by Tom Knox
‘Boris. Shut up.’ Jess sounded tense.
Everyone turned. In the middle of the clearing ahead stood at least a dozen native warriors. They were bare-chested, and exuberantly tattooed, and carrying knives and spears. Several of them wore Adidas sneakers. Three had noses pierced by macaw feathers; and two had small, leathery, grapefruit-sized objects dangling from their belts.
Shrunken human heads.
48
Pankarama Settlement, Ucayali River, Peru
Jessica knew she was dying, now; or rather she knew that she had turned the final curve in the river, that led to the inevitable and unavoidable waterfall. Huntington’s. The fit had been the clinching diagnostic symptom. She had her father’s disease. But when she searched inside herself for tears, or rage, or anger, or grief, they were not there.
Instead, she felt oddly calm, unexpectedly at peace: saddened yet soothed. There was no disputing what she had to do now. She was glad she had made those phone call and emails in Lima: she had prepared the ground well.
But something was wrong. She could sense it. The headhunters were too friendly. They recognized the captain’s mate, Jose, and eagerly embraced him. The Adidas sneakers were all-too-new. And the shrunken heads were old: they had the prognathous quality – the protruding lips and tongue, the wildly bulging eyes – of heads severed and shrunken many years ago.
Jess had encountered authentic hunter-gatherer tribes before: communities almost sealed from the outside world. They had been self-sufficient and therefore hostile; or at the very least indifferent. These guys were far too amiable, and needy, and supplicant.
The Pankarama warriors led them through the forest to their settlement. As Jessica had anticipated, it was not a pristine Neolithic forest hamlet: the scruffy huts and shacks were built from metal sheets and Toyota car parts as much as from palm fronds and river-mud bricks. There was new garbage strewn in old pools that looked suspiciously rainbowed and oily. Fuel oil?
Which meant these rather degraded people had cars or motorbikes or trucks. Maybe even a generator for a television hidden behind some shack …
On an instinct she checked her cellphone. And there it was. A signal. She actually had a reasonable signal in the depths of the supposedly pristine Peruvian Amazon!
Quietly she showed her phone to Adam, as the others walked on. He gazed at it, then at her, perplexed.
They rejoined Boris and Nina. The Pankarama man led them to the chief’s hut. Jessica flashed a dark, urgent glance at Boris. He shrugged. ‘Believe me. It’s all changed,’ he said very quietly. ‘Came here four years ago and they were the real McCoy. Untouched. Someone’s got to them in the meantime. Drug-dealers? But the climate’s really no good for growing cocaine …’
‘I got a signal on the cell.’
‘Then it’s definitely loggers. Illegal loggers. Fuckers. Putting up a mast. Don’t know which is worse. Gilipolas! I hate this, Jess, it’s tragic. Bet they’ve killed all the caimans too, shot all the tapirs.’
She looked at him, and the suspicions flared. ‘I know how it works, Boris. They pay off the tribesmen. Here, have a plasma TV in return for us raping and plundering all your ancestral lands. Question is: what are we doing here now? What’s the point?’
He hushed her with a finger, and whispered, as they ducked inside the chief’s hovel, ‘They may still have ulluchu!’
Jessica doubted their chances of success. The loggers – armed, violent, Peruvians or Brazilians no doubt – would have pressed the Pankarama to reveal all the natural resources hereabouts. An incredible wonder drug? The Pankarama would have offered it up immediately. In return for some liquor, and maybe a two-stroke Suzuki motorcycle.
Jess wondered whether it was time to make a call, to use this precious signal. How long did she have left? It was a fine judgment. She looked at her colleagues. Had Boris deliberately led them down a cul-de-sac? Why would he do that? Did she really trust him? Perhaps it had been a mistake to involve this famously greedy and ambitious man.
One by one they ducked under a wooden lintel. The chief’s shack was dark and aromatic, and it was decorated with caiman skulls and orchids. The skin of a jaguarundi hung from one wall. Several tiny, mouldering human heads hung from an elaborate bone hook on the opposite wall, obscene and sinister, yet speaking honestly of the culture. But the Sony TV in the corner detracted from this impression.
