The Tarantula Stone

Caine returned to his papers, seeming to have dismissed Martin completely.

‘Is that it?’ demanded Martin incredulously.

Caine glanced up in surprise. ‘Was there anything else?’ he inquired.

‘Well, uh … that’s for you to say. I figured there’d be some papers to sign … some kind of a contract.’

Caine chuckled, seemingly amused by the notion. ‘Oh, we have no need of any contract, Mr Taggart. That’s not the way things are done in Rio.’

‘Yeah, but … supposing I do strike it rich out there. I mean, what’s to stop me from just taking off with whatever I find?’

Now it was the turn of the two pistoleiros to laugh. They leaned back their heads and guffawed unpleasantly, revealing teeth that were riddled with dark metal fillings.

Caine gave a slow, expressive shrug. ‘Nothing at all, Mr Taggart. Nothing at all. In fact, many others have tried the same thing in the past. There’s a big graveyard out on the edge of the city. You’ll find every one of them there. In fact, why don’t you pay the place a visit before you leave for the garimpo. I’m sure you’d find it most interesting.’

Martin glanced from Caine to the two laughing pistoleiros. He studied their ill-fitting suits for a moment, with particular reference to the strange bulges beneath their left arms. He nodded slowly.

‘Just remember one thing,’ added Caine, beaming up at him. ‘I know everything that happens at the garimpo. You may think it’s a long way from there to this office desk but, believe me, my friend, distance does not matter when a fellow has as long a reach as I have. Once again, I wish you luck.’

Martin said nothing more. He turned and made his way out of the room, closely escorted by Agnello. They retraced their steps down the evil-smelling staircase.

Stepping out from the gloom of the hallway, he was momentarily dazzled by the harsh sunlight in the street. The old man was waiting, his little black eyes glittering greedily. ‘The fifty cruzeiros, senhor …’

‘Sure, sure, here …’ Martin peeled off fifty from the wad and pressed it into the old man’s skinny hand. He stood gazing at it for a moment, as though he could scarcely believe his luck. Then he glanced quickly round to ensure that nobody else had witnessed his good fortune. He grinned and scuttled abruptly away, diving headlong into the nearest alleyway. Martin was left alone in sun-baked silence. He tipped his hat back on his head a little and reached for his cigarettes.

He had come to Rio to become a garimpeiro and now he had the money to enable him to do it; but he didn’t like the set-up one bit. Caine had been too confident of himself to be making idle threats. There was little doubt that those who had tried to cheat the patron really were out in the graveyard he had mentioned. Martin was going to have to keep his nose clean from now on.

That afternoon, he purchased the equipment he required – a pick and shovel, several round pans with wire mesh bases for sifting rubble, a good pistol and some spare ammunition, a knife and as many packs of cigarettes as he could conveniently carry. All these things could be purchased up at the garimpo, the storeholders told him, but would cost very much more. The following morning, before dawn, he took a train through the jungle to Garimpo Máculo. It was a three-hour ride through dank, humid forest and the interior of the train was like a Turkish bath. It was packed with hopeful prospectors of every nationality, each, like Martin, sent out by a patron. For the most part they were a tough, hard-bitten bunch of men, most of them running away from something – the police, the war, or just their own poverty. There was no friendliness between any of them. They began the journey as they meant to continue, as rivals.

One thick-set bearded Englishman asked loudly if anybody could tell him what maculo meant. A Portuguese on the other side of the compartment shouted back in slow, heavily accented tones that maculo was the Portuguese word for the diarrhoea caused by dysentery and that the camp was named after it because the disease was rife there. But this was the only conversation of the journey. Martin was relieved when the train finally came to a stop and the passengers spilled out onto a muddy deserted halt in the middle of the jungle. From here, it was only a short trek across open scrubland to the garimpo.

