Tom Knox: The Babylon rite

‘Boris?’

‘Could be, Jessica, could be — right colour, a species I cannot identify, I believe them, I certainly believe they believe this is ulluchu — but the ulluchu we want — ahh…’

They were all crouched around the petals, and the seeds, and the toucan-bone tooting pipe.

Adam said, ‘So… we take it back to a lab, or what?’

Nina spoke up. ‘Boris? We need confirmation. Ask him. Do they remember my father? If this is where he came surely they would remember. I have a photo on my phone.’

Boris, his Hawaiian shirt dark with sweat, turned again to the chief. He spoke quickly, gesturing at Nina, then at the photo on the phone. The chief examined the image, and answered, in very fast and very accented Spanish. Boris nodded and made a slight bow.

‘Yes they remember him: a tall old white man. A year and a half ago. He came looking for the same drug, and they gave him this. Heck. Therefore this must be ulluchu.’

Was this final confirmation? Jess pondered and decided. No, it wasn’t. They still needed a test. They couldn’t know for sure. There was only one way to find out right now. What did it matter any more? Exhilaratingly, it didn’t matter at all.

She reached out and took a pair of the seeds. And swallowed them.

‘Jessica! Are you mad?’ Boris had his hands on her shoulders, remonstrating. Fiercely. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’

She smiled back at him; she felt quite in control. Perhaps more in command of her destiny than she had ever felt before. She didn’t care, not any more. No way was she going to die like her father. Thrashing and flailing. ‘Are we really going to go all the way back to Iquitos, do loads of tests? It’ll take days, weeks… This is the only way. The drug is meant to work quickly: just watch over me!’ She smiled sadly at Boris. ‘If I try to cut my own feet off, intervene. Swiftly.’

No one laughed. Jessica reached in her jeans pocket and handed over her pocket knife. ‘Seriously. Just in case.’ Then she stood and exited the shack, the others followed, shocked and gaping.

A short stroll brought Jess through a copse of enormous ceiba trees to the banks of the mighty Ucayali, almost as broad as the Amazon. She sat on a log and gazed at the river. Waiting for the drug to work. She sat for an hour. Colours drifted through her mind; she thought of her father and her mother and Dan Kossoy; she thought of the dead, smiling and waiting for her. The sky was green and the earth was blue.

She wondered if she could live here. In the jungle. For the rest of her shortened life. Eating melastom fruits, drinking medicinal teas brewed from sacha ajo, and chicha beer from the fruit of the miriti, and all the other regal palms. At night she would drink chuchuhuasi and rum, and stare at the electric eels in the river, glowing like slenderly curved neon lights.

A noise. A colour. Noises and colours. The caw caw of bamboo rats.

What was it? Death? It was just the immense, Amazonian delta of life. Nothing more. So many had already died out here, after the Spanish came: she remembered the terrible statistics. Three million Arawakans died between 1494 and 1508. Within a hundred and fifty years of Columbus the aboriginal population had been reduced from seventy million to three and a half million. In the Andes of Bolivia seventy-five Indians died every day for three hundred years; and yet — and yet the jungle survived. The world went on. The forest ate the sunlight.

And what was death anyway? Death was the emancipator, the good king, the liberator, the Abraham Lincoln who frees us all from the slavery of life, and without death life was nothing, pointless, lustreless, endless. Death was the blackness between the stars that made them shine.

Two hours had passed in a kind of trance. Jessica gazed over the wide sombre river where a patch of ochre clay glistened, where the grasses and sedges were shaved and flattened by recent downpours. An old canoe rose and fell on the languid surge of the river waves.

She knew now. This wasn’t the ulluchu of the Moche. Or, if it was, it was a very very weak variant; perhaps the Moche took this wild ulluchu, this special morning glory, and cultivated it elsewhere, in a different climate at a different altitude, in the mountains. They were expert horticulturalists; maybe they had turned a feeble jungle specimen into the mighty drug over many generations, by breeding and selecting and grafting. Whatever the case, this wasn’t it.

This meant Jessica had no choice.

A few minutes later, Boris came over. ‘So, what was-’

A loud noise interrupted him. Big black-and-white speedboats were zipping up the Ucayali, braking noisily, sending big surf-waves of water crashing against the Pankaramas’ modest wooden pier. A dozen men, at least, were standing in the boats. All of them were heavily armed. Some were shaven-headed, others were tattooed. One had a Z tattooed on his cheek.

Boris stepped back, his voice numb. ‘Jesus. It’s the Zetas. We’re dead.’

Jessica reached desperately for her cellphone. This was her last chance. She dialled. They had a signal and she had to get help.

Ucayali River, Peru

The Zetas were grimly efficient: like proper soldiers. With barely a word they plucked the cellphone from Jessica’s hand and barked a few questions into it.

The cartel officer turned and sneered. ‘You call a doctor? In Peru? How can he help? You are going to need more than Tylenol.’

The cellphone was thrown in the river. All their phones were thrown in the river. Then Jessica, Adam, Nina, Boris and Jose were separated from the Pankarama and led at gunpoint through the weeds and red squelchy mud of the Ucayali riverbank.

The military efficiency was no coincidence, of course, as Adam realized: they were still an army, at their core. Jess had told them the entire cartel was founded by deserters from the Mexican special forces. This fact might have given Adam some frail hope, of a military logic that could be somehow appealed to, if it weren’t for the captain, the obvious commander, who’d told them his name was ‘Marco’ — as he bluntly separated them out from the tribesmen. He was a stout, vigorous, muscular guy in his thirties, with skulls and wild roses and elaborate zeds for Zeta tattooed up his tanned, sinewy arms. And he had exactly the same gleam of strange, smart, sadistic eagerness in his eyes as Tony Ritter.

No doubt Marco too was on ulluchu, the real drug. What was he going to do to them? Were they going to be shot in a clearing in the forest? Away from witnesses? Or something else?

It was an effort not to show his fear. He wondered if Nina had noticed Marco’s demeanour, and was therefore remembering what happened to her sister in the Islington house. Blood and terror and violation.

A slight bend in the riverbank brought them to a large metal barge, lashed by a thick rope to a ceiba tree, and sagging with age. It was an old cargo boat rusting in a lost meander of this vast river system. Marco tilted his expensive European pistol and ordered them on to the boat.

‘The stairs. Go down those stairs. Now.’

Adam could see the fine jaw muscles moving in Marco’s face, from the grinding of his teeth. He clearly wanted to hurt them as soon as possible, he was restraining himself.

They stepped down the metal ladder into a metal room: a sealed storage container. The Amazonian sun had heated the entire boat so that the metal was painful to the touch. And it was in this steel cell, this steel oven, that they were going to be kept.

One of Marco’s men handcuffed them, again with soldierly swiftness and obedience, to the rigid metal pipes that ran along the side of the metal chamber. Just like the radiator in London, Adam realized: they were shackled in a line, like dogs in a row at a show.