Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 100, Nos. 4 & 5. Whole Nos. 603 & 604, October 1992

Turkey Durkin and the Catfish by William Beechcroft

William Hallstead is the author of seventeen books, including six suspense novels under the pen name William Beechcroft (the first five published by Dodd, Mead; the latest by Carroll & Graf). A former flight instructor, public relations man, and public television executive, he currently makes his home on Sanibel Island, in Florida. He takes us to an even more tropical spot in this story set in an Amazonian research outpost...

The moment Alexander Kroll stepped off the little river steamer onto the rickety dock, Durkin knew the man was going to be trouble. Up to now, Durkin had only suspected Kroll would be a problem. After all, it was highly unlikely that the untrained nephew of the Kroll Foundation’s chairman would be a scientific asset here at Research Station 4, halfway up the Amazon. Now that Durkin saw Kroll in the flesh, his suspicion hardened into realization that scrambling up the bank, followed by one of the deck hands laden with two glossy leather suitcases, was trouble.

Kroll looked to Durkin as if he had been rudely transported to the middle Amazon from a Broad Street sporting goods store. He arrived sweating at the bank’s crest, in now-soiled chinos and a ridiculous pith helmet, towered over Durkin, and said, “Why in hell don’t you build some steps up from the dock?”

“Because the six-month rainy season floods the river nearly up to this level,” Durkin said evenly. “Alexander Kroll, I presume.”

“Yeah. Where can I find Durkin? I’m supposed to—” Begrudged enlightenment seeped across Kroll’s precisely chiseled features. “Could you be him?”

Durkin knew he looked unprepossessing in his grubby khakis, but surely not that unprepossessing.

“I am he.” He stuck out an unenthusiastic hand. He hadn’t asked for help, he didn’t need help, yet here in the guise of an assistant stood Chairman Oliver Kroll’s dim-bulb nephew, exiled to mitigate the Philadelphia fallout of a scandal involving Kroll with some married Main Line socialite. So had come the rumor in a letter from one of Felicia’s Upper Darby friends. Uncle Oliver had alleviated the family problem by making Nephew Alexander a problem for Durkin now. The man had no marine biology background at all, Durkin had noted. “Alex is a Cornell man,” the chairman had written. “I believe his major was hotel management.”

Hotel management. Maybe here among the ragtag frame structures of this Amazon Astoria he could see that Durkin’s little cadre of Bororo Indians turned down the sheets on the cots at night and left a fresh orchid on each pillow.

“Take him under your wing,” the chairman’s letter had directed. “Teach him what you can.”

“Teach him what you can.” A key phrase. Not, “Teach him everything,” but “what you can,” a tip-off that this bronzed giant now recovering from his huff-and-puff up the riverbank was of limited mental prowess. The huffing and puffing told Durkin something more: the man’s healthy glow had probably been acquired in a Philadelphia health club — amplified by more recent lounging on the steamer’s gritty little deck during its five-hundred-mile ramble upriver from Belem.

Kroll dramatically shaded his eyes, despite the pith helmet’s overhanging brim. “Now that I’m here, exactly where am I?”

“Roughly between Oriximina and Terra Santa,” Durkin rattled off with a touch of pleasure at Kroll’s wince.

“God. What is there to do around here besides whatever you do for the foundation?”

Durkin smiled. “There’s an opera house in Manaus, the closest city of any size.”

“Where’s Manaus?”

“By river, three hundred miles west.”

“Jesus.”

The deckhand plunked down the bags and gave Kroll a burlesque salute, a lopsided grin, and muttered something that didn’t sound complimentary.

“What did he say? I don’t speak Spanish.”

“Neither does he. That was the Portuguese equivalent of ‘Have a nice day.’ ”

Kroll looked around as if he were expecting to summon a bellman, then he gave a whistling sigh, bent down and hefted his two bags. They walked down the path from the riverbank, Durkin in the lead, Kroll puffing behind.

