CHAPTER 12

If they were selling the milk of human kindness by the quart, Dr. Mendoza could have opened a dairy, Caine decided irritably. It was annoying, because Mendoza didn’t fit his expectations. Certainly no one who observed him working on the little Chama boy would have ever mistaken him for the infamous Mengele. The boy, his skin flushed and sweating, was about six years old. He had been carried into the examining room by the anxious father, a short, squat Indian, his face tattooed with red and black stripes, who still carried a blowgun. The Indian stood silently next to Caine, mechanically chewing a chaw of coca leaves as he watched the doctor prod the child. The heat was intense in spite of the electric fan that rotated its face back and forth across the room, like a robot programmed to answer “no.”

Inger removed the thermometer from the boy’s rectum and examined it critically. Mendoza poked the boy under the left rib cage and the boy squirmed like a wounded animal and began to cry.

“Thirty-nine point five Celsius,” Inger said, her violet eyes burning with something that could have been anger, or hatred.

“It’s going to be close,” Mendoza muttered irritably. “This fool has almost left it too late”—gesturing at the father. The Indian blinked stupidly, his blank eyes bulging out of his head, like frog’s eyes, and began to tremble. The white god was angry.

“The Chamas believe that disease comes from invisible poison darts directed at the victim by some enemy. So he probably took the boy to a brujo, a witch doctor, to exorcise the bad magic. By the time this fool brought him to us, it was touch and go,” Mendoza remarked to Caine, a faint trace of German evident in his English.

“Now the symptoms are not so clear; complications may have set in. In these parts fever can be caused by a thousand things. So we consider the symptoms,” he said, holding up his hand and counting them off on his fingers, one by one. “High, intermittent fever; blood pressure is quite low, ninety over fifty; respiration rate high and somewhat irregular, with signs of some bronchopneumonia, or pulmonary edema.”

“The urine shows signs of albumin,” Inger said.

“I don’t think we have time for a blood test,” Mendoza said and turned irritably to the Indian.

“Iai? He is eating?” he demanded in pidgin Chama, pointing at the child. The Indian anxiously shook his head and trembled.

“How many days?”

The Indian held up four fingers and acted out vomiting and diarrhea, with sign language.

“The key factor is the enlarged spleen. It’s quite tender. Here you can feel it,” Mendoza said, and placed Caine’s fingers on the boy’s abdomen. Caine could feel something swollen move under his touch and the child squirmed and screamed with pain.

“Forget the blood test. It’s falciparum malaria. We’re lucky he was brought here today. By tomorrow, if he had lived, it would have degenerated into black-water fever,” Mendoza said, staring at the Indian, who squirmed uncomfortably under his gaze, like a child, his face smeared with chocolate, who says he doesn’t know what happened to the cake.

“We’ll start him with two hundred milligrams of chloroquine,” Mendoza said to Inger, who prepared the syringe. Mendoza patted the child’s head paternally and turned him over. He popped the hypodermic into the boy’s buttock and told the father to take the boy and follow Inger to the infirmary ward, but the Indian stood there with his head bowed, waiting for the white god to punish him. The Indian’s hair was alive with lice and Caine felt his skin crawl and moved away from him. Mendoza reached into his shirt pocket and brought out a piece of sucking candy, which he offered to the Indian.

“Iai, eat,” Mendoza said in lingua geral, used between the Amazona tribes much as Swahili is used between the differing tribes of east Africa. The Indian looked at him blankly.

“Oarishama, good,” Mendoza tried, and smiled. The Indian put the candy into his mouth and smiled broadly. He had been reprieved. He picked up the boy and the blowpipe and followed Inger into the infirmary. As he left, Mendoza called out to Inger, his eyes twinkling with self-satisfaction, “And have Maria shampoo his head. It’s crawling.”

Now was the time to do it, Caine thought While they were alone, before the next patient came in. But suppose he was wrong. Suppose Mendoza wasn’t Mengele. In spite of all the clues it was impossible to imagine this dedicated man, who treated the Indians with such kindness, as Mengele, the ruthless exterminator of what he regarded as inferior races. Jesus, what did you expect? To find the place festooned with swastikas and barbed wire? he asked himself sardonically. But still, what if he was making a mistake? He would have to wait till he was sure, he thought, accepting a cold glass of papaya juice from Mendoza, who sat on the edge of the examining table.