Martin’s expectations of the place had never been very high and yet he was unprepared for what he saw; a great ugly gash in the surface of a wide stretch of red rock which not so long before had been covered with dense jungle; and, within the gash, countless numbers of man-made pits, each with a single occupant grubbing his way frantically deeper with pick and shovel. There were hundreds of men working here, tough, scowling, sunburnt men dressed in rags who greeted the arrival of the newcomers with nothing more than a sidelong sneer. Round the edges of the garimpo were the living quarters, a description that was little more than a bad joke when applied to the tumble-down, ramshackle collection of squalid huts, lean-tos and canvas shelters that the garimpeiros called home. As Martin and his companions disembarked from the train, a little weasel-faced man in a filthy suit and a shapeless panama hat moved amongst them, announcing that he was the fazendeiro on whose land the garimpo was situated. If anybody wanted to dig here, they would have to pay him, Senhor Mirales, ten per cent of anything they found. The man was an irritating little insect and would normally have been swatted aside like a troublesome mosquito; but, predictably, he was backed up by three venomous-looking pistoleiros and the newcomers were too dazed and numbed from their journey to make much trouble. They milled about in confusion while specially appointed men moved amongst them, offering accommodation for hire. The prices demanded were exorbitant but nobody was in any position to refuse. Martin was billeted in a filthy little wooden shack with no windows, no door, no toilet, not even any running water. There was simply a rough bed made out of boards with a single filthy blanket lying on it. Water could be obtained from a hand-pump on the other side of the clearing or, failing that, from the stretch of muddy river that ran alongside the perimeter of the garimpo. Food could be purchased from the nearby barraca at about four times the going rate elsewhere and would have to be cooked on open fires outside the shelter. Also from the barraca would come any equipment that needed replacing and the cachaça with which a weary miner might drink away the misery of a long fruitless day’s work. For those with a little more money to spend, there was a brothel situated next to the store, haunted by a collection of dead-eyed, gaunt and miserable-looking Indian girls. They were plain and, for the most part, rife with venereal disease but, after a few months of unrelenting toil, it was surprising how attractive they could look.

Martin threw himself into the work with silent dedication, rising every morning at first light to go and hack away the ground in the place which had been allocated to him. The first few weeks were terrible. His skin blistered in the sun, he was bitten half to death by a multitude of insects, he suffered a dose of malaria that turned his skin grey and racked him with uncontrollable bouts of shivering. His hands blistered and scarred against the hard wooden shaft of the pick and at night he staggered back to the stinking little shack to sleep only to find it crawling with rats and cockroaches. And, worst of all, in all this time he found nothing, not the smallest trace of a stone. Others found diamonds. Every few hours a wild shout would go up from some corner of the garimpo and there would be a sudden rush of men, anxious to see what had been discovered. A few moments later, the same men would trudge grimly back to their own claim and continue to hack at the hard, indifferent, unyielding soil. Men went down with the maculo, the debilitating diarrhoea that left them little more than weak skeletons. Others contracted typhoid. The sick who had any money left took the train back to Rio, the others simply died and were buried in shallow graves out in the scrub jungle by men who were well schooled in the art of digging and had no time for prayers.

When a man did grub a diamond from the earth, the word spread like wildfire through the camp; and a short time later, a buyer – a comprador – would appear, a professional man usually employed by the patron or the fazendeiro. He would examine the stone with his eyepiece while the finder looked hopefully on; and then he would make his offer with calm, well-practised disdain. ‘It is not much of a stone; a good size, I grant you, but badly flawed. I could not offer you anything more than ten thousand cruzeiros for it.’ The price offered was always a fraction of the stone’s true value, but the presence of the ever-watchful pistoleiros in the background prevented any possibility of argument. The ‘lucky’ finder would take his share of the money and promptly go on a binge, getting blind drunk, spending a couple of nights fulfilling his tawdry fantasies in the brothel, brawling with his fellow garimpeiros; and a few days later he would be back at his accustomed place, hacking savagely into the soil, fuelled by the conviction that what had happened once could happen again. Sometimes really large diamonds were discovered, so big that even the comprador’s lousy offer would amount to a sizeable sum. Then all kinds of madness would break loose. Martin came to hate the garimpeiros and their stupid macho philosophy which dictated that it was a great loss of face not to squander any money that they had earned in the shortest possible time. One man who had found a good diamond went to the lengths of having a Cadillac shipped in from the United States, piece by piece, so that it could be brought in to the garimpo by train. Once everything had arrived, he had it put together and delighted for a few days in driving the expensive vehicle round and round the perimeter at breakneck speed, its interior packed with yelling drunken men who normally would not have bothered to talk to him. This went on until the car ran out of petrol and the owner was running short of money. Soon he was back at work and the rusting, dilapidated hulk of the car still stood at the edge of the jungle, an incongruous intruder in this remote corner of the world. Other diamond finders had more unfortunate ends. Sometimes a man was knifed in the back at the height of some drunken brawl and the remainder of his money appropriated by the killer. Others simply drank too much cachaça, went berserk and plunged yelling and shrieking into the jungle. Either the Indians got them or wild animals; they were never seen again.

