Books Of Blood Vol 6

HOW SPOILERS BLEED

LOCKE RAISED HIS eyes to the trees. The wind was moving in them, and the commotion of their laden branches sounded like the river in full spate. One impersonation of many. When he had first come to the jungle he had been awed by the sheer multiplicity of beast and blossom, the relentless parade of life here. But he had learned better. This burgeoning diversity was a sham; the jungle pretending itself an artless garden. It was not. Where the untutored trespasser saw only a brilliant show of natural splendours, Locke now recognised a subtle conspiracy at work, in which each thing mirrored some other thing. The trees, the river; a blossom, a bird. In a moth's wing, a monkey's eye; on a lizard's back, sunlight on stones. Round and round in a dizzying circle of impersonations, a hall of mirrors which confounded the senses and would, given time, rot reason altogether. See us now, he thought drunkenly as they stood around Cherrick's grave, look at how we play the game too. We're living; but we impersonate the dead better than the dead themselves.

The corpse had been one scab by the time they'd hoisted it into a sack and carried it outside to this miserable plot behind Tetelman's house to bury. There were half a dozen other graves here. All Europeans, to judge by the names crudely burned into the wooden crosses; killed by snakes, or heat, or longing.

Tetelman attempted to say a brief prayer in Spanish, but the roar of the trees, and the din of birds making their way home to their roosts before night came down, all but drowned him out. He gave up eventually, and they made their way back into the cooler interior of the house, where Stumpf was sitting, drinking brandy and staring inanely at the darkening stain on the floorboards.

Outside, two of Tetelman's tamed Indians were shovelling the rank jungle earth on top of Cherrick's sack, eager to be done with the work and away before nightfall. Locke watched from the window. Tiie grave-diggers didn't talk as they laboured, but filled the shallow grave up, then flattened the earth as best they could with the leather-tough soles of their feet. As they did so the stamping of the ground took on a rhythm. It occurred to Locke that the men were probably the worse for bad whisky; he knew few Indians who didn't drink like fishes. Now, staggering a little, they began to dance on Cherrick's grave.

'Locke?'

Locke woke. In the darkness, a cigarette glowed. As the smoker drew on it, and the tip burned more intensely, Stumpf s wasted features swam up out of the night.

'Locke? Are you awake?'

'What do you want?'

'I can't sleep,' the mask replied, 'I've been thinking. The supply plane comes in from Santarem the day after tomorrow. We could be back there in a few hours. Out of all this.'

'Sure.'

'I mean permanently,' Stumpf said. 'Away.'

'Permanently?'

Stumpf lit another cigarette from the embers of his last before saying, 'I don't believe in curses. Don't think I do.'

'Who said anything about curses?'

'You saw Cherrick's body. What happened to him ...'

'There's a disease,' said Locke, 'what's it called? - when the blood doesn't set properly?'

'Haemophilia,' Stumpf replied. 'He didn't have haemophilia and we both know it. I've seen him scratched and cut dozens of times. He mended like you or I.'

Locke snatched at a mosquito that had alighted on his chest and ground it out between thumb and forefinger.

'All right. Then what killed him?'

'You saw the wounds better than I did, but it seemed to me his skin just broke open as soon as he was touched.'

Locke nodded. 'That's the way it looked.'

'Maybe it's something he caught off the Indians.'

Locke took the point.'/ didn't touch any of them,' he said.

'Neither did I. But he did, remember?'

Locke remembered; scenes like that weren't easy to forget, try as he might. 'Christ,' he said, his voice hushed. 'What a fucking situation.'

'I'm going back to Santarem. I don't want them coming looking for me.'

'They're not going to.'

'How do you know? We screwed up back there. We could have bribed them. Got them off the land some other way.'

'I doubt it. You heard what Tetelman said. Ancestral territories.'

'You can have my share of the land,' Stumpf said, 'I want no part of it.'

'You mean it then? You're getting out?'

'I feel dirty. We're spoilers, Locke.'

'It's your funeral.'

'I mean it. I'm not like you. Never really had the stomach for this kind of thing. Will you buy my third off me?'

'Depends on your price.'

'Whatever you want to give. It's yours.'

Confessional over, Stumpf returned to his bed, and lay down in the darkness to finish off his cigarette. It would soon be light. Another jungle dawn: a precious interval, all too short, before the world began to sweat. How he hated the place. At least he hadn't touched any of the Indians; hadn't even been within breathing distance of them. Whatever infection they'd passed on to Cherrick he could surely not be tainted. In less than forty-eight hours he would be away to Santarem, and then on to some city, any city, where the tribe could never follow. He'd already done his penance, hadn't he? Paid for his greed and his arrogance with the rot in his abdomen and the terrors he knew he would never quite shake off again. Let that be punishment enough, he prayed, and slipped, before the monkeys began to call up the day, into a spoiler's sleep.

A gem-backed beetle, trapped beneath Stumpfs mosquito net, hummed around in diminishing circles, looking for some way out. It could find none. Eventually, exhausted by the search, it hovered over the sleeping man, then landed on his forehead. There it wandered, drinking at the pores. Beneath its imperceptible tread, Stumpf s skin opened and broke into a trail of tiny wounds.

They had come into the Indian hamlet at noon; the sun a basilisk's eye. At first they had thought the place deserted. Locke and Cherrick had advanced into the compound, leaving the dysentery-ridden Stumpf in the jeep, out of the worst of the heat. It was Cherrick who first noticed the child. A pot-bellied boy of perhaps four or five, his face painted with thick bands of the scarlet vegetable dye urucu, had slipped out from his hiding place and come to peer at the trespassers, fearless in his curiosity. Cherrick stood still; Locke did the same. One by one, from the huts and from the shelter of the trees around the compound, the tribe appeared and stared, like the boy, at the newcomers. If there was a flicker of feeling on their broad, flat-nosed faces, Locke could not read it. These people - he thought of every Indian as part of one wretched tribe - were impossible to decipher; deceit was their only skill.

'What are you doing here?' he said. The sun was baking the back of his neck. 'This is our land.'

The boy still looked up at him. His almond eyes refused to fear.

'They don't understand you,' Cherrick said.

'Get the Kraut out here. Let him explain it to them.'

'He can't move.'

'Get him out here,' Locke said. 'I don't care if he's shat his pants.'

Cherrick backed away down the track, leaving Locke standing in the ring of huts. He looked from doorway to doorway, from tree to tree, trying to estimate the numbers. There were at most three dozen Indians, two-thirds of them women and children; descendants of the great peoples that had once roamed the Amazon Basin in their tens of thousands. Now those tribes were all but decimated. The forest in which they had prospered for generations was being levelled and burned; eight-lane highways were speeding through their hunting grounds. All they held sacred - the wilderness and their place in its system - was being trampled and trespassed: they were exiles in their own land. But still they declined to pay homage to their new masters, despite the rifles they brought. Only death would convince them of defeat, Locke mused.

Cherrick found Stumpf slumped in the front seat of the jeep, his pasty features more wretched than ever.

'Locke wants you,' he said, shaking the German out of his doze. 'The village is still occupied. You'll have to speak to them.'

Stumpf groaned. 'I can't move,' he said, Tm dying-'

'Locke wants you dead or alive,' Cherrick said. Their fear of Locke, which went unspoken, was perhaps one of the two things they had in common; that and greed.

'I feel awful,' Stumpf said.

'If I don't bring you, he'll only come himself,' Cherrick pointed out. This was indisputable. Stumpf threw the other man a despairing glance, then nodded his jowly head. 'All right,' he said, 'help me.'

