The Devil's Garden (23 page)

II

I heard the drone and registered its constancy before my conscious mind understood its meaning; but in another moment I was calling out and crashing recklessly forward.
This was not the whine of flies, nor the buzz of the Meliponinae, but the deeper
peque-peque
of a boat.

My tongue was a monstrous clapper in my mouth. My words were all cries without consonants. The engine had slowed. I shouted. The ground rose and fell. I struggled on. I yelled.

The engine had gone. I could not hear anything.

I hurled myself off the path, which had been paralleling the river as if to torture me, and I plunged sideways – directly towards the water. The undergrowth was dense and thick and darker
here and I had not the strength to climb. I went on my belly beneath a tangle of thorns thrown up across my way. I called out once more. I squirmed the last of the rise until the ground fell away
and – through the trees below me – I could see the river. I heard my name.

III

‘Stay out of the water.
Zum Teufel nochmal.
Stay out of the water.
Komm nicht weiter ins Wasser rein.
’

I hesitated on the bank.

‘Stay out of the water.’

I wanted to wash the filth away.

‘Stay out of the water.’

Knee deep, beneath the overhanging forest, I stopped, swaying, faint, my heart like a humming bird, the river running cool in my boots. He was driving the boat towards me, drifting in across the
glimmering river towards my shore – the cigarette and the hat and the glint of his earring.

I croaked.

He took a hold of the bow rope and leapt out. The sun shot through the splashes. And in a moment he had his shoulder under my arm, his arm around my back.

‘Your hands are bleeding, my friend, and we don’t want the piranha to know about your injuries, do we?’

He pulled the boat towards us and helped me collapse over the side.

Somewhere in the deeper shade of a long bend, he cut the engine and tied us up. He busied himself with his rucksack, his tobacco fingers working nimbly on the zips and
straps.

‘First, rehydration tablets.’

He climbed over the seat to where I lay, handed me a plastic bottle, examined my hands and then dropped two pills into the liquid.

‘This. Slowly.’ He watched me trying to drink. ‘
Du bist ein warer Glückspilz.
’

The fluid tasted like flat lemonade.

‘Slowly,’ he repeated.

I was choking and could not swallow.

‘Little sips,’ he said, pinching together finger and thumb.

‘Sole?’ I asked.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘They have not bothered her. They’re afraid of Cordero. But in a minute. Drink.’

‘Where is Kim?’

‘She wouldn’t leave without you. Believe me, I tried. And now I think they are suspicious of her.’

‘For what?’

‘One thing at a time. Little sips.’

I drank as he instructed.

‘Are you injured?’

I shook my head.

‘Are you sick?’

‘Diarrhoea.’

He opened another pocket in his pack. The river was strangely still. There were no other boats. I saw macaws flying overhead and thought that it must be the afternoon. I saw the sun through the
branches.

‘Chew this. Wash it down.’ He held my head and placed a tablet into my mouth. ‘What have you been eating?’ he asked.

‘
Myrmelachista schumanni
.’

He laughed his ugly rubber-faced laugh and I thought that he was some kindly forester from one of those old German folk tales after all – kings, kingdoms, princesses, wolves and
woodcutters; a lesson in goodwill and self-reliance.

I drank again – with less discomfort. Already, restoration was seeping through me and I was becoming aware of the terrible itching of my skin, a tender pain radiating out across my
shoulder blades, a crusted sore on my face, my splintered fingers, my savaged feet, my lips, my arms, a spasm curling in my gut. There was embarrassment, too.

‘I didn’t get lost,’ I said after a while. ‘I was kidnapped. Somebody locked me in a hut. I didn’t get—’

‘Easy, my friend. Easy. I know. I know you didn’t get lost. Of course you didn’t get lost.’

‘You know? How do you—’

‘Easy. Drink. Let me do the talking. You drink.’ He reached for his cigarettes. ‘It was not Cordero – or Lugo.’ He smiled sarcastically. ‘They don’t
have to bother with kidnapping you. They can do whatever they want to you. Believe me.’

‘So who?’

