by Alex Archer
They spun and leaped and stabbed and slashed in a dance as wild and abandoned as any capoeira fight. The circle had closed around them. Faces shone orange in flickering torchlight. Many hands clapped in rhythm. The band played their strange moaning, tinkling song.
The thinking part of Annja was freewheeling almost as completely as the rest of her. Not with the passions that raged like a tornado within her—anger and joy and the fierce desire for justice—but with confusion. Why is he doing this?
Why am I doing this?
The sweat poured down her whirling limbs so profusely she felt as if her skin would slough. Dan’s face streamed with sweat as if the tropical rains had moved in again. His features were purple, suffused with inhuman fury that seemed to mount with each attack she parried, each slash she leaped nimbly over or ducked beneath. Her own mad, self-righteous drive to withstand him likewise grew.
The end came quickly. His fury at last overpowered all traces of skill—skill Annja couldn’t imagine the young political activist could ever have acquired in the first place. Screaming so ferociously that his voice failed, he ran at her, slashing two-handed with fantastic strength.
But his blows, though powerful enough to cut her in half at the waist should one connect, came looping in like predictable haymakers. Overriding the urgency and sense of presence within, the sheer muscle memory from long, exacting practice at half a dozen styles of swordplay took over. As he swung, she spun away to catch his blade from behind as she completed her circle. She sent it spinning from his hand, end over end above the heads of the crowd and away in the night.
Unbalanced, he staggered away several steps. Then he turned and hurled himself through the air at her, hands bent to claws.
She drew back the sword. A single thrust through the sternum would end this madness.
But Annja took control again. The sword went away. With the strange and terrifying strength that had filled her, she met him instead with a palm-heel strike to the center of his chest that threw him into a backward somersault to smash upside down into the weapons rack, knocking it to splinters and sending spears and machetes flying through the air and clattering on the pavement.
She stood a moment, swaying. Her head spun. Her stomach seemed to rotate in the opposite direction. The roaring wind moved up through her until it seemed centered in her head. Then it seemed to sweep upward and away.
Silence.
Swaying.
Blackness.
SHE BECAME AWARE of the taste of raw alcohol filling her mouth and scalding her tongue like boiling water. She sat up choking and spitting.
“Easy, child, easy,” a husky female voice said in Portuguese. “Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” Annja said weakly.
“Good, good.” Strong hands grasped her shoulders and drew her back down to cradle her head on the skirted thighs of a kneeling woman. Her benefactor smiled down from a round face. She was not the woman Annja had spoken to, but a big, ample-breasted woman with mahogany skin. Other faces looked down on her, a rough oval against the sky. Their expressions seemed to combine solicitude with a certain awe.
“What happened?” she asked.
“Drink, child,” a man said. He knelt by her side, proffering a bowl of water. It was cool. She sat up again, took it and drank greedily.
At once she vomited violently. The onlookers, possibly realizing such a reaction was likely, leaped nimbly out of the way.
The woman who cradled her pulled her head down to her lap again. Someone soothed her brows, then her cheeks, with a cloth soaked in cool water.
“I’m sorry,” Annja croaked. “So sorry. I don’t know what came over me. Over us. How’s Dan?”
She tried to sit up again. She was held firmly down. “My friend. Is my friend all right?”
“He’s fine,” said the man who had taken back the bowl of water before Annja’s explosion. “He’s right over there.”
He nodded to his right. Ten feet away Dan sat with his knees up and his face buried against his legs. Celebrants, most in white, knelt around him, speaking in soothing voices, touching him gently but almost furtively. It was as if they were trying to calm some kind of ferocious wild animal.
“Is he badly hurt?”
“Not at all. The power of his rider, Ogum, kept him from harm.”
“But I—” Annja said. “I knocked him through that rack. Unless it was a dream.”
“Oh, no. We all saw. You were ridden by Iansã of the winds,” a woman said. “You and your friend are both very holy people. Very fortunate.”
