Hour of the Assassins (35 page)

Mengele was fumbling at a desk drawer, probably for a gun, but before he could grab it, Caine had lunged across the desk, his fist smashing against Mengele's shoulder and knocking him against the wall. Mengele cowered against the wall as Caine stalked him, their eyes locked on one another.

“
Nein, bitte
,” Mengele whimpered. “I can make you a rich man, a million—” and threw a clumsy right hook at Caine's head.

Caine sidestepped the punch, blocking it with his forearm, and put all his rage into a savage right hook to the ribs that came from his toes. Mengele's ribs snapped like dry twigs and he sprawled across the desk, howling in pain and kicking desperately out at Caine. A wild lucky kick hit Caine's midsection, knocking him back, and Mengele scrambled to his feet, his hand holding his ribs. Caine could hear the sounds of movement and voices from outside. He was running out of time. Rolf and the Indians would be on him at any moment. He remembered what Koenig had taught him, that you only use your body as a last resort. “No matter where you are, there is always a weapon at hand. A rock, sand, a bottle, anything will do,” Koenig had said.

As Mengele rushed for the door, Caine grabbed a ballpoint pen from the desk and raced after Mengele, cornering him in the lab. Mengele stood there panting, his tongue lolling like a heat-stricken dog, his eyes darting around frantically. He threw a flask at Caine and Caine barely managed to duck out of the way. Before he heard the flask smash behind him, he had already begun to move.

He aimed a stab at Mengele's eye with the pen, but the stab was a feint and as Mengele's arm came up to block the blow, Caine side-kicked Mengele's groin. The back of Mengele's head was exposed as he doubled over with a high-pitched scream. Caine stabbed at the back of Mengele's neck, ramming the pen into the small indentation between the neck and the base of the skull. Caine felt a sudden tremor as Mengele's body collapsed. He had hit the foramen magnum, perhaps the most vulnerable spot in the human body. Mengele was dead before his body hit the floor.

A savage exultation flooded Caine. It was like nothing he had ever felt before. A sense of pure joy and freedom beyond orgasm that only the gods can know. He let out an insane animal yell that was both terrible and awesome—the triumphant howl of primordial man, the killer ape. The hunter had made his kill and for an instant the jungle itself stood still.

A wide-eyed Indian face peered at him from the front doorway. Caine grabbed a flask and heaved it at the Indian, and the head disappeared. The flask shattered harmlessly on the doorpost. He suddenly became conscious of the babble of voices outside and the sounds of running. His body still tingled with the thrill of what he had done, but he knew he had almost run out of time.

He picked up a small corked vial that contained some tissue specimen floating in formaldehyde and slipped it into his pocket as he ran back to Mengele's office. Helga had managed to get up on all fours and was slowly crawling, like a massive sloth, toward the scalpel on the floor. Caine kicked her in the side, connecting with the spot under the ribs that boxers aim at, and she dropped as though she had been poleaxed. He grabbed the scalpel and ran back to Mengele's body.

Mengele's hand was curled and grasping as Caine turned it over. It looked like a bird's claw. He slashed quickly at the first joint of the thumb, the blood spilling over his hands and onto the floor. He felt no repugnance as he sawed away at the ligaments of the joint. It felt good to have Mengele's still warm blood bathing his hands, almost as though he were enacting some ancient, savage ritual, washing his hands in the blood of his enemy. The scalpel grew slippery in his hand and he had to wipe his hands on Mengele's shirt.

He glanced up to see three or four Indian faces staring at him from the doorway, their eyes wide with horror at the hellish spectacle of the white man kneeling over the body, dismembering the white god, Mengele. They were too frightened to attack or even move. None of them had ever seen anything like it. The white man with the bleeding face was a jungle demon incarnate.

“Justice,” Caine shouted at them, his body swaying drunkenly as he straightened up, his eyes burning with flames that were not of this world.

“For the Jews,” he cried, and then he remembered the old Gypsy at Auschwitz. “And the Gypsies. And for all the poor bastards from whom God hid His face when they cried out to Him!” he spat out. “And for me,” he said with quiet intensity. “Caine, the killer.”

And he lifted Mengele's dead hand to his lips and savagely bit off the thumb at the nearly severed joint He spat the bloody joint into his hand. A sense of release came over him, like a baptism, and he flung the hand away from him and stood up. His lips were red and glistening with Mengele's blood.

