The Devil's Garden (27 page)

‘Soledad is with the Judge,’ she said. Then she held up her heavy key in front of her forehead and blessed us both with its crucified skeleton. ‘The Virgin sent me
here.’

‘Estrela,’ Kim breathed.

‘Here.’ From somewhere in her clothes, she drew out her carcass knife and raised it up to me like a religious offering. ‘Go quickly.’

I glanced out into the clearing then pulled her inside.

‘Estrela, have you got a torch? There is a way to the river past the washhouse. Lothar cut through. Could you find it?’

She shook her head. ‘We go on the main path. There are many people. But the soldiers are busy. She must wear this.’ Estrela took off her shawl.

‘Kim, go with her.’

‘Tord?’ Kim asked.

‘I will do what I can. Don’t look at me like that. When you get to the river, go downstream and hide by the mud banks. Wait for me there. If I don’t come by the time it starts
to get light, pay one of the Matsigenka families to ride in their boat to Laberinto. Take Estrela, if she wants to stay with you.’

Kim’s eyes were still now but I could not read what was written there.

‘You are insane,’ she said. ‘I see it now.’

‘Go.’

She hesitated another second, looking back at Tord, and then she was out of the hut and on the steps and hurrying with Estrela across the clearing and towards the far wall of the jungle
beyond.

I wrapped up my soap and my notebook in a shirt. I took the last bottle of water. Then I closed the door on Tord.

VII

I limped swiftly through the shadows behind the
comedor
. The noise of the music had not abated and still there were voices and cries but now several of the upstream
huts were lit as well. A man was grunting; a woman urging him to finish.

Ahead, the Judge’s lamps were lit and it was quieter as I moved further away from the
comedor
. I began to hear a different music – a thin-voiced aria that seemed surreal and
outside of time. Close by, a tree had filled the night with the thick scent of its resin. The heat clung like a familiar.

I passed around the back of the Judge’s hut and rose silently up onto the porch from the far side. The lights from the other huts cast stretched squares of illumination either side of the
path where it ran back towards the
comedor
. I stood a moment listening to the music from within. Then I placed the master key in the lock, turned it quickly, stood to one side and threw open
the door.

‘Sole?’

My voice died in the stifling air. For there she was, just inside, startle-eyed from her sleep, sitting on the Judge’s reclining chair.

‘Sole,’ I said again. ‘What—’

But already she had leapt up and embraced me.

‘Dr Forle, I hoped it would be you.’ The Judge’s voice rang out. I swung around. He was sat upright on the bed, fully dressed but wearing a blindfold. In his hand he had my
best bottle of whiskey,which he was drinking through a straw.

‘I hoped it would be you because I am certain that this would have been the last hour of my restraint. Half the night I can survive – but no longer, man, no longer. What is
abstinence but death’s more presentable cousin?’

He lifted what I now saw was some kind of sleeping mask from his head and threw it down.

‘There’s no need to look like that. I have not touched her. You have my word on that – my word as a hypocrite.’ He sipped directly from my bottle. ‘As you can see,
I have not even allowed my eyes the pleasure. It has not been easy.’ He winced against the whiskey’s burn. ‘After all, I am a man, she a woman and this a bed – and none of
us would wish to deny our own nature for too long. That would be contemptible – wouldn’t it, Doctor?’

He laughed and took another sip.

‘I’ve been hiding here since the Colonel left,’ Sole said. Her eyes searched mine.

‘It was the only way to save her,’ the Judge rejoined. ‘She told me her news. But who would have believed her? And what difference would it have made to the animals out
there?’

‘What news?’ I asked.

‘In another hour, I doubt it would have made any difference to me,’ he continued. ‘Beauty drives men mad.’

There came the sound of voices raised and then the growl of machine-gun fire. Sole ducked down and pulled aside the edge of the shade so that she could see out.

‘What’s happening?’ I kept my eyes on the Judge.

‘There are men all around Lugo’s hut,’ Sole replied. ‘The door is open. People are going in and out.’

Softer, the Judge said: ‘You’ll have to stay with me. We’ll be quite secure here – from the soldiers at least. There’s nobody alive dares to enter this room
unbidden. Except you, it would seem, Dr Forle. Can I at least interest you in a drink? The quality is surprising.’

