by PJ Skinner
‘That’s a lot of chocolate, gringa.’
‘I’m going to the jungle,’ she said. ‘I need emergency supplies. Didn’t we meet in the Discoteca?’
‘Ah yes. The girl with beautiful green eyes. You should buy dark chocolate. The more cocoa, the less likely it is to melt in the heat.’
‘Oh, I didn’t know.’ She took them back to the shelf and changed them. ‘Thank you. Alfredo isn’t it?’
‘Yes, Alfredo Vargas at your service.’
‘Actually, if you’re at my service, I’ve some questions, about the treasure, if you’ve time to talk.’
‘Let’s sit outside on the bench in the shade. Do you want a beer?’
‘No thanks, I’ll have a Seven-Up though.’
They sat in the shade with the bright sunlight all around them sucking the colour out of the street.
‘What did you want to know?’ said Alfredo.
‘Well, I’ve got this book and it says that the Incas buried Atahualpa’s ransom in Sierramar. Do you know anything about it?’
‘More than anyone alive. I’ve searched for it most of my life.’
‘So, you believe it still exists?’
‘Yes, I’m convinced. I’ve done years of research.’
‘Where is it hidden?’
‘There’s a hand drawn map that shows a hiding place in the mountains near Guayumba.’
‘Have you searched up there?’
‘Of course, often. I believe it’s only a matter of time before the treasure is rediscovered.’
‘How exciting. Can we talk about it when I get back from my trip?’
‘Any time gringa. Mi casa es su casa.’
***
The brothel was in the southern part of old Calderon on a sordid-looking side street. The outside of the building did not advertise the trade carried on inside its sturdy door. The only clue was a large peephole with a shutter that was drawn back when someone knocked. Wilson did not have to wait for long after he banged on the door. A shadow appeared in the peephole and disappeared in one fluid movement. The door opened so fast that Wilson fell into the gloomy interior. The décor inside the brothel was a bit of a cliché, with its red velvet sofas in booths of dark mahogany, the fabric now stained with use, and the cheap chandeliers with dim bulbs. Several world-weary women of uncertain vintage and massive make-up were draped unconvincingly around the bar. A tired young woman gyrated without enthusiasm to cantina music on a filthy stage.
‘So,’ said a voice, ‘you decided to pay us a visit. How nice.’ The heavy sarcasm was evident in the gravelly tone. Esteban Nunez stepped out of the gloom and stood under the dim bulb in the hallway, his greasy face shining.
‘I told you not to show your face again until every penny was paid off. You’re taking a big chance coming here.’
Wilson smiled.
‘Brother, why are you treating me like this when I’ve come to pay you and spend my money in your establishment?’
‘Pay me? Ha!’ Esteban opened the door and looked out at the sky. He shut the door and glared at Wilson.
‘There are no flying pigs going by,’ he said.
‘Esteban, would I lie to you?’ asked Wilson.
‘Yes, and you do all the time.’
‘I’m hurt, but I forgive you. Set me up in a booth with Conchita and a bottle of whisky, and I’ll forget it ever happened.’
‘Are you nuts? Where’s my money?’ asked Esteban, turning purple with fury.
Wilson reached into his pocket and took out his wallet.
‘How much do I owe you?’ he asked rhetorically, although he already knew. ‘Seven-hundred and fifty, wasn’t it? I’ll give you a thousand so I’ve some credit to spend in here.’ He handed over the dollars with a flourish.
‘Seven-hundred and fifty-six dollars and thirty cents exactly. And that doesn’t include interest. Where did you get the money? I heard you got fired again.’
‘None of your business. I don’t know why you’re complaining about your best customer. I always recommend you to everyone I know. Now, where’s Conchita? I’ve got a tremendous thirst.’
Mollified, Esteban waved to one of the women at the bar and signalled to her that she had a client with cash. The woman shimmied over to the booth and tried to look pleased as Wilson joined her.
‘Hello, darling,’ he said, ‘long time no see.’
