"Over four million square kilometers," McKay muttered.
"Don't make it sound so bad," Hi said, looking over a particular region. "Try two and a half million square miles."
"How can we hope to find Hitler's camp," McKay asked, "with over four million--"
"Stop worrying, McKay," Hi said irritably. "I know where to find him."
"What?" McKay gasped. "Why didn't you tell me?"
"You didn't ask. I know the general area. That narrows it down."
"What was the clue?" asked Diego.
"Eva's earrings," Hi said. "They were carved out of vilca wood."
Diego snapped his fingers. "Nova Dolencia."
"What," McKay asked them both, "are you talking about?"
Hi pointed it out on the map. "This village, McKay. The only place in the world where they make and sell vilca-wood earrings." Hi was pointing to a dot on a branch of the Purús River, about three hundred miles southwest of Manaus, in Brazil's Amazonas province. The heart of the selva or rain forest.
"Nova Dolencia," Diego repeated. "The Nazis must get their supplies there."
"Right," Hi said, his eyes poring over the area. "There's no other village for a good hundred miles."
"Then the people there should be able to point the way," McKay said eagerly.
"For a price," Hi told McKay. "Be prepared to buy some vilca-wood earrings."
Less than one week later, the three men flew in Diego's single-engine, four-seat Cessna 170 from Peru to Canutama, Brazil. This small selva town on the Purús--a river flowing north, from the Andes of Peru, for over two thousand miles, to join the Amazon at Manaus--had the closest airstrip to Nova Dolencia.
Buying an outboard motorboat and enough supplies for a two-week jungle reconnaissance, the trio spent two and a half days going north from Canutama on the meandering Purús.
For McKay, new to the tropical rain forest, the humidity was oppressive and the scenery monotonous. The river was turbid, its low-banked, jungle-lined waters muddy brown from the rain forest's drainage. The constant meanders made a straight-line mile seem eternal. The crocodile-like caimans made McKay nervous at first, but they soon became tiresome, as did the squawking birds and the chattering monkeys. But occasional jaguars were seen, the snakes weren't your garden variety, and a caiman prowls also at night. McKay refused to sleep on the bank, yet got little sleep in the boat, for fear of some night creature's jaws. Even vampires weren't out of the question.
On the third day Hi navigated the boat into a Purús tributary. They headed south on this serpentine branch, walled by unbroken jungle. There was no hint that human beings had ever been there before, till to McKay's surprise, on the fifth day out of Canutama, they passed the vestiges of some kind of estate, its few crumpled ruins long since reclaimed by the jungle. Diego informed McKay that it was once a rubber plantation. Finally, not far downstream from the ruins, Hi, Diego, and McKay reached Nova Dolencia.
The village was a collection of thatch-roofed buildings made of bamboo and wood from Brazil nut trees. Its founders were caboclos (Brazilians of mixed white and Indian blood) from drought-ridden northeast Brazil. They had come to Amazonas in 1910 to work on the rubber plantation. But within two years there was no plantation to work on. Due to Malayan competition, Brazil's rubber economy collapsed and never bounced back. Now the villagers got by as best they could, fishing, foraging, and exporting forest products, such as Brazil nuts and rosewood oil, to distant Manaus by canoe. And virtually all were involved in some way in the crafting or selling of vilca-wood earrings.
The earrings were an innovation of the late Euclides Vidigal, one of the village's founders. And when it came to haggling over earrings, McKay proved no match for the local tendeiro or shopkeeper, thirty-four-year-old Maneco Vidigal. This slender, bright-eyed, blackbearded son of Euclides was a natural-born haggler. And since customers in Nova Dolencia were about as frequent as snow, Maneco made the most of each opportunity. Though a merchant in Manaus carried the earrings for a while in his shop, they simply lost their mystique there, selling poorly. Nova Dolencia--if for some reason you found yourself there--was the place to buy vilca-wood earrings. And Maneco's store was the spot.
