by Aaron Elkins
“This is the Plaza de Armas, the main square,” Phil told them after they’d pulled their luggage down from the racks at the backs of the taxis, “and that monstrosity is your hotel, the Dorado Plaza. Go freshen up, take a nap or something, and I’ll meet you right out here at, say, four o’clock, after things have cooled down. I’ll give you a quickie tour. I’d go inside with you in case there’s any problem at the desk, but they’d never let me through the door.”
At this stage of their journey, none of them looked very appetizing, but Phil was in a class of his own. He was, to put it mildly, not a man greatly concerned with outward appearances. His come-again, go-again, pepper-and-salt beard was three weeks on its way in, and his lank, thinning gray hair looked as if it had seen its last pair of clippers six months ago. In addition, he was dressed in his standard travel apparel: a tired T-shirt with a sagging neckline, baggy, multi-pocketed, knee-length khaki shorts, scuffed, sockless tennis shoes that did nothing to enhance his skinny legs, and a faded On the Cheap baseball cap with a sweat-stained, curling bill. Gideon knew that in his backpack — Phil’s first rule of travel was never to take anything that couldn’t fit into a backpack — were duplicates of each item of clothing that he wore and a few necessities such as toilet paper (you never knew), toothpaste, insect repellent, and a pair of flip-flops. That was it. He would be dressed exactly the same every day of the trip. And he would spend a lot of time washing clothes in his bathroom sink.
“You know,” he said, shrugging into the backpack for the short walk to his own hotel, but hesitating before starting, “it’s not too late to cancel your reservations here. You can still get a couple of rooms at the Alfert with the rest of us.”
“Why would we want to do that?” Gideon asked.
“Because it’s sixty bucks cheaper, and also because almost everyone else on the cruise is there, but mainly because it doesn’t have air-conditioning, and minifridges, and TV, and all that crap that you tourist types go for. What’s the point of coming down here at all if you’re going to live the way you would in Seattle or New York? The Alfert is a real Iquitos hotel. It’s the kind of place the real people stay.”
“Phil,” Gideon said with a sigh, “I am a real person. Even John is a real person.”
“Damn right,” agreed John. “Wait a minute—”
“To appreciate a certain amount of material comfort,” Gideon continued, “does not mean you are not a real person.”
Phil shook his head sadly. “And you call yourself an anthropologist,” he said, dripping contempt, as he had on similar occasions in the past and was sure to do again in the future.
PHIL was right about the afternoon heat. Even at four o’clock, supposedly after things had “cooled down,” the thermometer in the lobby of the Dorado Plaza read thirty-seven degrees centigrade. Approximately ninety-nine degrees Fahrenheit. And the relative humidity was even higher, according to the humidity sensor: 100 percent. The air couldn’t hold any more moisture if it tried.
Gideon’s crisp, fresh shirt went limp even before he and John were all the way through the revolving door to the plaza, where Phil, also apparently in fresh clothes (although, who could tell for sure?) was waiting. From there he led them on a walking tour of the highlights of Iquitos: the moldering once-grand, porcelain-tiled houses of nineteenth-century rubber barons on the Malecón Tarapacá; the strange Iron House, made entirely of engraved iron plates (it looked like a house made of tinfoil), designed by Gustav Eiffel for the Paris exhibition of 1889 and shipped to Peru by one of the barons; and the floating “village” of Belén, a swarming, astonishing, malodorous marketplace hawking everything from native medicines to capybara haunches, smoked monkey arms, and fresh turtle eggs.
By five-thirty even John was drooping from the heat, and they were all ready for a cold beer and something to eat. Gideon suggested the Gran Maloca, a nice-looking restaurant they’d passed, with white-shirted waiters visible through the windows and Visa, Master-Card, and aire acondicionado stickers on the door. But he was outvoted, as he knew he would be, by Phil and John, who opted for the open-air Aris Burgers; John because of the word burgers and Phil because it was where the motokar drivers and other “real” people ate.
