The Babylon rite

25

Outskirts of Chiclayo, north Peru

‘So tell me more. Please.’

Steve Venturi was on the phone. Jessica was in the cab of the TUMP Chevy; Larry was driving them the last few miles into Chiclayo.

The signal dropped for a few moments, then Venturi’s languidly intellectual, southern Californian drawl returned. ‘Well, I’ve written it up — and emailed a PDF. Do you want to hear the summary?’

‘Yes. Yes please.’

‘OK. “Described below are three possible cases of foot amputation in skeletal remains associated with the Moche culture of north Peru. The three skeletons belonged to young male and female adults, and date from the eighth-century AD… ”’

‘But-’

‘Wait, Jess. Here’s the lox in the bagel. “Each case exhibits non-functional tibio-talar joints with proliferative bone occupying the normal joint space. The robusticity of the tibiae and fibulae suggest renewed weight-bearing and mobility following recovery. There is no evidence of pathology in any of the skeletons which might imply a surgical need for amputation. The osteological evidence is therefore consistent with details shown in Moche ceramic depictions of footless individuals.”’

Jessica kept the phone pressed tightly to her ear. They were stuck in the seething and seedy traffic of peripheral Chiclayo. Blood-red graffiti, on a low whitewashed wall behind Larry, shouted Ni Democracia! Ni Dictadura! ‘Let me get this right, Steve. That means, in plain English, they cut off their own feet while they were alive, when they were perfectly healthy.’

‘Yup.’

‘Because they wanted to! They just wanted to? What’s wrong with them? It’s like Jay said, this is just the sickest society ever. Who the heck are we digging up?’

Steve Venturi laughed, long and laconic. ‘The mad and terrible Moche. No?’

‘Sure… I know, but… Jeez Denise.’

‘OK, Jessica, I gotta go. Any more of these scientific coups and you’ll be after my job!’

The call ended. Larry turned the steering wheel. ‘So, tell me, what did he say? Give me the Full Venturi.’

Jess explained the confirmation of her suspicions: the amputations were done when the ‘victim’ was alive, some time before death, years before death even. Voluntary amputations: perhaps as some kind of spiritual payment, some sacrifice, to the unknown Moche god.

The first, virulent suburbs of Chiclayo loomed on either side of the scruffy road — battered adobe shacks, hovels of concrete, a sullen lavanderia.

‘So they really…’ He scanned the busy road ahead, and swerved past a motokar with a dead black goat strapped to the back. ‘They really did it! Just like you predicted, uh-huh?’

‘Yep.’

‘I can’t believe it. It’s just incredible.’ Larry smoothed a worried hand over his jaw.

‘He’s emailing a PDF. You can see it if you like.’

‘No, no. I believe you.’

They passed a row of uninhabited concrete houses, one of them used as a garbage depot: a great green pile of plastic Sprite bottles was heaped within. The next corner revealed a dirt road that dwindled into a cloud of grimy haze; open concrete sewers full of trash divided the busted hovels from the road.

It was a scene of apocalyptic dereliction, a scene from Iraq just after the war: shattered suburbs of desolate beige, with helpless brown wide-eyed kids staring in mystification at a world so totally destroyed by the grown-ups. The only difference was here there had been no war.

The traffic slowed and surged, and slowed; she thought of her father, being tested. In hospital. The blood test. Jessica had already accepted her own denial, she knew she wasn’t going to get the test, she wasn’t even going to call her mother. She was going to live her life until she couldn’t live it any more, whatever was really wrong with her. Anything else was intolerable: the knowledge of certain and appalling death was worse than the fear of her ignorance. Her conscious decision not to know actually gave her an odd elation, a kind of liberation. Self-acceptance.

Larry grabbed a slug of Inca Kola from a big yellow plastic bottle in the gear well. ‘You hear about Jay?’

‘No?’

‘Says he has been having nightmares. Nightmares about the Moche god, coming to cut off his head!’

‘Except of course technically, the Moche cut off their hands, as well, and their feet. As we now know.’

Larry’s sigh was derisive, yet resigned. ‘That’s the damn crux, isn’t it? They did it to themselves, voluntarily. I have no conceptual way of understanding this-’

‘The Aztecs self-mutilated.’

