It was made of brown leather, new but built to look well used, and large enough to hold a small legal library. Nate sat it on his knees and popped it open. “Toys,” he said.

“That tiny gray instrument there is the latest high-tech digital phone,” Josh said, proud of the things he'd collected. “Valdir will have local service for you when you get to Corumba.”

“So they have phones in Brazil.”

“Lots of them. In fact, telecommunications are booming down there. Everybody has a cell phone.”

“Those poor people. What's this?”

“A computer.”

“What the hell for?”

“It's the latest thing. Look how small.”

“I can't even read the keyboard.”

“You can hook it to the phone and actually get your e-mail.”

“Wow. And I'm supposed to do this in the middle of a swamp with snakes and alligators watching?”

“It's up to you.”

“Josh, I don't even use e-mail at the office.”

“It's not for you, It's for me. I want to keep up with you. When you find her, I want to know immediately.”

“What's this?”

“The best toy in the box. It's a satellite phone. You can use it anywhere on the face of the earth. Keep the batteries charged, and you can always find me.”

“You just said they had a great phone system.”

“Not in the Pantanal. It's a hundred thousand square miles of wetlands, with no towns and very few people. That SatFone will be your only means of communication once you leave Corumba.”

Nate opened the hard plastic case and examined the glossy little phone. “How much did this cost you?” he asked.

“Me, not a dime.”

“Okay, how much did it cost the Phelan estate?”

“Forty— four hundred bucks. Worth every penny of it.”

“Do my Indians have electricity?” Nate was flipping through the owner's manual.

“Of course not.”

“Then how am I supposed to keep the batteries charged?”

“There's an extra battery. You'll think of something.”

“So much for a quiet getaway.”

“It's going to be very quiet. You'll thank me for the toys when you get there.”

“Can I thank you now?”

“No.”

“Thanks, Josh. For everything.”

“Don't mention it.”

IN THE CROWDED TERMINAL, at a small table across from a busy bar, they sipped weak espresso and read newspapers. Josh was very conscious of the bar; Nate didn't seem to be. The neon Heineken logo was hard to miss.

A tired and skinny Santa Claus ambled by, looking for children to take cheap gifts from his bag. Elvis sang “Blue Christmas” from a jukebox in the bar. The foot traffic was thick, the noise unnerving, everyone flying home for the holidays.

“Are you okay?” Josh asked.

“Yes, I'm fine. Why don't you leave? I'm sure you have better things to do.”

“I'll stay.”

“Look, Josh, I'm fine. If you think I'm waiting for you to leave so I can dash over there to the bar and guzzle vodka, you're wrong. I have no desire for booze. I'm clean, and very proud of it.”

Josh looked a bit sheepish, primarily because Nate had read his mind. Nate's binges were legendary. If he cracked, there wasn't enough booze in the airport to satisfy him. “I'm not worried about that,” he said, lying.

“Then go. I'm a big boy.”

They said good-bye at the gate, a warm embrace and promises to call almost on the hour. Nate was anxious to settle into his nest in first class. Josh had a thousand things to do at the office.

Two small, secret precautionary steps had been taken by Josh. First, adjacent seats had been booked for the flight. Nate would have the window; the aisle would remain vacant. No sense having some thirsty executive sitting next to Nate, swilling Scotch and wine. The seats cost over seven thousand dollars each for the round trip, but money was of no concern.

Second, Josh had talked at length with an airline official about Nate's rehab. No alcohol was to be served, under any circumstances. A letter from Josh to the airline was on board, just in case it had to be produced to convince Nate.

A flight attendant served him orange juice and coffee. He wrapped himself in a thin blanket, and watched the sprawl of D.C. disappear below him as the Varig airplane climbed through the clouds.

There was relief in the escape, from Walnut Hill and Sergio, from the city and its grind, from the past troubles with the last wife and the bankruptcy, and from the current mess with the IRS. At thirty thousand feet, Nate had almost decided he would never return.

But every reentry was nerve-racking. The fear of another slide was always there, just beneath the surface. The frightening part now was that there had been so many reentries he felt like a veteran. Like wives and big verdicts, he could now compare them. Would there always be another one?

