Thief (24 page)

Glassy-eyed, a lot drunk, he was holding a roll of duct tape, and that thing he used to attack her soul.

“Time for more payback, bitch,” he said. “Like I told you,
la fraternidad
never forgets.”

Refusing to show him fear, Sister Rachel said, “I forgive you.”

“Aw, that's sweet, so Christian of you,” Vargas replied. “But here's the thing: El Cazador does not believe in God, and he does not forgive. Never have. Never will.”

 

32

THE FERRY WAS A
madhouse.

All four decks above the hold were jammed with people and chickens, parrots, and geese in cages, and tied-up goats, and every other thing you could imagine. Families camped on their luggage or boxes up top, and lounged in hammocks they slung from the ceilings on the lower decks. The ship came about and headed west, upriver. The sun broke through and beat down with a shimmering intensity that made the humidity that much worse. The smell of humanity and the river was everywhere.

Ashore, the modern skyline of Manaus gave way over the next hour to riverbanks and low hillsides covered in ramshackle wooden hovels built on stilts and painted in pastel blues, pinks, and greens; and then to larger shacks and fishing villages and the confluence of the two rivers that formed the lake.

Santos pointed out where the Negro River came in clear from the north and the highlands of Colombia, and where the Solimões River flowed muddy from the vast jungle basin. The ferry passed over the seam of clear water giving way to the silted current, and chugged upstream into one of those braided deltas Monarch had seen from the plane.

The forest that lined the Solimões was dense, towering, and many hues of green. Mist hung from the treetops and licked at vines that bloomed with scarlet and crimson flowers. There were birds flying everywhere, big white ones soaring high above the canopy, brilliant blue ones flitting in the lower branches, and magenta ones darting over the river as insects hatched.

“What kind of trees are these?” Monarch asked. “They all look different.”

“Because they are different,” Santos said. “On a single hectare of jungle in this area, you could find a thousand different species of trees and plants. In the entire basin there are believed to be more than eighty thousand different plant species, but more are being discovered all the time. You're looking at the lungs of the world, Monarch. Without the diversity of trees and plants in this basin, life as we know it, would end.”

“What about global warming?”

“That won't affect the rain forest much, as a matter of fact,” she said. “These trees have been growing here since prehistoric times, much hotter eras than are predicted by climate scientists in our future. Unless they are cut down by farmers clearing land, or miners stripping them aside so they can get at the minerals underneath, the trees will be around long after humans are gone.”

The researcher said this all with such passion that Monarch reappraised her, asked, “Do you do everything with such intensity?”

She smiled, cocked her head, and said, “Well, of course. If you're going to do something, don't be half-assed about it.”

“Personal creed?” he asked, amused.

“That was actually my great-grandmother's advice,” she said.

“Vovo,” Monarch said.

“That's right.”

“You kind of left me in the lurch on her story. You cut me off when she woke up in the jungle in a ratty old dress.”

“A ratty old yellow dress,” Santos said, smiling again.

As they sailed deeper into the Amazon rain forest, Santos told Monarch that her great-grandmother had screamed for help upon finding herself alone, but soon realized that she'd been abandoned. Walking in bigger and bigger circles, Vovo finally stumbled onto a game path, and started to follow it.

She walked for days along the game paths, eating fruit and drinking water from streams, before she found a wider trail that led her to a fishing village on the banks of the upper Amazon.

“She couldn't speak a word of Portuguese,” Santos said. “And the people, especially the women there, treated her horribly, called her
mulhar da cavena
. The cave woman. Things like that. I think they were cruel because Vovo was so beautiful. Ultimately her beauty saved her.”

Santos said an older couple gave her great-grandmother a place to sleep and food to eat in return for work. Through them she learned basic Portuguese. There were men after Vovo almost from the beginning. One in particular, a fisherman whom she found repulsive, was always trying to get her alone.

One day the ugly fisherman cornered her on the riverbank away from the village where she'd gone to do laundry. He knocked her down and was tearing her clothes off when a man yelled out. He was on a boat fifty yards out from the bank and had a rifle.

“My great-grandfather was the most handsome man she'd ever seen,” Santos said. “He rescued her and fell in love with her at first sight. He was a mining engineer from São Paulo, and within six months she was married to him, and having his children.”

“Is that true?”

“Absolutely,” the scientist said. “My great-grandfather kept meticulous records, and journals. I've read every one of them, and actually it's because of his papers that I started to believe some of her old stories.”

“How's that?”

“Vovo died in 1994,” Dr. Santos recalled. “It shocked us all. Honest to God, she was strong, healthy, and happy to the end. Just passed on in her sleep. I was really shaken up by it, though. We were very close, and I started going through her things.”

Santos found a fireproof box of documents that included her great-grandfather's university diplomas, photographs, will, and journals. The birth certificate of the scientist's father's father was there as were those of her grandfather's siblings. She also found Vovo's marriage license. It read that on July 19, 1898, Vovo, whose legal name was Ulé Cavernas, married Tomas Fuego. He was twenty-five. She was seventeen.

Santos stopped talking, leaned on the ferry rail, and gazed at Monarch, said, “Do the math.”

Monarch was good at figures, so he was surprised he hadn't seen it right away, even before she told him to run the numbers.

“She was one hundred and fourteen when she died?”

“Give or take a year,” Santos said, nodding. “We can't be too sure of those original shaman calculations.”

Monarch remembered the snapshot of Vovo and Santos as a girl, and was mightily impressed. He'd guessed Vovo had been in her sixties.

“So she was in her early nineties when she came to care for you?”

“Give or take another year.”

“That's incredible.”

“Exactly, my reaction. You would never, ever, have thought she was that old.”

“Did she tell you she was that old?”

