Books of Blood: Volumes 1-6

  He kissed her as he worked, and swallowed the pestilence with her spittle; his hands came off her body gritty with her contagious cells. He knew none of this, of course. He was perfectly innocent of what corruption he embraced, and took into himself with every uninspired thrust.

  At last, he finished. There was no gasp, no cry. He simply stopped his clockwork motion and climbed off her, wiping himself with the edge of the sheet, and buttoning himself up again.

  Guides were calling her. She had journeys to make, reunions to look forward to. But she did not want to go; at least not yet. She steered the vehicle of her spirit to a fresh vantage-point, where she could better see Kavanagh's face. Her sight, or whatever sense this condition granted her, saw clearly how his features were painted over a groundwork of muscle, and how, beneath that intricate scheme, the bones sheened. Ah, the bone. He was not Death of course; and yet he was. He had the face, hadn't he? And one day, given decay's blessing, he'd show it. Such a pity that a scraping of flesh came between it and the naked eye.

  Come away, the voices insisted. She knew they could not be fobbed off very much longer. Indeed there were some amongst them she thought she knew. A moment, she pleaded, only a moment more.

  Kavanagh had finished his business at the murder- scene. He checked his appearance in the wardrobe mirror, then went to the door. She went with him, intrigued by the utter banality of his expression. He slipped out onto the silent landing and then down the stairs, waiting for a moment when the night-porter was otherwise engaged before stepping out into the street, and liberty.

  Was it dawn that washed the sky, or the illuminations? Perhaps she had watched him from the corner of the room longer than she'd thought – hours passing as moments in the state she had so recently achieved. Only at the last was she rewarded for her vigil, as a look she recognised crossed Kavanagh's face. Hunger! The man was hungry. He would not die of the plague, any more than she had. Its presence shone in him – gave a fresh luster to his skin, and a new insistence to his belly.

  He had come to her a minor murderer, and was going from her as Death writ large. She laughed, seeing the self-fulfilling prophecy she had unwittingly engineered. For an instant his pace slowed, as if he might have heard her. But no; it was the drummer he was listening for, beating louder than ever in his ear and demanding, as he went, a new and deadly vigour in his every step.

  XXVIII: HOW SPOILERS BLEED

  Locke raised his eyes to the trees. The wind was moving in them, and the commotion of their laden branches sounded like the river in full spate. One impersonation of many. When he had first come to the jungle he had been awed by the sheer multiplicity of beast and blossom, the relentless parade of life here. But he had learned better. This burgeoning diversity was a sham; the jungle pretending itself an artless garden. It was not. Where the untutored trespasser saw only a brilliant show of natural splendours, Locke now recognised a subtle conspiracy at work, in which each thing mirrored some other thing. The trees, the river; a blossom, a bird. In a moth's wing, a monkey's eye; on a lizard's back, sunlight on stones. Round and round in a dizzying circle of impersonations, a hall of mirrors which confounded the senses and would, given time, rot reason altogether. See us now, he thought drunkenly as they stood around Cherrick's grave, look at how we play the game too. We're living; but we impersonate the dead better than the dead themselves. The corpse had been one scab by the time they'd hoisted it into a sack and carried it outside to this miserable plot behind Tetelman's house to bury. There were half a dozen other graves here. All Europeans, to judge by the names crudely burned into the wooden crosses; killed by snakes, or heat, or longing. Tetelman attempted to say a brief prayer in Spanish, but the roar of the trees, and the din of birds making their way home to their roosts before night came down, all but drowned him out. He gave up eventually, and they made their way back into the cooler interior of the house, where Stumpf was sitting, drinking brandy and staring inanely at the darkening stain on the floorboards.

  Outside, two of Tetelman's tamed Indians were shoveling the rank jungle earth on top of Cherrick's sack, eager to be done with the work and away before nightfall. Locke watched from the window. The gravediggers didn't talk as they laboured, but filled the shallow grave up, then flattened the earth as best they could with the leather-tough soles of their feet. As they did so the stamping of the ground took on a rhythm. It occurred to Locke that the men were probably the worse for bad whisky; he knew few Indians who didn't drink like fishes. Now, staggering a little, they began to dance on Cherrick's grave.

