The Last Place God Made

FIVE

Forte Franco must have been the sort of posting which to any career officer was equivalent of a sentence of death. A sign that he was finished. That there was no more to come. Because of this I had expected the kind of second-rater one usually found in command of up-river military posts, incapable of realizing his own inadequacies and permanently soured by his present misfortunes.

Colonel Alberto was not at all like that. I was helping Mannie get the Hayley ready to go when the launch came into the jetty and he disembarked. He was every inch the soldier in a well-tailored drill uniform, shining boots, black polished holster on his right thigh. Parade-ground smart and the face beneath the peaked cap was intelligent and firm although tinged with yellow as if he'd had jaundice which was a common enough complaint in the climate.

There were half a dozen soldiers in the boat, but only one accompanied him, a young sergeant as smartly turned-out as his colonel with a briefcase in one hand and a couple of machine-guns slung over one shoulder.

Alberto smiled pleasantly and spoke in quite excellent English. ‘A fine morning, Senhor Sterne. Is everything ready?’

‘Just about,’ Mannie told him.

‘And Captain Hannah?’

‘Will be down shortly.’

‘I see.’ Alberto turned to me. ‘And this gentleman?’

‘Neil Mallory,’ I said. ‘I'm Hannah's new pilot. I'm going up with you, just to get the feel of things.’

‘Excellent.’ He shook hands rather formally then glanced at his watch. ‘I have things to discuss with Figueiredo. I'll be back in half an hour. I'll leave Sergeant Lima here. He'll be going with us.’

He moved away, a brisk, competent figure and the sergeant opened the cabin door and got rid of the machine-guns and the briefcase.

I said to Mannie, ‘What's his story? He doesn't look the type for up-country work.’

‘Political influence as far as I understand it,’ Mannie said. ‘Said the wrong thing to some government minister or other in front of people. Something like that, anyway.’

‘He looks a good man to me.’

‘Oh, he's that all right. At least as far as the job is concerned, but I've never cared for the professional soldier as a type. They made the end justify the means too often for my liking.’ He wiped his hands on a rag and stood back. ‘Well, she's ready as she'll ever be. Better get Hannah.’

I found him in the shower, leaning in the corner for support, head turned up into the spray. When he turned it off and stepped out, he tried to smile and only succeeded in looking worse than ever.

‘I feel as if they've just dug me up. What happened last night?’

‘You got drunk,’ I said.

‘What on — wood alcohol? I haven't felt like this since Prohibition.’

He wandered off to his bedroom like a very old man and I went into the kitchen and made some coffee. When it was ready, I took it out on a tray and found him on the veranda dressed for flying.

He wrapped a white scarf around his throat and took one of the mugs. ‘Smells good enough to drink. I thought you Limeys could only make tea?’ He sipped a little, eyeing me speculatively. ‘What really happened last night?’

‘Can't you remember anything?’

‘I won a little money at poker, that's for sure. More than my share and Avila and his boys weren't too happy. Was there trouble?’

‘I suppose you could say that.’

‘Tell me.’

So I did. There was little point in holding anything back for he was certain to hear it for himself one way or the other.

When I was finished, he sat there on the rail holding the mug in both hands, his face very white, those pale eyes of his opaque, lifeless. As I have said, the appearance of things was of primary importance to him. His standing in other men's eyes, the image he protrayed to the world, and these men had treated him like dirt — publicly humiliated him.

He smiled suddenly and unexpectedly, a slow burn as if what I had said had touched a fuse inside. I don't know what it would have done for Avila, but it certainly frightened me. He didn't say another word about the matter, didn't have to and I could only hope Avila would be long gone when we returned. He emptied what was left of his coffee over the rail and stood up. ‘Okay, let's get moving. We've got a schedule to keep.’

Flying the Hayley was like driving a car after what I'd been used to and the truth is, there wasn't much enjoyment in it. Everything worked to perfection, it was the last word in comfort and engine noise was reduced to a minimum. Hannah was beside me and Colonel Alberto sat in one of the front passenger seats, his sergeant behind to preserve, I suppose, the niceties of military rank.

Hannah opened a Thermos flask, poured coffee into two cups and passed one back. ‘Still hoping to get the nuns to move on, Colonel?’ he asked.

‘Not really,’ Alberto said. ‘I raise the matter with Father Conté on each visit, usually over the sherry, because it is part of my standing orders from Army Command Headquarters. A meaningless ritual, I fear. The Church has considerable influence in government circles and at the highest possible level. No one is willing to order them to leave. The choice is theirs and they see themselves as having a plain duty to take God and modern medicine to the Indians.’

