At the other end of the table someone sighed. Glasnost, perestroika, and all the other news of far-off political turbulence, had no relevance for the deep-seated problems of Latin America. They were sick of being told Karl Marx was dead when they all knew that Karl Marx had simply been betrayed by selfish materialistic European workers.
Marti was determined to persuade them. He had been to Europe on one of his continual rounds of lecture tours. Leaning forward he said, ‘The workers no longer look to Marx for economic miracles. I am convinced that we must take over a thriving economy, with full employment and foreign investments, if we are to provide the masses with the rewards that are their right.’
‘In such a booming economy we would not secure enough support,’ Ramón said.
‘Ramón – you show such little faith. Is there no surplus value in every man’s labour?’
Ramón did not reply. Both men knew each other’s arguments so well that they could have exchanged roles without fluffing the lines.
Someone at the other end of the table said, ‘Are you saying that we can promise only redistribution of wealth, Professor Marti?’
Aware that his questioner, a bitter townsman who’d lost an arm in the battle for the customs house, would quote him, Marti said, ‘The redistribution of wealth is necessary to a rich economy. By refuelling a stalled and stagnant capitalist economy we can provide added wealth.’
No one spoke. So far the meeting had done nothing except reinforce the ideas that every delegate had come here with. Nothing new had been said; no new thoughts exchanged. Ramón said, ‘I will visit the sentries on the outer posts when it starts to cool off. Who will come with me?’
Even this dialogue was predictable. Big Jorge would not move without the protection of his bodyguards. Professor Dr Marti would not risk a recurrence of his bad back.
‘It would give the men great pleasure,’ Ramón persisted. ‘Along the outer ring to the river posts … It will be like old times. The men would enjoy seeing us together.’
‘I would enjoy it too,’ Marti said. ‘Next time perhaps, when I am better fitted for the jungle. I fear I have become a desk-revolutionary these days.’
Ramón said, ‘The men still remember, Dr Marti … we all still remember, you leading the attack on the customs house.’
‘So long ago,’ said Marti. One of the house servants came in silently and stood by the door. It was a signal to say that lunch was ready.
Big Jorge took off his tinted glasses and ran a fingertip round his eye. ‘When it is cool we will talk more,’ he promised and finished his drink.
Still exchanging pleasantries, the delegates got up from the conference table and moved along the corridor to the dining-room. The sentry saluted, then opened the door for them with all the deference that a butler would grant to a Duke.
It was a lovely room. Its french window gave on to a tiny tiled patio and provided a view of the courtyard. There were locally woven carpets on the floor and a landscape painting hung over the huge carved fireplace.
As they sat down, Marti said, ‘Are my men having the same meal?’
‘Yes, they are,’ said Big Jorge, making no effort to disguise his irritation at such pomposity. Ramón smiled. He saw such remarks as a symptom of Professor Dr Marti’s age, as much as of his pretensions.
Ramón was the first of the men at the table to hear the plane, but already the guards and the sentries had it under observation. The unusual push-pull configuration of the two Continental engines made a sound that was easily distinguished. The Cessnas were designed for military reconnaissance and Ramón recognized it only too well.
Ramón went to the window and called to his men. ‘René, I want everyone to wave if that plane comes back this way. Make sure there is no one wearing armbands or carrying guns.’ Then he saw Santos on the rooftop. Santos saluted to acknowledge the order.
The Cessna followed the river. Then it turned across the plantation and headed directly towards the residencia. It circled the conspicuous yellow-painted residencia twice and then flew down the river again. It seemed as if there was an element of indecision in the movements of the plane, and in fact the men inside it were arguing.
The pilot recognized it as a house that belonged to the Minister of Agriculture. Nothing on their acción confluencia files suggested that the Minister was a subversive. They concluded that their prisoner had brought them on a wild goose chase. They were very angry.
