Isvik Page 13

  I glanced once more at the hotel, thinking of the comfort of sheets, the softness of a bed. Then I started the engine and drove back to where I had seen the Pan-Am Norte sign.

  I suppose we were in that meteorological horror that is called an inversion, heat and humidity pressing down on us, numbing the brain and starting the sweat from every pore of the body. I didn’t see the great walled city of Chanchán, only the mist and rain, the blur of the headlights and the windscreen wipers clicking endlessly across my vision. I had the strange feeling I was driving back in time, groping my way into a world of Inca and Chimú people, a world of great empires that built roads and temples and forts of mud on the coast and of cut stone in the Andes, stone that was dove-tailed to resist the trembling of its foundations when the earth quaked.

  Finally the rain stopped. Miles of sugar cane, followed by miles of flat desert country, all seen through a damp haze so that nothing seemed real. Rice, too, in river outlets to the Pacific that were like oases of green in the waste of sand that fringed the coast. For a few minutes the sun glimmered through the mist to my right, a red ball just risen above the mountain. Then the mist closed in again thicker than ever.

  Ward stirred and asked me the time in a voice heavy with sleep. No play-acting now, no switching of accents. He was still barely conscious and hadn’t the energy to be anything but himself. I glanced at my watch, found I had forgotten to adjust it and read the time for him from the digital clock at the base of the instrument panel. It was 08.07. And then, more for the comfort of hearing my own voice than with any certainty, I said, ‘We should get in to Cajamarca some time between ten and eleven.’

  He gave a snort. ‘We’ll be lucky. It depends what conditions are like when we start climbin’ up to the pass.’ He reached for a cigarette and lit it. ‘Want one?’ He seemed to have forgotten I had tried to walk out on him fifty kilometres or so back.

  I shook my head. The mist was now so dense it was more like a sea fog, the humidity very high and the sweat dripping from my forehead as I leaned forward, my eyes straining to see through the murk. I had the windscreen wipers on again and our speed was down to less than 30 k.p.h. Neither of us spoke after that, Ward smoking in silence, and then, when he had finished his cigarette, he seemed to drift off to sleep again. Only the sound of the engine, and my eyes shifting from the mist and the road to take covert glances at his face; I knew no more about him now than when I first met him, except what he had told me on the flight down from Mexico. But that, unusual though it was, had been only the outline, the skeletal framework of the man. What his real nature was, what made him tick, I had no idea.

  It is difficult to explain my state of mind. Fear, real fear, is something I had only experienced once in my life, and that, strangely enough, was not on the round-the-world race, but in my own little boat, and in my own waters off Blakeney. I had been following some seals in bright sunshine, stripped to the waist and taking photographs. I had no VHF then, only a transistor, and I was so preoccupied I missed the weather forecast.

  Suddenly I was enveloped in one of those bitter North Sea murks and it was blowing quite strong from an easterly direction. I was off Cley at the time, so I lowered the main and ran for home. I never saw Kelling or Salthouse churches, or any sign of the coast at all, and I landed up sailing right over the ridge called Blakeney Overfalls, wind over tide, a filthy sea and virtually nil visibility.

  That was the only time I had known real fear. Like most of my generation, I had never known a war, had never had fear rammed down my throat time and time again like the older generation. I was thinking particularly of my great-uncle George, the stories he had told, men pulled out of the sea half burned alive, the sudden explosions as another slow cargo vessel slid to the bottom, nobody stopping for survivors and the feeling of terror as the U-boats gradually picked the ships off until the one he was on was alone in the pattern.

  He had been a gunner on three different merchantmen, first on Atlantic convoys, then on the Murmansk run. Twice he had been torpedoed, and each time he had finally been picked up; then on PQ17, when the destroyers left and they had been ordered to scatter …

  He is dead now, but I’ve never forgotten his description of how he had felt as the German bombers came in from Norway, picking the scattered merchant ships off, the sound of the bombs, and the cold, always the cold. Cold and fear. It crippled your guts before you were even hit. And all the time telling us about it in that slow, unemotional Norfolk voice of his.

