Orinoco

by Dan Pollock

  Or perhaps, Chucho thought, with less current and a little more depth ahead, they might try running the motor at low speed, while Angel squatted in the bow with the long paddle to push them off submerged rocks. But for the moment, they clearly needed all three men grunting in the rapids, while the lovely señorita rode amidships like a princess. Besides, it was amusing to see old Oscar slipping and stumbling over the moss-slick boulders and screeching like a macaw every time he went under.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  It was a first for Sam, flying so close to Auyán-Tepui without venturing in for a glimpse of Angel Falls. Yet so imperative was the business at hand that this thought scarcely crossed his mind. The sheer-sided “Lost World” plateau this morning was no more to him than a gigantic guidepost, allowing him to follow the Río Kukurital along the tepui’s western base. He need only keep his six-place Cessna chasing that quicksilver thread down there through the broccoli-topped greenery, and eventually he’d come to the Kamarata Valley. Then he’d hang a sharp left and head for the Capuchin Mission airstrip.

  The three cabin passengers were equally subdued, with the twin 260-horsepower engines providing an ominous, double-bass accompaniment to their separate preoccupations. D.W., beside Sam, showed a grim-visaged profile, his mirrored lenses catching the sun-fire that, moments ago, had cleared the rim of Auyán-Tepui off to their left. In the two seats behind, Enrico Tosto studied last night’s box scores from Venezuela’s winter baseball league; while Bernardo had his nose mashed against plexiglass, as he saw, for the first time in his young life, his country’s ancient island-mesas rising out of oceanic jungles and grasslands.

  Sam could guess at one added component to D.W.’s anguish. Besides agonizing over his daughter, the man must now be endlessly second-guessing himself. Should he have remained captive in his command-post penthouse, the pawn of the security guys, waiting for that phone call and relying on their hardball tactics to save Jacqueline? Was he crazy to be going off on this wild-goose flight with a man whose erratic behavior and corporate irresponsibility he’d just denounced to the Proteus board? So long as Jacqueline’s fate remained unknown, Sam knew, D.W. would find no correct answers to his questions. And if the outcome proved tragic, his guilt would be unending.

  Before taking off from the ranch at sunrise, D.W. had phoned his hotel and been yelled at, apparently, by no less than Colonel Acosta, Siso’s superior in the security police. D.W. told Sam afterward that he’d refused to divulge his whereabouts, but since the connection had lasted for at least a minute, it was possible the call had been traced to the ranch.

  Sam agreed. And he decided not to mention that his flight plan had been filed with the civil aeronautics agency in Ciudad Bolívar. Failure to do so could cause big problems for Enrico and the ranch, as well as himself. But, obviously, if the federales made a few phone calls and deductions, they’d know where D.W. was and where he was likely to be going.

  The purpose for D.W.’s call, of course, had not been to antagonize the security chief. He’d called to learn of any overnight developments. But there had been no overnight developments, or so Colonel Acosta had flatly informed him. And when D.W. had requested an itemized progress report, Acosta had replied that if D.W. wanted to stay informed on the investigation, he should get his ass back to the hotel. D.W. then repeated his request for information, upping the volume and adding career threats. In the end, all he got for his efforts was the vaguest sort of rundown.

  An expanded search area was being worked from the air by planes and helicopters, on the ground by boats and cars, even by foot patrol around parts of Guri Lake. Law-enforcement agencies nationwide, meanwhile, were still beating the urban bushes to locate Oscar Azarias Rivilla, but so far had gathered only more sordid details for his criminal resumé.

  In short, D.W. learned little that he and Sam and Enrico hadn’t already gotten from the early a.m. Venevisión and CNN news roundups at the ranch. Again and again, they had seen Oscar’s hangdog mugshot dealt out beside smiling photos of the “beautiful American heiress” and her “industrialist father,” followed by graphic lists of Proteus’ extensive holdings superimposed over a map of Venezuela. And there were references to the two notorious Carloses in Oscar’s criminal past—the Jackal and Lehder, the legendary terrorist and the ex-Medellin drug kingpin serving life plus 135 years in a U.S. federal pen. There were frequent appeals for information and, finally, with facts hard to come by, a lot of dire speculation. Obviously mercy was not to be expected from such a hardened criminal. But authorities so far were refusing to comment on what, if any, demands had been made...

