Better drivers wove back and forth insanely, avoiding two-foot-deep holes. Anasasio steered around an enormous semi truck piled high with tropical hardwoods. “Cut illegally,” he announced. He passed a refrigerated cattle truck, swaying like an accordion. “Yum! Meat!” We carried sloshing fuel in plastic jugs in back, as “gasoline sold on the highway is watered.” The windshield wipers smeared mosquitoes. Eight P.M. was mosquito cocktail hour.
Three hours left until my meeting with Rooster.
“I wish we could have tracked Eddie through his phone,” I said.
“It is probably at the bottom of the Madeira.”
I thought, Rooster’s note in my pocket said, 11 P.M. 32 Rondon Street. Do not bring Anasasio!
“You know the poem. A woman and cocaine dull all pain,” Anasasio said. His hand was on my knee.
If Rooster is the liar, the meeting will be a trap.
Traffic thickened as we entered the Rondônia state capital. Twenty years ago it was a sleepy backwater. Now the road widened to four lanes, and we slowed into a traffic jam of old metro busses and smoke-belching trucks and new Mercedes cars. The outlying shantytowns, once rain forest, were masses of one-story-high tin-roofed shacks where trees were memories, the sky crisscrossed by pirated power lines: copper, TV wiring, anything that carried electricity. Anasasio laughed at the lawbreaking. “What do you do in your country when a law is stupid? You ignore it, of course.”
I told him that I did not need him this evening as a translator. I lied and said that I’d stay at the hotel. We passed into the newer business area, banks, glass office buildings, even a “museum of nature”—museums being where civilized people like to keep nature — and paved residential streets lined with ranch-style, white-walled, stucco-roofed homes. Richer properties came with alarm systems. The difference between first-world and developing countries is the attention given public places versus privately owned ones.
“My friend, Joe. Let me take you along tonight. I know an excellent place on Rondon Street.”
I tried not to show surprise on my face. I hoped the place on Rondon Street was not the same one where I was to meet Rooster. That Porto Velho was one of those towns where saloons, brothels, and gambling dens are located in a row.
“Just the hotel, Anasasio.”
“No! Let us make another tour of the malaria hospitals. Perhaps your friend checked in while we were away! We must keep trying! You are right! Maybe he did not drown!”
Ninety minutes to go.
The “hospitals” were one-room clinics where dozens of victims lay looking half dead in beds beneath mosquito netting. Intravenous lines ran blue medicines into their arms. Malaria patients exhibit the rag doll attitude of the dead, when they are not shivering.
Suddenly I straightened and joy filled me! I saw Eddie, in a bed in the corner!
It wasn’t Eddie. My spirits plunged.
Anasasio put his arm around my shoulder as we arrived at the hotel and main plaza. “The hotel of lost causes is well named. I’ll see you in the morning. Sleep is what you need, Joe. Then a trip home. Good night.”
The hotel of lost causes — the Ecológica — lay across the plaza from the Governor’s mansion and cathedral and two-story-high barracks that served as state headquarters for the National Police. I’d been grilled there for hours when I’d reported Eddie gone.
Why are you really here, Doctor?
The hotel was the sort of remote bastion of idealism that Stuart usually booked for researchers: bright, clean, and filled with underdogs from the world over; German environmentalists trying to save the rain forest, New York Botanical Garden scientists seeking cancer cures in the treetops, leftist journalists chronicling rich ranchers fighting poor rubber tappers, and Indians, who got a cut rate at the Ecológica, discounts being the only benefit of contact, since half the Indians had been wiped out by “civilized” disease. The common cold.
There are many interesting foreign stamps in your passport, Federal Police Major Rubens Lemos had said.
The Hilton got the mining company execs, the Ecológica the miners. The Marriott got the hydroelectric dam builders, the Ecológica the grad students studying forest to be drowned when waters rose up, a year from now.
I walked in after Anasasio dropped me off, dreading the upcoming phone call to Eddie’s family. The owner’s son shook his head at me from behind the reception desk, Sorry, no Eddie, and held up a finger, meaning he had something to tell me, probably tonight’s menu. I kept going. I was in no mood for food. Ignoring him would prove to be a mistake.
The lobby was sunny with arched doorways and smelled of fresh coffee. It was tastefully decorated with Indian spears, baskets, and potted Brazil nut trees. Everywhere hung leftist political posters, in Portuguese, but between the clenched fists, marching peasants, and smiling spider monkeys, it was easy to get the messages. Save the Forest!
In my second-floor room — sunny, usually, balcony overlooking the plaza, rotating ceiling fan, latched door/windows — I called FBI Assistant Director Ray Havlicek, hoping that the new information might help. He listened, but seemed dubious. “An Indian? A bar? A rumor?”
“As I recall, Ray, you asked us to listen for rumors.”
“Don’t you think you’re reaching for answers?”
“What happened to call me anytime?”
I hung up and called our summer intern Aya Vekey, in New York. She was a brilliant high school senior whose youth had nothing to do with her abilities. Adults underestimated Aya because of her age. Sometimes when I phoned her I felt as if there was a forty-year-old professor on the other end, and at other times, a kid. But I owed my life to Aya, and she was as much a member of the team as Eddie. She knew Eddie was missing, but didn’t know the secret part of our mission.
“I’ve been reading more on Rondônia, Joe. Stay away from the police. Last year there was this report in O Globo about police helping cocaine smugglers there.”
“Good work. Meanwhile, keep learning more about this place. Issues. Factions. Medical studies. Check the journals.”
“Medical studies? Why?”
Because if someone is kidnapping sick people, I want to know why. “Just do it,” I said.
“But why?”
“Aya, you’re the intern. I’m the boss.”
“I’ll tell Mom to put pressure on Ray Havlicek. She’ll make him help Eddie. He does what she wants.”
“No. Not that way.”
“Why? This is about Eddie, not you! She doesn’t even love Ray! She only landed up with him because you wouldn’t—”
I relented. The kid was right. If Chris could pressure Ray to act, if that would help Eddie, why the hell not?
I dreaded the last call, to Eddie’s wife and daughters. I’d known Johanna Nakamura for over twenty years, since Eddie had met her after boot camp. I’d attended birthday parties for Renee Nakamura, seventeen, and India Nakamura, eighteen, since they were toddlers. When I called, the receiver was snatched up after half a ring. I envisioned the women on extension phones, in Boston. Johanna and Renee accepted the risks of Eddie’s profession. India’s childhood affection for me had soured. She blamed me for Eddie’s absences.
“I’ve got a lead,” I exaggerated.
Technology made their voices seem two feet away.
“Stop lying, Joe,” India snapped.
“India! Please,” Johanna said.
“If it wasn’t for him, Dad would be here.”