“Yeah, but not enough to sit still for getting scrubbed with a turnip,” John Lau said. “No, thanks, not my kind of thing.”
“Julie, I just don’t see what your problem is,” Marti said. “You already said you could get away.”
Julie nodded. She was a supervising park ranger at Olympic National Park headquarters in Port Angeles, she was overdue for some vacation time, and November was a good month to take it. “I could, yes…”
“Think of those warm, oily massages-”
“That’s just it. Actually, I’m not that crazy about massages.”
Marti stared at her. “How could anyone not be crazy about massages?”
“Julie doesn’t really enjoy being touched by other people,” said Gideon Oliver, her husband and the fourth and final member of the party. “Neither do I, for that matter.”
Marti guffawed. “That sure sounds like the recipe for a happy marriage.”
Julie smiled back at her. “Well, I make certain exceptions.”
“I’m relieved to hear it. Come on, though, will you at least think about it? It’d really be fun.”
“I am thinking about it,” Julie said, getting back to her wild-salmon-and-tarragon-mayonnaise sandwich. “Quite seriously.”
Old friends all, they were lunching at Maximilien in Seattle’s Pike Place Market, where Marti had just sprung the surprise she’d so ponderously hinted at on the telephone the night before. She had bought a twenty-five-dollar raffle ticket at a charity event a month earlier, and had wound up winning the grand prize: a one-week, all-inclusive stay at Cabo San Lucas’s posh Mandalay-Pacific Spa, to be used anytime before the end of the year. For two. And she wanted company.
She poked impatiently at her cheeseless vegetarian tarte flambe. (Marti was a nutritionist at the Virginia Mason Medical Center in the city and imposed on herself – and claimed to like – the same meatless, fatless, saltless, sugarless regimen she inflicted on her captive clientele.) “So,” she pressed after all of thirty seconds, “have you thought about it?”
“Yes, and it does sound tempting. But, well…”
“I know what’s worrying you,” Marti said. “What would we do with the boys?”
“The boys?” John demanded.
“The boys?” Gideon said. “Are you by any chance referring to-”
“Well, I wouldn’t quite put it that way,” Julie said, ignoring them, “but I can’t help wondering how they’d get along for a week without us.”
In this they were engaging in the affectionate self-delusion of wives everywhere that, in the absence of their domesticating influence for even a week, their husbands would regress to the natural male status of unshaven, uncivilized, antisocial troglodytes, and they, the wives, would come home to find the beds unmade, the ashtrays littered with cigars, the floors with socks and underwear, and the kitchen sink overflowing with beer cans and old, crusted pizza boxes.
In point of fact, however, “the boys” in question were two accomplished men in their early forties, both well able to take care of themselves, and both with highly developed senses of personal hygiene. Gideon Oliver was a professor of physical anthropology at the University of Washington’s Port Angeles campus and a highly regarded forensic anthropologist known to the world’s press (to his mild dismay and the continuing amusement of his colleagues) as the Skeleton Detective. John Lau, whose relationship with Gideon went back even further than Julie’s did, was an FBI special agent with specialties in firearms, ballistics, and international racketeering. John was a powerful, muscular six-two, Gideon a somewhat more slender six-one.
“I think maybe we could manage,” Gideon said mildly. “Don’t you, John?”
“Well, as long as it’s not for more than a week,” John agreed. “I’d need a change of socks by then.”
The women paid no attention to them. “As it happens,” Marti announced, “I have a plan.”
“Why am I not surprised?” John murmured. He went back to work on the cheeseburger he had so predictably ordered. “Okay, may as well hear it,” he said resignedly.
“It’s simple,” she said. “Give Phil a call and see what he’s got going in the next few weeks. Take a trip. You both have a standing invitation, don’t you?”
“I could do that,” John said amiably. “I’ve got vacation time coming.”
“It wouldn’t work for me,” Gideon said. “It’s right in the middle of the quarter. I have classes.”
“Ask Lyle Spatz to take them for you,” Julie suggested. “He owes you, doesn’t he?”
Gideon nodded slowly. “Well, that might work, especially if it’s over Thanksgiving so we’re already skipping a few classes anyway. I’d have to figure some things out.”
“Could be fun,” John said, “depending on what Phil’s got going.” He glanced out at the bleak day. “But if it’s not somewhere south of here, forget about it.”
“At least you wouldn’t be moping around by yourselves, and you wouldn’t have to scrounge up your own meals,” Marti said.
