The Devil's Garden (19 page)

‘What? Why?’ I tried to see Lothar’s face behind Kanari’s head. ‘I don’t understand. What’s happening? What is—’

‘Let’s walk. It’s possible to get to the river through the jungle if we go past the washhouses. It’s not far. We just have to cut through. We need to go now –
schnell
– are you OK?’

‘Kanari won’t get through. He can’t walk. He’ll bleed to death.’

‘No choice,’ Lothar said. ‘They’ll come for him tomorrow and beat him to death – even if he lasts the night. But if we get him to a boat, then maybe he has a
chance. His brothers will take him down the river.’

‘Lothar, what is happening?’

‘Kanari double-crossed Cordero. He’s been taking cocaine money as well. He’s been telling some of the cocaine militias where the soldiers are. There was an ambush today on one
of the rivers. Two soldiers have been injured. Believe me – Lugo will kill him as soon as Cordero says it is OK. And he won’t do it nicely.’ Lothar shifted Kanari’s weight
and I felt his head turn towards me. ‘Lift him up more if you can.’

I re-gripped Lothar’s arm; blood and sweat like glue between us.

‘Where do we get a boat?’

‘We go through the jungle then I walk along the river-bank and get one from the jetty.’

‘In the dark?’

‘Yes.’

‘And if there’s a guard?’

‘Then I’ll be careful and I’ll be quiet.’

I did not think it possible that we would get Kanari out even had we daylight and ten more men. But I had moved beyond care. If we were caught, then so be it. Perhaps we would be arrested, I
thought, but still, in my heart, I did not believe they would physically harm us. And this time there would be more than a report – photographs, witnesses, names, newspapers, everything.

Tupki was reeling along behind us. We were passing the first hut.

‘Sole?’ I asked. ‘Kim?’

‘Together,’ Lothar said. ‘Kim came out when they shot the gun and we stopped her going back to the
comedor
. Nothing more will happen tonight. Kanari is not important to
them. Not really. And they are not going to think you are capable of cutting your way out to the river with him in this state.’ He leant back and looked across at me behind Kanari’s
head and for the first time I saw the whites of his eyes in the darkness. ‘It’s over,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. We leave tomorrow. We get Kim and Sole and Felipe –
if he wants to come – and we get out of here.’

V

The insect trill was like some great tinnitus. Lothar’s light swept the black. Fronds and leaves and twine lit up, white as fish bones in the darkness all around.
Sometimes there was space, a deeper blackness; other times the forest closed in and we stood a moment – isolated, hemmed, claustrophobic. When we stopped to breathe, a dozen creatures gorged
on our blood.

Lothar was ahead, his machete drawn, cutting a way through the undergrowth. We lurched and shuffled into a shallow dip. I felt Tupki’s support weakening further and the weight of Kanari
threatening to rip my shoulder from its root. He had given up tipping his head back and we were dragging him more and more. He groaned and sobbed. My face was smarting from a hundred scratches. I
cursed. Tupki murmured. Lothar hacked at the jungle. On we went: another step, another step.

I began to believe that both of them would die. I saw José and Mubb – waiting, day after day, for their father to return, until, understanding before his brother and suddenly a
five-year-old adult, José began the kitten game.

We stopped. I felt water thickening in my boots and I could smell wetness and rotting more intensely. Above, the fireflies vibrated back and forth in quick-shifting smears of light.

‘The shortest route is up there.’ Lothar came back towards us, his torch bright in my eyes a moment. ‘The river is just on the other side. But obviously we cannot climb. So . .
. So we must follow this stream down there a little way. It’s not good to be in the water. But we have no choice.’

‘How far?’ I asked.

‘Eighty metres.’

‘That’s not too bad.’

‘We have only come sixty metres since we left the washhouse.’

Lothar spoke to Tupki in a language I did not understand. Then he took off his head torch and handed it to the old man.

‘All kinds of
Scheiße
live in this swamp water,’ he said.

‘Caiman?’

‘Yes.’ We shouldered Kanari. ‘But at least we can see their eyes shining with the torch. It’s the other stuff that will kill us.’

The going was easier in the riverbed with Lothar on the other side; between us, we were almost able to lift Kanari off his feet. I became reckless with tiredness or shock or euphoria or fear and
I tried to hurry. But the water suddenly deepened and I sank to my knees and pulled all three of us down sideways in the darkness and the mud – thrashing, sodden.