  "Locke?"

  Locke woke. In the darkness, a cigarette glowed. As the smoker drew on it, and the tip burned more intensely, Stumpf s wasted features swam up out of the night.

  "Locke? Are you awake?"

  "What do you want?"

  "I can't sleep," the mask replied, "I've been thinking. The supply plane comes in from Santarem the day after tomorrow. We could be back there in a few hours. Out of all this."

  "Sure."

  "I mean permanently," Stumpf said. "Away."

  "Permanently?"

  Stumpf lit another cigarette from the embers of his last before saying, "I don't believe in curses. Don't think I do." "Who said anything about curses?"

  "You saw Cherrick's body. What happened to him…"

  "There's a disease," said Locke, “what's it called? – when the blood doesn't set properly?"

  "Haemophilia," Stumpf replied. "He didn't have haemophilia and we both know it. I've seen him scratched and cut dozens of times. He mended like you or I."

  Locke snatched at a mosquito that had alighted on his chest and ground it out between thumb and forefinger. "All right. Then what killed him?"

  "You saw the wounds better than I did, but it seemed to me his skin just broke open as soon as he was touched." Locke nodded. "That's the way it looked."

  "Maybe it's something he caught off the Indians."

  Locke took the point."I didn't touch any of them," he said.

  "Neither did I. But he did, remember?"

  Locke remembered; scenes like that weren't easy to forget, try as he might. "Christ," he said, his voice hushed. "What a fucking situation."

  "I'm going back to Santarem. I don't want them coming looking for me."

  "They're not going to."

  "How do you know? We screwed up back there. We could have bribed them. Got them off the land some other way."

  "I doubt it. You heard what Tetelman said. Ancestral territories."

  "You can have my share of the land," Stumpf said, "I want no part of it."

  "You mean it then? You're getting out?"

  "I feel dirty. We're spoilers, Locke."

  "It's your funeral."

  "I mean it. I'm not like you. Never really had the stomach for this kind of thing. Will you buy my third off me?" "Depends on your price."

  "Whatever you want to give. It's yours."

  Confessional over, Stumpf returned to his bed, and lay down in the darkness to finish off his cigarette. It would soon be light. Another jungle dawn: a precious interval, all too short, before the world began to sweat. How he hated the place. At least he hadn't touched any of the Indians; hadn't even been within breathing distance of them. Whatever infection they'd passed on to Cherrick he could surely not be tainted. In less than forty-eight hours he would be away to Santarem, and then on to some city, any city, where the tribe could never follow. He'd already done his penance, hadn't he? Paid for his greed and his arrogance with the rot in his abdomen and the terrors he knew he would never quite shake off again. Let that be punishment enough, he prayed, and slipped, before the monkeys began to call up the day, into a spoiler's sleep.

  A gem-backed beetle, trapped beneath Stumpf's mosquito net, hummed around in diminishing circles, looking for some way out. It could find none. Eventually, exhausted by the search, it hovered over the sleeping man, then landed on his forehead. There it wandered, drinking at the pores. Beneath its imperceptible tread, Stumpf s skin opened and b
roke into a trail of tiny wounds.

  They had come into the Indian hamlet at noon; the sun a basilisk's eye. At first they had thought the place deserted. Locke and Cherrick had advanced into the compound, leaving the dysentery-ridden Stumpf in the jeep, out of the worst of the heat. It was Cherrick who first noticed the child. A pot-bellied boy of perhaps four or five, his face painted with thick bands of the scarlet vegetable dye urucu, had slipped out from his hiding place and come to peer at the trespassers, fearless in his curiosity. Cherrick stood still; Locke did the same. One by one, from the huts and from the shelter of the trees around the compound, the tribe appeared and stared, like the boy, at the newcomers. If there was a flicker of feeling on their broad, flat-nosed faces, Locke could not read it. These people – he thought of every Indian as part of one wretched tribe – were impossible to decipher; deceit was their only skill. "What are you doing here?" he said. The sun was baking the back of his neck. "T his is our land." The boy still looked up at him. His almond eyes refused to fear.

