The Babylon Rite

by Tom Knox

  Carlos Monroy smiled at them. A gesture to the guards and some of them walked out, leaving two alert, and silent, sentries. He spoke: ‘The beating of our hearts is the only sound …’

  He walked up to Nina, who was staring, rapt, at the drug lord, from her chair. Staring down at her white, mud-smeared face he said, ‘Your father was quite a man, quite a man. The only man to outwit me in many years.’

  His accent was pure East Coast going on British. Quite flawless. His pale and austere eyes were very slightly bloodshot. The tiny fleck of foam at the corner of his mouth again spoke of ulluchu.

  ‘You’ve taken the drug,’ said Nina. ‘We can tell.’

  ‘The dose can be carefully calibrated so you achieve the exquisite high of sadism, but not the horror of suicide. You are not unintelligent. You have worked out a lot, Jessica has told me.’

  Jessica?

  ‘But what you haven’t worked out is what the drug ultimately does.’ Monroy reached behind him, to a fine marble mantelpiece. He took down a small silver box. And showed it to Nina, then Adam. The small elegant box glittered in the sunlight through tall French windows that gave on to a balcony overlooking the patio. Adam wondered if he would survive a jump from that balcony.

  Monroy turned the box in one hand. ‘Made by Francis Harrache, in London. Joyous, isn’t it? 1750. Solid silver. For tobacco, of course. Just one of the many drugs you Europeans took from the New World. And still you take our drugs …’ He snapped open the lid. ‘But we have less time to talk than I had hoped.’ His shining eyes regarded Adam. ‘Your outburst on the street was a sensible move. It is what I would have done in such reduced circumstances. And now the Zetas are indeed alerted: the street is a network of gossip and treachery. Just like the closest friendships. So. Here. This is ulluchu. This is what Archibald McLintock found. Look—’

  The lid was open. Adam couldn’t help his curiosity. If he was going to die he wanted to see what he was going to die for.

  He peered. The powder inside the box looked not unlike tobacco snuff, only greyer and finer.

  Monroy carefully placed the open box on a side table. He took out a tiny silver spoon from a pocket in his pale jacket. His eyes flickered across them, from face to face. ‘Your theories as to the functioning of ulluchu were audacious. Creditable. But you missed the crucial factor, you failed to grasp what makes this plant so utterly unique even amidst the bounteous entheogenic richness of Amazonia.’ He picked up the box again. ‘Yes, the drug induces hypersexuality. Yes, it arouses violence and sadistic urges. Yes, the alkaloids therein work with extraordinary speed, just like dimethyltryptamine. Yes, the ulluchu commonly has gruesome or precise side-effects: the urge to drink blood is common, likewise a desire for sex per ano. Especially in a zoophiliac or necrophiliac context.’ He gazed at them, ‘And yes, the seeds, when powdered very, very finely, also have the happy character of being completely absorbed into the blood stream with great efficiency. The powder, we have elucidated, is best absorbed through the nasal or oral membranes. That way the powder is dissolved in seconds; if it is taken orally it is undetectable a few minutes later; you would have to analyse the molecules of the glottis to discern what had happened, even if you knew what you were looking for.’

  He turned. ‘I deviate. You need to know what this drug does. You need to know because I am about to give it to you, approximately 0.5 grams, in a fine powder form, about five times what I take every day from my little Georgian snuffbox. When taken at that very concentrated level, in one single dose, the drug not only powers the libido and the aggressive and libidinous instincts, it arouses what Freud called the death instinct, thanatos, so closely entwined to eros, the sex drive, the life instinct. You see, the drug,’ his smile was pallid and moist, ‘makes you want to die. It makes the user yearn for death, so that he …’ He paused. ‘Or she, will self-mutilate, tear at their own flesh, or hurl themselves into danger with urgent fearlessness. Hoping for a fatal wound. Like the brave Templars of the Crusader Levant, foolishly throwing themselves into battle, believing they died for Christ, believing they died like Christ. Sacrificing themselves, quite intoxicated with the death instinct. Quite, quite inebriated on ulluchu. So this really is the secret that gets you killed. The late Archibald McLintock so loved that phrase.’

  He scooped a tiny amount of powder from the box with the delicate silver spoon.

