Shadow Play (33 page)

He blinked and King came into focus, his electric blue eyes gazing up at Morgan. "You know what I want," he said. ' 'If you agree, this will end, Morgan. No more pain."

Morgan hung in his bonds, strangling and choking in his blood. Somehow he managed to get up the strength to spit blood in King's face.

"Cut him down," came the words.

Then cruel hands were wrenching at his ravaged limbs, making him groan and wonder numbly if King had changed his mind after all, and
—

He was being forced to his knees and hands, and someone dragged his head back because he was too weak to do it himself. Chavez was walking toward him.

"Morgan, I had wanted to save you from this," came King’s words.

He groaned in his throat and tried to stand, to push the brutal hands away that were holding him down. The fear inside him was obliterating all else. Not that. Oh, God, not that. Anything but that...

Not rape. Please, God, please...

"You know what I want, Morgan. You can spare yourself this humiliation. You know what I want."

"Bastard!" He hissed it, sounding like some dying animal. It made him sick. He started to vomit and couldn’t stop.

"You know what I want, Morgan."

"Go to hell!"

King turned on his heel and started back to the house, and Chavez was unbuttoning his pants and—

' 'Bastard!'' he roared.

And King kept walking.

He tried to fight off the hands, but there wasn't strength and he kept slipping in his own blood and vomit. He tried to kick, but they were grabbing his legs and
—

He threw back his head and screamed, ' 'Yes! Yes, god-damn you, V11 do anything! Anything! Is that what you want to hear? Just have mercy..
.
please. I
—/
beg you, not this.

I'd rather die, Randi. Please, for the love of God, don't let him do this to me!''

When King returned there were tears rolling down his face. He slowly removed his suit coat and handed it to Chavez. Then, stepping up to Morgan, he wrapped his arms gently around him, holding his weight against him as his starched, clean-smelling white shirt soaked up Morgan's sweat and blood, and he said to the others, "Get your goddamned hands off him or I'll kill you."

Chapter Sixteen

"Senhor Kane, can you not hear me? It is Chico, senhor. Can you not open your eyes?"

The pain in his head was vicious. The Indians had been right. Some fever was eating away his brain.

"Senhor Kane, please try to hear me. You have been unconscious for three days."

He forced open his eyes, wincing from the illumination of a candle somewhere close by.

Gradually, the surroundings came into focus. He stared at the adobe ceiling and
the walls where several long lizards scuttled with a flip of their tails toward the shadows.

Then the old man's face and shoulders came into view. Behind him, an Indian
woman gazed down at Morgan with worried eyes. Chico eased one hand under Morgan's
head and, pressing a cup to his lips, said, "Drink, my-friend. It is only a weak soup, but it
will give you strength."

He tried to turn his face away, knowing that every morsel of food was treasured by the
seringueros,
to accept it would mean someone would do without.,

"You must eat or you will die."

"Better me than you," he managed to respond.

"You have changed little," Chico said.

"In that case, you know I won't eat your food."

"It is the least I can do for you. I owe you my life. Now drink the soup and allow this guilt I have felt these many months to subside. There. Very good. The woman is a very bad cook, but it will fill your empty belly."

The soup was bitter, but he swallowed it without com- plaint. When he had finished Chico produced a cup of
masato,
which he pressed to Morgan's lips.

"This will dull the pain in your head."

Chico was right. Soon the discomfort had eased. The soup gave him strength. He was able to sit up and, leaning against the wall, study his surroundings, or what he could see of them in the semidarkness: an earthen floor, a few clay pots, several straw mats thrown into a corner. The smell of dirt permeated the air, and a moth fluttered in and out of the candlelight placed near his mat.

Chico Hinojosa was a
caboclo,
a man of Portuguese and Indian blood. King had hired him and his family five years ago while in Lima, Peru, promising that the old man, his wife, three sons, and a daughter would never know poverty again. Within a month of arriving at the plantation, he had watched his wife be beaten to death with clubs because she had failed to meet her quota of rubber for the day. And because one of his sons had tried to escape King by fleeing through the floresta, his daughter had been staked upon the ground, raped by no less than twenty men, and then doused in kerosene and set on fire.

