Tom Knox - The Babylon rite

Adam scrutinized Jessica Silverton as she and Nina talked, a little awkwardly, as they wove through the madding traffic. Behind the self-conscious self-confidence he could see fear and anxiety in the American woman’s brown eyes: and a definite wariness, too. She was scared about something, haunted even. But of course she had recently seen friends and lovers killed, and that was probably enough reason for mistrusting anyone and everything.

Jess had shared her theory about the Aztecs with them on the flight from Lima. It was a fine insight. So fine, Adam wanted to hear it again: this time he was going to write it down. Like a proper journalist. He tapped her on the shoulder, and requested a reprise. She smiled, uncertainly. ‘OK. This is how I see it, after the Moche, the cruellest and most drug-addled of all these American civilizations were surely the Aztecs. They must have possessed ulluchu in almost as strong a form, perhaps stronger. A distillation maybe, or a new preparation.’

Adam raised a hand. ‘Wait, please.’ The Valentinemobile was swerving wildly, avoiding potholes. Adam steadied his pen. ‘OK. Sorry. Go on.’

‘However, the Aztecs were also the last great civilization in North and Central America: the last of the ulluchu users. So what happened when the white men came? The Aztecs hid it from the conquistadors. They hid the drug! That explains the legends of the famous buried treasure of Montezuma: the gold the Spanish could never quite find. It wasn’t gold: it was a golden flower, a golden morning glory flower, the flower of evil, which disappeared.’

A page of his notebook was filled. Adam thanked her and pocketed his pen, and felt the pungent Iquitos breeze on his face, scented with sewage and spice and squalor. The idea was good, the theories were good; the reality was still very dangerous. He gazed about, nervously.

The streetscape was ageing and narrowing as they approached the centre: older Spanish colonial buildings, decaying in the decades of jungle storms and wetness, were lined up on either side of the narrow boulevards.

Nina was just gazing: wordless now, as she had too often been of late. It was a growing contrast to the chatterbox girl he had met in that pub in Edinburgh just a few weeks ago. Then he could feel her extroversion, her effervescence. But the tragedies and the violence and the grief had ground her down; they were corroding her, diminishing her: she had got quieter and quieter. Maybe he hadn’t helped, with his stupid violence in Portugal, but he had done it because he was defending her. He wanted to kiss her. He was never going to kiss her. He was never going to allow himself to do this, not after Alicia. Not again. A girl who would occupy his heart and soul and then fuck him up with grief or heartbreak or loss: never again. But if he couldn’t allow himself to love her, he could win this, solve this, defeat this: for her.

He wondered what she was thinking, right now. He wanted to squeeze her hand and ask, but he couldn’t. Probably she was thinking of her dad, who came here eighteen months ago. They knew from his receipts that he had taken a ferry upriver, and stayed six days — somewhere — and then came back. They had no idea where he stopped, and disembarked, but they knew his direction.

But if this trip was recorded in the notebooks it also meant the Zetas were probably out here too, in the riverine slums, hunting them down. And they weren’t just hunting him and Nina, they were hunting for more ulluchu, of course.

The ripples of the puzzle suddenly froze into a pattern.

‘They’re looking for ulluchu. They want more ulluchu,’ he said, to the whole vehicle, to no one.

Nina said, ‘We know that.’

‘No, I mean both of them. The Zetas, and Catrina, they both have limited supplies, and they are both trying to find more.’

‘But my dad must’ve sold the Catrina a lot, we discussed this-’

‘Yes.’ Adam nodded. He noticed that Jessica was staring at him, intently. He went on. ‘But consider the actions of the Zetas, all this killing, the explosions, murders. Of course they are desperate to find more ulluchu, to source it, that is why they stole the notebooks, as we know — to find out what your father knew, where he went, where he got the drug — but at the same time they want to prevent the other gang, Catrina, from following the same trail. Because maybe Catrina are running out of ulluchu too.’

The minibus rattled over a pothole.

‘It makes a load of sense,’ Jessica said. ‘Horrible sense. That’s why the Zetas blew up Casinelli, and killed Dan, and tried to kill you: they want to extract all the information they can, and then silence their sources, prevent El Santo from getting the same information.’

