

Drink the Sky

by Lesley Krueger

Copyright 2015 Lesley Krueger
The Rev. Adam Sedgwick

to Charles Darwin,

on the publication of the

Origin of Species,

1859:

There is a moral or metaphysical part of nature

as well as a physical. A man who denies this

is deep in the mire of folly....

You have ignored this link; and,

if I do not mistake your meaning,

you have done your best in one or two pregnant cases to break it.

Were it possible (which, thank God, it is not) to break it,

humanity, in my mind,

would suffer a damage that might brutalize it,

and sink the human race into a lower grade of degradation

than any into which it has fallen since its written records

tell us of its history.

On the other hand, novels, which are works of the imagination,

though not of a very high order,

have been for many years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me...

I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily -

against which a law ought to be passed.

— Charles Darwin
Prologue

The day was already hot and greasy as Charles Darwin set out from his cottage on Botafogo Bay. Corcovado, the humpbacked mountain, billowed up before him. Leaving the road which skirted its base, Darwin chose a red and rutted path that meandered toward the summit. In his journal that night, he might describe these Brazilian mountains as abrupt domes of French grey arching like mosques from the tropical plain.

Like illustrations he had seen of mosques. If his work as a scientist were to be of value, he had to be precise in his description, and Darwin had never set eyes on a mosque. His route on this journey around the world, as naturalist on board the ship Beagle, lay to the south of the Holy Land. Already, in crossing the Atlantic, he had dipped far below the Equator to put in on this bay, at Rio de Janeiro, where he had been left to collect his specimens while the Beagle's crew surveyed the coast.

A stirring sounded to his left, a rustle in the forest. Darwin pictured game and raised his rifle slowly, tracking not so much the animal as the leaves it displaced, a sly progression parallel to the path as if the game were stalking him. His scalp prickled with expectancy as his finger met the trigger.

Children! Little children burst out of the forest, boys - four boys - circling him, laughing and pointing, chattering in Portuguese as poor abashed Darwin lowered his gun. Sweating, he pulled out his handkerchief as the boys capered around him, bare-legged, bare of chest, their sheathed knives dancing against their thighs. Not game, he thought. They were playing a game. Prodding him, tweaking the wool of his trousers, feeling its weft and heft before skittering back into the forest.

Darwin was left to wipe his brow, his heart still pounding. Charley, he admonished himself, you've got to look about yourself, see what's up. This is the New World, not the Old. Do you think you're up to it?

Stowing his handkerchief, shaking his head, Darwin headed down the path. Odd how the admonishing voice had been as high as his father's. A huge man, the old man, to have such a whistling, whispering voice. The largest man in England, they said: towering more than six foot tall, expanding well past twenty stone, a physician, rich as Croesus, solid as the Golden Rule. Darwin should have called these mountains the encircling image of his father. Didn't they have the same bald pate, and the pater's broad girth? They loomed over Darwin, casting him in shadow, as advice whistled from their summits like the wind.

Be precise. See it newly. Avoid fatuous comparison.

Smiling to himself, and turning a corner, Darwin came across the boys again, playing in a glade. They had cut a stick and dug it upright into the red soil at the far side of the clearing. Now they stood with knives unsheathed, and he watched each take a turn to fling his knife all that wide distance at the narrow stick, hitting it every time. Darwin marveled at their accuracy, one following the other - what? Until one missed? Each knife shrieked across the clearing like chalk on slate, and as he shivered, Darwin grew mindful of the shrieking around him, of birds crying from the branches above and insects sawing, sawing, in the weedy tropical heat.

A fat boy threw his knife across the glade and hit the stick with a reverberating gulp. Ambling over, the boy retrieved his blade as a toucan flapped loudly above him. Brazilians surely loved their knives - and from an early age. The tiny boy who came up next aimed a blade that was half the length of his tender arm. He drew up straight, then hurled the knife so murderous hard, both stick and steel stood quivering.

A tall boy followed, then a wide one who reminded Darwin of his younger self, squinting and equable, then the fat one again with his graceful ponderous gait, and the baby, and the tall boy - who missed and threw his knife into the forest.

Terrible howling tore the air, such bleating and mad screaming. Confused, Darwin stepped forward and back, in and out of the clearing. This was wrong: the wailing was above them, nowhere near the knife's trajectory. Unnerved by the clamor, Darwin raised his gun and shot. Instantly, the howling ceased, and a coarse body toppled into view. The monkey swung above them, still held to the branch by its prehensile tail - a brown pendulum ticking dully. Gone, gone, it seemed to say, while scattering arcs of blood on the gaping boys below.

Darwin walked into the clearing, bringing the boys back to life. They swarmed him again, chattering and dancing and picking at his clothes: the jacket, the stifling woollen trousers. Then he saw the glint of callipers half in, half out of his vest pocket. He slapped vainly at the children, trying to knock their fingers away, swearing in protest before it came to him they were putting his possessions back; returning those scientific odds and ends they had sequestered earlier, while repeating their thanks and a word that even with his rudimentary Portuguese he could decipher as dinner.

"No," he cried helplessly in English. "Not dinner. A specimen. My specimen."But the tall boy ran out of the forest with his retrieved knife and began climbing the tree from which the monkey swung; climbing like a monkey himself up its rough bark, its widely-spaced branches, his toes splayed and arms grasping. He climbed up to a sickening height and crawled out on the limber branch, inching along with infinite care until he was close enough to hack at the monkey's tail - hacking once, twice, a third time before the body finally dropped free.

The boys ran from Darwin as the monkey landed with a thud, its heartbreaking arms extended. Even from this distance, Darwin could see human creases in the empty curling fingers. They seemed so near to children, these uncouth creatures. When the squat boy picked up the body, he cradled it protectively. The monkey was a little bigger than the smallest boy. A fallen brother, limp and needing Mother's care.

Dinner! they cried again, and ran off quickly down the path. Darwin was left to stand alone at the edge of the clearing. As he watched, the remaining tail slipped free of the branch like a length of rope untied. There was a sound like a footfall as it hit the humus, then a rat scurried forth and made off with the ropy length in its teeth.

Darwin walked across the blood-spattered glade and squatted by the stick the boys had splintered. He reached for the stick to steady himself, a rod and a staff to comfort him. But it was small comfort, when he didn't know where he was, or what name to call these things. Dizziness took him. He was sweating inside.

Where was this raw and violent place? What was he doing here? What would it do to him?

"I want to go home," he said in a reasonable, unheard voice.

April 1832.

Sitting in her Rio studio, Holly Austen painted the date in one corner of her canvas. The traffic outside sounded like the ancient mumbling sea. She breathed the same damp leafy air that Darwin must have breathed, heard the unchanged squeal of marmosets and a yelping yellow bird. Everything took her back - to a place she'd never been.

Define art.

Creation. Conception. Generation.

The conception of a new generation.

In 1832, Charles Darwin was twenty-three years old.
Part One
1

Changes in the weather blow in on big winds in Rio de Janeiro. The faint stirring of leaves in a garden, the dry clattering of palms, the nervous bowing and straightening of the grass on the flanks of the huge bald mountains — these are warning signs, especially in summer. The wind can pick up cruelly and sky cloud over in minutes. Lightning crackles and the day darkens until the clouds erupt with a roar. As thunder booms, the hard rain bounces, spatters, gathers into streams rushing down the steepest roads and gullies. The streams form creeks and the creeks, rivers — reddish rivers boiling with dense Brazilian soil. Storm sewers explode. Manhole covers fly off and pressurized fountains leap high into the air. At the bottom of the hills, canals and rivers surge over the highways. Worried drivers try to rush home, but the water quickly swamps them. Motors stall and cars are abandoned in frightful criss-cross jams.

The wind will be moaning by then. Somewhere a power line will snap. A driver sprinting for safety will hurl out his arms, claimed by the sizzling, writhing wire. Up in the shanty towns, high on the vertiginous slopes of the hills, heaps of garbage will loosen and start their killing slide. At least one will wash free, burying a frail house with unwatched children inside. Or maybe the lights in the shanty town will fail, and a drug lord on the next hill over will send his troops on a raid against his blacked-out neighbours. Beneath the snap of thunder and the howling of the wind, automatic weapons fire will crackle through the night.

Drifting restlessly downstairs from her studio, Holly could sense a summer storm approaching. The windows were open on a languid morning, hot and still; hazy under a vague blue sky. But Holly had lived in Rio for eight months, and paused by the window knowing it was too hot, too still. Breathless. Storms could break on days like this. Holly smiled: days on which her husband Todd was returning from his environmental work in the Amazon.

Yet Holly couldn't help worrying about this latest trip. Something happened that Todd wouldn't talk about on the telephone. He'd sounded distracted when he'd called, even agitated, and on the tedious, fractured flight back, landing in one boom town to another, he would have been subjected to another overview of the pillage of the Amazon. Holly hadn't been there herself, but from Todd's description she could picture the way agriculture had been imposed on the flat, steamy landscape. In some places, the ragged rectangular farms now butted one against the next to form great sweeps of settlement. In others, the farms were scattered through the forest, red earth openings in the dark green mass that gave the landscape, from the air, the look of poorly cut fabric. Todd said the strangest part was not seeing any houses. The farmers built their houses back in the remaining stands of high canopy forest, sheltered from the sun and hidden from view, so the fields looked abandoned. They looked far emptier than the vital green forest, as deserted as a battlefield from a devastating war where the land had not yet healed.

After all this, he would have to ferry home their latest celebrity. Jay Larkin was due in from Chicago on an inter-continental flight, arriving at about the same time as Todd. Larkin had called himself a musician on the telephone, although in a magazine piece Todd found later, he was referred to as a performance artist and avant-garde composer. Cutting edge. Noir. Todd was unable to use any of these terms without raising an eyebrow, although he found opportunities to use them often, Todd's feelings about their celebrity sympathizers being every bit as branched and intricate as the flyways at the airport.

Holly could only hope that Larkin had got enough rest to be able to fill Todd's silences. She imagined him on the airplane, his world traveller's eyeshade in place — black, no doubt, matching his noir clothes. With luck, he'd wake only as they descended over Rio's bald mountains, banking over Sugarloaf, sliding down over Guanabara Bay, rested, refreshed, and ripe for conversion as Todd's small plane buzzed in underneath.

Holly was smiling as the phone rang. It was Todd, calling from the airport.

"You're here. You're alive," she carolled.

"I'm here, and I have our guest. The pleasant surprise is, he's booked himself into a hotel. He's just coming over for the briefing."

"Briefing with breakfast," Holly said. "I've got some ready. But you have to tell me what he's like."

"At the moment he's preening himself in a shop window," Todd replied.

He looked over at Larkin, who had, in fact, walked a few steps away to let Todd call his wife in peace.

Holly pushed back her hair, freeing herself of its heat. "So you're okay?" she asked. "When you phoned the other day, I got the impression you couldn't really talk. What happened? Something bad?"

"I'm afraid it might be," Todd said. "I'm probably going to have to go back there, Holly. Something's going on."

"What? When?"

Todd paused. "I actually called to say we're on our way home."

Of course. She'd forgotten that he sometimes came home. Lately, they had their most intimate conversations on the telephone.

Holly hung up, unsettled by Todd's tone, but also amused by his picture of Larkin. Poor man, caught preening. He was probably just brushing himself back into place after the endless, chafing flight. Holly had hardly slept herself on that flight, always alive to the fact she was moving to a new city for the first time in her life — moving countries, moving continents! She'd felt almost deliriously cramped in the narrow, hurtling plane. Her skin prickled, her knees danced with childish, scratchy energy. She'd been both unnerved and elated, and could scarcely contain her exhilaration as they thrashed through the headwinds off the northern coast of South America sometime during the last brown hours before dawn.

She must have fallen asleep then. The next thing Holly could remember was opening the windowshade at first light and looking out at a rolling ocean of mist, solid and deep beneath her. Yet as she watched, the first rays of the rising sun began burning off the heavy mist, sent it wisping upwards, thinning, flying to reveal kaleidoscopic patches of forest lying underneath. The mist swirled above the trees like silk, brushing the highest branches. Then suddenly the light grew dazzling. The forest seemed to surge toward the airplane, throwing off the last of the white, and all Holly could see below her were the newborn trees, tufted trees in so many shades of green the forest looked like a bed of moss, soft and moist and seductive. Her cramped legs were so weary. All she wanted in the world was to step out on top of the damp, mossy trees, and roam toward the southern horizon.

The forest unbroken, the forest burned. Holly leaned against her dining room table, picturing the whole vivid continent flaring into fire. Everything she knew had left her with an almost overwhelming sense of the forest's fragility, its transience. And everything she'd learned had left her with the same breathless feeling about Rio. That was the word for life here: transient. Fruit spoiled in a second, clouds rolled across the sky on wheels, her friends' moods soared and fell like notes of music. You could see it even in the city's rich history. Charles Darwin had lived here once, not three miles from where she stood. Was it any wonder that he'd gone on to write the last word on transience, his theory of evolution?

Holly's plans were neither so scientific nor so grand, but at least she had a longer time to accomplish — what? Their visas gave them two full years in Brazil, and she planned to use every minute. Right from the start, she'd painted the tall square rooms of her house in lustrous tropical colours. Now she could live inside fuschia walls and lemon trim; run her fingertips along the heartbreaking ochre contrast. She loved her house, although it was crumbling from age and humidity. She loved the hill they lived on, adored Rio and yoked all her hopes to the fierce transience of Brazil, feeling that at any moment its intense volatility could sweep away the timid habits of a lifetime. Why not change? Why not dare? Why not fly?

Holly was smiling and testing a mango for ripeness when she heard the outside gate scrape open. Far earlier than she had expected, male voices came into the yard.
2

Todd had time to take just one step inside the living room before their boys were on him, laughing and pulling him onto the floor.

"Here we are!" Holly cried. She hurried toward them, but was startled off track when Jay Larkin stepped out of the hallway. He seemed just as surprised. "My God," she could see people thinking. "That can't possibly be Austen's wife."

"Holly Austen," she said, holding out her hand.

What made Larkin look so dubious? Wasn't it almost a cliché, an alpha male married to a much younger woman? It was true she'd dressed up for the occasion, when Larkin had probably been expecting someone from an environmental flyer. A fading, clean-faced wife. Helpful. Ethical. Wearing hemp.

"I'm sorry," he said, shaking her hand. "A dose of brain lag."

"Jet lag?" Holly asked.

Larkin tapped his forehead. "Delayed in transit." He gave her an appealing smile, but Holly was disappointed. Entertainers were supposed to be small, neat people, while Larkin was tall and lanky, so lean he looked sketched in. The pallor didn't help, and his black hair was cut in a shank that fell into rather insistent blue eyes. Irish colouring. He had Holly's colouring, when she was convinced men of her own physical type were moody, evasive and self-indulgent.

While Todd was far too blond to live in the tropics.

"What are we going to do with you, my love? I hope you've been to a doctor."

A hectic rash was working its way across Todd's chest. He tugged his shirt back into place and levered himself clumsily to his feet. The boys didn't want to let him go. Their younger son, Evan, held on with legs as well as arms, the way the monkeys outside embraced the trunks of trees.

"Shower," Todd said, flipping Evan upside down. Both boys squealed as he walked Evan across the room on his hands. When he let the boy down, Todd bussed Holly, rubbing her cheek with his unshaven one before remembering their guest. "Larkin? You were talking about a shower?"

Nodding and agreeing, glancing back at Holly, Larkin followed Todd and the chattering boys upstairs.

"Rash?" she called. There was no answer. But yes, he was.

Holly smiled and shook her head at the hall mirror. She always felt electric when Todd came home, excited and relieved that he'd made it through another trip. But this time she felt uneasy as well, unsure what Larkin wanted and unhappy to find her husband looking so tired. Todd was in danger of burning himself out; she'd been sensing it for some time. Recently, when he'd fallen asleep on the sofa after dinner, she'd caught herself stretching in the doorway as if willing him to stretch, wake up, bounce up energetically the way he once did.

And notice her, of course. Notice her new haircut; what running every day had done to her legs. Holly laughed at herself in the crackled mirror. Oh, wasn't she singing the housewife's lament? My husband doesn't pay attention to me any more. A cliché, self-indulgent, so self-pitying — although it also contained a nasty prickle of truth. Every second fax from Todd's environmental coalition sent him off on another trip, guiding sympathizers through the Amazon, evaluating research projects, overseeing the work of local cooperatives that exported oils and nuts. He loved it. He loved his job. And wasn't he lucky Holly could laugh at her complaints? Too many women in her position seemed to cultivate grievances. Holly didn't mix much with the expatriate community, but she'd already seen several different versions of what could happen when the men had too much to do and their wives not enough.

Yet when Todd came back downstairs, he hooked Holly's head in his arm for a long kiss. The humid little boys danced around them. He'd taken them into his shower, a conscientious father, able to switch gears when he got home with a speed and grace that Holly admired. She'd kept the boys back from school to see him: it was also true he was home less and less often. As Todd pulled away from her, Evan was already talking. Hardy, red-headed Evan, six years old and chatty, insisted on recounting every twist of a cartoon's antic plot.

"Because the fire trucks got there late. And the branch just fell on top of them."

"That is so boring," said Conor, who at seven was a slight, elfin version of Todd, very blonde with huge, heart-stopping blue eyes. He didn't miss much, which was probably what made him such a high-strung child; fond of pets, tender with babies, both protective and scornful of his younger brother.

"Well, I guess you probably had to be there," Todd said. "Though preferably not underneath the branch. Who wants breakfast?"

He walked to the laden table, looking contented as the boys sat down on either side of him, and Holly poured the thick Brazilian coffee.

"You're here for a while, though," she said.

"As long as I can," he answered, taking some bread. "I wish things wouldn't keep piling up."

"But what could possibly have happened up there?"

Todd glanced at the boys, busy now with their chocolate, and then at the ceiling. They could just make out the sound of running water upstairs. Larkin was still in the shower.

"I don't know," Todd said. "Don't laugh at me; it could be serious. I heard a story about some garimpeiros, some freelance prospectors. They'd supposedly been attacked by a tribe of aboriginal people way up some godforsaken river. The story was, this was an uncontacted tribe."

"Uncontacted?"

"That's what I was told."

"Enough to get you up there, I guess. Todd, I wish you wouldn't."

He gave her a quick glance. "Actually I thought it was a crazy story. But it turns out there really had been a tribe in the area. No sign of them now. They're nomadic, probably. Uncontacted, I'm not so sure. It's their own business if they want to limit their interaction with the outside world. The simplest explanation is that they warned some prospectors off their land, then melted back into the forest. But when I got back to town, the local coronel made a point of checking me out. Doutor Eduardo. I don't know why he bothered doing that. He wouldn't be mixed up with a bunch of cheap little prospectors. Which makes me start to worry what really happened to the tribe."

"So it is dangerous," Holly said. "I wish you wouldn't keep expanding your job definition. I can't help worrying, love."

"You say you want me to tell you these things."

"When you do them. I just wish you wouldn't do them. You don't really have to go back there, do you? I thought you'd quit anthropology years ago."

Todd poured himself more coffee as Holly waited.

"How dangerous?" Conor asked. Holly sighed.

"Daddy is just being Daddy," she said. "He's like Curious George, always getting into trouble. But he seems to keep getting out of it again."

"Curious Daddy," Evan laughed.

"Very curious," said Holly, smiling at her husband. "I'm in a good mood," she told him. "I intend to stay in a good mood as long as you're home."

"So do I," Todd answered, holding out his hand. Pipes shuddered in the wall behind them as Larkin finally turned off the shower. "My Christ, that man is clean," Todd said, and they shared a complicit smile.

By the time Larkin rambled in, the boys had gone outside to play. Holly was ready to resent the musician's intrusion into her time alone with Todd, yet Larkin seemed more composed as he took his seat, and his wet, slicked-back hair made him look reassuringly older. He still ducked his head when he spoke and affected a humility Holly doubted he truly felt, but as he ate his breakfast, he contrived to make thoroughly inconsequential small-talk about his travels, about his work and hers, until Holly began to think they might get on after all. Yes, she told him, she was an artist. At least, she'd always worked in crafts. The constructions on the walls were hers, the subtly woven strips of handmade paper she'd coloured with herbs and bark from the medicine women in the market.

"I made my living in crafts," she said. "At least, that's what I started out doing, although these past few years I've been so preoccupied with running the gallery — yes, I had a gallery. We did quite well, but I sold it before leaving. I even ended up selling the building. Divesting myself to come down here. Getting rid of the excuses, I suppose."

"Excuses?"

Holly paused. "It sounds so presumptuous, but I've always meant to be a visual artist. To make paintings, acrylics. That's what I'm doing here, mainly. These constructions are just — extra."

"I don't know why you say it's presumptuous. That's something I tend to be accused of. But you don't really look the part."

Holly leaned forward and confided, "I'm terribly ambitious."

"What else is there?" Larkin asked.

"Well, the children," Holly said. "They didn't exactly beg to come here, did they? And watch their mother turn all vague and distracted while she paints. But this seems to be working out for them, too. They like their school, and afterwards they get to ride their tricycles up and down the driveway. That's all I ever wanted to do when I was their age, ride my tricycle up and down the driveway. I take it you don't have children?"

"I was one," Larkin offered.

By this time they'd finished breakfast. The plates were pushed aside, and Holly was starting to get interested in Larkin. Could she question him the way he'd questioned her? What's it like to be famous, even a little? What do people want from you? What do you want from us?

"You're probably wondering why I'm here," Larkin said. Holly smiled, then saw he'd turned to Todd. "I know you're over-worked. I don't mean to take up too much of your time."

"That's kind," Todd answered. Larkin held out a hand, deflecting the compliment, but Holly knew it was insincere anyway. Her smile faded as she settled back in her chair. Todd was going to perform now, putting on the mask he wore with celebrities, the compassionate and foggy West Coast persona he used to cover his irritation at their well-meaning incursions into issues he considered to be his. Not that he ever maintained it for long. At some point during a celebrity tour of the ice fields, or first-growth forest — lately, the Amazon — he always phoned Holly in an agony of scab-picking, telling her that a respectable media would cover an issue on its merits, not because some overwrought self-involved actress had helicoptered in and aimed her affectations at the camera. Poor Todd. He tortured himself with the way things should be, leaving himself too little time to enjoy the way they were. Yet having fielded long-distance requests for shipments of birth control pills, facial mud, worse, Holly felt entirely sympathetic, and couldn't help looking at Larkin more skeptically herself.

But Larkin was shaking his head. "The fact is, my reasons for being here are a little under-defined. I wasn't planning to ask you for anything, at least not right now. It was more a case of wanting to make contact with someone when I got here. Knowing I could count on them later, if I needed to."

"You've heard about the Rio crime rate," Todd said. "It's actually not as dangerous as advertised, although it pays to be careful."

"Well, that's disappointing," Larkin replied. Seeing Todd's face, he added, "What I mean is, as far as I've got a focus, it's on urban decay. I might not have been the first to notice, but you live in any big city these days, at least in my country, and you're watching it fall apart. Chicago's my town, and it's almost a cliché to say it, but it's true — the place was at its best years ago. Even decades. It was the Fifties ideal of civic progress, the modern city. Except I think people are right in saying that the modern age is over, it's in retreat, and I'm fascinated by this idea of retreating into the future. Progressing backwards. I've been working on the idea anyway, but what brought me here was getting to know a couple of Brazilians — musicians — around the clubs. And they tell me, look, if you think the future lies in deterioration, then in Rio they're already living in the 24th century."

Holly was surprised. She'd been playing with ideas like that herself, although hearing Larkin articulate her thoughts made her suspect their joint concept of being a little shallow.

"I work once a week in a day care centre," she told him. "A crêche, they call it, out in the Zona Norte. And I should take you into the favela, the shanty town nearby. Because it's true — whenever I go there, I don't know if I've warped back to the Middle Ages or forward to some post-nuclear nightmare. It's a continuum, isn't it? Past to future, future to past."

"The future, Holly?" Todd asked. "It's only the future — only even a possible vision of the future — if you look at it from a North American perspective. Rio as a demonstration of what could happen to Chicago. Since you're asking," he said, turning back to Larkin. "I don't think it's a demonstration of anything, and certainly not of the future. Unfortunately, it's the way most people in the world live right now. And if you want to toss ideas around, I'll tell you what I often think, looking at myself in this particular context. I wonder if I've come down here to use people for my own purposes. To play out my particular obsessions about the environment despite what they might want from their lives."

Larkin leaned back and crossed his legs. "Do you?" he asked.

"I quite honestly do, yes."

"Well, it's interesting to hear you say that, because it isn't anything I've ever heard from my environmental friends." Larkin paused. "Whom I admire greatly, by the way. Their dedication is beyond mine. But I think you're right, at least about artists. We're scavengers." He smiled at Holly. "Magpies, picking up the shiny bits. My friends know they have to watch what they say in front of me in case I steal it. Which is my defence. I do it in the most privileged contexts. I'm an equal-opportunity exploiter, getting my material here, there." He shrugged. "You think I'm wrong?" he asked Todd.

"I'm not sure anymore. Am I? Maybe it depends on the situation."

"Well, I'll tell you my situation," Larkin said. "I obviously want to look at the music scene first. Therefore I can be accused of coming here to use Brazilian culture, exploiting it for my own purposes. Except that I brought down a dozen names my Brazilian friends gave me. Contacts, musicians my friends say will want to show me the scene, might even want to work with me. So isn't this a good thing? At least there's the possibility for a genuine cultural interchange?"

"Of course," Todd replied. "Along with the foreign exchange. Preferably in American dollars."

"They'll get that," Larkin told him.

"I'm sorry," Todd said. "I didn't mean it that way. I'm tired. Exhausted, actually. But you saw part of the Zona Norte coming in from the airport. You were looking at the potholes. A lot of musicians live there, or come from there, and the simple fact of the matter is that they need a buck. People here do. That's why so many of them head up to the Amazon. They're just trying to make a living. Burn down a few acres of useless forest — to them it looks useless — and start a little farm. They can sometimes even earn a living for a year or two, although no one's ever told them how poor the soil is under all that forest, and that it's going to erode away in — what? — three, four years, so they have to move on and burn down a few more acres, start another little farm, add to the enormous devastation that the big guys, the ranchers, are only too happy to exploit. But who can blame the little guys? Can I blame them?"

Todd closed his eyes and rubbed them slowly. "But I can't talk with any real intelligence about the future," he said. "People ask me what I expect is going to happen to the forest. But tell me — even five years before it happened, was anyone predicting the reunification of Germany? I think I have a pretty good idea what's coming down the tubes for the next two, three years. Four, five years — more or less. But I'm less clear after that, and beyond ten years, nothing. Not a clue. What's that quote? That prophecy is the most gratuitous form of mistake? I would say, myself, that so-called prophecies are simply more or less accurate descriptions of what's going on at the moment they're made. Rio isn't the future. It's what we live with every day."

"Funny," Larkin said. "I always thought the environmental movement bought heavily into future shock. Predictions of doom and gloom."

Todd snorted, and Larkin gave him a long, speculative look. They all did eventually. "My God, that can't be his wife?" How often had Holly seen people work past their first questionable impressions of Todd and begin to wonder what lay hidden underneath. He'd start to speak, and what had been a conversation would turn into a dialogue, then a monologue, Todd's lecture. Her poor husband. He spent too much time alone, on the road in cheap motels, arguing his positions to himself as the shouts of drunks in the inevitable bar kept him awake. When he finally found an audience, he couldn't help delivering himself of his rehearsed speculations, and it was useless to interrupt. Holly had almost given up trying. No matter how carefully she framed her interjections, she always sounded — to herself, at least — like spoiled child demanding attention.

And it made her despair. Todd's brilliance could be overwhelming. It could certainly overwhelm Holly: he'd been known to talk right over her. Worse still, correct her in public. Two children later, Todd sometimes forgot she was no longer his student. In the middle of a party, a conversation, a Persian rug, he was capable of turning professorial. His tone would be instructive, his eyes kindly, his eyebrows ever so faintly amused.

Not just despair. It enraged Holly. She'd had more than enough of playing the younger, decorative, subservient wife. What she'd told Larkin was true. She was terribly ambitious.

Also high-strung, timid and apologetic to a fault. Holly sighed. It wasn't really Todd's fault. Her mother's maybe, but not Todd's. Yet at Holly's age, even a mother like Mavis was no real excuse. Poor, fierce, dissatisfied Mavis. Holly should have been over Mavis by now. It was also true that what Todd said over top of her was often astute, and if taken the right way, nutritious. Holly knew she had no real grounds for complaint. She never really had much to add to her husband's monologues, either. Maybe that was what really galled her: Todd was right. She had a tendency to be naive, small town, undergraduate. And maybe that was what she really wanted to change by moving to Rio. Herself.

"More coffee?" she asked pleasantly, and reached for Larkin's empty cup.

That night, with Larkin long gone to his hotel and the boys finally in bed, Todd told Holly, "He was about what I expected."

"More awkward than I expected, but also less pretentious," Holly answered, clicking the ice cubes in her glass.

"He certainly liked you too, didn't he?"

"Green," Holly said. "The colour of the environmental movement."

"He liked you," Todd repeated, although for once he didn't take it further. Just as well. It was useless to argue. Too hot to argue. The storm hadn't broken and the night was hotter than the day.

"You haven't told me about your latest tour," Holly said, raising the icy glass to her forehead. "Weren't these the concerned academics?"

Todd snorted. "I can't even begin to tell you," he replied. "Urban expectations at the ass end of the boondocks. They wanted me to produce tramp riverboats on schedule. Endangered birds every time they took out their binoculars." He shook his head. "One guy in particular was obsessed with seeing a giant river otter. We passed a goddamn puddle, the man would chime, `And this is the habitat of the giant river otter?' I ended up ready to strip down, dive in, and roll downstream past some specified point where I'd solemnly assured them they were guaranteed to see the goddamn otters." Smiling, Todd added, "They're six feet long and beige."

Holly laughed. "But you said they had binoculars."

"Binoculars, telescopes, tripods, an entire pharmacy in a suitcase and watches that went beep on Eastern Standard Time. I woke up before any of them one morning at this camp on a river. Everyone sleeping in their hammocks, the bunkhouses dark. Suddenly I hear big wings outside. Some large bird landing on the dock. Then beep beep beep meep meep. The watches go off, right on schedule. I feel like I'm trapped in a cave full of anxious bats."

Still laughing, Holly said, "As long as they go back with a good report."

When Todd didn't answer, she added, "Did they get to meet this Doutor Eduardo as well?"

"None of us actually met him," Todd replied. "He just came to the bar to check us out. Probably for understandable reasons: a contingent of wackos showing up in his state. I'm probably imagining anything more."

"They you don't have to go back. Say you don't, love."

Todd shrugged, then said casually, "I saw him give you something when he left. What's-his-name. Larkin."

"CDs," Holly said. "He gave us some CDs of his music. If we can't talk about Doutor Eduardo, I might as well put one on."

"I'm sorry," Todd said. "I'm sorry, I know this affects you. I know you end up covering for me. I know that, Holly."

"Thank you," she answered.

"Not that you need to bother taking Larkin out to the Zona Norte. It was kind of you to offer, but Bob was way out of line sending us some goddamn musician with an agenda."

"Todd, for heaven's sake, I was just making conversation." Holly clicked her nails against the glass. "Although now that you mention it, I probably should take him out. Give him the usual tour. He's probably good for a nice fat cheque."

"Oh. You want him to give money — "

"For the children."

Holly didn't know if she really wanted to take Larkin out to the favela, but she'd had enough of Todd's demands for one day. After all, who supported the family financially? Who looked after the children? "Money for the children." Amazing how disagreements which used to take hours could now be condensed into a single phrase. Twelve years into their marriage, things were finely balanced. At least, they were usually fine, and mostly they stayed balanced. Appropriately enough, this being an environmental household. Equilibrium — wasn't that the green ideal?

But there was also the question of taking Larkin out to the favela. Holly wasn't sure she could be bothered, but it also seemed a shame to deprive herself of Larkin's observations. Progressing backwards: she really had liked that one. Story of Todd's life, wasn't it?
3

Todd had been born into wealth — Old Money, as far as Vancouver was concerned, the first flush of it dating from frontier days at the end of the last century. His birth had been rather precariously preceded by a society wedding joining two proud provincial families, the Todds and the Austens, fish and lumber, through the athletic matrimony of Sally and Steve. Todd was the first of their three children, although it was generally agreed their contribution in his case was negligible, Todd being the image of his paternal grandfather, old Hank Austen, later Henry, pillar of British Columbia society.

When Holly tried to describe Vancouver to her friends in Rio, she could make them picture the mountains swelling out of the ocean, the intense and tangled green, the frequently oppressive weather. But Rio was so volatile, they had trouble understanding this as a grey oppression that came from weeks of rain and gloom. The weather pressed down on Vancouver, while the wilderness always pressed in. Gardens soon went ragged, and trees leapt up with astonishing speed, hiding even the newest houses in shadows and a mysterious feeling of time and depth which the houses themselves had not yet earned. When Holly was a child, she often had an edgy, claustrophobic feeling that the forest could overrun the city, pushing down from the mountaintops, up from the leafy, loamy soil. It could push people right to the water's edge, and from there a great earthquake could fling them beyond, sending them falling, splashing, flying, tumbling off the edge of the world.

Edgy, but exhilarating too, especially for sportsmen like Todd's parents. They sailed and skied, they golfed, they rode, and no matter how they dressed, they always looked as if they were wearing tennis whites. They city was their playground, and if this marked them as privileged when they were young, the economic boom in their middle age meant privilege was recast as rights. Bicycle paths unspooled along the shoreline. Seawalls domesticated squalid False Creek, yachts docked there, lawns sprouted on its banks. Going outside for a solitary ramble meant tripping over a hundred breeds of dog walker and a thousand shades of blond; over espresso bars, movie crews, competitive kite flyers and martial artists practising for slow-motion, well-intentioned kills. Goodbye wilderness outpost. It had turned into a park.

Yet Holly still loved the grimy, raffish city that went about its business a couple of layers underneath. Todd refused to acknowledge anything else. Being fifteen years older than Holly, he was that much more attached to the old port city, which he knew from his trips to the dock with his grandfather. He'd breathed in quantities of salty air, shouted above the bump of logbooms, thrummed to the beat of tugboat engines. He could remember the smell of sawdust inside Sweeney's Cooperage; had heard grain whistle through the tubes at the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool. At times old Hank had forced him to clamber on board freighters anchored in the Inlet, and once Todd even found himself attending a meeting in which his grandfather explained the issues in the most recent longshoremen's strike to ranks of red-faced union leaders in language he was bound they would understand.

Henry Austen had his finger in countless pies. Thumb on them, Todd would later say, once he'd joined the environmental movement. Joined the movement, renounced his family, thrown back his income, even quit his anthropology career, making it publicly clear he would no longer associate with profiteers. His grandfather obliged by promoting the fortunes of a cousin Todd disliked. Yet Holly had spent enough time with the old man by then to believe he was able to see past his personal disappointment and understand that Todd really was his heir. Todd was choosing adventure. Not the same adventure, but not its opposite, not the city. Todd had joined his grandfather in fighting for ownership of the wild. A take-over bid, which old Henry was probably more inclined to appreciate than many of his friends, having diversified out of lumber a good dozen years before.

Todd had taken Holly to meet the old man several months after they'd started dating. Todd was still teaching anthropology; the golden boy of Northwest Coast Indian research, the reluctant heartthrob who paced the chalky lecture room utterly destroying the girls with his long blonde hair, his pale, poetic skin and a tongue so sharp it could slice even the limpest insights to shreds.

"Thank you, Ms. Ketcham. We'll write Chomsky — shall we? — and correct him."

Holly had taken his survey course the year before, and she'd been awed, nervous, even a little frightened when Todd first held her back after class, leaning against the lectern as he tried to draw out what she knew perfectly well were her worthless opinions of aboriginal art. She suspected he'd noticed her attention wandering in lecture hall, and planned to manoeuvre her into making an absurd assertion that would peel her ignorance naked. Staring down at his scuffed shoes, at the frayed corduroy cuffs of his pants, Holly had no idea how to behave. Her mother had only prepared her to date frat boys.

Date? The thought startled Holly into glancing up. Todd gave her an earnest, worried smile, his cheeks looking mottled behind an absent-minded stubble.

"We could always talk about this over coffee," he said.

Holly nodded, warm with shock. What a heady feeling, thrilling, so intimate. It was tempting to be cruel and change her mind, remembering an appointment — though not very. Holly's wandering attention during his lectures owed a good deal to her daydreams about their accidental meetings. The Japanese garden, all damp moss and rhododendrons flowering, petals falling, an armful of textbooks toppling, something that gave her an excuse to start talking to him. About herself, Holly realized, prickling with amusement. Seeing her half smile, Todd looked more encouraged. People often mistook her that way.

"This was my last class," Todd said. "Why not head downtown and get a decent cup of coffee?"

"Thank you," Holly said, and kicked herself. Such a stupid answer. But seeing Todd's pleasure, she got the happy idea he was hearing what he wanted. An insight into her future husband's expectations that was far deeper than she could know.

Later, Holly wasn't sure what to make of the fact that relationships like theirs grew unpopular, with latter-day Todds terrified of sexual harassment charges and younger Hollys acutely aware of the insidious power of older males; intensely mindful of their own sexuality, if not always pleased with it, as if it was something they had to carry around, a battered old Freudian purse. Fashions were always changing, but it was hard to know if something as superficial as fashion, even moral fashion, affected the root sexual response. Perhaps a modern version of their marriage would be prevented. Perhaps it would be improved. At the time, Holly was delighted, flattered, even giddy at the thought of what had so unexpectedly dropped into her lap. It would be an excellent match. Even her mother would be impressed. Holly Austen. She whispered the name at night, littered her lecture notes with sample signatures, and later on, rather than trying to second-guess herself, Holly could only conclude that she'd been unusually young for her age. She hadn't yet awakened to the world, and had no idea how many other choices she could have made.

Unlike Todd, who had been shuffled between his parents' absent-minded marriage and his grandfather's strictures, Holly had grown up protected, her household secure. At least, that was how her mother put it. Mavis held fiercely to the concept of security. We gave you a secure base, she insisted, although Holly always thought of the line in war films, "Sir, we've secured the village." First you encircle, then you overrun, and if you flatten, too bad, that's war.

Tall, ardent, drawling Mavis played over Holly's childhood like a restless arc of spotlights. She stayed slender and kept herself brunette. Cigarette smoke swathed her high-boned face, cutting ironic lines between her eyebrows, apostrophes around her curling lips. Martinis and ambition were her two magnetic poles. They were probably fortunate that one kept her from adhering too closely to the other. She'd been an Eaton's model before she got married. Mavis and Mike. They called each other 'M' and bought an architect's cantilevered house based on Mike's expectations. He was a surgeon, his fingers keen as his wife's eyes, eyes rapid as her judgments. They were both operators, though Mavis went the homemaker route, raising three fine boys then Holly, the late-coming, wished-for, pounced-upon girl.

Mavis gave her everything. Dresses with hand-rouched smocking. The canopied bed, a parade of bored-looking porcelain dolls — Eaton's dolls, some of them antique. When Holly was ten, Mavis started holding children's tea parties, serving tiny spots of Earl Grey in cups of heated, sugared milk. She served plates of triangular sandwiches, their crusts removed, rolled sandwiches, paté, and tartlets of creamed lobster and crab. How well Holly's little schoolmates behaved, crossing their frilly white ankle socks. How terrified they must have been to spill, to smear, to turn down any of the rich, unfamiliar food or disgrace themselves by getting sick.

Holly most of all. She knew how unsatisfactory she was. She was so clumsy, so wrong, that Mavis always had to correct her. You really prefer Barbie to that nasty old rabbit. Say thank you, darling. She'll have milk. It was worse when Holly started school. The other children knew it wasn't just what she said or did, the problem was Holly herself. Fatty, fatty lumpkin — always sticks her stomach out — hair too thick, lips too big, fatty, fatty lumpkin. Ubangi, that was the name of the tribe that put plates in their lips. All the girls got National Geographic; their parents had subscriptions. Ubangi, Ubangi lips. Even her mouth is fat.

Holly didn't dare tell her mother what they put her through, but Mavis knew everything and invited them to tea. "Sir, we've secured the village." Disarmed, defused. Did Mavis help? The puckering stuff she painted on twice daily stopped Holly from biting her nails. The diets kept her acceptable — It's only baby-fat — despite her secret candy-bar binges. But what really ended the teasing was Holly's sudden growth. At adolescence, she stretched up, slimmed down, filled out what they called 'properly.'

Holly, you want to come skating with us? Ooooh, look at her outfit. Oooooh, why can't I look like her? She could be a model like her mother.

Holly didn't believe them. She also didn't want to believe them, which was a slightly different thing. How could she look like her mother? Holly started falling down stairs, cutting herself when she was in the kitchen, one time when she wasn't even in the kitchen.

Her mother had found her tumbled, crying, bleeding, at the bottom of the stairs.

"You're growing so fast, you're tripping over your own feet." Mavis brushed Holly's hair back, pulled her dress straight at the waist, swabbed the blood from her arms without saying anything about it. Whatever Holly did and was, Mavis wouldn't see it, leaving Holly unsure how to see herself. She was an unfocused double image: the one people looked at, and the one she was inside.

Who did Henry Austen meet the first time Todd brought her over? Snow White, all red-cheeked and beaming? But Holly knew she was really just one of the dwarves, poison underneath, a poisoned apple. Round as a lumpkin, ugly and rustic. She wasn't a princess at all.

"Gramps, this is Holly. I've told you about Holly."

"No you haven't."

But his handshake was so firm, his eyes so bright, Holly knew he meant she didn't fool him for a minute.

Henry Austen had been well into his eighties by then, a vigorous old man almost as tall as Todd with remarkably weathered skin. Dropping his hand, Holly thought he looked like an old bull elephant, with those tiny, dark, mobile eyes bracketed by fold upon fold of skin. When the housekeeper served tea, Holly clutched her saucer like a life-ring, her posture perfect and manners formal, feeling hyper-conscious of the old man's eyes darting all over her. He wasn't lewd. In fact, she would have said he looked puzzled — a look she was surprised to see later as he opened the double doors of the library to show her his important collection of Northwest Coast Indian art.

Todd had told her that his grandmother had banished the collection from the rest of the house, preferring the homey patterns of chintz and the lemon-scented shine of respectably varnished wood. "Father's old stuff," she'd called the collection, which her husband had begun to accumulate years before, having been struck by the way an Indian agent had spirited off whatever he could. Todd claimed his grandfather was more interested in accumulation than he was in the artifacts themselves, a gourmand rather than a gourmet. Yet that day, in the library, Holly hadn't sensed any simple pride of ownership. Rather, the old man had seemed curiously tentative as he showed her the Haida raven rattle, the Bella Coola thunderbird mask, the argellite pipes and each sinuous, wave-like spoon inside the mirror-bottomed cases.

"They say this here's a killer whale," the old man told her. "Although you've got to look hard to see it."

Later on, remembering those puzzled eyes, Holly wondered if Todd's grandfather was a holdover in the modern age: one of those rare people who allowed himself to feel fascination, even reverence, for something he knew he didn't understand. Did that also explain his attitude toward her, toward women? After all, he was an old-fashioned man, something of a puritan, who had doggedly courted a small-town teacher, then stayed faithfully married to her for more than sixty years. After she died, he refused to remove even one mask from the library, or reupholster a single fading flowered chair.

"Mother didn't like it."

"Mother took care of all that."

Holly hoped that if she died first, Todd would throw out, rearrange, refuse to huddle in a shrine; although she also suspected he would live precisely like his grandfather. It was a heavy burden to carry. She could still smell the airless rooms of Henry Austen's house, the institutional odour that made it seem as full and empty as a church. Perhaps puzzlement was a necessary facet of reverence, and reverence an inextricable part of the old man's greed for possession and destruction: destruction not just of the forest, but of the cultures he had robbed. After all, how could you make your mark destroying something that nobody valued?

"Another Bella Coola mask," the old man told her. "Bella Bella and Bella Coola, best on the coast."

"The weasel skins are insignia of rank," Todd said. "With eight skins, this mask would have belonged to someone important."

"Now, is that a fact?" Todd's grandfather marvelled.

"Abalone insets. I've told you this before, Gramps."

"Keep your eye on the figures, not on the field. I've told him." The old man winked at Holly, giving her the interesting idea he thought he could still manhandle Todd back into the family business, despite their fights over the anthropology career and Todd's loudly reiterated distaste for commerce — Steve and Sally apparently having made an impact on their son's character, after all.

"And always hire good detail men," the old man added.

Holly smiled, but Todd wasn't pleased. "So I'm hired, am I?"

"Even better. Sired." The old man chuckled happily. "And what about you?" he asked Holly, poking her lightly with an index finger. "What good are you? Eh? What good are you?"

"That's enough, Gramps."

"Eh?"

"I don't know yet," Holly answered.

The old man laughed, his eyes darting from her to his ladles, his masks, his wood panelled cases, his mirrors, his grandson, his reflection.

When Todd quit everything, two years later, he said in a series of pious newspaper interviews that he'd been inspired to devote his life to environmentalism by the earth-centred teaching of the Northwest Coast Haidas, on whom he'd done his anthropological research. No doubt that was true. Yet as Holly watched him stride back and forth across their living room, explaining almost gleefully that they would have to learn to live on less, get by without a car, start to garden and to barter, what she saw most clearly was Todd's revulsion from his grandfather's grasp.

By then, of course, Holly wasn't surprised. When things first got serious with Todd, Holly had assumed that if he didn't end up in the family business, at least she'd be a faculty wife, with a house in Point Grey and hobbies, children, charities — in exactly that order. But the last time she'd got what she'd expected was when they were driving home from that first visit with his grandfather. Todd had rolled down the window, adjusted his side view mirror, and said he supposed they ought to get married. Holly felt a stab of delight, but only nodded cautiously, having anticipated this moment for long enough to realize it would be best not to over-react. Stopping at a traffic light, Todd said he supposed she would want to quit university. Again Holly nodded, having already decided that it would be inappropriate for a professor to be married to a student.

"Quit university," Todd repeated, "drop that damned art history major, get away from that overbearing dragon of a mother, and head downtown to art school where you belong."

"Who did you say was overbearing?" Holly asked, feeling rather pleased with herself for being so mordant — a word she'd learned only recently. It also happened to be true: Todd was uncomfortably like her mother at times. Or did she mean 'comfortably?' "Sir, we've secured the village." Yes, he had, and the joy and uncertainty rounding her words made Holly seem arch and teasing; airy when she felt surprisingly dark.

Todd pulled over to the side of the road.

"Come here then, little wife," he said.

They were so different. Well-matched, but different. Not quite two years later, as Todd strode across their living room in a glorious fever of giving up, Holly sat anxiously and stubbornly planning to hold onto whatever she could. The idea of bartering and gardening was clearly outlandish. Todd would never get around to it, and she couldn't do it on her own. Holly didn't like seeing her older husband so transparently wrong, and her agitation left her almost giddy. Yet that's when she glimpsed it, a way to make this work. A safety net was something you crafted.

Art school had looked like a mistake at first. Holly's smudged charcoals, the instructors' insistence she try harder, the daily proof on paper she was second rate — it was all too familiar, even if the derision she heard came not from the other students but from the truly mordant voice inside herself. She retreated from life class, sketching, oils, and signed up for crafts courses with too many housewives, feeling this was all she deserved.

Yet the colour sense Holly's instructors all praised gave her a subtle way with natural dyes. Her nervous fingers proved limber on the loom, and soon she was dazzling her classes with weaving. Her throws and cushions would never represent the full expression of her artistic intentions — silently, stubbornly, she was too ambitious for that — but she quickly found they were marketable, and as Todd paced their living room, she understood this to be a blessing. Reviewing Henry Austen's hints, Holly ticked off ways to step up her production, diversify, find new markets. She didn't imagine she'd get rich, nor particularly cared if she did. She had no taste for luxury, and in any case she agreed with Todd that the world would be better off without excess. Without poverty, as well: Holly saw no reason to deny herself the same degree of comfort other reasonable people allowed themselves. While Todd described the great migrations of the humpback whale, she calmed herself by thinking dye lots, looms, taxes, craft fairs, wholesale.

As it turned out, Holly not only had a talent for crafts, her strain of nervous sensitivity might have been designed for marketing. She had the knack of seeing what people liked before they noticed it themselves, and was soon pulling in far more orders than she could fill, sub-contracting, representing friends, pushing local taste that eloquent half-step forward — all while running schedules that left a shrinking window for Mavis. A lunch a month, no more. Holly may not have been making the art she'd always dreamed of, but she was plainly a success. Even Todd had to admit it. Not just admit it, but as the craft fairs gave way to a gallery, and her gallery was written up internationally, the poor man had to submit to living in a comfortable house, not in Point Grey but still ample, shingled, squatting on a deep, treed lot and overrun by two children he had not originally wanted to bring into this imperfect, over-populated world. Her poor, dear, transparent husband. He had such a difficult relationship with the material world. He couldn't cook, didn't care what he ate, and whenever he had to handle money, he got the same expression of distaste around his mouth as a musician being forced to play an untuned piano.

"Maybe I'll try one of his CDs," Holly said, breaking their a long silence.

Larkin had left two pieces of music. One seemed to be performance art. But Holly was sick of words and put on the symphony, hoping for something light to help lift the humidity; something piercing that would finally bring down the storm.

Oboes. A flute. Holly sat down listening to the opening notes, a pair of plaintive cries that sounded faintly Japanese. They grew into a melody, still light, almost springlike. As a child, Holly had pleased Mavis for once by learning to play piano prettily, although she had enough taste to realize she had little real talent. In Larkin, she could recognize a weakness for prettiness as well. His first movement reminded her of the nice upward curl at the edges of his eyes. Then he began layering on the instruments, building his theme, returning almost insistently to the same few lines of melody, until suddenly the piece reminded Holly less of Larkin than it did of Todd. Persistent Todd, dogged Todd, never letting go. Admirable Todd, who had helped her wake up to the real world. Little as he sometimes seemed to enjoy it himself.

The horns clashed. She heard loud Todd, demanding Todd. A clarinet noodled back: his irreverent sense of humour. Holly listened with her eyes closed to the great thrust of her husband's personality interpreted by someone who didn't know him. Immense commotion coming out of the speakers. Todd's anger, his accusations. Then a recessional, a layering back of all the gathered instruments. This was Todd backing off, backing out of the children's room after he'd read them to sleep. Finally the solo oboe again. His regrets, his farewell, as he was once again leaving. Then silence. Holly sat silently in her chair as Todd turned off the humming machine. She wondered what had really happened in the Amazon, what he wasn't telling her, what she didn't understand about her husband's life, whether this project of moving to Rio was going to let her to lever herself out of his enormous shadow, after all.

Outside, the storm had broken. Rain came down hard, clattering on the tile roof. They sat and listened, while Todd looked at the CD in his hand.

"He tries too hard," he said.
4

Their house was on the slope of the mountain at the end of Leblon beach. A cobbled one-way street led uphill past a few stoic old houses and the massive encroachment of apartment blocks before taking a wide, sweeping turn in front of some half-built condominiums and starting back down again. The Austens lived not far past the condominiums, buffered from the worst of the construction noise by a forest that lapped down to the road. Macumba offerings appeared at times on a knoll in the forest, clay bowls heaped with rice or maybe a couple of guttering candles, although it wasn't a popular site. The forest didn't seem majestic enough — just weedy second growth that straggled back from the road, spilling behind the houses and apartments before struggling uphill in the thinning soil, stunted roots snaking along the surface of the rock, each tree shorter and more tenuous than the one before so that tall grass eventually took over, a wide swath growing — yellowing — above the last of the trees, until finally the granite burst free of the vegetation to rise as two humped peaks, Dois Irmãos, the two brothers that gave the mountain its name.