‘In that order?’ Hannah said and laughed for the first time that morning.

‘And the Huna?’ I said. ‘What do they think?’

‘The Huna, Senhor Mallory, want no one. Did you know what their name means in their own language? The enemy of all men. Anthropologists talk of the noble savage, but there is nothing noble about the Huna. They are probably the cruellest people on earth.’

‘They were there first,’ I said.

‘That's what they used to say about the Sioux back home,’ Hannah put in.

‘An interesting comparison,’ Alberto said. ‘Look at the United States a century ago and look at her now. Well, this is our frontier, one of the richest undeveloped areas in the world. God alone knows how far we can go in the next fifty years, but one thing is certain — progress is inevitable and these people stand in the way of that progress.’

‘So what answer have you got?’ I said. ‘Extermination.’ ‘Not if they can be persuaded to change. The choice is theirs.’

‘Which gives them no choice at all.’ I was surprised to hear my own bitternness.

Alberto said, ‘Figueiredo was telling me you spent a year in the Xingu River country, Senhor Mallory. The Indians in that area have always been particularly troublesome. This was so when you were there?’

I nodded reluctantly.

‘Did you ever kill one?’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘I was at Forte Tomas in November thirty-six when they attacked the town and butchered thirty or forty people.’

‘A bad business,’ he said. ‘You must have been with the survivors who took refuge in the church and held them off for a week till the military arrived. You must have killed many times during that unfortunate episode.’

‘Only because they were trying to kill me.’

‘Exactly.’

I could see him in my mirror as he leaned back and took a file from his briefcase, effectively putting an end to the conversation.

Hannah grinned. ‘I'd say the colonel's made his point.’

‘Maybe he has,’ I said, ‘but it still isn't going to help the Huna.’

‘But why in the hell world would any sensible person want to do that?’ he seemed surprised. ‘They've had their day, Mallory, just like the dinosaurs.’

‘Doomed to extinction, you mean?’

‘Exactly.’ He groaned and put a hand to his head. ‘Christ, there's someone walking around inside with hob-nailed boots.’

I gave up. Maybe they were right and I was wrong — perhaps the Huna had to go under and there was no other choice. I pushed the thought away from me, eased back the stick and climbed into the sunlight.

The whole trip took no more than forty minutes, mostly in bright sunshine although as we approached our destination we ran into another of those sudden violent rainstorms and I had to go down fast.

Visibility was temporarily so poor that Hannah took over the controls in the final stages, taking her down to two hundred feet at which height we could at least see the river. He throttled back and side-slipped neatly into the landing strip which was a large patch of campo on the east bank of the river.

‘They don't have a radio, so I usually fly in over the settlement just to let them know I'm here,’ Hannah told me. ‘The nuns enjoy it, but this isn't weather to fool about in.’

‘It is of no consequence,’ Alberto said calmly. ‘They will have heard us land. The launch will be here soon.’

The mission, as I remembered, was a quarter of a mile upstream on the other side of the river. Alberto told Lima to go and wait the launch's arrival and produced a leather cigar case.

Hannah took one, but I declined and on impulse, opened the cabin door and jumped down into the grass. The rain hammered down relentlessly as I went after the sergeant. There was a crude wooden pier constructed of rough-hewn planks, extending into the river on piles, perhaps twenty or thirty feet long.

Lima was already at the end. He stood there, gazing out across the river. Suddenly he leaned over the edge of the jetty, dropping to one knee as if looking down at something in the water. As I approached, he stood up, turned to one side and was violently sick.

‘What's wrong?’ I demanded, then looked over the edge and saw for myself. I took several deep breaths and said, ‘You'd better get the colonel.’

An old canoe was tied up to the jetty and the thing which floated beside it, trapped by the current against the pilings was dressed in the tropical-white robes of a nun. There was still a little flesh on the skeletal face that stared out from the white coif, but not much. A sudden eddy pulled the body away. It rolled over, face-down and I saw there were at least half a dozen arrows in the back.

Lima climbed up out of the water clutching an identity disc and crucifix on a chain which he'd taken from around the nun's neck. He looked sicker than ever as he handed them to Alberto and stood there shaking and not only from the cold.

Alberto said, ‘Pull yourself together for God's sake and try and remember you're a soldier. You're safe enough here anyway. I've never known them to operate on this side of the river.’

If we'd done the sensible thing we'd have climbed back into the Hayley and got to hell out of there. Needless to say, Alberto didn't consider that for a second. He stood at the end of the jetty peering into the rain, a machine-gun cradled in his left arm.

‘Don't tell me you're thinking of going across?’ Hannah demanded.

