The Codex (21 page)

“Who’s this?”

“My Teacher from the Ashram.”

“What the hell is he doing here?”

“We’re together.”

The man stared up at Tom fixedly.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“He’s got a fever. He stopped speaking two days ago.

Tom pulled the medicine chest out of their supplies and stepped into the other dugout. The Teacher followed his every movement with his eyes. Tom bent over and felt the man’s forehead. It was burning hot; a temperature of at least 104 degrees. The pulse was thready and fast. He listened with a stethoscope: The lungs sounded clear, the heart was beating normally, albeit very fast. Tom injected him with a broad-spectrum antibiotic and an antimalarial. Without access to any kind of diagnostic tests, it was the best he could do.

“What kind of fever does he have?” Vernon asked.

“Impossible to know without a blood test.”

“Is he going to die?”

“I don’t know.” Tom switched into Spanish. “Don Alfonso, do you have any idea what disease this man has?”

Don Alfonso climbed into the boat and bent over the man. He tapped his chest, looked into his eyes, felt his pulse, examined his hands, then looked up. “Yes, I know well this disease.”

“What is it?”

“It’s called death.”

“No,” said Vernon, agitated. “Don’t say that. He’s not dying.”

Tom was sorry he had asked for Don Alfonso’s opinion. “We’ll bring him back to camp in the dugout. Chori can pole that dugout, and I’ll pole ours.” Tom turned to Vernon. “We found one dead guide back there. Where’s the other?”

“A jaguar dropped down on him at night and dragged him up into a tree.” Vernon shuddered. “We could hear his screams and the crunching of his bones. It was ...” The sentence finished in a choking sound. “Tom, get me out of here.”

“I will,” Tom said. “We’ll send you and your Teacher back down to Brus with Pingo.”

They arrived back at the camp just after nightfall. Vernon put up one of their tents, and they carried the Teacher up from the boat and put him inside. He refused all food and remained silent, staring at them in the most unsettling way. Tom wondered if the man was still sane.

Vernon insisted on spending the night with him in the tent. The next morning, as the sun was just catching the treetops, Vernon roused them all with a call for help. Tom was the first to arrive. The Teacher was sitting up in his sleeping bag, highly agitated. His face was pale and dry, and his eyes glittered like chips of blue porcelain, darting about wildly, focusing on nothing. His hands were grasping at the air.

All at once he spoke. “Vernon!” he cried, groping about with his hands. “Oh my God, where are you, Vernon? Where am I?”

With a shock Tom realized he must have gone blind.

Vernon grasped his hand and knelt. “I’m here, Teacher. We’re in the tent. We’re taking you back to America. You’re going to be fine.”

“What a goddamn fool I was!” the Teacher shouted, his mouth twisting with the effort to speak, causing spittle to fly.

“Teacher, please. Please don’t excite yourself. We’re going home, back to Big Sur, back to the Ashram ...”

“I had everything!” the Teacher roared. “I had money. I had teenage girls to fuck. I had a house by the sea. I was surrounded by people who revered me. I had everything!” The veins were popping out on his forehead. Drool ran down and dangled from his chin. His whole frame trembled so violently that Tom fancied he could hear his bones rattling. The blind eyes roved madly in his head, like whirling pinballs.

“We’re going to get you to a hospital, Teacher. Don’t talk, everything’s going to be all right, all right ...”

“So what did I do? Ha! It wasn’t enough! Like a fool I wanted more! I wanted a hundred million dollars more! And look what happened to me!” He roared out these last words and, having uttered them, fell back heavily, his body making the sound of a dead fish hitting the floor. He lay there, his eyes staring wide open, but the glitter was gone.

He was dead.

Vernon stared in horror, unable to speak. Tom put his hand on his brother’s shoulder and found him shaking. It had been an ugly death.

Don Alfonso was badly shaken as well. “We must leave,” he said.

“A bad spirit came and took that man away, and he did not want to go.

“Prepare one of the boats to return,” Tom said to Don Alfonso. “Pingo can take Vernon back to Brus while we go on—if you don’t have any objections.”

Don Alfonso nodded. “It is better this way. The swamp is no place for your brother.” He began shouting orders to Chori and Pingo, who rushed about, equally terrified, only too happy to be leaving.

“I can’t understand it,” Vernon said. “He was such a good man. How could he die like that?”

Vernon was always being taken in by swindlers, Tom thought—financial, emotional, and spiritual. But now wasn’t the time to point it out. He said, “Sometimes we think we know someone, and we don’t.”

“I spent three years with him. I knew him. It must have been the fever. He was delirious, out of his mind. He didn’t know what he was saying.”

“Let’s bury him and move on.”

Vernon went to work on digging a grave, and Tom and Sally joined in. They cleared out a small spot behind the camp, chopping through roots with Chori’s axe and digging down into the soil underneath. In twenty minutes a shallow grave had been hollowed out of the hard-clay soil. They dragged the Teacher’s body to the hole, laid him in, packed a layer of clay on top of him, then filled the grave with smooth boulders from the riverbank. Don Alfonso, Chori, and Pingo were already in the boats, fretting, waiting to go.

“Are you all right?” Tom asked, putting his arm around his brother.

“I’ve made a decision,” Vernon said. “I’m not going back. I’m going on with you.”

“Vernon, it’s all arranged.”

“What have I got to go back to? I’m dead broke, and I don’t even have a car. I certainly can’t go back to the Ashram.”

“You’ll figure out something.”

“I’ve already figured out something. I’m coming with you.”

“You’re in no condition to come with us. You almost died back there.”

“This is something I have to do,” said Vernon. “I’m all right now.”

Tom hesitated, wondering if Vernon really was all right.

“Please, Tom.”

