Hour of the Assassins (29 page)

“Which tribes are around there?”

“Mostly Chamas, Yaguas, and Shipibos. Simple folk and relatively peaceful. Not like the Achuals. But Dr. Mendoza is an extremely private man. He doesn't like outsiders and rarely allows visitors. The only access to the institute is by river and the Peruvian Army has a gunboat on the Yarinacocha to discourage intruders. I sometimes think that he's trying to expiate some past sin by burying himself in the jungle. Perhaps that's just a priest talking,” he mused, thinking out loud, as do many solitary men.

“Tell me, hasn't anyone ever wondered about what Mendoza did before he came here?”

Father José frowned and he looked sadly at Caine.

“In the Amazona one learns not to ask a man about his past. Dr. Mendoza himself never speaks about the outside world. When he found out that the government had nominated him for the Nobel prize, he was furious. They say he wrote the authorities an angry letter, demanding that they withdraw the nomination. A very private man, Dr. Mendoza,” the priest said. “Still, thanks to his efforts, malaria and tuberculosis and death by snakebite have almost been eliminated among the Indios.”

“Why this mania for privacy?”

“Dr. Mendoza is a brilliant man. In addition to practicing medicine, he researches tropical diseases and collects botanical specimens.” For a moment Caine was reminded of Mengele's
Experimentieren
and his eyes glittered like green fire. “He's also a linguist and something of an ethnologist,” the priest went on.

“He says that he doesn't want outsiders to contaminate the Indios with the white man's culture. I daresay he has a point. Most of the white men who come to the Urubamba are fortune hunters, fairly disreputable types seeking out gold, or carrying some dubious map to Vilcabamba, the fabled lost city of the Incas. I can understand why Mendoza doesn't want them around. All the white man has ever brought the Indios are trinkets, misery, and diseases against which they have no natural immunity.”

Father José paused and signaled to the salon attendant for another round of beers. His thin bronzed face glistened with sweat.

“And the Word of God,” he murmured, almost to himself, “although I fancy the Indios think of Jesus as the white man's god. I suspect they've mentally placed Him in some niche in the Pantheon of Gods, somewhere between the river god and the sun god.”

Caine stood up and stretched; he had to think. With the institute so isolated and protected by Indians and the Peruvian Army, he would have to reevaluate his escape route. Father José looked up at him.

“I'm going downstairs, perhaps it's cooler there,” Caine said and stepped out of the salon, the half-finished bottle of Cristal in his hand. He went down the stairs and passed through the feral smell of a family of Campa Indians camped around the cargo cases of plantains, and the sharp, putrid stench of stacked alligator hides, toward the flat prow of the riverboat. He stood gazing at the placid, almost solid surface of the river slowly passing underneath. There was no break in the brown water or in the edge of the jungle, brooding like a dense green fog on the riverbank. He took another long sip of beer, finishing the bottle, then tossed it over the side. It bobbed on the surface like a sleek fish, in the wake of the boat. He watched it till it was too far away to see.

After leaving Vienna, Caine had gone to Marseille to pick up an American passport in the name of Ross Payne from Claude. He used a doctor recommended by Claude to treat his bruises from Vienna. The doctor told Caine that he had been lucky; the doctor himself refused to drive because of all the crazy drivers. He put a fresh bandage on Caine's eye and told him it would probably heal in a week or so. Caine threw the bandage away as soon as he left the doctor's office.

Using the Payne passport, which he planned to keep as a backup cover, he had flown to New York and then on to Houston, where he had a secretarial service type up a résumé and a letter applying for a job as a geologist with Petrotex. He managed to get an appointment with the chief geologist, named James McClure. He arranged for the secretarial service to call McClure with an important private call during the interview, and while McClure stepped out of the office to answer the call, Caine stole a sheaf of Petrotex stationery.

