attempts.’
Adam looked at Jessica for confirmation. But her blonde hair curtained her downcast face.
Monroy continued, ‘The second thing you need to know is that Jessica’s father died when she was young, of Huntington’s Disease. And that is a very evil way to die. Progressive and degenerative and appalling. The kind of disease which makes you question the goodness of God.’ He walked closer to Adam. ‘There is, of course, no cure. Huntington’s is genetic. Many people with the disease refuse a genetic test to see whether they are carriers. Why? Because a positive diagnosis induces many to commit suicide even before they fall ill, so great is their terror of the eventual affliction.’ He paused. ‘Jessica is, we now know, a carrier. What is more, she has the worst kind: a speedy and juvenile variety of the chorea. The clinching symptom is epileptiform seizure.’
Adam spoke, his voice hoarse. ‘How do you know all this?’
‘For many months Jessica admits she has been in denial of various symptoms — the initial signs that she had Huntington’s. And who can blame her for denying such a terrible fate for herself? Then, when her situation became incontrovertible, in the last weeks, days even, the intense horror took hold: and she knew she wanted to kill herself rather than go through what her father endured. And she wanted to face this death with yearning rather than dread, face it with contemptuous courage even, face it like the noble Templars, or the gallant Moche, the fearsome berserkers. Rather understandable, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Jess.’ Nina whispered. But still Jessica said nothing. Adam could feel the first rush of his own heart. The drug kicking in. They were all spiralling into oblivion, into the pure darkness of dementia. The sensation was blissful and terrifying.
Monroy paced the gilded room, like a gifted young lecturer, like the Harvard scholar he once was.
‘Jessica guessed, a while ago, what ulluchu really did. That it was a drug that made you want to die, thus obviating the terrors of death and of suicide. She felt that you, in turn, were unlikely to achieve success in finding the real ulluchu. Certainly she could not rely on this, and she was ever more desperate. Yet she knew I was most likely to be in possession of the echt drug, and she could not be sure anyone else had any of the dwindling supplies — and she could not be sure anyone else would understand her side of the bargain. Therefore she kept her options rather cleverly open by initiating contact with me, from Lima, the day you met. She gave me a few clues as to her situation and your whereabouts. Following her seizure on your boat, when her genetic fate was confirmed, when she felt the cold kiss of death on her pale American neck, she called me once more from the UNESCO site. She said if you failed in the jungle she would do a deal. Cut a sweet little deal. She would, if she could, make a phone call from the jungle: we were monitoring her phone, we were able to triangulate her location. She took a risk, but she is not without courage. And we knew you were near Iquitos: Peru is a cheap place to buy friends. So we located you, and thus we were able to come and… rescue you. As it were.’
‘What deal?’ Adam’s forehead was prickling with sweat. His pulse was up. ‘What deal could she do? What is her side of the bargain?’
‘Jessica told me she probably knew where Nina’s father had sourced the drug. She said she had seen the receipts and she had worked it out for herself, but told no one. The drug, she thought, had been removed from the jungle and cultivated elsewhere, by the Moche, probably in the mountains. They must have developed a much stronger variety, at certain distinct altitudes, with the perfect levels of rainfall and sunshine and frost — through centuries of horticulture. The Muchika were a very clever people. They were quite excellent irrigators.’
‘So, where?’
Carlos Monroy raised a hand, his smile princely in the sun slanting in through the long tall windows. ‘Let us ask her. She has yet to tell me. I do not know. Let us hear what she says.’
Colours menaced through Adam’s mind. The drug was really in his blood stream now. Gorgeous sexual images. Nina. Jessica. Blood-red swirls of purple. He forced himself to concentrate.
Monroy walked to Jessica’s chair. And crouched before her. ‘Tell me.’
A short painful pause ensued. Then Jessica lifted her head. She had been weeping silently, judging by her red-rimmed eyes. But her voice was quite distinct and articulate. ‘I saw the last receipt. Archibald McLintock went to Toloriu. After the jungle.’
Monroy frowned. ‘A little town near Huancabamba. In the Andes, what good is that? Which mountain?
