Thief (27 page)

Monarch took off his ball cap and neckerchief, leaned over the side and plunged them into the water and held them there.

“I wouldn't keep your hand in there long, Mr. Monarch,” Santos said.

He glanced at her puzzled.

She said, “Piranha.”

Monarch jerked his hand, hat, and neckerchief out as if he'd touched a live wire. The scientist smiled and looked away.

The river had narrowed considerably, and traffic had dropped off as well. Since leaving Tefé, they'd seen only fishermen and a few small ferries coming downstream from one of the lesser villages ahead. Moored along the bank were three speedboats Santos said belonged to a mining company.

“SJB,” she said as if she were spitting. “They're criminals.”

“Meaning?” Monarch said.

“It's a vast wilderness where we are headed,” she said. “A forbidden zone, eighty-six million square miles set aside for the uncontacted Indian tribes, and by Brazilian law those lands are off-limits to logging and mining exploration. But SJB ignores the boundaries and sends in small crews to do tests. They have several mines right up against the boundaries.”

“But then again, we're going into that forbidden zone, right?”

“In the interest of science, not money,” she said in a huff.

“Is what we're doing illegal?”

She hesitated, and then said, “Technically, I suppose, but I'll deal with that if I have to. Again, it's all in the interest of science.”

Pink and white wading birds flushed before them. The air at times smelled perfumed, and at others foul. Woodsmoke hung in the air as they passed small logging operations, and tiny settlements with long, thin, shallow draft boats pulled up on the banks. In the increasingly longer stretches of uninhabited jungle and river they saw caimans, South American crocodiles, dozens of them sunning along the banks, and floating in reedy backwater channels.

An old woman crouched in the water upstream of six or seven of the huge reptiles. She was washing clothes in the silted water. Seeing her, Monarch remembered all that Santos had said about the number of centenarians in Tefé.

He looked over at the scientist, and said, “So what did you find in common among the three hundred and fifty-six people older than one hundred years old in Tefé?”

“Most had indigenous blood in them,” she said, seeming relieved to change the subject. “Which is odd because so many of the Indians who leave the jungle end up adopting the absolute worst habits of the Western world once they're exposed. They smoke too much. They drink too much. Their diet is horrible.”

“So it's genetic?” Monarch asked.

“This trip is an attempt to figure that out,” she replied. “But it could easily be the diet involved, or the things they smoke.”

“Smoke?” he asked.

“Part of their spiritual life,” she said.

“Okay,” the thief said, not knowing what to make of that. “But back up. How did you get from Tefé to where we're going?”

“That took me nearly five years,” she said. “Whenever I could come to Tefé for my fieldwork, I kept thinking about the village Vovo walked to after she was abandoned, and I finally decided to search for it.”

“How?”

“I talked to as many of the centenarians as I could,” she said. “Asked them if they or any of their ancestors walked out of the jungle to join society. I was shocked at the number of them who had left the rain forest on a long walk similar to Vovo's, or were born to Indians who'd walked out a generation before them.”

Santos began to gather these stories of exodus. In almost all of them, the wanderer remembered coming to the banks of the big river for the first time. The scientist set out to find some of these places, traveling alone or with local guides, searching up one braided channel of the Solimões or another. She found several locations that matched the descriptions she was given, but discovered nothing there of note, no obvious beaten-down trail, no logic to any of it.

But then again, why would there be an underlying logic to how people left one life for another? One universe for another?

“I supposed their great walk was like any migration, forced upon them by environmental or societal factors, at different times and in different places,” Santos said. “So trying to pattern the migrations in and of themselves didn't help much. And my search was hampered by the language barriers. The dialects up here change every ten or fifteen miles.”

“How many languages in Brazil?”

“Thousands,” she replied. “Most people speak multiple dialects up here, and there are trading languages, river languages, like Bororro.”

“What about the dialect Vovo spoke to you?”

“That was the discouraging part. I tried to speak it to nearly everyone I encountered in Tefé and during my further explorations. Some of them almost seemed to understand me, but it wasn't solid, you know?”