After pulling out of the driveway, Holly had to back the car uphill so she could park and shut the gate. This usually didn't bother her, but she was on her way to pick up Larkin for a trip to the favela and for once the extra effort grated badly.

They hadn't heard from Larkin again after driving him to his hotel, and assumed he'd settled happily into sessions and parties with the musicians he had mentioned. Then he'd phoned, mentioning Holly's offer of a favela tour without seeming to hear her polite, stammered excuses — one child under the weather, the weather still so hot — instead letting hang a series of awkward little pauses, sentences that trailed off in the direction of his growing interest in Brazil, his wish to see another side of Rio, his hope of pursuing his idea, progressing backwards; all of it so courteous and so relentless that Holly finally found herself agreeing to make the long and draining trip on what was bound to be a malignantly hot day.

Hanging up, she'd been angry with herself. She'd made the huge decision to shed everything, move south and finally make her art. Yet look at her — teaching at the crêche, still fiddling with constructions, helping out at the boys' school. With Todd travelling so much, she was already doing double duty as a parent. Now Larkin. Why Larkin? It was time to say no, lock herself in the studio and goddamn paint.

Holly slammed the gate to the driveway, propelling it so fast the lock didn't catch and the spikes rattled at the top of the wall. They lived behind a high, spiked wall with just one gate and one narrow door. Why had Todd had told Larkin the Rio crime rate wasn't as bad as advertized? Maybe it wasn't, but Rio still demanded caution, especially in the favelas. Did she really want to take Larkin out there? Even their own neighbourhood was so vulnerable Holly's friend Tânia kept trying to get them to move into a secure high-rise. Tânia hated the rusty spikes, the overhanging trees, the loose bars on the windows that Holly had seen as a guarantee she'd be able to get the boys out quickly if the ancient wiring sparked a fire.

"But a gang would be inside in half a second," Tânia insisted.

"Surely we don't have anything worth stealing. Not here."

"And what do you think happens, amor, when they go to all the trouble of invading your house and find that you've wasted their time?"

Yet Holly still loved her house. As she swung the gate shut — more gently this time — her last narrowing view of the carmine walls, shimmering with bougainvillaea, gave her such intense pleasure that nothing could spoil it. More than that. Everything enhanced it, insecurity most of all. Holly had a few secrets. The glimmer behind her eyes as she walked out into the hot and chancy streets at night. The jagged kick she felt at finding their car windows smashed. Her wicked exhilaration when she heard gunfire in the favela. Being skittish didn't make her a coward. She thought it might even give her an edge. If you sensed all the possibilities, you'd be ingenious at getting yourself out. Of what? Of something that might happen at the favela with Larkin? Maybe that was why she hadn't locked her door just yet. Holly sensed that whatever happened would feed her art. She was ready for it. Not just ready, but prepared. They probably shouldn't let foreigners into Rio unless they'd had a childhood like hers.

At a party one night, Holly had met a Finnish diplomat's wife visiting from Brasilia. She was an elegant racehorse of a woman, all attenuated energy and small grey eyes.

"You have no idea how much I love coming to Rio," she'd said, grasping Holly's arm. "My natural level of paranoia is finally justified."

Holly was still smiling as she pulled up at Larkin's beachfront hotel.

"Back to the future?" he asked, climbing in the car. Holly saw a linen shirt, a light tan, light blue eyes taking her in.

"Todd's probably right," she said. "Past, future. It's all mixed up."

Holly pulled out into traffic and sped inland from the sea.

It took them two full hours to arrive at the entrance to the favela. Larkin looked happy, his theory — expectations, prejudice; what was the word? — apparently confirmed by a drive that had taken them from his luxury hotel in Ipanema to a raw dirt road near a ditch that marked the unofficial end of a decent working-class neighbourhood and the yeasty beginnings of what lay beyond. He paused to scribble in the notebook he'd brought out during the drive. Holly pictured him playing anthropologist like this in Ipanema, where he let her know he'd been partying with the stars. She could almost see his lanky figure on a penthouse roof, spotlit turquoise pool at his feet, floodlit orange Corcovado behind him, with Cristo Redentor spreading his concrete arms to embrace them all in gaudiness. He'd scribble, scribble, shyly playing the artist at work, abashedly recording each numinous inspiration. Meanwhile writing God knows what.

"Ready?" he asked Holly, closing the notebook. She turned to the guide Sister Celeste had assigned them at the crêche. Erenilda was a boxy, mannish-looking woman with a peculiarity. One eye was blue and the other brown. The first time Holly had seen her, she'd been delighted to think Erenilda could close one eye and see the world in either colour, as if she was looking through different panes of stained glass. But not even the children could have asked about this. Whimsy wasn't Erenilda's strong point.

Examining Larkin coolly, she told Holly that he looked a little like a musician, but mainly he looked rich.

"She says?" Larkin asked.

"That you're going to have to do as you're told."

"We're into discipline, are we?" he asked.

"Self-discipline."

"I'm flattered you find it necessary," Larkin replied. Holly gave him a quick glance. So this was why he'd called her back instead of asking his new friends to arrange a favela tour. She wondered why he hadn't met a Brazilian beauty at one of his glossy parties, then realized that he probably had, and she was safer. Smiling, Holly jumped the ditch after Erenilda.

She'd never been to any other part of the Third World, but Holly imagined shanty towns must look much the same everywhere, built with gleaned wood, scavenged tools, ingenuity and desperation. They walked up a red dirt road past a series of gap-toothed fences enclosing irregularly shaped lots, with even more irregular houses — shacks — inside them. It was nearly noon, blistering hot, and there were few people outside to stare back at them, although Holly knew they were inside watching. She kept a sharp eye on Larkin herself. He seemed to be sketching a plan of the street, all angles and edges, almost an aerial view, as if he were designing a quilt. A crazy quilt, the seams half unravelled. It was hard to imagine the respectable working-class neighbourhood on the other side of the ditch had once looked much like this, but people there had started out the same way years before, banging together houses out of whatever they could find. Only gradually had they improved their lots — a foundation one year, a cinder block wall the next, then another couple of walls, and another, a proper roof — until finally they ended up with a house like the groomed white bungalow which, on the way past, Erenilda had been proud to tell Larkin was her home.

Scribble, scribble. He'd seen the scavenged car seat on the deep front porch where Erenilda liked to sit and watch the world. A striking image, yet his brief visit couldn't tell him how dearly both that car seat and her few moments of leisure had cost Erenilda over the years. Holly doubted that Larkin had ever managed to exercise the discipline — self-discipline — which had levered Erenilda and her husband into that modest house, kept them married and working, and made sure both their teenage daughters were able to stay in school.

Could Holly have done it? Without even considering the money, where did you find the mettle to work yourself out of a favela? The flimsy houses leaked rain and filth and rat urine during even the mildest storms, spreading disease. Drug lords fought vicious turf battles at night, their bullets ripping through the tenuous walls so people could be casually shot in bed, if they had a bed, or pulled out of it by death squads made up of off-duty police officers bent on executing anyone who looked like a criminal. In the midst of all that, Holly could imagine giving into the grating, teeth-grinding glee of living for the moment. The parties, the sambas, the parade of feckless men. How would it feel to pull the hair of a rival tart, rip open her dress, claw at breasts already bruised by her man's daily beatings? Afterwards, Holly would drink so much cachaça she'd conceive another of the children Sister Celeste cared for all week, and despaired of every weekend.

Not all the shacks eventually evolved into homes like Erenilda's. For each success, a dozen, a thousand failures. Larkin exuded such superiority, such confidence. What made him think he wouldn't fail too?

Or end up wearing a blue plastic shower cap like the man who came trotting around the corner.

"Oi, João!" Holly called. But João ducked and crouched behind a fence, too drunk or hung-over to answer.

"You know these people?" Larkin asked, wiping his forehead. The day was already wickedly hot, and the heat was only building.

"I come in sometimes with a doctor Tânia browbeats," Holly said. "My friend, Tânia Ramsay. She helped set up the crêche, and still drags in volunteers. I'm not much of a nurse, but I'm available."

"Are you?" Larkin asked.

Holly mentally kicked herself, but only smiled. "For all manner of worthy things," she said.

Larkin gave her a quick glance as he fumbled for a dry spot on his handkerchief. There didn't seem to be one. He gave up and stuffed the sodden cloth into his pocket, looking peevish.

"I hope I don't qualify as worthy."

"Not at all," Holly replied, and Larkin surprised her by laughing.

"I seem to be a little off-speed this morning," he said.

What was Larkin looking for, really? He rambled beside her down the melancholy street, taller than any of the favelados, looking rangy on the move, athletic — clearly a runner — but also amused, aloof, noting without apparent concern the heart-breaking details of people's lives. Catching Holly's eye, he smiled and lifted his chin at the road ahead.

"The local tourist attraction?"

They'd arrived at the painted house, their neighbourhood folk art marvel. Wanton flowers bloomed across its scavenged boards.

"Monica is quite wonderful," Holly replied. "A born artistic talent with just a huge personality. We know her because she brings her children to the crêche. Though every once in a while she goes on a bender. We don't see her for a couple of weeks, and when we go looking, we find the kids running wild. So skinny. She'll give them junk food and think she's a good mother because they like it so much. But a diet of sugar. And the diseases — "

Holly paused, having lost her place in the script. It was getting far too hot, and she couldn't find her way back to the story of Monica's talent, their hopes for the children, and how much all this cost. As she wiped her face, Larkin waited silently, refusing to help out. All Holly could think of was the diseases; of washing and disinfecting her hands when she got back from nursing tours to pick up her sons at the crêche. She would usually find them playing soccer with the local kids, so much larger and better-fed they looked clumsy as they chased after the ball. Little streaks of local talent always got there first. She'd watch them finish a game through the bathroom window, washing obsessively before calling the boys inside and brushing back their hair; stroking it, feeling a defensive guilt about its healthy shine, and checking surreptitiously for lice.

"When I got home once, I did some watercolour washes like the skin of Monica's six-year-old boy," she said. "He had everything — ringworm, impetigo. And he was the most interesting colours. So I did these washes, and then — I'd been working with the children doing hand prints, so I ended up scrawling these outlined hands over top of the washes. Very primitive. Like those ancient paintings on the rocks and caves in Europe. About that texture. My friend Tânia — she's a painter — Tânia said they're the best things she's seen me do."

Awful as it sounds, Holly thought, pausing again. She could never seem to describe her art. Meaning it was good or bad? Larkin was still looking at her, but it was his turn now.

"Stigmata," he said. "I've done some work with that myself."

He undid his cuffs and began rolling up his sleeves. Holly didn't know how he'd kept them buttoned for so long. Then she saw the ropy white scars across each wrist. She prickled with shock, then realized he was showing her the scars. Showing them off.

"One-upmanship, you mean," she said. Larkin grinned and signalled, Touché.

"Shall we go on?" she asked, and he bowed with courtly irony before walking forward.

Holly had been on this tour often enough to lead the way to its finale. On the far side of an open space, where itinerant vendors sometimes spread their blankets to sell a few cans of cooking oil, or bottles of cachaça, Holly took Larkin into a narrow alley. They were almost at the morro, a hill that swelled suddenly out of the plain like a grey inky outcrop in a Chinese scroll, but busy, webbed with houses, pathways, peoples' lives; and splintered always with violence. A drug lord ruled the morro. They couldn't go up. But at its base, where the alley again widened, was something Larkin was clearly beginning to smell. By this time, they'd grown used to the usual favela stench of rancid food and sewage and decay. But this was something else under that, something dusky and ashen that caught at the throat.

"Has there been a fire?" Larkin asked. "My God, I'd hate to think of a fire in here. It would all go up in a minute."

"Fire's a real problem," Holly replied, as the stench grew stronger. A bassoon line for his symphony, she would say, deep and stubborn and rising. Holly led the way around a corner until they saw, not too far ahead, the abrupt face of the morro with a staircase built against it. Beside the staircase was the charred fence that now overpowered everything with its reek of quenched fire. Parts of it were charred, although the burned boards were not all together. One with its edges eaten black stood between two that were completely unharmed, just as they did in the house behind. There, damaged posts supported untouched beams to make a shallow but shadowy porch. Singed planks and painted ones, all odd sizes, were nailed one against the next to build the body of the house. Holly let Larkin slowly realize that there had been a fire, and afterwards every half-sound piece of lumber had been salvaged to rebuild so that someone — the survivors? the arsonist? — could live inside that graveyard smell.

"And people wonder why there's such a rush on to the Amazon," Holly said. The crash of cymbals, scorched wood symbols, and now they could go home.

"I've been wondering why you do your tour," Larkin said. "Is this it? To produce a little ecological epiphany?"

Caught out, Holly met Larkin's eye. He seemed remarkably tall and lean, imposing now, and cleaner than her. She smiled uncomfortably, then with real amusement.

"Actually, no. Todd's people don't usually want to see the urban jungle. The ones I bring through are from the local foreign community, people who want to have a look around before giving a donation to the crêche.

"You're our first artist," she said.

"I see." Larkin's voice was the driest thing around, although as he reached to scratch his back, his shirt clung to his chest as if he'd been performing under the punishing lights of a stage. Holly finally realized what she'd been missing about Larkin. He was wearing stage clothes. The loosely-tailored linen shirt, soft leather jungle boots. She realized she'd never seen any kind of performer wearing what people really wore, even off-stage. She'd been to Beverly Hills once and no one had been wearing what people really wore. But Larkin was supposed to be the audience here, not the performer.

"I seem to feel a little light-headed," Holly told him.

"Tour's over, is it?" Larkin asked. He still sounded remarkably dry, and drifted towards the morro stairs like a scrap of paper.

"What's he after?" Erenilda asked, moving closer to Holly.

"He says inspiration. But I think what he means is stimulation."

"Take care you don't give it to him, girl."

Larkin tested the bottom stair with one foot, looking speculative.

"She doesn't want me to go up here, does she?" he asked. "I wonder why."

Holly turned to Erenilda. "What happens if he goes up?"

"Sei lá." Who knows? An odd expression, actually an abbreviation. "Sei lá no ceu," they said, which literally translated as, "I'll know up there in heaven." After death, presumably. Looking down. "These days," they implied, "I simply can't predict, and it exasperates me profoundly."

When Holly turned back to Larkin, she found he was already halfway up the stairs.

"I'm light-headed, Erenilda," she said.

"He's going up."

"Oh, what the hell," Holly said, and started after Larkin.

Heading up the flimsy stairs, Holly felt giddy with daring. Was this what she was looking for? Erenilda lumbered after her, muttering that Larkin would get them all killed. Of course, they couldn't let him go up there on his own. But he'd get them killed, she muttered, to the tune of a beating heart.

The stairs led up a super-heated slope of bare rock into a warren of shacks. Holly stared inside avidly, as any one of these people would have stared into her kitchen, here or at home. She sniffed the mildew, wrinkled her nose at the stench of rancid oil. Defining the odour — the desire to define the odour precisely — made Holly feel like an anthropologist. She noted each slap of a foot on the rock, each hushing mother, every silenced child. Todd said anthropologists had to efface themselves, forcing themselves to become no more than nose and eyes and ears. They were court reporters, not the judge, having to refrain from judgement and let the ambient culture sink into their subconscious so they could understand it on its own terms. What humility the profession must require. What awareness of its own fallibility. Imagine spending your life testing your humility against a stinking awful mess like this.

Todd had lost that one, hadn't he?

It was a jumbled maze, the morro. Easy to get turned around here. Walking up the rocky path — so steep, now, she could look down on the quilt-like plain of streets and houses — Holly had a dazed sense she was flying. Flying past the favelados on either side of her, who meticulously cast down their eyes. Wasn't it was dazzling, wasn't it was strange? With Larkin so drenched with sweat he seemed to slither through the air ahead of her. Or was he shimmering in the waves of heat?

A slop of greasy water landed in their path. Potato peelings. A few stray pieces of beans and rice. Holly looked up and saw an old woman staring out her window with a look of hatred on her deeply scarred face.

"Can I really manage this?" Holly asked.

"I thought that was Erenilda's job," Larkin answered. He looked avid, alive, taller than ever, but Holly only felt confused. Potato peelings?

Then she saw the two boys pointing guns, pointing them at her, and after a couple more heartbeats realized the guns weren't toys.

Erenilda apologized as she stepped in front of Larkin. Holly was inclined to say that Larkin was the one who owed her an apology, then realized Erenilda was speaking to the boys — two gangly teenagers, posing with their weapons. Erenilda kept bobbing at them, like a hen picking grain.

It was supposed to be a simple walk around the neighbourhood, she explained. Sister Celeste had cleared it, even though nothing had ever happened before. But this particular foreigner was far more careless than most. He'd insisted on coming up the stairs, and Erenilda would never stop being sorry that she hadn't prevented him. But wasn't it a problem, when she had no idea what he wanted?

"To see the animals, the world of animals," the taller boy replied. Both boys were immaculate, down to their imported white runners. Their mothers must have scrubbed for hours, Holly thought, picturing two lined women the same age she was.

"Is he a journalist?" the shorter boy asked, nodding at Larkin.

"Stupid," the other one replied, butting him with the stock of his gun. "You see any cameras?"

"They said he was writing in a notebook. He could be from a newspaper. Stupid yourself."

The boy cracked a burst of automatic rifle fire into the air. Holly shivered as the concussion echoed into her heels. Brothers, she thought. One mother scrubbing. One precious pair of panti-hose sacrificed for masks. She hadn't noticed they were wearing masks at first, accepting their flattened faces as the way they were.

"Actually, he's a musician," Erenilda said. "They say he writes songs for famous singers."

"Lulu writes his own songs," the shorter one replied. Lulu Santos, the rock singer. They were speaking to a hard rock fan. What else should you expect to find on a morro?

I will not laugh, Holly told herself sternly. The taller, older boy looked as if he had never laughed in his life.

"Foreign musicians," Erenilda said.

As the boys paused to consider this, Holly felt Larkin gently take her arm and urge her forward half a step. She didn't understand, but he steered her with the graceful, warm insistence of a good dancer. Then she saw him reach slowly for Erenilda, who had placed herself in front of them. He urged her backward; led them both backward down the hill, each step fluid and almost undetectable, certainly hypnotic. The boys watched, but didn't move, one paralyzed by the pressure of his questions, the other immobilized by his lack of curiosity. Larkin led them downhill like water slowly flowing. Then he took them around a corner, out of sight, and Holly laughed wildly as they ran.

Holly had never known Sister Celeste to be so quiet. She sat behind the old teacher's desk in her office, hands clasped ostentatiously on top, bag after bag of donated rice and beans slipping off the shelves behind her. She looked so starchy herself that Holly had to stifle her giggles. The giddy relief of having survived, of having got away with it, left her feeling airborne.

"Land, Holly," she told herself, not realizing she'd spoken out loud until she saw Larkin's amused eyes.

She asked more soberly, "This won't hurt the crêche?"

"Sei lá." Sister Celeste emphasized each word bitterly. But wasn't there something almost unbearably delightful about a nun knowing someday in heaven?

"Well, here," Larkin said, fumbling in his pants pocket. He came to stand so close behind her, Holly could feel the heat of him on her back. Half turning, she saw him offer a huge wad of banknotes to the sister.

Holly blanched. "You took that up there?"

"What difference would it have made?" Larkin asked, holding out the bills.

But Sister Celeste refused to take them. She kept her hands tightly clasped, and her mouth looked even tighter. Larkin shrugged, and put the money on her desk.

"What difference did it make?" he insisted, starting to range around the office. They watched him take in the Sacred Hearts, the family education diplomas, the Brazilian and Irish flags. Sister Celeste came from County Cork, but she'd been in Brazil so long that she no longer spoke much English. Even when they'd arrived, and she'd been happy to see him, Larkin and the sister had found communication difficult.

"I thought Holly said you'd left the church," he said, as he roamed.

"I said she'd left her order, not the church." Holly replied.

"Might I ask why?" Larkin asked, ending his circular tour in front of the desk.

Sister Celeste met his eyes steadily. "I was unworthy," she replied. With a great shout of jolly, cynical laughter, she pulled open the top drawer of her desk and swept the money inside.
5

The day was cool. Holly sat in her top-floor studio, spine held rigid as she faced her easel. Everyone knew this was her time for working, although they sometimes forgot and walked in unexpectedly to find her staring blankly at a project. In that case she always told them she was blocked by an artistic problem. Then made one up.

In Holly's experience, staring at projects neither evaporated problems nor precipitated inspiration. You had to work for that. Yet blanking out this way — staring past the canvas — was her way of getting focused. She refused to explain; it was nobody's business. Besides, they'd lock her up.

At the moment Holly was trying to cast herself back to 1832, to the Consul's residence in Rio. She could picture the outside walls, seedy with efflorescence; see the carriage entrance, the liveried servants manipulating the handles, the peeling wooden doors opening in front of her. Yet she couldn't seem to get inside. Her concentration was off. The courtyard she would normally see as starkly lit by the tropical sun looked smudged today, as if someone had been putting his fingers all over the picture.

Holly closed her eyes. She refused to think about Larkin or dwell on what had happened up the morro. That was yesterday. It was over. She'd been stupid, but she'd survived. Maybe even got away with it. With what? An image, a conjunction of colours? She had to push the experience so far away she'd see only the essentials; what she could use. Surely 1832 was far enough.

Yet only with the greatest effort could Holly force her antique carriage into the courtyard; could she emerge from the carriage like an underwater swimmer and move in slow motion through the cave of a door into the glimmering mirrored halls of her residence.

It is mid-May and the Consul's wife is returning in good time to receive her afternoon visitor.

But Holly couldn't remember reading whether May had been cool that year or unseasonably hot. She felt annoyed with herself. She had to get the details right. It was one of the rules, a type of discipline.

Self-discipline.

The Consul's wife reaches her drawing room and sits down gratefully. Even in her exhaustion, her spine is rigid, her posture perfect against the swanning lines of the gilt chair. She wears the transparent, faintly tinted muslin she has copied from her cousin, Rosamond Vincy of Middlemarch. Footsteps approach. She has not expected her caller so soon, but readies herself to receive the young gentleman just over from Shropshire, a naturalist like her husband, Mr. Austen, who is off on an expedition to the interior.

Holly jumped as the door to her studio swung open and Larkin walked in. She realized she'd heard the bell at the outside gate, heard the sound of the gate scraping open. What a strange thing to do, to incorporate Larkin's approaching footsteps into her daydream. To hear and not to hear him. She remembered now the sound of someone sprinting up the stairs, and saw that Larkin looked damp and slightly flushed. At the same time she realized her own cheeks were hot from blushing.

"I'm probably interrupting," Larkin began.

"Good morning," she replied. "But as a matter of fact —"

Holly gestured vaguely at the empty canvas.

"White on white. I thought you'd done that."

As he stood over her with an eloquent, almost intimate smile, Holly realized she'd made a mistake in asking Larkin to drive back from the crêche. It put him a little too much in charge. The man, driving. She was going to have to get out from under that.

"You're telling me you don't start work with an empty sheet of paper?" Holly asked.

"My notebook," Larkin answered, leaning against her desk and crossing his arms like an old friend. "I tell everyone they should carry one. When you get back to the studio, it makes the blank page look a lot less threatening."

Holly shrugged. "It's not something that works for me."

"What does?"

Holly disliked his insinuation, and got up to roam around the studio. She stopped by one of the piles of books that tended to accumulate on her tables and shelves. Period pieces from whatever period had caught her interest. She picked up the Voyage of the Beagle, but Larkin strolled over and took it from her, opening it idly. He was standing far too close.

"Charles Darwin lived here in 1832," Holly told him, moving away. "I never realized before we came here, but he spent four months in Botafogo. Which was a rural hamlet then instead of highrises and a sports club where the bicheiros hang out on weekends. The guys who run the numbers racket? Hanging by the swimming pool with their bodyguards. I used to take my kids there. It's a great pool, and it's cheap to join, but then someone told me who the bicheiros were, and I kept picturing my kids in the water during a shoot-out."

She stopped, remembering the morro, and shivered as Larkin picked up a paper from the table.

"These the pieces you were talking about?"

Her beautiful washes of skin disease. When she'd finally got home the previous afternoon, Holly had gone straight to her studio and taken out them out, layering the table with the subtle mixtures of colour that Larkin now began to thumb through, distracting her, making her flush again at the sight of him judging her work.

Holly wasn't sure why she'd wanted to look at them again. She'd puzzled over them for ages, only coming to herself at the sound of the boys downstairs piping like angry birds.

"It's my truck!"

"Mine!"

Holly had felt a moment's irritation before remembering that Todd was back in the Amazon. She'd been neglecting the boys, leaving them with the maid for far too long. Sighing, Holly trotted downstairs, arriving in the living room to see Evan and Conor tugging red-faced at either end of a cheap plastic fire truck, while the maid, Cida, called from the kitchen, "You've got thousands of trucks."

"You do," Holly said. "What a noisy racket."

She sat down on the floor with her back against the sofa, quietly watching the tug-of-war until Conor — glancing at her — grew half-hearted, embarrassed to seem as babyish as his little brother, and irritably let go of the toy.

"That isn't even the best one," he said, choosing a metal Dinky toy so small that Holly couldn't even see what it was as he leaned on it, making loud truck noises while pressing it determinedly across the rug. Poor honourable Conor; he was so intense he always tugged at Holly's heart. But little Evan was happy, and at least they weren't fighting. Holly rubbed her back against the sofa, watching them play as she drifted slowly back to her washes.

The question was, had she made illness beautiful? Or had she simply painted colours, form without subject? Pursing her lips, she had to ask, Was there any morality to art at all?

"Mommy, look at the little man climbing the ladder. Look how he goes up and up and up." Evan, singing. "Look at the little man, Mommy."

"My truck is saving more people," Conor told her. "It's saving the environment. See, Mommy? It's saving the trees."

"They're hungry," Cida said, bashing open the kitchen door with an overloaded tray. "But look at this, I made biscuits for dinner."

"Biscuits! Biscuits!"

"My God, is it dinnertime already?" Holly stood up reluctantly, seeing her day evaporate in food, bath, bedtime stories, and now she thought of it, a promised phone call from Todd that would probably crackle over the otherwise unreliable phone lines just as the boys were settling; unsettling them, leading to more stories, probably a bedtime snack.

And her washes?

Glancing at the subtle greys, Holly drifted unwillingly closer to Larkin. She never had time to follow through on her thoughts, leaving her art inconclusive. She needed to carve out more time for herself. It was probably the main challenge she faced: find time not just to paint, but to think about painting. It was hard to justify staring into space when her children needed her, yet she needed her daydreams, the perspective they gave her, the images that arose, both the confidence they let her feel and the sense of completion. Erotic completion, sometimes, with Todd so often gone. It occurred to her that Larkin knew something about that. What was that they said? Artists are great masturbators. Artists, musicians.

She was smelling Larkin's musky cologne, his drying sweat. Holly felt helplessly angry with herself. Why had she thought about her erotic daydreams? Didn't she also have long conversations with Darwin? Spin scenarios to examine her day from different angles; to finally, maybe, grasp what was important, what had actually happened when she was too busy looking at the clock to see time passing by? There were really two Hollys, her chaotic inner self and the form people saw. They only came into focus in her daydreams, and once she was focused, she could finally make art.

It really did sound crazy. Would Larkin see through her? Holly crossed her arms nervously, suddenly unable to bear the familiar, even proprietary way he was pawing through her washes with one hand while holding her book with the other. This was her heavily underlined, scribbled over, thoroughly private copy of Darwin's Voyage. By coming to Rio, she'd embarked on her own long voyage and couldn't stand for him — well, to have a hand in it. Holly smiled and shook her head. Larkin glanced at her in surprise, and she was able to tease the book out of his grip.

"But in 1832 — " she said, retreating towards the other side of the table.

"We can't forget 1832."

"Botafogo was still rural, and Darwin lived there in a little cottage. He was just starting his round-the-world trip as naturalist on the Beagle. They'd left England the previous December and sailed across the Atlantic to Brazil. Then Captain FitzRoy, the Beagle's Captain FitzRoy, decided he was going to survey the Brazilian coast, so he just dropped Darwin off for four months in Botafogo. The ship's artist was there too, and Fuegia Basket. She was the native girl from Tierra del Fuego, the one FitzRoy had kidnapped a few years earlier. Do you know this story?"

Larkin shook his head. "This is what you're painting?"

"It's hard to know where to start," she admitted, flicking a finger at the empty canvas. "I dropped out of art school, and I'm just not very experienced technically."

"But the paper isn't blank if you're using Darwin's book, is it?"

Holly glanced over quickly, suspecting Larkin of trying to score a point. But he looked kind, his head still canted toward her intently, his eyes shining brightly from within the cave of brows. He was so sincere, he threw her. Living with Todd for so long had left her accustomed to layers of irony and rebuke. The empty canvas was a rebuke. Holly started rambling around the studio again, touching the wall as she went.

"What happened is that FitzRoy had been to South America a couple of years before the voyage of the Beagle. When he was mapping Tierra del Fuego, he picked up three native people there and took them back to England. Four, actually, but one died from his smallpox vaccination. FitzRoy called the ones who were left York Minster, Jemmy Buttons and Fuegia Basket. If you can imagine. He decided he was going to educate them as Christian missionaries and take them back to Tierra del Fuego, where they were supposed to spread the word. The trouble was, he couldn't get another ship for a couple of years, so his captives had to live with the mission society all that time in England. They learned some English and how to use forks, then they were presented to the King and Queen.

"But everything moved so slowly then. When they finally sailed on the Beagle, FitzRoy decided he was going to map the Brazilian coast, so he ended up leaving Fuegia Basket in Botafogo for four months with Darwin. She was about 11 years old at the time, about nine when she'd been kidnapped. Darwin had a houseful of kids later on in England. You wonder how they got along. FitzRoy, you know, FitzRoy ended up founding the science of meteorology. After which he slit his throat."

"Interesting," Larkin said. "Meteorology?"

"It's Darwin I'm painting."

Holly arrived back at the canvas, thinking it best that Larkin leave. "I'm sorry I sound so disconnected. I guess this is what I'm like when I'm working."

"What you are is a great purveyor of information," he said gently. "It's a sign of loneliness, I always think. The way it builds up and spills out."

Holly touched the milky white canvas. She had no idea what to say.

"I came to take you out to lunch," Larkin said.

Holly shook her head, feeling out of her depth. Men may have looked at her, tried to flirt, let her know they were available. But no one had ever actively pursued her, if that was what Larkin was doing. She'd perfected the role of the virtuous wife, calm, businesslike, distant, helpful, and at times a little hard of hearing. It had always kept her safe; she could congratulate herself on her constancy. Meanwhile confirming her sense, as the men drifted off, that she was not insurmountably tempting.

"Don't be boring, Holly. It's only lunch."

"Oh, 'boring.' As if boredom was the eighth deadly sin."

Holly pursed her lips, then realized she must have looked petulant, which was probably the wrong thing to do. Larkin was leaning toward her again, leaning down from his rangy height. He seemed confidential now, and older, superior.

"Boredom or chaos," he said. "I prefer chaos, myself. Finding it's usually one or the other."

"I don't," Holly said. She shrugged; it was true. Not that she had thought it out before.

"Repression," Larkin said, coming around to her side of the table and touching her lightly on the cheek. "I suppose it has its uses. Your friend's right, your work is very good. A little weird, but good. The strain is showing." He bent and kissed her, brushing her cheek with the faintest suggestion of lips and stubble.

"Call me," he said, going out the door.

She realized he must do this often, and felt a coruscating envy.

Mrs. Austen, the Consul's wife, is out for a morning's ride. Holly insists she will ride peacefully through the aboriginal forest, a calm place seldom visited by overseas travellers.

Yet Holly is not completely in control of this fantasy, which tunes in and out of the day's uncomfortable reality. Mrs. Austen, for instance, seems to be accompanied by an oddly modern band of companions who would not have ridden with an English lady in the nineteenth century. The young Darwin rides to her left, which is plausible: he is a gentleman, after all; a blonde and blue-eyed boy from home. Yet to her right is the Indian girl, Fuegia Basket, who should not know how to ride, despite the fact she is an alert, vivacious child who has seen a great deal in her short life. Their party is led by a Brazilian rancher who is taking them on an excursion to his country house; a shrewd, boxy-looking individual with one blue eye and one brown. He is an acquaintance of Mr. Austen, who has unfortunately been prevented by official business from making one of their party: which, of course, in the real — repressed — nineteenth century, would have stopped this ride before it had begun. Wouldn't it?

Yet, for all this, the picture has an antique look, which Holly finds increasingly restful. Mrs. Austen seems to have dressed young Fuegia in a cut-down riding habit far too hot for the country. She is herself wearing an elegant habit and a pair of doeskin gloves. Slaves follow with their picnic and much of Mr. Darwin's collecting equipment. The weight of their burdens distresses Mrs. Austen, who is, like young Mr. Darwin, an opponent of the pernicious institution of slavery. She can only hope they are cooled by the pleasant morning breeze, which touches her own cheeks lightly.

It is June, early June, and the scene around them is most limpid and affecting. Lianas twine loosely about the trees, drooping like fine silk draperies. Orchids sprout from the crooks of branches, fleshy but pure. The road here is wide, and protected as it is by an immense canopy of trees, the surface remains dry, though soft and leafy, sounding a soft clump beneath the slaves' feet and horses' hooves. Near the log crossing of a narrow stream, they pass huge spiders' webs strung between the lofty trees. Mr. Darwin must dismount to collect an unsightly specimen, and apologizes cheerfully as they resume their way.

It is a peaceful ride. Monkeys call, marmosets cry, and insects loudly grate their songs. Then the riders catch sight of a white breast and a black tail falling in the shape of a lyre. It is an unusually beautiful bird sitting on a dead branch at no great elevation. The Brazilian shows little interest in a specimen he declares is seen here commonly. Yet its lyre-shaped tail is like nothing the English have known before, and Mr. Darwin raises his rifle slowly. He shoots, misses, and the bird flies on, although it perches again no great distance down a lane which here intersects the road.

Now there comes a sound of hooves. Captain FitzRoy rides up, an unsettling development. No one wants his dark, raw presence, his overweening manner. He is too much the aristocrat, being directly if illegitimately descended from King Charles II, and a nephew of Viscount Castlereagh: the same Castlereagh who cut his throat ten years before, casting a prophetic shadow over his nephew's life.

Does the body bear ghostly scars of violence yet to come? A nettling thought; yet on this June day, all that Mrs. Austen can perceive of Captain FitzRoy is his high-bred arrogance. He has seen the lyre-tailed bird, yet does not appear to notice the party of slaves who accompany them, merely dismounting and extending his hand until a slave runs forward with his gun. Mr. Darwin dismounts after him, followed by Mrs. Austen, who is followed in turn by Fuegia Basket. Mrs. Austen does not want to join the gentlemen, but seems to have little choice. Together they close in upon the bird, but it flies again, and they must creep further down the lane. The Brazilian rancher falls in behind them, signalling for his slaves to join them.

The chase is long, the bird a flirt, flitting from branch to branch down the narrowing lane. None of the three chief hunters is able to take a successful shot, although Mr. Darwin collects a blue morpho butterfly which bumbles out of the forest on wings as big as clapping hands. Mrs. Austen's Portuguese is uncertain, and she cannot make out whether the Brazilian calls their prey a tesouro or a tesoura, a treasure bird or scissors bird, for the shape of the tail. Yet for all her reluctance, she hopes she is seeking a treasure.

The lane soon degenerates into a path, and is heading noticeably uphill, yet the Brazilian assures them he knows well where they are, and that there is no harm in continuing. Once they think they have lost the bird. But Fuegia Basket spots its white breast shining just inside the forest, on what they quickly perceive to be an animal trail cutting down from the hill's summit. It is no place for an English lady, but Captain FitzRoy does not seem inclined to abandon his quest: not least, Mrs. Austen now understands, because of Man's unvarying desire to impress Woman with his daring. As Mr. Darwin secures a beetle, the captain uses the barrel of his gun to push at the foliage guarding the entrance to the trail. When he is sure that Mrs. Austen is watching, he steps recklessly into the opening he has made, and they are committed to ascend.

There is very little chance for sport on this steep and humid trail. They must scramble upwards in single file, the trail being like a tunnel, hemmed in nearly by vegetation. Increasingly, they use this vegetation to pull themselves forward, and soon enough are crawling up the rocky face of the mountain, granite in their reaching hands, or the snaking tree roots which surface here above the thinning soil. Mrs. Austen quickly loses sight of the lyre-tailed bird, although there are loud, indeterminate animal cries in the forest all around them. Then she sees an opening in the trail, and to her eye the men before her disappear into a blaze of sunshine. Mrs. Austen herself soon emerges into a clearing, where she finds the Brazilian rancher scuffing with his boot at a cultivated patch of some bristly crop which does not seem to please him. On one side, the crop ends at a sheer cliff falling straight to the plain below them. Then she sees a silver flash as Mr. Darwin shoots a white breast off a dead tree at the edge of the forest. There is an eerie human cry as the shot bird falls.

Immediately, the Brazilian yells and darts into the forest. He is dragging forth two black children, each by a shoulder, as his slaves disperse beyond the first clearing, stout sticks at the ready. Mrs. Austen draws Fuegia Basket to her side, and crouches with her at the head of the trail. The Brazilian now cries loudly in English that these are his neighbour's escaped slaves. Mrs. Austen understands he means to suggest his own slaves do not wish to escape; or in any event, that they do not escape. She knows his reputation as a disciplined man who has never flinched from what needs be done. Nor has Captain FitzRoy, who joins the new hunt wolfishly. He is wicked, he is thorough, he clearly enjoys playing the bully, while poor blonde Darwin trots miserably past, apology in the bent of his shoulders as he retrieves his unremarkable specimen from the base of the long-dead tree.

It is not long before the clearing is filled with a dozen or more recaptured slaves, who do not speak, or even cry. It is not certain the entire complement has been discovered. A messenger is now sent, to inform the Brazilian's neighbour he may wish to return with dogs. Another trustee is delegated to strip lianas from the forest, which may be used to bind the slaves. Mrs. Austen no longer feels herself a part of the gentlemen's hunting party. Instead she examines the gathered group, as if searching for an answer to a question yet unasked. Slowly the English Consul's wife becomes aware that the oldest of the recaptured slaves, an ancient crone with scarified cheeks, does not take her eyes off Fuegia Basket.

Each cheek is slashed thrice vertically, and above each set of slashes are three raised dots. The woman must have been born in Africa, the scarring rituals of her heathen religion being forbidden in Catholic Brazil. Yet Mrs. Austen must surmise the crone arrived while still very young, for it is clear she recognizes Fuegia Basket as native to American shores, and the Indians of this part of Brazil have been killed long since.

Fuegia fingers the buttons of her cut-down habit, unaware of the old crone's scrutiny. Mrs. Austen is now struck by the odd trajectory of the child's life, which begins on frigid austral shores, where her people live naked, and brings her to this tropical summit, where she is over-clothed. The girl must surely have expected to live out her life in her canoe, with its warming fire guarded at the centre, yet she has been taken to England, even summoned to an audience at the Palace, where Queen Adelaide made her the present of a purse, which King William filled with gold.

Mrs. Austen presents Fuegia with a handkerchief, and loosens the strings of her bonnet. She means by this to apologize to the crone; for she is certain now that what holds the ancient woman's gaze is the great fracture of her own life, repeated in Fuegia Basket. Indeed, Mrs. Austen now understands that her own life has been irretrievably broken by her removal to Brazil. Home will never seem the same again, and she feels a sudden anguish; a premonition of endless loss. Is that what she has come here to find?

Somewhere nearby Captain FitzRoy laughs. The sound echoes across the morro, and the English Consul's wife is seized by a wish to demand that he free young Fuegia so they may live together. And the old slave as well? Child, adult, crone: the three ages of woman patched together to make a whole. Mrs. Austen thinks she can find safety here, and reaches for the girl. Fuegia smiles, for she is an affectionate child with a responsive, biddable nature. Yet in looking up, the girl has chanced to see the crone, and now turns fully to meet her gaze, threatening to loose something Mrs. Austen cannot control.

With the persistence of a growing plant, the old one rises to a crouch. Should the Brazilian or the Captain glance that way, they will think her merely resting on her haunches. They will not see the gathering strength of her legs, nor the power of her scarified face, which is turned on Fuegia Basket. Only the observant Mr. Darwin looks up mildly, as if the wind has changed.

Then suddenly the old crone springs. Springs far out onto the cultivated field, running so swiftly her feet scarce touch the soil she has pampered, crying as she runs, "Follow me, follow me," flying over the bristly crops, flying, flying off the cliff, over the morro, airborne, shrieking, free at last, on red Brazilian ground.

"As it was growing dark," Darwin writes, "we passed under one of the massive, bare, and steep hills of granite which are so common in this country. This spot is notorious from having been, for a long time, the residence of some runaway slaves, who, by cultivating a little ground near the top, contrived to eke out a subsistence. At length they were discovered, and a party of soldiers being sent, the whole were seized with the exception of one old woman, who, sooner than again be led into slavery, dashed herself to pieces from the summit of the mountain. In a Roman matron this would have been called the noble love of freedom: in a poor negress it is mere brutal obstinacy."

Holly mutters the words over and over. "Roman matron," she says. "Mere brutal obstinacy." She also seems to be cutting a water colour wash of those interesting skin diseases into the shape of a morro. She is making a collage, pasting the morro onto a sheet of such varying blue it is liquid, shimmering behind the stubborn rock. Then women. She draws women flying off the mountain. Black women, aboriginal women, pale women with grey beating veins in their wrists — all fly like angels into the sky.

Yet at the base of the morro she must also draw a man in antique naval uniform holding his hand to his slit throat. Look at him: he's been leaving bloody handprints all over the morro.

She's drawn down there. Pulled up here. As her soaring angels drink the sky.

"You must listen to the advice I gave my hasty son George," Darwin tells her. It is the whitebeard Darwin speaking, an old man now, long returned to England's shires. "You must listen:

"Pause, pause, pause." 
Part Two
6

Holly sat in the bow of the boat, the boys and Todd behind her. On either side was Amazon forest — scrubby here, all out-of-focus green, like paint seen too closely on a canvas. Bright flashes streaked the green, startling yellows and reds that Todd said were toucans taking nervous flight, although Holly couldn't hear their cries above the deep bass roar of the outboard.

The boatman ran them full throttle up the blackwater river. Their speed raised a cool breeze, and the spray felt like fog on Holly's bare arms. She shivered, mostly with relief to be out of Rio. Finally, a week's vacation. Holly had tracked Todd down after Larkin's visit, convincing him that she and the boys should join him in the Amazon. They all needed a break, herself especially. Not that she'd mentioned the way Larkin had dropped into her studio. Todd was so angry when she told him about the morro that Holly decided not to take it any further, saying the strain Todd heard in her voice came from the endless heat of a summer that was lingering far too long. She was suffering from fatigue, she said.

Which was probably as good a word for it as any.

The river was maybe forty feet wide, a tributary of a tributary of one of the great branches of the Amazon. It ran swiftly against them, the water a dark rippling mirror that reflected the confusion of forest. Grey-green, blue-green, shockingly emerald, the trees pushed right to the river's edge, with only the occasional crescent of sandy beach a few feet long and a few feet wide to subtle down the colours.

They'd begun their trip the previous morning, spending a day flying and a night in the cheap hotel where Todd had been waiting, a noisy place on the banks of the wide and polluted river into which the tributary flowed. The boatman had met them at the dock very early the next morning, running them downstream for an hour before heading up the blackwater river toward the nature preserve where they would spend the week. Todd had never been to the nature camp, but said there was supposed to be swimming off the dock. They'd go hiking, canoeing, fishing; play badminton and volleyball with the boys. Holly looked forward to tiring herself out, never thinking beyond the moment. In the past, she'd emerged from vacations like this with her confusion dissipated, her troubles calmed, and her direction firmly set; a largely subconscious process she was counting on now.

They arrived at the camp without much warning, rounding a hairpin bend in the river to see a high dock — a deck, really, or outdoor bar, with its patio tables shaded by umbrellas. Nodding to himself, the boatman turned and headed for a muddy clearing downstream from the dock. As they nosed in, he cut his motor abruptly, and Holly was startled by the intensity of the whirring and cawing that instantly replaced the motor's roar. Cicadas, parakeets, chattering monkeys. She was surprised to hear the soft scrape of the boat on mud as they hit shore; surprised she could still hear it. Todd jumped out and pulled them in, quickly followed by Evan. Conor hung back, getting his bearings, but bullish Evan led the way past some overturned canoes, making for a trail that led, through roots and stones, up the river's low, muddy bank.

At the head of the trail was a wide lawn planted with flowering trees and shrubs. Holly pulled Conor up the final incline, then paused with him to look around. The lawn sloped down to the dock they'd seen from the river, with its tables and umbrellas. Toward the rear, facing the river, was a large log cabin. The front of the cabin was open, though screened against the insects, and Holly could see it was filled with picnic tables. On either side of this main building was a pair of smaller, screened cabins. Bunkhouses, hung with rows of brightly-coloured hammocks. One had a sign saying, "Damas." It was like a children's camp — girls in one bunkhouse, boys in the other.

Holly walked a few steps forward, searching for a cabin she and Todd might share. Nothing. Holly glanced at Todd in despair. They so seldom made love any more. He travelled half the time, and when he got home — frequently ill, always exhausted — he didn't seem to realize how often he turned away from her at night, too tense and agitated to sleep quickly, but also wanting to be left alone, off duty, sex having becoming one of too many demands, almost another chore. On those nights, Holly lay awake even longer than Todd, sometimes hearing the galling sounds of lovemaking from apartments down the road; cries carried through the open windows on the breezes and queer, clear, bell-like silences that preceded the summer storms. Todd had always been such a sweet lover; courtly, sometimes pleading, arching over her like a splendid bridge. It had been so good for both of them that Holly had never imagined it would end.

She hadn't expected to make it to the Amazon, either. Holly took a long breath, looking up at the tall forest surrounding the clearing. For the first time, she was seeing true canopy forest, higher and richer than the scrub along the river. She concentrated on the mingled green — the same green as the river scrub, though spattered here with yellow and scarlet flowering trees that flung into the upper canopy like fountains. She could see herself painting that. She'd bring out her water-colours, brushes, the sketchbooks she'd packed, making the most of what she had.

Ahead, Todd stood talking with Evan in the middle of the clearing. Conor had been watching them, and finding Holly inclined to linger at the edge of the lawn, he shook free of her hand and ran toward them. Holly watched his sweet skinny knees lift high. She watched him brush a bush that was bright with yellow flowers.

It burst. Holly cried out as the bush threw off colour, its flowers growing, glowing, fragmenting in the humid air. Conor tripped and landed on his knees, surrounded by yellow fragments, lemon snowflakes spiralling upwards, torn paper lifted in a whirlwind towards the deep blue of the morning sky.

Butterflies. It was butterflies, a flock of yellow butterflies lifting from the bush. Conor raised his hands as they gathered, fluttering, above his head, then moved in one great clumsy wavering body across the grassy clearing. Holly stood transfixed, as happy as she'd ever been, watching the butterflies land on a pathway leading into the forest. Their wings were fanning to and fro against the reddish earth as if the wings themselves were breathing.

Then they exploded for a second time. Two men were coming toward them down the path, an old one and a man Todd's age. The boys ran across the grass, chasing the butterflies around the smiling men as they walked into the clearing.

"Mr. Austen. You've arrived," the older one said.

"Doutor Eduardo," Todd replied.

It took Holly a while before she remembered where she'd heard that name before. In the meantime, she watched the younger one put a fatherly hand on Conor's head, and for some reason, that was what she didn't like.

"I can't believe you've brought us to a place owned by someone you don't trust. This is the man who wanted to look you over in the bar? The coronel? And now you bring your children? Why Todd? So he could get a look at them, too?"

"I wouldn't have brought you if I hadn't thought it would be fine. Most of the other Amazon camps are touristed out. The animals have left. You don't see anything any more. Then I heard about this place. It's new, he's just opened it. And look at it, Holly. Look around. The place is gorgeous."

"And you had no idea he would be here?"

"I heard he's been spending a lot of time up here, so I thought he'd probably be around. And yes, I wanted a chance to talk with him. As a bonus. Listen to me, a bonus. It was an impulse mainly, but I thought it would be all right."

"I don't believe you have impulses anymore."

Holly looked at her hammock with distaste. She had called Todd into the women's bunkhouse after settling Evan and Conor. It appeared she was to stay here, while Todd and the boys were across the clearing with Powell, the man who had walked out of the forest with Doutor Eduardo. Powell was the only other tourist here, and somehow his lone presence made everything that much worse. He would want to tag along with them, burning his knees even redder above his Boy Scout socks. His blue eyes already turned doggish when he looked at her, and Holly didn't believe him when he said he was a pilot. Powell looked competent — a bandy-legged little man with hard calves. But his welcome was over-enthusiastic and he struck her as sad. She hoped to persuade him to go canoeing and leave them to themselves.

"You don't want to spend a week alone with us," she said. "You want more. You really want to talk to that horrible doutor. Why can't you ever stop working any more?"

Todd sat down heavily in an old white wicker chair. "Do you want to leave?"

"After taking nearly two days to get here?"

Holly began pacing the large room, her fists burrowed into her armpits.

"You back people into corners, don't you? That's how you operate. But I'm not a job. Your children aren't jobs. That isn't how you're supposed to treat us."

Holly stopped and glared at Todd. He dropped his eyes and his face sagged, but she saw no sign he felt in any way at fault. She knew he was thinking that she'd wanted to come to Brazil far more than he had, pressing him to take the unexpected job offer, seizing her chance to paint. He'd been intrigued by the opportunity as well, of course, but he'd said from the start that the job was badly defined. There were too many members of the sponsor coalition who would make too many demands. He'd predicted that he'd end up having to work all the time to accomplish even half of what they'd ask.

Of course, he could have done what she did all the time. Agree to anything, then decide what you want to do and convince them it's their idea. But Todd couldn't operate like that. He couldn't take on less than everything. Despite the cynical face he showed people like Larkin, Todd was trying to save the world, and he would tolerate neither compromise nor delay.

One day he might recognize the irony of trying to save the world by using the same hard-driving, competitive, male tactics that had got them in trouble in the first place. Then again, he might not.

Holly sighed and rubbed her forehead more gently on the screen, knowing without turning that Todd was still sitting slumped in his chair, staring at his loosely clasped hands.

"You just don't get it, do you?" she said. "It's an equation. If you give everything you've got to your job, there's nothing left for your family."

"Then I won't talk to him, all right? We'll go canoeing, swimming."

"That isn't the point, either. You didn't want to spend a week with us. You're owed a vacation, and if anyone had objected, you could have pointed out how much you obviously need a rest."

"And how does that sound, Holly? To say I'm not really up to the job."

"I would say at the moment it has the ring of truth."

Todd looked worried as Holly walked across the bunkhouse, stopping in front of him.

"I can't not talk to the man," Todd said. "He'd start to wonder why I was up here, and that could really cause problems."

"Todd, I need your help here. I need a partner. I need you to focus on us."

"Life is complicated, Holly. One way to contribute to your family is to make sure you keep your job."