Some of the bystanders didn’t look so sure. “Maybe your man is not so lucky to have been picked out by Ogum,” another woman said. “He is very terrible.”
“I am so sorry,” Annja said again. “We did not mean to intrude.”
It came to her to wonder if harsh tobacco was all that was being smoked, or if perhaps the incense had an extra kicker. Half the world’s ethnobotanists, it seemed to her, were in the depths of the Amazon at any given moment. And while they were legitimately looking for the next medical miracle in the largely untapped natural pharmacopoeia of the rain forest, the fact was many of them were most interested in loading up on the local hallucinogens. Could she and Dan have been dosed by some kind of aerosol form of drug, she wondered.
But Annja’s helpers were trading knowing glances and big grins. “Intrude?” the woman cradling Annja said. “We told you—Iansã happened. She took you over good.”
“Good thing she did, too,” said another woman standing nearby. “Ogum got your friend pretty hard. And he seemed pretty pissed.” Whether she meant Dan or the orixá, Annja couldn’t tell. Possibly the speaker drew no distinction between them.
“That’s not possible. We don’t practice candomblé. We’re American.”
“Anyone can see that, child,” the man said, holding out the water bowl again. Annja took a mouthful of water, sloshed it around, turned her head to spit without endangering anybody’s skirts or feet. Then she drank again, more cautiously than before. Her stomach seemed to wallow a few times like a tugboat in a high sea, but the water stayed down.
“It’s a sign.” The words were English. Annja recognized the voice of the trim middle-aged woman who had spoken to her before. “The orixás have marked you as their own. They don’t do that much to foreigners. Obviously, you are acting out some great and powerful destiny.”
She opened her mouth to say, “Nonsense.” The syllables turned to ash on her tongue.
“Who’s Iansã?” she found herself asking instead. “What’s she like? And—did you see me with a sword?”
“Of course,” the large, cheerful woman whose lap cradled her said. She held out the front of her T-shirt. “Iansã always has a sword. See?”
Annja half turned to look. The woman wore a shirt labeled Cavala Da Iansã, Iansã’s Horse. It showed an African woman dressed in swirling skirts of red and pink and yellow. In one hand she carried a horsetail fly whisk.
In the other she carried a cutlass.
“Iansã,” the woman said. “She is the wind, the tornado and the lightning. She fights like a man for justice alongside her husband, Xangô, the sky father, lord of thunder.”
“I don’t know how I’d feel about being married to the god of thunder,” Annja said shakily.
The onlookers laughed. “Don’t worry,” the woman in the Iansã shirt said. “There are some things an orixá won’t ask her horse to do.”
“She prefers to do those things herself,” said another woman, to even louder laughter.
THEY MADE THEIR WAY back to the hotel through streets filled with music and cheerful people. Walking through the humid air was draining. The night seemed full of chattering voices that pierced the ear like needles and jagged colors that bruised the eye.
Annja and Dan walked with arms around each other for support. Dan had a black eye and half his face was covered by a bruise that had already begun to go green and yellow. Annja’s right hip hurt, as did her rib
s every time she breathed. She didn’t remember being hit during their battle. But she felt as if she’d been used to hammer nails.
The doorman on duty in his natty white cap, shirt and shorts—a pretentious touch for such a modest hotel—didn’t blink when the two staggered by, undoubtedly looking overly amorous, drunk or both.
They said nothing to each other as they crossed the threadbare carpet between the potted palms in the comfortably shabby lobby, nor as they rode the elevator. In silence they walked the short distance to the adjoining doors of their rooms.
Fumbling slightly, Annja got out her key card and unlocked her door. Dan followed her inside. She did not question it, internally or aloud. It was somehow unthinkable that he not do so. After what they’d been through, they needed to be together.
12
The lobby door blew open in a swirl of air so humid and thick with smells of exhaust and the omnipresent water and jungle that it seemed to Annja you ought to be able to see it.
