The Babylon rite

49

Ucayali River, Peru

The Zetas were grimly efficient: like proper soldiers. With barely a word they plucked the cellphone from Jessica’s hand and barked a few questions into it.

The cartel officer turned and sneered. ‘You call a doctor? In Peru? How can he help? You are going to need more than Tylenol.’

The cellphone was thrown in the river. All their phones were thrown in the river. Then Jessica, Adam, Nina, Boris and Jose were separated from the Pankarama and led at gunpoint through the weeds and red squelchy mud of the Ucayali riverbank.

The military efficiency was no coincidence, of course, as Adam realized: they were still an army, at their core. Jess had told them the entire cartel was founded by deserters from the Mexican special forces. This fact might have given Adam some frail hope, of a military logic that could be somehow appealed to, if it weren’t for the captain, the obvious commander, who’d told them his name was ‘Marco’ — as he bluntly separated them out from the tribesmen. He was a stout, vigorous, muscular guy in his thirties, with skulls and wild roses and elaborate zeds for Zeta tattooed up his tanned, sinewy arms. And he had exactly the same gleam of strange, smart, sadistic eagerness in his eyes as Tony Ritter.

No doubt Marco too was on ulluchu, the real drug. What was he going to do to them? Were they going to be shot in a clearing in the forest? Away from witnesses? Or something else?

It was an effort not to show his fear. He wondered if Nina had noticed Marco’s demeanour, and was therefore remembering what happened to her sister in the Islington house. Blood and terror and violation.

A slight bend in the riverbank brought them to a large metal barge, lashed by a thick rope to a ceiba tree, and sagging with age. It was an old cargo boat rusting in a lost meander of this vast river system. Marco tilted his expensive European pistol and ordered them on to the boat.

‘The stairs. Go down those stairs. Now.’

Adam could see the fine jaw muscles moving in Marco’s face, from the grinding of his teeth. He clearly wanted to hurt them as soon as possible, he was restraining himself.

They stepped down the metal ladder into a metal room: a sealed storage container. The Amazonian sun had heated the entire boat so that the metal was painful to the touch. And it was in this steel cell, this steel oven, that they were going to be kept.

One of Marco’s men handcuffed them, again with soldierly swiftness and obedience, to the rigid metal pipes that ran along the side of the metal chamber. Just like the radiator in London, Adam realized: they were shackled in a line, like dogs in a row at a show.

The subordinate disappeared up the metal steps. Marco followed, then paused at the top, a dark figure silhouetted by the sun. He gazed at his prisoners in the bowels of the boat and his prisoners all stared up, at this last square of hope, this glimpse of tropic sky.

‘Your friends,’ Marco said, abruptly, taking some objects from a sack. He threw two footballs into the metal cell, which bounced along the steel floor. Then he slammed the trapdoor shut.

With the only opening to the outside world quite sealed, it was profoundly dark in the stinking, broiling metal chamber. Yet there was just enough sunlight, lancing through small rusty holes in the metal roof, to make out that the footballs were not balls at all, but two human heads: the captain of the MV Myona, and the other deckhand.

Jose wailed like a child and then made a retching sound. Adam stared, riveted and appalled, at the heads. They were lying sideways and staring wet-eyed at each other, like lovers talking on a shared pillow. The expressions on the heads were incomprehensible, terror and serenity. A tiny dewdrop of blood fell from the dead captain’s hair on to the metal floor.

‘We are finished.’ Boris’s voice was quavering. ‘They are going to kill us all, but they will torture us first. The Zetas’ cruelty is famous. ’

‘We know.’ Adam said, flatly. ‘We fucking know.’ He yanked at the handcuffs looping him to the metal pipes. This was beyond useless. Yet he tried uselessly, for ten minutes, twenty, tugging at the cuffs until his wrists were scraped and raw and bloody.

Jess spoke, for the first time. ‘We could bargain with them.’

Nina replied, fierce in the shadows. ‘With what? We have nothing. Fuck all of them anyway. Let them kill us — even if we had something to give they would still kill us.’

Boris’s once-macho voice was reduced to a low whimper. ‘This is quite right, whatever we do, whatever we say, they will kill us — but first they will try and get any information: they will torture us.’

A shock of light silenced his lamenting.

The trapdoor had been opened. Marco came down the stairs, followed by two of his lieutenants. He reached the bottom of the ladder and surveyed them. Contemptuously.

‘There is no ulluchu here. We came here a week ago. We asked all the tribes, we tried it. We have been following you. We spoke to the shaman in Belen. Boris Valentine is celebrated in Iquitos.’

His voice was surprisingly neutral. He spoke exceedingly good English: he was evidently very educated. This man could have been a rising young major in the Mexican army, Adam thought. But the Zetas paid so much more.

Marco paced across the rusty metal floor, kicking a severed head out of the way as if he was practising football. Then he knelt by Nina. Adam strained in his shackles to see what was happening, there, at the other side of the chamber, in the shadows.

‘What do you know, Nina? Your father’s notebooks end at Iquitos. What did your father know? Where did he go after this? We think he went into the Andes. The mountains. Where the ulluchu grows better?’

