Aaron Elkins - Little Tiny Teeth

There was no Internet cafe, but the bar, which had opened at five, had a few computers set up along one wall. No charge, but order something to eat or drink, and you could use one of them for as long as you could make your order last. Gideon got a good, fresh orange juice and a cup of weak but bitter coffee, and tapped out an e-mail to Julie.

Hi Sweetheart,

We’re all safe and sound in Lima – not too bad a trip, although we’re a little grubby by now. We’re waiting out a slight (I hope) delay on the Iquitos leg. You wouldn’t believe it if I told you the reason. It’s six A.M. here – nine in Cabo, I guess – and I just tried calling you, but you weren’t in the room. Probably at the spa getting your nodes uncrystallized. Don’t overdo it now. I really admire your nodes the way they are.

Nothing else to say, really – I just wanted an excuse to “talk” to you. I love you and I’m already missing you, and I’ll see you next week. Have a great time, honey.

XXX Gideon

With a sigh he turned to his e-mail inbox.

It took a couple of hours, but the artillery blasts did the job. The vultures flew away, the flight loaded up and left, and by ten A.M. – about the time the attendants were handing out welcome trays of warm, tasty ham-and-cheese sandwiches, orange juice, more bad coffee, and rum cake – the plane had left the coastal plain behind, had cleared the craggy, snowy peaks of the Andes, and was beginning its long descent to the Amazon Basin and Iquitos. Gideon pressed his face to the window.

He had flown over other jungles, in Central America and the South Pacific and Africa, but he’d never seen anything like this. For minute after minute the flat, gray-green mat stretched to the horizon in every direction, broken only by meandering loops of brown river the color of coffee with cream. What was especially strange was that the landscape looked almost the same from five thousand feet as it had from twenty-five thousand feet: like a huge green sponge, evenly pimpled and almost perfectly level, with no visible open spaces, even small ones, other than the river itself.

At five thousand feet visibility was cut off due to the misting of the windows, an ominous indicator of the heat and humidity to come. Gideon, who had long ago grown to love the cool, crisp air of the Pacific Northwest, valiantly prepared himself to suffer.

“Hey, look at this, this is cool,” John said with unintended irony as he came down the steel steps that had been rolled up to the Airbus. “It’s like being in an Indiana Jones movie.”

Gideon nodded his agreement. The Iquitos Airport consisted of two crisscrossed runways sitting in a sharp-cornered rectangle carved out of the jungle. No other planes there. No sign of a city or anything like it, and no sign of the twenty-first century, either, for that matter. Except for the jet airliner they had just left, they might have been in the 1930s. There was a long, low, one-story terminal awaiting them, and a few thatch-roofed huts around the perimeter of the field. At the very edge of the clearing, up to their bellies in weeds, were two rotting, doorless, windowless passenger planes of indeterminate age that had obviously made it to Iquitos once upon a time but hadn’t managed to make it back out.

The air was everything Gideon had dreaded, as thick and hot as soup. Before he reached the bottom of the stairs, his shirt was wet with sweat and his unshaven face was greasy. He felt like a turkey basting in the oven.

“A little hot,” he said mildly.

“You think this is hot?” Phil said. “Ho, ho, this is only the morning. Wait till the afternoon!”

The ride into town was by means of a couple of two-passenger “ motokars” – open-sided, surrey-like conveyances (including the fringe on top) perched on three-wheeled motorcycles driven at break-neck speed that forced the riders to hang on for dear life at every curve. These were the only taxis to be found in Iquitos, and the streets were full of them, all skidding and scooting around each other (and around the occasional hapless pedestrian trying to cross a street) with a reckless elan that would have earned the admiration of a London bicycle courier.

The liveliness and bustle of the city came as a surprise. Gideon had known that it was the second largest settlement on the Amazon, with a population of over a quarter million, but all the same he’d anticipated a languid, heat-frazzled sort of place, where nobody moved very fast and everybody got out of the sun at midday. Instead, careening down Calle Prospero toward their hotel, he found a tacky, colorful, hard-working town that was anything but languid. There were block after block of surplus stores, off-brand clothing shops, luggage stores, check-cashing services, hole-in-the-wall restaurants, and tobacco and liquor stores, most of them with bars on their windows but their doors wide open. Many of the merchants seemed to be out on the street arguing or chatting with passersby. If not for the absence of anything taller than three stories, he might have been on Canal Street in lower Manhattan.

Still, there was an unmistakable frontier quality to it, perhaps from the musty, jungly smell of the great river only a few blocks away, perhaps from the people themselves, an extraordinarily diverse mix of tall, blond, blue-eyed Europeans, short, black-haired, wary-eyed Indians, and absolutely every possible variant between the two. The whole scene, Gideon thought, could have come straight out of a Joseph Conrad novel.

The motokars screeched to a stop in front of a grand, multi-columned hotel, with nothing at all tacky about it, that fronted a pretty square with fountains and neat green lawns. Phil made a show of paying all their fares – a total of four nuevos soles for the four-mile ride: a little over a dollar. The drivers seemed happy with their two soles each.

“This is the Plaza de Armas, the main square,” Phil told them after they’d pulled their luggage down from the racks at the backs of the taxis, “and that monstrosity is your hotel, the Dorado Plaza. Go freshen up, take a nap or something, and I’ll meet you right out here at, say, four o’clock, after things have cooled down. I’ll give you a quickie tour. I’d go inside with you in case there’s any problem at the desk, but they’d never let me through the door.”

At this stage of their journey, none of them looked very appetizing, but Phil was in a class of his own. He was, to put it mildly, not a man greatly concerned with outward appearances. His come-again, go-again, pepper-and-salt beard was three weeks on its way in, and his lank, thinning gray hair looked as if it had seen its last pair of clippers six months ago. In addition, he was dressed in his standard travel apparel: a tired T-shirt with a sagging neckline, baggy, multi-pocketed, knee-length khaki shorts, scuffed, sockless tennis shoes that did nothing to enhance his skinny legs, and a faded On the Cheap baseball cap with a sweat-stained, curling bill. Gideon knew that in his backpack – Phil’s first rule of travel was never to take anything that couldn’t fit into a backpack – were duplicates of each item of clothing that he wore and a few necessities such as toilet paper (you never knew), toothpaste, insect repellent, and a pair of flip-flops. That was it. He would be dressed exactly the same every day of the trip. And he would spend a lot of time washing clothes in his bathroom sink.

“You know,” he said, shrugging into the backpack for the short walk to his own hotel, but hesitating before starting, “it’s not too late to cancel your reservations here. You can still get a couple of rooms at the Alfert with the rest of us.”

“Why would we want to do that?” Gideon asked.

“Because it’s sixty bucks cheaper, and also because almost everyone else on the cruise is there, but mainly because it doesn’t have air-conditioning, and minifridges, and TV, and all that crap that you tourist types go for. What’s the point of coming down here at all if you’re going to live the way you would in Seattle or New York? The Alfert is a real Iquitos hotel. It’s the kind of place the real people stay.”