Pleasantries were exchanged. The chief was a tired-looking, bare-chested man in his fifties, with stingray spines through his ears and a piranha-tooth necklace. Jess wondered if he had quickly taken off his Chinese shorts and Barcelona soccer shirt when he heard they were coming.
‘Buenas … ’
‘Ola, gran jefe … ’
He spoke good Spanish. Another sign of inauthenticity.
One by one they bowed before the chief, seated on his throne of bones and wood and clumsy nails.
Boris asked straight out, ‘Do you have ulluchu, the drug of the flower, the drug of the ancients, the drug of the dead?’
That was what the woman at Belen market had called it. The drug of the dead.
The chief smiled a weary smile, and said nothing, prolonging the moment. Despite her doubts, Jessica felt a helpless surge of excitement. Say yes. Please say yes. Maybe they did have it, maybe it would be here, why not? Would the loggers care about a strange and dangerous hallucinogen?
‘Sí, tenemos la droga. Ulluchu.’
They had it. She experienced a foolish but giddy relief.
The chief clapped his hands – ceremoniously – and a younger man rushed in. The two Pankarama men talked quickly in their own language. Then the man stepped out and moments later returned with a small, hollowed-out gourd. Jessica recognized the type: a lime gourd called yoburu – or in Spanish a mujercita. The little vagina.
That was definitely the real deal. The locals certainly honoured this drug, whatever it was.
The chief bade them squat on the floor. The younger Pankarama warrior also had a snorting pipe, made apparently from the windpipe of a toucan, and an elegant, ancient, intricately carved walnut snuffing dish. The man poured some fine powder on to the rectangular dish – the powdered seeds of the ulluchu?
Jess hissed at Boris. ‘Tell them we want to see the flower, and the seeds, before they are ground up.’
Boris gravely nodded, and turned to the chief.
‘Gran jefe …’
Two minutes later the young Pankarama warrior was back in the chief’s shack with a plastic shopping bag. He opened it and several golden-yellow petals fell on to the floor. Jessica eyed them, excitedly. They were morning glories, without question; they were a beautiful pale sun-gold – the gold of the Aztecs? Next, the young man took a leather pouch, and poured the seeds on to the matting. The seeds were shaped like commas. But then nearly all morning glory seeds looked like commas. They were so very close; but were they close enough? Was this it? Was this, finally, the terrible drug of the Moche? The ur-drug of all ancient America?
‘Boris?’
‘Could be, Jessica, could be – right colour, a species I cannot identify, I believe them, I certainly believe they believe this is ulluchu – but the ulluchu we want – ahh …’
They were all crouched around the petals, and the seeds, and the toucan-bone tooting pipe.
Adam said, ‘So … we take it back to a lab, or what?’
Nina spoke up. ‘Boris? We need confirmation. Ask him. Do they remember my father? If this is where he came surely they would remember. I have a photo on my phone.’
Boris, his Hawaiian shirt dark with sweat, turned again to the chief. He spoke quickly, gesturing at Nina, then at the photo on the phone. The chief examined the image, and answered, in very fast and very accented Spanish. Boris nodded and made a slight bow.
‘Yes they remember him: a tall old white man. A year and a half ago. He came looking for the same drug, and they gave him this. Heck. Therefore this must be ulluchu.’
Was this final confirmation? Jess pondered
and decided. No, it wasn’t. They still needed a test. They couldn’t know for sure. There was only one way to find out right now. What did it matter any more? Exhilaratingly, it didn’t matter at all.
She reached out and took a pair of the seeds. And swallowed them.
‘Jessica! Are you mad?’ Boris had his hands on her shoulders, remonstrating. Fiercely. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’
She smiled back at him; she felt quite in control. Perhaps more in command of her destiny than she had ever felt before. She didn’t care, not any more. No way was she going to die like her father. Thrashing and flailing. ‘Are we really going to go all the way back to Iquitos, do loads of tests? It’ll take days, weeks … This is the only way. The drug is meant to work quickly: just watch over me!’ She smiled sadly at Boris. ‘If I try to cut my own feet off, intervene. Swiftly.’
