by Aaron Elkins
There wasn’t much to watch. In the middle of the afternoon, with a blazing sun hanging motionless overhead, the jungle was hazy and still, seemingly without inhabitants other than an occasional darting swift or flycatcher or swallow along the shore. The already slow-moving river seemed to have slowed down even more. The two men did a lot of yawning, maybe even dozing, for a pleasant half hour, and then their desultory, sporadic conversation, which had mostly concerned giant spiders, turned to their shipmates.
“So what do you think of our companions?” Gideon asked lazily. “Interesting bunch, wouldn’t you say?”
“Not too bad, all in all. And yeah, this ethnobotany stuff could be interesting. I don’t know about Scofield, though. I mean, maybe the guy’s a big-time expert, but he’s a phony right down to his toenails. All that chuckle-chuckle crap and that cutesy business with the pipe.” He dug an imaginary pipe stem into his cheek. “The others can’t stand him. I don’t know if you noticed. Even Duayne’s got something against him, and he never even met the guy.”
As it often did, John’s perspicacity caught Gideon by surprise. Not that he thought John was dumb — far from it — but the man didn’t show much, and even when he seemingly wasn’t paying attention he was taking things in.
“I noticed.”
“And what about the Cisco Kid?” John asked. “Oh, that’s gonna be great, following him into the jungle.”
“Yes, he was a little… off, all right. Obviously, the guy has a problem.”
“Yeah, the problem is, his brains are fried. He’s put in a lot of years stuffing stuff up his nose, or however they do it down here.”
He wrinkled his own nose. “I smell smoke.”
Gideon pointed toward the shore. “There’s a fire. Several fires.”
Up ahead, atop a high bank, was what looked like the epicenter of a gigantic bomb blast, a huge wound in the jungle, a good three hundred feet across, littered with hundreds of felled trees and piles of burning, smoking, head-high debris. At least a hundred nearly naked men were scrambling through the hellish scene, trimming branches with machetes and chain saws and tossing them into the smoldering piles. An earthen ramp, red and raw, had been chopped into the bank, and on it lay some of the trunks, tilting down toward the river, where an old barge waited. Another group of workers toiled, their brown backs glistening, pulling and pushing one of the trunks down toward the barge with nothing but chains and ropes and rough posts used as levers. Shouted orders and cries could be dimly heard through the racket of the chain saws.
“It’s like something out of the Inferno, isn’t it?” a suddenly subdued Gideon said.
“Or the building of the pyramids,” John said. “Not a machine in sight. Not a backhoe, not a crane.”
“And how would they get a crane there?” said Vargas, who had strolled up behind them. “They could barge it down the river, yes, but how would they get it up the bank? Forty feet, almost vertical.” He shook his head. “Impossible.”
“What are they doing?” John asked. “Is it logging?”
“Oh, yes, logging. There are many such. Ugly, yes? And do you know what is the most amazing thing about it?”
They looked at him.
“It wasn’t here at all two weeks ago,” Vargas said. “The forest here was untouched. And two weeks from now, they will be gone, doing the same thing somewhere else along the river.”
“It’s controlled, though, isn’t it?” Gideon asked. “I mean, there are regulations, oversight…”
Vargas smiled. “This is Peru, my friend. It’s regulated by how much money changes hands.”
“How long does it take to grow back?” John asked.
“Oh, it grows back quickly enough. A year from now, all will be green again. From here, it may look the same, but it will not be the same, it will no longer be, I forget the word, natural forest, first forest…”
“Virgin forest?” offered Gideon.
“Yes, professor, virgin forest. No, it will be all brambles, and thorns, and swamps, and mosquitoes. The big trees won’t be back for a hundred, two hundred years.”
Silently, the three men watched the gash disappear behind a wall of jungle as the boat moved on. All were glad to see it go.
