Little Tiny Teeth

SEVENTEEN

There were three of them, the kind of beings for whom there is no longer a polite term: savages, primitives. Wild men. You could sense that, instinctively and at once, from their veiled eyes, from the way those dark, impassive eyes looked at you but didn’t look at you, focusing on nothing, as if the consciousness that lay behind them was in some other place and time. The men seemed to hold their bodies apart as well, standing tall (or as tall as they could; the biggest was perhaps five-foot-four) and poised and aloof. Their foreheads and cheeks were tattooed with complex designs of undulating lines and dots in orange, blue, and black. Their lips were dyed blue and their eyebrows plucked and replaced with thin, painted, blue crescents. Their thick black hair hung loose in back and was chopped into bangs in front. Quills or small, thin bones ran horizontally through their nasal septa. Although they wore no earrings, the holes in their ears showed they often did. Their earlobes had been dragged and stretched by heavy ornaments into two-inch long flaps. Their smooth chests were daubed with more dots and waving lines, this time in white. Their clothing consisted of short bark kilts – aprons, really. All were barefoot, all had yellow-gray teeth in terrible condition.

Vargas couldn’t stop staring at them. “Chayacuro?” Gideon whispered, about equally scared and enchanted.

“No, Arimaguas!” Vargas whispered agitatedly. “God help us, real tree climbers! Be careful.” He grinned at them, bobbing his head. “ Hola, amigos!” Slipping off his watch, he held it out invitingly. “ Le gusta? Un regalo! OK?” Do you like it? It’s a gift!

The nearest one took it from him, a casual flick of the hand without any change in his stone-faced expression, more or less without looking either at Vargas or the watch, then gestured at Gideon’s wrist.

“Give him your watch,” Vargas said.

“Wait a minute, why-”

“ Give it to him!” Vargas urged. “They’re as bad as the Chayacuro. Worse! Give them what they want, don’t upset them. Trust me, give them the watches and they’ll go away.”

Gideon unclasped the watch and handed it to the Indian. “ Un regalo,” he said, with markedly less enthusiasm than Vargas had shown. And a gift it had been, from an appreciative fellow professor for whom he’d filled in for a couple of weeks. Well, at least it would make a good story when he told her about it. Oh, the watch? Sorry, Marilyn, it was taken from me in the Amazon by a bunch of Indians with bones in their noses.

The second watch was handed to another man, and both objects disappeared under their aprons. That they had some contact with modern life was shown by the shotguns that all three carried on their shoulders with the grace and ease of long custom. Also by the fact that at least one of them, the one who’d taken the watches, spoke a primitive Spanish.

“You come,” he said, not particularly threateningly. Not particularly friendly, either. Not anything. Just an announcement. You come. He was the oldest of the three, a man probably in his late thirties or early forties, with a nose that had long ago been diagonally split across the bridge with a knife or, more likely, a machete. (In addition to the shotguns, each had a machete slung over his back in a sheath of woven palm fronds.) Gideon could see that the vicious, ropy, white furrow of a scar extended upward from his nose, over his right brow all the way up to and under his clipped bangs. Below, it ran down his left cheek to the corner of his jaw. It was deep enough to have done some serious bone damage, and indeed, his left malar – the cheekbone – was conspicuously caved in, making one eye appear weirdly lower and bigger than the other, like a head in a Picasso painting. Clearly, someone had once tried to cleave his head in two and very nearly succeeded, but here he was, spectacularly disfigured but otherwise apparently hale. I’d hate to see what the other guy looks like, Gideon thought.

“Come? Come where?” Vargas demanded, gathering up a few shreds of his dignity. “I am the captain of a ship, I have a ship to-”

“You come,” he repeated in exactly the same toneless tone, and at his nod the other two unshouldered their shotguns. Gideon noted that a firearms safety course had not come with the weapons. Each carried his gun with the action closed, and with his finger curled on the trigger, not alongside it or on the trigger guard. He had no doubt at all that there were live shells in the chambers. A jag of one of the double muzzles in Gideon’s direction made it clear that he was included in the invitation as well. He thought briefly of yelling for help, but everybody else was back on the Adelita, and the Adelita was at the base of a forty-foot bank that was sixty or seventy feet away. It was unlikely that they’d hear him, and even if they did, what would ensue in the thirty or forty seconds it took anyone to reach them? Besides, what could they do against three men, whatever their size, who were armed with shotguns and machetes?