“Jesus!” Kroll said again, this time with more vehemence. Durkin knew his unasked-for assistant had just gotten his first real look at Station 4.

“This is all there is to it? This clearing at the edge of the jungle?”

“Research building on the right, mess hut straight ahead, storage and generator buildings between.” Durkin nodded at the weather-faded, clapboard building to their left, a long, low, shedlike structure. “Living quarters. Felicia and I are in the near side. You can take your stuff to the other end.”

“I heard your wife is here with you. When do I meet the ‘little woman’?”

Now that struck Durkin as just about the patronizing limit. He’d already had it with this Philadelphia philanderer, had it at first glance. He instinctively disliked anyone that much taller than his own five-foot-seven. Moreover, Kroll had the good looks of a men’s sleepwear model, a distressing contrast to Durkin’s sallow boniness. Even in his soiled chinos, Kroll managed to project a debonair aura, an effect peculiarly enhanced by his hard-traveled appearance. Durkin’s trousers and shirt-sleeves seemed to flap around his skinny limbs even in the still air of the rain forest.

A faint odor of spice drifted among the fetid smells of the river and the underlying stink of rotting vegetation. Kroll’s shaving lotion, for God’s sake, and this late in the day.

“The little woman,” Kroll had said, as if the likes of Durkin would attract only the kind of mousy, vapid, workaday wife that trite expression anticipated.

“She will join us at supper. Right now, it’s siesta time for her.”

The whole station, in fact, was asleep: Felicia, the two stolid male Bororo Indians (Durkin thought they were Bororos, but in a country that had encouraged racial intermarriage for decades, it was hard to be precise), the pair of equally impassive middle-aged Indian females, and Agata, the younger, almost pretty, Bororo girl in her twenties, the best worker of the five.

Employer to employee, Durkin showed Kroll to his barren quarters, pointed out the screened-off wooden tank that served as their bathtub when the run-off from the roof was enough to fill it, and left the man to settle in until suppertime.

“I thought I heard the steamer leaving,” Felicia murmured sleepily from inside the mosquito netting tent over her cot. “Is he here?”

“He’s here.”

“Is he what you expected?”

“Exactly.” Durkin sat back in one of their creaky wooden chairs and watched her doze again. When he had literally run into her at the University of Florida during his graduate studies, she had looked like an English Lit major — which she had turned out to be, with an IQ way up there. That had appealed to him only minutes after they had clashed cafeteria trays. He saw right past the beesting breasts and bony hips beneath her bag of a dress. He liked her for her brain, which electrified her. And which was why, when he asked her two months later to marry him, she breathed a fervent, “Oh, yes!”

Intimacy was new to Durkin, and he liked its novelty, but not all the mental strain that went with it. Felicia Noonan Durkin was not an easy coupler. She wanted her moments of culmination to be bracketed by persuasive forehappenings and lengthy afterglows. All of which seriously paled for Durkin after a few months. He loved her, sure, but... He was aware that she lamented the fast fade of their initial bliss.

Then, one year to the day from the date of their marriage, they found themselves up the Amazon. Literally. Five hundred miles from the northeast coast.

“And six hundred miles south of Paramaribo. A thousand miles from Rio,” she had lamented when the asthmatic river steamer had bumped them ashore. The research station’s frame structures would have failed the lowest of Pocono Mountain summer camp standards. The five Indian assistants were day workers who had the good sense to return to their own no doubt more comfortable village a mile southward, along a rank path Durkin was never to have the slightest impulse to explore.

The Durkins replaced a scraggly, bearded skeleton named Warnowski, a wreck of a Ph.D. who had been sent here by the foundation the year before. His specialty was supposed to have been the freshwater stingray, but observation told Durkin it now was the pinch-bottle. Not long after the steamer, with Warnowski aboard, chugged out of sight around the sharp bend to the east, they found an unopened bottle of Haig & Haig behind the tattered linens in the residency cupboard. Durkin poured the Scotch onto the spongy ground behind the building.

