Isvik (12 page)

‘Porton Down?' The name rang a bell. ‘Isn't that something to do with chemical warfare?'

He nodded. ‘It's an experimental establishment, scientists playin' around with all sorts of horrors. According to this man, it was the first of its kind in the world.' He began leafing through the dictionary. ‘
Podrido
. That's a new one on me.' And when he found it he nodded. ‘Putrid. Ah should have guessed that.'

The stewardess bent over us to ask whether we would like anything to drink during the film. A moment later the lights dimmed and the screen on the for'ard bulkhead came alive, an old Gary Cooper western. Ward kept his reading light on and began chasing another word in the dictionary. I leaned back, watching the film, but not really taking it in. In the semi-darkness, with the blinds all down and the murmur of the engines powering us at speed above the Atlantic towards what was once the New World, my thoughts ranged free over the kaleidoscope of events in which I had become involved.

At one point I turned from the screen to look at Ward, bent now over his book, totally absorbed. He had a big, solid head, and his strong features, with that great beak of a nose and the slightly sensuous mouth, were outlined in profile by the hard white pinpoint of light beamed down from above.

Some time after the film was over and the lights were on again the same stewardess issued us with landing cards. Glancing over Ward's shoulder to see what he was entering for our address in Mexico, I saw he had put his occupation as ‘antiquarian', and when I made some humorous remark about it being an odd description for a haulage contractor operating the Near Eastern run, he smiled at me almost slyly. ‘Covers a multitude of sins …' He peered rather pointedly at my own card and nodded approvingly. ‘Between us we should give them enough to occupy their minds.'

All through the flight, ever since we had taken off, part of my mind had been groping for some explanation, some sensible reason for his getting himself so deeply committed to this expedition. Altruism? But there was nothing altruistic about him, and mulling over the extraordinary mix of his upbringing, I was tempted to think that Eton may have had a far greater influence on him than he would care to admit. Either that, or else he smelt a profit in it, and since I couldn't see that there was money to be made out of the
Andros
, I was forced back once again to considering the possibility that he was in some branch of intelligence.

Why else would he be brushing up on his Spanish, reading with such concentration a book on the Disappeareds and breaking his journey at Lima? That he might have fallen for Iris Sunderby never crossed my mind.

II

ANGEL OF DEATH

ONE

The time difference between London and Mexico City is six hours, and because we had been travelling with the sun, it was still quite high in the sky as we descended into the sepia haze that hung over the whole flat expanse of what had once been a great lake. Dust! That was my first impression of a city whose disastrous birth rate has made it the largest in the world, a vast expanse of concentrated housing broken only by open spaces of baked earth where the wind-blown dust swirled, and far away to port the snow-capped volcanic hulks of Popocatépetl and Iztaccihuatl towering huge through the burnt brown atmosphere.

‘We'll dump our things at the hotel,' Ward said, ‘and if there's time we'll have a look round.'

The landing was a smooth one, but once we were inside the terminal building everything moved at a snail's pace, the queue at immigration long and slow moving. When it was our turn I found he had been right about the word antiquarian giving the immigration officers something to think about. They were a good ten minutes arguing over what it meant, even calling in the senior officer on duty, who spoke a little English. ‘Old books? Why you want old books? You are tourist, no? In transit.'

‘Aye, Ah'm booked out on the flight to Lima in the mornin'.' Ward was smiling a bright, happy, almost drunken smile, playing the innocent Scot and putting on his broadest accent. ‘Dae ye no' like books yersel'? Books are me most prized possessions, ye ken. There's the binding now. An' inside ye'll find all the truth about the world in which we live. An' auld books, the woodcuts, the drawin's – dae ye no' ken the drawin's o' Leonardo da Vinci? – the beautiful illustrations, the illuminations o' the monks an' priests – it's a fabulous world, an' all there inside o' the gold-lettered covers.'

He went on like that until the chief officer nodded him through with a glazed look in his eyes. He never glanced at the visas, never looked at my passport. ‘Just as I said,' Ward murmured, no trace of an accent as we collected our baggage. ‘Covers a multitude of sins.'

