The man smiled at length. She wanted cocaine. The other told him that she was Jonas’s girlfriend, and Annie didn’t realize that this was the cause of the man suddenly raising his eyebrows, as if he smelled something wrong, and sending the other one away. Facing her, he gently took her two arms and asked her something incomprehensible. Immobile and still peering at him, she could feel, in place of his missing finger, the stump of skin caressing her. She would give a great deal to know how he had lost his finger, and even more to know to whom the finger she had found belonged. She almost took it from her pocket, to show it to the trafficker and wait for him to draw his own conclusions. Instead, she simply stared at him and repeated cocaine, cocaine, cocaine. There was no way he couldn’t understand, and who knows why he decided to humor her.
After a signal to a third man, Annie within minutes had in front of her three lines of the best cocaine she had ever done. The boss was generous — he could only want something in return. At her first snort Annie saw it was a fine, very white powder, and it had an unusually good smell. So different from what Jonas normally supplied her with day to day, though a little more like what she snorted on the nights they had sex. Feeling her body move as if responding involuntarily, it was as if she were reconstituted to return to a situation now very far away in her life, the situation before everything happened. As if she no longer needed to recover, as if her life in Rio had magically worked out, as if the past could be expunged to make way for a present both solid and very fleeting, a present over which she would have the control she’d never had: she felt her bones restoring themselves, the world regaining its colors, people moving about, and the extremely dark eyes of the man without a finger staring at her. What do you want? he seemed to ask and perhaps did ask. Annie would have so much to reply, but for now she thought of Jonas. Where was he? You understand me, her eyes said, I know you understand me, and he seemed undecided whether to take her at that moment, whether she was worth all the trouble she seemed to bring with her.
But no, perhaps he wasn’t pondering anything, and Annie for the first time paid attention to her surroundings. On a bureau in the corner a forgotten cell phone was vibrating, announcing a message, a cell phone exactly like Jonas’s. Whether or not it would be suicide for Annie to break through the blockade of the man’s eyes and go to check who was sending the message, it no longer mattered to her — after all, she could do anything now. Determined, she went over and picked up the phone and opened it. The screen was scratched like Jonas’s, and there were new messages. Since some of them could be the very ones she had sent hours before, she opened the first one: it was in Portuguese and therefore said nothing. She didn’t have time to see the second one because the man with the dark eyes and missing finger grabbed the device and angrily shouted something that certainly wasn’t an authorization for her to keep snooping. At that moment, Annie realized that nothing would be as easy as giving up for good. As calmly as if she had done this before, she took the finger from her pocket and almost rubbed it in the man’s face. “Whose is it?”
His reaction only indicated that she had gone too far. He yanked the finger out of her hands and stared at it, looking a bit sad. He glanced at the finger in one hand, the cell phone in the other, at Annie’s face, then back at the finger, mulling over his next steps. He wasn’t furious but a little melancholy, and above all, startled: how the fuck had that finger ended up in the hands of that goddamn gringa who couldn’t speak and didn’t know anything about anything? Or maybe she knew and was trying to threaten him? Just let her try.
Grumbling, the man called one of the others. He was older, very skinny, and slightly bent over. Upon hearing the orders of the boss without a finger, he began smiling and Annie saw he was missing two front teeth. Still smiling, he took her by the hand, and she asked for the first time what she should have tried to discover from the beginning: “Doesn’t anybody here speak English?” But those there who spoke at least at a basic level weren’t the ones who heard Annie before she was taken to another alleyway and placed without resistance on the passenger seat of a motorcycle by the old man, who a few minutes later started the engine.
“Where’s Jonas?” she shouted again. It was as if he were deaf. He drove at high speed through the forest and the sound of the engine drowned out the words, “Where is Jonas? Where are you taking me? Why?”
Without answers, they rode deeper into the forest. Little by little Annie could feel the air grow cooler, humid, like in the carefree mornings when she wandered the trails. The houses gave way to trees and finally to dense vegetation on both sides of the asphalt. She knew that many of the roads in the forest were outside the limits of the park itself and therefore remained open after visiting hours, even though it was all the same woods. The question was where the man was taking her. They could emerge in another favela on the other side of the city. They could stop right there, or in some other spot, God knows where. Annie tried to keep calm. She might never find out what had happened to Jonas or to the owner of the finger. Things of the past, like all the rest. She would have to recover from them like from everything else, like from herself if she were spared that night.
“Are you going to spare me?” she asked. The man grunted; it was useless.
If they could at least communicate. The park ranger had warned her. If she at least spoke Portuguese, she could find out what was going on, could have a history, cause and effect. If she had listened to Jonas, to the ranger, and later to the traffickers. If she listened. The bike’s engine didn’t completely drown out the crickets, a few night fowl that she had never heard before. In the Kansas fields so long ago she would know how to listen to them. In New York she hadn’t heard anything, but that had been a long time ago. She could understand; if she spoke, if she listened, she might take off the blindfold.
A car passed by, its engine approaching and retreating. She could yell for help, in some form, throw herself from the motorcycle and run as best she could toward whoever had just crossed her path. She could throw herself from the motorcycle at any moment; what kept her tied there? She would come out a bit banged up, true, but it wouldn’t be the first accident in her life. The man kept on driving, impassively. Annie yelled one last time, “Why?” And without reply they continued through the forest, deeper and deeper, the lampposts were becoming farther apart and the darkness of the trees, once so welcoming, was now only the darkness in which no one could see, speak, or investigate anything. The curves came one after the other and the roadway disappeared behind them in seconds, until they rounded one that suddenly ended in a small square. In the square was a car with its headlights off and some people inside who were surely having sex.
Unable to resist, the man braked, turned off the motor, and peeked in. Annie peeked as well and would never forget the two pairs of eyes suddenly staring through the glass, observing them in return, planning their defense. The woman’s breasts, very large and sagging for her young age, swung lightly while the man, still in his shirt, kicked open the door and, holding an iron bar, came toward them. The old, toothless man was lost: he had to fight. With tears in her eyes, petrified, the woman opened the rear window to scream for help and gestured to the man who had been fucking her to let it go, get in the car, and flee. Because the stranger on the motorcycle could be armed, and was. Old, yes, but his criminal appearance left no doubt. The man who had been fucking the woman nevertheless advanced, and before seeing the old man take out his gun, Annie realized she wouldn’t have another chance to get away. She ran into the woods before hearing the first shot.