A year here had changed them both. With little to do in the oppressive climate, Felicia grew lethargic, but at the same time she blossomed like a lush, tropical flower. The bony hips filled out. The pathetic little breast buds blossomed. Unexpectedly, Durkin found himself drawn to a soft, warm, compelling female. He liked the surprising excitement of that, and he liked his work for the foundation. After he learned something of the ways of the Bororos, he liked them, too. Everything here had fallen satisfyingly into place for him.

Now the heavy hand of nepotism in far-off Pennsylvania threatened to, well, screw it up with the mandated arrival of Alexander Kroll.

The big man from Philadelphia ambled into the mess hut fifteen minutes after Agata, slender and sleek in brightly dyed homespun, had served a thin fish soup.

“I thought in South America, you ate late,” were his first words.

“We eat early so the Indians can get to their village before dark,” Durkin informed him. But Kroll was not listening.

“So this is the missus. Well, well, well. A pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Durkin.”

“Please, Felicia, Mr. Kroll.”

“And I will be most happy if you will call me Alex.” He seemed to be undergoing a transition to smooth civility as Durkin watched.

“The menu for tonight?” Kroll asked her.

“Fish broth and—” She spoke with the hovering Agata in rapid Portuguese, which she had picked up with little trouble, then turned back to Kroll. “Roast pork and manioc. With papaya for dessert.”

“Impressive, here in the middle of nowhere.”

Felicia smiled at Kroll’s compliment, obviously enjoying her unaccustomed gracious hostess role. “Agata spent a few years in Manaus. She was a chef’s assistant at the Restaurante Palhoca. We’re very fortunate.”

The delicious aroma of roast pork loin, carved from a wild boar the two Indian men had speared in honor of the occasion, provided a veneer of civilization in the raw hut. But it was abruptly shattered by a hair-raising screech across the broad river.

“Jaguar. Getting ready for the hunt. They hardly ever get over this side.” Durkin said that perfunctorily because he had just realized something that was a lot more disturbing than a jaguar’s evening scream. He had just been struck by the fact that since Kroll had entered the mess hut, his speculative slate-blue gaze had never once wavered from Felicia until the jaguar’s shriek had split the outside silence.

“Breakfast at seven,” Durkin said coldly. “In the lab at seven-thirty. I’ll teach you what I can.”

Kroll was not a morning person, Durkin decided. At breakfast, the man met Durkin’s “Good morning” with no more than a surly nod. In silence, he downed two cups of Agata’s excellent arabica coffee in an apparent effort to jolt himself fully awake. Then he leaned back in his camp chair and stared up at the underside of the thatched roof.

“God,” he muttered in disgust. “There are live things crawling up there.”

“We stay in our part of this little world, they stay in theirs.” Durkin, incorrigibly task-oriented, glanced at his watch. “Time to get to work, Kroll.”

The research building was the best-built structure in the compound. Its corrugated metal roof protected the lab at one end. The rest of the large interior was occupied by rows of bubbling aquariums. The lights here and in the other buildings, the ceaselessly humming aquarium pumps, the laboratory electrical outlets, and the emergency radio in the mess hut were powered by a throbbing gasoline-fueled generator in the adjacent shack. So Durkin informed Kroll as he toured his superfluous assistant through the lab, then into the area of the holding tanks.

“That was the damned thrum-thrum-thrum I heard all night,” Kroll said with a grimace.

“After you’ve been here a while, you won’t notice the generator at all. Now in this first tank—”

“Felicia doesn’t join us for breakfast?”

“Seven’s too early for her.” Durkin tapped his forefinger on the edge of the murky tank to focus Kroll’s wandering attention. “In here is an impressive example of Electrophorus electricus. Notice these two fine wires leading to the volt meter on the side of the tank. The purpose—”

“Wait a minute, Durkin. In English, okay? Electro-for-what?”

