L’Hôtel Excelsior had been everything and nothing like what I’d expected. I was somewhat disappointed when Marlowe told me that we would be staying there. The romantic fantasies again. What I’d desired was a rough base camp in the countryside, or at the very least some sort of wilderness station: a place that occupied that netherworld between civilization and the bush. I freely admit that I conjured these images from the darkened cinemas of my childhood: films of African safaris and colonial wars. I wanted dusty, clapboard buildings with gaps in the walls that allowed the whistling wind to blow through; or better still, a ring of squarish canvas tents, all facing in toward a great roaring fire, the only amenity a jerry-rigged bush shower with a tarpaulin curtain and a bucket with holes drilled in the bottom. I said no such thing to Marlowe, of course, not wanting to draw any more attention to my inexperience. Still, I have no doubt that my chagrin was evident when we arrived at the hotel.
There was a time when the Excelsior rivalled, if not in size, most definitely in splendour, the grand resorts of the French Riviera, on which it was modelled. Rising majestically from behind a tall greystone wall, it stood as a rose-coloured paragon to the wealthy Europeans and Americans who paid exorbitant prices to occupy one of its sixty-five rooms, each a fully furnished suite with canopy bed and sunken bathtub. On the ocean side of the hotel a wide white-sand beach, restricted to guests, led down to the turquoise waters of Baie de Gloire. There were red-clay tennis courts to one side, and to the other a palm-shaded swimming pool, the bottom of which was inlaid with a ceramic mural depicting the hotel itself. The courtyard contained a magnificent tropical garden displaying a collection of colourful blooms indigenous to the island: jacaranda, giant poinsettia, hibiscus and flowering frangipani.
But that was the Excelsior in its heyday. The Excelsior that now stood at the foot of Avenue-de-la-Mer was but a shadow of its former self. Rolls of concertina wire now coiled across the top of the greystone wall, there to prevent thieves from stealing in and robbing the guests as they slept. The facade had bleached to a pale, unhealthy pink, and in places the stucco had come away altogether, leaving angry white scars. The pool was dry and its tiles cracked, the nets were gone from the tennis courts and the beach was befouled by the detritus of the poor, who squatted by the water’s edge in the hope of salvaging something of value from the jetsam offered up by the torpid sea. The only part of the Excelsior that in any way resembled its former glory was its lounge. The bar at the Excelsior had always been the centre of Cap Gloire society. Foreigners, what foreigners there were left—mostly diplomats and journalists—and those in power, in this case the Maladif junta, congregated around the mahogany tables or at the marble-topped bar of the Excelsior’s lounge. They drank champagne and expensive Scotch, and sat down to imported steak dinners, all the while trading rumours, which were the basis for political discourse on the island. In the evenings they were entertained by a local chanteuse, a startlingly beautiful young woman with ice-blue eyes and skin the colour of warm mocha. Between sets she sat with a rather fat, middle-aged general who was in charge of military intelligence. When the Marais junta was in power, she’d sat with a different fat general.
I was contemplating all of this while Mathieu eased us down the Avenue-de-la-Mer and away from the hotel. While it was true that the Excelsior was not what I’d hope for, there was, behind its tired pink facade, more romance than I could have ever imagined. Even Marlowe, sick in his bed, the mosquito netting hanging down from the canopy, the fever of a tropical illness shivering his weakening body, enlivened my fantasy.
I turned back round in my seat and looked out at the road ahead. It was crowded with peasants, most of them ragged and spectral, come to the capital city from the surrounding countryside in search of something better. Many pulled handcarts that were piled high with batons of charcoal, or balanced on their heads wicker baskets filled with dried fish and shrivelled plantains, the staple of their meagre diet. Some bore upon their backs the precious sacks of flour and rice donated by the myriad aid agencies that were trying to combat the rampant hunger that plagued the population. In each instance, these individuals were surrounded by a protective phalanx of men carrying crude, heavy-ended clubs, ready to rain blows down upon anyone who might attempt to pilfer the already-pilfered spoils.