It began to rain slowly and steadily, the drops clattering like pebbles on the corrugated metal roof of the bungalow. The rain was as warm as bathwater and had that same feel of dirtiness, of having been already used. A black and tan moth, as large as a hand, blundered against the window screen, its wings beating feebly against the wire mesh. The patter of the raindrops was swallowed by the cough of the diesel generator that supplied electricity to the institute, as it started up. For a moment the electric fan paused in its endless oscillation, the blades becoming visible, and then resumed its mechanical survey of the room, barely stirring the dead, humid air.

Was it possible? Caine wondered. It seemed incredible that he could be sitting here calmly sipping papaya juice with the man he had hunted over half the world—the man he was being paid half a million dollars to kill.

“You’re not a journalist, are you?” Mendoza asked him good-naturedly, but his dark eyes were masked with a trace of suspicion. Caine shook his head and lit a cigarette, the smoke tasting of disinfectant and vegetation and the earthy smell of the tobacco-colored rain.

“Because I don’t want the world to discover me the way they discovered Albert Schweitzer. They turned him into a celebrity, a commodity for public consumption, like some overdeveloped Hollywood starlet,” Mendoza said with disdain. “After a while the publicity-seekers and professional do-gooders outnumbered the lepers. Any publicity would only interfere with my work and contaminate the Indians. You’ve seen for yourself how hard it is to get them to give up on their brujos and bring the sick here. Had I seen that little boy twelve hours later, I wouldn’t have been able to save him. Fill this place up with white men and we’ll never be able to get them out of the jungle to where we can help them.”

“I’m just an oilman, Doctor. I’m here to establish medical facilities for our drilling crews. It can mean a lot of money for you. Money for equipment, drugs, even research, if you like.”

He dropped the word research like bait, hoping Mendoza would pick it up.

“What research?” Mendoza looked sharply at him.

“I was told by Father José that you were interested in studying tropical diseases.”

“Oh, that,” Mendoza said, his eyes troubled. “No, I don’t do research anymore, Señor McClure. And I don’t want your oil crews here either. Your people can only interfere with my work here.”

“That’s all I’m trying to do, too. Just my job, Doctor.”

A little Shipibo girl who barely came up to Caine’s knee wandered into the room. Completely naked, she gravely reached out a hand to Mendoza, who placed a piece of sucking candy in it. Her other arm had been amputated above the elbow. She put the candy into her mouth and padded out the door.

“Snakebite,” Mendoza explained. “Probably a fer-de-lance. The Indians tried to treat it with river mud, parrot feathers, and brujo chants. By the time we caught it, we had to amputate.” There was no emotion in his face and Caine was reminded of Mengele’s bleak Laboratorium, where healthy limbs were amputated as a matter of course. He would do it tonight, he decided, using the cover of darkness to get back to the camp by the lake, where he had instructed Pepé to wait for him with the lancha.

“Why don’t we discuss it tonight over dinner,” Caine said. “At the very least you might consider letting Petrotex make a financial contribution to your work.”

“As you wish, Señor McClure. But I’m quite firm about my policy of noninterference. I only saw you as a courtesy to Ministro Ribiero.”

“We’ll talk at dinner,” Caine insisted, trying Harris’s sincere smile again. He was beginning to get it right, he thought. Soon he would be like Harris and he wondered if Harris himself knew when he was being sincere.

“People come and go in the Amazona, like bits of debris in the river,” Mendoza said, and shrugged. It was almost a threat, Caine thought, and he was about to confront Mendoza right there and then, but didn’t because Inger appeared in the doorway, and he was certain now that the flame in her eyes was hatred.

