The Babylon Rite. Tom Knox
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pot was unusual: a spouted jug in the form of two toads copulating. This was maybe all that was left of the Casinelli collection, yet she couldn’t bear to pick it up.
After that, she’d done her duty: weeping, occasionally, in her hotel room at night; giving her evidence to the police by day. Dan had called many times, very attentively, and she had been grateful to hear a consoling voice. Now, a week later, she was heading back to work. Determined but rattled.
Her hands trembled for a moment on the steering wheel of her long-term rented Hilux. She needed a break, and she definitely needed a cooling drink, a Coke, some water, even an Inca Kola, even if it did taste like bubblegum drool. Anything would do. Slowing down, she drove past a row of shanty slums, houses of reed and plastic, people living in the middle of nowhere.
It was barely more than a hamlet, and a pretty impoverished one at that. Adobe bricks lay drying on the roadside, like hairy ingots of mud. The settlement was surrounded by a cemetery so poor it had hub caps for gravestones, the names daubed thereon in red paint. She knew what to expect in a desert village like this: restaurants where the chicken soup cost twice as much if the chicken was plucked; dire and rancid tamales served on plastic plates.
But she had no choice. This was north Peru. It was always like this, everywhere, a satanic part of the world: no wonder the civilizations that emerged here had been so insane. The landscape was evil, even the sea could not be trusted: one day serving up endless riches of anchovy and sea bass and shark, the next offering El Niño or La Niña, and wiping out entire civilizations with drought or flood, leaving rotten corpses of penguins strewn across the beach.
The image of the burning garage filled her mind once more: she thought of her dead father and she didn’t want to know why.
‘Señorita?’ a dirty barefoot kid looked hopefully at her gringa blonde hair as she climbed out of the Hilux. ‘Una cosita? Señorita?’
‘Ah. Buenas …’ Jessica deliberated whether to give the kid a few soles. You were not meant to. But the poverty gouged at her conscience. She handed over a few pennies and the lad grinned a broken-toothed grin and did a sad barefoot dance and gabbled in Quechua, the ancient language of the Inca: Anchantan ananchayki! Usplay manay yuraq …
Jess had no idea what he was saying. Thank you kindly? Give me more, Yankee dogwoman?
It could be anything. She barely understood Peruvian Spanish, let alone this Stone Age tongue. Braving the boy with a half-hearted smile, she headed for the nearest cantina advertising the inevitable pollos.
Inside it was, of course, dingy: a few plastic tables, the whiff of old cooking oil. Three men in cowboy hats were sharing one dirty glass of maize beer served from an enormous litre bottle. The men glanced at her from under their hats, and turned back to the shared liquor. The first man poured a slug, and guzzled, and tipped a little on the dirt floor, making an offering to Pachamama, the mother bitch of the earth, with her dust that ate cities.
‘Agua, sin gas, por favor?’ Jess said to the tired woman who approached, her hand was scarred with an old burn. The woman nodded, loped off behind a counter, and returned with a bottle of mineral water. And a chipped glass. A chalkboard on the wall advertised ceviche, the national dish: raw fish. Jess shuddered. What might that be like out here in the desert? Rancid, rotten, decomposing: six days of dysentery …
Her cellphone rang. Daniel, again. Click. ‘Jess, you’re OK?’
‘Dan, I’m fine! You don’t have to keep ringing me – I mean, I’m glad you do but I’m fine.’
‘Where are you now?’
Jess squinted out of the little window, at the thundering fishmeal trucks heading Lima-wards. ‘Pan-American, about sixty klicks south of Chiclayo. I’ll be in Zana in an hour.’
‘OK. That’s good. Great. So, uh, do they know any more about the truck? The driver?’
‘No, not really.’ Jess drank a cold gulp of the water, refreshing the memory she would prefer to leave undisturbed. ‘The cops think, now, it may have been just some guy with a grudge. Apparently he was sacked by Texaco a week before, he was working off his notice. No one really knows. But Pablo paid the price.’
A sad brief silence. ‘Jesus F. Poor Pablo. Still can’t get over it, the museum was totally destroyed: all the Moche pottery, the best collection outside Lima!’
‘Yep.’
One of the men in the cowboy hats brushed past Jess, opening the door to the noisy highway. He turned, for a second, and glanced at her from beneath the brim of his hat. The glance was long, and odd, and obscurely hostile. The image of the eerie Moche pot, with the toads copulating, filled her mind. But she shook the stupidity away, and listened to Dan as he went on.
‘Jess, I do have, however, some pretty good news. It might cheer you up. We got results. From your friend the bone guy.’
Her alertness returned, even a hint of excitement. ‘What? Steve Venturi? The necks? He called you?’
‘Yes. He kept trying to reach you, apparently, but you were in the police station. So he called here and I picked up this morning and … well bone analysis confirms it all, Jess. You were right. Cut marks to the neck vertebrae, coincident with death. Made with the tumi.’
‘The cuts were made deliberately?’
‘Yes. No question.’
‘Wow … Just. Wow.’ Jess felt half-bewildered, half-exhilarated. Her theory was expanding, but the concept was still a little sickening. She pushed away her glass of water. ‘So we finally know for sure?’
‘Yep we do, thanks to you …’ Dan’s voice drifted and returned, with the vagaries of the Claro Móvil signal, across the vast Sechura.
‘Wait, Dan – wait a moment! I’ll take it outside.’
Jess stood and left a few soles on the table. She needed the fresh, dirty air of the Pan-American. The two remaining men in cowboy hats watched her depart, their gaze fixed and unblinking. As if they were wax statues.
Outside she breathed deep, watching the traffic: the SUVs of the rich, the trucks of the workers, the three-wheeled motokars of the poor.
‘Go on, Dan.’
‘This is it. The sacrifice ceremony really happened. You were spot on. They really did it, Jess. The Moche. They stripped the prisoners, lined them up, and ritually cut their throats, hence the strange cut marks on the neck bones. And then they probably drank the blood, judging by the ceramics. Extraordinary, eh? So the scenes on the pottery depict a real ceremony! I’m sorry I doubted you, Jessica. You are a credit to UCLA Anthropology. Hah. Steve Venturi actually called you his prize pupil.’
Jessica felt like blushing. She watched as a turkey vulture descended from the sky, and pecked at a fat-smeared piece of plastic, half-wrapped around a lamppost. A dog came running over to investigate; the animals squabbled over it. A shudder ran through her: surely another aftershock, from the explosion.
‘Jess, are you still there?’
‘Sorry, yes, I’m still here.’
‘There’s something else. Something else you need to know. More good news.’ His pause was a little melodramatic.
‘Dan, tell me!’
‘An untouched tomb.’
‘Huaca D?’
‘Yes.’ He paused. ‘And you’ll be there to see it, when we go in tomorrow. If you want, of course!’
Jess smiled at the endless desert. ‘Of course I want to be there! An untouched tomb. Yay!’
Saying her goodbyes, she closed the call, and walked to the truck with renewed vigour. Her moments of fear and self-doubt had passed; she was already dreaming of what lay inside the tomb. An untouched Moche tomb! This was a fine prize;