The Economy of Light (3 page)

“Will you make me a list of what we’ll need to take?” I asked.

He nodded.

“I’ll take care of the plane and the motor,” I said.

“The boat it’s easier to work out when we get to Manaus. I know someone who will let us use his motor for fifty thousand cruzeiros.”

That was about a hundred dollars.

“Do you really believe that this...doctor can help me?” I asked as he turned to leave.

“If he’s still there,” he said. “That is the chance you will take.”

“Are you afraid?” I asked him.

But Genaro just looked at me, his face tight, his eyes hard and glittering. I was reminded of the
musselmanner
in the camp—those internees who had given up life, but were still alive. The walking dead. But in that instant when our eyes met, everything seemed to change.

I felt his fear like a spider crawling under my shirt.

I felt a connection with him.

I believed him.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE MAGIC OF DARKNESS

We left a week later and traveled light. I bought comfortable sneakers, much better in rain forest than combat or jungle boots, and stocked our first aid kit with extra medicine. I took cloroquine and Fansidar tablets, which would take care of all but the deadly strains of malaria, insect repellents, and various other medicines, including tablets to purify water, which was often tainted with feces. We also brought a few gifts to trade: cigarette lighters, two powerful flashlights, nails and needles, combs, a small tape recorder, cheap plastic watches, a few pairs of shorts and dresses, and a hammock. I took several wads of paper money, just to be safe, which I carried inside my shoe, in a money belt, and in my wallet.

And I also took a thirty-eight-caliber revolver.

We would fly first to Itaituba in an old Brazilian Bandeirante, which could hold fifteen passengers, and then on to Manaus. I had called an old friend who lived in Belém and ran a one-man commuter airline of sorts—actually, he was a glorified bush pilot. He made most of his money smuggling. He was an expert on gemstones, and he showed me three clearwater diamonds and a fist-sized amethyst crystal he was planning to sell. He had picked them up in Roraima from the
garimpeiros
, a rough lot, many with forged passports, who risked everything they owned to dig for the stones and perhaps become rich. The stones he bought from them were
brute
, or uncut, and he cut each one himself. He boasted that he was the finest lapidary in Brazil. Perhaps he was, for the stones, especially the diamonds, were beautiful, almost transparent, with a touch of blue; it was like holding cold pieces of the Brazilian sky. His name was Bob Pizor, and he was an American. He holstered a pistol on his hip and claimed that in Roraima and Porto Velho, where he did a lot of business, you needed a gun if you were going to survive. Yet Bob looked like the antitheses of an adventurer. He was tall and very thin. His shoulders were always hunched, as if he found being tall an embarrassment. He was balding, yet his hair seemed a patchwork flecked with gray. He wore black thick-framed plastic glasses and had uneven teeth that were so white they might have been caps. His full mustache exaggerated his thin face, which was an expanse of forehead, gaunt cheeks, and a cleft chin. He had been a salesman in Long Island. Airplanes were his hobby. He had a family, three children. And here he was in Brazil, enjoying himself hugely and complaining constantly of how guilty he felt about his misspent life. He was the most nervous and intense man I had ever met. He smoked four packs of cigarettes a day, drank too much, and never seemed to sleep. He also made a fetish of wearing a black suit and tie, as if he were still living in suburbia. But commuters in Sea Cliff, Long Island didn’t wear revolvers.

He picked us up at a private airstrip on a nearby ranch, and we flew around storms, past the black thunderheads, and the plane shimmied and rattled and shook as if we were in an old bus. Below was rainforest, uniform, a seemingly endless sea of evergreen. It had often been described as an ocean, and that was the effect it had always had on me. Looking down through wisps of cloud, one was always on the verge of panic, for the forest seemed larger than life and somehow as deep and as dark as any uncharted undersea shelf. Genaro sat near a window, too, on the other side of me, and looked down. He was silent, and I imagined that he was feeling awe, just as I was. But Bob started talking, perhaps to break up the silence that seemed to be percolating up from the jungle floor below. “All this jungle used to scare the shit out of me. But I just stopped thinking about it, since I’m in the air all the goddamn time over it. If anything went wrong, though, we’d be shit out of luck. Even if we could survive crashing into the treetops, who the fuck would ever find us out here? I’ve known of planes going down; never found a one.”

“What about your radio?” I asked.

