Secret of the Slaves

by Alex Archer

  The commissary walls were bare, as were those in their rooms. The obvious reason was tightfistedness, the desire to squeeze every possible penny of profit from this great yellow wound in the rain forest for minimum overhead. Annja suspected something more underlay it. Life was cheap in Feliz Lusitânia. What went on there was so raw and elemental that any kind of ornamentation would have been absurd frivolity.

  “What’s going on out in the river?” Dan asked.

  Gomes fluttered his eyelids momentarily. The motion, like the size of his eyes, was exaggerated by the lenses of the glasses he wore. He looked everywhere but at the two young North Americans, then cleared his throat, scooped up, chewed and swallowed another mouthful of food.

  “You both are to enjoy our complete cooperation in your efforts, whatever they may be,” he said in a tone that suggested, if they wished to confide in him, they’d find a ready ear. “That comes from Director Oliveira himself.”

  Again Annja wondered what ties Publico had to this hellhole—and just what strings he’d pulled for them. “We appreciate that,” Annja said. “We’ll let you know what we need when we…get our bearings better.”

  “And what about those poor bastards crucified outside the wire?” Dan demanded.

  Annja looked down at her plate, cheeks flushing in sudden shame. I should have asked that, she thought.

  Gomes compressed his lips to a line. “We attract unwelcome attention from outside. A very great deal of wealth flows through here.”

  “Attention from photojournalists and the like?” Annja asked.

  “No, no, nothing like that. Raiders. Bandits.”

  “Through all this jungle?” Dan said in a tone of obvious skepticism.

  “The river is a most broad highway.”

  “You get that many people trying to attack such an obviously well fortified camp?” Annja asked.

  “Well, and malcontents—” He stopped, blinked. “Well, of course, order must be kept. Otherwise anarchy will swallow us all. And in any event they were dead when they went up—mostly….”

  Dan gave his head a sliding sideways shake, smiling an ironic, twisted smile. “So here we see jungle capitalism in all its unfettered glory,” he said.

  Gomes drew himself up in his chair. “Not at all! The majority owner of this great enterprise is the state of Amazonas, and its proceeds go for the welfare of our people! Although to be sure we have foreign investors. What we do here we do for the greater good.”

  “So the ends justify the means?” Annja asked.

  Dan shrugged. “Sometimes they do, Annja.”

  Gomes picked up his hat from the table beside him and settled it over his bald spot. Summoning his dignity, he rose.

  “I fear I must leave you to attend to other duties,” he said. “If you have needs, ask a staff member and they will be attended to promptly.”

  “I’ll bet,” Dan said.

  “You must understand, my North American friends,” Gomes said. “That inscription over the gate from the helipad—that does not refer to the poor devils in the cage, or out in the settlement. They know their fate, and how thoroughly it is sealed. And in any event, they usually do not arrive by helicopter.

  “No, those who are advised to abandon hope on entry are the lower managers and administrators, the physicians, the skilled workers, the people who actually run this place. Such as my poor self. Because otherwise, we might imagine we had more chance to escape than those poor devils panning gold in the river.

  “I leave you with one final bit of advice—you have the option of leaving Feliz Lusitânia. It is a rare and precious gift. I should contemplate that deeply, were I you. And also, the wisdom of not asking questions whose answers cannot possibly do you any good. Good night.”

  THE RAIN CAME not long after they returned to their rooms. Publico had instructed them to leave their computers and cell phones behind, as they were unwelcome at the camp. Annja found her mind too agitated for reading and her soul too desolated by the day’s sights, sounds and smells to sleep. And the rain fell with fury that seemed unusual even for what was a rain forest. It was violently pounding, as if trying to batter down the camp and wash every trace of it away down the Amazon a thousand miles to the sea.

  At last, wearing only her long shirt over her panties, she rose and left her room. Dan answered the door promptly when she knocked. He had on only jeans. His hair was tousled, as if he, too, had tried to sleep and been denied.

