Hour of the Assassins (41 page)

“Did you find Dr. Mendoza?” Father José asked.

“I found him,” Caine said.

“How is he?”

“How should I know? I'm not his damned keeper,” Caine snapped. The priest looked at Caine with his sad eyes, then he looked at the river. Violet and gray clouds covered the sky over the river with a thick woolly blanket. The large
lancha
trembled with the throb of the engine. A light wind stirred ripples on the surface, where the deep current ran. Soon it would rain.

“You murdered him, didn't you?” Father José said, and looked back at Caine. It was not a question. Caine didn't say anything.

“My God, did you think that sort of thing can be kept quiet? The word has spread like wildfire through the jungle,” Father José said.

“Has the news reached Iquitos yet?”

“Not yet,” the priest admitted. He struck a match and lit his pipe. The smoke wreathed his face like a halo.

“Why did you wait till now, before bringing it up?” Caine asked. After all, they had been together on the river since Flor de Punga two days ago. The priest shrugged wearily, resting his chin on his chest His thick black beard covered the grayish cassock over his chest like a bib.

“I thought you were too weak. Besides, who am I to judge you? Judgment belongs to God. Besides, I didn't want to know.”

“No,” Caine said quietly. “You don't want to know.”

“How could you do such a thing?” Father José said suddenly, his face reddening, as though he were embarrassed.

“How could I not do it?” Caine retorted. “Dr. Mendoza's real name was Josef Mengele. Does that mean anything to you? Yes, I can see that even here in the middle of nowhere you've heard of the Angel of Death of Auschwitz,” Caine said, his green eyes glittering. “He was responsible for more human suffering and death than any man in the world. What's one death amid all that carnage?”

“One death is what it's all about,” the priest said.

“It doesn't do any good to talk about it. I've seen Auschwitz and I tell you Mengele wasn't fit to walk the earth. I'm not sorry about any of it.”

“But who nominated you to do it?” Father José asked. Caine shrugged and spat over the gunnel. His spittle was touched with pink. His gums still bled a little from where Rolf had knocked out one of his teeth.

“It just happened that way. Besides, I was the right man for the job. You said it yourself. I'm a hunter. God didn't create the jaguar to be a vegetarian,” Caine said.

“I should turn you over to the authorities when we reach Iquitos,” the priest said unhappily.

“Are you going to?”

Drops of rain with the size and force of marbles began to fall into the river. The surface of the river looked like a vast field of water flowers splashed up by the raindrops. A small waterfall cascaded over the edge of the canvas sunscreen under which the two men sat. Father José stretched his bony frame and sighed.

“‘He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone,'” the priest said, staring into the gray wall of rain. “No, I won't betray you to the authorities. But when, we dock in Iquitos, let's just pretend we never met.”

“In a way we never did,” Caine said, getting up. He walked to the prow of the
lancha
and just stood there in the rain. The raindrops smashed like bullets, soaking Caine's new clothes and molding them to his body. He had bought the cheap slacks and shirt for a few soles at the one tin-roofed general store in Flor de Punga, a tiny riverfront village. He had landed the raft there and caught a lift back to Iquitos with Father José, who was taking the mission
lancha
downriver to straighten out a delayed shipment of medical supplies, which were being held up by the customs office in Iquitos. Father José told him that it would take a lot of palaver and a judicious bribe before he would be able to get the shipment released.

The
lancha
was piloted by a young
caboclo
seminarian, who drove the boat day and night with the reckless audacity, if not the skill, of a Grand Prix driver. By the afternoon of the fourth day they were approaching Iquitos, about a half-day's journey downriver from the junction of the two great rivers, the Marañon and the Ucayali, which join to form the Amazon River. And Father José had waited all that time before confronting him.

The rain felt cool and refreshing to Caine. He was feeling much better. Maybe that was why Father José had held off talking about it. Out of a rare sense of delicacy, not wanting to confront Caine while he was still weak and shivering with fever. Well, at least it was out in the open between them, Caine thought with a sense of relief. Now he no longer had to pretend to be the oilman McClure for the priest. One of the real hardships for a spy is often trying to pretend to be less interesting than he really is. In fact, Koenig had once warned them about agents who deliberately courted danger out of pure boredom with their cover roles.

