The Babylon rite

51

Le Casa de Carlos Chicomeca Monroy

‘Why?’ said Nina, softly, gazing at Jessica. ‘Why did you betray us? Because you are ill?’

Jessica Silverton said nothing: she stared at the chevrons of the parquet floor. Handcuffed and miserable.

Carlos Monroy set the silver spoon on the marble mantel. ‘I can explain for Miss Silverton. You have to understand. She is an expert in her field, one of the brightest. She guessed some time ago the possible true nature of ulluchu. That it contained a unique alkaloid. Let us call it thanatine. An alkaloid which induces the desire to die. An alkaloid we have tried, and failed, so far, to isolate, extract and synthesize. Despite all our valiant attempts.’

Adam looked at Jessica for confirmation. But her blonde hair curtained her downcast face.

Monroy continued, ‘The second thing you need to know is that Jessica’s father died when she was young, of Huntington’s Disease. And that is a very evil way to die. Progressive and degenerative and appalling. The kind of disease which makes you question the goodness of God.’ He walked closer to Adam. ‘There is, of course, no cure. Huntington’s is genetic. Many people with the disease refuse a genetic test to see whether they are carriers. Why? Because a positive diagnosis induces many to commit suicide even before they fall ill, so great is their terror of the eventual affliction.’ He paused. ‘Jessica is, we now know, a carrier. What is more, she has the worst kind: a speedy and juvenile variety of the chorea. The clinching symptom is epileptiform seizure.’

Adam spoke, his voice hoarse. ‘How do you know all this?’

‘For many months Jessica admits she has been in denial of various symptoms — the initial signs that she had Huntington’s. And who can blame her for denying such a terrible fate for herself? Then, when her situation became incontrovertible, in the last weeks, days even, the intense horror took hold: and she knew she wanted to kill herself rather than go through what her father endured. And she wanted to face this death with yearning rather than dread, face it with contemptuous courage even, face it like the noble Templars, or the gallant Moche, the fearsome berserkers. Rather understandable, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Jess.’ Nina whispered. But still Jessica said nothing. Adam could feel the first rush of his own heart. The drug kicking in. They were all spiralling into oblivion, into the pure darkness of dementia. The sensation was blissful and terrifying.

Monroy paced the gilded room, like a gifted young lecturer, like the Harvard scholar he once was.

‘Jessica guessed, a while ago, what ulluchu really did. That it was a drug that made you want to die, thus obviating the terrors of death and of suicide. She felt that you, in turn, were unlikely to achieve success in finding the real ulluchu. Certainly she could not rely on this, and she was ever more desperate. Yet she knew I was most likely to be in possession of the echt drug, and she could not be sure anyone else had any of the dwindling supplies — and she could not be sure anyone else would understand her side of the bargain. Therefore she kept her options rather cleverly open by initiating contact with me, from Lima, the day you met. She gave me a few clues as to her situation and your whereabouts. Following her seizure on your boat, when her genetic fate was confirmed, when she felt the cold kiss of death on her pale American neck, she called me once more from the UNESCO site. She said if you failed in the jungle she would do a deal. Cut a sweet little deal. She would, if she could, make a phone call from the jungle: we were monitoring her phone, we were able to triangulate her location. She took a risk, but she is not without courage. And we knew you were near Iquitos: Peru is a cheap place to buy friends. So we located you, and thus we were able to come and… rescue you. As it were.’

‘What deal?’ Adam’s forehead was prickling with sweat. His pulse was up. ‘What deal could she do? What is her side of the bargain?’

‘Jessica told me she probably knew where Nina’s father had sourced the drug. She said she had seen the receipts and she had worked it out for herself, but told no one. The drug, she thought, had been removed from the jungle and cultivated elsewhere, by the Moche, probably in the mountains. They must have developed a much stronger variety, at certain distinct altitudes, with the perfect levels of rainfall and sunshine and frost — through centuries of horticulture. The Muchika were a very clever people. They were quite excellent irrigators.’

‘So, where?’

Carlos Monroy raised a hand, his smile princely in the sun slanting in through the long tall windows. ‘Let us ask her. She has yet to tell me. I do not know. Let us hear what she says.’

Colours menaced through Adam’s mind. The drug was really in his blood stream now. Gorgeous sexual images. Nina. Jessica. Blood-red swirls of purple. He forced himself to concentrate.

Monroy walked to Jessica’s chair. And crouched before her. ‘Tell me.’

A short painful pause ensued. Then Jessica lifted her head. She had been weeping silently, judging by her red-rimmed eyes. But her voice was quite distinct and articulate. ‘I saw the last receipt. Archibald McLintock went to Toloriu. After the jungle.’

