With an indefinite length of time to wait, they split up. Gideon tried unsuccessfully to call Julie in Cabo San Lucas and then went looking for an Internet cafe, John went back to the food court to do some more grazing, and Phil went back to sleep.
There was no Internet cafe, but the bar, which had opened at five, had a few computers set up along one wall. No charge, but order something to eat or drink, and you could use one of them for as long as you could make your order last. Gideon got a good, fresh orange
juice and a cup of weak but bitter coffee, and tapped out an e-mail to Julie.
Hi Sweetheart,
We’re all safe and sound in Lima—not too bad a trip, although we’re a little grubby by now. We’re waiting out a slight (I hope) delay on the Iquitos leg. You wouldn’t believe it if I told you the reason. It’s six A.M. here—nine in Cabo, I guess—and I just tried calling you, but you weren’t in the room. Probably at the spa getting your nodes uncrystallized. Don’t overdo it now. I really admire your nodes the way they are.
Nothing else to say, really—I just wanted an excuse to “talk” to you. I love you and I’m already missing you, and I’ll see you next week. Have a great time, honey.
XXX Gideon
With a sigh he turned to his e-mail inbox.
IT took a couple of hours, but the artillery blasts did the job. The vultures flew away, the flight loaded up and left, and by ten A.M.— about the time the attendants were handing out welcome trays of warm, tasty ham-and- cheese sandwiches, orange juice, more bad coffee, and rum cake—the plane had left the coastal plain behind, had cleared the craggy, snowy peaks of the Andes, and was beginning its long descent to the Amazon Basin and Iquitos. Gideon pressed his face to the window.
He had flown over other jungles, in Central America and the
South Pacific and Africa, but he’d never seen anything like this. For minute after minute the flat, gray-green mat stretched to the horizon in every direction, broken only by meandering loops of brown river the color of coffee with cream. What was especially strange was that the landscape looked almost the same from five thousand feet as it had from twenty-five thousand feet: like a huge green sponge, evenly pimpled and almost perfectly level, with no visible open spaces, even small ones, other than the river itself.
At five thousand feet visibility was cut off due to the misting of the windows, an ominous indicator of the heat and humidity to come. Gideon, who had long ago grown to love the cool, crisp air of the Pacific Northwest, valiantly prepared himself to suffer.
“HEY,look at this, this is cool,” John said with unintended irony as he came down the steel steps that had been rolled up to the Airbus. “It’s like being in an Indiana Jones movie.”
Gideon nodded his agreement. The Iquitos Airport consisted of two crisscrossed runways sitting in a sharp- cornered rectangle carved out of the jungle. No other planes there. No sign of a city or anything like it, and no sign of the twenty-first century, either, for that matter. Except for the jet airliner they had just left, they might have been in the 1930s. There was a long, low, one-story terminal awaiting them, and a few thatch-roofed huts around the perimeter of the field. At the very edge of the clearing, up to their bellies in weeds, were two rotting, doorless, windowless passenger planes of indeterminate age that had obviously made it to Iquitos once upon a time but hadn’t managed to make it back out.
The air was everything Gideon had dreaded, as thick and hot as
soup. Before he reached the bottom of the stairs, his shirt was wet with sweat and his unshaven face was greasy. He felt like a turkey basting in the oven.
“A little hot,” he said mildly.
“You think this is hot?” Phil said. “Ho, ho, this is only the morning. Wait till the afternoon!”
THE ride into town was by means of a couple of two-passenger
The liveliness and bustle of the city came as a surprise. Gideon had known that it was the second largest settlement on the Amazon, with a population of over a quarter million, but all the same he’d anticipated a languid, heat-frazzled sort of place, where nobody moved very fast and everybody got out of the sun at midday. Instead, careening down Calle Prospero toward their hotel, he found a tacky, colorful, hard-working town that was anything but languid. There were block after block of surplus stores, off-brand clothing shops, luggage stores, check-cashing services, hole-in-the-wall restaurants, and tobacco and liquor stores, most of them with bars on their windows but their doors wide open. Many of the merchants seemed to be out on the street arguing or chatting with passersby. If not for the absence of
anything taller than three stories, he might have been on Canal Street in lower Manhattan.
Still, there was an unmistakable frontier quality to it, perhaps from the musty, jungly smell of the great river only a few blocks away, perhaps from the people themselves, an extraordinarily diverse mix of tall, blond, blue-eyed Europeans, short, black-haired, wary-eyed Indians, and absolutely every possible variant between the two. The whole scene, Gideon thought, could have come straight out of a Joseph Conrad novel.
The motokars screeched to a stop in front of a grand, multi-columned hotel, with nothing at all tacky about it, that fronted a pretty square with fountains and neat green lawns. Phil made a show of paying all their fares—a total of four
“This is the Plaza de Armas, the main square,” Phil told them after they’d pulled their luggage down from the