  Sam had walked into the den after filing his flight plan and found D.W. transfixed by one of these ghastly bulletins. So Sam had switched off the set and started hustling him and the others out to the Cessna.

  Better to do anything, even if it proved fruitless, than wallow in impotence. An hour flight down, maybe a couple of hours there, then an hour back, Sam figured. Afterward he and D.W. could sit down and weigh the options remaining. Meanwhile, with almost no hope of its being needed, D.W. was taking along the Avensa zipper bag bloated with so-far-unsolicited ransom—close to a million dollars in U.S. hundreds and Venezuelan “Orchids,” five-hundred-bolívar notes. As long he was going, he might as well go prepared to buy his daughter back.

  For D.W.’s sake and his own, Sam tried continually to turn off his own feelings. He could function tolerably with the situation as a steady, abstracted heartache. But the instant he let himself think personally about Jake—out there somewhere, in the hands of that predatory old man—it was like getting a paralyzing injection of rage and despair.

  At the moment, for instance, Sam had just recalled his single encounter with the kidnapper. It was that afternoon on Cerro Calvario when he and Jake had gone riding, and he’d flushed Oscar from behind the rocks. The old man had been spying on them through his binoculars. And as now Sam knew, not just spying, but stalking his future prey. If only Sam had had his Winchester Model 70 scabbarded alongside the saddlehorn that afternoon. Just shoulder the butt, center the bastard’s head in the crosshairs and squeeze the fucking trigger. Adiós, scumbag! A life sentence in a Venezuelan jail would be a sweet price to pay.

  While savoring this impossible vengeance-in-hindsight, Sam was unaware that all the lines of his long face had drawn tight. Nor did he realize that the verdant panorama into which he flew was for the moment veiled behind a red mist.

  *

  They came in from the southwest, watching the Kamarata Valley floor conform with their gradual descent into grasslands, gallery forests and a lacework of verdure-fringed tributaries radiating from a medial river, the Río Akanan. The distant, flat-topped peaks studding the horizon ahead and to their right remained in lavender remoteness. But on their left, the striated walls of Auyán-Tepui, a long, irregular march of majestically eroded battlements, lifted high above them now into the day’s early brilliance.

  Farther on, a clearing appeared suddenly on the left bank of the Akanan. A moment later they saw the runway—a slender, asphalted scar in the savanna—and a scattering of palm-thatched structures that made up the Kamarata Mission and adjacent native village. Then, with a negligible bounce, they were down, and D.W could let go of that incremental anxiety about his own safety. The controlling dread, having to do with his lost child, remained intact.

  A moment later they were rolling off the pocked asphalt and bouncing along a dirt taxiway toward several bronze-skinned, barefoot young men in shorts and bright bathing suits, standing beside a rusty wheelbarrow. One of the delegation, D.W. saw, was shaking an admonitory finger at them. Sam responded by spinning the Cessna’s nose and, when the finger widened to a flat palm, coming to an abrupt stop.

  The welcoming committee seemed perplexed when D.W. declined to deposit his flight bag in their wheelbarrow. Enrico and Bernardo, next off and each shouldering only a light daypack, also bypassed the luggage service. Once the propellers had spun down and everything inside was switched o
ff, Sam came down the retractable steps, handing the nearest man the chocks. He spoke briefly to the other Indians in Spanish, pointing at the cockpit, then at his watch, and D.W. saw their expressions brighten, their faith in humanity apparently restored.

  D.W. was relieved to be on the ground, even though the hard-packed clay was already scorching through the soles of his chukka boots. But his spirits were not lifted by the encircling grandeur or the dazzling-hot clarity of the morning sky. On the contrary, as the four visitors fell in behind the Kamarakotas trundling their empty wheelbarrow on a well-worn path toward a nearby cluster of huts, D.W. found himself again thinking of last night’s thunderstorm. He tried not to envision Jacqueline having been out in it, exposed to its full fury, but such images insinuated themselves again and again into his embattled mind.

  Continuing this self-flagellation, D.W. kept pace with the others, toting his blue bag and striding purposefully, while feeling completely powerless in this maximum crisis of his life. It was to Samuel now that he must look for leadership—just to keep himself plodding on, step after step, through this sun-blasted valley.

