brazilian authorities pay snitches the same way police back in the States do. And we’re foreigners, not family or friends to any of these people. One wouldn’t have too much trouble giving us up to save his own hide, say.”

  Dan’s scowl etched itself deeper on his lean, handsome face. She liked him but he had a tendency to petulance and flashes of anger that bothered her a bit.

  “You’ve got a point,” he mumbled.

  She smiled and nodded. It reassured her that he was fundamentally sound.

  She turned and walked toward the crowd, leaving Dan to follow or no
t as he chose. Several bystanders nodded and smiled as the two Americans approached. Some of them were casually dressed. Many of the obvious participants were dressed in white. Some of the women wore lacy dresses that suggested bridal gowns to Annja. She wondered at the symbolism.

  “I wonder how you tell the onlookers from the worshipers?” she said to Dan.

  He shrugged. He still seemed grumpy and uncommunicative. She looked at him a moment. What’s bothering him? This isn’t just some weird petulance at my dragging him to do something he doesn’t want to do.

  The combatants continued their acrobatic match, stepping forward, stepping back, launching kicks and strikes that the other blocked or dodged just in the nick of time. They played with smiling abandon that made it impossible for Annja to tell whether this was actually a competition or some choreographed ritual.

  The twang and thump and insistent rumbling rhythm of the music seemed to get inside her bones and resonate. She felt a rising sensation of heat. Somehow she didn’t find it oppressive. Oddly it seemed to well within her, owing little to the heavy, humid, tropical evening air.

  The crowd cried out together. One of the combatants did a back flip away from his opponent, then both bowed. They backed into the crowd to great applause.

  Then the crowd stilled except for the continued thumping of the drum. A man stepped forward. He was short and wiry, with a blue-and-green headband wound around his forehead and brown, tightly coiled hair. His clothes were shades of blue and green. His feet were bare. He walked crouching, wide kneed, holding a hand flattened above his eyes and peering this way and that.

  “Are you Americans?” a woman who stood near Annja asked in English. She was small and compact, dressed in slacks and a tropical-flower blouse. Annja realized from the lines around dark eyes and smiling mouth that the woman must be older.

  “Yes,” Annja said.

  “Do you know what’s happening here?” the woman asked.

  The man dropped a hand to the pavement before him. He peered left and right. Although she felt no breeze some must have come up briefly, because Annja grew aware of a smell of the dense tropical vegetation that crowded closely on Belém from inland.

  “No,” Annja said. “Not really.”

  “Welcome to the roda, the sacred circle,” the woman said. “Now, watch.”

  Still crouching, the man moved to the band and snatched one of the bowlike instruments from a musician’s hand. The musician showed no resentment. He merely smiled and stepped back.

  The instrument was held by one end to play. Instead the man in green and blue held it in the middle as if it were a bow. He began acting out the motions of hunting through the rain forest.

  “He is Oxóssi,” the Brazilian woman said to Annja, seeing her perplexed expression. “He has momentarily claimed the berimbau for his use. That is the bow with the gourd.”

  “Oxóssi is an orixá?” Annja asked.

  The woman nodded. “The orixá of the hunt. That man is his horse, you see.”

  “Great,” Dan growled on Annja’s other side. “A mime. I hate mimes.”

  “Everybody hates mimes,” she told him. “But he’s not a mime. He’s a horse for a spirit named Oxóssi.”

  The brief wave of jungle smell had gone. Possibly it had been swamped by the smell of the cigars some of the celebrants, men and women alike, were smoking. It was a harsh tobacco, very strong. Annja realized it was making her head swim, and her stomach began to roll like a sea in a rising wind. Oddly, the feeling wasn’t entirely unpleasant.

  She glanced over at her companion, intended to remark on the smoke, her light-headedness, her slight but ominously growing nausea. She froze.

  Dan was wound tight like a tugboat cable. His handsome face had become a purple mask; tendons stood out in his neck. His fists clenched and unclenched as if crushing walnuts.

  Suddenly he thrust forward. Oxóssi’s horse looked at him. Recognition came into his pale brown eyes. He nodded to the young American, then backed carefully away. His attitude suggested a hunter who had encountered one of Brazil’s many venomous serpents in the bush—not fear, but rather respectful caution, wariness.

  Puffing out his chest, Dan swaggered around the circle in an exaggerated display of alpha-male machismo. It looks like a bad Popeye imitation! Annja thought.

  “Dan,” she called to him. He didn’t react. She started forward.

  The diminutive woman at her side laid a gentle but surprisingly strong hand on her forearm. “No,” she said. “You can do nothing. You must do nothing.”

  To her astonishment Annja saw that none of the worshipers seemed to be taking affront at Dan’s thrusting himself into the midst of the festivities. Rather they had begun cheering and clapping in rhythm to his swagger. The drummer beat time. The other two berimbau began to play along.