“I thought the technical name was self-evident, along with your keen visual observation.”

“Looks like a fat watersnake to me.”

“It’s an Amazon electric eel, capable of a discharge up to five hundred fifty volts. Enough to stun a horse.”

“Why him?”

“I don’t follow you, Kroll.”

“What are you doing with this guy?”

At least that crude question was a flicker of interest.

“I’m tabulating precise measurements of its discharge rates, voltage peaks, and eventually, its controllability.”

Kroll shrugged. “Why?”

“There may be certain medical, even military applications. The latter is classified,” he said with a degree of satisfaction. “Next, we have three tanks of Sphaeroides annulatus.”

“Uh huh. Look like fish to me.”

“They are fish. Not native here, they’re west coast Gulf puffers. Saltwater fish, but the foundation has no facility in that area, so they’re here. The flesh is edible, even delicious. But the intestines, liver, gonads, and skin contain tetrodotoxin, a deadly poison.” Durkin was in lecture mode now, a status he enjoyed. “The victim first notices tingling of the lips and tongue. That develops into numbness of the entire body, respiratory difficulty, hemorrhages of the skin, muscle twitches, tremors, then convulsions. There’s no antidote and only a forty percent survival rate. The foundation is interested in the puffer’s pharmacological possibilities.”

“Swell,” was all Kroll had to say.

They moved on to an outsized tank of brownish water that seemed paved with large, fleshy discs.

“Stingrays,” Kroll offered, apparently unimpressed by a creature so commonplace.

“Potamotrygon motoro, the Amazon variety of freshwater stingray. The venomous stinging barb on this variety is situated well out on the tail instead of at its base.”

“So?”

“So that weapon near the end of the long whip of a tail makes the Potamotrygon among the most dangerous of the species. The wound is hugely painful, of course, and stings in the upper-body areas have been known to be fatal. Again, there is no specific antivenin.”

Kroll bent to peer into the tank, shrugged, and straightened. Durkin waited for his obvious question, but he said nothing.

“The purpose of the rays’ being here is the simple extraction of venom for shipment to a Miami research lab in search of an antidote.”

Sweat began to stain Kroll’s shirt, not from the impact of this little hall of aquatic terrors, Durkin surmised, but from the oppressive humidity.

“Next we come to Urinophilus erythrurus, members of the catfish family, known locally as ‘candiru.’ ” Durkin crouched to observe the dozens of tiny fish hovering near the bottom of the brackish tank. “Barely two inches long — some of them not even that — these are one of the most fascinating of the dangerous marine animals. They may have a unique military application if—”

But Kroll wasn’t listening. His attention had wandered upward to the slot of a window across the narrow room, then beyond to the woman who ambled across the compound toward the mess hut. Lithe in blue slacks and a white blouse, Felicia was on her way to breakfast.

“Kroll? Kroll!”

“Yeah, what?”

“Your first duty is to take that broom over there and sweep this place clean.” Agata would be happy, Durkin thought, to be relieved of her research building cleaning duties. Dynamic balance, in a way, since she was now cooking for another mouth.

“Sweep? Hell, this is a dirt floor.”

“All the more reason to keep it swept. After that, report to me in the lab. There are housecleaning opportunities there as well.”

That should take care of Mr. Alexander Kroll for today. Durkin strode into the lab, satisfied that he had properly fitted the man into the scheme of things. At the bottom.

But at lunch, with Felicia joining them briefly, Kroll appeared newly energized.

“Quite a little chamber of horrors your hubby has there.” He nodded over his shoulder in the direction of the lab. “Convinced me to stay out of the river at all costs.”

At least I made some inroad into that pudding of a brain, Durkin thought, but he still didn’t like the way Kroll’s eyes addressed Felicia alone.

“Back to work,” he ordered as Agata cleared away the remains of her version of Caldeirada, a fish stew thickened with farina and doused with a peppery sauce.