Cherrick had no wish to lay a hand on Stumpf. The man stank of his sickness; he seemed to be oozing the contents of his gut through his pores; his skin had the lustre of rank meat. He took the outstretched hand nevertheless. Without aid, Stumpf would never make the hundred yards from jeep to compound.

Ahead, Locke was shouting.

'Get moving,' said Cherrick, hauling Stumpf down from the front seat and towards the bawling voice. 'Let's get it over and done with.'

When the two men returned into the circle of huts the scene had scarcely changed. Locke glanced around at Stumpf.

'We got trespassers,' he said.

'So I see,' Stumpf returned wearily.

'Tell them to get the fuck off our land,' Locke said. 'Tell them this is our territory: we bought it. Without sitting tenants.'

Stumpf nodded, not meeting Locke's rabid eyes. Sometimes he hated the man almost as much as he hated himself.

'Go on ...' Locke said, and gestured for Cherrick to relinquish his support of Stumpf. This he did. The German stumbled forward, head bowed. He took several seconds to work out his patter, then raised his head and spoke a few wilting words in bad Portuguese. The pronouncement was met with the same blank looks as Locke's performance. Stumpf tried again, re-arranging his inadequate vocabulary to try and awake a flicker of understanding amongst these savages.

The boy who had been so entertained by Locke's cavortings now stood staring up at this third demon, his face wiped of smiles. This one was nowhere near as comical as the first. He was sick and haggard; he smelt of death. The boy held his nose to keep from inhaling the badness off the man.

Stumpf peered through greasy eyes at his audience. If they did understand, and were faking their blank incomprehension, it was a flawless performance. His limited skills defeated, he turned giddily to Locke.

They don't understand me,' he said.

Tell them again.'

'I don't think they speak Portuguese.'

Tell them anyway.'

Cherrick cocked his rifle. 'We don't have to talk with them,' he said under his breath. They're on our land. We're within our rights -'

'No,' said Locke. There's no need for shooting. Not if we can persuade them to go peacefully.'

They don't understand plain common sense,' Cher- rick said. 'Look at them. They're animals. Living in filth.'

Stumpf had begun to try and communicate again, this time accompanying his hesitant words with a pitiful mime.

Tell them we've got work to do here,' Locke prompted him.

'I'm trying my best,' Stumpf replied testily.

'We've got papers.'

'I don't think they'd be much impressed,' Stumpf returned, with a cautious sarcasm that was lost on the other man.

'Just tell them to move on. Find some other piece of land to squat on.'

Watching Stumpf put these sentiments into word and sign-language, Locke was already running through the alternative options available. Either the Indians - the Txukahamei or the Achual or whatever damn family it was - accepted their demands and moved on, or else they would have to enforce the edict. As Cherrick had said, they were within their rights. They had papers from the development authorities; they had maps marking the division between one territory and the next; they had every sanction from signature to bullet. He had no active desire to shed blood. The world was still too full of bleeding heart liberals and doe-eyed sentimentalists to make genocide the most convenient solution. But the gun had been used before, and would be used again, until every unwashed Indian had put on a pair of trousers and given up eating monkeys.

Indeed, the din of liberals notwithstanding, the gun had its appeal. It was swift, and absolute. Once it had had its short, sharp say there was no danger of further debate; no chance that in ten years' time some mercenary Indian who'd found a copy of Marx in the gutter could come back claiming his tribal lands - oil, minerals and all. Once gone, they were gone forever.

At the thought of these scarlet-faced savages laid low, Locke felt his trigger-finger itch; physically itch. Stumpf had finished his encore; it had met with no response. Now he groaned, and turned to Locke.

Tm going to be sick,' he said. His face was bright white; the glamour of his skin made his small teeth look dingy.

'Be my guest,' Locke replied.

'Please. I have to lie down. I don't want them watching me.'

Locke shook his head. 'You don't move 'til they listen. If we don't get any joy from them, you're going to see something to be sick about.' Locke toyed with the stock of his rifle as he spoke, running a broken thumb-nail along the nicks in it. There were perhaps a dozen; each one a human grave. The jungle concealed murder so easily; it almost seemed, in its cryptic fashion, to condone the crime.

Stumpf turned away from Locke and scanned the mute assembly. There were so many Indians here, he thought, and though he carried a pistol he was an inept marksman. Suppose they rushed Locke, Cherrick and himself? He would not survive. And yet, looking at the Indians, he could see no sign of aggression amongst them. Once they had been warriors; now? Like beaten children, sullen and wilfully stupid. There was some trace of beauty in one or two of the younger women; their skins, though grimy, were fine, their eyes black. Had he felt more healthy he might have been aroused by their nakedness, tempted to press his hands upon their shiny bodies. As it was their feigned incomprehension merely irritated him. They seemed, in their silence, like another species, as mysterious and unfathomable as mules or birds. Hadn't somebody in Uxituba told him that many of these people didn't even give their children proper names? That each was like a limb of the tribe, anonymous and therefore unfixable? He could believe that now, meeting the same dark stare in each pair of eyes; could believe that what they faced here was not three dozen individuals but a fluid system of hatred made flesh. It made him shudder to think of it.

Now, for the first time since their appearance, one of the assembly moved. He was an ancient; fully thirty years older than most of the tribe. He, like the rest, was all but naked. The sagging flesh of his limbs and breasts resembled tanned hide; his step, though the pale eyes suggested blindness, was perfectly confident. Once standing in front of the interlopers he opened his mouth - there were no teeth set in his rotted gums - and spoke. What emerged from his scraggy throat was not a language made of words, but only of sound; a pot-pourri of jungle noises. There was no discernible pattern to the outpouring, it was simply a display - awesome in its way - of impersonations. The man could murmur like a jaguar, screech like a parrot; he could find in his throat the splash of rain on orchids; the howl of monkeys.

The sounds made Stumpf s gorge rise. The jungle had diseased him, dehydrated him and left him wrung out. Now this rheumy-eyed stick-man was vomiting the whole odious place up at him. The raw heat in the circle of huts made Stumpf s head beat, and he was sure, as he stood listening to the sage's din, that the old man was measuring the rhythm of his nonsense to the thud at his temples and wrists.

'What's he saying?' Locke demanded.

'What does it sound like?' Stumpf replied, irritated by Locke's idiot questions. 'It's all noises.'

'The fucker's cursing us,' Cherrick said.

Stumpf looked round at the third man. Cherrick's eyes were starting from his head.

'It's a curse,' he said to Stumpf.

Locke laughed, unmoved by Cherrick's apprehen- sion. He pushed Stumpf out of the way so as to face the old man, whose song-speech had now lowered in pitch; it was almost lilting. He was singing twilight, Stumpf thought: that brief ambiguity between the fierce day and the suffocating night. Yes, that was it. He could hear in the song the purr and the coo of a drowsy kingdom. It was so persuasive he wanted to lie down on the spot where he stood, and sleep.

Locke broke the spell. 'What are you saying?' he spat in the tribesman's rnazy face. 'Talk sense!'

But the night-noises only whispered on, an unbroken stream.

'This is our village,' another voice now broke in; the man spoke as if translating the elder's words. Locke snapped round to locate the speaker. He was a thin youth, whose skin might once have been golden. 'Our village. Our land.'

'You speak English,' Locke said.

'Some,' the youth replied.

'Why didn't you answer me earlier?' Locke demanded, his fury exacerbated by the disinterest on the Indian's face.

'Not my place to speak,' the man replied. 'He is the elder.'

'The Chief, you mean?'