  Suddenly Dan strutted to the circle of onlookers, seizing a half-full bottle of rum from a man dressed in white with frilly sleeves. If I’m optimistic, it’s half-empty, Annja thought.

  “What’s going on?” she said plaintively.

  “Can’t you see? He is taken. He is ridden now by Ogum. A great honor. But worse luck. He must be a very angry young man,” the woman said.

  That’s true, part of Annja’s mind said, rather louder than the skeptic trying somewhat desperately to scoff this all away.

  Dan raised the rum bottle to his lips, tipped his head back and drank until his cheeks puffed like a blowfish and rum ran down his chin and neck and down the front of his shirt. The crowd’s clapping crescendoed. None clapped more enthusiastically than the man whose rum bottle he had grabbed. The band played with redoubled vigor. The rasp and the bell joined in.

  Suddenly Dan spit the rum into the street in a great alcoholic spray. He seized a torch from another participant, tossed it into the pool of liquid. Red flames flared up. Laughing, he poured on more rum. The stream caught—an arc of fire. Before the bottle could go off in his hand he smashed it in the midst of the flames, which soared up as high as his chest, garish in the near darkness. It underlit his face, turning it into a bizarre mask of joyous rage.

  Again he moved with surprising swiftness and yet no apparent haste, snatching a machete from a rickety wooden platform at one side of the cleared circle. He brandished it above his head in a serious of whistling swoops. Then he pressed its point against the middle of his sternum, grasped the hilt with both hands and pushed.

  “No!” Annja screamed. She could see the effort, see the muscles stand out like cords on his wiry forearms.

  Yet nothing happened. The machete was not pointed like a spear, but it possessed a sharp edge. And she knew Dan was surprisingly strong for his lean build. That much effort should have punched the tip right through his flesh.

  It did not. Dan tore his shirt open to reveal his pale skin remained unbroken. Then he punched both hands at the stars in an age-old gesture of triumph. The crowd gasped and then cheered wildly.

  Annja’s informant nodded with a certain brisk if gloomy satisfaction. “That’s Ogum. Two things he can’t resist—rum and showing off.”

  Dan began a wild swirling dance, swinging the machete. He reeled this way and that, heedless of the onlookers, some of whom began to stumble over each other in their eagerness to get out of his way. He only laughed and danced faster.

  Now that he posed a clear danger to the crowd a man in white trousers and white-and-purple headband leaped forward to confront him. Annja gasped as Dan, rage twisting his features, swung the machete at him. The man flung himself into a sideways dive. The blade hissed harmlessly above him as he did a headstand and flipped back to his feet.

  “Uh-oh,” the Brazilian woman said.

  Dan was all over him. Closing in a flash, he grabbed the man by the throat and lifted him into the air. Annja gasped. There was no way the young activist, fit though he was, should have been able to do that.

  And nobody should have been able to throw the hapless man through the air to smash a wooden cart filled with various
paraphernalia at least a dozen feet away.

  Annja’s head spun. Heat rose within her like flames, seemingly rising up through the soles of her feet, her legs, her loins, her belly. A wind seemed to rise. Bits of paper and fallen flowers began to skitter along the cracked blacktop.

  Without conscious decision her will exerted itself. The sword sprang into her hand.

  She ran forward into the circle to confront Ogum, in defiance of all sense and judgment.

  11

  “Ahh,” the crowd gasped. “Iansã is come.”

  Things were totally out of control as Annja entered the middle of the circle and took up a stance with the sword tipped back over her shoulder. She felt totally irresponsible. What was happening made no sense.

  But it seemed Annja was thinking with a larger mind, one not altogether familiar—yet somehow not totally alien. Her mind saw wind bending palm trees and storms building waves. Lightning filled her thoughts, ripping asunder a black-clouded sky above the gates of an ancient graveyard. Troubling images, yet stirring. For all their fury, violence and darkness, they were untainted by evil. Rather they were thoughts of a warrior who relentlessly battled evil.

  Dan spun to confront her. His eyes were bloodshot. Or did they glow red? Was that a trick of the torchlight and—whatever had overcome her?

  With a mighty scream of rage he launched himself at her. He cocked his machete over his left shoulder and swung a ferocious overhand cut at the top of Annja’s head.

  What is he doing? Annja thought in desperation as she flung up the sword to parry. What are we doing?

  The blades clanged together with a noise like a church bell. The impact sent vibrations rippling down Annja’s arm.

  With a ringing, singing slide and spray of shockingly bright yellow sparks, Dan ripped his machete away and swung again at her. This time it was a two-handed horizontal strike, aimed to take her head off at the neck.

  She wove her body sideways. The black blade swished by overhead.

  The rushing wind seemed to fill her head, her body, her soul, subsume her. It was as if something—someone—else had command of her movements as she wove through a crashing, clashing, whirling battle with the man.