‘It’s good. What is it?’
‘Chicha beer. Made from manioc. They ferment it by chewing it up and spitting it out. It’s basically a beer made from old woman’s drool. This way.’ He turned and dived back into the melee.
Adam knew he was being tested. He refused to flinch; but the gorge rose inside him as they walked on.
Finally they reached the floating market, where the just-after-the-rainy-season Amazon reached up to the waist of the city. Boris, of course, was first in the little boat; the rest of them climbed in, unsteadily, sweating, dirty, energized, frightened.
The motorboat puttered between stilt houses and houses floating on balsa platforms. This part of the market was mercifully quieter: Adam got the idea that they were in a different emotional zone of Belen market.
Jess said quietly, ‘It reminds me of the Witches’ Market in Chiclayo.’ She paused. ‘These people are curanderos, I think. Shamans.’
There were men and women in tribal costume hawking their goods from the floating houses and tethered balsa rafts. Men in loincloths with parrot feathers in their hair. Women in nylon ra-ra skirts with tattoos on their faces. They sold strange-coloured fungi, withered vines, tiny seeds in little calabash pouches, dried birds’ heads, and litres of ayahuasca in old Johnnie Walker whisky bottles. At several spots Boris stopped and chatted discreetly with the shamans and the shawomen, mostly in Quechua or some rare Amazon language.
Occasionally Adam caught the odd snatch of Spanish, and what he could interpret was not encouraging. ‘ Se los lleva el sol.’
They are being taken by the sun.
‘?Que es eso?’ ‘Eso es el polvo de yohimbina.’
What is that? It is just yohimbe.
The sun was beginning to set, to thankfully sink into the Amazon beyond the floating market. Adam’s anxiety rose. The cartels could be following them anywhere. They were all-powerful. They could arrange for a London policeman to be silently garrotted, just as a kind of lurid joke. The cartels were richer than some countries. They had the weaponry of modern armies. They carved words into your skin with knives and filmed it, and then they dissolved you in vats of acid.
Even Boris was looking defeated and anxious. He muttered something about trying again tomorrow. Glancing nervously at the setting sun. ‘You don’t want to be in this part of Belen after dark. Specially with Catrina on your case, mes amigos. Let’s try this one last house.’
The last floating house had the most flamboyant shaman of all, a Kofan shaman with a coloured mantle that fell to his knees. Festoons of multicoloured beads hung around his neck, alongside necklaces of shells and seeds and curving white jaguar teeth. His eyebrows had been vigorously plucked and painted, his lips were dyed a sombre purple-blue, his wrist was braceleted with iguana skins, his flat brown nose had a singular emerald macaw feather pierced through the septum, and his long earlobes were studded with caiman fangs. Surmounting it all was a resplendent headdress of violet hummingbird feathers, scarlet macaw feathers and wild sapphire parrot tail feathers, like the halo of an archangel.
‘What does he say?’ whispered Adam, in awe.
‘He says we should talk to his wife.’
There was an awkward pause. Then the shaman’s wife came out from the floating shack wearing denim shorts, flip-flops and a dirty T-shirt with a picture of Justin Bieber on the front. She listened to Boris’s question. Then she nodded, casually. ‘ Ulluchu si.’ She talked quickly in her own language.
The excitement quickened with the dying of the day. ‘Where?’ Adam asked. ‘What is she saying? Where?’
Boris turned. His face was uncharacteristically grave. ‘She says we will find it two hundred miles upriver. That makes sense. It tallies with what we know of Archibald McLintock’s movements.’
‘Two hundred miles?’ Nina interjected, her forehead slightly streaked with river mud, and the inevitable thick Iquitos sweat.
‘Two hundred miles up the Ucayali. With the Pankarama. Protected tribal wilderness.’ Boris looked perturbed, for the first time that day.
‘So?’
‘ Amigos. The Pankarama are headhunters. They kill gringos. They kill everyone. And then they shrink their heads.’
46
The Amazon, Peru
They left at dawn the next day, bribing their way on to a small cargo ferry, the MV Myona, transporting mahogany and ebonywood and camu-camu and jungle spices to Pucallpa, via ‘a certain number’ of jungle villages and settlements.
The captain was half shaven, evasive, a cliched drunk at 3 a.m.; a quarter Colombian, he wore flip-flops and long Billabong surf shorts, and a Brazilian flag T-shirt that was stained with diesel. Two of his bare-chested crew members bore bizarre scars on their backs.
Adam stood on the roofed, open passenger deck of this hired apology for a boat, with their gently swaying hammocks behind him, watching Iquitos disappear in the early mist. If he’d still been a simple journalist he’d have been sad to leave this city so soon, this place of apparently endless stories; but they were being hunted. The Zetas were out there, right now; and probably Catrina too. So he was very glad to leave, before they could be taken, or killed, or brutally chopped up with machetes like the forest hogs in Belen market.
He leaned over the taffrail and stared down as the last cargo was longshored aboard; then the good ship Myona belched dirty water into the muddy riversurf and they moved out, treading the sludgy waves. The mist was still covering the mighty expanse of river all around them, rising like an army of wraiths.
Nina joined him at the taffrail, gazing at the river slums of Iquitos where the backwash curtseyed on the grey beaches of litter, and naked children with white teeth laughed and bathed in the citrusy sewage that guttered into the dawnlit water. She asked, ‘Do you trust him?’
‘Boris?’
‘Aye. Boris! He blethers. One minute he wants to scare us to death about visiting this place, this place with the headshrinkers, then the next it’s all, och, it’s fine we’ll be fine, let’s get goin’. Mm?’
‘Well. He says the captain knows the Pankarama well. That makes sense if he trades with them. He says we’ll be safe.’
‘What if Catrina are there already? Looking for the same drug, like you said? They’ll be expecting us. Them and the headshrinkers. What chance do we fucking have then?’ She paused. ‘Sorry. Must be brave. I know. But it’s just hard, sometimes.’
He wanted to hug her, comfort her, but he couldn’t. Instead, he turned and surveyed. Jess was in her hammock, sleeping; her face was pallid, sweaty. Boris Valentine was talking, animatedly, with the captain in the cabin, eating from a small paper bag of barbecued maggots. He’d been doing this since they embarked. Adam wondered if he did it just to provoke.
The endless Amazon stretched before the boat, a three-mile-wide road of river. The mist had now fled, scorched away by the tropical sun. Mighty ceiba trees, with flocks of green parrots flying between, lined the river like lofty guardsmen on a processional mall, with smaller lemon and moriche palms in between; every so often a clearing fed on to long steep wooden stairs, which led to ramshackle river piers and little riverine beer shacks. Kids stood on the piers selling mangos, guanabana fruit, and flat rounds of bread. Pineapples for a cent. Fried piranhas two cents.
The immensity of the river induced a kind of false serenity. It was as if nothing was happening, nothing was going to happen, nothing could ever happen. Not here, in the severity of the sun that silenced the birdlife, where the jungle stretched for a thousand miles in almost every direction. And yet somehow the jungle also seemed menacing in its silence. Watchful. And steadily drawing them in to the final revelation, the terrible drug. Ulluchu.
By noon it was hot and Adam was scared. The boat was doing ten knots: they wouldn’t reach the next town for six years at this rate. If anyone came after them in a fast boat, and it wasn’t hard to find a faster boat than this,
