And what was death anyway? Death was the emancipator, the good king, the liberator, the Abraham Lincoln who frees us all from the slavery of life, and without death life was nothing, pointless, lustreless, endless. Death was the blackness between the stars that made them shine.
Two hours had passed in a kind of trance. Jessica gazed over the wide sombre river where a patch of ochre clay glistened, where the grasses and sedges were shaved and flattened by recent downpours. An old canoe rose and fell on the languid surge of the river waves.
She knew now. This wasn’t the ulluchu of the Moche. Or, if it was, it was a very very weak variant; perhaps the Moche took this wild ulluchu, this special morning glory, and cultivated it elsewhere, in a different climate at a different altitude, in the mountains. They were expert horticulturalists; maybe they had turned a feeble jungle specimen into the mighty drug over many generations, by breeding and selecting and grafting. Whatever the case, this wasn’t it.
This meant Jessica had no choice.
A few minutes later, Boris came over. ‘So, what was-’
A loud noise interrupted him. Big black-and-white speedboats were zipping up the Ucayali, braking noisily, sending big surf-waves of water crashing against the Pankaramas’ modest wooden pier. A dozen men, at least, were standing in the boats. All of them were heavily armed. Some were shaven-headed, others were tattooed. One had a Z tattooed on his cheek.
Boris stepped back, his voice numb. ‘Jesus. It’s the Zetas. We’re dead.’
Jessica reached desperately for her cellphone. This was her last chance. She dialled. They had a signal and she had to get help.
49
Ucayali River, Peru
The Zetas were grimly efficient: like proper soldiers. With barely a word they plucked the cellphone from Jessica’s hand and barked a few questions into it.
The cartel officer turned and sneered. ‘You call a doctor? In Peru? How can he help? You are going to need more than Tylenol.’
The cellphone was thrown in the river. All their phones were thrown in the river. Then Jessica, Adam, Nina, Boris and Jose were separated from the Pankarama and led at gunpoint through the weeds and red squelchy mud of the Ucayali riverbank.
The military efficiency was no coincidence, of course, as Adam realized: they were still an army, at their core. Jess had told them the entire cartel was founded by deserters from the Mexican special forces. This fact might have given Adam some frail hope, of a military logic that could be somehow appealed to, if it weren’t for the captain, the obvious commander, who’d told them his name was ‘Marco’ — as he bluntly separated them out from the tribesmen. He was a stout, vigorous, muscular guy in his thirties, with skulls and wild roses and elaborate zeds for Zeta tattooed up his tanned, sinewy arms. And he had exactly the same gleam of strange, smart, sadistic eagerness in his eyes as Tony Ritter.
No doubt Marco too was on ulluchu, the real drug. What was he going to do to them? Were they going to be shot in a clearing in the forest? Away from witnesses? Or something else?
It was an effort not to show his fear. He wondered if Nina had noticed Marco’s demeanour, and was therefore remembering what happened to her sister in the Islington house. Blood and terror and violation.
A slight bend in the riverbank brought them to a large metal barge, lashed by a thick rope to a ceiba tree, and sagging with age. It was an old cargo boat rusting in a lost meander of this vast river system. Marco tilted his expensive European pistol and ordered them on to the boat.
‘The stairs. Go down those stairs. Now.’
Adam could see the fine jaw muscles moving in Marco’s face, from the grinding of his teeth. He clearly wanted to hurt them as soon as possible, he was restraining himself.
They stepped down the metal ladder into a metal room: a sealed storage container. The Amazonian sun had heated the entire boat so that the metal was painful to the touch. And it was in this steel cell, this steel oven, that they were going to be kept.
One of Marco’s men handcuffed them, again with soldierly swiftness and obedience, to the rigid metal pipes that ran along the side of the metal chamber. Just like the radiator in London, Adam realized: they were shackled in a line, like dogs in a row at a show.
The subordinate disappeared up the metal steps. Marco followed, then paused at the top, a dark figure silhouetted by the sun. He gazed at his prisoners in the bowels of the boat and his prisoners all stared up, at this last square of hope, this glimpse of tropic sky.
‘Your friends,’ Marco said, abruptly, taking some objects from a sack. He threw two footballs into the metal cell, which bounced along the steel floor. Then he slammed the trapdoor shut.
With the only opening to the outside world quite sealed, it was profoundly dark in the stinking, broiling metal chamber. Yet there was just enough sunlight, lancing through small rusty holes in the metal roof, to make out that the footballs were not balls at all, but two human heads: the captain of the MV Myona, and the other deckhand.
Jose wailed like a child and then made a retching sound. Adam stared, riveted and appalled, at the heads. They were lying sideways and staring wet-eyed at each other, like lovers talking on a shared pillow. The expressions on the heads were incomprehensible, terror and serenity. A tiny dewdrop of blood fell from the dead captain’s hair on to the metal floor.
‘We are finished.’ Boris’s voice was quavering. ‘They are going to kill us all, but they will torture us first. The Zetas’ cruelty is famous. ’
‘We know.’ Adam said, flatly. ‘We fucking know.’ He yanked at the handcuffs looping him to the metal pipes. This was beyond useless. Yet he tried uselessly, for ten minutes, twenty, tugging at the cuffs until his wrists were scraped and raw and bloody.
Jess spoke, for the first time. ‘We could bargain with them.’
Nina replied, fierce in the shadows. ‘With what? We have nothing. Fuck all of them anyway. Let them kill us — even if we had something to give they would still kill us.’
Boris’s once-macho voice was reduced to a low whimper. ‘This is quite right, whatever we do, whatever we say, they will kill us — but first they will try and get any information: they will torture us.’
A shock of light silenced his lamenting.
The trapdoor had been opened. Marco came down the stairs, followed by two of his lieutenants. He reached the bottom of the ladder and surveyed them. Contemptuously.
‘There is no ulluchu here. We came here a week ago. We asked all the tribes, we tried it. We have been following you. We spoke to the shaman in Belen. Boris Valentine is celebrated in Iquitos.’
His voice was surprisingly neutral. He spoke exceedingly good English: he was evidently very educated. This man could have been a rising young major in the Mexican army, Adam thought. But the Zetas paid so much more.
Marco paced across the rusty metal floor, kicking a severed head out of the way as if he was practising football. Then he knelt by Nina. Adam strained in his shackles to see what was happening, there, at the other side of the chamber, in the shadows.
‘What do you know, Nina? Your father’s notebooks end at Iquitos. What did your father know? Where did he go after this? We think he went into the Andes. The mountains. Where the ulluchu grows better?’
She said nothing. Marco’s sigh was ominous and heavy. He leaned closer, and Adam was reminded of Ritter, trying to kiss her, or lick her: like a predatory rapist.
‘I could hit you, Miss McLintock. I could electrocute you, or cut you up. Maybe I could cut off one of your fingers. Or your lips. I could cut your lips off. Tell me.’
Nina said nothing.
He stood, with a slight jerkiness in his movements. The ulluchu maybe? Then he signalled to one of his men, who was carrying a plastic box, a kind of Tupperware container, quite ludicrously domestic.
