Eye of the Forest

by P. B. Kerr

  “Just what I always wanted,” muttered Groanin. “You shouldn’t have, really.” And then: “Is there a gift card?”

  “But I don’t understand,” said Philippa. “Why on earth do we need to bring along Pizarro’s skull?”

  “Haven’t you heard, Miss Philippa?” said Groanin. “Two ‘eads are better than one. Even an ‘ead with an ‘ole in it. I say, even an ‘ead with an ‘ole in it.”

  “Do shut up, Groanin,” said Nimrod.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’d better take it and get back to the hotel.”

  “Yes, sir.” And still carrying the lead-lined box containing the conquistador’s skull, he shimmered out of the little chapel.

  “My butler,” Nimrod said to Father Polzl, as if that was explanation enough.

  Father Polzl smiled. “He’s quite a card, isn’t he?”

  “Yes, but not always the winning kind,” said Nimrod.

  They stayed talking to the Father for another fifteen minutes until it was time for him to go and conduct mass. The cathedral was already filling up with people for whom Pizarro was just an unpleasant name in history. And having thanked the Father for his help, the five djinn went outside and onto a plaza made chillier by the spray from a fountain that seemed to have its own police guard.

  “So what’s the head for, Mr. V?” asked John, bursting with curiosity. “A gift for the headhunters, perhaps?”

  “There are no headhunters in South America,” insisted Philippa. “Possibly, there never were. Most likely, it was just a story invented by explorers who wanted to make a bigger deal out of coming here.”

  Mr. Vodyannoy said nothing to Philippa, preferring to answer John’s question than to argue with his sister. “If ever we come across Manco Capac,” he said, “or any of his descendants — most of the Indian tribes in the upper Amazon are probably related to the Incas — it might be very useful to be able to hand over the head of the Incas’ greatest enemy.”

  “But Manco himself died long before Pizarro came to Peru,” said Philippa. “In which case Pizarro’s name will probably mean nothing to him.”

  “Must you be so literal, Philippa?” exclaimed Nimrod. “Try to remember that you are a djinn, not an attorney in a court of law. Given Manco Capac has almost certainly returned from the dead, I think we can agree that he might be capable of almost anything, don’t you?”

  “Good point,” said Philippa. “Sorry. Since that time I spent in Iravotum, I still get bogged down with logic sometimes.”

  “Yes. Yes, of course,” said Nimrod. “I’d quite forgotten about that.”

  “I wish I could,” said Philippa.

  Mr. Groanin walked slowly back to the hotel with the box containing Pizarro’s skull under his arm.

  “The things you get asked to do when you’re a butler for a djinn,” he muttered to himself. “I feel like flipping Hamlet walking around with old Yorick here.”

  Seeing a café, he decided to stop for a quick drink, thinking it would be nice if someone waited on him for a change. Groanin sat down at an outside table and, seeing a waiter, he was about to order a cup of tea until concern about the local water quality prompted him to change his mind and order a lemonade instead. And while he waited for the waiter to return, he started to think about how lemonade is made: from adding lemon to water and heating the result. But suppose, thought Groanin, the water came straight out of the Amazon, for instance? And did they actually boil it? Was the lemonade in Peru safe to drink? These were the questions that occupied poor Groanin’s mind in the time it took for the waiter to return with his lemonade. By which time he’d thought better of drinking it.

  “Blast this country,” he muttered, and stood up. “I should have ordered a beer. They boil that.” He was about to leave when he noticed, at the next table, a very attractive woman weeping copious amounts of tears. “What’s the matter with you?” he asked. “I say, miss, what’s the matter with you?”

  The woman pointed to the other side of the main plaza. To Groanin’s surprise, she spoke good English. “Do you see that man in the red jacket, señor?” she said. “He just ran away with my handbag.”

  “You’re joking,” said Groanin. “You mean he stole it? In broad daylight?”

  The woman blew her nose and then nodded. “It had my whole life in it. My purse. My keys. My phone. Everything. I really don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  Groanin stared into the distance. “The fellow in the red shirt, you say?” The woman nodded. “Wearing the blue trousers?” The woman nodded again. Groanin placed the antique box containing Pizarro’s skull on the table in front of her. “Stay there,” he said. “I said, stay there. I’ll sort this out. I’m English.” And with that, Groanin walked swiftly across the plaza in the direction of the man in the red shirt. He was a sucker for a pretty face.