So caught up was I by this sorry panorama that I did not hear Mathieu when he spoke to me. He had to reach across and tap me on the shoulder to get my attention.
“Docteur?” he said, his eyes bright with alarm in his dark face. “You not well, Docteur?”
I followed his gaze as he looked down at my hand, the same hand that Marlowe had taken hold of just a few hours earlier.
“C’est malaria?” he said, sounding genuinely concerned.
Communication with Mathieu was difficult. Unlike Marlowe, I could not understand the Creole indigenous to the island and possessed only a paltry French vocabulary. So it came down to Mathieu’s limited English and my ability to translate the rest. This last question, however, had been quite simple.
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “No. Not malaria. I am fine.”
The tremor in my left hand was a sad irony. One lost on neither Marlowe nor myself. After years of exhaustive case studies, experimentation, animal testing, clinical trials, re-evaluations of data, more clinical trials, natural compounds, synthetic cocktails, amalgams of the two, we still had not found anything definitive; indeed, we often ended up with more questions than answers. Then one day I found myself, almost as if by dint of prolonged exposure, in the first stages of the neurological disease we’d been working so hard to combat. The Devil had worked himself within.
My symptoms had not progressed yet beyond the slight tremor in my left hand, though it had been present long enough that I rarely noticed when it occurred. I did my best to deflect notice of this defect by holding my hand close to my body, or carrying in it something heavy enough to mask the shaking. Knowing the disease as I did, I was aware that it wouldn’t be long before concealment became impossible. Soon it would affect the whole of my musculature: either the palsy would spread or I would find myself trapped within the rigid clutches of my own body. Either way, I knew my time for finding an answer was quickly running out. But if Marlowe was to be believed, and I could see no reason why he shouldn’t, that answer lay in Ascension.
The highway leading away from Cap Gloire was in much better shape than I had expected, especially after the pitiful conditions of the roadways in the capital. It was a two-lane blacktop that stretched with Roman straightness from Cap Gloire to Port Amitié, the country’s second city on the northern coast of the island. Before reaching Port Amitié, the highway cut through the Maladif district and the foothills below Ascension. We were to stop there and spend the night in a hotel in the town of Espérance. This was Mathieu’s hometown, and I could tell that he was excited at the prospect of spending the evening among friends. In the morning, we would begin our ascent into the mountains. The first leg of our journey would be made on mule-back. The remainder would be on foot through the jungle.
But Espérance was still hours away, and as Mathieu and I were unable to carry on any real sort of conversation, I turned my eyes to the countryside we passed through. At one time, the forest would have encroached upon the highway, muscling in, trying to reclaim the swath that had been cut from its heart. But now the land fell away dry and flat from the verges, taking on the aspect of a poor man’s savannah. Far off the road to the east, I could see a struggling copse of native eucalypts trying to establish themselves among the burnt grasses. They would not last long. The next band of migrating peasants to catch sight of them would have the trees cut down and baked into charcoal before their sap had the chance to run dry. I was struck by the resonance this held for the country itself. It was a scene similar to the one that had played itself out innumerable times on this sad island, first by the French, who annihilated the native Indian population, then by the African slaves, who rose up and slaughtered their French maste
rs. And for the past one hundred and fifty years it had been a succession of corrupt regimes, one cutting down another, ensuring that they in turn would be cut down by the next. This was a nation built on shifting, blood-soaked soil. That it was now prepared to offer up something of benefit seemed to me at odds with its cruel legacy. But Marlowe was convinced.
The exuberance he displayed when he telephoned the institute had been infectious. Marlowe rarely made contact when he was in the field. When he did, it was never to discuss the expedition, but usually to plead for more funds. I remember that I was performing the euthanasia of a rhesus monkey in order to take a cross-section of its substantia nigra. I had just injected the animal when my assistant called me to the telephone. At first I did not recognize Marlowe’s voice. It was ragged with enthusiasm, and on top of that the connection was faulty: there was a delay on the line, as well as an annoying echo.
“For God’s sake, James,” Marlowe finally said, fed up with my constant interruptions. “Will you just be silent a moment and listen to me. I’ve found it, James. I have found it.”
