Secret of the Slaves (4 page)

The first thing that hit her, along with the earth-burrow coolness, was the smell. It wasn't an unpleasant smell, particularly. But it was a complicated one. A skein of smells, a tapestry, woven out of elements familiar, hauntingly reminiscent and outright strange. Some were organic, some chemical and astringent.

“May I help you?” a voice said from the shop's dim depths.

A beaded curtain rustled. A woman emerged into the front room among close-packed shelves and counters. She was tall, possibly taller than Annja, although the red-and-yellow turban around her head added a few inches. In the gloom it was hard to be sure.

Annja glanced sideways at Dan. “We'd like to talk to the shop owner,” she said.

“That's me,” the woman said. She seemed to glide forward without moving her feet, doubtless an illusion caused by her long skirts, which brushed the warped boards of the floor. “I am Mafalda. How may I help you?”

As she came close enough to distinguish detail, Annja realized that she was a very beautiful woman, seemingly no older than Annja, with mocha skin and eyes that might have been dark green.

“You're Americans,” Mafalda said.

Annja smiled.

“What can I do for distinguished visitors from so far away?” Mafalda seemed to be slipping into a familiar role, which Annja guessed was half mystic, half huckster. She probably had one mix for the tourists and another for the locals.

Annja looked openly to Dan. Though never spoken, the arrangement seemed to be that while she was in charge of the scientific and research aspects of the expedition, he spoke for their mutual employer Moran. She wasn't entirely comfortable with the arrangement, but Sir Iain was paying her very well.

“We understand you might have some information about a hidden city,” Dan said.

“Who told you that?” the proprietor asked. Shrewdly, Annja thought.

“Someone back in the United States,” Dan answered blandly.

Mafalda seemed unimpressed with that response. “Lost-city rumors crawl all over the Amazon like bugs,” she said, unwittingly echoing what Annja had told Sir Iain in his Manhattan headquarters. “They have done so ever since the days of the first explorers. I don't deal in treasure maps. Perhaps you should seek elsewhere.”

Shooting an exasperated look at Dan, who only shrugged, Annja said, “Perhaps if you'd be so kind as to show us what you do deal in, please, we'd better understand how we might help each other.”

It occurred to Annja that their employer might be playing his cards too close to his well-muscled chest. Unless he simply had no better information to share. But he must have had some reason to send them here.

After favoring Annja with a quick, cool glance of appraisal, Mafalda smiled slightly. “Of course. If the lord and lady will follow me.”

“Lord and lady?” Dan echoed quietly.

Annja sniffled. He cocked his head at her.

“I'm allergic to something in here,” she said.

Mafalda, who had waited coolly for the whispered exchange to end—suggesting some experience with tourists—began her tour. “I serve the practitioner of
candomblé.
I have here everything needed for the
toques,
the rituals, whether public or private.”

“What's
candomblé?
” Dan asked as Mafalda led them through narrow aisles with bins of sheaved herbs, colorful feathers and beads.

“It's a widespread folk religion in Brazil,” Annja said. “It's basically a combination of Catholicism with West African beliefs.”

“Like voodoo?” Dan asked.

“That's right,” Annja said, nodding. She dabbed surreptitiously at a droplet that had formed at the end of her nose and sniffled loudly again.

“We believe in a force called
axe,
” Mafalda said, leading them into an aisle with a number of tiny effigies that reminded Annja of Mexican Day of the Dead figurines. There were also racks of odd, twisted dried roots and vegetables and sturdy cork-topped jars with not-quite-identifiable things floating in murky greenish fluids.

“Mind the
jacaré,
” Mafalda said as an aside.

“Huh?” Dan said. “What's
jacaré?
”

He bumped his head on something hanging from the ceiling. He did a comical double take to find himself looking into the toothy grin of a four-foot stuffed reptile hung from the ceiling.

“One of those,” Annja said. She had found a travel pack of tissues in the large fanny pack she wore, and was in the process of blowing her nose. It made a handy cover for her grin. “An Amazon caiman. There's a specific species named
jacaré,
but people around here mostly call all crocodilians that.”

Dan cocked a brow at Mafalda, who wasn't bothering to hide her own toothy grin. “Decorating with endangered species?”

“We're more endangered by the
jacarés,
” their hostess said promptly. “They eat many Brazilians each year.”

“Is she serious?” Dan asked.

“Oh, yes,” Annja said.

He shrugged, shaking his head.

