Little Tiny Teeth (18 page)

“Actually,” Gideon said, “they do drink mate down here for stomach problems.”

“Well, all I know is, both times the guy’s completely out of it inside an hour. I had to let myself out. Once I came back the next morning at nine, and he shows up on the doorstep in the same clothes, all sleepy and dopey, with his hair all mussed and all. I mean, obviously, he’d been spaced out the whole time, probably never got out of his damn chair.”

This was the most wordy they’d heard Mel, and the most irate, and for a few moments there was silence. “You don’t get along very well with him, do you?” John asked.

Mel was indeed in a confiding mood, and there followed a list of grievances, foremost among which was that Scofield had assured him – had promised him – that his name would be on the title page of Potions, Poisons, and Piranhas, right up there with his own.

“So he gives us all the book, right? Big fanfare and everything. ‘Hot off the press, fine bookstores everywhere.’ So naturally, I’m excited, I look for my name and I don’t see it, and that sonofabitch tells me with a smile on his face, oh yes, sure my name’s there, see? Right on page Roman numeral three, down there with his faithful typist and the nice lady at the library. And he looks at me like I’m supposed to be grateful. I swear-” He folded his hands and sank back with a sigh. “Ah, what the hell. I don’t know why I’m getting so worked up. Don’t pay any attention to me. I shouldn’t have had that wine. I’m gonna hit the sack. Night, all.”

Duayne also heaved himself to his feet. “I’m off too,” he said. “I’m hoping for a better day tomorrow.”

“You didn’t have a good day today?” Phil asked. “I thought it was pretty cool, especially the shaman.”

“Oh, that was fine as far as it went, I suppose,” Duayne allowed. “Very interesting. But this is not the Amazon I’d expected. We’ve been here two whole days now, and I haven’t seen a single cockroach, not a one!” He shook his head. “Who would have thought?”

“Yeah, that is tough,” John said.

“I’m not talking about giant cockroaches, John, I’m talking about any cockroaches!”

“Well, cheer up, Duayne,” said Gideon, “tomorrow may bring another giant spider.”

Duayne’s expression lightened. “It is a beaut, isn’t it?”

“It sure is,” Gideon said warmly.

And Duayne went off to bed with a smile on his face.

The three men lay back enjoying the relative quiet for a while, and then Phil said, “So what do you think? Did Mel just give us a pretty good reason for playing nasty tricks on Scofield? He’s pretty upset.”

“You mean just because he didn’t get his name on the title page?” John asked doubtfully. “I mean, the spear and all? Isn’t it a little much? He got his money, didn’t he? And he got mentioned – acknowledged. What’s the big deal?”

“Don’t ask me,” Phil said, “I wouldn’t know about such things. Let’s ask the academic over there. Among the weird and wonderful types you associate with, Dr. Oliver, would a person go to such lengths to humiliate someone over a failure to provide proper attribution?”

Gideon smiled. “Humiliate, kill, maim, draw, and quarter.”

Not long afterward, Maggie came up and slipped into Duayne’s vacated chair. “Do you mind if I join you? The fellows” – with a tilt of her head she indicated Tim and Cisco, who were now vigorously snuffling something out of coffee cups, the visible effect of which was a lot of sneezing and hacking – “are getting a bit too empirical for my taste.”

“What are they snorting now?” John asked, disapproval etched in every line of his face.

“It’s cooked from something Cisco brought along. He gave me a sprig.” She held up a twig with three narrow green leaves attached. “He says the locals call it mampekerishi, not a familiar name to me. I’m guessing it’s one of the Gesneriaceae, but I don’t know the genus. I’ll check it later tonight. Possibly, it’s something new. Now wouldn’t that be nice?”

“What do they use it for?” Phil wanted to know.

“According to Cisco, the Nahua use it for headaches. And of course ceremonially, for visions. He says it gives you visions of eyeballs.”

“Eyeballs?” Phil echoed. “Why the hell would anyone want visions of eyeballs?”

“You’ve got me there,” Maggie said, laughing.

“What is it like?” Duayne asked. “Did you try it? Did you really see eyeballs?”

She shook her head forcefully. “Absolutely not. I’m not one of these ethnobotanists that goes around sampling all these things. Not anymore. I found out very early that they’re mostly quite unpleasant. Aside from the unsettling visions – and eyeballs would be among the least of them – there’s an awful lot of vomiting involved, you know. And defecating. And half the time, the drugs induce amnesia, so that you have no memory of the experience anyway, so what’s the point? No, I just want to classify them. And analyze them, of course, to see if there’s some valid medicinal use. Which there often is, I might add.”