Holly closed her eyes. Outside, she heard Evan squeal happily, and realized the boys had been squealing steadily behind her argument with Todd. Opening her eyes, looking outside, she gradually made out the figure of Powell twirling in the bright sun. When she narrowed her eyes, she saw Powell swinging Evan by an arm and a leg — swinging him far too close to a heavy wooden picnic table.

"Put him down!" she called, and ran out the door. "That isn't safe. Put him down right now." She heard a hysterical note in her voice. Powell let Evan down, and stood beside the two boys with an abashed, reproachful look on his face identical to theirs. He'd been kind to the boys and this was how she treated him. Holly didn't care. She wanted Powell away from her children for reasons she knew were almost certainly unfair, having far too much to do with the sight of his awkward sunburned knees. Forcing a false, bright note into her voice, she told the boys, "Come on, let's go for a walk in the forest."

A predictable chorus of protest followed.

"There's a path I saw," Holly coaxed. "Maybe it has monkeys."

"Where's Daddy?" Conor asked.

"Daddy's busy." Holly raised her voice. "We'll leave Daddy to his work."

She pictured Todd first rising, then sinking back into his chair.

"Come on," she said, feeling half ashamed of herself. "We'll have an adventure."

"Just watch for snakes where there's a rocky outcrop," Powell told her. He smiled helpfully. "You come across it suddenly when the path takes a turn about halfway back."

Holly felt as if she was trapped in a room that was getting smaller and smaller. "Come on, then," she told Powell ungraciously, and they headed into the forest.
7

Powell wasn't so bad, Holly decided. He was an unattractive and lonely man who kept trying to meet her eyes as he shepherded the boys down the path. Yet his warning about ticks and snakes was given with enough casual authority to keep even wayward Evan from wandering. He knew the names of all the trees — the perna de moça, young girl's leg, with its virginal beige bark; the sapling you cut to get hearts-of-palm. He cut one ten-foot tree nearly in half to give the boys a taste of the cool, crisp heart. Taking a piece from Powell's knife, Holly realized Todd would never cut down a tree. She closed her eyes and pressed her fingertips against the lids, wanting to blur the image of Todd waiting back at the camp, slumped in his white wicker chair.

It was hot and increasingly humid under the canopy of trees. As they headed away from the camp, they lost all benefit of the faint river breezes and seemed to walk into thicker air. Holly found it dense, although the undergrowth was surprisingly sparse. Only isolated ferns and shrubs broke through the mat of fallen brown leaves, making the forest look half-furnished, and there was a peculiar mustiness coming off the leaves that reminded her of the smell inside a deserted cabin. Before long, only Powell remained lively and energetic. He scraped a trace of bark from another tree for the boys to taste, laughing when they spat it out.

"Bitter?" he asked. "Locals use it to treat parasites."

By this time, Powell's drawl of authority had convinced Holly that he was a pilot, as he'd said. Soon he dropped back to walk beside her.

"I know trees," he said, "but I'm a bird man, really."

Holly coughed to cover her laughter, picturing Powell's squat body soaring over the trees. Had he noticed her reaction? He was taking off his hat to wipe his head with a huge white handkerchief. Underneath the hat, he was bald as an egg.

Yet Powell strode forward with relentless enthusiasm. He said he'd become a birder years ago in Alaska, where he flew bush planes. He'd already compiled a long life list by the time he moved to Morocco — he'd flown for the national airline — but since going back to an American carrier, he'd got less interested in sheer quantity, and had been spending an increasing amount of time in the Amazon. Recently, he'd taken a leave of absence and set himself up in Manaus, planning to do some serious exploration.

"Over on the Peruvian side couple years ago, they found an entirely new species," he told Holly. "Two guys from back home, one professional — ornithologist — one what you'd call an educated amateur. They'd heard rumours about this new type of parrot. Went out into bush which is practically indistinguishable from the bush around here. Bingo. New bird."

Holly pictured Powell as a nineteenth century explorer bashing off into the jungle. She pencilled in a heavy moustache, a line of "locals" hired as bearers. There was something about Powell's bland face and pale, barrel-chested body that let you picture him in other roles. Holly wondered if he played roles, possibly with prostitutes. That was his business. He was a person who had not been given many personal advantages, but he coped.

He also talked too much. His love of bird calls, his bashful hope of finding a new species. Larkin said that talking too much was a sign of loneliness. Holly pictured Larkin in her studio, the faintly exciting sight of his fingers in her book. It was true Larkin had his attractions. He grew on you — although he was wrong about the loneliness. People talked to cover things up, to obscure them, and loneliness was only one of the things they tried to hide.

What was Powell hiding? Not that she cared. Everyone had secrets, and Powell's looked as if they'd only be sad.

The bird man reached for Conor's arm.

"Look here, snickers," he said. "See that hole in the ground? It's probably made by an armadillo, but there's a bird called a motmot who sometimes hides in burrows like that. We're up real early tomorrow, maybe we'll get lucky and see him."

"My Daddy knows all about birds," Conor told him. "Right, Mommy?"

"Your father is a very formidable man," Holly answered. "Be warned," she told Powell, who laughed rather weakly.

"Hear those parrots?" he said.

The path grew increasingly narrow and the trees huge. They eventually reached brazil nut tree with a trunk the circumference of a small house. Powell got them to join hands to try to circle the tree, making Holly think of Todd's campaigns to save the old-growth forest on Vancouver Island. She wished now she hadn't lost her temper. Todd was only behaving the way he'd always behaved, and losing her temper wasn't going to change that. Better to plan a calm discussion. The boys needed more time with their father, she needed more time to herself. Yet Holly didn't know how to convince Todd that her work was as important as his. She was also getting a headache, and found it hard to focus, more and more difficult to share Conor's wonder at the size of the tree trunks, increasingly arduous to dog after Powell, who strode so vigorously ahead.

It must have been well past noon. Holly realized they still had a long hike back when they reached the rocks Powell had warned them about, rough boulders that rose barely ten feet above the forest floor, and were covered with moss and plants. Hearing a solitary bird call, Powell raised his binoculars to the canopy and clambered half-blindly onto the rocks. He walked carelessly over a bed of plants, breaking their sword-like leaves.

"Evan! Keep down!" Holly cried. She knew she sounded shrewish but her head just throbbed. Besides, they were orchids. Powell was trampling a bed of wild orchids. They weren't yet in bloom, but that wasn't the point. He'd obviously been telling the truth when he said his real passion was birds, although Holly couldn't help noticing how little concern he showed for the supposed presence of the poisonous snakes he had warned them about back at the camp. He'd just wanted to tag along with them, and she shouldn't have let him. His cheerfulness was wearing — undiminished even when he failed to find his elusive bird with its repeated, piercing who of a call — and Holly was relieved, not long after the path finally turned, to see the clearing appear at the end of the green tunnel of trees like an open door to a lighted room.

"Uh-oh," Powell said, lifting Conor's arm. "Ticks after all."

Conor shrieked at the sight of the tiny brown speck on his wrist and grabbed Holly's leg in fright.

"Hey, no problem," Powell said. "What you do, you take off your clothes and jump in the river. No kidding. The cold makes them lose their grip. And you put your clothes in the sun, they scamper off. You want some help?"

But Holly was already urging the boys into the clearing. She took them to her bunkhouse and got them quickly into bathing suits. A middle-aged woman appeared with her arms out-stretched for the clothes. Powell must have sent her over. But Holly was angry with Powell for taking the boys so close to the brazil nut tree; far more angry with Powell now than she was with Todd. Her temples pounding, she hurried them down to the dock, where Todd rose from a chair.

"We're just covered with ticks," Holly cried.

"The river's running fast. I'll go first, and then they jump." Turning to the boys, he said, "You hold onto the rope that's in the water."

Todd headed for a gap in the railings where the ladder descended and dove into the river. With a whoop, Evan jumped after him, leaving Conor to hesitate, hug himself and — seeing more ticks on his skinny arms — throw himself recklessly into the river. He surfaced near Todd, and when Holly saw both boys safely holding the rope, she dove in to join them.

Cold. Shocking cold. The water pierced Holly like needles. She surfaced gasping for breath, not knowing how she could stand it, shivering, close to panic.

Todd was treading water nearby. "You'll get used to it."

"Story of my life," Holly replied. Yet Todd was right. Her headache was gone — instantly gone — along with her fatigue. She felt as if she'd just woken to a cool, clear morning. It was true the river was high and the current strong, and she had to work to stay in place. But treading water only warmed her.

"You're okay?" Todd asked.

She raised an arm to make sure the ticks were gone, and lost some of her momentum against the current, drifting downstream to spoon against Todd. As he put an arm around her waist, the last of her fury drifted away.

"Why does everything have to be complicated?" she asked. Before Todd could answer, Evan let go of the rope to swim frantically toward them. With a jealous cry, Conor splashed behind him. They were all holding onto each other as Powell came thumping across the dock.

"Cannonball!"

Tumbling boulders hit the water with less force than bird man Powell.

That night, it cooled down so far that Holly felt chilly, and Powell helped Todd build a campfire on the gravel near the barbecue. Powell clearly had his uses. Long after Holly and Todd had grown tired of playing with the boys in the river, he was still giving them rides on his back, only stopping to instruct them in the fine art of cannonball dives. Conor wouldn't try at first, but Powell got him to climb just one step up the ladder before jumping, then another, and another, until in the end, Conor was happily diving off the railing a good fifteen feet above the river.

Sipping her drink, Holly thought that if Todd had decided to teach the boys how to dive, he would have placed Conor at the top of the ladder and gone below to wait for him, sounding increasingly stern as Conor stood there scraping his toe across the dock, finally ordering him to jump so that Conor started whining and they were into a cycle of impatience and stubbornness that could only end with Conor hating the water. Somehow, everything Todd did worked best with Evan, although never seemed to see that himself, much less change his behaviour.

Not that Powell was a model male. Wandering over to the railing, Holly saw desperation in his endless indulgence of the boys. When they demanded one more ride, he grabbed the rope without even pretending to protest, letting them clamber on his back while glancing up at Holly with doggy, abject eyes.

Todd had his problems as a father, but at least he was never that needy, and in no danger of living through his children. He played with them for long enough, then relaxed in a deck chair, lazily watching a heron fly downriver. Sipping his beer, scratching the drying hair on his chest, he looked entirely masculine; utterly adult in his expression of calm pleasure. He closed his eyes as a faint breeze riffled past, and when he stretched out his legs, Holly was stirred by the sight of his tautening shorts. She wished again that they were in a cabin, then realized she could take him to the women's bunkhouse that night. Unless someone came in later, she would be the only woman there, and Powell would be in the other bunkhouse with the children in case they woke up.

Later, as the campfire crackled, the boys were so punch-drunk with exhaustion that Holly doubted they would have any trouble sleeping. Powell had brought out his telescope, but Evan staggered as he tried to look through the eyepiece, unable to hold himself steady. As frogs chirped from the trees and river, Holly remembered the night Evan was conceived. She'd known she was pregnant instantly, both times, and wondered idly whether her memory of lovemaking added something to the warmth she felt for her children. She was also wondering how they would manage in a hammock when Evan staggered over from the telescope, crawled into her lap and fell asleep.

"My grandchildren do the same when they come here," said Doutor Eduardo, coming up behind her.

Holly was so startled that she let Evan's head drop, although he only stirred without waking. As she settled him more securely, Holly could see her plan for the night rise like burning paper from the fire, hang in the air for an instant, then lift, drift, and finally fly away. Now Todd would stay up late to talk, and when she finally got him to the bunkhouse, he would rehash the conversation over and over as she drifted helplessly off to sleep.

Yet as the elegant old doutor sat down beside her, Holly realized that she might finally learn more about the uncontacted tribe and the prospectors, the garimpeiros, or at least why the old man had shown such an interest in Todd the last time he was in the Amazon. That would be enough to keep her awake, maybe even for days. In any case, all she could do was smile politely at the doutor, a middle-sized man in a clean white shirt that lapped over his khaki pants. Todd had told her that Doutor Eduardo Gusinde was the biggest landowner in the region, with acreage in the millions. Part he had inherited, part came with his wife. He was now about seventy, and had spent his rich maturity diversifying into cattle ranches, mining, airlines and recently, acutely, tourism. Most people who knew him only by reputation assumed that his title was an honorific, a tribute to his power, but Todd said that as a young man — a second son — he had taken his medical degree, and apparently planned to practice as a surgeon before his marriage made that unnecessary. A restless man, he moved incessantly between his ranches in the interior and a penthouse in Rio de Janeiro, while his regal wife travelled separately between their homes in São Paulo and the Continent.

Now he ordered a drink from the middle-aged woman Holly had seen before. The woman and her husband ran the camp, living in a small house attached to the back of the dining hall. Holly gathered they were the daughter and son-in-law of the boatman who had brought them upriver, Seu José. Todd called him Doutor Eduardo's enforcer, which seemed a little melodramatic. Seu José was such a mild old man, big-bellied, broad-faced, kind to the children, patting them on the head with his ham-sized hands. Holly decided it was time she found out what was really going on. Making love in a hammock would probably have reduced her to giggles, anyway.

"Do you have many grandchildren?" she asked the doutor, as he took his beer.

"Five. Only five. My children seem to have had more divorces than offspring. But now I will sound like a very old gentleman asking what the world is coming to."

"Maybe it isn't so bad for our poor, crowded world to have only five grandchildren. It seems to me a respectable amount."

"And to me, the world doesn't seem so crowded," he said, smiling and waving his hand at the immense singing darkness. "Your other boy isn't tired?"

Meaning the opposite. He'd evidently heard Conor's high-pitched stutter of over-excitement, and was dismissing Holly to deal with her child. Without answering, she picked up Evan and carried him to the bunkhouse, refusing Powell's assistance when she returned for Conor, and wrapping them both in blankets against the growing chill. Conor was shivering with exhaustion and nerves, and she had to promise to leave the light on so he could get to sleep. Fortunately, the camp had a generator, which had hummed to life at sunset. Doutor Eduardo probably expected her to stay with Conor, but Holly wasn't ready to turn in. She returned to find the three men standing by Powell's telescope, looking for the moons of Jupiter.

In retrospect, Holly found it incredible that three well-travelled, sophisticated men could remain so unaware of what they unconsciously revealed. Todd and the doutor were clearly assessing each other, deciding when to talk. And Powell?

Standing by the telescope, Powell detailed its powers of magnification before mentioning binoculars — birding binoculars — and flitting quickly to the possibility of finding new species in the area. At first, he turned with courtly interest to acknowledge Holly's occasional comment. But before too long he was standing with his back to her, looking up at Todd and the doutor, who were both much taller, as if seeking their approval. He seemed to lose interest in Holly, and by the time they went to sit by the fire, he turned his chair to face the others, canting his shoulder away from her as if he'd done his duty by her attractions earlier, and could finally, thankfully forget her — forget women; their emotions, their exhausting judgments — to relax in the company of men.

Holly couldn't help feeling amused by the change. And noticed that Powell never really relaxed. He was trying too hard to impress, and when the lights flickered off and on — the generator stuttering, threatening to fail — he leapt up at the sound of Conor's wavering cry for Holly, as nervous as the boy.

"Is he okay? I'll go help."

"He's fine," Todd said, and called across the clearing, "We're right here. You go to sleep, now. It's way past your bedtime."

New species. Powell seemed to be one himself, a strange mixture of competence, servility and need. As he slowly settled back into his chair, Holly caught Doutor Eduardo giving him a look of amused contempt. The doutor must have known how useful it would prove if Powell actually discovered a new bird and he could launch his camp on a wave of publicity. But in making himself useful, in taking on the role of publicist, Powell had turned himself into another of the doutor's underlings — and one from whom the old man didn't seem to expect much.

Something quite different was implied by his watchful attitude toward Todd.

"You're unconvinced, Mr. Austen," the doutor said. "You doubt the existence of our friend's new species."

"No."

Todd had been listening intently, and once or seemed about to say something, but he'd stayed quiet until the doutor spoke to him, sunk so far back in his chair that he had to lever himself up to reply.

"No. They just discovered a new primate, a new monkey — where was it? Not all that far from São Paulo. Found eight individuals, as I recall. And shot one to prove it."

"Mist nets," Powell said instantly. "You place mist nets, photograph and release the specimens. Myself, I wouldn't harm — "

"Though you brought your guns," the doutor said. "Which is for the best."

Powell muttered something inaudible.

"You mean, because of the garimpeiros," Todd replied.

"There are no garimpeiros up this river," Doutor Eduardo said mildly. "This is a designated nature preserve."

"Designated by whom?" Todd asked.

"Me," the doutor replied. He smiled and shrugged.

"So you need guns for — ?"

"I hope the birds," said Doutor Eduardo. "I would advise being less sentimental and rather more incontrovertible about the proof. If indeed there are new species to be found."

"Well, in an area where there are said to be uncontacted tribes," Todd began, speaking a little too quickly. Holly glanced quickly at Doutor Eduardo, but the doutor only shrugged.

"Further to the northeast, I believe."

"Then you've heard of them?" Todd asked.

"Amazing how these uncontacted tribes are so well known. It's all rather like the experience of our friend's ornithologists in Peru, who realized they could 'discover' a new type of parrot based on the description provided by the local people. It is my project to spend a pleasant evening describing all our local birds until I mention one that our friend here doesn't know. I believe you would recognize the description of an unclassified bird?" the doutor asked Powell, who could do no more than lean forward in his chair before Todd interrupted.

"To the northeast, but south of the serra," Todd said.

The range of mountains. Doutor Eduardo looked at him more sharply.

"I'm an old anthropologist, with an interest in these things," Todd said. He smiled, but gave up trying to be charming when he realized the doutor saw through him. "And I hear the garimpeiros made some pretty goddamn emphatic contact with the tribe."

"A rumour I heard as well. Untrue, as it happens. The garimpeiros haven't reached that river yet."

"Really? How can you be sure?"

"This is an extremely isolated area, as perhaps you have seen. What actually happened is that some Indian agents making an exploration there were fired on with arrows. I speak confidentially. The investigation is well in hand, but to avoid curiosity-seekers, it must be kept private. Which means, of course, that information circulates in a distorted fashion."

Todd looked perturbed. "I was sure it was garimpeiros," he said.

"So as to the birds," Powell began.

"I'm glad I'm wrong," Todd cut in. "But it's still only a matter of time before garimpeiros really do reach that river. It's a gold rush, they're everywhere. You've managed to declare this land a nature preserve. Could we talk about the mechanics of doing the same thing with this new tribe's territory?"

"They're no more 'new' than you or I," Doutor Eduardo replied. "And besides, they have no territory."

"So it is your land."

"People with no concept of private property can hardly have territory, can they? You realize that we're talking about primitive people who carry everything they need in baskets on their backs. Carry them from one place to another, setting up camps to burn a little patch of forest. You're an anthropologist, you know this. They grow their crops for a season and move on to another patch. But the government has already been very generous in designating a reserve north of the serra. Your not-quite-uncontacted tribe has long had ample room to live a traditional, nomadic life within the boundaries of the reserve."

"But what if this really is another group, previously unknown, and quite distinct from the tribe living on the reserve?"

The doutor paused.

"Because if you could really find the time to describe the birds — "

"Give me a minute here, Powell."

"How would you have me answer?" Doutor Eduardo replied. "If you want me to say I'll help the Indians, I can say it. Although they haven't asked."

Todd considered his ambiguous offer in silence as Powell looked at him sullenly. Holly felt a prickle of sympathy for both, yet chiefly felt relieved to see Todd's latest project unravelling. If Indian agents were already involved, he wouldn't have to go back there, would he? And risk being shot with arrows. Yet to her surprise, Todd seemed to consider saying something more, only delaying when the lights flickered several more times, and Conor cried out from the bunkhouse.

"He can't still be awake," Holly said.

"Your disappearance that so angered your colleagues," Doutor Eduardo said. "This was an attempt to contact your uncontacted tribe?"

"They would have been even angrier if I'd found them, wouldn't they? I wonder where they could have gone." Todd looked foggy, then added, "You wanted to know about the birds, Powell?" Yet when they turned toward Powell's chair, the bird man wasn't there. Nor could they see him in the clearing: the lights were flickering, the generator sputtering, and suddenly the humming, well-lighted camp fell into darkened silence.

"Mommy!"

Running toward Conor, Holly found that the fire cast a remarkably small circle of light. Outside the circle, the darkness and the cool air slapped her face like wet fabric. She stumbled, and when she righted herself, she found she couldn't make out anything up ahead. Her eyes were open, but they might as well have been closed. She felt so disoriented that she turned back to the fire, where she saw Doutor Eduardo still sitting in his chair and Todd standing up to look toward the invisible bunkhouse. He was looking in the same direction that Holly had instinctively taken, and she turned back to follow the straightest possible line between the fire and her terrified child.

It was useless to hurry. After tripping a second time, Holly slowed down and staggered like the exhausted Evan across the uneven lawn, brushing against bushes and recoiling from the scratch of twigs on her bare arms. The sensation of the humid air on her blind, open eyes was so unpleasant that she finally closed them, and found she could walk more steadily with her eyes closed, picturing the clearing in her mind. Conor's wailing had stopped; she could no longer use it to guide her. But when she finally bumped into the corner of a building, she could feel her way along the wire mesh to the door, taking its cool, curving metal handle in her hand. She was opening the door when the lights went on, and blinked to see Powell half sitting on the hammock, cradling Conor in his lap.

The moment she saw him, Holly knew. He looked too startled, and his hand was in the wrong place on Conor's thigh. Not very high up, but wrong nonetheless.

"Come on with Mommy, sweetie," she said, walking toward Conor. Did the expression on Powell's face change? She wasn't sure, she couldn't be sure, and Holly lifted Conor from Powell's lap without acknowledging his presence. It would be awkward to take both children out of there at once, but she was going to do it. Burrowing into his hammock with her free arm, she picked up the sleeping Evan and somehow arranged the children so she was supporting one under each arm, one on each hip. She didn't know how she could carry them both, but she did.

"Mommy's tired," she told Conor. "You're going to come sleep with Mommy, in her bunkhouse. Then you'll be all right."

They'd be all right, but Powell was all wrong, and Holly was terribly angry at Todd for not being there. Why hadn't Todd come running too? Helped her out, backed her up, witnessed what she had trouble believing herself. Holly felt guilty when Powell gave her a reproachful look as she turned to open the door. But he'd be good at that, wouldn't he? Weren't they experts at disarming parents? Todd would probably believe his denials; the alternative was unthinkable. Yet that didn't make it untrue. Straining under the weight of her children, Holly saw Todd as another innocent she carried. His campaigns, his plans, his touching, unshakeable belief that people were inherently good and would come around eventually.

No, Holly thought, they were not. She was furious with Todd, wanted to yell at him: Innocence is a luxury. It's something we allow the children. You have to take more responsibility, Todd. I can't do this by myself much longer.

Arms aching, heart pounding, Holly staggered into the women's bunkhouse. Her legs were buckling as she put Evan in one hammock and Conor in another. Standing between them, she thought she might be mistaken about Powell. She might be unjust. But in any case, Powell wasn't going to get anywhere near her children from that moment forward.
8

The next morning, Powell headed upriver with his mist nets before Holly and the boys were awake. Seu José took him in the outboard, although his daughter, Olga, told Holly at breakfast that her father would return in time to take them to town so they could catch their plane.

Holly felt so relieved she was afraid to speak, and helped the boys with their cutlery before turning to Todd.

"They probably won't get back much before the end of the week. Powell's going to want to make sure he doesn't miss anything up there."

"He got his talk with the doutor last night after you went to bed," Todd said. "It doesn't seem to have turned up anything new. I'm not sure how long he'll be away, actually. He looked pretty down this morning."

Out of guilt or wounded innocence? "There's something I want to talk about," she told Todd. "Not now. But definitely later."

"Big people's talk," Evan said, startling Holly with a knowing look, adult eyes in his baby face, on equal evaluating another. Holly felt a wrenching fear he'd seen something last night. But looking closer, she saw he just meant she didn't fool him, he knew he was being excluded, and his mouth quivered with pride for having seen through her. Holly was impressed and nodded, making Evan grin.

And Conor? Conor looked unconcerned, dipping his spoon in the cereal, filling it cautiously the way he always did. He didn't seem to have noticed anything wrong with Powell either, and Holly hoped there wasn't, although she winced when she realized that the birdman could return just as suddenly as he'd left. After breakfast, as they walked outside, she found herself straining to catch the sound of an outboard motor. What if he'd forgotten something and turned back? Powell struck her as too well organized for that. In fact, Todd had said he'd packed most of his gear, which probably meant he'd be gone for several days. If they were lucky, maybe he'd even send Seu José to fetch them on Saturday and stay upriver by himself. Would he do that?

Seu José probably wouldn't let him. What kind of tourist camp would risk leaving one of its guests alone in the bush? For the rest of the morning, Holly kept thinking she heard the distant buzz of the returning outboard, although it would turn out to be Olga's husband Clovis at work with his chainsaw, or cicadas, the free frogs, or sometimes nothing at all. She was increasingly conscious of waiting, of being suspended, until the day began to seem muffled, unreal, slightly distanced from a sharper and more pressing reality, just as she was kept from talking to Todd by the constant demands of the children. What's that bird? See what I drew? Volleyball time! I'm thir-sty. He's bugging me, Mommy! Can we go swimming? They even found a soccer ball Olga's grandson had left on his recent visit.

"Here, Mommy," Evan cried, giving it a kick. Holly seemed to see a vapour trail across the sharp grass. Then Todd took Evan's pass and they were playing soccer, although even this seemed disconnected, Holly's thoughts apart from the rest of her. She kicked the ball, Go get it, Connie, taking passes, blocking Todd, laughing and thinking, When can we stop? When will it end? Why do I always have to take care of everyone else — Good one, C! — good wife, good mother. I can't stand it any more. I just can't. If this doesn't end I'm going to —

"Gooooooal!" Conor yelled. He tackled Holly, sending her sprawling on the grass so he and Evan could clamber on top of her.

"Tickle Mommy," Evan proposed, and they began pawing at her ribs. She hated what they called tickling and shrank under the paw paw paw of little hands, such blunt punching, such unbearable claustrophobic giggling in her face when all she wanted in the world was for them to stop, to get off her, to leave her alone.

Until they finally did, exhaling contentedly and cradling down on either side of her, one under each arm, so she could feel the fullness of both buttery little bodies, sweet with sweat. Relaxing, she nuzzled their hair, one after the other as she kissed them both, with Todd's strong legs crossed on the grass beside them.

Oh, I love my babies, she thought. I love them so much. And lay, hugging them tightly, sheltered by the perfect sky.

Holly put the boys in their hammocks for a nap after lunch and walked over to Todd, who was reading on the veranda of the other bunkhouse.

"Last night," Holly began, so Todd blinked up at her mildly, smiling, his eyes straying back to his book. She took it from him, sitting on the edge of the other chair.

"That man Powell," she said. "When I got into the bunkhouse, he'd already got Conor in his lap. He's a molester, Todd. A pedophile."

"My God, is Conor all right? Why didn't you tell me? The dirty bugger, what was he doing?"

"Conor's fine," Holly said. "Nothing actually happened. I got there so quickly he didn't have a chance to do anything. But the way he was holding Conor was all wrong. His hand — " She tried to demonstrate, but couldn't remember what had struck her. It wasn't the angle of his wrist so much as the look on his face, or maybe a combination of the two. "It's hard to explain. He looked like someone who'd been caught. I wouldn't have given it a second thought otherwise. His hand was in the wrong place, but you can hold a child awkwardly. And Conor's all right, the boys are all right. They don't have a clue what happened."

Todd pursed his lips, staring down at his clasped hands for a long furrowed moment before glancing over at her quickly. It was a keen glance, and skeptical.

"The look on his face, Todd. Of being caught."

"But nothing happened. That's the important thing. You're sure of that?"

"It could have happened. If he comes back, we have to make absolutely sure that it doesn't."

"If he does. With any luck, we've seen the last of him."

"I hope so," Holly said. "But in retrospect, doesn't it strike you as a little odd, the way he attached himself to the boys so quickly? I could kick myself, but we let him jump right in. Why didn't he get bored? No one plays that long with other people's children. We should have noticed. But it was just too damned convenient for us, to let someone else do a shift with the kids. What on earth were we thinking?"

Todd shuffled in his chair, looking uncomfortable, rumbling with the effort having to explain something he knew she wouldn't like. "I noticed," he said finally.

"There's more?"

He gave her another quick look. "He was trying to impress you, Holly. He kept looking at you, to make sure you saw how good he was being with the children. Coming on to you in his own peculiar way. This isn't the first time that's happened."

"Oh, God, not again. Not even with that unattractive little man. Looking at me to make sure I didn't notice, more likely."

"What has being unattractive got to do with it? I don't find him particularly engaging myself, love, but you've got to be fair. On these tours I take around, people try out all sorts of flirtations, all sorts of roles. I end up believing that's half the reason they come. Suddenly, some wimpy little academic can play Tarzan. Testosterone fuelled. 'Yaw, what's a few mosquito bites in the pursuit of science?' I like to say, 'malaria,' just to see them blanch. Maybe Powell has a fantasy of being a family man, nice kids, pretty wife. Cross me out of the picture, I'm tired and unobtrusive anyway."

"Unobtrusive," Holly repeated, smiling and admitting, "At first I thought that's what he was doing, too. Trying to impress me. What a conceited ass I am. If you'd only seen the look on his face." She punched her knee lightly in emphasis. "I just knew. And doesn't it count for something, that in all the years we've had kids, this is the first time something like this has ever occurred to me? I don't go around seeing bogeymen. Whatever else my faults, I'm not over-protective. Mavis inoculated me. I refuse to repeat her mistakes."

"I know you're not, love. But from what I've read, molesters tend to work in professions having to do with children, or at least they work with children in their spare time. Soccer coaches, choir leaders. The man is a pilot whose hobby is birding." Todd shook his head. "What also troubles me is that I've read quite a lot about it lately. Suddenly we're in the middle of an epidemic of child abuse. Where did that come from? Is it really that bad? Frankly, what it reminds me of is the communist scare I grew up with. Reds under the bed. You probably don't remember much about it, but even my father got exercised enough to talk about building a bomb shelter. He never did, but it was an issue, and from what I know, every generation grabs onto an issue like that. War atrocity stories. Some big fear. I'm not saying these things don't exist. But what we're reacting to is probably only partly truth, and partly something worse. Tribal. Mythic. Archetypal, whatever the word. I know you're a good mother, love. But I wonder if you aren't unconsciously projecting the modern vision of the devil onto an innocent man."

"Why can't you believe me? I know what I saw. We have to be prepared if this guy comes back."

"I'm prepared. I'll be watching. And I don't disbelieve you, love. I just think the jury's still out."

Holly looked down at her hands. Working hands, the nails kept short, looking older than her face, prematurely dry from solvents. They were serious hands, and respectable.

"It's a problem for me, Todd, that you don't respect what I say. You never just accept it. You have to turn everything over in your mind, and somehow the conclusion emerges is what you'd prefer to see. We moved down here to try to break old patterns. I know you said the job was problematic, but you were setting it up, thousands of miles from head office, and I really hoped you'd structure it so you could spend more time with your family. It's all very well to say I'm a good mother, and I am. But I'm far from perfect. I don't have the patience I see in other parents. I never wanted to be at home full-time with the children, and that's even less true now, when I'm finally painting. So you can't use me as an excuse. It makes me really angry, Todd, the way you simultaneously use me as an excuse to shuffle off your own responsibilities and put me down in the process. Holly's a good little mother. Let her take care of the kids."

After thinking for a long time, Todd raised his clasped hands in a gesture of resignation. "What do you want me to do?"

"What do fathers do on vacation? With their kids."

"I think what we did all morning. But clearly I'm not the right person to say."

"Please don't," Holly said. "Can't we start again now? Can't you start something new at any moment in your life? Isn't that what makes it all so interesting?"

"Responsibilities conflict, love. We lead complicated lives. We decided to lead complicated lives."

"Just try," Holly asked, and over the next few days, she could see that he did. Todd roused them all at first light, when mist still eddied from the river, damp on their skins. Breakfast was quick, and they soon went down on the dock with the binoculars, where he helped the boys get a good long look at the big birds flapping downriver. They saw screeching Christmas-coloured macaws; a circus of toucans with waxy, banana-shaped bills. Once he showed them a tree at the water's edge with a curious patch of roughened bark. Not bark, Holly saw, but brown hairy moths, a huddled congregation with neatly folded wings. One opened intelligent, black little eyes. Not moths, but bats, tiny bats. Todd clapped sharply and the bats sped away.

Another time, they saw a burnished black bird sitting perfectly still on a leafless branch. Holly pictured Darwin collecting it. Powell shooting it.

"Aren't we lucky in the weather?" she cried. After their morning walk, they played volleyball, badminton, long games of soccer. Falling, the red clay earth felt hard, and the grass was sharp enough to cut their knees. The boys' legs were quickly dappled with bruises. They didn't cry, deciding to be brave, but before too long the heat defeated them, and they would run to the dock for a swim. The black, cold water was a daily shock; lunch, afterwards, a heavy midday dinner of rice and beans and meat. They had to rest after eating, reading and dozing in their hammocks, then they played quieter games, swam again, and walked out on the trails when the animals were stirring at sunset.

Once, at dusk, Todd pointed out some monkeys swinging in, crowding the camp high in the trees. Holly saw a mass of movement in the canopy, indistinguishable, massive. There came a thrumming noise like drums.

"Howler monkeys," Todd said, above the eerie, escalating boom.

Holly found herself shivering as the boom grew almost deafening, then broke into deep-voiced, furious, cynical growls that sounded like menacing thunder. It sounded insane, and Holly could picture the animals jumping from the trees to surround them, see them closing in. Their bent legs, their swinging arms were coming nearer; coming toward her children.

No. They were far away, and she walked to the river to calm herself down. But the beasts were all around them and the cries seemed endless. Walking restlessly back toward Todd, Holly grew damp with tension. She hated the primitive moans, the uncanny booms and ghastly bellows, finally pressing her hands against her ears to keep them away.

Conor reached for Holly's arm, looking up with worried eyes. Feeling ashamed of herself, Holly made an effort to smile, trying to turn it into a joke by widening her eyes.

"Can you scream that loud?" she asked.

Grinning, the boys started to scream.

"Louder," she yelled.

Clovis, standing nearby, rocked with silent laughter.

"Loudest!" she told them.

If Powell grabbed one of the boys, would he know to yell like that? Could she get them to yell like that, without frightening them beforehand? If they were too frightened, they wouldn't be able to yell. And then Powell would grab them.

"Weren't you loud!" she cried, as the monkeys swung away again, and her tension slowly receded. Yet it didn't leave her entirely. Each passing day brought Powell's return a little closer. Lying in her hammock after lunch, stretched on the dock after their swims, Holly began rehearsing ways to caution the boys against him. It would be best if they mentioned him first, so she could say casually, "He'll be tired after his trip. We'd better plan on not bothering him." To which Conor would reply, "Oh, we don't bother him," which was so obviously true that Holly would have nothing else to say.

What could she say? She wished Powell would find his damn species and head straight downriver to report it. But of course that wouldn't happen. He wasn't going to find any new species, and Holly could picture the exact angle of his bowed head as the outboard hit the riverbank. She could almost see him step slowly out of the boat, looking downcast, embarrassed; angry and trying to hide it. He'd want something as compensation, wouldn't he?

Holly shivered.

"Pleasant breeze, isn't it?" Todd asked. It was Thursday, mid-afternoon, and they were dozing on the dock. "I needed this," he admitted.

After that, how could Holly raise Powell's name again? Todd was doing everything she'd asked, even avoiding Doutor Eduardo. She couldn't tell him she looked at the river sometimes and seemed to see Conor swirling downstream, lost in the current. Nor could she mention the nightmares: a huge python coiling languorously around her sleeping children. Oh! The glistening muscles of its belly. The boys' flushed pink skin. Sometimes she'd even do it consciously, picturing a brilliant viper coiled in the brush. Powell was be approaching. Stumbling through the undergrowth, raising his binoculars, he would plant his leg and be struck. The leg would swell and mottle as if he were already dead. His body would swell, his throat swell closed. She could see his mottled, choking face falling on the ground.

But macumba said evil thoughts rebounded on the thinker. Didn't they say that once you knew a superstition it haunted you forever? And down the hill from their house in Rio was an important crossroads where macumba offerings piled up for Exu, the African trickster. Holly had seen clay bowls overflowing with rice, dead chickens sometimes, and always hot red burning candles. This bright and breezy afternoon, Holly wanted to light a candle against the threat of darkness. Instead, she slipped into the kitchen, asking Olga if they kept a snake bite kit at the camp. Olga didn't know what she was talking about at first, then picked up a cleaver and mimed the way she would cut the wound and suck out the poison.

"Okay?" She kept her bright eyes fixed on the silly, expensive foreigner.

"Obrigada," Holly said, although she left the kitchen convinced that Olga had never seen a snake bite, and rejoined Todd unhappily on the dock. She felt increasingly foolish; entirely unable to trust her own judgment or to make the necessary assessment of risk. Todd was right. She had no real evidence Powell was a pedophile. She'd been tired that night. She'd probably made a mistake.

Except she knew that she hadn't. Holly closed her eyes and pressed her fingertips against them so hard she saw stars. When she next opened them, Olga was walking onto the dock.

"Everything all right?" Olga asked.

"Lovely," Holly replied.

The boatman's daughter nodded and headed past them, holding a cooler in one hand and a length of fishing line in the other. Glad to be distracted, Holly watched her stoop to put the cooler down beside the railing. Without straightening, she flipped it open and used something inside to bait the brutal-looking hook tied to the end of the line. Afterwards, she leaned over the railing and unwound the line with a series of jerks, letting it drop straight into the river. Almost as soon as the hook hit the water, the line went taut. Olga gave it a quick yank, then began hauling in the line hand over hand until a silvery, humpbacked, foot-long fish appeared above the railing. As it arched and flailed, Olga caught it with her free hand at the back of its head and held it up for the boys to see.

Holly saw two thick jaws straining open, each lined with terrifying needle teeth.

"Piranha," Olga said. Seeing the look on Holly's face, she added, "These ones won't hurt you."

"It's the black ones that swarm," said Todd, who was suddenly awake. "Go on," he told the boys. "Go look. Just don't touch it."

He turned to Holly, and said almost beseechingly, "There aren't any black piranha in this river."

"I see," Holly said, trying not to scare the children. They were squealing at the sight of the piranha's teeth without seeming to understand that they had been swimming between them.

"It's all right," Todd said. "Although you probably shouldn't go in when you've got a period."

"I do." After one unsatisfactory try at the hammock, Todd hadn't come near her. Life hadn't turned perfect overnight.

"Well, you're okay," he said. "Obviously."

Olga threw the piranha in the cooler just as Holly heard the buzz of an outboard motor upriver. She laughed, surprised to hear a note of hysteria in her voice.

"Look who's back," she said.
9

Who could have predicted it would happen this way? The boys crouched intently by Olga's cooler, watching the piranha slowly die. Another time, Holly might have tried to distract them, but now she wanted them to remain unaware of the approaching boat for as long as possible while she tried to think what to do.

What could she do? She felt horrified, frightened, and the droning insect buzz of the outboard was growing louder. Finally, she saw the boys go still, like alerted little animals, then run to the railing and begin waving cheerfully when they recognized Powell.

It hadn't occurred to Holly that the boys would be pleased to see Powell, excited by the change, the news, the promise of even more adult attention. But who wanted to believe their children would be excited by someone like the bird man? Holly winced as she pictured the way they'd tumbled all over him in the water like puppies. The sickening fact was, they responded to him physically. In such innocence! But that was probably not how he saw it.

"Todd?" she asked, unable to control the panic in her voice.

"I'm here," he said. "I'll be watching."

"Now we can go out in the canoe," Evan told them happily.

Holly gave the canoe a distracted glance. It was the camp's one untested diversion, a wide red scow of a thing she knew she couldn't handle. A couple of days before, Todd had proposed that Clovis tow them upriver with the smaller outboard, then cut them loose to drift downstream. They would hear the birdcalls, surprise turtles, maybe even stumble on some river otters. Todd would easily be able to steer a course, as long as Holly could provide a little power up front when the time came to turn ashore and land.

But Holly could only picture the red canoe spinning sideways downriver like a lost carnival ride, throwing her children into the current to bob away forever. She'd shaken her head vigorously, and Todd gave her a quick look before clapping his hands and proposing a game of soccer. He must have had his own reservations about her capabilities, and Conor seemed to glimpse something that made him quickly drop the idea. Why hadn't she paid any attention to Evan? He'd kept bringing up the canoe, the turtles, and especially the otters to the point where she'd stopped listening, or at least, stopped hearing him. As Seu José beached the outboard, Evan ran toward the path at the top of the riverbank, leaving Holly to follow like a sleepwalker in his wake.

Who could have predicted this? As first Evan, then Conor, called out enthusiastically from the top of the path, Powell waved half-heartedly and turned aside. Stooped, gawky, looking exhausted, he stumbled out of the boat and onto the greasy red mud of the bank. He couldn't seem to get his footing, and finally slipped so violently he had to grab for the side of the boat, twisting around to keep from going down.

"What happened to his face?" Evan asked.

Powell's left cheek was red and inflamed. The disfigurement ran from his neck to his eye, making the skin look shiny and pushing one eye partway closed. Holly could only shake her head.

"Mr. Powell!" Evan called. "Did you get hurt?"

Powell turned unwillingly toward them. "It's just a spider," he called. "Wasn't watching where I was going and she bit me."

He tested his footing and came reluctantly up the path.

"Was it poison?" Evan asked, when Powell finally joined them.

"It's what you call an allergic reaction," Powell said. "I like some bugs about as much as they like me."

"Does it hurt?" Conor asked. The children were crowding around him like puppies again, and he smiled grotesquely.

"Naw, snickers, it's not that bad. Just looks awful."

"So you can still take us out in the canoe with Daddy," Evan said.

Todd, coming up behind Evan, put a hand on his shoulder. "We're going to let Mr. Powell have a rest."

Powell looked grateful. "All I want in the world is a shower," he said.

He sounded so genuine that Holly realized she couldn't have been more wrong about Powell. Hot with shame, damp with guilt, she glanced up at Todd, who wouldn't look back at her.

"Any luck?" he asked Powell.

"Zip point squat," the birdman replied.

"You'll get one next time," Conor told him.

"Thanks, snickers," he said, patting Conor's hair distractedly.

They were heading for the men's bunkhouse. Holly trailed behind them, trying to make herself so small that nobody could see her.

"Don't you want to go out in the canoe?" Evan asked.

"Not now, buddy," Powell replied.

"But it's a big canoe. We take it up the river then we all float down. It would be fun."

"Evan," Todd warned.

"I want to go out in the canoe," Evan whined.

"Not right now," Powell said. "But if you wanna have a shower, you can come have one with me. Wanna have a shower? That's fun, too. Soap and stuff."

"No," Holly said, stepping forward. Putting an arm around each of the boys, she told him fiercely, "The children are clean."

Powell blinked. He'd thought she'd dropped behind them. She saw that too, and his sly, repressed anger.

"Go have your shower," Todd told him. His tone suggested a jocular punch on the shoulder. "We were just going to play soccer. We're going to play soccer, aren't we guys?"

"Soccer!" Conor cried.

"Go get the ball," Evan said, running toward the equipment shed.

"Later," Powell said, going into the men's bunkhouse. He let the door slam.

"So you see," Holly told Todd, feeling half strangled.

"See what? What did I see? A man not surprisingly wanting a shower and an absurd response. Not in front of the children, Holly."

"What do you mean?" Holly asked. "You consider it normal for a stranger to invite your children into his shower?"

"I saw a man being badgered and trying to accommodate."

"You saw black and insist it's white."

"You're insisting white is black. He's just an ordinary shit, Holly. Completely normal."

"Soccer!" Evan cried, running happily onto the lawn.

"I'll sit this one out," Holly said.

"Mr Darwin," his visitor greets him, entering the study at Down House in Surrey. The great theorist looks up mildly, a middle-aged man now, balding, studious and frequently ill. It is clear he does not recognize the Consul's wife from Rio de Janeiro, nor does she expect him to. She feels much older; also younger: wavering, uncertain, as if the nap of her velvet cloak were brushed back and forth — first matte, then lustre — bringing her briefly into focus and out.

"I am sorry, but Mrs. Darwin is out," the scientist tells her. "You will find her at church."

"I have come to see you, sir, about your Origin of Species."

"Ah yes," Darwin says, as Mrs. Austen, unbidden, takes a seat. He has become something of a recluse, and cannot look happy at the intrusion, but few men are more polite. Or, it is said, more happily married, despite the divergence of views between husband and wife on the Genesis of man.

"I have become a painter, Mr. Darwin," she tells him, laying aside her cloak. "A creative artist, working by intuition rather than deduction. I don't follow the scientific method, I'm afraid. But I came to ask whether a scientist, a naturalist like yourself, shouldn't value inspiration. Surely there must have been a flare, a flame, a moment of inspiration when you first glimpsed your great theory."

"The scientist is methodical by nature," Darwin answers kindly. "One formulates a theory, looks about oneself for evidence, and tries to place that evidence within the structure that the theory provides. It will either support the theory or it will not. One then proposes the theory or discards it. There is no foregone conclusion."

"Yet I cannot help but believe that for years before publishing your theory you must have known you were right."

"I could assert, but I could not prove. Proof is crucial."

"It is unthinkable," Mrs. Darwin cries. Suddenly, she is home from church and shaking the green velvet cloak so its rich nap wavers. It is mottled like grass darkened by shadows, running shadows, an emerald green that flares bright when lit by the play of the sun. With a shudder, Mrs. Austen understands. One may be right, but it is unthinkable to be proved right, beyond all power of contradiction.

"What should I do?" she cries. The green nap smothers her. It darkens and grows light — darkens what grows light — the play of sun and children left unsheltered.

From a muffled distance, Darwin answers, "Persevere."

An hour later, Holly sat as upright as the Consul's wife in the wide-hipped, lubberly canoe. Clovis had run them upriver before cutting them loose, and now they were ploughing downstream, heading back to camp. Todd, in the stern, kept them flush in the middle of the river. Powell crouched in the bow, his paddle trapped under one foot as he scanned the forest with his binoculars. Holly had put Evan beside her and Conor on the seat behind. Fear held her rigid, and fury at Todd for taking Powell up on his offer.

The birdman had appeared again after his long shower, looking dangerously refreshed. The water was cold, pumped straight from the river. Even his cheek looked a little less red.

"Who wants to go for a canoe ride?"

"Me. Me."

"We won't ever hear the end of it otherwise, will we?" Todd replied, without even looking at Holly. Powell didn't seem to see her either, although she could tell both men were acutely aware of her presence even before Todd turned.

"You don't need to bother to come," he said. "We can manage."

"Wouldn't miss it for the world," she replied.

Olga bustled out with children's life jackets, more talkative than usual as she told Holly how she'd made sure Clovis got them for their grandchildren's visits. The boy who had left his soccer ball behind was exactly Evan's size, though older, so Olga knew precisely which jacket he needed. As Holly watched, Olga got the boys tied in correctly, kneeling to test the straps, making sure they gave comfortably, but not too much, and admitting shyly as she tugged and fussed at Conor's slightly over-sized jacket that she couldn't swim.

Olga lived on the river and couldn't swim. Holly was astonished — not least at herself, for having thought in terms of scientific method at a place like this. Nothing was logical here. Olga feared she was going to drown, so she bought life-jackets for her grandchildren. And Holly? Holly knew what was going through Powell's mind because of what she'd started to think about Jay Larkin's invitation to give him a call. She understood Powell because she was beginning to understand the way you manufactured excuses for what you could not quite consciously admit to yourself you were probably going to do. You knew it was wrong, but you were probably going to do it, so you made it somebody else's fault. Powell was doing that by turning Holly into the villain. He hated her for seeing through him, so he was going to punish her by doing what he wanted to do with her children. It hadn't escaped Holly that he'd said the spider that bit him was female. He probably had reason to believe it was a female. Weren't female spiders twice the size of males? But how many other people would have said she and not it?

This was all her fault.

No, it wasn't, it was his. Todd's, Larkin's, Powell's; she couldn't remember which. As they drifted downriver, the forest leaned in on her, and the animals were jeering. A small bird flying ahead of them dipped into the overhanging bushes and emerged, dipped and emerged; a flashing tease, taunting them as they ploughed a course back to the camp.

"Pygmy kingfisher," Todd called out.

Conor pointed to the opposite shore. "And who's that little bird?"

Holly shook her head to try to clear it, then followed Conor's pointing finger to see a small, grey-headed bird hopping along a log at the river's edge. Powell, with his binoculars, couldn't seem to find it.

"A little bird," Conor told him.

It had reached the end of the log before Powell finally spotted it. As they drifted past the log, it bobbed its tail, and Powell swivelled slowly to watch it.

"I don't know what that is," he said, in a tone of wonder.

Then Powell let his binoculars drop, grabbed his paddle, and whispered fiercely, "Get me over there."

Todd turned the canoe, and the two men paddled hard against the current to try to head upstream. Despite their frantic efforts, they could barely hold their own against the swiftly flowing water. Holly told herself to memorize the bird's markings, although they seemed undistinguished. It had a silver-grey head, a round white breast and black tail feathers edged with white, which it cocked up like a folded fan. The boys were excited but managed to keep quiet, sensing the importance of whatever was happening. What was happening?

The bird seemed like such an insignificant piece of importance. Holly realized that she had been picturing a new species as some sort of missing link, an evolutionary proof both dramatic and useful. This was a tiny, fragile, helpless thing that could surely have no impact on the wider world. Powell's search now struck her as ridiculous. Powell himself looked absurd, and Holly felt a sudden, mean flash of hope that everyone else would think so, too. Not just the boys, but the whole scientific establishment would laugh at his transcendent claims for the tiny, hopping bird.

Holly watched maliciously as the bird man paddled against the current. She hated Powell and wanted him to die. It was good to see him straining so hard that the back of his neck turned into a damp, pink crescent that appeared and vanished beneath his crumpled white hat. A well-timed heart attack, perhaps? He stroked and pulled, stroked and pulled, intent on gaining a beach she hoped would flicker out of existence when they got too close, like a lost mirage.

Yet Holly could see that Todd had a plan. He was aiming for a point upstream from the log so that when he turned, he could use the force of the current to throw them towards land. It seemed like an impossible task — impossibly slow — and Holly almost laughed out loud when the bird hopped up the fallen log and disappeared into the forest. But Powell only grunted and kept paddling, pulling them upstream by arduous inches until even Holly had to admit that they were making progress. Finally Todd could turn his paddle, canting it sideways to steer them in.

And suddenly they were flying, sailing, bursting out of the current across a sheet of calm, shallow water and onto the sandy beach just downstream from the log. The coarse sand screeched so loudly against the bottom of the canoe that Conor covered his ears with his hands, then had to throw his arms around Holly's waist, bracing himself as Powell jumped out and rocked the canoe heavily before they'd quite landed. The bird man stopped only to pull them further in before hurrying off into the forest. In the moment's peace that followed, Holly looked behind her and saw that Todd, although sweating and painfully red, badly wanted to join him.

"I don't suppose it makes any difference, but I'd prefer that you stayed here."

"I'll just go get him," Todd said. "Two minutes, no more. We'll have a look, then I'll send him back with Seu José."

Without waiting for an answer, Todd jogged into the forest. Holly was beyond fury. The children watched her quietly, impressed by her serious face without understanding what was going on.

