by Noel Hynd
He stepped out of the shiny black taxi at the foot of Edgerton Gardens in Kensington. It was a mild morning. He would walk the rest of the way home, pass by a pub for an early pint maybe, then go home and sleep off the previous evening.
He sighed to himself. He blinked against the unusual bright sunlight of London in April. He put on a pair of sunglasses.
First rain, then sun, then more rain, then more sun. He blinked. How did these English ever get used to it? It wasn’t like Ukraine where things were steadier.
He skipped the pub. He had been out late the night before and needed a long nap. He turned onto his block of red brick flats and saw nothing unusual.
He entered his building. The lift was out of order again. Well, he only lived three flights up. He took the steps two by two. He clutched an old metal key in his hand.
He looked at his door. The little splinter that he’d left above the lock was still in place. No one had entered while he was out. Either that, he mused to himself, or whoever had entered was so good that they looked for the little marks like that and fixed them.
The floor was silent. Anatoli opened the door and stepped inside.
The lunging, swinging metal baseball bat came from his blind side and was aimed straight at his kneecap. It missed slightly, but smashed the bone of his shin with a sickening crack. At the same time, doors to the apartment behind him opened and men in London police uniforms rushed toward him. They hit him hard from behind and shoved him forward into his own apartment.
Anatoli went berserk. He fought like a wild man. If there were two things he knew in life, one was fighting. The other was killing. Now he knew a third thing: if he were taken prisoner, he wouldn’t see freedom until he was a very old man, if then.
He threw his powerful elbows at the men behind him, caught one in the jaw and one in the gut. He clenched a fist, threw a backward punch at the same man and caught him in the groin. The man howled profanely and loosened his grip.
The man with the bat hammered at Anatoli’s knee again and caught it. Anatoli screamed, then cursed in Ukrainian. Those he fought cursed him in English.
Anatoli started to go down. But he managed to get a hand to the gun he carried under the left armpit of his leather jacket. He moved the gun at one of his assailants. He counted six of them now, plus one that was smaller, older, who was standing back. He pulled the trigger, once, twice.
One bullet flew wildly. But the other tore part of the left hand off one of the men who was trying to take his freedom away. The man spun away with a loud screech, blood splattering in every direction like a shattered bottle of ketchup. Anatoli saw a curled pinky finger hit the floor.
Then the bat hit Anatoli’s wrist. The gun flew away from him. Anatoli’s hand and wrist were then rendered nerveless and paralyzed from a second blow.
“Bring him down! Down! ” the leader said from outside the fight.
One of the intruders had a police club and used it with remarkable efficiency. He walloped Anatoli on the left side of the temple so hard that it crushed the cartilage in his ear. Another blow to the midpoint of his face broke his nose. Then there was one to his groin that took much of the fight out of him.
Anatoli went down hard onto his face, overpowered. The fight had taken a full minute. Championship bouts one-on-one often took less.
Anatoli lay stunned but not unconscious on the old Pakistani carpet that covered the floor. Someone grabbed him by the hair, lifted his head, and slammed it down again. He felt his hands pulled behind his back and cuffed. His mouth was hot and salty, and little shards of his teeth floated on his tongue. His physical fight was gone but a rage still surged within him. If he ever got out of here, he swore to himself, he would find all these men and kill them.
He was still breathing hard, clinging to consciousness, wondering how he could have been so careless or who had betrayed him. He wondered if the redhead had been a setup to get him out of his apartment. And how had they found him?
Voices. Voices in the room. A voice talking on a cell phone: the man who had stayed back from the fight. He was obviously the leader. Even dazed and defeated, Anatoli knew how these things worked.
“Yeah, we got him,” the voice said.
There was a pause. Then it continued. Same guy.
“Are you kidding me? Of course he fought, you moron. He fought like a stuck hog. What’d you expect… that he’d come to tea with us at Fortnum’s?”
There was another pause. Then, “One of my men got clubbed in the balls. Another got a bullet wound. We need some doctors fast.”
In the background Anatoli could hear the man he had shot wailing and crying. Anatoli wished to hell he had killed him.
“Should I put him down, Mark?” Anatoli heard someone say.
“Put him down,” the commander said in response.
Anatoli hadn’t been in America often and his English wasn’t strong. But it seemed like most of these men who had attacked him were English.
They looked it. They smelled it. They sounded it.
But their leader, Mark, the one with the cell phone, the one who had stayed clear of things until the dirty work was done, was American. Anatoli could tell by the accent. If he’d known his American accents better, he would have recognized the soft strains of the Tidewater region of Virginia.
Through a broken nose, shattered teeth, and a fractured jaw, Anatoli cursed his captors. But there was no physical fight left in him now. Darkness came down on him like a collapsing brick wall.
Everything hurt. Consciousness faded. And even as darkness descended, his right eye twitched uncontrollably, even more than usual.
Then one of the assailants pressed something to the side of his head. The nose of a pistol, it felt like. A few seconds later, there was a tremendous explosion and darkness.