Using the stolen stationery, he had written to the Minister for Jungle Development in Lima, describing the purpose of his forthcoming trip and hinting delicately of potentially huge bribes for possible oil-drilling concessions in the Peruvian Amazon. Then he went to the city hall and got a Xerox copy of McClure's birth certificate, which he used to apply for a passport. He also had business cards with the Petrotex logo made up in the name James McClure. In a world of computers and bureaucracy it is easier to steal a man's identity than his small change, Caine thought sardonically. Armed with the McClure passport and a self-typed letter of introduction on Petrotex stationery, he flew to Las Vegas, where he dug up the suitcase with the guns. He took a Greyhound bus from Las Vegas to Los Angeles to avoid airport security. In L.A. he contacted a Marina travel agency to arrange an Amazon hunting safari, to facilitate transporting the guns. But he didn't pack all the guns. Acting on a hunch, he deposited the S & W .44 Magnum revolver and shells and $2,000 in cash in a safety-deposit box in a Hollywood branch of the Bank of America. Then he called Wasserman.

Wasserman took the call in his Mercedes, somewhere on the Pacific Coast Highway. Caine briefly brought Wasserman up to date and they arranged for Wasserman to acquire an additional cover passport for Caine, in case it became necessary as a backup. Caine would contact Wasserman through a classified ad addressed to C.J. in the Personals section of the L.A.
Times
, in case of an emergency or once the job was done, if he needed help in getting out of Peru. Wasserman seemed surprised when Caine asked him if he'd had any further contact with Harris and there was a note of irony in his voice when he told Caine that C.J. was at the beach house.

They made love on the living room carpet, tearing off their clothes from the minute she opened the door to him. She climaxed in a wild series of shudders, arching her back and moaning his name over and over, her long fingernails digging into his buttocks. Later they relaxed over sandwiches and chilled Chablis on the balcony overlooking the beach. The ocean breeze rustled the fringes of her long hair as they ate, her serious blue eyes never leaving his face. Once she reached over and touched his cheek and even now, here in the jungle, he could still feel that soft, almost imperceptible touch, as though it had left a permanent scar.

“I thought I would never see you again,” she said.

“I'm like the bad penny that always turns up,” he shrugged.

“Are you a bad penny?” she asked, her eyes serious and intent, as though she were asking him to tell her fortune.

“Not for you,” he said and they both looked away for a moment, knowing that it was a commitment.

“Why me?” she asked thoughtfully.

“Because you're the only woman in L.A. who hasn't asked me what my astrological sign is,” and they were laughing easily and lightly for the first time. She wrinkled her nose and made a face at him, like a little girl.

“What is your sign, anyway?”

“Slippery When Wet,” he grinned, and she answered with a smile full of sexual complicity.

That was how he remembered her now, the faint scent of lovemaking still on her, her eyes blue and squinting slightly in the bright sun, her smile as breezy as her long blond hair, the sounds of children playing on the beach drifting up to the balcony, like smoke in the wind.

But the same hunch that had made him leave the revolver in the safety-deposit box still troubled him. There was more to the job than just the hit, but he couldn't put his finger on it. It bothered him all the way to Lima, where he had met with the minister and made even stronger hints about bribes and the joys that American technology and Coca-Cola could bring to the jungle. When Caine left the office, Ministro Ribiero gave him a letter of authorization to the local officials and a warm
abrazo
, the Latin American hug of friendship.

But it was still bothering him as he reviewed everything that had happened since he had met Wasserman, on the long flight over the Andes from Lima to the jungle port of Iquitos, where he had boarded the river-boat to Pucallpa. It was, Caine thought, a little like having a tooth pulled. Time and again, your tongue explores the gap. Something was missing and he couldn't let it alone. There were too many loose ends: Harris in Berlin and his remark about oil, which might have subconsciously prompted Caine to use the Petrotex cover; the Company—and most of all the two references to “the Starfish,” whatever that was. The first, the memo he had seen in the Mengele office in Asunción; and then the two goons who had wanted to ask him about it in Vienna. He shook his head, as though to clear it, and wiped his sweating forehead on his sleeve. He had enough to do as it was. Mengele's jungle isolation made the hit extremely chancy and he might have to tackle the jungle itself as an ex-cape route if the army and the Indians closed the Yarinacocha to him.