They walked across the compound in the rain, Inger pointing out everything of interest, in a kind of breezy, nonstop chatter, as though she were the local Welcome Wagon lady. The rain flattened her short, boyish yellow hair and plastered her clothes to her skin, giving her the compelling appearance of a Rhine maiden washed ashore by the river—one of those legendary Loreleis who lure sailors to their destruction. Caine followed her slim, young figure to the lab, where a heavyset middle-aged German technician named Guenther sat peering through a microscope at blood slides. Guenther nodded gravely to Caine and solemnly explained his work, spoken in a monotonous tone, as though he were reading a legal contract out loud. He declined Caine’s offer of a cigarette, and when pressed, he indicated that the only thing he felt the lack of was a new centrifuge.

Inger introduced him to Helga, Guenther’s wife, in one of the bungalows set aside for special cases. Helga was a short, stout woman in a white nurse’s uniform who spoke only German. She had hard, piggy eyes, blotchy cheeks that reminded him of a figure in a Hals painting, a mouth that opened and closed like a trap, and Caine had little difficulty in picturing her as a matron in a concentration camp. Helga acknowledged Caine with a grim smile and he felt a prickle at the back of his neck. His certainty about Mendoza’s identity was beginning to grow.

Helga was adjusting a bottle of an aromatic amide solution of 2-hydroxstilbamidine set up for intravenous feeding into the arm of a teen-aged Yagua boy, the left side of his face, ear, neck, and chest covered with horrible sores from blastomycosis. The air in the hut was thick with the sickly stench of rotting skin. The boy barely glanced at them, never taking his frightened eyes off Helga, who busied herself with the butterfly clamp that controlled the intravenal flow as though she were rigging up some kind of white man’s torture device.

It was only after Inger had shown him everything—the bungalows and huts where the families of the patients stayed; the operating room; the storage rooms full of food supplies, drugs, and medical equipment; the generator shed; the kitchen and dining room; the vegetable patch and barnyard pens for chickens, pigs, and goats—that she took him to her bungalow.

“What’s in here?” Caine asked, his face shiny from the rain.

“This is my room,” she said, her violet eyes hooded like those of a cobra, and she began to unbutton her shirt. Caine started to back away from her, his senses bristling with the prickle of danger. To go to bed with her would be like mating with a barracuda, he thought. She had the same air of streamlined beauty and deadly efficiency, as if she were made of very fine, very cold steel. She took off her shirt and faced him, her small pointed breasts not much bigger than a young girl’s, the nipples erect like tiny daggers. She pressed herself against his wet shirt and kissed him, her sharp teeth gnawing at his lip as though she wanted to draw blood.

“Well, what are you waiting for? Take off your clothes!” she ordered harshly, her eyes almost phosphorescent in the humid midday gloom.

“I don’t think this is a very good idea,” Caine said, gently pushing her hands away, but he never got a chance to say why, because she slapped his face savagely, her eyes blazing with a hate-filled passion, her teeth bared in an animal growl. Without thinking, Caine slapped her back as hard as he would a man, knocking her backward and splitting her lip. With a cry she sprang at him, spitting like a cat and clawing at him with her fingernails. He grabbed her arm and using a hip-roll, threw her to the floor. She licked at the blood on her lip with a long, pointed tongue and her eyes glittered like sapphires.

“Yes, oh yes, oh yes,” she sobbed, and he was startled by the sudden knowledge that this was what she wanted. She liked it! She crawled over to him and began to lick his muddy shoes, her mouth a smear of mud and blood, then she tore off her wet jeans and panties and began fumbling with his belt buckle. He felt her biting his shoulder, as she pulled him down on top of her, her legs spread wide and her pelvis humping madly against his. He entered her moist, tight vagina that burned hot enough to scorch him, her rhythmic thrusting moving even faster against him, like a mindless machine running out of control. He pinned her arms to the ground, his body pounding into her as though he wanted to split her open.

“Hurt me, hurt me,” she gasped, sucking the rain and sweat from his neck like a vampire. He thrust deep into her, impaling her on his cock, realizing that this was as close to rape as he had ever come, their mating the ultimate savage battle of the sexual war.

“Fuck me, you animal, fuck me hard! You animal, you animal!” she screamed in time to his thrusts and she climaxed with a piercing cry. He pounded even harder at her slackening body, his cock stabbing into her, as though he were trying to kill her with it and when he came, it was with a desperate grunt that brought little sense of relief, drops of semen spilling out of her onto the floor between her legs.