They all fell silent, in the hubbub of Iquitos. Adam stared around: if he was right — and he knew he was right — this meant the Zetas were surely here. And not just the Zetas. The soldiers of the skulls, the soldiers of Catrina, if they had guessed that Iquitos was the key, they would also be here: waiting on the next corner in the next mosquitoey cafe, their Glock revolvers hidden under the dirty table. Hands tattooed with Santa Muerte skulls. Yearning to kill for killing’s sake.

He stilled his nerves, as best he could — and listened. Boris, who seemed oblivious to their anxieties, was now talking, loudly, as he crashed the gears up and down, joining the squealing and discordant symphony of the wild Iquitos traffic. ‘Look at this place. Look at it! I just love this city. It’s just so damn absurd. Frankly speaking, it shouldn’t even be here any more, the only reason they built it was the rubber boom in the nineteenth-century. Back in the day, when this place, along with Manaus, were the capitals of rubber, you could get anything, any luxury imaginable. Four hundred bucks would buy you a fourteen-year-old Polish virgin: they had whores from everywhere, Cairo, Tangier, Paris, Baghdad, Budapest, New York, fricking Tashkent. They watered their horses with iced Taittinger champagne. The donkeys got Veuve Clicquot. They had banquets costing a hundred thousand dollars. Caviar by the scoopful, cured meats from Paris, top hats from England, Danish butter imported on barges filled with ice. Cuban cigars they lit with their hundred-buck notes. The rubber barons lived in these mansions here-’ He was gesturing at the mouldering, decrepit, colonnaded buildings, collaged with posters for ARPU the Peruvian socialist party. ‘Anyway, all this talk of caviar — I’m famished. Shall we eat? We can we get some arepas — rounds of milk cheese wrapped in banana leaves, best drunk with small thimbles of tinto coffee. Delicious. You know the Peruvians believe Christ ate guinea pig at the Last Supper? Aqui! ’

He parked the minibus. They climbed out and bought some food from a stall. Adam gawped. Rats ran under their feet, next to a new luxury hotel already mouldy from the heat and the wet, the air which pretended to be air.

The arepa-seller handed over the banana leaf wraps of cheese, which were delicious and disgusting at the same time. They climbed back in the minibus. Boris continued talking. He never stopped talking, it seemed. ‘Now poor old beautiful mad Iquitos is having a second boom. It’s the trade in lumber, in hardwoods, and oil of course, and all the good stuff of the jungle, and it’s also pesos turisticas from the mad gringo and Jap kids who come here to take drugs. Because the Amazon jungle contains the vast majority of the globe’s naturally occurring recreational substances. You know what indole is?

‘No,’ said Adam.

‘Indole-containing plant hallucinogens are concentrated, overwhelmingly, in the New World, and in Amazonia especially. Hell, you could probably eat the rats around here and have a decent little trip, if you don’t get leptospirosis first.’ The car raced past a tall woman loitering on a corner wearing a dizzying blonde wig; Adam looked again: ‘she’ was a transvestite. ‘What I was saying, yeah, the Amazon is the most amazing place of all for discovering new mind-altering drugs. It all started in the 1850s. Two Brits, Alfred Russell Wallace and Richard Spruce, they travelled around here and on the upper reaches of the Rio Negro, Spruce saw a buncha Indians preparing a strange foodstuff, then he noticed that the main ingredient was a liana, a climbing vine — he called it Banisteria caapi. Finally he realized this plant was the main ingredient for ayahuasca, the vine of the gods, the great hallucinogen of the jungle, and that’s why we get kids coming here from all over: backpackers, British students. You Brits like to get high, don’t you? Is it the rain that depresses you? Damn it anyway, look, there’s one: I’ll try and run him over — stoned as a lizard — look at him, god-damn hippies.’ Boris swerved the battered windowless minibus and scared the bedraggled Western youth onto the sidewalk. ‘They come here in their fricking pyjamas and sandals hoping to meet a shaman and take some ayahuasca in a stupid clearing in the jungle and they pay two hundred bucks to take some crappy old yage mixed with dope and diesel and lord knows, and they puke their guts up for eight hours and claim they’ve had visions of monkeys with dentures and then they come back to Iquitos and get off their gourds on coke and heroin, and then they wander around like zombies and get run over. Sometimes by me. We’re here. Belen river market. Prepare yourselves. You ain’t seen nothing like this.’