‘What I know, I will tell you. Drink.’ He turned his head to let go the first of his smoke but kept his eyes fixed straight on me. ‘I waited for you at the fallen tree. You did
not come. I waited longer. I decided not to make another relay. I walked to the boat. Kim was there. You were not. So. Something has happened. I run
schnell
to look again – and, this
time, I curse the fact that I am such a pig-mounter – because now that I think to look, I can see clearly on the ground that there has been a problem.’

‘Who?’

‘Could be a lot of people.’ He shrugged. ‘But it’s not going to be the oil – so it is either drugs or a resurgence of the guerrillas, or it’s tribesmen
working for one or the other, or even for themselves. Somebody wants to make money out of you, my friend. Or somebody wants the newsmen here. The bigger the coverage, the higher the
price.’

‘Why did they leave me without water and food?’

‘They would have been back,’ he said. ‘If they wanted to kill you, then there is no place better in the world for murder.’ He gestured about himself. ‘Anyway, in
that moment, it did not matter who it was. I saw that you had been kidnapped. And I was so angry with myself, I could have cut off my own balls.’ He pulled at his ear. ‘I was sure it
was not Cordero. I decided that Kim would be better off with him than standing in the forest so I ran back to the river. I sent her straight to the Station. Then I returned to the fallen tree. I
walked up and down until it was dark and I could not see my own stupid feet. But I could not find anything. So. I come back to the river. I sleep in the other boat with my head full of snakes. All
night I hear people moving about. I begin to wonder if you are already dead. I begin to wonder if I am already dead.’

He exhaled his smoke through his nose. ‘I am awake before the squirrel monkeys have brushed their teeth. But now who should come paddling along nice and quiet in the half-darkness, scaring
the
Scheiße
out of me . . . it’s Tord. He is searching for me, he says. He has intelligence. He tells me there are more soldiers at the Station and that the place is like a swine
farm. He tells me that they are looking for you. He tells me Kim is OK. So. We agree we have to find you by the afternoon or we have to go back and alert every news organization in the world just
in case Cordero decides not to do anything about you being disappeared.’

‘How were you planning to find me?’

‘Let me finish. Tord and me – we go back on the trail together. It is proven that four eyes are better than two – or maybe there are miracles after all – because this
time we find the second path. We follow it together and we come to your little place in the jungle. We see the hut. We see the lock. We see the broken wood. I see the termites. I laugh.’

‘It wasn’t a good joke at the time.’

‘But it improves – no? So, now, at the hut Tord says we have a bigger problem. And the little soldier of Jesus is correct. If you had stayed in the prison, we could have all been
home by now, eating spider monkey and potatoes. But, no, you have broken out and you could be anywhere in the whole forest.’

Lothar fired a second cigarette. ‘It was Tord’s idea that we go back to our boats. There are too many paths here, from the rubber days and from everything else. The forest is not so
dense either, which makes it easier to get lost. But we are also lucky because here we are between two rivers that meet not so far away and so the gap between is not so wide. Tord thinks that
sooner or later you would hit the banks of one of the rivers – unless you managed to walk straight up, deeper into the interior, in which case maybe the Piro would find you and then eat your
brain. So we decide to split up. I will go up and down one river and he will go up and down the other. We meet at five and if nothing, we go back and . . . and then we raise whatever is left in
hell that has not already been raised.’

I had finished the fluid. ‘I think I saw the Mascho Piro. I heard their voices.’

He looked at me steadily. ‘I’m sure they come down this way. People see their signs all the time.’

‘Disembowelled monkeys?’

He shrugged and looked away – up the river. ‘We are death to them. We make them ill. We rob them of their lands. We murder them. What else can they do? They can’t speak to us.
They do not
want
to speak to us. But all the signs they leave are as clear as one human being can be to another and they mean the same thing: “Go away. Leave us alone.” They
don’t want democracy or Jesus or even science. We are the needy ones in the relationship. We want them to like us. We want them to agree with what we are doing to the world, we want them to
participate. You should drink plain water now.’ He handed me a bottle. ‘And then try to eat something that doesn’t crawl.’