She looked up from noodling at her journal in a vague way on the notebook computer she had open on her lap. She wore cargo shorts, a lightweight buff-colored shirt and an expression, or so she suspected, of weary befuddlement.
She watched as a couple of black men in white linen suits swept in. They were very, very big. From the way they moved they were muscled like the workers on the Belém waterfront, though better dressed.
She made herself look away as they swept the lobby with the bug eyes of their sunglasses. She didn’t want them noticing the hardening of her expression. She suspected they were gangsters. The only reason alarm bells weren’t shrilling in her soul was that their body language suggested they were looking for potential troublemakers, not trouble themselves.
She was aware of operating at lower than usual. She felt numerous aches and pains. She still hadn’t been able to process the events of the previous evening. She and Dan had clung tightly to each other until they fell into restless sleep.
Annja suspected she and Dan had inadvertently been dosed with some kind of strong psychoactive smoke. In the cold light of day that seemed more and more conclusively the case.
“So,” a familiar voice said from behind her. “You survived.”
She looked around as the two big men moved slowly to different sides of the lobby. Dan stood there. He was dressed in a loose shirt over cotton trousers. He looked even more tousled and unshaved than usual. His eyes were sunk in dark, saggy pits.
“More or less,” she said. “Much as I hate to say it, you look like I feel.”
“Yeah,” he grunted.
Sometime in the dark hours of the long tropical night he had risen from her bed and left without a word. Insofar as she could remember, they had not exchanged a word since their confrontation in the midst of the crowd. She had been somewhat dreading their inevitable meeting.
A second pair of men entered the lobby. They were white and bulky. They wore white linen jackets over what looked like T-shirts and white duck trousers. The jackets were tailored loosely enough about their wide upper torsos they might well have concealed shoulder holsters.
Even more than the two hard black men, one of whom had now taken up position near the elevators, the other by the brief corridor to the restaurant, the newcomers looked like the kind of men who’d be wearing shoulder holsters. Annja had recently acquired way more experience of hired muscle than she’d ever really cared to have. If these guys weren’t that, with their shaved heads, their dark sunglasses, their square jaws jutting from necks wider than their heads, then it was time to look around for the rest of the film crew, because central casting had hit all the cherries.
“Ahh,” Dan murmured as the newcomers took up positions flanking the hotel’s entrance. “Our esteemed employer arrives.”
“You know these thugs?” They weren’t the pair with Publico on Annja’s landing on his penthouse roof.
“Goran and Mladko,” he said. “Croatian war criminals. His bodyguards.”
“He uses war criminals as bodyguards?”
Dan shrugged. “It’s supposed to be rehabilitation. He’s all about forgiveness, you know. Besides, nobody’s looking for them too hard.”
Through the big glass doors Annja saw a commotion outside as hotel porters swarmed to a long, low, white limousine with dark-tinted windows. Another huge black man popped out the front passenger door and waved them off. They obeyed with alacrity. Maybe it was his size. Maybe it was his air of undeniable authority. Maybe it was the stubby little machine pistol with the magazine in the butt and the separate broom-handle foregrip he was brandishing none too discreetly.
The gunman opened the limo’s rear door. At last, out came Sir Iain Moran, Publico himself, looking neat in a lightweight gray suit. He stood, stretched slightly, smiled and nodded at his bodyguards. Then he tipped his sunglasses down his nose and looked through the windows into the lobby.
Dan raised two fingers in a halfway salute. Publico beamed, nodded, swept inside.
“What’s he doing here?” Annja asked. Last night’s intended conference call had never come to pass.
“I e-mailed him from my cell phone after that stuff went down at Mafalda’s.”
Sir Iain paused between his two human pillars and swept the room with his gaze. His fine leonine head was held high, the long hair streaming down to his shoulders.
He approached Annja and Dan, beaming, a powerful hand held out.
“Annja, Dan,” he said in his deep, gravelly Irish voice. “So good to see you.”