Lothar cursed. Kanari was howling, his face half submerged in the filthy water inches from my own. I tasted mud. His cries were terrible. Tupki had loped back and was begging him to be quiet.
Lothar somehow covered his mouth in the darkness, muffling him. Something else was writhing in the water with us, churning against my legs. I struggled up. We bent to drag Kanari to his feet.

‘Ready?’ Lothar asked. There was no word of reproof. ‘Let’s keep going, then,’ he said.

We came at last to a narrow tongue of mud that spat us out by the deeper darkness of the main river. There was a beach of sorts further along.

‘It will take me half an hour to fetch a boat,’ Lothar said.

‘How are you going to get back along the river?’

‘Carefully.’

It was impossible to see – and I could not guess his expression.

‘Don’t move from here.’

And with that he was gone.

We sat down. Tupki rested Kanari’s head on his lap. I wanted to wipe my eyes but no part of my clothing remained that was not soaked.

‘I will look,’ Tupki murmured.

He shone Lothar’s beam around us in ever-wider circles. I did not understand at first. Then, across the bed of the shrunken stream down which we had come, where the far bank gave place to
reeds, he stopped. No more than forty paces away: twin fiery diamonds were glowing in the light; eerie and empty, low to the ground, the eyes of the black caiman. At such a distance, it was
impossible to tell if they belonged to some fifteen-foot leviathan or a mere hatchling.

We counted four. But even the near-futile precaution of placing them lasted no more than a few moments. For now came pouring out of the darkness, one by one, then dozen by dozen, a quivering
swirl of giant moths. Heavy-winged as bats, they flitted about our faces, swarming out of the night, landing on us as fast as we could swipe them off, licking at our skin like a thousand tiny
feathers. The light had attracted them and now they sought the salt of our sweat. Tupki extinguished his torch. I leapt up, swatting. I stumbled six paces in the darkness. They clung to me. I ran
in what I thought was a tight circle, fearing to stray, fearing to fall.

When at last I felt them almost gone, I called out. Tupki flicked his torch on again a moment. He had not moved. He was sat fifteen paces away, holding Kanari in his arms, moths still fluttering
all around his head so that it seemed grotesquely swollen and indeterminate. I walked back to wait beside them – the father and the son sat by the black water on the dark wet earth.

I

We hid the boat on the riverbank, the mists still curling over the water. Then we passed quickly through the milky light of the forest dawn and emerged like spies by the
washhouse; the walk, this time, less than ten minutes.

‘We need a story,’ Lothar said, ‘they will question us before we can leave.’

I glanced around. In fifteen minutes it would be fully light. I spoke quickly and softly. ‘I’ll say that I took Tupki back to my hut with Kanari. I cleaned them up as they asked. I
left them both in there. When I went to find them this morning, they were gone. I’ll tell them that I don’t sleep in my own hut very often – the Judge knows about Sole. Whoever
sees her first makes sure that she corroborates.’

‘Good.’ His sad grey eyes met mine a moment. ‘We pack up the expensive stuff and we leave. See you in the lab.’

‘One hour,’ I nodded. ‘Don’t let Kim go to the
comedor
if you get to her before I do.’

He touched his hat. Then, carefully, he held aside a tangle of the undergrowth and ducked beneath. He was going to go back for the boat and take it round to what was left of the jetty so that it
would not be counted as missing and cast unnecessary suspicion on us. He was confident that he would not be seen. If there was a guard, he would stop short and come back.

My plan was to walk back from the washhouse as though I had come down as normal to shower, as though I had taken no part in anything but love and sleep. I would steal a damp towel from the
laundry and wrap myself in that to go back. The main thing was to hide the clothes I was wearing in case the soldiers were already looking for me; they would not believe that anybody would have
spent the night in such a state – not unless they had been crawling through the jungle with a bleeding man.

We had arrived at Tupki’s house, half relieved, half despairing. Two of the oldest brothers had been woken and they had left immediately with an unconscious Kanari in his
father’s boat. By torchlight and in whispers, his mother and his sisters had swept through the rooms gathering all that they could carry, loading it into their second boat with Lothar,
hastening back and forth from the river in overburdened relays.

