“Abilio, thank you for talking to me. Did you eat or drink anything before you got sick? Maybe something tasted wrong to you?”
“No.”
“You’re sure?”
The head shook weakly. The eyes were huge with fright but the voice remained steady. “We ate fish from the river. We ate tapir, but it was cooked. We ate rice that we got from FUNAI, the Indian agency. It all tasted fine.”
“Something you drank, then?”
“Just water, boiled, like doctors said.”
“Maybe you went somewhere new. A mine. A ranch,” I said, wondering if the kids had been exposed to a chemical used for deforestation, construction, mineral processing.
“Only to see Shrek, Doctor.”
I didn’t get it at first. I thought he’d said a Portuguese word. I asked Bracamonte what Shrek meant and he smiled despite the boy’s pain and told me, “It is the American film. You never heard of Shrek?”
“The movie?”
“We watched it at FUNAI,” Abilio forced out. “It was funny. There was a green man. Animals sang songs and talked in the movie. I laughed very much.”
“Did all the kids who got sick go to the movie?”
“Yes.”
“Were adults there, too?”
“They were at a government meeting about the new dam. Only children saw the movie.”
“You liked the movie?” I asked, not to learn a clue, just to keep him talking while I figured out more questions. But sometimes the wrong question gets the right answer.
“The donkey was funny! It was cold in the room from the air conditioner. So cold! That old conditioner was making so much noise that it was hard to hear the singing donkey.”
I sat back and let my eyes rove over the children. Blankets were thrown off some, who were sweating. Or piled on cold ones, who shivered. The ward smelled of vomit. Abilio had just said something important. About the movie. What was it? The animals talked, he said. No adults were there, he said. And then I saw it. The disparate symptoms might have just fallen into place.
Cold, he’d said. Cold!
“Old air conditioner,” I said softly.
“And noisy! Clackclackclackclack!”
“Dr. Bracamonte, do you have a microscope in the hospital? Can I see his sputum or blood? Can we also get someone to scrape dust off that air conditioner?”
The hospital had no electron microscope, he said, but their compound-light unit would provide a 2,000 magnification. In a dimly lit lab, fifteen minutes later, I peered down at Abilio’s sputum and saw something inside it looking like churned-up chopped meat from a hand grinder, pinkish strands. I sat back on the stool, breathing rapidly. An hour later the same pink strands showed up in the dust brought back from the AC vents at FUNAI. That the doctors here had missed the symptoms was not unusual. This particular disease is misdiagnosed even in developed countries 90 percent of the time. In fact I’d only thought of it because bioterror seminars always feature presentations on biodelivery systems, and airflow systems — ventilation shafts, cooling towers, AC — top the list.
“It’s Legionnaires’ disease.”
The rare illness is often misdiagnosed because the diarrhea — not normally part of pneumonia — throws clinicians off. And Indians in recent contact with the modern world would be particularly susceptible. Legionnaires’ was named in 1976 after it killed several American Legion conventioneers in Philadelphia, spread by a hotel vent system. The good news was that if you catch it early, treatment is available, and different for children than it is for hardier adults.
“Penicillin doesn’t work on this,” I explained to Dr. Bracamonte. “You used the right drug for pneumonia, but not for what they have.”
Bracamonte told me that the recommended drug for children stricken with Legionnaires’—azithromycin — was unavailable in Porto Velho. I got on the sat phone and woke Stuart in New York, at 4 A.M. I told my boss that we could improve “local government relations” if he sent down some crates of the drug. If there are two words that Stuart responds to instantly, they are government relations.
“They will be there tomorrow,” Stuart said. “How are things otherwise, Joe? Any word on Eddie?”
“No.”
When I hung up, a grateful Bracamonte told me, “While you were on the phone, two men from the miners union were asking about you. They are thugs. They had your photo. One of them said he is a friend of yours, but I did not believe it. I told them you were not here. I hope I did right.”
“Thank you. You did. I was never here, okay?”
That night, Cizinio let us sleep at the Indian House, the publicly maintained hostel open to any tribal member in town. It was a hard dirt compound ringed by a clay wall and it offered visitors simple dorm buildings with bunk beds along three walls. We spent the hours before dawn squatting before a campfire as Cizinio traced maps of New Extrema and the island in the dirt, beneath the southern stars. He’d not come with us, he said. He’d stay with his son.
“The guards are usually by the dock, here. Two of them. This is where they will many times buy Indian artwork, blowguns, or pottery. But then they send us away. There is a stream here, in back of the island, where there are no guards, but there are biting snakes and sand that you sink into, unless you step in the right place.”
“Cizinio, do you know where I can get a gun?”
“You need gold for that.”
“I have it,” said Rooster helpfully.
“I’ll pay you back,” I promised. “My money is at my hotel, in the safe.”
Rooster’s plastic vial of gold dust got emptier at a shanty where an emaciated, cigarette-puffing, coughing man nicknamed “Hulk” sold us an old, well-oiled Brazilian-made Taurus pistol, wrapped in rags. It came with thirty rounds of .40-caliber ammunition. I racked the slide. When a water truck went by outside, its muffler broken, I fired into a tree. The pistol pulled slightly to the left. But it worked fine.
Rooster also paid for the boat tickets (we had to wait until dusk to leave), rice, hammocks, mosquito netting, and rain ponchos, in an open-air market near the Indian House. I felt lousy about the next part but not bad enough not to do it. Since my medical kit was at the hotel, at a side door to the hospital, we bought stolen antibiotics; tet and sulfa… from a fat, furtive attendant who Rooster knew. Yesterday I’d helped save patients here. Today I was robbing them. But if Eddie needed care I wanted to be able to provide it. For everything I steal, I will send five times the amount back from the U.S., I promised myself.
If I get home.
But Eddie comes first.
“Your brother might not even be on the island, Rooster. And if he is, things might get violent.”
“If you risk going, I can, too.”
“If you knew that your brother might be on that island, why did you wait so long to check it out?”
Rooster blushed in embarrassment. “I was afraid. But you are so determined. You made me brave.”
Now the weekly ferry chugged into a darkness as thick as nonexistence. The lights of Porto Velho had long ago fallen behind, steady ones for electric light, flickering ones for firelight in shantytowns. On deck, riders played dominoes or guitar music. A woman unwrapped beans and rice from a foil-covered plate for her family. It smelled good.