Tom Knox - The Babylon rite

The minibus pulled over. The heat and humidity was now joined by the intense noise of a pullulating market. Boris gave some kid a few pesos to watch the bags and the gutted bus and he dived straight into the melee, expecting them to follow.

Jess turned to them. ‘I know he seems crazy. I know. But he really knows this stuff: he’s the best ethnobotanist around. Come on before we lose him.’

It was all too easy to lose someone in Belen market. The place was teeming with tribespeople from up and down the Amazon. Little boys and girls ran naked between stalls selling potatoes and cheap Valium and huge catfish and sad-looking sloths in cages and dead turtles on their backs with slimy, yellow intestines tugged out and displayed. Ingots of raw sugar were stacked like building bricks in huge piles next to plastic sacks of cornflour. The rats were everywhere: big, sleek and smug.

A man sang the blues with a three-stringed guitar. Women wearing three hats at once cackled and shouted, ‘ Hay chambira, hay uvas, hay jugo de cocona a cinquenta centimos ’ as they stood over trestle tables piled high with crude cigarettes made from mapacho jungle tobacco, and arrays of reeking salt fishes, and piles of large gourds and camu-camu fruit; selections of parrots, bell peppers, and fat manzanillas; chunks of wild black jungle pig; hooves of tapirs still bloody and frazzled with flies; tiny coconuts the size of ping-pong balls; strips from the ten-metre-long great river fish called paiche; plates of platano mush being hungrily eaten by off-duty river captains; plantains, chambira, copaiba wood, spices in supersaturated colour; dead buzzards which might have been on sale or might just have died and fallen from the sky.

‘Here,’ said Boris, ‘try this.’ It was a bottle of white liquid, in a clear plastic bottle, like runny yoghurt. ‘Go on, try it.’

Adam was thirsty, and sweating, in the intense humidity; he grabbed the bottle gratefully, and swigged. It was sweet and drinkable. He glugged some more, wiping his mouth with his wrist.

‘It’s good. What is it?’

‘Chicha beer. Made from manioc. They ferment it by chewing it up and spitting it out. It’s basically a beer made from old woman’s drool. This way.’ He turned and dived back into the melee.

Adam knew he was being tested. He refused to flinch; but the gorge rose inside him as they walked on.

Finally they reached the floating market, where the just-after-the-rainy-season Amazon reached up to the waist of the city. Boris, of course, was first in the little boat; the rest of them climbed in, unsteadily, sweating, dirty, energized, frightened.

The motorboat puttered between stilt houses and houses floating on balsa platforms. This part of the market was mercifully quieter: Adam got the idea that they were in a different emotional zone of Belen market.

Jess said quietly, ‘It reminds me of the Witches’ Market in Chiclayo.’ She paused. ‘These people are curanderos, I think. Shamans.’

There were men and women in tribal costume hawking their goods from the floating houses and tethered balsa rafts. Men in loincloths with parrot feathers in their hair. Women in nylon ra-ra skirts with tattoos on their faces. They sold strange-coloured fungi, withered vines, tiny seeds in little calabash pouches, dried birds’ heads, and litres of ayahuasca in old Johnnie Walker whisky bottles. At several spots Boris stopped and chatted discreetly with the shamans and the shawomen, mostly in Quechua or some rare Amazon language.

Occasionally Adam caught the odd snatch of Spanish, and what he could interpret was not encouraging. ‘ Se los lleva el sol.’

They are being taken by the sun.

‘?Que es eso?’ ‘Eso es el polvo de yohimbina.’

What is that? It is just yohimbe.

The sun was beginning to set, to thankfully sink into the Amazon beyond the floating market. Adam’s anxiety rose. The cartels could be following them anywhere. They were all-powerful. They could arrange for a London policeman to be silently garrotted, just as a kind of lurid joke. The cartels were richer than some countries. They had the weaponry of modern armies. They carved words into your skin with knives and filmed it, and then they dissolved you in vats of acid.

Even Boris was looking defeated and anxious. He muttered something about trying again tomorrow. Glancing nervously at the setting sun. ‘You don’t want to be in this part of Belen after dark. Specially with Catrina on your case, mes amigos. Let’s try this one last house.’

The last floating house had the most flamboyant shaman of all, a Kofan shaman with a coloured mantle that fell to his knees. Festoons of multicoloured beads hung around his neck, alongside necklaces of shells and seeds and curving white jaguar teeth. His eyebrows had been vigorously plucked and painted, his lips were dyed a sombre purple-blue, his wrist was braceleted with iguana skins, his flat brown nose had a singular emerald macaw feather pierced through the septum, and his long earlobes were studded with caiman fangs. Surmounting it all was a resplendent headdress of violet hummingbird feathers, scarlet macaw feathers and wild sapphire parrot tail feathers, like the halo of an archangel.

‘What does he say?’ whispered Adam, in awe.

‘He says we should talk to his wife.’

There was an awkward pause. Then the shaman’s wife came out from the floating shack wearing denim shorts, flip-flops and a dirty T-shirt with a picture of Justin Bieber on the front. She listened to Boris’s question. Then she nodded, casually. ‘ Ulluchu si.’ She talked quickly in her own language.

The excitement quickened with the dying of the day. ‘Where?’ Adam asked. ‘What is she saying? Where?’

Boris turned. His face was uncharacteristically grave. ‘She says we will find it two hundred miles upriver. That makes sense. It tallies with what we know of Archibald McLintock’s movements.’

‘Two hundred miles?’ Nina interjected, her forehead slightly streaked with river mud, and the inevitable thick Iquitos sweat.

‘Two hundred miles up the Ucayali. With the Pankarama. Protected tribal wilderness.’ Boris looked perturbed, for the first time that day.

‘So?’

‘ Amigos. The Pankarama are headhunters. They kill gringos. They kill everyone. And then they shrink their heads.’

The Amazon, Peru

They left at dawn the next day, bribing their way on to a small cargo ferry, the MV Myona, transporting mahogany and ebonywood and camu-camu and jungle spices to Pucallpa, via ‘a certain number’ of jungle villages and settlements.

The captain was half shaven, evasive, a cliched drunk at 3 a.m.; a quarter Colombian, he wore flip-flops and long Billabong surf shorts, and a Brazilian flag T-shirt that was stained with diesel. Two of his bare-chested crew members bore bizarre scars on their backs.

Adam stood on the roofed, open passenger deck of this hired apology for a boat, with their gently swaying hammocks behind him, watching Iquitos disappear in the early mist. If he’d still been a simple journalist he’d have been sad to leave this city so soon, this place of apparently endless stories; but they were being hunted. The Zetas were out there, right now; and probably Catrina too. So he was very glad to leave, before they could be taken, or killed, or brutally chopped up with machetes like the forest hogs in Belen market.

He leaned over the taffrail and stared down as the last cargo was longshored aboard; then the good ship Myona belched dirty water into the muddy riversurf and they moved out, treading the sludgy waves. The mist was still covering the mighty expanse of river all around them, rising like an army of wraiths.

Nina joined him at the taffrail, gazing at the river slums of Iquitos where the backwash curtseyed on the grey beaches of litter, and naked children with white teeth laughed and bathed in the citrusy sewage that guttered into the dawnlit water. She asked, ‘Do you trust him?’