Isvik (16 page)

We crossed the Rimac river, which was swollen, running brown and very fast. I knew the way then, for we were backtracking the route we had taken from the airport. ‘He was following us, wasn't he?' I asked.

‘Aye.'

‘Why? Has he told you why?'

To earn some money.'

‘Yes, of course. But who paid him to follow us?'

‘The other one, the man he was with. He doesn't know where he got his orders from.'

Directions for the great north-south coastal highway came up and suddenly we were on a dual carriageway that cut through the remains of a giant sand slide. I was doing over a hundred k.p.h. then through a miasma of mist, the Pacific glimmering opaquely away to our left and the light fading. ‘Stop at some nice convenient pull-in and we'll take leave of our friend.'

I pulled over and Ward and the Indian got out. There was a hot, wet wind, but no dust blowing. It was too damp. ‘
¿El Niño?
' Ward said, and the Indian nodded. ‘
Si, si. El Niño
.'

‘His name is Palca.' Ward handed him a ten-dollar note. ‘
¡Buen viaje!
' He laughed and clapped him on the back.

The Indian looked at the note, then at Ward. His face was impassive. It showed neither surprise nor pleasure. ‘
Momento
.' He jerked his poncho up, felt about in the pocket of his filthy jeans and producéd a screwed-up bit of paper which he handed to Ward with a few muttered words. Then he turned, and with a little gesture of farewell crossed the highway and headed back towards Lima, a small, shambling figure glancing back every now and then in search of a truck that would give him a lift.

Ward opened up the paper to reveal two tiny clay figures interlocked, the woman with her head bent over the man's huge phallic erection. ‘What is it?' I asked him.

‘Some sort of votive offerin', Ah imagine. Ah've seen this sort of thin' in the Mediterranean, but not as erotic.' He held it out to me. ‘Look at the self-satisfied smirk on the man's face. Good, isn't it? He said it was Mochica, from a grave south of Lima. It's typical of Mochica pottery – a lot of it is highly erotic. Ah've seen pictures of drinkin' vessels where the only way of gettin' at the liquor is through the penis, but Ah've never seen fellatio depicted or pictures of miniatures like this … Maybe it's just a copy. But if so, it's remarkably well done.'

He was staring at it almost lovingly. Then he turned and stood for a while gazing out at the Pacific. ‘Ah feel like stout Cortés, silent upon a peak in Darien.'

‘That's a long way further north,' I said. ‘And anyway it was Balboa.'

‘Ah know.'

He got back into the front seat and we started up the coast. ‘Ah don't like it,' he said at length. There was a long silence, night closing in fast. I switched the headlights on.

‘What don't you like?' I said at last.

‘He was just a driver. Ah should have grabbed the other one. Ye didn't notice him, did ye? He was waitin' fur us at the airport, a mean-faced little mestizo dressed in a pale blue suit. Ah didn't see him at first. He was standin' half-hidden among a group of American tourists.'

‘Where was this?'

‘In the baggage claim area. He watched us go through customs, followed us to the lock-up, then out to the parkin' lot. Remember Ah asked ye to go slowly at the start? He was running then to that old heap the Indian was drivin'. They were behind us all the way to the hotel.'

‘If he was following us,' I said, ‘why didn't he stay in the car?'

Ward shrugged. ‘Wanted to make certain we weren't bookin' in fur the night, Ah suppose, find out what our plans were. He was lurkin' in a doorway while Ah was grabbin' the driver.'

‘But why? Is there something you haven't told me?'

‘Such as?'

I hesitated. But what the hell, better have it out with him now. ‘Are you something to do with Intelligence?'

I would like to have been watching the expression on his face, having put the question to him so bluntly, but just at that moment I had to slam on my brakes for two gaudily painted trucks, one of them with
La Resurrección
elaborately painted in red. They loomed up ahead of me, travelling side-by-side at just over 80 k.p.h. and completely blocking the highway. I flashed my headlights and the one on the left gradually pulled ahead.

I heard Ward laugh. ‘Whatever gave ye that idea?' He brushed the question aside and I realised it had been silly of me to ask it. If he were Intelligence he certainly wouldn't tell me. ‘Ye have too vivid an imagination,' he said.

