The Babylon Rite (42 page)

Adam stirred. How long had elapsed? An hour? Could have been two. It was still daylight. He could still hear the murmur of tourist business out there, in the car park, as Teotihuacan complex welcomed and disgorged its many thousands of visitors.

The hotel room was silent. Nina? He realized, with a painful start, that
Nina wasn’t there.

He had to use this moment of consciousness. He didn’t know if this was the ulluchu wearing off or just another brief interlude before the madness began again. But he had to find and save Nina.

There. A noise. Panting? Someone was softly panting, gasping even, gulping fine breaths. The noise was muffled by a door: she was in the bathroom. He rushed across the room and pushed at the door and it was firmly locked: and he knew at once what was happening.

‘Nina!’ He thumped on the door. ‘Nina!’ He began to kick at the door.

She was locked inside the bathroom, probably dying.

He was too late.

He kicked at the door; it barely budged; he pulled back and kicked again, hard, and the entire thing buckled, and collapsed, half of it swinging on broken hinges, the rest a mess of angry splinters and shattered planking.

Adam stepped over the debris, and there she was. Lying in a bath full of water, nude. She had a broken safety razor in her hand – the blade exposed. And it was poised and trembling just over the arteries of her upper wrist.

The way she was holding the blade told him enough.

‘Nina.’

She said nothing. Her head was bowed, she was staring at the razor blade in her white-knuckled hand.

‘Nina.’ His voice was gentle. ‘Please.’ He knelt. ‘Don’t. You’re nearly through it. I feel different now, better, the drug really does wear off. Jessica was right.’

Slowly she lifted her head, her beautiful white face soiled with tears and grief, and she said, staring hard into him, and also beyond him, ‘Why? It will never wear off. They are dead. Daddy. My sister. All dead. Why don’t I just fucking join them?’

She was holding the broken razor blade so hard that blood was seeping between her knuckles. Her hand trembled and prepared: poised, ready to slash and to kill.

‘Because you want to live,’ said Adam. ‘You told me, your father’s suicide made you want to
live,
this is just the drug talking.’

‘It’s not. I’ve
always
wanted this. The fucking end of. End of story. End.’

‘Nina—’

‘The woman is perfected.’

She was panting, and gasping. As if she was being waterboarded by grief and despair, gulping for air for a moment, then slammed underwater again. Drowning in hopelessness.

The blade touched her skin. She was going to do it. Adam moved close and reached a hand for her wrist. She yelled, ‘Don’t fucking touch me, Adam!’

He looked at her angry, desolate, whitely beautiful face, the lovely face he was too scared to love, because of Alicia. Yet this
was
the face and the body he loved, or desired, or wanted, more than anything,
despite
Alicia.
Because of Alicia.
Love
defeats
death. God is death
and love.
He loved Nina purely and truly.

There was a terrible pause. Then he moved his hand, and he touched her bare breast, he caressed the curve of her breast, soft and young and damp with bathwater.

Her eyes met his. Angry, yet yielding.

He reached for her, he reached into her and hauled her naked to her feet then he half-dragged and half-carried her over the broken door into the bedroom, and threw her on the mattress and tore off his clothes and opened her legs and it was as if she wanted it to be as violent as possible. She bit him and fought him and he scratched her, they scratched at each other, half-fighting, half-biting, scratching and coupling and fighting and kissing.

She bit him so hard on the shoulder he yelled; he reached out and grabbed at her slender white throat, and he realized he was killing her. She was staring up at him, choking, saying, ‘Go on, do it, Adam, do it!’

He let go of her and plunged his mouth to hers and they kissed again, and he was deep inside her again; they were both riding the same terrible waves, and then the storm began to subside: the bites became less fierce, she was pulling him closer, she was touching him softly, and he was just kissing her, and making love to her, and then it was just tender, and they were through it, and then they just looked at each other for what seemed like an hour, and the next time he gazed at the window it was black and quite starry and night.

Nina lay there in the bed. She leaned and kissed his shoulder. She said that she loved him. He didn’t need to reply. And then she cried for a few seconds and she shook her head and then she turned over and she closed her eyes.