  ‘Half a gram. I am going to give each of you half a gram of ulluchu. At first you will feel nothing. Then you will experience intense pleasure, and you will become aroused, and probably violent, possibly at the same time. This will be interesting for us all. Consequently the very high dosage will … kick in. You will feel an unconquerable urge to seek the end, to slough off this weary mantle of worldliness, perhaps to hack off your own lips, to gouge out your eyes, in short: to die. You will want to die: this is the death drug, the ultimate drug, the suicide drug. Then you will kill yourselves. I have no idea in what way. It seems to affect different people in different ways: how they actually perform the Babylon rite of self-murder. The entertainment will be potentially quite profound, even, it is arguable, desolately beautiful. A kind of artwork. A gesamtkunstwerk, a living theatre of sex and death, like the rituals of the Moche in the Pyramid of the Sorcerer, like the overdosed Templars torturing men and children in Temple Bruer and hiding the evidence.’

  Abruptly, he stepped close and grabbed Nina’s white cheeks, so hard that her mouth was forced open. He poised the heaped little spoon in front of her mouth, and blew the powder between her soft red open lips.

  Then he let go. She coughed and hacked brown spittle on to the floor. Monroy shook his head. ‘The powder is on the very back of your throat, already being absorbed. You cannot spit it out. And now for the gentleman.’

  Adam tried to avert his face but Monroy’s grip was very strong. He felt the powder hit the back of the throat. Felt the bitter taste, extraordinarily tart, almost like a powdered acid. A tang of some heavenly dark citrus. The taste disappeared, and a surge of pleasure overtook him.

  Monroy stiffened, and walked to the last chair. ‘I don’t have to force you, do I, Jessica Silverton? You want the drug, don’t you? You want to die? That is, after all, why we are all here?’

  She mumbled her reply, her eyes wet with tears. ‘Yes.’

  51

  Le Casa de Carlos Chicomeca Monroy

  ‘Why?’ said Nina, softly, gazing at Jessica. ‘Why did you betray us? Because you are ill?’

  Jessica Silverton said nothing: she stared at the chevrons of the parquet floor. Handcuffed and miserable.

  Carlos Monroy set the silver spoon on the marble mantel. ‘I can explain for Miss Silverton. You have to understand. She is an expert in her field, one of the brightest. She guessed some time ago the possible true nature of ulluchu. That it contained a unique alkaloid. Let us call it thanatine. An alkaloid which induces the desire to die. An alkaloid we have tried, and failed, so far, to isolate, extract and synthesize. Despite all our valiant attempts.’

  Adam looked at Jessica for confirmation. But her blonde hair curtained her downcast face.

  Monroy continued, ‘The second thing you need to know is that Jessica’s father died when she was young, of Huntington’s Disease. And that is a very evil way to die. Progressive and degenerative and appalling. The kind of disease which makes you question the goodness of God.’ He walked closer to Adam. ‘There is, of course, no cure. Huntington’s is genetic. Many people with the disease refuse a genetic test to see whether they are carriers. Why? Because a positive diagnosis induces many to commit suicide even before they fall ill, so great is their terror of the eventual affliction.’ He paused. ‘Jessica is, we now know, a carrier. What is more, she has the worst kind: a speedy and juvenile variety of the chorea. The clinching symptom is epileptiform seizure.’

  Adam spoke, his voice hoarse. ‘How do you know all this?’

  ‘For many months Jessica admits she has been in denial of various symptoms – the initial signs that s
he had Huntington’s. And who can blame her for denying such a terrible fate for herself? Then, when her situation became incontrovertible, in the last weeks, days even, the intense horror took hold: and she knew she wanted to kill herself rather than go through what her father endured. And she wanted to face this death with yearning rather than dread, face it with contemptuous courage even, face it like the noble Templars, or the gallant Moche, the fearsome berserkers. Rather understandable, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Jess.’ Nina whispered. But still Jessica said nothing. Adam could feel the first rush of his own heart. The drug kicking in. They were all spiralling into oblivion, into the pure darkness of dementia. The sensation was blissful and terrifying.

  Monroy paced the gilded room, like a gifted young lecturer, like the Harvard scholar he once was.