He glared at the Indians and began to walk toward them, as they started to back respectfully away from him. Like all primitives, they knew that madness is inspired by the gods. Then he stopped. He heard Rolf angrily cursing in German and Spanish, outside. He was screaming at the Indians to get out of his way. Caine had only a few seconds left.

Instantly he whirled, leaped over the body, and ran for Mengele's office, clutching the bleeding finger in his fist. The doorpost cracked with a loud snap from the .300 caliber slug as he ran past it. He charged across the room and dived headfirst through the window, tearing the screen away and taking it with him as he rolled on the dark ground. He ran across the dark compound with sudden zigzags, like a fleeing rabbit, as the shots of the Winchester echoed through the night.

He stumbled and seemed to hear the hum of a bullet as it whizzed through the space where his head had been. He was tumbling in the mud and suddenly found himself waist-deep in the stream. He dived under the surface, letting the current carry him toward the black wall of the jungle's edge.

The water was cool and soothing as he floated with the current. It felt like balm to his burning skin and the tension began to drain away. He wanted to float forever down the stream, like a log, drifting into a peace he had never known. The coolness touched him with a sense of absolution and he was almost asleep when he came to with a sudden jerk, thrashing and sputtering in the stream. A part of his mind was sounding a desperate alarm—unless he got moving, they would kill him.

He waded to the mudbank and staggered up the slope, somewhere near the edge of the clearing. He had to find the trail back to the Yarinacocha before Rolf and the Indians tracked him down. The darkness was almost complete and it was impossible to orient himself. Even if he found the trail, to attempt the jungle by night was madness. He was sure to lose his way in minutes. But to stay was certain death. Hell, it was death either way, he reasoned. Reason, that was pretty good, he thought. For the first time since they had marched him to the Anthill, his mind was reasoning again. He began searching for the mouth of the trail among the dark trees.

One by one the lights of the institute clicked on, casting dim pools of light over the compound. Soon the Indians would be after him, he knew. They would try to get him before he faded into the dark bush. But the light was a godsend. It would help him to find the trail and he ran faster. He thought he spotted the opening where he and Pepé had emerged from the trees and headed toward it at full speed, when he collided with an Indian, suddenly emerging out of the artificial twilight.

Caine lay dazed on the ground for a moment, then leaped to his feet as the Indian sprang at him, his tattooed face like a ferocious demon mask. Caine pivoted, his feet slipping in the dirt, moving into a clumsy spinning back-kick that luckily caught the Indian high in the chest, knocking him down. Caine didn't hang around to finish the Indian off. He had to get to the safety of the trail. He didn't think they would try to track him in the darkness; that would make them crazier than he was. Suddenly an opening in the trees was before him and he dived into it. Darkness swallowed him as he staggered down the trail, his chest heaving desperately for air.

Somehow he stumbled on through the darkness, branches whipping at his face, until his legs finally collapsed under him. The pain washed over him in waves, his body shivering with the violence of it. There was no end to it, he thought dully. The blackness of the jungle was ominous and eternal, like that of the grave, and his imagination populated it with snakes and scorpions and ugly, crawling shapes. So this is what it's like to be blind, he thought with a shudder, and a feeling of helplessness and horror engulfed him. Stop it! he warned himself. That way madness lies. Who wrote that line, anyway? he wondered. Somebody. Shakespeare, probably. You're alive, damn it. Alive! You did it, you son of a bitch. You pulled it off!

His breathing had grown more regular and the shivering began to ease off. Where was the thumb? he wondered, and it took him a full minute before he realized that it was still clenched in his fist. With fumbling fingers, he took the vial from his pocket and plucked out the tissue specimen. He put the thumb into the vial, recorked it tightly, and replaced it in his shirt pocket, buttoning it securely, the sharp smell of the formaldehyde filling his nostrils. He'd swap the thumb for a cigarette in a minute, he decided. If there was a part of his body that didn't hurt, he couldn't feel it.

They were sure to close his escape route, he knew. By morning Rolf would have radioed Pucallpa and the gunboat would be alerted, so the Yarinacocha was out. And even if he could somehow make it back to Pucallpa, the town was too small and isolated for him to evade the authorities and the Indians. Pucallpa would be a death trap, he realized.