The priest had treated him with Lomotil, chloroquine, and penicillin. The medicine combined with canned food and lazy days of rest on the boat to bring Caine back into relatively good condition. At long last he felt that the nightmare was ending. Except for the Starfish. That was still running. For the rest all he wanted was to collect his money and C.J. from Wasserman and take off for Zurich. He wanted to make his dream about skiing in the Alps with her come true.

Father José came over and stood beside him in the rain. The priest's head was bowed and his hands were clasped behind him in the posture of a penitent, submitting himself to the flagellation of the raindrops. They stood like carved figures, rocking slightly with the motion of the boat. Rainwater ran down their faces in tiny rivulets.

“I lied just now about not judging you. I'm still judging you—I can't help it,” Father José said.

“I guess you're as human as the rest of us, Padre,” Caine said.

“Just tell me this, was it truly necessary to kill him?” Father José asked, his earnest gaze searching Caine's face.

“I don't know,” Caine said softly, his voice almost lost in the hiss of the rain. For an instant their glances touched and they both looked away.

“I think you found the darkness I warned you about, didn't you?” Father José asked.

“Yes, you were right, but there's something else. I think it's possible that killing Mengele was the first decent thing I've ever done in my life,” Caine said. “Maybe it makes up for … well, maybe it makes up for some of the other things I've done. I don't know. But when and if the time ever comes for God to judge me, I've got a few questions of my own to put to Him,” he added.

“We all do,” Father José murmured sadly.

The two men stood side by side for a long time in the cooling rain, each of them locked into his own private world of darkness and light. Finally the rain began to slacken and Father José suggested a cup of coffee, which they brewed on the little Primus stove under the sunscreen. They shared one cup between them as though it were a kind of communion.

They docked at Belén, a floating slum of small boats and shacks on stilts which formed the port section of Iquitos. Belén was built on a long, narrow mud flat joined by a ramshackle wooden bridge to the town built on a bluff overlooking the river. It was late afternoon, the tropic sun caught in the distant treetops like a giant yellow balloon.

Caine helped Father José tie the
lancha
to a rotting wooden pier that balanced precariously over the river. The air was pungent with the smells of mud and garbage and decaying fish.
Caboclos
swarmed along the wharf, laden with heavy reed baskets and clay water jugs. Day laborers were loading bananas and animal skins onto a rusty Booth Line freighter. Scores of pirogues and
lanchas
were beached on the mud flat and the air was alive with the cries of Indians and traders hawking goods. After the isolation of the jungle the sudden return to the world startled Caine. All the noise and vitality stunned him, and he felt more than ever an alien in the crowd.

Father José and Caine parted without
abrazo
, or even a handshake. They glanced briefly at each other and then the priest kind of nodded. Caine hopped onto the pier and walked toward the narrow wooden footbridge that joined the port to the town, without turning back. Yet as the Indians jostled and shoved around him while he crossed the bridge, Caine could feel the priest's dark-eyed gaze burning into his back.

Caine climbed up the muddy street to the Malécon, the old-fashioned promenade that ran along the bluff overlooking the river. At a number of places he had to walk around barricades of crumbled cement, where the rise and fall of the river had taken giant mouthfuls out of the walkway. Young couples and tradesmen strolled arm-in-arm along the Malécon, past Victorian buildings fronted with white tiles decorated with blue floral patterns, relics of the rubber boom around the turn of the century when Iquitos had been a thriving city instead of a sleepy jungle town. The air was redolent with the scent of decay from the port, characteristic of a city with a past more alive than its present. Caine turned off the Malécon and went into a large sidewalk café called the Caravelle.

Caine sat at the bar and ordered a pisco sour from the sweating Indian barman. The café was filled with the smell of cigarette smoke and the vinegar scent of
ceviche. Anticuchos
, skewered chunks of seasoned beef heart, were roasting over a nearby charcoal brazier. It was incredible how keen his sense of smell had become in the jungle, Caine thought as he stared at his reflection in the tarnished mirror behind the bar. He scarcely recognized the gaunt face in the mirror as his own. The sun had burned it to a reddish mahogany, covered by a coppery-blond stubble of whiskers. His skin was stretched taut over his cheekbones and his tangled hair badly needed cutting. Only his eyes hadn't changed. They were as cold and green as ever, only now they seemed larger somehow. He drank the pisco sour and ordered another.

