The Babylon rite

45

Iquitos, Amazonia, Peru

Boris Valentine was about forty-five and tending to fat. He was adorned in a lurid Hawaiian shirt almost open to the navel, he had a silver medallion dangling way down this chest and his eyes were vigorously blue, yet he looked like he hadn’t had a proper night’s sleep since the 1970s. Indeed he looked, to Adam, as if he belonged in the seventies or eighties. A sleazy entrepreneur running a celebrity disco in New York, with a tiny coke spoon at the ready, and three anorexic girlfriends.

Yet this was the renowned ethnobotanist from UCLA, according to Jessica Silverton, this was the man who could track down ulluchu, out there in the jungle. And the man was evidently keen to do it: to get out there in the bush and make his name in the jungle: he already exuded ambition like an over-musky aftershave.

‘So you’re the drug-hunting gringos. That’s just what we need here in Iquitos. More kids after a headrush. We only have three thousand of them.’ Boris laughed and shook hands with Adam, and then he kissed Nina’s hand and then he just kissed Jessica. Turning, smartly, he marched them off the airstrip in his incongruous and finely-tooled cowboy boots, talking the while. ‘Welcome to Iquitos my friends, the largest city in the world that you cannot reach by road. Welcome to the capital of the Amazon. Shall we hurry the fuck up before the Zetas come and start a Facebook appreciation page in honour of your arrival?’ He laughed at Nina’s expression. ‘Sorry, be of good cheer! We are going somewhere even the biggest cartels in Mexico won’t find us: out there-’ he waved at the trees, prowling the airport perimeter. ‘And we’re going upriver. There are places two hundred miles from here no white man has ever seen, at least not on the ground, or not without getting himself killed by the poison at the end of a dart, made from the venom of killer bees and the extruded toxin of the curare vine. Here’s the Valentinemobile, hop in. Chuck your luggage in there. On the seat. Let me get rid of the ten-inch millipede. We have a great number of very large insects here. A lot of them extremely venomous.’

It was a rusted, stripped-down VW minibus with all the windows punched out and the roof torn off. Like the shell of a vehicle hit by a mortar.

‘Air conditioning, Iquitos style. Boy, you are going to like this city. Well, like it I, most of the time; but I’m in a good mood because I haven’t had half my family killed.’

They all climbed on the minibus. Boris Valentine belched robustly, turned the key, and the rattling old vehicle sped out of the airport precincts into the whirl of Iquitos traffic: languid and barefoot kids on motorbikes, motokars with Lenin Es Ma Vida on the transparent covers, more VW Beetles and buses with the roofs shaved off, as if there was a tax on automobile roofs.

Boris and Jess talked animatedly at the front of the minibus. Every so often one of them would glance behind at Nina and Adam, as they sweated like gringo tourists in the back of the bus: the breeze through the punched out windows was indeed welcome. The humidity was profound, a wet suffocation; Adam felt he could almost rub it between his fingers, the air, it had a viscosity, even a greasiness: the exhalations of the jungle — the jungle that entirely surrounded them, like a besieging army.

Jess turned, and talked loudly, above the traffic noise, to Adam and Nina; lecturing from the front seat as if she was a tour guide introducing them to Hell. ‘Boris says we’re going to Belen market. If anyone knows of ulluchu it will be there, he reckons. All the river people go there, he says: the river pirates, the river gypsies, the river tribes. It’s the trading centre of all Amazonia.’

‘How long, exactly, have you known Boris Valentine?’

Jess looked at Nina. ‘Quite a few years. I took a couple of his lectures at USC. As I said, he really is the go-to guy for the plant life of the Amazon. Entheogens and psychedelics, medicinal plants. All of it. He’s been working upriver for years.’

Adam scrutinized Jessica Silverton as she and Nina talked, a little awkwardly, as they wove through the madding traffic. Behind the self-conscious self-confidence he could see fear and anxiety in the American woman’s brown eyes: and a definite wariness, too. She was scared about something, haunted even. But of course she had recently seen friends and lovers killed, and that was probably enough reason for mistrusting anyone and everything.

Jess had shared her theory about the Aztecs with them on the flight from Lima. It was a fine insight. So fine, Adam wanted to hear it again: this time he was going to write it down. Like a proper journalist. He tapped her on the shoulder, and requested a reprise. She smiled, uncertainly. ‘OK. This is how I see it, after the Moche, the cruellest and most drug-addled of all these American civilizations were surely the Aztecs. They must have possessed ulluchu in almost as strong a form, perhaps stronger. A distillation maybe, or a new preparation.’