'The Chief is dead. All his family is dead. This is the wisest of us -'

'Then you tell him -'

'No need to tell,' the young man broke in. 'He understands you.'

'He speaks English too?'

'No,' the other replied, 'but he understands you. You are ... transparent.'

Locke half-grasped that the youth was implying an insult here, but wasn't quite certain. He gave Stumpf a puzzled look. The German shook his head. Locke returned his attention to the youth. 'Tell him anyway,' he said, 'tell all of them. This is our land. We bought it.'

'The tribe has always lived here,' the reply came.

'Not any longer,' Cherrick said.

'We've got papers -' Stumpf said mildly, still hoping that the confrontation might end peacefully,'- from the government.'

'We were here before the government,' the tribesman replied.

The old man had stopped talking the forest. Perhaps, Stumpf thought, he's coming to the beginning of another day, and stopped. He was turning away now, indifferent to the presence of these unwelcome guests.

'Call him back,' Locke demanded, stabbing his rifle towards the young tribesman. The gesture was unambiguous. 'Make him tell the rest of them they've got to go-'

The young man seemed unimpressed by the threat of Locke's rifle, however, and clearly unwilling to give orders to his elder, whatever the imperative. He simply watched the old man walk back towards the hut from which he had emerged. Around the compound, others were also turning away. The old man's withdrawal apparently signalled that the show was over.

'No\' said Cherrick, 'you're not listening.' The colour in his cheeks had risen a tone; his voice, an octave. He pushed forward, rifle raised. 'You fucking scum!'

Despite his hysteria, he was rapidly losing his audience. The old man had reached the doorway of his hut, and now bent his back and disappeared into its recesses; the few members of the tribe who were still showing some interest in proceedings were viewing the Europeans with a hint of pity for their lunacy. It only enraged Cherrick further.

'Listen to me!' he shrieked, sweat flicking off his brow as he jerked his head at one retreating figure and then at another. 'Listen, you bastards.'

'Easy ...' said Stumpf.

The appeal triggered Cherrick. Without warning he raised his rifle to his shoulder, aimed at the open door of the hut into which the old man had vanished and fired. Birds rose from the crowns of adjacent trees; dogs took to their heels. From within the hut came a tiny shriek, not like the old man's voice at all. As it sounded, Stumpf fell to his knees, hugging his belly, his gut in spasm. Face to the ground, he did not see the diminutive figure emerge from the hut and totter into the sunlight. Even when he did look up, and saw how the child with the scarlet face clutched his belly, he hoped his eyes lied. But they did not. It was blood that came from between the child's tiny fingers, and death that had stricken his face. He fell forward on to the impacted earth of the hut's threshold, twitched, and died.

Somewhere amongst the huts a woman began to sob quietly. For a moment the world spun on a pin-head, balanced exquisitely between silence and the cry that must break it, between a truce held and the coming atrocity.

'You stupid bastard,' Locke murmured to Cherrick. Under his condemnation, his voice trembled. 'Back off,' he said. 'Get up, Stumpf. We're not waiting. Get up and come now, or don't come at all.'

Stumpf was still looking at the body of the child. Suppressing his moans, he got to his feet.

'Help me,' he said. Locke lent him an arm. 'Cover us,' he said to Cherrick.

The man nodded, deathly-pale. Some of the tribe had turned their gaze on the Europeans' retreat, their expressions, despite this tragedy, as inscrutable as ever. Only the sobbing woman, presumably the dead child's mother, wove between the silent figures, keening her grief.

Cherrick's rifle shook as he kept the bridgehead. He'd done the mathematics; if it came to a head-on collision they had little chance of survival. But even now, with the enemy making a getaway, there was no sign of movement amongst the Indians. Just the accusing facts: the dead boy; the warm rifle. Cherrick chanced a look over his shoulder. Locke and Stumpf were already within twenty yards of the jeep, and there was still no move from the savages.

Then, as he looked back towards the compound, it seemed as though the tribe breathed together one solid breath, and hearing that sound Cherrick felt death wedge itself like a fish-bone in his throat, too deep to be plucked out by his fingers, too big to be shat. It was just waiting there, lodged in his anatomy, beyond argument or appeal. He was distracted from its presence by a movement at the door of the hut. Quite ready to make the same mistake again, he took firmer hold of his rifle. The old man had re-appeared at the door. He stepped over the corpse of the boy, which was lying where it had toppled. Again, Cherrick glanced behind him. Surely they were at the jeep? But Stumpf had stumbled; Locke was even now dragging him to his feet. Cherrick, seeing the old man advancing towards him, took one cautious step backwards, followed by another. But the old man was fearless. He walked swiftly across the compound coming to stand so close to Cherrick, his body as vulnerable as ever, that the barrel of the rifle prodded his shrunken belly.

There was blood on both his hands, fresh enough to run down the man's arms when he displayed the palms for Cherrick's benefit. Had he touched the boy, Cherrick wondered, as he stepped out of the hut? If so, it had been an astonishing sleight-of-hand, for Cherrick had seen nothing. Trick or no trick, the significance of the display was perfectly apparent: he was being accused of murder. Cherrick wasn't about to be cowed, however. He stared back at the old man, matching defiance with defiance.

But the old bastard did nothing, except show his bloody palms, his eyes full of tears. Cherrick could feel his anger growing again. He poked the man's flesh with his finger.

'You don't frighten me,' he said, 'you understand? I'm not a fool.'

As he spoke he seemed to see a shifting in the old man's features. It was a trick of the sun, of course, or of bird-shadow, but there was, beneath the corruption of age, a hint of the child now dead at the hut door: the tiny mouth even seemed to smile. Then, as subtly as it had appeared, the illusion faded again.

Cherrick withdrew his hand from the old man's chest, narrowing his eyes against further mirages. He then renewed his retreat. He had taken three steps only when something broke cover to his left. He swung round, raised his rifle and fired. A piebald pig, one of several that had been grazing around the huts, was checked in its flight by the bullet, which struck it in the neck. It seemed to trip over itself, and collapsed headlong in the dust.

Cherrick swung his rifle back towards the old man. But he hadn't moved, except to open his mouth. His palate was making the sound of the dying pig. A choking squeal, pitiful and ridiculous, which followed Cherrick back up the path to the jeep. Locke had the engine running. 'Get in,' he said. Cherrick needed no encouragement, but flung himself into the front seat. The interior of the vehicle was filthy hot, and stank of Stumpf s bodily functions, but it was as near safety as they'd been in the last hour.

'It was a pig,' he said, 'I shot a pig.'

'I saw,' said Locke.

That old bastard

He didn't finish. He was looking down at the two fingers with which he had prodded the elder. 'I touched him,' he muttered, perplexed by what he saw. The fingertips were bloody, though the flesh he had laid his fingers upon had been clean.

Locke ignored Cherrick's confusion and backed the jeep up to turn it around, then drove away from the hamlet, down a track that seemed to have become choked with foliage in the hour since they'd come up it. There was no discernible pursuit.

The tiny trading post to the south of Averio was scant of civilisation, but it sufficed. There were white faces here, and clean water. Stumpf, whose condition had deteriorated on the return journey, was treated by Dancy, an Englishman who had the manner of a disenfranchised earl and a face like hammered steak. He claimed to have been a doctor once upon a sober time, and though he had no evidence of his qualifications nobody contested his right to deal with Stumpf. The German was delirious, and on occasion violent, but Dancy, his small hands heavy with gold rings, seemed to take a positive delight in nursing his thrashing patient.

While Stumpf raved beneath his mosquito net, Locke and Cherrick sat in the lamp-lit gloom and drank, then told the story of their encounter with the tribe. It was Tetelman, the owner of the trading post's stores, who had most to say when the report was finished. He knew the Indians well.