  They didn’t speak. No words were necessary. Their bodies met in a fervent embrace. Their mouths met in a kiss. They moved to the bed and made love with a fierce intensity. Then they lay and clung to each other like small animals on a natural raft of vegetation, out on the storm-stirred river, until sleep finally overcame emotion and they slipped into blessed oblivion.

  20

  Annja and Dan ate a subdued breakfast of somewhat crusted eggs, wilted bacon, bread and fruit from a buffet-style spread of covered hot trays that seemed left out for latecomers. Aside from the sounds of people puttering back in the kitchens, conversing in what Annja guessed was an Indian language, there was no sign of anyone at all.

  The pair ate quietly, avoiding each other’s eyes. The physical intimacies of the night before had led to no increase in the emotional intimacy between them. What that left between them, Annja wasn’t quite sure. A shared sense of purpose, of comradeship. Respect and even affection. But anything deeper—that particular yawning gulf in Annja’s life was not, it seemed, going to be filled by Annja’s co-worker.

  In the light of day—brutal in every sense—Dan was a different man. It wasn’t as if the sensitive and vulnerable youth of the night before was either illusion or facade, she decided. It was just that the danger and the sheer raw evil of their circumstances brought out another aspect of him, harder edged, more certain. More at home. Maybe he really is an action hero, she thought.

  “I guess they know we’re here,” Dan said after they had mostly finished. “The camp administration, I mean. God knows what they think we’re doing.”

  He took a sip of his coffee. “I wonder how the hell we’re supposed to proceed from here?” he said. “I don’t know about you, but I’m not ready to go wandering outside the citadel by myself. Call me a coward.”

  Annja shook her head vigorously. “No. Or I’m one, too. I know you’re brave, Dan. You’ve got nothing to prove to me. But suicide to no purpose isn’t bravery. Not in my book.”

  He looked at her with amusement. “You know, I think that’s the first really personal thing I’ve heard you say.”

  She shrugged. “Well our conversations have run largely to business, small talk or political statements, haven’t they?”

  He laughed. “With me making most of those last, huh? Am I really that bad?”

  She opened her mouth to protest when he looked past her and his expression shifted.

  “Don’t look now,” he said, “but either our guide just got here or Hell’s got a new work-release program.”

  Annja turned in her chair. His description was spoton. The woman standing just inside the entrance to the commissary had the hunched shoulders and swiveling head of something’s prey and big, gold, frightened-waif eyes. She was almost skeletally gaunt—not anorexic, but something visibly other, as if all excess had been melted out of her by an eternal flame of fear. She looked all around the commissary as if expecting to see something terrible lurking in wait, coiled to spring. Then she looked back toward them.

  Annja decided standing up might look more welcoming than threatening, so she did that. “Hi,” she said in Portuguese. “I’m Annja Creed.”

  The woman set her narrow jaw and nodded once, almost spasmodically. She came forward, with fast steps, eyes downcast, shoulders slumped, and head forward—the demeanor of a true victim. “I am Dr. Lidia do Carvalho,” the woman said apologetically in clear but accented English. “I was told I am to be your guide.”

  Dan stood up. “Pleased to meet you,” he said. “I’m Dan Seddon. Tha
nks for coming out to help us.”

  She nodded. She would not look up.

  “Listen,” Annja said. “We can make other arrangements. You don’t have to go.”

  The head came up. Lidia looked as if she had cut her hair herself, possibly with pruning shears. It was as if vanity had no place in her life. Only survival.

  Those huge frightened-cat eyes met Annja’s. “Yes,” the doctor said. “Yes, I do.”

  SHE LIVED OUT HERE in the citadel, she told them as they scurried from cover to cover among the ramshackle dwellings. She was part of the camp’s small medical staff, recruited from the city of Cuiabá in the high-plains farm country of Mato Grosso State. It was an economically distressed area and jobs weren’t easy to come by.

