Isvik (23 page)

‘There's also a boat waiting for us down at Punta Arenas. We may find something wrong with her, items we need for overwintering in the ice. She's a long way from any source of supply and if there's something that has to be specially made, or is too bulky to fly out – a new engine, for instance …' They stared at each other for a moment, not exactly hostile, more two people measuring each other up. ‘We can discuss that while we drive, no? Have you settled the
cuenta
?' Her tone was imperious, deliberately provocative.

I saw Ward hesitate, then he smiled and nodded. ‘Aye, we can talk about it – while we're lookin' round the mud ruins of Chanchán.' He, too, was being provocative, quite deliberately making it a clash of wills, but still smiling as he told me to get the bags into the Toyota. ‘And don't let that briefcase out of yer sight.' He nodded to the case, which was under the table, and strode out.

The route we had taken through the cordillera from Cajamarca had brought us virtually into the outskirts of Trujillo and we had put up at a hotel in the centre of the city, all three of us more or less out on our feet. Now, in the brightness of a cloudless morning, the air clear after a night of rain and surprisingly dry, we started out thoroughly refreshed. Certainly I felt, for the first time, that sense of anticipation, of excitement almost, at the prospect ahead of me – a journey down the whole coast of South America, and then on to the very southernmost rim of the world. Even the digression up to Cajamarca now seemed in retrospect more like an adventure than something to send shivers down the spine.

But though my spirits were high, the shadow of that man, who liked to be called the Angel of Death, travelled with me, the memory of his good looks, his well-oiled virility, above all Iris Sunderby's apparent infatuation, constantly there in my mind.

Ward took the wheel as we left the hotel, but instead of heading south, he turned north, and when Iris Sunderby remonstrated with him, all he said was, ‘Chanchán. Ah'm bloody well goin' to have a look at Chanchán.' Adding, by way of explanation, that it was the old Chimú capital. ‘Pre-Inca and almost as powerful.'

Like Iris, I was impatient now to get on with the journey south and see the vessel that was to be our home, but when I saw Chanchán … It was incredible, so incredible, so lost in time that it did something to me – changed my perspective, my outlook, something strange that even now I barely understand.

To begin with it was vast, a huge mud city fallen into ruin, desolate, remote as the moon, and gloomy as hell, for a mist had rolled in, completely obscuring the sun. It was only a short distance off the Pan-Americana, all grey mud dust, the outer walls towering so thick, so solid, that, after the better part of a millennium, they were still standing eight or nine metres high, only the ramparts showing the erosion of time. It was virtually desert country, the irrigation channels blocked with debris, nothing that could be called a tree to be seen anywhere. Once inside those walls, it really was another world, more than fifteen square kilometres of streets bordered by the crumbling walls of houses, public buildings, cemeteries and reservoirs, some with bits and pieces of bone lying exposed where long-dead looters and grave-robbers had been at work. Looking back towards the Pan-Americana, the huge mud complex appeared ringed with peaked and desiccated mountains. Westward its bulwark was the Pacific. I could hear it, a steady, grumbling sound, like an earthquake.

I walked right through that fantastic ruin. It was the largest I had ever seen, split up into walled units, ten of them Ward had said, and when I reached the western limit of it I was face to face with the heaving bulk of the ocean. A big swell was rolling in, building waves like mountains in the mist and breaking with a thunderous and persistent roar.

There was a slight onshore breeze. I stood there with the salt spray and the mist damp on my face, and the vastness of it, and the antiquity of the desolate remains behind me, made all my life to date seem insignificant and of no account. I can't explain it, but it was as though I were transported outside of myself, on the verge of grasping the significance of being. In the atmosphere of the place there was something almost biblical, and yet this was a pagan world I had stepped into. How could it be so full of meaning? Was it the monstrous, heaving power of the waters confronting me, or was it my conscious awareness of the dead of a great city?

I don't know what it was, but I felt almost disembodied, ten feet tall and near to God. The impact was so great that the effect of it was to remain with me in the months ahead and give me strength when I most needed it.

