Hour of the Assassins (28 page)

The brief paragraph indicated that Dr. Felix Mendoza had been born in Lima and had studied medicine at the University of Munich. In 1973 he established the Mendoza Institute as the first medical facility for the natives of the Peruvian Amazon. The institute had been patterned after the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Ghana and had the enthusiastic support of the Peruvian government, which had publicly hailed Mendoza as “the Schweitzer of South America.” As a result of his charitable efforts for the Indians, Mendoza had been twice nominated for the Nobel peace prize.

“Have you got an atlas?” Caine asked, and Feinberg ran to the shelves and found it almost immediately. They jostled each other in their excitement, until they found the map of Peru. With a cry of triumph Feinberg stabbed at the map with his finger.

“There it is!”

His finger pointed at the dot marked
PUCALLPA.
It lay several hundred miles south of Iquitos, along the Amazon tributary called the Ucayali. Iquitos itself was situated near the juncture of the Ucayali and the Amazon rivers. For a long moment the two men looked at each other, their eyes bright with discovery.

Got you, you bastard! Caine thought exultantly. All the pieces fitted perfectly. Müller's anguished cry of “Peru.” Cohen's sighting of Mengele in Iquitos and subsequent death in Lima. The payments of Mengele and Sons to support the jungle hospital. The almost complete safety and isolation provided by the jungle hospital, founded in 1973, the year Mengele had gone to ground in nearby Paraguay. Mendoza's education at the University of Munich, Mengele's alma mater. Even the brazen similarity in the names: Mengele—Mendoza. He was dead certain. The hunt was over. He had found Josef Mengele.

Caine smiled broadly and then the two men were hugging each other, Caine wincing at Feinberg's embrace. Feinberg grabbed the bottle and raised it in a toast. Suddenly his eyes were brimming with tears as he pronounced the ancient Hebrew prayer of thanksgiving, with a bittersweet quaver in his voice: “Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who has preserved us and sustained us and brought us through to this time,” and he drank a long swallow of schnapps.

Caine raised the bottle to his lips. “Amen,” he said, his one good eye glinting green in his swollen face, like an emerald in a statue of Buddha.

For the moment it didn't seem to matter that he had stumbled across something called “the Starfish” and that it wasn't very friendly. It didn't matter that he didn't know what the game was, or who the players were. Or even that he was hotter than August in Death Valley. All that really mattered was that he had pulled it off. He had managed to do in seven weeks what five governments were unable to accomplish in thirty years. Of course, he had to admit, they hadn't been trying very hard. In his mind's eye he was already composing the cable he would send to Wasserman from Marseille: “Have located the missing parcel. Stop. Initiating Phase two.”

PART II

“Hasn't it occurred to you that if Cain had not killed Abel, it would have been Abel who would have ended by killing Cain?”

—Miguel de Unamuno

“The Gods are mighty; but mightier still is the jungle.”

—Amazonian proverb

CHAPTER 11

Sudden clouds extinguished the sun and, just like that, it was raining. The rain fell with an oily hiss into the earth-colored river. Large heavy drops shattered the placid surface into ripples. Where a moment before he could see the endless vista of jungle crowding the river-banks, now there was only a gray wall of water.

The engine of the riverboat droned monotonously as the boat glided upriver against a current so slow it was impossible to determine its direction merely by looking through the open windows of the salon. The salon attendant, his dark Indian eyes impassive as always, lit a kerosene lamp to brighten the salon and brought them a fresh round of Cristal beer, the brown bottles sweating in the humid jungle heat.

“Well, at, least the rain might keep the
moscas
away for a while,” Caine said, idly scratching a mosquito bite on his neck.

“Don't scratch. The slightest break in the skin turns septic in this climate,” Father José rebuked him gently and took a long pull at the warm beer. His large work-gnarled hand wrapped around the bottle was covered with millions of black spots, the vestige of countless
borrachudo
bites.
Borrachudos
were tiny poisonous flies that filled the air like clouds, and their stings were known to have driven men mad. Caine took another swig of the beer and placed his bottle on the table, where it stood trembling with the engine vibration.