In the afternoon, Durkin instructed the two Bororo men to repair the siding on the generator shed, and he sent Kroll to help them. That ought to complete stage one of the useless fellow’s basic training. The Indians were not delighted to spend the steamy afternoon replacing warped boards with newer ones from the lumber stockpile, but they stuck at it. Which was more than Kroll did. At 3:45, Durkin discovered he was missing.

...And found him sprawled on the little verandah behind the residence, a glass of lemonade in hand, and Felicia seated nearby.

“I was under the impression that I’d told you—”

“Enough’s enough, professor. Seems to me we have a minimum to do and all the time in the world to do it.”

“The foundation is expecting—”

“Oh, Emmett,” Felicia broke in. “It’s his first day. Besides, I haven’t had anyone from the outside to talk to since we’ve come here.”

Thus dismissing Durkin, she turned back to Kroll. “The Turners in Bryn Mawr, did you know them, too?”

That night after supper (“Fish again?” Kroll had snorted as if the chef at this resort had lost all imagination), Durkin found his patience further stressed as he and Felicia prepared for bed.

“He has no interest in what we’re doing here,” he grumped. “And the man didn’t finish what I told him to do. So endeth the day with Mr. Kroll.”

“But he is amusing in a way.” In the dim light from the naked twenty-five-watt bulb overhead, Felicia’s sea-green eyes were more alive than Durkin had noticed in weeks. Months. His heart stuttered.

“Amusing?”

“He’s brought all the latest Main Line gossip.”

“Including the little incident concerning himself?”

“Well, that may have been as much her doing as his. Those things are never totally one-sided. It takes two, doesn’t it?”

“You’re defending the man.”

“I’m being impartial. Go to sleep.”

Through the following week, Durkin assigned Kroll to a succession of minor tasks which Kroll performed in lackadaisical fashion, or in one instance, not at all. That one involved the meal worms in a covered tray in a corner of the aquarium area. The worms were propagated as food, primarily for the puffers and the candiru.

“Damned if I’ll touch those squirmy things,” Kroll announced, and he stalked out of the building.

“You’ll do as I say!” Durkin shouted after him. But the big man walked on as if Durkin had said nothing at all. A half hour later, Durkin spotted the two of them, Kroll and Felicia, strolling along the riverbank.

“You, sir,” he assailed Kroll at dinner, “are a disgrace to the work of your uncle’s foundation.”

Kroll smiled. “But here I am, Durkin. And Uncle Oliver says here I stay. For a whole goddamn year.” His smile had begun as one of mirth at Durkin’s impotent railing. Now it was one of mockery.

Later, in the darkness after a long silence, Durkin said quietly, “He’s trouble, Felicia, and you’re... not helping.”

From her side of the muggy room, he heard nothing.

“Felicia?”

He felt her weight on the edge of his creaky cot.

“He’s just a big boy in a man’s body, Emmett. Try to understand him.”

She thrust the mosquito netting aside. “He amuses me, but you’re my husband.” Which struck Durkin as a peculiar way to put it, and what ensued seemed more palliative than passionate.

“You will bear in mind,” Durkin told Kroll in the lab a week later, “she is my wife.” As soon as he had said that, he realized how ludicrous it must have sounded to this hulking playboy. If Durkin had been the six-foot-one, two-hundred-pounder, and if he had snarled, “She is my wife!” at a hundred-forty-pound, chicken-boned Kroll, it would have come off as dramatic. But the actuality of Kroll towering over him while he squawked up at the man made the implied threat toothless. Even comical.

“Don’t scare me, prof.” A grin displayed Kroll’s beautifully capped teeth. “Hey, listen, I’m not going to sweep, saw, or pick worms today, okay? Time for a day off. Mind if I borrow the canoe or dugout or whatever that thing is down there at the dock?”

“Yes, I do mind.”

“I thought you would,” Kroll said amiably, and he walked out.