Her breathing came slower, and longer. He watched her. A white marble angel, cold and warm at once, softly breathing, and sleeping deeply. Then he got up and dressed and went to buy some water from the machine in the lobby. It was the depths of the night. Four a.m. No one was around.

Something drew him outside. Into the night. He walked down the hotel path: and there he saw them, the great pyramids of Teotihuacan. Just over the fence. Ancient and moonlit and enormous and calm: purple ziggurats in the whispering darkness.

He went to a payphone at the hotel entrance. With his faltering Spanish he managed to get a call reversed: to London.

‘DCI Ibsen?’

‘Yes …’

He told the detective the story. The short version. Truncated to a few minutes. There would be time for longer explanations later.

‘So that’s it, Mark, we’re out, but we’re still stuck, we don’t have any money.’

‘Stay there. We’ll sort it. We’ll get this sorted: I’ll call the embassy right now, we will get you out of Mexico tomorrow. Give me the hotel details.’

Adam did as he was told and offered his thanks.

Ibsen said, ‘Incredible. Just incredible. You are one brave Aussie bastard. Or lucky. Or both.’

The call ended.

Replacing the receiver, Adam turned, shoving his water bottle in his back pocket, and he vaulted the little fence; and then he walked down between the great ancient pyramids of Teotihuacan, down the vast, silent, deserted Avenue of the Dead.

The Pyramid of the Moon was on his right, the even larger Pyramid of the Sun was ahead of him. He stopped at one smaller temple, with feathered serpent gods carved in stone, forming the balustrades: biting the soft Mexican air, angrily, and for all time. Unwatched in the dark.

There was a carving here, a frieze in relief on a side-wall, with the detailing sharpened by the slanted light of a nearly-full moon. Adam regarded the artwork. It showed people dancing, and stylized jaguars, and priests in feathered headdresses. Wreathing lyrically between these figures were seven flowers.

Unmistakably, they were morning glories. Five-petalled and beautiful.
Ulluchu.
As he gazed at the flower Adam thought of all the places they had sought this drug and yet never quite found it: Scotland and England and Spain and France and Peru. Then he thought of Portugal, and that extraordinary round chapel where the Templars of Tomar took mass on horseback, sipping from the Holy Grail, drinking the very drug of the Lord, the liquor of the gods that took them closer to death, or to Christ. Or to both.

Adam pulled the water bottle from his pocket and drank the delicious cold water. He wondered how exactly they would get home. Then he stopped wondering. The embassy would find a way. It didn’t matter. What mattered was the mere fact they had survived. Everyone else was gone, everyone else was dead, but he and Nina: they were not. They had defied the drug. They had defied death. They were still alive.

What was he going to do with this place? Felip Portera gazed at the semi-ruined building:
Casa Bima.
He had been farming these steep green Pyrenean hillsides since he was a boy. The land itself had been in his family for countless generations, and in that time he’d seen the grand old house decay with increasing speed.

Now it was almost a ruin: his cows enjoyed it mostly, as a shelter from cold winter rain and hot Catalan sun, from the mountain winds and thunderstorms. The windows were all broken, the roof was worse than useless; snakes slept in the courtyard in June.

Yet it must have been magnificent once: the views across the valley to Felip’s family house, in the handsome stone hamlet of Toloriu, perched on the opposing crag, were truly stirring. A suitable place for an emperor’s daughter.

Felip whistled for Miro, his dog, who was intent on worrying a calf.

‘Miro.
Parada.
Miro!’

The young dog perked his ears, and tilted his head; the old farmer tried to look serious and, frowning, he tutted and waved a finger; and then he abandoned the attempt at being stern, and he smiled at the puppyish animal, indulgently.

Leaning on his weary knees, Felip picked up a stick, and threw it; the happy dog galloped down the hill in the early spring sunshine.

Again Felip turned his attention to the house. One day very soon, as a family, they would have to decide: demolish it once and for all? Or rebuild it and refurbish, turn it into an attraction for tourists, by using the legends?

The story was indeed romantic. The daughter of the last Aztec emperor who married a bold Catalan conquistador, Juan Pedro de Grau, who then brought his imperial bride all the way across the seas, to this lonely mountain valley!

