Hour of the Assassins

by Andrew Kaplan

  Now was the time to do it, Caine thought While they were alone, before the next patient came in. But suppose he was wrong. Suppose Mendoza wasn’t Mengele. In spite of all the clues it was impossible to imagine this dedicated man, who treated the Indians with such kindness, as Mengele, the ruthless exterminator of what he regarded as inferior races. Jesus, what did you expect? To find the place festooned with swastikas and barbed wire? he asked himself sardonically. But still, what if he was making a mistake? He would have to wait till he was sure, he thought, accepting a cold glass of papaya juice from Mendoza, who sat on the edge of the examining table.

  It began to rain slowly and steadily, the drops clattering like pebbles on the corrugated metal roof of the bungalow. The rain was as warm as bathwater and had that same feel of dirtiness, of having been already used. A black and tan moth, as large as a hand, blundered against the window screen, its wings beating feebly against the wire mesh. The patter of the raindrops was swallowed by the cough of the diesel generator that supplied electricity to the institute, as it started up. For a moment the electric fan paused in its endless oscillation, the blades becoming visible, and then resumed its mechanical survey of the room, barely stirring the dead, humid air.

  Was it possible? Caine wondered. It seemed incredible that he could be sitting here calmly sipping papaya juice with the man he had hunted over half the world—the man he was being paid half a million dollars to kill.

  “You’re not a journalist, are you?” Mendoza asked him good-naturedly, but his dark eyes were masked with a trace of suspicion. Caine shook his head and lit a cigarette, the smoke tasting of disinfectant and vegetation and the earthy smell of the tobacco-colored rain.

  “Because I don’t want the world to discover me the way they discovered Albert Schweitzer. They turned him into a celebrity, a commodity for public consumption, like some overdeveloped Hollywood starlet,” Mendoza said with disdain. “After a while the publicity-seekers and professional do-gooders outnumbered the lepers. Any publicity would only interfere with my work and contaminate the Indians. You’ve seen for yourself how hard it is to get them to give up on their brujos and bring the sick here. Had I seen that little boy twelve hours later, I wouldn’t have been able to save him. Fill this place up with white men and we’ll never be able to get them out of the jungle to where we can help them.”

  “I’m just an oilman, Doctor. I’m here to establish medical facilities for our drilling crews. It can mean a lot of money for you. Money for equipment, drugs, even research, if you like.”

  He dropped the word research like bait, hoping Mendoza would pick it up.

  “What research?” Mendoza looked sharply at him.

  “I was told by Father José that you were interested in studying tropical diseases.”

  “Oh, that,” Mendoza said, his eyes troubled. “No, I don’t do research anymore, Señor McClure. And I don’t want your oil crews here either. Your people can only interfere with my work here.”

  “That’s all I’m trying to do, too. Just my job, Doctor.”

  A little Shipibo girl who barely came up to Caine’s knee wandered into the room. Completely naked, she gravely reached out a hand to Mendoza, who placed a piece of sucking candy in it. Her other arm had been amputated above the elbow. She put the candy into her mouth and padded out the door.

  “Snakebite,” Mendoza explained. “Probably a fer-de-lance. The Indians tried to treat it with river mud, parrot feathers, and brujo chants. By the time we caught it, we had to amputate.” There was no emotion in his face and Caine was reminded of Mengele’s bleak Laboratorium, where healthy limbs were amputated as a matter of course. He would do it tonight, he decided, using the cover of darkness to get back to the camp by the lake, where he had instructed Pepé to wait for him with the lancha.

  “Why don’t we discuss it tonight over dinner,” Caine said. “At the very least you might consider letting Petrotex make a financial contribution to your work.”

  “As you wish, Señor McClure. But I’m quite firm about my policy of noninterference. I only saw you as a courtesy to Ministro Ribiero.”

  “We’ll talk at dinner,” Caine insisted, trying Harris’s sincere smile again. He was beginning to get it right, he thought. Soon he would be like Harris and he wondered if Harris himself knew when he was being sincere.