And after all, what was going on? They were safely stowed in a canoe while two foolish men thrashed off in search of a bird. Regaining her voice, Holly had no trouble answering the boys' questions without making Powell seem adventurous or appealing.

"Once they get a closer look, I'm sure they'll know what it is."

"But it might be a new species. It might," Conor said. "And I saw it first."

"That's right, love. See the swallow over there? Isn't that a silly name?"

They made swallowing noises and played I-Spy, although it seemed a witless game so far off in the forest. I spy with my little eye something that is green. How many times could you pick "tree?" Black, "river." Red, "canoe." Any other colour was a bird passing, and the boys could always trump her.

"Toucan," she guessed, when Evan spied yellow.

"Channel-billed toucan," his father's son replied.

Hurry up, Holly thought. She wasn't wearing a watch, but it seemed to her that Todd and Powell had been gone at least ten or fifteen minutes. They'd forgotten her, of course. And the boys. They might be in for a long wait, although Holly soon spotted a bit of help, at least in terms of distracting the boys. Powell had left his bird guide under the seat.

Powell seldom forgot his bird guide. Not long after Clovis had cut them loose, she'd seen him scribble a few words on some paper stapled at the back, presumably about a bird Todd had pointed out to the children. Sunbittern. It had been standing on a log with its wings thrown open, a golden bull's-eye sunburst blazing under each wing. Holly wondered if she could find a picture of the bird, and reached for the book as the boys began squabbling.

"I saw it first, ha, ha."

"So what? Who cares about a stupid little bird? I just saw a river otter right over there."

"Did not. Mommy, he did not."

"Look at the pictures," Holly said.

Parrots, green and red macaws. The boys pointed out the most colourful birds, while Holly scanned the text for stories. Powell had added some notes, an uninteresting scrawl detailing the times and places he'd seen the birds. Although the handwriting! Powell wrote in a childish hand, his letters round, uneven, slanting back. A boy of twelve might write like that. A homely, nasty boy of twelve, who bullied younger children.

Any evidence he'd stopped?

"How many birds have we seen up here? My goodness, Mr. Powell's seen a lot of birds. Look at the pages here at the back."

Holly flipped to the paper stapled to the back cover, a computer print-out of scientific names trimmed to fit inside the book. Under each name was a space left for notes, which Powell had often filled not just with a place and time, but with a brief description of what the bird was doing when he saw it. Licking her lips, Holly remembered hearing that many pedophiles kept lists and detailed notes. Didn't pilots have to run through checklists when they powered up a plane? Was there a pattern here? Holly could see nothing else, and the boys demanded that she turn back to the coloured pictures, whining again, and increasingly bored.

"Here's the sunbittern!" she cried brightly, pointing to that day's date beside the name Eurypyga helias. "In Greek, helios means sun."

Why had she remembered that? She was a child again in their West Coast rockery, following her father on his at-home rounds. "Sunflower," he said, checking the stake. "Genus, Helianthus. From helios, sun; anthos, flower." The plants' bland faces were turned to the sun, Holly's tilted up at her father. She adored him, although he was seldom home. Because he was so seldom home? So much like Todd and the boys.

Conor James Austen.

Evan William Austen.

Why had Powell had written their names on his print-out?

Holly went clammy. On a buried, central page of his print-out, Powell had written the boys' full names and dates he must have copied from their passports. How had he got their passports? Last name, given names, place of birth, date of birth, passport number, where it was issued, all transcribed in Powell's nasty slanted terrifying script.

"Todd!" she screamed. "Todd! Come back!"

Holly stood up, rocking the canoe, which the boys took to be a new game. They jumped up and rocked it harder, shrieking piercingly.

"Daddy! Daddy! Da-deeee!""

No one answered, and for the first time Holly wondered if something had gone wrong. The boys continued shrieking, enjoying the noise until they finally seemed to realize their father wasn't coming. Their shouts trailed off, and they turned to Holly, looking puzzled.

"He isn't lost, is he?" Conor asked.

"Of course not, sweetie. Daddy knows his way around forests."

As did Powell. Why hadn't he answered, either? Forcing herself to calm down, to think things through, Holly realized that even if one had been injured, it was unlikely that something had happened to both. They were just ignoring her.

"Todd! Would you get back here! For God's sake, it's time to go!"

Silence. Holly felt increasingly uneasy; half worried, half convinced they were playing an ill-considered joke. In any case, she was trapped here, unable to take the boys back to camp to fetch help. It had taken every bit of the men's strength to bring the canoe into shore. How could she hope to dock it herself? At the same time, she couldn't leave the boys alone to make a search herself. What if Powell came back before she did? Holly cupped her hands to yell again when it occurred to her the roar of the river carried away their cries. It would be best to walk the boys a short distance into the forest and call from there. Make such a satisfying heartfelt racket that Todd could no longer ignore her.

"You know what?" she told the boys. "We're going to surprise Daddy. Let's go look for Daddy."

She'd take the bird book, she decided, helping the boys out of the canoe. Powell wasn't getting it back. She'd show it to Todd, back at the camp, proving once and for all that she was right. Yet Holly couldn't go any further without fishing a pen out of her backpack and writing furiously across the page, You keep away from my children!

Macumba. Warding off evil spirits. Cida periodically walked a stick of lighted incense through their house to purge it. Holly remembered the bark-like smoke, a deep-throated smell that suddenly seemed like the forest itself.

The forest would help her, Holly thought, as she led the boys up the low bank towards some scrubby trees.
10

She found broken eggshell in a small, sandy clearing at the top of the bank. Turtle eggs, judging from the size of the fragments. Heading away from the river, Holly found the sand to be a shallow overlay on damp, springy soil. The bank they'd climbed was the highest point in the area, and the land sloped quickly down again into the forest. Reaching the line of scrubby trees, Holly slapped a mosquito, then took off her backpack again to slather the boys and herself with more repellent. She'd seen Todd go off to the left, upriver. Heading in that direction, thankfully entering the shade of the forest, she quickly found his footprints on the pliable ground. He seemed to be following another pair of prints. Smaller, obviously Powell's. They were skirting a swamp lying to their right, making their way between the river and the swamp not far inland. She broke the top of a plant to mark their trail, and ants poured out of the hollow stem.

"Gross," Evan said happily.

"We're not getting ticks, are we?" Conor asked.

"We're playing follow the leader," Holly said. "See Daddy's footprints? Up, now, over the log."

Holly lifted the boys over the fallen log, and saw Todd's footprints veer inland, along what seemed to be an animal trail. Soon they were close to the edge of the swamp, where the ground was wet enough to dampen their sneakers. In places, Todd's big wide footprints had already filled with water. Were there really such things as sinkholes? Holly picked up a fallen branch and used it to prod the ground in front of her, keeping the boys close but slightly behind her. The air seemed almost as moist as the ground. It was heavy as felt, unpleasant to breathe, and somehow strangely lifeless. If the men were on the other side of the swamp, they wouldn't have heard her calling through the thick, dead air.

"Da-deeee!" both boys yelled. But even their high-pitched cries couldn't cut through. They hit the solid air like butterflies with weakened wings; dropping, dying, sucked into the rotting mess below. It smelled dirty here. Nature wasn't supposed to be so putrid, so corrupt, and Holly half thought of going back. Then the path turned into away from the swamp and into a circular clearing under the branches of the first big brazil nut tree they had seen.

Holly left the boys in the clearing and did some scouting. She was relieved to discover the huge old tree guarded the entrance to real forest. Behind it, the land sloped up and away from the swamp. The air promised to be cleaner there, and she was happy not to find any footprints emerging from the clearing on the lower, swampy side of the tree. Holly didn't see any footprints on the forest side either, but the ground was dry there and she wasn't leaving prints herself. There was a trail, though; another narrow animal path leading up the gentle slope to the left of the tree. She thought they must have taken that, and used her stick to scrape a blaze onto the side of the brazil nut tree before leading the children into the forest. They would get to the top of the rise, she decided, and call Todd from there.

It was humid and gloomy beyond the big tree, but the forest didn't smell as rank as the swamp. The trees were tall and draped with vines, though it was hard to see their full elegance of line with the undergrowth so much thicker than it was at the camp. Clovis must have cleared it out there so they could find the wildlife more easily. Here, they could hear the birds without seeing them; whistling cries, or quick, loud squawks. What was the name of the bird with the piercing, unearthly cry?

Screaming piha, Todd had said. The boys imitated the call and made monkey noises, then started in on tramping songs. Holly sang along happily. Discovering the swamp's odd acoustics had convinced her that Todd hadn't heard her yell. He hadn't been ignoring her, but was just being Todd, off on yet another futile adventure. She looked forward to reaching the crest of the incline and yelling for him as loudly as she'd always wanted — yelling at him — then taking the boys back down to the river, where she hoped he was already waiting for them, worried half to death.

Holly's only worry was the time of day. She hadn't worn her watch since they'd arrived at the camp, and now found she was unable to estimate how long they'd been in the forest. Surely not long, although it was so humid here she was quickly drenched in sweat; as sopping as her shoes. The incline was insidious, gentle but unending. She'd worked up the sweat quickly. Had they been gone ten minutes? Fifteen? Surely no more than twenty minutes, though maybe not much less.

Yet Holly also knew it had been late afternoon when they'd entered the forest, and that darkness would fall promptly at six. She looked ahead for the crest of the incline, but still found nothing. Tramping forward another few steps, it finally occurred to her that this could just be a long, slow rise of land sloping away from the river. They weren't going to reach a crest, and if they went on much longer, they'd be trapped by nightfall.

"Okay," she said, turning to the boys. "Go ahead and yell!"

"Daddy!" they cried. "Daddy! Daddy!"

Their shouts didn't seem so muffled here.

"Todd! For God's sake!" she screamed. "What do you think you're doing?"

Above her, a monkey screamed back. It caught her closing pitch exactly, and the boys collapsed in giggles.

"Mon-keeeee!" Evan yelled.

On two sides now, monkeys screeched from the trees. Looking up, Holly could see moving forms in the branches. They'd dropped lower down than she'd seen them come before, and looked much larger. Shockingly large. They were silhouettes, shadows, but as tall as the boys, bulky and strong. Wild animals, she realized. Above all, unpredictable.

"All right," she told the boys. "We called Daddy. Now it's time to turn around."

Evan ignored her, screeching up at the trees.

"Eee-eeee-EEEEE."

The monkeys screeched back. They seemed excited, restless, jumping from branch to branch. Was it her imagination, or were they circling even lower? Holly had no idea what kind of monkeys these might be, or how you were supposed to handle them. Her broken stick seemed like a laughable defence, and she finally understood why Powell carried guns.

"Let's go," she said, herding the boys down the path ahead of her. Was it better to keep them ahead or behind? An awful thrumming started in the treetops. Howler monkeys! Holly shivered, then cursed, stumbling on a tree root. Reaching to steady herself, she dug her fingers into Conor's shoulder, making him cry out shrilly. A monkey screamed back, and the thrumming noise grew louder, like saws cutting drums. The monkeys seemed to be following them, and Holly had an idea that the boys had veered off the path. Not that it mattered. If they kept going down, they'd reach the river eventually. The most important thing now was to keep ahead of the monkeys and their terrifying noise, which was building, deepening, booming through the air like crazy thunder.

"I don't like this," Conor said.

"We're just getting back to the river," Holly said.

They were clearly off the path. The undergrowth scratched them, and if they hadn't got ticks before, they would surely have them now. Holly thought of the cool black river ahead of them. The ground seemed to be levelling out, which meant they would reach the swamp soon. When they did, they would only have to turn to their right and skirt the edge of the swamp to reach the river and their canoe.

The noise was awful, endless. Holly was sweating rivers. Then she realized the ground had started to rise again. What was this? Holly put a hand on each boy's shoulder and pulled them to a stop. She had to think, though the howlers were far too noisy for her to think. She had to think. They were lost.

Retrace their steps, get back on the path. She rubbed her temples, turning back to see what was behind them. Fortunately, in their rush downhill, they'd broken a new path through the heavy undergrowth. She could see the way they'd come, and turned the boys around to go ahead of her again. Or should she stay in front?

The monkeys thrummed and threatened. She was sure they'd come lower in the trees. Evan was pulling her down so he could speak.

"Where are we going?" he shouted.

"We got off the path. We're just going back to the path."

Conor, who hadn't heard her, said, "We're lost."

"We're not lost, snickers. Just misplaced." Holly couldn't believe she'd called him that. What was worse, the boys looked reassured.

"Come on," she said, and steered them back the way they'd come.

Or did she? After going only a few steps, Holly could no longer make out the path she thought they'd broken, and had to stop again to think. It was impossible. The howlers were far too loud for her to think. Looking up, she found them closing in on her. But she also saw the huge trunk of a brazil nut tree not far to her right. Holly turned the boys around again, and pushed them ahead of her as she kept her eye on the tree. She prayed they'd found the clearing where she'd made her blaze, and could stumble back along the sodden path to the river.

The noise of the monkeys was almost unbearable. Holly didn't know how much more she could take, or what she might do afterwards. She started shaking, her heart pounding in tune to each rhythmic, wild cry. Then the slope started down again. Perhaps it was the tree she'd blazed. The ground was getting damper. Were they near the swamp? Holly licked her lips; the taste was foul. Then they reached a small swampy hollow, and found it wasn't the big swamp, just a hollow with no path along the side. Holly put her stick two steps forward and it sunk into ooze. She'd have to circle around, climbing over roots and logs, keeping the tree always in sight, while the demented monkeys above them thrummed their dreadful cry.

The hollow stank. The mosquitoes were bad, and she could see the ticks on her wrists. Holly had no idea how long they'd been in the forest, or how long they'd been lost. Probably since the moment she'd left the canoe. She was exhausted, sweaty, filthy. Also surprised the boys had not yet panicked. Surprised she hadn't. Then the snake slid across the fallen log in front of her and she screamed.

It seemed to go on forever, flowing directly across their path like an elevated stream. A foot thick, creamy-browny-beige, it was marked in some way she didn't want to see more closely. Anaconda or constrictor? Holly didn't know what it would be called, but she had a good idea what it could do, and held the boys tightly against her. Snakes couldn't hear well, could they? Or see well? Yet she knew she had to keep the boys almost breathlessly still as the snake passed by, not a yard in front of them.

Somewhere at the edge of her consciousness, Holly heard the howlers scream as well. Scream and scream, almost in panic. Then they retreated. She couldn't take her eyes off the snake, but she could hear their howls growing fainter, almost as if they too flowed away. Then the snake was finally gone, and there was blessed silence. Holly grabbed the boys and ran for the clearing by the brazil nut tree. It wasn't the same tree. It had no blaze. But she didn't care, and settled the boys against the trunk.

"We'll wait here until Daddy comes and gets us."

Evan was whimpering. Conor's eyes had never looked bigger.

"We're lost," he whispered.

"But Daddy's going to find us," she told him, as the light began to fail.
11

Clovis was the one who found them. He smelled their fire and followed it to the brazil nut tree. He was relieved she'd had enough sense to light a fire.

"I had some matches for the fire at camp," she said. "Some matches in my backpack. The children were frightened. The animals, the noises were frightening."

Seeing both boys asleep and safe, Clovis fired three shots in the air. The boys sat up, then froze in place, looking at him wildly.

"There was a sound like that earlier," their mother said. "Just before dark. Four or five shots. I was scared myself."

"Birds," Clovis said.

Holly pictured birds with guns, wings crooked on rifles. Then she understood that Powell had shot some specimens of his new species. Specimens of species. She hoped he hadn't shot all of them. Discovered and extinct simultaneously.

"So much for mist nets," she told Clovis, unaware of how long it had been since he had spoken.

Clovis was busy dousing the fire with water from the swamp. He'd brought a powerful torch, although Holly still shivered as the flames went out. Then she seemed to register the boys, and murmured to them reassuringly. Conor scrambled to his feet and stood watching Clovis, his arms dangling at his sides.

"Soon," Holly said. After the water, Clovis stirred earth onto the dampened fire. Finally he was finished, and straightened up to look at the boys. Conor's knees were knocking together.

"Ta bom," Clovis said, with surprising tenderness. Holly remembered that his grandson had just been to visit Clovis took Conor's hand and led him forward, leaving Holly to carry Evan, who seemed unable to walk by himself. They turned in what she would have said was precisely the wrong direction. Yet before too long, she heard the river, and soon they emerged at a moonlit, sandy bank. Two outboards bobbed in the gently lapping water, tied to the small bird's log.

Doutor Eduardo was waiting for them, with Seu José and Olga standing behind him. They were silent, but turned at the sound of a terrible crashing from the bush. Soon Todd ran out of the forest with Powell dogging behind him.

"My God, are they all right?" Todd yelled.

The children ran toward him, though Holly stood her ground, refusing to apologize. She was tired of blame, and only wanted to cleanse herself and the boys under a brilliant, freezing rain.

Todd knelt to hold both boys tightly, and she heard him sob.

"You got lost," Conor told him. "We went to find you. We got worried."

"God, I'm sorry." In the harsh, slanting light of the hand-held torches, Todd looked like an old man.

"Maybe we should get them back," Powell said.

"You and your specimens," Holly told him. "So much for mist nets."

Todd shook his head and picked up Evan, then stumbled when he tried to take Conor too. Powell darted toward them.

"Need any help?"

"If you touch my kids, I'll kill you," Holly said.

"Holly!"

She waved the bird book.

"He's written the boys' full names and passport numbers in his book. Dates, address, everything."

"An address book?" Holly looked away contemptuously, and caught Doutor Eduardo's eye. The old man knew what she meant.

"So that's it," he said.

They were speaking English. Seu José, Olga and Clovis looked puzzled as Powell shuffled back and forth.

"You're hysterical," Powell told Holly. "Who wouldn't be?"

"Let's not get ahead of ourselves," Todd said.

"You liked to take the boy out fishing."

Doutor Eduardo had switched from English to Portuguese.

Turning to Olga and Clovis, he repeated, "He took your grandson out fishing."

The pair exchanged puzzled glances.

"The boy liked to go out at first," the old man prompted. "He liked fishing. Then later, he said he didn't. He hid."

Todd put Evan down. "Let's take this slowly," he said.

But Clovis met Holly's eye. When she nodded, he looked into the forest, then drew himself up sharply. In one quick motion, he raised his gun to his shoulder. Powell tried to leap aside, but the bullet caught him in mid-air and tossed him to the ground.

"Son of a bitch!" Todd yelled. Galvanized now, he pushed the boys at Olga and charged toward Clovis, knocking the gun straight up so Clovis fired a second time into the air.

"Enough," Doutor Eduardo roared. Then he said quietly, "The children."

Todd and Clovis stepped apart uneasily. Holly heard Powell moan, and Todd swivelled and strode toward him.

Both boys ran to Holly, burying their heads in her hip and waist. It would all be like a dream to them afterwards. A nightmare they would soon outgrow. Surely to God they would outgrow it. It would fade into vagueness, the way the world around her had faded now.

"In the arm," Todd called, pulling off his shirt and tearing off a strip of fabric for a tourniquet. "Almost at the shoulder. It's gone clean through."

"A winged bird man," Holly said. "Except he's not a bird, he's a snake."

"That's not very useful, Holly."

Todd worked quickly to stop Powell's bleeding, then got up and washed his hands in the shallow margin of the river. Piranha, Holly thought. Todd pulled his hands out quickly.

"I can't do anything more," he told Doutor Eduardo, drying his hands on the remainder of his shirt. Only then did the doutor stroll over, and take a look at the bleeding man.

"Get him into the smaller boat."

Seu José helped Todd carry the swearing, jerking Powell into the second outboard.

"He needs medical attention," Todd told Seu José. "Can you make it down to the city at night?"

"They'll take him," Doutor Eduardo said.

"I'll go, too," Todd replied.

"That won't be necessary."

"It damn well is."

Doutor Eduardo shrugged. "In which case, I'll go myself."

"I said I'd go."

"And your family?" The doutor turned to Holly.

"I don't think he's planning to talk to me," Holly said.

Todd blew out his breath and came over to Holly, taking her arm to lead her farther away.

"I'll be back. I'll be back quickly. But you understand, don't you? One push, bleeding like that, he's in the river and he doesn't come out. You're understanding this? And no matter what he's done, you don't believe in lynch mobs. You don't, Holly. We have a responsibility here, considering how this started. My God, they'll claim it's an accident, and then he's gone."

"At least you're consistent," Holly said. "Never seeing what's in front of you."

Looking over her shoulder, Todd saw Clovis and the doutor get into the outboard after Seu José. He started to jog toward them, though Holly pulled him back.

"Your children?" she asked. "Needing you? Think of your children for once, why can't you, Todd?"

The outboard motor sprang to life.

"Son of a bitch!" Todd cried, jerking free of Holly and running toward the boat. He was running down the riverbank as Seu José opened the throttle and sped away. Holly felt no sympathy as he ran uselessly into the water, though she drifted over to the margin of the river to watch the outboard recede.

Todd came back slowly, shaking his head. The children were both whimpering.

"My God, Holly," he asked. "What have you done?"

Later, Holly realized this was not the moment things finally fell apart. That came the next day, on board a small plane. They were sitting on the tarmac at an airport three stops into their hopscotch route leading back to Rio de Janeiro. It was a new plane, the inaugural flight of a Canadian-built Dash 8. It smelled like new carpet. She remembered the time she had carpet installed in the Vancouver house. She'd told the carpetlayer how much she liked the smell of new carpet, and he'd replied, "Women always say that."

There was carpet halfway up the walls of the plane, as thick and sleek as an animal's coat. The cabin attendant brought the boys some colouring books that were just as new and glossy. Conor told the attendant they were Canadian, like the plane, and he was so pleased he went to get the pilot.

"We're lucky to have you on board," the pilot said, taking the seat next to Holly.

She wondered if the carpetlayer sometimes got lucky with bored housewives who wanted a roll on their new-smelling carpet. If pilots got lucky with passengers. Powell? And unaccompanied minors! It occurred to Holly that Powell's leave of absence might be involuntary. Perhaps now indefinite. She wondered if he'd survived the night.

Todd had stayed to find out. He'd got off at the first stop along their route, having persuaded Holly it was the right thing to do. The pilot lounged in Todd's empty seat, but Holly was too tired to listen to what he was saying. It had not been easy to get the boys to settle down when they'd finally returned to the camp. They hadn't been able to eat the hamburgers an unhappy-looking Olga had cooked, although they must have been hungry.

They were tired, but unable to keep still, and Conor broke a glass in the dining hall, making Evan scream. Holly had satisfied herself that they hadn't seen Clovis take aim at Powell. Both thought the shooting was accidental. Yet they were still so nervous and confused that it took hours of singing and soothing in their hammocks before first Evan, then Conor, fell into an exhausted sleep.

They'd been quiet and frighteningly polite on the plane. Nice, well-behaved, innocent children, attracting adult smiles. When the pilot realized Holly wasn't listening, he offered the boys a look at the cockpit. Both declined, and the pilot was left to retreat, puzzled by the three chilly Canadians. Holly knew the boys' disengagement was unhealthy

and that it would have to be dealt with. But for the moment, she leaned back in her seat as they opened new packs of crayons, colouring with unprecedented neatness within the thick black lines.

"I thought they'd be awake all night," Todd had said, throwing himself in the white wicker chair. The boys' hammocks were at the other end of the long, shadowed room. Holly stood looking at them, refusing to let them out of her sight.

"You're absolutely sure he didn't touch them?" Todd said.

"I told you that days ago. But something else seems to have happened since then, hasn't it?"

"They'll be all right. It's confusing, they're frightened. But they'll be all right."

"I don't know why you say so. I hope you're right. But there are some of us who aren't all that used to guns and forests."

"Why did you go in there, Holly?"

"Why did you?"

She sat down. She could still see the boys from here. "Arguing won't get us anywhere," she said.

"You're right," he replied. "I'm sorry."

"Just please stop making all these assumptions. We'll watch the boys, day by day. Maybe they'll need therapy, I don't know. We can't assume. Any more than you really know what happened to Powell, do you?"

When Todd didn't answer, Holly insisted, "The doutor couldn't just get rid of him, could he? Someone would eventually go looking for him. He's an American citizen. And wouldn't that make it much more likely that Doutor Eduardo would just chase him away?"

Powell was a terrible man, but Todd was right. Holly didn't believe in lynch mobs. The more she thought of it, the more worried she'd grown. Guilt and fear and an oppressive sense of responsibility rode her like a hag.

"Please, Todd," she whispered, so he sighed.

"I don't know," he answered.

"Well, you see?"

"I don't see, either. I'm not going to lie to you, Holly. From what I think I know, they could easily pitch him over the side of the boat. I'm sorry, but they might do that. And if they did, and I'd still find witnesses down in the city who saw him arrive, and swore he left on the red-eye plane."

"They could also be telling the truth," Holly said.

"Yes, they could. The other thing they do, when they suspect a sexual crime, is cut off the guy's genitals. That's possible as well."

Holly took a deep breath. "You're right, it's better not to lie. But I also don't want the boys to suspect any part of it. If they ask, I want you to be able to look them in the eyes and say the man's all right. Can you do that?"

"Of course I will. What do you think? And maybe he is. Probably he is. What the hell do I know?" Todd looked exhausted. "I'll always be the foreigner. Half of what they tell me is probably just rumour, and the rest they saw on a TV cop show. That's the problem with things up here, Holly. It's all like bad TV reception. You stare at the screen. It goes clear for a moment, then fuzzy. What was that? What's really going on here? Damned if I know."

Todd shook his head.

"Some guy sidles up to me in a bar. This is the sort of thing I have to deal with. We're in the bar this last long trip, me and the concerned academics. Doutor Eduardo finally leaves, so this guy decides to risk it. He tells me what I really need to do is find the doutor's mistress in Rio. She's the one who can help me."

"Help you what?"

"I don't know. I can't find her. Not that I didn't look. But of course no one's heard of a mistress. A mistress? Sei la. Which is typical. I know nothing, I find nothing, and I've spent eight months of my life here."

"Eight months isn't very long," Holly said. "A day is, but not eight months."

From the hammocks came the sound of Evan's faint snores. Todd smiled, but as his smile faded, he shook his head skeptically.

"I can look the boys in the eye and say anything you like, Holly, but nothing's going to make me trust Doutor Eduardo. He lies through his teeth. Saying the tribe fired arrows at some Indian agents. What he doesn't know is that I went up there with an agent. We were trying very quietly to make contact with the people after reports of a fight. Maybe they weren't fighting prospectors, but it wasn't anyone from the bureau, either. In which case, who was it? My God, I hate to think what he's covering up. Because the entire tribe has disappeared. They're gone, Holly. They're just not there."

"I'm sorry, Todd. But thanks for finally telling me what's going on."

"We're even?" he asked.

"Just let my babies be all right."

They listened to Evan snore. A soothing sound. It made Holly remember how late it was, and wonder if they ought to sleep in shifts.

"If I could honestly tell them Powell survived, Holly."

She closed her eyes, opening them to see that Todd was aching to ask if he could send her home with the boys while he stayed behind in the Amazon. He was desperate to search for Powell, or the uncontacted tribe. Maybe both, maybe neither. Redemption, really.

"What point have I been making this whole trip, Todd?"

"Fine. Fine. If you're sure you can live without knowing what really happened. If it wouldn't just eat away at you. Because Conor would sense that, even if Evan didn't."

Holly sighed. Maybe he was right.

."Stay," she told him.

"I shouldn't."

"No, you shouldn't," she agreed.

But he'd already begun to sketch the logistics, proposing that they leave together on the first flight, that he get off at the next big town, that he look for a priest who might be there. He was very concerned about the details of their flight, planning a route that would give them smooth connections all the way home. Todd's definition of a good father: one who arranged the right connections. Unfair of her, but it was true. It was also the most he'd ever got from his own father. Poor Todd. The poor boys. Conor groaning, Evan snoring.

"I'll be back in a couple of days."

"Please just that," Holly said. "Just find out and leave."

"And give him a shock, if he made it," Todd said. "I got a quick look at his specimens, and I think what he's found is the juvenile of a type of ant wren. He didn't recognize the markings because it was only just described. But someone's beat him to the punch. I saw a letter in a journal a couple of weeks ago, and it sounds identical to what Powell found. The previously undescribed juvenile of a particular type of ant wren. Now which one was it?"

He pursed his lips.

"If he made it," he said.

Shooting juveniles. Sitting in the airplane, Holly shivered, even though the door was thrown open on a hot afternoon. The smell of fuel was strong, the tarmac steamy, the airport anxious and loud. She wished she hadn't agreed that Todd should stay, not least because she had more questions. Who was the priest he wanted to find? He had never mentioned a priest before, nor the name of the town where he'd disembarked, although he seemed to know it well. The town was on the same river as the city where Powell ought to have been taken. One of the few things Todd had said was that he and the priest could boat back to investigate. Holly pictured a churning, milky river. She seemed to hear the roar of a boat, then realized it was the sound of a small plane taxiing to a stop beside them on the tarmac. She watched it idly as the pilot cut his motor and the passenger door swung open.

Seu José was the first one out.

Seu José? Holly couldn't believe it. But when she looked more closely, her heart beating fast, she found it was indeed Seu José, and that he was followed out the door by Powell.

It was unmistakably Powell. He was pale, but he was laughing, his arm in a clean white sling. The left arm. Holly hadn't seen which one before.

Doutor Eduardo was the third man out. Powell seemed to be laughing at something the doutor had said just before they left the plane. Holly could see both men clearly. She saw obsequiousness in the way Powell ducked his head, and contempt in the doutor's bearing. He was wearing a beige linen suit, while Seu José, who did not look amused, wore a freshly-ironed pair of jeans, his paunch hanging over them.

"See, Mommy?" Conor said, holding out his colouring book. As Holly glanced over, the attendant slammed the door on their own plane, and by the time she looked outside again, Powell and his companions had gone. She helped the boys secure their tables as the plane taxied onto the runway and quickly took off. Watching the forest fall away beneath them, Holly felt Todd's hold on her finally slip.

What have you done, Holly?

Too damn little now that you ask.

They landed in Rio late that night. The city was jewels beneath them, and the drive home from the airport a kaleidoscope of light.

"What do you mean, you're not in a hurry?" the cabbie said. "Who's driving? You're driving? I'm driving."

She couldn't even feel frightened any more. At home, the maid, Cida, had fresh bread waiting, but Holly couldn't eat it. The boys sprawled half asleep at the table, and dropped off the moment she got them in bed.

On the answering machine was a message from Tânia about a party she was holding the following week.

"Can you persuade Todd to come? Or is he a nervous wreck from taking too many days off?"

Holly didn't know when Todd would be back, and didn't really care. She wondered if Larkin was still in town. She seemed to remember his number and dialled it.

Larkin sounded surprised when she greeted him.

"If you like parties as much as I think you do, there's one at my friend's place on Saturday night," she said.

"I was planning to leave on Friday," he told her. "But there's no real reason I couldn't stay. You think?"

"Why not?" Holly answered, and hung up before she could change her mind.
12

Tânia lived in a huge apartment near the crest of Rio, high in the cobbled neighbourhood of Santa Teresa. Her modern building overlooked the formal gardens of the governor's palace, and during the day, the greenery crowding the smoky glass of her many windows made the apartment seem dim and aquatic. Holly always felt she was swimming through the filtered, greenish light, and when they were to have lunch, she preferred meeting Tânia at her studio, a few winding blocks away in a house that seemed to tumble down the mountain, each room leading onto a terrace that was really the roof of the room below; all of the rooms connected by an outside stair down which Holly would scramble, calling for Tânia at the door of each disconnected room until she'd find her at work with her back to the view, a gaunt, chic woman touched by fingers of sunlight reaching through the open terrace doors.

Holly would have abandoned the apartment to live in the studio, painting over the water stains on the walls and clipping a garden out of the wild disorder of grass and trees and vines outside. But that only showed Holly to be a foreigner, while Tânia was intricately connected here. Well connected, people said. She may have called herself the family rebel, but her family was as important as the rebellion, and she wouldn't have dreamed of leaving the grand and gloomy apartment for a less exclusive address. Her cousins would have assumed she'd had to move, and Tânia never liked to admit she had to do anything, especially when there was an implication of money.

Besides, the apartment was perfect for parties. The old-fashioned sofas that looked so empty in the daylight filled up at night with her family and the demimonde of Rio, which seemed to be much the same thing. She'd introduced Holly to architects and designers, transvestites, the younger sons of the deposed Brazilian imperial family (both branches), photographers, painters, a deaf and dwindling great-aunt who'd had an affair with André Breton — she sometimes said Max Ophuls — the aunt's pompous banker son, school friends, gay friends, very rich men and their soignée wives, art students, models, beauties of good family, a foreigner or two, cousins (actually, most of them seemed to be cousins), all four of her children, and lately even the second ex-husband, Ramsay the American, who had been staying in a back room of the labyrinthine apartment while paying an extended visit — four months, so far — with their teenage daughters.

"He's a good father, Holly," Tânia had said. "They like to see him. So he stays."

"And you've known him so long at this point, he must seem like another cousin."

"Like a table. Like a chair."

Arriving at Larkin's hotel, Holly was amused to find herself taking the same line with him. She was deliberately late, feeling that what she was planning to do was important, but also that it was not. It would have been perfectly acceptable if he had given up waiting for her and gone off on his own, although she quickly saw him at the lobby bar, playing with his glass.

Larkin caught her eye in the bar's gilt mirror. "I would have sworn you said nine o'clock."

But Holly was wearing a cocktail dress and black spike heels. As he caught the full effect, Larkin couldn't help turning, glinting with satisfaction as the other men in the bar gave him the same respectful, envious glance he'd given Todd when they'd first met. "You haven't noticed things start late here?" Holly asked.

He was instantly contrite. "Of course they do."

Men accepted blame so readily if you played the game. It was just a matter of a strapless dress and precarious shoes, both promising a fall. Holly felt only contempt as Larkin fumbled with his bar bill.

"Are we ready?" she asked, and took him to her car.

The elevator doors opened directly onto the party. Taking in the crowd, the art, the circulating waiters, Larkin adjusted his jacket. The parties he'd been going to were probably more nouveau than this. Also more open. Holly had first been invited when she was studying with Tânia at the art school in Ipanema. She'd gone there straight out of language class, a month after arriving, determined to carry through with her plan of getting back to painting. As it turned out, her Portuguese still wasn't good enough and she'd had to drop out. Yet by that time Tânia had written her onto the invitation list, and they were becoming friends.

Tânia's parties were famous at the Faculdade. She asked her best students, introduced them to society. Holly knew that wasn't why Tânia had first invited her, although as Larkin went to find her a drink, she could pick out a student she knew to be very talented standing near the doors to the terrace, shifting from one foot to the other, his white shirt so flat against his skinny ribs he looked like a gently stirring curtain. He was probably far too aware that the tight shirt and even tighter pants were wrong for the party, although there was also a suggestion of defensive scorn around his mouth which said that clothes were not important to the best sort of people. And while he was right, he was also a type. Young, hungry, caustic, edgy, susceptible and poor.

Sweet boy, Holly thought. She wondered if he understood that Tânia was giving him a chance. He could remain on the fringes, derisive and pure, and never have a real career. Or he could step into the room and learn how to talk to these people. He probably thought of this as selling out, and believed there were other roads to success. Unfortunately, there were not.

"So this is your mentor," Larkin said, coming back with a couple of drinks.

"Not really," Holly asked, keeping her eyes on the boy. "I think at first she just wanted to practice her English. She lived in New York for a long time. Now we get along." Holly shrugged, and looked around for her friend.

"But she likes your work?" Larkin said.

"I think so."

"You think? And you still get along?"

"She's very good. If she were a man, she'd have a huge career by now. Instead the critics compare her to people. She's supposed to do portraits like Lucian Freud, that sort of thing. Not that they've ever actually seen anything by Lucian Freud. They're just trying to pay her a compliment."

"And she's no better at accepting compliments than you are."

"She's over there," Holly said.

Tânia stood at the centre of a crowd — a tall, virile-looking woman in her late forties with a clever, probing, skeptical expression; thin lips, dark eyes, a knife-like nose. It occurred to Holly that Tânia might not like what was happening with Larkin. She liked Todd, or at least she'd approved of him the one time they'd met. She'd told Holly she didn't care two straws about the environment, but Todd himself seemed to strike a chord, maybe because they came from the same type of family. While Larkin said his parents owned a hardware store.

Tânia finally turned from her group and smiled when she saw Holly.

"And so you've failed to lure your husband once again," she said, coming over and kissing her on both cheeks. "What? Working on a Saturday night?"

"I'm afraid he's still up in the Amazon."

"And I still have to hear about your trip. Was it wonderful? You know, I was born in Manaus. Before this horrible expansion, of course, when it was a lovely, sleepy little town."

"Yes, but we were quite far from there. The children are recovering." Holly made a polite half turn. "Have you met Jay Larkin?"

Keeping her eyes on Holly, Tânia shook Larkin's hand absent-mindedly. When he held her hand too long, Tânia gave him a cool glance, then turned back to Holly.

"But clearly we have to talk. The children, recovering? My dear, this is a cliff-hanger, when I have so many guests coming in. Tell me now that they're all right."

"It's surprising. They're doing well. Conor is a bit more thoughtful, and Evan a little clingy, but nothing major. One minor tantrum when Evan wanted some old stuffed toys he never really touched before. I didn't even bother bringing them to Rio."

Holly briefly closed her eyes. "We got lost in the forest," she said, forcing herself to smile.

Larkin started to ask something, but Tânia stopped him.

"That was rather silly of you," she said. "Their father wasn't there, I would imagine."

"We went looking for him. He'd gone off into the bush, leaving us alone."

"So you were both naughty. However, you seem to have survived."

One of her daughters came to lean on Tânia's shoulder. Arianna: a tall, supple, languid girl of seventeen. Tânia put an arm around her. "But the important thing is that our children survive us, isn't it, amor? Holly, you must get Evan stuffed animals, if that's what he wants."

"You can see we're terribly spoiled," Arianna said.

"These children were lost in Amazonas," Tânia told her. "Think of all the creatures there. This way, he can hurt them back."

"Poor things," Arianna said. "I'll give him some of mine."

She felt sorry for the toys, and would give some to Evan. Holly felt uneasy, although Arianna smiled sleepily from her mother's shoulder.

"When Jeni went up to Uncle Dudu's camp, she was also frightened by the animals. But you see, nothing happened. It was only noise coming from the trees."

Dudu. Eduardo. Brazil was a big country, but small and inter-related at this level of society.

"Doutor Eduardo is your uncle?" Holly asked.

"Did he let you get lost?" Tânia answered sharply. "That was careless of him. Does he think I'm supposed to let my girls go there now?"

Arianna stroked her mother's hair. "It's only noise," she said gently. But Tânia seemed almost angry.

"Holly, we must talk soon," she said, striding off toward some arriving guests, trailing Arianna behind her like a scarf.

"So our husband is in the doghouse, is he?" Larkin asked.

"In the Amazon," Holly murmured. She turned and found Larkin looking suspicious and wry. It was hard not to feel a little sorry for him.

"In the Amazonian doghouse," he persisted. Holly could only shrug. This was up to him now. Would he take offence and leave? She wasn't sure she cared.

Finally Larkin dropped his eyes, half smiling to himself and shrugging as she had done. Over his falling shoulder, Holly glimpsed Tânia's latest find on the margins of the party. Larkin had probably been like that once, scornful and intense and untarnished. He had made so many compromises in the meantime, another wasn't going to hurt, was it? Yet the idea of Larkin young and vulnerable touched Holly's heart.

No, she thought, and stopped a waiter for another drink.

Two, three hours later. For the first time in years, Holly was drunk. Deliberately drunk and enjoying it. It felt so good to laugh, to flirt. There was something else. What else was it? An unusual feeling that took her a while to place.

She was having fun. Not something she was used to, was it? Such a serious girl. So thoughtful and pragmatic. Where had that got her? Had it made her a revered artist? A respected wife? The ideal mother? No, it had not. Clearly it was an unsuccessful strategy. Time to abandon. Cut loose, try something else. Drift through the party, perhaps, with a successful artiste.

Larkin was in his element here, liquid and masterful, as he'd been up the morro. Holly introduced him to people she didn't remember meeting and played along when they supposed him to be her ecological husband. Larkin used the occasion to lament the extinction of a species of lactating newt that could have given the world a natural alternative to collagen injections. His audience murmured in sympathy, and only seemed surprised at Larkin's inability to speak Portuguese. Holly wondered why he hadn't bothered to learn even a few phrases when he'd been here — how long? She couldn't remember, and drifted away to find a clock, although she was quickly sidetracked into a discussion of aerobic exercise. Larkin eventually found her in a bedroom with two women who were comparing liposuction scars, and pulled up his shirt to show them where the doctor had remodelled his abdomen. The women marvelled at his invisible incisions as Holly stared at the line of neatly crossed hairs running from his navel into his slightly-open fly.

."You're cruel," she told him as they left the room, then leaned in to whisper the most salacious, intriguing, compromising gossip about whose nose had been shortened, whose breasts augmented, whose sex change was hermaphroditically incomplete. Hadn't someone said once that gossip was beneath her? It wasn't beneath her. It was inside her, and bottled up.

That round-cheeked, rosy-cheeked, downy-cheeked boy? The one with the moist red lips? she asked. Couldn't you see the ghost of a paunch, the paunch he'd develop in the future? There were truly ghosts from the future, she said, not just from the past. And he, Antônio, the medical resident, was Tânia's latest lover. Imagine! When Tânia first met him, he'd had a beard. She'd thought he was probably about 30, which already made him younger than her son from her first marriage. Then Antônio arrived for a date clean-shaven, with years taken off his face. She'd panicked and insisted on seeing his I. D. Imagine! He was all of 27!

A scandal.

A triumph.

An indulgence.

Then there was the sister-in-law. The prune-faced woman in badly-cut silk? She was actually the sister of Tânia's first husband, but she still came around, being related in some other way and poor besides. "Poor" in the context of this apartment. It left the woman disapproving. That was her role, to disapprove. She'd told Tânia that Antônio more properly belonged to one of Tânia's daughters, meaning one of her own. Afterwards, the woman's oldest, gorgeous, sardonic girl had sat on Antônio's lap and called him Uncle. Moving her butt salaciously, playing with his blonde-red curls. This was the Jeni that Arianna had mentioned, the one who rinsed her hair in frigid water. Antônio was 27; she'd got her response. Jumped up to show it. Red-cheeked, downy-cheeked, genial Antônio.

"Every action has its equal and opposite reaction," he said. "If you lower yourself sufficiently, something else will rise."

Larkin's hand fluted to her elbow. He steadied Holly as she laughed, and stood a little closer. Four hours couldn't possibly have passed. Holly looked around again to check, but apartments in Rio had no fireplace, no mantel, no brass clock ticking away, leaving her with the comforting sense of having fallen out of time.

"The woman over there?" she asked. "The slightly aging beauty? I'm being so unkind that you can't pick her out. I mean the blonde woman talking to the man who's smiling and bowing. She started out as a beauty queen — well, some time ago. Then she married a playboy Tânia knew. But the playboy needed cash and threw her over for an heiress. It's so nineteenth century. And now she's a kept woman, a professional mistress. I suppose the word is courtesan. Tânia says some very famous men have picked up her bills."

"One after the other, or all at once?"

Holly paused, remembering something about a mistress. Todd had mentioned a mistress. But she couldn't remember what Todd had said, and shook her head at Larkin.

"Tânia says she's very expensive. But at the same time, she belongs to a terreira, a macumba temple out in the Zona Norte. She goes into a trance and gets ridden by a goddess. Puffing this huge cigar and grabbing men, when you can see she's so lady-like normally."

Doutor Eduardo's mistress, that was it. A mistress in Rio, who was the key. Tânia overlooked many social barriers, but Holly had an idea she wouldn't invite her uncle's mistress to her parties. Unrelated courtesans were pleasantly scandalous. Related ones were tawdry. And in any case, mistresses were locks, not keys.

"Something's funny?" Larkin asked.

But Holly stumbled away from him, looking for the remains of the party. Everyone was leaving; she hadn't noticed this before. It was curious. One minute, the room was full, and in the next the guests were dissolving like ghosts. When Holly finally found Tânia, she was accepting thanks from a chaise longue on the terrace. An architect bent over her, holding her hand. Osvaldo, the Argentine. He spoke Spanish while Tânia answered in Portuguese. As Holly approached, she understood him to be proposing that he and Tânia lead the dregs of the party to a gay sex show in Copacabana.

"Oh, but I've always wanted to go to one of those," Holly said.

"No, my flower, this is not for you," Tânia told her. She switched to English as Larkin appeared. "Nor for me, tonight, Osvaldo."

"But it's closing so soon, María Tatiana. You have to picture the universal endowment. Boys pulled across the stage by their zeppelins. And tasteful, you understand. Sanitized into camp. Which is to say, no rutting. Instead, we have choreographed dances in which the only unusual feature is a series of leaping boners."

"Osvaldo dear, it can't be nearly as entertaining as your description. So I think we'll settle for that."

"A true Rio touristic experience. The boys end by composing a three-tiered pyramid, all gloriously muscled and oiled and jerking off while they sing the Botafogo football song."

For the first time, Tânia looked faintly interested. "And do they come in unison?"

"I think it would depend on the night. There's one, you know, who balances a scale on his member and weighs items offered by the audience. Some of them quite heavy. You'd enjoy it, Tânia. Think of the silly looks on the faces of your male guests."

Antônio, who was standing behind Tânia, had followed the discussion with his usual look of pleasant equanimity, although when Holly looked at Larkin, she found his smile was rather forced. She giggled, and felt panicked at the thought they would be leaving soon. The discussion brought the mechanics too close. She could picture the bellboy smirking in the lobby of Larkin's hotel. Upstairs, they would fumble with zippers, condoms, excuses. You'd think I was still seventeen. Take it as a compliment. Lying there, disappointed, blaming herself. Women did that.

"I think we should go with Osvaldo!" she cried.

"I've been," Larkin said. "And in this case the description really does transcend reality." He bowed to the Argentine, who bowed back.

"Of course it does," Tânia said. "Holly, I promised you a little talk. Good night, Osvaldo. Good night, Mr. Larkin."

She accepted their kisses. As the men retreated, Holly felt enormous relief that Tânia had decided to interfere. She sat down gratefully on the chaise longue and clasped her hands like a schoolgirl.

"I promised you a talk, Holly," Tânia repeated, once Larkin was out of earshot. "Whatever decided your husband to take you to my uncle's camp?"

The terrace seemed to shift. Holly didn't understand what Tânia wanted, and found it almost impossible to answer. "Because he wanted to talk?" she asked.

"Which means Eduardo would get to talk to him, as well. Not necessarily a good idea, Holly. Did they meet?"

Holly rubbed one hand across her eyes. "Doutor Eduardo was up there. Todd knew he had been spending a lot of time at the camp. And he took us there anyway." As she forced herself to remember what had happened, Holly's surprise gave way to a renewed sense of grievance. "You're saying he shouldn't have done that?"

Tânia paused. "He's my uncle, yes. My father was the older brother, but he died. Both my parents died when I was fourteen, Holly. My mother had cancer, my father was in an accident not long afterwards." Tânia waved her hand. "It was not unconnected; he'd retreated into drink. I was the first and only child. My mother had been ill for so many years. And naturally, Eduardo was the guardian."

Tânia paused, looking thoughtful. "I'm embarrassed to tell you how long it was before I started paying attention to the financial picture. Actually, I now find I'm rather good at business. Artists really ought to be. You already know this, but it took me a little longer to understand. Well, that's how it was, and no use crying over spilt milk. But it's important now to get everything cleared up. Really, Eric shouldn't worry; I can handle it. And it's for him I'm doing this, and the girls."

Tânia paused again. "But it's true my uncle dislikes giving up control, my dear."

Erik was Tânia's son. He must have been almost Holly's age, but he seemed younger, feckless, altogether too fond of parties, drugs, and in constant danger of ending up like his grandfather. If Tânia was trying to get him more of the family money, Holly could understand why Doutor Eduardo might object. And if Doutor Eduardo objected, she could see how difficult Tânia's project might prove.

"When we were at the camp," she said, "I remember saying to myself, Why does Todd think he can make Doutor Eduardo do anything he doesn't want to do? What tools does he have?"

"This is something I've found, Holly. You see, the only tools that work are feminine. Cleverness and indirection and attention to the details. You've noticed, for example, I never say anything that can't be passed on."

Holly considered this. "Yes, I see," she said, and smiled. Tânia took her hand.

"My dear, you won't be angry with me? I heard Eduardo mention Todd's name months ago, not long after you'd arrived. This Todd Austen. I'm actually rather good at names. Like the author, I told myself. So when another Austen showed up in my class, I began to wonder if there was any connection. And you see, I was right."

Holly removed her hand from Tânia's grasp to rake through her hair. "I didn't think you were really very interested in my work," she said.

"My dear!"

"I wouldn't have thought much of you if you had been. I was horrible there. That's really why I left." She looked at her hand. "This isn't what I thought we were going to talk about."

Tânia thought for a minute, then shrugged.

"The musician? Or composer, whatever he says. I call that type a shallow pond to paddle in, Holly. You're going to get tired of him quite quickly, but I think you know that. I also suspect you want to, don't you, dear?"

Holly was hurt to find Tânia didn't care what she did. It wasn't important, not the sort of thing that cost her a moment's thought. No, what was important was Todd's business with Doutor Eduardo. Holly was only Todd's wife; the second, the secondary Austen.

"I'm worth a little more than that, Tânia," she told her, and walked inside.

Tânia was left to address the empty terrace. "Then prove it, my dear."

Holly found Larkin sprawling on a sofa, frowning at his watch.

"This isn't too flattering, is it?" she asked him. "Though of course I have no idea how much people usually flatter you."

As Larkin levered himself up, Holly shivered and crossed her arms.

"How big a celebrity are you, anyway?" she asked. "Do you mind my asking? I mean, you probably have to suspect people flatter you to get something, don't they? Or do they? Do you ever get anything out of it? I've been wanting to ask."

Larkin stood up and looked down at her quietly.

"I suppose I get something out of it," he replied.

"Well that's all right then, isn't it?" she said.

"I suppose so," he answered, taking her elbow to lead her downstairs.

In his hotel room he instructed her. Come here. Can you take it off? That's right. Undo that. Murmuring as his fingers ran over her. He was lean himself in the arms and ribs. He probably ran long-distance. There was something attenuated about him, something pared down, pared off. Remembering the scars, she laughed and drew his khakis down further.

He was gentle, smooth, sweeter than she'd expected, reaching onto the table behind him. Take this, he said, giving her the packet. Bite it open. Put it on. He brought her on top of him and groaned. She arched up, cupping her hands on the wings of his clavicles, holding him under her, pushing him under her, pushing him under as she fell down herself, down down there.

Afterwards, he felt close. Wanted to talk. Little things about the places he'd lived. As a child, he had a room beneath the eaves. She slipped into the rhythm of his stories, his murmurs, feeling open to the wash of words. He soothed her, made her laugh. A gentle man with long shanks laid vulnerably bare. Yes, he said, he ran every day.

She liked that, liked him more than she ever could have anticipated, and surprised herself by wanting him again. Holly felt ready to take this as far as it would go. In moving here, she'd planned to change, fly, drink the sky.

