by Angela Hunt
“I did not know what they were . . . until Ya-ree told me.”
“He told you all of this—just as you related it to me?”
“Si, el doctor. He told me everything I have told you.”
Michael sat silently for a moment, digesting the details of the dying man’s story. For a patient exhibiting dementia, the tale had a surprising coherence. Most dementia patients had trouble recalling a progressive timeline. But if the story were even partly true. . .
He leaned back in his chair, folding his hands as he contemplated the possible significance of such a story. Supposedly “lost” Stone Age tribes had been discovered in Brazil; the Yanomani tribe of that nation now lived on thousands of protected acres. He had never heard of lost tribes in Peru, but the vast Amazon had never been fully explored. An unknown tribal group living deep in the jungle probably could remain undisturbed and undiscovered . . . for a while. Eventually, though, the civilized world would encroach upon their territory. In July 2002, Brazil had succeeded in installing radars and sensors to monitor every inch of its 1.9 million square miles of rainforest, so Peru would not be far behind.
He gave Esma an apologetic smile. “I’m sorry if I seem cynical. You warned me the story was incredible.”
She acknowledged his confession with the smallest softening of her eyes. “But he spoke so clearly . . . I believed him. And I believe he does not fear death now. He cared nothing for the priest who came to anoint him. He is committed to this keyba.”
“But what is it?” Standing, Michael moved to the edge of the bed and studied his patient. Apart from the tattoos dotting the man’s face, neck, shoulders, and chest, his skin was nearly unlined, so he could not be much older than forty. Still, forty was a vast age in the jungle.
He glanced up at Esma. “Do you think keyba is a name for his god?”
She looked down, her lashes hiding her eyes. “I do not know. He certainly spoke of the keyba with—how do you say it?—reverencia, reverence.”
“Does the word keyba mean anything in español?”
She shook her head. “Nada.”
“Well, then. A question for an anthropologist . . . if we ever find one in these parts.” Michael moved around the bed, then extended his hand to the clerk. “Muchas gracias, Esma. If the patient were conscious, I am sure Yar-pee would thank you for your kindness.”
A half-smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. “Thank you, Doctor. And his name is Ya-ree.”
As she moved past him and exited the cubicle, Michael stared at his patient and wondered what secrets lay behind his smooth face and hideous markings.
1 APRIL 2003
6:16 P.M.
Alex twirled her fork in a heaping plate of vegetarian spaghetti and half-listened to the conversations swirling around the dining room table. To her right, Caitlyn was entertaining Dr. Baklanov with stories of their last trip to London, while to Alex’s left, Louis Fortier was badgering Lazaro for information about fragrant plants with medicinal purposes. Directly across the table Emma Whitmore, the anthropologist with an avowed fear of heights, sipped from her glass in silence.
A small woman with clipped white hair and startling blue eyes, Emma caught Alex’s eye and smiled. “I must confess, Dr. Pace, I was thrilled to discover Mr. Carlton didn’t expect me to climb trees with the rest of you.” She ran her fingertip around the edge of her glass of powdered limonada. “It’s a real pleasure, though, to be with you on the ground. I rarely have the opportunity to mingle with other researchers when I’m in the field.”
Alex leaned forward to be heard above the other conversations. “What does your work involve?”
The woman tapped her lips with a paper napkin, then tented her hands. “The Yagua, of course. I’ve been visiting the people of Puerto Miguel for fifteen years, working to complete a statistical study on education and children’s health. The infants I weighed at the onset are now having babies of their own.” Her voice grew wistful as her gaze shifted to Lazaro. “Some of them venture out into the larger world; others spend their entire lives in the village. A few of the lucky ones find employment at tourist lodges like this, where they can earn enough to support a household of fourteen or fifteen people. They are happy and usually healthy.” Her eyes grew misty. “Still, though most of my colleagues would be horrified to hear me say so, I can’t help wishing they had more.”
Alex lifted her knife. “I think that’s a very human response, Dr. Whitmore.”