Adam raised a hand. ‘Wait, please.’ The Valentinemobile was swerving wildly, avoiding potholes. Adam steadied his pen. ‘OK. Sorry. Go on.’

‘However, the Aztecs were also the last great civilization in North and Central America: the last of the ulluchu users. So what happened when the white men came? The Aztecs hid it from the conquistadors. They hid the drug! That explains the legends of the famous buried treasure of Montezuma: the gold the Spanish could never quite find. It wasn’t gold: it was a golden flower, a golden morning glory flower, the flower of evil, which disappeared.’

A page of his notebook was filled. Adam thanked her and pocketed his pen, and felt the pungent Iquitos breeze on his face, scented with sewage and spice and squalor. The idea was good, the theories were good; the reality was still very dangerous. He gazed about, nervously.

The streetscape was ageing and narrowing as they approached the centre: older Spanish colonial buildings, decaying in the decades of jungle storms and wetness, were lined up on either side of the narrow boulevards.

Nina was just gazing: wordless now, as she had too often been of late. It was a growing contrast to the chatterbox girl he had met in that pub in Edinburgh just a few weeks ago. Then he could feel her extroversion, her effervescence. But the tragedies and the violence and the grief had ground her down; they were corroding her, diminishing her: she had got quieter and quieter. Maybe he hadn’t helped, with his stupid violence in Portugal, but he had done it because he was defending her. He wanted to kiss her. He was never going to kiss her. He was never going to allow himself to do this, not after Alicia. Not again. A girl who would occupy his heart and soul and then fuck him up with grief or heartbreak or loss: never again. But if he couldn’t allow himself to love her, he could win this, solve this, defeat this: for her.

He wondered what she was thinking, right now. He wanted to squeeze her hand and ask, but he couldn’t. Probably she was thinking of her dad, who came here eighteen months ago. They knew from his receipts that he had taken a ferry upriver, and stayed six days — somewhere — and then came back. They had no idea where he stopped, and disembarked, but they knew his direction.

But if this trip was recorded in the notebooks it also meant the Zetas were probably out here too, in the riverine slums, hunting them down. And they weren’t just hunting him and Nina, they were hunting for more ulluchu, of course.

The ripples of the puzzle suddenly froze into a pattern.

‘They’re looking for ulluchu. They want more ulluchu,’ he said, to the whole vehicle, to no one.

Nina said, ‘We know that.’

‘No, I mean both of them. The Zetas, and Catrina, they both have limited supplies, and they are both trying to find more.’

‘But my dad must’ve sold the Catrina a lot, we discussed this-’

‘Yes.’ Adam nodded. He noticed that Jessica was staring at him, intently. He went on. ‘But consider the actions of the Zetas, all this killing, the explosions, murders. Of course they are desperate to find more ulluchu, to source it, that is why they stole the notebooks, as we know — to find out what your father knew, where he went, where he got the drug — but at the same time they want to prevent the other gang, Catrina, from following the same trail. Because maybe Catrina are running out of ulluchu too.’

The minibus rattled over a pothole.

‘It makes a load of sense,’ Jessica said. ‘Horrible sense. That’s why the Zetas blew up Casinelli, and killed Dan, and tried to kill you: they want to extract all the information they can, and then silence their sources, prevent El Santo from getting the same information.’

They all fell silent, in the hubbub of Iquitos. Adam stared around: if he was right — and he knew he was right — this meant the Zetas were surely here. And not just the Zetas. The soldiers of the skulls, the soldiers of Catrina, if they had guessed that Iquitos was the key, they would also be here: waiting on the next corner in the next mosquitoey cafe, their Glock revolvers hidden under the dirty table. Hands tattooed with Santa Muerte skulls. Yearning to kill for killing’s sake.

He stilled his nerves, as best he could — and listened. Boris, who seemed oblivious to their anxieties, was now talking, loudly, as he crashed the gears up and down, joining the squealing and discordant symphony of the wild Iquitos traffic. ‘Look at this place. Look at it! I just love this city. It’s just so damn absurd. Frankly speaking, it shouldn’t even be here any more, the only reason they built it was the rubber boom in the nineteenth-century. Back in the day, when this place, along with Manaus, were the capitals of rubber, you could get anything, any luxury imaginable. Four hundred bucks would buy you a fourteen-year-old Polish virgin: they had whores from everywhere, Cairo, Tangier, Paris, Baghdad, Budapest, New York, fricking Tashkent. They watered their horses with iced Taittinger champagne. The donkeys got Veuve Clicquot. They had banquets costing a hundred thousand dollars. Caviar by the scoopful, cured meats from Paris, top hats from England, Danish butter imported on barges filled with ice. Cuban cigars they lit with their hundred-buck notes. The rubber barons lived in these mansions here-’ He was gesturing at the mouldering, decrepit, colonnaded buildings, collaged with posters for ARPU the Peruvian socialist party. ‘Anyway, all this talk of caviar — I’m famished. Shall we eat? We can we get some arepas — rounds of milk cheese wrapped in banana leaves, best drunk with small thimbles of tinto coffee. Delicious. You know the Peruvians believe Christ ate guinea pig at the Last Supper? Aqui! ’