The food was good enough, however — there were Peruvian dishes as well as burgers — the beers were cold, and the real people were colorful. By the time they finished they were relaxed and contented, and very much ready to call it a day. Phil headed for the Alfert and John and Gideon walked back to the Dorado Plaza. On the square, they found a crowd of at least a hundred people watching a remarkably good Michael Jackson imitator go through his routines to the accompaniment of a boom box. Gideon and John watched too, for a good twenty minutes, while the young man with fedora and single sequined glove gyrated and tapped and moonwalked.
“How does he do it in this heat?” Gideon said, shaking his head.
“I guess you can get used to anything,” said John.
They each left a dollar in the can he was using for donations and went up to their rooms.
Thirty minutes later, exhausted, lying in his bed with the air-conditioning turned up to high, Gideon could still hear the boom box going.
SIX
THERE are no roads into or out of Iquitos. A few supplies come in by air, but the great majority of its goods come and go via the river. As with almost every settlement on the Amazon, however, it has nothing resembling a working port or pier or dock. This is because every year the river rises forty to sixty feet in flood season, and then, of course, sinks again six months later. To build a commercial pier able to handle that kind of elevation change is beyond the resources of these jungle communities.
Thus, this being what is laughably called the dry season on the Amazon, John and Gideon got their first look at the Adelita the next morning from the crest of a long, unpaved, muddy, slippery incline that dropped from the level of the town down to the current shoreline.
“There she is,” Phil said as proudly as if he owned her.
“Jesus,” said John, staring. “That’s the Adelita?”
Phil looked offended. “What’s wrong with her?”
“Nothing, except it looks about a hundred years old.”
“It is a hundred years old. More.”
It had been built in the boom times of the 1890s, he explained, to carry supplies and company VIPs to and from the rubber plantations. In the 1920s and ’30s it had spent a decade as a prison ship to transport criminals to hellhole prisons in the jungle. Very few had made the return trip. When Captain Vargas had rescued it from the river five years ago it had been a half-sunk hulk, rusting away on the shore, like quite a few of the other derelicts that were still to be seen along the riverbank. He’d installed twin diesel engines in place of steam power, gotten the boat into reasonable shape mostly with his own two hands, and had been hauling cargo and mail up and down the river ever since. Now he was eager to convert to the burgeoning eco-tourism trade — to what he hoped would be a burgeoning eco-tourism trade. This would be his first try at it.
“So we’re his guinea pigs,” John said. “What the hell, as long as it floats.” He eyed Phil. “It does float, doesn’t it?”
“It floats, all right, but just don’t expect too much,” Phil said. “The accommodations are pretty, um, basic. Don’t expect a basket of goodies in the bathroom.”
“Uh-oh,” Gideon said. “Sounds like the real people are going to love it, but we fake people may have a few reservations.”
But in fact he did love it at first sight. A peeling, white-painted, metal-hulled, much-dinged old bucket of a two-decker about the length of a Greyhound bus, it was everyone’s idea of an old jungle steamer: tubby and experienced and just a little raffish.
Negotiating the slick incline down to it was tricky, but they managed it without falling. Waiting on deck to greet them, effusively and somewhat anxiously, was an overweight, bespectacled, heavily perspiring man in jeans, T-shirt, and a bright new captain’s cap complete with woven gol
d-oak-leaf filigree. “Felipe, you’re here! Welcome, welcome. I was worried! You are the last to come.” He turned for a second to signal someone in the wheelhouse and at once the engines revved up and someone ran to untie the mooring lines from their cleats and haul them in.
“Captain, these are my good friends Professor Gideon Oliver and Mr. John Lau,” Phil said. “John and Gideon, Capitán Alfredo Vargas.”
“Welcome to the Adelita.” Vargas pumped hands all around. “Welcome, welcome, welcome.”
“Me llamo Juan,” said John.
“In thirty minutes we have a nice meeting for everyone, yes? In the ship’s salon. Until then, perhaps you would like to see your cabins? Chato will show you.”
Chato, slim, silent, and about five feet, two inches tall, took them to the upper deck, where there were ten cabins, set back to back, five to a side, with doors and single windows opening out onto the deck. He opened their doors — there were no locks — and left without having said a word or once having met their eyes. The boat began to slip away from the shore.