SIXTY-SEVEN
F rom the day she arrived in Barranco Lajoya, Alex kept her eyes and ears open on behalf of her employer, Joseph Collins. Her assignment had been to take a good look at things and report back. What’s being done right? What might be done better? And above all, see who might be trying to push these poor indigenous people off their land.
Identify who and report back.
To that end, Alex embedded herself in the everyday life of the village, the better to catch the pace and feel of the place. The better to observe.
Father Martin installed her in a thatched hut located behind the church. Some of the wives from the village, accompanied by their daughters, had scrubbed the concrete floor of the hut with a heavy bleach and disinfectant before Alex’s arrival. As noxious as the smell was, it kept the insects at bay, though when she lay down to sleep, she could see the insects crawling above her, through the leaves and branches of the roof. There was also a small supply of citronella candles on a wooden table and a small can of insecticide.
Bedding was a thin foam mattress spread on the floor, plus a sheet and mosquito netting. There was a ring of chili powder around the sleeping area, which kept most of the crawling spiders, lice, and red ants away. In the evening, two candles lit the room, and Alex was cautioned to leave one on at night to deter the occasional small snake that might intrude. Rattlers, she was reminded, could sense the body heat of their prey and would strike in complete darkness.
The best plumbing in town was also in the back of the church, in an attached shed, but this was in a single open room where food supplies were also kept. When Alex used it, two of the women from the town, whom she quickly befriended, “stood guard” for her so that no men would walk in. The village men were too well mannered, or intimidated, to burst in on her, but accidents could happen.
Bathing was rudimentary, too. About a hundred yards through the woods there was a mountain stream which was about twenty feet wide where it ran past the village. The women of Barranco Lajoya considered it safe in terms of pollution and wildlife. They had been using it to bathe and wash laundry for many generations.
The men tended to be away during the day, so the women would go t
ogether in the late afternoon before dusk, maybe ten to fifteen at a time, usually with many children. Alex tended to go to the river with the younger women, the wives who were sometimes barely older than sixteen, but mostly in their twenties.
They would disrobe completely, leave their clothes in neat piles on the riverbank and move quickly into a meter of rushing water. They would scrub themselves with bars of a strong Mexican soap. The water came from a great elevation and was surprisingly refreshing. A strong current kept it clean.
Alex was hesitant at the procedure at first and reluctant to undress in front of the women of the village, though the venue was really no more than an outdoor version of a women’s locker room. But she quickly got used to the procedure. In a strange primal way she felt at one with God’s nature when she waded into the cool stream and then slowly submerged herself. It occurred to her that the topography here had probably not changed much in two thousand years, since the time of Christ. People had probably been bathing in this tributary for just as long. Before many days had passed, she looked forward to the daily ritual.
She had heard that sometimes soldiers came through the area and would stand on the opposite riverbank, watch the women, and shout to them. Sometimes the soldiers would even take pictures. The men of the village tolerated this. They knew better than to challenge the soldiers. Everyone in Venezuela knew better than to challenge groups of military.
Alex kept an eye out for the soldiers. She had no inclination to put on a show for them. But she did see them once. Two of the younger soldiers were taking pictures from the opposite shore while Alex and three others were bathing in knee-deep water.
Surprisingly to Alex, the women bathing made no effort to cover themselves and actually waved to the men in uniform. One blew kisses.
Later one of the women explained. “We are safer when the soldiers come by to watch us,” she said. “Because we bathe in the river, the soldiers pass by our village. If they didn’t pass by, we would be at the complete mercy of bandits.”
To bathe, the women also needed to wear rubber sandals. The thongs protected the soles of the feet from microscopic dangers that lurked on the bed of the stream. It was through the soles of the feet that parasites, some of which could be fatal, might enter the body. A woman named Inez who was always accompanied by three small children, gave Alex a pair of black rubber thongs made from an old tire.
Two weeks after Alex arrived, a medical mission from Maracaibo visited Barranco Lajoya. With the exception of Mr. Collins’s missionaries, foreign visits were a rarity in the little town perched three thousand feet above the valley floor. The scenery may have been Aspencaliber, but there were no ski lifts here, no businesses. There weren’t even toilets outside of the church. On one side of the town, the drop on the mountain was so steep that one could fall off. Sometimes children did.
The people of the town were endlessly grateful when the doctors and nurses arrived. If residents of Barranco Lajoya got sick, they usually had to hope they would get better on their own. Some didn’t even bother to do that. They had learned to live with pain and infection, and sometimes die with it.
“The worst thing that can happen to a human being is to lose hope,” Father Martin said one morning. “A lot of people here feel hopeless.”
On the first day of the visit, the missionaries turned the town’s church into a medical clinic in a matter of minutes. Two doctors from Maracaibo set up shop behind little-kid-style desks. Other missionaries set up stations to take blood pressure and test adults for diabetes. Bags of pills and medical supplies were stashed behind the altar of the church. Outside on the playground, the cluster of townspeople was organized into a line and missionaries registered every single person. They wrote down names, ages, and complaints, which ranged from hacking coughs and stomach aches to limbs rotting from blood poisoning.
