River of Death

‘We are about to land at Romono.’ The loudspeaker was scratchy, tinny and the words almost indistinguishable.

‘Please fasten seat-belts.’

The plane banked, lost altitude rapidly and made its approach directly above and along the line of the river. Several hundred feet below the flight-path a small, open outboard motorboat was making its slow way upstream.

This craft—on closer inspection a very dilapidated craft indeed—had three occupants. The largest of the three, one John Hamilton, was tall, broad-shouldered, powerfully built and about forty years of age. He had keen brown eyes, but that was about the only identifiable feature of his face as he was uncommonly dirty, dishevelled and unshaven, giving the impression that he had recently endured some harrowing ordeal, an impression heightened by the fact that his filthy clothes were torn and his face, neck and shoulders were liberally blood-stained. Comparatively, his two companions were presentable. They were lean, wiry and at least ten years younger than Hamilton. Clearly of Latin stock, their olive-tinged faces were lively, humorous and intelligent and they looked so much alike that they could have been identical twins, which they were. For reasons best known to themselves they liked to be known as Ramon and Navarro. They considered Hamilton—whose given name was, oddly enough, Hamilton—with critical and speculative eyes.

Ramon said: ‘You look bad.’

Navarro nodded his agreement. ‘Anyone can see he’s been through a lot. But do you think he looks bad enough?’

‘Perhaps not,’ Ramon said judicially. ‘A soupçon, perhaps. A little touch here, a little touch there.’ He leaned forward and proceeded to widen some of the already existing rents in Hamilton’s clothing. Navarro stooped, touched some small animal lying on the floorboards, brought up a bloodied hand and added a few more artistically decorative crimson touches to Hamilton’s face, neck and chest then leaned back to examine his handiwork critically. He appeared more than satisfied with the result of his creative workmanship.

‘My God!’ He shook his head in sorrowful admiration. ‘You really have had it rough, Mr Hamilton.’

The faded, peeling sign on the airport building-hardly more than a shack—read: ‘Welcome to Romono International Airport’ which was, in its own way, a tribute to the blind optimism of the person who had authorised it or the courage of the man who had painted it as no ‘international’ plane had ever landed or ever would land there, not only because no-one in his right senses would ever voluntarily come from abroad to visit Romono in the first place but primarily because the single grass runway was so short that no aircraft designed later than the forty-year-old DC3 could possibly hope to land there.

The aircraft that had been making the downriver approach landed and managed, not without some difficulty, to stop just short of the ramshackle terminal. The passengers disembarked and made for the waiting airport bus that was to take them into town.

Serrano kept a prudent ten passengers behind Hiller but was less fortunate when they boarded the bus. He found himself four seats ahead of Hiller and therefore was in no position to observe him any more. Hiller was now observing Serrano, very thoughtfully.

Hamilton’s boat was now closing in on the river bank. Hamilton said: ‘However humble, there’s no place like home.’

Using the word ‘humble’ Hamilton was guilty of a grave understatement. Romono was, quite simply, a jungle slum and an outstandingly malodorous example of the genre. On the left bank of the aptly named Rio da Morte, it stood partly on a filled-in, miasmic swamp, partly in a clearing that had been painfully hacked out from a forest and jungle that pressed in menacingly on every side, anxious to reclaim its own. The town looked as if it might contain perhaps three thousand inhabitants: probably there were double that number as three or four persons to a room represented the accommodation norm of Romono. A typically sleazy end-of-the-line—only there was no line-frontier town, it was squalid, decaying and singularly unprepossessing, a maze of narrow, haphazardly criss-crossing alleys—by no stretch of the imagination could they have been called streets-with the buildings ranging from dilapidated wooden shacks through wine-shops, gambling dens and bordellos to a large and largely false-fronted hotel rejoicing, according to a garish blue neon sign, in the name of the OTEL DE ARIS, some misfortune having clearly overtaken the missing capitals H and P.

The waterfront was splendidly in keeping with the town. It was difficult to say where the river bank began for almost all of it was lined with houseboats—there had to be some name for those floating monstrosities—relying for their construction almost entirely on tar paper. Between the houseboats were piles of driftwood, oil cans, bottles, garbage, sewage and great swarms of flies. The stench was overwhelming. Hygiene, had it ever come to Romono, had gratefully abandoned it a long time ago.