Larry accelerated into a traffic gap, between two green and red motokars. ‘OK, yeah sure, they spiked their penises with cactus thorns. They drew blood from their ear lobes. They scarred themselves. And lots of cultures scarify, Jessica. But this crazy-ass Moche shit is on a whole new level — cutting off your own healthy hands? To impress? To please the gods? Why? And then there’s the sex, the kinky stuff. Sex with skeletons? Sodomizing each other during horrible ritual murder? It’s like — like they must have been getting off on it. All the torture.’

‘Clearly. But the eroticism is a leitmotif throughout the culture, Larry — victims and perpetrators are all involved, all sexualized. We have the evidence of the murals. The aroused naked prisoners, brothers and sons, brothers and… and fathers…’

‘So they flay them and torture them and tie them up, their own sons and brothers, and then they slowly bleed them to death, and then someone drinks the blood from a special cup, and as all this is going on someone else thinks, hey, I know, let’s have anal sex in the same room at the same time just in case it gets a bit goddamn boring.’

‘And all this while the rest of the people are singing and dancing and watching, yep, it is incredibly bizarre.’

‘And then they bring in the pumas. They have sex with pumas.’

‘We don’t know the puma sex was consensual.’

‘Ah, no. Muy stupido.’ Larry’s laugh was wild and bitter. ‘Might have been puma rape, right? Now they’ve really crossed the line. Sodomizing old corpses, cool; drinking your brother’s blood, that’s fine and dandy; but puma rape? Heck. Someone call PETA!’

The pick-up took a turning, at speed. They were closer to the centre of the city now. The buildings fled past. A red Nova Scotia bank, a white concrete evangelical church, then a statue to a fat, forgotten general in an anonymous and dusty plaza jammed with imprisoned traffic.

Larry sighed. ‘It’s just beyond — beyond anything… It’s just… way out there.’

‘Yep. And Dan still doesn’t quite buy it, he’s still resistant. Emotionally. He doesn’t believe it really happened, and if it happened — well then he wants to blame it on El Nino. He can’t actually come out and say the obvious: that that this is just what the Moche did. Stuff they liked to do. Chop off their own hands, or feet, or noses. Mutilate themselves.’

A pink San German bus was passing them on the right, stuffed to the broken windows with poor tired people: weary fish-workers and bag-clutching housewives staring soulfully at the gringos in the Chevrolet.

‘So you fault him for this?’

‘Actually, yes, I do.’

‘Why? I thought you two were in love.’

There was a long silence. Jessica blushed, fiercely. ‘Is it that obvious?’

Larry laughed. ‘Yes. It’s that obvious. Everyone in Zana knows about you and the boss, babe. You’re not very good at sneaking around, you two. But don’t worry!’ He laughed again. ‘We’re all happy for you. You make a nice couple! And Dan is a very decent man and he was kinda lonely before you came along… So it’s a good thing. Don’t fret.’

She shrugged, half-embarrassed, and yet half-pleased. ‘Don’t know what to say. But I want you to know it doesn’t affect the science, for either of us. That’s separate, we’re still professionals. And Dan and I disagree on the Moche.’

‘How?’

‘I think he is hampered by political correctness. Like so many academics of his generation. Take cannibalism.’

‘If you insist.’

‘These days, if you believed most senior anthropologists and archaeologists, cannibalism never happened. Never ever, or hardly ever, and certainly not when poor brown people are being discussed.’

‘Right.’

‘Yet we know for sure that cannibalism has been, through history, a pretty widespread phenomenon. Dozens of cultures have recorded it, from the Anasazi to the Sumatrans to the Maori. Fiji. New Guinea. The Amazon. Scientists have even found bones, with saw marks on them, next to human middens with evidence of human flesh digested by human alimentary canals. And yet the bien pensant ethnologists still say — oh no, it’s racist, how can you accuse these poor people of such horrible things, perhaps a bear came in and used a knife?’

They were much closer now. The streets were definitely older and narrower, low-slung Spanish colonial buildings painted dirty orange or red, flickered past.

‘OK, Jess. But look at it the other way. Accusations of cannibalism were also, like, used as a neat way to disparage non-Europeans, right? So the questioning of cannibalism is a justified reaction to that, to the racist jokes about boiled missionaries, decades of horrible eugenics, fuzzy-wuzzies with bones through the noses.’