'I've been here years,' he said, feeding nuts to the mangy monkey that scampered on his lap. 'I know the way these people think. They may act as though they're stupid; cowards even. Take it from me, they're neither.'

Cherrick grunted. The quicksilver monkey fixed him with vacant eyes. 'They didn't make a move on us,' Cherrick said, 'even though they outnumbered us ten to one. If that isn't cowardice, what is it?'

Tetelman settled back in his creaking chair, throwing the animal off his lap. His face was raddled and used. Only his lips, constantly rewetted from his glass, had any colour; he looked, thought Locke, like an old whore. 'Thirty years ago,' Tetelman said, 'this whole territory was their homeland. Nobody wanted it; they went where they liked, did what they liked. As far as we whites were concerned the jungle was filthy and disease-infected: we wanted no part of it. And, of course, in some ways we were right. It is filthy and disease-infected; but it's also got reserves we now want badly: minerals, oil maybe: power.'

'We paid for that land,' said Locke, his fingers jittery on the cracked rim of his glass. 'It's all we've got now.'

Tetelman sneered. 'Paid?' he said. The monkey chattered at his feet, apparently as amused by this claim as its master. 'No. You just paid for a blind eye, so you could take it by force. You paid for the right to fuck up the Indians in any way you could. That's what your dollars bought, Mr Locke. The government of this country is counting off the months until every tribe on the sub-continent is wiped out by you or your like. It's no use to play the outraged innocents. I've been here too long ..."

Cherrick spat on to the bare floor. Tetelman's speech had heated his blood.

'And so why'd you come here, if you're so fucking clever?' he asked the trader.

'Same reason as you,' Tetelman replied plainly, staring off into the trees beyond the plot of land behind the store. Their silhouettes shook against the sky; wind, or night-birds.

'What reason's that?' Cherrick said, barely keeping his hostility in check.

'Greed,' Tetelman replied mildly, still watching the trees. Something scampered across the low wooden roof. The monkey at Tetelman's feet listened, head cocked. 'I thought I could make my fortune out here, the same way you do. I gave myself two years. Three at the most. That was the best part of two decades ago.' He frowned; whatever thoughts passed behind his eyes, they were bitter. 'The jungle eats you up and spits you out, sooner or later.'

'Not me,' said Locke.

Tetelman turned his eyes on the man. They were wet. 'Oh yes,' he said politely. 'Extinction's in the air, Mr Locke. I can smell it.' Then he turned back to looking at the window.

Whatever was on the roof now had companions.

'They won't come here, will they?' said Cherrick. 'They won't follow us?'

The question, spoken almost in a whisper, begged for a reply in the negative. Try as he might Cherrick couldn't dislodge the sights of the previous day. It wasn't the boy's corpse that so haunted him; that he could soon learn to forget. But the elder - with his shifting, sunlit face - and the palms raised as if to display some stigmata, he was not so forgettable.

'Don't fret,' Tetelman said, with a trace of conde- scension. 'Sometimes one or two of them will drift in here with a parrot to sell, or a few pots, but I've never seen them come here in any numbers. They don't like it. This is civilisation as far as they're concerned, and it intimidates them. Besides, they wouldn't harm my guests. They need me.'

'Need you?' said Locke; who could need this wreck of a man?

'They use our medicines. Dancy supplies them. And blankets, once in a while. As I said, they're not so stupid.'

Next door, Stumpf had begun to howl. Dancy's con- soling voice could be heard, attempting to talk down the panic. He was plainly failing.

'Your friend's gone bad,' said Tetelman.

'No friend,' Cherrick replied.

'It rots,' Tetelman murmured, half to himself.

'What does?'

The soul.' The word was utterly out of place from Tetelman's whisky-glossed lips. 'It's like fruit, you see. It rots.'

Somehow Stumpf s cries gave force to the observation. It was not the voice of a wholesome creature; there was putrescence in it.

More to direct his attention away from the German's din than out of any real interest, Cherrick said: 'What do they give you for the medicine and the blankets? Women?'

The possibility clearly entertained Tetelman; he laughed, his gold teeth gleaming. 'I've no use for women,' he said. 'I've had the syph for too many years.' He clicked his fingers and the monkey clambered back up on to his lap. 'The soul,' he said, 'isn't the only thing that rots.'

'Well, what do you get from them then?' Locke said. 'For your supplies?'

'Artifacts,' Tetelman replied. 'Bowls, jugs, mats. The Americans buy them off me, and sell them again in Manhattan. Everybody wants something made by an extinct tribe these days. Memento mori.'

'Extinct?' said Locke. The word had a seductive ring; it sounded like life to him.

'Oh certainly,' said Tetelman. 'They're as good as gone. If you don't wipe them out, they'll do it themselves.'

'Suicide?' Locke said.

'In their fashion. They just lose heart. I've seen it happen half a dozen times. A tribe loses its land, and its appetite for life goes with it. They stop taking care of themselves. The women don't get pregnant any more; the young men take to drink, the old men just starve themselves to death. In a year or two it's like they never existed.'

Locke swallowed the rest of his drink, silently saluting the fatal wisdom of these people. They knew when to die, which was more than could be said for some he'd met. The thought of their death-wish absolved him of any last vestiges of guilt. What was the gun in his hand, except an instrument of evolution?

On the fourth day after their arrival at the post, Stumpf s fever abated, much to Dancy's disappointment. The worst of it's over,' he announced. 'Give him two more days' rest and you can get back to your labours.'

'What are your plans?' Tetelrnan wanted to know.

Locke was watching the rain from the verandah. Sheets of water pouring from clouds so low they brushed the tree-tops. Then, just as suddenly as it had arrived, the downpour was gone, as though a tap had been turned off. Sun broke through; the jungle, new-washed, was steaming and sprouting and thriving again.

'I don't know what we'll do,' said Locke. 'Maybe get ourselves some help and go back in there.'

'There are ways,' Tetelman said.

Cherrick, sitting beside the door to get the benefit of what little breeze was available, picked up the glass that had scarcely been out of his hand in recent days, and filled it up again. 'No more guns,' he said. He hadn't touched his rifle since they'd arrived at the post; in fact he kept from contact with anything but a bottle and his bed. His skin seemed to crawl and creep perpetually.

'No need for guns,' Tetelman murmured. The statement hung on the air like an unfulfilled promise.

'Get rid of them without guns?' said Locke. 'If you mean waiting for them to die out naturally, I'm not that patient.'

'No,' said Tetelman, 'we can be swifter than that.'

'How?'

Tetelman gave the man a lazy look. 'They're my livelihood,' he said, 'or part of it. You're asking me to help you make myself bankrupt.'

He not only looks like an old whore, Locke thought, he thinks like one. 'What's it worth? Your wisdom?' he asked.

'A cut of whatever you find on your land,' Tetelman replied.

Locke nodded. 'What have we got to lose? Cherrick? You agree to cut him in?' Cherrick's consent was a shrug. 'All right,' Locke said, 'talk.'

'They need medicines,' Tetelman explained, 'because they're so susceptible to our diseases. A decent plague can wipe them out practically overnight.'

Locke thought about this, not looking at Tetelman. 'One fell swoop,' Tetelman continued. 'They've got practically no defences against certain bacteria. Never had to build up any resistance. The clap. Smallpox. Even measles.'

'How?' said Locke.

Another silence. Down the steps of the verandah, where civilization finished, the jungle was swelling to meet the sun. In the liquid heat plants blossomed and rotted and blossomed again.