They lay there for a long time, motionless as bodies on a battlefield, the only sounds their labored breathing and the clattering of the rain on the corrugated metal roof. Gradually he became aware of the weight of his body on hers, his nose buried in the golden thatch of her hair, which smelled like wet straw. He eased himself off her gingerly, his back still sore from the crash in Vienna.

There was a moment when the lulling sound of the rain, the whisper of the wind as it rustled the palm fronds, the sweet and sour smell of sex, and the sticky, jungle heat made him think of Lim and the sickly, cloying scent of Asia, of the soft times of loving when the war was only a shadow in the corner and all that mattered was the two of them sheltering from the storm, safe within each other’s arms. But when he looked into Inger’s cold, sparkling eyes, he knew that what they had experienced was not lovemaking, but something far more ancient in its mindless savagery. The priest had been right, he mused. To enter the jungle is to enter the primordial darkness of the heart.

Almost as if he had summoned it with his mind, a giant black beetle, the size of his palm, crawled out of a dark corner and across the wall, its shiny pincers open and threatening, its very existence a declaration that the Jurassic Age hadn’t ended, that hideous monsters still stalked the earth. With a sigh he reached for his discarded shirt, pulled a crumpled cigarette from the pocket, and lit it.

“Don’t think this means anything, because it doesn’t,” Inger said bitterly, getting up from the reed mat and lying down on her narrow bed. He sat beside her, exhaling the smoke as if it were a sense of regret and flicked his ashes on the floor.

“I’ll bet you say that to all the boys,” he said.

“You bastard!” she snapped, her eyes flashing. She tried to slap him again, but he easily caught her wrist in his hand.

“Don’t,” he warned, “or I’ll break it. This time it won’t be for fun.” And his eyes glittered as coldly as hers.

“You think you’re really something, don’t you?”

“Tell me, is it just me, or are you out to get the entire male sex?” He felt her wrist relax and he released it as if it were something dirty.

“You’re so damn smart, you figure it out,” she sneered.

“Let’s not pretend you didn’t want this. You brought me here.”

“Of course I used you. Who am I supposed to fuck around here? The Indians? I’d sooner do it with one of the goats out back,” she retorted, her face contorted with disgust. Perhaps some of that disgust was for herself, he mused. The sound of the rain was lighter now. Soon it would stop.

“No, it’s more than that,” he said finally. “You hated me from the minute you saw me. But why? Who am I to you?”

“My father is a brilliant man,” she said.

“Yeah, I’ll bet he’s a wow doing his Great White Father act for the Indians,” he said, egging her on, his senses alert and probing. Danger, as real and palpable as the black beetle, had entered the room. She had something to tell him if he could just needle it out of her.

“He’s more of a man than you are, old as he is. Someday the world will recognize his genius,” she said defiantly. “Take that magnificent diagnosis he did on that little Chama boy. It was my father who discovered that blackwater fever is a complication of falciparum malaria. He wrote a paper for Lancet, proving that blackwater fever is an antibody-antigen reaction resulting in intravascular haemolysis, but the fools refused to publish it. They said that his research methods weren’t rigorous enough, that his results weren’t conclusive! They wanted control groups. Control groups!” she said, her eyes blazing.

The rain had stopped and the outside air was thick with sunshine. A rainbow had formed in the sky over the compound, the colors rich and sparkling, like some giant snake curved over the jungle. The air steamed in the relentless heat and clouds of mosquitoes rose Like columns of smoke in the strong light. Pockets of mist lay over the mud puddles, white and gleaming, as though it had snowed during the storm.

“What’s wrong with control groups?”

“What do you know, anyway?” she retorted.

“Not much, I guess.”

“My father established the institute to help the Indians, not to experiment on them. He’s too kind a man for that. That’s why they worship the ground he walks on; that’s why we all do. He’s the finest man I’ve ever known. Hell, he’s the only real man I’ve ever known.”

“He seems to treat the Indians very well,” Caine said carefully.