“We’d better go with them, Captain,” he said.

“You come, yes?” He was grinning now, and his voice had taken on a wheedling, nasty tinge, like a Japanese soldier’s in a World War II movie. “Now.”

With one of the Arimaguas in front leading the way, and the other two behind them, Vargas and Gideon were marched into the bush.

“Captain Vargas, what’s this about? I think you know more-”

“No talk,” said Split-nose. An unexpected and painful jab of the gun into Gideon’s lower back emphasized his point. Both of the following Indians chuckled merrily at Gideon’s “Hey!”

The jungle closed in at once. In thirty seconds, the warehouse clearing was completely obscured from sight. In a minute, they were unable to see more than ten feet in any direction. The path, if there was a path, was invisible to the two white men, although the Indians clearly knew where they were going. Their naked, callused feet moved with speed and certainty over the uneven ground.

Gideon absently watched their rhythmic, confident motion for a few moments, and then did a double take that nearly brought him to a standstill (and no doubt another jab with the shotgun). These were feet such as he’d never seen in life before, and they filled him with a sense of wonder that almost made him forget the uncomfortable circumstances he was in. He’d read descriptions of tribes with feet like these in the accounts of nineteenth-century jungle adventurers, and had even seen group photographs of them, but he’d thought of them as historical curiosities at best; things of the past, long disappeared from the earth. Certainly, he’d never expected to see them for himself, except in a rare individual case, and here were three pairs of them!

In most respects they were like anybody else’s feet; a bit broader across the sole perhaps, and more callused, but not all that different, generally speaking. But the big toes were another thing entirely, twice the size of normal big toes – three inches long, at least, and proportionately thick. Moreover, they were splayed outward at an incredible angle, very nearly a right angle, from the rest of the toes. This was a deformity not unknown in the modern world. Hallux varus it was called, and you saw it once in a while, usually as the result of a botched operation for bunions, although it could also show up as a congenital deformity. Three-million-year-old footprints in Africa showed that it was nothing new in the human condition. But to see three sets of them at once…!

Clearly, the huge, muscular, near-prehensile appendages would permit their owners to easily clasp two-or-three-inch-thick branches between their toes and give them a far more secure grip on branches that were larger. “Real tree climbers,” in Vargas’s words, these people were what the old explorers called “arboreal dwellers,” thinking that they pretty much lived in the trees. Whether the condition was genetic in these cases, or rather the result of behavioral adaptation, was unknown then and unknown now. There had been argument, in fact, among the learned professors of the nineteenth century, as to whether they were humans at all, or some kind of tree apes. Well, they were indisputably human, all right, and here they were, alive and well, in the middle of the Amazon, in the twenty-first century!

For a very little while, his extreme gratification at seeing them for himself and his similarly extreme regret at not having a camera with him were his uppermost thoughts, but others soon enough intruded. Where were they going, and why? How would they possibly get back? Would they be permitted to come back? But within an hour – it seemed like five, but the sun had barely moved and wasn’t yet directly overhead – even those concerns about the future had been driven from his mind by the present, by the nightmarish immediacy of the trek itself. The jungle they were slogging through – the Indians so effortlessly, so sweatlessly, the two white men stumbling and cursing at the thorns and bugs – was nothing like what they’d been in during the last two days. This was not Scofield’s “awe-inspiring” virgin rain forest, but second- or third-growth, scrabbly and wretched in the extreme, not mature enough yet to have created its own high, protective canopy. It was all thorns, mud, brambles, ankle-grabbing ground vines, mosquitoes, and terribly persistent clouds of vicious, biting, black flies. And except for the occasional blessed patch of shade from a quick-growing ceiba tree or banana bush, all of it in the roasting, shriveling heat of the sun.

Once they had to cross a small, fast-running green river on a “bridge” consisting of a section of an old, rotting tree trunk, twenty feet long and slimy with algae. The first Arimagua trotted easily across – those toes were prehensile, a marveling Gideon observed; he could see how they clutched the curving, slippery surface and pushed off from it – and turned, beckoning with his shotgun. A motion from Split-nose’s gun encouraged Vargas onto the log, on which he managed two wavering steps before losing his balance and tipping over, arms swinging, to plunge backside first into the river, which was fortunately only about four feet deep.