'I asked how,' Locke said.

'Blankets,' Tetelman replied, 'dead men's blankets.'

A little before the dawn of the night after Stumpf s recovery, Cherrick woke suddenly, startled from his rest by bad dreams. Outside it was pitch-dark; neither moon nor stars relieved the depth of the night. But his body-clock, which his life as a mercenary had trained to impressive accuracy, told him that first light was not far off, and he had no wish to lay his head down again and sleep. Not with the old man waiting to be dreamt. It wasn't just the raised palms, the blood glistening, that so distressed Cherrick. It was the words he'd dreamt coming from the old man's toothless mouth which had brought on the cold sweat that now encased his body.

What were the words? He couldn't recall them now, but wanted to; wanted the sentiments dragged into wakefulness, where they could be dissected and dismissed as ridiculous. They wouldn't come though. He lay on his wretched cot, the dark wrapping him up too tightly for him to move, and suddenly the bloody hands were there, in front of him, suspended in the pitch. There was no face, no sky, no tribe. Just the hands.

'Dreaming,' Cherrick told himself, but he knew better.

And now, the voice. He was getting his wish; here were the words he had dreamt spoken. Few of them made sense. Cherrick lay like a newborn baby, listening to its parents talk but unable to make any significance of their exchanges. He was ignorant, wasn't he? He tasted the sourness of his stupidity for the first time since childhood. The voice made him fearful of ambiguities he had ridden roughshod over, of whispers his shouting life had rendered inaudible. He fumbled for comprehension, and was not entirely frustrated. The man was speaking of the world, and of exile from the world; of being broken always by what one seeks to possess. Cherrick struggled, wishing he could stop the voice and ask for explanation. But it was already fading, ushered away by the wild address of parrots in the trees, raucous and gaudy voices erupting suddenly on every side. Through the mesh of Cherrick's mosquito net he could see the sky flaring through the branches.

He sat up. Hands and voice had gone; and with them all but an irritating murmur of what he had almost understood. He had thrown off in sleep his single sheet; now he looked down at his body with distaste. His back and buttocks, and the underside of his thighs, felt sore. Too much sweating on coarse sheets, he thought. Not for the first time in recent days he remembered a small house in Bristol which he had once known as home.

The noise of birds was filling his head. He hauled himself to the edge of the bed and pulled back the mosquito net. The crude weave of the net seemed to scour the palm of his hand as he gripped it. He disengaged his hold, and cursed to himself. There was again today an itch of tenderness in his skin that he'd suffered since coming to the post. Even the soles of his feet, pressed on to the floor by the weight of his body, seemed to suffer each knot and splinter. He wanted to be away from this place, and badly.

\ warm trickle across his wrist caught his attention, and he was startled to see a rivulet of blood moving down his arm from his hand. There was a cut in the cushion of his thumb, where the mosquito net had apparently nicked his flesh. It was bleeding, though not copiously. He sucked at the cut, feeling again that peculiar sensitivity to touch that only drink, and that in abundance, dulled. Spitting out blood, he began to dress.

The clothes he put on were a scourge to his back. His sweat-stiffened shirt rubbed against his shoulders and neck; he seemed to feel every thread chafing his nerve-endings. The shirt might have been sackcloth, the way it abraded him.

Next door, he heard Locke moving around. Gingerly finishing his dressing, Cherrick went through to join him. Locke was sitting at the table by the window. He was poring over a map of Tetelman's, and drinking a cup of the bitter coffee Dancy was so fond of brewing, which he drank with a dollop of condensed milk. The two men had little to say to each other. Since the incident in the village all pretence to respect or friendship had disappeared. Locke now showed undisguised contempt for his sometime companion. The only fact that kept them together was the contract they and Stumpf had signed. Rather than breakfast on whisky, which he knew Locke would take as a further sign of his decay, Cherrick poured himself a slug of Dancy's emetic and went out to look at the morning.

He felt strange. There was something about this dawning day which made him profoundly uneasy. He knew the dangers of courting unfounded fears, and he tried to forbid them, but they were incontestable.

Was it simply exhaustion that made him so painfully conscious of his many discomforts this morning? Why else did he feel the pressure of his stinking clothes so acutely? The rasp of his boot collar against the jutting bone of his ankle, the rhythmical chafing of his trousers against his inside leg as he walked, even the grazing air that eddied around his exposed face and arms. The world was pressing on him - at least that was the sensation - pressing as though it wanted him out.

A large dragonfly, whining towards him on iridescent wings, collided with his arm. The pain of the collision caused him to drop his mug. It didn't break, but rolled off the verandah and was lost in the undergrowth. Angered, Cherrick slapped the insect off, leaving a smear of blood on his tattooed forearm to mark the dragonfly's demise. He wiped it off. It welled up again on the same spot, full and dark.

It wasn't the blood of the insect, he realised, but his own. The dragonfly had cut him somehow, though he had felt nothing. Irritated, he peered more closely at his punctured skin. The wound was not significant, but it was painful.

From inside he could hear Locke talking. He was loudly describing the inadequacy of his fellow adventures to Tetelman.

'Stumpf s not fit for this kind of work,' he was saying. 'And Cherrick -'

'What about me?'

Cherrick stepped into the shabby interior, wiping a new flow of blood from his arm.

Locke didn't even bother to look up at him. 'You're paranoid,' he said plainly. 'Paranoid and unreliable.'

Cherrick was in no mood for taking Locke's foul- mouthing. 'Just because I killed some Indian brat,' he said. The more he brushed blood from his bitten arm, the more the place stung. 'You just didn't have the balls to do it yourself.'

Locke still didn't bother to look up from his perusal of the map. Cherrick moved across to the table.

'Are you listening to me?' he demanded, and added force to his question by slamming his fist down on to the table. On impact his hand simply burst open. Blood spurted out in every direction, spattering the map.

Cherrick howled, and reeled backwards from the table with blood pouring from a yawning split in the side of his hand. The bone showed. Through the din of pain in his head he could hear a quiet voice. The words were inaudible, but he knew whose they were.

'I won't hear!' he said, shaking his head like a dog with a flea in its ear. He staggered back against the wall, but the briefest of contacts was another agony. 7 won't hear, damn you!'

'What the hell's he talking about?' Dancy had appeared in the doorway, woken by the cries, still clutching the Complete Works of Shelley Tetelman had said he could not sleep without.

Locke re-addressed the question to Cherrick, who was standing, wild-eyed, in the corner of the room, blood spitting from between his fingers as he attempted to staunch his wounded hand. 'What are you saying?'

'He spoke to me,' Cherrick replied. 'The old man.'

'What old man?' Tetelman asked.

'He means at the village,' Locke said. Then, to Cherrick, 'Is that what you mean?'

'He wants us out. Exiles. Like them. Like them!' Cherrick's panic was rapidly rising out of anyone's control, least of all his own.

'The man's got heat-stroke,' Dancy said, ever the diagnostician. Locke knew better.

'Your hand needs bandaging ...' he said, slowly approaching Cherrick.

'I heard him ...' Cherrick muttered.

'I believe you. Just slow down. We can sort it out.'

'No,' the other man replied. 'It's pushing us out. Everything we touch. Everything we touch.'

He looked as though he was about to topple over, and Locke reached for him. As his hands made contact with Cherrick's shoulders the flesh beneath the shirt split, and Locke's hands were instantly soaked in scarlet. He withdrew them, appalled. Cherrick fell to his knees, which in their turn became new wounds. He stared down as his shirt and trousers darkened. 'What's happening to me?' he wept.

