Bite (4 page)

Jack Erskine, Penny Ryan and Don Quiggan walked out of the chill of Amsterdam's central mortuary and heard the heavy door bang behind them. No-one spoke. The vision of Bob Mazzio's pale hairy body hung like a ghost before their eyes, the dried foam riming his blue lips, the empty eyes.

Penny knew Jack would ask her to speak to Heidi Mazzio, to answer the inevitable questions that her terse telephone briefing from the Dutch cops would leave unanswered. Yes, he had been alone. No, he had not been robbed, his wallet was still in his jacket. Yes, he just seemed to have fallen in. No, Amsterdam isn't considered a dangerous city to be out in at that time. Yes, we were also surprised no-one heard him struggling in the water. No, we do not believe he had been drinking. No, they do not need a post mortem. Drowning was the official cause of death. Yes, we've got him to a very good chapel of rest until we can get the body flown home. All of you there have our deepest condolences. Heidi, let me tell you Bob will be sorely missed.

What Penny would not tell Heidi was that the canal where her husband drowned was in the Red Light Area. She would destroy the damp but still legible receipt found in his wallet; a transaction only three hours old in which he had paid nine hundred euros, for ‘business services' on his corporate gold card. She would keep to herself evidence of uncharacteristic sloppy dressing - the assistant coroner noted Bob's Van Heusen shirt was misbuttoned low down, the belt missing two loops on the trousers of the Hugo Boss suit.

No, she would not speak ill of the dead.

Today was a day in hell. We spent four hours on our hands and knees digging out the Land Rover and packing brushwood into the ruts beneath it. The rain hasn't stopped for two days, and the mud made us look like we had been dipped in melted chocolate. Georg said there is supposed to be a better wet-season crossing of the Asa, but we couldn't find it.

Just as we finished two women came to the river to collect water, and we were told that Zizunga was only fifteen minutes walk away. It took longer with the Land Rover because we had to cut down some trees to get it through the bush, and we finally emerged into a muddy paddock surrounded by two dozen rickety shacks, to be met by a horde of excited children. They rushed us to a hut where two middle-aged Belgian nuns, Sisters Margaret and Annette, were tending the sick woman, whose name was Dr Sophie Hofhaus. Her husband, a Brazilian entomologist named Dr Jarman Herrera, was holding her hand.

Sophie must once have been a beautiful woman, with large brown eyes and delicate cheekbones, but now she looked as waxy as a corpse. Her breathing was shallow, her eyes sunken. Dried spume crusted her cracked lips. Georg asked Jarman about her illness. He doesn't think it is dysentery. Georg delicately raised the possibility of rabies, but Jarman replied that his wife was inoculated and hadn't in any case been bitten by any of the monkeys for months. She has also been inoculated against yellow fever, so that's out. Jarman said that he'd looked at a sample of Sophie's blood under his microscope and at first had thought it might be malaria, but when the nuns used the ParaSight test kit it came back negative. Jarman was still convinced it was some kind of blood infection.

We loaded her as best we could into the Land Rover, while Jarman stroked her face and talked to her. There wasn't room for everybody in the vehicle, so Tomas and Salvation stayed behind at Zizunga with Sister Annette. Amy rigged up a saline drip and gave Sophie an injection to stop her convulsions.

Just as we were about to go, Sister Margaret roared up on a muddy motorcycle, wearing engineers' boots and crash helmet. Jarman told me that in 1966, before she took holy orders, Sister Margaret had crossed the Sahara on the very same aged Husqvarna. She was an excellent mechanic, and if the Land Rover broke down she would either be able to fix it, or ride off to fetch help. Without the motorcycle it would have been impossible for her to keep in contact with outlying villages, to visit the sick and comfort the bereaved.

Jarman said that the army had done its best to make Zizunga a ghost town. They had come roaring through three months ago and conscripted all the men aged between fifteen and thirty five. They had also helped themselves to most of the maize, yam and manioc that was surplus from the last harvest.

At four in the afternoon Georg radioed ahead to Kisangani to find out if the Cessna and pilot chartered by the Swiss company that owns the research centre were on their way to Ubulu. He was told that they should be at the landing strip by seven the next morning. The only way to make the rendezvous was to drive right through the night. Motorcycling though, would be too exhausting. We urged Sister Margaret to turn back if she was to get home before dark, but she refused. Finally we compromised. The motorcycle was tied onto the roof rack while Sister Margaret squeezed onto the front seat between me and Georg.

For hours we bumped and slithered and crashed along the worst forest tracks I have ever seen. Jarman never once let go of Sophie's hand. He told me they had met at a science faculty at Graz in Austria when he was an exchange student interested in moths and beetles and she something of a star in the zoology department. It wasn't love at first sight for her, but he was persistent and finally won through. They married in 1974, had a two day honeymoon in Zanzibar and then came out here to work, founding Tetro-Meyer's monkey colony. The first year was the worst. The conditions were squalid, they were frequently ill, the local people were suspicious and their employers seemed to have forgotten them. Yet already they knew they were happy. I looked at Sophie's unconscious form while he talked. She seemed to have a slight smile on her face.

About nine o'clock Georg uttered an oath and slammed on the brakes. Ahead were a dozen hyena tearing at the carcass of a little antelope called a duiker. Their evil yellow eyes reflected the headlamps, and they showed no fear, sniffing the air as we passed as if they could sense we were something more tender.