“This climate would try a saint's patience,” he said irritably, wiping his brow with a forearm already swollen by mosquito bites.

“You're right about that,” Father José agreed, his consonants in English still retaining a faint echo of his native Dutch. “It's no accident that the Indians call the Ucayali,
Río de los Mosquitos
.”

“And yet you stay on here.”

The priest shrugged and drained his beer, signaling to the attendant for another.

“It's what God wants me to do,” he said simply. He was a big man with brooding brown eyes and a luxuriant black beard that cascaded down the front of his dirty gray surplice, which had once been white. “It's been almost fifteen years now,” he added, shaking his head with wonder. “When I first came to the Amazona, I thought it would only be for a two-year mission, but there was so much to do that I couldn't leave. Now I don't suppose I ever will,” he said sadly, for the moment his dreamy eyes filled with the memory of the lost windmills of Haarlem.

“Then why did you become a missionary?”

“Oh, that all goes back to when I was a small boy growing up in a village near Haarlem. When I knew that I wanted to be a priest, I began to read the Bible with an incredible intensity, poring over every word. And a single sentence of Christ seemed to burn itself into my soul: Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, you do also to me.'

“It was as if the words had been branded on me. I couldn't get rid of it. Finally I understood what God required of me. To help the least of men. Mind you,” he said, pausing to drain another bottle of Cristal, “had I known what I was letting myself in for, I'd have spent more time arguing with God about choosing someone else for the job.

“When I first came out here, it was to replace Father Antonio at the Franciscan mission near Requena. He had been killed trying to make contact with the Achual Indians, who are kissing cousins to the Jivaro. Not long after, an Achual tried to sell me Father Antonio's head. It had been shrunken to the size of an egg.”

“I thought head-hunting had been outlawed.”

“I'm afraid you don't understand,” Father José said gently, his voice almost lost in a deafening explosion of thunder. A sudden flash of lightning brightened the salon with harsh white light and a long rumble of thunder underscored his words like a drumroll.

“
Urumuha
, that's what the Indians call this kind of a thunderstorm,” the priest said pensively, almost to himself. The light of the kerosene lamp glowed like embers in his eyes. “You see, there is no law here,” he went on.

“The Indians are not like us. You and I are savages with a veneer of civilization, but the Indians lack even the veneer. They are simply savages. Even after fifteen years of living with them, I still have absolutely no idea how they think, or if they even think at all, as we know it. I never know on any given day whether they'll welcome me or kill me for no reason at all.”

“This river”—gesturing at the salon window—“covers more than distance. We are going upriver as much in time as in space. The Amazona is the last unexplored place on earth and with good reason. If you want to know how old the world really is, the Amazona will teach you. Make no mistake, señor, the jungle is more ancient than you can imagine and
civilization
is merely a word.”

“That sounds like a warning, Father.”

“It is, Señor McClure. To enter the darkness of the Amazona is to enter the darkness of your own heart,” the priest said, his dark eyes brooding, and Caine knew that he was really speaking about himself.

“Call me Mack,” Caine said. He liked that touch. It gave his cover a sense of reality. He looked out the salon window. The storm had ended as abruptly as it had begun. The hot, heavy sun was shining brightly on the brown water, the jungle steam rising over the trees forming a glistening curtain of rainbows. Once again they could hear the raucous chatter of the parrots, invisible in the greenery along the river.

“
Salud
, Mack,” Father José said, starting another bottle of beer, pouring the amber fluid down his throat as though he were filling a bottomless tank. Caine shrugged and followed suit. It didn't matter how much they drank; they sweated it out as quickly as they poured it in.

“Well, I don't know how much success you'd have with us civilized types either. I'm not exactly a Lenten Special, Father,” Caine said, slapping at a
mutaca
, a stinging insect almost twice the size of a horsefly. He felt the soft squashy body crack under his fingers and disgustedly flicked it away.

“Few of us are,” the priest said, a shy smile revealing itself amidst the dark foliage of his beard.