Jesus! He had them all after him now: the Peruvian Army and
policia
, the locals, the Nazis, the Chamas, Yaguas, and Shipibos. And he was on their ground, not his. For him there was only the jungle, where no man can survive alone for long. They had him boxed, all right. And in the morning Rolf and an army of Indians would be on his trail, and they could move twice as fast as he could. It was hopeless.

If he could just get back to the survival pack he had hidden, he thought. It was his only chance. He thought about the AR-15 carbine hidden in the tree, and felt better. If he could just get back to it, he could take a few of the bastards with him, he reflected grimly. Christ, he wanted a cigarette badly. There were cigarettes in the survival pack, he reminded himself. He had to get back to it.

What time was it, anyway? He brought his wrist up to his eyes, the radium watch dial glowing in the darkness, like a constellation of stars. His eyes fastened greedily on the tiny specks of light. A quarter after nine. It was still early, in spite of everything that had happened. The night seemed endless.

Where was C.J. now? he wondered. Probably having dinner in some fancy restaurant, her face glowing from an afternoon on the beach, surrounded by the murmur of conversation and the tinkle of cocktails. Did she think of him, or was she really taken by all the superficial charm of the people around her? He felt a kind of contempt for their world of surfaces, filled with those who do not know that the ocean is not the surface you can see, but the depths that cannot be seen. Suddenly he began to laugh, because as desperate and painful as his situation was, he was luckier than they were. He was alive! He could feel life pulsing through his veins. He wondered if C.J. could ever see things that way.

He felt something move across his foot and he froze, the sweat rolling down his face as though it would never stop. Something long and slow and he knew it was a snake. And then the movement stopped and he was sure that within inches from him, somewhere in the darkness, the long, forked tongue was flicking out, sensing the air for the heat of his body, waiting to strike. He held his breath in terror. The slightest sound or movement would give him away. His instincts, harking back to tree-dwelling days, were screaming at him to run, but he couldn't move. What was it? he wondered desperately. It was too light for a boa constrictor and that meant it could well be poisonous. There was no sound of rattling, so it probably wasn't a bushmaster. It could be anything, a
fer-de-lance
, a palm viper, or a deadly coral snake. Whatever it was, it wasn't his idea of a house pet. A bead of sweat hung on the tip of his nose, itching maddeningly. Go away, his mind screamed and it was almost worth getting killed just to scratch his nose. If he could just see its head—but it might be anywhere.

The screech of a howler monkey sounded from the darkness far above him. The cry was taken up by a trio of macaws and the jungle came alive with chattering cries. And then a slender, pale shaft of light touched his foot. It was the moon! he thought exultantly. If the snake would just move, he had a chance to get away. He could just make out the trail in the dim, ghostly light. He had to get out of there! Move, you bastard! Move!

At last, after what seemed like an hour, he felt the snake slither on and on across his foot and disappear, with a faint rustle of leaves, into the darkness. It must have been a good eight feet long! He forced himself to wait for at least twenty seconds more, counting them as if they would never end. He moved his stiff legs and broke into a run down the trail, feeling his way as much as seeing. It was time to perform the classic, military maneuver known as “Getting the fuck out of there.” He had to put as much distance between the institute and himself as possible before daylight. The distance he covered this night was all the head start he was going to get If only he had a flashlight! Or a cigarette, damn it, he thought, rubbing his nose gratefully as he ran.

The night passed in a kind of twilight daze, like that odd moment between sleep and waking when one is not sure which is the reality and which the dream. His brain was dizzy and increasingly confused. He couldn't tell whether it was fatigue, or the darkness, or the pain, or the rising fever from the ant bites. Time and again he lurched into trees and bushes, bouncing against them, like a beaten fighter against the ropes. Each time they knocked him down, he would scramble up again and stagger on. He blundered into invisible spiderwebs that tickled his face with long, sticky fingers. With a shudder he tore through them with flailing arms and stumbled ahead, his skin crawling with the feel of hairy legs and no way of telling whether they were imaginary or real. He was completely exhausted, yet he went on and on, hardly knowing what he was doing. His arms hung like dead weights from his shoulders and his head swayed drunkenly, lolling on his panting chest.