I admit that initially I was skeptical. Marlowe had made such claims before, most notably on his return from Peru three years before. There he had located a river tribe that dipped the points of its hunting darts into a paste derived from several rare local moulds. A single prick was sufficient to bring down a fully grown wild boar. The animal, once stuck, became completely flaccid, allowing the hunters to safely bleed it while its heart continued to beat. Our hopes had run high, but it became apparent as soon as we began laboratory testing that the agent, rather than effecting the levels of either dopamine or acetylcholine in the brain, was little more than a powerful psychotropic that left its victim trapped in a hallucinogenic void. But there was an edge in Marlowe’s voice that told me this new find was different.
“What is it?” I asked him, tucking my shuddering left hand beneath my thigh. “Where is it?”
“It’s here, James,” Marlowe said, his voice crackling along with the poor connection. “Here on the island. Where I thought it would be. The stories I heard about it were true.”
The stories to which Marlowe referred were of a remote jungle village, whose inhabitants, fiercely protective of their own, had managed to cut themselves off from the outside world; in a country where towns and villages were routinely and brutally punished for real or imagined loyalties, such seclusion was exceptional. It had been achieved through sheer reputation: the people of Ascension, it was said, were more cruel, more brutal, than even the most ruthless of the country’s regimes. They were also, it was believed, cursed.
“So, it’s the voudoun drug that you’ve been looking for, then?” I said to him. There was a long silence and for a moment I thought we’d been disconnected. Then finally Marlowe spoke: “A rather dramatic term for it, but yes.”
I was rehashing our conversation in my mind when, far off in the distance, I saw the dark mountains of the Maladif district, looming like a great bruise on the horizon. The sky above us was an empty, dry blue. I found it strange that this island, though it lay so squarely in the tropics, was enveloped by an arid, almost desert-like heat, as if it were a bone stripped clean and left to crack in the sun. Then I noticed that the sky above the distant hills, while still empty of clouds, displayed a far deeper tinge, as if maybe it contained a different heaven than the one above us.
“Soon, Docteur,” Mathieu said, his eyes not straying from the road ahead. “Soon Espérance.”
We did not see another vehicle until we’d left the highway and started down the rutted dirt road that led to Espérance. About a mile outside the town, we were approached by two military transports. Mathieu had to pull the Land Rover into a shallow gully to let them pass. The beds were crowded with soldiers, their black faces slick with sweat under their heavy, camouflaged helmets. They sat on benches with their rifles propped between their legs. It appeared as if many of them were asleep, their drooping heads lolling back and forth as the trucks bumped and shuddered along the uneven road. I looked at Mathieu. He stared straight ahead as if the passing convoy did not exist, but I could see the worry on his face. We discovered later that the execution of a local government official had taken place that morning. The troops were present to discourage any thoughts of civil unrest. But the people of Espérance knew better than to protest any dictate of the junta. As the desk clerk at the hotel put it: “What is the worth of one man against that of many?”
Mathieu helped me to carry the equipment from the Land Rover to my room on the upper floor of the hotel, then he joined me for dinner in the small bar off the lobby. We ate paella and drank hibiscus tea, followed by several bottles of the local beer, which tasted faintly of formaldehyde. At one point, Mathieu leaned across the table and said to me, in a hushed voice: “Not before. They not let me in. J’ai grigou.” I reached out and took hold of his arm. “Not any more,” I said, then added in my best French: “Tu est un homme de science.” He liked that very much and we raised our glasses to one another. I had begun to regret my initial judgment of this man and thought if only we’d shared a common language we might have possibly become friends.
Mathieu left me after dinner to spend the evening with relatives. I retired, slightly drunk, to my room on the second floor. The hotel, rather ambitiously called La Majesté, was a world away from the Excelsior, even in the latter’s present dishevelled state. The colonial facade of La Majesté concealed a rough-hewn interior of creaking floors and paper-thin walls. There was no bath in my room, and the toilets—dark, foul-smelling affairs—were at the far end of the corridor. A single light, suspended beneath a slow-moving ceiling fan, offered the only illumination to my otherwise murky apartment. When I switched it on, several bright green geckos scurried across the dingy papered walls. The bed, when I lay upon it, revealed a great rift running down its middle. And I was almost certain that I felt something moving beneath the sheets. Disconcerted, I pulled myself out of the hollow and set about preparing the equipment for the next day’s trek.
