If they escape disaster, they will be the better for it.
Rodrigo Vargas's black Mercedes was a powerful four-door sedan that smelled of cigars. Battered and slowed by her breathing and the deep bruise in her hip, Natalie had driven nearly a quarter of a mile before finding a narrow dirt spur cutting off into the dense forest. After she assured herself that the car was invisible from the road, she made four trips back to the Jeep to haul supplies up the hill. By the time she had transferred her compact tent, backpack, water, and food supplies into the Mercedes, it was late afternoon. During that time, not one car passed in either direction.
With no idea how far she was from Dom Angelo, she decided to drive, albeit slowly. In just thirty minutes, a road dropped off downhill into the forest to her right. A sign nailed to a tree at the fork had an arrow pointing to the left, along with the crudely painted directions, DA 2 km. Less than a kilometer along that road, she found a pair of rough tracks cutting off into the dense growth to her left. She drove the Mercedes in until the tracks had all but disappeared at the base of a hill. This time she did her best to cover the rear of the car with tree branches, and then wedged the key tightly beneath the right front tire.
During the drive, she had concocted a reasonably satisfying story of a naturalist from America hiking the rain forest and, at the moment, searching for a relative who, last she knew, worked as a nurse in Dom Angelo. Part of her story would also be a nasty downhill tumble when the edge of the drop-off gave way.
Her backpack, with the tent strapped on, was heavier than she would have liked, but anything less might have drawn suspicion. The pain in her hip was an annoyance, but not unbearable, and served as a constant re minder that her continued existence was a threat to some person or group. She just had to find a way to keep the pressure on.
The early evening forest was awesome — rich with oxygen and the blend of a thousand scents. As she walked, she tried to conceive of how she might be connected to this place, many thousands of miles from her home. The road followed a prolonged, gentle slope before curving to the right. Then, with little warning, the forest fell away, and the road dropped sharply. Ahead and below her, nestled in a broad valley, was what she assumed was the village of Dom Angelo.
For a time, Natalie sat at the base of a thick palm and studied the scene below, which from this distance looked like a diorama. There were a number of structures — mostly residences, it seemed — aligned along a grid of dirt streets. The buildings were crudely built with clay and corrugated metal. Smoke curled from several of them. To her left — north, she reckoned — was what appeared to be the entrance to a mine, hewn into the base of a mountain that towered over the valley. To her surprise, there were electric lights on poles, scattered throughout the village. Beneath them, children were playing. Natalie guessed two hundred inhabitants, maybe two fifty.
A hundred yards beyond the mine entrance, a narrow waterfall, twenty feet high, filled a small pool, which then emptied into a fast-moving stream, coursing alongside the village. Natalie wondered if somewhere downstream, this was the water that was sweeping over the dancing corpse of Rodrigo Vargas. There were children in the pool, and at least two women washing clothes in the stream. Farther down, two men were working primitive sluices, panning for gems or gold.
Idyllic, Natalie thought, quaint and absolutely peaceful, and yet, she had been maimed because of the place, and another woman murdered.
With a soft groan, she pulled herself upright and headed down into the basin. Chickens were the first to greet her, followed by two generic brown dogs. Next were three women — all Brazilian Indians. The tallest of them was still well less than five feet. The trio smiled at her openly and without the slightest hint of suspiciousness.
'Boa noite,' she said. Good evening.
'Boa noite,' they replied, smiling broadly.
Natalie wandered casually along the hard-packed streets and stopped at a tiny store for some packaged meat, ginger ale, and some sort of small melon. The proprietress, another Indian, shook her head when asked about a woman named Dora Cabral. Several more citizens of the village gave her similar responses, including two miners just finishing a day's work in the hole in the mountain.
The altitude and long day were beginning to take their toll on Natalie's stamina. She was thinking about locating a place in the forest to pitch her tent when she spotted a chapel — whitewashed clay with a red tile roof and a stubby, square-topped steeple with a crude, six-foot cross on top. The canvases forming the top half of the walls and the door were rolled up and tied, exposing two rows of ten rough-hewn pews. The altar was unadorned save for an elaborate ceramic crucifix fixed to the solid wall behind it.
Although she considered herself spiritual in the sense of living in constant awe of the vastness of the universe, the wonders of nature, and the need to treat others with respect and some form of love, Natalie had never been religious in any organized sense. Still, she felt a deep serenity in this simple structure and responded to it by sitting down on one of the benches.
Despite her attempts to relax and clear her mind, the horror of Vargas's attack on her and his violent death, along with the puzzle of Dora Cabral, simply would not let go. She had been in the chapel for, perhaps, fifteen minutes when a man spoke to her from behind in accented, though fluent, Portuguese.
'Welcome to our church.'
His voice was gravelly and low, but somehow soothing. Before she even turned, Natalie breathed in the all- too-familiar scent of cigarettes.
Standing behind her was a priest in a plain, black, mud-spattered robe, white collar, and sandals. He was fifty or so, somewhat gaunt, with dark hair cut short, a day or two of gray-black stubble, and striking, electric blue eyes. A heavy silver cross dangled halfway down his chest, suspended on a thick silver chain.
'This is a very lovely place,' she replied.
'You are American?' the priest said, in perfect English — or at least as perfect as someone probably raised in Brooklyn or the Bronx could have.
'Boston,' Natalie said, switching to English and extending her hand. 'Natalie Reyes.'
'Reyes. So you are Brazilian?'
'My mother is Cape Verdean.'
'I am Father Francisco Nunes — Frank Nunes of the Brooklyn Nuneses.'
Natalie smiled as the man took a seat on the pew opposite hers. He had a magnetic presence that immediately drew her to him, but there was also an unmistakable aura of melancholy that she suspected might have something to do with the reason he had migrated so far from New York.
'This is quite a parish,' she said.
'Actually, I minister to several villages in the rain forest, but primarily I am here. Call it penance if you wish.'
Natalie declined the silent offer to pursue the matter. Father Francisco seemed anxious to talk.
'And here is?'
'Dom Angelo, a mining community — primarily emeralds, but also green tourmaline, topaz, opal, amber, and some sapphire. I have become something of an expert on the purity of these gems. And you?'
'I am a student, taking some time away from my studies to reorder my priorities in life, and to hike the rain forest before it is all gone.'
'It still has a ways to go, but I understand.'
'I notice that most of the people here are Indians.'
The priest laughed.
'Many of our residents are indigenous to these vast forests,' he said, 'but there are a number of others here who crave the anonymity of a place like this, where all transactions are done in cash, and people only have last names if they wish to.'
'Do the Indians own the mine?'
Again an ironic laugh.
'These poor, pure people own next to nothing,' he said, 'and are probably the better for it. The gems they mine are quite profitable, and in Brazil profit often means involvement of the Military Police. It is they who own this place — at least a small group of them do. Think of them as the sheriffs and Dom Angelo as Tombstone in the once