As soon as we had cleared customs he made for a bank of telephones, and when he rejoined me he was smiling. ‘That's all fixed. He got my cable and he'll meet us fur dinner.'

‘Who?' I asked as we picked up our overnight bags and moved towards the exit.

‘The author of that book, Luiz Rodriguez. He lives here.'

At the hotel he told the taxi to wait, and after checking in and having a quick clean-up in our rooms, we drove out to Teotihuacan. ‘Ah'd have liked to take a look around the Archaeological Museum, but Ah fear we'd never make it in time through the rush-hour traffic. It's the other side of the city, whereas Teotihuacan is relatively handy.' He passed me a map and a brochure he had picked up at the hotel. ‘At least we shall be able to say we've seen the Temple of Quetzalcoatl, the Street of the Dead, and the great Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon.'

Teotihuacan was some twenty kilometres north-east of the centre of Mexico City and I thought I had probably glimpsed those pyramids through the dust haze as we flew in. The brochure said that the Pyramid of the Sun was over sixty metres high, larger than the Great Pyramid of Egypt, and the Street of the Dead more than three kilometres long, but even though it contained a plan, as well as photographs, I was still not prepared for the colossal dimensions of the place.

We had barely forty minutes there, but we still managed to walk the whole huge complex, even climbing to the top of the smaller Pyramid of the Moon. Ward had his camera with him, and though he led me round at a breathless pace, talking all the time about the terrible religious cult of the Aztecs, he also took quite a few pictures, usually with myself or some other human in the foreground to give an indication of the scale of the place. In addition to Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent god of learning, he talked of Tezcatlipoca, the sky god, Tlaloc, the rain god, and the name I have' most difficulty in pronouncing or even spelling, and the most terrible god of all – Huitzilopochtli.

I have a picture in my mind still of endless queues of captives waiting under guard to mount the steps of the Aztec temples where the priests of Huitzilopochtli stood waiting with obsidian stone knives, hands and faces black with caked blood, their robes stiff with it, as they worked industriously to open up each human chest, extract the still-palpitating heart, offering it to their filthy god, then tossing the torn-open body back down the steps to the waiting warriors below, who hacked it into joints for the ritual cannibalism that ensured both the pleasures of the flesh and added prowess from the absorption of the captive joint into their own live bodies.

It is a picture indelibly imprinted, Ward's voice painting it in quiet words, neither excited nor repelled by the horror of it, but simply repeating information he had obtained from one of the books he had borrowed from his Glasgow library as soon as he knew the route he would be taking to Punta Arenas and the Antarctic. I have referred to it here because, to me, Mexico was a curtain-raiser to the horrors we were to uncover later.

The sun was setting in a red blaze as we drove into the centre of Mexico City the long geometrically laid-out streets already darkening into canyons filled with the lights of cars. There were men half-hidden by piled-up mountains of coloured balloons at some of the street corners, a relic, Ward said, of the magnificent feathered headdresses of the Aztecs, and with the stillness of evening the dust haze had gone, so that the huge square of the Zócalo had a brooding sense of peace, the cathedral's twin towers still touched with the sunset's warmth and the great mass of it dominating the presidential palace.

The restaurant Rodriguez had chosen was in one of the streets behind the cathedral, a small sombre place which served only Mexican food. He was tucked away in a corner, the only man on his own, a solitary candle illuminating his face as he pored over the paper on which he was writing. It was an unusual face, the skin stretched tight across high cheekbones and of a yellowish-ochre colour like old parchment, the features themselves almost patrician with their high forehead and prominent nose.

He didn't look up as we crossed the room, his head bent and the pen moving swiftly across pages held in a clipboard. I had the sense of a withdrawn person, a loner. ‘Rodriguez?' There was no warmth in Ward's voice.

The man raised his eyes, nodded, then closed the clipboard and got to his feet. ‘Señor Vord, eh?' They shook hands, eyeing each other warily. Ward introduced me and we sat down.

‘What's that you're drinking?' Ward asked, leaning forward and putting his big nose down to sniff the pale liquid.

‘Tequila.'