Bob laughed. “Don’t worry about it. This old horse feels like it’s falling apart, but it’s better than anything in its class, better than anything like it made in the USA.” Without pause, he asked. “What are you doing with all that shit, anyway?” He meant our packs and provisions. “ You still looking for war criminals?”

“No,” I said, “just business.”

Bob nodded, as if that would explain everything. “You still doing work for the
Post
?”

“Yes,” I free-lance for them.”

“You back here to work or just fucking the dog at your ranch?”

“A little of both,” I said, feeling uncomfortable.

“And you’re completely full of shit,” he said. But he didn’t ask anything more, and he never said a word about the pemphigus that disfigured my face.

We landed in Itaituba, and Bob said he wouldn’t be more than a half-hour. We waited in the plane. I took a painkiller and watched planes taking off and landing, seemingly at once from opposite ends of the airstrip, for this was a gold-rush town, which might account for why Bob was making a stop.

Although Genaro was sitting right beside me, I felt absolutely alone, bereft. I had done nothing in my life but chase down a myth. Now, even when I knew that Mengele was dead, after I had
seen
his bones in the graveyard, I was still chasing the myth. Chasing it to death. I had no wife, no family. I shivered with the realization that I had suddenly leapt from all the possibilities of youth to the shock of mortality, as if the intervening wasted years had collapsed with the weight of my ennui, and here I was. Perhaps the stimulus had been seeing the jungle below me and trying to grasp its green infinities, and yet I felt I was slipping inescapably into its darkness. Even here in the noisy, gasoline-stinking afternoon, bright with sunlight, I knew that I had torn free of all that had been my life.

I felt as if I were back in the camps.

I was in pain. But that wasn’t it. I was feeling the magic of darkness, of the underside of things, of slipping past the rational and the traditional...even though this was a scorching, transparently clear and bright afternoon. I had let the jungle take me, just as I had let Mengele take me. I was of one mind again, child and adult.

I looked away from the death-defying acrobatics of the pilots in the hundred or so planes taking-off and landing and found Genaro staring at me.

As if we were both
musselmanner
.

As if we were both lost.

Damned.

* * * *

We were in Manaus by dusk. Bob had business to do in town and was going to stay the night. We took a taxi to a fleabag hotel we had both used over the years, a place just outside of the duty free zone. Manaus was probably one of the world’s largest outdoor bazaars. The streets were filled with elegant turn-of-the-century buildings adorned with French ironware; below were shops selling electronic equipment, watches, cameras, stereos; and street vendors sold their wares on blankets laid out side by side on the baking sidewalks. Music of every variety was constant, and at night neon and prostitutes turned the area into a honky-tonk whorehouse. In the center of town were skyscrapers, for this hole in the jungle was also a place of international commerce. Further out were shack cities and the modern, middle-class subdivisions called
conjuntos
; and on the edge of town were the new factories, mostly Japanese, that assembled radios and televisions, for there was no import duty on components here. The stench of chemicals pervaded the air of Manaus; it was as if Trenton, New Jersey had been transplanted in Eden, in the primordial forest. From where we were we could just see the blue and gold tiles of the
Teatro do Amazonas
reflecting the tropical sun like a jeweled helmet; it wasn’t a church, but an opera house built during the rubber boom.

Our hotel,
The Elegância
, had a charming old-world façade. It was four stories, stuccoed, and covered with creeping vine. Outside the door an old cabloco woman wearing very dirty clothes of very bright colors was selling parrots and wild animals in cages. The musky smell of jaguar was overpowering, even outside on the streets. There was a large male, just over five feet from nose to the root of his tail, in an inadequately small cage. It growled as we passed, a low vibration. I turned to look back, and it met my eyes. It was orange-tan with rosettes of black all over its body. It pressed its head against the bars, as if it could somehow slip past them through stealth alone.

What better guide to death than this cat by my door...?

We checked in, walked up two flights to three adjoining rooms. I felt tired and depressed. The room didn’t help my mood: cracked plaster on walls and ceiling, a bed with a white cover that looked grimy and yellowed, and there was no door separating bedroom from bathroom. But my window overlooked the streets and I opened it fully. The sounds below were faint and muffled, yet comforting.

I cleaned myself up and lay down on the bed.

There was a knock on the door. I said “Enter” and Bob walked in with a bottle of
cachaça
and two water glasses.

“You still drink this stuff?” he asked, sitting down on the bed beside me.