“You were telling us about
axe,
” Annja prompted Mafalda. She had no idea if it had anything to do with their mission—to find some lead, however tenuous, to the mysterious hidden city named Promise—but she was fascinated, personally and professionally, with the local folk religion.

“Oh yes.” The turbaned head nodded. “
Axe
is the life force. It permeates all things.”

“So your
toques
involve evoking this life force?” Annja asked.

The woman led them on toward the front of the cramped store. “Somewhat. Mostly we invoke the
orixás.
”

The word was unfamiliar to Annja. “What are they?”

Mafalda flashed a quick smile. “Our gods,” she said, “Olorum is the supreme creator, but he doesn't pay so much attention to us little people. So we don't trouble him. The
orixás,
though, they're the deities who deal with us humans. So they're the ones we have to worry about keeping happy.”

“Makes sense,” Dan said.

The tall woman had led them back to the cash register, which was a modern digital model, Annja noted, Beside it stood racks of CDs with colorful covers. Dan picked one up and scrutinized it. “You have a sideline selling Brazilian jazz?” he asked. “These don't look like New Age meditation CDs.”

“They are for the
capoeira,
” Mafalda said.

“The martial art?” Annja asked.

Mafalda laughed. “It's more than a martial art.”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you know the story of the slaves?” Mafalda asked. Annja felt Dan tense beside her. Her own quick inhalation turned into a sneeze, only half-staged.

“Some,” Annja said cautiously.

“Well, the slaves weren't happy being slaves. So they practiced to rebel. But the masters would not permit this. So the slaves had to create a way of training that they could practice under the masters' eye without their suspecting.”

“Hiding in plain sight,” Annja said.

Mafalda nodded, smiling. “Exactly. So they hid their warrior training as a type of dance used in religious rituals.”

“And so in turn
capoeira
practice got worked into the actual rituals?” Annja asked.

“Perhaps. Today
capoeira
is all these things—a form of fighting, a dance,
candomblé
ritual.”

“I see.” Annja skimmed the rack until a cover caught her eye. A very dark, very skinny man was performing a trademark
capoeira
headstand kick in front of a rank of colorfully dressed dancers shaking what appeared to be feather gourd rattles. “I'll take this one, please.” It seemed a gracious thing to do, a way to keep open lines of communication with their uninformative informant. Also she was curious.

Mafalda rang up the transaction. She wrapped the CD in fuchsia paper and taped it neatly.

“Some of the slaves did fight back, you know,” she said as she handed the parcel to Annja. “They escaped and fled into the forest. There they fought. Some died, some won their freedom.”

“The Maroons,” Dan said.

“Yes,” Mafalda said. Her manner was suddenly very grave. “The ones about whom you asked—they do not like strangers seeking after them.
Capoeira
was not the only weapon they created unseen beneath the world's nose. And their reach is very long.”

“Was it just me,” Dan said, sipping strong coffee the next morning at a green metal table at an open-air waterfront café near their hotel, “or did that woman seem scared to tell us about the Maroons?”

“It wasn't just you,” Annja said. She took a sip of her own coffee. “But she seemed more scared not to.”

“So did we learn anything?” he asked.

“They have a long reach.”

Dan set down his cup, shaking his head. “This is all starting to sound way too Indiana Jones.”

She smiled. “What would you call a quest for a lost city?”

He laughed but shook his head again. “The real world doesn't work like that.”

“Doesn't it? I thought terrorizing people to get results was thoroughly modern. Doing it long-distance, even.”

“Touché,”
Dan said without mirth. “It just struck me as far-fetched.”

It would have me, not so long ago, Annja thought but did not say.

The café stood near a set of docks servicing riverboats somewhat larger, if not markedly more reputable looking, than the small craft Annja and Dan had seen crowding the river the day before. Dockworkers were swaying cargo off a barge with an old and rickety-looking crane. The stevedores were big men, mostly exceedingly dark and well muscled.

Although it was relatively early in the day and they were both lightly dressed and sat in the shade of an awning, Annja could feel sweat trickling down her back.

“It's not, really,” she said, sipping her coffee. “Farfetched, I mean. If you think about them just like any other…interest group or faction. A lot of governments go to extremes to protect their secrets.”

“Corporations, too.”

“Sure. Other groups, as well. These people's ancestors fled to escape slavery and then persecution—attempts to recapture them, reenslave them. That could account for their being a little paranoid.”

“But didn't Brazil abolish slavery—what? Over a hundred years ago,” Dan said.

“In 1880,” Annja said. “It may be,” she continued, setting the cup down and leaning forward over the table, “that Mafalda gave us more information than she intended.”