‘Ah yes, made from the
Agave tequilana
, the sisal tree plant.'

Rodriguez nodded. ‘You like some tequila?'

Ward nodded. ‘I suppose so. You going to have one?' he asked me. ‘It's pretty fiery stuff.' And when I nodded, he flicked his fingers at a passing waiter. ‘
Dos tequilas
. What about you, Señor Rodriguez?'

‘
Gracia
.'

He ordered three, then sat back, staring at the man we had come to see. ‘You writing another book?'

‘No. An article for an American magazine.'

‘About the
Desaparecidos
?'

‘No. It concern the drug traffic on the Mexican-US border. Cocaine. It come mainly overland from Colombia and Ecuador.' There was a short silence. ‘You want to see me about something?' It was a question, not a statement, and the man was nervous. ‘What is it you want to see me about?'

Ward didn't answer. He just sat there, staring at the man.

‘You say it is urgent, a matter of life or death for me.' Rodriguez spoke softly, his voice so low it was almost a whisper. ‘What is it about then?'

Ward hesitated, then shook his head. ‘Later.' He picked up the menu. ‘We'll talk about it later, after we've fed.' But Rodriguez wanted to know right away. He still had his biro gripped in his right hand and he was fiddling with it tensely, his brown, slightly almond-slitted eyes fallen to the table, unable to meet the directness of Ward's gaze.

The drinks arrived, three thick-rimmed glasses full of a slightly syrupy liquid, rather like mead, but with a sharper, more aromatic flavour, and as Ward had said, very fiery. He ordered
sopa de mariscos
, which was crab, mussels and shrimps with
cilantro
, onions and rice, followed by
guacamole
and
chile salteados
with a
tortilla
. Rodriguez had already ordered for himself. I followed Ward's lead as he seemed to know what the dishes were.

Rodriguez was part Indian, a short man with lank black hair. ‘I have a touch of the Quechua in me.' He announced this in English, an explanation of something he had said that Ward had not understood. They had been talking in Spanish. ‘You must excuse,' he said. ‘I am not speaking altogether correctly. My Spanish is of the Argentine. There are many variations all through South America, and of course here in Central America it is different again, particularly in Mexico.' He pronounced it
Mehico
.

Ward's excuse for talking in Spanish had been that he was accustoming himself to using it freely. The soup came and with it the three bottles of beer he had ordered. Rodriguez was starting with prawns wrapped in bacon. At this point the conversation, still in Spanish, seemed to be about politics and the Mexican economy, but when Ward had finished his soup, he suddenly reverted to English. ‘Mario Ángel Gómez.' He pushed his plate away and stared at Rodriguez. ‘When did you last see him?'

There was silence, the writer's eyes gone suddenly blank. Like an animal sliding away from an unwelcome confrontation, he took refuge in a displacement activity, taking the last of the little pastries hot with spice that had come with the drinks and waving the empty plate at a passing waiter.

‘Well?'

‘When I am finishing the book. You say you have read it. It is all in my book, everything about. Gómez that I know.'

‘He went to Peru, didn't he?'

‘He was going to Peru. That's what he told me when I interviewed him that second time in Buenos Aires.'

‘And you didn't visit him there?'

‘No, I don't visit him.'

‘You mean you haven't seen him in Peru? You haven't talked to him after he took up residence there?'

The man shook his head. But before he did so there had been a fractional hesitation.

‘He
is
in Peru, isn't he?'

Again a shake of the head, and when Ward pressed him, repeating the question, Rodriguez said, ‘Maybe. But I don't know for sure.'

The waiter arrived with the next course and they reverted to politics, talking Spanish again, Ward's tone, his whole manner softened. He was trying to put Rodriguez at his ease. But then he suddenly asked, ‘Why did he leave Argentina?' He was a fast eater and now he was leaning forward across his empty plate, his English sharp and abrupt. ‘Why?'

Rodriguez shrugged. And when Ward persisted, he said almost reluctantly, ‘Why does any man leave? There were rumours. I have said that in my book.'

‘Rumours concerning the
Desaparecidos
?'