by Alex Archer
“It was a popular legend among slaves from about the eighteenth century onward. Especially those laboring on the rubber plantations before the abolition of slavery. Even afterward, I daresay—even after emancipation, working conditions weren’t always ideal.”
The look he cast back over his shoulder was weary and sad. “Nor are they always today. Especially farther up the river.”
Big fans swooped lazily overhead like circling condors, making gentle swooshing sounds. Somewhere air-conditioning labored, not quite valiantly enough to keep the heat and humidity at bay. Annja actually loved the musty smell of libraries and books. Even though she knew lots of the smells were the odors of decay, of mildew and molds and dust, she loved them all. The libraries in New Orleans had smelled much that way. Without a family and other distractions, she had amused herself growing up by reading. The memories didn’t bubble to the surface very often. When they did they felt good, like warm slippers and a fuzzy robe on a cool autumn morning.
Whereas the other library staff she’d encountered had been dressed in a business-conservative manner and acted very solemn, the special-collections head wore a lurid tropical-print shirt pulsating with scarlet blossoms, emerald vines and blue-and-yellow macaws. He wore shorts and sandals that looked as if they might have been made out of old tires.
“You’re saying it’s a legend, then,” she said. They conversed in Brazilian Portuguese. Viguerie spoke excellent English but did not insist on practicing on her.
He smiled. “Ah, but that doesn’t mean the stories aren’t true. Or don’t contain a germ of truth. Perhaps.”
Annja moved her lower lip slightly up over her upper. Perhaps. That was the one answer she really didn’t want.
“Here we go.” He pulled down a heavy volume with hands encased in thin gloves. “These aren’t rubber, by the way,” he said, as he carried the book toward a reading table. “I have a latex sensitivity. Ironic, in this former rubber capital, don’t you think? Ahh, let’s see.”
He opened the volume on the table and leafed carefully through the yellowed pages. A gloved finger slid what seemed a few microns above the yellowed, mottled paper, tracing crabbed lines of handwriting in ink that had faded to purple and stained out into the paper, blurring each word slightly. This, too, was familiar to Annja. Actually, she was accustomed to much older and worse. This book, she judged by its shape and appearance and the fairly modern spellings of the words she glimpsed, was not much more than a century old.
“Here we’ve an account written by a superintendent at a rubber plantation farther up the river in 1905,” Viguerie said. He looked at her. “You can read it, yes?”
She nodded and read aloud. “‘Lobo tells me that three more workers ran away from the north field barracks last night.’”
Viguerie nodded. “Lobo was an overseer on the plantation. Well named—a beast of a man. In his spare time he used to shoot Indians for sport.”
She looked at him. “Seriously?”
“All too much so.”
She read more—silently, now, as if afraid what she might say.
He tells me they are talking again of this damn quilombo of dreams, where a man can be free and live forever. I sent him out armed with good Mausers and with dogs, but the rascals had got clean away.
A glint from the dim light overhead in round lenses made the old librarian’s eyes unreadable. “Slavery officially had ended,” he said. “It found ways to persist. In various forms.”
She continued to read.
Even Lobo will only go so far. Parties who hunt escaped laborers tend to vanish as if the cursed selva swallows them alive. The workers say the Maroons still look out for their own.
“So what have we here?” An aide fluttered up. He had short spiked dark hair and a gold ring in one ear. “We don’t get many norteamericanas in here.”
“This is Annja Creed,” Viguerie said, drawing himself up with much dignity. “She is an important archaeologist from America of the North.”
The aide drummed slender fingers on the tabletop and pursed his lips as he read the open book. “An archaeologist hunting for the fountain of youth?”
Annja felt her cheeks flush hot. “What do you mean?”
“You’re reading up on Promessa, aren’t you? The mythical city of dreams?”
“The quilombo of dreams, yes. I’m fascinated by the quilombo phenomenon—as well as the possibility fugitive ex-slaves from the coast, over 1400 kilometers away, might have penetrated this far and farther up the Amazon Basin.”