There was such a depth of pleading in Vernon’s voice that Tom was surprised—and, despite himself, a little glad. He grasped Vernon’s shoulder. “All right. We’ll do this together, just as Father wanted.”

Don Alfonso clapped his hands. “Enough talking? We go now?”

Tom nodded, and Don Alfonso gave the order to push off.

“Now that we have two boats,” Sally said, “I’ll do my share of the poling.”

“Puah! Poling is a man’s job.”

“Don Alfonso, you are a sexist pig.”

Don Alfonso crinkled his brow. “Sexist pig? What kind of animal is this? Have I been insulted?”

“You certainly have,” said Sally.

Don Alfonso gave his boat a good pole, and it glided forward. He grinned. “Then I am happy. To be insulted by a beautiful woman is always an honor.”

28

Marcus Aurelius Hauser examined his white shirtfront, and, finding a small beetle making its laborious way up it, he plucked it off, crushed it between spatulate thumb and forefinger with a satisfying chitinous crackle, and tossed it away. He turned his attention back to Philip Broadbent. All that archness, that fey effeteness, was gone. Philip squatted on the ground, shackled hand and foot, filthy, bug bitten, unshaven. It was disgraceful how some people just could not maintain their personal hygiene in the jungle.

He glanced over to where the guide, Orlando Ocotal, was being held by three of his soldiers. Ocotal had caused him considerable trouble. He had almost made good his escape, which Hauser had only prevented by the most dogged pursuit. A whole day had been wasted. Ocotal’s fatal flaw had been in assuming a gringo, a yanqui, would not be able to track him in the swamp. He evidently hadn’t heard of a place called Vietnam.

So much the better. Now it was out in the open. They were almost through the swamp anyway, and Ocotal had outlived his usefulness. The lesson he would teach Ocotal would be a good one for Philip, too.

Hauser inhaled the fecund jungle air. “Do you remember, Philip, when we were packing the boats? You wanted to know what we were going to do with these manacles and chains?”

Philip did not answer.

Hauser remembered how he had explained that the manacles were an important psychological tool to manage the soldiers, a sort of portable brig. Of course, he would never actually use them. “Now you know,” Hauser said. “They were for you.”

“Why don’t you just kill me and get it over with?”

“All in good time. One doesn’t kill the last in the family line lightly.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Delighted you asked. Shortly I’ll be taking care of your two brothers, who are behind us in the swamp. When the last of the Broadbent line has been made extinct, I will take what is mine.”

“You’re a psychopath.”

“I am a rational human addressing a great wrong that was once done to me, thank you.”

“What wrong is this?”

“Your father and I were partners. He deprived me of my share of the loot from his first big discovery.”

“That was forty years ago.”

“Which only compounds the crime. While I struggled for forty years to make a living, your father bathed in luxury.”

Philip struggled, rattling his chains.

“How wonderful is the turn of the wheel. Forty years ago your father cheated me out of a fortune. I went on to a lovely place called Vietnam while he went on to riches. Now I stand to gain it all back and more. The irony of it is delicious. And to think, Philip, you brought me this on a silver platter.”

Philip said nothing.

Hauser inhaled again. He loved the heat and he loved the air. He never felt so healthy and alive as in the jungle. All that was missing was the faint perfume of napalm. He turned to one of the soldiers. “Now we will do Ocotal. Come, Philip, you won’t want to miss this.”

The two dugouts were already packed, and the soldiers shoved Ocotal and Philip into one. The soldiers fired up the engines, and they headed into the maze of pools and side channels at the far end of the lake. Hauser stood in the bow keeping an eye out.

“That way.”

The boats motored on until they came to a stagnant pool, cut off from the main channel by the lowering water. The piranhas, Hauser knew, had been concentrated in the pool by the subsiding water. Long ago they had eaten all the available food and were now eating each other. Woe to any animal that blundered into one of those stagnant pools.

“Cut the engine. Drop anchor.”

The engines sputtered off, and the ensuing silence was broken only by the two soft splashes of the rock anchors.

Hauser turned and looked at Ocotal. This was going to be interesting.

“Stand him up.”

The soldiers pulled Ocotal to his feet. Hauser took a step forward and gazed on his face. The Indian, dressed in a Western shirt and shorts, was straight and cool. His eyes showed neither fear nor hatred. This Tawahka Indian, Hauser thought, had proven to be one of those unfortunate people motivated by superannuated notions of honor and loyalty. Hauser disliked such people. They were unreliable and inflexible. Max had also proven to be a person like that.

“Well, Don Orlando,” Hauser said, giving the honorific an ironic emphasis. “Have you anything to say for yourself?”

The Indian gazed at him unblinkingly.

Hauser removed his pocketknife. “Hold him tight.”

The soldiers grasped him. His hands were tied behind his back, and his feet were loosely tied together.

Hauser opened the little knife and sharpened the blade on a whetstone with a quick zing, zing. He tested it against his thumb and smiled. Then he reached out and scored a long cut across Ocotal’s chest, cutting through the fabric of his shirt to his skin below. It wasn’t a deep cut, but the blood began to run, turning the khaki black.

The Indian did not even flinch.

He made a second shallow cut on the shoulders, and two more cuts on the arms and back. Still the Indian showed nothing. Hauser was impressed. He hadn’t seen such stamina since his days questioning captured Viet Cong.

“Give the blood a little time to flow,” he said.

They waited. The shirt darkened with blood. A bird screamed somewhere in the depths of the trees.

“Throw him in.”

The three solders gave him a shove, and he went over the side. After the splash there was a moment of calm, and then the water began to swirl, slowly at first, and then with more agitation, until the pool seethed. There were flashes of silver in the brown water like fluttering coins, until a red cloud billowed up, turning the water opaque. Tatters of khaki cloth and strings of flesh rose to the surface and bobbed on the chop.