  *

  The path from the airstrip widened out into the main street of the Kamarakota settlement, which was being patrolled by several roosters and a tan, shifty-looking dog. Spaced out along this and radial avenues of sun-baked earth were traditional Indian churuatas of adobe brick painted white or ocher with palm-thatched roofs. Variety was served in floor plan—round, oval, rectangular—and roof design—conical, peaked, curbed, even mansard-hipped. In the village center was what Sam took to be either a communal dwelling or meeting house, a large circular structure topped by thirty-foot-tall conical thatching.

  Sam followed Enrico toward its deep-shadowed doorway now, pausing under the shaded overhang to inspect an ocelot curled up in a small chicken-wire cage. Then they went inside, adjusting their vision to the obscurity. A plump girl got up from a bench and waddled forward, a baby straddling her hip. Enrico asked directions to the Kamarata Mission school, while Sam scanned the earth-floored, unpartitioned interior. He estimated its diameter to be at least fifty feet. A noose of daylight sliced through a gap above the mud-brick walls and palm-thatched eaves. Furled hammocks hung between poles. At long wooden tables a half-dozen women and girls worked, braiding fibers, stringing beads, weaving baskets. But the girl was already leading Enrico back outside. In the sudden sun, her exoticism was striking. Sam thought she looked like a Spanish-mulatto-Indian blend. She was pointing down the road toward a distant, elongated adobe structure shaded by moriche palms.

  “Escuela es allí,” she was saying.

  They thanked her and started toward it. Midway there, the rough track skirted a hardpan campo de futbol with painted goalposts and a game in spirited progress. The Mission school was apparently in recess, since the players were mostly small boys, with one or two larger players. It could have been a soccer game in any Caracas barrio, Sam judged. The boys wore shorts or cut-off jeans, and several had T-shirts blazoned with imported pop-culture icons. Among the sideline onlookers Sam saw pirated shirt-likenesses of such mythic heroes as Bart Simpson, Tortugas Ninjas, Michael Jordan and the ubiquitous Mickey. Several boys, possessors of broad brown feet that could scale trees or walk all day over jungle trails, plainly coveted Bernardo’s psychedelic high-tops, which looked to Samuel only slightly less cumbersome than ski boots.

  “Where’s your padre?” Enrico was asking one of the sideliners.

  “Over there.”

  The boy pointed midfield at a thin, spectacled man in maroon shorts, who was apparently refereeing the game. But when the ball bounded near, the man angled quickly after it, stopped it with his foot, then nudged it frantically along ahead of him. A pursuing chorus screamed “Padre!” and “Uribe!” The man eluded several defenders before tripping and tumbling on the hardpan. By the time he scrambled back up, the ball had been kicked diagonally far across the field.

  Enrico called out and motioned to him. A moment later, the man in maroon in shorts had walked over to them, a bony, middle-aged man with thinning fair hair. He was still out of breath, perspiring heavily and wiping his glasses with a corner of soggy T-shirt. Beneath the baggy shorts, his knobby knees were scraped raw. But the most noticeable thing about this Father Uribe was a gold-inlayed smile that knotted his cheeks, squinched his blue eyes inside a mask of wrinkles and somehow transformed his homely features into unaffected radiance.

  But Enrico hesitated to shake his hand, and the Capuchin friar was puzzled—till he glanced down and discovered his right palm, like his kneecaps, was abraded and bleeding from his spill. His smile turned sheepish then, and he wiped the wounded hand on his shorts.

  Sam left the introductions to Enrico. The moment it was explained that D.W. understood almost no Spanish, Father Uribe switched to English:

  “I hope my English will be good enough to answer your questions then. I do try to keep my hand in, as they say, rereading all my Hornblower novels, and of course listening to the Beeb and Fats Waller records. I’m very ‘up’ on old nautical terms and Harlem slang. Now, gentlemen, if you don’t mind, I’m afraid the rectory is being rethatched this morning. But perhaps this will serve.”