BASIC was the right word. Gideon’s cabin, the rearmost one on the starboard side, consisted of a cot-sized bed with a thin kapok mattress under the single window, an open alcove with two shelves and hooks for hanging things — no closet, no drawers — and a bathroom with a sink about as big as a medium-sized mixing bowl, a toilet, and a claustrophobia-inducing shower. Both rooms were in a total of what couldn’t have been even a hundred square feet. Not places to spend a lot of time, but perfectly fine for sleeping. And the barred window over the bed — a leftover from the Adelita’s days as a prison ship — opened, which was good, because the heralded air-conditioning, a clanking, groaning unit on the ceiling, while it was trying its best, wasn’t quite up to the task. He guessed the temperature in the room was about eighty-five degrees, maybe ten degrees cooler than outside. The humidity was considerably less oppressive, though. It was bearable. It would do.
Fortunately, Vargas had made available two unoccupied aft cabins for the botanists to store their equipment and for everyone to leave their luggage. If not for that, they would all have been climbing over their bags to get into and out of their rooms.
In the bathroom, atop the toilet tank, were a plastic liter-bottle of Cristalina water, a squat, heavy tumbler, a cleanly cut half of a new bar of Ivory soap, and a roll of toilet paper. No toilet-paper holder, no towel rack, no washcloth, and most definitely no basket of goodies. A single thin towel the size of a moderately large dish towel lay neatly folded on the blanketless bed. But everything looked clean and shipshape. The wood-plank walls were gummy with multiple coats of paint, the latest a glossy off-white that had been applied recently enough so that it still gave off a painty smell. Gideon didn’t doubt that under all the dried goop were the original cabin walls that the ship had come with. Except for the air-conditioning, the shower, and the window bars, in fact, he guessed that what he was looking at was pretty much what an 1890s VIP traveler would have found as well.
When he went to the sink to wash his hands and face, he found that there was no hot water. The same cloudy, lukewarm fluid came out of both taps. Well, no problem there, either. There wasn’t going to be much demand for piping hot water on this particular cruise. He washed up as well as he could in the tiny sink, got into a fresh shirt, and went downstairs to join the others. He was surprised to see that the Adelita was already to the outskirts of Iquitos. Ahead lay an unmarred vista of brown river and green jungle.
SEVEN
“WELCOME, welcome, my dear friends, my good friends, welcome,” enthused the overexcited Captain Vargas. “Or as we say in Peru, bienvenidos amigos! It is my great pleasure to welcome you to the Adelita with pisco sours, the national drink of Peru. Or you can have Inca Kola, the other national drink of Peru, both completely without any necessity of payment. Only for this one time, of course. Afterward, payment will be gratefully accepted, ha-ha. Please, help yourselves, all you wish, go ahead.” He motioned them into action with his hands.
The “ship’s salon” had turned out to be a small open area on the lower deck, bounded by the dining room on the forward side and a storage room to the rear. Projecting into this area from the dining room wall, on the left side of the entrance, was a small, glassed-in bar fitted with a Dutch door, the upper half of which folded outward to make a serving counter. There were four white plastic tables with a few green plastic garden chairs around them. Two of the tables were empty. One was fully occupied, with four people around it. The last had only one person at it, and it was there that Phil, John, and Gideon had sat down. Their companion was a quiet, lost-looking individual who had introduced himself as Duayne V. Osterhout and who looked like a cartoonist’s version of John Q. Public, right down to the toothbrush mustache, the horn-rimmed glasses, and the air of timid, put-upon uncertainty.
There was a breeze wafting through the open space, created by the vessel’s movement, that would hardly have qualified as “cool” in the Northwest, but that felt wonderful here. On each table was a small pitcher of foamy white liquid — those would be the sours — several dark green bottles of Inca Kola, and some bottled water. John and Phil twisted the caps off water bottles, Gideon tried the Inca Kola, and their tablemate reached for the pitcher. “Never had one of these,” he murmured, pouring himself a brimming glassful. He took a tentative sip, cocked his head, and swallowed. “Say, this isn’t bad!” He tried another sip and obviously enjoyed that one too. “Salty, sweet, and bitter at the same time.” He smacked his lips. “And sour too. It engages all the taste receptors. Well, except for umami, of course, inasmuch as there wouldn’t be any glutamic acid in it.”