Hi and Diego served McKay well enough as interpreters, but the Portuguese-speaking Maneco, knowing he had something that these fellows wanted (or at least they seemed to think so), was in a position to name his own price. His own quantity too. McKay wound up buying three goodsized cardboard boxes full of vilca-wood earrings. Maneco even charged for the boxes. McKay didn't really mind the money--his operational budget, after all, was virtually unlimited--but there was the immediate logistical problem of what to do with some thirty thousand vilca-wood earrings. As the news of this staggering earring sale got around, the denizens of Nova Dolencia exuberantly began planning a celebration that would last fourteen days.
Maneco agreed, as his part of the bargain, to arrange for a "certain party" in Nova Dolencia to meet with McKay, to divulge confidentially what this certain party might know concerning "nonindigenous groups" (to use McKay's term) in the area. The meeting took place as scheduled on the evening of the following day, in the village's restaurant, which was little more than a lamp-lit shack by the river. Hi and Diego again served as interpreters. The certain party turned out to be Maneco himself, though he claimed that the party originally scheduled was indisposed as a result of the first day's celebration.
While thus enjoying a large meal at McKay's further expense, Maneco had information more useful than he himself realized. Every couple of months, he told the three men, a European "military-type" officer and two or three "privates" would come to Nova Dolencia. They came from somewhere west of the river, to buy mostly food, candles, gasoline, and kerosene. They crossed the river by canoe. ("No," the puzzled Maneco replied to a question from Hi, no one had seen them "fly over.") The officer was called something like "house furor," and the privates were something like "shits." They were pale and said little except to complain. They spoke in incomplete Portuguese sentences, with the help of a pocket dictionary full of "lengthy, weird-looking words." Maneco wondered what they were doing in the jungle, but was glad they had come there with money. He gathered they had generators and kerosene lamps. "Yes," he replied to Hi, they had bought some vilca-wood earrings. But only one pair. Maneco vividly recalled the house furor griping about having to buy them for "that bitch from B.A.," which in Portuguese was not easy to say.
Since Hi, Diego, and McKay knew that vampires had no need for ordinary foodstuffs, they readily concluded that Hitler and his bloodsucking cronies were maintaining captives as their blood source. When Hi wondered aloud what "house furor" meant, McKay said it was probably a Hauptsturmführer, the SS equivalent of captain.
When asked where he thought the "military-types" were located, Maneco related the story of a small group of foragers from the village who had happened across some buildings in a clearing, about five miles northwest from the river. The foragers left in a hurry when an armed shit approached them. It was clearly the place where the house furor and friends, judging by their paleness, stayed holed up during the day.
As the meeting concluded, McKay left a tip for the waiter, a conscientious lad of thirteen, and asked the boy what he owed for the meal. The boy informed him that the restaurant belonged to his father Maneco, who then figured up McKay's bill.
On the following day, while drunken revelry in Nova Dolencia continued, Hi, Diego, and McKay, wearing camouflage uniforms, set out on reconnaissance northwest from the river. They buried the three boxes of earrings once out of sight of the village. ("I'll be damned," McKay had said bitterly, "if I'll give one pair back to those leeches.") This reduced what they had to carry to food and drink, three guns with ammunition, three machetes, and three sets of hammers and stakes.
The hammers and stakes were precautionary. The purpose of the reconnaissance was to locate, not yet to confront, the undead foe. Any confrontation now and Hi, Diego, and McKay knew they would not make it back to the village. They could not pretend to be innocent jungle explorers, not with Wolfgang's acquaintance with Hi. And even innocent explorers would likely be drained of their blood. No, the best that the three men could hope for, if discovered, would be to take one or two Nazis down with them.
The Nazis, by their periodic visits, were wearing a rudimentary trail through the selva, which away from the river did not have much undergrowth under its light-blocking canopy. Hi, Diego, and McKay proceeded to follow the path, winding their way through the rain forest. As Hi led the way, his mind was filled with recurring voices, commenting on the challenge ahead. He heard Eva say, "Don't come after us, Hi. Please." He heard McKay's voice again: "We must save the world from Hitler Part Two." He heard Juan weep and whine, "Kill Hitler, kill them all, but save Evita. Bring her back." He heard Eva say, "I was so sick of Juan."
On the second day out, they found Hitler.