The Babylon rite

36

Huaca D, Zana, Peru

‘Mio Dios.’ The torchbeams played across the little skeletons, illuminating one tiny skull, then another. ‘ Esto es terrible. ’

The voice was unexpected: not the same as before. Jessica squinted to see who was in the tomb, then she glimpsed the shine of a cap badge. Police. It was the police.

The Peruvian officers lifted her to her feet. The police? She felt a sudden urge to fight back, to protest: they had frightened her so much, sent her into the darkest terror. Vainly she slapped a hand away, pushed at one of the officers. Almost flailing.

They looked at her in the semi-dark, perplexing, questioning, bewildered. ‘Senorita…’

This was foolish, and Jessica knew it. She was chiding them for what? Saving her life? They were doing their job and they had done it well.

‘Senorita?’

She calmed, a little. ‘I… soy… Lo Siento. I am sorry — I was scared…’

They dismissed her words with a wave: they wanted her out of the huaca straightaway.

Stumbling over the bones, she obeyed: following them slowly out of the antechamber, and down the passageways, making the long retreat out of the huaca. No one spoke: the only sound was the scrape of boots in mud, the whisper of dust disturbed.

She steeled herself for what she was about to see as she approached the quadrangle of light that was the pyramidal exit: Dan’s body, prone in the Zana dust. But as she reached the fresher air, her apprehension was replaced by confusion. The body was already gone: only the bloodstains remained.

The tallest policemen, a handsome English-speaking man with a gentle smile, touched her mud-dusted shoulder. ‘Your friend is already in an ambulance.’

‘He is alive?’

‘No. I am sorry, no. He was killed, but we must examine the body.’

Jessica resisted the surging sadness, the tears she hadn’t cried. ‘What about the killers?’

‘They escaped. Someone from the village, from Zana, called us, they heard the shooting. Please-’ He gestured at one of three police cars, their red lights flashing absurdly, in the desert air. ‘We would like you to come to Chiclayo, and make a full statement. Is that permissible?’

‘Yes.’ Jessica shrugged. She was exhausted to the point of indifference; numbed by it all. ‘Of course.’

The questioning, in Chiclayo police headquarters, lasted four hours. It was polite, efficient, depressing, and repetitive. Towards the end Jessica found her mind wandering, gazing at the maps and mug-shots on the wall of the grubby office. What was she going to do now? TUMP was obviously finished. Her life was probably in danger. She didn’t especially care. Her lover, Dan, was dead: at the moment when he’d told her he loved her, almost exactly as she’d realized she probably reciprocated his feelings, he had been taken from her.

Death had a cruel sense of humour.

The police drove her back to Zana to collect her stuff. They expected her to move out of town for her own safety, she had to pack at once.

The police car stopped near the town plaza. Jessica alighted, reassuring the police that she could drive back to Chiclayo on her own. But they insisted on escorting her. She yielded to their protection, and agreed she would meet them at the lab in three hours. Then they could follow her Hilux to Chiclayo.

Jessica began her walk to the lab, and her little apartment next door. But as she walked, another enormous wave of melancholia almost knocked her legs away. The sadness was like a sack of rocks, as if she was hauling eighty kilos of grief on her back.

She needed to pause and think. Finding a broken bench in the town square, Jessica sat down, under fraying palm trees with gangrenous trunks.

Taking a can of cherry cola from her bag, she cracked it open, and drank. She was also hungry, but she had no food. Drinking the cola, she stared up the road. It terminated after two blocks with a rubbish-filled maize field, and then came the huacas. With the little children. And the bloodstains. The sadness was unbearable.

She stood and tossed the can in a bin, and began her walk to the lab. But a small black child was in the way, kicking a football against a wall of the grimy Panateria Tu Casa. A peeling wall poster for Inca Kola, El Sabor de Peru! flaked a little more paper onto the dirty street each time the ball thumped.

‘ Ola, Eduardo.’

The kid stopped, and turned, and grinned at Jessica. He was the son of the cleaner at the archaeology lab, at the other end of town. Jess often saw him running late to school, in shoes so battered he might as well have gone barefoot. She would never see him again. Eduardo answered, eagerly, ‘Buenas dias, Senorita Silverton!’ Another kick of the ball, ‘?Quieras jugar?’

Do you want to play?

Jess smiled, sadly, and turned down the offer. ‘ No, gracias. Los estadounidenses somos muy malos jugando al futbol. ’

I am an American, we are useless at soccer.

The boy grinned, and Jessica said goodbye, feeling herself stumble on the finality of the word — adios, adios — then she walked quickly to the lab.

She found Larry inside hastily packing away equipment.

They looked at each other. And Jessica knew that anything they said would feel pointless and wrong.

‘What are you going to do, Jess? Go home to California?’

Jessica sat on a stool. ‘Christmas in Redondo, with my mom?’ She sighed. ‘Maybe. You? What about you? And Jay?’

‘Still thinking. Jay’s already bought his ticket to Chicago. But I’m not sure.’ He picked up a Moche pot, then set it down. ‘The police say they might want us as witnesses pretty soon. So we’d just have to come back.’

‘They told me the same. I might go to Lima till the New Year. Lie low.’

Larry pulled up a stool and sat beside her. ‘What a freaking mess! Poor Dan.’

‘I know.’

‘You must…’ His embarrassed eyes barely met her gaze. ‘I mean, Dan and you, it must be horrible…’

She shook her head. She didn’t want to talk about Dan.

Larry seemed to understand. He stared at the window. ‘Just who the fuck are these people, Jess? Who is doing this?’

Jessica did not reply; there was no reply. No one had any idea. The fridges hummed in the silence; she wondered idly what would happen to their contents. The Moche bones and skulls. The notion of these things made her faintly nauseous.

Larry swivelled, and leaned closer, his voice lowered. ‘Jess… Did you, did you find the police kinda… odd?’

‘What do you mean?’

Her colleague shrugged, his concerned face was darkened by a puzzled frown. ‘I thought they seemed… scared. Like they knew something, or sensed something, and it frightened them. Gut feeling, is all. But I definitely got the sensation they were trying to close this all down: close down the lab, get us out of the way, get shot of the whole business. They don’t seem keen to follow up leads. Like, Archibald McLintock, he must be crucial to this case, yet they weren’t interested when I told them. They were more interested in asking me when I was going to leave Zana, and go to Lima, or America. They just wanted me gone.’

Jessica stared at him, absorbing the information. He was right: the cops hadn’t even asked her about McLintock. Why not? What were they avoiding? ‘But, Larry,’ she had to ask the obvious question, ‘what could be so bad it frightens the police?’