Meanwhile, in the grove of açai palms, we hung Tupki’s biggest lamp. And there we dug the ground – another brother, Virima and I – mutely directed by Tupki, his haggard
face streaked in the river’s mud, the filth of the snake and his own son’s blood. Close by, sat on a fallen log, José and Mubb kept silent watch – José pointing his
flashlight on our spades while Mubb lay resting in his brother’s thin little lap, looking out with wide infant eyes from his blanket.

When we pulled it out of the earth, the small metal box contained one hundred and ten American dollars, jewellery worth less than thirty, a man’s watch and a necklace of jaguar’s
teeth. Tupki placed these items carefully in a small purse attached to a body belt and handed them to Virima, who raised her T-shirt and wrapped it around her waist.

As we approached the rise of the bank, we became aware that there was too much light and noise coming from the river. Fear slowed our steps and sped our hearts. Tupki and I went ahead –
careful, silent, torch dark.

In a second, we understood everything. There were no soldiers but the brothers were back. I saw Tupki curl over beside me on the ridge, hands to his knees, tearless sobs rising from somewhere
deep within him. Kanari was still lying in the boat. He was dead.

I came out of the wash room and looked for somewhere close to hide my clothes. There was half a parting in the forest wall at the very furthest reach, past the two big sinks
that we used for laundry. Wearing my boots untied and wrapped only in two damp towels, I hurried that way. I eased through the gap, conscious of the exposure of my skin. Three or four more paces
and the shade gathered and deepened. Another half-dozen would do it – inside a hollow tree, perhaps. I stood on my laces, stumbled and looked down. The ground beneath my boots had been
recently dug, the covering of the leaves was much thinner, the colour of the earth red. I kicked a little at a root. Then I stopped. A cold feeling ran up my spine and hunched my shoulders. I was
standing on a shallow grave – barely that. The root was not a root but a dead man’s arm thinly covered in soil – a rotting hand, insects, fingernails.

II

In my hut, I dressed quickly. I had thought for a second that it might be Jorge. But then I realized that this must have been the business of the Boy and his associate on
the night that Sole and I had sat up listening to the squeaking of the cart. They had tortured the prisoner to death. And they had barely bothered to hide his body.

I hurried out into the clearing, glancing up the path towards the kapok tree, expecting to see soldiers at any moment. The door of Sole’s hut was locked. I called her name. No answer. It
was still less than an hour past dawn but already the heat was renewing itself. I considered going straight to the
comedor
but crossed instead to the lab as was our agreement.

Kim looked up sharply as I entered the dry room.

‘Have you seen Lothar?’ I asked.

‘Yes. He just knocked on my door looking like he had been in some kind of mud bath.’ She shook her head.

‘What did he say?’

‘He told me to get dressed and come here and to make a copy of everything onto the spare hard drive and then to wait for you.’ She puffed out her cheeks. ‘But the battery is as
low as it has ever been. It’s the photo catalogue that’s taking the time.’ She pushed back on the wheels of the chair. ‘The generators didn’t come on last night. We
can’t charge anything. The computer won’t last more than another half an hour. The satellite isn’t working either. What the hell is going on?’

‘Let’s sit.’ I backed out of the plastic screen and she followed me into the main area. ‘Have you been up to the
comedor
?’

‘No. I came straight here like Lothar said.’ She swung her legs over the bench. ‘What’s happening? Someone fired a gun last night and Sole says you went out
somewhere.’

‘Where is Sole now?’

‘I don’t know. She disappeared with the mud monster.’

I drew a deeper breath. ‘We’re leaving, Kim – today. As soon as we can. After we’ve got the PCR and the field scopes from the storage hut.’

‘No.’ Anger tightened her brow. ‘Why? No. I thought—’

‘Kim – Kanari is dead.’

The shock stilled her.

‘After you left, Lugo came back. They beat Kanari badly. I . . . I tried to clean him up. And I don’t even know why or what he died from . . . But he died – on the boat. His
brothers were taking him to a doctor.’

I began to tell her everything – about the violence, the trip to Tupki’s house and all that had happened there. I told her, too, about the fire on that first night – the Boy,
the white-hot rod. I told her that I believed the body of the prisoner was buried just beyond the washhouse. She listened in deepening silence, resting her head in her palms with her thumbs half
covering her ears. When I had finished, she asked: ‘Where will they go?’