“What do you mean?”

“I thought a lot about what she told us last night. She was worried, basically, that the Maroons—the Promessans, we might as well call them—might think she talked too much about them.”

“So you're thinking they've got some kind of surveillance on her,” Dan said. “Bugs? Or maybe something astral?” He said the last with a laugh.

“Hey, I'm as hardheaded skeptical about that stuff as you are.” Although I bet I have to work a whole lot harder at it, she thought. “I'm not even sure I go so far as buying electronic eavesdropping, although with snooping gear so incredibly cheap and tiny these days, I guess I shouldn't dismiss it out of hand.”

“What are you thinking?” He was all business now. In a sense she was pleasantly surprised. While he had been polite and correct the whole time they had been together, she had picked up pretty unequivocal signals he found her attractive. But he also conveyed a certain sense of superciliousness. Not quite disdain. But as if he were the professional here, not she.

Given his background, and current mission brief, she could even understand that, however it irked her.
If only he knew how wrong he was.
And yet, of course, she couldn't tell him that the last thing she needed was his protection.

Not that he'd believe her if she tried.

But now he was acting like one pro talking business with another, and that was good. “While it's not even impossible they could bug Mafalda's shop long-distance—I mean, all the way from Upper Amazonia—I don't think that's the likeliest thing. At least, it's unlikely to be their only measure,” Annja said.

“Back up a step. You think they could bug the shop all the way from their hidden fortress?” Dan asked.

She shrugged. “Why not? It could be something as prosaic as a satellite phone relay.”

“So you're not envisioning these people as, like, some kind of lost culture still living in the eighteenth century or whenever?”

“I think that's King Solomon's Mines,” she said with a smile. “Not necessarily. Were you? For that matter, is Sir Iain? I thought his whole thing was the possibility they might possess technology far in advance of ours.”

“Well—maybe. But they could possess, say, herbal techniques developed beyond the scope of modern medical science and still have an archaic culture. Or an essentially indigenous one.”

“Maybe. But from what Sir Iain told me, and some research I did afterward, one of the first things the escaped slaves did was start trading with the English and the Dutch for modern weapons.”

“I don't mean to be racist, but that seems pretty sophisticated for slaves,” Dan said.

“I found out something pretty startling. Not all the slaves were preliterate tribal warriors from the bush. It turns out the Portuguese colonists were so lazy they got tired of administering their plantations and mines and other businesses themselves. So they started kidnapping and enslaving people from places like the ancient African city of Tombouctou. They may even have enslaved their own people from their colonial city of Luanda.”

“Meaning—”

“Meaning they were deliberately capturing and enslaving clerical and middle-management types,” Annja said.

He laughed vigorously. “That's great,” he said. “Just great. They really
were
lazy. And so these well-educated urban slaves teamed up with their warrior cousins taken from the tribal lands and created their own high-power civilization.”

“Pretty much. That's why they were able to stand off their former masters for so long. They were every bit as sophisticated as the Europeans. More, in a way, because of their allying with the Indians early on. They knew the terrain better.”

“A guerrilla resistance,” he said. “I like it.”

“My sense is,” she said, leaning forward onto her elbows with her hands propping her chin, “if this city Sir Iain thinks exists really does, its occupants would be pretty current with modern technology.”

“Or even advanced beyond it.” He arched a brow.

She shrugged. “Your boss seems to think so.”

Dan frowned. “He's a great man. He's my friend. You can call him our employer,” he said, emphasizing the
our
subtly, “but I don't like the word
boss.
”

“Understood,” Annja said.

“So, all right, conceivably these descendants of the long-ago escaped slaves, the Maroons or Promessans, might be able to bug a shop in Belém long-distance. I see that. But you seem to think that's not what they're doing.”

“If they really exist,” Annja added.

“Sure.”

She thought a moment, then sighed. “No. I don't. A key aspect of their early survival was trade. I'd bet they've stuck with that as a mainstay of their economy. If for no other reason they'd have agents—factors—in the outside world. Belém is pretty much the gateway to the entire Amazon in one direction and the entire world in the other. And that seems to have been the connection with the German businessman your…Publico told me about. He must have had some kind of commercial relationship with Promessa. What business was he in, do you know?”

“Electronic components of some sort. Controls for computerized machine tools, possibly.”

“Hmm.” She regretted not pressing Moran for further details. The fact was, he had so swept her off her feet during their one and only interview, with the sheer hurricane force of his personality and passion, that she never even thought of it. “Perhaps we can call him or e-mail him. That might be a lead to follow up, too.”