  “Even for doctors?” Dan asked. Off in the distance they could hear shouts, shots, screams. They weren’t forty yards from the gate between the citadel and the colony, still in sight of its own forbidding machine-gun towers. “Surely they have socialized medicine here in Brazil.”

  “With ample free injections for the poor,” Lidia said grimly, “of saline solution. Medical education is cheap. Real medicines are expensive. And government jobs go to the well connected. Come, now—I think it’s safe to move.”

  She seemed to have a knack for slipping through quiet ways, little traveled by either starveling workers or the armed patrols. The workers weren’t much in evidence anyway. They labored or slept at this hour. The mines ran twenty-four hours a day. Still, Annja’s stomach was a constant sour knot of tension from anticipating ambush at any moment.

  “You work out in the colony?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “But you said you were staff,” Annja said. “Couldn’t you live in the citadel?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you choose to live in this?” asked Dan, his eyes narrowed in disgust and dismay.

  They halted behind a structure cobbled together from a random assortment of warped planks. The smell of sewage and decay were stronger than most places. Annja blinked tears from her eyes.

  “Oh, yes,” Lidia said. “Much safer.”

  “You have got to be kidding,” Dan said.

  She shook her head—a quick, furtive gesture. “Out here I enjoy a certain status. I have protectors. People understand that I help them.”

  “What about drugs?” Annja asked. “Don’t people try to steal them from you?”

  Lidia held up a cautioning hand. A hundred yards or so ahead a ragged pack of men walked past the alley mouth. They were skinny and so sunburned Annja couldn’t tell what race they belonged to. They clutched machetes or wooden clubs.

  “I have antibiotics and such things only,” Lidia said. The gang passed without a glance aside, as if intent on some goal. “Nothing recreational. The pain drugs are available at a special kiosk right outside the citadel fence. It is heavily guarded day and night. Sometimes, of course, there are those who won’t accept that I have nothing to ease their pains of mind and spirit. My shack where I live—not so different from this one, but I try to keep it clean—is ransacked frequently. That doesn’t matter. I have nothing even for the most desperate to find worth stealing. And when people try to force me to give them drugs, or to do other things, I have only to scream. Then the people from the vicinity come. They take the people who are attacking me and do things to them. Terrible things.”

  She looked up at Annja. For the first time she almost met her eyes. “I should try to stop them, of course. Or feel worse about it. But I am weak. I fear that I cannot.”

  Annja felt an urge to touch her reassuringly on the shoulder. She didn’t. She feared it would be perceived as patronizing somehow. Maybe it would be patronizing.

  She had ample experience with poor people, and with people in the hinterlands of developing nations. In general she and they got along fine. She wasn’t hard to get along with—for people of goodwill. Simple respect and friendliness, she found, went a long way.

  She had never experienced anything remotely like this.

  “Then why not live in the citadel, where it’s safe?” she asked.

  Lidia uttered a bitter laugh. “Safe? It’s far worse than out in the colony. Here I have some status. I have protectors, as I told you. Inside—”

  She shook her head. “Inside they play the games of power. And no one has a friend.”

  “But aren’t they all in this together?” Dan asked. “The bosses, I mean?”

  “What?” she asked. “Do you believe in honor among thieves? You are very naive, young man, though you think yourself hard.”

  “But their class loyalties—”

  “Do not exist outside of the air-conditioned class-rooms of the universities,” she said. “I, too, once believed in such things. Then I came here and saw the truth. Whatever they call themselves, socialists, capitalists—those who have power are all mad things, struggling constantly with each other for more. Inside the citadel, without a powerful patron you are waiting only to be collateral damage—or a plaything for those with the sort of mind to crucify workers who try to run away!”

  “So that’s what that’s all about,” Dan said.