“And it probably would be interesting,” Julie said. “Don’t you think?” And Gideon could tell that she was warming to the idea of her own week in Cabo San Lucas.
All right, then he would help make it happen. “With Phil, it’s always interesting,” he said. “Okay, let me see what he’s got on the calendar.”
He borrowed Julie’s cell phone, took it to a quiet corner near the entrance, and hit the button to speed-dial Phil Boyajian’s number in Anacortes.
Another old friend, Phil’s relationship with Gideon dated back two decades, to Gideon’s days at the University of Wisconsin, where they’d both been graduate students in the anthropology department. Since earning his Ph. D., Gideon had pursued a reasonably straightforward path up the academic ladder. Phil’s progression had not only been anything but straightforward, it had been distinctly peculiar. As he himself had described it, he’d had a career in reverse. He’d started at the top, with a tenure-track position at a major state university lined up even before he’d completed his doctorate in cultural anthropology. He’d lasted just one year. (“Can’t stand the politicking!”) From there he’d gone on to a community college in Seattle, managing to stick it out two years this time before quitting. (“How can anyone stand all those damn committees?”) Then came a stint in a high school, also not to his liking. (“I’m not a jail guard.”) This was followed – inevitably – by grade-school teaching. (“Have you ever tried spending all day with eight-year-olds?”)
With just about nothing else to descend to, he had hooked up as a tour guide with On the Cheap, a new company that promoted and arranged economy travel. With his scruffy appearance and no-frills approach to life, his natural optimism, his readiness to see the good in everyone, and his love of travel, it was the job he’d been born for. Now a partner in the firm, he still led about twenty foreign tours a year, and there was always space for the Laus or the Olivers. And if they were willing to lend a hand when and if needed, they were welcome to come along at no charge, or rather at cost.
It was a very good deal, and Gideon and Julie had taken him up on it twice now, once on a trip to Costa Rica, and once on a tour of Italy’s Lake Maggiore region.
Phil answered on the third ring and immediately came up with a proposition.
“How does Peru sound? Six days, starting in three weeks, November twenty-sixth.”
“Peru!” Gideon exclaimed, thrilled. “Fantastic! I’ve wanted to go for years; I’ve just never gotten it together to go. That’d be great, Phil, wonderful! Machu Picchu, Sipan-”
“Well, don’t get too-”
“-the Moche tombs, Cuzco, Huaca Rajada-”
“Hey, hold your horses, will you? Forget archaeology. That’s not exactly what we’ll be doing.”
“-the ruins at – it’s not?”
“Not exactly, no.” He cleared his throat.
“It better be someplace warm,” John said as Gideon returned to the table. “That’s my one and only condition.” John, who’d grown up in Hawaii, loved hot weather. He considered it a cruel trick of fate that he’d been assigned to cold, gloomy Seattle. He claimed to have a standing request into the bureau for a transfer to Mexicali if they ever opened a regional office there.
“Well, then,” Gideon said, “you’ll be happy. How does eight days on the Amazon sound?”
John’s eyes popped wide open. “Seriously?”
“ On the Amazon?” Julie asked. “You mean on a boat?”
“Yup, an Amazon cruise.”
“That sounds fabulous,” Marti said. “Hey, maybe we should go. I love cruises. Talk about pampering.”
“Yes, but this is Phil we’re talking about,” Julie said. “On the Cheap. Somehow, I don’t think pampering will be on the agenda.”
“Don’t they have anacondas on the Amazon?” John asked. “Headhunters? Poisonous frogs? Giant spiders?”
“I’m pretty sure headhunting died out thirty years ago or so,” Gideon said. “About the others, I don’t know.”
“And what about mosquitoes?”
“I believe there are a few down there.”
“And malaria? How many damn shots would we have to get?”
“There aren’t any shots for malaria, there are pills you take. Other than that, there may be a couple of other shots, just to be on the safe side.”
“Great, I love shots,” John said under his breath, but Gideon could see he was just going through the motions. He was intrigued with the idea, and who wouldn’t be? “So where would we pick up the ship?”
“In Peru. A town called Iquitos,” Gideon said, “way upstream, near the headwaters of the Amazon.” He returned to his salad of smoked salmon, Dungeness crab, and avocado, picking it over to see if he’d missed any slivers of crab. “It’s not Phil’s usual thing, though. That is, it’s not an official On the Cheap tour, it’s a kind of… I guess you’d say, an evaluation visit, and he wouldn’t mind having us along to help him evaluate.”