Finally she had.
Part Three
13

Todd let the speed of the boat push him back as they roared into open water. He closed his eyes to take the full blast of air in his face. The rasp of wind on his sunburnt cheeks made him shiver, although it also revived him enough to hope he would get through another trip without collapsing. Over two days of travel, they'd dodged through a maze of water, roped themselves like horses to pull the boat through shallows, and just finished poling their way through a claustrophobic channel. It had been a challenge even for the younger men. They were sweating blood — and all in pursuit of a chimera.

"We can't be far below the rapids," Ignacio said.

Father Ignacio. Todd couldn't use the Catholic title without remembering that he was old enough to be the young priest's father: a reflection that was not helpful this far back in the bush, when he needed to convince himself he still possessed reserves of strength which had probably been exhausted years before.

Todd looked out at the wild shores of the river.

"Just around a couple more bends, aren't they?" he guessed.

"Isn't everything?" Ignacio replied.

It was a relief to laugh. The priest was right. Life was complex here, and motives twisted back upon themselves like rivers. Todd's chimera, for instance, was not Powell. Could chimeras have such red knees? Todd was a bit ashamed of himself over Powell. The first thing he'd heard after leaving Holly and the boys was the story of an American ornithologist having been winged by his assistant while they were collecting specimens. It was a good cover story with a suspiciously happy ending. The American had left only to get treatment, and promised to return.

Then it turned out Ignacio had actually seen a bandaged foreigner get on board a small plane bound for Manaus. Ignacio had been picking up a package at the airport when one of his parishioners pointed out the so-called ornithologist walking across the tarmac. It had to be Powell: the injured left arm, the swollen face, the knee socks and the knees. Reaching the plane, the American seemed to give the ground crew orders about his bags, insisting on personally seeing them stowed. He wasn't in any hurry, even though the pilot stood with his arms crossed outside the door to the plane. As he finally he got on board, the man gave the pilot an exaggerated smile which Ignacio remembered as conveying a funny sort of servile condescension. Powell, Todd thought.

He tried to call Rio immediately, hoping to leave a message that would be waiting when Holly arrived home. Powell was alive and heading back to Manaus; she could rest easy. But he couldn't get a line through — the operator claimed it would take hours — and now that he was days away from contact, he knew what Holly would say: that he should have kept trying to phone her; that he didn't care about her feelings; that he'd manufactured his concern about Powell as an excuse to stay longer in the Amazon; that all he'd really wanted to do was join the priest on this latest trip in search of the uncontacted tribe. His chimera. El Dorado.

Todd wished a man's motives could be as clear to him as they were to his wife. Holly often got at the truth, although at the moment it was less her penetration he envied than her certainty; a wife's sometimes withering assumption that her husband knew exactly what he was doing.

No, Todd thought. When he'd arrived in town, he'd sought out the priest as the one most likely to know whether Powell was alive or dead. He hadn't expected to find Ignacio on the dock preparing to head north again, and was surprised to hear him confess that he would like Todd to join him. Far from being planned beforehand, the trip was not even particularly well thought-out. For the second time, Todd just jumped.

They'd headed upriver for the first time in April, guided by a settler named Jefferson. Back then, Todd wasn't thinking of anything so elevated as chimeras. He'd suspected they were off on a wild goose chase, and in other circumstances, he probably wouldn't have gone. Yet he'd been desperate to escape the delegation of concerned academics he'd been trotting around the Amazon. These were people who never stopped nattering. Their punctuated discourse, the niggling back and forth over sources and theories, the aggrieved claims of greater expertise were all a form of territorial pissing which Todd could not abide.

Ignacio had appeared in his hotel room one day when the academics were writing up their notes before dinner. He was a lean, pretty-faced Spaniard whom Todd often rescued from circles of fawning, disappointed women. Had he hoped to escape them in the priesthood? Escape was his modus vivendi. He slipped away as often as he could to the distant reaches of his huge parish, admitting once to Todd that he could bear the trials of wilderness trips far more happily than he could the small-town politics of his local church. He was a fastidious man, keeping his hair cropped close to the skull, and dressing plainly in well-cut clothes with the foppish asceticism of someone who had been born and raised in Madrid. Ignacio had a weakness for high-toned gossip about the upper reaches of the Catholic church, but he was usually more discreet about local matters, and Todd was often disappointed when trying to get something useful out of their talks.

Yet that day, Ignacio had some information to exchange for a favour. Taking a chair in Todd's hotel room, he told Todd the story about fighting between prospectors and the uncontacted tribe. He'd said he'd also told an agent from the government's Indian affairs bureau, a friend who'd agreed to investigate. This friend was an anthropologist by training, yet according to Ignacio's tactful formulation, the training had not yet been sullied by much experience, and it would help if Todd came along.

He didn't give Todd much time to decide, saying they would have to leave before dawn for a town upriver. The agent had arranged to meet his brother there, a bush pilot who would fly them to a landing strip further east. Jefferson would pick them up at the other end for the final leg of their journey — Jefferson being a loner, a northeasterner who had settled deep in the wilderness, living on God knows what. Living on God. Given the young priest's gingerly way of speaking, Todd guessed that Jefferson was the original source of the rumour; even that he'd disclosed something at confession: conceivably that he'd led the prospectors into the region on an expedition gone wrong. What else could explain Ignacio's hesitation, the way he pursed his lips and frowned, his vague answers to most of Todd's questions?

The fact he knew nothing concrete, of course. The fact he knew nothing at all.

"Jefferson has an idea where the people keep a fishing camp," Ignacio said.

"These 'uncontacted' people?"

"They seem to prefer to avoid any contact with the outside world. Which implies some degree of acquaintance, however."

"And no small degree of wisdom."

"Cynicism is not wisdom," the young priest replied.

Todd had trouble taking the plan seriously, and despite what Ignacio said, he suspected the agent had his doubts, as well. A government agent would not normally take a priest along when investigating reports of a conflict. Taking a foreigner was unheard of. Of course, the agent could have been as green as Ignacio claimed. But it seemed more likely that he was indulging his friend by mounting the chase, perhaps in the course of some other business. Still, Todd couldn't resist the opportunity of getting away from his academics, at least temporarily, and after shaking hands with Ignacio, he arranged for his assistant to take over the tour. Feeling gleeful, he slipped out of the hotel very early the next morning, well before the academics could worry themselves awake.

Ignacio and the agent, Celso, were waiting on the dock, two smudged figures in the pre-dawn dark. Four o'clock was the dankest hour, weedy and thick. They were close enough to the equator that the sun wouldn't rise for another couple of hours, giving them a long swath of darkness for their trip upriver, followed by half an hour's foggy grace. It was important for Ignacio's investigation — or at least, important to maintaining the pretence of an investigation — that they leave without any stray prospectors suspecting what they were up to, and arrive on the other end unannounced.

They pushed off quietly in Celso's boat. Todd was surprised to find the agent so nervous, scuffing the heel of his sandal on the deck, punching his fists together, unable to keep still. He insisted Todd and Ignacio hide in the suffocating cabin, even though it was dark, and there were few other vessels on the river. The cabin stank, and the engine thrummed and throbbed around them like a bruise. Todd wanted to ask Ignacio whether there was something else about the trip he ought to be told, but realized he would have to shout, and that in any case Ignacio would not have misled him. Celso was merely proving himself to be as green as the priest had said.

Todd sometimes despaired of himself. And had to laugh. The great revelations of his life were never unmediated discoveries. Those clarifying moments when he felt a sudden illumination, a leap of understanding, usually came when he finally understood the accuracy of something everyone had been telling him for years. You're the picture of your grandfather, people told him. It had been wicked finally seeing the truth of that one.

Todd left the cabin once they'd passed the outskirts of town and dozed on deck for the remainder of the trip, waking as they approached the village where Celso's brother would be waiting. Leaving the boat at the brother's pier, they slipped through the streets of the sleeping village in the last moist moments of darkness. Roosters had begun to crow. Todd caught the copper gleam of feathers by starlight, and saw Celso's bare heel and sandal lifting ahead of him as they turned a corner. Yet Celso's face remained a blur until they boarded the small two-engine plane. Only then did Todd see the busy eyes in the homely face, the skewed nose, the bad skin. Celso darted quick looks around the plane, at Todd and Ignacio — several times at Todd — and when his brother slammed the plane door closed, he began to talk, clutching his seat as they sped toward take-off, and waving both hands excitedly as they lifted into the air.

"Chegamos," he cried. We did it. We've done it. Literally, We've arrived. "Nobody knows where we are." He had to yell above the thundering engines, and grabbed his seat as they hit turbulence.

"I wish I could find that entirely reassuring," Todd yelled back, while the plane bucked upwards and groaned.

"Puxa vida," Celso swore in agreement. When they cleared the last wisps of morning cloud, the plane finally steadied, and they banked northeast into dawn.

"Though you should," Celso added, turning shrewd as he met Todd's eye.

Ignacio glanced his way and nodded. Loosing his own grip on his seat, Todd felt foolish. Ignacio had been truthful as far as he'd gone, but Todd hadn't asked why he'd told Celso his suspicions and not someone more senior. There must have been an agent in the local office Ignacio didn't trust. This was hardly surprising. More than a few Indian agents had been caught taking bribes from big ranchers for relocating tribes off land the ranchers claimed. The possibility of backroom deals, of prospectors being sent to provoke a fight, gave Todd his first queasy sense there might be something to Ignacio's rumour, after all.

"I hate flying," Celso went on. "Ask my brother: Why would someone who hates flying take a job like mine? Ask him how much he likes flying me places."

"Cala boca, cara," his brother replied genially. Shut your mouth, Celso. He did not.

After a two-hour flight, Jefferson met them at the remote landing strip and loaded their gear into his metal outboard, pushing off upriver without saying much to anyone. He was as guarded as Celso was talkative; a whippet-like, closed-faced man who looked about the same age as the others, which probably made him even younger. The seats were low and Todd felt cramped, especially as the sun rose higher and the heat unfolded like a blanket. It would be a long trip. They had to thread their way so deep in the forest they would pass even Jefferson's camp, the last house before some evil rapids which hardly anyone had ventured beyond. Ignacio said they would portage the rapids and continue past them for an hour or so, to the point where the land began to rise into a low range of mountains, a serra. Jefferson thought the tribe, the people, sometimes fished by a creek at the foot of the serra. It was here, he said, that the skirmish with prospectors might have taken place.

As Ignacio described the terrain, Todd began to think that if there was indeed an uncontacted tribe living above the rapids, a fight was not merely possible, but inevitable. A gold rush was sweeping the Amazon, and every serra held the promise of gold. Jefferson said there were already settlers in the lower reaches of the river. They'd gone there to farm, but some had ended up sluicing the waters, as well. No one had found anything so far, but that wouldn't keep a young adventurer from someday trying his luck upriver. What did you expect? The settlers fished and hunted, tapped rubber, sold moonshine, but the soil was so poor they could cultivate only manioc, and feuds.

Todd noticed that Jefferson kept to the far side of the river when passing some of their houses and turned up creeks to avoid others entirely.

"I hate these boats," Celso said. "So fucking loud. Everyone knows we're coming. Presuming anyone's out here, which is supposed to be the point."

Yet even Celso went quiet as they reached the lower eddies of the rapids, and Jefferson steered them through the turbulent water to make a clear patch of shore. He'd built his homestead here, just back in the bush behind the cleared beach. They could hear the rapids now above the growl of the boat, and when Jefferson cut the engine, the river seemed to roar. Todd wondered how Jefferson could stand the noise. He felt oppressed by the clamour, and stooped as he jumped from the boat. No one spoke. They merely followed Jefferson's lead in unloading, tying up, and shouldering their packs. He'd hidden a canoe near the house which they would use on the other side of the rapids.

It seemed a small matter at first to help carry the canoe upriver. Jefferson had cut a path along the shoreline and the footing was secure. But the soggy heat quickly turned draining, killing, and the bellow of water bore down on them. Before too long, the portage became a hellish, slippery scramble along a meagre green track, stifling and endless. The canoe, their packs, their chafing clothes, all felt useless. Their effort was useless. An uncontacted tribe? Attacking prospectors? If people here, hidden here, were likely to attack, Todd didn't think Jefferson would trot along so calmly. The whole enterprise began to seem bizarre. He felt as if he was trapped inside a nightmare, walking a huge industrial treadmill with hot green walls closing in on either side. He felt dizzy, and tottered as they finally reached the head of the rapids. Yet Jefferson simply trotted on, leading them to another small cut, a beach he'd cut into the river. Finally they could put the canoe down. But as they let go, Todd found himself stumbling again. The ground spun, and he fell to his knees in the river.

Jefferson knew the forest people. Todd finally understood as he continued his fall to duck his head in the cool water. Open-eyed, he blew out bubbles, then bucked back to shake the water from his hair, irrigating his chest with double-handed splashes of water. Jefferson knew these people, and had cut a trail to visit his friends. Shivering in the cool water, steaming under the hot sun, Todd was besieged by odd, splintered visions: of the forest people running barefoot down the path, light feet barely touching the leaf mould, taut bodies scarcely parting the air; of Jefferson running, Jefferson kneeling as Todd was kneeling, confessing not that he'd led some prospectors in, not that they'd stumbled on the people from the forest, that guns were drawn, bows strung, weapons fired — no, Jefferson had not confessed to fighting on the side of the prospectors, had he?

And had woven past the other settlers' encampments for reasons Todd had not begun to suspect before.

Was this, finally, the truth of the matter? Todd glanced at Ignacio, who was standing at the side of the river, carefully rolling his pant legs to the knee. He wished Ignacio had told him more of the story. He was subtle. He could have hinted at what he'd learned in the confessional. Celso, at least, could have given him more background.

But as he watched the priest dip his handkerchief in the river, Todd knew Ignacio was no more capable of bending the rules than he was of breaking them. And as for Celso, ever since take-off he'd peppered Todd with questions, trying to understand the nature of this foreigner, this one-time anthropologist uncited in all known literature who'd had the arrogance to intrude on his turf. Who did Todd think he was, coming here to impose his own vision of a new world on a country, a culture, that could live more happily without him? Another tall, white male. He wasn't about to confide in him.

What probably made it worse for Celso was that he'd felt insecure enough to welcome Todd's intrusion in the first place. And what made it worse for Todd was agreeing with Celso. He'd become suspicious of his own motives; as Ignacio had said, reflexively cynical.

Yet if cynicism was not wisdom, what was? As he stood up wearily, Todd wondered if it might start with the understanding that someone could be unfashionable and still be right. Surely he deserved some credit for trying to put things right.

Then he remembered a woman saying, "They don't just want to rule the world, they want you to feel sorry for them, too."

"We'll go find your friends now, shall we?" he asked Jefferson.

Jefferson shrugged. "Vamos ver." We'll see. Or did he mean, We're going to see? Despite his exhaustion, Todd felt a prickle of excitement as they guided the canoe into the river, and began to paddle north.

Their clothes dried quickly. It was late afternoon, but the sun still burned. They took shifts paddling, sharing the load. Yet the rhythm of the paddles gave Todd a peace he would not have predicted. He was going to meet the people of the forest, even though he didn't know what outsiders like himself could possibly offer them. What could Celso offer? This was an unauthorized expedition. It made more sense to simply ask what the people wanted, although there was a skewed irony involved in asking for something rather than being prepared to give.

The river curved and widened around them. In April, the rainy season was just past its peak, and throughout their trip the water had run deep. Yet here the river spread to twice, three times its normal width and for once it was running shallow. Boulders pocked the surface, blazing white where the sun struck them and dark, almost black, underwater. Water lilies grew near shore, flowering pink against the boulders and foaming, bronze-coloured water. It was a pretty spot, and it looked to Todd like a good place to fish. He turned to Jefferson, who nodded and headed for shore. The settler steered them easily between the boulders, making for a small white beach where he nosed the canoe onto the sand. As they stepped ashore, Todd saw no sign of human activity, although the recent rains would have washed away any mild disturbance. Jefferson walked toward a narrow creek at the far side of the beach.

"Up here could be a longhouse."

One of the communal palm-leaf dwellings built by forest tribes. Todd shivered with excitement as he shouldered his pack and followed Jefferson toward the creek. Igarapé, they called them. Jefferson waded into this one as if it were a path, walking up the knee-high water still wearing his sandals, and prodding the creekbed ahead of him with a stick. Poisonous snakes lived in these woods. Here there be dragons. Todd could see no obvious signs of human passage, although the creek was suspiciously cleared of vines to head height. Celso's height; he was the smallest, and waded along behind Jefferson, with Todd coming next and Ignacio bringing up the rear.

Walking against the current quickly tired the muscles of Todd's calves, but the cool water numbed them soon after, leaving him with the strange yet happy sensation of walking on stilts. It felt like being a kid again. He stooped to drink some water from his cupped palms, and it tasted of cool, budding leaves. The creek must run straight down from the serra. He pictured the unseen beauty of the green hills ahead of them, the unclassified plants, the orchids and vines twined through the forest. Somewhere near here legend had placed El Dorado, the Golden One of Spanish myth, a king who painted himself daily with a new coat of gold. Todd's El Dorado was more prosaic, a man of the forest who rubbed himself with salves made from local plants to cure diseases that defeated all the finest modern doctors. But he had no more idea how to mine knowledge without damaging the people here than the Spaniards did of safely mining gold.

Ahead of Todd, Jefferson raised his hands and gave a monkey's yakking cry. If it was a signal, there was no answer. Jefferson cupped his hands and tried again. A screaming piha shrieked back, but that wasn't what Jefferson wanted. He dropped his hands and led them forward more reluctantly, finally turning to part the greenery on a path kept invisible from the water. Were they unwelcome? Todd heaved himself out of the creek and onto dry land, tottering noisily into the bushes as he found he didn't have full control of his numbed legs. Jefferson swivelled to give him an angry look, holding Todd's eyes and starting to chatter like an animated monkey. Todd shrank back, not understanding at first that this was another signal, but seeing only that Jefferson's eyes were oddly disconnected from the chattering. They were too worried, too alert, too human for the animal sound. When there was still no reply, Jefferson's face closed up again, and he turned to go on.

It was a short but excruciating walk up a hill from the creek. Shooting pains brought feeling back into Todd's cold legs, and it was all he could do to keep from hissing in agony. Then Jefferson was suddenly gone, stepping sideways from the path through vines that swayed closed behind him. Holding his breath, Celso followed, then Todd and Ignacio, emerging into a clearing with a large palm leaf dwelling at one side. A longhouse. The itch in Todd's legs was now indistinguishable from excitement. He'd never seen a tropical longhouse before, although knew what it was, what it had to be. He also knew it was empty. The clearing around them was as deserted as a Yukon ghost town. Yet those had been deserted once gold fever passed, not when it had just begun.

Jefferson turned circles in the middle of the clearing, looking for signs of people who might be hiding, and letting himself be seen. After a few moments, he gave up and walked off into the forest, his eyes on the ground. Todd wondered whether he was looking for a message or for a disturbance that might signal their direction. There did not seem to have been a fight here, although it was possible Jefferson was also looking for graves. Ignacio and Celso with him, but Todd decided he would be better employed searching the longhouse, and headed for the far side of the clearing.

He found a rectangular structure smelling of smoke and game which would have housed all the families of the tribe around their separate hearths. Their fires were unvented; the smoke discouraged insects. Nor was there a door, although Todd knew he had only to part the palm fronds to find himself inside. He was granted a certain power by his diligent reading. Yet going inside the longhouse was like looking up from a book's bright pages on a sunny day. It took a while for his eyes to adjust to the gloom, though when they did, he could see how quickly the people had left. Fled? Bits and pieces of daily life lay scattered on the ground. A cassava, some palm fibre. He stooped to pick up a basket lying on its side, forgotten or dropped near an extinguished fire. The basket had a head strap which he slung over his shoulder as he moved, still half stooping, to feel the ashes of the fire.

Celso came in and stood quietly for a moment, letting his eyes adjust.

"The fire's cold," Todd told him. "They didn't leave here today."

He stood up painfully. His back was stiff from paddling.

"I don't smell any blood," he added, then wondered why he'd said that, and whether he could. Maybe he could. He meant he didn't smell anything worse than blood. Walking around the longhouse, he found an iron pot (uncontacted?) also on its side, a couple more baskets, wood shavings, detritus. They hadn't left much food. No weapons. Todd prodded the pot and other baskets with his toe, but didn't otherwise touch them, and was standing quietly in one corner when Ignacio came into the longhouse.

"Nothing," Ignacio told them.

Both the priest and Celso seemed to be in shock. Nodding at them, Todd went back outside, half forgetting he was carrying the first basket on his shoulder.

He hadn't forgotten. When his eyes had readjusted to the light, he examined the basket's fine, regular weaving. He didn't recognize the plant fibre, but it had dried to a strong brown colour and was painted with simple black designs. There were six vertical rows of circles spaced unevenly around the basket, each circle the size of a joined thumb and forefinger and pecked at the centre with a single dot. One circle was empty; maybe forgotten, maybe not. In between the lines of circles, dots had been dabbed in vertical lines of three, five or seven. At the bottom of the basket, a bigger circle had been drawn on fibres woven flat enough for the basket to sit upright on the ground.

Setting it down, Todd wished he could show Holly the design. Impossible, of course. The basket belonged to someone else, and he wasn't a thief. He wasn't even sure he could sketch the design in case he was stealing a pattern of religious significance. He suspected there was no particular significance; part of the basket's charm lay in its absent-minded execution. But now that native people had begun objecting to white men appropriating their ideas, Todd felt bound to respect their wishes. Not that being white had anything to do with it. He was a man who wanted something to take home to his wife, and the propitiation of wives probably transcended all racial and cultural boundaries.

Celso had joined Todd in looking down at the basket as Jefferson slowly walked over.

"Did you marry here, Jefferson?" Todd asked him.

Jefferson crouched down and touched the basket with one forefinger.

"If you brought your wife an iron pot, she had to leave it. It was too heavy for her to carry, especially if she had to carry a child. Do you have children here, my friend?"

Jefferson traced the circles on the basket with his forefinger. Then he stood up, and as Todd reached for his shoulder, Jefferson howled.
14

Todd finally heard the story on the way back. Everything had started when the prospectors arrived above the rapids one afternoon as Jefferson was visiting his family. Yes, there was a wife; yes, a baby daughter. As news travelled upriver that there were intruders, Jefferson joined the men of the forest tribe in hiding down at the mouth of the creek. As the intruders drew closer, he recognized the voices of two of his neighbours. They must have been guides, since the rest of the voices he heard belonged to strangers.

On signal, the forest people rose and fired warning arrows across the bows of the intruders' boats. From the river came shouts, cries of confusion. Jefferson trained his gun on the boats, ready to shoot back-up, but the outsiders fired only a few panicky answering shots before turning their boats and racing downstream. Word came back that they fled down the portage trail like a company of frightened forest rats. The men acted out the story of their successful hunt to their wives. But then one of Jefferson's friends wandered back to the longhouse with his scalp bleeding from the graze of a stray bullet. The pajé had to work quickly, gathering herbs and crushing them for a poultice to stop the bleeding. Jefferson didn't know which herbs the old man used; he would have used cobwebs himself. In any case, the people were impressed by the damage the intruders could do, and grew afraid of what would happen if they came back. It had been Jefferson's idea to seek protection from the Indian bureau. Maybe the people hadn't really wanted this and decided to leave. On the other hand, maybe not.

By the time Jefferson finished his story, they were back at his homestead, hanging their hammocks for the night. The next morning, Jefferson insisted on leaving for the landing strip as soon as it was light, dropping Todd and Ignacio there so he could start to search for his family. Celso's brother flew in that afternoon and took them back to town, Todd to meet the academics he had abandoned two days earlier. Sweating in the local bar, feeling hemmed in, chafed by the academics' vocal unhappiness at his disappearance, Todd doubted he would ever see Jefferson again, and fell into an odd mood of irritated mourning.

It was then that Doutor Eduardo had arrived in the bar, causing a stir, a ripple of respectful nods. There must have been a couple of hundred drinkers there that night, and they all recognized Doutor Eduardo. Todd knew him too, from the files. He controlled the state, ran the governor, probably owned the bar. It was the biggest place in town, even bigger than the nearby Bank of Brazil, and more central to the town's business. An immense field of banged-together tables took up most of its concrete floor. The academics had pushed three tables together, and Doutor Eduardo sat down behind them. He didn't have to order his beer. The bartender brought a sweating draft as the old man looked the academics over. Most were tall, drunk, well-fed men whose rumps overflowed the seats of their chairs. Todd grew conscious that a nearby curtain stirred from their windy gestures as they argued out their points with angry, circular illogic; one of them taking up where the other had not, in fact, left off.

They had not been welcome even before the doutor had arrived. This Amazon gold-rush town welcomed foreigners with useful skills, geologists and engineers. But these were environmental sympathizers — big, soft men and plaintive women with a sentimental attachment to grass and frogs. Keeping an eye on Doutor Eduardo, Todd decided to steer the discussion away from local concerns. It was growing far too clear that despite his differences with the academics, he'd provided them with large amounts of suggestive data.

"Our guide," one academic said. "Your attention, please. Our erstwhile guide has something to say."

"About where he's been. Where the fuck he's been."

"About Denby's paper on global warming," Todd said. "Can someone tell me how the hell he got that published?"

He had a biologist ready to bite. An avid mouth opening. But the economist, who was very drunk, leaned on Todd's shoulder.

"I still say we had a right to know why our alleged guide abandoned us."

"To my very qualified assistant. As I said before, it was personal business." Todd cursed his miscalculation. Until he spoke, they'd forgotten all about him. "But Denby's reputation — "

"This is what I don't understand," the economist said. "Personal business up here?"

"Denby's reputation for — "

"We have ten precious, ten precious fucking days up here. And you wasted two."

"Of my own. My assistant tells me your program went off very well."

"Fucking hell."

The academics started bobbing and crowing at him like roosters. Over their heads, Todd caught Doutor Eduardo's eye. The doutor stared straight back, and the square man sitting across from him turned around in his chair. Seu José, Todd figured, remembering the files. As the academics renewed their grievances, Todd realized a group of sleeker men had spaced themselves around the room's perimeter. Until then, he'd believed the forest people had been harassed by simple prospectors. Now he understood that the threat was far more sophisticated and dangerous. The doutor's presence was a warning, although he couldn't decode it in all the racket.

"We've got ten fucking days and we fucking want to make the most of them."

"Excuse me."

Todd got up and went to the bar, hoping Doutor Eduardo would join him. But when he looked in the bar mirror, the doutor was gone, Seu José was gone, and the last of the sleek assistants was disappearing out the door.

"Shit!" Todd turned around to stare at the last retreating back, leaning his elbows behind him on the bar as a miner came up to order a whiskey.

"The mistress will help you," the miner murmured.

"Help me what?"

But even the miner was gone.

Almost three months passed before Todd found Ignacio on the dock, preparing for the second trip upriver. Holly and the boys were on their way back to Rio. And Powell was alive, Ignacio assured him.

"Winged," the priest said dryly, packing supplies into his outboard.

"Thanks, my friend. I'll have to phone home and leave a message." Todd sat back on his haunches, feeling relieved. Then he saw a thin whippet of a man slip onto the dock. "My God, Ignacio, that's not Jefferson?"

"Tudo bem?" asked the settler, passing nearby. Todd surprised him with a hearty embrace, making Jefferson laugh soundlessly.

Without stopping work, Ignacio told Todd that the settler had reappeared at his church about three weeks earlier. He'd staggered in, ill with fever, but the nuns had nursed him, getting him back on his feet surprisingly quickly. Ignacio suspected an incentive. Jefferson hadn't found the tribe, but he'd heard rumours which made him keen to resume his search. He intended to go alone, although he was still weak enough that Ignacio had insisted on accompanying him as far as the longhouse.

"But I'd be glad of company," Ignacio told Todd. "Especially on the way back to town."

Celso couldn't go with him, having recently left on other business.

"You can't wait till Celso gets back?" Todd asked.

Ignacio murmured something dismissive. It was a vague morning, hazy and unsettled, the kind that would eventually cool their labours with rain. Todd was about to let Ignacio's nebulous answer drift off into the clouds when he remembered how often he'd done that on the first trip.

"You don't want to?" he insisted.

Ignacio sat back on his heels, looking troubled.

"This has been hard on Celso," he replied. "First he made the great discovery of an uncontacted tribe, then he realized that with all the unfortunate corruption in the local office, he didn't know who to trust with his information. Soon he even began to doubt what he'd found. Perhaps these were merely the people he read about in the files, the tribe living on the reserve north of the mountains. They're a nomadic group. It seemed possible they had simply wandered further south."

Todd glanced at Jefferson.

"He says not," Ignacio went on. "He says they're two quite separate tribes, although they might have met."

"They might have, might they?"

Ignacio tossed a coiled rope into Jefferson's outboard. They were taking two boats as far as Jefferson's camp. It was a poor man's convoy, loaded with dried food and gasoline. Todd saw an axe, a package of cloth. The humble stock of an itinerant trader. Of a guilty husband, coming home late.

"What are we getting towards, Ignacio?" Todd asked. "I can't play Sherlock Holmes any more, I'm too tired. Can't you just try and tell me the story?"

Ignacio smiled faintly, and looked apologetic. "The narrative impulse is not mine, I'm afraid. But it's true he came into the hospital when Jefferson was ill. 'Tell me what they call themselves, give me some of their language.' He wanted to ease his doubts, you see. But these are very precious things, very carefully guarded. When Jefferson didn't answer, Celso shook my poor friend. The sister saw this. She was even forced to stop it."

Ignacio coloured in embarrassment, and got up to place another gas can gently on board his boat.

"You're leaving now because he's away."

When Ignacio didn't answer, Todd added, "You're hanging him out to dry, Ignacio."

"We'll deal with Celso later."

"And one of the few things I know for sure is that it's better to deal with a problem right at the start. Do it properly; it's hell to correct it later. Though maybe we're already too late on this one."

"By several centuries, I believe." 
15

When Todd heard the rapids for the second time, they were louder, fiercer. In June, the rainy season was just ending, and the river ran high. He wondered if they'd have to put in to shore further below Jefferson's camp, and glanced toward the settler in the boat ahead.

As he did, Todd saw Jefferson tense, straining to see something upriver. Then the settler threw open his throttle and raced away. Ignacio had to sit back and let the wake overtake them. They rode up and down, maddeningly up once more and down before Ignacio could gun his motor to follow. Even then, they were well into the eddies below the rapids before Todd finally made out what Jefferson had seen, and closed his eyes in horror.

Someone had widened the tiny beach below Jefferson's house into an ugly, muddy cut in the forest. Someone had used it; was using it. As Jefferson rode hard into shore, Todd began to see pockmarks in the mud. Footprints? Worse: the tracks of earth-moving equipment leading up the low bank. What he didn't see was Jefferson's house. The small house had stood just inside the sheltering forest, but it was no longer there. Instead, Todd glimpsed bright industrial yellow through the gently-moving leaves. Landing, scrambling, following the tracks, they found a bulldozer parked where the path widened on the site of Jefferson's vanished house. It was small enough to have been brought on a barge upriver.

Big enough to have levelled the landing strip Todd saw through the trees.

Jefferson sat down on his haunches beside the machine and pulled his cap down over his face. While Ignacio lingered beside him, Todd walked up to the rude, bulldozed strip. With the rapids so close, it sounded like a busy airport, although there was only one plane parked at the far end of the clearing. Tents were pitched near it. Todd could hear scattered high notes from a tinny tape deck playing there.

"Can I help you?"

The small figure at the far end of the landing strip called to Todd in American-accented English. He sounded brisk, businesslike. New here.

"I doubt you could, actually," Todd called back.

They met at the centre of the runway. The latest intruder was a tall, muscular, prematurely-balding fellow in his thirties who kept his meaty arms crossed suspiciously. Todd wondered why no one his own age ever seemed to make it to the Amazon.

"Todd Austen," he said. "Rainforest Coalition." The man stepped back and his expression turned ironic, but he shook Todd's hand.

"I didn't know we had any of you guys up here. Rob Mankiewicz. Rio Anna Mines."

"So we're neither of us traffickers," Todd said, and Mankiewicz laughed, caught out. "Geologist?" Todd asked.

"That'll be about right." He looked over Todd's shoulder. Ignacio and Jefferson must have walked onto the airstrip, but Todd was keeping an eye on the Brazilians behind Mankiewicz, who did not look friendly.

"Father Ignacio Esquilache Cruz," Todd said, as the priest arrived. "And this is our guide, Jefferson."

"Father," the geologist said respectfully. So he was a good Catholic boy, happy to shake hands with Ignacio. Jefferson hung back, looking shell-shocked, but the geologist wasn't paying any attention to Jefferson.

"Haven't happened to stumble on the remains of a house around here?" Todd asked, and Mankiewicz smiled uncertainly. "Our guide had a house up here. Right about where that impressive piece of earth-moving equipment is squatting at the moment."

The geologist rubbed his jaw. "He was squatting?"

"Sorry?"

"Your guide was squatting here, was he? A squatter. On company land. Company has clear legal title to this land, and exclusive mining rights to the hills up there."

He gave Todd a shrewd look.

"The issue of legal titles is a complicated one here," Ignacio said. "I'm afraid big companies can obtain concessions from the government over land that settlers quite legitimately own. It's not always clear who is the squatter."

"Well, all I can say, Father, is that I've seen some pretty official looking maps and documents pertaining to this area, and the ownership is with Rio Anna. If your guide has his own claim, I would take it up with the company. I can't speak for them, but I would imagine that if he's got some papers, it might be in their interest to find some compensation." Glancing at Jefferson, he added, "Drop in the bucket, frankly. When I flew in two days ago, there wasn't any house."

"But you must understand why we're concerned," Ignacio told him.

"If he has his papers, Father, and you're going to bat for him, he might actually end up better off than he was before. In all sincerity, this is a class outfit. I've been impressed."

Turning to Todd, he added, "Before you set off any big international protest, you might want to consider whether you'd prefer having one big outfit up here that's going to adhere to environmental controls. Yes they are, I'm under guidelines — which I agree with, by the way. What's your alternative? You want to end up with hundreds of little independent operators? You know better than I do they're just going to pump mercury into the river. Government can't regulate the garimpeiros. Hasn't managed so far, anyway."

"So it's gold you've found, or nickel?" Todd asked.

"I'm not saying we've found anything. Like I said, we just set up base camp here a couple of days ago. But up in a chopper, few months back, I saw some formations that could mean a lot of no comment. And you can quote me on that."

"You wouldn't happen to have a stock option with Rio Anna Mines, would you?" Todd asked.

"Class outfit," Mankiewicz repeated.

Studying him, Todd asked, "So you were on the expedition that was fired at in April?"

Mankiewicz looked so startled that Todd was convinced he knew nothing about the skirmish. Yet he was also convinced that the April intruders had not been freelance prospectors, but a party from Rio Anna, which was one of Doutor Eduardo's holdings. Todd thought of the old man's confident assertion at his camp that the intruders weren't garimpeiros. Apparently he knew what he was talking about. It was even possible that among those fired on were some Indian agents: turned agents prepared to grant permission for exploration to proceed. It struck Todd now that the doutor was too clever to tell outright lies. What, therefore, to make of his ambiguous offer to "help" the uncontacted tribe? Todd pictured Holly hugging the children. "I just love you to death," she would say. He'd always hated that expression.

"No sense standing around here baking," Mankiewicz said. He turned to walk back toward the tents, clenching and unclenching his fists.

"In April," Todd said, walking beside him, "we had reports of a number of boatloads of men coming through here. They were about an hour past the rapids when arrows were fired across their bows."

"Arrows?"

"There seem to be people here who regard this as their territory."

"Oh, look. I was specifically told there's a reserve northeast of the mountains, but as long as I keep to the south, I'm okay." He stopped outside the tents.

"Apparently not," Todd answered.

"Am I going to believe this?" Mankiewicz said, rubbing his forehead. "Where's it coming from?"

"I mentioned Jefferson had a camp here."

"Shit," the geologist said. "I thought we had it all worked out. There's even a guy with the go-ahead from the Indian bureau. Where's that guy?"

Todd closed his eyes briefly, then opened them to find it was indeed Celso's brother's plane parked at the end of the runway. It took him a moment longer to locate Celso, who was ranging behind the crowd of watching Brazilians, looking over their shoulders, weaving, ducking, dancing with nerves. Everything Todd had seen during their first trip upriver convinced him that Celso hadn't been present during the skirmish, but it looked as if he might have been turned since then by an agent who had. Jefferson was muttering something like this to himself, and Todd felt a moment's unease before the settler veered off the airstrip to hunker on his haunches underneath the trees. Turning to Ignacio, he found the priest watching with interest the progress of a column of ants that would soon reach his feet.

"We're not talking poisoned arrows here?" Mankiewicz asked.

"Oh yes," Ignacio said gently.

"Shit. Excuse me, Father. But I'm guessing these aren't some of your converts."

"Unfortunately not."

"Where's that guy?" Striding forward, scattering the ants, Mankiewicz waded into his watching crew and found Celso, weaving, cringing and smiling at the rear of the crowd. "What the hell is this?" he asked. "I thought these tribes were north of the mountains."

An interpreter said in Portuguese, "He thought the Indians were out of the way."

"The bureau has determined there are no uncontacted tribes in this area," Celso replied

"And the bureau is rather conveniently wrong," Todd told him in Portuguese.

"What did he just say?" Mankiewicz asked the interpreter.

"I don't know why you're so certain," Celso told Todd. "I'm not."

"You're splitting hairs." Todd turned to the geologist and said in English, "Talk to Doutor Eduardo about the skirmish here, with my compliments."

"What doctor?"

"This is very confusing for you, I'm afraid," Ignacio said.

Celso met Todd's eye for the first time and told him, "You should leave this to Brazilians."

"Tell that to your friend here," Todd replied.

"No one's asking the geologist to make any decisions. He's collecting rocks."

"Leave it to Brazilians," the crew murmured.

"What's going on here?" Mankiewicz asked.

"A disagreement," the interpreter answered helpfully.

"Look," Todd told the geologist. "After the incident, we came up here to investigate. We didn't find the people, but we found an abandoned longhouse, one of their communal houses. Even Doutor Eduardo — who owns the controlling interest in your Rio Anna Mines, by the way — Doutor Eduardo himself admits that these are nomadic people. It doesn't matter whether we met up with them. An incident combined with a longhouse proves that they consider this to be part of their territory. The Indian bureau has been persuaded to give you your permit on a technicality: the people can go to a reserve northeast of the mountains. But that doesn't mean they want to stay there, much less that they plan to stay there. You're not safe from an ambush, I'm afraid, and you're even less safe if you fire back. Because I'm telling you, if I hear a word about any of these people getting hurt, I am coming in here with an international campaign that's going to carbonize your ass. Is that sufficiently clear?"

Mankiewicz sat down on a folding chair. "I bail out of that Panama business and this is what I get."

Breaking a silence, Ignacio asked, "Do you speak Spanish?"

"Mas o menos," the geologist replied, in a heavy accent.

"Mas o menos," the translator repeated in Portuguese. The phrase was the same in both languages, but the pronunciation was different enough that Mankiewicz didn't understand. He appeared to have no ear for languages, but Ignacio smiled at him hopefully and began to speak in elegant Castillian.

"A moment without complications doesn't exist. Nor a decision without adverse consequences." He switched back to English to add, "Yours is such a hopeful language, I sometimes feel it difficult to express myself. It's curious, for instance, that you have no adequate translation for the French 'l'etranger.' I find that the title of the book by Camus is sometimes left untranslated, or translated in different ways. The publishers can't agree: the outsider, the stranger. Neither of which quite captures the degree of dislocation, perhaps because you prefer not to acknowledge that there are places where you might not belong."

The interpreter was listening carefully, but Mankiewicz only shook his head. "I'm a scientist, Father. This leaves me behind. I'm afraid I'm going to need some instructions." He rubbed his face unhappily with both hands. "What a mess," he said.

They headed back downriver from the base camp not much more than an hour after they'd arrived. Celso stood just inside the forest to watch them leave. The agent probably knew what Jefferson was planning, but he didn't try to stop it. He had to realize there was nothing left for him to say and no room in which to manoeuvre. Poor Celso. It would appear that the green apple had been harvested. Then boxed.

Jefferson didn't travel much beyond the first bend in the river before putting back to shore. He repacked his kit and asked for a blessing from Ignacio, then slipped off into the forest. Todd took over his outboard, and their diminished convoy headed downstream until they reached the camp of settlers Jefferson trusted. The man agreed to keep the boat until Jefferson got back, while his wife insisted on feeding Ignacio and Todd large portions of their scarce dinner, fish soup with farinha, dried manioc root. Afterwards, they wouldn't hear of a priest sleeping outdoors, and vacated their rough board house in the encroaching dark, tying their hammocks to the nearby trees. Left inside the smoky house, hanging his hammock in the failing light, Todd paused to scratch himself, deciding he would have preferred the night's flying insects to the lice and fleas inside. But there was little choice. As the night grew cool, the settlers lit a fire in the clearing and quickly fell asleep.

Todd was exhausted, but knew it would be hours before he could sleep himself. Swinging into his hammock, he could feel the day's events chitter in his head. And pity, undercutting his rage. The poor bugger of a misplaced geologist. Poor Celso, poor Jefferson. He felt especially sorry for his itchy, overburdened self.

But Todd couldn't work up any fellow feeling for Doutor Eduardo. Maybe the old man had cried once at the margin of a river that he was piteously misunderstood, but Todd had his doubts. He doubted the doutor cared what anyone thought, as long as they couldn't prove it in a court of law. He was sure Mankiewicz was right. The papers for Rio Anna Mines were perfectly in order. Soon Doutor Eduardo would order the construction of a model mine that would have the international business press admiring his standardized extraction of more gold or copper or nickel or iron than the world should properly need, forgetting about the unknown species that were lost each day, the illegal mines that would soon flourish in its shadow, and the inconvenient inhabitants of the land whom Todd was afraid were gone now forever. The forest people. Maybe Jefferson.

How had the old man arranged the tribe's disappearance? Shifting in his hammock, Todd was certain the doutor was behind it. Or more accurately, above it, like a god. A modern god. Post-modern? Certainly post-Darwin: the instigator, the creator who set all things in motion and then stepped back. Not the ancient, meddling Jehovah with his plagues and tests and groaning judgments, dictating moral strictures from on high. No, there was no question of morality in this case, was there?

"Ignacio?" he asked. "You still awake?"

"Unfortunately. The fleas."

Todd shifted again to face in Ignacio's direction. "Do you think there's any chance the people might really have gone to the reserve?"

"If they did, Jefferson will find out," Ignacio replied. "He says he knows the back way in. The front door being so firmly closed."

It was one of the few policies of the Indian bureau Todd agreed with: the practice of refusing outsiders access to designated reserves in an effort to protect unacculturated tribes. He felt the full irony of having just helped Jefferson circumvent it, although judging from Ignacio's tone, this didn't bother the priest nearly as much as the fleas. He seemed prepared to take the opposite position, and argue that the people should be left free to make their own choices. It was a genial-sounding approach, although Todd had never been able to understand how newly-contacted tribes were supposed to arrive at a sophisticated understanding of all the available choices.

"What if the bureau opened up the reserves, Ignacio?" he asked. "And the first ones in were Protestant evangelicals. Holy hallelujah, let us cover their nakedness — presumably in second-hand clothes. Conversion as second-hand clothes. I'm starting to mix my metaphors. But it can't be something you support."

"Mixing metaphors? Conversion is something less flippant, I'm afraid. Being a matter of immortal souls.''

Todd felt he was grasping Ignacio's point so slowly, he might as well have been reaching through water.

"I'm sorry if I embarrass you," Ignacio said. "Faith seems to have become as distasteful a subject as the body once was, to elevated discourse."

"You weren't going to try and convert these people?" Todd asked. He sank back in his hammock, feeling mortified. He'd assumed the priest had been helping Jefferson for the sake of justice, and to ease the man's mind. It had simply never occurred to him that Ignacio might cherish an antique wish to evangelize among the heathen.

"Jefferson knows he must consecrate this marriage," Ignacio said. "And then there is the question of baptism for his daughter. Jefferson is devout; he wishes this."

"Baptizing one of these children, Ignacio?"

"Oh, yes," he said.

Todd closed his eyes in pain. "And I was a party to this," he said.

"It will eventually count in your favour, I'm sure."

"Now you're being flippant, Ignacio. Please, I'm actually feeling terrible." He levered himself up again. "You can't really want to go in and try to take away these peoples' indigenous beliefs? If there is a God, surely it doesn't matter what road you use to reach him. What religion, what metaphors."

"But I'm a priest, you know," Ignacio said. "Every week, I conduct a mass in which I take small wafers and some very bad wine and they become the sacred body and the blood of Christ. This is not a metaphor, my friend, but a miracle. It may have become bad odour to talk about faith these days. But allow me to say that I live at a place where the metaphor becomes reality."

Todd pursed his lips unhappily. "So you're a metaphor and I'm a cliché," he said. "Both of us thrashing around in a legendary wilderness. Oh, this makes me feel just fine."

"I'm glad of that, at least," Ignacio said, settling back into his blankets.

Now Todd knew he wouldn't sleep at all. Unhappy, uncertain and increasingly cold, he shifted restlessly from side to side. Insects were running relays across his belly. Soon he needed to urinate. He might try to play the intellectual, but he was really just a flea bite weighed down by a bladder. He scarcely had enough energy left to get himself outside. Only with the greatest effort could he drop his feet out of the hammock and reel across the pitch-black room, groping for his pack, his flashlight, and finally the door.

Outside, unzipping, Todd felt only contempt for himself. He kept presuming such neat divisions in life, right lined up against wrong, when really there was neither unmixed good nor unchanging bad. Far from being a fighter for the good and true, he was simply one of the checks and balances humankind threw out to ensure its own continuation. He was a small part of a great unconscious dialectic; an amoral, perhaps genetic attempt to ensure the preservation of the species. There was something defensible in that, or at least inevitable. Yet as he zipped himself up again, Todd suspected that even if this were true, if there were this role, he was far from the best person to fill it. Too many people saw him as a symbol of something they didn't like, which gave them an excuse to stop listening to what he said. Padding inside, he wondered if he should give up and go home. Right home, to his own house, and spend his time taking care of the children. There was something symbolically pleasing in that, a man renouncing his privileged position to take on the world's most undervalued task. And Holly would certainly like it.

"Ignacio," he asked, grasping his hammock.

"Yes, my friend."

"Do you ever have doubts?"

"No."

But he's a fanatic, Todd thought. He shone his torch on the priest.

"No doubts at all?"

"I'm not that big," Ignacio replied.

"I'm sorry, Ignacio, but is that a case of false humility?"

"Very deserved humility."

Todd lot the torch drop. "So I fail even at that," he said.
16

Holly sounded far away. It wasn't just the long-distance line, but the nervous way she answered the phone. It had been a week since Todd left her on the airplane, and he'd hoped to find her sounding more like herself. It was just as well she couldn't see into his booth at the telephone company, where the fluorescent tube cast too harsh a light on everything he'd been through since.

Nothing had gone smoothly. A few hours out from the camp of Jefferson's friend, on a river as wide as a small, muddy lake, their motor started coughing, threatening to stall. Ignacio tried to gear down, but the motor cut out instead, and when Todd came back, reaching to open the casing, he burned his hand on the overheated metal. Ignacio didn't understand; he'd just had the motor reconditioned. Ducking his hand in the river, Todd felt paranoid enough to wonder whether this might have been the problem, and shivered to feel a surge of cold wind on his back. Looking north, he saw a storm running toward them, and nudged Ignacio. They both gaped at the boiling clouds, then Ignacio grabbed a paddle to make for shore, while Todd wrapped his hand in a strip of torn shirt and quickly joined him.

The wind was already rising, and as the first raindrops fell, there was a sickening crack of fractured metal inside the hot casing. By the time they reached a small, sandy beach, the forest had darkened under the weird yellow-brown light of an electrical storm. Trees tossed, and licks of water rose in crests, corrugating the river. They were relieved to be on dry land, but also realized they were stranded there. They needed a mechanic, or at least a settler with enough baling wire to get the motor running, and no one would be coming out on an open river like this until the weather calmed.

Todd had no intention of telling Holly they'd been stranded there for three days. A succession of storms blew through, and the region's few settlers stayed close to home, knowing the unpredictable winds were likely to capsize anyone foolish enough to venture far. Todd lost his taste of bunking down in open air, and would gladly have traded the clouds of stinging, biting piumes for the comparatively benign attentions of fleas. But their food lasted, and the settler who finally saw their waving shirts was friendly, towing them all the way to town. He'd been on his way there; some things turned out better than expected.

Todd told her about Powell.

"I know," Holly said. "I saw him get off a plane with Doutor Eduardo and his sidekick. What's his name? Seu José?"

Todd blinked. Another piece of a maddeningly intricate puzzle. He seemed to see it lying in his blistered palm, its edges nicked like the course of a river, yet also worn smooth. The doutor was so frighteningly smooth.

"You might have phoned, Todd," Holly said. "You promised you'd be gone just a couple of days. Instead you disappear for a week, and I haven't got a clue where you are. Not a clue. Meanwhile, I'm fielding all these phone calls. They've phoned half a dozen times from head office wanting to know what on earth you're up to."

Her voice was so urban, so jittery. Todd felt as if he'd been back in the bush for a long time. "What did you end up telling them?" he asked.

"I covered up. Dissimulation, isn't that a good word? Covering up the process of covering up."

"Are you all right, love?"

"The boys seem to be all right, which is the main thing. They fight a little more than usual, and sometimes I catch them staring into space, but usually they're fine. I was planning to keep them home from school all week, but after a couple of days, they wanted to go back. I've scarcely left them for a moment otherwise, aside from Tânia's party last night."

Her voice sounded strangled. She had a dry cough.

"Meanwhile, you're supposed to have been in Porto Velho yesterday to meet the agronomist. Honestly, Todd, you just can't disappear like that. Too many people are depending on you." Was she coughing, laughing or crying? "And none of it's going very well, is it? Except my work, I have to say. I had brainwave last night. About Darwin? Living in Botafogo with an 11-year-old girl. I see that somewhat differently at the moment, as you might imagine."

Todd passed his hand over his face, feeling shaken. Holly sounded as if she was having some sort of breakdown. He should have taken them home, got them settled, looked after them better. Todd realized that he'd miscalculated; that he'd made a number of miscalculations lately. She was right. He was slipping.

"I know what people say, of course," she went on. "It's easy to misinterpret history by screening it through modern ideas. On the other hand, what else can you do? How could you interpret history from a contemporary point of view without being a contemporary? In which case the history wouldn't be historic yet, would it? So you have to ask, is art supposed to merge the contemporary with the historic? Or to screen them out? Which I'll have to put to Tânia, by the way. We didn't have a chance to talk last night. At least, not about this."

"Holly, listen," Todd began.

"At her party, you know. And when I got home, I just had a shower and went straight to work. Of course, as soon as the boys woke up, I went downstairs. I was with them all morning. Although I have to confess, this afternoon I got Cida to take them to a play date. They're not here right now, I'm afraid. And it's supposed to be Cida's day off, but I told her she could have tomorrow off instead. I think it's fine to send them with her. They'll be fine."

"Holly, I'm worried. How long has it been since you've had any sleep?"

"So Powell's plane was heading to Manaus, was it?" she asked. "Which doesn't mean he can't come here later. I got his bird book, but Doutor Eduardo must know where we live. I mean, Tânia is Doutor Eduardo's niece, did you know that? Oh — she had a message. You're supposed to stay clear of him. Friendly advice. 'He dislikes giving up control.'"

"My God, Holly. I'm coming home." He had to speed up, readjust, prepare to deal with this. From what she said, it was all connected, anyway. "Listen. I'm going to be on the first plane out of here."