He went up to his cabin and prepared a small jungle-survival kit, which he packed in a waterproof plastic suitcase. As he packed, he felt a disquieting sense of dread. It was like Paraguay all over again. In addition to the Colt AR-15 rifle and a machete, he packed a small knapsack containing a mosquito net, insect repellent, iodine, a compass, a small aluminum pot, salt tablets, Halezone tablets, fishing hooks and line, a flashlight, a plastic canteen, a wad of coca leaves, four chocolate bars, matches in a waterproof case, the Payne passport and a thousand dollars in dollars and Peruvian soles, the clips of 5.56mm ammunition, and three packs of cigarettes.

He lit a cigarette and went up to the pilot's cabin, still troubled by “the Starfish.” In the back of his head he could hear Koenig's voice, like a conscience that he couldn't shrug away. “In this business, it's what you don't know that'll kill you,” Koenig used to say.

He watched the pilot steer the riverboat for a long time. The landscape hardly changed. Always there was the flat, muddy surface of the river hedged by the dense tropical foliage, the monotony occasionally relieved by the wedge-shaped ripple of a water snake, or the screech of a spider monkey from a nearby tree. With an easy movement the Shipibo pilot turned the boat to port toward the far bank.

“Why did you do that?” Caine asked.

“To avoid sandbars, señor. It's best for the
barco
to follow the deep channel.”

“Doesn't the channel ever shift?”

“
Sí, señor
,” the pilot grinned widely, his teeth bright in his dark, tattooed face. “The channel is always shifting. It is never the same twice in this
madre
of a river. This river will trick you every chance it gets.”

“But how did you know that the channel ran to the port side? There was nothing in the surface of the river, no landmark to show you where it was.”

“The river did show me, señor,” the pilot laughed. “I saw where the floating leaves and bits of wood were. They follow the current to the sea. Where they go, the current is fast and the water is deep. The river is a woman, señor. She is beautiful, but sometimes unfaithful. You must learn to follow her moods, otherwise she will swallow you up.”

Caine took out his cigarettes, offered one to the pilot, and they both lit up. Koenig had been right, Caine thought. He'd have liked the Indian pilot, because they both believed in searching for the overlooked bit of information, and they both knew that it's what you don't know that'll kill you.

“When will we reach Pucallpa?” Caine asked.

“Two, maybe two hours and a half, señor.”

They docked in Pucallpa in the sweltering noon heat, even more oppressive now that there was no longer the faint river breeze of the boat's passage to cool them. The port was like a junkyard, a tangle of scrap metal huts and warehouses scattered along the mud flats, with haphazardly angled corrugated roofs stained red with rust and crowded with small powerboats,
lanchas
, and Indian rafts. The mud flats were streaked yellow and red with sawdust that flowed down to the river from the sawmill on the bank.

The boat docked by an old wooden pier, its pilings black with sewage and oil slicks floating on the scummy surface of the water. The ripe stench of mud and decaying matter rose with the heat waves to Caine's nostrils. On the other side of the pier, sweating
campesinos
, naked except for ragged loincloths, loaded a barge with stacks of freshly cut lumber, stained red as thought the sap were blood. Next to the riverboat floated a dugout pirogue full of chattering Shipibo women weaving a reed mat. The women were as bright and pretty as jungle birds in their colorful skirts woven in intricate geometric designs, and long, straight black hair. The Shipibo women are among the most beautiful in the world, Caine thought. With their lightly tanned skins and pretty, vaguely oriental features they reminded him of a Gauguin painting. They seemed out of place here, floating like water lilies on this dung-heap outpost of civilization.

Planks had been stretched from the boat's flat lower deck to the wharf, and a large group of
caboclo
laborers were attempting to manhandle an old Chevy from the deck to the pier. After a great deal of shouting and violent gesturing they managed to lift the car and carry it onto the dock. It had never occurred to any of them to simply drive the car over the planks to the dock. Father José was right, Caine mused. We bring them the dubious gifts of civilization that they truly don't know what to do with. Almost as if Caine's thought had summoned him, the priest appeared beside him at the rail of the upper deck. He had come to say good-bye.

Father José embraced Caine with a rather formal
abrazo
, his expression a disconcerting mixture of warmth and anxiety. He was oddly nervous, as though he had something to say that he really didn't want to put into words. He tugged anxiously at his beard, as if it were a bell rope, then he looked searchingly into Caine's eyes and brought it out.