Dancy moved towards him. 'Let me help.'

'No! Don't touch me!' Cherrick pleaded, but Dancy wasn't to be denied his nursing.

'It's all right,' he said in his best bedside manner.

It wasn't. Dancy's grip, intended only to lift the man from his bleeding knees, opened new cuts wherever he took hold. Dancy felt the blood sprout beneath his hand, felt the flesh slip away from the bone. The sensation bested even his taste for agony. Like Locke, he forsook the lost man.

'He's rotting,' he murmured.

Cherrick's body had split now in a dozen or more places. He tried to stand, half staggering to his feet only to collapse again, his flesh breaking open whenever he touched wall or chair or floor. There was no help for him. All the others could do was stand around like spectators at an execution, awaiting the final throes. Even Stumpf had roused himself from his bed and come through to see what all the shouting was about. He stood leaning against the door-lintel, his disease-thinned face all disbelief.

Another minute, and blood-loss defeated Cherrick. He keeled over and sprawled, face down, across the floor. Dancy crossed back to him and crouched on his haunches beside his head.

'Is he dead?' Locke asked.

'Almost,' Dancy replied.

'Rotted,' said Tetelman, as though the word explained the atrocity they had just witnessed. He had a crucifix in his hand, large and crudely carved. It looked like Indian handiwork, Locke thought. The Messiah impaled on the tree was sloe-eyed and indecently naked. He smiled, despite nail and thorn.

Dancy touched Cherrick's body, letting the blood come with his touch, and turned the man over, then leaned in towards Cherrick's jittering face. The dying man's lips were moving, oh so slightly.

'What are you saying?' Dancy asked; he leaned closer still to catch the man's words. Cherrick's mouth trailed bloody spittle, but no sound came.

Locke stepped in, pushing Dancy aside. Flies were already flitting around Cherrick's face. Locke thrust his bull-necked head into Cherrick's view. 'You hear me?' he said.

The body grunted.

'You know me?'

Again, a grunt.

'You want to give me your share of the land?'

The grunt was lighter this time; almost a sigh.

There's witnesses here,' Locke said. 'Just say yes. They'll hear you. Just say yes.'

The body was trying its best. It opened its mourh a little wider.

'Dancy -' said Locke. 'You hear what he said?'

Dancy could not disguise his horror at Locke's insistence, but he nodded.

'You're a witness.'

'If you must,' said the Englishman.

Deep in his body Cherrick felt the fish-bone he'd first choked on in the village twist itself about one final time, and extinguish him.

'Did he say yes, Dancy?' Tetelman asked.

Dancy felt the physical proximity of the brute kneeling beside him. He didn't know what the dead man had said, but what did it matter? Locke would have the land anyway, wouldn't he?

'He said yes.'

Locke stood up, and went in search of a fresh cup of coffee.

Without thinking, Dancy put his fingers on Cherrick's lids to seal his empty gaze. Under that lightest of touches the lids broke open and blood tainted the tears that had swelled where Cherrick's sight had been.

They had buried him towards evening. The corpse, though it had lain through the noon-heat in the coolest part of the store, amongst the dried goods, had begun to putrefy by the time it was sewn up in canvas for the burial. The night following, Stumpf had come to Locke and offered him the last third of the territory to add to Cherrick's share, and Locke, ever the realist, had accepted. The terms, which were punitive, had been worked out the next day. In the evening of that day, as Stumpf had hoped, the supply plane came in. Locke, bored with Tetelman's contemptuous looks, had also elected to fly back to Santarem, there to drink the jungle out of his system for a few days, and return refreshed. He intended to buy up fresh supplies, and, if possible, hire a reliable driver and gunman.

The flight was noisy, cramped and tedious; the two men exchanged no words for its full duration. Stumpf just kept his eyes on the tracts of unfelled wilderness they passed over, though from one hour to the next the scene scarcely changed. A panorama of sable green, broken on occasion by a glint of water; perhaps a column of blue smoke rising here and there, where land was being cleared; little else.

At Santarem they parted with a single handshake which left every nerve in Stumpf s hand scourged, and an open cut in the tender flesh between index finger and thumb. Santarem wasn't Rio, Locke mused as he made his way down to a bar at the south end of the town, run by a veteran of Vietnam who had a taste for ad hoc animal shows. It was one of Locke's few certain pleasures, and one he never tired of, to watch a local woman, face dead as a cold manioc cake, submit to a dog or a donkey fora few grubby dollar bills. The women of Santarem were, on the whole, as unpalatable as the beer, but Locke had no eye for beauty in the opposite sex: it mattered only that their bodies be in reasonable working order, and not diseased. He found the bar, and settled down for an evening exchanging dirt with the American. When he tired of that - some time after midnight - he bought a bottle of whisky and went out looking for a face to press his heat upon.

The woman with the squint was about to accede to a particular peccadillo of Locke's - one which she had resolutely refused until drunkenness persuaded ner to abandon what little hope of dignity she had - when there came a rap on the door.

'Fuck,' said Locke.

'Si,' said the woman. 'Fook. Fook.' It seemed to be the only word she knew in anything resembling English. Locke ignored her and crawled drunkenly to the edge of the stained mattress. Again, the rap on the door.

'Who is it?' he said.

'Senhor Locke?' The voice from the hallway was that of a young boy.

'Yes?' said Locke. His trousers had become lost in the tangle of sheets. 'Yes? What do you want?'

'Mensagem,' the boy said. 'Urgente. Urgente.'

'For me?' He had found his trousers, and was pulling them on. The woman, not at all disgruntled by this desertion, watched him from the head of the bed, toying with an empty bottle. Buttoning up, Locke crossed from bed to door, a matter of three steps. He unlocked it. The boy in the darkened hallway was of Indian extraction to judge by the blackness of his eyes, and that peculiar lustre his skin owned. He was dressed in a T-shirt bearing the Coca-Cola motif.

'Mensagem, Senhor Locke,' he said again, '... do hospital.'

The boy was staring past Locke at the woman on the bed. He grinned from ear to ear at her cavortings.

'Hospital?' said Locke.

''Sim. Hospital "Sacrado Coraqa de Maria".'

It could only be Stumpf, Locke thought. Who else did he know in this corner of Hell who'd call upon him? Nobody. He looked down at the leering child.

'Vem comigo,' the boy said, 'vem comigo. Urgente.'

'No,' said Locke. 'I'm not coming. Not now. You understand? Later. Later.'

The boy shrugged. '... Ta morrendo,' he said.

'Dying?' said Locke.

'Sim. Ta morrendo.'

'Well, let him. Understand me? You go back, and tell him, I won't come until I'm ready.'

Again, the boy shrugged. 'E meu dinheiro? he said, as Locke went to close the door.

'You go to Hell,' Locke replied, and slammed it in the child's face.

When, two hours and one ungainly act of passionless sex later, Locke unlocked the door, he discovered that the child, by way of revenge, had defecated on the threshold.

The hospital 'Sacrado Coraqa de Maria' was no place to fall ill; better, thought Locke, as he made his way down the dingy corridors, to die in your own bed with your own sweat for company than come here. The stench of disinfectant could not entirely mask the odour of human pain. The walls were ingrained with it; it formed a grease on the lamps, it slickened the unwashed floors. What had happened to Stumpf to bring him here? a bar-room brawl, an argument with a pimp about the price of a woman? The German was just damn fool enough to get himself stuck in the gut over something so petty. 'Senhor Stumpf?' he asked of a woman in white he accosted in the corridor. 'I'm looking for Senhor Stumpf.'