“Come back here!” Durkin fumed. Then he got hold of himself. Another couple of minutes, and Kroll would have had him shaking his finger and stamping his foot. To hell with the man. Surely he could trust Felicia to... not to... Hadn’t she called Kroll a mere boy?

He went about his lab work with more equanimity than he had felt for days. When Kroll had not reappeared by lunchtime, he didn’t find that disturbing. With luck, the man had fallen out of the boat, and piranhas had picked him to the bone. Except that Durkin had seen no trace of that deadly little scavenger in this vicinity.

When Felicia also failed to appear at the mess hut, Durkin decided to take a not-so-casual stroll along the riverbank. Just as he reached the drop-off, he spotted them exiting the dugout. He stepped back so that he was hidden from below by the crest of the bank. The man’s got me spying on my own wife, he realized guiltily. Then his guilt turned to futile anger. Felicia’s bright frock (where did that come from?) had merged with Kroll’s suntans. They were embracing down there!

Live and let live? Through lunch, Durkin found himself assailed by anger, frustration, then disillusionment — with Felicia, and with his own sense of leadership. He was in charge here. Yet Kroll, an inferior example of manhood if ever there was one, and his own wife, whose superior intellect had captivated Durkin in the first place, showed signs of running amok. And Durkin found himself powerless to do anything about it.

Then the Indians sensed what was afoot here. Until now, the four older ones had never turned their backs on him. Even when they had been hard at work and he approached, they’d managed to face him respectfully until he had nodded and passed by. Now, except when he was directly addressing them, he found himself pointedly ignored.

Agata had been less subservient than they, but she had managed to convey respect through her tiny, ever-present smile. But now she had erased that pleasantry. Her bittersweet chocolate eyes seemed to pierce his, to spear straight into his brain and find cravenness there.

He was a marine biologist, not an expert in conjugal relations. He had no idea what to do, so he did nothing.

Next, Kroll didn’t bother to appear in the research building at all. He sunbathed on the rustic verandah, he strolled around the compound. He disappeared for hours, and Durkin noticed more and more frequently, so did Felicia. Along the river in the dugout? Down the path that led to the Bororo village? Maybe even to some secluded place here on the grounds? Where they went had to remain a mystery because Durkin refused to lower himself to searching for them.

He asked Agata to return to her former part-time chore of research building housecleaning and was gratified that she accepted without a sign of protest.

At length, Felicia didn’t seem to care whether Durkin noticed her barely suppressed state of newfound excitement, her frequently flushed face, her often-rumpled clothing. The two of them surely knew he knew, and he was further depressed that they apparently weren’t concerned.

He felt he faced two dismal choices: confrontation, which he would undoubtedly lose; had already, in fact, lost. Or endurance. Surely Felicia’s innate intelligence would surmount her infatuation with this physically attractive — to her — novelty who had enlivened her boring existence here. Durkin could even relate to that. He had his absorbing work, but she’d had... what? An abortive try at a first novel which now mildewed somewhere in a residence building storage closet. Then she had begun to catalog fauna that she observed in the clearing. That, too, died in the endless days of compressing heat and sudden, drenching rainfalls. Now she had Alexander Kroll. Another fad, Durkin could hope.

For two more weeks, Station 4 endured a balance of tensions. Durkin’s gripping anger was mitigated by the interesting fact that Felicia still came to him occasionally, and he even found quirky stimulation in that apparent atonement for her fascination with Kroll.

Further offsetting Durkin’s hatred of Kroll was the man’s obvious physical superiority. In bare-knuckled conflict, Heaven forbid, Durkin knew he would quickly be reduced to mincemeat.

Perhaps he could conceivably devise some nonconfrontational means of settling with his now detested “assistant.” A slice of Gulf puffer liver slipped into Kroll’s fish stew? But murder was not in Durkin’s soul.

