Aaron Elkins: Little Tiny Teeth

It was a very good deal, and Gideon and Julie had taken him up on it twice now, once on a trip to Costa Rica, and once on a tour of Italy’s Lake Maggiore region.

Phil answered on the third ring and immediately came up with a proposition.

“How does Peru sound? Six days, starting in three weeks, November twenty-sixth.”

“Peru!” Gideon exclaimed, thrilled. “Fantastic! I’ve wanted to go for years; I’ve just never gotten it together to go. That’d be great, Phil, wonderful! Machu Picchu, Sipan-”

“Well, don’t get too-”

“-the Moche tombs, Cuzco, Huaca Rajada-”

“Hey, hold your horses, will you? Forget archaeology. That’s not exactly what we’ll be doing.”

“-the ruins at – it’s not?”

“Not exactly, no.” He cleared his throat.

“It better be someplace warm,” John said as Gideon returned to the table. “That’s my one and only condition.” John, who’d grown up in Hawaii, loved hot weather. He considered it a cruel trick of fate that he’d been assigned to cold, gloomy Seattle. He claimed to have a standing request into the bureau for a transfer to Mexicali if they ever opened a regional office there.

“Well, then,” Gideon said, “you’ll be happy. How does eight days on the Amazon sound?”

John’s eyes popped wide open. “Seriously?”

“ On the Amazon?” Julie asked. “You mean on a boat?”

“Yup, an Amazon cruise.”

“That sounds fabulous,” Marti said. “Hey, maybe we should go. I love cruises. Talk about pampering.”

“Yes, but this is Phil we’re talking about,” Julie said. “On the Cheap. Somehow, I don’t think pampering will be on the agenda.”

“Don’t they have anacondas on the Amazon?” John asked. “Headhunters? Poisonous frogs? Giant spiders?”

“I’m pretty sure headhunting died out thirty years ago or so,” Gideon said. “About the others, I don’t know.”

“And what about mosquitoes?”

“I believe there are a few down there.”

“And malaria? How many damn shots would we have to get?”

“There aren’t any shots for malaria, there are pills you take. Other than that, there may be a couple of other shots, just to be on the safe side.”

“Great, I love shots,” John said under his breath, but Gideon could see he was just going through the motions. He was intrigued with the idea, and who wouldn’t be? “So where would we pick up the ship?”

“In Peru. A town called Iquitos,” Gideon said, “way upstream, near the headwaters of the Amazon.” He returned to his salad of smoked salmon, Dungeness crab, and avocado, picking it over to see if he’d missed any slivers of crab. “It’s not Phil’s usual thing, though. That is, it’s not an official On the Cheap tour, it’s a kind of… I guess you’d say, an evaluation visit, and he wouldn’t mind having us along to help him evaluate.”

There was a cargo boat operator in Iquitos, he explained, who had been trying for some time to convert his rebuilt ship, the Adelita, to the tourist trade. The operator/captain, Alfredo Vargas, had earlier contacted Phil about Phil’s writing up his would-be cruise enterprise in the next edition of South America On the Cheap. Phil had agreed to come down and check out the Adelita if and when Vargas got an actual boatload of paying passengers together for a bona fide cruise. That had been two years ago, and not long ago an exuberant Vargas had come through: a professor named Arden Scofield had chartered the ship for a week in late November for a scientific research cruise from Iquitos to Leticia, Colombia, a trip of 350 miles. Including Scofield, there would be a total of five paying passengers. Meals would be provided, and each passenger would have his or her own air-conditioned cabin with private bath. There were at present ten such cabins on the ship, but more would be added in the future as the cruise business prospered.

“In other words, other than telling Phil how we like it, we wouldn’t have any responsibilities at all. Nothing to do. Just relax and enjoy it.”

“A research cruise,” Julie said. “What kind of research?”

“Well, apparently they’re all ethnobotanists-”

“Ethnowhatanists?” Marti said.

“Ethnobotanists. Sort of a combination of cultural anthropologists and botanists. They study the way various peoples live with and use their local plants. You know, how they use them for medicine, for food, for clothing, and so on. Phil says they’re going to be doing some scientific collecting – there’s a tremendous number of unknown, uncataloged flora in the Amazon basin – and talking to shamans along the way to see what they can learn from them.”

“Learn from shamans?” Marti snorted. “And these guys are supposed to be scientists?”

“Well, I know what you mean,” said Gideon. “A lot of the shamanistic stuff is mumbo jumbo, but they do know an awful lot about the properties of their plants, especially the curative aspects, and some of it’s very much worth knowing. It’s been put to a lot of use in medicine, and there’s still a lot to be learned.”

They paused while the waiter cleared their plates and poured coffee for all.

Phil had offered a few other details, which Gideon now shared. Scofield held a dual professorship, spending most of the year at the University of Iowa, but also teaching at the Universidad Nacional Agraria de la Selva in Tingo Maria, Peru, where he ran an extension program that trained Amazonian coffee and cacao farmers in ecologically sound farming techniques.

Twice a year he took some of his American students and other interested people down to Peru on a botanical field expedition. Until now, they had always been treks in the Huallaga Valley near Tingo Maria, three hundred miles south of Iquitos and the Amazon, but this year he’d wanted to do something different: an Amazon River expedition. Hence, his hiring of the Adelita.

“So what would this cost us?” John asked.

“Well, Phil says he can get there and back for a six-hundred-dollar fare: Seattle to Iquitos, and then Leticia back to Seattle.”

“That’s a terrific deal,” Marti said to John. “Harvey and Cece Sherman went to Peru in June and just their round trip to Lima was something like eleven hundred dollars.”

“And once we’re there,” Gideon said, “we’ll pay the same thing on the boat that Phil will – twenty dollars a day to cover food – a hundred and forty bucks for the week.”

“So… seven hundred forty bucks for the whole deal?” John said.

“Right. The regular passengers are paying over thirteen hundred just for the cruise part.”

John set his cup on its saucer with a decisive clink. “What the hell, let’s do it. What’s the name of the town again? Iquistos?”

“Iquitos,” Gideon said, then added with a smile: “It rhymes with mosquitoes.”

Captain Alfredo Vargas, founder and president of Amazonia Cruise Lines, headquartered in Iquitos, Peru, conducted most of his business meetings with government officials, potential investors, and prospective clients in the bright, pleasant bar of the Hotel Dorado Plaza, self-described, with some justification, as “the only five-star hotel in the Peruvian Amazon.” While this practice might seem extravagant to some, it was in reality a measure of thrift on the captain’s part, being far more cost-effective than renting a bona fide office full-time, especially inasmuch as his business meetings were few and far between. Of course, once Amazonia was on its feet, once there was a steady stream of passengers for the Adelita, once another ship or two had been added to what he fondly thought of as his “fleet,” then there would be a fine office with an anteroom and a receptionist, and right on the Malecon Iarapaca too, the grandest boulevard in all Iquitos.