“But the City of the Promise is all about wonders—walking through walls, shape-shifters, living forever. Not that I blame you. Who wouldn’t want to live forever and keep their beauty? I do.”
“What about the dangers the superintendent writes about?” Annja said. “This Lobo doesn’t sound like the sort of man who’d be easily scared off by mere superstitious rumors.”
“Oh, the threat was real enough,” the aide said with a flip of his finely manicured fingers. “It is today. It’s just the Indians. Miserable savages, with no regard for human life at all.”
His words struck her like a slap. I guess I’m not in Kansas anymore. No matter how much time she spent abroad, trying to keep her mind open to other beliefs and ways as befit an archaeologist, it also managed to find ways to shock her. She thought she caught a hint of sadness in Viguerie’s old hound-dog eyes.
“What about that report from a few months ago, in the spring?” Viguerie said. “About a whole company of loggers with bulldozers and soldiers who disappeared in the space of an afternoon, farther up the Amazon.”
The aide shrugged. “The Indians are clever devils. They know their land. They ambushed them. Nothing supernatural about it.”
Annja stared at him. “Surely men with enormous machines and modern weapons don’t just vanish?”
Viguerie tipped his head to the side. “And yet they did. More than a hundred, many of them foreign mercenaries. A certain prominent state official vanished with them. It was all the talk of the cafés for weeks.”
Annja shook her head.
“Sweetie, that kind of thing doesn’t even make it to the Internet,” the aide said. “You’ll never see it on TV or read it in the papers. But it goes on all the time.”
16
“Remember,” Dan told her softly. “It’s for the greater good.”
Darkness was easier to come by at this stretch of the Manaus riverfront than Annja had anticipated. The River of Dreams Trading Company warehouse-office complex lay a few miles up the Rio Negros from the deepwater port facility. The port was a blaze of light, the big freighters and container ships hives of activity at all hours. Looking toward them it was hard to imagine they were almost a thousand miles from the sea.
Looking straight across the river, at the unbroken green wall of the forest, it wasn’t hard to imagine at all.
Dan led her into a space between the River of Dreams building and a neighboring structure that looked abandoned. They wore dark clothing, jeans and long-sleeved shirts, despite the hammering tropical heat. They had rolled down their sleeves as they entered the alleyway to reduce the visibility factor of their white skin.
“It’s a bit unusual,” Dan admitted. “But I’ve seen a lot of tourists do this against the bugs. And anyway, it’s lot less conspicuous than running around in black from head to toe like movie ninjas.” It made sense to Annja, despite the discomfort.
Given the desperate poverty of much of Brazil and the rampant crime, Annja was surprised the import-export company didn’t take more overt security measures. In a land where people who rode in nice cars tended to pay armed guards to ride with them, chain-link fencing, cameras and floodlights would seem the least precautions a waterfront business might take.
Yet there was none of that. Just a battered green-painted metal door in a yellow fan of light from an external fixture with a conical shade. Annja looked around but saw no sign of activity in the immediate area.
“Looks as if
a lot of the businesses in this area are derelict,” Dan said. “Things look much nicer from the street out front. All part of the national preoccupation with appearance, I guess.”
The humidity was so heavy Annja almost felt as if she were swimming through the air as she followed Dan to the metal door. The air smelled of petrocarbons and water and decaying vegetation.
And there were those bugs Dan had mentioned. Big bugs, little bugs, crawling bugs, biting bugs, stinging bugs—flies and gnats and mosquitoes and God knew what else. Annja was no entomologist. She wasn’t squeamish, nor phobic. But that was one problem with the jungle—way too many bugs. Getting way too familiar.
From the moment she had seen Manaus from the air, like some deep-relief concrete scab crusting in the midst of the green skin of jungle by the wide brown river, she’d felt a sense that it didn’t belong. Its builders had pushed back the rain forest, wedged the city in there where it shouldn’t be. For a time it had fallen; the forest came back. But now the Amazonas State politicians had decided for reasons of prestige that Manaus should live again.