Monroy frowned. ‘A little town near Huancabamba. In the Andes, what good is that? Which mountain?

‘No.’ Jessica shook her head. ‘Not Toloriu in Peru. The receipt was handwritten. A taxi. They-’ she glanced at Adam and Nina, ‘They didn’t realize. He went to a different Toloriu. A tiny hamlet, in the Pyrenees. Catalunya. He went back to Spain.’

Monroy stood up. His frown slowly became a gratified smile, then a triumphant laugh. ‘Toloriu. Casa Bima! The legend! The most obscure of legends!’ His laughter died, but the gleaming smile remained. Happy and aggressive.

Leaning against the mantelpiece, he picked up his silver spoon. And then the glinting silver snuff box. ‘ Casa Bima. What an ornate yet apposite denouement: the fulfilment of a very ancient story. Jessica, you were right: there are few people in the world who could have pieced that together… you, and me. And Archibald McLintock. Superb. You have earned your reward.’ He shook his head. ‘Of course I promised to save your friends and of course you knew I was lying and you didn’t care. Correct? But I will not torment them unduly. Let them kill themselves. And now it is your turn for the sweet release. Please, open your mouth. You can have an entire gram, a large proportion of my dwindling supplies. As a token of my generosity. It will work that much quicker, and your death will be sweeter. It will be exquisite. A sensuous climax.’

Jessica opened her mouth. Monroy had scooped his tiny glittering spoon in the powder, now heaped with half a gram of ulluchu. He positioned it carefully, then blew it — a puff of snuff between Jessica’s trembling lips. He did it again — another half a gram. She swallowed, and looked at the floor.

Monroy stood. He gazed, hard, at Nina and Adam. ‘Your cheeks are quite flushed. I see it is taking effect. I’d say you all have twenty minutes of consciousness and lucidity. I can tell you the rest of the story to fill these dull moments! Yes? Yes, I think so. But I’ll be brief. When you are dead, in about an hour or two, at your own hands, I will have to leave here. Los Zetas are surely seeking me out right now, searching for this house, I took enough risks flying you into the country. They have spies throughout the system, they are the shadow state, at airports, everywhere… And your clever outburst in the street will have alarmed and alerted the entire city.’ His face began to smear in Adam’s vision.

Adam wanted to kill this man, to tear him open. Drink the blood. He thought of Nina naked. Deliciously naked. Then Alicia.

The red mouth of the pale man opened and closed.

‘It was Harvard that changed me. All that wealth, all that incredible American wealth. The arrogant rowers on the Charles River, the egregiously regal Bostonians. When I got there, I compared it with my own country, impoverished, and ridiculed, and risible and — far, far worse — torn apart by the drug wars. How could I not? The drug wars are caused by America, by their ridiculous and bogus Puritanism, their absurd, adolescent prohibition on the purely human urge for intoxication, for altered states. Men have been taking drugs for ten thousand years: it is a human universal; mankind cannot bear too much reality. And the Americans are no different. And yet their same grunting American hunger for drugs, for cocaine and marijuana, for heroin and methamphetamine, for anything to enliven their absurdly dull materialist lives of gorging, shopping and corpulent waddling — this greed and desperation was killing my people, not harming them. Quite invidious. ’ Monroy snapped the snuff box shut, angrily. Adam closed his eyes and just listened to the voice.

‘The hypocrisy sickened me. America imported the drugs, yet religiously banned them. This same American prohibition therefore made the drug-trade all too appealing and profitable, accelerating the deathly wars in my country. My country. Mexico. Indeed all Latin America. Thousands are dying, tens of thousands are slaughtered yearly, just across the Rio Grande from peaceful El Paso. To salt the wound of irony, America makes and sells us the guns with which to kill each other! They actually profit from our massacres, massacres caused by their canting hypocrisies. And still they didn’t care, as long as they kept the death and destruction on the other side of the frontier, over the river, beyond the great big fence, that keeps the spics and wetbacks out, the fence that nonetheless lets all the dope and the meth and the cocaine in, for the kids in Harvard Yaaaard to get so pleasantly zoned.’

Sex and murder, sex and bloody murder. Alicia naked and dying. Adam felt his own arousal at the death of nude Alicia. He was aroused by the nearness of his own death. The sensation was tremendous and irresistible: he was being ravished by crueller desires.

