The man with Dr. Omayra Torres was Mauro Carías.
The next morning, the People of the Mist returned. The women brought baskets of fruit and the meat of a large tapir to repay the gifts they had received the day before. The attitude of the warriors seemed more relaxed, and although they did not put down their clubs, they exhibited the same curiosity as the women and children. They watched from a distance, and though they didn’t go near the extraordinary birds of noise and wind, they felt the clothing and weapons of the nahab, pawed through their belongings, went into their tents, posed for their cameras, decked themselves in plastic necklaces, and tested the machetes and knives with wonder.
Dr. Omayra Torres thought the climate was right for undertaking her project. She asked Nadia to explain once again to the Indians the urgent need to protect against epidemics, which she did, but they were not convinced. The only reason for Captain Ariosto’s not forcing them at gunpoint was the presence of Kate and Timothy Bruce. He could not use intimidation before the press, he had to keep up appearances. There was no choice but to wait patiently through the eternal discussions between the girl and the tribe. The absurdity of shooting them to death to keep them from dying from some disease never crossed the captain’s mind.
Nadia reminded the Indians that she had been named by Iyomi to appease the Rahakanariwa, which had the habit of punishing humans with terrible epidemics; therefore they should do what she said. She offered to be the first to submit to the shot, but that was offensive to Tahama and his warriors. They would be the first, they said finally. With a sigh of satisfaction, she translated the decision of the People of the Mist.
Dr. Omayra Torres had a table set up in the shade, and laid out her syringes and vials while Mauro Carías tried to organize the tribe in a line to assure that no one would miss being vaccinated.
In the meantime, Nadia took Alex aside to tell him what she had seen the night before. Neither of them knew what to make of that scene, but they felt vaguely betrayed. How was it possible for the sweet Omayra Torres to have a relationship with Mauro Carías, the man who carried his heart in a totebag? They concluded that there was no doubt that Mauro Carías had seduced the good doctor. Didn’t everyone say he had great success with women? Nadia and Alex could not see anything the least bit attractive about the man, but they supposed that his manners and his money could deceive others. The news would fall like a bomb among the doctor’s admirers, César Santos, Timothy Bruce, and even Ludovic Leblanc.
“I don’t like this one bit,” said Alex.
“Are you jealous, too?” Nadia joked.
“No!” he replied, indignant. “But I feel something here in my heart, something like a terrible weight.”
“Does it have to do with the vision we shared in the city of gold? You remember? When we drank Walimai’s potion and we all dreamed the same thing, even the Beasts.”
“Right. That dream was like one I had before I came on this trip: a huge vulture kidnapped my mother and flew away with her. I interpreted that to be the cancer threatening her life; I thought the vulture represented death. In the tepui, we dreamed that the Rahakanariwa broke out of its cage where it was prisoner and that the Indians were tied to the trees, remember?”
“Yes, and that the nahab were wearing masks. What do masks mean, Jaguar?”
“Secrets. Lies. Betrayal.”
“Why do you think that Mauro Carías is so interested in seeing the Indians vaccinated?”
The question hung in the air like an arrow stopped in midflight. The two friends looked at each other in horror. In a flash of insight, they realized the terrible trap they had all fallen into: the Rahakanariwa was the epidemic! The death that threatened the tribe was not a mythological bird but something much more concrete and immediate. They ran to the center of the village, where Dr. Omayra Torres was just touching the needle of her syringe to Tahama’s arm. Without thinking, Alex threw himself like a battering ram against the warrior, sending him sprawling to the ground. He jumped back up and raised his club to crush the youth like a cockroach, but a cry from Nadia froze his arm in the air.
“No! No! This is the Rahakanariwa!” the girl screamed, pointing to the vials of vaccine.