Monarch nodded. “Did you ever find where Vovo came out?”

“I've narrowed it down to a few places, but not exactly,” she said. “Somewhere upriver of where Vovo eventually met my great-grandfather.”

Monarch looked beyond her and Carson. Rousseau was driving the second Zodiac with the two graduate assistants up front. The follow raft swung lazily behind them. They were traveling a long straight in the river, and he was able to look well over a mile back to the last bend.

It was late afternoon by then, almost evening, and the light had turned slanted. He caught a flash back there, the sun reflecting off metal. Another boat most likely. Two of those shallow-draft canoes came by from the opposite direction.

Monarch kept looking downriver as the sun sank lower, but saw no more flashes.

Twenty minutes later, Santos pointed inland toward a small lake and village, said, “That's Uarini where I had the biggest break. I had been interviewing centenarians there, and was getting ready to leave to go back to Tefé, when a friend of mine, a nurse who roams the river offering medical care, found me.

“She said she'd heard from one of her patients that an indigenous girl had walked out of the jungle three days before,” Santos went on. “She was paralyzed with fear, and no one could understand a thing she was— Oh, look there: see those two huge rubber trees growing near the bank, how their branches join, and that little stream beyond?”

Monarch saw what she was talking about. It almost looked like a gateway. “I do.”

“That's where I think Vovo came out,” she said. “At least I like to think so.”

“Kind of gives you chills,” he said.

“Doesn't it?”

Before Santos could continue with her story, Rousseau slowed to ask her which way to go. The river was severely braided in this stretch, and she had to get up in the bow to navigate. Twice she got lost and they had to double back and find the right channel.

Finally, as dusk fell, Santos said, “That's it up ahead, the mouth, that tiny village there on the left, just beyond the confluence.”

Monarch peered through the low light past a side channel to glowing kerosene lanterns hung on poles before a ring of shacks. Several of those long, thin skiffs were pulled up on shore, and men were mending nets.

Santos said, “So anyway, to continue what I was saying before, I first came to this little settlement late in the day after hearing about the girl who'd walked out of the forest from my friend the nurse.”

Carson cut the engines and they drifted up beside the beached skiffs. Shack doors started opening and people in ragged clothes began piling out, shouting out cries of welcome and hello. Men, women, and children crowded forward around the scientist, kissing her, hugging her, and shaking her hand.

“The conquering hero returns,” Monarch said when the hubbub had died down a bit, and the people had gone to greet the others.

Santos laughed, said, “That was not the way I was treated the first time I came here, I can assure you. They were very protective of her, and didn't want me seeing her at first. But eventually they let me, though they warned me I wouldn't understand a thing she said.”

“Where was she?”

“In that shack there on the right,” Santos said, looking like she was reliving the moment as she stared at the crude dwelling. “I went inside with a lantern. She was afraid of it. She was afraid of anything that was new, which was pretty much everything. So when I walked in, she cringed and hid from me.”

The scientist spoke to her soothingly in the other two Indian dialects she'd learned, and got no response. Then she tried the language her great-grandmother taught to her, and the girl's head lifted in astonishment.

“She looked at me like I had come down from the sky to rescue her,” Santos recalled in awe. “She came and threw her arms around me and started to sob out words to me, and my God, Monarch, I understood all of it.”

Tears streamed down the scientist's cheeks when she said, “It was the greatest moment of my life.”

“Stella!” a woman cried.

“Kiki?”

Kiki rushed out of the darkness, a young Indian woman in a khaki cotton skirt, sleeveless black shirt, and sandals. She threw her arms around Santos, and began chattering at her in a language that only the two of them understood.

Monarch was moved and fascinated by the entire experience. Obviously Kiki was the girl from Vovo's tribe.

At last, the scientist stood and gestured to the thief, calling him by name.

“This is my dearest friend Kiki,” Santos said.

