The Codex (18 page)

Philip kicked a stick back into the embers. The hell with the “challenge.” It had to be the most asinine thing a father ever did to his children since King Lear divided his kingdom.

Ocotal, the guide they had picked up at that sorry town on the river, was sitting by himself, tending the fire and cooking rice. He was a strange fellow, this Ocotal—small, silent, utterly dignified. There was something about him that Philip found attractive; he seemed to be one of those men who had an unshakable, inner conviction of his own worth. He certainly knew his stuff, guiding them through an incredible maze of channels, day after day, without the slightest hesitation, paying no attention to Hauser’s exhortations, comments, and questions. He was impervious to any attempts at conversation, whether on Philip’s part or Hauser’s.

Philip reamed out the dottle, glad he had thought to stock up on tins of Dunhill Early Morning, and repacked the pipe. He really should cut back, especially in light of his father’s cancer. After the trip. For now, the smoke was the only way to keep off the mosquitoes.

There were shouts, and Philip turned to see Hauser coming back from the hunt, with a dead tapir slung on a pole, carried by four soldiers. They hoisted the animal up with a block and tackle from a tree branch. Hauser left the men and came to sit down next to Philip. There was a faint smell of aftershave, tobacco smoke, and blood. He took out a cigar, clipped it, and lit it. He took in a lungful of smoke and let it trickle back out of his nose, like a dragon.

“We’re making excellent progress, Philip, don’t you think?”

“Admirable.” Philip slapped at a mosquito. He couldn’t understand how Hauser managed to avoid getting bitten, despite the fact that he never seemed to use insect repellent. Maybe his bloodstream had a deadly concentration of nicotine. Philip noticed that he inhaled his fat Churchill cigars the way most people inhale cigarettes. Strange how one man dies of it, another lives.

“Are you familiar with Genghis Khan’s dilemma?” Hauser asked.

“I can’t say I am.”

“When Genghis Khan was getting ready to die, he wanted to be buried as befitted the great ruler he was—with heaps of treasure, concubines, and horses to enjoy in the afterlife. But he knew that his tomb would almost certainly be robbed, depriving him of all the joys due him in the afterworld. He thought about this for a long time and could come up with no answer. He finally called in his Grand Vizier, the wisest man in his kingdom.

“ ‘What shall I do to keep my tomb from being robbed?’ he asked the Vizier.

“The Vizier thought about it for a long time and finally came up with an answer. He explained it to Genghis Khan, and the ruler was satisfied. When Ghenghis finally died, the Vizier put the plan into action. He sent ten thousand laborers off to the remote Altai Mountains, where they built a great tomb hewn down into the living rock, filling it with gold, gemstones, wine, silks, ivory, sandalwood, and incense. More than a hundred beautiful virgins and a thousand horses were sacrificed for the great Khan’s pleasure in the afterworld. There was a grand funeral with much feasting among the laborers, and then Genghis Khan’s body was shut up in the tomb and the door carefully concealed. The area was covered with dirt, and then a thousand horsemen rode back and forth over the valley, obliterating all traces of their work.

“When the laborers and the horsemen returned, the Vizier met them with the Khan’s army and killed them to a man.”

“Nasty.”

“Then the Vizier committed suicide.”

“The fool. He could’ve been rich.”

Hauser chuckled. “Yes. But he was loyal. He knew that even he himself, the most trustworthy of men, could not be trusted with such a secret. He might utter it at night in a dream, or it might be tortured out of him—or his own greed might eventually get the better of him. He was the weak link in the plan. Therefore, he had to die.”

Philip heard a hacking noise and glanced over to see the hunters gutting the animal with machetes. The guts spilled to the ground with a wet sound. Philip winced and turned away. There was something to be said for the vegetarian lifestyle, he mused.

“Here’s the rub, Philip, the weakness in the Vizier’s plan. It required Genghis Khan to trust at least one other person with his secret.” Hauser exhaled a cloud of pungent smoke. “My question to you, Philip, is who was the one person your father trusted?”