There was a cargo boat operator in Iquitos, he explained, who had been trying for some time to convert his rebuilt ship, the Adelita, to the tourist trade. The operator/captain, Alfredo Vargas, had earlier contacted Phil about Phil’s writing up his would-be cruise enterprise in the next edition of South America On the Cheap. Phil had agreed to come down and check out the Adelita if and when Vargas got an actual boatload of paying passengers together for a bona fide cruise. That had been two years ago, and not long ago an exuberant Vargas had come through: a professor named Arden Scofield had chartered the ship for a week in late November for a scientific research cruise from Iquitos to Leticia, Colombia, a trip of 350 miles. Including Scofield, there would be a total of five paying passengers. Meals would be provided, and each passenger would have his or her own air-conditioned cabin with private bath. There were at present ten such cabins on the ship, but more would be added in the future as the cruise business prospered.
“In other words, other than telling Phil how we like it, we wouldn’t have any responsibilities at all. Nothing to do. Just relax and enjoy it.”
“A research cruise,” Julie said. “What kind of research?”
“Well, apparently they’re all ethnobotanists-”
“Ethnowhatanists?” Marti said.
“Ethnobotanists. Sort of a combination of cultural anthropologists and botanists. They study the way various peoples live with and use their local plants. You know, how they use them for medicine, for food, for clothing, and so on. Phil says they’re going to be doing some scientific collecting – there’s a tremendous number of unknown, uncataloged flora in the Amazon basin – and talking to shamans along the way to see what they can learn from them.”
“Learn from shamans?” Marti snorted. “And these guys are supposed to be scientists?”
“Well, I know what you mean,” said Gideon. “A lot of the shamanistic stuff is mumbo jumbo, but they do know an awful lot about the properties of their plants, especially the curative aspects, and some of it’s very much worth knowing. It’s been put to a lot of use in medicine, and there’s still a lot to be learned.”
They paused while the waiter cleared their plates and poured coffee for all.
Phil had offered a few other details, which Gideon now shared. Scofield held a dual professorship, spending most of the year at the University of Iowa, but also teaching at the Universidad Nacional Agraria de la Selva in Tingo Maria, Peru, where he ran an extension program that trained Amazonian coffee and cacao farmers in ecologically sound farming techniques.
Twice a year he took some of his American students and other interested people down to Peru on a botanical field expedition. Until now, they had always been treks in the Huallaga Valley near Tingo Maria, three hundred miles south of Iquitos and the Amazon, but this year he’d wanted to do something different: an Amazon River expedition. Hence, his hiring of the Adelita.
“So what would this cost us?” John asked.
“Well, Phil says he can get there and back for a six-hundred-dollar fare: Seattle to Iquitos, and then Leticia back to Seattle.”
“That’s a terrific deal,” Marti said to John. “Harvey and Cece Sherman went to Peru in June and just their round trip to Lima was something like eleven hundred dollars.”
“And once we’re there,” Gideon said, “we’ll pay the same thing on the boat that Phil will – twenty dollars a day to cover food – a hundred and forty bucks for the week.”
“So… seven hundred forty bucks for the whole deal?” John said.
“Right. The regular passengers are paying over thirteen hundred just for the cruise part.”
John set his cup on its saucer with a decisive clink. “What the hell, let’s do it. What’s the name of the town again? Iquistos?”
“Iquitos,” Gideon said, then added with a smile: “It rhymes with mosquitoes.”
THREE
Captain Alfredo Vargas, founder and president of Amazonia Cruise Lines, headquartered in Iquitos, Peru, conducted most of his business meetings with government officials, potential investors, and prospective clients in the bright, pleasant bar of the Hotel Dorado Plaza, self-described, with some justification, as “the only five-star hotel in the Peruvian Amazon.” While this practice might seem extravagant to some, it was in reality a measure of thrift on the captain’s part, being far more cost-effective than renting a bona fide office full-time, especially inasmuch as his business meetings were few and far between. Of course, once Amazonia was on its feet, once there was a steady stream of passengers for the Adelita, once another ship or two had been added to what he fondly thought of as his “fleet,” then there would be a fine office with an anteroom and a receptionist, and right on the Malecon Iarapaca too, the grandest boulevard in all Iquitos.