  “But we’re in the middle of the rain forest,” Annja said. “I’d think it would be easy to disappear, once you got away from the camp.” Not that that guaranteed safety or survival, she knew. Spanish and Portuguese soldiers and explorers had perished of hunger in droves out there, despite its being perhaps the Earth’s most nutrient-dense environment. What doomed them was what would likely doom city-dwellers who tried to trek through the woods—simple ignorance. The early explorers simply hadn’t known what to eat.

  “The Indians turn them back,” Lidia said.

  “They cooperate with their exploiters?” Dan asked.

  Lidia laughed again. “Exploiters? The directors bribe the local tribes well. And the Indians get rewards for any stragglers they bring back—bonuses if they are still alive. As they get paid when they bring other Indians in as slaves.”

  “My God,” Annja said. “Oh, my God.”

  “You didn’t know things like that went on?” Dan asked.

  She looked in his eyes. It was like looking through windows to a private hell. “No. I never imagined any such thing. I’ve seen bad things—terrible things. I’ve witnessed starvation and disease and even massacre. But—nothing to compare to this.”

  “All I know is we’re a terrible species. And we do terrible things, and the Earth might be better off without us,” Dan said.

  To Annja’s amazement Lidia favored him with a flat, angry glare. “I at least,” she said, “know how to distinguish between the victim and the victimizer!”

  She walked on, leading them farther into the reeking horror of the camp. Dan stood a moment staring after her, opening and closing his hands.

  “I wish I did,” he said.

  ANNJA DARED a second glance. The small patrol had vanished. “Right,” she said to Lidia. “Let’s go.”

  The slight doctor led them out across the broad space through which the mercenaries had marched moments before. As soon as she turned the corner of the container hut Annja had to jump to avoid tripping over a dead body, in cutoff shorts and a torn shirt pulled up around its belly. It had begun the bloat in the heat—thankfully it lay facedown. It seemed to be a male.

  They had not smelled it from less than ten feet away. It was the third corpse they had encountered that day.

  “How come everybody hasn’t died of cholera or some other disease?” Dan wondered in a quiet voice as they scurried across the open space and slipped down an alley with containers on one side and plank hovels on the other. Even the three of them, carrying little spare body fat among them, had to turn sideways to negotiate the passage.

  “The patrol will probably report the body,” Lidia said, “and another team will come out to pick it up and carry it away to dump in the river. And they give out lots of antibiotics.”

  No doubt breeding all kinds of resistant strains of bacteria in the p
rocess, Annja thought. Under the circumstances it was the least of their misdeeds.

  Lidia told them how the camp drew workers from all over South America and even beyond with promises of high pay. “All lies,” she said, “of course. But once here—well, you’ve seen what happens to those who try to run away. And they might be the lucky ones.”

  “How is that even possible?” Dan asked.

  “You saw the cage, out in the river?” Lidia asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Annja said.

  “Once you go in the cage you never come out—alive,” the doctor said. “It is for people who really annoy the directors. Sometimes failed subordinates, or unlucky rivals. Or sometimes international campaigners who make their way here to reform the camp.” She looked meaningfully at Dan.

  “I’m not that kind of campaigner,” he told her. “I’m more the proactive sort, you might say.”

  Lidia frowned and looked quickly away. She evidently disliked Dan. Annja understood. In the doctor’s circumstances it would be prohibitively hard to make herself look inside the young man and see the genuine care there—and the pain.

  “What do they do in the cage?” Annja asked.

  “Pan for gold,” Lídia said with a wild little yip of a laugh. “Like your gold rush, yes? They glean what is missed by the machines sluicing out in the river or scraping at the land.”

  “What if the prisoners don’t work?” Annja asked.

  “Then they don’t feed them. Anyone. After a while the holdouts either come around or their fellow sufferers drown them in their sleep.”

  Annja swallowed hard.

  “Of course they don’t last long,” Lidia said, almost clinically now. “Aside from the grinding labor and the privation and exposure, there are the heavy-metal salts.”

  “Heavy metals?” Dan asked.

  “Oh, yes. The Amazon Basin is rich in heavy metals, didn’t you know?”