Bite

by Nick Louth

  Chapter Seven

  Jack Erskine, Penny Ryan and Don Quiggan walked out of the chill of Amsterdam’s central mortuary and heard the heavy door bang behind them. No-one spoke. The vision of Bob Mazzio’s pale hairy body hung like a ghost before their eyes, the dried foam riming his blue lips, the empty eyes.

  Penny knew Jack would ask her to speak to Heidi Mazzio, to answer the inevitable questions that her terse telephone briefing from the Dutch cops would leave unanswered. Yes, he had been alone. No, he had not been robbed, his wallet was still in his jacket. Yes, he just seemed to have fallen in. No, Amsterdam isn’t considered a dangerous city to be out in at that time. Yes, we were also surprised no-one heard him struggling in the water. No, we do not believe he had been drinking. No, they do not need a post mortem. Drowning was the official cause of death. Yes, we’ve got him to a very good chapel of rest until we can get the body flown home. All of you there have our deepest condolences. Heidi, let me tell you Bob will be sorely missed.

  What Penny would not tell Heidi was that the canal where her husband drowned was in the Red Light Area. She would destroy the damp but still legible receipt found in his wallet; a transaction only three hours old in which he had paid nine hundred euros, for ‘business services’ on his corporate gold card. She would keep to herself evidence of uncharacteristic sloppy dressing - the assistant coroner noted Bob’s Van Heusen shirt was misbuttoned low down, the belt missing two loops on the trousers of the Hugo Boss suit.

  No, she would not speak ill of the dead.

  Today was a day in hell. We spent four hours on our hands and knees digging out the Land Rover and packing brushwood into the ruts beneath it. The rain hasn’t stopped for two days, and the mud made us look like we had been dipped in melted chocolate. Georg said there is supposed to be a better wet-season crossing of the Asa, but we couldn’t find it.

  Just as we finished two women came to the river to collect water, and we were told that Zizunga was only fifteen minutes walk away. It took longer with the Land Rover because we had to cut down some trees to get it through the bush, and we finally emerged into a muddy paddock surrounded by two dozen rickety shacks, to be met by a horde of excited children. They rushed us to a hut where two middle-aged Belgian nuns, Sisters Margaret and Annette, were tending the sick woman, whose name was Dr Sophie Hofhaus. Her husband, a Brazilian entomologist named Dr Jarman Herrera, was holding her hand.

  Sophie must once have been a beautiful woman, with large brown eyes and delicate cheekbones, but now she looked as waxy as a corpse. Her breathing was shallow, her eyes sunken. Dried spume crusted her cracked lips. Georg asked Jarman about her illness. He doesn’t think it is dysentery. Georg delicately raised the possibility of rabies, but Jarman replied that his wife was inoculated and hadn’t in any case been bitten by any of the monkeys for months. She has also been inoculated against yellow fever, so that’s out. Jarman said that he’d looked at a sample of Sophie’s blood under his microscope and at first had thought it might be malaria, but when the nuns used the ParaSight test kit it came back negative. Jarman was still convinced it was some kind of blood infection.

  We loaded her as best we could into the Land Rover, while Jarman stroked her face and talked to her. There wasn’t room for everybody in the vehicle, so Tomas and Salvation stayed behind at Zizunga with Sister Annette. Amy rigged up a saline drip and gave Sophie an injection to stop her convulsions.

  Just as we were about to go, Sister Margaret roared up on a muddy motorcycle, wearing engineers’ boots and crash helmet. Jarman told me that in 1966, before she took holy orders, Sister Margaret had crossed the Sahara on the very same aged Husqvarna. She was an excellent mechanic, and if the Land Rover broke down she would either be able to fix it, or ride off to fetch help. Without the motorcycle it would have been impossible for her to keep in contact with outlying villages, to visit the sick and comfort the bereaved.

  Jarman said that the army had done its best to make Zizunga a ghost town. They had come roaring through three months ago and conscripted all the men aged between fifteen and thirty five. They had also helped themselves to most of the maize, yam and manioc that was surplus from the last harvest.