The rest of his crossing was accomplished in the water alongside the log, with a muttering Vargas holding on to it for balance, to the indescribable mirth of the three Indians, who were clutching their sides with laughter. There was nothing particularly mean about it, it seemed to Gideon; nothing contemptuous or cruel. They just plain found it absolutely hilarious. Vargas, still grumbling, climbed onto the opposite shore and shook himself like a dog.

Gideon’s turn. The Indians looked at him with the obvious anticipation of more good fun. Well, I’m going to disappoint you, he vowed. I am not going to fall in. But in his heart he knew he would. And did, although he managed four whole steps before it happened. Only whereas Vargas had keeled over in a slow, relatively stately manner, like a toppling tree, Gideon’s feet went out from under him on the slick log, setting them into a frantic pedaling while he fought to keep his balance. It was like something out of a Charlie Chaplin movie, and the Arimaguas were convulsed even before he hit the water, flat on his back and hard. Like Vargas, he had to go the rest of the way up to his armpits in the river, with the remaining two Indians jogging easily across the log to beat him to the other side, still chuckling.

“If I had toes like yours, I could do it too,” he griped up at them in English, bringing more gales of merriment, so artless and happy that they even forced a smile from Gideon. Well, anyway, it’s cooled me off, he thought.

But a few minutes later, all five of them were wriggling and slapping at themselves like a whole crowd of Charlie Chaplins that had blundered into a hornet’s nest, and nobody was laughing. They had apparently disturbed a colony of fire ants, and with astonishing speed thousands of the ferocious, minuscule insects had charged out of their mound a few yards away. These were tiny creatures, half the size of the fire ants of the American South, and their sting, Gideon quickly learned, was more itch than pain, but itch of a truly excruciating intensity. Back to the river they ran to plunge in and get rid of the things.

“Don’t worry,” a grimacing, panting Vargas told him as they vigorously scrubbed themselves. “The itch, it doesn’t last long if you don’t have too many bites.”

“No talk,” growled Split-nose, who had never let go of his gun, and whose cool good humor had been severely strained by the ants. “ Vamonos.” Let’s go.

In what Gideon estimated was another hour’s tough trekking they reached a second, larger river and turned left along it. They were back in virgin jungle here, with a welcome green canopy overhead to shield them from the sun. There was even a recognizable path, with no brambles to tear at their bloodied legs (the Indians’ legs showed plenty of old scars, but not a single fresh wound), and the Arimaguas speeded up the pace. With the increase in humidity, Vargas’s glasses immediately steamed up so much that he had to take them off.

After a while they came to a squalid riverside settlement of tarpaper, tin-roofed shacks, ugly, concrete-block houses, and mud streets “paved” with planks here and there over the worst of the potholes. An occasional swaybacked, dejected horse stood tethered to a wooden post, its head hanging. The few surly, furtive, unshaven men they passed didn’t bother to look twice at them. Apparently, there was nothing unusual about the sight of two filthy, bloody white men being practically frog-marched down the street by a gang of gun-toting Arimaguas.

At the riverfront there was a small, primitive pier, and at the head of it was a wooden shanty, a jungle cantina, into which Vargas and Gideon were marched. Inside there was a plank counter, behind which were a few crooked shelves holding bottles, cans, and glasses, an ancient refrigerator with a clanking old generator, and an even more ancient woman, milky-eyed and toothless, chewing on her gums, who watched them come with no sign of interest. The Arimaguas immediately went to her, asked for and got Inca Kolas, and retreated with them to a wall, at the base of which they squatted, their shotguns propped upright between their knees. Gideon and Vargas were left standing in the middle of the room.

There were three rectangular, battered, extremely dirty tables – stains, crumbs, empty, toppled beer bottles, used glasses – with five or six old cane chairs around each. The nearer tables were unoccupied. At the farthest one sat four decidedly rough-looking men, the sole occupants of the bar other than the old lady. All of them were smoking cigarettes. Two of the three had rifles leaning up against the table at their sides. Another had a revolver in a shoulder holster, and the fourth appeared to be unarmed. The table held three brown bottles of beer, a clear, half-empty bottle of what looked like aguardiente – there was no label – a crumpled blue pack of cigarettes, and four stubby, thick-bottomed tumblers. All the place needed to look like the bandido’s hideaway to end all bandido’s hideaways were some cartridge belts slung over the chair backs.