César Santos thought his daughter had gone mad, and tried to hold her but she pulled away and ran to join Alex, yelling and pounding her fists on Mauro Carías, who had stepped in front of her. As quickly as she could, she tried to explain to the Indians that she was wrong, that the vaccine would not save them, just the opposite, it would kill them, because the Rahakanariwa was in the syringe.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Bloodstains
DR. OMAYRA TORRES did not lose her calm. She said this was all some fantasy of the young people and that the heat had made them a little crazed, and she demanded that Captain Ariosto take them away. She tried to resume her interrupted task, despite the fact that the mood of the tribe had changed completely. At that moment, with Captain Ariosto ready to impose order by force and as the soldiers were wrestling with Nadia and Alex, Karakawe, who had not spoken more than a dozen words the whole trip, came forward.
“Just a minute!” he cried.
To everyone’s surprise, this man who had scarcely opened his mouth for days announced that he was an officer of the Department for the Protection of Indigenous Peoples, and explained that his assignment was to find out why the Amazon tribes were dying en masse, especially those who lived near fields of gold and diamonds. For some time, he had suspected Mauro Carías, the man who had benefited most from exploitation in the region.
“Captain Ariosto, seize those vaccines!” Karakawe ordered. “I will have them examined in the laboratory. If I am right, these vials do not contain vaccine but deadly doses of the measles virus.”
Captain Ariosto’s response was to aim his pistol and shoot Karakawe in the chest. The officer fell dead on the spot. Mauro Carías pushed Dr. Omayra Torres aside, pulled out his weapon, and as César Santos was running to shield the woman with his body, emptied his gun at the vials lined up on the table, shattering them to bits. The liquid drained into the ground.
Events happened with such sudden violence that afterward no one could describe them with precision; everyone had a different version. Timothy Bruce’s camcorder registered part of the events and the rest were captured in the camera Kate was holding.
When they saw the destroyed vials, the Indians believed that the Rahakanariwa had escaped its prison and would come back in the form of the cannibal-bird to devour them. Before anyone could stop him, Tahama let out a bloodcurdling yell and brought his club crashing down on the head of Mauro Carías, who dropped to the ground like a sack of meal. Captain Ariosto turned his weapon on Tahama, but Alex clipped him from behind and Nadia’s monkey, Borobá, jumped into his face. The captain’s bullets went astray, giving Tahama time to retreat, protected by his warriors, who had armed their bows.
In the few seconds it took the soldiers to get organized and unholster their pistols, the tribe scattered. The women and children raced away like squirrels, disappearing into the undergrowth, and the men got off several arrows before they, too, fled. The soldiers fired blindly, while Alex struggled with Ariosto on the ground, helped by Nadia and Borobá. The captain cracked the youth in the jaw with the butt of his pistol, leaving him half-stunned, then beat off the girl and the monkey. Kate ran to help her grandson, dragging him out of the center of the melee. In all the yelling and confusion, no one heard Ariosto’s commands.
Within a few minutes, the village was stained with blood: besides the corpse of Karakawe and the unconscious Mauro Carías, three soldiers were wounded by arrows and several Indians were dead. One woman had been hit by bullets and the child she was carrying in her arms lay on the ground a few feet away. Ludovic Leblanc, who from the moment the tribe had appeared had maintained a prudent distance crouching behind a tree, had an unexpected reaction. Until then he had been nothing but quivering nerves, but when he saw the child exposed to danger, he drew courage from some unknow
n source and ran through the arrows and bullets and snatched up the tiny creature. It was only a few months old, spattered with its mother’s blood and crying at the top of its lungs. Leblanc stood there in the midst of the chaos, holding the child tight against his breast and trembling with rage and bewilderment. His worst nightmares had been reversed: they themselves were the savages, not the Indians. Finally he went to Kate, who was trying to rinse her grandson’s bloody mouth with a little water, and handed her the baby.
“Here, Cold, you’re a woman; you will know what to do with this,” he said.
Caught off guard, the writer took the infant, holding it with outstretched arms as if it were a flower vase. It had been so many years since she had held a baby in her hands that she didn’t know what to do with it.
By then, Nadia was on her feet and staring at the camp strewn with bodies. She went over to the Indians to see if she recognized them, but her father put his arm around her and led her away, repeating her name and murmuring soothing words. She had managed to see that Iyomi and Tahama were not among the corpses and was feeling thankful that at least the People of the Mist had two chiefs left that they could count on, because the other two, Eagle and Jaguar, had failed them.