By then the faster truck,
La Resurrección
, had pulled over and I had a blurred impression of brilliantly painted pictures of Bethlehem, the birth and the Virgin Mary as I passed it. ‘It must cost them a fortune.' Ward was changing the subject and I let it go at that. Time would probably answer my question. Meanwhile, there was the more urgent matter of why we had been followed. ‘Who sicked those two on to us?' I asked.

‘Aye, who did? Yer guess is as good as mine, Pete.'

‘Gómez?

‘Ah'd imagine, yes.'

‘But why?'

That's what Ah don't know.' He leaned forward and pulled the map from the dashboard shelf, flashing his torch on it. ‘The first town we go through is Huacho.' He spelled it out for me. ‘About a hundred kilometres. There's a hotel marked. We'll stop there. Ah could do with a drink.'

‘Maybe we could get something to eat.' I slowed as headlights blazed, dazzling, out of the mist. A great mammoth of an American truck went thundering past, forcing me on to the dirt shoulder.

‘Pisco sour,' he murmured, settling himself on his seat and closing his eyes. ‘Ah'm sure lookin' forward to my first pisco sour.'

The sea mist was thicker now, the road worsening with potholes in places. Roadworks came and went, unlighted piles of debris looming suddenly. ‘What is pisco sour?' I asked him, but he was already asleep and I drove on to Huacho, wondering what sort of a man Gómez would turn out to be and why Iris Sunderby had broken her journey at Lima and driven up to Cajamarca. Was he really going to join ship as navigator? And if so, why had he paid those two to watch for us at the airport? What was the point of their following us?

I was still worrying about this when I pulled into the hotel at Huacho, the mist thicker than ever and my eyes so tired they felt as though they had been sand-blasted.

TWO

Pisco sour proved to be a local brandy whisked up with white of egg and the juice of fresh limes with a few drops of angostura bitters lying like dark bloodstains on the white bed of foam. I can't remember how many I had in the course of that meal, or what I ate. Ward was due to take over the driving and at the end of it I slumped into the seat beside him in a happy daze which insulated me from all sense of reality. I didn't care where I was going or what was going to happen to me. I just drifted away to the sound of the engine as we hammered our way up the Pan-Americana.

The rain hit us somewhere north of Huarmey, a solid wall of water lit by flashes of lightning. We were in desert country, the thick, cloying smell of fish oil from the port of Huarmey lingering in the car. There were oleanders and an untidy tumble of bamboo dwellings. The cloudburst switched itself off as abruptly as it had started, and the moon, peering momentarily out from an ink-black cloudscape, showed a coastal desert of pure white sand backed by low hills of chemical-green and violent reds, cactus everywhere and trucks parked on the dirt verge, most of them painted in livid crimson on white –
Optimista, Primero de Mayo, La Virgen
.

We rolled into Casma just after three in the morning, the stink of fish oil hanging over the port and an old adobe fort peering at us out of mist. The ugliness and poverty of the place is all I remember of it, and Ward saying, ‘Ah'll drive as far as Chimbote, then ye take over.' He sounded half asleep and an approaching truck was flashing its lights. The green of sugar cane showed above dry yellow stalks as we crossed another river bed, the sound of rushing water drowning the engine. ‘Light me a cigarette, will ye?' He fumbled a packet from the pocket of his anorak and I lit one for him with the dashboard lighter. ‘We'll need to get gas somewhere.' He drew on the cigarette as though his life depended on it.

‘Trujillo,' I said. ‘Are we all right till then?'

‘That's another hundred and twenty to thirty kilometres.' He was peering at the petrol gauge. ‘Should just about make it.'

Chimbote was a dreadful place, litter everywhere and smelling to hell of oil. Miles of poverty with modern adobe dwellings either being built or falling into ruin. I took over and we lost our way where a blackened adobe town sprawled over a hill above a steelworks. Corrugated iron, cardboard, paper and sand were in constant motion as a wind came in gusts off the Pacific. We found a solitary gasolene pump and got the owner of it up from his couch of rags in a kennel-like shelter of tin and packing cases that rattled and moaned in the fitful wind. Fish oil chimneys and workers' shacks, fish boats lying at the quays, trucks and oil tankers as dirty as the town; only the central square showed a glimmer of respectability, with a hotel and flowers; but still the all-pervading stink, and there were pelicans scavenging in the blackened sand between the shacks.

