Thief (34 page)

“Oh, God, sugar,” he said. “The spirit is willing. But this old boy's done.”

She pouted.

Arsenault turned his expression pitiful. “I won't be able to walk right as it is.”

Lynette laughed then, deep and genuine. “I gotta be getting to the club anyway. You come watch the first set?”

“You know I would,” Arsenault said. “But my daughter and grandson are coming into town this evening.”

“That's nice,” Lynette said. “My son was down with his baby girl last week.”

“Hard to see you as a grandmother,” he said.

She sobered, shrugged, said, “I started young. Too young. That's what makes this so important to me.”

“You'll get your break,” he said. “It's coming. I can feel it.”

He got up and started toward her tiny bathroom. She sat up in bed, said, “Did you get a chance to talk to that producer you know?”

Arsenault stopped, tilted his head, grinned, and said, “I haven't. But only because he's off in Europe on vacation. He'll be back next week, and once he's gotten a chance to settle, I surely will call and tell him about the undiscovered nightingale singing every night down in the quarter.”

“You think he'll come?” she asked, the hope in her voice ringing like a bell.

“How could he not?” the mogul said. “He trusts my taste, and I've delivered for him several times before.”

Arsenault turned on the shower and got in feeling content and even-keeled. He loved this part of the cycle, when his dusky protégée was finally starting to believe in his power to deliver her dreams. Their sexual ardor was fueled by gratitude, and by the fear that something could always go wrong, that their long, longed-for vision could just slip by, like a feather floating just out of their grasp.

God, they liked to fuck when they were like this.

He loved Louisa. He really did. But when it came right down to it, there was nothing like the passion of a woman of color when she gets in heat and starts dreaming.

There was a trick to keeping them in this state. String them along, inch by frustrating inch, keeping that feather just out of reach. The truth was his producer friend wasn't in Europe. He could have called him ten times in the past week.

But as Arsenault turned off the shower, he knew he wasn't ready for this stage to be over yet. He wanted to enjoy it as long and as frequently as possible.

He dressed and went out into Lynette's bedroom. She was up, naked, arms folded. She gazed at him expectantly. “I'll hear from you after you talk to that producer?”

“You know you will,” he said. “Right?”

Lynette nodded, her eyes watering. “I can't tell you how much I—”

“Shhh,” he said. “Hush now. It's the least I can do for an artist like you.”

*   *   *

As the mogul exited the shabby building, his car pulled up to the curb. Five steps and he was to the car, opening the door, and sliding inside.

“Twelve Oaks, Owen,” he said, shutting and locking the door.

“Yes, sir,” Owen said.

As they pulled away, Arsenault saw Lynette standing at her window, no doubt twisted with doubt and anxiety. He smiled. He enjoyed the tawdriness and desperation of this stage. He rested his head back, and began to close his eyes. His cell phone buzzed with an incoming text.

It was from Saunder's most recent burn phone, asking if he was available.

The mogul texted back that he was, and got a message in return that said, “Secure location. Skype.”

That was good. He hadn't heard from Saunders in days.

“Got some work to do, Owen,” Arsenault said, pushing the button that raised the soundproof wall.

Arsenault fished his iPad out of his briefcase, and called up Skype. He found a bogus account Saunders had created, and dialed an equally sham number. In moments, the face of his director of security filled the screen.

“Where have you been?” he asked.

“I'm still in Rio,” Saunders replied. “I wanted to give you an update.”

“I'm listening.”

Even thought they believed the connection was secure, Saunders spoke in euphemisms, nothing concrete, but Arsenault got the gist of it because they'd decided to refer to Monarch as “the butterfly.”

Saunders began by saying that the “butterfly's sister was fine and safe.” Then his face fell, and he said, “But there have been setbacks and complications.”

“Name them.”

“The butterfly sensed his old friends,” Saunders said. “He went to war, and lost them in the forest three days ago.”