  "They don't understand you," Cherrick said.

  "Get the Kraut out here. Let him explain it to them."

  "He can't move."

  "Get him out here," Locke said. "I don't care if he's shat his pants."

  Cherrick backed away down the track, leaving Locke standing in the ring of huts. He looked from doorway to doorway, from tree to tree, trying to estimate the numbers. There were at most three dozen Indians, two- thirds of them women and children; descendants of the great peoples that had once roamed the Amazon Basin in their tens of thousands. Now those tribes were all but decimated. The forest in which they had prospered for generations was being leveled and burned; eight-lane highways were speeding through their hunting grounds. All they held sacred the wilderness and their place in its system – was being trampled and trespassed: they were exiles in their own land. But still they declined to pay homage to their new masters, despite the rifles they brought. Only death would convince them of defeat, Locke mused.

  Cherrick found Stumpf slumped in the front seat of the jeep, his pasty features more wretched than ever. "Locke wants you," he said, shaking the German out of his doze. "The village is still occupied. You'll have to speak to them."

  Stumpf groaned. "I can't move," he said, I'm dying-”

  "Locke wants you dead or alive," Cherrick said. Their fear of Locke, which went unspoken, was perhaps one of the two things they had in common; that and greed.

  "I feel awful," Stumpf said.

  "If I don't bring you, he'll only come himself," Cherrick pointed out. This was indisputable.

  Stumpf threw the other man a despairing glance, then nodded his jowly head. "All right," he said, “help me." Cherrick had no wish to lay a hand on Stumpf. The man stank of his sickness; he seemed to be oozing the contents of his gut through his pores; his skin had the luster of rank meat. He took the outstretched hand nevertheless. Without aid, Stump would never make the hundred yards from jeep to compound.

  Ahead, Locke was shouting.

  "Get moving," said Cherrick, hauling Stumpf down from the front seat and towards the bawling voice. "Let's get it over and done with."

  When the two men returned into the circle of huts the scene had scarcely changed. Locke glanced around at Stumpf. "We got trespassers," he said.

  "So I see," Stumpf returned wearily.

  "Tell them to get the fuck off our land," Locke said. "Tell them this is our territory: we bought it. Without sitting tenants."

  Stumpf nodded, not meeting Locke's rabid eyes. Sometimes he hated the man almost as much as he hated himself. "Go on…" Locke said, and gestured for Cherrick to relinquish his support of Stumpf. This he did. The German stumbled forward, head bowed. He took several seconds to work out his patter, then raised his head and spoke a few wilting words in bad Portuguese. The pronouncement was met with the same blank looks as Locke's performance. Stumpf tried again, re-arranging his inadequate vocabulary to try and awake a flicker of understanding amongst these savages.

  The boy who had been so entertained by Locke's cavortings now stood staring up at this third demon, his face wiped of smiles. This one was nowhere near as comical as the first. He was sick and haggard; he smelt of death. The boy held his nose to keep from inhaling the badness off the man.

  Stumpf peered through greasy eyes at his audience. If they did understand, and were faking their blank incomprehension, it was a flawless performance. His limited skills defeated, he turned giddily to Locke. They don't understand me," he said.

  Tell them again."

  "I don't think they speak Portuguese."

  Tell them anyway."

  Cherrick cocked his rifle. "We don't have to talk with them," he said under his breath. They're on our land. We're within our rights -”

  "No," said Locke. There's no need for shoo ting. Not if we can persuade them to go peacefully." They don't understand plain common sense," Cher rick said. "Look at them. They're animals. Living in filth." Stumpf had begun to try and communicate again, this time accompanying his hesitant words with a pitiful mime. "Tell them we've got work to do here," Locke prompted him.

  "I'm trying my best," Stumpf replied testily.

  "We've got papers."