“No, I haven’t had a drink in some time.”

“Well, here,” he said, handing me a glass of the transparent liquid. “I got a big deal going down tomorrow. I’m nervous.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“Gonna sell the stones, and some stuff I picked up in Itaituba. Then I’m going back home.”

“What? I thought you loved it here.”

“Time to go home,” he said, pouring himself some more rum and then putting the bottle on the floor between his feet. “This is going to be a big shot for me, and I’m going to take the money and go back to the US of A. I talked to Tonie.” Tonie was his wife.

“You mean she’s going to take you back, after all these years?” I asked, incredulous.

“I’ve been writing her letters for the past year, and calling her, you know, begging her forgiveness. The real problem’s going to be with my kids. They’re teenagers, and from what Tonie says, they hate my guts.”

“You can work all that out,” I said. “But I must admit, it’s a surprise. It became dark quickly and the room glowed in blinking neon light from the barras below.

“I’ll get a job. I gotta do something. But we’ll have enough money, and I’ll try to make it up to her. She thought I was dead, did you know that?” He laughed. “And when I called her the first time, she couldn’t believe it was me, that I was down here, doing what I’m doing. I think now she’s got some respect for me, you know what I mean? But, you know, she wasn’t seeing anybody else. Christ, it’s been ten years. It was as if she was waiting for me or something.”

I nodded.

“So this is probably the last time we’ll see each other for a while...if at all. We should have a party or something. So now you want to tell me what’s going on with you?”

“There’s nothing going on,” I insisted.

“You’re sick, and you smell bad. Tell me. I got a bad feeling about you, like you’re dying or something. That’s it, isn’t it. You’re dying. But what the fuck would you be doing out here, and don’t give me any of that secret mission shit. You owe me at least an explanation. You still owe me one for that tip on that SS guy who you found in Uruguay. What happened to him?”

“He’s dead.”

“Who killed him?”

I didn’t say anything; I didn’t have to. We killed him in 1965. We were under orders from Mossad. He had been one of the executioners in Riga. I had bludgeoned him to death, and we put him in a trunk in Colombia Street near Carrasco. But killing him haunted me for years. I saw Mengele laughing at me as I hit the fugitive Nazi SS officer. Mengele supervised my dreams from that time on, for in that instant, I had become like him. I had become like the man who had killed my family. I had become the man I killed.

“Well,” Bob said, “be seeing you.” He picked up his bottle and stood up.

And then I told him that I was dying and going to see a witch doctor.

But I didn’t tell him that he might, impossibly, be Mengele.

Bob stood by the bed, shoulders hunched, and looked at me. “Well, if the doctors can’t help you, what the fuck else are you going to do? It makes as much sense as anything else. Wasn’t there some guy that was in the news some years ago, a healer who operated without instruments? Maybe that was in Mexico, I can’t remember.” He suddenly stopped talking, as if he had embarrassed himself. Perhaps he thought that I was delusional, yet he had been taken in, just for an instant, only because he could believe that I was very ill.

He left the room, unable to say very much, unable to look straight at me, it seemed; but returned an hour later with three women.

“What the hell is this?” I asked.

“One last party, remember?” Then he knocked on Genaro’s door, shouting, “Hey, Genaro, I bought you a present, open up.”

The women huddled just inside the doorway. They were obviously prostitutes, overly made-up and wearing very tight, low-cut dresses and high spiked heels. The one standing closest to the door was of average height, and her hair was blond. She was pretty, but much too thin and flat-chested for my taste, and she had buck teeth, just slightly bucked, but enough to cause her to open her mouth slightly, which gave her a breathy look, a caricature of a nineteen fifties pin-up. The others had dark hair and looked like
caboclos
: part white and part Indian. Their features were sharp and thick and strong, as if created by a woodcutter rather than an etcher; their bodies, although shapely, were compact, as if they were made of denser stuff than the other woman. The
cabloclo
women were quite pretty. Both were tall and had long straight black hair that was so shiny as to have been oiled; one of them had a hairline scar on her cheek, which added to her feral appearance. But all of them looked hard and bored, and angry that they had to be here at all, that they would have to lay down under Bob or me or someone else in a foul-smelling bed and be pounded and suffocated for those few minutes that it took to come.

Well, they wouldn’t have to worry about me. “Goddammit, Bob,” I said as he returned to my room. “Get these people out of here.”