“Call me Emma, please.”
“Only if you’ll call me Alex. Why would your colleagues be horrified by your compassion?”
Emma tilted her head and half-smiled. “Because anthropology is the study of cultures as they are—our job is to study and record, not to effect change. In some ways we’re like photojournalists—we are supposed to observe and report, not stage a scene. But sometimes, especially when I see those darling children, I want to help them. Is that wrong?”
Alex shook her head. “My field is so far removed from yours, I’m afraid all I can offer is simple opinion.”
“And we all know what opinion is worth in science—nothing.” Emma laughed softly. “Well, then. What are you learning in the treetops?”
Alex blew the bangs from her forehead. “How to sweat away ten pounds without getting dehydrated? Seriously—not much at the moment. I’m assisting Dr. Baklanov in his search for new bacteriophages. I’m hoping we can find something that will be able to attack infectious proteins. But it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack.”
The woman’s fine brows flickered. “I can imagine.”
“I’ve been watching the animals, though—particularly the primates.” Alex kept talking as she cut her spaghetti. “Researchers around the globe have noticed scrapie turning up in several species. It’s likely to appear in the jungle sooner or later.”
She wasn’t sure if the word scrapie or the mention of animals threw a wet blanket over the atmosphere, but while she spoke the other conversations at the table faded away. She looked up to find everyone watching her. “Sorry. Is scrapie not a suitable topic for the dinner table?”
Caitlyn shot her a reproving glance, but Baklanov laughed. “This is probably the best place in the world to talk about such things. This is not America, where you erect boundaries around dinner conversations. This is wilderness.” He reached for the pitcher of lemonade. “More drink, anyone?”
Alex put down her knife. “How about the rest of you? Have you noticed animals behaving oddly? Lazaro? You’re probably the best judge of jungle animal behavior.”
The guide squinched his face into a question mark. “What do you mean, señora?”
Alex twirled her spaghetti, trying to keep her face composed in blank lines while she listed the symptoms she might soon be experiencing personally. “The indications I’m looking for would be a general loss of coordination, trembling, difficulty in feeding or swallowing. Some species begin to scrape away their fur—that’s why they called the disease ‘scrapie’ when it first appeared in sheep.”
“Wait a minute.” With narrowed eyes, Louis Fortier waved his fork in her direction. “Are you saying a sheep disease is on its way into the jungle?”
“Could be.” Alex lowered her fork, realizing that she may have inadvertently spoiled dinner for the entire table. She found it hard not to talk about her work, however, when the disease she studied was the disease she carried.
She looked at her Russian friend. “Why don’t you explain crossspecies contamination?”
The Russian cast her a “gee, thanks” look, then spread his hands. “It is simple, really. To use a meteorological metaphor, they say that a butterfly can fan its wings in West Africa and cause a momentary atmospheric disturbance that will send gradually increasing currents across the Atlantic until they hit the United States with hurricane force.”
Caitlyn nodded as she reached for the bowl of fried plantains. “That’s overstated, but probably true.”
Baklanov grinned. “Thank you, little
girl. Yes. Well, the same analogy applies to disease. Suppose a native hunter in west central Africa cuts himself while butchering a monkey. The monkey passes its virus to the hunter, who passes it to his wife, who passes it to their children. The AIDS virus probably began this way. Though it is not spread through casual contact, it can be transferred from one species to another through hunting and butchering.”
“The people here eat monkeys all the time,” Caitlyn announced. “Tito told me.”
Alex looked from her daughter to the anthropologist, whose face had paled in the dim light of the lantern.
“Scrapie has also been known to jump species,” she said, gentling her tone. “Though it is not caused by a virus, but by infectious proteins called prions. Scrapie is actually an encephalopathy.”
“Brain disease,” Caitlyn inserted.
Alex frowned at her daughter. “Yes. There are many different strains of encephalopathy, but all are fatal. Once prions enter an organism, they cause normal proteins to mutate into the misfolded shape of the prion, and this mutation kills brain cells. As a result, the brain becomes spongiform.”