  Only a few strides from the playing field, he led them into the shade of a “caney,” a crude shelter made of four corner poles supporting a palm-woven roof. Uribe chased a large rooster outside the shaded perimeter, then gestured at a long bench. It was surprisingly cool inside, and cooler yet when a Kamarakota boy trotted in with an ice tub studded with cans of Polar and Coke. When they all grabbed beers, even Bernardo, Father Uribe decided to do likewise.

  After a long swallow, Sam launched into their morning’s business. The priest was appropriately distressed. He had no television, but had heard a bulletin about the kidnapping on the radio. Enrico unzipped his daypack and passed out the Polaroids of Chucho and Angel. Uribe didn’t recognize the faces.

  “But I wouldn’t, don’t you see? I was only transferred to this Mission last year. But Padre Tomas would know them, if they’re from here.”

  A few minutes later, they were joined by two older men—a squat, leathery, baseball-capped Kamarakota with a soft handshake; and Padre Tomás, a wizened, white-bearded man in brown Capuchin robes and sandals, who pumped hands vigorously all around. Uribe summarized the reason for the strangers’ visit, as Enrico handed them the Polaroids. Both men reacted instantly to the faces, chattering together in the Pemón language—plus a little Spanish and lot of gesturing. All this eventually got digested and translated, first into Spanish by Tomás, then into English by Uribe.

  There had been a bit of scandal five years earlier. The big one—Angel was his mission name—had lain with a forbidden woman—a fifteen-year-old girl who also happened to be his “unlawful cousin,” the daughter of his father’s brother. Father Uribe explained that, among many indigenous tribes, the children of two brothers, or of two sisters, were not permitted to mate. A traditional duel with nabruxi clubs had ensued. Angel had hit his opponent on the skull and fled into the bush, thinking he had killed him. Angel’s half-brother, Chucho—the smaller one—had run after him.

  The brothers had apparently hidden up in the Kavak caves, but a week later were discovered lower down in the canyon. They fled again, this time by curiara down the Río Kukurital all the way to Canaima Camp. The last the old Kamarakota had heard of the brothers, they’d joined the comunidades indigenas there, but run away again after more trouble with the Canaima authorities.

  “Could they tell us more about these caves?” Sam asked.

  Kavak Canyon, they learned, had been carved out of the southern tip of Auyán-Tepui by the Kavak River, which was tributary to both the Akanan and Kukurital. Its canyon narrowed finally to a long, constricted passage between towering rock walls, then opened into a cul-de-sac grotto—La Cueva, the Cave. This grotto was also the basin for a spectacular waterfall—one of the Rió Kavak’s long leaps from the heights of Auyán-Tepui.

  According to leg
end, a great Kamarakota chief, fleeing a massacre by a rival tribe, had sought refuge in the grotto. His enemies had failed to find the way in, and the chief was spared. His deliverance was attributed to divine intervention, and ever since La Cueva had been considered sacred to the Kamarakota.

  The old Indian squinted expectantly from under his cap, but there were no further questions. After they’d thanked him and Padre Tomás for their help, D.W. turned to Uribe to ask another favor. Was there any way he could contact the Hotel Inter-Continental Guayana and check in with the police? The gangly priest assured him that could be accomplished with the mission’s radio and led off toward the schoolhouse. Perhaps, he said, they could already see the sapling-mounted antenna behind the thatched structure. The wire connected to a hundred-watt base station transceiver in an alcove beside the school’s kitchen.

  While D.W. was being patched through, Sam waited outside with Enrico and Bernardo in the shade of the overhang. He listened to the wind rustling the loose thatch of the eaves. Aside from that, a humming silence prevailed, as the gathering heat slowed activity. Even the futbol field had fallen quiet now. Westward across the valley, the quartzite-slabbed ramparts of Auyán-Tepui seemed to sparkle and vibrate with reflected light.

  Was she over there, Sam wondered, up in Kavak or some other hiding place? Or was she a hundred, even five hundred miles away? Unfortunately, aside from the interesting background information they’d just uncovered on the Indian brothers, there was no reason to suppose Jacqueline might be near. And though Sam tuned himself now to the vast silence, he received no mystic message either. Perhaps Father Uribe could consult with the tribal shaman for such auguries.

  “Sam, look.”

  Enrico pointed with his cigarette. Hustling up the path came Padre Tomás, holding his cassock skirts, followed by the old Indian in the baseball cap.