“Well, well,” said Vargas brightly, to introduce a change of subject. Had they spotted any of the Amazon’s famous pink dolphins yet? No? Well, they must be sure to look for them, they were something that shouldn’t be missed. Would they care for a drink from the bar? Technically, it wasn’t yet open, but it would be no trouble at all — it would be a pleasure — to pour something for them. In their cases, of course, he whispered with a wink — an actual, literal wink — there would be no charges at the end of the voyage, and the same went for their excellent friend Phil. Their tabs would discreetly be made to disappear, poof. Only please — he looked around and leaned closer — don’t tell the other passengers.
This offer they politely declined in their own and in Phil’s behalf, and Gideon asked if it was possible for the boat to travel a little closer to the shore so that they might perhaps catch a glimpse of the rain forest wildlife. Vargas, as always, was anxious to oblige: as it happened, there was a sufficiently deep channel on the starboard side that ran along only a hundred feet from the southern bank, and he would be pleased to have the Adelita cruise in it for the next few hours. John and Gideon were to make certain to be on the lookout for monkeys and sloths in the trees, and down below for caimans and capybara, who liked to come down and lounge along the waterside when the heat of the day was on the wane.
Indeed, as dusk approached, and enormous, pink-tinged, end-of-the-world clouds began to build on the horizon, and the light turned from brassy to golden, the small, darting swifts and swallows were replaced by larger birds: white cattle egrets and brilliant toucans and macaws. The caimans did show up along the shore, as still and gnarly as old tree stumps, their eyes and nostrils poking out of the water. And life within the trees became visible. They saw a sloth making its lethargic, languorous upside-down way along the branch of a tree — it covered only three or four feet in the five minutes it was in view — and a spider monkey and a family of squirrel monkeys chittering among the leaves.
“This is what I was hoping it would be like,” Gideon said happily.
“Yeah. Hey, is that a capybara?” John gestured at a pig-size animal wallowing in an eddy along the shore. “With the nose?”
“Tapir,” Gideon said, as confidently as if it weren’t the first one he’d set eyes on outside of a zoo.
“Well, whatever the hell it is, you don’t see them in Seattle.” He shook his head and considered. “We are really a long way from civilization here, you know?”
“Can’t argue with that.”
The local denizens, the ones aboard the ship, also began making their appearances as the air cooled. Arden Scofield, in gym shorts and with a towel draped around his neck, came out to circle the deck for exercise. “Hundred and ten feet per circuit,” he informed them as he zipped by. “Forty-eight circuits to a mile.” Apparently completely recovered from his earlier encounter with Theraphosa blondi, he merrily mimed exhaustion and panting. “Only forty-six to go, if I can last.”
Fifteen minutes later, the Adelita slowed and Vargas returned with exciting news. There was a school of pink Amazon dolphins playing up ahead and if they cared to move back to the port side of the boat they could see these remarkable creatures for themselves.
They saw three of them slipping in and out of the water in concert a few hundred yards ahead; gleaming, blubbery objects not as sleek or graceful as the more familiar dolphins of the north, but assuredly, indubitably pink.
“Aren’t they marvelous?” Scofield called out from behind them. He had finished his walk and now stood leaning against the bar, mopping his face and watching the dolphins play.
“These fish,” Vargas said, “in all the world are found only in the Amazon. On our future trips, there will be a, what do you call him, a naturist, a naturalist, aboard
to—”
He was shocked into silence by a reverberating thunk that could be felt in the floorboards, and then a microsecond later a tremendous crashing and tinkling of glass. The racket had come from behind them, from the bar, which was basically a slightly modified eight-by-six-foot prefab storage shed, the back of which had been bolted to the outside of the dining room wall, beside the entrance. Glass shelves filled with bottles and glasses around three sides left just enough room for a bartender to fix drinks and serve them through the opening of the Dutch door. The walls on either side had been fitted with large, fixed glass panes so that the attractive array of bottles within could be seen from the outside.