‘And then we go back. And we get Sole and Kim and whatever we can and we leave.’

‘Exactly so.’

‘Lothar – thank you. I owe you.’

‘No.’ He shook his head and smiled. ‘There’s no owing. We both know that.’

IV

They cruised up beside us like fighter planes appearing on either side of a passenger jet. One moment nothing – just the amber and gold of the evening river and the
dull chug of our engine not quite echoing against the trees; the next – two boats gunning toward us from the shadows of the overhanging branches where they had been lying in wait. The
uniformed men were sat in single file in their boats, just as they had been that first day on the jetty when I threw them the rope.

I twisted sharply around. I counted six guns. This time death was merely the momentary matter of a puerile finger on a perfunctory trigger.

Lothar raised his voice against their engines, his face somehow deeper within the circumference of his hat: ‘They want us to pull into the bank.’

‘How do we feel about that?’

‘Right now, it seems like a great idea to us.’

I sank back. My body ached more than I had ever known it; but I was not as sick and the spasms in my stomach had ceased. Nor did I have any anxiety about what might happen to me any more. I
could endure.

We stopped in the silt of the shoreline and raised our hands in the manner of all surrenders. But the two boats did not follow us in. Instead, they floated together thirty paces out, the guns
still lazily trained. I recognized Captain Lugo. He seemed to be discussing something with a lieutenant who was sitting in the other stern.

With little more than a raising of his head, Lothar indicated where the water was darker beneath the overhanging foliage. No more than eight feet away, a black caiman lay absolutely still, all
but submerged, the only motion its inner eyelid blinking – sideways – purposeful, patient, prehistoric.

He spoke softly from beneath his hat: ‘They are looking for me.’

‘I was beginning to suspect as much.’

‘I hoped not to burden you. I was going to disappear after you had left the Station. But, well, now we may be in a bad situation.’

‘Seems like life is just one bad situation after another,’ I said.

He smiled and for a moment I saw the child in him again, the practical joker, but then it was gone and the lines in his face redrew themselves.

‘I think they know. So you should know, too.’ He winced as though his secret was leaving him physically. ‘I take photographs and I report on what happens here – all the
bad things. I am the spy they are looking for.’

Lugo seemed to be talking into a satellite phone. I lowered my hands. They knew we were not going to go anywhere. If they wanted to shoot me, they could.

‘What do you mean – spy? Who for Lothar?’

‘I tell the Ashaninka where the oil people are. I tell the Matsigenka where the drugs people are. I tell the drugs people where the soldiers are. I even tell soldiers where the loggers
are. And I tell the news organizations everything.’

‘You write articles?’

‘And other stuff. Some journalist usually re-writes it to make themselves look like they know. But it’s me. Half the pictures in the newspapers are mine, too. Or they have come from
cameras that I know about.’ He paused. ‘And I have been using your computer to send this information.’

‘You mean you’re an activist?’

‘They say spy. You say activist. What does it matter what we call it? It’s what I do that counts.’

‘So who do you work for?’

‘Nobody.’

Two of the men were climbing out of one boat and into the other. I looked across. ‘You don’t take money from anyone? You’re not with anybody?’

‘Not any more. Maybe you could say I work for everybody. I do what I think is in the interests of the long-term health of the forest and the remaining un-contacted tribes. I work for what
is best.’

‘I am glad you can work out what that is.’

The boats were separating.

‘I have been here a long time, my friend,’ he said. ‘Once you free your mind of all the noise and the propagandas – you can think clearly.’

‘Which is why you have been helping the drugs people – against the army?’

I heard a deep sadness in him now, the long-abiding spirit behind everything else. ‘Against the army because – at this moment – the army is the government – which is
– in reality – just the oil companies.’

‘Which also means that you’re helping arm the cocaine barons.’

‘I don’t arm them. But I do make choices. At the moment I prefer cocaine to the loggers – it’s true – and I usually prefer cocaine to the oil concessions. Maybe
this will change.’ He raised his shoulders. ‘I have to alter my position often. But the tribes have lived with coca for a long time. Oil threatens everything. Here. Now.’

The engines startled birds into flight.