It was a good question, one that Philip had been considering for some time. “It wasn’t a girlfriend or ex-wife. He constantly complained about his doctors and lawyers. His secretaries were always quitting on him. He had no real friends. The only man he trusted was his pilot.”

“And I’ve already determined he wasn’t in on the deal.” Hauser held the cigar at a steep angle against his lips. “There’s the rub, Philip. Did your father have some kind of secret life? A secret affair? A son born out of wedlock that he favored above you three?”

Philip felt himself go cold at this last suggestion. “I have no idea.”

Hauser waved his cigar. “Something to think about, eh, Philip?” He fell silent. The intimacy encouraged Philip to ask a question he had been wanting to ask for some time. “What happened between you and father?”

“Did you know we were childhood friends?”

“Yes.”

“We grew up together in Erie. We played stickball together on the block where we lived, we went to school together, we went to our first whorehouse together. We thought we knew each other pretty well. But when you go out there into the jungle, when you’re shoved up against the wall of survival, things come out. You discover things in yourself that you never knew were there. You find out who you really are. That’s what happened to us. We got out there in the middle of the jungle, lost, bitten, starving, half dead with fever, and we found out who we really were. You know what I discovered? I discovered that I despised your father.”

Philip looked at Hauser. The man returned the look, his face as calm and smooth and opaque as always. He felt his flesh creep. He asked, “So what did you discover in yourself, Hauser?”

He could see that the question took Hauser by surprise. The man laughed it off, threw the cigar butt into the fire, and rose. “You’ll find out soon enough.”

24

The dugout pushed through the thick black water, the engine whining with the effort. The river had divided and divided until it had become a labyrinth of channels and stagnant pools, with acres of exposed, black, stinking, shivery muck. Everywhere Tom could see whirling clouds of insects. Pingo stayed in the bow, shirtless, wielding a huge machete with which he took an occasional swipe at a vine hanging in the water. The channels were often too shallow to use the engine, and Chori would raise it and pole. Don Alfonso remained on his usual perch atop the canvas-covered heap of supplies and sat there cross-legged, like a wise man, puffing furiously on his pipe and peering ahead. On several occasions Pingo had to get out and chop a notch through a half-sunken log to allow the boat to pass.

“What are these hellish insects?” Sally cried, slapping furiously.

“Tapir-fly,” said Don Alfonso. He reached into his pocket and extended a blackened corncob pipe toward her. “Señorita, you should take up smoking, which discourages the insects.”

“No, thank you. Smoking causes cancer.”

“On the contrary, smoking is very healthful and it leads to good digestion and a long life.”

“Right.”

As they proceeded deeper into the swamp, the vegetation seemed to press in from all sides, forming layered walls of glossy leaves, ferns, and vines. The air was dead and thick and smelled of methane. The boat pushed through it as if it were hot soup.

“How do you know this is the way my father went?” Tom asked.

“There are many pathways in the Meambar Swamp,” Don Alfonso said, “but there is only one way through. I, Don Alfonso, know that way, and so did your father. I can read the signs.”

“What do you read?”

“There have been three groups of voyagers before us. The first group came through a month ago. The second and third groups were only a few days apart, and they came through about a week ago.”

“How can you tell all this?” Sally asked.

“I read the water. I see a notch chopped in a sunken log. I see a cut vine. I see a pole mark on a sunken sandbar or a groove made in the muddy shallows by a keel. Those marks, in this dead water, last for weeks.”

Sally pointed to a tree. “Look, over there is a gumbo-limbo tree, Bursera simaruba. The Maya use the sap for bug bites.” She turned to Don Alfonso. “Let’s head over there and collect some.”

Don Alfonso took his pipe out of his mouth. “My grandfather used to collect this plant. We call it lucawa.” He gazed at Sally with a newfound respect. “I did not know you were a curandera.”

“I’m not really,” said Sally. “I spent some time in the north living with the Maya while I was in college. I was studying their medicine. I’m an ethnopharmacologist.”