Esteban made sure that Wilson was distracted and then he slipped into his office and searched in a desk drawer for a scrap of paper he had stored there. He unfurled it and dialled the number that Pancho Rojas, known as El Duro, had given him.
‘Señor Rojas, it’s me Esteban Núñez. You asked me to let you know when Wilson Ortega made an appearance. He’s here and he’s loaded.’
‘He’s got money? How typical of that scumbag that he spends the money he owes to me in a brothel.’
‘Have I done the wrong thing?’
‘No, of course not. I’ll deal with this in my own way. Thank you for calling me.’
Chapter VII
A week after their meeting, Mike drove Sam and Wilson to San Martin, a town two-hours north of Calderon, from where they would travel into the jungle. The dry landscape through which they travelled supported only a few scrubby bushes and some small dusty towns along winding roads cut through several banded rock formations, whose relief stood out in the moonlight. There was a large multi-layered fold in one of the rock faces. She wanted to ask Mike to stop the car so she could take a photograph but he was driving with grim determination and she didn’t fancy his reaction.
When they arrived at San Martin, they checked into the Hotel California. Mike took one look at the dilapidated hotel and decided to drive back to Calderon rather than stay the night. With a misplaced sense of economy, he had insisted that Sam and Wilson share a room.
‘There’s no point wasting money,’ he said. ‘You’ll be sharing in the field anyway.’ Sam was slightly taken aback at the thrifty attitude, considering the luxury in which Mike kept himself in Calderon.
‘I suppose so,’ she said without enthusiasm.
‘Okay, so I’ll see you at the beach, Sam. Have a good trip.’
‘I will. Drive carefully.’
After Mike left, they went straight into the dining room, which had a huge poster of the Golden Gate Bridge plastered over one wall. Sam felt abandoned and nervous. Wilson was behaving like he owned the place, clicking his fingers and ordering food for them both. They sat at a table with sticky patches on its dark surface. The plastic chairs were too low for the table so Sam stacked a second one on hers for comfort. Bare wiring hung from the ceiling and the flimsy, stained curtains did not hide the filthy windows. There were some young local men at a table in the corner drinking beer and smoking unfiltered cigarettes. They flirted with Sam across the room and made her laugh and blush. She enjoyed the Latin lack of reserve more than she had imagined.
‘Boys,’ sniffed Wilson, and he turned around to glare at them.
After a supper of chicken and rice washed down with Seven-Up, they went upstairs. The room allocated to Sam and Wilson turned out to be L-shaped with a bed at each end and all the supplies stacked up in the middle. This gave a certain amount of privacy, so Sam felt less exposed. Wilson left the hotel to get something that she didn’t understand, and she took an early night, hoping to avoid talking to him again that evening. She lay in bed shivering under the thin blanket, feeling the nylon sheets sparking under her. Quivering with anticipation about the trip, she couldn’t get to sleep.
After an hour or so of tossing about in the crackly sheets she heard singing in the street. She lay in bed resisting the temptation to look out the window. The singing was insistent, and her curiosity got the better of her. She knelt on the bed and pulled aside the filthy curtains. There was a dim street light opposite her room, and underneath it stood the boys from the restaurant. They had a guitar, and they were singing up at her window. She wasn’t sure what to do, but the singing was pretty good, so she opened th
e window and leaned out. The singing became more passionate, and to her surprise, they started to sing Angie, a song by the Rolling Stones. She smiled at the garbled words that must have been learned phonetically from the radio, but there was no mistaking their intensity.
Suddenly Wilson came back into the room. He saw her leaning out of the window and roughly pulled her in. He smelt of drink and sex, which made her stomach turn. He cursed the boys, who ran off laughing. Sam was disappointed and furious.
‘How dare you? Don’t ever touch me again. Go away!’
‘You should not show yourself to those boys.’
‘I said go away.’