She said nothing. Marco’s sigh was ominous and heavy. He leaned closer, and Adam was reminded of Ritter, trying to kiss her, or lick her: like a predatory rapist.

‘I could hit you, Miss McLintock. I could electrocute you, or cut you up. Maybe I could cut off one of your fingers. Or your lips. I could cut your lips off. Tell me.’

Nina said nothing.

He stood, with a slight jerkiness in his movements. The ulluchu maybe? Then he signalled to one of his men, who was carrying a plastic box, a kind of Tupperware container, quite ludicrously domestic.

Inside the translucent box were small creatures moving in dirty water: the wriggling shadows were visible through the plastic, they looked like long, dark tadpoles.

Boris, lying next to Adam, was already writhing and whimpering. What did he know?

The whimpering was evidently a mistake. Marco swivelled, alerted by the noise. He scrutinized the fat man in the bright Hawaiian shirt and khaki trousers. The little fishes wriggled in the box in the dark chamber light.

‘And you are Boris Valentine. Famous scientist. So you know what these are, don’t you?’ A slight, unpitying smile. ‘For the benefit of your friends, who probably do not know, I will explain.’

Marco took the box and put it on the floor. He opened the lid. The little fishes jiggled, as if enlivened, exposed to the beam of sunlight from the open trapdoor.

Marco was putting on a very thick rubber glove. ‘These fish are candiru. The toothpick fish. Or, more often, the vampire fish. Of the family Trichomycteridae. A type of parasitic freshwater catfish. Unique to Amazonia.’

He flexed his fingers in the glove. ‘The vampire fish was once thought to be the matter of legend. Or, at least, their less pleasant habits were considered much exaggerated. But then the first case of true human parasitism was scientifically recorded. In 1997.’

He dipped a finger in the box, stirring the silty water. All the little black fish wriggled and jiggled, excitedly.

‘The candiru has a voracious appetite for blood. Given the chance it will eagerly parasitize fish and mammals, including humans. Some believe they are attracted by the smell of urine. They commonly enter the human system through the penis, anus or vagina. Once there, they lodge themselves in the urinary tract, or maybe the fallopian tubes or ovaries. Or the seminal vesicles? Is that the English word? Yes. Vesicles. And the ureter.’

Boris was backing away, kicking at the metal floor in his urge to retreat from the shallow box of dancing vampire fish. Marco’s smile was brief. He reached in and picked out a fish with his gloved hand.

‘Once it is safely within the human body, the fish grows, gorging itself on human blood and flesh. They can easily triple in size. Quadruple even. They eat away at your flesh from the inside. Their vicious spikes prevent them being removed without lethal damage to internal organs, once they are in they are in. The pain as they eat their way through the sexual organs and lower intestines is said to be indescribable. For a man, the only possible way they can be removed is by complete emasculation. That is to say, by cutting off the penis and testicles. Even then the possibility of death from blood loss, trauma and sepsis is extremely high. But first the little fish has to enter the body.’

He held the wriggling black fish in his palm and moved closer to Boris.

‘Tell me what you know.’

Boris was wetting himself. Adam could see the stain on his khaki trousers. He sympathized fiercely. And he turned away. Helpless.

Boris yelped, ‘He went to the mountains! He went to the Andes! The Andes!’

Marco tutted. ‘Where in the Andes?’

‘Huancabamba. He want to a place, near Huancabamba! It’s true. I saw the receipts.’

Marco shook his head. ‘Huancabamba? Why there? And where exactly?’

‘A mountain, uh ah uh ah — a village called Toloriu.’

Marco shook his head, and dropped the little fish in the box. Then he pulled a knife from his pocket and quickly and brutally slashed open Boris’s khaki trousers, exposing the professor’s chubby white thigh. Then he diligently made a short but deep cut in Boris’s skin.

Boris yelped like a dog being whipped.

With his gloved hand, Marco dipped once more in the box and retrieved one of the fishes. It wriggled in his palm. Then he carefully tipped the little fish towards the bleeding red gash in Boris’s pale thigh. Adam stared, even though he didn’t want to stare. The vampire fish in Marco’s palm seemed to lift its tiny head, sniffing the blood. Then it slid gratefully into the open wound. Repulsively, quite repulsively, Adam could see the fish under the skin, intent and wriggling inside the flesh. Then it burrowed deeper and was gone.

Boris was screaming.

Marco gripped Boris’s shaking head with his rubber-gloved hand. ‘I can maybe cut it out now, before it reaches your groin, before it begins to eat your intestines. And your genitals. From the inside out. You have just a few seconds.’

Boris’s voice was so thick with fear and pain it was barely comprehensible. ‘Toloriu… Toloriu.’

Marco spat on the floor. ‘Not enough.’

He turned to his men. ‘ He terminado con el. No sabe nada. Matalo. Y tambien a su amigo.’

Boris Valentine was unshackled from the pipes, the blood spattering from the wound in his torn-open leg, a sagging, dying figure, groaning with pain. The Zetas dragged him up the metal steps, and pushed him into the light. Then they did the same with Jose.