Amazing.

It must have been a bewildering experience, Felip mused, as he sat on a bare rock, and unwrapped his lunchtime bocadillo. She was the daughter of a living god, born into the court of an exotic empire, surrounded by priests and lords and bloody sacrifice on sunlit pyramids; then she moved here, to a damp house in the cloudy green Pyrenean meadows, where she was surrounded by white peasants and burly farmers.

What did she think as she stared from her kitchen at the goats, listening to their tinkling bells? Did she remember the old gods, Quetzalcoatl and Huitzilopochtli, as she helped to churn the butter? Did she daydream of the skull racks of the eagle warriors, as they brought in the sows for branding?

Over the years Felip had tried to learn as much as he could about this girl, the emperor’s daughter, Xipahuatzin Montezuma, not least because of the intriguing legends of a treasure, buried hereabouts. What could it be? The great and secret treasure of Montezuma himself? A cache of marvellous gold and turquoise? Eighty years ago some Germans had apparently rented the sloping fields of Casa Bima and tried to find it, and failed; every so often, every few years, someone else made the long wearying walk from Toloriu, already a remote spot in the mountains, to try to find the same. No one had ever found anything. Of course.

Because it
was
just a legend. And now the house was a saddening sight, and fewer and fewer visitors made the effort to see an old ruin, full of cowpats, vipers and damp cobwebs. Yes, one day soon they would have to decide what to do: probably they would demolish it, maybe build something new. A hotel with a pool. For proper tourists.

Rubbing his hands, Felip finished his sandwich and threw the last piece of crust to the happy dog.

‘
Anem hi
, Miro.’ He turned, commencing his walk back to Toloriu. His precious day off was being wasted, his wife would be back from Urgell with the grandchildren soon enough.

But again he paused at the top of the forest path, and gazed at the tall, notable yellow shrub. This singular morning glory plant grew around Casa Bima, and only around here, on the southeast-facing slope. It was a curiosity in itself. Felip could remember when there were hundreds of these distinctive shrubs on this slope, but they too had dwindled over the years: because of climate change, perhaps? The plants seemed very susceptible to altering conditions – very delicate and fragile.

And then that Scotsman had come here, nearly two years ago; the tall old man with the charming smile – who had picked most of the seeds! Felip remembered the man’s agreeable but distracted nature. He had presumed, at the time, that he was an eccentric botanist. If so, he was surely not a very good botanist: by picking all the seeds he seemed to have killed off nearly all the remaining shrubs.

Felip did not, however, especially mind this destruction. The plant was a nuisance. Occasionally one of his cows would stray near the forest, and nibble the leaves and seeds, and then fall sick. So he wasn’t upset that the plant was dying out, even if it was rather pretty. And now there was just one plant left.

Why not get rid of it altogether? The farmer nodded to himself. Yes: tomorrow he would get up early and he would come back here, and pull up the last shrub by its roots, get rid of it once and for all: burn the golden flowers and toxic seeds. Then he would do something about the rotten old fencing in the woods.

Calling his dog to heel with a cheerful whistle, Felip Portera continued his stroll along the dappled green path, to his village in the hills. A wind was picking up, and it was time to go home. And as he walked away, the little golden flowers shivered, in the sweet and freshening breeze.

Acknowledgments are due to the many writers on whose work I have drawn for this book. They include Steve Bourget, Wade Davis (especially), John Hemming, Juan Atienza, Ed Vulliamy, Daniel Everett, John Simpson, Johann Reinhard, Michael Wood, Malcolm Beith, David Grann, Steve Monaghan and Peter Just, David Carrasco, Steve Simpson, Marcello Spinella, Hugh Schultes, Martin Carver, Albert Hoffman, and many others.

My trips around north Peru would have been almost impossible without the assistance of the Real Peru travel company, and the Explorama lodges along the Upper Amazon. Thanks are also owed to the unknown but very helpful man who helped to dig my alleged four-wheel-drive out of the forest of Pomac in Lambayeque, Peru. And thanks to Jenny Green for showing me the best and worst of Mexico, and to Mikel Babiano Lopez de Sabando, for assistance with Spanish translations.