  “People come and go in the Amazona, like bits of debris in the river,” Mendoza said, and shrugged. It was almost a threat, Caine thought, and he was about to confront Mendoza right there and then, but didn’t because Inger appeared in the doorway, and he was certain now that the flame in her eyes was hatred.

  They walked across the compound in the rain, Inger pointing out everything of interest, in a kind of breezy, nonstop chatter, as though she were the local Welcome Wagon lady. The rain flattened her short, boyish yellow hair and plastered her clothes to her skin, giving her the compelling appearance of a Rhine maiden washed ashore by the river—one of those legendary Loreleis who lure sailors to their destruction. Caine followed her slim, young figure to the lab, where a heavyset middle-aged German technician named Guenther sat peering through a microscope at blood slides. Guenther nodded gravely to Caine and solemnly explained his work, spoken in a monotonous tone, as though he were reading a legal contract out loud. He declined Caine’s offer of a cigarette, and when pressed, he indicated that the only thing he felt the lack of was a new centrifuge.

  Inger introduced him to Helga, Guenther’s wife, in one of the bungalows set aside for special cases. Helga was a short, stout woman in a white nurse’s uniform who spoke only German. She had hard, piggy eyes, blotchy cheeks that reminded him of a figure in a Hals painting, a mouth that opened and closed like a trap, and Caine had little difficulty in picturing her as a matron in a concentration camp. Helga acknowledged Caine with a grim smile and he felt a prickle at the back of his neck. His certainty about Mendoza’s identity was beginning to grow.

  Helga was adjusting a bottle of an aromatic amide solution of 2-hydroxstilbamidine set up for intravenous feeding into the arm of a teen-aged Yagua boy, the left side of his face, ear, neck, and chest covered with horrible sores from blastomycosis. The air in the hut was thick with the sickly stench of rotting skin. The boy barely glanced at them, never taking his frightened eyes off Helga, who busied herself with the butterfly clamp that controlled the intravenal flow as though she were rigging up some kind of white man’s torture device.

  It was only after Inger had shown him everything—the bungalows and huts where the families of the patients stayed; the operating room; the storage rooms full of food supplies, drugs, and medical equipment; the generator shed; the kitchen and dining room; the vegetable patch and barnyard pens for chickens, pigs, and goats—that she took him to her bungalow.

  “What’s in here?” Caine asked, his face shiny from the rain.

  “This is my room,” she said, her violet eyes hooded like those of a cobra, and she began to unbutton her shirt. Caine started to back away from her, his senses bristling with the prickle of danger. To go to bed with her would be like mating with a barracuda, he thought. She had the same air of streamlined beauty and deadly efficiency, as if she were made of very fine, very cold steel. She took off her shirt and faced him, her small pointed breasts not much bigger than a young girl’s, the nipples erect like tiny daggers. She pressed herself against his wet shirt and kissed him, her sharp teeth gnawing at his lip as though she wanted to draw blood.

  “Well, what are you waiting for? Take off your clothes!” she ordered harshly, her eyes almost phosphorescent in the humid midday gloom.

  “I don’t think this is a very good idea,” Caine said, gently pushing her hands away, but he never got a chance to say why, because she slapped his face savagely, her eyes blazing with a hate-filled passion, her teeth bared in an animal growl. Without thinking, Caine slapped her back as hard as he would a man, knocking her backward and splitting her lip. With a cry she sprang at him, spitting like a cat and clawing at him with her fing
ernails. He grabbed her arm and using a hip-roll, threw her to the floor. She licked at the blood on her lip with a long, pointed tongue and her eyes glittered like sapphires.

  “Yes, oh yes, oh yes,” she sobbed, and he was startled by the sudden knowledge that this was what she wanted. She liked it! She crawled over to him and began to lick his muddy shoes, her mouth a smear of mud and blood, then she tore off her wet jeans and panties and began fumbling with his belt buckle. He felt her biting his shoulder, as she pulled him down on top of her, her legs spread wide and her pelvis humping madly against his. He entered her moist, tight vagina that burned hot enough to scorch him, her rhythmic thrusting moving even faster against him, like a mindless machine running out of control. He pinned her arms to the ground, his body pounding into her as though he wanted to split her open.