No one laughed. Jessica reached in her jeans pocket and handed over her pocket knife. ‘Seriously. Just in case.’ Then she stood and exited the shack, the others followed, shocked and gaping.
A short stroll brought Jess through a copse of enormous ceiba trees to the banks of the mighty Ucayali, almost as broad as the Amazon. She sat on a log and gazed at the river. Waiting for the drug to work. She sat for an hour. Colours drifted through her mind; she thought of her father and her mother and Dan Kossoy; she thought of the dead, smiling and waiting for her. The sky was green and the earth was blue.
She wondered if she could live here. In the jungle. For the rest of her shortened life. Eating melastom fruits, drinking medicinal teas brewed from sacha ajo, and chicha beer from the fruit of the miriti, and all the other regal palms. At night she would drink chuchuhuasi and rum, and stare at the electric eels in the river, glowing like slenderly curved neon lights.
A noise. A colour. Noises and colours. The caw caw of bamboo rats.
What was it? Death? It was just the immense, Amazonian delta of life. Nothing more. So many had already died out here, after the Spanish came: she remembered the terrible statistics. Three million Arawakans died between 1494 and 1508. Within a hundred and fifty years of Columbus the aboriginal population had been reduced from seventy million to three and a half million. In the Andes of Bolivia seventy-five Indians died every day for three hundred years; and yet – and yet the jungle survived. The world went on. The forest ate the sunlight.
And what was death anyway? Death was the emancipator, the good king, the liberator, the Abraham Lincoln who frees us all from the slavery of life, and without death life was nothing, pointless, lustreless, endless. Death was the blackness between the stars that made them shine.
Two hours had passed in a kind of trance. Jessica gazed over the wide sombre river where a patch of ochre clay glistened, where the grasses and sedges were shaved and flattened by recent downpours. An old canoe rose and fell on the languid surge of the river waves.
She knew now. This wasn’t the ulluchu of the Moche. Or, if it was, it was a very very weak variant; perhaps the Moche took this wild ulluchu, this special morning glory, and cultivated it elsewhere, in a different climate at a different altitude, in the mountains. They were expert horticulturalists; maybe they had turned a feeble jungle specimen into the mighty drug over many generations, by breeding and selecting and grafting. Whatever the case, this wasn’t it.
This meant Jessica had no choice.
A few minutes later, Boris came over. ‘So, what was—’
A loud noise interrupted him. Big black-and-white speedboats were zipping up the Ucayali, braking noisily, sending big surf-waves of water crashing against the Pankaramas’ modest wooden pier. A dozen men, at least, were standing in the boats. All of them were heavily armed. Some were shaven-headed, others were tattooed. One had a Z tattooed on his cheek.
Boris stepped back, his voice numb. ‘Jesus. It’s the Zetas. We’re dead.’
Jessica reached desperately for her cellphone. This was her last chance. She dialled. They had a signal and she had to get help.
49
Ucayali River, Peru
The Zetas were grimly efficient: like proper soldiers. With barely a word they plucked the cellphone from Jessica’s hand and barked a few questions into it.
The cartel officer turned and sneered. ‘You call a doctor? In Peru? How can he help? You are going to need more than Tylenol.’
The cellphone was thrown in the river. All their phones were thrown in the river. Then Jessica, Adam, Nina, Boris and Jose were separated from the Pankarama and led at gunpoint through the weeds and red squelchy mud of the Ucayali riverbank.
The military efficiency was no coincidence, of course, as Adam realized: they were still an army, at their core. Jess had told them the entire cartel was founded by deserters from the Mexican special forces. This fact might have given Adam some frail hope, of a military logic that could be somehow appealed to, if it weren’t for the captain, the obvious commander, who’d told them his name was ‘Marco’ – as he bluntly separated them out from the tribesmen. He was a stout, vigorous, muscular guy in his thirties, with skulls and wild roses and elaborate zeds for Zeta tattooed up his tanned, sinewy arms. And he had exactly the same gleam of strange, smart, sadistic eagerness in his eyes as Tony Ritter.
No doubt Marco too was on ulluchu, the real drug. What was he going to do to them? Were they going to be shot in a clearing in the forest? Away from witnesses? Or something else?