“Line up in front of that tree!” Captain Ariosto ordered the International Geographic group. He was purple with rage, his pistol trembling in his hand. Things had turned out very badly.
Kate, Timothy Bruce, Professor Leblanc, and the two young people obeyed. Alex had a broken tooth, a mouthful of blood, and was still dazed by the blow to his jaw. Nadia seemed to be in a state of shock, with a scream stuck in her chest and her eyes glued on the dead Indians and the soldiers moaning on the ground. Dr. Omayra Torres, blind to what was going on around her, tears streaming, was holding Mauro Carías’s head in her lap. She kept kissing him and begging him not to die, not to leave her, as his blood soaked into her clothing. “We were going to be married . . . ,” she repeated like a litany.
“The doctor is Mauro Carías’s accomplice. She was the one he meant when he said that someone they could trust was traveling with the expedition. You remember? And we were accusing Karakawe,” Alex whispered his new understanding to Nadia, but she was so paralyzed with fright that she didn’t hear him.
Alex realized that the entrepreneur’s plan to exterminate the Indians with a measles epidemic had required the collaboration of Dr. Torres. For several years, the natives had been dying off, the victims of measles and other diseases despite the authorities’ efforts to protect them. Once an epidemic broke out, there was nothing to be done, because the Indians had no defenses; they had lived in isolation for thousands of years and their immune systems could not withstand the viruses carried by the Whites. A common cold could kill them within a few days, to say nothing of more serious illnesses. Physicians who were studying the problem could not understand why none of the preventive measures were having results. Who could imagine that Omayra Torres, the person entrusted to vaccinate the Indians, was the one injecting them with death so her lover could appropriate their lands?
This woman had eliminated several tribes without raising a single suspicion, and that was what she had intended for the People of the Mist. What had Carías promised that would cause her to commit a crime of such magnitude? Was it simply out of love for him, and not for money? Whatever her reason, whether love or greed, the result was the same: Hundreds of men, women, and children were murdered. If not for Nadia Santos, who had seen Omayra and Mauro Carías kissing, the designs of that pair would never have been discovered. And they could thank the timely intervention of Karakawe—who had paid with his life—that the plan had failed.
Now Alexander understood the role Mauro Carías had in mind for the members of the International Geographic expedition. A couple of weeks after being inoculated with the measles virus, an epidemic would break out among the tribe and the contagion would rapidly spread to other villages. Then the befogged Professor Ludovic Leblanc would testify to the world press that he had been present when the first contact was made with the People of the Mist. No one could be blamed; the necessary precautions had been taken to protect the village. The anthropologist, backed by the reporting of Kate and the photographs of Timothy Bruce, could prove that all the members of the tribe had been vaccinated. In the eyes of the world, the epidemic would be an inevitable misfortune; no one would suspect otherwise, and in that way Mauro Carías would be guaranteed that there would be no government investigation. It was a clean and efficient method of extermination that left no trail of blood, unlike the bullets and bombs used for years against native peoples in order to “clean out” the Amazon territory and open the way for miners, traffickers, settlers, and adventurers.
When he heard Karakawe’s accusation, Captain Ariosto had lost his head and impulsively killed him to protect Carías and himself. He had acted with the confidence bestowed by his uniform. In that remote, nearly unpopulated region, too distant to be reached by the long arm of the law, no one disputed his word. That gave him a dangerous power. He was a crude, unscrupulous man who had spent years in border posts; he was accustomed to violence. As if the weapon at his belt and his position in the military were not enough, he had the protection of Mauro Carías. The entrepreneur, in turn, had connections in the highest ranks of the government; he was a member of the ruling class, he had a great deal of money and prestige, and no one asked him for an accounting. The association between Ariosto and Carías had been beneficial for both. The captain estimated that in less than two years he would be able to hang up his uniform and go live in Miami, a millionaire. But now Mauro Carías was lying there with his head split open and could not protect him any longer. This was the end of the ride. He would have to justify the murder of Karakawe to government officials, as well as the deaths of the Indians lying there in the middle of the camp.