Three of the men raised their heads to look speculatively – amusedly? – at the newcomers. The fourth didn’t turn, remaining as he sat partially facing away from them – purposely facing away, it seemed – very relaxed in his tipped-back chair, one hand loosely hanging, a cigarette between his fingers, and the other hand apparently tapping his knee under the table, slowly, appraisingly, as if he were considering the pros and cons of some difficult issue.

The boss, Gideon knew instantly.

This was confirmed when, with a tip of his head, he sent the other three to another table, taking their guns and their beers with them. They sat down, also watching. The boss man simply continued his contemplative smoking and knee tapping. He had yet to look at the newcomers, let alone acknowledge their presence.

Thirty seconds of this – of standing there filthy and parched and edgy and uncertain, waiting for who knew what – was enough to snap Vargas’s fragile self-restraint.

He stepped forward. “ Senor-”

“Shut up,” the man said offhandedly in Spanish, and now he turned fully toward them, ground out his cigarette on the tabletop, dropped the butt on the floor, and brought his hand up from under the table. In it was a lovingly polished stainless steel knife that he laid in front of him with care, aligning it so that it was at a right angle to the table’s edge. But this was no ordinary knife, this was a Rambo knife, a Crocodile Dundee knife, a foot long, with an olive-drab handle and a broad, heavy, faintly scimitar-shaped blade, saw-toothed on top, that curved upward to a vicious hooked point. Gideon had seen a knife like this before. He even knew what it was called: a Krug Assegai combat knife. It had been used in the most horrific homicide that it had ever been his misfortune on which to consult.

We’re going to be killed, he knew with sudden, cold certainty. We’ve been brought here to be murdered. Murdered and carved up, not even necessarily in that order.

The man was watching from under lowered lids to see their reaction to the weapon, and he must have loved Vargas’s. The captain’s eyes bugged out, his mouth popped open and then closed with a click as his teeth snapped together, and he took a stuttering step back.

Gideon was determined to provide no similar satisfaction. Swallowing down the seeming ball of cotton that had suddenly clogged his throat and crossing his arms to make sure his hands didn’t tremble, he said in Spanish: “We could use some water.”

“Oh, they could use some water,” the man said, grinning, and there was some low chuckling from the other table. “Sure. Why not?” He called out a command to the old woman. As with so many other people in this part of the world, his teeth were in wretched condition, some of them nothing more than yellow nubbins barely protruding from his gums.

“ Senor, I don’t know what this is about…” Vargas said pitiably, practically wringing his hands. If he’d had a forelock, he would have been tugging on it. “But I assure you, there has been a misunderstanding of some-”

“I told you once to shut up,” he was told. “I’ll deal with you later. Right now, I want to talk to the professor.”

That came as a shock to Gideon. How did he know I was a professor ? That meant he had been brought there not by pure accident, not because he’d happened to be with Vargas at the wrong time in the wrong place, but on purpose, because he was who he was. But how does he know me? What the hell was going on here?

“I am called Guapo,” the man said, speaking directly to Gideon.

Guapo. It meant handsome, but if this Guapo had ever been handsome, it had been a long time back. A fleshy, beetle-browed man, he was cut from the same cloth as Colonel Malagga: gross-featured, brutal, thuggish, with the high, thick shoulders of a bull buffalo, no neck to speak of, and small, mean, piggish eyes. A lush, silky, jet-black mustache (the only conceivable basis of the “ guapo ” nickname) drooped over the sides of his mouth, Pancho Villa style. Like the other men Gideon had seen in this settlement, he hadn’t shaved for three or four days. He wore jeans, sandals, and a dirty, white soccer jersey with Alianza Lima on the chest. The belly-ballooned front of the jersey was smeared with finger marks where he’d wiped his hands on it.

“So, you heard of me?” Guapo prompted. He had a serious drinker’s voice, husked and whispery, from deep in his throat.