The three men reached the bank, disembarked and tied up the boat. Hamilton said: ‘When you’re ready, take off for Brasilia. I’ll join you in the Imperial.’

Navarro said: ‘Draw your marble bath, my lord? Lay out your best tuxedo?’

‘Something like that. Three suites, the best. After all, we’re not paying for it.’

‘Who is?’

‘Mr Smith. He doesn’t know it yet, of course, but he’ll pay.’

Ramon said curiously: ‘You know this Mr Smith? Met him, I mean?’

‘No.’

‘Then might it not be wise to wait for the invitation first?’

‘No reason to wait. Invitation’s guaranteed. Our friend must be nearly out of his mind by now.’

‘You’re being downright cruel to that poor Mr Hiller,’ Navarro said reproachfully. ‘He must have gone out of his mind during the three days we stayed with your Muscia Indian friends.’

‘Not him. He’s sure he knows he knows. When you get to the Imperial keep close to a phone and away from your usual dives.’

Ramon looked hurt. ‘There are no dives in our fair capital, Mr Hamilton.’

‘You’ll soon put that right.’ Hamilton left them and made his way in the gathering dusk through winding, ill-lit alleyways until he had passed clear through the town and emerged on its western perimeter. Here, on the outskirts of the town and on the very edge of the forest and jungle, stood what had once passed for a log cabin but was now no more than a hut and even at that, one would have thought, a hut scarcely fit for animal far less human habitation: the grass-and weed-covered walls leaned in at crazy angles, the door was badly warped and the single window had hardly an unbroken pane of glass left in it. Hamilton, not without some difficulty, managed to wrench open the creaking door and passed inside.

He located and lit a guttering oil lamp which gave off light and smoke in about equal proportions. From what little could be seen from the fitful yellow illumination, the interior of the hut was a faithful complement of the exterior. The hut was very sparsely furnished with the bare essentials for existence—a dilapidated bed, a couple of bent-wood chairs in no better condition than the bed, a warped deal table with two drawers, some shelving and a cooker with some traces of the original black enamel showing under the almost total covering of brown rust. On the face of it, Hamilton didn’t care too much for the sybaritic life.

He sat wearily on the bed which, predictably, sagged and creaked in an alarmingly disconcerting fashion. He reached under the bed, came up with a bottle of some undetermined liquid, drank deeply from the neck and set the bottle down somewhat unsteadily on the table.

Hamilton was not unobserved. A figure had appeared just outside the window and was peering inside from a prudent distance, a probably unnecessary precaution. It is more difficult to see from a lighted area to a darkened one than the other way round and the windows were so filthy that it was difficult to see through them anyway. The watcher’s face was indistinct, but the identity of the man not hard to guess: Serrano was probably the only man in Romono who wore a suit, far less an off-white one. Serrano was smiling, a smile composed of an odd mixture of amusement, satisfaction and contempt.

Hamilton extracted two leather pouches from the torn remains of his buttoned pockets and poured the contents of one of them into the palm of his hand, staring in rapt admiration at the handful of rough-cut diamonds which he let trickle onto the table. With an unsteady hand he fortified himself with another drink then opened the other pouch and emptied the contents onto the table. They were coins, glittering golden coins; all told there must have been at least fifty of them.

Gold, it is said, has attracted men from the beginning of recorded time. It unquestionably attracted Serrano. Seemingly oblivious of the possibility of discovery, he had moved closer to the window, so close, indeed, that a keen-eyed and observant person inside the hut might well have seen the pale blur of his face. But Hamilton was being neither keen-eyed nor observant: he just stared in apparent fascination at the treasure before him. So did Serrano. The amusement and contempt had disappeared from his expression, the unblinking eyes seemed huge in his face and his tongue licked his lips almost continuously.

Hamilton took a camera from his rucksack, removed a cassette of exposed film, examined it closely for a moment and, in doing so, dislodged two diamonds which fell and rolled under the table, apparently unobserved. He put the cassette on a shelf beside some other cassettes and cheap camera equipment then turned his attention to the coins again. He picked one up and examined it carefully, almost as if seeing it for the first time.