At the moment, however, it was anything but attractive. The glass pane on the port side had been shattered — shards lay everywhere underfoot — and two of the glass shelves had come down in fragments, their bottles — those that hadn’t been broken — rolling around on the floor. The air reeked of whiskey and beer. In front of this enclosure stood Scofield, openmouthed and frozen in place, his towel clutched to his chest with both hands. His eyes popping, he was staring at the shaft of a heavy, still-vibrating six-foot-long spear that had buried its point in a half-empty vodka carton inside the little room, nailing the carton to the floor. Given where the chalk-white Scofield was standing, it couldn’t have missed him by more than a foot.
The three others ran up to him. “Arden, are you all right?” Gideon asked.
Scofield just stood there quaking; rippling shudders wrenched him all the way down to his legs.
John shook him roughly by the shoulder. “Are you hurt? What the hell happened?”
That brought him around, at least to the point at which he could speak, if not yet in full sentences, then in a torrent of disconnected chips and chunks of speech, from which at least some sense could be made. “Someone… I was just, just standing… that, that spear, it, it…”
It didn’t take long for them to understand that the obvious had happened. Someone had hurled a spear at the Adelita. Scofield had been watching the dolphins, his back to the nearby shore. He had seen nothing, heard nothing, when suddenly, next to him, the window exploded and the spear came crashing through, showering him with glass shards. The wooden shaft had actually brushed him in passing. Look, you could see the abrasion on the back of his right hand. And see the little splinters of glass stuck in his arm? He had almost been killed! But miraculously the point had passed him by. If it had been even six inches to the left…
“Come along, now, Arden,” Maggie Gray said in her teacherly, dismissive, Our Miss Brooks tone, taking his other arm. With some of the others, she had come to see what the clatter had been about. “Let’s go and sit you down in the dining room. I’ll get the splinters out of your arm. You’ve got some in your hair too.”
“Don’t patronize me, dammit,” he snapped at her, shaking his arm loose, but then, mumbling, let himself be led away, “Oh, hell, I’m sorry, Maggie… . It was just so… I mean, if I’d been standing…”
John had been peering keenly at the shore, seeking out some movement, some glimpse of the thrower, but there was nothing; no stirring fronds, no flash of a brown body retreating into the undergrowth. He sighed and turned to Gideon. “So there aren’t any more headhunters, huh? Well, that’s sure a relief. They just spear you now.”
Gideon shrugged. “What do I know?”
Vargas, looking about as distraught as a human being could possibly be, waved helplessly at the mess in the bar and shook his fist at the shore. “Goddamn Indians, what have they got against my poor Adelita? Did I ever hurt them?”
“You mean this kind of thing has happened to you before?” John asked. “They throw spears at passing boats? It’s just something that happens?”
“No, no, it never happen to me before. I never hear that it happen to anyone.” He shook his head in distress. “Chato, where the hell are you? Bring a mop! Look at that window! Look at that bottles! What I’m supposed to do now?” The excitement was playing havoc with his English.
The question was presumably moot, but John answered anyway. “Well, first off, Captain,” he said mildly, “I’d suggest you get us a little further away from the shore.”
The suggestion snapped Vargas out of mourning his lost supplies and he ran clumsily toward the wheelhouse, shouting in Spanish. “Hulbert, quick, put us in the central channel, what are you waiting for? Hurry up, don’t waste any time… mother of God…”
NINE
ALTHOUGH the tip of the spear was still hidden from sight in the vodka carton, Gideon knew what it was. He had seen a pair of them in the South American collection of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. It was called a shotgun lance, used by several Indian groups in the Amazon basin. It was made by taking the barrel from a worn-out rifle or shotgun, pounding its base into a point, and then sticking a wooden shaft, honed to the diameter needed for a snug fit, into the muzzle end. It was, he knew, a man-killing spear (as opposed to the lighter ones used for hunting animals). But he thought he’d read somewhere that they had gone out of use by the 1950s, by which time new firearms had become more freely available. So how did… ?
Maggie stuck her head out of the dining room. “Arden could really use a drink. Scotch.” The door popped briefly open again almost before she’d closed it, and once again her head poked out, one eyebrow raised. “For that matter, my dears, so could I.”
“I’ll get them,” Gideon said, stepping gingerly through the space where the window had been. “Looks like the bar’s open early today, anyway.”