"When I saw you standing there at the door," came Chico's voice, made raspy by the smoke he was forced to breathe every day, "I thought you were a spirit. They told us you Were caught in Manios and killed. Gilberto de Queiros waved before us a man's testicles and said they were yours."

Morgan grinned, then drank more of his
masato.
"There
are probably a few husbands who would like to take credit for that, but I'm happy to say I still have mine."

Chico's mouth parted in a smile. "Why have you re- turned?"

"Revenge."

"No one takes revenge on King. It is like spitting in the eye of a devil and expecting that to destroy him."

"There are ways. But I'll need help."

At that moment the woman who had left the hovel earlier shuffled back through the door. Behind her came one of Chico's sons, Teobaldo. He regarded Morgan with hostility.

^il
Dios,
Papa, what can you be thinking to hide him here?"

"Hello to you too, Teobaldo," Morgan said.

Ignoring Morgan's greeting, the young man demanded, "What is he doing here, Papa? If King learns he has returned and that you have taken him in, he will murder us all like he did my sister and mother and brother."

"Be quiet," Chico replied. "Our friend has been very ill."

"I can see that. Too bad he did not die. With any luck he will do so before
elpatrao
learns you have helped him."

"I am too old and sick to fear
elpatrao,"
Chico argued. "If he killed me tomorrow I should be grateful."

Morgan smiled his thanks as he accepted another cup of
masato.
His eyes on Teobaldo, he said, "I'm moved by your gratitude. As I recall, you were one of the men I was trying to protect when I was tied up and whipped. Perhaps it's your own conscience biting at you that makes you so angry."

"Do not speak to me of conscience." He spit at Morgan's feet. "We all admired you. The young men respected you. When you were cast out of
la casa blanca
for refusing King's demands, we all thought you a saint, a hero. But then you turned on us all and went back to him. What happened, was your lover's rod not big enough to satisfy you? Is that why you finally ran away? Or perhaps you have
an itch now and have returned because
elpatrao
is the only one who can scratch it!"

In one motion Morgan left his mat. Throwing the cup aside, he grabbed Teobaldo's shirt with his fists and slammed him against the wall. "You bastard, if you weren't Chico's flesh and blood I might kill you."

"Do you deny the facts, senhor?"

"Yes, I deny them. I never let him touch me. Never!"

"You must have done something to enamor him to you. When you escaped he was like a wild man, taking out his vengeance on every man, woman, and child. Show him, Papa, what he did to you because he knew you were friends with the American. Show him!"

Looking back at Chico, Morgan relaxed his grip on Teobaldo as he said, "What the hell is he saying, Chico?"

"It is nothing, my friend—"

Pushing Morgan aside, Teobaldo grabbed his father and turned him around. He raised his shirt, exposing his lacerated flesh. "I would not call that nothing, would you, Kane? And that was only the beginning. There were women and children who were butchered, all because you had touched their lives in some way."

Closing his eyes, Morgan sank against the wall.

"Our wounds have barely healed, and now you come back. Why? Why could you not leave us in peace?"

"You call daily beatings and raping and being slowly starved to death peace?" he answered.

"If we follow his rules, meet his quotas, and show him respect, he leaves us alone."

"That's all right for strong young men like you, Teobaldo, but what about the weak, like your father? What happens when he can no longer meet his quotas? That day is not far off. Will you stand by and preach tolerance when King is dousing Chico in kerosene and setting him afire or perhaps dismembering him and feeding his body to his own pet jaguars?''

"I suppose you have a better alternative," he sneered.,

"Perhaps."

"I want no part of it. And neither does my father. You are death to these people, Kane. You are death to anyone you touch."

"And King's not? How long do you people intend to let men like King rob you of the very thing that could make you all a hundred times wealthier than King ever thought to become on rubber? Who the hell gave him the right to come here and take the land belonging to these Indians, and in the course of doing so rob them of their pride as well? When are you going to stand up and demand what is right- fully yours, Teobaldo?
You
should be pocketing the profits from this rubber, not King."