Eventually, Martin found a diamond; not a particularly big one, but a diamond nonetheless; and though he had sneered in the past at the brutish excesses of his workmates, he found himself acting in just the same way. Long months of loneliness and frustration spilled out of him and there was nothing he could do to stop himself. He drank himself insensible at the barraca, he beat up some man who was too slow to get out of his way and, that night, in one of the grubby beds of the brothel, he rutted with an Indian girl who barely acknowledged his presence. The next morning, sick at heart, ashamed of his stupidity and suffering from the worst headache in all of creation, he was back at work, ignoring the jeers of men working alongside him.

Time passed with slow, relentless monotony. The long rains of his second year came, when there was nothing to do but lie in the shelter and stare out at the sorrowful yellow waters, swirling ankle deep around the garimpo and across the floor of the shack, bringing with it all manner of creatures – snakes, rats, scorpions. Vast swarms of mosquitoes and plague flies hovered in the air and fed on the abundance of human flesh. At a time like this, a man had to obtain credit to get those things that would keep him alive. There was always an interest rate and the next year was begun with the miner heavily in debt.

Martin had worked on, stubborn, indefatigable. The third and fourth years, he did better, found six diamonds in all, a couple of them of reasonable size. This time he forced himself to follow some kind of a plan. From each sale he put a little money aside, hiding it in the heel of his boot, and then went ahead and squandered the rest, in the usual flamboyant style, managing to convince his workmates that he had spent everything. He dared not let anybody know he was keeping some back, because inevitably a greedy man would come in the night and take it from him with the blade of a knife. He feigned poverty, asking for credit at the store, even though he no longer needed it. His plan was simple. To amass enough money to escape from the garimpo to something better. It might take him years but there was always the chance that he really would make it good, that he might find a diamond that was big enough to risk running with.

The news that the war had come to an end deepened his resolve. Now he should be able to get back to … or at least pass through, his homeland. The long rains came again. He bided his time. Sometimes, as he lay in the hammock he had constructed as a safer alternative to sleeping close to the water level, an image would come to his mind, an image of Charles Caine, fat and scented with lavender water, growing steadily rich on the proceeds he obtained by selling his diamonds on the international market; and a calm powerful hatred would come to Martin, a hatred and a hunger for revenge. But then he would remind himself that he had only himself to blame for this misery. He himself had wanted to become a garimpeiro; Caine had only provided the one-way ticket. There were men working at the garimpo who had been here for years and, what’s more, it was plain they would remain here till they died.

‘But not me,’ vowed Martin silently. ‘No, not me. I’m going to get out of this.’

And so the sixth year had begun. Martin’s money stash had now become too big to keep in his shoe. Instead he had made himself a crude money belt out of a discarded piece of canvas, working at the dead of night by the light of a candle. He found another two diamonds that year and treated the money as he had done before, creaming off a little for his nest egg and frittering away the rest. He took to hiding the money belt in a small gap behind one of the roof beams of his shack, afraid that somebody might search him when he was drunk. He carried his gun with him at all times and would have been prepared to use it without a moment’s hesitation, should the necessity arise.