During dinner, he realized Josh had been working behind the scenes. Wine was never offered. He picked through the food with the caution of one who'd just spent nearly four months enjoying the great lettuces of the world; until a few days ago, no fat, butter, grease, or sugar. The last thing he wanted was a queasy stomach.

He napped briefly, but he was tired of sleeping. As a busy lawyer and late-night prowler, he'd learned to live with little sleep. The first month at Walnut Hill they'd drugged him with pills and he'd slept ten hours a day. He couldn't fight them if he were in a coma.

He assembled his toys in the empty seat next to him, and began reading his collection of owner's manuals.

The satellite phone intrigued him, though it was difficult to believe he would actually be forced to use it.

Another phone caught his attention. It was the latest technical gadget in air travel, a sleek little device practically hidden in the wall next to his seat. He grabbed it and called Sergio at home. Sergio was having a late dinner, but happy to hear from him nonetheless.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“In a bar,” Nate replied, his voice low because the lights in the cabin were down.

“Very funny.”

“I'm probably over Miami, with eight hours to go. Just found this phone on board and wanted to check in.”

“So you're okay.”

“I'm fine. Do you miss me?”

“Not yet. You miss me?”

“Are you kidding? I'm a free man, flying off to the jungle for a marvelous adventure. I'll miss you later, okay?”

“Okay. And you'll call if you get in trouble.”

“No trouble, Serge. Not this time.”

“Atta boy, Nate.”

“Thanks, Serge.”

“Don't mention it. Just call me.”

A movie started, but no one was watching. The flight attendant brought more coffee. Nate's secretary was a long-suffering woman named Alice, who'd cleaned up after him for almost ten years. She lived with her sister in an old house in Arlington. He called her next. They'd spoken once in the past four months.

The conversation lasted for half an hour. She was delighted to hear his voice, and learn that he'd been released. She knew nothing about his trip to South America, which was a bit odd because she normally knew everything. But she was reserved on the phone, even cautious. Nate, the trial lawyer, smelled a rat, and attacked as if on cross-examination.

She was still in litigation, still at the same desk, doing pretty much the same thing but for a different lawyer. “Who?” Nate demanded.

A new guy. A new litigator. Her words were deliberate, and Nate knew that she had been fully briefed by Josh himself. Of course Nate would call her as soon as he was released.

Which office was the new guy in? Who was his paralegal? Where did he come from? How much medical malpractice had he done? Was her assignment with him just temporary?

Alice was sufficiently vague.

“Who's in my office?” he asked.

“No one. It hasn't been touched. Still has little stacks of files in every corner.”

“What's Kerry doing?”

“Staying busy. Waiting for you.” Kerry was Nate's favorite paralegal.

Alice had all the right answers, while revealing little. She was especially mum about the new litigator.

“Get ready,” he said as the conversation ran out of steam. “It's time for a comeback.”

“It's been dull, Nate.”

He hung up slowly, and played back her words. Something was different. Josh was quietly rearranging his firm. Would Nate get lost in the shuffle? Probably not, but his courtroom days were over.

He would worry about it later, he decided. There were so many people to call, and so many phones to do it with. He knew a judge who'd kicked booze ten years earlier, and he wanted to check in with his wonderful report from rehab. His first ex-wife deserved a blistering call, but he wasn't in the mood. And he wanted to phone all four of his children and ask why they hadn't called or written.

Instead he took a folder from his case and began reading about Mr. Troy Phelan and the business at hand. At midnight, somewhere over the Caribbean, Nate drifted away.

ELEVEN.

AN HOUR before dawn, the plane began its descent. He had slept through breakfast, and when he awoke a flight attendant hurriedly brought coffee.

The city of Sao Paulo appeared, an enormous sprawl that covered almost eight hundred square miles. Nate watched the sea of lights below and wondered how one city could hold twenty million people.

In a rush of Portuguese, the pilot said good morning and then several paragraphs of greetings that Nate missed entirely. The English translation that followed was not much better. Surely he wouldn't be forced to point and grunt his way across the country. The language barrier caused a short bout of anxiety, but it ended when a pretty Brazilian flight attendant asked him to buckle his seat belt.

The airport was hot and swarming with people. He collected his new duffel bag, walked it through customs without so much as a glance from anyone, and rechecked it on Varig to Campo Grande. Then he found a coffee bar with the menu on the wall. He pointed and said, “Espresso,” and the cashier rang him up. She frowned at his American money, but changed it anyway. One Brazilian real equaled one American dollar. Nate now owned a few reals.

