The Devil's Garden (21 page)

My eyes went back to the
comedor
and fixed themselves above Jorge’s galley. Cordero was enthroned at the top of the steps. He had moved our dining table to the very edge and there
he sat behind it, not facing outwards like the Judge but sideways on, as though the whole clearing were his office and the entire forest his barracks. He raised his head like a grazing bull
disturbed.

Sole was serving him coffee. She was wearing one of Tord’s baseball caps – also pulled down low. We had spoken. There was no question that she would be leaving with us as soon as we
came back. She just had to get through the next four hours.

I stopped. The mud was cracking from the lack of rain. I knew that it would be foolish to draw attention to her in front of Cordero and his men. But, still, it cost me to turn away.

As we approached the river path, Felipe looked up and tried to smile but guilt and self-reproach were asphyxiating him and his grin looked more like some twisted choke. The Judge did not pause
in his work.

IV

We took both of our boats. Three of Cordero’s men followed us. They watched us beach the first and then they turned and sped off. I had agreed to a second meeting
with Cordero. There was nothing to be gained from refusing and – now that he knew about Tupki and Kanari – there was nothing he could ask me that I could not answer directly. I wanted
only to be able to secure our equipment and the lab and then leave. If he was going to arrest us, then I assumed he would arrest us regardless. If they escorted us out, then so be it.

Paradoxically, the river seemed friendlier than before – busier, certainly. Canoes passed. There were families, groups of three and four – many of them presumably travelling to the
registration in the hope of whatever was being handed out. Some of them waved. Some of them did not. There were hand-paddled craft as well as
peque-peques
. But nobody paid us any special
attention. And we were not unduly worried about being in the forest. As Lothar said, while the soldiers were based at the Station, then that was the most dangerous place to be; and everybody for
dozens of miles around knew exactly who we were and what we were doing.

We had decided to work in relays for speed. Lothar carried from the storage hut and dropped off on our grey tarpaulin – roughly halfway along the path; I picked up from there and ferried
almost as far as the river. Kim waited on a clay rise, standing on a second tarpaulin from where she could see the boats, then, as I dropped off, she took things down to stow. All the kit that we
had taken out to the store haphazardly, one day at a time, now had to be brought back in a single trip. Besides the DNA amplifier, I wanted to collect the field scopes, the spare GPS, the camping
gear, the emergency and first-aid bags. Everything that we used was owned by our department – under-resourced, under-funded – and I was determined to do my duty even if I was leaving my
post. But after two relays – each a full fifteen minutes there and back – I was changing my mind. I wanted to be going.

I reached the tarpaulin where Lothar had left another load and stood a moment beneath a great
cumaru
tree. Ants were streaming up and down and around the trunk in thin diagonals like
shiny black necklaces strewn by passing spirits.
Odontomachus bauri
. Trap-jaw ants; 130 microseconds to spring shut their mandibles and no living creature in the world that moved quicker. I
had never seen them in the field before.

I resolved to do this relay and then wait for Lothar on the next return. I slung the additional pack over my shoulder and picked up the box of field scopes and the GPS and set off back down the
trail. The jungle was rinsing every last mineral from my body. At a fallen trunk, I put down the box to swig my water.

Something ripped my shirt over my head.

Or this – in the quarter second – was all that I could think had happened. There was darkness – intense heat – but even before the panic had detonated, I was pushed over
by a forceful weight – a body – or arms – or shoulders – some kind of animal – something that had barrelled into me with great force. And so I went down in worsening
confusion – blind – crashing into the trunk ahead – calling out – my wrist twisting against some branch I could not see. I struggled to move, to find my feet – and now
my mind came racing into the moment, chasing my body, and hot fear flooded my veins. What animal so big? Pain bloomed. I felt myself being yanked up and my head jerked back so that I thought my
neck was about to be broken. I began to fight and flail and still I could not properly stand. Voices. And then horrified, understanding . . . that this was a hood and that I was a prisoner. The
sweat on my back ran cold and I stood at last, dead still, sucking hotter and hotter air closer and closer about my face while a strange reason – or wild irrational shock – numbed the
pain and shut the panic. And already I was assessing, bargaining, pleading – as my tongue found a rough mouth hole and my ears strained and I felt a rope being bound over my wrists.