  “Hurt me, hurt me,” she gasped, sucking the rain and sweat from his neck like a vampire. He thrust deep into her, impaling her on his cock, realizing that this was as close to rape as he had ever come, their mating the ultimate savage battle of the sexual war.

  “Fuck me, you animal, fuck me hard! You animal, you animal!” she screamed in time to his thrusts and she climaxed with a piercing cry. He pounded even harder at her slackening body, his cock stabbing into her, as though he were trying to kill her with it and when he came, it was with a desperate grunt that brought little sense of relief, drops of semen spilling out of her onto the floor between her legs.

  They lay there for a long time, motionless as bodies on a battlefield, the only sounds their labored breathing and the clattering of the rain on the corrugated metal roof. Gradually he became aware of the weight of his body on hers, his nose buried in the golden thatch of her hair, which smelled like wet straw. He eased himself off her gingerly, his back still sore from the crash in Vienna.

  There was a moment when the lulling sound of the rain, the whisper of the wind as it rustled the palm fronds, the sweet and sour smell of sex, and the sticky, jungle heat made him think of Lim and the sickly, cloying scent of Asia, of the soft times of loving when the war was only a shadow in the corner and all that mattered was the two of them sheltering from the storm, safe within each other’s arms. But when he looked into Inger’s cold, sparkling eyes, he knew that what they had experienced was not lovemaking, but something far more ancient in its mindless savagery. The priest had been right, he mused. To enter the jungle is to enter the primordial darkness of the heart.

  Almost as if he had summoned it with his mind, a giant black beetle, the size of his palm, crawled out of a dark corner and across the wall, its shiny pincers open and threatening, its very existence a declaration that the Jurassic Age hadn’t ended, that hideous monsters still stalked the earth. With a sigh he reached for his discarded shirt, pulled a crumpled cigarette from the pocket, and lit it.

  “Don’t think this means anything, because it doesn’t,” Inger said bitterly, getting up from the reed mat and lying down on her narrow bed. He sat beside her, exhaling the smoke as if it were a sense of regret and flicked his ashes on the floor.

  “I’ll bet you say that to all the boys,” he said.

  “You bastard!” she snapped, her eyes flashing. She tried to slap him again, but he easily caught her wrist in his hand.

  “Don’t,” he warned, “or I’ll break it. This time it won’t be for fun.” And his eyes glittered as coldly as hers.

  “You think you’re really something, don’t you?”

  “Tell me, is it just me, or are you out to get the entire male sex?” He felt her wrist relax and he released it as if it were something dirty.

  “You’re so damn smart, you figure it out,” she sneered.

  “Let’s not pretend you didn’t want this. You brought me here.”

  “Of course I used you. Who am I supposed to fuck around here? The Indians? I’d sooner do it with one of the goats out back,” she retorted, her face contorted with disgust. Perhaps some of that disgust was for herself, he mused. The sound of the rain was lighter now. Soon it would stop.

  “No, it’s more than that,” he said finally. “You hated me from the minute you saw me. But why? Who am I to you?”

  “My father is a brilliant man,” she said.

  “Yeah, I’ll bet he’s a wow doing his Great White Father act for the Indians,” he said, egging her on, his senses alert and probing. Danger, as real and palpable as the black beetle, had entered the room. She had something to tell him if he could just needle it out of her.

  “He’s more of a man than you are, old as he is. Someday the world will recognize his genius,” she said defiantly. “Take that magnificent diagnosis he did on that little Chama boy. It was my father who discovered that blackwater fever is a complication of falciparum malaria. He wrote a paper for Lancet, proving that blackwater fever is an antibody-antigen reaction resulting in intravascular haemolysis, but the fools refused to publish it. They said that his research methods weren’t rigorous enough, that his results weren’t conclusive! They wanted control groups. Control groups!” she said, her eyes blazing.

  The rain had stopped and the outside air was thick with sunshine. A rainbow had formed in the sky over the compound, the colors rich and sparkling, like some giant snake curved over the jungle. The air steamed in the relentless heat and clouds of mosquitoes rose Like columns of smoke in the strong light. Pockets of mist lay over the mud puddles, white and gleaming, as though it had snowed during the storm.