“You a professor, by any chance?” John said.
“Ah… no,” said Osterhout, returning to his enthusiastic sampling of the sour.
“So what’s the Inca Kola like?” John asked Gideon.
Gideon rolled the liquid around his mouth and swallowed. “Mmm, something like a Vanilla Coke, but with some kind of, I don’t know—”
“Try to guess!” Vargas boomed, overhearing. “No? It’s lemongrass! The secret ingredient. No lemongrass in Coke! Hey, you know Peru is the only country in the world where we got our own drink that sells better than Coca-Cola? It’s a known fact. Tastes pretty good, huh?”
“It’s delicious,” said Gideon, who thought it might conceivably have been passable if the sugar content had been cut by 60 percent or so.
Vargas then provided a general introduction to the ship and the cruise. They would cruise for the remainder of today and the next along the southern bank of the Peruvian Amazon. At the Colombian border they would take a northern, more remote branch of the Amazon known as the Javaro River, on which they would travel for several more days, until they rejoined the main body of the Amazon at Leticia, Colombia, at the end of their journey.
“You mean we don’t even spend two days on the Amazon?” their tablemate Duayne Osterhout asked, plainly disappointed. “I thought—”
“Let me explain,” interrupted a stocky man of forty-five, with a tanned, ruddy face, a reddish crewcut just beginning to go gray, and small, bright, intelligent eyes. “You see, the Amazon River itself, as you get anywhere near Leticia, is pretty broad and well-traveled… crowded, you might almost say. But the Javaro is much smaller, a dark, serpentine, little-known stream through an almost totally unpopulated area. Hardly anyone uses it as a thoroughfare because, with all its S-curves and its looping back on itself, it takes forever to get anywhere.”
“Still, the Amazon… !”
“You won’t regret it, I assure you. Because of its remoteness, you see, the Javaro is an absolute treasure-house of exotic plants and wildlife. Like the Amazon was forty years ago.”
“If you say so,” said Osterhout with a pallid little sigh.
“I guarantee it.”
Vargas waited politely until, with a wave of his unlit pipe, the man signaled him to continue. In addition to the passengers, they were carrying a cargo of coffee, along with a
few miscellaneous items — a generator, a few dozen pairs of rubber boots for a jungle store, a dining room table and chairs, a wooden door, and some miscellaneous lumber. The coffee was bound for a warehouse on the Javaro; the other items would be dropped off along the way. All other stops would be at the discretion of the expedition guide, and of Dr. Scofield — he nodded at the stocky man, who returned it with another wave of his pipe, by now lit and smoking and emanating a sweet, coconutty aroma.
“Speaking of our expedition guide,” Scofield said genially, “the famous Cisco. I don’t believe I see him among us. He is aboard, I hope?”
“Aboard?” Vargas said as if the question were laughable in the extreme. “Of course he’s aboard. He’s, ah… resting at present. Yes.” Gideon could practically see the sweat popping out on his forehead. “You’ll meet him soon, don’t worry.”
He hurried on before Scofield could pursue the matter. The Adelita, the group was told, would provide them with many amenities. Their cabins would be cleaned each day, their linens replaced two times during the week. A fresh liter of drinking water would be placed in their rooms every morning. There would be three healthful meals a day, the precise timing to depend on the day’s excursions. Today’s dinner would be at six-thirty. Coffee, fruit, and more drinking water would be available twenty-four hours a day on the buffet table in the dining room. The bar would open for an hour before dinner each day, and drinks could be signed for and accounts settled at the end of the cruise.
The list of nonamenities was shorter but more striking. Between Iquitos and Leticia, there was no TV reception, no e-mail, no Internet, no cell phone transmission. Here in the nearly unpopulated jungle there were no communication satellites zipping overhead for such things. Unless any of the passengers happened to be carrying a shortwave radio, the sole communication with the outside world would be the captain’s shortwave in the wheelhouse.