The woman shook her head, and pointed towards a harried-looking man further down the corridor, who was taking a moment to light a small cigar. He let go the nurse's arm and approached the fellow. He was enveloped in a stinking cloud of smoke.

'I'm looking for Senhor Stumpf,' he said.

The man peered at him quizzically.

'You are Locke?' he asked.

'Yes.'

'Ah.' He drew on the cigar. The pungency of the expelled smoke would surely have brought on a relapse in the hardiest patient. Tm Doctor Edson Costa,' the man said, offering his clammy hand to Locke. 'Your friend has been waiting for you to come all night.'

'What's wrong with him?'

'He's hurt his eye,' Edson Costa replied, clearly indifferent to Stumpf s condition. 'And he has some minor abrasions on his hands and face. But he won't have anyone go near him. He doctored himself.'

'Why?' Locke asked.

The doctor looked flummoxed. 'He pays to go in a clean room. Pays plenty. So I put him in. You want to see him? Maybe take him away?'

'Maybe,' said Locke, unenthusiastically.

'His head ...' said the doctor. 'He has delusions.'

Without offering further explanation, the man led off at a considerable rate, trailing tobacco-smoke as he went. The route, that wound out of the main building and across a small internal courtyard, ended at a room with a glass partition in the door.

'Here,' said the doctor. 'Your friend. You tell him,' he said as a parting snipe, 'he pay more, or tomorrow he leaves.'

Locke peered through the glass partition. The grubby-white room was empty, but for a bed and a small table, lit by the same dingy light that cursed every wretched inch of this establishment. Stumpf was not on the bed, but squatting on the floor in the corner of the room. His left eye was covered with a bulbous padding, held in place by a bandage ineptly wrapped around his head.

Locke was looking at the man for a good time before Stumpf sensed that he was watched. He looked up slowly. His good eye, as if in compensation for the loss of its companion, seemed to have swelled to twice its natural size. It held enough fear for both it and its twin; indeed enough for a dozen eyes.

Cautiously, like a man whose bones are so brittle he fears an injudicious breath will shatter them, Stumpf edged up the wall, and crossed to the door. He did not open it, but addressed Locke through the glass.

'Why didn't you come?' he said.

Tm here.'

'But sooner,' said Stumpf. His face was raw, as if he'd been beaten. 'Sooner.'

'I had business,' Locke returned. 'What happened to you?'

'It's true, Locke,' the German said, 'everything is true.'

'What are you talking about?'

'Tetelman told me. Cherrick's babblings. About being exiles. It's true. They mean to drive us out.'

'We're not in the jungle now,' Locke said. 'You've got nothing to be afraid of here.'

'Oh yes,' said Stumpf, that wide eye wider than ever. 'Oh yes! I saw him -'

'Who?'

'The elder. From the village. He was here.'

'Ridiculous.'

'He was here, damn you,' Stumpf replied. 'He was standing where you're standing. Looking at me through the glass.'

'You've been drinking too much.'

'It happened to Cherrick, and now it's happening to me. They're making it impossible to live -'

Locke snorted. Tm not having any problem,' he said.

'They won't let you escape,' Stumpf said. 'None of us'll escape. Not unless we make amends.'

'You've got to vacate the room,' Locke said, unwilling to countenance any more of this drivel. 'I've been told you've got to get out by morning.'

'No,' said Stumpf. 'I can't leave. I can't leave.'

'There's nothing to fear.'

'The dust,' said the German. The dust in the air. It'll cut me up. I got a speck in my eye - just a speck - and the next thing my eye's bleeding as though it'll never stop. I can't hardly lie down, the sheet's like a bed of nails. The soles of my feet feel as if they're going to split. You've got to help me.'

'How?' said Locke.

'Pay them for the room. Pay them so I can stay 'til you can get a specialist from Sao Luis. Then go back to the village, Locke. Go back and tell them. I don't want the land. Tell them I don't own it any longer.'

Til go back,' said Locke, 'but in my good time.'

'You must go quickly,' said Stumpf. 'Tell them to let me be.'

Suddenly, the expression on the partially-masked face changed, and Stumpf looked past Locke at some spectacle down the corridor. From his mouth, slack with fear, came the small word, 'Please.'

Locke, mystified by the man's expression, turned. The corridor was empty, except for the fat moths that were besetting the bulb. 'There's nothing there -' he said, turning back to the door of Stumpf s room. The wire-mesh glass of the window bore the distinct imprint of two bloody palms.

'He's here,' the German was saying, staring fixedly at the miracle of the bleeding glass. Locke didn't need to ask who. He raised his hand to touch the marks. The handprints, still wet, were on his side of the glass, not on Stumpf s.

'My God,' he breathed. How could anyone have slipped between him and the door and laid the prints there, sliding away again in the brief moment it had taken him to glance behind him? It defied reason. Again he looked back down the corridor. It was still bereft of visitors. Just the bulb - swinging slightly, as if a breeze of passage had caught it - and the moth's wings, whispering. 'What's happening?' Locke breathed.

Stumpf, entranced by the handprints, touched his fingertips lightly to the glass. On contact, his fingers blossomed blood, trails of which idled down the glass. He didn't remove his fingers, but stared through at Locke with despair in his eye.

'See?' he said, very quietly.

'What are you playing at?' Locke said, his voice similarly hushed. This is some kind of trick.'

'No.'

'You haven't got Cherrick's disease. You can't have. You didn't touch them. We agreed, damn you,' he said, more heatedly. 'Cherrick touched them, we didn't.'

Stumpf looked back at Locke with something close to pity on his face.

'We were wrong,' he said gently. His fingers, which he had now removed from the glass, continued to bleed, dribbling across the backs of his hands and down his arms. 'This isn't something you can beat into submission, Locke. It's out of our hands.' He raised his bloody fingers, smiling at his own word-play: 'See?' he said.

The German's sudden, fatalistic calm frightened Locke. He reached for the handle of the door, and jiggled it. The room was locked. The key was on the inside, where Stumpf had paid for it to be.

'Keep out,' Stumpf said. 'Keep away from me.'

His smile had vanished. Locke put his shoulder to the door.

'Keep out, I said,' Stumpf shouted, his voice shrill. He backed away from the door as Locke took another lunge at it. Then, seeing that the lock must soon give, he raised a cry of alarm. Locke took no notice, but continued to throw himself at the door. There came the sound of wood beginning to splinter.

Somewhere nearby Locke heard a woman's voice, raised in response to Stumpf s calls. No matter; he'd have his hands on the German before help could come, and then, by Christ, he'd wipe every last vestige of a smile from the bastard's lips. He threw himself against the door with increased fervour; again, and again. The door gave.

In the antiseptic cocoon of his room Stumpf felt the first blast of unclean air from the outside world. It was no more than a light breeze that invaded his makeshift sanctuary, but it bore upon its back the debris of the world. Soot and seeds, flakes of skin itched off a thousand scalps, fluff and sand and twists of hair; the bright dust from a moth's wing. Motes so small the human eye only glimpsed them in a shaft of white sunlight; each a tiny, whirling speck quite harmless to most living organisms. But this cloud was lethal to Stumpf; in seconds his body became a field of tiny, seeping wounds.

He screeched, and ran towards the door to slam it closed again, flinging himself into a hail of minute razors, each lacerating him. Pressing against the door to prevent Locke from entering, his wounded hands erupted. He was too late to keep Locke out anyhow. The man had pushed the door wide, and was now stepping through, his every movement setting up further currents of air to cut Stumpf down. He snatched hold of the German's wrist. At his grip the skin opened as if beneath a knife.