When the plane tipped one wing towards the courtyard the pilot pulled his passenger’s seat-belt undone. The man in the back seat pushed Chori’s shoulder and the prisoner fell out through the open doorway. He dropped, arms and legs bound, like a sack of potatoes. A thump sounded and a cloud of dust rose as he struck the flower patch near the kitchen.
Again the plane circled. The men inside it were watching the body, but there was no movement. Chori was dead. When the aviators were quite sure of it, the plane set course north again. But not until it was out of earshot did any of the guerrillas walk over to the broken corpse. It was Ramón who identified it.
14
THE MAMISTA BASE CAMP.
‘… an encyclopedia of tropical medicine.’
Ralph Lucas, sitting at his bench looking out of the window, suddenly shivered. It was cold. Even when the sun came from behind the clouds it rarely found a passage through the roof of the great rain forest. Where it did, it used golden wires to probe and find the ground, placing a perfect image of itself upon the rotting vegetation.
Only here at the river was there a gap in the forest where the sun could warm the air just a little. The previous night moonlight had made the water gleam like quicksilver. It had been noisy then, with the sounds of animals scrambling down to the river to drink. Sometimes there was a strangled scream or a splash, for predators also waited at the water’s edge. Now, in daylight, all was silent. The river, half a mile across, was no more than a stream by local standards. It was khaki and so untroubled that one might have thought it stagnant, except when a piece of debris – a leaf, a log or a carcass – sped past.
Plants had taken over this world. Green moss covered the rocks and tangles of hyacinths formed islands in the water. Everything battled for control. Liana and matted creeper strangled the trees and turned green as other fungi in turn devoured them. Three thousand species in one square mile: orchids, bananas, poison vines and wild rubber. A botanical junkyard.
Lucas shared his room in the derelict factory that bordered the river with a colony of ants. An endless file of them marched across the earthen floor brandishing pieces of leaf and dirt and disappearing through a crack in a piece of rotten timber that had once been a supervisor’s desk. Neither twig, boot nor man-made earthquake deterred them. Lucas found it difficult not to admire such tenacity.
They had assigned the old Andes Viejos match factory to him as an office and surgery. In the main room had been assembled the entire medical resources of the camp. Lucas sat at a long bench. This was where a dozen little Indian girls had spent twelve hours a day packing matchboxes into neat parcels and wrapping them ready for the steamboat.
Lucas was wearing a safari jacket and cotton trousers. On the bench in front of him stood an Australian-style bush hat he’d found among the spare clothing. Although stained it was a good hat with a wide brim, the sort of hat Aussies had always worn, and it made him feel better. He was finishing his report by making a list of the stores. There were six large bottles of iodine, two boxes containing bandages in scuffed paper wrappings, and a stethoscope. There was a portable anaesthesia apparatus but the bottles were empty. There was a very ancient, foot-operated, dental drilling machine and half a dozen drills of various shapes and sizes but no other dental supplies, not even amalgam. A sturdy wooden carrying box held an assortment of surgical instruments. Lucas looked at the worn scalpels, scoops and hooks and sorted through the forceps to find ligature holders and bone nippers. He listed each down in his neat handwriting. There were scissors, probes and tweezers too. On the sh
elf there were half a dozen chipped enamel bowls and three jugs. Below the shelf there was a row of chairs, and a stout kitchen table upon which – judging by the position of the ominous brown stains – surgery had been performed. He finished his list, and then made a copy of it to send to London.
Helped by ‘nurses’ from the women’s compound, Lucas had held court here for almost a week. He’d lanced some fearsome boils, peered down throats past rotting teeth, seen innumerable examples of ‘mountain leprosy’ fungus, tapped chests, listened to wheezing lungs, taken faint pulses and high temperatures and watched men die.
During that time he had filled four school exercise books with his notes. Now he turned to a fresh page and started to summarize it all into a report that would be easily understood by the members of the board.