  "I don't think they'd be much impressed," Stumpf returned, with a cautious sarcasm that was lost on the other man. "Just tell them to move on. Find some other piece of land to squat on."

  Watching Stumpf put these sentiments into word and sign-language, Locke was already running through the alternative options available. Either the Indians – the Txukahamei or the Achual or whatever damn family it was accepted their demands and moved on, or else they would have to enforce the edict. As Cherrick had said, they were within their rights. They had papers from the development authorities; they had maps marking the division between one territory and the next; they had every sanction from signature to bullet. He had no active desire to shed blood. The world was still too full of bleeding heart liberals and doe-eyed sentimentalists to make genocide the most convenient solution. But the gun had been used before, and would be used again, until every unwashed Indian had put on a pair of trousers and given up eating monkeys.

  Indeed, the din of liberals notwithstanding, the gun had its appeal. It was swift, and absolute. Once it had had its short, sharp say there was no danger of further debate; no chance that in ten years' time some mercenary Indian who'd found a copy of Marx in the gutter could come back claiming his tribal lands – oil, minerals and all. Once gone, they were gone forever.

  At the thought of these scarlet-faced savages laid low, Locke felt his trigger-finger itch; physically itch. Stumpf had finished his encore; it had met with no response. Now he groaned, and turned to Locke.

  I'm going to be sick," he said. His face was bright white; the glamour of his skin made his small teeth look dingy. "Be my guest," Locke replied.

  "Please. I have to lie down. I don't want them watching me."

  Locke shook his head. "You don't move 'til they listen. If we don't get any joy from them, you're going to see something to be sick about." Locke toyed with the stock of his rifle as he spoke, running a broken thumb-nail along the nicks in it. There were perhaps a dozen; each one a human grave. The jungle concealed murder so easily; it almost seemed, in its cryptic fashion, to condone the crime.

  Stumpf turned away from Locke and scanned the mute assembly. There were so many Indians here, he thought, and though he carried a pistol he was an inept marksman. Suppose they rushed Locke, Cherrick and himself? He would not survive. And yet, looking at the Indians, he could see no sign of aggression amongst them. Once they had been warriors; now? Like beaten children, sullen and willfully stupid. There was some trace of beauty in one or two of the younger women; their skins, though grimy, were fine, their eyes black. Had he felt more healthy he might have been aroused by their nakedness, tempted to press his hands upon their shiny bodies. As it was their feigned incomprehension merely irritated him. They seemed, in their silence, like another species, as mysterio
us and unfathomable as mules or birds. Hadn't somebody in Uxituba told him that many of these people didn't even give their children proper names? That each was like a limb of the tribe, anonymous and therefore unfixable? He could believe that now, meeting the same dark stare in each pair of eyes; could believe that what they faced here was not three dozen individuals but a fluid system of hatred made flesh. It made him shudder to think of it. Now, for the first time since their appearance, one of the assembly moved. He was an ancient; fully thirty years older than most of the tribe. He, like the rest, was all but naked. The sagging flesh of his limbs and breasts resembled tanned hide; his step, though the pale eyes suggested blindness, was perfectly confident. Once standing in front of the interlopers he opened his mouth – there were no teeth set in his rotted gums – and spoke. What emerged from his scraggy throat was not a language made of words, but only of sound; a potpourri of jungle noises. There was no discernible pattern to the outpouring, it was simply a display – awesome in its way – of impersonations. The man could murmur like a jaguar, screech like a parrot; he could find in his throat the splash of rain on orchids; the howl of monkeys. The sounds made Stumpf s gorge rise. The jungle had diseased him, dehydrated him and left him wrung out. Now this rheumy-eyed stick-man was vomiting the whole odious place up at him. The raw heat in the circle of huts made Stumpf s head beat, and he was sure, as he stood listening to the sage's din, that the old man was measuring the rhythm of his nonsense to the thud at his temples and wrists.

  "What's he saying?" Locke demanded.

  "What does it sound like?" Stumpf replied, irritated by Locke's idiot questions. "It's all noises." "The fucker's cursing us," Cherrick said.