By midnight Georg passed over the driving to Jarman, but when the doctor himself drifted off to sleep and ploughed us into a thicket at five in the morning I knew it was my turn to take the wheel.

It was when we changed over that we noticed. My hands were stained dark, and so were the seats and the floor. Georg's torch revealed that Sophie's blanket was drenched in dark blood, almost black. It seemed she was passing it in her urine. With the movement of the vehicle it had got everywhere. Sophie herself was delirious and didn't even recognise her husband. He seemed close to panic, and no-one could say anything to reassure him. We cleaned up in a gloomy silence and set off. There was nothing more we could do.

Sister Margaret kept talking to me as I drove, but it was fear that really kept sleep away. While Jarman slept I had heard Amy and Georg reviewing Sophie's symptoms and the worst-case causes: lassa fever, haemorrhagic fever, ebola, green monkey disease. Each was highly infectious, frequently fatal, and difficult or impossible to treat even in a western hospital. The discussion became still more surreal as we discussed the trade off between quarantine for us and trying to save Sophie. We exhausted ourselves before we came to any conclusions.

It was with some surprise that at half past six in the morning we passed a few shacks and a metalled road, before arriving at the overgrown concrete of the airstrip at Ubulu.

It was deserted, so we waited. The sun rose, blazing across the forest canopy and the crickets quietened. A man appeared with a broom and swept the verandah of the airstrip's whitewashed shack, before disappearing again. Seven o'clock came and went and Georg got on to Kisangani on the radio. They said the Cessna should already have arrived.

Jarman set up a makeshift bed beside the Land Rover and carried Sophie onto it like a sleeping child. Amy walked up to me and whispered into my ear. ‘She's gone into a coma. I'm frightened to tell Jarman, but she's not going to make it.'

Sister Margaret sat with Sophie and got out her rosary while Jarman frenetically scanned the empty sky, shading his eyes while he strained for the tiniest distant dot. Just before eight Sister Margaret took Jarman on a short walk, with her arm cupping his shoulder like they were old friends. All we could see was his head shaking slowly from side to side. When he returned, his face streaked with tears, they knelt together over Sophie. Sister Margaret read the last rites. At 8.17am, in the shade of the Land Rover under an empty blue sky, Sophie Hofhaus let out a deep sigh and passed away.

(Erica's Diary 1992)

Max looked at his watch. Almost ten. Erica's conference began at four. Max knew she would be there early. Erica might have cut him out of her heart, but parasites, worms and bugs would be wriggling there forever. Besides, there might be a chance to find Professor Jürgen Friederikson and get some clues about who this old friend was that he had mentioned at the restaurant. The absence of the laptop was a hint that this was all to do with her paper. Why else would Erica sneak out for a midnight assignation with a conference deadline breathing down her neck?

He put on his shoes and walked out to the hire car. The green Polo was parked way up on the right, on one of hundreds of identical oblique metered bays squeezed between the narrow cobbled street and the edge of the canal.

When he was within seventy yards of the bay, Max saw a woman with long, wavy brown hair and a very short blue skirt. She was leaning over rummaging under the boot of a wheelclamped car. From it she picked up a grey plastic object the size of a large book, inserted it into a plastic bag and fixed it to the carrier of a bicycle. Max felt some sympathy, having himself had to feed the damn meter every few hours since he arrived. The woman mounted her bike, a rust heap painted pink, and rode past him, a balky pedal clicking each time she pressed on it. Max's gaze lingered on her shapely figure as she went.

The moment Max got to the parking bay he realised the clamped car was a green Polo. He checked the key fob against the licence plate. It was his car. He'd just been robbed. In broad daylight. The grey plastic object – that must be Erica's laptop. It couldn't be anything else.

Max cursed soundlessly and sprinted along the deserted street after her. The thief was now a good hundred yards away, moving steadily, unaware of his pursuit. At sixteen Max had clocked a hundred yards in 11.8 seconds. That was a lot of beers and TV dinners ago. He pumped his arms, but stayed short of flat out. That was the only way to keep on the outside edges and toes of his sneakers. The last thing he wanted was for her to see him and accelerate away.

The gap was down to forty yards before she turned, her face wide in surprise. She leaned forward and pumped hard on the pedals, tanned legs working. Click, click, click. The bike was accelerating, rattling over the cobbles. As he closed to twenty, she began hauling on the handlebars, pressing her torso forward to get every ounce out of the aged bike. Max was close enough to hear the scrape of the oilless chain, to see the foam stuffing protruding from the split saddle, to watch the warped back wheel wobble, her long legs and shapely bottom giving their all.

A couple of hundred yards ahead a Mercedes taxi was clattering along the cobbles towards them, taking up the whole of the narrow street. A last hope. Max put on an extra spurt, but knew it wouldn't last long. When he got within ten yards she stood and pounded the pedals. Her skirt hem flared behind her, revealing colourful panties printed with cartoon characters. He recognised Bugs Bunny and Road Runner.

She was on a collision course with the car, but at the last moment, as its horn blared, she flicked her bike to the left, bucked it expertly up the kerb between bollards to a narrow pavement, then down again after the cab passed. Max jumped aside as the taxi ploughed past. The woman now had a choice of bridges, left or right, or could head straight on to the stop lights, a wider road where the tram route ran. She turned left.