‘Don’t move. Stay on the bed.’

‘The more I see of you, Dr Forle, the more I like you.’ Across his eyes and around the side of his head there was a ring of paler skin where the mask must have been tightly drawn.
‘Shall I continue with the music?’

I glanced down to where Sole was crouching. I did not know what she had told the Judge, nor his allegiances. But her kisses had been real.

‘We have to get to the river,’ I said. ‘We have to steal a boat.’

She let go of the shade and looked up. ‘No – there’s a boat coming.’

‘For us?’

‘Yes.’

‘There’s a boat coming!’ the Judge cut in.

‘How?’ I ignored him. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘When she saw the soldiers bring you back, my mother gave a boy my money to fetch a boatman – someone who knows the back channels here. We were going to wait until they went to sleep
. . . But it’s just been getting worse and worse. And nobody sleeps.’

‘Your mother has gone with Kim,’ I said. ‘I told them to wait for us. We still have to get to the river somehow.’

She bent back to the window. ‘There are too many soldiers. We won’t get past.’ Without looking back up, she added: ‘They forced their way into my mother’s store.
They desecrated her shrine.’

Outside, the noise rose. Somehow the Judge had started his music playing again but quietly. I stood facing him, still uncertain. He raised an open hand so that I could see it and with a passing
flourish to the music reached out a cigarette from his box by the bed. ‘Shall I tell you the real problem?’

‘Do you have a gun?’ I asked.

‘I do.’

‘Where is it?’

‘In my other hand.’ He dipped his head to sip.

‘Use it now if you are going to use it.’

‘I will use it when and on whom I wish, Dr Forle. But don’t worry: I have no immediate plans to shoot you. I am not on any side.’ He smiled. ‘I am impartial. But the
struggle is real and very much alive here – and, as you see, it is as tangled as the forest itself.’

‘Will you give me your gun?’

‘No.’ He lit his cigarette. ‘I am also an anthropologist, Dr Forle. Amateur, maybe. But I know what kind of man you are beneath it all. Mendax.
Homo mendax
. Does she
know you yet?’

I turned my back on him and bent to watch outside. But it was impossible to work out what was happening from this distance. Fire torches flickered. They must have known that we were gone. Were
they looking for us? Or was this something else happening? Behind, the Judge’s voice assumed the deeper demagogic tone that I had last heard on the only day of rain.

‘The
real
problem, Dr Forle, is that a man cannot really see anything clearly until the moment of his death when it is, of course, too late. Only in death does the deception of our
little self-story-making end.’ I heard the sound of whiskey being sucked through teeth. ‘And suddenly the successes we have sworn by begin to wither on the boast, the love we gave we
see in truth was never really love, the qualities we claimed for ourselves we realize were but disfigurements masquerading, and everything we accrued through all those look-at-me years –
instantly worthless. Yes, finally, we see them for what they are: the lies – the endless lies we have told ourselves and lived by and told one another. But explain to me this, Doctor: to whom
– to what – are we lying when we lie to ourselves? What creature is it that lives inside? Of what are we so afraid?’

The smell of his cigarette smoke mingled with the smell of camphor.

‘Meanwhile, the stars do not hear us. Never have. Never will. So, here we are, Doctor: you and me and this woman and the rest of our species. We dare not know that which is within us and
we cannot know that which is without. We are marooned in time and space searching in the darkness for we do not know what. My advice, Dr Forle: sleep with a woman whenever the opportunity arises
and learn a musical instrument.’

There were fewer men around the huts now but the sound of automatic fire had become more frequent.

‘I wish you would have a drink,’ he urged. ‘You can have the bed if you like. I would be content to observe from the chair. There are a few hours of the night still to go. And
tomorrow promises to be exciting. I have wine if you prefer.’

I stood. ‘I need your gun,’ I said.

‘I know you do.’

I started towards him but just then Sole gripped my arm. I turned and bent down beside her again. A lone figure was coming up the path.

‘It’s Felipe,’ she said.