The Indians now pointedly faced away whenever he neared. They took his orders, they did their work, but they would not show him their faces. Except Agata. She could hardly work the mess hut without facing its diners, but her fetching little smile had suffered an apparently permanent death. Her expression now was one of stone.

He could live with that. He could live with the backs of the other Bororos giving him what constituted a version of continuous jungle “mooning.” He could even live with Kroll’s refusal to do anything at all by way of useful work. He would survive Felicia’s fling, and Kroll’s high-handed relationship with her. Because he had to, and because this wasn’t Philadelphia. It was the Amazon riverbank, three hundred miles from anything real, and they had all become sunstruck. Heat-driven. Crazy.

Then Kroll did something that upset the uneasy dynamics of Station 4. He did it one evening at dinner, after he and Felicia had been missing most of the afternoon. What he did probably did not seem to him to be more than adolescent teasing. But to Durkin, it was an unpardonable bombshell.

Kroll wiped his mouth, settled back in his groaning wood-slat chair, chuckled to himself.

And he said to Durkin, “I understand they used to call you ‘Turkey.’ Haw-haw-haw.”

Durkin felt blood rise over his limp shirt collar, race along his jaw, and suffuse his cheeks with crimson.

“Haw-haw! Gotcha, Turkey,” Kroll blathered. “Has a nice ring: ‘Turkey Durkin.’ ”

Durkin glanced at Felicia. She smiled at Kroll. She had told Kroll!

God, how Durkin had hated that nickname. All nicknames. In private grade school, a nine-year-old lump had called him “Emmy.” Durkin was undersized, with a piping little voice. The more he protested, the worse it got until the whole school was chanting, “Emmy, Emmy, your name is femmy!”

In public high school, he was for a time free of the taunts of what he had considered the snobbish rich kids. Then some wag came up with “Spider,” all too appropriate for a skinny runt with toothpick arms and legs. He lived miserably with that all the way to graduation. Then he left it behind with a sense of relief when he entered U. of P. Whereupon another mental Visigoth struck upon the euphonious “Turkey.” Turkey Durkin did have a catchy ring. It stuck with him all four years, followed him through graduate studies. Then he’d thought he’d left it at the University of Florida — where he had met Felicia Noonan, coincidentally from Philadelphia. She had never used the horrible nickname.

Yet now she had told Kroll, and they had unified to ridicule him. That hit Durkin like an icicle plunged straight down his throat to explode into frigid shards deep in his gut.

But as his hands gripped his chair arms in a rictus of fury, he realized he was as incapable of standing up to this chortling lout as he had been of confronting his tormentors from the age of nine.

Perhaps Felicia was putting him to a test, something she may have concocted from equal parts of boredom, Durkin’s gradual transferral of passion from her to his work — he had unconsciously been doing that, hadn’t he — and the availability of Kroll. She had escalated the challenge from obvious attraction to the man, through stages of increasing intimacy, to out-and-out infidelity. Durkin had done nothing. Now she was employing, through Kroll, raw derision. At last, Durkin had found that unendurable.

But though he now seethed with fury, he was still the same man behind it, a man unable to assail Kroll head-on, and just as incapable of waylaying him along the Station’s latrine path and firing a bullet into his heart. In fact, there was no firearm available. Durkin wouldn’t hear of it. A spear? Surely one of the Indians would be able to provide one. But the thought of even the likes of Kroll twisting on the end of a length of hardwood pole turned Durkin’s blood cold.

Now Felicia and Kroll flaunted their affaire Amazonia, as Durkin had bitterly termed it to himself. One late afternoon, when he had trudged across the compound from the research building, he heard laughter. Felicia’s giggles, then Kroll’s deeper chuckle. This, from behind the screening of the oversized rain tub. They were in the thing together, their clothing hung over the woven screen panels like defiant flags.

A surge of hot fury made Durkin’s head thunder. Unendurable, that laughter. Simply unendurable. His lists knotted. His throat threatened to close. Yet he strode away.