“Ethnopharmacologist? That sounds like a very big profession for a woman.”

Sally frowned. “In our culture, women can do anything a man can. And vice versa.”

Don Alfonso’s eyebrows shot up. “I do not believe it.”

“It’s true,” Sally said defiantly.

“In America, the women hunt while the men have babies?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

Don Alfonso, with a smile of triumph on his face, placed the stem of the pipe back in his mouth, argument won. He gave an exaggerated wink to Tom. Sally shot Tom a look.

And here I didn’t say a thing, Tom thought, annoyed.

Chori brought the boat up alongside the tree. Sally gave the bark a chop with her machete and then peeled off a vertical strip of bark. The sap immediately began oozing out in reddish droplets. She scraped some off, rolled up her pants, and smeared it on her bug bites, then rubbed it into her neck, wrists, and the backs of her hands.

“You look a fright,” said Tom.

She scraped some more of the gooey sap off the bark with the machete and held it out to him. “Tom?”

“You’re not putting that stuff on me.”

“Get over here.”

Tom took a step over, and she rubbed it into the back of his badly bitten neck. The itching, burning sensation ebbed away.

“How does it feel?”

Tom moved his neck. “Sticky, but good.” He liked the feeling of her cool hands on his neck.

Sally handed him the machete with its dollop of sap. “You can do your own legs and arms.”

“Thanks.” He smeared it on, surprised at how effective it was.

Don Alfonso also helped himself to the sap. “This is truly remarkable, a yanqui who knows the medicinal secrets of plants, a real curandera. I have lived one hundred and twenty-one years and still there are things I have not seen.”

That afternoon they passed the first rock Tom had seen in days. Beyond, sunlight filtered down into an overgrown clearing made in an island of high ground.

“Here is where we will camp,” announced Don Alfonso.

They brought the dugout alongside the rock and tied it up. Pingo and Chori leapt out with their machetes in hand, scrambled up and over the rocks, and began mowing down the new growth. Don Alfonso strolled around and examined the ground, scuffing it with a foot, picking up a vine or a leaf.

“This is amazing,” Sally said, looking around. “There is some zorillo. Skunk root, one of the most important plants used by the Maya. They make an herbal bath from the leaves and use the root for pain and ulcers. They call it payche. And here is some suprecayo.” She began plucking leaves from a bush, rolling them, and smelling. “And over there is a Sweetia panamensis tree. This is amazing. It’s a unique little ecosystem here. Anyone mind if I go collecting?”

“Be our guest,” said Tom.

Sally went into the forest to collect more plants.

“It looks like someone camped here before us,” Tom said to Don Alfonso.

“Yes. This large area was first cleared about a month ago. I see a fire ring and the remains of a hut. The last people were here perhaps a week ago.”

“All this grew up in a week?”

Don Alfonso nodded. “The forest does not like a hole.” He poked around the remains of the fire and then picked up something, handing it to Tom. It was a cigar ring from a Cuba Libre, moldy and half dissolved.

“My father’s brand,” said Tom, looking at it. It gave him a strange feeling. His father had come here, camped in this very spot, smoked a cigar, and left this tiny clue. He put it in his pocket and began collecting wood for the fire.

“Before you pick up a branch,” Don Alfonso advised him, “you must beat on it with a stick to knock off the ants, snakes, and veinte cuatros!”

“Veinte cuatros?”

“It is an insect that looks like a termite. We call them veinte cuatros, twenty-fours, because after their bite you are unable to move for twenty-four hours.”

“That’s nice.”

An hour later he saw Sally tramping out of the jungle with a long pole slung over her shoulder on which were tied bundles of plants, bark, and roots. Don Alfonso looked up from the parrot he was boiling in a pot to watch her arrive.

“Curandera, you remind me of my grandfather Don Cali, who used to return just like that from the forest every day, except you are prettier than he was. He was old and wrinkled while you are firm and ripe.