V

Cracks of light. I was standing in a rough storage hut – similar to our own. The floor was dirt and little else. The roof sloped: as I faced the door, it reached up
to my right no more than a foot higher than myself; to my left it came down as low as my knees into the deeper darkness. I paced carefully as my eyes adjusted: three and a half strides long, two
and a half wide – though I must bend and then crouch to guess the width. Further into the gloom, where the roof was lowest, there were piled plastic sacks of the kind used for chemicals or
fertilizer.

Moving spider-fingered down the wall, I put my eye to each light. If I was anywhere near another building, I could not see it. My guess was that I was in a clearing – though not a large
one; nothing more than where two paths met, perhaps.

Panic swept through me like a storm again. I yelled and gripped the cross beam with my hand and shook and juddered at the door. But nothing gave. I threw my shoulder at it. Nothing. I kicked
– again and again and then with my heel. The door moved a quarter of an inch each time – no more. My foot began to throb with the pain and I stopped, resting my hands on my knees, sweat
dripping off me, breathing hard.

I forced myself to consider. I forced myself to be rational.

They had removed the hood so that I could walk. I had stumbled barely thirty paces and yet already my eyes recognized nothing of where I was – the same path, some other?
With my hands roughly bound, I had followed the bare, brown, sweat-covered back of the anonymous man in front. He had never once turned. I had not been able to tell what kind of man he was or how
old. He had not stopped, but somehow, though forever ten steps ahead, he had measured his pace to slow a little as I slowed and speed up whenever I did the same.

I could not be sure how long we walked. They took my watch along with my pack. My only gauge was that it had not grown dark. Twice I attempted to look around to see the faces of the men behind
me, but each time I was met with a blow to my shoulder blade that sent me stumbling forward, crying out with pain.

When, at last, the figure stopped, I automatically did the same – as if mesmerized into mirroring his every action. But before I could shake off this spell the hood was back on my head.
Then they cut the cord that bound my wrists and led me blindly by the hand – something momentarily tender and out of place in the gesture – before they kicked me inside the hut.

Bellowing, I tugged at the hood but it caught on my neck, the cord cutting hard into my flesh and the underside of the jawbone where it would not slip past my chin. I wrenched and twisted until
I thought I would garrotte myself. Hot angry tears rose. I clawed at the mouth hole to make it wider; it ripped – easily – stupidly. I tore the more until the hood fell around me like a
bandanna and I found myself in wider darkness.

I squatted now with my back to the hut door, listening to the forest squawk and trill. Fear came in pulses, threatening to take hold like the onset of sea-sickness. But each
time it came, I pressed my back harder against the wood. I could not have walked more than two hours. Eight miles at the outside, then. Much less in all likelihood. But I had no idea who had put me
in here or why. Cordero’s men, the soldiers, the traffickers, other guerrillas, affiliated tribesmen, unaffiliated tribesmen? Was I to be used in some way? Was I to be ransomed? I knew it was
not un-contacted Indians: my captors had spoken only two words to me, ‘walk’ and ‘now’, and though the accent was thick, the language was Spanish. Neither did the
uncontacted have keys and storage huts. Who though? They had not spoken among themselves. I had guessed there were three but there could have been more. My mind circled lower and lower. If the
intention was to kill me, then why bring me here at all? There would be water then, and there would be food. They would surely keep me alive. They would return. In any case, I told myself, these
conjectures did not matter because there were only two possibilities: that either I found a way out myself or my captors let me out.

I stood up. I must check every board, every plank and every section of the roof. I must be systematic. I would escape.

I began at the door. I pushed at the bottom – then I pressed and kicked and tapped all the way up as far as I could reach. Next, the roof above the door. I reached up and thumped as best
as I could. I would work my way clockwise around the hut.

Voices.

A language I did not recognize. Tribesmen?