‘But it’s bad science. Science should be science. Uninfluenced by politics.’

‘I agree. But maybe not everyone is as ruthlessly clear-headed and ambitious as you.’ Larry was half-smiling, obviously teasing. ‘And Jessica, you gotta recall the emotional context.’

‘How?’

‘Dan has been studying the Moche for a decade. It’s like they are his family. The Moche are his people. Now someone comes along…’

‘Me?’

‘Yes. His smart and ambitious young girlfriend. And you say uh-oh sorry, Dad was a sex-killer and Mom liked threesomes with goats. He’s offended on behalf of his family. The Moche. So just… go easy, Jess. You’re vindicated. Be magnanimous.’

‘All right.’ Jess permitted herself a nervous laugh.

‘You had any thoughts about the gunman?’ Larry asked quietly. ‘Dan won’t even talk about it.’

‘Been trying to not think about myself, if I’m honest.’

‘Sure. But, didn’t you say you got some scuttle on this dude? This

… McLintock guy?’

‘He’s a Scottish historian. Or he was.’

‘Killed himself recently?’

‘Yes.’

‘Coincidence? The suicide?’

Jess shook her head. ‘I’ve no idea. Perhaps. There’s a cached Facebook page about it. Deleted but still readable. It’s strange. But the thing is… He was a historian of medieval Europe. It’s difficult to see a connection between him and the Moche in eighth-century Peru. Fifteen thousand miles away.’ She was one kilometre away from her destination. ‘Yet that is definitely who the gunman named. Archie McLintock. A dead Scottish medievalist. Who recently drove into a wall. About the same time someone killed Pablo.’

A silence in the cabin. The squeal of brakes. Larry was pulling over. ‘All very sinister. I might ask for a raise if there are gonna be evil assassins. Anyway. We’re here, babe. The supermercado.’

Jess alighted from the Chevy pick-up, smiling. ‘Thanks for the lift, Larry.’

Larry lifted a dismissive hand. ‘Hey, the company was good. We all need to stick together. Buzz me on the cell when you’ve finished shopping and I’ll pick you up later. Stay safe.’

The Chevy pulled out. Jessica watched it depart into the dust and melee. Then she turned and waited; then glanced at the burbling noise of the shadowy market across the square from the modern supermercardo.

That’s where she was really headed; she didn’t want the Roski supermarket: that was a ruse. Jess felt a need to keep her investigations to herself right now. She wanted the witches’ market, inside the town market. She wanted to ask about ulluchu, and she reckoned that maybe, just maybe, some of the people here, descendants of the Moche themselves, might know something about it. The blood of the unknown Moche god.

Immediately she crossed into the darkness, she was lost in the bustle and the shouting and the odours. Boiling tripes in cauldrons. Piles of yams and dirty potatoes and lurid red peppers and secondhand mannequins with gouged-out eyes wearing terrible nylon clothes. Headless, goosepimpled chickens sprawled on blood-smeared counters. Women in bowler hats sat at rough wooden benches eating skewered beef hearts, anticuchos, under a saccharine portrait of Jesus in a luminous toga. Here was the corner which led to the witches’ market proper. She paused.

A baby was lying on the floor of the market. Just lying there, face up, in nylon swaddling. Staring quietly at the ceiling, all alone, with damp concrete beneath him. Peruvians often did this, especially native women — just left babies on the ground to go off to do their shopping. Probably the baby was fine. Yet the sight was reflexively painful for a Westerner: it broke every taboo, abandoning a child on the dirty floor of a crowded market, where it could be crushed or run over or kicked.

The least she could do was put something under the baby, protect it somehow. She had to do something. Hurrying across the dirty concrete, she rushed up to the blank-faced child and as she did she wondered if something was wrong. The baby’s face, the way it wasn’t doing anything, it was just a doll, was it just a doll? And then she saw blackness.

She was grabbed and hooded, roughly. Musty sweat and horror flared her nostrils, she kicked out and screamed; heard a suppressed curse, voices raised. The hood tightened like a noose around her neck, her arms were lashed. Jess was being kidnapped.