SEVEN
“WELCOME, welcome, my dear friends, my good friends, welcome,” enthused the overexcited Captain Vargas. “Or as we say in Peru,
The “ship’s salon” had turned out to be a small open area on the lower deck, bounded by the dining room on the forward side and a storage room to the rear. Projecting into this area from the dining room wall, on the left side of the entrance, was a small, glassed-in bar fitted with a Dutch door, the upper half of which folded outward to make a serving counter. There were four white plastic tables with a few green plastic garden chairs around them. Two of the tables were
empty. One was fully occupied, with four people around it. The last had only one person at it, and it was there that Phil, John, and Gideon had sat down. Their companion was a quiet, lost-looking individual who had introduced himself as Duayne V. Osterhout and who looked like a cartoonist’s version of John Q. Public, right down to the toothbrush mustache, the horn-rimmed glasses, and the air of timid, put-upon uncertainty.
There was a breeze wafting through the open space, created by the vessel’s movement, that would hardly have qualified as “cool” in the Northwest, but that felt wonderful here. On each table was a small pitcher of foamy white liquid—those would be the sours— several dark green bottles of Inca Kola, and some bottled water. John and Phil twisted the caps off water bottles, Gideon tried the Inca Kola, and their tablemate reached for the pitcher. “Never had one of these,” he murmured, pouring himself a brimming glassful. He took a tentative sip, cocked his head, and swallowed. “Say, this isn’t bad!” He tried another sip and obviously enjoyed that one too. “Salty, sweet, and bitter at the same time.” He smacked his lips. “And sour too. It engages all the taste receptors. Well, except for umami, of course, inasmuch as there wouldn’t be any glutamic acid in it.”
“You a professor, by any chance?” John said.
“Ah . . . no,” said Osterhout, returning to his enthusiastic sampling of the sour.
“So what’s the Inca Kola like?” John asked Gideon.
Gideon rolled the liquid around his mouth and swallowed. “Mmm, something like a Vanilla Coke, but with some kind of, I don’t know—”
“Try to guess!” Vargas boomed, overhearing. “No? It’s lemon-grass! The secret ingredient. No lemongrass in Coke! Hey, you know
Peru is the only country in the world where we got our own drink that sells better than Coca-Cola? It’s a known fact. Tastes pretty good, huh?”
“It’s delicious,” said Gideon, who thought it might conceivably have been passable if the sugar content had been cut by 60 percent or so.
Vargas then provided a general introduction to the ship and the cruise. They would cruise for the remainder of today and the next along the southern bank of the Peruvian Amazon. At the Colombian border they would take a northern, more remote branch of the Amazon known as the Javaro River, on which they would travel for several more days, until they rejoined the main body of the Amazon at Leticia, Colombia, at the end of their journey.
“You mean we don’t even spend two days on the Amazon?” their tablemate Duayne Osterhout asked, plainly disappointed. “I thought—”
“Let me explain,” interrupted a stocky man of forty-five, with a tanned, ruddy face, a reddish crewcut just beginning to go gray, and small, bright, intelligent eyes. “You see, the Amazon River itself, as you get anywhere near Leticia, is pretty broad and well-traveled . . . crowded, you might almost say. But the Javaro is much smaller, a dark, serpentine, little-known stream through an almost totally unpopulated area. Hardly anyone uses it as a thoroughfare because, with all its S-curves and its looping back on itself, it takes forever to get anywhere.”
“Still, the
“You won’t regret it, I assure you. Because of its remoteness, you see, the Javaro is an absolute treasure- house of exotic plants and wildlife. Like the Amazon was forty years ago.”
“If you say so,” said Osterhout with a pallid little sigh.
“I guarantee it.”
Vargas waited politely until, with a wave of his unlit pipe, the man signaled him to continue. In addition to the passengers, they were carrying a cargo of coffee, along with a few miscellaneous items—a generator, a few dozen pairs of rubber boots for a jungle store, a dining room table and chairs, a wooden door, and some miscellaneous lumber. The coffee was bound for a warehouse on the Javaro; the other items would be dropped off along the way. All other stops would be at the discretion of the expedition guide, and of Dr. Scofield—he nodded at the stocky man, who returned it with another wave of his pipe, by now lit and smoking and emanating a sweet, coconutty aroma.
“Speaking of our expedition guide,” Scofield said genially, “the famous Cisco. I don’t believe I see him among us. He
“Aboard?” Vargas said as if the question were laughable in the extreme. “Of course he’s aboard. He’s, ah . . . resting at present. Yes.” Gideon could practically see the sweat popping out on his forehead. “You’ll meet him soon, don’t worry.”
He hurried on before Scofield could pursue the matter. The
