A rusty Coca-Cola sign hung from the shack at the end of the path. An equally rusty jeep was decaying under the onslaughts of humidity, orchid vines, and chewing insects.
"He comes here to see a woman," Inocenza said.
"What woman?"
"More Indian than me. Big and fat. He gets drunk."
On the water's edge, where a rickety dock had collapsed into the reddish current, a large corrugated iron shed, surrounded by a broken web fence, was almost indistinguishable from the forest and swamps beyond. The soimd of a tinny radio came from within the cavernous interior. He smelled manioc pancakes frying, and realized he was hungry. None of them had had breakfast. The big shed had once been a rubber processing plant, where the smoked rubber, in days gone by, had been delivered here in great balls of two hundred pounds each. The past was dead and decayed here.
"What do you want from O'Hara?" Inocenza asked.
"Information."
"He knows what you must know? If he does not tell you, what will you do?"
"He'll tell me," Durell said grimly.
"He is a dangerous man. Be careful. I want to go with you, though. I want to watch."
Durell looked at her. There was a strange light in her smoky eyes. "Do you hate him so much, Inocenza? I won't kill him just to please you, you know."
She smiled grimly. "Perhaps I will be lucky."
He moved toward the shed. He thought he saw a caiman in the reddish river that swirled around the broken dock. He looked back, but no one had followed them out of town. Inocenza moved lightly beside him. Her breathing had quickened. He pushed aside some vines and stepped through the wide, yawning doorway.
"O'Hara!" he called into the darkness.
His voice echoed eerily. There were piles of bat droppings on the cracked concrete. No one answered him. He heard the radio playing a swift Brazilian tune. Probably from Manaus, he thought. Daylight shone in gloomy shafts through holes in the roof. More daylight showed at the opposite end of the warehouse. The place smelled of the bats, of ancient sweat, of smoky rubber, even after all these years. Machinery stood in broken shapes here and there. Vines came down through the holes in the roof.
He took out his gun.
Then he heard O'Hara's voice, rumbling, half-singing. It came from the opposite end of the long shed. He ducked through the interior vines and came onto a stilt cabin supported on raw poles, with woven reed sides and an old iron stove and a mildewed mattress on the dirty floor. Through the three open sides, he could see the wide river.
O'Hara sprawled in an Indian hammock, a bottle of Tepucata beer in his hand, a number of empties on the dirt floor around him. The Indian woman knelt naked on her haunches, her enormous, flaccid buttocks spread, and cooked the manioc cakes Durell had smelled in the warehouse. A faded, flowered dress lay on the dirt floor beside her. Her pendulous breasts swung as she turned to look at Durell when he stepped in. She held a new, shiny spatula in her left hand. The charcoal fire was smoky. The place stank of sweat and O'Hara. There was a bruise on the Indian woman's flat face. Nothing changed in her solemn, patient face. Her eyes were just eyes.
"O'Hara!" Durell said.
The fat, bearded man was singing remotely in tune with the battery radio. His voice was hoarse, bawdy. His bald head shone just above the edge of the sagging hammock. Durell called his name again and the man kept singing and waving the beer bottle over his head. The naked old Indian woman crouched and watched with limpid, sorrowing eyes. Durell crossed the shack, caught one edge of the hammock, and flipped it over. O'Hara crashed mountainously to the floor. His roar of rage made the Indian woman sit backward on her vast buttocks. The beer bottle broke. O'Hara came up with his Colt's Frontiersman swinging toward Durell. There was nothing drunken in his rheumy eyes. Durell kicked at the gun and knocked it across the floor and it landed at the Indian woman's knees. She did not move to touch it. O'Hara lunged for it and Durell kicked him in the flank and O'Hara went over, rolling on his beer-keg belly. He wore stained, striped cotton pants, nothing more. He went for the gun again and Durell kicked it from between the Indian woman's knees. Inocenza picked it up and said, ''Capitdo, if you move, I will blow a hole through your big belly."
"Inocenza, what—"
"I mean it."
"I know you mean it, baby."
"Then be still. Do not bother a mae anymore."
Durell said, "She's your mother?"