Wilson stepped backwards and then, shaking his head, he turned on his heel and disappeared around the corner to his part of the bedroom. Sam got back under the covers, shivering with indignation. She was not happy at being manhandled by Wilson. It would be an uphill struggle to work on equal terms in the jungle while he considered her to be inferior to him. She felt herself at a disadvantage as he was the one holding the cards. Her safety was in his hands and her knowledge of alluvial mining was only from books. It would be hard to gain his respect under those circumstances but she would have to grin and bear it. No one said that it was going to be easy to break into this male world. It was amazing to be employed at all. She turned to face the wall.
***
At dawn the next morning, they paid for the hotel.
‘Why were those men singing to me last night?’ Sam asked the manager, who spoke English because of his time working in ‘gringolandia’.
‘The serenata or serenade, is a way of winning a girl’s heart in Sierramar. When you appeared at the window, you signified interest in the petition.’
‘Wilson told them to go away.’
‘They must’ve been disappointed. I know I’d have been,’ he said winking at her.
The hotel manager was squat and sweaty but he knew how to deliver a line. Sam blushed and fiddled with her rucksack.
They walked through the empty streets to the ramshackle train station to buy their tickets to the coast. It was freezing and Sam shivered in her thin cotton shirt and trousers. Her new Wellington boots flapped against her cold legs. She felt their clammy hold on her calves and wished that she could afford a nice pair of leather walking boots. Mentally, she added them to the list of things she was going to buy when Mike eventually paid her. The list was growing all the time and she wondered if it was a fantasy. If he was saving money by making her share a room with Wilson, it was pretty unlikely that she would get paid any time soon, in shares or otherwise.
As they approached the station, it became apparent that they weren’t the only people planning on catching the train. They would be competing for tickets with hordes of other people, carrying baggage of every kind imaginable. Wilson led them into the crowd. The pushing and shoving was something Sam had never experienced before. She struggled to stay on her feet. No-one queued for tickets. A diaspora of humanity pushed in every direction to get to the window where they were being sold. Wilson surged ahead and disappeared into a crowd of bodies swathed in woollen shawls against the cold. Sam could see his fedora moving to the small window where the tickets were being dispensed. She was very weary, feeling as if she had not managed to sleep on the thin foam mattress over the wooden slats of her bed. Having Wilson in the same room didn’t help much either. He snored like a lorry with dirt in its fuel.
‘What time does the train leave?’ she asked him when he came back with the tickets.
‘That depends.’
‘On what?’
‘It’s meant to leave at seven o clock, but it doesn’t leave on time very often.’
‘So how will we know?’
‘When the driver gets into the cabin.’
‘So, we can’t go and have some breakfast?’
‘No. They will leave without us.’
‘Can we get the next train?’
Wilson looked at Sam to see if she was joking.
‘There is one train a day so if you don’t want to wait until tomorrow...’
While they waited for the train, the platform they were standing on became a market. Local traders arrived from every direction, carrying their entire stalls on their backs and setting up shop. There were several scruffy, black, hairy pigs snuffling around on the tracks. One of their more unfortunate brethren was being cooked over a slow fire by a couple of large ladies. The smell of the burning hairs and roast crackling crept up Sam’s nose, both revolting and enticing her. She almost drooled with hunger as she imagined the taste of the hot pork fat. It was noticeable that the population now consisted of as many black people as indigenous ones. They were the descendants of African slaves brought to Sierramar by the Spanish during their conquest of the Incas. Sam found it strange to hear them speak Spanish. They spoke with abbreviated words, missing entire chunks of sentences, like Tati did. It had never occurred to her that there would be different accents in Spanish. She wasn’t sure what she had expected, but not this. What was the point in learning Spanish in one accent when everyone she met spoke it in another one? The Esmeraldas accent in Spanish was the equivalent of a Glaswegian accent in English and whether she liked it or not, she would be heavily reliant on Wilson’s translations to get along on the trip. When the train finally reversed into the platform from a siding, she was astonished to see that it was actually a bus adapted to run on rails. There was a mad scramble as everyone tried to get on the train at the same time despite the seats all being pre-booked. Wilson told her to get on the train while he made sure that the provisions were loaded on the roof. Sam looked at the sea of hysterical people pushing and shoving, took a deep breath, and waded in. The smell of unwashed bodies marinated in wood smoke was pungent and, in some cases, nasty. Somehow, she got a foothold on the metal step up into the solitary door to the train. She heaved herself up by holding on to the bars on either side of the door. The bars were coated in the grease from filthy hands. Sam let go as soon as she could and staggered aboard, trying to avoid crushing the chickens that were lying about trussed up with palm leaves and fibres. She checked her tickets and looked down the bus. Two large men were sitting on her seats. She didn’t feel up to the struggle of asking them to move and decided to stay standing until Wilson arrived. There was nothing malicious about the bedlam that surrounded her, and she felt relaxed at being pushed aside by the other passengers in their rush to secure their seats.