I must have stood there for at least ten minutes, quite still as though transfixed. Finally I turned and started back, not conscious of anything, my mind still locked in on the impression the place had made so that I only vaguely heard a voice calling me. She was sitting in a gap in the outer wall, and as I approached her, she said, ‘You look as though you've seen a ghost.' She smiled. ‘What were you staring at?'

‘Nothing – just the sea.'

She was looking up at me with an expression of concern. ‘You are thinking about what lies ahead.'

I nodded. I was looking down at her, brown knees drawn up to her chin and the open V of her shirt showing the round of her breasts, even the pinking of the nipple circles. She patted the broken wall beside her. ‘Does it scare you?' I didn't say anything and she turned her head away, facing the sea again. ‘Well, it does me.' She said it in a whisper. ‘It's so vast. That's what I find disconcerting. It goes on and on and on – ten thousand miles of virtually uninterrupted ocean. And where we're going the winds come from right around the globe.'

I sat down beside her, both of us gazing out through the mist at the heaving, pounding water, the noise of it thundering in our ears, filling our whole world with sound. ‘He's coming with us, is he?' I asked her.

‘Ángel? Yes.' She nodded. ‘He'll navigate us down into the ice, and afterwards he will act as our guide.' And she added, speaking quietly as though to herself, ‘He knows where it is.'

‘You trust him?'

She hesitated. ‘No. No, I don't trust him. But he will take us there.'

‘Why?'

She gave a hollow little laugh. ‘Ah, if I knew that …'

I waited, but she didn't pursue the matter. ‘Do you love him?' I asked.

She turned on me then, but not with anger, her tone one of contempt. ‘Love! That is not something he would understand. You don't love a man like Ángel.'

‘What then? He fascinates you, is that it?'

Her mouth was compressed into a tight line. ‘It is none of your business. But yes, he is very attractive. Don't you feel it?' And she added slowly, ‘He is as attractive to men, you know, as he is to women.'

I wondered about that, why she had said it. ‘It's you I'm concerned about. I'm asking about you.' It was presumptuous of me, but I had to know, and now I had the opportunity. The atmosphere of the place, the mood between us, everything was right.

She nodded almost reluctantly. ‘I suppose. It is the way we are made. He is a devil, but you cannot help what the gods …' Her voice tailed away in a little shrug of the shoulders that was like a shudder. ‘And he is not my brother.'

‘Not even your half-brother?'

‘No.'

‘Then who is his father?'

‘How the hell do I know? I have barely seen him since my father died.'

‘What about Carlos then? A cousin, you said.'

She ignored the question, turning to me and asking why Iain had brought us here. ‘Why does he insist on Chanchán? All these mud walls – it is so depressing.' There was a pause, and she added, ‘He never does anything without a purpose. The play acting, those accents, the changes of mood – all is intentional I think.' She was looking at me again, waiting for an answer. And I thought, my God! We're going to lock ourselves inside the fragile skin of a small floating home, and all of us, three of us anyway, at odds and full of motives I didn't understand.

She nodded as though she had read my thoughts. ‘Looking at that sea, you have reason to be scared.'

‘I'm not scared,' I assured her. ‘Just a little concerned.'

‘A leetle concairned!' She laughed at her mimicry.

‘About Carlos?' I reminded her.

‘What about him? He is all right. The police will sort it out, and if they have arrested the boy, then he will be released as soon as they realise the body is not mine, but that of some poor little Dockland tart.'

‘But your handbag.'

‘My handbag? Yes, of course. It suddenly came to me. If they mistook the body …'

‘And the ring. Victor Wellington said there was a ring of yours on the dead woman's left hand.'

‘I got very wet.' She nodded, smiling. ‘Also I was a little frightened, and the water was filthy. There was nobody around. Nobody saw me, thank God. Poor little Carlos!' She glanced at me quickly. ‘Why are you asking about him? You think they will blame him?' She said it almost eagerly.

‘You recognised him when he followed us out of Greenwich.'

‘Of course I recognise him. He is –' She stopped there. ‘You ask too many questions.'

‘I only want to know what his relationship is to Gómez. You said he was some sort of cousin.'