O'Hara made a spitting sound. "Shit. She's nobody's mother. You'd be surprised who Inocenza's mother really was."
Durell said, "Move over there, O'Hara. Pull up your pants."
O'Hara said, "She's seen the engine before."
"You're not drunk, so you can understand me. You're going to answer a few questions."
"You need Inocenza to help you?"
"I wouldn't stop her. Where are the rest of your clothes?"
"A mae is washing them."
"Inocenza, tell her to get them. O'Hara, you'll get dressed and come with me."
O'Hara rubbed his bald head, pulled at his unkempt beard, and whined, "I'm an old man. You're pickin' on an old man who don't know anything. Why, I'm as old as your grandpappy Jonathan—takin' off ten years, maybe. I can't tell you nothing. I keep forgettin' things, lately. Gettin' senile, maybe." O'Hara spat and belched. Durell could smell the stale beer on his breath. The manioc cakes were starting to bum when Inocenza spoke softly to the Indian woman, who got up and put on her faded cotton dress over her bulbous body. Then she went out quietly. Inocenza scraped the burned manioc off the heated griddle. O'Hara said, "Regular little homemaker, ain't you, baby? Any man can find a home between your legs."
Durell hit him, snapping his head aside, and O'Hara fell against the hammock. He hung there, arms spread, his head lowered. He spat blood from his lower lip. Durell said, "Tell me now. Tell me who you're working for."
"And if I don't?"
"Then I'll kill you."
"And then you won't get to the auction."
"I'm breaking the string. I'm on my own now. I'll get there," Durell said, "with or without you."
"To hell with you," O'Hara said.
"Inocenza?"
"Yes, Senhor Sam."
"Kill him," Durell said. "Any way you like."
"Yes, Senhor Sam."
The black-haired girl raised O'Hara's big gun. Her almond eyes gleamed like hot coals. Her smile was crooked as her finger tightened on the trigger. O'Hara screamed and ran back behind the hammock as if it could offer him protection. His bristly gray beard quivered.
"Hold it," Durell told the girl.
She looked disappointed.
"Now tell me," Durell said.
O'Hara belched again. "I don't know his name. His place is up the Xapajos—maybe twenty, thirty miles. All I know is I got this money, the passage for you and your people, and Mr. Stepanic and his people, and I was told to take you upriver until I'd be told to stop and let you off."
"Where?"
"I don't know. He never said.”
"What did he look like?"
"All I saw was a young squirt, a messenger."
"What's up the river?"
"Nothing," O'Hara said sullenly. "I only go as far as Tiparucu. That's maybe forty miles upstream. It's an old railroad terminus. Death Railway, they used to call it, in the old rubber days. Them were good times, lots of money around, everybody working, like a gold rush."
"What did this messenger look like?"
O'Hara coughed. "Could I have another beer?”
"No. Answer me."
"Just one of these slick hip Indian boys who went to Belem and Rio and learned reading. I got no other answers for you, Durell. Anyway, his money spoke for him. I need the beer real bad. You're real cruel to an old man. I've told you all the truth I know."
"What happens at the Hotel O Rei Felipe?"
"You get orders to stay on the Irmaos with me."
"As far as Tiparucu?"
"That's right."
"Any other passengers?"
<
br /> O'Hara looked devious. "A couple. I seen them already. They had bad luck. Their hydroplane crashed. They're blacks, strange people. From Africa, I think."
"You're supposed to take them, too?"
"Correct."
Durell drew a deep breath. He knew O'Hara was not telling all of the truth. The Indian woman came back and handed O'Hara his damp clothes. The sun was up over the treetops now. The reddish silt in the river made it look stained with blood. He suppressed a quick rush of anger.
"You admitted you know we're going to an auction, O'Hara. How do you know about it?"
"The guy with the money said that."
"What's being auctioned?"
"I don't know and I purely don't care. I take you where you're supposed to go, I got my money and another five thousand when we get there, and that's all." O'Hara hopped on one foot, putting on his shoes. "Inocenza, baby, stop pointin' that big old gun at your papa."
"You're not my papa, you old goat."
"I sure ain't, but I raised you since you stopped suckin' your mother's tit. I fed you and taught you good, all about the river. So put away that gun."