Ramón came into the room and walked to the window without saying anything. Apart from the black beret, the crisp outfit he’d worn at the residencia was gone. He was wearing patched twill pants and a black T-shirt. The view of the river was compulsive, for the factory was partly built upon a loading pier that reached out over the water. The vibration of the powerful river current could be felt through the massive wooden piles that supported it. The windows at this end of the building afforded a view like that from the bow of a boat. Ramón stood there for a moment and then he prised a splintered piece of wood from the window-frame. Taking aim carefully he tossed it into the water and watched it dart away.
The factory and the outbuildings were all derelict. The guerrillas had left it that way in case any sign of renovations alerted the people moving down the river. The factory had been one of the first targets of the violencia. It had been raided for the sodium chlorate and sulphur in the warehouse. They were ingredients of ‘Andes Viejos’ matches and of guerrilla bombs too. It was a two-storey building. The exterior of the lower part had been stripped bare by passing boatmen. Recently the outside staircase had collapsed. Now the upper floor was more difficult to reach. Some glass partitions and even a huge mirror remained intact up there. What remained of the exterior balustrade hung only by its rail and swung gently in the wind that followed the river. Sometimes its loose bits of wood clattered against the window-frames.
Lucas finished writing the introductory paragraph. He looked up and said, ‘Do you want me, Ramón?’
Ramón had walked half a mile from his headquarters to speak with Lucas, but in his devious way he tried to avoid the Australian’s directness. ‘Is there anything else you need?’ he asked from across the room.
Lucas laughed and toyed with his pen.
‘I am serious,’ Ramón said.
‘I know you are,’ Lucas said, speaking to himself in English. ‘That’s what makes it so bloody comical.’
The loose balustrade rattled more loudly than before. René the bullfighter, who had been assigned to be Ramón’s bodyguard, appeared. He went to the hallway. There the ceiling was missing so that he could see right up to the rafters. He studied the wrecked landing on the floor above. To silence the clattering woodwork would mean climbing up outside the building. René decided against it. The weight of the man walking across the flimsy floor made the structure shake. There had been times, with thirty or so men here, when Lucas had expected the whole factory to collapse.
‘Don’t keep telling me the brigade is sick,’ Ramón said.
‘Brigade! You haven’t got a brigade. And if your other camps are anything like this one, you haven’t got an army.’ Lucas screwed the cap on to his ball-point pen and clipped it into his pocket. He preferred to write in this oil-based ink. In Vietnam he’d found that the humidity ruined everything else. ‘Here you’re commanding three thousand or so walking wounded!’ He tapped his exercise book. ‘These read like an encyclopedia of tropical medicine. It would be thicker except that half of them have got diseases I can’t identify.’ He flicked the pages. ‘Look.’ He was about to read some of these case notes but the handwriting recalled all too vividly the sufferers. He closed the books and laid a hand flat upon them. ‘My God, Ramón, you’ve got a lot to answer for. You’d better do something bloody fast.’
‘The two men you excused from duty this morning. One of them is dead,’ Ramón said.
‘Now tell me something I can’t guess,’ said Lucas, dismissing Ramón’s admonitory tone. ‘They should have both been dead a month ago by all normal medical probabilities. I’m talking about disease, Ramón. I’m talking about an outbreak that could spread up through the central provinces as far as Tepilo. Many of the men I’ve examined are townsmen. Manual workers, dockers, porters and even clerks. They look very fit and muscular in the cities but such men haven’t the stamina to survive the jungle. Not to survive it for years on end.’
Ramón resented this criticism coming from a foreigner who knew nothing of the history of the movement. ‘I’ve given them heart and hope and self-respect.’
‘Perhaps you have, Ramón. But in doing so you have consigned them to a penal settlement of your own making, and sentenced them to sickness and maybe to death.’
‘By next year we will …’
‘Ramón, are you insane? What are you trying to do? Do you want a new tropical disease named after you?’
Ramón shook his head. He took everything seriously.
‘Well, you’d better start doing something about it. I calculate that you have about five hundred men here who, by the standards you have created, might be called fit and healthy.’