The gear I was to take was minimal. Two canteens that I had filled with distilled water before leaving Cap Gloire. A survival kit that included such generic medical supplies as surgical gauze, filament, salt tablets, painkillers, insect repellant, plasters, tensor bandages, peroxide and iodine. There was also a web belt from which hung a very dangerous-looking machete and an airtight, stainless-steel specimen container.
It was the machete that most impressed me. I carefully withdrew it from its long leather sheath and held it up to the light. The newly sharpened edge shone silver. I swung it about me like a sword, imagining that I could hear it cutting the air. I liked the feeling it gave me, and for a moment considered testing the blade on one of the geckos that clung to the wall behind the bed. I decided against this on account of the mess it would cause, though there were several stains on the mouldy wallpaper that hinted at many such eviscerations in the past. Instead, I returned the machete to its scabbard and lay down again on the sway-backed mattress.
Lying there, looking up at the lethargic fan blades, I had an almost desperate urge to speak to Marlowe, to thank him for my being in this place. Of course, there was no telephone in the room; I wasn’t certain that there was one in the entire hotel. Besides, it had grown late, and as sick as he was, Marlowe was probably already asleep under his mosquito netting.
It had come as something of a surprise to me when he invited me along. At first, I thought it had been done out of simple politeness, a gesture in recognition of the years we had served together at the institute. During that time we had been amiable, but there was always a slight distance between us. Marlowe was insistent, though, saying that he wanted me to share in the event. I suspected that this persistence was in sympathy of my condition, and I rather admired the sentiment. I was only sorry that now his own illness, impermanent as it was, would keep him from participating in the final stage of our adventure.
Mathieu showed up at the hotel an hour late the following morning, his
eyes still yellow with drink. I was waiting for him in the bar, wearing my khaki safari suit, machete-heavy web belt, backpack and Australian bush hat with corks dangling from its wide brim. I was concerned about insects. Needless to say, I received some strange looks from those around me. A few remarks were passed amongst the hotel staff, but as I didn’t understand the language, I was not bothered. I think the presence of the machete strapped to my leg curtailed any overt comments.
When Mathieu did finally arrive, the expression on his face caused me some concern. He was drawn and nervous. I was certain, regardless of whatever threats Marlowe may have made, that he was going to back out, was going to manufacture some excuse and send me on my way alone. But he did not. He simply nodded in my direction and waited for me to join him in the lobby. He did not remark upon my attire.
I don’t know which was more skittish, the mules or Mathieu. We collected them from an odd little livery on the edge of town. It was no more than a corrugated-iron lean-to with a small corral in front. The transaction was completed without the exchange of a single word. Mathieu strolled across the paddock to where the proprietor, an elderly man whose ebony complexion was deepened by a shock of white hair, sat waiting on an overturned fruit crate. Mathieu handed the man a small crumpled wad of bills, then returned trailing two mules behind him. They were both ragged, stinking beasts, with matted hides and flanks callused by whips. Mathieu swung his leg over the back of one and motioned for me to do the same. Sitting atop the animal with my feet barely off the ground, I felt more than a little foolish as we started on our way.
The mule leg of the journey took the better part of four hours, and followed a lazily slow ascent along a winding trail that repeatedly doubled back on itself. It was as if whoever had originally beaten the path sought to prolong his inevitable penetration of the jungle above. The grade of the climb was so slight that it seemed to me rather pointless that we’d bothered with the mules at all. The journey could have quite easily been made on foot, and probably at a quicker pace. I had to assume that the purpose of the animals was to conserve our energy for the trek through the forest. I thought to ask this of Mathieu, but he’d not spoken a word to me since we’d gathered the mules.
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