  Maybe my imagination was running out of control, but the weather, Gómez, the pass ahead, everything became distorted and magnified in my mind. Gómez in particular. Ángel de Muerte. By the time I was through San Pedro de Lloc and had reached the turn-off to Cajamarca at San José my mind had built the man up into some sort of a monster. I didn’t believe what Rodriguez had said about the reason for that soubriquet. No man gets to be called the Angel of Death just because he tells his men to stand fast and fight. There had to be some more deadly reason than that.

  Ward was still asleep when I turned right and headed eastwards towards the Andes, the mist a white vapour, the rice fields, the cacti, the occasional trees, all having a weirdness about them that matched my mood and added to my growing fear of what lay ahead, beyond the mountains I could not see. There were moments when the sun almost burst through the mist and I kept on driving, waiting and hoping for a first glimpse of the cordillera, my mind groping for some answer to the enigma of Iris Sunderby’s behaviour. I think it was then I tried to work out her relationship to Gómez, but the complexity of it made it difficult to grasp. He was the son of a woman who had been a nightclub singer and briefly married to Juan Gómez, that was all my tired mind seemed able to grasp. That and the fact that Juan Gómez was her father, too. He had owned a big department store that had burned down, and he had then hanged himself.

  So why had she gone rushing north from Lima to see this half-brother of hers? Why? Why? Why? Was he really coming with us as navigator? Winter in the Antarctic. Pack ice grinding. Bergs lowering over us, thrashing through the pack, and that ghost ship seen by a frightened glaciologist …

  ‘Look out!’

  Ward’s voice smashed into my consciousness and I slammed on the brakes. A man had suddenly emerged out of the blinding iridescence of the mist, a vague figure standing in the middle of the road with his back towards us.

  I only just stopped in time. Even then he didn’t turn round, just remained there, motionless, staring straight ahead at the road, and there was a roaring that filled the inside of our vehicle with the solid, continuous sound of water on the move.

  The road ran straight ahead of us until it disappeared in the mist, except that at the man’s feet it was gone and there was a gap some fifty metres or so wide through which a brown torrent ran so high and in such furious waves that it almost lipped the broken macadam where the road had been swept away.

  The man himself was small, with a brown and red poncho hung from his shoulders and a wide-brimmed hat of brown felt rammed tight on the lank black hair that covered his bullet head. He took no notice of us, just standing there, gazing at the swirling brown tide of water almost lapping his sandals as though lost in the wonder of such a happening.

  ‘He is in the presence of his God,’ Ward whispered to me. And when I asked him what he meant, he said irritably, ‘Oh, don’t be more stupid than you need be. He’s lookin’ at something too big for him to understand. And so am Ah,’ he added, slapping me on the back as he got out of the car. ‘Buenos días.’ He had to repeat his greeting twice before the Indian came out of his trance-like reverie and turned to face us.

  ‘Buenos días, señores.’ He had a broad, high-cheekboned face, a straight beak of a nose, and dark eyes that stared at us without expression. In fact, the whole face was expressionless, the only feature with mobility being the mouth, which was broad and thick, always seeming to be on the point of making a statement without actually saying anything. Having greeted us, he just stood there, g
azing at us totally without curiosity or any sign of interest.

  ‘What’s the river?’ I asked Ward.

  ‘How the hell dae Ah know?’

  ‘You had the map. I was driving, remember?’

  I heard him question the Indian and I reached into the car for the map which he had left on his seat. The word ‘Hecketypecky’ passed between them, and when I eventually found it – the Rio Jequetepeque – I could hardly believe the spelling. ‘Well, that’s that,’ I said. ‘That mad flood of a torrent runs beside the road all the way up to the top of the cordillera.’

  ‘Of course it does. That’s why there’s a pass.’ He turned to the Indian again, asking questions in Spanish and getting nowhere. The man just stood and stared at him blankly.

  ‘Why don’t you phone Gómez if you want to find out whether Mrs Sunderby has arrived safely in Cajamarca?’ He should have done that before instead of insisting on our groping our way up the Pan-Am Highway in darkness and bad visibility. ‘Have you got his phone number?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then I suggest we go back to the hotel in Trujillo, get hold of his number and phone him from there.’