He sipped the coffee while standing shoulder to shoulder with some rowdy Japanese tourists. Other languages flew around him; German and Spanish mixing with the Portuguese coming over the loudspeakers. He wished he'd bought a phrase book so he could at least understand a word or two.

Isolation settled in, slowly at first. In the midst of multitudes, he was a lonely man. He didn't know a soul. Almost no one knew where he was at that moment, and damned few people cared. Cigarette smoke from the tourists boiled around him, and he walked quickly away, into the main concourse, where he could see the ceiling two levels above and the ground floor below. He began walking through the crowds, aimlessly, carrying the heavy briefcase, cursing Josh for filling it with so much junk.

He heard loud English, and drifted toward it. Some businessmen were waiting near the United counter, and he found a seat near them. It was snowing in Detroit, and they were anxious to get home for Christmas. A pipeline had brought them to Brazil, and before long Nate tired of their drivel. They cured whatever homesickness he felt.

He missed Sergio. After the last rehab, the clinic had placed Nate in a halfway house for a week to ease the reentry. He hated the place and the routine, but with hindsight the idea had merit. You needed a few days to get reoriented. Maybe Sergio was right. He called him from a pay phone, and woke him up. It was six-thirty in Sao Paulo, but only four-thirty in Virginia. Sergio didn't mind. It went with the territory.

THERE WERE no first-class seats on the flight to Campo Grande, nor any empty ones. Nate was pleasantly surprised to observe that every face was behind the morning news, and a wide variety of papers at that. The dailies were as slick and modern as any in the States, and they were being read by people who had a thirst for the news. Perhaps Brazil wasn't as backward as he thought. These people could read! The airliner, a 727, was clean and newly refurbished. Coca-Cola and Sprite were on the drink cart; he almost felt at home.

Sitting by the window twenty rows back, he ignored the memo on Indians in his lap, and admired the countryside below. It was vast and lush and green, rolling with hills, dotted with cattle farms and crisscrossed with red dirt roads. The soil was a vivid burnt orange, and the roads ran haphazardly from one small settlement to the next. Highways were virtually nonexistent.

A paved road appeared, and there was traffic. The plane descended and the pilot welcomed them to Campo Grande. There were tall buildings, a crowded downtown, the obligatory soccer field, lots of streets and cars, and every residence had a red-tiled roof. Thanks to the typical big-firm efficiency, he possessed a memo, one no doubt prepared by the greenest of associates working at three hundred dollars an hour, in which Campo Grande was analyzed as if its presence were crucial to the matters at hand. Six hundred thousand people. A center for cattle trade. Lots of cowboys. Rapid growth. Modern conveniences. Nice to know, but why bother? Nate would not sleep there.

The airport seemed remarkably small for a city its size, and he realized he was comparing everything to the United States. This had to stop. When he stepped from the plane, he was hit with the heat. It was at least ninety degrees. Two days before Christmas, and it was sweltering in the southern hemisphere. He squinted in the brilliance of the sun, and descended the steps with a firm hand on the guardrail.

He managed to order lunch in the airport restaurant, and when it was brought to his table he was pleased to see that it was something he could eat. A grilled chicken sandwich in a bun he'd never seen before, with fries as crisp as those in any fast food joint in the States. He ate slowly while watching the runway in the distance. Halfway through lunch, a twin-engine turbo-prop of Air Pantanal landed and taxied to the terminal. Six people got off.

He stopped chewing as he wrestled with a sudden attack of fear. Commuter flights were the ones you read about and saw on CNN, except that no one back home would ever hear about this one if it went down.

But the plane looked sturdy and clean, even somewhat modern, and the pilots were well-dressed professionals. Nate continued eating. Think positive, he told himself.

He roamed the small terminal for an hour. In a news shop he bought a Portuguese phrase book and began memorizing words. He read travel ads for adventures into the Pantanal-ecotourism, it was called in English. There were cars for rent. A money exchange booth, a bar with beer signs and whiskey bottles lined on a shelf. And near the front entrance was a slender, artificial Christmas tree with a solitary string of lights. He watched them blink to the tune of some Brazilian carol, and despite his efforts not to, Nate thought of his children.