‘I have no choice. I must find out what the situation is over there. There could be survivors.’

‘You've got to be joking,’ Hannah exploded angrily. ‘Do I have to spell it out for you? It's finally happened, just as everyone knew it would if they didn't get out of there.’

Colonel Alberto ignored him and said, without turning round, ‘I would take it as a favour if you would accompany me, Senhor Mallory. Sergeant Lima can stay here with Senhor Hannah.’

Hannah jumped in with both feet, his ego, I suppose, unable to accept the fact of being left behind. ‘To hell with that for a game of soldiers. If he goes, I go.’

I don't know if it was the result Alberto had intended, but he certainly didn't argue. Sergeant Lima was left to hold the fort with his revolver, I took the other machine-gun and Hannah had the automatic shotgun he habitually carried in the Hayley.

There was water in the canoe. It swirled about in the bottom breaking over my feet in little waves as I sat in the stern and paddled. Hannah was in the centre, also paddling and Alberto crouched in the prow, his machine-gun at the ready.

An old log, drifting by, turned into an alligator by flicking his tail and moving lazily out of the way. The jungle was quiet in the rain, the distant cough of a jaguar the only sound. On the far side of the river, sandbanks lifted out of the water, covered with ibis and as we approached, thousands of them lifted into the rain in a great, red cloud.

The sandbanks appeared and disappeared at intervals for most of the way, finally rising in a shoal a good two hundred yards long in the centre of the river opposite the mission jetty.

‘I landed and took off from there twice last year during the summer when the river was low,’ Hannah said.

I suspected he had made the remark for something to say more than anything else for we were drifting in towards the jetty now and the silence was uncanny.

We tied up alongside an old steam launch and climbed up on to the jetty. A couple of wild dogs were fighting over something on the ground at the far end. They cleared off as we approached. When we got close, we saw it was another nun, lying face-down, hands hooked into the dirt.

Flies rose in clouds at our approach and the smell was frightful. Alberto held a handkerchief to his face and dropped to one knee to examine the body. He slid his hand underneath, groped around for a while and finlly came up with the identity disc he was seeking on its chain. He stood up and moved away hurriedly to breathe fresh air.

‘Back of her skull crushed, probably by a war club.’

‘How long?’ Hannah asked him.

‘Two days — three at the most. If there has been a general massacre then we couldn't be safer. They believe the spirits of those killed violently linger in the vicinity for seven days. There isn't a Huna alive who'd come anywhere near this place.’

I don't know whether his words were supposed to reassure, but they certainly didn't do much for me. I slipped the safety catch off the machine-gun and held it at the ready as we went forward.

The mission itself was perhaps a hundred yards from the jetty. One large single-storeyed building that was the medical centre and hospital, four simple bungalows with thatched roofs and a small church on a rise at the edge of the jungle and close to the river, a bell hanging from a frame above the door.

We found two more nuns before we reached the mission, both virtually hacked to pieces, but the most appalling sight was at the edge of the clearing at the end of the medical centre where we discovered the body of a man suspended by his ankles above the cold ashes of what had been a considerable fire, the flesh peeling from his skull. The smell was nauseating, so bad that I could almost taste it.

Alberto beat the flies away with a stick and took a close look. ‘Father Conté's servant,’ he said. ‘An Indian from down-river. Poor devil, they must have decided he'd earned something special.’

Hannah turned on me, his face like the wrath of God. ‘And you were feeling sorry for the bastards.’

Colonel Alberto cut in quickly. ‘Never mind that now. Your private differences can wait till later. We'll split up to save time and don't forget I need identity bracelets. Another day in this heat and it will be impossible to recognise anyone.’

I took the medical centre, an eerie experience because everything was in perfect order. Beds turned down as if awaiting patients, mosquito nets hooked up neatly. The only unusual thing was the smell which led me to the small operating theatre where I found two more nuns, their bodies already decomposing. Like the one at the end of the jetty they seemed to have been clubbed to death. I managed to find their identity discs without too much trouble and got out.

Alberto was emerging from one of the bungalows. I gave him the discs and he said, ‘That makes ten in all; there should be a dozen. And there's no sign of Father Conté.’

‘All they've done is kill people,’ I said. ‘Everything else is in perfect order. It doesn't make sense. I'd have expected them to put a torch to the buildings, just to finish things off.’

‘They wouldn't dare,’ he said. ‘Another superstition. The spirits of those they have killed need somewhere to live.’