IN the dining room he found Maggie standing over Scofield and meticulously plucking bits of glass from his crew cut, which she then laid on some paper towels that had been spread out on the table. Scofield grabbed for his drink so convulsively that he spilled half of it. The other half went down his gullet in a single swallow, followed by a grateful sigh. Maggie, on the other hand, sipped primly, then went back to exploring Scofield’s scalp while Scofield, passive and docile, sat motionless. Gideon felt a highly inappropriate bubble of laughter trying to work its way up his throat. The thing was, it was like watching a pair of rhesus monkeys at grooming time.
He managed to stifle the thought, however. “Can I do anything else for you?” he asked.
“No thanks, I’m fine,” Scofield said, and indeed the Scotch seemed to have gone a long way toward restoring him. The ruddy little disks that were natural in his cheeks were coming back. He even tried a feeble little joke. “But I’m beginning to think that becoming an ethnobotanist might not have been such a great career move after all.”
Gideon smiled. “I’ll admit, you’re not having much of a day so far.”
“And it’s not even six o’clock yet,” Maggie dryly observed.
“Say, Doc?” John had opened the dining room door. “Could you come on out when you have a minute?”
His overdone nonchalance (John wasn’t much of a dissembler) made it clear that it was something important, and Gideon went out to join him. Most if not all the others were there now, gathered around the smashed bar, gabbling away and gesturing at the spear, which had been pulled from the floor and laid on one of the salon tables.
John pointed at its front end, which had formerly been hidden by the vodka carton. “Is that thing what I think it is?” he asked soberly.
Gideon bent to examine it. The others quieted down, watching. Attached to the base of the metal spear point by a length of twisted fiber was a sinister, misshapen object a little bigger than his fist.
“Ugh,” he said. “I hate these.”
Looking up at him was a distorted, monkeylike, yellowish-brown face made even creepier by the rim of beautiful, combed chestnut hair that framed it. A dangling length of string had sewn each eye shut, and three more knotted strands threaded through the grotesquely distorted lips. The nose too had been stretched to impossible proportions.
Gideon gingerly turned it to peer into the nostrils. He pressed a finger against the closed eyes. He m
oved the long hair aside to study the ears. Finally, he put it down.
“No,” he said.
It had been several minutes since John had asked the question and people looked confused.
Phil spoke for them. “No, what?”
“No, it’s not what John thinks it is.”
John’s eyebrows shot up. “It’s not a shrunken head?”
“It’s not a shrunken human head, which is what I presume you meant.”
“What the hell is it, then? A monkey head?” He frowned. “Do monkeys have eyebrows?”
“Not so to speak, no, but it’s not even that. It’s not a head at all. This is a tourist item. They make them from monkey skin or goatskin, and carve them and mold them to look like this, and add a little hair where they need to.”
“It’s true,” Vargas said. “You can buy such things in Iquitos.”
“You can buy them on eBay,” Gideon said.
All the same, Duayne Osterhout was intrigued. “But it looks so… Why are you so sure it isn’t human?”
“Oh, a lot of things,” Gideon said. “This is a pretty good one, as they go, but there are some things that are almost impossible to duplicate in a fake head.” He turned the head upside down. “For one thing, as you see, where’s the neck opening? But, more important — there’s no nasal hair.”
“If it was real, it would have nose hair?”
“Oh yes. I’m talking about the bristly little things in the nostrils — they act as filters — that everybody has. They stay right there even when a head has been shrunk. To fake them, you’d have to plant each one separately, which would take a long time, and even then it’d be hard to make them look authentic. But since just about nobody knows to look for them, they don’t bother with it. And then, these threads from the eyes, from the lips — they’re obviously commercial twine, the kind you can buy at the local hardware store, not the kind you get from slicing palm fronds into narrow slivers and twirling them into a cord. And the ears…” He pushed back the hair. “Human ears are very intricately shaped, very difficult to reproduce convincingly. You can see how crude these are. That’s why these things always have so much hair hiding them.”