  ‘Jessica guessed, a while ago, what ulluchu really did. That it was a drug that made you want to die, thus obviating the terrors of death and of suicide. She felt that you, in turn, were unlikely to achieve success in finding the real ulluchu. Certainly she could not rely on this, and she was ever more desperate. Yet she knew I was most likely to be in possession of the echt drug, and she could not be sure anyone else had any of the dwindling supplies – and she could not be sure anyone else would understand her side of the bargain. Therefore she kept her options rather cleverly open by initiating contact with me, from Lima, the day you met. She gave me a few clues as to her situation and your whereabouts. Following her seizure on your boat, when her genetic fate was confirmed, when she felt the cold kiss of death on her pale American neck, she called me once more from the UNESCO site. She said if you failed in the jungle she would do a deal. Cut a sweet little deal. She would, if she could, make a phone call from the jungle: we were monitoring her phone, we were able to triangulate her location. She took a risk, but she is not without courage. And we knew you were near Iquitos: Peru is a cheap place to buy friends. So we located you, and thus we were able to come and … rescue you. As it were.’

  ‘What deal?’ Adam’s forehead was prickling with sweat. His pulse was up. ‘What deal could she do? What is her side of the bargain?’

  ‘Jessica told me she probably knew where Nina’s father had sourced the drug. She said she had seen the receipts and she had worked it out for herself, but told no one. The drug, she thought, had been removed from the jungle and cultivated elsewhere, by the Moche, probably in the mountains. They must have developed a much stronger variety, at certain distinct altitudes, with the perfect levels of rainfall and sunshine and frost – through centuries of horticulture. The Muchika were a very clever people. They were quite excellent irrigators.’

  ‘So, where?’

  Carlos Monroy raised a hand, his smile princely in the sun slanting in through the long tall windows. ‘Let us ask her. She has yet to tell me. I do not know. Let us hear what she says.’

  Colours menaced through Adam’s mind. The drug was really in his blood stream now. Gorgeous sexual images. Nina. Jessica. Blood-red swirls of purple. He forced himself to concentrate.

  Monroy walked to Jessica’s chair. And crouched before her. ‘Tell me.’

  A short painful pause ensued. Then Jessica lifted her head. She had been weeping silently, judging by her red-rimmed eyes. But her voice was quite distinct and articulate. ‘I saw the last receipt. Archibald McLintock went to Toloriu. After the jungle.’

  Monroy frowned. ‘A little town near Huancabamba. In the Andes, what good is that? Which mountain?

  ‘No.’ Jessica shook her head. ‘Not Toloriu in Peru. The receipt was handwritten. A taxi. They—’ she glanced at Adam and Nina, ‘They didn’t realize. He went to a different Toloriu. A tiny hamlet, in the Pyrenees. Catalunya. He went back to Spain.’

  Monroy stood up. His frown slowly became a gratified smile, then a triumphant laugh. ‘Toloriu. Casa Bima! The legend! The most obscure of legends!’ His laughter died, but the gleaming smile remained. Happy and aggressive.

  Leaning against the mantelpiece, he picked up his silver spoon. And then the glinting silver snuff box. ‘Casa Bima. What an ornate yet apposite denouement: the fulfilment of a very ancient story. Jessica, you were right: there are few people in the world who could have pieced that together … you, and me. And Archibald McLintock. Superb. You have earned your reward.’ He shook his head. ‘Of course I promised to save your friends and of course you knew I was lying and you didn’t care. Correct? But I will not torment them unduly. Let them kill themselves. And now it is your turn for the sweet release. Please, open your mouth. You can have an entire gram, a large proportion of my dwindling supplies. As a token of my generosity. It will work that much quicker, and your death will be sweeter. It will be exquisite. A sensuous climax.’

  Jessica opened her mouth. Monroy had scooped his tiny glittering spoon in the powder, now heaped with half a gram of ulluchu. He positioned it carefully, then blew it – a puff of snuff between Jessica’s trembling lips. He did it again – another half a gram. She swallowed, and looked at the floor.

  Monroy stood. He gazed, hard, at Nina and Adam. ‘Your cheeks are quite flushed. I see it is taking effect. I’d say you all have twenty minutes of consciousness and lucidity. I can tell you the rest of the story to fill these dull moments! Yes? Yes, I think so. But I’ll be brief. When you are dead, in about an hour or two, at your own hands, I will have to leave here. Los Zetas are surely seeking me out right now, searching for this house, I took enough risks flying you into the country. They have spies throughout the system, they are the shadow state, at airports, everywhere … And your clever outburst in the street will have alarmed and alerted the entire city.’ His face began to smear in Adam’s vision.