“Where are the butterfly's old friends now?”

“Sitting on his back trail.”

“Okay,” Arsenault said.

“And the old friends have allies.”

“How's that?”

“There is a second party in the forest, an unfortunately familiar party.”

That pissed the mogul off. Somebody else was after Santos's secrets, too? Somebody he competed in business with?

But then Saunders said, “They're after a place to dig.”

The mogul squinted. “For what?”

“They're not saying.”

“Party name?”

Saunders thought about that, and said, “Saucy Jello Buns.”

Arsenault had no idea what he was talking about until his security chief repeated the phrase, emphasizing the first letter of each word: “S-J-B.”

He tightened up inside, and leaned to the screen. “You got to be kidding.”

“No.”

The mogul restrained himself from making a snap analysis or judgment. This was too big a development. He set it aside for the moment, said, “That it?”

“No,” Saunders said. “The butterfly's comrades have been to Switzerland, and are now hunting in the town of Saucy Jello Buns. But we're good. Everyone of consequence has been well paid to flee for the caves.”

“Suggestions?”

Saunders nodded. “We give the butterfly's old friends more weapons. We show him that his sister's wings can be damaged or worse.”

Arsenault thought about that. Something about it made his stomach sour. But there was no denying the effect it would have.

“Use restraint.”

“Always.”

“And the second party?”

“I know you don't want to hear this, but you need to rethink your alliances.”

The mogul took the advice, and set it aside. “More?”

“No.”

“Stay reachable.”

Saunders nodded, and broke the connection.

Arsenault rode in silence, his brain ticking through the developments one by one, evaluating the potential repercussions of each until he reached the final one: Saunders's advice that he rethink his alliances.

That stuck in his craw and it took until they were ten miles from home for the mogul to finally swallow it. Then he went through his regular phone contacts, found Silvio Juan Barbosa's number, and hit send.

There was a good chance Barbosa would not answer, but to his surprise, he did on the third ring, saying coldly, “I thought we were done for good.”

“I'm as heartbroken as you are,” Arsenault said. “But past issues aside, I've come to learn that we have parallel interests in Brazil.”

There was a long pause before Barbosa said, “Where in Brazil?”

“Amazon basin,” Arsenault said. “Where else?”

 

47

TWO DAYS LATER, MONARCH
watched Dr. Santos balance on a bamboo ladder up against the overhung wall as she carefully scrapped tiny samples from the cave painting of the full moon next to the shaman's personal tattoo symbol. The old wise woman watched with interest. She had given up trying to call down hexes on them.

Indeed, Fal-até had formed a bond with Santos upon hearing that she believed the Ayafal did know the age of everyone in the tribe. The lead scientist told the shaman and the chief that the tribe was important to all mankind, and that she needed help to figure out what made members of the tribe live to such an old age.

When she was asked how, Santos intertwined her fingers and told them that she thought she could perform a different kind of time measurement using small samples from the tattoo ink under her skin, and small samples from the cave paint. She believed that their equipment could perform basic carbon-14 and gas spectrographic analysis on both the paint, which was made from ash, and from the tattoo ink, which came from a succulent plant that oozed a bruised purple liquid when its stem was snapped.

Augus and his small clan had refused to cooperate. But Naspec agreed to let her take the samples, especially from the oldest Ayafalians. To their surprise, Fal-até had also agreed to taking samples from the moon phase cave paintings.

It turned out that the shaman was also a midwife, herbal healer, and vast repository of knowledge that the tribe had passed down generation to generation. The Ayafal, for example, knew that there was an outside world. Fal-até said generations of men, including both Naspec and Augus, had left the canyon and gone on long, perilous journeys that brought them to the edge of contact with the modern world, but they'd always turned back.

“Why?” Santos asked the first night as they sat around the fire on those logs arranged out in front of what members of the expedition had taken to calling the northern settlement. Sitting by the fire was a nightly occasion in the Ayafal culture. Every person in the tribe went for at least an hour to talk openly and about everything, men, women, and children.