The coin, indisputably gold, did not appear to be of any South American origin—the likeness of the engraved head was unmistakably of classical Greek or Latin origin. He looked at the obverse side: the characters, clear and unblemished, were unmistakably Greek. Hamilton sighed, lowered some more of the rapidly diminishing contents of the bottle, returned the coins to the pouch, paused as if in thought, shook some coins into his hand, put them in a trouser pocket, put the pouch into one of his buttoned shirt pockets, returned the diamonds to their pouch and his other buttoned pocket, had a last drink, turned out the oil lamp and left. He made no attempt to lock the door for the sufficient reason that, even with the door as fully closed as it would go, there was still a two-inch gap between the key bolt and door jamb. Although it was by now almost dark he did not appear to require any light to see where he was going: within a minute he vanished into the shanty-town maze of corrugated iron and tar-paper shacks which formed the salubrious suburbs of Romono.

Serrano waited a prudent five minutes, then entered, a small flashlight in his hand. He lit the oil lamp, placing it on a shelf where it could not be seen directly from the outside then, using his flashlight, located the fallen diamonds under the table and placed them on the tabletop. He crossed to the shelves, took the cassette which Hamilton had placed there, replaced it with another from the pile of cassettes and had just put the cassette on the table beside the diamonds when he became suddenly and uncomfortably conscious of the fact that he was not alone. He whirled around and found himself staring into the muzzle of a gun expertly and unwaveringly held in Hiller’s hand.

‘Well, well,’ Hiller said genially. ‘A collector, I see. Your name?’

‘Serrano.’ Serrano didn’t look any too happy. ‘Why are you pointing that gun at me?’

‘Calling cards you can’t get in Romono, so I use this instead. Are you carrying a gun, Serrano?’

‘No.’

‘If you are and I find it I’m going to kill you.’ Hiller was still geniality itself. ‘Are you carrying a gun, Serrano?’

Serrano reached slowly for an inside pocket. Hiller said: ‘The classic way, of course, my friend. Finger and thumb on the gun barrel then gently on the table.’

Serrano carefully, as directed, produced a small snubnosed automatic and laid it on the table. Hiller advanced and pocketed it, along with the diamonds and the cassette.

‘You’ve been following me all day,’ Hiller said consideringly. ‘For hours before we boarded that plane. And I saw you the previous day and the day before that. In fact, I’ve seen you quite a few times in the past weeks. You really should get yourself another suit, Serrano, a shadower in a white suit is no shadower at all.’ His tone changed in a fashion that Serrano clearly didn’t care much for. ‘Why are you following me, Serrano?’

‘It’s not you I’m after,’ Serrano said. ‘We’re both interested in the same man.’

Hiller lifted his gun a perceptible inch. If he’d lifted it only one millimetre it would have carried sufficient significance for Serrano who was in an increasingly apprehensive state of mind. ‘I’m not sure,’ Hiller said, ‘that I like being followed around.’

‘Jesus!’ Serrano’s apprehension had become very marked indeed. ‘You’d kill a man for a thing like that?’

‘What are vermin to me?’ Hiller said carelessly. ‘But you can stop knocking your knees together. I’ve no intention of killing you—at least, not yet. I wouldn’t kill a man just for following me around. But I wouldn’t draw the line at shattering a kneecap so that you couldn’t totter around after me for a few months to come.’

‘I won’t talk to anyone,’ Serrano said fervently. ‘I swear to God I won’t.’

‘Aha! That’s interesting. If you were going to talk who would you talk to, Serrano?’

‘Nobody. Nobody. Who would I talk to? That was just a manner of speaking.’

‘Was it now? But if you were to talk, what would you tell them?’

‘What could I tell them? All I know—well, I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure—is that Hamilton is into something big. Gold, diamonds, something like that—he’s found a cache somewhere. I know that you’re on his track, Mr Hiller. That’s why I am following you.’

‘You know my name. How come?’

‘You’re a pretty important man around these parts, Mr Hiller.’ Serrano was trying to be ingratiating but he wasn’t very good at it. A sudden thought appeared to occur to him for he brightened and said: ‘Seeing we’re both after the same man, Mr Hiller, we could be partners.’

‘Partners!’