“And you,” said Annja a little feebly as she rose. She was trying hard to bottle up the flash of anger and resentment at her so-called partner for communicating with their boss without letting her know.
She took his hand. He shook firmly, covering her hand with his, then moved on to embrace Dan.
“Welcome to Belém,” Annja said.
He smiled and nodded. “Sure, sure.”
He looked to the two black men who had preceded Goran and Mladko. Annja saw no signal from them, but what Publico saw seemed to lead to a sudden decision.
“Let’s walk,” he said with a brisk nod of his head. “It’s a beautiful day.”
They walked down toward the river esplanade. The two black bodyguards preceded them. Mladko and Goran winged out from them, a step or two behind. The big man with the machine pistol followed a few steps behind. It wasn’t exactly subtle. Annja gathered it wasn’t intended to be. In any event, few people spared them more than a glance.
She was surprised no one seemed to recognize Sir Iain. It struck her that perhaps nobody associated Publico—dressed in a T-shirt and torn blue jeans and grimacing into a microphone with his sweat-lank hair hanging down his back—with this dapper, obviously wealthy white guy from elsewhere.
“We had just about run out of leads here,” Annja said. She wasn’t able to keep a note of accusation from creeping into her voice. “You didn’t give us much to work with. Especially after our one major contact was murdered.”
“Sorry, Annja dear,” he said with a contrite smile. “But you were fully the skeptic, weren’t you? I already told you more than you were willing to believe—that much was plain as the nose on your face.”
“I’m still a skeptic,” she said. “And I’m not sure what to believe right now.” She hoped Dan hadn’t felt duty-bound to e-mail him about their experience the evening before.
“What happened to Mafalda did kind of put a damper on our investigation,” Dan said. “There’s nothing written down about Promessa, at least that we could track down. I get the impression plenty of people know about this hidden quilombo, but nobody wants to talk to strangers about it.”
“Do you blame them, after what happened to Mafalda?” Annja asked.
“Ah, but there we have the key bit of evidence, don’t we?” Publico said almost impishly. He seemed to be taking a childlike delight in the intrigue. “The fact that she was done in is itself as strong a lead as we could ask, don’t you see?”
“It means we�
��re on the right trail,” Dan agreed somewhat reluctantly.
“It may or may not,” Annja said quickly. “Although it’s not as in-your-face here as it is in the megacities down south, crime is a real problem in Brazil. It can hit anybody any time—or why are we walking around surrounded by men bristling with guns?”
“Point taken,” Publico said with a grin.
“Dealing in candomblé items is a pretty well respected trade around here, but it certainly doesn’t rule out contacts with a pretty bad element. Mafalda might’ve crossed a business associate. Or turned the wrong crime boss down on a sexual proposition,” Annja said.
He raised a brow. “You really think so? I thought you found the same people in her shop who visited you in your bedrooms the night before. And who vanished mysteriously.”
“Maybe,” Annja said. Dan looked at her sharply; she paid him no mind. “The vanishing isn’t necessarily all that mysterious. We’re not from around here, and they are. They know the city much better than we do. And while I never saw Dan’s nocturnal guest, mine and the guy in the shop—well, it’s not as if wiry little guys who look like Amazonian Indians are rare in these parts.”
“It was the same woman,” Dan said flatly. “She threw me like I was a child.”
“You think she displayed superhuman strength?” Publico asked. His voice seemed to hold an edge of eagerness.
“I don’t know. She could have just been real good at martial arts. But it was the same woman, and she shot some kind of energy weapon at Annja.”
Annja frowned. “Maybe.”
Dan glared at her. “You told me—”
She held up a hand. “I know. But I’ve thought about it. It might have been conventional firearm using a special laser sight. Maybe it was a special effect designed to make it look like some kind of high-tech ray gun.”
“But she vanished again on you,” Dan said, “when you chased her into that tenement room.”