Kate, with the baby still in her arms, understood that her life and those of the other expedition members, including her grandson and Nadia, were in grave danger; Ariosto’s first priority would be to prevent having the events at Tapirawa-teri revealed. It was not simply a matter here of pouring gasoline over the bodies, setting fire to them, and declaring they had “disappeared.” The captain’s plan had backfired; the presence of International Geographic had shifted from being an advantage to being a serious problem. He had to get rid of the witnesses, but he would have to do it very carefully; he couldn’t shoot them without really putting his foot in it. Unfortunately for the foreigners, they were a long way from civilization and that would make it easier for the captain to cover his tracks.
Kate was sure that if the captain decided to kill them, the soldiers would not lift a finger to stop him, nor would they dare report their superior. The jungle would swallow up the evidence of the crimes. They couldn’t just cross their arms and wait for the fatal shot, they would have to do something. They had nothing to lose, the situation could not be any worse. Ariosto was heartless, and nervous besides; they could all suffer Karakawe’s fate. Kate didn’t have a plan, but she thought that the first thing she should do was create a distraction in the enemy ranks.
“Captain, I think it’s urgent that we send these men to a hospital,” she offered, pointing to Carías and the wounded soldiers.
“Shut up, old woman!” he barked back.
A few minutes later, nevertheless, Ariosto had Mauro Carías and the three soldiers loaded onto one of the helicopters. He ordered Omayra Torres to try to remove the arrows from the wounded men before putting them onboard, but the doctor ignored him completely; all her attention was for her dying lover. Kate and César Santos took on the task of attempting to improvise bandages for the soldiers to stop their bleeding.
While the military men went about getting the wounded into the helicopter and trying in vain to contact Santa María de la Lluvia by radio, Kate, in a low voice, communicated her fears regarding their situation to Professor Leblanc. The anthropologist had reached the same conclusion: they were in greater danger in Ariosto’s hands t
han with the Indians or the Beast.
“If only we could escape into the trees,” Kate whispered.
For once, the man surprised her by keeping a cool head. Kate was used to the professor’s fits and his insolence, but seeing him calm and collected, she yielded authority almost automatically.
“That would be madness,” Leblanc replied firmly. “The only way to get out of here is by helicopter. Ariosto is the key. Luckily he is ignorant, and vain; that works in our favor. We must pretend we do not suspect him, and conquer him with cunning.”
“How?” asked the writer, skeptical.
“By manipulating him. He is frightened, so we will offer him the opportunity to save his skin, and in the bargain come out of this a hero,” said Leblanc.
“Never!” exclaimed Kate.
“Don’t be foolish, Cold. That is what we will offer him, it doesn’t mean that is what we will give him. Once we are safely out of this country, Ludovic Leblanc will be the first to denounce the atrocities being committed against these poor Indians.”
“I see that you have changed your opinion about the Indians,” Kate growled.
The professor did not dignify her with an answer. He rose up to the full extent of his small stature, tugged at the tails of his mud- and blood-spattered shirt, and walked up to Captain Ariosto.
“And how, my esteemed Captain, shall we return to Santa María de la Lluvia? We will not all fit in the second helicopter,” he said, pointing to the soldiers and the group under the tree.
“Keep your nose out of this! I’m giving the orders here!” bawled Ariosto.
“But of course! It is a great relief to have you in charge, Captain. If not, we would be in a most difficult situation,” Leblanc commented smoothly.
Ariosto, thrown off guard, listened.
“Were it not for your heroism, we would all have perished at the hands of the Indians,” the professor added.
Ariosto, slightly calmer, counted the people and concluded that Leblanc was right; he then decided to send half his contingent of soldiers in the first chopper. That left him with only five men and the expedition party, but as they were not armed, they represented no danger. The helicopter took off, raising clouds of red dust as it lifted from the ground. It flew off over the green canopy of the jungle, fading into the sky.