‘I can help you, Mr Hiller.’ Serrano was eagerness itself but whether from the prospect of partnership or the understandable desire not to be crippled by Hiller it was difficult to say. ‘I can help you. I swear I can.’

‘A terrified rat will swear to anything.’

‘I can prove what I say.’ Serrano seemed to have regained a measure of confidence. ‘I can take you to within five miles of the Lost City.’

Hiller’s initial reaction was one of astonishment and suspicion.

‘What do you know about it?’ He paused and recovered himself, ‘Well, I suppose everybody’s heard about the Lost City. Hamilton’s always shooting off his mouth about it.’

‘Mebbe so. Mebbe so.’ Serrano, sensing the change in the atmosphere, was almost relaxed now. ‘But how many have followed him four times to within a few miles of it?’ If Serrano had been at the gambling table he’d have leaned back in his chair, his trump card played.

Hiller had become very interested indeed, even to the extent of lowering, then pocketing, his own gun.

‘You have a rough idea where it is?’

‘Rough?’ Immediate danger past, Serrano invested himself with an air very close to benign superiority. ‘Close is more like it. Very close.’

‘Then if you’ve come all that close why don’t you go looking for it yourself?’

‘Look for it myself!’ Serrano looked almost shocked. ‘Mr Hiller, you must be out of your mind. You don’t understand what you’re talking about. Have you any idea what the Indian tribes in the area are like?’

‘Pacified, according to the Indian Protection Service.’

‘Pacified?’ Serrano gave a contemptuous laugh. ‘Pacified? There isn’t enough money in the country to make those desk-bound pansies leave those lovely air-conditioned offices in Brasilia and go see for themselves. They’re terrified, just plain terrified. Even their field-agents—and there are some pretty tough cookies among them—are terrified and won’t go near the area. Well, four of them did go there once some years back, but none of them ever returned. And if they’re terrified, Mr Hiller, I’m terrified too.’

‘That creates quite a problem.’ Not surprisingly, Hiller had become quite thoughtful. ‘An approach problem. What’s so special about those bloodthirsty people? There are many tribes who don’t care all that much for people from the outside, what you and I would regard as other civilised people.’ Apparently Hiller saw nothing incongruous in categorising himself and Serrano as ‘civilised’.

’Special? I’ll tell you what’s special about them. They’re the most savage tribes in the Mato Grosso. Correction. They’re the most savage tribes in the whole of South America. Not one of them has moved out of the Stone Age so far. In fact, they must be a damned sight worse than the Stone Age people. If the Stone Age people had been like them they’d have wiped each other out—when those tribes up there have nothing better to do, they just go around massacring each other—to keep their hand in, I suppose—and there would have been no human left on this planet today.

‘There are three tribes up there, Mr Hiller. First, there are the Chapates. God knows they’re bad enough, but all they do is use their blowpipes, pump a few curare-tipped poison darts into you and leave you lying there. Almost civilised, you might say. The Horenas are a bit different. They use darts that only knock you unconscious; then you’re dragged back to their village and tortured to death—this, I understand, can take a day or two-then they cut off your head and shrink it. But when it comes to sheer savagery, the Muscias are the pick of the bunch—I don’t think any white man has ever seen them. But one or two of the outside Indians who have met them and survived say that they’re cannibals and if they see what they regard as being a particularly appetising meal they dump him alive into boiling water. Something like lobsters, you know. Go looking for a lost city surrounded by all those monsters? Why don’t you go looking? I can point you in the right direction. Me, I only like cooking pots from the outside.’

‘Well, maybe I’ll have to do a little more thinking on that one.’ Absently, almost, he handed Serrano back his gun. Hiller was no mean psychologist when it came to gauging the extent of a man’s cupidity. Hiller said: ‘Where do you live?’

‘A room in the Hotel de Paris.’

‘If you saw me in the bar there?’

‘I’ve never seen you before in my life.’

An unbiased guidebook to the better taverns of South America would have had some difficulty in finding the space to list the bar of the Hotel de Paris, Romono, in its pages. The bar was not a thing of beauty. The indeterminately coloured paint, what little there was of it, was peeling and blistered, the splintered wooden floor was blackened and filthy and the rough-cut softwood bar bore the imprint of the passage of time. A thousand spilt drinks, a thousand stubbed-out cigars. It was not a place for the fastidious.

