He dropped a succulent piece of steak into his mouth and sat back. The agreeable hum of the air conditioning comforted him and he closed his eyes for ten minutes.
They came into Iquitos in a tumble of dust just under an hour later. Garcia drove and Isaacs, who had been assisting Dollie in his basement when they got the call earlier, was sitting beside his boss like a loyal guard dog.
“You send that ole boy back home before we left?” Dollie asked him, lowering his sunglasses.
“Yes I did, boss.”
“How was he feeling about it all when he lit off?”
Isaacs rubbed his chin in contemplation, looking for the right words. “I’d say contrite and grateful would describe his outlook.”
Dollie didn’t have to join in on torture sessions as he had done that morning, but he made a conscious effort to do so from time to time. He didn’t really care for the violence, but it showed those working for him that he was not to be fucked with. This time it had been a local businessman who had been a bit too vocal about his ill feeling toward Dollie and Emerald Earth.
“Well, I’m sure his remaining eye will see a lot clearer now.” Dollie remarked.
The car pulled up outside a peeling colonial building to the north of town. Dollie jumped out and studied the duck-egg-blue walls and ornate, pink fretwork. He breathed the warm moist air in steadily as Garcia and Isaacs checked the doorways. Inside, they passed two guards and went through a dark corridor which smelled sour and stuffy.
The Focus Room was behind a heavy steel door opened by a keypad, but was much less dramatic-looking than its name suggested. The ground floor of the building had been knocked out for the most part and rebuilt. The long, narrow room was lit with stark sodium lighting at the front. Two banks of Mackintosh computers ran along desks against the walls. Half of them were manned by young men. About halfway down, the light softened and then faded out completely. A young Peruvian man in jeans and a Houston Oilers T-shirt came out of the gloom to meet the three men. He looked tired.
“Is he ready, Raphael?” asked Dollie abruptly.
“Yes.” The man skipped to stay up with Dollie as he marched past. “After the mandatory six hours he started to question me about the black–”
“What did he ask?”
“What did I know about it, that sort of thing.”
Dollie stopped behind the large digital projector, lit from above by tiny spotlights. He rolled his hand in front of him. “And?”
“After three more hours, he broke. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing but … you know best.”
“Damn straight I do.” Dollie looked up at the film being projected onto the back wall. The image was of a poorly lit, ramshackle room. There were cabinets bursting with books against the walls. A wooden table sat in the centre of the room with an easel on it. Unfinished paintings littered the floor. A man was sitting on the floor beside the table, running his fingers through the wet paint on a canvass. He spoke without looking up. “Here comes Dollie … Dollie, Dollie, Dollie.”
“How do you know about the black butterfly, Hawthorne?” asked Dollie.
Hawthorne looked up, but not at the men; he couldn’t see them. “I told that little shit! Now get me out of here!” he demanded.
“I want to hear it from you and then you can go. I swear on that.”
Hawthorne got to his feet unsteadily, sucked some paint from his fingers and then spat it on the floor in disgust. “I don’t understand why I can’t get out of my own flat.” His voice rose and fell in a weary despair. “The doors don’t open, the windows won’t break …”
“Tell me or you’ll never get out,” Dollie said flatly.
Hawthorne began to wander his room aimlessly, kicking at objects as he spoke. “I overheard something you said once, that’s all.”
“When?”
“A few weeks ago.”
“Where?”
“There was a party at your house. I don’t know what it was for.”
Dollie sighed. “First off, you wouldn’t get no invite to any occasion of mine. Second, I don’t talk about my business at no God damn parties … not ever!”
“But you did. This fellow walked away from the guests with you, right out to the fence of your property. I was there in the trees. I’d been there–”
“Bullshit!”
“–all day.”
“What the hell for?”
“Because I’m nosey. I knew you were having a party and I couldn’t help myself. You were whispering, but I’ve got this voice amplifier, handy for snooping. I couldn’t believe it at first, but the more I researched the myth afterwards …” Hawthorne sighed. “I just wanted a bit of info I could make some money on.”
Dollie looked away and his fists clenched and unclenched rhythmically. He turned back to the man projected onto the wall. “Who did you tell?”
Hawthorne sat down. “Nobody, I swear.”
“You must have … a secret like that; it’s too big to hold on to for long. Who did you tell?”
“You swore you’d let me go if I told you how I knew.”
“I lied, shit for brains!” Dollie’s words were thick and poisonous, like spilt axle grease. “You will never leave that room.”
The Englishman looked up, his eyes spinning in terror. “I’ll break out,” he said doubtfully.
“You already tried that, remember?”
Hawthorne laughed and threw his glance across the room at one of the oil lamps. “I’ll burn this place. You’ll get nothing more from me … do you hear me?” His voice rose to a cracked scream.
There was no movement from Dollie, just his words, implacable, relentless, and logical. “Last year, I had photographs taken of all my employees. Do you remember that? That camera’s quite something. It doesn’t record an image of you; it takes a part of you.”