  At four in the afternoon Georg radioed ahead to Kisangani to find out if the Cessna and pilot chartered by the Swiss company that owns the research centre were on their way to Ubulu. He was told that they should be at the landing strip by seven the next morning. The only way to make the rendezvous was to drive right through the night. Motorcycling though, would be too exhausting. We urged Sister Margaret to turn back if she was to get home before dark, but she refused. Finally we compromised. The motorcycle was tied onto the roof rack while Sister Margaret squeezed onto the front seat between me and Georg.

  For hours we bumped and slithered and crashed along the worst forest tracks I have ever seen. Jarman never once let go of Sophie’s hand. He told me they had met at a science faculty at Graz in Austria when he was an exchange student interested in moths and beetles and she something of a star in the zoology department. It wasn’t love at first sight for her, but he was persistent and finally won through. They married in 1974, had a two day honeymoon in Zanzibar and then came out here to work, founding Tetro-Meyer’s monkey colony. The first year was the worst. The conditions were squalid, they were frequently ill, the local people were suspicious and their employers seemed to have forgotten them. Yet already they knew they were happy. I looked at Sophie’s unconscious form while he talked. She seemed to have a slight smile on her face.

  About nine o’clock Georg uttered an oath and slammed on the brakes. Ahead were a dozen hyena tearing at the carcass of a little antelope called a duiker. Their evil yellow eyes reflected the headlamps, and they showed no fear, sniffing the air as we passed as if they could sense we were something more tender.

  By midnight Georg passed over the driving to Jarman, but when the doctor himself drifted off to sleep and ploughed us into a thicket at five in the morning I knew it was my turn to take the wheel.

  It was when we changed over that we noticed. My hands were stained dark, and so were the seats and the floor. Georg’s torch revealed that Sophie’s blanket was drenched in dark blood, almost black. It seemed she was passing it in her urine. With the movement of the vehicle it had got everywhere. Sophie herself was delirious and didn’t even recognise her husband. He seemed close to panic, and no-one could say anything to reassure him. We cleaned up in a gloomy silence and set off. There was nothing more we could do.

  Sister Margaret kept talking to me as I drove, but it was fear that really kept sleep away. While Jarman slept I had heard Amy and Georg reviewing Sophie’s symptoms and the worst-case causes: lassa fever, haemorrhagic fever, ebola, green monkey disease. Each was highly infectious, frequently fatal, and difficult or impossible to treat even in a western hospital. The discussion became still more surreal as we discussed the trade off between quarantine for us and trying to save Sophie. We exhausted ourselves before we came to any conclusions.

  It was with some surprise that at half past six in the morning we passed a few shacks and a metalled road, before arriving at the overgrown concrete of the airstrip at Ubulu.

  It was deserted, so we waited. The sun rose, blazing across the forest canopy and the crickets quietened. A man appeared with a broom and swept the verandah of the airstrip’s whitewashed shack, before disappearing again. Seven o’clock came and went and Georg got on to Kisangani on the radio. They said the Cessna should already have arrived.

  Jarman set up a makeshift bed beside the Land Rover and carried Sophie onto it like a sleeping child. Amy walked up to me and whispered into my ear. ‘She’s gone into a coma. I’m frightened to tell Jarman, but she’s not going to make it.’

  Sister Margaret sat with Sophie and got out her rosary while Jarman frenetically scanned the empty sky, shading his eyes while he strained for the tiniest distant dot. Just before eight Sister Margaret took Jarman on a short walk, with her arm cupping his shoulder like they were old f
riends. All we could see was his head shaking slowly from side to side. When he returned, his face streaked with tears, they knelt together over Sophie. Sister Margaret read the last rites. At 8.17am, in the shade of the Land Rover under an empty blue sky, Sophie Hofhaus let out a deep sigh and passed away.

  (Erica’s Diary 1992)

  Max looked at his watch. Almost ten. Erica’s conference began at four. Max knew she would be there early. Erica might have cut him out of her heart, but parasites, worms and bugs would be wriggling there forever. Besides, there might be a chance to find Professor Jürgen Friederikson and get some clues about who this old friend was that he had mentioned at the restaurant. The absence of the laptop was a hint that this was all to do with her paper. Why else would Erica sneak out for a midnight assignation with a conference deadline breathing down her neck?

  He put on his shoes and walked out to the hire car. The green Polo was parked way up on the right, on one of hundreds of identical oblique metered bays squeezed between the narrow cobbled street and the edge of the canal.