  Adam wanted to kill this man, to tear him open. Drink the blood. He thought of Nina naked. Deliciously naked. Then Alicia.

  The red mouth of the pale man opened and closed.

  ‘It was Harvard that changed me. All that wealth, all that incredible American wealth. The arrogant rowers on the Charles River, the egregiously regal Bostonians. When I got there, I compared it with my own country, impoverished, and ridiculed, and risible and – far, far worse – torn apart by the drug wars. How could I not? The drug wars are caused by America, by their ridiculous and bogus Puritanism, their absurd, adolescent prohibition on the purely human urge for intoxication, for altered states. Men have been taking drugs for ten thousand years: it is a human universal; mankind cannot bear too much reality. And the Americans are no different. And yet their same grunting American hunger for drugs, for cocaine and marijuana, for heroin and methamphetamine, for anything to enliven their absurdly dull materialist lives of gorging, shopping and corpulent waddling – this greed and desperation was killing my people, not harming them. Quite invidious.’ Monroy snapped the snuff box shut, angrily. Adam closed his eyes and just listened to the voice.

  ‘The hypocrisy sickened me. America imported the drugs, yet religiously banned them. This same American prohibition therefore made the drug-trade all too appealing and profitable, accelerating the deathly wars in my country. My country. Mexico. Indeed all Latin America. Thousands are dying, tens of thousands are slaughtered yearly, just across the Rio Grande from peaceful El Paso. To salt the wound of irony, America makes and sells us the guns with which to kill each other! They actually profit from our massacres, massacres caused by their canting hypocrisies. And still they didn’t care, as long as they kept the death and destruction on the other side of the frontier, over the river, beyond the great big fence, that keeps the spics and wetbacks out, the fence that nonetheless lets all the dope and the meth and the cocaine in, for the kids in Harvard Yaaaard to get so pleasantly zoned.’

  Sex and murder, sex and bloody murder. Alicia naked and dying. Adam felt his own arousal at the death of nude Alicia. He was aroused by the nearness of his own death. The sensation was tremendous and irresistible: he was being ravished by crueller desires.

  ‘So I began to plot some revenge on America, on the gringo who was destroying my country. And
what sweeter, more deliciously ironic revenge could there be, I realized, than finding a terrible drug which Puritan America simply could not resist? The ultimate drug, the terminal high. A drug that was initially blissful, and quite sublime, combining the languid rapture of heroin with the euphoriant buzz of pure cocaine, as you are now experiencing; and then something much much better. And then something very much worse.’ He licked his lips, gazing at Jessica. She had her head thrown back, swallowing compulsively. He walked over and stroked her hair. She sighed. He stroked, and talked, ‘And then one day I visited the Schultes Archives in Harvard, and I had my intimation. Maybe it wasn’t just a daydream, a wild and foolish ambition, maybe there was such a drug; maybe in the great vivid pageant of pre-Columbian entheogens I could find something: what was it the Aztecs took, the Moche, the Maya, the denizens of mighty Teotihuacan? Maybe they had a drug they gave to men before they were sacrificed that made them all willing victims, victims of the reeking priests with the obsidian knives.’

  He leaned to kiss Jessica on the neck, and then to caress her breasts. Adam yearned to join them. The three of them. The four of them. Dissolving into each other’s bodies. Monroy drew back from Jessica, and continued, ‘So I began my research. I discovered ulluchu. I deduced that it had disappeared, yet I also discerned that the drug had maybe once reached Europe, perhaps reached the Templars: hence the lust of the conquistadors, the warriors from the last lands of the Templars, the very inheritors of the Templar legends, to find it once again.’ He flashed a smile, a brief, proud, exultant smile. ‘Once you realize the Templars were drugged, it all coheres. But what was this drug? I had to know. So I contacted the one man who could help, the great Templar expert, Archibald McLintock. Happily, he wanted the money I offered, and he was intrigued by my description of this putative narcotic. I later discovered why, of course: he was dying. He wanted the money as a legacy for his daughters; he wanted ulluchu for himself.’