“No, I never heard of you.” Gideon’s own voice, he was glad to hear, remained steady, although his breath was a little short. He was looking about him as inconspicuously as he could, with his mind working at top speed. What were the ways out? Forget the way they’d come in. There were three white men and three Indians with guns between him and the door. But in the wooden wall right behind Guapo were two large, windowless openings. Could he get by the man and his knife and through one of them before someone with a rifle could get a bead on him? No, not if he made a run for it around the table. But what if he acted with enough suddenness, at a moment of inattentiveness, launching himself right onto the tabletop, kicking or swatting Guapo over in his chair and vaulting over him through the opening… maybe even grabbing the knife on the way, if he could? But what about poor Vargas? What about The corners of Guapo’s mouth turned down. “No, he never heard of me,” he said sarcastically, and unpleasant laughter came from the three men at the other table.

“Sit down, Professor.” With his foot, Guapo kicked out one of the chairs. Gideon took it, angling it slightly and moving it back a little to give himself room for a better shot at the opening.

“I’ll go and sit over there,” Vargas offered, indicating the one unoccupied table. “I don’t want to intrude.”

“No, you’ll sit here. I want you to see what happens to him. I want you to have a real good view, so you’ll remember.”

It didn’t seem possible for Gideon’s stomach to sink any lower than it already had, but it did. Guapo didn’t intend to kill them, he intended to kill him. He noticed that Guapo’s fingers lay loosely on the knife, but he wasn’t actually holding it. If he were to move his hand or turn to look away, even for an instant…

The woman shuffled over with a bottle of mineral water and two cloudy glasses. She was blind, Gideon realized from the way she touched the table before setting them down. Guapo himself poured for them with the expansive, benevolent air of a host providing for his guests – first moving the knife out of their immediate reach and keeping his hand on it – and Gideon and Vargas each gulped down a glass of the closest thing to nectar Gideon had ever tasted.

“More?” Guapo asked hospitably and was answered by two vigorous nods. The second glasses were emptied as fast as the first and once again eagerly held out. Strange. Minutes from probable death – an unimaginably unpleasant death – and yet one could take so much grateful pleasure from a glass of cold water.

When Gideon had put down his glass again without signaling for another, Guapo said something to him that he didn’t understand. Something about the river and the Adelita. Gideon asked him to repeat it.

He said it again and Gideon still couldn’t make it out. “I’m sorry, I don’t-”

Guapo was suddenly furious. He slammed the table with a heavy hand (Vargas actually jumped out of his chair; Gideon managed – just – to stay in his), grabbed the monstrous knife, and waved its point at Gideon’s eyes. “Don’t play dumb with me, you bastard! I know you speak Spanish.”

“I speak some Spanish, yes.”

“You speak perfect Spanish.”

No, I don’t, Gideon thought, his stomach moving up just a little toward its normal location. Vargas was right. It was some kind of misunderstanding. They had him confused with someone else. Talking their way out of this might still be a possibility.

“Look,” he said evenly, reasonably, “I don’t know who you think I am, but-”

Guapo got up, leaned on his hands – on the knuckles of the one holding the knife – and loomed aggressively over him. Gideon smelled whiskey, cheese, cigarettes, sweat. “You’re telling me you’re not the professor?”

“I’m a professor, but I’m obviously not the one you think I am.” And now a sudden burst of reckless but welcome righteous anger surged in him. He jumped up too, so he was nose to nose with Guapo. (Vargas, sitting between them, skidded back, out of the likely range of the knife.) “Why don’t you tell me who the hell you think I am? This is…” He sought the word for outrageous, but had to settle for terrible, the same in Spanish as it was in English. “You send your Indians to… to… you…” But his Spanish wasn’t good enough and he was reduced to waving his arms and sputtering: “Mud… thorns… mosquitoes… threats…”

His language difficulties had more effect than his protestations. For the first time, Guapo’s heavy, cruel face showed some doubt. He sat slowly down again, peering hard at Gideon.

“So who are you then?”

“Look…” Gideon zipped open the fanny pack he wore near his belt buckle, in which he kept his passport, airplane tickets, and money (and for the moment, a miscellaneous collection of fresh cranial fragments), then fumbled through a wad of damp nuevos soles and tenand twenty-dollar bills to pull out the passport, its familiar blue cover somehow reassuring, as if he were at an airport and simply showing it could get him out of whatever this mess was. He opened it to the identification pages and pushed it across the table to Guapo. “See? Gideon Oliver, that’s me.” He tapped his photograph.

Guapo peered sulkily at it. “And how do I know it’s not fake? Why should I think you’re not trying to fool me?”