After that they sprawled in their chairs, enjoying the cool, quiet night for a while until John suddenly coughed, said “Jesus!” and batted at the air in front of his face. “Now they’re smoking something again!”

“That’s just pot,” Phil said, sniffing. “That’s what you told them to smoke yesterday. They’re just taking your advice.”

“I know it’s pot,” John groused. “You think I don’t know what pot smells like? I’ll tell you what it is that gets me, though. Not Cisco, he’s a lost cause; he can’t help himself any more. But Tim – a nice kid, and he seems bright enough, good future in front of him-”

“He’s extremely bright,” Maggie said. “One of my favorite students.”

“And yet there he is, snorting or smoking or drinking every damn thing that comes his way. He shouldn’t be taking lessons from a guy like Cisco. He’s screwing up his life.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t go that far, John,” Maggie said. “A lot of ethnobotanists have their fling with the hallucinogens they study. I did. It’s appealing to many young people. And then, you have to give Tim a bit of leeway. He’s under a lot of stress right now. Arden has been giving him a hard time.”

Arden was Tim’s major professor, she explained, and his signature on Tim’s dissertation was all that stood between Tim and a Ph. D. – and the postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard that he longed for. She herself thought the dissertation was more than good enough; she and the third member of Tim’s dissertation committee, a professor named Slivovitz, had already signed off on it, but Arden was driving Tim crazy with it, sending him back to the drawing board again and again. And again.

Gideon thoroughly sympathized. His own graduate years were not far enough behind him to make him forget what the ordeal of the dissertation had been like. “That’s tough, all right. Will Arden ever go along, or is it hopeless?”

Maggie shrugged. “Oh, I suppose he’ll go along eventually. It’s not that his criticisms are necessarily invalid, it’s just that they’re… well, quibbles: style, punctuation, chapter organization, that kind of thing. But between us, Tim’s material is certainly no worse than what you find in the published journals. Personally, I think it’s a damn shame, and I’ve said so to Arden. But Arden’s his own man, and where I come from, what Arden says goes.”

“Arden’s the department chair?” Gideon asked.

“The director. Formally, we’re an institute, not a department, although we come under Biological Sciences. That is to say, we were an institute. As of September, we won’t exist anymore. The ethnobotanical faculty will be whittled down from three to one – that’ll be Arden, it goes without saying. The other prof, Slivovitz, saw the handwriting on the wall and lined up a job for himself down south.”

“And what will happen to you, Maggie?” John asked. “Where will you be?”

“Well, technically I’m still a contender for that one slot, but that’s never going to happen, and nobody’s pretending that it will. So, in answer to your first question, I’m out. In answer to the second, it looks like I’ll be moving down here.”

“To the Amazon?” Phil asked.

“To the Huallaga Valley, a few hundred miles south of here. Much the same jungle ecosystem, but a few hundred feet higher, so maybe not quite as hot and humid… but close. Arden’s gotten me a faculty appointment at his school down there. In the idyllic garden spot known as Tingo Maria.” It was too dark to read her expression, but Gideon heard her sigh. She wasn’t happy about the prospect. He wouldn’t have been either.

“That sounds like a terrific opportunity for someone in your field,” he said with as much enthusiasm as he could muster. “For an ethnobotanist, it must be paradise.”

He heard her chuckle, a single arid note, as she got to her feet. “All things considered,” she said with a side-of-the-mouth twang, “I’d rather be in Iowa City. Goodnight, all.”

“Well, Doc,” said John, watching her leave, “as far as your theory of aggravating Scofield goes, at least there’s one problem it doesn’t have.”

“Namely?”

John laughed. “Shortage of motives.”

Of the entire trip, this was the moment that Capitan Alfredo Vargas had most dreaded. He had managed, by and large, to keep it from his waking thoughts, but not his sleeping ones. For the past two nights he had dreamed the same dream, something out of some movie about Devil’s Island: with his hands tied behind him and wearing a blood-drenched, open-throated white shirt, he was being marched to the guillotine while six drummers, three on either side of him, kept up a dismal drumbeat that grew louder and louder and faster and faster until it shook him violently awake. Both times the drumbeat had turned out to be the hammering of the blood in his ears, and the wetness had come from the sopping T-shirt in which he slept.

