Tom Knox - The Babylon rite

It took an hour for Adam and Nina to share all their crucial information. As Nina passionately explained the role of her father, and the police, and the terrible scenes in London, and the way they had followed the trail of the receipts — from Temple Bruer to Tomar, from Rosslyn to Sagres and finally to Peru — Jessica sensed the dynamic between this fiercely determined girl and the tall, brooding Australian. The tragedies that bonded them.

Once more, Jessica felt the pang of her own loneliness. Her dyingness? No. That was stupid. She chided herself for her self-pity, and urged Nina to continue.

Finishing her third black room-service coffee, Nina mentioned their discovery in Portugal, the sculptures in the church, the pentagram in old Tomar Jessica leaned close. ‘Pentagram?’

‘Yes.’ Nina looked at Adam, who shrugged. She turned back. ‘That’s the only bit we couldn’t work out.’

‘But I can — I know how it fits!’ Jessica pulled her little laptop from her bag, opened it, and tapped a few words. ‘See. The pentagram is not a symbol of the devil or Christ’s wounds — at least, not in this case. It is also symbol of a flower. The five-pointed flower of the morning glory. That’s the final proof: with the seeds, and the uncanny similarity to ololiuqui, and now this, that’s enough proof. We now know ulluchu is definitely a morning glory, we just don’t know which one.’

Adam was gazing at the laptop screen and its row of pentagrams, juxtaposed with morning glories. He nodded. ‘So, please. Now tell us what else you know.’

This took less time: Jessica skipped the more gruesome episodes; she couldn’t bear to reveal them. At the end Adam nonetheless looked shocked; she waved away his sympathies and said, ‘Show me the last receipts again.’

Pulling out an envelope saying Peru September 2nd — 13th, Nina handed them over.

Jessica opened the envelope. ‘So your father went to Iquitos? For a week — that makes sense.’

‘Why?’

‘Because Iquitos is the capital of the Amazon rainforests and the Amazon is where everyone goes to look for new drugs. Amazonia is just seething with undiscovered plants and trees and fungi, with all kinds of medicinal and psychotropic potential, a five-thousand-mile-wide pharmacopoeia. I have an ethnobotanist friend researching there now who is willing to help you, if you want. He is good. Very good. And this is the kind of stuff he loves.’

Adam gave her a sardonic expression. ‘We’ve made it all the way here. Another thousand miles: so what?’

‘Of course.’ Jessica was focused on the receipts; she had picked out the final chit, a small piece of paper bearing the handwritten word Toloriu and the figure 5; and the date: September 18th.

‘It’s a taxi receipt, we think.’ Nina said. ‘Ach. His last movements are opaque: his plane tickets are missing. But we found this, five days after all the others: it’s a town in the northern Andes?’

‘Yes, I know it. Near Huancabamba. Quite famous for its curanderos. So maybe he got the ulluchu in Iquitos, then had it prepared by a healer. It’s possible.’

Jessica stared once more at the chit, then returned it to the envelope.

‘OK. We need to be straight. You know the danger. The Mexican drug cartels are the most powerful criminal syndicates in the history of-’

Nina smiled bleakly. ‘The visible universe. Aye. We know. We’ve been through a few wee scrapes ourselves.’

‘Sorry. Sorry, yes, of course.’ Jess handed back he envelope of receipts. ‘So we go to Iquitos tomorrow?’

‘We go to Iquitos tomorrow.’

For a moment they sat in silence. Nina and Adam seemed pensive; but Jessica was more animated, she was positively distracted. She had just this moment grasped another shining fragment of the puzzle.

The Aztec legend. The great Aztec legend.

Iquitos, Amazonia, Peru

Boris Valentine was about forty-five and tending to fat. He was adorned in a lurid Hawaiian shirt almost open to the navel, he had a silver medallion dangling way down this chest and his eyes were vigorously blue, yet he looked like he hadn’t had a proper night’s sleep since the 1970s. Indeed he looked, to Adam, as if he belonged in the seventies or eighties. A sleazy entrepreneur running a celebrity disco in New York, with a tiny coke spoon at the ready, and three anorexic girlfriends.

Yet this was the renowned ethnobotanist from UCLA, according to Jessica Silverton, this was the man who could track down ulluchu, out there in the jungle. And the man was evidently keen to do it: to get out there in the bush and make his name in the jungle: he already exuded ambition like an over-musky aftershave.

‘So you’re the drug-hunting gringos. That’s just what we need here in Iquitos. More kids after a headrush. We only have three thousand of them.’ Boris laughed and shook hands with Adam, and then he kissed Nina’s hand and then he just kissed Jessica. Turning, smartly, he marched them off the airstrip in his incongruous and finely-tooled cowboy boots, talking the while. ‘Welcome to Iquitos my friends, the largest city in the world that you cannot reach by road. Welcome to the capital of the Amazon. Shall we hurry the fuck up before the Zetas come and start a Facebook appreciation page in honour of your arrival?’ He laughed at Nina’s expression. ‘Sorry, be of good cheer! We are going somewhere even the biggest cartels in Mexico won’t find us: out there-’ he waved at the trees, prowling the airport perimeter. ‘And we’re going upriver. There are places two hundred miles from here no white man has ever seen, at least not on the ground, or not without getting himself killed by the poison at the end of a dart, made from the venom of killer bees and the extruded toxin of the curare vine. Here’s the Valentinemobile, hop in. Chuck your luggage in there. On the seat. Let me get rid of the ten-inch millipede. We have a great number of very large insects here. A lot of them extremely venomous.’

It was a rusted, stripped-down VW minibus with all the windows punched out and the roof torn off. Like the shell of a vehicle hit by a mortar.

‘Air conditioning, Iquitos style. Boy, you are going to like this city. Well, like it I, most of the time; but I’m in a good mood because I haven’t had half my family killed.’

They all climbed on the minibus. Boris Valentine belched robustly, turned the key, and the rattling old vehicle sped out of the airport precincts into the whirl of Iquitos traffic: languid and barefoot kids on motorbikes, motokars with Lenin Es Ma Vida on the transparent covers, more VW Beetles and buses with the roofs shaved off, as if there was a tax on automobile roofs.

Boris and Jess talked animatedly at the front of the minibus. Every so often one of them would glance behind at Nina and Adam, as they sweated like gringo tourists in the back of the bus: the breeze through the punched out windows was indeed welcome. The humidity was profound, a wet suffocation; Adam felt he could almost rub it between his fingers, the air, it had a viscosity, even a greasiness: the exhalations of the jungle — the jungle that entirely surrounded them, like a besieging army.

Jess turned, and talked loudly, above the traffic noise, to Adam and Nina; lecturing from the front seat as if she was a tour guide introducing them to Hell. ‘Boris says we’re going to Belen market. If anyone knows of ulluchu it will be there, he reckons. All the river people go there, he says: the river pirates, the river gypsies, the river tribes. It’s the trading centre of all Amazonia.’

‘How long, exactly, have you known Boris Valentine?’

Jess looked at Nina. ‘Quite a few years. I took a couple of his lectures at USC. As I said, he really is the go-to guy for the plant life of the Amazon. Entheogens and psychedelics, medicinal plants. All of it. He’s been working upriver for years.’