  “What’s wrong with control groups?”

  “What do you know, anyway?” she retorted.

  “Not much, I guess.”

  “My father established the institute to help the Indians, not to experiment on them. He’s too kind a man for that. That’s why they worship the ground he walks on; that’s why we all do. He’s the finest man I’ve ever known. Hell, he’s the only real man I’ve ever known.”

  “He seems to treat the Indians very well,” Caine said carefully.

  “It’s not just the Indios, it’s everyone. He’s an incredible philosopher and medical researcher. He’s a linguist and an anthropologist. Someday his theories on the origin of the Indian races will revolutionize our knowledge of the development of man. He’s even an architect. He designed and built everything you see here. When he came to the Urubamba, all this was nothing but malaria-infested jungle. He did it all by himself. And that’s not all. He’s a zoologist who has classified dozens of new insect and bacterial species. Even in this place he’s brought us the culture of the world. He’s a brilliant violinist. You should hear him play Mozart and Schumann. It’s glorious,” she rhapsodized.

  “What about your mother?”

  “She died when I was a little girl. She was his mistress in—” she hesitated, “—in another place. But she wasn’t worthy of him, that’s why he never married her. That’s right,” she declared defiantly, thrusting her chin out as if it were a weapon. “I’m a bastard! My father didn’t have to take me in, especially with all he had to do, a busy, important man like him, but he did. He’s the most wonderful man in the world!”

  “The way you talk about him, he sounds more like your lover than your father.”

  “He was,” she said simply. Her words hung in the air between them like a curtain. He turned to look at her, the side of her face lit with a bright bar of sunlight, her hair a splash of gold in the drab room. She was lying on her side, her head supported on her arm, her expression as motionless and veiled as the Sphinx. She ignored the fly sipping at a bead of sweat in the hollow where her neck joined her breastbone. With her golden helmet of hair, her virginal, almost boyish face and flat chest, she might have reminded him of a young knight, an adolescent Parsifal, were it not for the damp triangle of curly, light brown pubic hair. For the first time he looked around the whitewashed room.

  The room was as bare as a nun’s cell, with none of the usual feminine dust collectors. The furniture consisted of the narrow bed, a nightstand, chest of drawers made of cedar, and an old mahogany standing closet. The furniture
had the heavy look that was fashionable in Europe during the thirties. A crude dressing table, mirror, and a chair completed the room. The bed and the closet stood on legs set into coffee cans filled with liquid disinfectant, the acrid aroma permeating the room. The whitewashed walls were bare except for a colorful glass display case of butterflies and a large framed black-and-white portrait of Mendoza hung over her bed. A gauzelike mosquito net was draped over one of the bedposts, like a shroud, and a single screened window looked out over the vegetable patch.

  “Where was all this?” he asked.

  “We were living in—” She hesitated, and he could have sworn she was about to say Paraguay. Then she shrugged, her thin shoulders looking frail and white in the bright afternoon light.

  “We moved around a lot. After my mother—” She stopped and began again. “Anyway, there was nothing permanent in my life. There were no other children to play with. We were very isolated. All I had was my father.”

  He could picture her as a small, solemn little girl, isolated on the finca in Pedro Juan Caballero, her only companion, a doll. How lonely it must have been for her in that gloomy house, populated only by that maniacal man and the brooding ghosts of old crimes, he thought, feeling the first stirrings of a kind of sympathy for her. But pity was expensive baggage. Dao had taught him that, he remembered. He wasn’t there to pity her. He was there to kill her only real lover, her messiah, he thought disgustedly.

  “It was a hard time for my father. He must have been very lonely. Even as a child I knew that my father was a great man, but one whose genius had been rejected by the world, by blind fools who couldn’t hold a candle to him,” she said with a voice that seemed to come not from her, but from the shadows of the room. It might have been the black beetle that was talking. He could hear the croaking of the frogs. A macaw was squawking nearby with a voice that was almost human.