"But what about your agronomist, Todd? We had quite a pleasant chat. He really needs you in Porto Velho."

He put the earphone of the receiver to his forehead and drew in a long breath.

"Go to Porto Velho," Holly said. "You really want to."

Todd brought the receiver back down. "I don't want to, love. I want to be there with you."

For once she paused, seeming to consider what to say.

"But there's another thing, isn't there? Whether I want you here." Again Holly paused. "I'm afraid not, Todd. You pushed me past my limit, you really did. It's probably best if you stay away for a while. I don't want you here right now."

"No, Holly."

"I haven't known quite what to say when you finally called. But I just don't want you here. I'm completely fed up. And the boys — the sad fact is, they're so used to you being away, it seems normal to them. I half think if you came home right now, it would be counter-productive. Over-excite them. They're fine with you being gone. It's too bad, but it's true."

Todd squeezed his eyes shut, not knowing what to say.

"I've given you so many chances, Todd. I don't seem to have any more in me. Not right now."

"I'm sorry," he whispered.

"Oh, a sorry figure," she said, teasing him. He felt like rolling over and wagging his tail, wriggling at the faintest hint of warmth.

"I'll be on the next plane," he told her.

"Better not," she said. "If you just show up, I'm afraid you'll find the locks all changed. I was terrified Powell might have got his hands on a key. So they're changed, and I think you'd better respect that. Let's try to be dignified about this, please."

Todd pictured himself climbing the wall around their house. He'd never worried about dignity before. But he could also picture the look on Holly's face if he tried it. Todd had often asked himself whether imagination was necessary to the husband of a beautiful woman. Extraneous? A disadvantage?

It was hellish.

"Just the week?" he asked, licking his lips.

"Longer," she said.

"What's the matter, Holly?"

"I know you probably find this a shock," she said. "But maybe that's what we need. Shock therapy." She coughed or laughed or cried. "We won't call it a separation."

"Please don't, Holly. I don't want this. I don't want any part of it."

"I'm not asking," she replied.

Todd simply didn't know how to answer. He listened hopelessly as Holly said it was useless for them to keep covering the same ground; they'd done that far too often. They'd talk again when he'd thought about what she'd said. In the meantime, she was sorry, but she'd better go. Aside from anything else, she wanted to do a bit more work before the boys got home. If he would excuse her.

"Darwin," she said, hanging up.

This was ridiculous. Holding the receiver to his forehead, exhausted, his eyelids fallen weakly closed, Todd had trouble believing what had just happened. He'd been told not to come home, and found himself resenting a man who had been dead for more than a hundred years. Did Tânia have her doing a portrait of Darwin? Todd had an idea Tânia was mixed up in this somehow. He liked Tânia, yet he'd always suspected her of being a bad influence on Holly. She was too sophisticated, equivocal, even decadent. And now she was Doutor Eduardo's niece, as well? Todd wondered what was he supposed to make of that. What he was supposed to make of any of this? He no longer had any idea how other people managed their lives. How did they make up their minds, order their priorities, know how to act?

He'd been away from ordinary life for so long he no longer knew what it looked like. And once you'd lost sight of something, how did you find your way back?

Please God, say he wasn't going to lose his wife and children.

Someone rapped on the door to his booth. Looking up, Todd saw lipstick, mascara, a frown. The operator wanted him to leave his booth; another caller was waiting.

Todd opened the folding door and asked her to connect him with the agronomist in Porto Velho.

"A mess," he told the waiting caller, who shrugged companionably and retreated. Messes were common in the Amazon. Solutions, no.
Part Four
17

The January heat muffled Rio like fog, leaving the sky white and the air heavy with humidity. Walking was like swimming: take too deep a breath and you risked drowning. In the crowded favelas you could drown in neighbours, drown in noise. The heat muted the noise, but it never ended. The growl of traffic, howls of babies, shrieking anger and surprise — it all dripped like condensation from the humid air, wearing people down. You wore the heat there, and only escaped it in the suburbs, in the condominiums towering over the beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema and Leblon, where air conditioners dripped, flinging droplets of water like diamonds onto the sizzling sidewalks below. Here, you felt a lightness, a vacancy, a floating-above. Balconies and penthouse patios yawned empty. Curtains were closed, the buildings slept. Stray dogs panted in the paltry shade.

Holly was in her kitchen, moving slowly between the counter and the table. Her second southern summer was hotter than the first, but the heat had grown so gradually she'd adjusted by degrees, and wasn't even conscious of it any more. She walked barefoot across the tile floor wearing a loose dress that swung against her legs. The air felt like another layer of fabric; layers of gauzy fabric that brushed her like curtains she parted as she walked — a luminous feeling that made even the simplest chore seem like a piece of theatre. Padding across the smooth tiles, she took the cold plate of butter from the refrigerator and set it perfectly on the table. Performing, she thought. She was performing her duties.

She was also watching her maid, Cida, who was walking as if she were pregnant. That loose-hipped waddling, toes turned out. This was new. Was it too new to mention? Holly tried to see Cida's shape, but she wore her T-shirt tucked into the waistband of her shorts in back and billowing free in front. In any case, she'd put on weight in their house. Poor girl, she'd needed to; her last employers hadn't given her much to eat. Tânia had proposed Holly hire her away almost as soon as they'd met — Cida being the daughter of Tânia's housekeeper.

"She's good with children, and her mother taught her to cook," Tânia had said. "The only problem is that she's such a very pretty girl, most people won't hire her."

"While I was always accused of hiring girls because they were pretty," Holly said. "Decorative, for the gallery. But I'm tough, you know. Boyfriends stay outside office hours."

Tânia paused, then said, "Apparently your husband only wanders geographically."

So he did. Watching Cida pad around the kitchen, Holly couldn't recall Todd ever once treating the girl with anything other than distracted courtesy. Even these past six months, he'd shown no signs of noticing her — or any other woman, for that matter — although Holly had been conscious of giving him an excuse last June when she'd asked him to stay away. Not permission, but an excuse. And he couldn't have lacked for opportunities, living most of the time on the road.

But Todd was the opposite of other men. In opposition now, her opposition — although she also hoped they hadn't become opponents. Poor, faithful Todd. He was almost maddeningly faithful. When he came home to visit the boys, he couldn't seem to stop following her around, at least with his eyes, and while he managed to stifle his sighs, he so clearly stifled them that Holly was soon beside herself with exasperation. Or perhaps the word was pity. Lately, they'd had a couple of good long talks on the telephone, even though Holly wasn't sure Todd quite grasped what she was saying, or even what she was really trying to tell him. This had drifted on far longer than she'd intended, and she no longer had any idea how it would end.

Yet something was going to have to give, with Larkin due back soon for another visit. It was probably time to tell him their affair had to end, yet even the thought made Holly shudder. Jay Larkin. J. Larkin. John, Jack, Jackie as a boy. She'd heard of cultures where people believed a man lost power when his real name was revealed. If they were right, Jay was a man with many weak spots. Which was to say, he was more susceptible than most. Kinder, more even-tempered, a much more casual man than she was accustomed to. Although he was remarkably persistent about coming back.

Five weeks after Tânia's party, just as Holly was telling herself she'd forgotten all about him; as she was pottering, humming, hanging a canvas in the living room, Cida had answered the bell at the gate and led someone inside. Holly thought it was probably the boy from the butcher shop delivering their weekly order, and only turned at the last moment to see it was Jay, eyes bright, arms spread, coming to embrace her. Cida must have seen the heat in her face, although Holly was able to control herself and gave him only the most conventional kiss on each cheek.

She usually kept Jay away from the house after that, and had him phone before his subsequent trips to Rio. She didn't think Cida suspected anything, and Todd certainly didn't, although she knew she deserved contempt, recriminations, disgrace. There would be no easy way out of this. How could she get out of this? She had to — what?

Holly took a share of cutlery from Cida, helping set the table for the boys' bedtime snack. It was the wrong time to worry about herself. She had to think about the girl. If Cida were pregnant, she'd need help. Holly would have to get on the phone, line up a doctor, work a few angles.

That seemed to be Cida's plan.

The girl was exaggerating her waddle to make sure Holly noticed. A moment before, going for the bread, she'd walked swiftly across the room. Then she checked herself, slowed down, and waddled. She wanted Holly to notice, wanted her to bring it up, wanted to escape the risk of bringing it up herself and making awkward demands upon Madame. Poor girl. Is that what she was thinking?

Sighing, straightening, Holly asked, "Are you pregnant, Cida?"

The girl slumped against the fridge. "I need money for an abortion. My friend knows where."

Holly felt relieved. This might actually be quite simple.

"Well," she said, "let's talk about it. Have you seen a doctor yet? How far along are you, do you know?"

"Six months. Well, maybe a little more. Maybe seven."

"Seven months!"

Holly remembered Cida's sudden craze for exercise three or four months before. Once she'd even come near to fainting, having walked all the way up the hill on a hot day carrying two heavy bags of groceries. "There's no point to this," Holly had scolded, laying cool cloths on her face and wrists. "When it's this hot, you're only losing water."

Seven months. Holly sat down, and gestured toward another chair. But Cida remained standing, her arms crossed, and before Holly could press her, the boys rushed into the kitchen.

"We're hungry and the video's over," Evan said, planting himself in front of her.

"We're not quite ready," Holly replied, standing up again. "Can I get you guys to wait a little? Just another little bit downstairs."

"But we're hungry," Evan insisted, and she stroked his hair. Such thick wiry hair, threads between her fingers, copper-coloured and gleaming. Too often lately she'd had to put them off, leave them with Cida. She tried to schedule, tiring herself out by working at night — sometimes all night — but there were always errands to do during the day. After bringing the boys home from a couple of hours swimming, feeling pleasantly sleepy, still sensing their rubbery little bodies in her arms, she'd have to call, Cida, can you take them while I — go shopping, track down the carpenter, take the car into the shop? Stroking Evan's wiry hair, Holly wished she didn't have to put them off again.

"You can watch another video. Just a short one."

They raced back downstairs. When Holly looked back at Cida, she knew from the expression on the girl's face that she had been watching Holly stroke Evan's hair. Evan was Cida's favourite. Poor child, poor children.

"Seven months," Holly said, shaking her head. "Cida, when babies are born at seven months these days, they can sometimes keep them alive. One of my friend's children was born at seven months. You can't get an abortion now; it's too late. But adoption. If you want me to find out how to arrange an adoption, of course we can do that."

Looking after the boys, Cida answered, "No one else is going to bring up my kid."

"'Your kid,'" Holly said, feeling stung. "So maybe you don't really want an abortion?"

"I need one," Cida answered. "My mother's going to kill me."

"So you've told her."

"Of course not. She'd kill me."

Holly leaned against the door frame.

"Cida, what do you really want? If things could be perfect, how would they be?"

"Things aren't going to be perfect, and I'm never going to get what I want."

She uncrossed her arms and glared at Holly.

"That's why I want an abortion."

Holly felt fatuous, foreign, and far older than the girl. There was no use asking why she hadn't mentioned this before, or where the father was, or what she'd done with her salary for the past five months. Each question was too grim a reproach. Also irrelevant, when she both wanted the baby and didn't.

Cida started crying. "That stupid boy. He said it wasn't even his. He said it could have been anyone's. But I'm a good girl. I wouldn't say it was his if it wasn't."

Holly walked over and put her arms around the girl, who sobbed dryly against her shoulder.

"Where is he now?" Holly asked.

"Foi embora." Went home. Took off. Disappeared. "He was working on the condominiums up the hill."

The three mammoth towers under endless construction. They'd been working on them ever since Holly arrived, and were still nowhere near finished. They weren't even doing any work there at the moment. Every so often, the developers seemed to run out of money and the work shut down. How long had it been shut down this time? Two, three months. But six or seven months ago, the site had been a hive of workmen layering the concrete shells of apartments out from the central elevator shafts, each floor a deep cell open to the air. By day, the men clambered up and down the scaffolding. At night they sometimes threw parties, laying in some cachaça — white lightning — and inviting the neighbourhood maids. One night, not long after Tânia's party, Holly heard the deep bass thrum of their boom box and slipped out into her garden. Through the trees she could see the elongated shadows of dancers thrown by their lanterns onto the layers of ceilings above her. They weren't close. There was a wide buffer of forest between Holly and the party, but the bent light and long dancers seemed to strain toward her, speaking to something distorted in her until she started dancing alone in her garden, transformed into a shadow herself: elegant, languorous, disjointed; stretching elusively through the dark.

Cida wouldn't go to those parties at first. At the time Holly hired her, the future towers had been no more than slippery holes in the mountainside, and it must have seemed dire, hellish, to party there. She'd also been more timid, perhaps still cowed from her previous job, or still too closely tied to her careful upbringing. Cida had grown up in a house Tânia had bought her mother years before, in the north-zone neighbourhood she'd discovered when first helping Sister Celeste open her crêche. It was a stolid cinderblock house much like the one Erenilda and her husband had built, with a deep porch and a bright red hibiscus trained around the walled front yard.

Cida's mother lived at Tânia's six days a week while her own mother brought up Cida and the boys. Strictly, Holly gathered. Both of Cida's brothers were successful. One worked in an office, while the older had a business distributing newspapers. Only Cida had missed graduating from high school, and Holly suspected she was the family's cherished failure, its bruise. It hadn't seemed so, at first. The girl was eager to please. Yet a couple of months after saying she'd never go to those parties, Holly heard her steal in at dawn on a Sunday morning and sway off to bed. She looked fragile the next afternoon. Precarious; perhaps a little too eager to please? Holly wondered whether to make an issue of it. Caution her, forbid her to go back. Why? On what grounds?

Cida was nineteen. Her belly was hard against Holly's now, her dry sobs unending.

"It's all right," Holly soothed, although she still wasn't sure what to do. Over Cida's shoulder, she could see beads of water rolling down the cardboard carton of milk. The butter was melting, pooling on its plate. From downstairs came the manic sound of the boys' new video. If Holly wasn't mistaken, they'd taken advantage of the situation to put on a violent cartoon she'd banned. She rubbed Cida's shoulder, perhaps a bit less patiently.

"You're all right," she told the girl.

"I'm all right," Cida echoed, disengaging herself and going to stand by the counter. She took some tissue and daubed at her eyes.

"Everything's going to be all right," she said. "You can take me and the baby to Canada. I'll say I'm divorced."

Divorciada. She looked Holly directly in the eye as she said it and raised her chin, suddenly firm, and challenging her. What? Holly felt confused. Was the girl daring her to say that no one would believe she was divorced? They'd never believe she'd been married, much less divorced. Was that it? Or was she saying that Holly would probably be divorced soon, and would need her help in Canada? Was it that?

Or worse. That if Holly didn't promise to take her to Canada, she'd tell Todd about Jay. Then we'll see who's divorced.

Holly walked quickly to the table and snatched the butter and milk, putting them both in the refrigerator before taking them out and putting them back on the table. The boys had to eat.

"Cida, I can't take you to Canada. I know some people who wanted to bring their nanny back from Hong Kong, but there were so many regulations, it took them a year and a half to get her a visa. And this was a woman of forty without children. I don't think the government would let a young girl into the country alone with a child."

The girl shook her head impatiently. She'd turned confident, her lips ripe, her posture proud.

"Doutor Todd is an important person. He's on television all the time, and he's a personal friend of the governor of your state."

Evan. She'd got that from Evan. The longer Todd was away, the more Evan boasted about him, to an extent that sometimes troubled Holly. She didn't know what to do about it, although at the moment she preferred not to undermine the boy with Cida.

"You could talk to Doutor Todd about arranging a visa," the girl went on. "Or I could do it myself if it's too much trouble. Would you like me to talk to him myself?"

It was unmistakable now. Her voice rose high into the realms of insincerity. Holly pursed her lips, feeling — what? An odd sort of amused distaste that she didn't like about herself. It was too cruel, too superior. Yet didn't Cida deserve it? The girl was behaving badly. Yes, she was a poor child dealt a bad hand in life, but there were better ways to handle this. Blackmail was wrong; Holly shouldn't be the one to feel apologetic. She did that too often and look how it ended, with people rolling all over her. "Sir, we've secured the village."

Maybe not.

"Evan is very proud of his father," she said carefully. "But I'm afraid Doutor Todd really isn't that important."

It was true. Todd wasn't that important, and Holly felt liberated finally saying it. The girl could tell Todd about Jay if she wanted. Tell him everything she knew or suspected, whatever she cared to embroider, and Holly would survive. The marriage might not, of course. It might not anyway, but in the meantime Holly refused to be blackmailed. Holding Cida's eye, Holly told herself she'd had enough of trying to meet unjust demands and absurdly high expectations. She was sick of falling short, of falling back, of feeling second-rate. That was really what she'd been trying to tell Todd, wasn't it? She was worth far more than he'd been giving.

Holly drew herself up, feeling so confident now that poor Cida drooped. The girl's mouth twisted bitterly as she cupped her hands over her unprotected belly. Holly felt a stab of tenderness, wondering if it might really be possible to take her to Canada, after all.

"I'm going to think about what you said, Aparicida. And I want you to think about it a bit more, too. We'll talk again after we've slept on it. But now the boys really have to eat."

Holly went to get her sons, parting the resistant waves of heat with furious energy. She could handle this. She could handle all of it. Like making a painting. How good it was to finally feel in charge.
18

Night. Holly's studio. She'd been working mainly in acrylics lately, and mostly on one big canvas, although she'd learned lately that it went better if she kept too many other projects under way and felt pressed for time, turning to her canvas only when the work had built up inside her and refused to wait any longer. That way, the lines snaked boldly from her brush and the colours stayed stark, lucid, more blazingly tropical than if she paused to think. The day after Tânia's party, working in a delirium, Holly finally realized she'd always thought too much about her art. She could block in a painting quickly enough, but then she'd start to change her brushes obsessively, worry at her palette, and agonize so long over every daub at the canvas that she'd finally lose her vision of the image as a whole. No wonder she'd abandoned so much work, overwrought, frustrated, daunted by the enormity of what she was attempting, the absolute gall of creation.

No longer. She blazed away at her canvas, which stood in a brightly-lit corner of her studio, the off-centre focus to the large, air-conditioned attic room. This had originally been the house laundry, and two big sinks with built-in washboards dominated one wall. Above them was a clothesline with sheets of remade paper waving like banners, the colours subtly herbal: blue-grey, green-grey, a faint camomile yellow. The herbs she used for tinting the paper were pinned to a second line. The studio was rank with the oily, nose-prickling stench of the freshest herb, the erva-de-santa-maria. In English it was wormseed goosefoot — such an absurdly Anglo-Saxon sound, blunt, assertive; as rooty as quick repeated fucks. How ironic: the market women whispered that it would bring on a miscarriage if the lady wanted.

Cida.

Holly's arm dropped. She closed her eyes, but only saw Cida's bitter face, and opened them unhappily. After putting the boys to bed, Holly had come straight to the studio and disappeared into her work. Not that she was acting in bad faith; not at all. In telling Cida she'd think about her situation, Holly meant she was going to not think about it, let it seep underground, percolate there, and see what came out in her art. She'd been doing this more and more successfully lately, mucking around in her subconscious, playing around, fooling around, playing the fool. Which explained her relationship with Jay, she supposed. But it also meant she wasn't avoiding Cida's problems. She was doing the opposite, plumbing for solutions — although it was true Holly found vertiginous pleasure in digging this deep. She stood there loving her free-fall into the subterranean, even though it had always terrified her before. She hadn't been able to bear the idea of losing control, nor stand to picture what might come out if she plumbed too far. What was she really like? What did she really think of Todd/Jay/Cida? She hadn't wanted to know before, suspecting she'd find her feelings inconvenient, her true self common and her art superficial. If you try to do what you've always wanted, there's a chance you'll fail. And then?

Holly didn't care anymore. The scene with Cida this afternoon had shredded off the last of her hesitation. Wasn't it better to rage out in flames than shrivel up in the corner? She was determined now to seize life, and give back whatever was inside her. Let it all come out, everything she knew about transient, transitory, transmogrifying Rio. Cida, Todd, Jay — let them all appear.

Though it was curious: neither Jay nor Todd ever appeared in her art. They were almost stubbornly absent. Nor did Holly see anything of Cida as she turned back to her canvas. Cida might have emerged that evening as Holly touched up Fuegia Basket's face. The big canvas showed Darwin and Fuegia on the beach that once bordered Botafogo. It was painted in Holly's evolving style, the naive edging toward surrealism — which left plenty of openings for Cida. But the girl simply wasn't there, and as Holly frowned at the painting, she was distracted by remembering that wormseed goosefoot had been grown in the Canary Islands, where it was used to embalm corpses. Had it been used in seafaring days, to ship corpses home? The book didn't say, and Holly was left to wonder whether Darwin had known it. Maybe he'd used it to preserve specimens. But if it was that strong, what must it do to girls like Cida?

Holly shook her head impatiently, willing Cida away. She would get to her through Darwin; get to everything through Darwin. But first she had to get Darwin himself. It was a trying fact that after working for months on his portrait, Holly still hadn't got Darwin's face. It remained a scraped crater in the centre of the canvas — and if Holly couldn't paint the contours of a face, how could she trace the infinitely more subtle shape of the truth lying beneath the skin?

Holly seized her brush and dug a swath of colour into the bare canvas. Darwin and Fuegia were bright figures, both foreigners in Rio, equal for once in being equally misplaced. The background glowed silver, with flat, grey Corcovado behind them and the fine sand of the beach below. Darwin was sprawling against a driftwood log on which Fuegia rather primly sat, both of them in evening dress, the line of Fuegia's tilted head and square torso falling into the angles of Darwin's slouch, his comfortable shoulders and extended legs. Inset into the top left corner was Darwin's favourite daughter, Annie, standing inside a serrated white border that made her look like a snapshot from the family album. Annie was born ten years after Darwin lived in Rio and five years after he returned from his voyage. She died when she was ten — about the age of Fuegia Basket when Darwin knew her.

Working quickly, Holly sensed rather than saw her copy of pug-nosed Annie's photograph on the wall beside her canvas, the photograph Darwin was said to have cried over for thirty years after the girl's death. This was Holly's Darwin wall. She had a copy of Captain FitzRoy's sketch of Fuegia, his sketches of Fuegia's future husband, York Minster, and of young Jemmy Button; sketches, portraits of FitzRoy himself and everywhere of Darwin; young Darwin, old Darwin, Darwin middle-aged. Around them all were words, Darwin's words, or other peoples' words about him; phrases that caromed off each other so vividly Holly didn't know why they wouldn't tear holes into his bland and wary young face.

Look at the way he wrote about Tierra del Fuego. He seldom wrote about Fuegia herself, but he'd filled many pages describing their fraught arrival in her homeland, from which she'd been kidnapped four years before. Holly could see painting a second canvas of Darwin and Fuegia surrounded by Fuegia's people — the "savages" whom Darwin described in such an odd tone of sexual dread. One full-grown woman would be standing naked in her canoe, the salt spray and sweet rain trickling down her body. Another would be nursing her baby while sleet fell and thawed on her exposed breasts. Darwin had seen her, described her, watched the sleet not only fall, but thaw: he couldn't take his eyes off her. Around them would be the blunt beech trees that so disturbed him; erect still, he'd said, yet decayed to the heart and ready to fall. Holly suddenly realized that to do this, she'd have to go to Tierra del Fuego, which would mean going soon. The far southern summer was a brief window, a cool brightening which ended almost as soon as it started.

But before starting another canvas, she had to get Darwin in Rio, where he'd been almost as oddly preoccupied by tales of torture, big and small. He'd described wasps that half-killed caterpillars and spiders, stuffing them in their nests so their hatching larvae could eat the living, paralyzed victims; described another wasp in lengthy battle with a large spider, which was injured and attempting to hide in a clump of grass as the wasp harried it, teasing like an English hound bringing a fox to ground — Darwin's description; he'd watched it all, an enthusiastic hunter himself. Darwin loved Brazil, wandering through the cathedral forest, writing "hosannah" to the twining vines. But he also hated it. He was shocked to learn that a woman living near him used thumbscrews to punish her slaves. He loathed slavery, and twice heard screams from tortured slaves that would haunt him all his life.

Shuddering hosannahs: how much of his tortured mood in Brazil had to do with the letter he'd received from his sister? His sweetheart at home had waited scarcely a month after the Beagle set sail to accept another man's proposal, and by the time Darwin held the letter, his dear black-haired Fanny had become the untouchable Mrs. Biddulph. He cried over the news, and wrote back that Corcovado would make a good lover's leap. Meanwhile sharing a cottage in its shadow with Fuegia Basket, "who daily increases in every direction except height."

She was developing, reaching puberty in fertile Rio. Holly looked at the breasts she'd given Fuegia on her canvas, rounded as distant foothills of Corcovado. What leaps could be made from there? Especially when Darwin's younger daughter warned ambiguously, "He was passionately attached to his own children, although he was not an indiscriminate child-lover."

What was he, then? Who was Charles Darwin? It was absurd that after months of furious work, Holly still couldn't get his face. She worked feverishly, as she'd worked so many times before, knowing that she'd probably end up scraping if off again. At best it would be unconvincing, and there were times when it was far, far worse.

It was Powell. The odious Powell kept emerging. He was emerging again now as Holly painted, smirking out at her from the canvas. Blond as Darwin, bland as Darwin, but evil and malicious. Holly shuddered, dropping her arm and turning away. Until this started happening, she thought she'd recovered from the terror of Powell which had gripped her so powerfully after she got home from the Amazon. Her first day back, she'd rushed to develop her photos from the trip and thrust one at Cida — her hands, voice trembling — insisting that Cida never, on any account, let this creature in the house. After which she sat down limply and watched her boys squabble. Time and again, her frenzied activity gave way to near-paralysis, then she erupted once more with uncontainable energy. Yet in a surprisingly short time, Powell's influence began to wane. They saw no sign of him. Possibly — probably — they never would. People moved on, got distracted, found other temptations. God knows, she knew how that happened. Days would go by in which she wouldn't think about Powell. Yet he still emerged from her brush when Darwin wouldn't, or Todd, not even Cida, his powerful smirk burning from her canvas like St. Elmo's fire.

Should she leave him in? Holly forced herself to turn back to the canvas. It was true she was making a powerful image. That prim, vulnerable girl was so terribly unaware of the sneer on the face of the lounging man that Holly could scarcely bear to look at them. But Darwin's future daughter did, hovering above them. Maybe Annie was sitting in judgment. Maybe in Judgment she would die.

Except that this was wrong, lazy, superstitious, and not what Holly had been reaching for. Darwin couldn't be Powell. Powell was post-Darwin, growing up a century after Darwin's theories of evolution had shaken the tree of religion so forcefully that morality fell down. Darwin himself was pre-Darwinian, his personality formed years before his theories changed the world. No, Holly had put Annie in the picture to suggest Darwin's ties to his own future, not to any future Powell. There were always lines running through people's lives, an invisible rigging that gave them consistency, which was perhaps more commonly called the self. Holly was trying to trace one of those lines in Darwin. And even if he wasn't Powell, even taking into account his younger daughter's caution, it was clear he was always far more passionately responsive to children than most men. He hired choir boys to sing in his rooms at college, cried out in pain to see a slave boy beaten in Brazil, campaigned in later life against using children as chimney sweeps, and lovingly, relentlessly, despite his appalling ill health, he fathered ten children.

Maybe this was what obsessed Holly. Despite the biographies and the portraits proclaiming Darwin's goodness, his sweetness of manner, his eagerness to please, he seemed to her a strange and passionate man. More than that. He lived out the passions of a different age, which, if she could understand them, might say something about Passion itself, Passion Eternal — something in every way more compelling than the tired social conventions that drew arbitrary lines between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour, and called them right and wrong.

How should one behave? How should she behave? Given that she was evolved from the apes, not created by God to serve Adam. These days, Holly often felt that what she'd been taught to call "morality" was really just a set of rules drawn up aeons ago by shrewd old women trying to make life safe. Keep your virginity until marriage (or your husband will always suspect you.) Stay faithful to your husband (or he'll throw you out.) Don't indulge in murder (someone's going to get you back.) Men had always broken the rules, especially powerful men, because they could deploy their force and wealth to keep themselves safe. They didn't need to be moral. Morality was a shelter for the weak. But was Holly so weak she needed a shelter? Did she value safety above everything else? Or did she want something more profound out of life?

The problem was Powell. If there was no right or wrong, then what he did with children wasn't wrong, either. She hated that. There had to be lines between what one should and shouldn't do. But where did it lie? And on what side was she?

"The other point in her character," Darwin wrote of Annie, after she had died, "was her strong affection, which was of a most clinging, fondling nature...She would at almost any time spend half an hour in arranging my hair, 'making it,' as she called it, 'beautiful,' or in smoothing, the poor dear darling, my collar or cuffs — in short, in fondling me."

This man had helped overthrow religious morality. Replacing it with what?

"Occasionally she had a pretty, coquettish manner towards me, the memory of which is charming. She often used exaggerated language, and when I quizzed her by exaggerating what she had said, how clearly can I now see the little toss of the head, and exclamation of 'Oh, papa, what a shame of you.'"

Who was he? Holly no longer wanted to disguise herself as the Consul's wife. She wanted to get right inside Darwin, to work her way out from his bones, growing taller, thicker, broader, male. She sprouted hair on her chest, lost it from her temples, felt the drop of balls between her legs and the meaty forward growth of her clitoris. Darwin's clothes would be heavy and too warm for the climate, thick knit socks chafing his ankles. But he wouldn't notice that, would he? It was all he'd ever known. Nor was it hot. He checked his thermometer at nine o'clock every morning and night and was finding a pleasant mean temperature of 72° F. throughout this May and early June.

Darwin was scrambling downhill, heading back from the forested base of Corcovado with two heavy bags on his shoulders. They batted against his thighs, the vials jingling faintly. So fecund were the forests of Brazil that he'd collected 72 different specimens of insect life that day, augmented by the planaria he'd dug out from under fallen and decaying logs. He would soon be sending another shipment home to Henslow. Awkwardly packaged, it was true. He knew himself to be a clumsy man, and regretted that he could not draw his specimens as a botanist ought, nor play an instrument for his solitary pleasure. Yet he did love his work, and could boast of energy. His collections seemed bound to advance his name at some future date, as well as to ameliorate the present: for he found that strict concentration on his work served as a corrective to severe home-sickness, or sea-sicknesses, or love-sickness, all of which Darwin feared he had experienced to an uncommon degree for a twenty-three-year-old man.

The path emerged from the forest onto a broad tamped street, uncobbled here, and puddled into mud during the frequent rains. Walled, whitewashed compounds stood to each side, a glaring background for the black slaves emerging barefoot from their doors, and walking in white garments through the street as if they remained individually walled. These were tall people — taller often than the bellicose, excitable Portuguese, who trotted their portly horses past him. They were sweeter tempered too; with a dignity and intelligence he recognized from John Edmonstone, the freed slave who had taught him taxidermy while he lived as a student in Edinburgh. It was Edmonstone's stories which had first awakened young Darwin's desire to visit these tropics; to embrace so fervently the chance to stay ashore in Rio, while Captain FitzRoy sailed the Beagle north again to map the turbulent shores of Bahia. Edmonstone had been servant to the Catholic traveller Charles Waterton, and brought by him to Scotland from Guiana. Nearing his cottage door, Darwin felt he would have liked to find such a one as Edmonstone within. Yet any thought of hiring a servant here had been pre-empted by Captain FitzRoy, who left with Darwin the Indian girl, Fuegia Basket. She had been taught to cook and sew by the good evangelists in England, and she was to perform such duties now for him.

It was six o'clock and nearing sunset as Darwin entered the cottage. From a back room, he could hear the snores of Augustus Earle, the ship's artist who was his companion in Rio. The rain that day must have pained Earle's barometric leg, and he had taken an early dose of his usual medicine to stabilize the pressure. Darwin would have no company that evening. But he must have food, and called to Miss Basket to bring his tea to the table on the broad porch outdoors; for the rain having long ago ceased, it was a pleasant evening, warm and clear, with a full moon rising. He walked out into their small plantation of banana trees, breadfruit, and the orange, its leaves of far more vivid a green than the pallid, homesick things he'd seen in hothouses in England. Around him, the frogs had begun their sunset concert. He could make out the expectant chirp of a tiny fellow from the genus Hyla, who was soon joined by others of his species singing in delightful harmony. All that was lacking was his tea, although as he weighed a ripening orange in his hand, Darwin heard a footfall behind him and turned to see Fuegia Basket, who was swaying like an African as she emerged from the cottage with a tray upon her head.

She was an uncanny girl. Uncannily like a woman now, increasing in every direction except height, and adopting the ways of the African slaves with a perfection almost disturbing, being ever at odds with her childlike stature. She was a mimic, was Miss Fuegia Basket, possessing the unimaginable skill of speaking both Alikhoolip and Tekeenica; the languages, respectively, of York Minster and Jemmy Button; both so rude and guttural it seemed a good enough trick to be able to distinguish between them. Yet to this accomplishment she had lately added a casual mastery of far more Portuguese than Darwin himself had been able to learn. It was true he was a blockhead at languages, but it was equally true that there was something provoking about a mimic, something untrustworthy, and even freakish. He disliked the tendency of so many butterflies in Brazil to cloak themselves in deceptive dress. Too often, he found harmless creatures mimicking the markings of their poisonous cousins; seeking only to fool their predators, but succeeding also in confusing the poor, beetle-browed Naturalist to an unnatural degree. Mimics were an aberrant, irritating breed — yet he almost laughed out loud to hear Fuegia call, in the accent of a home-country maid, "Your tay, sir."

Tea, pipe, a moonlit night. He set to work immediately to prepare those specimens which must be prepared, and to conduct a few candlelit experiments. Work was both necessary and right. He could see now his father's wisdom in wishing him to prepare for a career, for though he suspected his father would leave him rich enough to be an idle dog of a fellow if he pleased; yet he found it did not please him to be idle. He must do something, especially when he wished to drive away provoking thoughts; and he was old enough now to suspect that life might prove to be filled with provocations, large, small or perfectly sized, with delightful black ringlets and an excellent seat upon a horse. How much easier he found it to work than to think about the problems of family and future. How much easier to slice a planaria most sharply in two, so that one single organism might soon regenerate as two separate individuals — infinitely easier, indeed, than to somehow make two separated individuals combine back into one.

Darwin worked as the stars rose, the Southern Cross most clear above him. To the frogs and cicadae were added the night-time conversations of his neighbours, their speech carried through the cooling air from cottages near at hand. Their Portuguese was impenetrable, thank God; for the laughter that accompanied it was rude. Then he heard something else, something more delicate; a footfall in his garden. Leaning forward in his chair, he saw a flash of lighter garment, heard a giggle, and moved outside the light of his candle to see Fuegia Basket chasing fireflies through the trees.

Charming sight! She was a child again, surrounded by the phosphorescence of fireflies, and without a thought, Darwin ran to join her. Laughing, they ran back and forth; and he showed her how to capture one pulsing insect in a bottle. She cooed over it, saying something in her own language. A rare novelty, a pet for the girl, who would not have had such a thing before. It was transitory, certainly; but it occurred to Darwin that much was transitory in her uprooted life; and he felt an odd tenderness for the child. Then she was off again, forgetting her pet, and he was after her, running for the pleasure of running, running to feel the physical pump of his legs against the hard grassed flanks of the earth; running to lose himself in the animal gladness of breathing, of sweating; of grabbing Fuegia's arms and spinning her around so she shrieked with laughter, spinning her so fast that she took flight, her legs lifting, her arms stretched tight as she laughed and shrieked and flew through the air. Oh, he could remember the feeling; remember his brother Ras spinning him thus; though it was absurd to think of tiny Fuegia being able to lift him, and he laughed and laughed till he was out of breath and lowered her gently again to earth.

Dizzy. He was so dizzy when he stopped, he fell down beside her, the unfamiliar stars spinning above him, the very ground in upheaval beneath. Young Fuegia laughed still, and when he regained his breath, he leaned down to tickle the child, liking the sound of that baby laughter. He was laughing himself, sitting astride her legs to keep her to ground. But what was this? And this? Hands roving too widely, tickling too far from her wide, soft belly, he finds another mound down here, a mound up here, a hard/soft mound of new-formed breast peaked by a teasingly erect nipple. Kneeling there, the young man groans, suddenly so hard himself and burning, imagining, he imagines, he.....

No. No, it's Holly imagining this, not him; her obsessions that invade the tropical evening. Holly can't really believe in this scene, although she knows, she knows, that very late that night, still awake in his hammock as the whole rest of the world lies seemingly at rest, Darwin will hear another sound from outside, a cry from a nearby cottage, sharp and grieved, as if a whip is descending rhythmically, a thumbscrew turned by cruel strong hands. The groans are desperate, deeply pained and painful to hear. My God, he must do something! Darwin leaps to his feet. And hesitates by the doorway, heart pounding. For what he doesn't know, what he cannot tell, is whether this is indeed the sound of torture, or whether it is passion; for, like Holly, he can no longer distinguish between the two.
19

The television set was fixed high on the wall, angled to be watched from the king-sized bed and playing the pornographic video Holly had seen her first time at the motel. She decided to keep it on. She liked a routine, the familiar seediness of the flickering black and white images, the Three Stooges-style comedy of porn stars looking stunned as strange things happened to their bodies. Groping around on their hands and knees. Tied up in chairs. Burlesque; wasn't that what they called it?

The shimmering blue of the television screen was reflected faintly on the pink sateen bedspread on which Holly lay. The first time she'd seen the video, she'd laughed so hard she'd spilled her drink.

"You've really never seen any porn before?" Jay asked.

"I've led a sheltered life," she answered dryly.

The motel was just over the mountain from Holly's house, ten minutes along the coastal road and down a driveway that led to a toll booth like the ones at the mouths of underground parking garages. She could do a painting of the toll booth with its anonymous-looking Charon inside negotiating passage to the Underworld by taking credit card imprints. He controlled a metal arm that went up and down, stopping Jay's rented car to take the imprint, then letting it rise so they could continue down the darkened drive. There were no keys. Instead, one in a line of automated garage doors would clank open. A light would go on, and they would drive into a private bay. As the metal shield clanked shut behind them, they would find the door to their suite in front and a decorator box of plastic plants to one side. A large Jacuzzi was just inside the door on the first of two floors. At the top of the stairs was a dining area with a large wooden table ruined by glass prints and cigarette burns. Behind this was the bed, fully mirrored. Greasy food could be delivered to a private door behind the dining area by waiters trained to look at the floor.

That night, the Jacuzzi had been running and filthy when they arrived. Holly didn't care whether she took a Jacuzzi, but Jay wanted one and called the maid to drain and clean it. Holly thought it good of him to make the call himself. She was tired of trying to clean up messes; confounded by Cida's stubbornness. In the four days since Holly had first learned the girl was pregnant, Cida had covered her ears at any mention of adoption, refused to telephone her mother, and insisted time after time that she wanted to go to Canada. What should Holly do? When Jay called from the airport a day earlier than expected, Holly felt relieved. He could often see through moral complexities with an ease that often stunned her.

She was lying on the dismal bed in a bias-cut shot silk dress. Holly enjoyed coming here in designer clothes, leaning toward Jay across the water-stained table, laughing and eating tasteless food as if they were actors on a film set, vital and lit while everything around them was makeshift, soiled and falling into shadows. Jay always ate his dinner late. How fascinating to find he did everything late, up all night, sleeping into the afternoon. Remembering that he'd be hungry, Holly rolled over to pick up the phone, ordering steak and cocktails before getting up to troll a restless path through the red shag carpet. She could see him from the top of the stairs, and leaned against the upper wall to watch him leaning at the bottom, chatting with the maid, practicing his Portuguese, exuding ease and camaraderie. Meanwhile seeing that the tiles were well-cleaned. Jay had a dread of infection and disease; one Holly found reassuring. Sensing her, he glanced upstairs and smiled.

This was Jay's fourth trip to Rio. Each time he'd come back, she'd schemed to spend more time with him. At times, this made her cringe with guilt. She saw her reflection in the mirror once, singing to herself, prettily dressed in case of an unexpected phone call. The guilt made her grit her teeth and hunch as if cowering from a blow. It wasn't just Todd; she spent even more time away from the boys when Jay was in town. Rearranging schedules, hurrying them out to play dates, rushing off this evening. .

"Mommy has an appointment," she'd called, running lightly from the phone. Yet as she turned in the doorway, the sight of Conor's drooping figure made her drift back toward him. A silhouette: frail shoulders in a blaze of window light. When he looked up, the light caught his pale face, and Conor gave Holly a look of such rueful stoicism that he broke her heart.

"Make an appointment with me for tomorrow," she said, kneeling to put an arm around his shoulders. Conor shrank away.

"You missed our last soccer game."

"I'm sorry. The carpenter finally showed up and I — " She broke off and hugged him tighter. "What are we going to do tomorrow? You decide."

"We have soccer."

"We have soccer, yes. And the beach after?"

"Hot dogs for dinner," he bargained warily.

Holly knew she had to end the affair. Yet she'd simply never felt anything like this before, such a sense of partnership, a feeling of complicity; an openness that breathed health. She and Jay were equals. They said whatever they felt without hedging or apology. She felt he didn't just listen, he understood what she was saying, which had never been the case with Todd. Holly knew Todd loved her. Of course he did, almost too much. But she'd never been quite certain that he approved of her, or that he would approve if she stopped censoring herself and told him everything she felt. It would be a punishing amount of work to repair their marriage.

When it was just so much fun to be with Jay. They were always heading out to night clubs, eating at the best restaurants, dancing at the samba halls in the Zona Norte — feral places, with funky couples jiving in the dark. She'd do cat rubs against him, tease him so fiercely they'd make love the rest of the night. Yet it wasn't just pleasure. On his last trip down, Jay had taken her to a rehearsal of his new performance piece. Holly had sat on a flimsy chair at the back of the baffled industrial space, amused to play the boss's girlfriend, never introduced, but also proud to be with Jay. He'd swung casually into place behind his keyboard, looking gaunt and commanding. After shuffling some papers, he raised his long hands and set a beat, massaging the air until he pulled the opening notes from his musicians — percussionists, mainly, a fat trumpet-player, the bassist and a pale young guitarist folded over what she'd learned to call his rig. The room was warm, but Holly shivered.

The piece was jazzy, Brazilian syncopated jazz, although the band soon faded down for Jay. He was speaking more than singing. It wasn't a rap, more a monologue. Yet the miking was wrong and Holly had to strain forward to hear what he was saying, trying to make sense of the words. A loud crackle made her jump, and Jay's voice popped louder. Yet as he sang a few ironic bars, Holly felt puzzled. She heard nothing about the great theme of post-modern disintegration Jay had talked about at first. No, the piece focused on Jay himself, his Brazilian adventures, his odyssey through Rio. His voice was bluesy and wry, the beat languid; it undercut him. Holly smiled as she realized he was undercutting himself, satirizing what had happened on the morro. He finessed his way through a cock-eyed version of their story, exaggerating a little, embroidering more. Despite some continuing roughness, Holly saw he'd captured the ravaged tone of the city. Add the indolent Brazilian beat, rehearsals, refinement, and she knew the piece would be a success. Yet Holly was disappointed. She couldn't see the point, the focus, any edge. Where was the edge he'd come looking for?

In her, Holly thought, cutting out her heart. She turned from the top of the motel stairs and walked to the table, pillowing her face in her hands.

"You tired?"

He'd come up quietly and startled her. Holly heard the maid close the door downstairs.

"I'm all right." She put her face up for a kiss, then got up and drifted toward the window, looking at the waves on the rocks below. "Are you here for very long?"

"That's up to you," he replied.

"I shall exercise my great power responsibly." Holly turned from the window. "For a change. But tell how the piece is coming. Did you do any revisions up there?"

"Way up north. Far into the cold country, chilled by arctic blasts."

"I'm not looking forward to my next Canadian winter. I'm getting too used to the heat. Though I've felt limp and withered lately. It's almost too hot."

Jay was watching her closely. Holly she shook her head and smiled.

"Somebody tried to blackmail me. How does that sound? Cida is pregnant and wants to go to Canada. She thought she could make me take her there." When Jay looked confused, Holly added, "The girl who helps me out. The maid."

"It doesn't sound like she's being much help."

"I don't blame her. She's lost. She doesn't know what to do. I don't know what to do."

"I know," Jay said gently, walking over and taking her hand. His hands were much larger than hers, capable and manicured. He looked after himself, although she gathered he hadn't always. In bed sometimes she studied his shadowed face in profile, seeing the way his skin looked both beautifully cared for and needing the care; a little puffy around the eyes at times, the pores relaxing with age. He was older than she'd thought at first, although still in splendid shape; a long, dark, muscled man who could be the walking version of one of Giacometti's attenuated sculptures. He said he'd been married once to a woman who left him almost immediately for someone powerful in the entertainment industry. He also seemed to have lived with another woman for a long time, but he talked about her so brokenly that Holly could never figure out whether she was before or after the wife. Nor did he say what happened to the woman, although this was apparently his period of greatest fame, with all the parties, drink and drugs. The scars on his wrists came from then, and Holly was left to wonder if he'd cut himself out of a life the woman hadn't managed to leave.

She took his cuff between her fingers. "Mostly these days, I just want to lock myself in the studio and paint. The work is going so well. But nothing else is, and I don't know what to do. What do you think I should do, Jay?"

"Come with me to New York," he said. "Bring the maid to look after the kids. Give the girl her chance."

"New York? You've got another concert?"

"To live," he said. "I'm finished with Chicago. Time for the big move."

Holly was startled into meeting his eyes, a greyer shade of blue than her own. She got up and walked nervously around the room, understanding that he'd made a remarkably generous offer. He would give Cida a home. And the boys. And her. Holly hugged herself, chilly and breathless, not knowing what to say. "New York is no place to bring up children."

"Connecticut." He was watching her closely. He'd thought this through.

"I don't know what to say. I can't even spell Connecticut."

"Three C's. I know it's something you have to think about. But haven't you been thinking about it? Just a little? Something along these lines?"

She had, of course. She'd also pictured conversing with Charles Darwin, phoning Cida's mother and shooting Ed Powell. Holly smiled and shook her head. "I don't seem to have been thinking very clearly lately," she admitted.

"Honey, that isn't flattering."

"I hope this isn't about flattery."

"You're right," he answered. "Say yes."

Out of the corner of her eye, Holly could see herself taking flight. White wings at her back, lifting her, flying her over the sea. Tears drenched her inside. Rain falling. Drink the sky, she thought, feeling vertiginous.

And the boys?

"I have to think about it. I can't say anything right now, Jay. How could I?"

"I know," he told her, adding, "And I should order some food."

"I already did."

He thanked her and retreated to the table, his eyes on Holly as she continued to pace.

"Come here," he said finally, patting his lap. When she curled up there, breathing on his neck, he quickly had an erection. He said in an amused voice, "Blackmail?"

Jay seemed to like the idea. He liked a little seediness, was that it? He liked this motel. Cleaned up a little, but not too much. He liked living the disintegration he'd talked about. Did she?

The waiter knocked on the door. Holly watched Jay eat his dinner from the other end of the long table. Afterwards, he reached for her.

"It's been too long," he said.

The next morning, Holly sat down at the kitchen table, deciding to work things out with Cida, at least. The girl should telephone her mother. It was probably unfair of Holly and officious to try to insert some direction into the girl's life when her own was so up in the air. Yet with the boys playing happily, they might as well talk.

"Cida?"

"Senhora?" the girl answered. She'd spilled a bag of black beans onto the table and was picking through them for pieces of gravel, looking bitter and exhausted. The summer weather was wearing in itself. Although it was early morning, the day was already hot. Holly couldn't help feeling sorry for Cida as she crossed her hands on the table.

"It's time to talk about plans," she said. "Your real plans, Cida, being realistic."

"Going to Canada," the girl answered, without looking up. "You keep telling me you'll think about it."

"I have, Cida. And in the end, I don't think it's a very good idea."

"It's my idea," the girl answered angrily. She seemed to remember the proprieties and added unctuously, childishly, spitefully, "Senhora."

"Cida, let me tell you something about Canada. It's very far to the north, and cold — so much colder than Brazil in almost every way. It's hard to imagine winter when you've never even seen snow. But maybe you can picture the very formal way people act toward each other. Here, I take the boys to school and their teacher gives me a hug and a kiss, doesn't she?"

"The senhora knows."

"That doesn't happen in Canada, Cida. Here I go into my favourite clothing stores and the salesgirls all hug me, too."

Cida shrugged.

"But that just doesn't happen in Canada." Holly sighed again. "I think you'd feel repulsed there, and lost. I don't know how I can go back there myself."

Cida looked oddly sympathetic. "It's Doutor Todd, isn't it?" she asked. Holly was surprised at her penetration, and wondered if Cida was trying to equalize things. If Holly was going to play a part in her decision, she wanted to talk about Holly's problems too, especially since they affected her hopes of coming to Canada. Yet Holly wasn't going to talk about her problems with a nineteen-year-old girl, and Cida must have seen this in her face.

"Ta bom." It's all right, she said, and went back to picking her beans.

Holly hesitated, unsure how to go on.

"I won't press you any more," she said finally. "But I'll say one last time that I think you should phone your mother."

"Okay. Why not?"

Holly was even more surprised by the sudden lack of resistance. Cida seemed terribly unsettled this morning, listless and removed. Yet why be surprised? Everything was unsettled. This might be the most important decision the girl would ever make, and there was no obvious answer. Holly ought to be able to sympathize with that.

"I really think your mother is the best person to help," she said.

"She's my mother."

Cida looked closely at the bean in her fingers.

"Although you're a grown woman now, Cida. These are your decisions to make."

The girl shrugged, but glanced over at the telephone.

"I guess I should allow you some privacy, if you want to call."

Holly was conscious of a little cowardice, and half expected Cida's contempt as she stood up. But the girl only shrugged again, pursing her lips.

"And Cida?" Holly said, pausing in the doorway. "I'd like to go out this evening with Tânia and some friends, if you don't have any plans."

"What plans can I have?" Cida asked, pushing the beans aside irritably. Then she rubbed her nose and drew the beans back toward herself, within the circle of her arms. "Have a good time," she said absently.

"It's tonight I'm going out," Holly said, lingering in the doorway. "I'm not going anywhere yet."

"I just meant, have a good time tonight," Cida said, in a voice that had again turned childish and spiteful. "I think I'll make my phone call now."

"Well, that's best isn't?" Holly asked, retreating, puzzled.

It was all a puzzle. As she drove to Copacabana that night, Holly wasn't sure how Tânia would react to Cida's news. Nor did she know what to say to Jay, who would be expecting an answer later that night. She would rather have stayed home, working within earshot of Cida and the boys. Not that she thought Cida needed watching with the boys. She was very good with them; that was never a concern. No, what Holly really wanted was her work. Not as solace, not as distraction, but because it had become an obsession. And wasn't that a breakthrough, to reach the place where her art was all-consuming and anything but safe? She thought it was, and when she considered her progress, she began to feel happier, more in control.

Parking the car, Holly also found it was a lovely night, limpid and warm, with a sweet breeze blowing off the water. She got a space on the beach side at the south end of Copacabana. High-rise apartments and hotels lined the curving beachfront road, but a few fishermen still tied their boats near a palm-roofed hut on the beach itself. Nearby, a couple of women were lighting candles in the sand to ask a favour of Iemanja, the goddess of the sea. As she locked the car, Holly felt like joining them. Or had she already been granted her wish, her work, her vindication?