  ‘Why?’

  Why? I stared at him, wondering what was going on in that complex mind of his, what his real motive was in pushing north by car when we could have had a good night’s sleep and flown up in daylight. The Indian had turned away, ignoring his questions and gazing across the swollen waters of that ridiculously named river. A wind had risen, the mist swirling and vague shapes of mountains looming through ragged gaps.

  ‘If you’re worried about Iris Sunderby surely the quickest way …’ But he had swung round at the sound of a vehicle approaching. The ghost of what looked like a Land Rover took shape in the billowing curtain of the mist, emerging as a Japanese four-wheel drive rather like our own, with two people in it. A woman was driving and she parked beside our land-cruiser, nodding to us briefly as she stepped out onto the road and flung a series of questions at the Indian, half in Spanish and half in a more guttural tongue, which I took to be Quechua.

  She was a startling sight in that setting, for she was immaculately dressed in riding clothes, her breeches almost white, boots black and so highly polished I could see the flood waters reflected in them. But it was the face that held me. It was a strange, very beautiful face, the mouth a broad gash of red, heavily made-up, the nose finely pointed with delicately arched nostrils, the eyebrows black like two thin pencil lines, and she wore a broad, flat-brimmed hat.

  Her manner, the way she stood, everything about her suggested breeding. I couldn’t help thinking she was like a racehorse, and when Ward started questioning her, she answered him with such haughty condescension, such arrogance, that his face went white and I swear he’d have play-acted the Gorbals slum kid and thrown a lot of four-letter words at her if he’d known how to do it in Spanish. She said the word Chepén several times, as though she was speaking to a particularly stupid servant, Tolambo, too, the Hacienda Tolambo, and at the same time she made a circling motion with her hand, ending up with her finger pointed at the road ahead and the jagged peaks of the cordillera disembodied in a ragged mist hole.

  She said something to the man who was with her, a thickset, dark-featured fellow, who stood with his hands in the pockets of his anorak frowning at the flood water. He nodded, and then they were both moving back to their vehicle, the Indian drifting light-footed into the back. The woman paused before getting into the driving seat and said to Ward in near-perfect English, ‘I think you’re a bloody fool, but if you’re determined to press on, I suggest you have a word with Alberto Fernandez when you get to Tolambo. He’s the manager. He may be able to give you some idea what the road is like further on.’ She suddenly smiled, a glimmer of warmth. ‘Good luck, señor!’

  ‘One more question,’ Ward said quickly. ‘There’s a man named Gómez lives at Cajamarca. The Hacienda Lucinda.’ Her face froze and he hesitated. ‘D’ye know him?’

  ‘I have heard speak of him.’ She climbed in and slammed the door, the sound of the starter drowning Ward’s next question. He watched as she backed and turned, then drove off, the grey curtain of the mist suddenly swallowing her up. ‘Bugger the woman,’ he grumbed. ‘I have beard speak of him.’ He was mimicking her English. ‘What did she mean by that, d’ye think?’

  He took the wheel after that and drove at a furious speed back to San José, where he turned right on to the Pan-Am. ‘Chepén,’ he said. ‘How far?’

  ‘You’re going on then?’

  ‘Of course Ah’m goin’ on. Ah’ve not come this far just to put my tail between my legs … How far is it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, wondering what I could do to stop him.

  ‘Well, look at the map, man.’

  It seemed so pointless, the mist thicker than ever now. No sign of the cordillera, no glimmer of sun, and the Pacific invisible somewhere away to our left.

  ‘Look at the map, damn ye!’

  ‘All right.’ My voice was taut with anger as I pulled it out of the shelf in front of me and opened it on my knees. Chepén. We were driving north and I saw it at once. ‘It’s the next town up the Highway.’

  ‘How far?’

  I told him I was trying to work it out. ‘About thirty kilometres I would guess.’ And I added, ‘There’s a minor road runs up over the cordillera via San Miguel and Llata to Hualgayoc where you can turn south to Cajamarca. It’s a good deal longer, but there’s no river marked, and it might be sensible –’

  ‘No, we’ll follow the woman’s instructions. She lives here. She knows the country.’