Well, he was wide awake right now, but it seemed to him that the thumping in his chest was loud enough to be heard ten feet away – even the leaping of his shirt front with each beat must surely be visible – and his uniform, the best, cleanest whites he had, was already dark under the arms and at the small of his back, and spotty streaks were starting to show on the front.

Scofield had laughingly assured him that there was nothing to worry about, that nothing could possibly go wrong, but Vargas had heard those words before from others, spoken in the same carefree manner, and he had observed that disaster had a way of almost invariably following them. Scofield, after all, had never dealt with the volatile, hard-drinking, unpredictable Colonel Malagga, a hard case if there ever was one, and a greedy, vulgar grafter besides. And Scofield wasn’t the owner and captain of the Adelita, the man on whom all responsibility must ultimately fall. Scofield, he was sure, already had figured out some way to wiggle out of trouble if it came, leaving Vargas holding the ball, or the bag, or whatever the hell it was.

He stared ruefully at the haggard face in the mirror – why had he let himself get talked into this; was he crazy? His heart couldn’t stand it; he wasn’t a young man any more. Making a final adjustment to his cap, the good one with the gold braid that was hardly corroded at all, he murmured a final prayer to the effect that Malagga would not be on duty at the border checkpoint today, and stepped out on deck.

An hour earlier, at a little after four in the afternoon, after cruising most of the day, he had swung the Adelita north, leaving the broad, safe, familiar expanse of the Amazon for the narrower, endlessly winding, more oppressive Javaro River. He had quickly pulled into a narrow inlet to let off Cisco and one of the kitchen crew, the Yagua Indian Porge, neither of whom had papers that would pass inspection at the border. They would run up ahead through the jungle, and once the Adelita was safely past the checkpoint (by the grace of God) and out of sight, the boat’s dinghy would pick them up.

A few minutes later the ship had passed the rusting Republica de Colombia sign high on the right bank (which was what had started the perspiration streaming), and now they were pulling up and securing to the dilapidated pier, at the end of which was the falling-apart wooden shack that housed the Colombian military border police. At Vargas’s order, the Adelita ’s gangplank, a two-by-twelve board studded with crosspieces every couple of feet, was let down. The door to the shack opened.

El momento de la verdad. The moment of truth.

From the shack swaggered an overweight officer in mirrored sunglasses, fatigues, and combat boots, with a black baseball cap on his head and his hand resting on the heavy, black butt of the supersized handgun holstered on his belt.

Vargas’s heart sank. Malagga.

“ Buenas tardes, mi coronel!” Vargas effused, grinning away like crazy. “ Como esta usted?”

He extended his arm to assist Malagga in making the one-foot jump onto the deck, but Malagga ignored him, as he had ignored the greeting. Instead he let himself down, and without even looking at Vargas, held out his hand and rubbed his thumb and forefinger impatiently, abstractedly together.

“Pasaportes.”

Vargas had them ready, having collected them earlier. Malagga riffled through them without evident interest, although he occasionally looked up, apparently to match a photograph with one of the faces of the passengers, all of whom were assembled in the deck salon at Vargas’s instruction.

While Malagga shuffled the passports, two soldiers that Vargas had not seen before came aboard, one well into his fifties, wiry and sly, the other a pot-bellied, dim-looking, snaggle-toothed youth of twenty. That these were low-grade officers was evident from their ragged, stained uniforms. Both wore fatigue pants, but only the older one had a matching shirt. The other had on a dirty T-shirt with a picture of an Absolut vodka bottle on it. The older one was wearing filthy tennis shoes; the other had on flip-flops. Neither had shaved for a few days. Both had the same sinister, mirrored sunglasses and the big semiautomatic pistols that Malagga had.

But it wasn’t the guns that had sent an icy, new spicule of fear deep into Vargas’s gut, it was the small, friendly-looking brown-and-white dog they dragged with them on a leash. A drug-sniffer, God help him. He had worried that such a thing might happen and had expressed his concern to Scofield, but Scofield had laughed it off – he was a big laugher, Scofield was, always chuckling – telling him that the balls of coca paste were hidden in the sixty-kilo coffee bags for a very good reason: the coffee beans would mask their scent so that the dogs couldn’t smell them. But did Scofield know that this was so? Or was it only something he had heard? Vargas, in the clutch of his shameful greed, which he now so sorely repented, had not asked, but only eagerly accepted it as fact.