“Like Swiss cheese,” Caitlyn interrupted again, warming to her audience. “Full of holes.”
Alex draped her arm over the back of her daughter’s chair, then tapped on the girl’s shoulder. “Let me tell it, will you?”
Caitlyn shrugged. “Just trying to help, Mom.”
When Alex looked up, she noticed that Lazaro wore an alarmed expression. His hand had flown up to grip the gold crucifix he wore like a talisman around his neck.
“We have no evidence that prions have infected the monkey population here,” she hastened to add, “or any population, for that matter. But in the last decade these diseases struck British cattle in what came to be called mad cow disease. Prions have also been found in cats, dogs, minks, goats, sheep, deer, elk, squirrels . . . and humans, of course.”
Emma leaned forward, her blue eyes wide. “This disease you described—could it possibly be related to kuru?”
Alex nodded. “We know it is.”
Louis Fortier waved his fork at the anthropologist. “If you would be so kind, madame, what is kuru?”
Emma blew out her cheeks. “I’m not sure you want to discuss this at dinner.”
“I’m not squeamish.” The perfumer looked around the table as if to dare anyone to contradict him. “You’re all scientists—except, of course, for la jeune—”
“I’m not squeamish, either,” Caitlyn interrupted. “You can talk about anything in front of me. My mom has never—”
Alex lightly clapped her palm over her daughter’s mouth. “I wouldn’t say you can talk about anything with a child at the table, but Caitlyn has heard of far worse things than kuru.”
Taking Alex’s comment as permission granted, Emma turned to the curious Frenchman. “Kuru is a disease with symptoms similar to those Alex has described. Until recently, the disease was endemic among the Fore tribe in New Guinea, particularly among the women and children. Typically, kuru struck without warning and with great force, causing unsteady movement in the first month, tremors and blurred speech in the second, and complete incapacitation in the third.”
Fortier wagged his brows when she hesitated. “And what is so terrible we cannot discuss at dinner?”
Emma looked down at her half-empty plate. “Researchers found the source of the disease when they began to explore the reason women and children were infected more often than men. The Fore warriors, you see, were the hunters, and rarely shared meat with their wives and offspring. So the women and children found the protein they needed in what became an important ritual: the eating of their dead.”
Fortier gasped in delighted horror. “Quelle horreur! Cannibals!”
Tipping her head back, Emma regarded the perfumer with a prim and forbidding expression. “Not anymore. Researchers convinced the Fore to abandon the practice after they realized the disease was transmitted orally. The women and children had been eating diseased brain tissues, contaminating themselves with the infective agent.”
“Gross!” Caitlyn made a face and tossed her napkin onto the table, but Alex knew she was only playing to her audience. She’d heard all this before.
Alex glanced around the table. “The same thing happened in the British animal industry—farmers had their downer cattle with mad cow disease hauled off to the knackers, who ground everything from the animals’ hooves to bones and placed the resulting mix in products ranging from cattle feed to rose fertilizer. Britain eventually put a halt to the use of infected cattle for these purposes, but the damage had probably already been done. One of the women who died from a prion disease in 1996 had been a vegetarian for eleven years.”
“How is that possible?” Baklanov lifted the question with bushy brows.
“Some strains have long incubation periods,” Alex answered. “And the process of deterioration takes time. Which is why my work is so frustrating—I know someone will eventually find that needle in the haystack, but it’s long, slow work . . . and people are unknowingly being infected with every passing day. I don’t mean to sound like a doomsday prophet, but the little woman next door who breathes in dust from her rose fertilizer is probably just as susceptible as the Brit who eats steak three times a week.”
She dropped her napkin with relief when one of the lodge busboys paused at her shoulder. “Finished, señora?”
“Yes, please.” She waited until he removed her plate, then sent a weary smile around the table. “I don’t know that prion diseases have made their way to the tropics, but we have recorded sporadic cases that appear to occur without cause. Most of my colleagues believe they are the result of happenstance—a one-in-a-million quirk of genetics. I tend to think these patients were infected somewhere, somehow. So if you see any animals acting strangely, please alert me. It could be nothing, but it could also be something important.”