  When he was halfway across the square, Groanin turned and looked back. The woman was standing up, watching him, as if hoping he was going to recover her handbag. Groanin waved and walked on. But now that he was nearer, he saw that the man in the red jacket was actually a man in a ceremonial military uniform. Under his arm he had a tall red hat with a plume on it and the only bag he was carrying was the cartridge bag on his Sam Browne military belt. The man was a policeman. Groanin gulped as he realized he’d been had and ran back to the café, but the woman was gone. And, what was worse, the box containing the skull was gone, too.

  It was then that he saw Nimrod and the others.

  “I’ve lost it,” Groanin said flatly. “That box, with Frank thingummy’s skull in it. I say, I’ve lost the flipping thing.”

  “You’ve lost the head of Don Francisco Pizarro?” Nimrod sighed loudly.

  “That’s what I said, isn’t it?” said Groanin unhappily. “Some Peruvian bird tricked me into thinking her handbag had been pinched and then nicked it.”

  “That was pretty stupid of you,” said Zadie.

  Groanin shot her a poisonous look.

  “Give me your hands, Groanin,” Nimrod said gravely.

  “It were an accident,” said Groanin. “I say, I’m sorry, sir. Look here, you’re not going to do anything unpleasant to me, are you?”

  Nimrod took hold of Groanin’s hands. “Not to you, Groanin,” said Nimrod, and closed his eyes.

  “What are you doing?” demanded Groanin. “She can’t have gone far. We’ve got to find her.”

  “That is precisely what I am trying to do,” said Nimrod. “If you will shut up and let me get on with it.” Nimrod lifted Groanin’s hands to his nose, inhaled deeply several times and muttered his focus word: “QWERTYUIOP!”

  “What’s he doing?” whispered Philippa.

  “Don’t tell me you don’t know about odorari,” scoffed Zadie.

  “Odorari,” said Mr. Vodyannoy. “It’s a mystical technique practiced by only the most powerful djinn. You see, traces of the box’s atoms are still on Groanin’s hands. Another few minutes and it would probably have been too late. You just watch. Nimrod will get the scent in a moment or two.”

  Nimrod took another deep breath from the sweating palms of his butler. He could smell some cheese, bread, throat lozenges, a trace of lemonade, and some soap. Then, finally he had it. Just a few particles of lead from the box lining but more than enough for his immediate purpose. Nimrod lifted his distinguished, fastidious nose high into the air and drew in a mixture of coffee, beer, cigarette smoke, fried food, human sweat, soap, silicon, water from the fountain, wood smoke, carbon monoxide, lead from gasoline, and finally the same carbon he had detected on Groanin’s large hands. Then he opened his eyes and smiled.

  “I believe I have them,” he said quietly. “Wait here.”

  The woman from the café carried the box containing the skull around the corner to where her friend and accomplice was waiting in his car. She hadn’t had time to look inside the old box, but she thought maybe it was an antique and probably very valuable on its own. She opened the front passenger door and sat down with the
box on her lap. Neither of them noticed the invisible figure that crept into the backseat behind her.

  “What is it?” asked the man, and nodded at the box.

  “I don’t know, but there’s a name on the lid. Don Francisco Pizarro Demarkes.”

  “Never heard of him. But he sounds rich.”

  “It looks kind of creepy. But valuable, don’t you think?”

  The man grinned wolfishly.

  “Perhaps there’s something even more valuable inside,” he said.

  “There is only one way to find out,” said the woman, and lifted the lid.

  Nimrod was not a cruel man but he had little sympathy for thieves and felt that giving this pair a good fright — especially the kind of fright that might cause them to stop stealing — would, in the long run, be in both their moral interests. For a moment, he considered changing his appearance to something much more frightening and then rejected the idea, for he had no wish to give the two thieves heart attacks. So he confined himself to looking like Pizarro, as imagined by the English painter John Everett Millais, in a picture Nimrod had once seen in London’s National Gallery, which is to say he wore a beard, a red doublet, a golden breastplate, a ruff around his neck, a soft hat with a feather in it, and carried a sword in his hand. This sudden appearance in the backseat of the car was accompanied by a bang as loud as an exploding paper bag.