  When he was within seventy yards of the bay, Max saw a woman with long, wavy brown hair and a very short blue skirt. She was leaning over rummaging under the boot of a wheelclamped car. From it she picked up a grey plastic object the size of a large book, inserted it into a plastic bag and fixed it to the carrier of a bicycle. Max felt some sympathy, having himself had to feed the damn meter every few hours since he arrived. The woman mounted her bike, a rust heap painted pink, and rode past him, a balky pedal clicking each time she pressed on it. Max’s gaze lingered on her shapely figure as she went.

  The moment Max got to the parking bay he realised the clamped car was a green Polo. He checked the key fob against the licence plate. It was his car. He’d just been robbed. In broad daylight. The grey plastic object – that must be Erica’s laptop. It couldn’t be anything else.

  Max cursed soundlessly and sprinted along the deserted street after her. The thief was now a good hundred yards away, moving steadily, unaware of his pursuit. At sixteen Max had clocked a hundred yards in 11.8 seconds. That was a lot of beers and TV dinners ago. He pumped his arms, but stayed short of flat out. That was the only way to keep on the outside edges and toes of his sneakers. The last thing he wanted was for her to see him and accelerate away.

  The gap was down to forty yards before she turned, her face wide in surprise. She leaned forward and pumped hard on the pedals, tanned legs working. Click, click, click. The bike was accelerating, rattling over the cobbles. As he closed to twenty, she began hauling on the handlebars, pressing her torso forward to get every ounce out of the aged bike. Max was close enough to hear the scrape of the oilless chain, to see the foam stuffing protruding from the split saddle, to watch the warped back wheel wobble, her long legs and shapely bottom giving their all.

  A couple of hundred yards ahead a Mercedes taxi was clattering along the cobbles towards them, taking up the whole of the narrow street. A last hope. Max put on an extra spurt, but knew it wouldn’t last long. When he got within ten yards she stood and pounded the pedals. Her skirt hem flared behind her, revealing colourful panties printed with cartoon characters. He recognised Bugs Bunny and Road Runner.

  She was on a collision course with the car, but at the last moment, as its horn blared, she flicked her bike to the left, bucked it expertly up the kerb between bollards to a narrow pavement, then down again after the cab passed. Max jumped aside as the taxi ploughed past. The woman now had a choice of bridges, left or right, or could head straight on to the stop lights, a wider road where the tram route ran. She turned left.

  Max’s heart was pounding and his breath was coming in raw bursts. As he rounded the corner his spirits lifted. Three noisy British youths, Heineken handed and Malboro mouthed, were just starting onto the bridge. The woman tinged the bicycle bell as she crested the bridge and freewheeled down towards them, hair streaming.

  ‘Stop her! She’s a thief,’ Max bellowed.

  They laughed as they scattered, whistling after her. One turned to Max. ‘Stole yer best racing bike did she, man? Best give up the tabs if you wannae catcha.’

  Fuck you, thought Max as he ground to a halt. Fuck you. But even as a non-smoker he hadn’t the breath to say it.

  The woman freewheeled left along the next canal-side street, looking over her shoulder just once before turning right into a narrow alleyway. Max jogged to the alleyway, holding his side. He rounded the corner, holding the brickwork and gasping.

  The alley was a short cut through to a main street, and deserted. On one side of the alley a row of quaint restaurants and bars, with overhanging upper floors, bubbled medieval glass, old metal signs and worn staircases leading to cellars. The other side was a series of boarded up buildings, covered in sprayed graffiti. The alley was dotted with dog turds. A couple of battered bicycles were chained to railings at the far end. Neither was pink.

  He walked along the alley and emerged into a main street just as a yellow tram scraped past. It was a shopping street by the looks of it, but on a Sunday morning there were only a few people around and all the stores were closed. Max scrutinised the steady stream of cyclists heading up towards the central station on the left. The thief wasn’t among them.

  Max walked back to the Polo. The trunk was unlocked. He opened it and found Erica’s black laptop case. It was empty. He couldn’t understand why Erica had put the laptop here with her precious paper stored on it. It would have been safer leaving it in the hotel room. He could only pray she had a back up copy hidden somewhere. Max looked over the rest of the car. Nothing else looked to have been taken. Even the CD player was untouched.