“Fool you? How could I know I was going to see you? How could I possibly know your Indians would come and get us?”

“My Indians, my damn Indians!” Guapo exploded, jumping out of his chair. He flung the passport at Gideon’s face. “Luis!” he called, and the man with the revolver came to sit at the table in his place. A snake-necked, fox-faced, crazy-eyed man with an inch of burning cigarette dangling from his lower lip, he was missing the thumb and first finger of his right hand. But with his other thumb, he steadily clicked the revolver’s hammer back, eased it forward, clicked it back, eased it forward… all the while keeping it pointed at the center of Gideon’s chest. Gideon did his best not to think about it, but his eyes kept returning to the moving thumb.

“Would you mind not doing that?” he said. “Or at least pointing it someplace else?” A mistake, he thought immediately.

Oozing malignance – whether it was general or directed specifically at Gideon was impossible to tell – the man smiled meanly, revealing yet another mouthful of discolored, rotting teeth, and kept on doing what he was doing. Click… click…

Gideon shrugged one shoulder in what he hoped was a show of unconcern, and turned to watch Guapo, who had stomped to the three Arimaguas, where they still hunkered down at the base of the wall with their rifles and their Inca Kolas. He began shouting at them, waving the big knife for emphasis. None of them looked at him, but only stared straight ahead. Split-nose was the only one who replied, his answers surly and curt. Like the others, he stared straight in front of him, into the middle distance, his eyes on a level with Guapo’s hips, as still, and as impassive, as a stone idol, and just about as grim.

A long silence after his last answer, and then Guapo suddenly lashed out, kicking the bottle out of the Indian’s hand and sending it skittering over the worn plank floor, spewing yellow-green liquid. Split-nose didn’t move a muscle: no start, no blink, no change of expression or focus. Guapo yelled even louder, a mix of Spanish and something else. Gideon couldn’t pick up most of what he was shouting, but he managed to make out imbecile and estupido. Split-nose’s answers were more of the same: monotonic and obstinate. He seemed unreachable, immovable, but Gideon suspected there would come a time when Guapo would pay for this.

Now would be a good time, he did his best to convey to Split-nose. Now would be a perfect time. But the Indian sat immobile and oblivious.

“What are they talking about?” he asked Vargas in English. The man guarding them frowned and watched them intently, as if trying to understand the words, but he didn’t tell them to be quiet.

“Guapo, he thought you were Scofield.”

“Scofield? Why would he think I was Scofield?”

“He sent the Indians to get him… and me. He told them Scofield was called ‘professor,’ and the fellow with the chopped-up nose, he heard me call you ‘professor,’ so he thought…” He shrugged away the rest of the sentence. “At least, I think that’s what they’re saying.”

“This Guapo, have you heard of him?”

Vargas nodded. “He’s a very big man, the boss in North Loreto,” he whispered, then stopped himself. With a wary glance at the man with the revolver to assure himself that he didn’t understand English (the obtuse, open-mouthed expression satisfied him), he went on: “A tough customer, a killer. He’d as soon take your eye out with that knife as-”

Guapo’s heavy returning footsteps silenced him. “Stupid bastards,” he grumbled in Spanish as he fell into the remaining chair and poured himself three fingers of aguardiente. “Trained monkeys would do better.” With a grunt and a sudden jerk he jammed the point of the knife into the tabletop, which Gideon now noticed was covered with splintery pockmarks from a hundred previous such spearings. There the knife remained, upright and quivering, about three inches from Guapo’s hand and five long, impossible feet from Gideon’s. And both Vargas and the guy with the gun and the itchy thumb now sat between them. Plan A – going up and over the table and through that opening in the wall – wasn’t going to work any more, that was clear. Guapo drained half the tumbler and smoothed his mustache with thumb and forefinger, a surprisingly dainty motion. “So where is Scofield?” he asked in a low voice, staring at the table.

A promising sign? Gideon wondered. He believes me?

“Professor Scofield has… has died, I regret to say,” Vargas stammered, clearly realizing how extremely unlikely it sounded. “Only last night.”

Guapo eyed him suspiciously.

“I swear it on the grave of my mother,” said Vargas. “A crazy person, a drug-crazed lunatic, threw him from the ship. He also threw another passenger, a-”

“And what do you say?” Guapo asked Gideon.