When Wilson got on, the interlopers gave them the seats without a murmur of dissent, giving the impression that they were warming them up. The seats were tiny, designed for the indigenous part of the population. Since the people on board consisted mostly of large men and women, as broad as they were tall, it increased the feeling of claustrophobic overcrowding. Wilson had to sit sideways with his bony knees sticking out into the thigh of a large mulatto woman who was perched on a barrel of lard in the passageway.
‘How far is it to San Lorenzo?’ said Sam, already dreading the journey.
‘It’s two hundred kilometres.’
‘So how long does it take to get there?’ she asked, cheered by the relatively short distance.
‘The programmed journey time is eight hours but it can take much longer if the train derails.’
‘Eight hours? Is there no quicker way?’
‘It’s possible to go by plane to the coast and come in to Riccuarte by car from the other direction but the train’s much cheaper and Mike didn’t want to pay for flights.’
Sam was not surprised.
A small plump man with a Hitler moustache and an ancient cap appeared from behind the ticket office and walked purposefully towards the train. Just as suddenly he turned around and went back to the groans of the passengers. Five minutes later he reappeared with what looked like a lunch box and a plastic bag full of clinking bottles. He opened the driver’s door and heaved himself up into the cabin. Shortly afterwards, the train set off with a prolonged shudder and shake though the groves of banana trees behind the s
tation and towards the nearby mountains. Sam sat back in her seat and admired the view from the railway line. The first part of the journey took them through breath-taking scenery that consisted of verdant knife-edged hills along whose sides the train teetered in an unnerving manner. They passed through several long tunnels in the pitch black. Every time they entered a tunnel, someone wolf-whistled in the dark, a practice that became more irritating as the trip wore on. The train made numerous stops along the way, but they didn’t last more than a minute or two. There was the inevitable mad rush as people clambered over the luggage and out of the train and pushed past the people trying to get on. The train moved off as the last people were still getting on. It was only a matter of luck that no one slipped under the wheels.
After a short time, they burrowed into the vegetation that heralded the fringes of the coastal jungle. The tiny villages where the train stopped were barely keeping the jungle at bay. In some places, the vegetation had reclaimed some of the older shacks, and they were being enveloped by branches of the trees in a sinister manner.
‘Do these villages have electricity?’ she asked Wilson.
‘No, they use candles for light at night.’
‘Water?’
‘They get water from the river for cooking. They wash in the river.’
About four hours into the trip, it occurred to her that if there was no water in the villages, there was unlikely to be a toilet either. She was managing to hold on but she knew she wouldn’t last all the way. Wilson had not mentioned this problem to her before setting out. He was used to this state of affairs and it had simply not occurred to him. He jumped out every now and then when the train stopped, and urinated against a tree, serenely unaware of Sam’s growing discomfort.
The scenery continued to change. The land was now flat. Here and there, the vegetation began to look ravaged. Banana and papaya trees replaced the matted tangle of vines and other tropical plants. All the people in the village were black or mulatto. The populations were young and well-nourished. Packs of children swarmed all over the train every time it stopped, and she was usually the centre of attention as the only white person on board. Every time the train stopped, they crowded around to stare at her, smiled big toothy grins and then looked abashed if she smiled back. Also present at every stop were women and children selling the local take-away foods, such as empanadas and fried bananas with cheese.