  The two thieves screamed and reached simultaneously for the door handles, only to find that these came off in their hands, and the doors stayed locked. In her haste to be out of the car, the woman managed to empty Pizarro’s skull from the lead-lined box and onto her lap, which only caused her to scream even louder. And then she tried to climb up onto the dashboard of the car, at which point the skull bounced onto the floor.

  “Who dares to purloin and then fumble my head like a pomegranate?” demanded Nimrod in a loud, imperious, and quite frighteningly Spanish voice. Leaning forward in his seat Nimrod allowed a very garlicky smell to escape from his mouth and nostrils, fouling the confined atmosphere of the car, before he added, “You dogs. You curs. You mongrels. You felons. You, who stole that precious box and the head of Don Francisco Pizarro Demarkes, must prepare thyselves to suffer the most terrible of punishments.”

  “Please,” whimpered the man, twisting around in his seat, his hands clasped as if in prayer. “I beg you, Don Francisco, please don’t kill us.”

  Nimrod sneered in his face sulfurously and rattled his sword in its scabbard. “You dare to entreat me, thief?” He was almost enjoying himself, as an actor might enjoy hamming it up as the villainous genie in some crummy Christmas pantomime. “Ask of me only by what mode of death thou wilt die and by what manner of slaughter shall I slay thee and thy worthless accomplice. Thou Mother of Amir, thou hyena, thou leper. Speak only that thou wilt swear on the life of thy mother and thy mother’s mother that thou wilt never steal again, and then, perhaps, will I spare your worthless lives. Otherwise, hold thy tongue, for thy last lying breath is in thy thieving nostrils and in thy dishonest mouth.”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” said the man. “I swear it. By my mother and my mother’s mother. I’ll never steal again. We both do, don’t we?”

  “Yes,” squeaked the woman lying across the dashboard. “I swear it.”

  “I believe thee not,” growled Nimrod, and made the car vibrate with his wrath until the radiator began to overheat. “For thou dost say nothing of returning my skull to the poor fool thou stole it from who must himself die a terrible death. And I hear thou sayest nothing about making amends to all the other fools whom thou hast tricked and robbed. But perhaps because thou hast both softened my heart a little I will give thee a choice of terrible deaths. Now then, shall I shut thee both in a leaky jar and then cast it into the dirtiest sea on the planet? Or feed thee both slowly to a boa constrictor with very bad breath?”

  “No, no, no,” said the woman, “we will take the skull straight back to him. I promise. And I will give all the money I have ever stolen to the church. I swear it.”

  “Me, too,” squeaked the man.

  Nimrod nodded. “Very well,” he said. “I do believe it. But if either of you ever again so much as steals a bit of stationery, avoids paying a bus fare, or causes a book to become overdue at the library, I will come back and replace your heads with elephant dung and make scarabs of your ears. Do I make myself perfectly clear?”

  “Yes, yes, yes.”

  “Now go. Return the box and the skull to the cream-faced loon in the square.” Nimrod caused the doors of the car to fly open and the two scrambled out, pausing only to collect the box and return Pizarro’s skull to its lead-lined interior.

  Chuckling a little, for he had rather enjoyed himself, Nimrod got out of the car and watched them run away. Thinking he might just remind them of the need to turn over a new leaf he turned to the car, muttered his focus word, and made a few alterations to the basic design — blacking out the rear windows and adding bars to them so that it looked more like a prison van. For good measure, he even laid out two orange jumpsuits and two sets of shackles on the seats. “Who says you can’t reform criminals?” he said.

  “Does she have to do that?” said Groanin as Zadie tap-danced her way around the café table where he, John, Philippa, and Mr. Vodyannoy were awaiting Nimrod’s return. “I don’t mind telling you I’m hoping there’s a mantrap or an open drain cover somewhere around this square.”

  “That’s a little cruel,” observed Philippa.

  “I don’t think so,” said John.

  “She’s driving me mad. All that dancing. Who does she think she is? Gene Kelly? Ginger flipping Rogers? Is she hyperactive or something? I say, is that daft girl hyperactive?”