“Maybe,” Dan said. “Publico kind of likes his people to use their own initiative.”

“Well.” Annja wrinkled a corner of her mouth in brief irritation. “Maybe it isn't necessary. If the Promessans keep agents here for trade, they can just as easily keep them here for other purposes.”

“So their traders are spies.”

She shrugged again. “There's precedent for that. They may or may not be the same people. We don't have enough data even to guess.”

“So if we can spot one of these agents we might not need Mafalda's cooperation.”

“That's what I'm hoping, anyway,” Annja said.

For a moment they sat, thinking separate thoughts. A young woman came into the open-air café. She was tall, willowy, and—as Annja found distressingly common in Brazil—quite beautiful. She squeezed the water from a nearby beach from her great mane of kinky russet hair. Water stood beaded in droplets on her dark-honey skin, which was amply displayed by the minuscule black thong bikini she wore.

The rest of the café patrons were locals. No one else seemed to take notice of the woman as she strode to an open-air shower to one side of the café, shielded by a sort of glass half booth from splashing any nearby patrons.

Nor did they show any sign of reaction when the young woman dropped a white beach bag with white-and-purple flowers on it to the floor, turned on the water and skinned right out of her bikini.

Annja looked around, trying to keep her cool.
Am I really seeing this?
The customers continued their conversations or their perusals of the soccer news in the local paper. She glanced back. Yes, there was a stark naked woman showering not twenty feet away from her.

She looked toward Dan. He was looking at her with a studiedly bland expression. “You might as well watch,” she said. “Just don't stare.”

“Never,” he murmured, and his eyes fairly clicked toward the showering woman.

The young woman finished, toweled herself briskly, then dressed in shorts and a loose white top. She looked up as a small group of young women came into the café, chattering like the tropical birds that clustered in the trees all over town. She greeted them cheerfully and joined them at a table as if nothing unusual had happened.

Dan let the breath slide out of him in a protracted sigh. “Whoo,” he said.

“Whoo indeed,” Annja said. “It's like a whole different country, huh?”

“Excuse me,” a voice interrupted.

At the quiet, polite feminine query in English both looked up. Two young people stood there, a very petite woman and a very tall man. Both were striking in their beauty and in their exotic appearance. Both wore light-colored, lightweight suits.

“Are you Americans?” the woman asked.

“Are we that obvious?” Dan asked.

The young man shrugged wide shoulders. He exuded immediate and immense likeability. “There are details,” he said in an easy baritone voice. “The way you dress. The way you hold yourselves. Your mannerisms—they're quicker than ours tend to be, but not so broad, you know?”

“And then,” Annja said with a shrug, “there's our tendency to gawk at naked women in the café.”

The man laughed aloud. “You were most polite,” he said.

“She probably would have appreciated the attention,” the woman said. “We Brazilians tend to take a lot of trouble over our appearance. Clearly you know that beauty takes hard work.”

“You've probably noticed, we don't have much body modesty hereabouts,” the man said. “But you were wise to be discreet. Brazilians also tend to think that Americans confuse that lack of modesty with promiscuity.”

“They're probably right,” Dan said, “way too often.”

“Please, sit down,” Annja told the pair. She was not getting threatening vibes from them. And she and Dan were drawing blanks so far. Any kind of friendly local contact was liable to be of some help. At least a straw to clutch at. “I'm Annja Creed. This is Dan Seddon. He's my business associate.”

Dan cast her a hooded look as the woman pulled out a chair and sat. The man pulled one over from a neighboring table. Annja saw that they both had long hair. The woman's hung well down the back of her lightweight cream-colored jacket, clear to her rump. The man's was a comet-tail of milk-chocolate dreadlocks held back by a band at the back of his head, to droop back down past his shoulders.

“I'm Xia,” the woman said. “And this is Patrizinho.” The pair looked to be in their late twenties, perhaps a year or two older than Annja.

“Pleased to meet you,” said Annja, who was accustomed to the Brazilian habit of going by first names alone. “What do you do?”

“We work for an import-export firm,” Xia said. “Mostly we are consultants. We help foreign merchants negotiate the labyrinth of our trade laws and regulations.”

“They're quite bizarre,” Patrizinho said. “Some of our people take perverse pride in having them that way.”

“And you?” Xia asked. “Are you here on vacation?”

Annja glanced at Dan. To her surprise he sat more tightly angled back in his chair than slouched, with his legs straight under the table, arms folded, chin on clavicle. He frowned slightly at her but gave no indication she shouldn't discuss their real purpose.