The air in the room was electric now. The young projectionist, even Garcia and Isaacs, they were all shifting a little uneasily. Dollie was doing what nobody had ever been cruel enough to do before: explaining the fine detail of a predicament too terrible to contemplate, to the victim himself.
“That part of you is then fed into this clever machine and here you are. The real Hawthorne is over yonder, on the other side of town. He might be feeling a mite sickly tonight cuz of what’s happening here, but he won’t know why. He’s lucky; he can and will die soon enough. You cannot; you’re just a slice of his soul that we can question forever.” Dollie turned from the man’s sobbing. He addressed the projectionist. “I’ll be back in the a.m. and I want names.”
They came back next morning at seven. The projectionist Raphael was slumped in a recliner by the entrance to the Focus Room. He was nursing a coffee. He stood up and rubbed his stubble when Dollie walked in.
“Lucito Morales, Howard Arizapana, Capac Huevo, Eduardo Castaneda and Moises Quispé,” he said wearily, reading from a crumpled piece of paper.
“Who?”
“They are butterfly boys. Hawthorne’s got a – had a – thing for boys.”
“Anybody else?”
“Nobody.”
“You’re sure.”
“Positive. Here are the recordings of the night’s interview.” He handed over a disc, which Dollie gave to Isaacs. “Check it out.”
“Shall we go fetch these kids?” Isaacs asked.
“No … they’re no threat, but we might put a watch on them and see where it takes us.”
As they left the building, Dollie saw a figure across the road holding something in the air above his head. The sunlight flashed in his eyes and he lifted his hand quickly.
“Who was that?” The figure, a boy, he thought, had disappeared.
Isaacs looked across the road. “I didn’t see–”
“Go, you idiots!”
By the time they came back, it was raining. Dollie watched them shrugging through it as they crossed the road. “You lost him.”
“Didn’t even see him,” said Garcia, and Dollie slapped him across the face hard.
“If brains were leather, you wouldn’t have enough to saddle a flea.”
“What do you want us to do?” Garcia asked sheepishly.
Dollie blew a sigh. “Nothing I guess.”
Isaacs opened the passenger door of the four by four and waited.
“That’s weird; it’s raining quite hard but the sun’s still out,” commented Isaacs. Dollie looked to the blue vault above him. “I guess the devil’s beating his wife again.”
That afternoon, Raphael awoke from a fitful sleep. He checked his watch and bleary-eyed, stumbled from his sweaty flat just off the Plaza de Armas and made his way to the east of the city. He stopped at a small roadside cafe on the way and ordered caldo de gallina. As he spooned the soup, his eyes, hidden behind mirrored sunglasses, carefully scanned the busy street. Revitalised by his late breakfast, he moved on again. He took a long, circuitous route and moved in fits and starts, sometimes loitering at shops, at other times ducking down alleys and waiting in the shadows thrown beneath rusting balconies.
The two men were waiting in a disused railway station in the Pevas district. Dogs scattered as Raphael came onto the platform, skipping away through muddy puddles and disappearing into the building’s carcass through broken doorways. The boy with the holdall was another young Mestizo, a close friend of Raphael’s. He got to his feet and they shook hands.
“Did you catch him, Daniel?”
The boy smiled broadly. “I did.”
“Him alone and not the bodyguards?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve checked?”
“Of course.”
Raphael clapped him on the back. “Well done! Thank you! Well done!” He began to laugh and the other boy joined in, relief and excitement overtaking them for a moment. “I can’t wait to ruin that gringo bastard.”
The old man, who had been sitting quietly, suddenly spoke in Yagua.
“What did he say?” asked Raphael.
“He is asking when you can interrogate Dollie.”
Raphael shrugged. “It will have to be soon. They take pictures of all of us, once every three months, for interrogation, to check our loyalty.”
Daniel whistled quietly. “A little piece of your soul every time? You paid a high price for this brother.”
Raphael’s eyes filled up for a moment and then he composed himself. “It’s true I have, but it was the only way.”
“When is the next check?”
“Mine will be in six weeks. I will question him before then and disappear,” he tried a smile again but it wouldn’t surface.
The Yagua chief stood up. His grass skirt rustled as he came over. He spoke again at length.
“He says he needs to know Dollie’s routine and Dollie’s knowledge of the black butterfly. Also, any codes or passwords for his house at Santa Clara … anything you can get.”
Raphael looked at the old man seriously. “Tell him I will meet him here in one month at the same time and he must take me with him into the jungle. It’s the only place I might be safe.”
Daniel handed over the holdall with the camera in it.
“How did you get this thing out of there anyway?”
“It’s a big, old building. The brickwork is rotten at the rear and I broke a hole in it, just enough to squeeze the camera through. Their arrogance is a weakness; all that security out front but nothing at the back.”
Daniel smiled in undisguised admiration. “What would you have done if they had needed the camera yesterday?”
“I would have run … and been caught.” Raphael swallowed hard and left without another word.
