People on deck suddenly pointed beyond her, calling happily to their friends. Look! Finally! New Extrema!
Her hands fluttered up, patted the air as if to say Calm down, boy! The lips curved as if amused but the eyes were hard. Khaki undershirt top. Tropical-weight painter’s pants and lightweight boots. She held the camera tightly, slightly lowered now.
“It took you long enough to see us, Joe Rush,” she said in English, with a Brazilian accent. “Keep your voice down. I will take your picture.”
I smelled Avon Skin So Soft, repellant of choice among Amazon travelers, even the toughest men.
“Stand still! What I want to know,” she said mockingly, snapping shots, “is what kind of moron goes to another country and can’t speak the language? Ambassador to China who can’t speak Chinese. CIA in Baghdad can’t speak Arabic. You have no idea what these people are saying about you, do you? Not a clue.”
“He knows,” I said defensively, nodding at Rooster.
“You think so? The passengers see you’re together so they talk about chickens when he’s around. Everyone on this boat except you and that pessoa, incompetente, knows what’s going to happen to you, and they’re afraid to tell you, because then it would happen to them. They’re even taking bets.” Her eyes flickered left.
I looked. Most passengers eyed the approaching landing, but the one or two faces that looked back at me showed the sick fascination marking onlookers at a traffic accident. The eyes you see staring before you pass out, the gapers torn between wishing you well, and wanting the entertainment of being the audience for your pain.
The woman told me, “The Captain got a radio message about you and then he sent crew to look for you. Get it? The union, the police, the Captain… connected. If you get off this boat in New Extrema, you’ll be killed, Joe Rush. Emboscada. Our time-honored frontier assassination.” She glanced at the sun meaningfully. It was starting to sink. The faint moon was up already, ghostly above treetops, like a cataract eye.
“Ray sent you?” I said thinking, He came through!
“Who the hell is Ray?” She shook her head like a fifth grade teacher disgusted with a lazy student. “You people make me laugh. You shut us out. You lie. Although I admit, I might have not figured out about New Extrema if not for you.”
“Who are you?”
“Oh, you don’t like it when friends don’t share imformation? You’re frustrated?” Considering the force in her, I was surprised at her diminutive size. Her head barely reached my chest. She was barely five feet tall. Only now did I see that her contempt was cover for rage.
“Look, whoever you think I am,” I said, fed up, “I’m not. And whatever you think I know, I don’t. So give me a break and stop talking in riddles. Who are you? And him?”
The landing coming up was dwarfed by forest. It looked like an afterthought, and could be wiped off the earth in the blink of an eye, the usual eventual fate of flyspeck settlements in this part of the world. This place had been falling apart since the moment of its creation. I saw a dozen squarish hut-like buildings, cinderblock walls, tin roofs, two rooms at most; and meat-scented cooking smoke rose from a stovepipe chimney. There had to be adults here but I didn’t see any, odd, because probably the once-a-week ferry arrival was a big local event.
Maybe they’d been warned to stay away.
A red dirt path meandered from the concave dock up the mud bank toward the forest… and the somnambulant air was underscored by a few chickens pecking, a mud-coated pig rooting, a skinny dog sleeping, a couple of paint-faded outboard boats and a dugout on the bank, and twin bare-chested, barefoot Indian boys grinning as the ferry coughed like an asthmatic and eased sideways and sooty smoke roiled out the top. Sleepy didn’t begin to describe this place. Dead was more like it. But the woman had just told me that killers were here. Which made the ratty buildings and massed trees all potential ambush points.
“Stay on the boat, Colonel. Go back.”
Eddie must really be here.
I shook my head. “Now who’s the naive one?” I said. “You’re telling me if I leave, I’ll be safe?”
She said nothing. Then, reluctantly, “You have a point. See those guys by the railing? They were taking bets on how many hours you’ll last. Ten to one… not ’til tomorrow.”
The boat bumped the dock. Whatever it is that constitutes instinct, every Marine knows that you ignore it at your peril, and the woman’s dirty green eyes blazed with passion now. As if to tell me, You fucked up my plans, too.
I thought back, There’s no way I’ll leave this place before finding out about Eddie. He would not leave if it was me, so goddamn you, CIA.
The gangplank lowered and a few riders filed off, but most would stay on, bound for other settlements. I noticed one little girl holding a liter-sized empty beer bottle as a doll, whispering to it, and glancing back with curiosity at me, having heard what her parents were saying about me, clearly wondering with those big eyes if Joe Rush would even make it all the way ten feet to shore, before shotguns blasted out from one of those buildings ahead.
I told Rooster that I was getting off here, but he was going back to Porto Velho, and I got no argument! Rooster, pale and trembling, just nodded. He was a good man, and his bravery was used up.
Somehow, that talk — my protecting Rooster — made the woman answer me finally, and identify herself. It was a shock. She wasn’t CIA at all.
TEN
The ambush came in the middle of the night.
Undercover Brazilian Federal Police Captain Izabel Santo reached to wake me at 1 A.M. but I was up, having heard the scraping outside. I stopped her hand before it touched my shoulder. In the dark I rolled from the unzipped sleeping bag and gripped my Taurus. The two special-assignment cops and I had practiced moving around the hotel room in blackness, the Brazilians fast-crawling to a corner, me swinging up into the latticework roof support. To turn on the bare bulb would have sent a crack of light beneath the door, alerted any attackers. But the light probably didn’t work anyway. No electricity did in New Extrema after 11 P.M., when the municipal generator went off, and jungle noises flooded in.
“You’re police?” I’d asked Izabel on the boat, amazed, hours ago. “Investigating your own people?”
“You don’t have internal investigations in your own country?” she’d snapped.
“Why are you on this boat?”
“Because we followed you. You and your friend show up, and you are clearly not just doctors. You work with Anasasio, a crook. You go to the gold rush, where there are smugglers. At first I think you are smugglers, too, but now I see that if these people — these filhos da puta—are after you, maybe you found what we’re looking for.”
Posing as magazine reporters, Izabel said, she and Sublieutenant Nelson Salazar had been taking photos of smugglers paying off local police.
Having a raging argument while trying to look casual before a boatload of curious strangers can be difficult. She called me a fool and a suicide and kept insisting that I stay on board with Rooster, sail past New Extrema, and perhaps my cowardice might keep us alive.
“Maybe you work with them,” I said.