What followed wasn’t textbook medicine. The doctors made diagnoses on the fly, seeing ten times the number of patients they would on a typical day in the US. The little pills that Americans took for granted made a huge difference in Barranco Lajoya. They could whip lingering infections and knock out the stomach parasites that could starve even a well-fed child.
Alex used her fluent Spanish to help counsel some patients. She saw one ten-year-old girl who had been suffering from a sore throat that made her wince every time she swallowed.
She asked how long the girl had been in pain.
The girl’s response: “ Seis anos. ” Six years.
The doctor prescribed antibiotics but told the girl’s mother she would need to take her to one of the hospitals on the distant coast to have her tonsils removed. She wasn’t sure that would happen. The medical brigade like this was like a strobe flash in the dark. The stomach parasites were going to come back, blood pressure medicine would eventually run out, lice would again infest the children. Suspected cancers would go untreated. But temporarily suffering had been lessened. At least those who brought in help from the outside had done something.
“I’d like to think that we weren’t just giving a dose of an antiparasitic but also a little dose of optimism,” Father Martin said at the end of the day. “And yet there are those who would take even that away from these people.”
As the first month passed, Alex watched as the resident missionaries went about their work, which consisted mostly of trying to establish a school, or at best literacy, and a small medical clinic. These activities took place in the church, which was close to a hundred degrees during the day.
Alex rose with each lemony dawn, sometimes watching the last of the men begin their daily trek down the mountain. She then set out to explore the region, trying to figure out what could be there that would cause someone to want to drive the missionaries away. If anything.
Some days she would hike on foot. On other days, burros were available. She would never travel alone, never travel unarmed. On her journeys, the most striking thing in Alex’s eyes was the magnificent raw beauty of the countryside, rivers and waterfalls, thick jungle, and endless unspoiled vistas. Always, she took photographs. Her digital equipment had enough memory for two thousand shots. She fired away liberally, then cleared out the clinkers in the evening.
Twice, Manuel returned to Barranco Lajoya to take her on explorations by air.
Each time, he guided her back down the mountain and drove her to a nearby landing field that could accommodate helicopters but not airplanes. From there she took off and surveyed the region by air.
On the first trip, the pilot took her all around the area to the east and northeast, all the way out to the Rio Amacura delta on the coastline and the blue Caribbean. She could see Trinidad and Tobago in the hazy distance. Then on another day, a different pilot flew her westward down over the Amazon jungle to Puerto Ayacucho, which was the capital of the Venezuelan state of Amazonas.
“The army has a huge base here,” Manuel explained. “We cannot fly too close to it or they will shoot at us. For sport, if for no other reason. They conduct a continuous campaign against drug runners from Colombia, yet some of them also take payoffs from the drug runners.”
Alex nodded. Then they continued south to one of the world’s great natural wonders, the Casiquare canal, a waterway that linked South America’s two greatest river systems, the Amazon and the Orinoco. By air for the first time, it was breathtaking, much like going over Niagara Falls and the Mississippi at the same time.
“When we return,” Alex asked, “can we fly north over Barranco Lajoya? I’d like to see the summit of our mountain.”
“We can do that,” Manuel answered.
The aircraft then guided Alex over her village by air. She took more pictures. She then had the pilot trace the route of the river until they found the places where the water came out of the ground. She could see no place where pollution could have begun, as once reported.
On foot, and on the backs of donkeys, Alex learned enough about the surrounding areas to take hikes on some days through paths in the jungle, never neglecti
ng her sidearm, always accompanied by men with rifles from Barranco Lajoya. Her daily outfit-boots, fresh socks that she’d wash each night, hiking shorts, a T-shirt, a red bandana, and cap-became her work clothes. She clipped the compass to one of the belt loops on her shorts and it remained there.
Her “school uniform,” as she thought of it. Her arms and legs tanned within a week. Her stomach flattened even more than usual, and her legs grew stronger than ever from the rugged hiking and climbing. Her local guides showed her to clearings where she could see horizons that were hundreds of miles away on a clear day. On other days they showed her lush orchards that they had planted on their own. The guides often trekked fifty pound bags of fruit by donkey down the path and sent the produce to market. On another day, she was led past the area when the women bathed to where the stream merged with a much larger body of water. There were three dugout canoes waiting, and her guides took her on a journey upstream about ten miles by paddle. They stopped at a quarry where the men picked up about twenty pounds each of smooth flat rock, a distinctive local granite with a quartz content that, like the sand in some of the river beds, gave the rock a pink hue.
“What are those for?” Alex asked.
Both men smiled. “ Mi sobrina,” said one of them. “My niece. And some of the other girls.”
“What do they do with them?” Alex asked, intrigued.
“We’ll show you later,” the girl’s uncle said.
Then, when the boats were loaded, they allowed the current to bring them back. It took the better part of a day.
That same evening, Alex received the answer to her question about the stones. The granite substance was not just unique for its color, but also for its density and durability. When Alex examined the stones, she was amazed how hard they were. They were like little pieces of natural iron. As a result, the young girls in the village used hammers and chisels on them and created jewelry of all designs. The jewelry was then sent to markets in the cities to sell to tourists. For a pendant that took many hours to create, a girl would receive a few pennies. But it was better than nothing.