* * *
… “Stop right there, Quispé! Do you hear me?”
Moises felt his shoulder being shaken and lifted his head. He turned in his chair, suddenly aware of how his eyes burned, how dry his mouth was from all the talking and the pulse of deep pain from the ruin of his left hand.
Lyman Dollie was already up and standing by the door, whispering urgently to Garcia and Isaacs. The two men took their orders and left the hut quickly. Wendell got up and spoke to Dollie quietly for a few moments. The Texan shook his head as though he didn’t want to hear the other man’s words.
“This here changes everything,” he muttered angrily as he turned back to Moises. He jabbed his finger at the butterfly. “How can that be on there, boy? How?”
“I don’t know. Did it happen this way?” Moises asked. His head was banging.
“As far as I can recollect, and just thinking about what it could mean makes me as nervous as a whore in a church.” The Texan placed the voice recorder on the table and sat beside the boy. “It confirms that all the stories are true, I mean, don’t it?”
“Maybe.”
Dollie kicked Moises’s leg. “You better not be holding out on me or I’ll drive you to hell myself and pay for extras.”
Moises became aware of some activity outside his hut. He could hear orders being given in measured voices. Beams of harsh, white light passed over the hut, slicing the small building into cool strips as they came through the wooden slats. Garcia and Isaacs came back and started to move the microscope carefully from the table. Moises instinctively moved to stop them and Garcia grabbed his right hand and slapped the stump of his little finger against the table top. A searing flash shot through his fingers and up into his lower arm, pulsing like an electric eel trapped between the bones. He bent over and the world grew vast and shrank away as he blew through the spikes of pain. Dollie handed Moises a cloth and watched him wipe his face. The butterfly was taken from the hut.
“Where are we going?” Moises asked.
“Back to my hacienda; you’ll read through the rest of the stories there.”
“I won’t do it.”
Dollie got up and Moises flinched. The big man stood in front of him staring at the hut floor, a lugubrious look on his face. “You will,” he said absently. “Besides, don’t you want to see Hawthorne again?”
Moises doubted his ears. “Not in this way.”
“It’s the only way you got since I killed him.”
“Mama selva, dame fuerza!”
“Quit saying that, it’s aggravating. First off it was Hawthorne, then you, and now this Raphael. He did go missing as well … Jesus!”
Dollie moved to the door, opened it and turned to glare at Moises. Moises got up slowly and walked outside. Wendell followed him. Two large motorboats sat purring at the water’s edge. Powerful arc lights swung across the water in front of them, tearing strips out of the night. Wherever they lingered, insects boiled in the white beams. The Texan stopped Moises a few feet from the house. “Sit here a piece, we ain’t quite ready.”
Moises crossed his legs on the cold, hard mud of the street and cradled his damaged arm with his good one. A faint breeze rippled his shirt and brought goose bumps up on his bare legs. He ignored the activity around him and focussed on the full moon, hanging above them all like a huge, silver eye staring out of the void. Thousands of tiny stars, cold and sharp, twinkled around it. Mama Quilla had always held a strong fascination for him. His father had once told him that she cried tears of silver when sad. These fell to earth and hardened for men to find and treasure. Moises longed to be sitting up there on her serene surface, free from men and the things they demanded of him. And yet now, even she wasn’t free of man’s destructive nature was she? He thought of Gabriella and shivered.
The German, Wendell, came over and sat on the floor next to him. “What makes you pick the stories you read?” he asked, staring off into the darkness.
“I don’t know. I feel a pu
ll and then they appear.”
“Have you ever been to London?”
Moises gave a tired laugh. He felt a strange mixture of pity and disgust for the man sitting next to him. He was feeling new emotions all the time, he realised, and new insights. He gestured towards the sky with his head.
“No, I have not been to the moon either. Hawthorne told me about his trips to London and I watch the movies.”
“Do you have control over the stories?”
“Of course not.”
Wendell stood up. “Come, we are leaving now.”
Dollie ushered Moises into the prow of the second boat a few minutes later and left him with Garcia and Isaacs. Moises sat there shivering, the ceaseless throbbing of his hand and the dense smell of the river making him feel nauseous. He wondered what time it was. In three hours from now they would be in Iquitos, at Dollie’s hacienda. Moises thought about Hawthorne and wet himself, the water warming his thighs briefly.
The deck vibrated as the boat’s engines were throttled up and they pulled out and headed up river. After an hour, Dollie brought Moises some black coffee and a small plate of peacock fish. He sat beside Moises sipping meditatively, as the boy bolted down the raw fillets and tipped the lemon juice into his parched mouth. The earthy taste of the fish brought back memories of those rare, special days when his father would allow Moises to come fishing with him and Moises’s older brother, Mayta. He put the plate down and clasped the cup in both hands, taking quick gulps, wincing at the heat. Afterwards, he felt a little better, although his hand pulsed intermittently with a wild pain, despite a second injection given by Isaacs when they boarded the boat.
The Dreams of the Black Butterfly Page 15