‘No.’ Jessica shook her head. ‘Not Toloriu in Peru. The receipt was handwritten. A taxi. They-’ she glanced at Adam and Nina, ‘They didn’t realize. He went to a different Toloriu. A tiny hamlet, in the Pyrenees. Catalunya. He went back to Spain.’
Monroy stood up. His frown slowly became a gratified smile, then a triumphant laugh. ‘Toloriu. Casa Bima! The legend! The most obscure of legends!’ His laughter died, but the gleaming smile remained. Happy and aggressive.
Leaning against the mantelpiece, he picked up his silver spoon. And then the glinting silver snuff box. ‘ Casa Bima. What an ornate yet apposite denouement: the fulfilment of a very ancient story. Jessica, you were right: there are few people in the world who could have pieced that together… you, and me. And Archibald McLintock. Superb. You have earned your reward.’ He shook his head. ‘Of course I promised to save your friends and of course you knew I was lying and you didn’t care. Correct? But I will not torment them unduly. Let them kill themselves. And now it is your turn for the sweet release. Please, open your mouth. You can have an entire gram, a large proportion of my dwindling supplies. As a token of my generosity. It will work that much quicker, and your death will be sweeter. It will be exquisite. A sensuous climax.’
Jessica opened her mouth. Monroy had scooped his tiny glittering spoon in the powder, now heaped with half a gram of ulluchu. He positioned it carefully, then blew it — a puff of snuff between Jessica’s trembling lips. He did it again — another half a gram. She swallowed, and looked at the floor.
Monroy stood. He gazed, hard, at Nina and Adam. ‘Your cheeks are quite flushed. I see it is taking effect. I’d say you all have twenty minutes of consciousness and lucidity. I can tell you the rest of the story to fill these dull moments! Yes? Yes, I think so. But I’ll be brief. When you are dead, in about an hour or two, at your own hands, I will have to leave here. Los Zetas are surely seeking me out right now, searching for this house, I took enough risks flying you into the country. They have spies throughout the system, they are the shadow state, at airports, everywhere… And your clever outburst in the street will have alarmed and alerted the entire city.’ His face began to smear in Adam’s vision.
Adam wanted to kill this man, to tear him open. Drink the blood. He thought of Nina naked. Deliciously naked. Then Alicia.
The red mouth of the pale man opened and closed.
‘It was Harvard that changed me. All that wealth, all that incredible American wealth. The arrogant rowers on the Charles River, the egregiously regal Bostonians. When I got there, I compared it with my own country, impoverished, and ridiculed, and risible and — far, far worse — torn apart by the drug wars. How could I not? The drug wars are caused by America, by their ridiculous and bogus Puritanism, their absurd, adolescent prohibition on the purely human urge for intoxication, for altered states. Men have been taking drugs for ten thousand years: it is a human universal; mankind cannot bear too much reality. And the Americans are no different. And yet their same grunting American hunger for drugs, for cocaine and marijuana, for heroin and methamphetamine, for anything to enliven their absurdly dull materialist lives of gorging, shopping and corpulent waddling — this greed and desperation was killing my people, not harming them. Quite invidious. ’ Monroy snapped the snuff box shut, angrily. Adam closed his eyes and just listened to the voice.
‘The hypocrisy sickened me. America imported the drugs, yet religiously banned them. This same American prohibition therefore made the drug-trade all too appealing and profitable, accelerating the deathly wars in my country. My country. Mexico. Indeed all Latin America. Thousands are dying, tens of thousands are slaughtered yearly, just across the Rio Grande from peaceful El Paso. To salt the wound of irony, America makes and sells us the guns with which to kill each other! They actually profit from our massacres, massacres caused by their canting hypocrisies. And still they didn’t care, as long as they kept the death and destruction on the other side of the frontier, over the river, beyond the great big fence, that keeps the spics and wetbacks out, the fence that nonetheless lets all the dope and the meth and the cocaine in, for the kids in Harvard Yaaaard to get so pleasantly zoned.’
Sex and murder, sex and bloody murder. Alicia naked and dying. Adam felt his own arousal at the death of nude Alicia. He was aroused by the nearness of his own death. The sensation was tremendous and irresistible: he was being ravished by crueller desires.
‘So I began to plot some revenge on America, on the gringo who was destroying my country. And what