“It’s true. Scofield’s dead.” Well, that had hardly been established beyond doubt, but it was highly probable, and this was not the time for complicated answers.

“They’re lying,” said the fox-faced one. “Why are we wasting all this time?”

Thoughtfully, Guapo drained the tumbler and poured a little more, finishing the bottle. Another sip, another delicate smoothing of the silky mustache, and he turned to Vargas to address him directly for the first time, other than having told him to shut up. “And you, I suppose you’re going to tell me you’re not Vargas.”

“No, senor, I’m Vargas, all right, that’s completely correct. Alfredo Vargas, Captain Alfredo Vargas, at your service.” His hand reached up to his braided captain’s hat, but it was no longer there, having been lost when he fell into the river.

“That’s good. I’m very glad you didn’t lie, my friend. You should be even more glad you didn’t lie. Now I want you to tell me exactly what happened to Scofield.”

“Of course, with pleasure-”

“And I want you to tell me exactly – exactly – what your boat is doing on the Javaro River.”

“Certainly, I have nothing to hide from you-”

Guapo held up his hand. “ You know who I am, don’t you? You’ve heard of El Guapo?” With a jerk, the knife was pulled from the table.

Vargas’s eyes followed it as if magnetized. “Of course, senor. Everyone has heard of El Guapo.”

“And have you heard of what happens to people who tell falsehoods to El Guapo?” With the point of the huge knife he gently, almost tenderly, touched Vargas’s left earlobe, then ran it around the entire ear. Gideon saw a single spot of blood where it nicked the top rim. Vargas sat through it as rigidly and motionlessly as was possible for a human to sit, although his Adam’s apple, beyond his control, glugged up and down a couple of times.

“Yes, senor,” he croaked through barely moving lips.

Guapo withdrew the knife, but his fingers remained around the handle. “Then go ahead. And don’t be nervous.”

Fox-face laughed nastily. “No, no, don’t be nervous, what is there to be nervous about?”

And so the story came out. The first part, about how Scofield and Maggie had been thrown overboard, and Maggie, but not Scofield, had been rescued, was told pretty much as it had happened. Gideon was asked to verify the details once or twice and complied. Guapo didn’t ask why Cisco would have wanted to kill Scofield. He seemed to accept Vargas’s description of a “drug-crazed lunatic” on the loose (which was accurate enough), and neither Vargas nor Gideon volunteered anything more about it. The simpler, the better. “You are very lucky you are not Scofield,” Fox-face said to Gideon with undisguised regret.

Gideon nodded his agreement. Any way you looked at it, it was the truth.

The rest of Vargas’s story, which he told with an occasional shamefaced glance at Gideon, and with many self-serving asides (“He talked me into it against my better judgment,” “Never have I done this before,” “It was my intention to do it only this one time, for enough money to upgrade my poor ship,” “I didn’t realize, I never thought, that we would be in a region of interest to El Guapo; had I known, I would never have agreed, never!”) was pretty much what Gideon was expecting by now. He had realized from the moment he had walked into the cantina and set eyes on Guapo and his men that John had been right: he, John, and Phil had gotten themselves into the middle of a drug-trafficking imbroglio. And Guapo’s original certainty that the Indians had brought him Arden Scofield, and his incensed disappointment that they had not, had made it clear that Scofield was the major figure in it.

The substance involved was coca paste, Vargas said. He understood that there were sacks of it hidden within the coffee bags (he himself, of course, had never seen any of it, but had only taken Scofield’s word for it; he himself had no part in the arrangements, but only provided the space and transportation) that were to be deposited at the warehouse “Was it you who had the warehouse burnt down?” Gideon asked Guapo.

“Hey – who told you to speak?” Fox-face said, but Guapo waved him down.

“Yes, sure, that was my man,” Guapo said. “Do you think I didn’t know what was happening? Do you think I would permit such a thing? Do you think anything happens in North Loreto Province about which I don’t know?”

“I guess not,” Gideon said, which seemed to please Guapo.

“How many coffee bags?” he asked Vargas.

“Forty or fifty, I believe.”

“Forty-eight,” said Guapo. “And how much paste?”

“About… about a hundred kilos, I think.”