He parked the minibus. They climbed out and bought some food from a stall. Adam gawped. Rats ran under their feet, next to a new luxury hotel already mouldy from the heat and the wet, the air which pretended to be air.

The arepa-seller handed over the banana leaf wraps of cheese, which were delicious and disgusting at the same time. They climbed back in the minibus. Boris continued talking. He never stopped talking, it seemed. ‘Now poor old beautiful mad Iquitos is having a second boom. It’s the trade in lumber, in hardwoods, and oil of course, and all the good stuff of the jungle, and it’s also pesos turisticas from the mad gringo and Jap kids who come here to take drugs. Because the Amazon jungle contains the vast majority of the globe’s naturally occurring recreational substances. You know what indole is?

‘No,’ said Adam.

‘Indole-containing plant hallucinogens are concentrated, overwhelmingly, in the New World, and in Amazonia especially. Hell, you could probably eat the rats around here and have a decent little trip, if you don’t get leptospirosis first.’ The car raced past a tall woman loitering on a corner wearing a dizzying blonde wig; Adam looked again: ‘she’ was a transvestite. ‘What I was saying, yeah, the Amazon is the most amazing place of all for discovering new mind-altering drugs. It all started in the 1850s. Two Brits, Alfred Russell Wallace and Richard Spruce, they travelled around here and on the upper reaches of the Rio Negro, Spruce saw a buncha Indians preparing a strange foodstuff, then he noticed that the main ingredient was a liana, a climbing vine — he called it Banisteria caapi. Finally he realized this plant was the main ingredient for ayahuasca, the vine of the gods, the great hallucinogen of the jungle, and that’s why we get kids coming here from all over: backpackers, British students. You Brits like to get high, don’t you? Is it the rain that depresses you? Damn it anyway, look, there’s one: I’ll try and run him over — stoned as a lizard — look at him, god-damn hippies.’ Boris swerved the battered windowless minibus and scared the bedraggled Western youth onto the sidewalk. ‘They come here in their fricking pyjamas and sandals hoping to meet a shaman and take some ayahuasca in a stupid clearing in the jungle and they pay two hundred bucks to take some crappy old yage mixed with dope and diesel and lord knows, and they puke their guts up for eight hours and claim they’ve had visions of monkeys with dentures and then they come back to Iquitos and get off their gourds on coke and heroin, and then they wander around like zombies and get run over. Sometimes by me. We’re here. Belen river market. Prepare yourselves. You ain’t seen nothing like this.’

The minibus pulled over. The heat and humidity was now joined by the intense noise of a pullulating market. Boris gave some kid a few pesos to watch the bags and the gutted bus and he dived straight into the melee, expecting them to follow.

Jess turned to them. ‘I know he seems crazy. I know. But he really knows this stuff: he’s the best ethnobotanist around. Come on before we lose him.’

It was all too easy to lose someone in Belen market. The place was teeming with tribespeople from up and down the Amazon. Little boys and girls ran naked between stalls selling potatoes and cheap Valium and huge catfish and sad-looking sloths in cages and dead turtles on their backs with slimy, yellow intestines tugged out and displayed. Ingots of raw sugar were stacked like building bricks in huge piles next to plastic sacks of cornflour. The rats were everywhere: big, sleek and smug.

A man sang the blues with a three-stringed guitar. Women wearing three hats at once cackled and shouted, ‘ Hay chambira, hay uvas, hay jugo de cocona a cinquenta centimos ’ as they stood over trestle tables piled high with crude cigarettes made from mapacho jungle tobacco, and arrays of reeking salt fishes, and piles of large gourds and camu-camu fruit; selections of parrots, bell peppers, and fat manzanillas; chunks of wild black jungle pig; hooves of tapirs still bloody and frazzled with flies; tiny coconuts the size of ping-pong balls; strips from the ten-metre-long great river fish called paiche; plates of platano mush being hungrily eaten by off-duty river captains; plantains, chambira, copaiba wood, spices in supersaturated colour; dead buzzards which might have been on sale or might just have died and fallen from the sky.