The chief had shrugged at Santos's question, and said, “We'd already found what we were looking for, and it was time to return here with it.”

“What were you looking for?” Carson asked.

“Girls,” the shaman said matter-of-factly.

When Santos had pressed her on the meaning of her reply, Fal-até revealed that the Ayafal understood the dangers of inbreeding, which she said had been taught to them by the moon god at the beginning of time. This fear of inbreeding explained why Santos's great-grandmother and Kiki had woken up the day after their sixteenth birthday to find themselves abandoned in the jungle.

“For every girl who leaves,” the shaman said. “Another must be brought in. This way, the blood of Ayafal babies remains strong.”

Monarch had flashed on the tribal members who looked more Mediterranean than indigenous, said, “Is she saying they kidnap girls and bring them here against their will?”

Santos posed the question. Fal-até shrugged, and said, “It has always been so.”

This news had distressed the lead scientist, who said, “Is it right to steal girls and bring them here when they don't want to come?”

Naspec had reacted angrily, saying, “They want to be here.”

The chief called over a woman about the age of twenty, who balanced a baby on her hip. She looked more Latin than Indian. Her name was Petté, and she was brought to the canyon when she was a young girl, so young she barely remembered her other life, which she said was full of demons.

“So you want to be here?” Santos had asked in Ayafal after Portuguese had failed.

“This is my life,” Petté said. “My husband, my children, the canyon. I am very happy. Ever since I came here I've been happy.”

Santos, the other scientists and their assistants, and Monarch cringed at the idea that the Ayafal regularly abandoned girls born in the canyon, and snatched others to replace them. It destroyed the idea that the canyon was an Eden, and the tribe the perfect society. It was also soon apparent that the females who'd been kidnapped into the society were tattoo-less, and because of it they seemed to be held in somewhat lower esteem than the tribal members who'd been born in synch with the moon.

And what of the banished girls, the ones drugged and abandoned? The shaman said they were given up to the gods, though their sudden absence always caused a collective grieving, almost like a funeral or a wake. The banished girls themselves were always watched from afar as they awoke from the paralytic drug, and then wandered off into the jungle. Until Kiki, not once in any living tribe member's memory had a banished girl managed to return.

But then, about a year after Kiki was abandoned, the men in the village heard the howler monkeys going nuts. The monkeys, so curious and concerned about strangers in their midst, were like an alarm system. Several men, including Naspec, went out to investigate, and spotted Kiki sitting on the stream bank where the girls were traditionally left. The chief was secretly overjoyed. But it wasn't until Santos had started speaking in Ayafal that he decided to bring Kiki and the others inside the canyon the first time.

Though Augus and his clan argued that that decision had already damaged the tribe, the other members seemed, after getting over the initial shock of outsiders, very welcoming. Especially Getok, who followed Monarch everywhere, smiling, and watching from behind his red mask.

He was smiling even now as Monarch watched Santos climb down off the ladder with the samples from the cave calendar in plastic sleeves.

“That everything you need?” the thief asked.

“Everything we need from here,” Santos said. “And Graciella and Edouard should be done taking the physical samples by the time we reach the settlement where those women who knew Vovo live.”

“What samples are they taking?” Monarch asked, noticing that Fal-até was staring up at the moon and the symbol that coincided with her own birth.

“Mouth swab for DNA,” Santos replied, writing on the plastic sleeves, identifying the samples. “And we make a slight stick of a very thin sterilized needle to get the dye.”

“No blood samples?” Monarch said.

“I figured that might cause a revolt,” she said. “Too much too soon.”

“You're probably right,” the thief said.

“We should get going,” the scientist replied. “We've got a long walk before dark.”

Fal-até came over to them and spoke. Naspec, the chief, listened, looked at Monarch with new eyes, and nodded.