The Orchid Hunter. Sandra Moore K.
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I asked.
“The international conference has every room in this place taken. We will have to share.”
“Then we should each get half our money back.” It was miserly of me—half would be all of eight dollars—but it was the principle of the thing. I didn’t appreciate being taken advantage of.
“He’s agreed to have dinner sent up.” He steered me back toward the stairs.
“Sent up? We’re not honeymooning.” I mentally cursed as slightly pornographic images starring my handsome roommate naturally coursed through my head.
His deep laugh sent a thrill down my spine. “Perhaps not, but I believe we may be together for some time.”
“What do you mean?” I stopped on the landing, leaving him a couple of steps behind and still at eye level. Nice and tall.
“Our generous landlord told me your name. Dr. Robards?”
“Yes,” I admitted warily, reluctant to give up even my stage name to this guy.
“I am Carlos Gutierrez, your pilot. Chico hired me to take you into the jungle.” He smiled, and his black eyes glinted many, many promises at me.
Thank you, Chico.
I slid out of bed well before dawn and silently dressed. Force of habit. I always check all my gear before heading out. At first light Carlos and I would be at the airstrip, taking off for the deep interior. I twisted the bare bulb in its socket to turn it on, then pulled out the number-coded paper I’d lifted from the Brain in San Antonio, memorized it and burned it in a metal ashtray. When the ashes cooled, I broke them up with a ballpoint pen.
Despite the crackling and the smoke, Carlos still slept soundly, as well he should after the heroically athletic sex he’d treated me to. He lay with one strong arm thrown over his bare stomach and the other tucked under my pillow.
I tipped the ashes into the waste can on top of the used condoms. Story of my sex life, I thought, looking into the can. I always get hot for somebody and go into it thinking, The sex is going to be great so maybe this guy is The Guy, and the next day have a helluva casual sex hangover. Maybe it was time to stop making this mistake. The ashes cast up a question mark of smoke. I went to check my gear.
All the essentials went into my day pack, and everything else would go into the canvas duffel bag, leaving me plenty of room for the orchids. Ordinarily I’d bring a newspaper with me for drying and pressing specimens. But von Brutten needed the Death Orchid alive, so I’d brought several cardboard tubes for storing and shipping. He’d also given me a handful of forged CITES certificates to help me get the orchid back into the States. I’d have to pass off the Death Orchid, if I found it, as a different orchid altogether.
That’s another irony of CITES. You can’t transport a specimen across international boundaries unless it can be identified as a known species. So if you’re like me, hunting down brand-new species, you’re outta luck. Or else you become a criminal, as I have. What a woman will do in the name of botany.
I settled in the chair and by the dim light took another look at Harrison’s notebook page Photostat. Marcus would probably figure out pretty fast what the blood on the original page really was, but my guess was I’d be in the jungle by then, out of reach of anything remotely resembling phone service. I’d just have to check messages next time I hit a city. Most of Harrison’s handwriting, shorthand and abbreviations I could decipher from three years’ practice working as his graduate lab assistant. The page took issue with Rudall’s suggestion of a close morphological relationship between Hypoxidaceae and Orchidaceae. Hypoxidaceae are bulb plants, like lilies and amaryllis. Put simply, in order for a plant to be chemically active, it needed, among other things, to have alkaloids, and Hypoxidaceae don’t. If orchids were like lilies, in other words, they’d be useless for any pharmaceutical company to pursue.
Harrison’s notes, calculations and research were all designed to determine whether his Death Orchid specimen could indeed be used by a pharmaceutical company. In layman’s terms, the answer was a whopping great yes.
A scribble near the margin, barely readable and in shorthand, caught my eye. Something about the orchid’s distinctively long column. That probably meant its pollinator, whatever it was, had a distinctively long proboscis. Rain forest relationships are ancient. Sometimes, more often than you might think, a single insect and a single plant have coevolved so that one can’t exist without the other. The bug drinks only the nectar provided by the plant and the plant can accept as pollinator only that bug. Or, like Scooter’s Phalaenopsis, the flower disguises itself as the bug’s mate so the males will be attracted to it. Darwin himself, after finding an orchid with a twelve-inch column, had hypothesized the existence of an insect with a twelve-inch proboscis. Turns out, years after Darwin’s death, someone found that very insect.
But the idea of saying “Open wide” and shoving a microscopic tongue depressor down a bug’s throat didn’t appeal to me.
Then another scribble: the Death Moth.
“Up already?” Carlos’s carelessly deep voice should have raised a shiver, but it merely annoyed me. I liked to work alone, in silence.
“Getting ready to go,” I replied, shoving the Photostat into my day pack.
“Where are we going today?” he asked.
I dug the medicine bowl out of my day pack and handed it to him. “I need to go where this was found.”
“Yanomamo,” he murmured. His forefinger traced the jaguar pawprint idly.
“And that narrows down my search to what? A million square kilometers of rain forest?”
Carlos grinned. “No, gatinha. I can take you to someone who can tell you exactly where this came from. A scientist.”
“Chico said you knew the area.”
“I do,” he said, flashing a charming smile that fell strangely flat. “I know every airstrip in the northern Amazon.”
Great. Now I’d have to risk exposing my mission to someone who just might deduce what I was after. Someone who might give Lawrence Daley the same information. This trip was getting more difficult all the time.
An hour later we piled out of a battered taxi and strode through a scattering mist toward the airstrip. A beat-up Cessna Caravan 675 squatted behind a sheet metal shed. At least the plane looked relatively new. Riding in it couldn’t be any worse than riding ten miles in a shockless Chevy over the pocked and jutted road to the airstrip. The runway, predictably, was a ribbon shaved out of the jungle, bounded by ever-encroaching forest currently being beaten back by a small army of machete-wielding Indians.
When we approached the shed, its crooked wooden door shoved open and a smallish Brazilian stepped out to yell at Carlos. Carlos started shouting back with equal verve in what I gathered was some kind of bargaining behavior.
Then a fresh-faced, good-looking young white guy bounded out of the shed, carrying a backpack, a tripod and a camera case.
“Oh no,” I said to Carlos, interrupting his shouting match and thumbing at the college boy as he joined us. “He’s not sharing my plane.”
College Boy pushed his wire frames higher on his nose and held his hand out to Carlos. After a shake, he launched into a spate of excellent Portuguese that, judging from Carlos’s raised eyebrows, surprised the pilot as much as it did me. The Brazilian stood back and grinned. Then College Boy reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of bills that could choke a horse.
“We had a deal,” I reminded Carlos. “You. Me. The plane. No one else.”
“Excuse me,” College Boy said in English, turning to me.
“What.”
His smile didn’t falter. “I’m Dr. Richard Kinkaid. I’m headed out to Ixpachia Research Station.” He shoved his glasses further onto his nose. “I’m an entomologist,” he added, as though that would