Human voices. But sing-song, then chattering, then soft – ‘ock-olock-olock’.

I moved from crack to crack hoping for a sightline. But I could see nothing. A shadow? The human shape? I could not be sure. The gloaming was thickening the forest from trunk to trunk. Now there
was murmuring, calling; strange ethereal sounds that I could not understand. Two, three different voices – it was impossible to tell. Where were they? I chased along the walls.

I called out. Waited. Called out a second time. Listened.

A moment’s stillness – silence almost.

I thumped on the door. I kicked. I shouted with all that my lungs could summon. I stopped. Listened again. Nothing. Nothing. The jungle noises were rushing in once more to fill the empty air
– the toothcomb and the croaks and evening calls of the birds and no sound that was human. I pounded at the door. I was nothing but my physical self, howling inside my cage.

It was bitter to return to my task. More bitter still that the cracks were becoming merely smears and I was working with my hands rather than with my eyes. The wood was rough
and splintered. I was reckless and despairing. And in the gathering darkness, my discomfort fed on itself and was soon grown to misery. Nothing was loose. Nothing moved. The cuticles of my toes
were hurting in my boots from the kicking. I was stung and bitten and raging with the itchy compulsion to tear off my skin. My nails were cut, and my shirt clung to my back. I had tried to urinate
through one of the gaps, using my fingers as a barrier to protect myself against the wood, but I had succeeded only in fouling my hands. And now I could no longer continue with my task because the
only sections left were the low walls where the roof sloped down above the plastic sacks and I didn’t want to lie in the dirt and probe blindly in the darkness. All this in less than six
hours. I had no appetite, I was not thirsty, but I wanted to wash. I wanted to be clean. I was afraid of losing my spirit. And this fear merged into all my other fears until fear was my all.

The night began. The blackness was soon so deep that I could only see my hands when I raised them before my eyes. Whatever crawled on the floor, I could not crouch on my heels
any longer. I allowed myself to sit in the dirt and it eased the pain.

Unsleeping, awake, asleep, awake again, I found I was slapping at my skin. The near-darkness whined with sound. With my head in my knees, I sought other places for my mind to
go. But I could think only of the immensity of the forest, the river networks, the paths, the billion trees, this clearing, the hut and my body locked inside, isolated.

Against this loneliness, I spoke to myself. Are you injured? No – no, I’m all right, I’m OK. Good. You’re lucky. They didn’t really hurt you. You need to keep
yourself injury free. You need to look after yourself the best you can. What about water? Shut up. You can last three days, even here. Longer. You wouldn’t give it a second thought if you
were heading to the station. You don’t drink water for days at home. So put it out of your mind. And food will not be serious for a long time either. So you’re not going to starve. Now,
right now, you have your strength and you’re not depleted. So think. Be systematic. This is just a shack. You can get out of here tomorrow. Stop wasting your energy, man.

There was surprising comfort in this. I knew well that it was absurd, but somehow the sound of my own voice stabilized me, held back the surge and press of other thoughts. And after a while, I
no longer thought of it as my own voice. Time and space became as one – both dark, all around and neither passing.

In the blackness something moved and into my mind came the image of a snake. No longer a species I had memorized but a living creature of the night, worming beneath the walls,
between the fissures, alive as I was, no more than a foot long, routinely fanged with a venom that would kill me – agonizingly, without significance or purpose.

I leapt up.

I would carry on. Anything would be better than this. Unseeing, I heaved out bags until I could wave my invisible arm in the empty space. Then I lay down on the bare earth and edged backwards,
my hands held above my head, groping for the far wooden walls in the darkness.

Beading.

The telltale tunnels of the termites.

VI

Dawn. I had a gap six inches tall by eighteen inches wide, beyond which, if I twisted, I could just about see the tangle of plants. I dug in my heels and thrust myself
deeper until I was close against the far wall, no more than a foot high. The air smelt of the heady sweetness of rot and ferment. My fingers probed back and forth. Towards the corner, the wood was
completely beaded and less dense – the pieces came away in my hand more easily like icing from a cake.