‘Here,’ said Boris, ‘try this.’ It was a bottle of white liquid, in a clear plastic bottle, like runny yoghurt. ‘Go on, try it.’

Adam was thirsty, and sweating, in the intense humidity; he grabbed the bottle gratefully, and swigged. It was sweet and drinkable. He glugged some more, wiping his mouth with his wrist.

‘It’s good. What is it?’

‘Chicha beer. Made from manioc. They ferment it by chewing it up and spitting it out. It’s basically a beer made from old woman’s drool. This way.’ He turned and dived back into the melee.

Adam knew he was being tested. He refused to flinch; but the gorge rose inside him as they walked on.

Finally they reached the floating market, where the just-after-the-rainy-season Amazon reached up to the waist of the city. Boris, of course, was first in the little boat; the rest of them climbed in, unsteadily, sweating, dirty, energized, frightened.

The motorboat puttered between stilt houses and houses floating on balsa platforms. This part of the market was mercifully quieter: Adam got the idea that they were in a different emotional zone of Belen market.

Jess said quietly, ‘It reminds me of the Witches’ Market in Chiclayo.’ She paused. ‘These people are curanderos, I think. Shamans.’

There were men and women in tribal costume hawking their goods from the floating houses and tethered balsa rafts. Men in loincloths with parrot feathers in their hair. Women in nylon ra-ra skirts with tattoos on their faces. They sold strange-coloured fungi, withered vines, tiny seeds in little calabash pouches, dried birds’ heads, and litres of ayahuasca in old Johnnie Walker whisky bottles. At several spots Boris stopped and chatted discreetly with the shamans and the shawomen, mostly in Quechua or some rare Amazon language.

Occasionally Adam caught the odd snatch of Spanish, and what he could interpret was not encouraging. ‘ Se los lleva el sol.’

They are being taken by the sun.

‘?Que es eso?’ ‘Eso es el polvo de yohimbina.’

What is that? It is just yohimbe.

The sun was beginning to set, to thankfully sink into the Amazon beyond the floating market. Adam’s anxiety rose. The cartels could be following them anywhere. They were all-powerful. They could arrange for a London policeman to be silently garrotted, just as a kind of lurid joke. The cartels were richer than some countries. They had the weaponry of modern armies. They carved words into your skin with knives and filmed it, and then they dissolved you in vats of acid.

Even Boris was looking defeated and anxious. He muttered something about trying again tomorrow. Glancing nervously at the setting sun. ‘You don’t want to be in this part of Belen after dark. Specially with Catrina on your case, mes amigos. Let’s try this one last house.’

The last floating house had the most flamboyant shaman of all, a Kofan shaman with a coloured mantle that fell to his knees. Festoons of multicoloured beads hung around his neck, alongside necklaces of shells and seeds and curving white jaguar teeth. His eyebrows had been vigorously plucked and painted, his lips were dyed a sombre purple-blue, his wrist was braceleted with iguana skins, his flat brown nose had a singular emerald macaw feather pierced through the septum, and his long earlobes were studded with caiman fangs. Surmounting it all was a resplendent headdress of violet hummingbird feathers, scarlet macaw feathers and wild sapphire parrot tail feathers, like the halo of an archangel.

‘What does he say?’ whispered Adam, in awe.

‘He says we should talk to his wife.’

There was an awkward pause. Then the shaman’s wife came out from the floating shack wearing denim shorts, flip-flops and a dirty T-shirt with a picture of Justin Bieber on the front. She listened to Boris’s question. Then she nodded, casually. ‘ Ulluchu si.’ She talked quickly in her own language.

The excitement quickened with the dying of the day. ‘Where?’ Adam asked. ‘What is she saying? Where?’

Boris turned. His face was uncharacteristically grave. ‘She says we will find it two hundred miles upriver. That makes sense. It tallies with what we know of Archibald McLintock’s movements.’

‘Two hundred miles?’ Nina interjected, her forehead slightly streaked with river mud, and the inevitable thick Iquitos sweat.

‘Two hundred miles up the Ucayali. With the Pankarama. Protected tribal wilderness.’ Boris looked perturbed, for the first time that day.

‘So?’

‘ Amigos. The Pankarama are headhunters. They kill gringos. They kill everyone. And then they shrink their heads.’