  “I believe she might be, yes,” said Mr. Vodyannoy. “It’s what we djinn call a fugue state. Like when someone chases a sort of baroque tune around a church organ. Quite a few djinn suffer from it when they’re young.”

  “There you are,” said Philippa. “She can’t help it. That means we have to be sympathetic.”

  “Speak for yourself,” said John.

  In truth, however, Philippa was already regretting having asked Zadie along on their South American adventure. It wasn’t the tap dancing she minded or even the toothbrush that was always in Zadie’s mouth so much as the other girl’s sharp and often critical tongue. That really bugged her.

  Zadie was still tap-dancing when the woman who had taken the box presented it and then herself at the table on the plaza with a cringing, fearful bow.

  “I’m very sorry,” she said. “I apologize. I’ll never ever do it again. Please forgive me, señor.”

  “Aye, well, that’s easy to say,” said Groanin. “You should be ashamed of yourself, young woman. I’ve a good mind to go and fetch the police and have you locked up. I say, I’ve a good mind to fetch a copper, do you hear? I’ve no time for thieves. Really I don’t. Especially not when they steal other people’s property.”

  The woman smiled abjectly and, wringing her hands piteously, bowed again. “Please, forgive me,” she repeated with tears in her eyes.

  “Never,” Groanin said firmly.

  “Groanin,” Philippa said sternly. “I seem to remember that you were once a thief. In fact, that’s how you met Nimrod, isn’t it? Because you stole a decanter that he happened to be inside.”

  The English butler harrumphed loudly and looked at Philippa stiffly. “Yes, well, that’s as may be. Thanks for reminding me of that, miss. Now you come to mention it, I suppose I had rather forgotten my former life.”

  “It is human to err and divine to forgive,” said Zadie.

  Groanin bit his lip. It was one thing being lectured by Philippa, whom he loved dearly, but it was quite another being lectured by the intensely irritating Zadie. “And to think I ever complained about that lad Dybbuk,” he murmured.

  “Hmm?” said Zadie, who wasn’t listening, anyway.

  “I say that’s fine and dandy for them as seem to be almost divine,” said Groanin. “But
for us mundane mortals, things are a bit different.” Groanin waved at the woman irritably. “Go on, be off, you baggage, before I change my mind and have you in the stocks or whatever it is they do to thieves in this pigging country.”

  The woman turned and fled.

  “There,” said Groanin triumphantly. “That told her, I think.”

  CHAPTER 6

  SICKY’S SHRUNKEN HEAD AND SOME OTHER REVOLTING AFTER-DINNER STORIES

  They chartered a plane and flew to Cuzco, the old Incan capital, high in the Andes. The plane was a Cessna Caravan, which it needed to be, given all the equipment they had brought from New York. While the plane was being refueled in Cuzco, they took a helicopter ride up to the citadel of Machu Picchu, the so-called “lost city” found by Hiram Bingham in 1911.

  Machu Picchu almost seems to be up in the clouds, and the twins thought it one of the most spectacular things they had ever seen. Almost as good as the pyramids, although it was more recent in origin.

  “Hard to believe the Incas moved all these huge rocks up here without djinn power to build this place,” observed John.

  “Well, they did,” said Nimrod. “This place was built in 1450, long after the djinn king of the Incas, Manco Capac, had died.”

  “There’s not much humans can’t do when we put our minds to it,” Groanin said breathlessly, because at nearly eight thousand feet above sea level, the air in Machu Picchu is quite thin. “Except perhaps treat a place like this with a bit of pigging respect. I must say, it doesn’t look very lost. Look at this place. I say, look at this place. It’s like Heaton Park in Manchester on a bank holiday. There are folk chatting on their cell phones or having picnics, hippies selling postcards, religious nutcases having prayer meetings — flipping heck, there’s even a group of Yanks over there making an advertisement for suntan lotion.”

  It was true, the ancient citadel was crawling with tourists of all nationalities, and John came away from Machu Picchu with the thought that it might have been best if Hiram Bingham had kept his discovery of the site a secret. Philippa found herself thinking it was rather hard to believe that another site like it — in Machu Picchu, there are one hundred and forty different constructions covering five square miles — such as Paititi, really could await discovery.