“Never.” Santos laughed. “You'd ask, and she'd say she was as old as a Brazil nut tree or something like that. I figured she was in her eighties around the time she died.”

“Did your dad think she was that old?”

She sobered. “He died the year before she did. I never had the chance to ask him.”

“Your mom?”

Santos sobered further. “Early on-set dementia.”

“God, I'm sorry,” Monarch said.

“Me too,” Santos said, chewing the inside of her cheek. “My mom's situation drove me here as much as Vovo's old—”

A miserable-looking, soaking-wet Graciella Scuippa appeared, and said, “We've got to rotate shifts. You can't believe how hot it is down there.”

Todd Carson's research assistant had been below deck guarding the equipment since they'd left nearly two hours before.

“I'll go and relieve him,” Santos said. “We'll do hour shifts.”

Monarch said, “I'll go with you.”

“
I'll
go with you, Stella,” Carson said, fixing Monarch with a stare. “I need to talk to you about a few things anyway.”

Figuring it was probably better to maintain civility, Monarch said, “I'll get the next shift.”

Santos and Carson returned an hour later looking drained. When Monarch entered the hold, he almost immediately had trouble breathing. The air was so saturated and superheated it felt like a full-on steam bath. He took off his shirt, and sat down, resting his back against the cargo net that covered the big outboard motors and the deflated Zodiac rafts. His eyes adjusted and he could see other men in the hold, guarding their valuables as well, and watching him.

Monarch closed his eyes, and a few moments later heard Philippe Rousseau climb down the ladder and come to sit down beside him, gasping, “It's like being in the third circle of hell down here.”

That opened Monarch's eyes to study the French Canadian botanist. “You've been to the third circle of hell?”

“Read about it,” Rousseau said. “You?”

“I've actually been past the third circle quite a few times,” Monarch said. “This is just a mind-over-matter deal, not even close to the third wheel.”

That quieted Rousseau for a few beats, then he said, “What's with the tattoo?”

“Something left over from a few lifetimes ago,” Monarch replied.

Two or three minutes went by, and Monarch was starting to drop into a heat-induced trancelike state when Rousseau said, “Estella won't fuck you, in case you were wondering.”

Monarch squinted at the botanist, said, “I wasn't wondering.”

“You must be the first man on Earth who upon meeting Estella Santos hasn't.”

Monarch said nothing, but remembered doing the human fly in her closet at the institute. She was absolutely stunningly beautiful. And her breasts and hips were works of art. There was no doubt of that, but he'd been trying to avoid thinking about her in that respect. Allowing himself to fantasize about her could cloud his judgment. For Sister Rachel's sake he had so far refused to let that happen.

“Carson has been trying to get in her pants from day one,” Rousseau remarked. “He follows her around like a puppy dog, hoping one day she'll drop her panties and bang him senseless.”

“Uh, huh,” Monarch said. “And you?”

“Me?” Rousseau said. “I wanted to fuck her the moment I saw her, but she'll have none of it with me, Carson, or you. She says it keeps things easier when she's the only woman around on an expedition.”

“Smart lady, Dr. Santos,” Monarch said.

“I wondered for a while if she was a lesbian,” Rousseau said thoughtfully. “But Lourdes said she had male dates out of the office.”

“You sound like you're obsessed,” Monarch said.

“Just interested,” he said. “And you're not?”

“Nope.”

“You gay?”

“Nope.”

“Insane?”

“That's debatable.”

“What's in it for you then? If you're not here to fuck her, I mean, why are you
really
here?”

“I like adventures, and she needed protection.”

“But you bankrolled this.”

“That's right.”

“What do you get in return?”

“First option to try to set up a deal once she's authenticated and patented the discovery.”

The botanist stiffened, said, “I certainly didn't agree to that.”

“If you've got some side deal with her on this research, I'm sure she's taking care of you,” Monarch said reasonably.

“There was another funding option, you know,” Rousseau said, obviously unhappy. “She turned it down without even consulting us, and then cut a deal with you. Estella does this kind of stuff all the time, and it frankly pisses me off.”

“That's between the two of you,” Monarch said.

The botanist stewed on that, before saying, “Well, in any case, we're a long way from patents and options. We don't have enough data yet to support the overall claim. And we have little clue as to what is responsible for the phenomenon.”

“You must have suspicions,” Monarch said.

The botanist studied him, nodded, said, “I believe it's a plant, though which one I have no idea. That would be like looking for the needle in the haystack. You'll see once we get in there.”

“What are we talking? One, two days more travel?”

“Three if we're lucky,” Rousseau said.

“Why aren't we just hiring a helicopter?”

“Try bringing that idea up to Estella and I guarantee you that you will never, ever fuck her,” the botanist said. “She has it in her head that she can learn their secrets and let them be, leave them the way we found them forever.”

“Kind of noble when you think about it.”

With a dismissive flip of his hand, Rousseau replied, “Leaving them the way we found them is impossible. People said the same thing the last time one of these lost tribes was discovered in Papua New Guinea. In one generation they were done, the culture destroyed.”

 

33

THE SUN WAS FINALLY
slanting toward the horizon by the time Monarch came up out of the hold with Rousseau. Though the temperature on deck hovered in the mid-nineties, it seemed cool after the stultifying heat in the confined space below. The two graduate assistants weren't happy about it, but they went down the ladder to take their second watch.

Monarch went to the stern, and sat on a coil of rope where he could catch the breeze. He tried Claudio again, and this time his friend answered.

“Any luck finding Sister or Vargas, brother?” Monarch asked.

Claudio told him about Maria, the woman who'd seen Sister Rachel put into a pickup truck that had also been carrying produce.

“That could be one of thousands around,” Monarch said. “No license plate?”

“She said they drove off with their lights off and it was dark and raining.”

“And the brothers? No one has been contacted by Hector?”