Marco departed, with a final blank yet thoughtful glance; and a keen little smile. It was the smile of ulluchu. Of pensive cruelty. Just like Ritter. The Zetas must have worked out a precise dose of the drug: enough to arouse the violent sexualized instincts of sadism, but not enough to self-mutilate. Something like that. Then they gave some to their top lieutenants.

The trapdoor slammed. The loud noise was followed by two more loud noises: gunshots. Then another. And another. The Zetas were executing Boris and Jose. A few seconds later, two loud splashes confirmed it: the bodies had been thrown in the river. For Boris it was probably a mercy, Adam reckoned. The piranhas eating his dead body was better than than the vampire fish slowly eating you inside out, as you screamed, fully conscious.

No one spoke. There was nothing to say. Apart from goodbye. Nina asked Jessica why she had called her doctor. Jessica looked at her helpless and pathetic. ‘I don’t know anyone else. He said he will call the police.’

The police? The idea of the police rescuing them from the Zetas was comically absurd. The police were scared of the Zetas. Everyone was scared of the Zetas. Except perhaps the rising force of Catrina.

An hour passed, maybe less, maybe much less: the fear was so intense it made time illegible. Then Adam heard noises, loud voices. He shunted himself back to the side of the metal chamber. Pressed his ear to the steel. The voices reverberated through the metal barge. He could hear.

‘Jessica. Listen — you speak Spanish — what are they saying?’

She pressed her ear to the steel wall. Then she shook her head in the pungent darkness. ‘No good. Worse.’

‘What are they saying?’

‘Most of the men want to kill us now. Just shoot us. And move on. The guy, Marco, wants to… torture us some more. He reckons we might still know something — and he says he wants some more fun. That is the word he used. Quiero divertirme un poco mas.’ She closed her eyes. ‘He wants to play with us a little more. That’s the ulluchu talking.’

The trapdoor opened; Marco came down. He was carrying the same plastic box. Full of hungry little fishes.

‘We were talking…’ He was wearing rubber gloves on both hands now. He looked Nina’s way and snapped: ‘You. You rather desire your friend Adam, do you not? Would you still desire him if he had no penis, no cojones, if he just had a bleeding socket?’

Nina shook her head. ‘Stop it.’

Marco ignored her. He crouched by Adam. The lid was off the box, the fish were wriggling. Grunting as he worked, he cut open Adam’s jeans at the groin. A few crude slashes of the knife and it was done: Adam’s thigh was exposed. Then Marco casually stuck the knife in Adam’s thigh, and made a sudden five-centimetre-long downwards cut. Adam refused to scream. He refused. The sweat of fear and agony made him faint, but he refused to scream.

‘Very brave. Muy bravo. I do not think you will be so silent in a minute. Mmm? Vale. Say hello to the fishes?’ Marco’s smile was quite sincere. He put down the knife, reached for the box and pulled out a jiving little fish. ‘This one, I think, is especially hungry.’

Then he paused. Because there was a noise outside. A big loud noise — people were shouting on the deck. Then gunshots echoed cacophonously around the metal hulk: an enormous and rattling hail of gunshots.

Male screams of anger followed the shots. Men were fighting on the deck. At once, Marco dropped the fish and dashed for the stairs, but even as he reached the foot of the ladder he fell back. Someone had calmly shot him several times from the trapdoor; Marco’s body slumped, blood gushing from his stomach. The sound of the bullets echoed deafeningly around the metal cell; everyone shrank from the ricochet.

Except Adam. He was staring in terror at the fish. It had fallen from Marco’s hand on to his leg. And now it lay there, wriggling, on his bared thigh. Right beside the open wound. It was sucking at his skin, urgently seeking the way in, trying to find the entrance into his body, where it could feed, and live, and grow.

Men were clattering down the ladder, he could hear them. They were in the room, snapping the shackles on the others; but Adam just stared, transfixed, at the fish: it had found the edge of the wound, and now it slipped inside. It was burrowing into his skin. He could see the shape of it. Adam screamed.

A knife flashed down, into the wound, and speared the fish, scooping it out of his thigh with a deft and practised movement. Like a gourmet skewering some buttery crabmeat. The fish wriggled at the end of the knife, then the fish was crushed under a military boot.

Adam looked up, faint with shock. He had been saved. But who were these men? The shackles on his wrists were cut by huge pliers; some wadding was applied to the wound in his leg, and it was wordlessly and hastily bandaged. He stood, unsteadily, then ran for the stairs and ran up and out, following Nina and Jessica on to the deck of the barge.

On the metal deck, in the hot sun, five more of these strange men gazed back at them. Implacable. Quite unsmiling. And very disciplined. It was the police. It had worked: Jessica’s phone call had worked. Adam turned in elation to Jessica but he saw she was staring in horror at something. The men. And their hands, clutching their guns.

All the men had dark black T-shirts and toned muscles and pressed jeans, like off-duty soldiers or elite police.

And they all had skulls tattooed on their hands.

Catrina.