Hannah moved out of the church and called to us. When we joined him he was shaking with rage. Father Conté lay flat on his back just inside the door, an arrow in his throat. From his position, I'd say he had probably been standing on the porch facing his attackers when hit. His eyes had gone, probably one of the vultures which I had noticed perched on the church roof. Most terrible thing of all, his cassock had been torn away and his chest hacked open with a machete.

Hannah said, ‘Now why would they do a thing like that?’

‘They admired his courage. They imagine that by eating his heart, they take some of his bravery into themselves.’

Which just about finished Hannah off and he looked capable of anything as Alberto said, ‘There are two nuns missing. We know they're not inside anywhere so we'll split up again and work our way down through the mission in a rough line. They're probably face-down in the grass somewhere.’

But they weren't, or at least we couldn't find them. When we gathered again at the jetty, Hannah said, ‘Maybe they went into the water like the first one we found?’

‘All the others were either in their middle years or older,’ Alberto said. ‘These two, the two who are missing, are much younger than that. Twenty or twenty-one. No more.’

‘You think they've been taken alive?’ I asked him.

‘It could well be. Like many tribes, they like to freshen the blood occasionally. They frequently take in young women, keep them until the baby is born then murder them.’

‘For God's sake, let's get out of here,’ Hannah said. ‘I've had about all I can take.’ He turned and hurried to the end of the jetty and boarded the canoe.

There wasn't much more we could do anyway so we joined him and paddled back downstream. The journey was completely uneventful. When we drifted in to the jetty at the edge of the campo, Lima was waiting for us looking more nervous than ever.

‘Everything all right here?’ Alberto demanded.

Lima said anxiously, ‘I don't know, Colonel.’ He nodded towards the green curtain of jungle. ‘You know what it's like. You keep imagining that someone is standing on the other side, watching you.’

Forest foxes started to bark in several different directions at once. Alberto said calmly, ‘I suggest we walk back to the plane quietly and get inside with the minimum of fuss. I think we're being watched.’

‘The foxes?’ I said.

‘Aren't foxes — not at this time in the morning.’

The walk to the plane was an experience in itself and I expected an arrow in the back at any moment. But nothing happened. We all got inside without incident and I took the controls.

I taxied to the end of the campo. As I turned into the wind, an Indian emerged from the jungle and stood on the edge of the clearing watching us, face painted for war, magnificent in a head-dress of parrot feathers, a spear in one hand, a six-foot bow in the other.

Hannah picked up one of the machine-guns and reached for the window. Alberto caught his arm. ‘No, leave it. Our turn will come.’

As we moved past, another figure emerged from the forest, then another and another. I don't think I have ever felt happier than when I lifted the Hayley over the trees at the edge of the campo, stamped on the rudder and swung north.

There was no landing strip at Forte Franco for the simple reason that the post had been built on an island strategically situated at the mouth of the Negro about a century before the Wright brothers first left the ground.

We radioed the bad news ahead the moment we were in range, just to get things moving, then put down at Landro. Alberto wasted little time in getting under way. He ordered his men to prepare the launch for a quick departure then went into Landro with Hannah to see Figueiredo. I was waiting at the jetty with Mannie when the colonel returned. Hannah was not with him.

‘What happens now?’ I asked.

‘There should be a reply to my message from Army Headquarters by the time I reach Forte Franco. I would imagine my instructions will be to proceed up-river at once with my command. All thirty-eight of them. ‘I've a dozen men down with fever at the moment.’

‘But surely they'll send you reinforcements?’ Mannie said.

‘Miracles sometimes happen, but not very often, my friend. Even if they did, it would be several weeks before they could arrive. This kind of thing is an old story as you must know, Senhor Mallory.’ He looked out across the river to the forest. ‘In any case, in that kind of country, a regiment would be too little, an army not enough.’

‘When we landed, you said we'd be safe on that side of the river,’ I reminded him. ‘That they never crossed over.’

He nodded, his face dark and serious. ‘A cause for concern, I assure you, if it means they are moving out of their usual territory.’ The engine of the launch broke into life and he smiled briskly. ‘I must be on the move. Senhor Hannah stayed at the hotel, by the way. I'm afraid he has taken all this very hard.’

He stepped over the rail, one of the soldiers cast off and the launch moved into midstream. We stood watching it go. Alberto waved, then went into the cabin.

I said, ‘What about Hannah? Do you think there's any point in going for him? If he runs into Avila in the mood he's in…’

‘Avila and his bunch moved out just before noon.’ Mannie shook his head. ‘Best leave him for now. We can put him to bed later.’

He turned and walked away. A solitary ibis hovered above the trees on the other side of the river before descending like a splash of blood against the grey sky. An omen, perhaps, of worse things to come?

I shivered involuntarily and went after Mannie.