The clientele, fortunately, were not of an overly fastidious nature. Exclusively male and dressed for the most part in scarecrow’s clothing, they were rough, uncouth, ill-favoured and hard-drinking. Especially hard-drinking. As many customers as possible—and there were many—pushed up to the bar and consumed huge quantities of what could only be described as rot-gut whisky. There was a scattering of bentwood chairs and rickety tables, largely unoccupied. The citizens of Romono were mostly vertical drinkers. Among the currently vertical were both Hiller and Serrano, separated from each other by a prudent distance.

In such surroundings, then, the entrance of Hamilton did not provoke the horror-stricken reaction that it would have in the plusher caravanserais of Brasilia or Rio. Even so, his appearance was sufficient to cause a marked drop in the conversational level. With his tangled hair, a week’s growth of matted and bloodied beard, and ripped and blood-stained shirt he looked as if he had just returned from the scene of a successfully if messily executed triple murder. His expression-as was indeed customary with him—lacked anything in the way of encouragement towards social chitchat. He ignored the stares and although the crowd before the bar was at least four deep a path opened magically before him. In Romono, such a path always opened for John Hamilton, a man very obviously held, and for a variety of good reasons, in considerable respect by his fellow citizens.

A large, very fat barman, the boss of the four men serving nonstop behind the bar, hurried forward towards Hamilton. His egg-bald pate gleamed in the light: inevitably, he was known as Curly.

‘Mr Hamilton!’

‘Whisky.’

‘God’s name, Mr Hamilton. What happened?’

‘You deaf?’

‘Right away, Mr Hamilton.’

Curly reached under the bar, produced a special bottle and poured a generous measure. That Hamilton should be thus privileged apparently aroused no resentment among the onlookers, not so much because of their innate courtesy, of which they had none, but because Hamilton had demonstrated in the past his reaction to those who interfered in what he regarded as his own private business: he’d only had to do it once, but once had been enough.

Curly’s plump, genial face was alive with curiosity as were those of the bystanders. But Hamilton was not a man to share confidences as everyone was well aware. He tossed two Greek coins on to the bar. Hiller, who was standing close by, observed this and his face grew very still indeed. His face was not the only one to assume sudden immobility.

‘Bank’s shut,’ Hamilton said. ‘Those do?’

Curly picked up the two shining coins and examined them with an air of unfeigned reverence.

‘Will those do? Will those do! Yes, Mr Hamilton, I think those will do. Gold! Pure gold! This is going to buy you an awful lot of Scotch, Mr Hamilton, an awful lot. One of those I’m going to keep for myself. Yes, sir. The other I’ll take and have valued in the bank tomorrow.’

‘Up to you,’ Hamilton said indifferently.

Curly examined the coins more closely and said: ‘Greek, aren’t they?’

‘Looks like,’ Hamilton said with the same indifference. He drank some of his Scotch and looked at Curly with a speculative eye. ‘You wouldn’t, of course, be dreaming of asking me if I went all the way to Greece to get those?’

‘Certainly not,’ Curly said hastily. ‘Certainly not. Will I will I get the doctor, Mr Hamilton?’

‘Thanks. But it’s not my blood.’

‘How many of them? Who did this to you—I mean, who did you do it to?’

‘Just two. Horenas. Same again.’

Although most people at the bar were still looking at Hamilton or the coins, the hubbub of conversation was slowly resuming. Hiller, glass in hand, elbowed his purposeful way towards Hamilton who regarded Hiller’s approach with his customary lack of enthusiasm.

Hiller said: ‘I hope you’ll excuse me. I don’t want to intrude, Hamilton. I understand that after tangling with head-hunters a man would like some peace and quiet. But what I’d like to say to you is important. Believe me. Could I have a word?’

‘About what?’ Hamilton’s tone was less than encouraging. ‘And I don’t like discussing business—I assume it is business—with a dozen pairs of ears hanging on to every word I say.’

Hiller looked around. Inevitably, their conversation was attracting attention. Hamilton paused for a moment, as if in thought, then picked up his bottle, jerked his head and led the way to the corner table most remote from the bar. Hamilton, as always, looked aggressive and forbidding and his tone matched his expression.

‘Out with it,’ he said, ‘and no shilly-shallying.’