"There she is," Tânia said. They were sitting outside at a bar across the street, and Tânia held out a hand to intercept Holly as she arrived. Her whole crowd was there: children, nieces, friends, cousins. Also Jay, looking relieved that Holly had arrived. Tânia had listened to one of Jay's CDs recently and asked, "So?"

"We're celebrating my news," Tânia told her. "I'm going to have a show." She added more quietly, "And I want to talk to you later."

"Congratulations," Holly answered, stooping to kiss her. Tânia painted slowly, and often on commission, so she seldom showed her work. But lately she'd been working with one model, an aging transvestite, and was getting a body of paintings together. Holly had seen them and they were massive. Some would say cruel. But Holly found the cruelty fascinating in light of Tânia's continuing relationship with Antônio, who was a little more than half her age. Her only other friends to have relationships with much younger partners were men. So who was the transvestite in Tânia's paintings? Taking in the puckered lips, the sinewy arms, Holly wondered whether artists ever truly represented anyone other than themselves.

Not that she could even hint at the idea. Tânia would quail at the implication, having grown painfully sensitive about anything touching on Antônio. Her family was increasingly uneasy about the affair, afraid she might marry him. At first, they hadn't thought it would last. But here he was, a year later, sitting happily beside Tânia in the Copacabana bar, cradling the helmet for a new motorcycle she surely must have bought him. Glances were being exchanged, and Holly quickly saw that Tânia's son Eric was scarcely bothering to be civil. Eric always acted like a child around Antônio, even though he was the older of the two, being the product of Tânia's early first marriage. But tonight he seemed worse than usual, pouting, lost in the sense of ill-usage that hung about him so prettily: he had the easy good looks of a model, though he was weak and dissipated, debauched, fond of drugs. The one time Todd had met Tânia, Eric had been her date. On the way home, Todd said dryly, "Amazing how much more energy he always had after those trips to the washroom."

Yet Tânia never appeared to notice Eric's behaviour. He was her first born, her darling, her eternal boy. As an evening wore down, she would often lean her head on his shoulder, kissing his ear and saying he was the best son, so thoughtful, so talented, so good at everything he did — even though he never seemed to actually do anything. He was always weighing a number of options; planning to take up architecture, go into the stock market, maybe act. Meanwhile, Antônio made his imperturbable way through a medical residency. His steadiness was a constant reproach to Eric, although Tânia never seemed to see that, either.

Or did she? As the evening drew on, Holly caught Tânia giving Eric a worried look. Who could understand families? The history. What was owed.

"Our talk, Holly," she said finally.

"We're always having talks," Holly replied, supposing this to be about Cida.

"You have to go home," she announced instead, so everybody turned. "It came to me today, looking at my work, that I stayed away too long when I moved to New York. My God, seventeen years. It didn't answer: I learned technique, but lost all my passion. Now you're making the same mistake, Holly. You're making it in reverse, but that isn't what's important."

Tânia shook her finger playfully, as if to take the sting off the words. Holly smiled ruefully and told Jay, "Tânia looked at my latest work and said obsession isn't art."

"Goes a damn long way towards it," he replied.

"There's also a question of the craft," Tânia told him. "When you're travelling, things like that can easily be mislaid."

"But people move around the world all the time," Holly said. "It's human history, we always have. And if that's what I'm trying to paint, how does it matter where I live, or where I work on my technique? I know I have to do it."

"I like this conversation," Jay said.

"But Rio isn't for you, my flower. We're not for you. If I had my way, you'd pack up your family tomorrow and fly straight home." Holly was about to answer when Tânia said to no one in particular, "She's fucking up. I give her a good maid, and the girl ends up pregnant."

"Oh, Tânia, that's not fair. Cida's responsible for herself. She's not a child, and I'm not her mother."

"You're a mother," Tânia said. "Once a mother, always a mother. That's also the strongest part of your art, you know. You paint from that."

Holly couldn't tell whether this was a description or an order. She'd never heard Tânia speak this way before, although she sounded like the person who had painted the transvestite with such avid cruelty.

"I warned you I was going to talk to you," Tânia said.

Antônio smiled at Holly, shaking his head. "You found a good teacher. That's a rare privilege."

Leaning across to him, Eric said, "So you have something in common."

Antônio laughed soundlessly, but with apparent good humour.

"I don't like this conversation," Holly said.

"Well, my flower," Tânia answered appeasingly. "We'll talk more later."

No. Holly wanted to leave. She'd been there for an hour, the others much longer, and she signalled to Jay that it was time to go. Yet for once Jay ignored her, looking alert, piqued by what was going on. He waved for the waiter and ordered another round of beer. Holly frowned, although she realized Jay was probably right. Everything remained too ragged and unfinished; she couldn't leave yet.

But she also couldn't help turning her chair away from the others to watch a far happier family nearby. This was a jolly white-haired couple with a coltish teenage daughter, or more likely granddaughter. The couple was sharing a series of jokes over their beer while the girl leaned against her grandmother, who played with her hair. As Holly watched, it struck her that the girl looked petulant, and she was tired of petulant girls. But the grandmother was being jolly with her, coaxing her to smile, to laugh at her grandfather's jokes, to reach for his outstretched hand. Finally, the girl allowed him to take her small hand in his big one, and the grandparents grew even more jolly. Then the grandfather got up and led the girl away, and as the air fractured, Holly remembered this was Copacabana, where a few dollars could buy you any disease you cared to name.

"You're staring," Jay said quietly.

"And how long were you fooled?"

"Fooled, my flower?" He was a deadly mimic.

"Was that a boy or a girl?"

"Maybe a virgin?"

"Tânia's right. I don't belong here."

"You belong in New York," he agreed.

Holly drew in her breath. "I've actually been thinking of going to Tierra del Fuego."

"What?"

Holly couldn't blame him. She'd been thinking about it in the same way she'd been thinking about Charles Darwin, shooting Powell — or moving to New York. But he was pressuring her, and she'd had enough of feeling pressured, seized, secured, God help her, even by the boys. All she really wanted to do was paint. Yet once she'd mentioned Tierra del Fuego, the idea had an odd plausibility.

"I want to be on my own for a while, think things over, make some sketches. Isn't that a good idea?"

Her voice sounded high and childish. Jay crossed his arms, then uncrossed them again.

"On your own in Tierra del Fuego. I admire your initiative, Holly, but somehow I can't picture it. Don't you think of yourself as a little urban for that?"

She felt flattered that he saw her in those terms. Sophisticated? "I don't think of myself that way at all."

"But penguins, honey? Glaciers?"

Holly smiled and shook her head, ready to admit it was an offhand idea when she heard Tânia say loudly, "Don't do that."

Looking over, Holly saw Tânia start to get up; saw Eric draw her back down to her chair.

"He seems to know them," he told her.

Distracted, pushing back from the table, Holly could see Antônio heading toward three rough-looking men who were standing around his new motorcycle.

"You're not supposed to do that," Holly said, turning anxiously to Jay. "Let them take it if they want."

"Antônio seems to think he knows who they are," Jay replied.

"More likely Eric knows who they are. Toughs like that."

"Antônio gets around himself," Jay said. "He wasn't exactly born with a silver spoon, you know."

"Is that the problem?" Holly asked. "Is that why they don't like him?" She watched nervously as Antônio reached the motorcycle, parked along the curb. Tânia tried to get up again, but again Eric restrained her.

"You'll only make things worse."

Antônio was being back-slapping friendly, apparently talking to the men about the motorcycle, showing them how to adjust the mirrors and saying something about the leather seat, which was shiny under the street lamps. The two youngest men — boys — grew interested despite themselves. One kicked the back tire. Antônio laughed, rubbing the guy's upper arm and clapping him on the back. But the oldest of them took offence at this and said something sharp. Antônio raised both hands, palms flat out, and started backing away from them, talking gently. But before he'd taken more than three or four steps, the older man said something else, and one of the boys grabbed for Antônio's wallet, bulging in his front pants pocket. Antônio was thrown off balance, and as he stumbled sideways, into the motorcycle, the first man shot him three times directly in the chest. Antônio threw out his arms and slid from the motorcycle onto the sidewalk as the gunmen fled.

"Não!" Tânia cried, pounding her fists against Eric until he let her go and she could run to Antônio. A friend ran behind her; a niece was screaming and screaming. Holly stood up and froze there, rigid with shock, while Jay started shouting at their waiter to get a policeman from the posto, call an ambulance, for God's sake call a doctor.

"He's bleeding, all the blood," Tânia cried. "My God, baby, all your blood."

The niece screamed until her sister slapped her. In the momentary silence, Holly heard Tânia's friend say very clearly, "Gone. Already gone."

Eric shook his head. "Over a stupid motorcycle."

"The man's gone," Jay called angrily. He made a move toward Eric. "The man's gone, and you say what?"

Eric gave a ghastly smile. For a moment he reminded Holly of someone. Not Tânia, Eric didn't look much like Tânia. Tânia said he looked more like his father, although Holly had never met Tânia's first husband, who had died two years before the Austens had arrived in Brazil.

Doutor Eduardo, she thought. In that moment, Eric looked like Tânia's uncle. The same debauched and petulant mouth, the artificial smile: Holly found herself distrusting Eric as much as she disliked him.

A policeman ran up, waving his gun. Jay calmed him down the way Antônio had tried to calm the motorcycle toughs. Behind them, Tânia's friends detached her gently from Antônio and brought her to sit at the table. She slumped there, her body old, her face looking raw as a girl's.

"Tierra del Fuego?" Jay asked, appearing behind Holly.

"Are they coming after me next?" Tânia said.
20

Todd rubbed his eyes with one hand. Holly's telephone call was different from anything he'd anticipated. Of course, the scenarios you anticipated were never the ones played out. It had something to do with chaos theory. The predictably unpredictable trajectory of the next shoe to drop.

"Tierra del Fuego," he said. "Holly, this is crazy."

"Yeah, my work is kind of crazy. But it's still my work. Why should I take it any less seriously than you take yours?"

"Who said I take this seriously? I just wrote the world's most fatuous press release. I'm the first to admit."

Todd heard her sigh, and knew she was on the verge of telling him he wanted it both ways. Was there anyone who didn't? Holly, for instance? Sending him away, then demanding he yo-yo home with only a day's notice. But she would say he'd always taken off on trips with almost no notice. Why couldn't he come home just as quickly when she needed him to look after the boys?

They could conduct entire arguments these days without saying a word.

"Tierra del Fuego," he said. "Well, that's an interesting idea, Holly. But my God, it's poorly timed. I was just getting somewhere on something I've been working on for a long time. I know — so are you."

"I'm afraid I don't have any leeway on the timing. Summer lasts two minutes down there and I want to stay two weeks. These are the best flights I could get. You know what it's like trying to coordinate flights to the end of the world. Now it's my turn."

"But why, Holly? Haven't you had enough time alone? The boys, of course," he added hastily.

"You're the one who said our lives are complicated," she said. "Maybe they don't need to be. I suspect that they don't need to be. I just need to get away from everything, even the boys. Take the final step, I guess, and finally think it through. The idea has been percolating for a while."

"So why is this the first time I've heard of it? Holly, I can't just rearrange everything inside of a day. I need more time. Why don't we peel back the urgency and talk this over?"

"Didn't I explain about the flights? Maybe I didn't, I'm feeling quite frazzled and upset. Tânia's friend Antônio was killed the other day. I'm just back from the funeral."

"Killed? My God, what happened? The poor bugger."

"Shot," Holly said. "God knows why. I'm also exhausted. I was in the studio half the night finishing Darwin's face. It turns out he has Antônio's face. So puzzled."

"Good Lord, Holly, you've had a shock, another shock, a series of shocks. You shouldn't just go running off like this."

"I'm afraid there's just no leeway. Oh — Cida's pregnant, but her mother's in charge. You don't need to worry about that."

"What just got thrown at me here?"

"I don't know what else to say. Goodbye. I'll see you tomorrow night."

"Holly, you can't do this."

She hung up.

She hung up and Todd threw the receiver onto the floor, sending the phone down with it in an absurd crash and jing-a-ling of bells. She expected him to be endlessly understanding; dancing to her erratic tune, making amends for things he frankly didn't remember doing, biting his tongue, eating his suggestions, prostrating himself the way too damn many people seemed to expect these days.

Imagine your wife acting like the most demanding and dissatisfied people you met. He'd fly into projects billed as warm and fuzzy exemplars of international cooperation and meet a staff of Hollys, human porcupines whose spines bristled as they smiled and smiled, their dim little eyes watching him for even the faintest hint of wandering attention, exactly the way she watched him play with the boys at home. He tramped through their natural rubber projects, their brazil nut projects, their goddamn acerola projects as gingerly as he did on her polished floors. They smiled and smiled, every bit as polite — even gracious — as Holly tended to be lately, meanwhile suspecting him of hidden motives, Macchiavellian manipulations, and a First World feeling of superiority toward their struggling projects. He could almost hear them say it.

Yes, we'll take your money, Mister nice liberal eco-imperialist, but don't for a solitary optimistic moment think that gives you any right to interfere in what you no doubt believe to be the pitifully backward way we choose to do things, which as a matter of fact has deep cultural roots and suits us just fine.

"I have no intention of interfering, but I do know a few things that might save you some time and money if you'd let — "

They're all the same.

Todd, that's just so typical.

He was sick of it. Sick of her. He was sick of it all.

Todd groaned, burying his hands in his hair. He sometimes felt he'd spent the past six months on a pilgrimage to expiate every sin of which he'd ever been accused, not to mention those of his fathers that had been visited upon him. Which wasn't to say he felt the criticisms to be unjust. He'd never claimed to be perfect. Far from it. Holly was right, he was very far from it. He was distracted at home, impatient at work. But at home, weren't they supposed to understand that your intentions were good, at least?

Sterling intentions. Unfortunately, his performance rating was dismal all around. Not only had Holly kicked him out, he'd had almost got himself fired. Todd groaned again. Much of the work he'd been doing lately was designed to repair relations with the environmental coalition. He'd been rebuked for what amounted to his stupidity in refusing to stroke the concerned academics he'd taken around the Amazon in April. Even at the time, Todd had known he was being remarkably self-indulgent with the academics. He knew he should have tugged his forelock, held off correcting their wild suppositions and refrained from demolishing their asinine opinions. As far as that goes, he should have jumped in the river and pretended to be some endangered goddamn otter. Because afterwards, hadn't they written just a poisonous letter to his board of directors? And hadn't he known they would? Of course he'd known, and everything that had happened since was an ironic gloss on his reiterated message: that hasty, ill-considered decisions taken to achieve a short-term goal led to dreadful complications later on. You paid and paid and paid.

Todd sighed. There were too many days up here, in this fetid mess, when all he wanted in the world was to sit in a book-lined study and read. Read and inspire students, read and enlighten his colleagues, read and write hair-splittingly arcane papers; treatises he'd manoeuvre through the competitive world of academic publishing by issuing precisely the sort of letter the members of his tour group had written, only better.

Actually, it wasn't bad. The coalition had sent him a copy, and he'd had to admit to the justice of many of the complaints, while admiring the subtlety the academics sometimes brought to their task of undermining him. But the letter showed signs of being written by committee, and Todd had spent a gleeful night in some Hotel Insomnia red-pencilling its more awkward constructions, editing out the prudent qualifications and sharpening its adjectives into stilettos. He'd even written an official response, agreeing sadly that he'd been unsuited to be their guide, having failed ignominiously to prevent one of the academics from giving their left-over food one night not to waiting street children but to the restaurant owner's Great Dane. Nor, he wrote, had he been able to persuade his honourable colleague to revisit the opinion that it wasn't the dog's fault there were too many poor children in the world.

Todd hooted with malice as he re-read his letter. Then he tore it up. By mailing it, he might have salvaged his chance to return to academia some day, his enemies torpedoed, his good name intact. But he tore up the letter, denying himself an out, forcing himself to keep doing what he believed was right. Not that he claimed to have found perfection in the environmental movement. He'd made mistakes. The entire movement had made mistakes. Yet it was also true the movement kept permitting him to grow. Holly may not have believed it, but he still tried, and something in the movement allowed this too; perhaps its youth. Todd wrote a letter to the coalition apologizing for his childish behaviour toward the academics, faxed it north and set off determinedly, making his pilgrimage, making amends, excoriating himself for his hereditary sins.

All of which would have been more impressive if he'd had anything else to do. His wife had informed him they weren't separated, but he'd better not come home. As meanwhile Jefferson wasn't heard from, the Amazon tribe stayed disappeared, and even Ignacio was beginning to fear that nothing would come of this, after all.

Until recently. This past week, in fact. The timing of Holly's trip couldn't have been worse, and Todd wasn't sure what to do about it. All he could do was hope for a break, even though hoping for another break seemed like tempting the gods. Or was spending so much time with Ignacio making him superstitious?

Todd had been sitting in Ignacio's clean-swept quarters behind the church when it happened. It was late, and they'd gone beyond talk to take up their regular game of backgammon. Ignacio was a fanatic player who'd insisted on teaching Todd the game to pass his long, shipwrecked nights. Todd wasn't sure he should have been keeping up with Ignacio, given the young priest's unfortunate evangelism. But if you approached it theoretically, you might also argue that Todd couldn't afford to isolate himself any further.

There was nothing theoretical about it. They were both lonely, and simply avoided certain subjects like an old married couple bent on peace.

"But you've left yourself so vulnerable, my friend," Ignacio was saying, as his unlocked door swung open and Celso slipped into the room.

Astonished, Todd stood up without extending his hand. He'd seen Celso occasionally over the months, and the agent usually made a point of ignoring him. If Celso was with someone else from the Indian bureau, he might turn to the other person and whisper something that made them both laugh. Now he stood on Ignacio's plank floor and rubbed his hands together, shrugging his shoulders, shifting from one foot to another; wriggling like a dog caught shredding a cushion. His ugly face was contorted with apology, the desire to please, and the underlying shrewdness and contempt which he could never disguise.

"So," Ignacio said pacifically.

"It is a different tribe, but not uncontacted," Celso said. "The bureau made contact in the Fifties."

"How do you know?" Todd asked, crossing his arms.

"There was an expedition," Celso answered, moving restlessly around the room. "Most of the people who went on it are dead, but there's an old man who kept one of the copies of the records. You know how crazy we are about making copies."

He laughed insincerely, desperate now to please, but Todd could see that underneath it all, he was just as desperately resentful.

"He kept them," Celso repeated, "and they show the people were deeded the land on the south face of the serra. All the land where the geologist is working, everything down to Jefferson's rapids. If I get the old man's copy of the agreement, could you get it out to someone who knows how to use it?" His face worked, and he said with sudden dryness. "The other copies seem to have disappeared from the files."

As they stared at him, Celso sat down in Todd's chair, one of Ignacio's two chairs, finally seeming satisfied with their astonishment. "He lives outside Manaus," he said. "I'm from Manaus. Remember the basket at the longhouse? I thought I'd seen one of those before, but I couldn't find a photograph anywhere in the records. Finally I remembered: the old man showed me one when I was a kid."

Todd pictured the unusual dark brown fibre of the basket. The head strap, the black circles arranged in an ambiguous, beguiling pattern. You could fall into those circles if you weren't careful.

"After he moved to Manaus, the old guy rented his boats from my father. I took him out myself a couple of times when I was a kid. Afterwards, we'd go over his collections."

Cracking his knuckles masterfully, Celso took advantage of their speechlessness by talking. Expounding, digressing, mainly about himself. His family had been in the Amazon for generations, and had always had boats. Lately, with the second boom of Manaus, Celso's father was adding taxis to the family business, not to mention the plane his brother flew. They must have been doing well to be able to send Celso to university, yet Todd knew that running any type of business in the Amazon was tough. Celso's father would be tough. He might also be rich one day, if he lived.

Leaning against the wall, Todd grappled with an odd feeling that he knew Celso's father. No, that wasn't quite right. It was his own grandfather he could almost feel standing beside him. And not old Henry either, but young Hank, years ago on his own frontier. He was as tough as Celso's macho father, swaggering across town, spitting into open ditches, turning deals on a pyramid of credit, lying, double-dealing, paying off police. The thrill young Hank must have felt. The dirty, backhanded joy! Todd was just as much in love with the kick of brinkmanship, the exhilaration of pulling off a truly great bluff. Bamboozle. Old Henry's favorite word. "We bamboozled 'em, all right."

And Celso? Todd couldn't get a feel for whether Celso was trying to bamboozle them or whether he'd been doing that to everyone else. The agent's anxious explanation of himself was too transparent an attempt to guarantee his sincerity. Why was Celso doing this? What was in it for him?

"Good job, Celso," Todd said finally. "Very well done. I'd sure like to meet the old man who kept the papers."

Celso glanced at him quickly. "He won't. Everybody else has forgotten about him, and at the moment he's just as happy about that."

"He was an anthropologist with the bureau?"

Celso stuttered for a moment, as if he was trying to phrase something subtly. Then he shrugged and said, "He calls himself a failure."

The man took shape in Todd's imagination, and for the first time he believed Celso might be telling the truth.

"If you can bring me some papers," Todd said, "I can get them out."

"Presuming there are any people left to benefit," Ignacio put in. But Celso was looking pleased.

"I'll also need the basket," Todd told him. "I don't know of anybody who's seen anything like the one we saw, and I've been checking the literature too."

Was there a basket? One he could legitimately study, produce, reproduce? Holly might sketch such a basket. He could picture her sketching it. Turning towards him, smiling.

"Sure, I'll get it," Celso said. He spoke so matter-of-factly that Todd finally believed him.

"This has taken a lot of work on your part," he said. "Did you find out if anyone knows where the people have gone?"

"They haven't been heard from. The local hires at the base camp feel they're being watched. I doubt they are, but I always make sure to ask. A little mythology never hurts. And it really fucks with the American." Celso smiled.

"Jefferson?" Ignacio asked.

"He's probably dead." Celso spoke with a surprising undertone of relish, and Todd remembered Ignacio's story of the agent shaking Jefferson in the hospital. Who didn't want his shame to die? Then Celso's pleasure seemed to fade and he got up to walk restlessly around the room.

"The problem is, the old man wants an absolute guarantee he won't be brought into this."

"So I'll say I can't name him," Todd replied. "Which in fact I can't. I've had to protect sources before."

"But it would be much easier to say that Jefferson came to you after finding the people, and brought some of their papers. He's probably dead anyway." Celso was suddenly pleading. "Can't I say you'd do that?"

"Lying is a sin," Ignacio said mildly. "And what's more, you're usually found out."

Todd smiled and repeated, "You've done a good job, Celso. But if you're asking me to help, you've got to go with my experience. Old bones don't like contortions. Believe me, your friend wouldn't be reassured by a complicated story. Just tell him it would be better if he was prepared to come forward, but if he's not, we can manage. The documents are either going to look genuine or they're not. Beyond that, whoever knows about the other missing copies must be afraid another one will surface, and they've probably already thought of a dozen places it might come from. I doubt the old man's identity will be a major issue, but in any case, I know how to protect my sources. Tell him that."

"So you'll take this on yourself?" Celso said.

"You don't have to play a public part in this either, if you don't want to."

Celso blushed and worried at his hands again. He might not want to end up like his old mentor, but that didn't make him brave.

"I'll bring it," he told them, and left.

They still hadn't seen any sign of Celso by the time Holly phoned. Sitting in his hotel room, staring at the receiver on the floor, Todd tried to convince himself he would have had to leave town soon anyway. People were going to start wondering why he was hanging around so persistently. The manager of the local acerola project was already worried by Todd's repeated visits, asking if there was some problem, growing uneasy about his funding. It might be just as well if Celso made his delivery to Ignacio, and Todd arranged to get it later. It was possible that nothing would happen until Holly got back, but if it did, he could always bring the boys along to pick it up.

He pictured the plane blown out of the sky. That wasn't going to happen, but he knew he shouldn't involve the boys, Holly would be furious. Better talk to people in Rio and arrange for a courier, keep Holly happy. Todd sighed: not that anything he did lately seemed to make her happy. What could he do? He kept asking himself the question, even though he didn't think he could do anything. Things may have been difficult lately, but surely she could see she was leading a full life. What more could she want? Could anyone want?

Holly had been so young when they'd married. Todd reminded himself that he'd always expected her to break out one day and decide what she wanted out of life. Well, she was doing that, wasn't she? He'd known he'd have to sit back, let her make her own mistakes. He'd just never realized it would be this painful.

Todd grunted as he bent to pick up the telephone and put it back on the table. Reaching for his agenda, he decided to make his plans over breakfast on the patio, and quickly left the room. Yellow-eyed oropendolas shrieked as he passed, fanning their wings as they strutted along the roof of the hotel. Later this morning he'd take his leave of the acerola project. Maybe he'd make the manager's day by clapping him on the back and congratulating him heartily on his work, making it sound as if they'd passed some crucial inspection. In fact, the project was run efficiently enough, but the manager's hopes for extracting vitamin C from the acerola berries on a scale large enough to be economic were heart-catchingly overblown. Acerola was not the future of the Amazon, although Todd was damned if could figure out what was. He ordered his eggs, jotted some notes. Actually, it wasn't going to take long to extract himself from the Amazon. The problem was Celso. Todd would have preferred to see Celso before he left.

And did, late in the afternoon, as he walked past the pharmacy on the main street of town. The immaculate store was open to the sidewalk, its metal grate pushed to one side. Under banks of fluorescent lights, plastic bottles of shampoo and mouthwash seemed to pulsate. In their midst stood Celso, feet planted wide apart, frowning at the viscous green bottle in his hand.

Todd took out his handkerchief and mopped his forehead, sitting down on a wooden bench in front of the store. His heart was pounding. What should he do? When Celso struck out for the cash desk at the back of the pharmacy, Todd got up to buy a coconut ice from a sidewalk vendor. As the vendor prepared his ice, Todd watched the agent share a joke with his pharmacist. They were laughing. What next?

Todd had to talk with Celso, however briefly. Counting the coins slowly, he paid the vendor and managed to be ambling forward, eating his ice, just as Celso left the pharmacy at his usual fast clip and walked straight into him.

"Watch," Celso cried, dropping his plastic bottle. He and Todd stooped at the same time. Acne medication. Todd got it first.

"Here," he said, though it was really a question.

"With the padre," Celso answered, grabbing the bottle and continuing on his way.

Anyone seeing the encounter would have assumed Celso disliked Todd, and they would have been right. No one said international cooperation was going to be easy, although for once it seemed to be working. Straightening painfully, the sticky ice already melting on his fist, Todd couldn't have been happier. He decided to go straight to Ignacio's church, picturing the basket waiting for him there, the documents, the trip home, the satisfying scandal that would follow.

Except that something was happening down the street. Celso was ducking into an assay office just as Doutor Eduardo came around the corner. Todd wasn't surprised to see the doutor, who seemed to be spending a good deal of time at his nearby ranch, maybe monitoring Mankiewicz's progress in the serra. Celso was being needlessly cautious in avoiding the doutor. If anything, he risked drawing attention to his wish to pass unnoticed. But Doutor Eduardo was talking to a younger man and didn't seemed to have noticed anything.

"Doutor," Todd said politely, as they passed.

"The inevitable Mr. Austen," the old man replied. Close up, Todd recognized his companion as Tânia's son Eric, although Eric didn't seem to recognize him. He wasn't surprised to find them together. They were related, after all. Still, something about the sight of them walking side by side jarred Todd, and he watched them turn a corner before continuing on his way.

"Have they gone?" Celso hissed from the assay office.

"What's your problem?" Todd asked, finishing his ice as he leaned against the outside wall of the office, watching the cars cruise back and forth along the town's one paved stretch of street.

Celso whispered back, "He can see right through you."

"Well, in any case, he's gone."

Celso emerged from the assay office to stand beside Todd, although he wouldn't look at him, and seemed to be muttering to himself. "I don't like the son, either."

"The nephew," Todd said. "His niece's son. Great-nephew, I suppose."

Celso puckered his lips. "Son, too," he answered, and slipped off down the street.
Part Five
21

Holly lay on her back, not far off the trail in the national park on the Beagle Channel. The cropped green turf was so soft underneath she might have been the fairy-tale princess lying on her bed of twenty mattresses. Or maybe the grass was like an animal's pelt. As she stroked it, she was stroking the emerald pelt of the world.

Out of the wind, she was warm in her sweater, her face shaded from the strong, cool sun by one of the white-flowering bushes spaced beautifully throughout the meadow. Rabbits crouched under some of the bushes. When she lifted her hand, the nearest few bounded away.

Receding white daubs of tails. Tails like clouds in the blue sky above. Like the snow on the mountains moving in and out of shadow. The meadow in which she lay was low on a mountainside and surrounded by deciduous forest stretching up and down the generous slope. These southern mountains were as huge and broad as the ones around Vancouver, rumbling wide-shouldered out of the sea to scratch their snowy crests on the sky. Tierra del Fuego was much like home; the air so clean that when the sun shone through the rolling clouds, the world lit up abundantly. But the stunted southern beeches glowed with a yellow-green that was new to her, and the white-flowered bushes were like nothing she had ever seen, their prickly leaves like juniper needles, looking almost glacial.

Home and not-home. Certainly not Rio. Everything was swept here, brushed by the southern wind. It was mid-summer, yet she'd been wearing a jacket on top of her sweater. When had she last worn socks? Or slept as well as she was sleeping under homespun woollen blankets? Making love until she felt as deep as sleep herself.

Jay sat on the grass beside her. She'd intended to do this alone, but he'd shown up in the transit lounge in the Buenos Aires airport. He hadn't guessed which flight she'd take from Rio to Buenos Aires, but there weren't many connecting flights south to Tierra del Fuego, and near the gate for the afternoon departure, he'd sat down in the next seat, wearing headphones and making a point of ignoring her.

Holly couldn't believe his impertinence. Why wouldn't everybody just leave her alone? Could she have said more bluntly that she needed to be alone? Shey turned back to her novel, deciding to ignore him too, and taking a while to realize she was reading one paragraph over and over. Her life had turned surreal. Here they were in an unknown country: her ignoring him, him ignoring her, while above them a digitized female voice made suggestive announcements about airline schedules. It was so absurd that Holly finally smiled, and Jay smiled back, taking off his headphones. A sense of humour was a sad impediment to getting rid of a man.

Yet Holly was glad now that Jay had surprised her. It was a relief to travel with an easy-going man: tidy in hotel rooms, polite to clerks, persuasive instead of demanding. He even spoke half-decent Spanish. Holly felt she'd been rewarded with Jay, although she also found herself growing afraid she would lose him. It was a fresh, sweetly-wounded feeling, unlike anything she'd known before. Todd would never leave her — even now, if he knew. She cringed to think of it, but it made little difference. The moment Jay sat down beside her in the airport, Holly knew she would probably move with him to New York. An equal partner for her, an affable father for the boys. He made her feel so desirable, a slim pretty figure slight against him, always conscious now of his height, his masculinity, his pleasant male usefulness.

Especially the usefulness. Holly's idea of the trip had been to fly into Ushuaia, on the Argentine side of Tierra del Fuego, and simply see what would happen. All she'd brought by way of guides were a Spanish phrase book and her copy of the Voyage of the Beagle, which at least had helped her pack the proper clothes. She'd expected a sleepy little place: Ushuaia on the Beagle Channel, the southernmost town on earth. She was flying almost to Cape Horn, within thought of Antarctica itself.

Ushuaia turned out to be a duty-free port serving thousands of tourists, many of them Argentines, most brought in by cruise ships en route to Antarctica. Holly wasn't sure what she would have done if Jay hadn't reserved a room in one of the overbooked hotels, or how they would have been able to do any travelling without the car he'd had waiting. It also helped that he liked maps. How had he put it? Maps were geographical scores, he said; the transcribed rhythms of the earth.

Holly would have been just fine without him. She would have come up with a room and a car, and she was a good driver perfectly capable of getting around on her own. Yet Jay was such an agreeable companion. Literally agreeable. He didn't care where they went — it was all new to him — and he seemed to have an infinite capacity for losing himself in thought, scribbling in his notebook or listening to tapes; entirely unlike the restless Todd, with his constant push toward what came next.

She knew she shouldn't compare them; it wasn't fair. Nor would Jay necessarily come out the winner, and she wasn't sure what that said about her. Would she really move to New York? Jay sighed with contentment and lay down beside her, throwing one arm across his face like a sleepy child. Holly wanted to pillow her head on his shoulder, although she knew what would come of that, or what she would want to. They'd been spending the long austral dusk exploring each other. Jay was a happy lover, laughing and energetic. Holly couldn't keep off him, and was burning by the time he entered her. Bruised when he withdrew. All this in opaline light coming through the languorous curtains.

But there was still this edge of fear getting her out of bed every morning, refusing to let her luxuriate there, to wallow all day. She was increasingly afraid of boring him by being too available, and slipped from under his arm to order breakfast, waking him to a set table and excursions intricately planned. This was their fourth day, and every morning so far she'd managed to be businesslike. Maps spread, routes noted. She talked as if she was glad she had a long day to paint in. The sun set at 11 o'clock, although their subtle, longed-for dusk lingered much later.

Jay, who didn't sleep well, told her their first morning that it only stayed dark for two or three hours. But he'd been ready to drive out after breakfast, heading east along the channel on a road that sometimes ran high on the side of a mountain and sometimes dipped down to a pebbly beach. The day was clear and calm, and at one small cove, far enough from town that there were no other tourists, they parked the car to picnic on the beach. Near the lapping water, Holly found golden lichen growing on the black volcanic rocks, and sat down on the crackling surface to watch big ducks paddling off-shore. Someone had once built a shack at the back of the cove, and amid the wrecked and rotting wood, daisies were growing wild.

She could paint this. Paint the shack and rocks and the lichen that would have grown here when Darwin walked on beaches like this. She'd felt almost drunk on the colours and the salty air. But best of all was a midden on the crescent of land just behind the beach, a grass-covered mound that must have been left by native people years ago. She'd never seen a midden before, but from Todd and her long-ago courses she knew what it was, and when she'd dug into the mound with a driftwood stick, she'd found the broken mussel shells and pieces of charred wood she'd known would be there. Maybe Darwin had been here, and maybe Fuegia Basket had once feasted on mussels from the broken shells which Holly now held in her palm.

Fuegia's people lived further west, at the Pacific end of the Beagle Channel in what was now southern Chile. But Fuegia seemed to have travelled widely even after Captain FitzRoy brought her home. In 1873, she visited a missionary named Thomas Bridges in Ushuaia, when he was the only white man there. Fuegia arrived in a convoy of canoes. By then, she was in her fifties and the mother of at least two adult children born during her marriage to York Minster. York had been dead for years, killed in revenge for murdering a rival, and when Fuegia met Bridges, she was newly married to an 18-year-old man.

Tânia, Holly thought, picturing a young man buoyed by the forceful words of an older woman. Fuegia spoke to the missionary in both Yámana and Alacaluf, and forty years after she'd last seen Darwin, she still remembered a bit of English. She was strong and happy, paddling away after a week in her canoe with its carefully tended fire at the centre. Yet her story ended sadly, as too many real-life stories did. By the time Bridges met Fuegia again ten years later, during a trip he made to the western islands, she was sickly and feared that her relatives would kill her. Tabacana: the Yámana she lived with practised mercy killing of the old.

"Are they coming after me next?" Tânia said.

Holly brought out her paints to catch the colour of the lichens as Jay read. She drew grey-black rocks and mustard-coloured encrustations in repeated whorls. There wasn't a pattern in the repetition. She couldn't see a pattern. All she saw was one whorl after another, at once alike and different. Home and here. Tânia and Fuegia. Darwin walking a beach much like this, yet seeing what Holly did not. He wrote of fetid Rio as the land of renewal, and clean-swept Tierra del Fuego as the home of moral rot.

The drove inland their second and third days, crossing the mountains into grasslands, pampas that was the southern extension of Patagonia, where Darwin had once ridden with the gauchos, hunting new species. For some reason Holly found nothing to paint there, although she copied swatches of colour for crafts. Maybe she needed people in her art, and the pampas felt so empty. Dry grass was blown flat by heedless scudding winds. The few distant houses looked so lost. She needed to paint from a different perspective, a greater closeness.

Jay, she thought.

By the fourth day, she felt lethargic as she lay on the grass. Too little sleep, too little focus. She didn't even bother trying to paint, although she'd insisted once again that they drive out after breakfast. West, this time, to the deserted park. What she really liked was driving with Jay. He seldom talked, and they could listen to the same music on the tape deck. She didn't have much to say herself, although she'd taken to carrying a dictionary she'd found, reading him snatches when something caught her eye. It was a blue paperback, badly scuffed, with square gold letters on the cover: Yamana-English Dictionary, by Rev. Th. Bridges. Thomas Bridges, the missionary whom Fuegia had once sought out.

Actually, her name was Yokcushlu. FitzRoy had written it down, just as Bridges had written down one of the languages she spoke, preserving a lost subtlety that Darwin never suspected. Darwin insisted that people who greeted him in Tierra del Fuego shouted only "yammerschooner" in mad and maddening repetition. But Holly read out their insights: that aian meant a dry wood fit for fuel, firewood, and with a prefix became cancer. Makaiiual-apai meant two or more children together, and with a suffix it turned into anything to do with the English. Amagon-a was the womb, and especially its contents. Ova, embryo, buds of leaves or flowers. It could mean budding, in bud, pregnant, or — how beautiful! — to enter into quiet waters between islands.

Ateakhaina, the dictionary said. With the suffix kipa or tuku it meant to be married, to be joined to a wife. Also to be caught as tree catches a kite, or a net is caught on a bush.

She didn't read Jay that one.

"Yokcushlu," Holly whispered, lying on the grass. She hadn't meant Jay to hear, but for all his tranquillity, he never missed a breath she took. He sat up and hooked his arms around his legs, waiting for her to continue.

"There was one incident near here," she said, levering herself up on her elbows. "Darwin was out in a smaller boat quite far from the Beagle. They beached the boat and were heading inland when he suddenly ran back and pulled the boat further onto the beach. A few minutes later, a glacier calved an iceberg into the sound, and if he hadn't moved the boat, it would have been smashed by waves.

"Imagine being sharp enough to see the crack. I think it was out of sheer terror. If he'd been shipwrecked, he would have had to live like the Yámanas. He kept emphasizing how different they were from Englishmen, but he also must have suspected they weren't. Amazing how you can hold two ideas in your mind at the same time."

"Only two?" Jay asked.

"So he came up with his theory that species adapt to local circumstances. But he never claimed this meant progress. There are those species of fish that lost their eyesight in caves. Where's the progress in that? Regressing into the future, you said."

Holly sat fully upright, hugging her knees, feeling the guilt encroach again with memories of Rio. But Jay only smiled.

"Myself, I was thinking how long it's been since I just lay on the grass. When I was a kid, I used to lie in the back yard for hours poking around after four-leaf clover."

Holly smiled back, distracted. "And did you ever find one?"

"I probably did. I'm sure I did. But what I mainly remember is tearing the middle leaf in half and trying to convince my mother it was the real thing."

Holly smiled more vaguely, and as she drew back into her thoughts, Jay said, "She never even pretended to believe me."

A picnic in the park, he thought. Elegant, with Holly. She was such fine china, expecting to be cherished, and never pausing to think how easy it was to get broken.

Lying back on the turf, Jay considered once again his invented Zen koan. How did you get inside china without cracking it, destroying its value? You became like water flowing and took the cup's shape. But he was never as fluid as he wanted to be. Despite his best efforts, he still suffered from angularities of temperament. He was rough around the edges. Clumsy, too — he'd broken what he valued before. And knowing this left him half paralyzed with desire. How do you move? What moves to make?

He'd enjoyed these past days driving her around. He liked the driving more than the scenery, with music going loud on the tape deck, although something appealed in the grasslands north of the mountains. He would have thought she'd like it too. Golden grass and sapphire sky, teal-coloured lakes and hills in the distance that were always purple. But he was the one who liked it there; the isolated Argentine and Chilean border posts separated by a long stretch of no-man's-land. It was on the Chilean side near a deserted place called Useless Bay that he'd seen pink flamingos in an alkaline lake. Damn lawn ornaments in the middle of Tierra del Fuego. And three German trekkers in black greatcoats rising at a crossroads to look down at him like gloomy death.

He'd blown a tire on the gravel roads. There was only one spare, and after changing it, he'd driven carefully up the local version of the Rockies. By the time they got partway down, Holly was showing a tender bruised fatigue around the eyes, so they put in for the night at a hunting lodge and she disappeared to bed, while he had his Spanish omelette and his glass of wine, then went out at 11 o'clock at night on the trail leading back into the forest.

The sun was still shining from below the horizon, casting the trees in a golden light that drifted down to the spongy ground. There was a damp smell of humus. He walked up a hill, jumping one rotting log and finding some old machine parts. Wheels, spindly things where Sleeping Beauty must have pricked her finger. He couldn't sleep as easily as Holly; he needed this walk. And had as companions two sassy little birds that followed him, hopping from bush to bush. Their song was just chatter, and he hadn't heard anyone speak of indigenous Fuegian music. There was nothing for him here, but Brazil was going well, and they'd tour the following winter. He had hopes for the Brazil project; enough to feed his idea of relocation. He had it all pictured, including the house in Connecticut with the big rooms Holly could fix up. Her kids would like it there. They could have more kids; he liked children. Perhaps only in theory, but he suspected most people started out that way. She could also have some sort of studio out back to pursue her art while he was on the road. The studio idea was a bit fuzzy, but the general set-up was something he'd wanted for a while. Meeting Holly had simply made it possible. The shock of her beauty in that tasteful house. I could do this, he'd thought.

As could she. His problem was to prompt her over the edge. To make her see she wanted it, too. She wanted a change, but people never really wanted a big change. They thought they did, but they really only wanted an improved version of what they had — in her case the house, the kids, the intermittent husband, the artistic career. She was too fond of having things her way to want a husband with the time and inclination to interfere in her department. But she was also tired of the one she had, the Puritan Father. She wanted to let loose, have a little fun. Not that her tastes were lavish; he wasn't going to disappoint her with his earning power the way he'd disappointed his former wife. Mainly Holly wanted to be appreciated, which wasn't too hard. She would hold up certain standards, but Jay was conscious of needing this. A scaffolding. A cup to flow into.

How did you put it?

Out above the hunting lodge, the dusk grew moist. It wasn't raining. The moisture had no weight or temperature, so gentle it wasn't even a drizzle. Dew falling: he'd heard of this. It beaded in the hair on his wrists, glistening there, so leaned back his head and extended his arms praying, Clean me.

"This turf is a little like an English park," he said. "A manor park out in the country."

"I think it's probably the result of the rabbits," Holly answered. "Which were introduced later. Darwin wouldn't have seen anything like it."

"He would have seen the rain. It's going to rain. You ready to leave?"

"I think so," she answered. "I think I will, Jay. Yes."

He rolled over quickly to see her face. Avoiding his eyes, Holly reached down to unzip his fly, finding him limp and doughy inside, although he quickly hardened.

"You mean New York?" he asked.

But Holly only bit his lip and massaged until he groaned, pumping into the damp moss. Afterwards, he realized the rain had started. He knelt to zip himself, ready to leave. Yet Holly surprised him by kicking off her shoes.

"We start out naked," she said, and pulled off her sweater. Methodically she worked down the buttons of her blouse, throwing it off, the brassiere on top, her pants, ignoring him as the cold rain drove harder. Finally she stood unfettered as a Yámana woman, Yokcushlo home from the enslaved morro, greeting the sky with arms spread wide. He could only watch. He could have watched her forever. Rain slicked her smooth skin, her open mouth, her tossed hair, falling down the lean line of her neck, her shoulders, arms, coursing off her puckered nipples like twin cascades of milk and pearls.

"I love this place," she yelled, ready to leap toward freedom.

Back in their hotel room, late at night, the telephone rang to break their satiated silence. Holly answered, having phoned her maid in Rio with the number. Otherwise, Jay knew it could only be his business manager, who was not unused to finding women in his room.

Hearing whatever voice, Holly looked annoyed at first, then puzzled, and then she froze. Jay got up, but she waved him off angrily. Then she stumbled backwards, sank onto the bed and moaned.
22

It started with Cida opening the gate that night. Not quite started: she'd been waiting for them to come and escort Doutor Todd to a necessary meeting, having been asked to cooperate by telephone that morning.

"He isn't home yet," she said. "Would you like to come inside and wait?"

"Shut up," one hissed, hurting Cida's feelings. Having agreed to cooperate, she'd thought out her part, and meant for anyone eavesdropping to assume that Doutor Todd was expecting these men and had told her to make them comfortable until he arrived.

Three of them. Three malandros, the oldest one almost handsome in his black leather jacket, which must have hidden the gun. He'd been in houses like this before, and took a professional look around before throwing himself in the doutor's favourite armchair and mumbling into his cell phone. The younger two were brothers, one tall, one shorter. The tall one sat on the edge of his seat, stiff as a puppet, while the other ranged around the room, trailing his hand along the backs of the sofas and running his fingers over the edges of bookshelves. He picked up a mango from the bowl and smelled it; reached for a picture frame and rubbed it between his fingers like a coin.

"That work is by an artist whose paintings hang in the Museum of Modern Art," Cida said, adding even more pointedly, "Tânia Gusinde de Ramsay," so the malandro snatched his hand from the frame as if it bit.

Doutor Todd seemed to be running late. How typical of him to cause other people problems. Cida had been prepared to admire Doutor Todd when she first came to work in this house. He was so handsome and always polite, pausing to thank her for bringing his coffee before taking the first sip. But he never noticed her, never saw her, not even once. This bothered Cida, and she'd started answering him in a childish, cheerful, satirical voice. He hadn't noticed that, either, although Dona Holly had, and failed to speak to her about it. That was the way things were in this house, and at first Cida put it down to the fact of Doutor Todd being rich and famous and the dona very beautiful; an arrangement often seen on television which meant the man was babied and put up with and worked around as much as possible by his resourceful wife.

Then it turned out the doutor wasn't famous, which also called the riches into question. It began to seem as if Dona Holly had the money —an even more interesting scenario. She'd been desperately in love with the doutor when he was younger, and his blond good looks had betrayed her into marriage with a man cold at heart. It was well known blondes were beautiful but icy, which Cida should have remembered before expecting him to wink at her. Nor could she blame Dona Holly for the musician. The musician had a much warmer temperament, flirting agreeably when he came to the house, yet never crossing the line to imply Cida was cheap. He was also planning to move to New York, which he'd mentioned when waiting for the senhora during his most recent visit. Cida had been restored from her despair by the musician's brief lesson in geography, during which she'd come to understand that New York could prove to be a far more attractive destination than Canada; Canada being an unimaginable place, as cold as the doutor's bloodless heart.

Not that this was the reason she'd let the men inside. They'd been here for more than an hour now, and were getting restless, especially the one who had fidgeted right from the start. He was still on his feet and pacing the room while punching one fist into the other. Even the stone-faced brother had started clasping and unclasping his hands, while the gunman tapped his foot irrhythmically on the floor. Despite the leather jacket, he wasn't really all that handsome. He'd snorted at Cida's offer of coffee, and she wished they would leave. But she'd agreed to let them in after understanding the direction the request was coming from. Or rather, having understood the direction, she knew she didn't have any choice. Doutor Todd needed a talking to. He'd been meddling in Brazilian affairs — as she could well imagine. Still, Cida had made them promise that he wouldn't get hurt, and congratulated herself for making the effort. Not that she believed them. But being a foreigner, he wasn't going to get himself killed, either. Neither killed nor pretty; he wasn't going to be left pretty. But Cida preferred not to split hairs, and only wanted to hear the doutor's key rattling in the lock.

As soon as it did, the gunman was going to point his pistol at her head to make it look as if they'd forced their way in. Her suggestion. The thrilling idea of steel on her temple; of struggling, not too much.

"Caralho!" said the gunman. "What's keeping him?"

"It's not my fault," Cida said. "His meetings aren't usually that long."

The nervous one rapped his knuckles sharply on the wall.

"You want to wake up the kids?" she asked. He jumped back, jamming his fists into his pockets. This one she could handle. He kept looking at her. And one was really all you needed, especially when the second was a brother, probably older, presumably indulgent.

Unquestionably stoned. Both brothers were high on something, though not the gunman, who kept talking into his cellular.

"Caralho!"

If he was going to tap his tennis shoes, he could at least try for some rhythm.

"Imported," she said. "Those must have cost you."

"Big eyes."

It was late and humid. The gunman was sweating now in his unseasonable jacket. She was getting impatient for them to leave.

"What happens if he doesn't get home?" she asked. "He knows I'm with the children. What if he stays somewhere else tonight?"

The gunman turned to her quickly. "He does that?"

"There's always a first time. And considering that the madame has her musician, maybe she knew he had his own caso, who knows how it started. He isn't bad looking, and maybe — "

"Shut up."

Injured this time, Cida told him, "I'm not responsible for his comings and goings. This wasn't my idea."

The gunman muttered into his cellular, listened for a moment, then pushed down the antenna and put the phone into his jacket pocket.

"Get the kids."

"What do you mean?"

But he wasn't looking at Cida. He was looking at the brothers, who were heading toward the stairs.

"What are you talking about?" Cida asked, grabbing the nearest shoulder. "They didn't do anything. They're babies. What's he going to talk to them about?"

The gunman came up behind her and twisted her arm behind her back.

"You're hurting me!"

"Worse than that if you don't shut up."

The brothers disappeared up the stairs as she struggled. "They're babies. This hasn't got anything to do with them. They never did anything."

When the brothers came back, each held one of the boys with a hand clapped hard over his mouth. All Cida could see were blue eyes over bent knuckles.

"You're smothering them!" she screamed. "You'll kill them." Flailing at the gunman.

"Shut up!" he told her.

Cida reeled from a slap on the face, but was able to spin free and try to grab Evan, kicking the nervous brother's leg and trying to pull the hand away from her baby's innocent mouth.

"You leave him."

But a searing jerk at her scalp made her reel. He had her by the hair, and pulled her off balance before throwing her to the floor. Tennis shoes kicked at her chin, her breasts, her belly.

"Babies," she whimpered, and saw retreating tenis as she passed out.
23

Todd didn't know where to start, what to do. Coming in, he'd found Cida on the floor. He found a pulse, then pivoted while still on his haunches to reach for the phone.

The boys! He sprang toward the stairs, pounding up before telling himself to be quiet, they might be there. He knew they weren't there. He saw rumpled yawning sheets in the darkness, then threw on the lights to be sure. Telephone. Call the police.

Bad idea. He pounded into the bathroom to wet a cloth, then ran downstairs again to wipe Cida's face. She moaned. Was she bleeding? Indelicate to look. Necessary. Blood and a belly quivering with labour. What was she? Seven, eight months?

She moaned, "Zinho." An unattached diminutive. Bébézinho? Although at least she was starting to come around.

"Cida, listen to me. You've got to tell me what happened."

"Malandros."

Which he'd always thought meant layabouts, lazy and unthreatening, when Doutor Eduardo was anything but. Why had he bothered to ask what happened? Hadn't he known exactly what was happening the moment he'd seen the girl on the floor? But why did the old man take the boys? Why hadn't he blown up the bloody plane instead? Doutor Eduardo was losing his grip. He'd let so much time elapse that Todd hated to think how many copies of the document he'd distributed. Safety in numbers: he'd given a copy to everyone he trusted. Obviously to one who shouldn't have been trusted. How in God's name could Todd get back all the copies? And with them, the boys?

"Mamaiiiii," Cida moaned. Of course, the mother. Again Todd reached for the telephone, then fumbled in his pocket for his address book. After which he paused, thinking who the mother worked for.