Behind him, a woman loosed a cry of horror. Locke, realizing that Stumpf was past recanting his laughter, let the man go. Adorned with cuts on every exposed part of his body, and gaining more by the moment, Stumpf stumbled back, blind, and fell beside the bed. The killing air still sliced him as he sank down; with each agonised shudder he woke new eddies and whirlpools to open him up.

Ashen, Locke retreated from where the body lay, and staggered out into the corridor. A gaggle of onlookers blocked it; they parted, however, at his approach, too intimidated by his bulk and by the wild look on his face to challenge him. He retraced his steps through the sickness-perfumed maze, crossing the small courtyard and returning into the main building. He briefly caught sight of Edson Costa hurrying in pursuit, but did not linger for explanations.

In the vestibule, which, despite the late hour was busy with victims of one kind or another, his harried gaze alighted on a small boy, perched on his mother's lap. He had injured his belly apparently. His shirt, which was too large for him, was stained with blood; his face with tears. The mother did not look up as Locke moved through the throng. The child did however. He raised his head as if knowing that Locke was about to pass by, and smiled radiantly.

There was nobody Locke knew at Tetelman's store; and all the information he could bully from the hired hands, most of whom were drunk to the point of being unable to stand, was that their masters had gone off into the jungle the previous day. Locke chased the most sober of them and persuaded him with threats to accompany him back to the village as translator. He had no real idea of how he would make his peace with the tribe. He was only certain that he had to argue his innocence. After all, he would plead, it hadn't been he who had fired the killing shot. There had been misunderstandings, to be certain, but he had not harmed the people in any way. How could they, in all conscience, conspire to hurt him? If they should require some penance of him he was not above acceding to their demands. Indeed, might there not be some satisfaction in the act? He had seen so much suffering of late. He wanted to be cleansed of it. Anything they asked, within reason, he would comply with; anything to avoid dying like the others. He'd even give back the land.

It was a rough ride, and his morose companion com- plained often and incoherently. Locke turned a deaf ear. There was no time for loitering. Their noisy progress, the jeep engine complaining at every new acrobatic required of it, brought the jungle alive on every side, a repertoire of wails, whoops and screeches. It was an urgent, hungry place, Locke thought: and for the first time since setting foot on this sub-continent he loathed it with all his heart. There was no room here to make sense of events; the best that could be hoped was that one be allowed a niche to breathe awhile between one squalid flowering and the next.

Half an hour before nightfall, exhausted by the journey, they came to the outskirts of the village. The place had altered not at all in the meagre days since he'd last been here, but the ring of huts was clearly deserted. The doors gaped; the communal fires, always alight, were ashes. There was neither child nor pig to turn an eye towards him as he moved across the compound. When he reached the centre of the ring he stood still, looking about him for some clue as to what had happened there. He found none, however. Fatigue irade him foolhardy. Mustering his fractured strength, he shouted into the hush:

'Where are you?'

Two brilliant red macaws, finger-winged, rose screeching from the trees on the far side of the village. A few moments after, a figure emerged from the thicket of balsa and jacaranda. It was not one of the tribe, but Dancy. He paused before stepping fully into sight; then, recognising Locke, a broad smile broke his face, and he advanced into the compound. Behind him, the foliage shook as others made their way through it. Tetelman was there, as were several Norwegians, led by a man called Bj0rnstr0m, whom Locke had encountered briefly at the trading post. His face, beneath a shock of sun-bleached hair, was like cooked lobster.

'My God,' said Tetelman, 'what are you doing here?'

'I might ask you the same question,' Locke replied testily.

Bj0rnstr0m waved down the raised rifles of his three companions and strode forward, bearing a placatory smile.

'Mr Locke,' the Norwegian said, extending a leather-gloved hand. 'It is good we meet.'

Locke looked down at the stained glove with disgust, and Bj0rnstr0m, flashing a self-admonishing look, pulled it off. The hand beneath was pristine.

'My apologies,' he said. 'We've been working.'

'At what?' Locke asked, the acid in his stomach edging its way up into the back of his throat.

Tetelman spat. 'Indians,' he said.

'Where's the tribe?' Locke said.

Again, Tetelman: 'Bj0rnstr0m claims he's got rights to this territory ...'

'The tribe,' Locke insisted. 'Where are they?'

The Norwegian toyed with his glove.

'Did you buy them out, or what?' Locke asked.

'Not exactly,' Bj0rnstr0m replied. His English, like his profile, was impeccable.

'Bring him along,' Dancy suggested with some enthusiasm. 'Let him see for himself.'

Bj0rnstr0m nodded. 'Why not?' he said. 'Don't touch anything, Mr Locke. And tell your carrier to stay where he is.'

Dancy had already about turned, and was heading into the thicket; now Bj0rnstr0m did the same, escorting Locke across the compound towards a corridor hacked through the heavy foliage. Locke could scarcely keep pace; his limbs were more reluctant with every step he took. The ground had been heavily trodden along this track. A litter of leaves and orchid blossoms had been mashed into the sodden soil.

They had dug a pit in a small clearing no more than a hundred yards from the compound. It was not deep, this pit, nor was it very large. The mingled smells of lime and petrol cancelled out any other scent.

Tetelman, who had reached the clearing ahead of Locke, hung back from approaching the lip of the earthworks, but Dancy was not so fastidious. He strode around the far side of the pit and beckoned to Locke to view the contents.

The tribe were putrefying already. They lay where they had been thrown, in a jumble of breasts and buttocks and faces and limbs, their bodies tinged here and there with purple and black. Flies built helter- skelters in the air above them.

'An education,' Dancy commented.

Locke just looked on as Bj0rnstr0m moved around the other side of the pit to join Dancy.

'All of them?' Locke asked.

The Norwegian nodded. 'One fell swoop,' he said, pronouncing each word with unsettling precision.

'Blankets,' said Tetelman, naming the murder weapon.

'But so quickly ...' Locke murmured.

'It's very efficient,' said Dancy. 'And difficult to prove. Even if anybody ever asks.'

'Disease is natural,' Bj0rnstr0m observed. 'Yes? Like the trees.'

Locke slowly shook his head, his eyes pricking.

'I hear good things of you,' Bj0rnstr0m said to him. 'Perhaps we can work together.'

Locke didn't even attempt to reply. Others of the Norwegian party had laid down their rifles and were now getting back to work, moving the few bodies still to be pitched amongst their fellows from the forlorn heap beside the pit. Locke could see a child amongst the tangle, and an old man, whom even now the burial party were picking up. The corpse looked jointless as they swung it over the edge of the hole. It tumbled down the shallow incline and came to rest face up, its arms flung up to either side of its head in a gesture of submission, or expulsion. It was the elder of course, whom Cherrick had faced. His palms were still red. There was a neat bullet-hole in his temple. Disease and hopelessness had not been entirely efficient, apparently.

Locke watched while the next of the bodies was thrown into the mass grave, and a third to follow that.

Bj0rnstr0m, lingering on the far side of the pit, was lighting a cigarette. He caught Locke's eye.

'So it goes,' he said.

From behind Locke, Tetelman spoke.

'We thought you wouldn't come back,' he said, per- haps attempting to excuse his alliance with Bj0rnstr0m.

'Stumpf is dead,' said Locke.

'Well, even less to divide up,' Tetelman said, approaching him and laying a hand on his shoulder. Locke didn't reply; he just stared down amongst the bodies, which were now being covered with lime, only slowly registering the warmth that was running down his body from the spot where Tetelman had touched him. Disgusted, the man had removed his hand, and was staring at the growing bloodstain on Locke's shirt.