Dawn broke as we reached Trujillo, the only decent-looking town we had seen since leaving Lima. There was a good hotel, too, but when I braked to a halt in front of it and suggested stopping there, Ward shook his head, muttering something about our still having two hundred miles to go and the coastal cordillera of the Andes to cross.

‘What's the hurry?' I asked him.

‘Iris,' he mumbled.

I was tired by then. We both were. ‘Why the hell don't we stop here and get some sleep?' I think we were also suffering from jet-lag.

He sat up, rubbing his eyes and staring out at the mist that hung over the grey stone building. ‘Drive on,' he said. ‘We've got gas. No point in stoppin' now.'

But I'd had enough. ‘I'm stopping here,' I told him, switching off the engine and opening my door.

I was just getting out when his left hand closed like a clamp on my arm. ‘Shut that door!' He had swung his head round, glaring at me, his eyes hard as glass. ‘What's the matter with ye? Ye haven't done a hundred miles yet. Now get movin'.'

‘I'm staying here,' I repeated, my voice sounding obstinate, almost petulant. I don't know what it was, the mist, the way it hung, hot and heavy like a blanket, the weirdness and the exhaustion of the long night drive up the coast, but I suddenly realised I was scared. Scared of the country, scared of Ward. Most of all of Ward. I think it was then, with his powerful fingers digging like claws into my arm, that I realised how formidable the man was.

I turned away, no longer able to face the eyes that looked at me so coldly in the gleam of the dashboard light. He let go of my arm. ‘All right, Pete.' His voice was quiet, almost relaxed. ‘Off ye go.' He made a noise that was something like a laugh. ‘Got yer passport?' And when I nodded, he said, ‘Good! But ye'll need money. Quite a lot of money to get yerself back to England, if that's where ye're thinkin' of goin'.'

He let me think about that, a long, tense silence between us. He reached into his door pocket and pulled out the map. ‘Pacasmayo,' he said quietly. ‘No, San Pedro de Lloc. That's about another eighty miles. The Cajamarca road joins the Pan-Am a mile or so further on, at San José.' He looked at me, then nodded. ‘Ah'll take over then.' He returned the map to the shelf in front of him and leaned back in his seat. ‘Now fur fuck's sake drive on.'

Slowly I reached out to my open door and pulled it shut. I had no alternative. Maybe I could have had the hotel ring the British Embassy in Lima, but I was too exhausted, physically and mentally – particularly mentally – to face all the complications. We should have been over the pass by now and starting to look for the Hacienda Lucinda. Instead, we had only reached Trujillo and the mist had clamped down thicker than ever.

I glanced once more at the hotel, thinking of the comfort of sheets, the softness of a bed. Then I started the engine and drove back to where I had seen the Pan-Am Norte sign.

I suppose we were in that meteorological horror that is called an inversion, heat and humidity pressing down on us, numbing the brain and starting the sweat from every pore of the body. I didn't see the great walled city of Chanchán, only the mist and rain, the blur of the headlights and the windscreen wipers clicking endlessly across my vision. I had the strange feeling I was driving back in time, groping my way into a world of Inca and Chimú people, a world of great empires that built roads and temples and forts of mud on the coast and of cut stone in the Andes, stone that was dove-tailed to resist the trembling of its foundations when the earth quaked.

Finally the rain stopped. Miles of sugar cane, followed by miles of flat desert country, all seen through a damp haze so that nothing seemed real. Rice, too, in river outlets to the Pacific that were like oases of green in the waste of sand that fringed the coast. For a few minutes the sun glimmered through the mist to my right, a red ball just risen above the mountain. Then the mist closed in again thicker than ever.

Ward stirred and asked me the time in a voice heavy with sleep. No play-acting now, no switching of accents. He was still barely conscious and hadn't the energy to be anything but himself. I glanced at my watch, found I had forgotten to adjust it and read the time for him from the digital clock at the base of the instrument panel. It was 08.07. And then, more for the comfort of hearing my own voice than with any certainty, I said, ‘We should get in to Cajamarca some time between ten and eleven.'

He gave a snort. ‘We'll be lucky. It depends what conditions are like when we start climbin' up to the pass.' He reached for a cigarette and lit it. ‘Want one?' He seemed to have forgotten I had tried to walk out on him fifty kilometres or so back.