“A hundred and fifty,” Guapo said, his voice hardening. “Be careful, my friend.” He sat back, slowly rotating the knife in his left hand, its point gently rotating against his right forefinger. “And for whom was it destined?”

“Destined? I-”

“Think before you answer. Tell the truth when I ask you a question, and you may yet get out of this with your life, and maybe even with all your appendages.”

Vargas fished in his pocket for his glasses and put them on, as if they might help him think more clearly. “Guapo… senor… I honestly don’t know the answer to that question, I didn’t want to know, I had no wish to be-”

“It was destined for Eduardo Veloso of the Cali cartel, whose carriers were to pick it up tomorrow night,” Guapo said, and Gideon began to think that there really wasn’t much going on, at least in this particular aspect of the regional commerce, that got by El Guapo. “And how is it hidden? Is there some in all the coffee sacks?”

“It’s in plastic bags – so I was told by the professor – not him” – a gesture at Gideon – “the other professor – in several of the sacks, fifteen or twenty of them, I think-”

“Thirty,” said Guapo warningly.

“Yes, thirty, that was it, that was it!” Vargas gibbered, the perspiration actually dripping off him onto the floor so that there was a little puddle on each side of his chair. Was he lying because he yet hoped to siphon off some of the paste for his own profit? Or was lying simply his instinctive reaction to stress? “Yes, thirty, that’s right, now I remember, of course. It’s thirty, all right. Now, senor, the honest truth is I do not know which bags it’s in, I was never told-”

“That’s all right, Vargas. It doesn’t matter.”

Vargas licked his lips. “ Senor, you are only too welcome to come and take it, to take it all. I regret extremely that I allowed myself to be used in this way, that I caused offense to you. I only want to go home and forget I was ever so stupid. It would be an act of kindness to me to take it away. Please-”

“What, and have the Cali people find out I have their paste? No thank you. I have no interest in taking any of it from you at all.”

If wheels turning in one’s mind made a sound, the room would have been filled with grindings and squeakings from Vargas’s quick brain. His eyes darted right, then left, then right, as he assessed the rapidly changing situation. Guapo had practically said he would be allowed to live. Was he going to get to keep the paste – all of the paste – as well? Surely it was worth many thousands – hundreds of thousands – of soles. It would change his life, he could go away from Iquitos, leave all this behind him, start fresh in the south with a fishing franchise, down by Pucusana Guapo could read Vargas’s thoughts as readily as Gideon could, and he laughed; a voiceless rumble that changed his expression not at all. “You are not going to keep any of it either, Vargas.”

Vargas blinked. “Ah… no?”

“No. You are going to throw it overboard. Into the river.”

“Into the-? But, sir, as I told you, I do not know which bags it’s in.”

“That doesn’t matter because you are going to throw all the coffee bags into the river. My Indian friends will take you back and will watch you do it. And my sincere advice is not to try and trick them. And never, never let me hear of you in this province again. Do you understand?”

“I understand, Guapo, but all the coffee? I have no insurance, I will have to pay for it myself-”

“Are you arguing with me? Negotiating with me, goddamn you? You should be thanking me for not burning your lousy boat and you with it,” Guapo said, looking as if it was still a distinct possibility.

“No, no, Guapo, of course not, Guapo,” Vargas mumbled. “Whatever you say. Thank you for your understanding. I can promise you-”

“And in case you’re wondering whether the Arimaguas have a number for ‘forty-eight’ (which was exactly what Gideon was wondering), I should tell you that they will have a bag with forty-eight pebbles in it. Each time a coffee sack goes in the river, a pebble is removed from the bag. When you have finished, you’d better hope that there are no pebbles left in the bag.”

“Of course, Guapo,” Vargas said glumly.

“And you,” Guapo said, turning to Gideon. “Now what are we to do with you?”

“I have some good ideas,” said a grinning Fox-face. The burning cigarette stuck to his lower lip couldn’t have been more than a half inch long.

“No, no, an American professor,” Guapo said, “I don’t think we want that kind of trouble. I’ll tell you what, Professor. You give me those pretty American dollars you have in that wallet of yours – you can keep the lousy soles – and I will send you back to the ship with your good friend the captain to go on with your life. You’ll have a good story to tell. What do you say?”

Gideon looked at Guapo, at the big knife, at the leering Fox-face, at the other armed men, and sighed.

“Sounds fair to me,” he said.