Durell said, "Let's go."
"Where?" O'Hara asked. "I got to look after my boat."
"You go where I say, from now on."
4
Willie Wells was waiting at the Hotel O Rei Felipe. "Did you spot Belmont? That crazy bastard is still hunting for Stepanic. Stepanic vanished off the boat and he sure hasn't come here. But we've got other company, Cajun."
"Where is Agosto?"
"Taking a shower. His colonel's uniform worked like a charm." Willie looked at Inocenza. "Hi."
"Hello," said the girl.
"Sam treating you right?"
"Just fine."
"You could be my girl, any time," Wells said.
"Take it easy, Willie," Durell said.
"Well, I always went for her color."
"Any messages? No new directives?"
"Nothing yet. Do we just sit here?"
"No," Durell said. "Take care of O'Hara, will you? See if you can sober him up."
"You want some breakfast, Sam?"
"In a little while."
He went looking for the company Wells had mentioned. The hotel was a sprawling affair with Victorian gingerbread that looked riddled with termites; it had a wide, musty lobby curtained in deep gloom and a long veranda in the rear facing the river. A few American roadworkers already sat at the bar. There were globe lamps, revolving fans in the ceiling, tasseled draperies from the turn of the century. The hotel was not crowded. Durell made a few inquiries of the Portuguese clerk at the desk, then went up the broad stairway from the lobby to the upper corridor, which was shadowed and cool compared to the sticky heat outside. They were not far from the ornate iron galleries of the fish market, slightly nostalgic of New Orleans.
The room was wide and airy, overlooking the junction of the two vast rivers. A small balcony gave him a glimpse of the docks to the left, with the twin stacks of the Duos Irmaos half a mile to the north, amid fishing boats and oil barges. A pall of humid mist hung over the view. Far across the rivers, the forests of the Amazon made a gray-green smudge against the hot, pale sky. There was not a cloud to be seen.
"You can just see it past the bend," Agosto said. He had come out of the tiled bathroom, resplendent in his police colonel's uniform. "They broke a pontoon. Hit some driftwood."
The hydroplane lay canted in the water, one wing tipped toward the sky. No one was near it. The nose was buried in debris that floated on the copper-tinted water.
Agosto smiled gently. "I checked the local police headquarters. My credentials worked very well, Senhor Sam. They say it flew in from Recife. The people in it are Africans."
"So I heard. Where are they staying?"
"Right here, Senhor Sam." The stocky Portuguese from Belem looked at Durell curiously. "The senhora—very lovely—asked for you at once. I checked their papers. All in order, visas, no contraband, but of course I am sure they all have arms. Their names are—"
"Prince Atimboku, Salduva Hukkim, and assorted assassins."
"Ah. You know them?"
"I know them," Durell said grimly.
"The African girl is very beautiful, I must say."
"Sally is all right; but Prince Tim worries me. He has a crazy violence, Agosto, that could blow us all sky-high."
"I checked everything, senhor," Agosto said. "They occupy a room above us. They have two—ah—warriors with them. They look uncomfortable in Western clothes. They are each seven feet tall—the warriors, I mean. The woman—the girl—is called the Queen Elephant of Pa-kuru."
"Royalty," Durell said. "I'd better see them."
"Are they competitors?"
"Rogues."
"They have money for the auction, too?"
"Diamond mines. Copper. A whole nation."
Agosto smoothed his small black moustache. "You wish to go alone, I see. I shall wait here for Belmont."
Durell nodded. "Willie is down in the lobby. He'll be bringing up Captain O'Hara and Inocenza. O'Hara is our ace."
Agosto smiled. "As you wish, Senhor Sam."