  He sat in the driving seat and tried to think. No-one could see into the trunk from outside. Yet the thief, working in broad daylight, preferred to go for that rather than the more obvious target. There was only one answer. She knew exactly what she was looking for. It couldn’t be a coincidence.

  We parked the Land Rover above Sophie to keep her body cool and the flies away until we could get a cotton shroud or plastic sheeting. Many children and a few adults gathered around to pay their respects. A local craftsman brought us a plywood casket that he had decorated himself. He refused to take any money.

  An aircraft eventually arrived at noon, but it wasn’t the Cessna that Tetro-Meyer had chartered. It belonged to a South African mining company. The pilot had flown from Kisangani and he had seen two mondeles, white men, get into Tetro-Meyer’s Cessna. He thought they were flying off in the other direction, to Kinshasa. Jarman was speechless. While he wandered away, head in hands, Georg took the pilot aside. I saw the pilot pocket a wad of money and heard him agree to fly Jarman and his dead wife all the way to Kinshasa. At least Jarman wouldn’t have to bury poor Sophie in the bush.

  The plane lifted off through the heat haze and dwindled to a droning dot over the endless unforgiving forest. If I was Jarman, up there with my dead wife and broken dreams, I would not come back to look after a bunch of monkeys. But everyone says he will. They say he’s the kind of person to say ‘this is what she would have wanted me to do.’

  (Erica’s Diary 1992)

  Chapter Eight

  Jack Erskine treated a Sunday like any working day: Penny knocked on his door at five, he’d jogged two miles, taken a shower, eaten a breakfast of fresh fruit and plenty of coffee, ahead of his meeting with the Dutch health minister.

  Originally he had hoped to be in and out of Amsterdam in two days. Pharmstar had agreed to buy Utrecht Laboratories NV for three billion dollars in stock, heads of agreement were signed, the deal announced, everyone was happy. Then the minister, Betsy Dijkstra, had asked to see him. Erskine was philosophical about such things. Ministers liked personal assurances about jobs, and in this case Erskine was happy to wait around to give them. After all, Mrs Dijkstra was tipped to be the next Competition Commissioner for the whole European Union. Anyone who could hold the whip hand over Pharmstar’s future takeover plans needed to be given the full benefit of his charm.
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  ‘You got everything there?’ Erskine looked at Quiggan as he flicked through Mazzio’s files. They were in a conference suite at the Krasnapolsky Hotel and Dijkstra’s entourage was due in five minutes.

  ‘I think so. Bob had done his homework ahead of time,’ Quiggan said.

  ‘Good,’ Erskine said. ‘It’s embarrassing enough him throwing himself into a canal. But being behind on the paperwork would be unforgivable.’

  Quiggan squinted up, searching Erskine’s features for a flicker of irony. He didn’t find it. ‘Is that what you’re gonna tell Heidi?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Bob’s wife. She arrives this afternoon, remember?’

  ‘Oh yeah. Penny’s taking care of that.’

  ‘Yeah, but Penny’s booked a table for four of us this evening. Expects us to take Bob’s wife out to dinner. Say a few words about his contribution. Make her go home feeling good.’

  Erskine sighed. ‘I’ll put Penny straight on that. The guy was only with us three months, you don’t earn a tickertape parade that quick.’

  Quiggan nodded. ‘Yeah. He was fine on the financials, but I didn’t rate his understanding of the industry nor his work rate.’

  ‘It was commitment he lacked, Don. The guy’s no loss.’ Erskine straightened his tie. ‘I’ll speak to Penny. Sure, we’ll take care of Heidi and the brats. But dinner, no. I’ve got plans.’ He cupped his hands under imaginary breasts, and winked at Quiggan.

  The chief financial officer hoisted one side of his face. ‘The blonde, from last time?’

  Erskine nodded just as the phone rang. Quiggan answered it. Dijkstra had arrived and was on her way up with a party of ministerial officials. Erskine levered himself off the couch.

  Suddenly he felt dizzy and remote, like he was looking up at the room from the bottom of a swimming pool. His head throbbed, blood hammered in his ears. Quiggan seemed to move in slow motion, opening the door to a large woman with short hair, and two male officials. Erskine saw his own hand reach out to shake the one she offered to him, but he didn’t hear the words she was saying to him, only a buzz in his head.