“It’s not just the Indios, it’s everyone. He’s an incredible philosopher and medical researcher. He’s a linguist and an anthropologist. Someday his theories on the origin of the Indian races will revolutionize our knowledge of the development of man. He’s even an architect. He designed and built everything you see here. When he came to the Urubamba, all this was nothing but malaria-infested jungle. He did it all by himself. And that’s not all. He’s a zoologist who has classified dozens of new insect and bacterial species. Even in this place he’s brought us the culture of the world. He’s a brilliant violinist. You should hear him play Mozart and Schumann. It’s glorious,” she rhapsodized.

“What about your mother?”

“She died when I was a little girl. She was his mistress in—” she hesitated, “—in another place. But she wasn’t worthy of him, that’s why he never married her. That’s right,” she declared defiantly, thrusting her chin out as if it were a weapon. “I’m a bastard! My father didn’t have to take me in, especially with all he had to do, a busy, important man like him, but he did. He’s the most wonderful man in the world!”

“The way you talk about him, he sounds more like your lover than your father.”

“He was,” she said simply. Her words hung in the air between them like a curtain. He turned to look at her, the side of her face lit with a bright bar of sunlight, her hair a splash of gold in the drab room. She was lying on her side, her head supported on her arm, her expression as motionless and veiled as the Sphinx. She ignored the fly sipping at a bead of sweat in the hollow where her neck joined her breastbone. With her golden helmet of hair, her virginal, almost boyish face and flat chest, she might have reminded him of a young knight, an adolescent Parsifal, were it not for the damp triangle of curly, light brown pubic hair. For the first time he looked around the whitewashed room.

The room was as bare as a nun’s cell, with none of the usual feminine dust collectors. The furniture consisted of the narrow bed, a nightstand, chest of drawers made of cedar, and an old mahogany standing closet. The furniture had the heavy look that was fashionable in Europe during the thirties. A crude dressing table, mirror, and a chair completed the room. The bed and the closet stood on legs set into coffee cans filled with liquid disinfectant, the acrid aroma permeating the room. The whitewashed walls were bare except for a colorful glass display case of butterflies and a large framed black-and-white portrait of Mendoza hung over her bed. A gauzelike mosquito net was draped over one of the bedposts, like a shroud, and a single screened window looked out over the vegetable patch.

“Where was all this?” he asked.

“We were living in—” She hesitated, and he could have sworn she was about to say Paraguay. Then she shrugged, her thin shoulders looking frail and white in the bright afternoon light.

“We moved around a lot. After my mother—” She stopped and began again. “Anyway, there was nothing permanent in my life. There were no other children to play with. We were very isolated. All I had was my father.”

He could picture her as a small, solemn little girl, isolated on the finca in Pedro Juan Caballero, her only companion, a doll. How lonely it must have been for her in that gloomy house, populated only by that maniacal man and the brooding ghosts of old crimes, he thought, feeling the first stirrings of a kind of sympathy for her. But pity was expensive baggage. Dao had taught him that, he remembered. He wasn’t there to pity her. He was there to kill her only real lover, her messiah, he thought disgustedly.

“It was a hard time for my father. He must have been very lonely. Even as a child I knew that my father was a great man, but one whose genius had been rejected by the world, by blind fools who couldn’t hold a candle to him,” she said with a voice that seemed to come not from her, but from the shadows of the room. It might have been the black beetle that was talking. He could hear the croaking of the frogs. A macaw was squawking nearby with a voice that was almost human.

“One day, I must have been about twelve years old, I got into one of my father’s medical books with my coloring crayons. I ruined it,” she said happily, a faint Mona Lisa smile bringing a dimple to her cheek.

“I must have colored every page. My father was furious. I remember him shouting at me and I ran to the bathroom to hide. I suppose I wanted his attention. Even then I wanted him all to myself. It felt good somehow, with him pounding in fury at the bathroom door, screaming at me to come out. It was scary, but it was exciting, too. I could feel myself tingling and getting wet between my legs, but I didn’t even know what it was. I had no one to tell me what those feelings were all about.