A bright green-and-red parrot squawked from a cage at the other end of the bar. A stuffed monkey snarled at him from atop a branch nailed to a wall, next to a poster advertising Cristal beer. The monkey, the parrot, and him—they were all out of place here. For a second the taste of monkey meat was in his mouth again and he almost gagged. Maybe they should stuff and mount me on the wall too, he mused, and tried to avoid the monkey's glass eyes.

Overhead a ceiling fan slowly stirred the heavy air. The tables were filled with local tradesmen dawdling over their liquor, plus a few wide-eyed tourists. At a nearby table a red-faced dealer in animal skins, with an accent rich in the vowels of London's Chelsea district, was regaling the tourists with some story about how he had single-handedly captured a boa constrictor.

“The bugger must have run thirty feet, by God. Had a fair time wrestling him into the bag, I don't mind telling you. When he wrapped himself around my chest, I thought sure he was going to put ‘paid' to me. Fearsome thing, an anaconda. Tackle anything in the jungle, even a jaguar. I've seen 'em swallow a two-hundred pound
capybara
whole, I have. You wrestle a boa, you'll find out what the jungle's all about.”

“Weren't you afraid?” a well-dressed American woman asked, her voice tremulous with an appropriate note of awe.

“Not a bit of it,” the Englishman said. “You've got to treat 'em like a woman, show 'em who's boss. That's what I say.” He winked.

I'll bet that's what you say, Caine thought, and grimly drained his drink, the foam leaving a frothy mustache on his lip. At another table several perspiring Peruvian businessmen in dark, shiny suits morosely discussed the falling price of raw rubber. At the other end of the bar a local grower was bargaining with an American trader over a consignment of chicle. The Englishman tried to convince the American woman that there was a fortune to be made in shipping parrots to the States.

“Top dollar. Absolutely top dollar,” he guaranteed, paternally patting her knee and giving it a sly squeeze. Caine began to wonder why he had been in such a hurry to get back to civilization.

He spotted two long-haired American hippies in faded, patched blue jeans and T-shirts, morosely sipping from brown bottles of Cristal at a corner table. He ordered three cold bottles of Cristal and carried them over to the hippies. He placed the bottles on the table, as though he were paying an entrance fee, and sat down to join them.

“What's happening, man?” Caine said. One of the hippies looked disdainfully up at Caine, then he shrugged and grabbed one of the bottles.

“Ain't nothing happened in Iquitos since the rubber boom, Jack,” he said, and took a long pull at the bottle. The other hippie twitched nervously and regarded Caine with wide, vacant eyes. His nostrils were red and partially eaten away from cocaine. He sniffed a dribble of snot back into his nose and languidly reached for the third bottle, staring through Caine as if he were transparent.

“You guys hang out in Belén?” Caine asked.

“Who wants to know?” the first hippie said, thrusting his lip out belligerently.

“Just asking.” Caine shrugged.

“Just telling,” the hippie retorted with a self-satisfied grin.

“Suppose I wanted to move something and didn't want the local pigs to know about it, who would I talk to?” Caine said, and put a couple of hundred-sol bills on the table next to the beer.

“Talk to the Chinaman,” the hollow-eyed hippie said, reaching for the money with the same languid gesture. Caine planted his bottle on the bills and held it there.

“Where do I find him?” he asked.

“Import-export office, at the end of the Malécon, near the old Clube Iquitos. The big iron building with the fancy colonnade. Shit, man. Everybody knows the Chinaman,” the first hippie said.

Caine left them sitting there, arguing about the money, and stopped off at a nearby barbershop for a haircut and shave. He left the barbershop feeling pounds lighter and cleaner, his skin and hair gleaming like burnished copper in the brief tropic sunset. Insects swarmed around the ornate streetlights on the Malécon as darkness fell over the river. A waxy yellow moon hung over the jungle with the haunting face of a primeval deathmask. He found the building with the faded sign above the doorway, that read:
A. FONG.IMPORT-EXPORT
.