The mistress will help you.

He didn't have much choice.

"I'd like to speak to Senhora Tânia, please. Senhor Austen." Amazing how calm he sounded.

"Yes, hello?" Tânia answered lazily.

"It's Todd Austen calling."

"Yes, they told me."

He paused. "Can I trust you, Tânia?"

"Yeah, sure," she answered. Was she tired or drugged?

"I've got Cida badly beaten up here. And your uncle has my boys."

In no more than a heartbeat, her voice changed completely. "This can't continue," she said.

"Idiot. Veado. Who said you could tell them to bring the kids?"

"Our man wasn't coming home. So now we do a simple trade. Much neater plan, when you think about it."

"You think about whose plan it was," Seu José replied.

"If it works, he's happy. And I say it works."

Powell walked toward the stairs to the second floor, where the children were being held. "I'll just look in on them. Make sure the arrangements — "

"You don't get a step closer," said Seu José, whose great-grandson no longer liked fishing, or anything else his helpless family tried.

Cida's mother and the driver took the girl to the hospital, planning to tell the doctors that she'd fallen downstairs. So many women had falls, even in houses without staircases, that the doctors were likely only to roll their eyes, do what was necessary, maybe rest their heads in their hands and quietly curse the world. God protect the girl from the persistent inquiries of a zealot, Tânia thought, and looked across the room at Todd.

"I can't get all the copies back," he repeated. "People have probably made copies of the copies by now."

"Of course they have. He must want something else."

"I can't tell him where it comes from originally because I don't know."

"So you had helpers." Tânia pursed her lips and tilted her head to one side. "For a start, he probably wants to know who they are."

"But he'll kill them. At least one of them. My God, or the boys if I don't tell. Why couldn't they just have taken me?"

"You see, Todd, I would have expected they would. This is why I'm puzzled. Taking the babies requires too much back-and-forth. It would be far easier to get what they wanted from you in person." Tânia pursed her lips again, this time half humorously. "Not easier for you, of course. But there is a greater degree of elegance in the more direct approach. By making it so complicated, they've brought in a number of variables. Me, for example."

The ransom call would come through soon enough, but Tânia knew Todd was right in trying to anticipate what they'd ask. She was also certain it had something to do with the origin of the document. When collecting his antiques, his art — regrettably, none modern — her uncle insisted on a super-human record of provenance from dealers. She'd heard this called just another example of his controlling nature; also an urge to pick the wings off flies. Clearly, it was another chance to parade his knowledge. But Tânia also recognized, as perhaps no one else could, a second son's obsession with succession and legitimacy. At her father's funeral, she'd felt battered by his mournful exultation as he repeated, "The head of the family now."

Before this, there was what she'd learned during those embarrassing afternoons with her dying mother, who had insisted on being arranged in her enormous creamy bed dressed in yards and yards of even creamier lace, the French scent never quite disguising the sweet smell of terminal cancer, her gay laughter throwing both the fear and the fever into even brighter relief. Her mother had been a delicious young woman; spendthrift and exuberant, a teasing, conspiratorial friend to her friends and a burning candle to men. She was precious, vivacious, so very loved and shallow. How agonizing it had been to be her rawboned, clever daughter, all nose and clavicles, hunched over to protect herself — unsuccessfully, as it turned out.

Her mother had talked about little beyond sex and intrigues, with her daughter as much as her girlfriends. She'd even burdened Tânia with the excruciating knowledge that her father had formerly exhausted her in bed. And Tânia's uncle:

"Well, and to find out your aunt Leonie wasn't a virgin when he married her! But what did he expect? Both the money and that? My dear! Would he honestly have got her otherwise?"

And so his endless, scourging suspicion about his children's paternity (in the case of the third girl, probably warranted.) How odd it was, that her uncle was most convinced of the legitimacy of his illegitimate son Eric, having had cause to be certain that Tânia was a virgin when he'd first entered her bed. What a proud turkey cock he'd been, marrying her off when she was pregnant to an available cousin — homosexual, as Tânia hadn't recognized at the time, but oh! such a beautiful boy, of whom she'd been so fond, poor child, poor children. He'd tried, but the marriage he had hoped would shelter him only led to endless, undermining titters about his cuckold's horns, a veado's horns; about the counterfeit paternity. In this way her uncle managed to muddy the waters around Eric's birth so there had been no public scandal, but no important doubt either of his own precedence.

"I imagine my uncle plans to prove your document is a forgery," Tânia said.

"A forgery?"

"Then it wouldn't matter how many copies you'd circulated, it could never be used."

Todd shook his head. "Everyone who knows anything about these things says it looks genuine."

"And will feel very disillusioned with you, my dear, when someone comes forward admitting that he forged it."

Todd thought for a minute. "Your uncle could arrange that anyway."

"Believably. A trail of proof. Provenance," she said. "Please understand I know what I'm talking about."

"I do," he said gently, glancing away, so that Tânia felt her old girlish shame at being the object of gossip. But perhaps he'd also glanced away when they'd tittered to him. Todd Austen was a gallant man and Holly a little fool. Yet Tânia had been so much worse than a fool she could hardly reproach Holly.

"Well," she said.

"I don't know if I should tell you I saw your son with your uncle up in Amazonas a couple of days ago."

"That too," she said, and closed her eyes. "Well."

When the telephone finally rang, Todd was indeed asked for the names of those who had given him the document, and told he would have to deliver the original to a designated location at a later time.

"I'll meet you with the document and the information you want, but only in exchange for the children."

The man on the telephone seemed to repeat what he'd said to someone behind him. He was just a voice, an anonymous conduit.

"You don't get the children until the sources check out." More whispering. "Which you give me now."

"You don't get anything until I have the children."

A consultation. "You get tonight to think about it."

"No, don't — "

Dial tone. Todd leaned his forehead on the receiver.

"What do we do now?" he asked. "Phone your uncle?"

"My uncle left São Paulo last night to meet my aunt in Paris. But there are other calls we have to make. Starting, I'm afraid, with Holly."
24

She hadn't even looked at Jay after the phone call. Once she'd hung up, she sat on the hotel bed, staring out the window at the twilight sky. From their room they could see the Beagle Channel. A depth of cold water, thrown out of focus by the retreating grey light. As she raked her nails through her hair, Jay tried to sit down beside her.

"Don't touch me," she said, darting off the bed and backing away from him, her arms outstretched to protect herself.

"It's all right, Holly," he said soothingly, slowly walking toward her.

"It's not," she said, and when he'd backed her into the wall she lunged at him, beating his chest with her fists; pummelling as hard as she could while he tried to grasp her forearms. "You get away from me. You shouldn't be here. I shouldn't be here. It's my fault. It's all my fault."

"It isn't your fault, Holly. It's not," he soothed, getting a strong grip on her wrists and forcing them back against the wall. Her chest heaved. "It's not your fault, Holly. It just isn't."

He dropped her arms when she seemed quieter, and she slapped him across the face.

"It's not my fault, either," he said, rubbing his stinging cheek..

"So whose fault is it?" she asked. "Whose fault do you think it is these assholes have my children?" She glared at him, hands clenched, quivering.

"Offhand, I would say the fault lies with the assholes. You don't kidnap children. There's just no excuse."

She dropped her arms. "It's true," she said. For a moment they were in calm and reasonable agreement. Holly saw them as two ships lying close at anchor, mirrored in steely water and still, peaceful, separate. Also ready to sail away from each other, an inevitable progression, not sad. Then she remembered her children.

"It's all my fault," she cried, and collapsed against him in agony.

Holly spent the night alternating between hysteria, useless phone calls to Rio and feverish, misdirected efforts to pack. She refused to take a sleeping pill, but Larkin put a couple in her coffee and she passed out on the sofa. When she woke up, she heard him pleading into the telephone.

He seemed to be trying to get her a flight out of Ushuaia that afternoon. The flights were all booked, but he was trying for a seat in disjointed Spanish that she could only half understand. Something about Rio, children, an accident. She thought he was saying the children had been hurt in a car accident. Two children; he seemed to be emphasizing the number as if this made it worse. Would it have been better if they'd taken only one of the boys? She began losing herself in the horror of the question, then pulled up when she realized he was talking as if they were his children too. He was telling some sad story about their children having been in a car accident after he and Holly had slipped away on vacation. Now both boys were in hospital, sobbing for their mother. Holly felt like shaking him. It was all a performance. Levering herself up, she saw him rhythmically punch the air, getting the beat right for his flat-footed male upset. Even the quaver in his voice was modulated. How could she ever have trusted him? He was making a performance piece out of the terrible fate of her children; a piece with such dramatic promise, so elemental — sentimental — that Holly could imagine him recording it in his hateful little scribbly notebook, then reworking and refining it until he could achieve a rare display of ironic pathos onstage.

When he finally hung up, she asked him, "You don't think you're coming with me, do you?" and stood up.

He looked over at her and sucked his cheeks. "Holly," he said finally, "I just managed to get you the first flight out of here this afternoon, even though they insisted they had no seats available for the next five days. And yes, I got a seat for myself. I don't particularly want to stay here. I never had any plans to come here in the first place, as far as that goes. But I also thought you might want some help."

Holly closed her eyes, trying to calm down.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I suppose you had to pump it up. Of course you did." She dropped back on the couch and rubbed one foot against the other. "So itchy," she said. "Last night, my legs felt so itchy that I literally couldn't stand it. I don't think I can stand it; my mind's just racing. Everything looks so sharp out the window it's almost cutting my eyes. I think I'm on the edge of going crazy."

Coming over, Larkin said kindly, "That's what your friend Darwin said about this place. Strange, isn't it? What lasts."

Holly half laughed, half sobbed. "I don't know what I've done to my children. I don't know anything. All I want in the world is to go home. I want this whole thing never to have happened."

"Well, it did."

Holly didn't know how he could be so cruel. She stared up at him, and slowly realized he thought she meant their relationship. Poor man. He looked distant as he worked out the next steps.

"You are going home, aren't you, Holly?"

"Yes," she replied. "I have to, Jay. Go home. For good, as they say."

He sat down and tried to put his arms around her, but Holly didn't want him to.

"I'm sorry," she said, shrugging to get loose.

"Progressing backwards, aren't we?" He got up to walk over to the window, looking so bitter that Holly hated herself. It was true, the affair never should have happened, but she was glad it did. Now she knew what it was like to play the great artist. The great male artist, randy as Pan. Time to invent a female version, wasn't it?

"I'm sorry," she repeated. "Or I was. A sorry creature, I'm afraid."

"Stop it."

Holly went to stand beside him, leaning against his shoulder until he put an arm reluctantly around her, then held her close, breathing through her hair. It was a wintry summer evening, gossamer and grey. She loved him, although she was a little disappointed in herself because of it. They would have been happy together, popular, and second rate. There were worse fates, of course, and it seemed likely she was going to live one.

"We've got to finish packing," she said.

This time she was calm and he was clumsy, unable to shut his suitcase over jumbled clothes.

"Fuck!" he yelled, punching it closed. Then he shook his head and smiled, his blue eyes clearing. "I'm sorry too."

It was a long trip. It was past midnight when they got to Rio and could stumble stiff-legged out of the plane. Holly was surprised when Larkin piled all of their luggage onto one cart, following her through the opaque arrivals door where Todd was waiting, poor man, poor men. Let him wait just a moment longer.

"Good-bye, Jay," she said, extending a hand.

"I hope it goes well," he said. "I'm sure they'll be fine."

He kissed her cheek, glanced at Todd, and took his suitcase from the luggage cart, walking toward the airport taxi counter, where Holly lost sight of him in the crowd.Turning, she asked her husband, "Is there any news?"

Todd couldn't look at her, but he mouthed, "No." Then he drew himself up and grabbed her suitcases before walking outside. Trailing behind him, Holly knew she'd been absurd, telling herself that she could fly when she was really falling, falling down to the blood-spattered ground. Just look what she did to the ones who had to catch her.
25

Todd didn't know what was taking them so long. Back in the living room, he avoided the eyes of his silent wife while thinking obsessively about the other kidnapping she'd described. The boy who had been taken from the bottom of their street had been held for eleven days. Eleven days! The full horror hadn't registered until now. In just two days, Todd felt he'd aged ten years. It was cool for high summer, but he still felt as if he were suffocating. The kidnappers were letting them hang, spacing their calls out meanly, and then only telling them to wait for further instructions. Were they hoping Todd would get in touch with some of his friends and advise them to disappear? Were his friends being watched? Which friends? Him? Them? Here?

He couldn't have contacted Ignacio anyway. Ignacio had left for a trip deep into his parish even before Todd had flown out of the Amazon. With Ignacio gone, Todd had no way of reaching Celso without letting everyone in the Indian agency know he was looking for him. Celso would be picked up after the first phone call, and killed as soon as they'd extracted the old man's name. After that, of course, it would have been easy to get the old man to say publicly and often that the document had been forged. Failure was addictive. Why should he rise to the occasion now?

If there was an old man. If Celso hadn't made him up. In his worst moments, Todd even suspected Celso of being involved in the kidnapping. It was utterly illogical to think so, except that Celso seemed to like playing both sides of the street. A double, triple agent. And it was strange the kidnappers used an obvious middleman on the telephone, as if they expected Todd to recognize the voice of whoever was in charge. Who was in charge, with Doutor Eduardo in Paris? Seu José? Tânia said Seu José did the dirty work, not the thinking. Not Mankiewicz; he was clean. Powell? Todd shivered at the thought of Powell near his sons. A nasty man, but Todd didn't think he was dirty in quite this way. And as for brains, Eric had scrambled his years before. Celso seemed as good a bet as any.

Or was Todd building up suspicions around Celso as a way to let go of him emotionally? Preparing to sacrifice Celso for the boys? A nervous stutter. Acne medicine. An unattractive man, grating as fingernails, easy to discard.

He couldn't give them Celso, but he had to get his boys. How could he do that? Without even knowing who he was dealing with, he had little hope of playing a winning hand.

Not that he could use those terms with Holly.

"It's my fault," he'd told her, on the way back from the airport.

"Mine, too," Holly answered. "Give me some credit here, Todd." She smiled wanly, then fell into sobs.

Todd knew he should reach for her, but he couldn't stop thinking about the man in the airport. Larkin. He knew his name perfectly well. He was chewing on it. Felt like spitting it, spitting it out.

"All my fault," he mumbled, his mouth so full.

"You never listen," she sobbed, half laughing, half hysterical. "You never listen, and I never manage to say what I mean. Yes, it's your fucking fault. And mine. We're their parents. How could we have let this happen?"

"I hate myself," Todd told her. "Just loathe myself."

"That isn't useful, Todd," she said, trying to regain control. "Tell me what happened. Everything. Right from the start." When he hesitated, she added, "Wouldn't it be a relief?"

It wasn't. Nothing would be, not until she'd told him her half; given him at least a taste of an apology. Yet when Todd finished sketching in his story, she only looked out the window, crying, and he stayed stubbornly silent until they got home. It was Tânia who embraced his wife. An improvement over Larkin, he thought bitterly. Over Holly's shoulder, Tânia said there had been no more calls, leaving Todd to start pacing. He didn't know what else to do. What were they trying to do to him? Exhaust him until he couldn't think straight?

The next morning, Todd was afraid they'd succeeded. He'd spent the night in his armchair. Now he stank, his beard was bristling, and the little he'd eaten had left him with a rumbling case of indigestion. Holly look equally wilted, slumped in the chair across from him. Only Tânia was efficient, grim, determined, and far more energetic than either of them, having slept and showered. She'd staffed the kitchen with a girl from her apartment and filled the garden with dubious-looking men whose vests bulged under the shoulder. As the Austens waited, she worked her cell phone, talking to Cida's oldest brother Wanderley, who was looking around in unspecified ways. Wanderley worked in newspaper distribution, meaning he knew something about information; where to get it, how it spread.

"Are we talking in euphemisms here?" Todd had asked. "Newspaper distribution?"

"Perhaps in metaphor," Tânia said, pursing her lips. "Better not to ask."

She radiated such resolve. Todd half suspected she was enjoying this, finally challenging her uncle, although he'd caught her at odd moment looking deep inside herself, bleak, austere, folded into sadness. Cida had lost the baby. Two months premature, tiny and traumatized. Tânia had said last night that Cida was recovering, and would soon be discharged from the hospital into her mother's care. Now she took another call, her energy visibly receding, and hung up telling them Cida was at home.

"There will be a little funeral," she added, so Holly wailed helplessly, an awful dying sound that made Todd ball his fists together tightly. Yet when she finally stopped, Holly's face was so different she might have been her own sister.

"I didn't ask last night," she said, drying her eyes. "Was it a boy or a girl?"

"A boy," Tânia answered quietly.

"So self-centred," Holly said. "I've got to stop that. We've got to talk about what's really happening here. I'm sorry, Tânia, but I have to ask. Is this all tied together somehow? Antônio, the boys?"

"No," Tânia said, shaking herself out of her reverie. "No, it's not connected, dear, except that my uncle's annoyance with me is probably making him a little more difficult with you. Which means I do owe you something, even leaving aside the babies. But I wonder — did you ever give Todd my message, that my uncle dislikes giving up control."

"I said to be careful."

"Which you weren't," Tânia said, turning to Todd. She shrugged. "I also told Holly some family history. I told her how my uncle became my guardian after my parents died, and took control of the estate. I know now that miracles occurred when he did. Large properties began to move around. From my name, you see, to his. However, I knew nothing about it at the time. I was very young, and soon afterwards, very badly married. My first husband later became a good friend, but when we were young, I'm afraid, we neither of us knew how to act toward the other. Poor Felipe. He's dead now. My Argentine friend Osvaldo was his partner for many years. Holly, you must have told Todd about Osvaldo."

Holly nodded, holding Tânia's eyes.

"I ran off," she admitted. "That's how I got out of it. I met an American and ran off to New York, which was convenient in many ways. Un mariage de convenance. Eventually giving three lovely daughters, so how can I complain? But it was seventeen years before I felt strong enough to divorce him and come back to Brazil. Another brief marriage; we all make mistakes. But I was finally on my own, and decided it was time to take a role in managing my affairs. I'd left it to others until then. My uncle always made a point to have the accountants go over it with me, but I never paid much attention. I was an artist. Why should I care? Not as long as he was giving me what I needed to live on, which he did.

"My uncle likes to spend money too, you see, on his possessions, although he makes a fetish of living simply himself. Cold baths, peasant meals. The best stable in Brazil, however, and a museum of colonial art on the walls.

"And then there was Antônio. The poor boy, you know, he was destined to be the chief executive officer of a large hospital. He would be a surgeon for a few years, and then begin to take a interest in the hospital procedures, become head of his department and so on, until he ran it all. You see how I've constructed an entire life for him in my imagination. I've even given him a young wife, later on, and several charming children. I met Antônio when I was already learning about business; paying attention during my silly little meetings with accountants. My second husband had kept files of everything they sent me in New York, seventeen years worth of documentation. The forensic accountants have it now. It isn't important, except to say that Antônio volunteered to help. He could get into the Brazilian land registry; also trace the publicly-traded companies. I wish you could have seen him, working through those dusty old records. He was remarkably patient, but in the manner of a gambler picking up his cards. You know, the poker face, while slowly putting together a royal flush. Hardly anybody knew that Antônio was a gambler. I mean, he was literally a gambler. His family had no money to speak of. This is what financed his medical education, not to mention that bloody motorcycle. When they killed him, I had no idea if it was some petty debts to a bicheiro or a warning to me."

"So you really thought it was a warning?" Holly asked.

"Yeah, sure, I had a pretty good idea. Then Todd told me you saw my son in the Amazon and I knew it was. He'd picked up something about what I was doing and decided that Antônio was manipulating me, trying to cut him out of his inheritance. He loathed Antônio, and if he got together with my uncle, the mixture of suspicions was probably too volatile. Weak, weak. I lived in New York, but I insisted on educating Eric in Brazil, and in retrospect I realize there was a fissure created in his personality. Into which both he and Antônio fell."

"But Tânia, do you have proof your uncle defrauded you?" Holly asked.

"Yeah, sure. But you don't need to be concerned with that. It's not connected, except maybe in making him more suspicious and difficult. He isn't sure what's going on, but he's worried, and he's probably afraid I'll impoverish him. Maybe that's why he's so eager to develop this mine in the Amazon."

Todd felt surrounded. How could you feel surrounded by only two women?"I won't impoverish him, it's all relative," Tânia said. She puckered her lips. "All relatives," she amended. "He's right, you know. It really is about legitimacy. Succession.

"But why don't they call about the babies?" she asked.

"It's a stupid way of doing things. We ought to make a straight trade, him for the kids. He brings along the documents, his wife takes the boys, and he does it right now. No more delays. Get it back the way it was supposed to be."

"I keep telling you, it's the psychology," Powell said. "This hasn't penetrated yet? We got trained in hostage-taking situations. The airlines brought in experts. You're taught to use psychology, you wear them down. Let them start second-guessing themselves. Get confused, suggestible. They defeat themselves in the long run."

"I don't like the long run," said Seu José. "I like to make it quick."

"And this way no one gets hurt. Okay? We get the information and nobody gets hurt. Are those children getting properly fed? Have you given them what they asked for?"

"I sent one of the boys out," said leather-jacketed gunman, whose name was Gilson.

"Well, where is he?"

"He can't find the right kind of bloody cereal around here. They want Choco-Krispis, and nobody here has it. I had to tell him to get on the bus."

"Choco-Krispis?" said Powell. "What kind of parents let their kids eat crap like that? What about their teeth?"

"You said to get them what they wanted."

"Go ask them if their parents let them eat it."

Exchanging a glance with Seu José, Gilson went upstairs, and found the boys hunched together at the far side of the cot, where the rough walls met in a rougher corner. They had not touched the toys bought for them, which still lay around the cot in their wrappers. Gilson had a boy and a girl himself. He thought this was a bad business.

"Hey," he said. "Does your mother let you eat Choco-Krispis?"

The older answered politely, "We're not allowed to have it in the house, but we can eat it in restaurants on vacation."

"You going to brush your teeth after?"

"Please don't hurt us," the kid said.

Aside from asking for the cereal, the younger boy hadn't spoken a word.

"Here. Take the rabbit," Gilson told him, holding out a stuffed toy. To his surprise, the kid grabbed it. Maybe he was afraid not to.

Gilson didn't like this business at all. Lingering outside the doorway, he heard the redhead say in a demented voice, "Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit."

"We're going to have to brush our teeth," the older one instructed. "When they tell us to, you do a really good job."

"Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit."

They were speaking Portuguese, sounding uncomfortably like Gilson's kids.

"We're going to do everything they ask us to."

Gilson thought, sounding the way parents wished their kids sounded.

"Rabbit-rabbit, rabbit-rabbit."

"Then Daddy will come get us. Daddy will take care of us. We just have to behave and then we'll be all right."

Gilson turned and went back downstairs.

"Not at home, but when they're on vacation," he told Powell.

"So where's the consistency in that? If they're bad for you, they're bad for you."

Powell got up from his chair, slapping his thigh as he walked around the kitchen. It was obvious to Powell that the Austens were terrible parents. They alternately over-indulged the boys and ignored them, filling them with chocolate and then abandoning the lonely little snickers to play with strangers on vacation. You couldn't do that. What was the mother thinking? That the world was a benign and predictable place where you could forget about your kids while you worked on your tan?

The boys were lucky they'd met Powell, who would take far better care of them than their feckless, self-involved parents. He'd been looking for something like this for a while, and wasn't planning to let go of it. First he'd extract the necessary information from the father and get him to deliver the document. Then he'd simply keep the chickadees, take off with them somewhere. As long as he got what he wanted, the big man wouldn't be overly concerned with the details.

Of course, Powell still had to work out a few details of his own. But he knew he could pull this off, one step at a time.

He checked his watch. The hands had worked around to eight p.m.

"Get them on the phone," he said.
26

"Yes," Todd answered.

"I want to talk to your wife."

"What?"

"I want to talk to your wife," the voice repeated.

"Your business is with me, not with her."

But Tânia signalled Todd from the other extension, and he handed the phone to Holly.

"I'm here," she said. "I don't know what you could possibly want with me, but I want to talk to my children."

"They're all right. I was just talking to them."

"But I want to talk to them. You sound like you're on a cell phone. I can't see that there's a problem. Can't you just take the phone to them?"

"You'll get them all upset. And then I'll have to calm them down."

Holly paused.

"They're okay," the voice said. "The younger one has a stuffed rabbit. They want Choco-Krispis. They say you don't have it at home, but they're allowed on vacation."Again Holly couldn't think what to say.

"You want your children back, don't you?" the voice insisted.

"You asked them what kind of cereal they're allowed to have?"

The guy snorted, but in amusement. Contempt?

"You must have children," she said. "You must have children yourself."

"Don't push it."

Holly drew a breath. "I want my babies back," she said.

"So you're going to ask your husband who gave him the document."

Holly asked cautiously, "And what am I going to do after he refuses? If he says he'll only tell you personally? After we have the boys."

"Ask him who gave him the document. Right now."

Holly turned to Todd, pillowing the receiver in her chest.

"Who gave you the document?" she asked. "They insist on knowing, and I have no idea here. No ideas. Tell me how this ends, Todd. Who pays?"

In agony, he snatched the receiver. "The guy's dead," he cried.

"We thought you were going to say that," the voice replied. "We're going to send you something."

He hung up.

"My God," Todd said helplessly, as Tânia sucked her cheeks. He pictured something grisly. But then he heard the fax downstairs in his office distantly ring and answer. Exchanging a confused glance with Holly, he ran down the stairs in time to see the grainy top of a full-page photograph start to emerge from the machine. But there was something wrong with the transmission. Not only was it too dark, the centre of the picture was lost in waving, extended lines. There was absolutely no telling what it was.

The telephone rang a moment later, and again Todd snatched it.

"You thought he was dead," the voice prompted.

"It didn't come through."

"What?"

"It didn't come through properly. It's all wavy."

"Oh, sorry. I'll try again."

As the voice hung up, Todd felt himself slipping toward hysteria. "Who are these clowns?"

"Chega," Tânia said sharply.

When the fax clattered to life again, Todd watched an enlarged photograph of Jefferson emerge. He was holding a Manaus newspaper headlined with stories proving the photograph had been taken only two or three days before.

"He didn't give it to me," Todd shouted, when the telephone rang. "It wasn't him. You let him go. He had nothing to do with this. He's just some poor shit off looking for his wife and daughter. He doesn't know anything about documents. He can't even read."

"You seem glad to learn he isn't dead."

"I never thought he was dead. Why would I think he was dead? Why did you think I did?"

All the while thinking, Celso, Celso.

"Everybody did," the voice answered mildly. "So who died?"

"His name was Antônio Rosa. He was killed a couple of weeks ago in Copacabana. He did research for me in the archives. Let the other poor guy go."

There was a moment of confusion on the other end. Jubilation?

"Now do I get my kids?" Todd yelled.

"That's just the first step," the voice answered. "We'll call back later."

Both Tânia and Holly stared at Todd as he hung up. Female judgments. Female eyes.

"So," Tânia said. She did not look pleased.

"I'm sorry. I never thought they had Jefferson. How could they have got Jefferson?"

"Did he give you the document?"

"Tânia, I can trust you?"

"More to the point, can I trust you? Well. Now they'll have to phone Paris and speak with my uncle." She checked her watch. "It's too late. He'll be asleep, and they won't want to wake him. We have a little time. You might as well tell your wife and me what you haven't, to prevent further surprises."

"I don't know who I can trust," Todd cried.

"Yes, very Macchiavellian," Tânia said. "Slip me in here, and get you to tell me what's going on."

She shook her head, and this time didn't turn to Holly.

"I hate my uncle. Does that answer your question? I gather you know he's the father of my son. Doesn't it sounds dreadful to say that? My uncle is the father of my son. And it was dreadful and I hated him, I hated him very passionately for years."

Tânia looked wounded and bitter, far more vulnerable than seemed possible, with that hawklike nose, the narrow, knowing, lucid eyes. "You've met Eric. It must have occurred to you that, my God, thirty years ago, my uncle was a remarkably handsome man. Sophisticated, with an enormous amount to offer a clever young girl. I always hated him, but I always waited for him, and hated myself even more. You can't possibly imagine how difficult it was for me to run away to New York. And when I came back, after seventeen years, don't you think he was there again? Panicking me into an embarrassing marriage. Why did he have to do this, Todd? What did he need me for, on top of everything else? It's only so lately I've begun crawling out from under him. And then what does he do? He kills my poor Antônio, and before the earth even settles on his grave, he comes and takes your babies. Such innocents, all of them, used by him. If I think about it closely I want to scream."

Tânia's hands shook, and she clenched them. When she opened them again, she looked over at Todd helplessly. "Why not trust me? I haven't ever been able to trust myself, but you might as well try. I am. Holly is."

"I'm sorry, Tânia." Todd replied.

"Well." She shook herself, and after a moment, added briskly, "Wanderley's still trying to get a description of the kidnappers out of Cida. She's just too traumatized, and silly. We'll have to wait. What's the time difference to Paris? Six hours? Nothing will happen until three, four in the morning here. Plenty of time for you to tell me the whole story, please Todd. And then perhaps both of you can get some sleep."

Finally Todd told the whole story. But he couldn't sleep; didn't even bother going upstairs. Hunkered down in his armchair, Todd thought of their bedroom as a parched sort of place, when he was already dying of thirst.
27

"Senhora?"

It was Cida's brother on the cell phone.

"Wanderley, meu filho," Tânia said. "I hope this is good news."

"I have an address."

"My God, what brilliance. But how can you be sure?"

"I've been talking to my sister."

"Yes?"

"Unfortunately, I have to tell you that the visit she received yesterday wasn't entirely unexpected."

"My God."

"She was phoned that morning. She didn't want to say who called at first. She was afraid of getting in trouble. But it had to be someone she knew, okay? Otherwise she would have been too frightened, and talked to our mother. And it also had to be someone she knew was connected to a certain party."

"Yes."

"You remember how he bought his driver Edison a house not far away from us?"

"I suggested the area."

"We know Edison."

"So."

"He's been doing well. He just bought himself another house to rent out. People talk. 'Edison's doing well. Have you seen his new house?' I've seen it. It's about four blocks away from here. People living on his street didn't like talking about who's been going in and out, but we got lucky. A kid showed up carrying a bag of groceries. He said he was just out buying some cereal, but when we showed him to my sister, she screamed."

"My dear, you are obviously the expert in this, but I wonder if that was strictly necessary."

"You said we didn't have much time."

"True."

"I also wanted him to see her, and understand we weren't very happy. It helped get answers to some questions."

"So?"

"Now I'm just waiting for some friends to come over. They get off duty at midnight."

"This is going to be useless if the children are hurt."

"The thing about this house is the second floor. It has a second floor, and they've got the kids locked up there. Usually the men stay downstairs in the kitchen. There aren't that many of them, either. A front and back door. We know the lay-out."

"They're going to get nervous about the boy not coming back."

"They sent him off on a bus to find cereal. They probably think he got lost."

"Thank you, Wanderley."

"Senhora? My sister thought they were going to take the kids' father. She fought when they took the kids."

"Yes," Tânia said. "We have to do that." She puckered her lips. "Do you know the crêche run by Sister Celeste?"

"Yes, senhora."

"You can take the children there."

After Tânia hung up, Holly said, "The crêche. For my children. Underneath it all, I felt so superior to people who used it. Now my kids need it, too."

"Don't you think I did?" Tânia asked. "Come on, now. Into the car."
28

Outside the house, Wanderley had everyone in place. Some of his friends had already jumped the fence into the back yard. Others had the cereal kid ready to play shield in front. The kid would knock, and they'd go in from both sides. It hadn't been hard coming up with a team. Wanderley thought he was going to be asking his friends for a favour, but it turned out he was granting one. They couldn't believe their luck in cornering Gilson Ribeiro, whom the kid assured them was inside. Not long past midnight, there were enough of Wanderley's friends on hand to be sure Gilson would take a very long trip. The children had become almost incidental, although everybody liked kids.

"You remember we don't want to shoot?" Wanderley asked the boy.

"Yes, sir."

"This isn't going to go hard on you. You and your brother are going to get out of here okay. You remember I'm a friend of your friend up the morro."

"Yes, sir."

"You're going to remember to tell him that?"

"Yes, sir."

"Good boy," Wanderley said, clapping him on the shoulder. Then he nodded to one of his friends, who walked the boy into the yard. There were already shadowy forms lined up on either side of the door. The kid raised his knuckles to knock.

"They've got me!" he screamed. "They've — "

They burst in shooting from both sides of the house. Seu José was nodding off on a chair in the back bedroom and fumbled onto the floor dying as he reached for his gun. The brother in the centre hallway put his hands up, but went down anyway. At the front, in the kitchen, Gilson Ribeiro managed to unholster his gun and fire while sliding to his knees, but his shots were wild, into the air, and he died before he had time to kill anyone else.

"Hold fire! Hold fire!"

"Jesus," Wanderley said in the silence. "Anybody hurt?"

One of his friends had been grazed in the arm, one had twisted his ankle.

"All accounted for?"

Five bodies were counted out, including the kid outside, although one of the men looked puzzled when he found Wanderley in the kitchen.

"The American was already dead," he said.

"What?"

They showed him the body in the front bedroom. Wanderley looked at it a while.

"The kids," he remembered. "Make me a clean route out the door."

His friends clapped him on the shoulder in jittery high spirits as he passed. Gilson Ribeiro! Gilson Ribeiro!

Wanderley found the little boys shaking in a corner upstairs.

"It's okay," he said, kneeling without getting too close. "It's okay, I'm Cida's brother. Your Mommy and Daddy are waiting for you over at the crêche."

The boys just looked at him, shaking and gulping. He decided not to rush them, and sat back on his haunches.

"Are you a policeman?" one finally asked.

"They're downstairs. I'm Cida's brother, Uncle Wanderley. Do you want to come with me?"

"You're not going to hurt us?"

"Naw, I'm going to take you to your Mommy and Daddy."

But they couldn't seem to trust him, and eventually he had to carry them both to the car.

"I don't like this," Seu José had told Gilson, while the American was in the bathroom.

"It's stupid," Gilson said. "If we had the guy here, we could get it all out of him at once."

"You remember that name? Antônio Rosa?"

When Gilson shook his head blankly, Seu José reminded him of Copacabana.

"Caralho! What's going on?"

"Psychology," Seu José said, and spat. Both he and Gilson looked down at the table when Powell came back in the kitchen.

"Where the hell's that kid with the food?"

"There's probably a shortage of Choco-Krispis," Gilson said.

"Anybody bother to check if they want anything else?"

"They don't look hungry," Gilson said.

"What kind of answer is that?"

Powell was jittery, dancing toward the stairs.

"You don't go up there," Seu José said, not looking over from the table.

"So what if I do?"

"And they see you?" Gilson asked. "What do you plan to do with them afterwards?"

Seu José turned slowly in his chair to stare at Powell.

"Who's in charge here?" Powell asked. Gilson glanced at Seu José. "It's a question of training and sophistication. Didn't I find out who gave him the document? Didn't I? You don't think Paris is going to like that?"

Seu José looked down at his lap, then bit a thumb.

"I'm going to check on the children."

He was almost at the stairs when Seu José darted up, a big man fast on his feet. He shoved Powell against the wall, then had Gilson and the remaining brother gag him, get him into the front bedroom, and hold him there. Delicately, showing distaste, Seu José opened the American's trousers and pulled both trousers and shorts to the ground. Then he unsheathed his knife and sliced off Powell's genitals. Afterwards, Gilson held the jerking man's head back by the remaining fringe of hair and Seu José slit his throat.

Washing his hands, the old man said, "He had it coming. Pervert. Now get that damn ecologista on the phone and we'll do a trade."

But it was ridiculous. The answering machine directed them to a cell phone number, and when they tried that, they got a message saying the service was down. They were going to have to wait.

"Psychology," Gilson spat. "Technology."

Seu José grunted, and went to sit in the darkened back bedroom to wait.

Holly and Todd each carried one of the boys into the crêche from the car. Both were wrapped in blankets, so it was hardly possible to tell which was which until they got them inside. When the blankets dropped, the children stood like new-hatched chicks feeling their legs for the first time. They wavered from side to side and blinked their eyes vacantly.

"How's my guys?" Holly asked, in a voice she tried to keep casual. "My guys are all right. They're all right now. It's all right," she cooed. Then Evan broke and threw himself at her, and Conor followed. She held them both tightly, trying not to cry in their baby hair, feeling the warm living weight of them and conscious, every moment, of poor Todd, who'd knelt and stood up empty-handed behind her.

Tânia came over and put a hand on his shoulder, pulling him back.

"They got them all?" he asked, without turning.

"Todd, all five of them are dead. Wanderley's friends had to go in shooting."

"Oh my God. The boys didn't see it?" Todd walked around the room before coming to a stop in front of Tânia. She sketched the broad outlines of what happened, focusing on the death of Antônio's three killers, the well-known gunman and his two hired boys.

Todd looked back at Holly and the boys. "They can't be told about this. Such an awful burden on their lives."

Tânia pursed her lips. "The American was also there."

Todd swung around. "My God, don't tell her, either." Then he whispered, "He didn't touch them, really?"

"Seu José killed him first. We know this. The American was dead before Wanderley got there."

Todd looked distracted, unable to grasp what was happening.

"And Celso?" he asked.

"I can't understand your obsession with this Celso," Tânia said. "Don't you see? If he'd been in with them, he never would have given you the document. And if they'd got to him afterwards, none of this would have had to happened. It sounds as if they approached him casually and he gave them some small portion of the truth."

Todd shook his head. "That's the thing about Celso. I don't think he's ever told anyone the whole truth. He's just scattered bits and pieces of it wherever it's suited him."

"É muito brasileiro," Tânia told him. Very Brazilian.

Todd met her eyes for the first time, and caught himself half smiling. "I couldn't have said that."

"You should thank him. He's saved your piece of forest."

"It isn't mine, Tânia, for God's sake."

"Oh, nitpicking," she said. "He saved a piece of forest. You're still going to have to leave the country, of course. But without Seu José, my uncle is rendered a little toothless for the time being. And it's quite a crucial time, you know."

It occurred to Todd that Tânia looked disturbingly pleased with herself. But she'd won, hadn't she? The next generation was about to take over.

"Good-bye Seu José. Hello Wanderley," he said.

"That's really very cutting, Todd. Do you really mean to be so hard on me?"

He turned back to Holly and the boys. "I'm very hard on everybody, all the time."

Holly took the children into the kitchen, talking with a middle-aged nun and a boxy, mannish-looking woman.

"Don't get bitter, Todd," Tânia said. "I really wouldn't, you know. I've tried not to. And I have far more reason for it than you."

He turned back toward her. "What are you going to do now, Tânia?"

"Well you see, I'm an artist. But artists have to know something about business, or society wouldn't allow much room for us, would it? So I do a little business, I do a little art, and cherish my private fantasy that artists really can make the best of the world. It's a question of investigation," she said. "And catharsis."

"All the killing. That's some catharsis. What makes you think it isn't just going to be the same thing over and over and over and over?"

"It's been said that art is a process of making things new."

"By Ezra Pound. A fascist."

"Oh! You're terribly hard to live with. Do you mean to be?"

"No," Todd answered, and started to cry.

"Where's Daddy?" Conor asked.

"In the next room," Holly answered. "Shall I go get him?"

She found Todd leaning on Tânia's shoulder. When Tânia saw her, she patted his back twice and walked into the kitchen.

"The children want you," Holly said.

"Are they going to be all right?" he whispered.

She decided it was time to move past this. They were adults. They had children to take care of.

"We're going to have to work on it," she told her husband. "We're what they've got, poor little guys."

Todd shook his head. But Holly held out her hand. "Are you going to come see them?"

"How did we let this happen?" Todd asked, holding back.

She smiled at him bleakly. Todd took her hand, finding it was as cold as her smile; as tense and necessary to him as the breaths he drew. He let her lead him into the kitchen, when he sat down shyly between the boys.

"My dear," Tânia told Holly, "You must spend the rest of your life teaching your children that this was not their fault."

"Promise me they'll listen," Holly said. 
Epilogue

Holly stooped in the front hallway to pick up the mail. There were two invitations to her friends' openings, magazines, bills, an envelope from her dealer, business letters for Todd's consulting firm. After returning to Vancouver, Todd had set himself up as an environmental consultant. It allowed him a slower pace, more flexibility, more time with the boys. Meanwhile, Holly had her studio in the garage. They were lucky to own a house large enough that they could both work at home. It let them keep apart if they wished. Also be together.

A final envelope dropped free of the slot. Glancing down, Holly saw it was a letter from the priest, Ignacio, addressed politely to both of them. She picked it up unhappily, reluctant to open — re-open — whatever it was Ignacio had to say. Then she ripped it open, finding it contained two photographs wrapped in several pages of baroque handwriting. Taking out the pictures, Holly saw a priest in the first one. It must have been Ignacio, holding up a little girl of two or three for the camera. Holly was puzzled until she turned to the second photograph, in which a group of forest people were standing around a bride and groom in Western dress. The bride was as tiny as the people of the forest, but the groom was tall enough that he must have been Jefferson. So, he'd found his wife, found the tribe. A happy ending, after all.

Holly leaned against the doorframe, holding the letter unread in her hand. From what's she'd finally heard, poor Jefferson's quest could not have been easy. For months after Todd and Ignacio had left him, he'd been unable to find his adopted tribe. Discouraged, suspicious of the geological team, he'd begun to haunt Mankiewicz's camp — a concrete explanation for Celso's gleeful report to Todd that the labourers there felt watched. Unfortunately, Jefferson got too used to stealing from the kitchen, and the cook finally caught him a couple of weeks before the boys were kidnapped. Mankiewicz turned him over to some friendly police, and Doutor Eduardo was able to order the photograph that was faxed to their house in Rio. Not long afterward, the kidnapping ended, and Celso arranged for Jefferson to be freed.

This much they knew before leaving Brazil. Turning back to the letter, Holly learned from Ignacio that Jefferson had returned to the rapids after his release. Under orders from new management at Rio Anna, the geological camp there was being dismantled and abandoned by a puzzled Mankiewicz and his men. Mankiewicz turned out to be right: Jefferson was better off after the company's arrival than before. He was able to scavenge enough discarded lumber to build himself a comfortable house, and found that the runway provided sufficient pasturage for a couple of cows. After setting himself up, Jefferson farmed, prospected and cleared more land, waiting for his wife to come back. Eventually she did.

From her they discovered there had been a second incursion above the rapids. Not long after the first skirmish, with Jefferson already on his way to get help, sentries ran into the longhouse warning that outsiders were approaching. A large party was slipping and snaking its way up the portage, carrying three light aluminium boats and bristling with arms. In a panic, the people packed whatever they could and fled into the serra. They hadn't meant to travel far, but soon the loud and callous machinery forced them over the mountains, where they explained their problem to the northern tribe. The longhouse people weren't particularly welcome in the north, but under the circumstances they were tolerated, and planted a season of crops. Meanwhile they watched the geologists leave; watched Jefferson build his camp unmolested. Now that another season had quietly passed, they proposed moving south again, and Jefferson was able to assure them they'd be safe.

Ignacio wrote that none of this was to be made public. There had been no armed men, no skirmish, no mining exploration. Officially, Mankiewicz had never even visited that part of the country. He couldn't have, since an Indian bureau document, dating back four decades, created a closed reserve south of the serra. The longhouse people had always lived there, migrating into the serra and out. Perhaps their latest migration had been a little more circuitous than usual, Ignacio wrote. But then, everything was, occasionally.

Holly let the letter drop, thinking that the fiction was finally complete. Their time in Brazil had been completely papered over. Nothing untoward had happened, and nothing anomalous could result. Tânia, for instance. Even though Tânia was taking an increasingly active role in running the Gusinde family holdings, this was seen publicly — as far as it was seen at all — as an overdue generational change. Doutor Eduardo was yesterday's man, old-style, somewhat countrified. He had no place in an increasingly internationalized economy. In fact, Tânia told Holly he was becoming almost an embarrassment to the family, issuing orders where he had no authority, demanding confidential information to which he had no right. As a result, his children conspired with Tânia to keep him out of the way, safe on his ranch near São Paulo. He could stay busy there; told his children he would die there.

Tânia said she hoped he would. She also complained that she had scant time for painting lately, although she'd surprised herself with a new lover. This was a spiky young artist. A sculptor; a woman. Tânia thought she was living a little through her lover, and told Holly she was never happy. Yet she said she took great gusto in living. Her daughters were splendid, her friends a consolation. Her son, Eric, had not changed, and was incrementally breaking her heart.

The Austens' sons, of course, had never been kidnapped. At least, the media never reported they'd been kidnapped, police records were unhelpful, and gunfire wasn't heard in the Zona Norte that final night. Ask any local resident if they'd heard gunfire, and they'd look blank. Gunfire? Sé la. If three bodies were found near the morro the next morning, they would simply have been the castings of another fight between drug traffickers, or perhaps the bicheiros. Trafficking was woven together with the numbers racket into such an intricate screen it was hard to tease out who might be responsible, and any corpses found in such circumstances would be buried by women who wailed poignantly, but didn't talk. Certainly when the Austens left Rio, their Brazilian friends knew of no problems locally, although those who saw them understood from their shattered faces that they were forced to leave because of a family emergency at home. Meanwhile, in Vancouver, friends gathered they'd returned after becoming unnerved by life in a violent city, worn down, plagued by homesickness and tropical parasites: which was about what everyone had expected all along.

One crack in the tower of silence. Shortly after the boys came home, a dead American was discovered in the Zona Norte, his genitals severed and placed in his mouth. There was a flurry of lurid newspaper stories in the days following the discovery, during which the body was finally identified as that of one Edgar Eugene Polh, a former airline pilot wanted in the U.S. on smuggling and racketeering charges, many of them related to a child prostitution ring. American consular officials did not appear to regret his demise, although a former neighbour in his Forth Worth condominium was quoted as saying Polh had been popular with residents. The children liked seeing him dressed in his uniform, she said, and sometimes he would give them plastic packages of wings.

Evan's and Conor's counsellor believed Polh had never touched them. Holly couldn't help fearing that the truth was buried here as well, but the counsellor felt almost certain the boys hadn't seen Polh during the kidnapping, and continued to believe he'd been shot by accident in the Amazon. In fact, they'd liked him, and Holly and Todd found themselves helplessly bound not to say anything implying they thought otherwise, which would only disturb the children further.

Evan was having the worst time. He withdrew for months after the kidnapping, his speech deteriorating, his coordination becoming jerky and rough. Eventually they realized that part of this was a terrible saudade, homesickness for Brazil. Tânia started sending packages of local candies and comic books, but Holly was haunted by something she'd said about a fissure having opened in Eric's personality as he'd moved between countries. It was true other people survived the experience. Much of restless modern life was predicated on surviving it. But Evan's improvement was slow, and even though he was back to speaking at age level, he was still prone to sudden terrors that could paralyze him in the middle of a game of catch.

Conor, fortunately, had held up much better, although he'd become almost too mature for a boy his age. This didn't make him popular, although he had a similarly bright best friend from the program for gifted children, and usually said that one friend was enough. He was also growing, weedy, his hair still blonde as others went darker, and Todd said he was increasingly reminded, God help the boy, of himself.

Sighing, Holly turned back to Ignacio's long letter. The priest wrote that he had officiated at Jefferson's marriage and the daughter's baptism about three months before. The ceremony was at Jefferson's farm, where the family planned to live. Fortunately for Jefferson, the farm was located just outside the boundaries of the reserve. He was also fortunate that tribal elders had given him permission to cross the boundaries at will. Or rather, permission was granted at their behest by Celso, whose recent promotion within the Indian bureau placed him in charge of contacts with the tribe. Apparently Celso was proving a stickler for the bureau policy of keeping reserves closed to outsiders, Jefferson being the one exception — along with Celso himself, of course, for the purposes of anthropological research.

Ignacio wrote with some asperity about Celso. The agent had recently refused him permission to open a one-man mission on the reserve, although he said he planned to keep applying. Holly smiled. From what she knew, it was easy to picture years of jockeying between the two, the end of which even Todd would not be able to predict. At least, it was clear Celso would arrange matters to his own liking, but Todd had scant hope of guessing what this might be. Holly and Todd had lived in Brazil for almost two years, but by the time they'd left, they'd only started to learn how much they would never know about the country, its politics, its culture, even their friends.

About as little as she'd ever know about her husband.

Todd was coming in the kitchen door, and smiled when he saw Holly.

"Mail?" he asked, giving her a kiss.

Silently, Holly gave him the letters, Ignacio's on top. Todd drew in a short breath, then read the priest's letter while sucking his cheeks, emotion flitting like sunlight across his worn face. Holly felt that they were married again, after a separation that hadn't really ended until long after they'd moved back home. Yet there were still some subjects they couldn't discuss. Her Darwin series. Larkin.

Holly hadn't been in touch with Larkin since leaving Brazil, and didn't want to be, poor man, although she couldn't help reading about him from time to time. It was hard to tell whether Larkin's celebrity had increased, or if she was simply more conscious of it. His Brazilian CD got good reviews, and the newspapers ran flattering profiles when he toured the clubs with his show. One day, when they were in a music store, Holly saw Todd snatch a copy of the latest CD, buy it surreptitiously, and throw it out as soon as they got home. She hadn't even been tempted retrieve it, knowing what music it contained, and not seeing any use for it. Not long afterwards, they almost stumbled on Larkin's acting debut, as he played the owner of a video store in an independent film. They'd been on the way out the door to see it, not knowing about his part, when Evan's tears had kept them in. After that, Holly noticed that Todd read film reviews more carefully, and she subsequently learned that Larkin took the role of a suave uncle in a young director's comic first feature, a popular hit, although his character was played by someone else when it was made into a television series; to Larkin's credit or discredit, Holly didn't know.

One time she caught herself staring at Larkin's grainy photograph in the newspaper. She'd felt embarrassed, baffled, tender, regretful. But when she also caught herself feeling superior, Holly pushed the paper away. She had nothing to feel superior about, even though her reputation as a painter was growing. She did figures, portraits. Sometimes she painted children, although Todd couldn't bear to hang her child portraits on their walls. Her palette was raw, brutish, vital. People said she was good, and Todd seemed to agree. Not that he claimed to be much of a critic. At least, he was trying not to be.

When Todd finished the letter, he folded it roughly.

"What do you think?" he asked.

"Another portion of the world swings back into balance," she answered. "More or less. For a while."

"You're not hopeful, then."

Feeling surprised, Holly replied, "I don't know if you'd want anything more."

Todd imagined she was right. As she gave him a kiss, he understood he'd started trusting her again, and wondered if she'd managed the same with him. Holly seemed much more sardonic lately, more nervous and open than she'd been before. Yet on her way out to her studio, she turned to give him a look of intelligent sympathy, so clear-sighted and so very kind that Todd couldn't help smiling back. Holly's blue eyes seemed tropical to him now, twin fragments of a sky they'd left behind, and were never leaving. 
Lesley Krueger is the author of seven previous books. Her most recent novel was The Corner Garden, called "masterful" by the Ottawa Citizen. It was published by Penguin Canada and is now available as an e-book. She is also the author of the novel Poor Player, the short story collection, Hard Travel, and two non-fiction books, Foreign Correpondences and Contender. She is also the author of a children's book, Johnny Bey and the Mizzenglass World.

Please visit Lesley's webpage, www.lesleykrueger.com or connect with her on Facebook.