‘So I began to plot some revenge on America, on the gringo who was destroying my country. And what sweeter, more deliciously ironic revenge could there be, I realized, than finding a terrible drug which Puritan America simply could not resist? The ultimate drug, the terminal high. A drug that was initially blissful, and quite sublime, combining the languid rapture of heroin with the euphoriant buzz of pure cocaine, as you are now experiencing; and then something much much better. And then something very much worse. ’ He licked his lips, gazing at Jessica. She had her head thrown back, swallowing compulsively. He walked over and stroked her hair. She sighed. He stroked, and talked, ‘And then one day I visited the Schultes Archives in Harvard, and I had my intimation. Maybe it wasn’t just a daydream, a wild and foolish ambition, maybe there was such a drug; maybe in the great vivid pageant of pre-Columbian entheogens I could find something: what was it the Aztecs took, the Moche, the Maya, the denizens of mighty Teotihuacan? Maybe they had a drug they gave to men before they were sacrificed that made them all willing victims, victims of the reeking priests with the obsidian knives.’

He leaned to kiss Jessica on the neck, and then to caress her breasts. Adam yearned to join them. The three of them. The four of them. Dissolving into each other’s bodies. Monroy drew back from Jessica, and continued, ‘So I began my research. I discovered ulluchu. I deduced that it had disappeared, yet I also discerned that the drug had maybe once reached Europe, perhaps reached the Templars: hence the lust of the conquistadors, the warriors from the last lands of the Templars, the very inheritors of the Templar legends, to find it once again.’ He flashed a smile, a brief, proud, exultant smile. ‘Once you realize the Templars were drugged, it all coheres. But what was this drug? I had to know. So I contacted the one man who could help, the great Templar expert, Archibald McLintock. Happily, he wanted the money I offered, and he was intrigued by my description of this putative narcotic. I later discovered why, of course: he was dying. He wanted the money as a legacy for his daughters; he wanted ulluchu for himself.’

Monroy kissed Jessica’s neck once more; his hand was inside her shirt. She sighed voluptuously.

Adam closed his eyes to the burning images, the image of a white naked body opened and bloody. He wanted to kill something. Drink the blood. Drink it all up. He was glad he was shackled to the chair. Monroy’s voice was a mellifluous bass tone.

‘McLintock fooled me. He unearthed the drug, said he’d found it somewhere in the Andes. He gave me a considerable supply which I in turn gave to my men — as an incitement. We planted seeds to grow bushes, but they all failed: this is a very delicate plant. Of course Archibald promised more in time, and I believed him. I planned my exportation to America, I planned how I would market this marvellous drug to all the fat greedy stoner American kids. I would get them hooked first, then introduce stronger supplies.’ His hand stroked Jessica’s cheek, tenderly. ‘You see, as I say, at the right subdued dose, ulluchu merely induces extreme and blissful sadism, and of course intense addiction. Perfect for creating junkies — and perfect for creating loyal cartelistas, loyally violent foot-soldiers. I tried it on my men first. It worked. My cartel flourished; we began to threaten the Zetas, because with the ulluchu we were even crueller than them, and so the Zetas grew scared. But then, one of my closest men betrayed me, for money: he told the Zetas of McLintock, the man in Scotland, they went after him — stole his notebooks, and, I presume, most of the ulluchu he had kept for his own purposes. Since then they have been trying to prevent me retracing the McLintock trail, following the death of Archibald himself. Though clever old Archibald must have hidden a truly secret stash, to smooth the path of his own death, at Rosslyn Chapel…’

Nina was moaning, writhing. Monroy smiled.

‘But then again, we all want to die, don’t we? Isn’t this the beauty of what you are feeling, Adam, Nina? To give in at last, to succumb to that dark, voluptuous urge, to throw yourself under the subway train, to drive into the oncoming truck.’

He was groping Jessica, she opened her legs, letting him touch her, her eyes were shut and she was sighing heavily, her throat pulsing, and then she spoke:

‘-me-’

‘Of course.’

‘Untie me.’

He knelt and unshackled her. She reached for him. Monroy motioned to the guards: leave. The sentries nodded and quit the room.

Nina said, ‘Me too.’

Monroy laughed. ‘Please. You can drown in each other’s blood when I am done. Here. Jessica. Beautiful, dying American blonde, Jessica Silverton, strip.’

She was pulling off her clothes.

‘And show me.’

She pulled down her jeans. She was naked. Desperate. Shivering. He laughed. ‘You are so very blonde — even here.’ He pulled her to the sofa, ‘Let them watch. I can cut you up as we fuck, like the Moche. Do you want that? Do you want me to cut you up, Jessie? It will make you come, you will have no face, it will be ribbons, it will be good, you will be beautiful, you are dying, it doesn’t matter, you want to die, don’t you? You want me to cut you, to shred your pale American skin, to-‘

He was smiling. His neck was smiling. Adam stared. The blur of images in his mind was bewildering. El Santo was smiling twice.

Then he saw. Adam realized what had happened through the leering and erotic desolation in his mind. Jessica had produced a razor from her mouth and she had cut Carlos Chicomeca Monroy clean across the throat.