Gary Braver - Elixir

A cold rash ran up Chris's back. "Marists? That was 1857."

"Yes."

"That's impossible! That would make you at least… a hundred and twenty-three." He started to laugh but the intensity in Iwati's eyes stopped him. "That's impossible. You can't be more than forty."

Iwati smiled indulgently. "I am. Much much more."

"You can't be that old, Iwati. Our biology doesn't allow it."

"Your biology."

"Iwati, that's ridiculous." He wanted to say he was just trying to spook him, that for four years they had shared the same rational world of science-but suddenly that seemed so remote. So did Iwati.

"I was fifteen when I learned the tabukari power from my father."

"And when was he born?"

"Nobody knows. Sometime before the Contact."

"The Contact? Jesus, man, what kind of fool do you take me for? You're talking the seventeenth century."

Iwati nodded.

"And what happened to him?"

"The Portuguese killed him. The expedition led by Antonio d'Orbo."

Antonio d'Orbo was the first recorded white man to voyage up the Sepik in the middle of the last century, Chris recalled. Only a handful of his men made it back to tell.

"You don't believe me," Iwati said.

"Frankly, not a word."

Iwati stared at him for a moment, turning something over in his head. Then he removed the shrunken head from his neck and held it out to him. "Look. Look at it."

Repulsive as it was, Chris studied it in the firelight. The face was small and shriveled, its skin a darkened leather, the lips and eyelids stitched shut. He had seen several others in museums, but there was something distinctly different about this one. And for a moment he couldn't place it. Then it struck him: the hair… Unlike all the others, this was not black but a light brown, and not kinky but silky straight. Caucasian. The head had belonged to a westerner. Iwati lifted the plait, exposing one ear. It looked like a black apricot except for the lobe which was looped with metal and miked through a hole to a gold coin. The inscriptions were worn down some, but he could make out the Roman letters-the word Anno Dei and the Arabic numbers.

"It says 1866," Chris said. "What does that prove?"

"It's him."

"Who?"

"Antonio d'Orbo."

"Iwati, what the hell are you telling me?" But he did not answer. Just stared. "You're saying you did this-you killed Antonio d'Orbo and shrunk his head?"

"He killed my father."

Chris threw his hands into the air, shaking his head. "Sorry, my friend, but I don't believe you. None of it." He stood up and made a move to go. "Thanks for the bedtime story, but now I'd like to get some sleep."

Iwati rose. "Christopher, listen to me. I am telling you the truth. I swear it." Nothing in Iwati's manner betrayed his words. "I owe you for saving my life."

Chris stared into Iwati's eyes, but they held no guile. Suddenly the image of the Okamolu warriors flashed across Chris's mind. And the little juju man. They believed it.

They believed it!

Like his ears suddenly clearing, things began to make weird, terrifying sense. It wasn't Chris's skin that had reduced the Okamolu to frightened boys. They had seen white men before, probably had even eaten a few. Nor was it the gun. It was Iwati who had spooked them. Iwati! They weren't sure it was he in T-shirt, shorts, and sunglasses-not until he had changed into his ceremonial headdress and face paint and shrunken head. The declaration of his juju identity. Not just another tribal shaman, but Iwati of the secret tabukari magic. Maybe, too, it was the reason the porters regarded him as a god. The reason they had trudged for two weeks even into tabu land of flesh-eaters. The reason their own heads were still on their shoulders and not on Okamolu spears.

To their minds Iwati was deathless.

Iwati nodded as if reading Chris's mind. Then he shrugged and slipped the head back around his neck. "Maybe it's best, my friend," he said and tossed the flowered vine onto the fire.

The flames sputtered. But before they could claim the braid of small white blossoms, Chris's hand flew into the fire and snatched it away.

Quentin took a sip of his champagne. "My best offer is three million dollars, take it or leave it."

"Leave it," said Antoine Ducharme, not missing a beat.

You son-of-a-bitch! Quentin thought. "Then we have a problem."

"No, my friend, you have a problem. The fee is five million per ton."

Quentin Cross, Chief Financial Officer at thirty-seven and future CEO of Darby Pharmaceuticals, sat in uneasy silence on the rear deck of Reef Madness, a long sleek cruiser that Antoine's girlfriend, Lisa, maneuvered around the coral heads. Working the mooring line from the bow was Marcel, one of Antoine's security guards, who wore a snub-nosed revolver and pair of handcuffs on his belt.

They were inside the barrier reef on the northern coast of Apricot Cay, a palm-fringed island fifteen miles southeast of Jamaica and owned by Antoine Ducharme, an elegant and highly educated yachtsman, entrepreneur, and drug trafficker. Antoine, who looked to be in his mid-forties, was a tall, solidly built man with short salt-and-pepper hair, and an open face that appeared scholarly behind his rimless eyeglasses. It was a face that was used to making substantial decisions and one that could turn to stone in an instant.

Dressed in a green lounging suit, Antoine had arranged for his ten associates a sunset dinner of lobster tail, sautéed breadfruit, and French cheeses topped off with a dessert of fresh apricots, of course.

Quentin knew very little about the other men except that they were all part of an international group of very wealthy power brokers given to secret capital ventures and extravagances. But their association with Antoine Ducharme suggested that they had no ethical qualms about getting dirty. There were no introductions. The men ate separately, speaking French and German, then moved into the inner cabin to watch a soccer game beamed from a satellite dish. To Quentin they were simply "the Consortium."

Sitting with Quentin and Antoine was an American of about thirty-five named Vince Lucas, Antoine's "financial security officer." He was lean and attractive in a feral kind of way. He had smooth fleshy lips, a tanned, V-shaped face, and shiny black hair combed straight back to expose a deep widow's peak. His eyebrows were perfect black slashes, and his eyes were so dark that they appeared to be all pupil. On his forearm was a tattoo of a bird of prey with a death-head skull. He looked like no financial officer Quentin had ever met.

"If you ask me, five million is a bargain," Vince Lucas said.

"Five million dollars is out of the question," Quentin repeated. But he knew that they had him by the proverbial throat.

Lisa cleared the dishes. She was clad in a scant black bikini, a yellow headband, and a rose tattoo on her shoulder. She was a stunningly exotic woman in her early twenties with cocoa skin and deep, uninhibited eyes-eyes which when they fell on Quentin made him self-conscious of his large pink face, thinning hair, and pot belly swelling over his shorts. When she was finished, she gave Antoine, who was twice her age, a long passionate kiss and went below, Marcel tailing her to leave the men to their business.

"Listen to me, my friend," Antoine said, "We have over two thousand acres of mountain rainforest, another thousand acres of orchards with mountain streams for irrigation, protected harbors, your own airstrip, storage buildings-'the works,' as you Americans say. And most important: total privacy."