“Finally he smashed in the bathroom door and stood there, panting. I was cowering on the floor, looking up at his red, angry face glaring down at me. It was terrifying and yet there was also that tingling sense of excitement. Then he grabbed me by the arm and he sat down on the folded-down toilet seat. He took off his belt and dragged me across his lap, pulling up my skirt. He tore off my panties and I was completely exposed and helpless. He beat me with his belt while I squirmed and screamed, but he wouldn’t stop. The pain was terrible, but it felt good too, somehow. I knew he was right to punish me and I loved him for it. Then I felt his hand fumbling between my legs and it felt wet and good. He slapped my thighs apart and I didn’t fight. I only wanted to please him. Then he took me, right there on the bathroom floor. And I loved it, do you hear? I loved it! I was proud that I could give pleasure to this great man, my father.”

“A great man,” Caine echoed, his voice a bleak murmur that she either didn’t hear, or ignored.

“That was how it all began,” she said with an air of quiet dignity, like that artificial solemnity that people tend to wear in church. “We were lovers until he sent me away to school in Switzerland. And even if he was my father, he was more of a man and a better lover than any of those fumbling, posturing Swiss boys we used to sneak out at night to see. Because I loved him! And he loved me!” she declared defiantly.

“Love,” Caine snorted. “Is that what you call it?”

“Yes, love!”

“Yeah, well, in my country we call it incest and statutory rape.”

“I knew you wouldn’t understand,” $he hissed through clenched teeth.

“You’re right.” He shrugged. “I’m far too crude to ever understand the finer points of child molestation. But there’s just one thing I don’t understand: Why are you telling me all this?”

“Because I wanted you to know what a wonderful man you’ve come to destroy.”

He grabbed her arms so tightly that she winced, and he stared intensely at her cold, perfect features. His eyes were like tiny green lights and at that instant he was ready to kill her. His body was desperate for movement, but he had to find out more.

“Where did you get that idea?”

She shrugged listlessly, as if the answer was self-evident.

“You’re from der Seestern, aren’t you?”

Her answer rocked his head back like a slap and his hands slid lifelessly away from her arms. The Starfish again! And all he could think of was how right Koenig had been about how it’s what you don’t know that’ll kill you. Because her words were his death sentence. That’s one for the books, he thought with savage irony: hearing your own death sentence pronounced conversationally by a naked woman.

It was proof positive that Mendoza really was Mengele, he thought. It tied Mendoza to Vienna and the Mengele office in Asunción, where he had found the memo. Not that it mattered anymore. Because it was a setup and he knew he’d never leave the institute alive. Whoever or whatever der Seestern was, they had been running him on a one-way mission. Because there was no way out. They had been expecting him! He had flown into the institute like an insect into a Venus flytrap. No, he amended the thought bitterly, looking with a sense of revulsion at her cold beauty, she was the Venus flytrap. He tried to joke his way out of it. He needed time, desperately.

“Actually, I’m from a company called Petrotex. We’re into oil, not fish.”

“We’ve been expecting someone, Señor McClure or whatever your name is. We knew it would have to be an outsider, a professional. As soon as we heard you were coming from Pucallpa, we knew it was you. From the second I saw you I was certain of it. That’s why I brought you here,” she said, her eyes sparkling with satisfaction.

“Will you kindly tell me what the hell der Seestern is all about?” he demanded irritably and made his move. He shoved her aside and started toward his pants, where the Bauer was, discarded on the floor near the door. But he was too late.

“That is something you and I will have to discuss, Señor McClure, or is it Foster now?” Mendoza said amiably from the doorway.

Mendoza wasn’t alone. Helga stood against the far wall, pointing the Bauer at Caine and smiling grimly, her mouth opening and closing like that of a fish. Caine slumped back on the bed in utter defeat. He was disgusted with himself for having been caught by lust, the oldest trap in the business. And this time there was no way out.

He couldn’t even try a bluff about his identity to hang on to the McClure cover, because of the tall, blond young man in jungle whites standing next to Mendoza. He looked familiar to Caine; he was one of the men in the BMW who had tried to run him off the road near Bariloche. That he recognized Caine was apparent by the calm certitude with which he pointed the barrel of Caine’s own Winchester at Caine’s chest, the muzzle opening looking as large as the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel.