The Babylon Rite

by Tom Knox

  ‘But why is Santa Muerte so powerful? For Monroy?’

  ‘Because Santa Muerte idolizes death. Therefore the practitioners are especially murderous, they want to kill. El Santo’s lethal emissaries see killing as an ideal, an end in itself. A way of worshipping the white lady. They are tattooed with skulls and may regard these tattoos as magical protection. The use of such magical tattoos has now spread to other gangs. You know about the deaths in England, of course—’

  ‘The McLintocks, those poor young people, yes.’

  ‘Some of the suspects in this case have Santa Muerte tattoos on their hands: that certainly indicates the Catrina cartel. But the man Ritter, who was killed in London, he was tattooed on the arm, which is more a Zeta trait. And he was firmly linked with the Camorra, in Italy, who we know are allied with the Zetas.’

  Jess gazed at the bare white walls, then at the officer. ‘You’ve spoken to people in London?’

  ‘Yep. We have already been in touch with the British authorities. Indeed we spoke to London this morning, to further our investigation, and to help them if we can. And this is where you come in … We were fascinated by your information. We know El Santo took an interest in ethnobotany at Harvard. He is obviously after new drugs. Or, should I say, old drugs. Please tell us everything you know about the history.’

  Jessica did as she was instructed. The DEA officer took copious notes. The president of the United States of America smiled down from the wall.

  An hour later the officer put down his embassy pen, stood up, shook her hand, and thanked her, solemnly. Jessica felt a sudden terror: at leaving the safe, guarded confines of the embassy, with its body scanners, and smartly saluting Marines. She had to go back out there, where the soldiers of El Santo were prowling, with the skull tattoos, yearning to kill for the sake of killing.

  The man evidently sensed her unhappiness. ‘Miss Silverton, let me repeat the advice I gave you on the phone.’ His eyes met hers. ‘Yes, you are in serious danger, there is no point in denying it. But it is arguable that California could be just as dangerous for you, for anyone, as Peru. The US cannot guarantee safety even for its own officials – we have lost many good men in Mexico and elsewhere, diplomats and businessmen, families with children, not just soldiers and DEA operatives. In your case, my hope is that they regard you as subsidiary. They will have no idea that you have this … special information. I would advise you again, however, to change your cellphone pretty quickly. Just in case. And don’t go back to Zana of course: the Peruvian police were quite correct in that advice. Moreover, if you do feel threatened in any way, please come here, we can guard you, you can certainly be safe here, if nowhere else. But of course on the streets – well, that it is more difficult. The choice, naturally, is yours.’ Another handshake. ‘Goodbye Miss Silverton, and, once again, thank you. You have assisted your government in a very serious situation. Happy Christmas. Please be careful.’

  By the time she had emerged through the various security levels of the embassy, which was like ascending from the dark blue depths of the sea to the gasping surface, Jessica’s hands were shaking. She definitely needed a coffee. And when she reached the coffee shop she asked for a mug because she didn’t trust her trembling hands to hold a delicate cup.

  Her trembling hands? She ignored the symptom. Strenuously, and as best she could. She was frightened. That’s why her hands were trembling. Frightened, or diabetic. Frightened.

  Halfway through the mug, her cellphone rang. For a moment she considered blocking the call, hurling the phone in the trashcan. Then she realized it was a British number. Prefix +44.

  She picked it up. ‘Hello.’

  ‘We’re just outside.’

  She looked up. Standing at the door was a pretty, dark-haired girl and a much taller man. They were here. Nina McLintock and Adam Blackwood.

  44

  Radisson Hotel, Lima

  They talked in her room for two hours: Jessica, Nina and Adam. Though they had only spoken twice on the phone, and sent a few urgent emails, though they had been brought together by a the most circuitous of routes – a call from Ibsen to Nina’s secret cellphone, the number only DCI Ibsen knew – by the end of these two hours, Jess felt as if she had been reunited with lost siblings. As if they were united by some high and benign agency because they shared the extraordinary DNA of this story.

  It took an hour for Adam and Nina to share all their crucial information. As Nina passionately explained the role of her father, and the police, and the terrible scenes in London, and the way they had followed the trail of the receipts – from Temple Bruer to Tomar, from Rosslyn to Sagres and finally to Peru – Jessica sensed the dynamic between this fiercely determined girl and the tall, brooding Australian. The tragedies that bonded them.

  Once more, Jessica felt the pang of her own loneliness. Her dyingness? No. That was stupid. She chided herself for her self-pity, and urged Nina to continue.

  Finishing her third black room-service coffee, Nina mentioned their discovery in Portugal, the sculptures in the church, the pentagram in old Tomar—

  Jessica leaned close. ‘Pentagram?’

  ‘Yes.’ Nina looked at Adam, who shrugged. She turned back. ‘That’s the only bit we couldn’t work out.’

  ‘But I can – I know how it fits!’ Jessica pulled her little laptop from her bag, opened it, and tapped a few words. ‘See. The pentagram is not a symbol of the devil or Christ’s wounds – at least, not in this case. It is also symbol of a flower. The five-pointed flower of the morning glory. That’s the final proof: with the seeds, and the uncanny similarity to ololiúqui, and now this, that’s enough proof. We now know ulluchu is definitely a morning glory, we just don’t know which one.’

  Adam was gazing at the laptop screen and its row of pentagrams, juxtaposed with morning glories. He nodded. ‘So, please. Now tell us what else you know.’

  This took less time: Jessica skipped the more gruesome episodes; she couldn’t bear to reveal them. At the end Adam nonetheless looked shocked; she waved away his sympathies and said, ‘Show me the last receipts again.’

  Pulling out an envelope saying Peru September 2nd – 13th, Nina handed them over.

  Jessica opened the envelope. ‘So your father went to Iquitos? For a week – that makes sense.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because Iquitos is the capital of the Amazon rainforests and the Amazon is where everyone goes to look for new drugs. Amazonia is just seething with undiscovered plants and trees and fungi, with all kinds of medicinal and psychotropic potential, a five-thousand-mile-wide pharmacopoeia. I have an ethnobotanist friend researching there now who is willing to help you, if you want. He is good. Very good. And this is the kind of stuff he loves.’

  Adam gave her a sardonic expression. ‘We’ve made it all the way here. Another thousand miles: so what?’

  ‘Of course.’ Jessica was focused on the receipts; she had picked out the final chit, a small piece of paper bearing the handwritten word Toloriu and the figure 5; and the date: September 18th.

  ‘It’s a taxi receipt, we think.’ Nina said. ‘Ach. His last movements are opaque: his plane tickets are missing. But we found this, five days after all the others: it’s a town in the northern Andes?’

  ‘Yes, I know it. Near Huancabamba. Quite famous for its curanderos. So maybe he got the ulluchu in Iquitos, then had it prepared by a healer. It’s possible.’

  Jessica stared once more at the chit, then returned it to the envelope.

  ‘OK. We need to be straight. You know the danger. The Mexican drug cartels are the most powerful criminal syndicates in the history of—’

  Nina smiled bleakly. ‘The visible universe. Aye. We know. We’ve been through a few wee scrapes ourselves.’

  ‘Sorry. Sorry, yes, of course.’ Jess handed back he envelope of receipts. ‘So we go to Iquitos tomorrow?’

  ‘We go to Iquitos tomorrow.’

  For a moment they sat in silence. Nina and Adam seemed pensive; but Jessic
a was more animated, she was positively distracted. She had just this moment grasped another shining fragment of the puzzle.

  The Aztec legend. The great Aztec legend.

  45

  Iquitos, Amazonia, Peru

  Boris Valentine was about forty-five and tending to fat. He was adorned in a lurid Hawaiian shirt almost open to the navel, he had a silver medallion dangling way down this chest and his eyes were vigorously blue, yet he looked like he hadn’t had a proper night’s sleep since the 1970s. Indeed he looked, to Adam, as if he belonged in the seventies or eighties. A sleazy entrepreneur running a celebrity disco in New York, with a tiny coke spoon at the ready, and three anorexic girlfriends.

  Yet this was the renowned ethnobotanist from UCLA, according to Jessica Silverton, this was the man who could track down ulluchu, out there in the jungle. And the man was evidently keen to do it: to get out there in the bush and make his name in the jungle: he already exuded ambition like an over-musky aftershave.

  ‘So you’re the drug-hunting gringos. That’s just what we need here in Iquitos. More kids after a headrush. We only have three thousand of them.’ Boris laughed and shook hands with Adam, and then he kissed Nina’s hand and then he just kissed Jessica. Turning, smartly, he marched them off the airstrip in his incongruous and finely-tooled cowboy boots, talking the while. ‘Welcome to Iquitos my friends, the largest city in the world that you cannot reach by road. Welcome to the capital of the Amazon. Shall we hurry the fuck up before the Zetas come and start a Facebook appreciation page in honour of your arrival?’ He laughed at Nina’s expression. ‘Sorry, be of good cheer! We are going somewhere even the biggest cartels in Mexico won’t find us: out there—’ he waved at the trees, prowling the airport perimeter. ‘And we’re going upriver. There are places two hundred miles from here no white man has ever seen, at least not on the ground, or not without getting himself killed by the poison at the end of a dart, made from the venom of killer bees and the extruded toxin of the curare vine. Here’s the Valentinemobile, hop in. Chuck your luggage in there. On the seat. Let me get rid of the ten-inch millipede. We have a great number of very large insects here. A lot of them extremely venomous.’

  It was a rusted, stripped-down VW minibus with all the windows punched out and the roof torn off. Like the shell of a vehicle hit by a mortar.

  ‘Air conditioning, Iquitos style. Boy, you are going to like this city. Well, like it I, most of the time; but I’m in a good mood because I haven’t had half my family killed.’

  They all climbed on the minibus. Boris Valentine belched robustly, turned the key, and the rattling old vehicle sped out of the airport precincts into the whirl of Iquitos traffic: languid and barefoot kids on motorbikes, motokars with Lenin Es Ma Vida on the transparent covers, more VW Beetles and buses with the roofs shaved off, as if there was a tax on automobile roofs.

  Boris and Jess talked animatedly at the front of the minibus. Every so often one of them would glance behind at Nina and Adam, as they sweated like gringo tourists in the back of the bus: the breeze through the punched out windows was indeed welcome. The humidity was profound, a wet suffocation; Adam felt he could almost rub it between his fingers, the air, it had a viscosity, even a greasiness: the exhalations of the jungle – the jungle that entirely surrounded them, like a besieging army.

  Jess turned, and talked loudly, above the traffic noise, to Adam and Nina; lecturing from the front seat as if she was a tour guide introducing them to Hell. ‘Boris says we’re going to Belen market. If anyone knows of ulluchu it will be there, he reckons. All the river people go there, he says: the river pirates, the river gypsies, the river tribes. It’s the trading centre of all Amazonia.’

  ‘How long, exactly, have you known Boris Valentine?’

  Jess looked at Nina. ‘Quite a few years. I took a couple of his lectures at USC. As I said, he really is the go-to guy for the plant life of the Amazon. Entheogens and psychedelics, medicinal plants. All of it. He’s been working upriver for years.’

  Adam scrutinized Jessica Silverton as she and Nina talked, a little awkwardly, as they wove through the madding traffic. Behind the self-conscious self-confidence he could see fear and anxiety in the American woman’s brown eyes: and a definite wariness, too. She was scared about something, haunted even. But of course she had recently seen friends and lovers killed, and that was probably enough reason for mistrusting anyone and everything.

  Jess had shared her theory about the Aztecs with them on the flight from Lima. It was a fine insight. So fine, Adam wanted to hear it again: this time he was going to write it down. Like a proper journalist. He tapped her on the shoulder, and requested a reprise. She smiled, uncertainly. ‘OK. This is how I see it, after the Moche, the cruellest and most drug-addled of all these American civilizations were surely the Aztecs. They must have possessed ulluchu in almost as strong a form, perhaps stronger. A distillation maybe, or a new preparation.’

  Adam raised a hand. ‘Wait, please.’ The Valentinemobile was swerving wildly, avoiding potholes. Adam steadied his pen. ‘OK. Sorry. Go on.’

  ‘However, the Aztecs were also the last great civilization in North and Central America: the last of the ulluchu users. So what happened when the white men came? The Aztecs hid it from the conquistadors. They hid the drug! That explains the legends of the famous buried treasure of Montezuma: the gold the Spanish could never quite find. It wasn’t gold: it was a golden flower, a golden morning glory flower, the flower of evil, which disappeared.’

  A page of his notebook was filled. Adam thanked her and pocketed his pen, and felt the pungent Iquitos breeze on his face, scented with sewage and spice and squalor. The idea was good, the theories were good; the reality was still very dangerous. He gazed about, nervously.

  The streetscape was ageing and narrowing as they approached the centre: older Spanish colonial buildings, decaying in the decades of jungle storms and wetness, were lined up on either side of the narrow boulevards.

  Nina was just gazing: wordless now, as she had too often been of late. It was a growing contrast to the chatterbox girl he had met in that pub in Edinburgh just a few weeks ago. Then he could feel her extroversion, her effervescence. But the tragedies and the violence and the grief had ground her down; they were corroding her, diminishing her: she had got quieter and quieter. Maybe he hadn’t helped, with his stupid violence in Portugal, but he had done it because he was defending her. He wanted to kiss her. He was never going to kiss her. He was never going to allow himself to do this, not after Alicia. Not again. A girl who would occupy his heart and soul and then fuck him up with grief or heartbreak or loss: never again. But if he couldn’t allow himself to love her, he could win this, solve this, defeat this: for her.

  He wondered what she was thinking, right now. He wanted to squeeze her hand and ask, but he couldn’t. Probably she was thinking of her dad, who came here eighteen months ago. They knew from his receipts that he had taken a ferry upriver, and stayed six days – somewhere – and then came back. They had no idea where he stopped, and disembarked, but they knew his direction.

  But if this trip was recorded in the notebooks it also meant the Zetas were probably out here too, in the riverine slums, hunting them down. And they weren’t just hunting him and Nina, they were hunting for more ulluchu, of course.

  The ripples of the puzzle suddenly froze into a pattern.

  ‘They’re looking for ulluchu. They want more ulluchu,’ he said, to the whole vehicle, to no one.

  Nina said, ‘We know that.’

  ‘No, I mean both of them. The Zetas, and Catrina, they both have limited supplies, and they are both trying to find more.’

  ‘But my dad must’ve sold the Catrina a lot, we discussed this—’

  ‘Yes.’ Adam nodded. He noticed that Jessica was staring at him, intently. He went on. ‘But consider the actions of the Zetas, all this killing, the explosions, murders. Of course they are desperate to find more ulluchu, to source it, that is why they stole the notebooks, as w
e know – to find out what your father knew, where he went, where he got the drug – but at the same time they want to prevent the other gang, Catrina, from following the same trail. Because maybe Catrina are running out of ulluchu too.’

  The minibus rattled over a pothole.

  ‘It makes a load of sense,’ Jessica said. ‘Horrible sense. That’s why the Zetas blew up Casinelli, and killed Dan, and tried to kill you: they want to extract all the information they can, and then silence their sources, prevent El Santo from getting the same information.’

  They all fell silent, in the hubbub of Iquitos. Adam stared around: if he was right – and he knew he was right – this meant the Zetas were surely here. And not just the Zetas. The soldiers of the skulls, the soldiers of Catrina, if they had guessed that Iquitos was the key, they would also be here: waiting on the next corner in the next mosquitoey café, their Glock revolvers hidden under the dirty table. Hands tattooed with Santa Muerte skulls. Yearning to kill for killing’s sake.

  He stilled his nerves, as best he could – and listened. Boris, who seemed oblivious to their anxieties, was now talking, loudly, as he crashed the gears up and down, joining the squealing and discordant symphony of the wild Iquitos traffic. ‘Look at this place. Look at it! I just love this city. It’s just so damn absurd. Frankly speaking, it shouldn’t even be here any more, the only reason they built it was the rubber boom in the nineteenth-century. Back in the day, when this place, along with Manaus, were the capitals of rubber, you could get anything, any luxury imaginable. Four hundred bucks would buy you a fourteen-year-old Polish virgin: they had whores from everywhere, Cairo, Tangier, Paris, Baghdad, Budapest, New York, fricking Tashkent. They watered their horses with iced Taittinger champagne. The donkeys got Veuve Clicquot. They had banquets costing a hundred thousand dollars. Caviar by the scoopful, cured meats from Paris, top hats from England, Danish butter imported on barges filled with ice. Cuban cigars they lit with their hundred-buck notes. The rubber barons lived in these mansions here—’ He was gesturing at the mouldering, decrepit, colonnaded buildings, collaged with posters for ARPU the Peruvian socialist party. ‘Anyway, all this talk of caviar – I’m famished. Shall we eat? We can we get some arepas – rounds of milk cheese wrapped in banana leaves, best drunk with small thimbles of tinto coffee. Delicious. You know the Peruvians believe Christ ate guinea pig at the Last Supper? Aqui!’