5
He saw her the moment he stepped into the corridor. A fine brass wall clock out there read nine o'clock. She came down the steps at the end of the hall with a quick, light stride and he saw her golden eyes and the big hooped earrings and her fine, small head and the gay skirt of striped Pakuru design, and for a moment he went back somewhere else, to Africa, to a railroad and a time of love and a time of danger, when he had saved her brother who was trying to assert his hereditary rights to the tribal throne of the emerging nation of Pakuru. All in the moment, he remembered their nights together after he got Prince Atimboku Mari Mak Mujilikaka safely free to plead for his rights at the United Nations. He and Sally had then spent two weeks in a Mozambique town by the Indian Ocean, smiled at by the Portuguese as lovers. Later, she became the "Queen Elephant" on the death of her matriarch mother. He shook his head. There were too many memories. It was over three years since he had last seen Sally, but she looked lovelier than ever, golden-eyed, radiantly exotic with her copper skin that reflected the blend of her mixed inheritance, part Boer, Chinese, and Banda. The only thing she had in common with her brother Prince Tim was her dark hair, carefully braided and massed above her regal face, since Atimboku had inherited from his father's Banda wife the fine aquiline features and ebony skin of the Banda people.
"Sam?" Sally whispered. "Darling Cajun?" She came down the stairs in an impetuous rush, then checked herself. She smiled. The hotel corridor was silent. "Hello, Salduva."
"Tim said you would be here. He said no one else but you would be chosen."
"It's good to see you, Salduva."
"Please call me Sally. The way you used to."
They stood a few feet apart. At first glance, nothing was changed. She had been three years and worlds away. Now only a step or two, and a moment, separated them. Durell took her arm and tuned into an angle of the corridor and they were out on the balcony that overlooked the river. She looked cool and competent, but he had hoped she wouldn't be here. He did not want her to be a part of this. Her hand was cool in his.
"You don't wish to kiss me, darling Sam?"
"You're royalty now." He smiled. "Do you still share the government with Prince Tim?"
"My brother would still like to kill me."
"Has he tried?"
Her smile was thin. "Not lately. He wanted to keep me from this—this gruesome auction. I came along to stop him. He means to buy the formula, Sam. It was tested and demonstrated in our country, too, you know. Tim is uncountably rich. He's built a few schools, some new roads, a great government palace where the tribal kraals used to be. But he keeps most of the national income for himself. He—he owns Pakuru, lock, stock and barrel."
Durell's voice was edged with anger. "Yes, thanks to our State Department, which made a pet of him."
"He's much worse now, darling Sam.
He'll sell the whole country into slavery for the formula." She shook her head, and the big hoops of gold at her ears sparkled. "His bodyguard goes everywhere with him. His killers." She paused again. "He says that now our plane is smashed, he'll hitch a ride with you."
"No," Durell said.
"He will. You wouldn't know him now. He held his promise once, but—oh, I wish I were back in England, writing those stupid articles for that silly old magazine, Toward Sunshine! I wish—but then I'd never have met you, would I? I remember—so much."
"Yes."
No one else was on the veranda. There was a steady hubbub of sound from the fishmarket, the chugging of a tug that pushed another oil barge into its wharf downstream.
"Sam, Prince Tim will kill you. He considers you his most dangerous opposition. I told you, he wants the formula, and nothing will stop him. Please, please be careful."
"I'll go see him," Durell said. "He's still only a spoiled brat, to me."
"You're wrong. He's a man, cruel and ruthless. I tell you he has changed, and he will not be stopped—"
"I'll stop him," Durell said.
She clung to him. "I should have stayed with you and never gone back from Mozambique. I should never have left you."
He said gently, "Sally, you belong to Pakuru. It's your country. You're its only hope."
She shook her head. "I can't beat Tim."
"We'll see."
6
No one had been in the corridor when he first took Sally out on the veranda, but when he stepped back into the gloomy hall, they were waiting for him, two of them, lean and immensely tall, very black, their knives very long and sharp.
They stood flat against the wall of the wide double-leafed door Durell went through. Their knives pricked his sides and one of them said in a careful Cambridge accent, "Be very still and silent, Mr. Durell." He did not move. They were Bandas from Pakuru, to judge from the tribal scars that beaded their long, bony faces. They wore their Western clothing as if-they were the tentlike tribal cloaks of Africa. Each man towered well over seven feet in height.
Sally, behind him, sharply ordered them to put down their knives. Durell said calmly, "Don't worry, they're not going to kill me."
"Not yet, Mr. Durell. Come with us, please."
Assignment - Amazon Queen Page 7