But the jungle abided. It smoldered with resentment as with a thousand small fires. And it pushed back.
Annja knew in her bones the jungle would win someday. She did not want to be here when the struggle found its horrible conclusion. She felt as if great green walls were about to fall. On her. She shuddered.
“You can get through the door?” Annja asked as Dan stopped in front of it and studied it.
He gave her a wicked grin. “You never know what skills will come in handy for an anticorporate activist.”
She still had misgivings about the ethics of what they were doing. But that argument had been lost already. Even with herself, apparently.
It was the practical situation that made her stomach churn and her skin crawl. “Could it possibly be this easy?”
“You’d be surprised.” As he spoke he was doing something to the door.
Annja kept her head swiveling up and down the alley. She also forced herself to remember to look up periodically. She’d sneaked up on people before by exploiting the human tendency to look only horizontally.
“There,” Dan said with satisfaction. He stepped back, pulling the door open. “After you, my lady.”
With tight lips and compressed brow Annja moved past him. She stuck her head around the frame in a three-second look. Then she slipped inside.
The warehouse was a cavern whose gloom seemed more accentuated than diminished by widely spaced yellow lights shining from the high ceiling. Annja stepped reflexively to the left of the door.
Dan slipped in, pulling the door quietly shut behind himself and stepping to the right. “Here you’ve been acting all innocent, where clearly you’ve done this kind of thing before,” he said.
“Just clearing the fatal funnel,” she said. “I do know anybody lingering in an open doorway makes an ideal target of herself.”
He raised a brow and nodded appreciatively. “I’ll look for an office. Why don’t you scout around?”
“So why not just break into the front office, if that’s what you were looking for?”
“They had better security on the pretty, glossy stuff out front.”
She shrugged in vague concurrence. They went by separate paths.
It was hot and close in the warehouse, almost stifling, although Annja could feel as much as hear the hum of some machine attempting with indifferent success to cool and presumably dry the air. Metal catwalks ran around the edge of the warehouse, which was built of grayish brick. Others crossed overhead, to what purpose Annja couldn’t tell. Wooden crates rose in tall stacks in some parts of the warehouse. In others, high metal shelves held boxes of various sizes. It all looked pretty straightforward.
She made a circuit of the perimeter. She was mostly interested in getting her bearings. She wasn’t really sure what Dan—or Publico—expected to achieve. Doors opened into little side chambers off the main room—workshops, smaller storage areas where she guessed office supplies were kept, as opposed to stock awaiting shipment up or down the great river complex. She saw Dan nod with satisfaction as a door into a windowed office area gave way before his efforts. He stepped inside.
She saw no sign of any kind of security measures. No cameras were in evidence. But she knew that with modern technology a camera could be invisibly small.
But the whole feel of the place suggested a bygone era. Not the high, wide, long gone days of the rubber boom, but some time before omnipresent surveillance cameras and spy bugs. The fifties perhaps—at least the seventies. Some time before she’d lived, when things were simpler.
She frowned. Stay sharp, she told herself sternly. But it was hard to focus without knowing what she was supposed to be focusing on. She wondered if her employer and partner were having a fit of male chauvinism, not trusting a mere woman with the real story. But why bring me in at all, if that were the case?
She found some wood crates with some paperwork attached. She studied the bills of lading. The crates, it appeared, contained medical supplies—equipment and drugs, consigned for someplace called Feliz Lusitânia. They came mostly through Belém, originating primarily from South America and Europe.
There seemed to be a lot of them. She wondered what Feliz Lusitânia might be. The literal translation was “happy Portugal.”
A tiny scuffle of sound, such as a furtive small animal might make, was all the warning she had.
She spun. A dark figure was flying at her, down from a ten-foot stack of crates at her back. She raised her hands, grabbed. Using the power of moving from the hips, turning about the centerline while keeping arms and upper body essentially locked, she guided the person jumping at her past and into the stack of crates bound for Feliz Lusitânia.