“I'll tell you the truth, Father. When I go into a cathedral and see starving Indians spending their last centavo to buy some silver medal to hang on an icon, it makes me want to puke. The Church has done terrible things all throughout history.”

“Terrible things,” the priest agreed amiably.

“You know, Padre,” Caine said, a broad smile breaking across his face, “I get the feeling you've had this conversation before. More than once, maybe.”

“More than once,” Father José answered with a grin of his own. “You'd be surprised how often people say the same things to priests. You know, to the Indios I'm a kind of white man
brujo
, a witch doctor of sorts. I sometimes wonder if white people don't think of priests in a similar way.”

“
Salud
, Father. Here's to witch doctors everywhere,” Caine toasted, the beer foaming over his mouth, giving him the momentary appearance of a slavering animal.

“
Salud
, Mack.”

Caine glanced out of the salon window at the unchanging landscape of river and trees. An Yagua fisherman stood in a dugout pirogue on the placid surface of the Ucayali, his bow poised and motionless. He released the reed arrow that was as long as he was, the line uncoiling behind it. As the riverboat drew abreast of the dugout, the Indian was already reeling in the fish, a great brown
paiche
, impaled and wriggling on the barbed arrow. The jungle steamed wetly in the sun, like a damp fire, and the green of the forest faded in the strong white light.

“Tell me about your plans,” the priest said. Conversation was as much a staple of life for white men in the jungle as
mandioca
root was for the Indians. Caine lit a cigarette and offered the pack to the priest, who shook his head and began fussing with an old briar pipe, the stem bitten and broken as though it had been gnawed by some animal.

“I'm a kind of advance man for Petrotex, a major oil company headquartered in Houston. We're interested in obtaining a drilling concession from the Peruvian government. As I explained to the Minister for Jungle Development, my job is to explore the site with an eye toward logistics, local conditions, labor supply, medical facilities, and what not before we actually make a bid for the concession. I have the minister's authorization right here,” Caine said, tapping the sweat-stained pocket of his khaki shirt. He hoped that he had sounded casual enough about his interest in “medical facilities.” He wanted the priest to be the first to mention the Mendoza Institute.

“Another rape of the Amazona,” Father José said pensively. “It's been going on since the days of Orellana and the conquistadors. Did you know that the Amazona contains more than a fifth of all the fresh water in the world and that it supplies about a quarter of all the oxygen on this planet?”

Caine nodded and the priest sat back in his chair with a satisfied air.

“It'll mean a lot of money for the people here,” Caine said defensively.

“It will also mean the rape of the environment and the destruction of the Indian cultures. All the Indios will be reduced to the status of
caboclos
, half-breeds, who have no place of their own, belonging neither to the Indian or the white worlds. Still,” the priest sighed, exhaling a thick stream of pipe smoke, “it doesn't matter. The jungle will win out in the end. It always does.”

“What can you tell me about medical facilities? Minister Ribiero mentioned something about a jungle hospital near Pucallpa,” Caine prompted. He had to get the garrulous priest talking about the Mendoza Institute, so that he could get a feel of what he was up against.

“You mean the Mendoza Institute?”

“I think that was it. Yes, that sounds right.”

“An extraordinary man, Dr. Mendoza,” Father Joséremarked. He put down the pipe for a moment and spit into his hand. Then he rubbed the tobacco-stained spittle over his hands and face. “Keeps away the mosquitoes and
borrachudos
,” he explained apologetically, his ascetic face gleaming with sweat and spittle. Caine glanced out of the window at the river, hoping he wasn't overplaying his interest. The gray back of a freshwater dolphin momentarily broke the flat brown surface of the river alongside the boat, its dorsal fin reminding Caine of a shark. Father José struck a match and relit his pipe.

“Do you know him?” Caine asked.

“Oh, yes. I've been to the institute several times. In just the five or six years he's been here, he has accomplished miracles. The Indios around Yarinacocha think he's a god. His word is law from the Santiago to the Ucayali.”