“Not a thing.”
“You’re not even trying, are you?”
“And thereby ignore a direct order from my superior? Perish the thought.”
“Isn’t that superior’s nose going to go out of joint if you get on an airplane and come here?”
“It most definitely is.”
“He won’t bankroll the trip. He won’t sign the forms.”
“That’s what credit cards are for. I’ll find some way to recover the money later.”
“And you can’t be here before four because you’ll be leav-ing at lunchtime when he’ll be ingratiating himself with some politician in an expensive restaurant.”
“Exactly right, my boy. Your powers of deduction are excellent. They must be genetic.”
Three hours later, Hector placed another call to his uncle.
“Turns out that travel agency was doing most of its book-ings with an airline called Mexicana.”
“So?”
“So we’re doing a computer run, crossing the names on Mexicana’s reservations database with recent missing per-sons’ reports from Brasilia, Rio de Janeiro, and Sao Paulo. Guess what?”
“A correlation?”
“Five hits so far, all within the last six months. Seems a bit excessive, don’t you think? Especially when you consider that not one of those five people actually made the flight.”
“It sure as hell does. Pick up that Argentinian.”
“I’ll have to find him first. The place has a big sign on the door: closed for vacation. We have no name for the guy other than Juan, which at least one out of every five
“I would have said one out of four.”
“The office space is rented in the name of Gabriel Larenas, but it turns out Larenas died in 2005. The owner of the building didn’t give a damn whose name was on the lease as long as he kept getting his check every month. The tele-phones and other utilities are in Larenas’s name as well. Babyface had a look through the glass and he says the place has an empty feel to it. His guess is that the bird has flown. We’re getting a search warrant. I’ll keep you posted.”
Chapter Thirty-five
Beyond the open window of Dr. Horst Bittler’s office, a bright sun shone out of a cloudless sky. Birds twittered. A cicada sang in the rosebushes.
In sharp contrast to the cheerful day, Clovis Oliveira sat like a man condemned.
Bittler, his eyes enlarged by gold-rimmed spectacles, stud-ied his visitor as if he were a scientific specimen. Clovis was dressed in a cheap suit that hung on his frame like it was two sizes too big for him. His hair was disheveled. There were dark pouches under his bloodshot eyes. He was still young, probably in his early thirties, but his shoulders were stooped like those of an old man.
Bittler filled the younger man’s demitasse, replaced the pot on its silver tray, and continued with the small talk that, like the coffee, opens every business meeting in Brazil.
“The FUNAI, eh?” he said, tapping a manicured finger on the open file that lay on the desk before him.
The FUNAI, Fundacao Nacional do Indio, was Brazil’s Federal Bureau of Indian Affairs. Clovis had listed them as his employer.
“The FUNAI, yes,” Clovis said.
“And what, may I ask, is the nature of your work?”
“I’m an anthropologist. I work in the Xingu.”
Clovis picked up his cup with a thumb and forefinger.
Bittler took a moment to absorb the stroke of good luck.
The Xingu was the name of a river, but also of Brazil’s largest Indian reservation. Founded in 1961, home to many different tribes, it occupied a tract of rain forest about the size of the American States of New Jersey and Delaware combined.
“You work with the Indians?” Bittler cloaked his eager-ness, made his question sound casual.
“That’s right,” Clovis said, taking another sip. The coffee was excellent, export quality, but the anthropologist showed no sign of appreciation. On the contrary, he was drinking it as if he wanted to get through the ritual as quickly as possible.
“You speak their languages?” Bittler persisted.
“Not all of their languages, no. No one does. There are tribes that speak languages that are unique, languages unlike any other. Some are spoken by a dozen people, or less. They’re no longer of any practical value, only worth learning if you have an academic interest.”
“Remarkable.”
“I even know of a language,” Clovis went on, warming to his subject in spite of himself, “spoken exclusively by a sin-gle old woman, the last of her tribe. She no longer has any-one to talk to in her native tongue. When she dies, the tribe will be extinct, and the language along with it.”
“Astonishing,” Bittler said. He removed a handkerchief from his breast pocket, took off his glasses, and set to polish-ing the lenses. The handkerchief was snowy white, whiter, even, than the suit he was wearing. “And have you worked in the area of establishing initial contact with these tribes?” he asked. “Contact with people who haven’t previously been exposed to our civilization?”
“I have, yes,” Clovis said, “but we don’t make it a policy. We bring them no benefits, no benefits at all, only sickness and death. Our value system is very different, and who’s to say which is better? They don’t use money or anything that takes the place of money. Personal possessions are of little value. Food is communal, everyone sharing rights to what everyone else hunts or gathers. They’re not resistant to our sicknesses. They know that now. They’ve seen contacted tribes decimated by diseases like simple colds. Now, they avoid us, run the other way when they see us coming.”
“How many of them are there, would you say?”
“Uncontacted people?”
“Yes.”
“No one knows,” Clovis said. “Some estimates run as high as forty thousand.”
Bittler smiled a genuine smile, rare for him. “As many as that?”
“I think it’s probably a gross overestimation,” Clovis said, “but, despite all of the pillaging and the burning, despite the landgrabs by predatory ranchers, and the lumber companies, and the prospectors, we’re still lucky enough to have more than four million square kilometers of rain forest. Much of it is still unexplored. It makes sense to assume that a good deal of it is populated.”
Bittler put his glasses back on. Clovis was talking about an area well over half the size of the continental United States.
“I’ve heard,” he said, “that the Indians in the Xingu are permitted to live the lives they’ve always led, warring among each other, stealing their wives from other tribes, that sort of thing.”
“That’s not strictly true,” Clovis said. “We do what we can to prevent bloodshed. It is true, however, that many of them resist any kind of integration into modern society.”
Bittler leaned forward in his chair. “No integration, eh? So would it be right to say they have no birth certificates, no death certificates, no national identity cards?”
Clovis nodded his head. “Exactly,” he said. “They have nothing like that. They’re not required to.”
His enthusiasm was fading as quickly as it had come. Impatience was beginning to show.
“But of course you didn’t come here to talk about Indians,” Bittler said smoothly. “We have something far more impor-tant to discuss.” He mopped his brow with the handkerchief he’d used to polish his glasses, folded it, and put it back into his pocket. “I’ve read Raul’s medical records,” he went on, pointing at the file in front of him, being careful to use the boy’s name. The parents liked it when he did that. It gave them the impression that he actually cared about their off-spring. “But I’d like you to tell me more about him. What kind of a baby is he?”