At the last instant she shifted, pulled slightly down. She might have slammed her attacker into the crates headfirst, but an intrinsic sense of mercy and justice struck her. I’m the intruder here.
Upside down, the attacker still hit hard enough to explode all the air out in a whuff clearly audible above the thump of impact and rending of shattering wood. Blue-and-white cardboard cartons labeled in some Slavic language Annja couldn’t recognize, far less read, spilled around as the person came to rest.
She seemed unconscious, at the least stunned. She was a small black woman with dreadlocks, wearing a loose blouse, ragged shorts and sandals. Backing away down the aisle between stacks of crates so that the woman couldn’t instantly spring on her again once she recovered, Annja looked around.
Two men approached from different directions, hemming her in. One was taller than her, rangy and looked Latino but had long dreadlocks shadowing his face. The other, she saw, turning her head swiftly left and right and then back, was blond and sturdy, a bit shorter than her. Both were dressed in rough workman-style clothing.
I told Dan it couldn’t be this easy, she thought. Somehow being right didn’t make her feel much better.
“Back off,” she told them in Portuguese. “I was just leaving.” It sounded lame—was lame—but she wanted to try to defuse the situation short of violence.
“Yes,” the Latin-looking guy said. “Yes, you were.”
As he spoke the blond man rushed her from behind. It was what she had expected—standard tactical sandwich.
A pure back kick is one of the strongest blows a human body can deliver. A woman as fit and with such long strong legs as Annja Creed could crush a man’s rib cage, especially if he added energy to the impact by rushing her, the way the blond man was. But she wasn’t going there. Not yet.
The solid rubber heel of her walking shoes slammed his sternum like the kick of a horse. His forward progress wasn’t just arrested—the blow lifted him off his feet and threw him flat on his back.
The blond guy landed with a whump on the stained concrete behind her. Annja turned her attention to her taller attacker. He swung a roundhouse blow toward her face—and then when she raised her guard, dropped lithely to one arm and swept her
legs out from under her with one long leg.
Her fall was awkward. She managed to get an arm down to act as a shock absorber, then took the brunt of the landing on her left butt cheek, not her tailbone or elbow or something else breakable. The pain still shot up the side of her body and she knew she’d have a fabulous bruise. She also knew she’d be lucky if she got out of this warehouse suffering no worse.
She arched her back, pressed the backs of her shoulders into the concrete, jackknifed forward and upward. The motion snapped her back upright.
The dreadlocked man was already swinging his right leg for her head. With no time to reverse her forward momentum to try to dodge the strike, she stepped forward, forearms vertical, to block the kick where it was weak, at his thigh near the fulcrum, rather than at the end, his foot, where momentum was greatest. She used a powerful downward stroke of the bottom of her forearm at the juncture of his long legs. He gasped and doubled over, staggering backward as every bit of air voided itself from his lungs in an instant.
A heavy weight landed hard on Annja’s back. Powerful legs locked around her waist. Already turning clockwise, Annja drove with her legs to slam her assailant into the stack of crates at her right.
Something about the exhalation driven out of the lungs of the person riding her back sounded feminine. Annja realized her initial assailant had quickly recovered from getting thrown through a crate and had gone straight back on the attack. The Promessans were tough, she had to admit.
Python-like the woman’s arms sought to encircle her throat. Annja tucked her chin into the crook of her attacker’s right arm to foil that. She kept turning until her back was directly toward the crate and the attacker still trapped between. She slammed her head back. Teeth gouged her scalp. The back of the woman’s head was smashed into the crate with a brutal crack. Her whole body slackened. Annja’s right hand tangled in her long hair and Annja snapped her body forward.
The Promessan woman flew over her right shoulder. As she did Annja’s left hand caught her right wrist, still at Annja’s own throat. She straightened the arm as she pulled up on her attacker’s hair to keep her from splashing her brains out the cracked back of her skull on the concrete. She was still unwilling to kill under such morally ambiguous circumstances.