Smiling shyly, Kiki held out her hand. He shook it and found her skin like fine glove leather and her grip strong. Indeed, everything about her looked strong and powerful, until a fourth person came out of the darkness from upriver. A hard-looking man in a cut-off T-shirt, black shorts, and sandals, he was smoking a cigarette and eyeing the rafts, the people, and Kiki suspiciously.

He barked several words at Kiki and Monarch saw her diminish somehow.

“It's her boyfriend Nolomé,” Santos said out of the side of her mouth. “He doesn't like me, but he likes the money I'm going to pay her to guide us.”

The scientist said something that Monarch didn't catch and Kiki's boyfriend looked like he wanted to spit, but then nodded with disdain.

“Okay then,” Santos said. “It's official. We'll start in toward the boundary first thing in the morning.”

“How long will it take us to get in there?” Monarch asked.

The scientist shrugged. “It depends on the river and the jungle and what's happened since we went in last time. On the whole, though, I advise you to stop thinking so much about time because the place we're going is timeless.”

 

37

BUENOS AIRES

“THAT HIM?” CHANEL CHAVEZ
asked, gesturing through the windshield.

She was pointing across the street to a Latino in his early forties whose well-tailored clothes made him look out of place as he did the pimp roll along a row of grimy auto mechanic and body repair shops ten miles east of the Villa Miserie.

Claudio Fortunato threw up the binoculars, took a quick look at the man and his inner right forearm, said, “I haven't seen him in almost twenty years, but that is Alonzo Miguel. And he's still flying the colors of
la fraternidad
.”

“What I tell you, Claudio?” said a heavyset man in the backseat of the rented Toyota van. “Did the brother steer you wrong?”

“Rico, you've never steered me wrong,” Claudio replied.

Rico smiled, revealing an upper-right gold incisor.

The man beside Rico was whippet-thin, sharply dressed, and puffing on an electronic cigarette. Looking disgusted, he whined, “Shit, Claudio. What about that time at Las Cavernas, that nightclub on—?”

“Hey, Nelly,” Claudio barked, looking in the rearview mirror. “Ladies present. Ladies present.”

Chavez looked over her shoulder at Nelly and winked. Nelly scowled, and ran his palm over his slicked-back hair. “Didn't know it was a sensitive subject.”

“So what now?” Rico asked.

“You and Nelly drive around the corner and down a couple of blocks and wait,” Fortunato said. “Channel and I are going to pay old Alonzo a visit.”

“You carrying?” Nelly asked.

Both Chavez and Claudio shook their heads.

“You should,” Nelly said, clamping the electronic cigarette between his teeth. He slid up his right pant leg, and came up with a small-frame .25-caliber Beretta, which he handed to Chavez. Then he reached around his back, under his shirt and came up with a stouter gun, a .45-caliber Ballester-Molina that he gave to Claudio.

“Why're you packing so much heat?” Rico asked. “You're a hair dresser for Christ's sake.”

“Better safe than sorry,” Nelly sniffed.

Claudio stuck the .45 in his waistband, but he didn't like it. He'd been shot once, and the idea of a gunfight frankly made him queasy. He got out of the rental car, and angled across traffic toward a low, mustard-colored building with two open garage bays, and “El Camino Auto” painted in green below the flat roofline.

Chavez slipped up beside him, said, “How did Rico steer you wrong?”

Claudio licked his lips sourly, said, “I'm not avoiding this?”

“Nope.”

The painter looked miserable, but said, “Years ago, Rico tells me that he's noticed a beautiful woman interested in me at a nightclub, so I go over. We talk, we dance, we go home, and things get interesting, and…”

“Out with it.”

“She was a he.”

Chavez snorted with laughter. “No.”

“Oh, yes,” Claudio replied, and chuckled. “A real eye-opener.”

They were close enough to the engine repair shop that they could hear the whir of air wrenches and the banging of hammer on steel. Two cars were up on hydraulic jacks. Mechanics worked beneath them, and it smelled of decades of motor oil and gasoline.