And then the miracle occurred, the moment of destiny to which his whole life had been geared. It was late July and he was digging in the merciless glare of the midday heat. He was about four feet down into the latest of a seemingly endless series of excavations. Having broken up a large amount of rubble, he scooped it up in his pan, clambered out of the hole and strolled down to the river to sift through the contents. The yellow stagnant water washed round his ankles and he dropped the sieve unceremoniously beneath the surface, gave the rubble a quick swirl and then heaved the contents back onto the firm mud of the shore. He left them for a moment to soak through, strolling back to the hole to continue digging for a while. This was his usual procedure. After about twenty minutes, he clambered back out of the hole and wandered down to examine what he had. He did not hurry himself, since this was only one of hundreds of similar loads that he examined every day. He picked up a piece of stick from the bank and began to sort through the collection of mud and rock, poking systematically.

For an instant, something seemed to glitter, catching the rays of the sun; but then more mud slid downwards and the light was gone. Martin frowned. He probed with the stick again and found a hardness that seemed far too big to be anything but rock. He pushed his fingers experimentally into the rubble and pulled something free that was the size of a duck egg. He grunted disgustedly and was about to fling the object aside, when another flash of light caught his attention. He gave the object an exploratory wipe with the flat of his left hand, revealing a crystalline, transparent surface below. It was a diamond, the biggest he had ever seen; and he had very nearly thrown it away.

For an instant, he was struck numb, frozen to the spot. Then he opened his mouth to scream, but snatched the sound away before it left his throat, realizing that other men were working only a few yards away. He closed his hand round the diamond, stood up and kicked out with his boot at the discarded pile of rubbish, scattering it in all directions.

‘Nothing but shit!’ he announced bitterly. Then he moved down to the river again, crouched down in the shallows and feigned the act of splashing water on his face, while with his spare hand he doused the diamond in the water, rubbing the remains of the mud from it. He was shaking with emotion and he felt his eyes fill with tears. He dashed them away with muddy water and allowed himself the luxury of a sly glance down at his prize. He had not dared to believe that it could all be diamond, expecting that its size had been increased by lumps of rock adhering to it. He almost cried out a second time. It filled the palm of his hand and was unquestionably the biggest diamond found at Garimpo Maculo, perhaps the biggest ever discovered in the continent of South America. Even sold locally it would make him a rich man. On the international market, it would sell for millions of dollars.

Realizing that to linger there much longer might make his fellow workers suspicious he slipped the gem into the pocket of his trousers, testing the lining first with his fingers to ensure that there was no hole through which the precious object might slip. Then, composing himself with an effort, he mopped his face on his bandana and forced himself to return to his digging place, keeping his face stony and impassive. He hefted his pick and went on with his work, digging methodically and taking the rubble down to the water’s edge every so often. At the back of his mind was the belief that, where one diamond had been, other lesser stones might occur. But all through that long afternoon, perhaps the longest of his life, he found no sign of anything else. As he worked, he considered the possibilities open to him. There was no way he would announce this find to the compradors. It was the discovery of a lifetime and he would either escape with the diamond or die trying. Once, he thought he saw the man working at the next dig staring at him suspiciously; but he assured himself that this was just the product of his overworked imagination.

When the brief tropical dusk came, he gathered up his equipment and trudged back to his shack. Impatiently, he waited for full darkness to fall and then, lying in his hammock, by the light of a single candle, allowed himself the luxury of a first proper look at the diamond. There was a curious shock in store for him. The stone was every bit as big as his first impressions had suggested; but what he could never have guessed was the fine, weird beauty of the rough gem. It was quite translucent and when he held it close to the candlelight, he gave a little gasp of surprise. For within the cool depths of the diamond a strange flaw had created a perfectly symmetrical and highly familiar shape. It was exactly like a spider, a tarantula, etched in a slightly grey series of veins within the heart of the stone.

He knew that shape only too well, for in the rainy season the creatures tended to seek sanctuary in the dusty corners of the hut. Though Martin knew that the bite of a tarantula was rarely very harmful, still he had a horror of their thick, hairy bodies and wriggling legs.