‘Then I could field one fighting battalion from this camp?’
How typical that Ramón could interpret it that way, Lucas thought. He said, ‘Forget it. Given those fit men to help, and some trained medical staff to supervise, you might enable fifty per cent of the rest of them to survive. A few might even regain their health. But once that group of relatively fit men succumb – and they’ll soon go, believe me – then you’ll sit around here watching them all die.’
‘Is that what your report will say?’
‘Sprinkled with a few Latin names, and a few numbers, plus a couple of dozen typical case histories, that is what my report will say.’
‘So we need drugs,’ Ramón said.
‘Have you been listening?’ Lucas asked wearily. ‘Drugs: yes. But you’ll need a whole lot more than that. If I had medicines … If I could put everyone on good-quality vitamins. If we cut down on all this filthy canned food and gave them fresh meat and green vegetables – not just beans – and proper fruit … Then maybe we could give the fittest a chance.’
‘You’ll prepare a list of what you need?’
‘I will. But before I can get any money to buy it I must return to London and get authority. It will take time. I might be able to make some phone calls and squeeze a little credit out of a local bank. That would get you started.’
‘That won’t be necessary,’ Ramón said.
‘Have you won the national lottery?’
‘I have won Singer. There is a price on his head: one million dollars.’
‘A price on his head? That’s rather feudal, isn’t it? How did you find out?’
‘The Yankees do it for senior CIA personnel. Singer is authorized to negotiate his own release for up to that amount.’
‘Are you sure he is telling you the truth? It sounds like nonsense.’
‘It is true,’ Ramón said in a tone that discouraged argument.
‘How much of that can I use for medicines?’
‘There will be bribes to pay. The peseta will be devalued any day now: foreign exchange will prove difficult to obtain. And I suppose some of the supplies must be paid for in Yankee dollars?’
‘You must have vitamin B complex. You must have streptomycin, penicillin and antibiotics.’ Lucas paused as he thought of the enormous problem. ‘You’ve got a lot of sickness that only sulfa works on. Also we need morphine, glucose, saline, plasma and …’ as he pushed aside the box of instruments, ‘… proper surgical equipment, syringes, dressings … I don’t know. You need a complete hospital. There will be no c
hange from a million dollars, Ramón.’
‘More money will come.’ Ramón sat down at the bench opposite Lucas.
The sun appeared from behind a cloud. The mountains of the old Andes – as etched upon the glass partition – were outlined on the floor’s broken planking. Ramón said, ‘You’ll not go to the other camps. You must go back to Tepilo with Singer and the American boy: Paz. When the ransom money is paid, you will buy drugs and what is needed. I will get a doctor from one of the other camps.’
‘To Tepilo? By road?’
‘Right now the roads are too dangerous,’ Ramón admitted reluctantly. ‘If you encountered a road-block they would arrest you. The soldiers would take Singer away and we would never get the ransom money.’
‘On foot?’
‘To Libertad. Thorburn will fly there to collect you. He’ll fly you to a disused military airstrip in the north. Comrades will hide you while the ransom is negotiated.’
‘On foot? It’s a long way.’
‘I will send experienced men with you. Mules for the baggage; guns to defend you. Are you afraid?’
This sort of machismo was a constant impediment to communication with Ramón, thought Lucas. He did not answer, but eased off his boots, wiped the inside of them with a cloth and walked a few steps in his stockinged feet to stretch his toes. Without hurry he put the boots on again and laced them carefully.
‘You’ll go, Colonel Lucas?’ Ramón asked.
Lucas watched him with interest. He considered him a patient, and extended to him that paternalistic superiority that is part of the physician’s role. Lucas found it difficult to believe that the Americans ransomed their men for a million dollars at a time. Such a policy would lead to more and more kidnappings. It would be madness and the Americans were not mad. So had Ramón been fooled by the smooth talk of the American? Or was Ramón not telling the whole truth? ‘I thought it was an order,’ Lucas said.