At supper, she clung to Kroll’s arm, all pretense now dissolved in the rain forest’s fetid air.

“What’s for dinner, Turkey?” Kroll boomed, and they were shaken by helpless laughter, drunk on each other. She had passed over the line, out of Durkin’s life into Kroll’s. If life had a way of balancing inequities, Durkin thought, surely such a balance was long overdue.

Then the evening rains, as predictable as sunset in this post-flood-season month, stopped. The water in the run-off tank that served as their jungle hot tub grew algae-ridden and dank. On Durkin’s order, one of the Indians drained it.

Yet, several afternoons later, Durkin heard splashing and mirth from behind the screening.

“Had the Indians fill it with buckets from the river,” Kroll blithely told him at supper. Now the man had even taken over compound management; ordered the Indians to fill the tank with river water...

When he heard Felicia’s first shrill scream, Durkin looked up from the volt meter on the Electrophorus’s aquarium. When Kroll’s hoarse yell joined in, and the Indians began to lope across the compound toward the rear of the residence building, Durkin set down his notes and trotted out of the lab.

By the time he reached the screened-off tank, all five of the Bororos had crowded inside, between the tank and the screening, all of them jabbering but uncertain as to what to do about the naked, panic-stricken white man and woman thrashing in the murky water.

“God Almighty!” Kroll screeched at Durkin, “get us out of here!” The man’s face contorted in a grimace of terror. He was still coherent, but his words were overridden by Felicia’s hysterical screams.

On Durkin’s order, the two male Indians began to hoist Kroll from the murky water. As he emerged, the shouts of the Bororos merged into an eerie chant, three syllables, over and over.

“What...” Kroll managed through clenched teeth, “what’s... ‘candy-roo’?” Then he pawed himself frantically. “Oh, God!”

“ ‘Candiru,’ they’re saying,” Durkin told him over Felicia’s cries. “The little catfish I tried to explain to you in the lab. They burrow straight into any body opening, and because of their rear-facing barbs, they can be removed only by surgery.”

“Jesus! In this tank? How—” Kroll’s question disintegrated in a pain-wracked moan.

“Incredible,” Durkin said. “To all of us, I’m sure.”

The two of them were hauled out, naked and writhing, wrapped in blankets, and carried into the residence. A day later, summoned by the emergency radio, a fast outboard from Oriximina picked them up to return them to the small airstrip there. By then, Kroll and Felicia were pitifully weak, fever-wracked, only semi-coherent. With prompt surgical attention in Belem, though, they would at least live.

In a week, perhaps several, the state of Para would send an investigator. Durkin could almost hear the conversation now.

“You say, señor, the Bororos filled the tank from the river. Very careless.”

“They did as they were ordered.”

“By you, Señor Durkin?”

“No, by Mr. Kroll.”

“I see. Unfortunate that the Bororos did not notice the candiru in their buckets.”

“The river is always muddy here. See for yourself.”

“Si, you are right.” The inspector would shrug. “An accident. And Senor Kroll seems to have brought it about by his ignorance.”

And that would be that.

The day after the fast boat had rushed Kroll and Felicia eastward, the compound seemed to exist in suspended animation. Agata arrived glum-faced to clean the research building, strode past Durkin as if he didn’t exist, seized the broom and began to work her way along the row of aquariums.

Then she stopped, and bent down to peer into the candiru tank.

In accented English, she said, “Empty? Tank empty?”

Durkin gazed at her, his face as impassive as that of any of the Bororos.

Shortly, she left the research building to prepare his lunch. When he crossed the compound toward the mess hut an hour later, the two male Indians suddenly turned from the work on the generator shack’s loose door hinge and faced him respectfully.

That was a welcome change.

In the mess hut, when Agata brought in his broiled fish, her smile had returned. As she leaned down to set the plate at his place, her breast softly brushed his shoulder, something that had never happened before. He found that quite heartwarming.

Even exciting.