He replaced the diamond in his pocket and began to draw up his plans. Any man here at the garimpo would readily kill to possess such a stone, so he did not intend to linger. In three days’ time, the regular train back to Rio would depart in the early hours of the morning, but to leave suddenly would inevitably cause suspicion. At Garimpo Maculo, there were only two reasons for leaving, death or sickness. So Martin decided that he would become sick that night. It would not be hard to fake. He suffered from recurring bouts of malaria and it would simply be a question of exaggerating the symptoms. That night he sat up sewing an old scrap of leather he had been saving to make a tobacco pouch into a bag in which he could keep the tarantula stone. He fixed a strong loop of rawhide to the bag, double testing it by wrenching the finished article with all his strength. Satisfied at last that it would not break, he hung the pouch round his neck, tucking it beneath the loose khaki fabric of his shirt. With the hard, rough shape of the diamond pressing reassuringly against his chest, he finally snatched a few hours’ sleep, but he was troubled by an awful dream.

He was climbing a remote mountainside, clutching precarious holds on some sheer granite rocks. Far below, the jungle spread out in every direction, the huge trees dwarfed by distance. He had no idea what he was doing in this place, nor what he had come to find. He only knew he had to go on.

Reaching a particularly tricky section, he was obliged to put up both hands in order to pull himself onto a ledge. He began to do this, reluctantly lifting his feet up from their holds and letting his legs dangle above a terrifying chasm, and started to haul himself up; and then, with a sense of shock, he felt a movement under the fabric of his shirt, against his naked chest. Glancing down in terror, he saw that beneath the fabric something was moving, wriggling, pushing against the folds. Martin opened his mouth to yell but the sound died in his throat as he saw something dark and horribly furry begin to edge out from beneath the shirt. His fingers were aching on the ledge, a thick sweat bathed every inch of his body, but he could not move so much as a muscle; he could only hang helplessly as first one leg, then another, came creeping out into full view. Then there was a squat, heavy body and a whole series of quivering tiny jaws. He knew suddenly, with a terrible conviction, that the tarantula was going to crawl up onto his face.

Martin woke, his body caked in acrid sweat. The first light of day was spilling through the open doorway of his shack. Remembering his plan, he stayed in his hammock much later than was his usual custom and then, after several hours of this, collected his tools and stumbled down to his digging place. He wore two layers of clothing to give the impression that he felt cold and of course this made him sweat profusely. The only difficulty was faking the shivering attacks, but even though nobody was taking a great deal of notice of him, he kept the act up all through the day, getting very little work done.

In the early afternoon, he was startled by the sound of a heavily accented voice just behind him. He turned and had to suppress a look of shock. Standing by his dig was the man who had been working opposite him the day before. He was Portuguese, a thick-set, bearded fellow with an enormous belly that jutted out over the belt of his jeans. He had moved to a new site that morning and Martin had not expected to see him again; but he stood now, his hands thrust into the back pockets of his jeans, regarding Martin with a calm, slightly mocking expression.

‘You are ill, senhor?’

Martin shrugged, mopped the sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his shirt. ‘Yeah … just a touch of malaria, that’s all. I get it from time to time …’ He turned away to recommence digging.

‘Funny … you don’t look so ill to me,’ the garimpeiro muttered. This was said in such a sly way that Martin was shocked; but he forced himself to continue digging grimly and when he turned round again, the man was gone. Back in the shack, Martin pondered the matter. Could the man have seen anything yesterday morning? Was his remark just coincidental? Was Martin himself becoming paranoid, seeing enemies at every turn? He did not sleep that night and the following morning his feeble attempts at digging were less of an act than they had been the day before. After a couple of hours of ineffectual fumbling, he gathered up his tools and stumbled off in the direction of the barraca. Behind the roughly made counter, he found Hernandez, the man who ran the store. Martin trudged slowly over to him and set the tools down in front of him, shivering violently as he did so.