Aaron Elkins - Little Tiny Teeth

What Vargas had told Scofield about him was mostly true, but there was plenty that he hadn’t told him. Foremost among these things was that Cisco’s knowledge of the curandero ’s arts was deep, all right, but pretty much limited to those relating to hallucinogenic plants. He had sat many long hours at the feet of various tribal healers and shamans and learned of the psychedelic virtues of ayahuasca, epena, ajuca, and a hundred others. In return, he had introduced several of his gratified tutors to the similar if less spectacular pleasures of cannabis and LSD. In short, what he was, when you got down to it, was a dopehead, vague and fog-brained, who was thought to live with an Indian woman in a shack down in the mudflats near Belen (where he went in flood season was anybody’s guess), and who eked out a living, such as it was, by occasionally hiring himself out as a guide to unsuspecting tourists.

It was true enough that many people – well, a few people – referred to him as the White Shaman, a title he promoted for himself, but others who knew him referred to him sarcastically as the White Milkman. Somehow or other, he had made a friend of a small, local dairy farmer who had taken pity on him and offered him on-again, off-again work with his paltry herd of a dozen or so skinny cows. He was not really a milkman in the sense of delivering milk, since no one in Iquitos drank fresh milk (babies drank thick, yellow stuff that came in cans from the U.S. and Austria), but he did milk and tend the cows, which were used to produce cheese, and so the Spanish term el lechero blanco, with its droll, mocking associations of gallantry and adventure, had stuck to him. It wasn’t much of a secret that he also made a little pocket money by running menial errands for the petty jungle drug traffickers or carrying messages for them. In Iquitos, this kind of behavior elicited no more than a noncommittal shrug from others. It was hard to make a living in Iquitos.

There had actually been some positive reports on his guide work. Once he’d taken a party of Swedish amateur botanists into the Yuturi wilderness, and they’d come back raving about his knowledge of the ecosystem. But another time he’d up and left a group of English horticulturists stranded in the jungle south of Pucallpa because he’d had a vision telling him to go home at once. So the man was a loose cannon, all right, but what choice was there? Who else could knowledgeably guide Scofield and his people and also introduce them to genuine jungle shamans? No one, only Cisco. Vargas had advanced him a hundred nuevos soles to get his hair and that wild beard of his trimmed and to buy a pair of new shoes to replace his disgusting, falling-apart, ankle-high sneakers. Whether he’d actually do any of that, or would even remember that he’d been asked, was strictly a toss-up.

Scofield, ready to leave now, drained his whiskey, smacked his lips, and set down the glass. “All right then, Captain, we have ourselves a deal.” His left hand went into the pocket of his neat plaid shirt, from which he withdrew a blue leather checkbook. His right hand clicked the top of a ballpoint pen and held it, poised, above the top check.

“Five thousand four hundred dollars, correct?”

“Perfectly correct,” said Vargas, his heart in his mouth. Five thousand four hundred dollars would almost cover what was still owed for the Adelita ’s refitting. The pen remained poised.

Write, write, damn it!

Scofield began to scratch away at last. “Let’s round it off and say fifty-five hundred, shall we?”

“Thank you, professor.” Vargas started breathing again. They were actually closing the deal. “I do have many expenses that-”

Scofield completed the check, tore it off with just about the sweetest sound that Vargas had ever heard, but then practically stopped the captain’s heart by drawing it back across the table before Vargas could snatch it.

Now what? “Is something wrong?” he said, managing what he hoped was a smile.

“I wonder, Captain,” Scofield said slowly, gently waving the check, “if you would be interested in earning an additional five thousand dollars?”

Vargas’s heart started up again. At about a hundred beats a minute. “You’re thinking about another cruise?”

“No, not another cruise. Something more in the nature of a simple favor on this one. No additional trouble on your part at all.” He leaned closer, smiling. “I have a proposition in which I think you might be interested, Captain Vargas.”

Twenty minutes later, the two men stood up and shook hands, Vargas having first used a cocktail napkin to surreptitiously wipe the sweat from his palm.

“We’ll look forward to our departure on the twenty-sixth, then,” Scofield said. “Thank you for the drinks.”

“Thank you, professor.”

Once Scofield had left, Vargas flopped back into his soft leather chair. With the thousand soles he was being paid for the mail and cargo deliveries, he would gross almost $11,000, an incredible sum, enough to outfit his beloved Adelita in the manner it deserved, enough for a down payment on a second ship! Yet all the same, an edgy panic, as thick and turgid as cold mud, pressed painfully on his heart. What had he gotten himself into?

He shoved his Inca Kola aside, and limply signaled the barman.

“Bernardo, a double aguardiente.”

In the elevator on the way to his fourth-floor room in the Dorado Plaza, Arden Scofield was experiencing a mixture of excitement, relief, and self-congratulation. The arrangement he’d just concluded with Vargas was the final element in an elegantly contrived plan. Had Vargas not agreed, it would all have come to nothing. But really, there hadn’t been much chance of that. His choice of Vargas was hardly random. He had chosen him with care, had meticulously researched him and liked what he had discovered: a cash-pressed boat owner with big dreams for the future; an ambitious, cunning, but basically simple man; not a hardened criminal by any means – certainly not “connected” – but definitely money-hungry and not above the occasional skirting of the law when expedience demanded it. Perfect for what Scofield had in mind.

And what Arden Scofield had in mind had little to do with ethnobotanical expeditions. What he was interested in was the more than $120,000 he would net from the 150 kilos of coca paste “rocks” – the gritty, sand-colored balls of coca-leaf derivative – that the ship would now be carrying. The individually wrapped rocks, grouped into eight-quart, white plastic kitchen garbage bags, would be stowed among the contents of the four dozen sixty-kilo bags of coffee beans that the Adelita was transporting to a riverfront warehouse in Colombia. From there, they would be picked up by runners and taken to Cali, where they would be refined into fifty kilos of “white gold” – pure, top-quality cocaine hydrochloride for the high-end North American trade.

In other words, the esteemed professor was a “ narco” on the side – a drug trafficker, one of the many thousands in Peru that make the international cocaine trade possible. While it is true that the majority of finished cocaine seen on the streets of Europe and the United States is made in Colombia, most of the coca paste from which it is processed comes from Peru, which produces three-quarters of the world’s supply of coca. And well over half of that is grown along the infamous “coca belt” – mainly the Huallaga Valley, the main commercial hub of which is Tingo Maria. Which happened to be where the resourceful professor resided three or four months a year.

On Scofield’s behalf it had to be said that he’d come with no intention of getting involved in the local drug commerce. But when certain opportunities more or less fell into his lap, his perceptions changed. And opportunities weren’t long in coming.