It could save my life.
Emma leaned back as the busboy removed her plate, then she gave Alex a quick, gleaming look. “This is a myth, mind you, but the Indians have spoken of a tribe so isolated that no person living today has ever seen them. They call them the ‘Angry People’ and maintain that the spirits delight in tormenting these people with a shaking disease—an illness that has always sounded to me like kuru.” She looked at Baklanov, who had pulled out his cigarettes, and lifted a brow. “May I?”
“Certainly.” Without hesitation the Russian handed over a cigarette, then flicked his lighter into flame.
“There’s no way to prove the story, of course,” Emma continued, holding her cigarette to the lighter. “Though the implication of kuru interested me, I’ve always thought the Angry People were a Yagua version of the American boogeyman—something with which parents can intimidate misbehaving children.”
“That’s not right.” Caitlyn folded her arms and spoke with authority. “Parents should not lie to their kids.”
“Perhaps they weren’t lying, dear.” Alex shifted her attention back to the anthropologist. “Were the Angry People supposed to be cannibals?”
“Indubitably.” Emma drew deeply on her cigarette, then exhaled twin streamers through her nose. “And kidnappers and woman-stealers and rapists. The other tribes credited the entire litany of jungle sins to this group; in time, they became the personification of every imaginable vice. They are said to be covered in fierce tattoos as a warning for others to stay away—a primitive ‘mark of Cain,’ as it were.”
Alex looked to their native guide, who had listened to the story in silence. “Have you heard of this tribe, Lazaro?”
The native gave her a forced smile and a tense nod. “Yes.”
“Do you believe they exist?”
“I have never seen them.”
Exhaling with disappointment, Alex leaned back in her chair. Finding a tribal group afflicted with kuru would have been a coup, but if Lazaro had never heard of them. . .
“Lazaro.” Dropping one arm to the table, Emma gave the
guide a reproving smile. “You dodged the question. Alex asked if you believed in them, not if you’d seen them.”
The man’s gaze dropped like a stone to the tabletop. “My father was a shaman,” he said, a firmness in his voice that verged on the threatening, “and he spoke often of their evil. They live deep in the jungle, and we did not ever search for them. Why should we seek more evil than we already know?”
“You make a good point, Lazaro.” Ever the convivial host, Louis Fortier patted the Indian guide’s arm. “Why should we search for evil when we are surrounded with good food and good friends?”
He probably intended the question to be rhetorical, but Alex couldn’t resist answering: “We search for evil in order to understand it . . . so we can defeat it.”
Fortier snapped his fingers in her direction. “I see your point, madame, and I like the way you think. As for me, I live in France, where we have been importing English beef for years. I would like to know if I am going to die of this brain disease you talk about, and I will pray you find a cure.”
“Thank you for the vote of confidence,” Alex’s voice went dry, “but you can forgo the prayers on my behalf. I’m a resolute agnostic.”
Wariness and amusement mingled in Fortier’s eyes. “Not an atheist?”
“An atheist,” Caitlyn answered in a singsong rhythm, “would have to know everything to know God does not exist. Mom says she can’t know everything, but everything she does know leads her to believe people invented God to make themselves feel better about hard times.”
Facing the giggles and guffaws Caitlyn’s recitation had elicited, Alex shrugged. “When your work is focused on empirical evidence, you tend to long for concrete beliefs in your private life as well. I’ve never found any use for God.”
“Not even as a child?” Emma smiled at the server who placed before her a dish of something that resembled custard. “Did you not believe in the tooth fairy or Santa Claus?”
“Sure.” Alex pulled her napkin back onto her lap, then gestured for Caitlyn to do the same. “But then I grew up and realized that fanciful illusions do not make life any easier.” She lifted a brow. “What about you? You study the role of religion in various cultures. What have you decided about God?”