"King has an army on his side. Have you forgotten? No one gets in or out of this place without his knowing it."

Pushing away from the wall, Morgan said, "I did." He dropped to the mat again, clutching his ribs as the pain shot through him. Chico hurried to dip him another cup of
masato
while he wiped the sweat from his face with his sleeve. "The trick is to get inside. You gotta get to King himself."

"But that is not possible. He surrounds himself with guards, even when he sleeps. You know that."

"Yes." Morgan swallowed. "I know that."

"Then you know there is no way in unless we were all heavily armed and moving together as a combined force."

"Yes."

Morgan watched as Teobaldo paced about the house. Finally he stopped and raised his eyes to Morgan's once more. "You know it is against the rules for us to communicate in any way with those from other sections, unless by King's orders."

' 'The only way to do it would be under cover of darkness."

"But the risk of being caught..." Teobaldo shook his head. "It would mean certain death."

"Every day that you stay here you're risking certain death, amigo. Think about it. Any day King could walk in
your door and point the finger at you for reasons as flimsy as not liking your looks, or because he's tossed a coin and you lose, or just because he's in the mood to see someone die. In hell's paradise, Teobaldo, there are no guarantees."

Teobaldo poured himself a cup of
masato
and took a drink. "Even if we could somehow gather forces against him, even if we could defeat him, what would be left for us?"

"Your freedom."

"Freedom. Yes, freedom. Freedom to do what? Return to Lima and walk the streets begging for handouts? Spending our days crouched in some squalid corner weaving baskets for merchants who pay us with bad milk or putrid bananas? And what about the Indians? Their tribes have been wiped out by interlopers like King who bring in their civilized diseases, or their whips. They have no families to return to."

"You remain here and continue what you're doing, Teobaldo. Only you'll do it without the fear of death looming at you from behind every tree. The people will pocket the profits, not King."

"Fancy words. You were always good with the big dreams, how you would someday be somebody. What are you now, Kane? Just a man twisted up with hate. A man intent on revenge. You had the perfect opportunity to begin again—you made it out, did you not? Yet here you are back, and you know and I know you will never leave here again. Never. For as soon as King discovers you, he will kill you."

Laying his head back against the wall, Morgan closed his eyes. "I am a dead man anyway. So what would it matter? You're right, of course. I made it out and discovered that the things I want most are beyond my reach.'' Imagining Sarah, he smiled, but then the smile faded as he looked at Teobaldo again.

"Dios," Teobaldo whispered. "You sound like a man who has condemned himself to die."

"I am a man with nothing left to lose."

"They are the most dangerous kind, senhor. They rarely care who they take with them."

"If that were the case, I would have gone straight to King. But some good must come out
of every battle, or what's the point in the fight? In your ease, it means freedom and a chance to build a new life. For me it will be the realization that I have at last accomplished something, if not for myself, then for someone else."

"Which brings us back to where we started. What would we have but one vast floresta?"

' 'Everything the floresta has to offer: cacao, peach palms, Brazil nuts, coffee, and cassava, not to mention the rubber. In Japura alone there are enough natural resources to make every man, woman, and child slaving for King very wealthy."

"You spout dreams, Americano. Do you not forget? You must have money to become a
patrao.
It takes many cruzeiros to employ good
matteiros
and
seringueros.
Then there are the ships to hire."

"What if I tell you there is a way for you to have the money that you need to begin your own plantation?"

Teobaldo regarded Morgan with skepticism. "I would say that the fever has eaten your brain. Look at us. We are poorer than those damn lizards on the wall."

"What if I tell you that you are standing on one of the richest gold mines in Brazil?"

"I would say you are loco."

"No," Chico joined in, "he is not loco." The old man, his legs crossed, sat on his mat and gazed into the candle flame as he said, "I have seen the many boats bring in more and more people to work, yet never have any of them been brought among us to collect rubber. I have watched rubber leave the plantation, yet King's wealth has grown far beyond what those shipments could have earned." With effort, he stood and walked to a corner of the room, dropped to his knees, and dug into the earth with his fingers. When he
returned to the light, he held a nugget in his palm.