fistfight. By the time the final whistle blew, the scoreboard showed 9–4 to the Quails, a convincing victory. In every other respect, however, the team got trounced. The Wild Boars left five of them in need of medical attention, compared with the Quails’ own tally of just two opponents hospitalised.
Among the Quail injured was Aaronson’s beloved hoop defender, who’d gone down with a gouged-out eye. All the way back to the hotel Aaronson lamented the fact that a potential love affair had been so cruelly nipped in the bud, over before it could even begin. He also bemoaned the ruination of such sublime physical beauty.
“I think he could really have been The One,” he said.
“With you they’re always The One,” Mal replied, “right up until they turn out to be The One Night Only. Besides, you didn’t even talk to him. You didn’t even meet him. He’s just someone you leered at from a distance.”
“It was true love.”
“True lust, more like.”
“You don’t have a romantic bone in your body, do you, boss? You wouldn’t know love if it came up and slapped you in the face. No. Correction. With you, love is a slap in the face.”
“Easy there, sergeant,” Mal warned.
“I’m just saying, from what I’ve seen you don’t have relationships — you have mutual abuse. You go for men you either feel nothing for or who feel nothing for you, and the more sordid and seamy your trysts are, the better. You know what? I think you don’t like yourself very much. You punish yourself all the time. You don’t believe you’re worthy of love or of anything good. It’s like you’re doing penance, who knows for what.”
“Here’s the mark, Aaronson.” Mal held out a hand in front of her, like a meat cleaver. She moved it a couple of feet to the right. “Here’s how far you’re overstepping it.”
“Look, let’s forget we’re DCI and sergeant for a moment,” Aaronson said. “Let’s just be what we are, which is friends. Good friends, I like to think. That means I can be frank with you if I want, and I do want. You’re a good- looking woman, Malinalli. If I was straight, I’d take a crack at you, definitely. You’re a success in a tough, unforgiving profession. You’re intimidatingly smart and sharp. You’ve got it all. But you’re also a fool to yourself. You’re never happy. Whatever it is that drives you inside so hard, it won’t let you rest, it won’t let you find contentment, it leads you to sabotage everything you achieve. Why can’t you tell that voice inside your head just to shut up every once in a while? I don’t mean deaden it with drink or drugs so you can’t hear it. I mean get it to pipe down and stop nagging so you can actually enjoy life for a change.”
“That’s rich, coming from you. When I need a lecture in self-restraint and sobriety from the world’s greatest hedonist…”
“At least I know how to kick back and have fun.”
“I have fun!” Mal said indignantly.
“When? When was the last time? Recently? This year? Last year?”
Mal was all set to answer, but she stalled. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t recall a single occasion, as an adult, when she’d done something for the sheer pleasure of it. Sex with strangers didn’t qualify. There was physical satisfaction to be had, but that was about all. Beyond that, the encounters were brief and meaningless and usually conducted through an alcoholic haze.
“Tonight,” she said at last. “The game. That was fun, wasn’t it?”
“It was a bloodbath.”
“Still, I heard you cheering.”
“Granted, but did you? Cheer, I mean.”
“Yes,” said Mal. “I think so. Didn’t I?”
“Not so’s anyone would notice. You sat there stony-faced throughout.”
“Inside, I was cheering.”
“Doesn’t count.”
They’d reached the hotel. After checking at the reception desk for messages, they crossed the lobby and rode the rickety lift to the sixth floor.
“Fun’s overrated, anyway,” Mal said as she unlocked the door to their room. “Fun’s for idiots.”
“Which is unquestionably the most idiotic thing you’ve ever said,” Aaronson replied.
They got ready for bed in frigid silence, like an old married couple after a tiff.
It was in the small hours of that night that the call came about Reston’s arrest.
The town of Mixquiahuala sat perched on a ridge of high ground above a plain. At its feet, chinampas fields stretched as far as the eye could see. Behind it, dark green rainforested slopes glowered.
The main approach road ran along a causeway, raised between deep irrigation canals in the chinampas. Farmhands were already out amid the maize crop, wrenching out weeds and relieving the vermin traps of their overnight haul of cavy and capybara corpses.
Past the fields the road snaked upslope to the town and, once inside its environs, branched off a dozen different ways. Mal pulled up alongside a pastry seller who was setting out his wares in front of his shop. He gave her directions to the town’s Jaguar HQ, and she purchased a couple of meringue-topped sponge cakes from him to placate Aaronson, who’d not stopped whingeing about how hungry he was the entire journey.
Necalli, the duty officer at the Jaguar HQ, had an amazing shovel-shaped nose, so large that it left little room on his face for his other features. After a few preliminaries he escorted the two British Jaguars downstairs to the holding cells. He told them that the prisoner had been in a disorientated state when he was brought in yesterday evening. He appeared underfed and showed all the signs of someone who’d been in the rainforest for several days: covered in bites, stings and scratches, not properly bathed, hair and clothing unkempt.
“Also, he’s been babbling, on and off. In English. No one round here speaks it, so we haven’t been able to make head or tail of what he’s saying. We haven’t even been able to process him properly. We’re hoping you’ll be able to help with that, now you’re here.”
“You took his armour off him, I suppose.”
Necalli gave her a look: This is Anahuac. You breeze in from a piddling little island colony like Britain and speak to us like we don’t know how to do our jobs?
“Just asking,” she said.
“As it happened, he surrendered the armour quietly. The arresting officers thought he was going to put up a fight, but he just handed everything over when invited to — sword, gun, the works — and went with them meek as a lamb. The funny thing was, he was wearing only a few items of armour, not a whole set. Like he’d dressed in a hurry and not been able to finish. All in all, he’s a queer fish. If it hadn’t been for you distributing round that intel about him, we’d have had a hell of a time figuring out who and what he was. We’d probably have assumed he was some kind of mental case and handed him over to a psychiatric care unit. I doubt any of us would have identified him as a terrorist. More likely a victim of bewilderness.”
“Bewilderness?” said Aaronson.
“You know. Civilian heads off for a jaunt into the forest, underprepared, thinks it’ll be just like a meander through the woods, a nice daytrip. He gets hopelessly lost, walks in circles for days or even weeks, and finally finds his way out, but by that time he’s been driven half mad by thirst, hunger and fever. Bewilderness. It happens more often than you’d think. And it’s almost always white foreigners. Some urge they have to conquer nature, challenge themselves, find themselves, maybe have a kind of ascetic spiritual experience, like religious hermits in the olden days. Anahuac natives are far too sensible for that. We know how fucking dangerous the rainforest is. We prefer our towns, most of us, with our air-conditioned buildings and our clean running water.”
“But the armour,” said Mal. “Wouldn’t that have been a big clue that he was something out of the ordinary?”
Necalli shrugged. “I’ve seen stranger. This one guy, a few years back, he turned up on the outskirts of Mixquiahuala naked apart from an anaconda skin. He’d killed the snake and cut the skin off and draped it around himself like a sort of cloak. There was plenty of it, too, so the snake itself must have been a monster. He was under the delusion that by wearing it he had become an anaconda himself. He died in custody.”
“Oh, one of those. Resisting arrest.”
“No, a genuine accident. There was a rat in his cell — crawled in via the toilet. He caught it and tried to swallow it whole. Choked to death.” Necalli chuckled ghoulishly at the memory. It seemed there wasn’t a Jaguar in the world who didn’t have a streak of gallows humour. It went with the territory. “The forest can do things to a