  He drove in silence after that and I fell asleep until the roughness of the road made me open my eyes. We were bumping our way between pale yellow walls of sugar cane. ‘Where are we?’ I mumbled.

  ‘Tolambo,’ he said. ‘Sorry to spoil yer beauty sleep.’

  My eyes were heavy-lidded with fatigue, and despite the jolting, I must have drifted off again, for suddenly we were stopped, everything quiet, only the sound of voices – Ward talking to a tall, dark man wearing dungarees and a sombrero. There was a narrow-gauge rail track stretching away through acres of cut cane, and in the distance a little tank engine panting wisps of smoke as a gang of men loaded its trailer wagons. They were talking in Spanish and I was only half awake. ‘Adiós?

  ‘Adiós, señor.’

  The sun was burning up the mist as we drove on. ‘Did he tell you what the road was like over the pass?’

  Ward’s reply was lost in the sound of the engine, and when I opened my eyes again we were bumping along the bank of what looked like an old Inca canal. The sun was blazing hot, the skin of my bare arm beginning to burn. Away to the left, black menacing clouds of cu-nim were piled up over mountains dimly seen through a haze of humidity. ‘When do we hit the road again?’

  ‘Soon.’ Ward, peered at the control panel. ‘Another kilometre to go, according to the foreman back at Tolambo.’ He was holding the bucking steering wheel with his artificial hand while he felt under the dashboard for his cigarettes.

  ‘What about the pass?’

  ‘He thought it might be a bit peligroso. Nobody has been through fur twenty-four hours and the telephone to Chilete, the last village before the summit, is out of action. So’s the railway, of course.’

  ‘And Cajamarca?’

  ‘He talked to Cajamarca yesterday.’

  Everything about us, the rocks, the yellow earth, the patches of vivid green in the valley, sparkled with moisture, the old irrigation canal half-full of stagnant brown water. Thunder rolled through the mountains, jagged forks of lightning splitting the black folds of the cu-nim. ‘I think we should turn back.’

  He didn’t answer, lighting his cigarette one-handed, and I didn’t press him. I was too tired, only vaguely conscious that we had come off the canal bank and were angling down across a steep slope of stony ground to the rice-green flatness of the valley floor.

  Finally we climbed a bank and were on the
road again, the smoothness of it lulling me into such a deep sleep that I never saw the barrier at the railway crossing, did not even hear them telling Ward the Jequetepeque had broken its banks a little further on. It was the violent jolting of our wheels on the sleepers that finally woke me to the realisation that Ward had switched from the road to the railway line itself and was bumping his way along the track towards the gaping mouth of a tunnel.

  I sat up then, suddenly wide awake. ‘What the hell?’

  ‘River’s cut the road again. They say we’ll see the break when we cross the bridge.’

  ‘The bridge?’

  ‘Aye. It’s just beyond the tunnel. A girder bridge.’

  ‘Anybody else taken this route today?’

  ‘No.’

  I was staring at him, at the set, aquiline face, the great beak of a nose and the hard line of the jaw, his features in silhouette. ‘You’re mad,’ I said.

  He nodded, smiling. ‘Maybe, but right now Ah think the wind is southerly.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ The tunnel entrance had grown big, the stone arch of it rearing up ahead of us like the open jaws of some petrified monster.

  ‘Hamlet, Ah think – Ah am mad north-north-west, but when the wind is southerly … Most times with me ye’ll find the wind is southerly.’

  A curtain of dripping water spat at the bonnet as the darkness of the tunnel engulfed us, the sound of the engine louder now and a sense of finality as the rock walls closed about us. It was like being in the adit of a mine, and I was driving into the bowels of the earth with a man who seemed hell bent on risking our lives for no apparent reason. I thought of the Weddell Sea, the ice and the ghost of that Flying Dutchman, visualising the friction that could develop in the close confines of a yacht. My God! I thought, the chances of coming out of that alive with this madman as the owner and driving force … It was crazy. Absolutely crazy.