She was staring at the sea again. ‘Per'aps he is. Per'aps not.' She shook her head, the dark hair glinting with moisture, her eyes turned to me and searching mine. ‘I can talk with you, I think.' I was to learn that her English always tended to deteriorate when her emotions took hold. ‘With Iain, no. I can't talk to him, not about private matters. I don't understand him. I suppose in a way I don't trust him. On practical matters, yes. He is a good man to have with us on this journey …' She shrugged. ‘You ask about Carlos. I don't know what that boy is, except he is something very close to Ángel. His mother is that Rosalli woman, I think. But who his father is –' Again the slight shrug of the shoulders. And then she got to her feet. ‘It is time we rejoin Iain and get going. We need to be in Lima tonight.'

‘Where is he?' I asked as we turned our backs on the Pacific and began working our way back through the maze of walls and rubble.

‘I left him examining what appeared to be the remains of a cemetery. He was armed with an archaeological book he had dug out of that bulging briefcase of his and was on his hands and knees sifting through a pile of discarded bones.'

We found him seated on a particularly high section of wall sketching the decoration of an inner chamber, and when I climbed up beside him I noticed his vantage point gave him a clear view of the Toyota. When we had parked there hadn't been another vehicle in sight. Now it had been joined by several cars and a coach was disgorging a gaggle of tourists. ‘I see you're not taking any chances.'

I said it more as a joke, but he took it seriously. ‘Would ye after what happened on the way up to Cajamarca?' I realised then that Iris had been right. It wasn't entirely his thirst for knowledge that had made him insist on driving north to Chanchán.

It was almost eleven before we left that great mud complex, driving back through Trujillo and on south across dull, desiccated country, a lot of it near-desert. The sun gradually ate up the mist until by the afternoon we were in a blazing oven under a burned blue sky. By the time we rolled into Lima it was dark and, though we had taken hourly turns at the wheel, we were all of us limp with exhaustion.

The following morning we flew to Tacna in the far south of Peru, crossed into Chile by taxi and flew on from Arica to Santiago. From there a delayed flight took us on to Punta Arenas where we arrived late in the evening.

I don't remember much about our arrival, only that the fourteen-kilometre drive from the airport was something of a nightmare with visibility almost nil in pouring rain mixed with flurries of hail and howling gusts of wind. It seemed bitterly cold after the heat of Peru. ‘Ah doubt this fuckin' place has even heard o' primavera,' Ward said in his foulest Glaswegian, and that just about summed it up.

The house we were in was solid Victorian in style, both inside and out, except that it had a tin roof. Between the gusts, the sound of rain on the roof and water pouring off it was continuous. The place was owned by an old ship's captain. He gave us coffee laced with Chilean brandy. ‘
Es bueno. Hara dormir bien
.' He had been at sea on the Chilean coast most of his life, running cargoes between the isolated ports of the southern waterways, a marvellous-looking old man, big gnarled hands warped with rheumatism and a long wrinkled face, little lines running out from his eyes, which were slitted as though he were permanently peering out into fog. His hair was thick and iron grey, and the rather drooping moustache was curved round the mouth to finish in a little tuft just below the under lip. The effect was that he always seemed to be smiling.

I was half asleep when he showed us up to our rooms, Ward and I sharing one at the rear of the building, which, in place of beds, had a double-tier bunk in the corner. The wind in the gusts seemed directed straight at the small casement window, which rattled and banged. At times the whole house shook.

When I woke the sun was shining, everything very still. Ward had already washed and was getting into his clothes. ‘Mornin'.' He was smiling. ‘Ah think we can regard this as being the start of our voyage. D'ye think it's an omen?'

‘What?' I was still half asleep.

‘Ye'll see what Ah mean when ye get to the bathroom. It looks right out on to the Strait, and it's flat calm, not a breath, the ships anchored off all standin' on their heads in marvellous reflection. And somethin' else –' There was an excitement about him that showed the boy behind the man. He looked so much younger with a mountain peak all covered in snow peering over his shoulder through the little window. ‘Come on, stir yerself. Ye'll find me down on the quay looking at her. She's right there, right in front of us, and she's rusty as hell. But she's a good-lookin' boat all the same,' he added as he went out.