VIII

He stood in the dim light thrown through the doorway, a small man, I saw now – oddly still, stiff, straight – abandoned by his smile and without spirit.
Instead, he looked at me with ghosted eyes that could no longer express feeling.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry. I came as quick as I could but—’

‘What, Felipe? What is—’

‘Dr Forle, they’re burning the lab.’

His stillness seemed to colonize my own body. I could not properly understand the meaning in his words. I turned slowly back to face the room again. I saw the Judge wave as a king might wave and
Sole’s face suddenly the face of every human feeling.

‘Go with Felipe, Sole. Find Kim. Wait by the river.’

I turned to run.

The Judge called after me: ‘What can you save, Dr Forle? Not even yourself.’

IX

Pain rattled and stabbed at my back, ripped at the raw flesh in my boots. There were people everywhere – as if Machaguar had come to the Station not as the carnival
of lights but unmasked at last as the carnival of death. I ducked down and away, off the path, and ran the dark wall.

On the far side of the
comedor
, beneath the music and the chug of the generators and the human tumult, there was a new noise: an urgent liquid crackle that seemed to feed upon itself,
swelling and rising, as I loped on.

By my hut, I bent over and held to my knees – gasping, blinking. My eyes swept the clearing but could not consent to what they saw. Everything was illuminated in the febrile light of a
fire that had already grown tall in its greed. Soaring flames writhed and twined, yellow, orange and red, tulip-curled around each of the wooden sides. Above, thick smoke barely rose. The air was
acrid. The blaze would surely leap the gap to the forest. Men stood watching from the path, idle, with their backs to me.

My cheeks were wet. My lips tasted of salt.

Sole was there beside me. She held my face, pulling me towards her even as I resisted and wheeled away. Again and again she reached for me and I saw that she was screaming above the noise. I
could not hear. I thought her likewise mad and gone.

‘Lothar,’ she was screaming. ‘Lothar is in the lab. That’s where they were keeping him. They tied him to a chair. Lothar is in the lab. Lothar.’

Unheeding, through the onlookers, racing, I ducked lower and lower. But the heat sought to scorch my face whichever way I turned my head. I bent lower again, trying to advance
beneath the smoke. I shut my eyes and lay on the earth and crawled forward. Embers rained down, smouldering through my shirt, searing my skin. Pressed against the soil, I squinted up and it was as
if I were in a molten pit and the flames were burning towers all above me. White heat rushed up from the base of the inferno in fearsome draughts that bent the air and sucked down the sky with a
terrible hiss; and from within, I could hear timber cracking, beams falling, glass shattering, a thud, a cry. I crawled forward again. My brow was singed where I held my hand against it, my lashes
thick when I blinked. I pulled my shirt above my head. I ceased to believe the flame was hot, that instead I might stand up and walk the last few yards untouched, that I might reach out with bare
hands and prise away the wood where it flamed and cut him from the chair with my knife and put him on my back and bear him to the river and bathe and cool him in the water. But I heard only the
roar and spit of fire and death.

X

Inside Lugo’s hut, the lava lamp cast a purplish light. Beneath my bare feet, there was sawdust – for the blood that had been already spilt. In the corner, the
puma still snarled.

Lugo was asleep.

The distance from the door was five short strides. At the third, he stirred. At the fourth, he spun around and raised himself up. At the fifth he found his gun. But he should have shot me
without hesitation. For now I was over the desk and falling on him from on high, driving the carcass knife into the softness of the right anterior quadrant, precise and exact, just beneath the base
of the sternum.

For a moment he thrashed and beat and clawed at me. But I lay heavy upon him and hunched myself against these blows and worked only with the knife, seeking to move the blade upward to lacerate
the liver and puncture the gall bladder so that his acid and his bile would mingle with the copious blood already loose and swilling inside of him. He could not know the agony of the death that was
coming. The Judge was wrong. I am
Homo necans
. I am man the killer.

XI

Downriver, sudden shards of light and ethereal flames lit up the night and the water was amber and oily black. Smoke drifted the surface and hung in the trees of the
banks. The air was heavy with the smell of greenery burning.

I sat on my haunches inside the jungle wall. There were boats taking to the water. Voices called. The sedges stirred and the clay glistened beneath me. I waited.