It was an effort not to show his fear. He wondered if Nina had noticed Marco’s demeanour, and was therefore remembering what happened to her sister in the Islington house. Blood and terror and violation.
A slight bend in the riverbank brought them to a large metal barge, lashed by a thick rope to a ceiba tree, and sagging with age. It was an old cargo boat rusting in a lost meander of this vast river system. Marco tilted his expensive European pistol and ordered them on to the boat.
‘The stairs. Go down those stairs. Now.’
Adam could see the fine jaw muscles moving in Marco’s face, from the grinding of his teeth. He clearly wanted to hurt them as soon as possible, he was restraining himself.
They stepped down the metal ladder into a metal room: a sealed storage container. The Amazonian sun had heated the entire boat so that the metal was painful to the touch. And it was in this steel cell, this steel oven, that they were going to be kept.
One of Marco’s men handcuffed them, again with soldierly swiftness and obedience, to the rigid metal pipes that ran along the side of the metal chamber. Just like the radiator in London, Adam realized: they were shackled in a line, like dogs in a row at a show.
The subordinate disappeared up the metal steps. Marco followed, then paused at the top, a dark figure silhouetted by the sun. He gazed at his prisoners in the bowels of the boat and his prisoners all stared up, at this last square of hope, this glimpse of tropic sky.
‘Your friends,’ Marco said, abruptly, taking some objects from a sack. He threw two footballs into the metal cell, which bounced along the steel floor. Then he slammed the trapdoor shut.
With the only opening to the outside world quite sealed, it was profoundly dark in the stinking, broiling metal chamber. Yet there was just enough sunlight, lancing through small rusty holes in the metal roof, to make out that the footballs were not balls at all, but two human heads: the captain of the MV Myona, and the other deckhand.
Jose wailed like a child and then made a retching sound. Adam stared, riveted and appalled, at the heads. They were lying sideways and staring wet-eyed at each other, like lovers talking on a shared pillow. The expressions on the heads were incomprehensible, terror and serenity. A tiny dewdrop of blood fell from the dead captain’s hair on to the metal floor.
‘We are finished.’ Boris’s voice was quavering. ‘They are going to kill us all, but they will torture us first. The Zetas’ cruelty is famous.’
‘We know.’ Adam said, flatly. ‘We fucking know.’ He yanked at the handcuffs looping him to the metal pipes. This was beyond useless. Yet he tried uselessly, for ten minutes
, twenty, tugging at the cuffs until his wrists were scraped and raw and bloody.
Jess spoke, for the first time. ‘We could bargain with them.’
Nina replied, fierce in the shadows. ‘With what? We have nothing. Fuck all of them anyway. Let them kill us – even if we had something to give they would still kill us.’
Boris’s once-macho voice was reduced to a low whimper. ‘This is quite right, whatever we do, whatever we say, they will kill us – but first they will try and get any information: they will torture us.’
A shock of light silenced his lamenting.
The trapdoor had been opened. Marco came down the stairs, followed by two of his lieutenants. He reached the bottom of the ladder and surveyed them. Contemptuously.
‘There is no ulluchu here. We came here a week ago. We asked all the tribes, we tried it. We have been following you. We spoke to the shaman in Belen. Boris Valentine is celebrated in Iquitos.’
His voice was surprisingly neutral. He spoke exceedingly good English: he was evidently very educated. This man could have been a rising young major in the Mexican army, Adam thought. But the Zetas paid so much more.
Marco paced across the rusty metal floor, kicking a severed head out of the way as if he was practising football. Then he knelt by Nina. Adam strained in his shackles to see what was happening, there, at the other side of the chamber, in the shadows.
‘What do you know, Nina? Your father’s notebooks end at Iquitos. What did your father know? Where did he go after this? We think he went into the Andes. The mountains. Where the ulluchu grows better?’
She said nothing. Marco’s sigh was ominous and heavy. He leaned closer, and Adam was reminded of Ritter, trying to kiss her, or lick her: like a predatory rapist.
‘I could hit you, Miss McLintock. I could electrocute you, or cut you up. Maybe I could cut off one of your fingers. Or your lips. I could cut your lips off. Tell me.’
