Isvik Page 14

  The dark of the tunnel hammered the engine noise back at us, water drumming on the roof above my head. Ward switched on the headlights, glancing at me quickly, a tight little smile. ‘Ye got to take a positive attitude. Ah enjoy this sort of thin’. Ah like excitement, the unexpected, shovin’ against the closed door of the unknown.’ He nodded ahead of us to where the tunnel showed an arched embrasure of light. ‘Darkness is only fur ever when ye’re dead.’ He dipped the headlights and the far end of the tunnel seemed to leap towards us, bouncing up and down to the thump of our tyres on the sleepers.

  Suddenly we were into daylight and right ahead of us the waters of the Jequetepeque ran brown and white, the river’s level close under the rails of the girder bridge as it flowed, deep and very fast, through the gorge. The sound of our wheels changed to a hollow banging of wooden boards as we drove across. But then the stupid bastard stopped right in the middle of the bridge. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing.’ He switched the engine off. ‘Just admirin’ the view.’ He was pulling the sun roof open and thrusting himself to his feet. The sound of the river increased to a roar. There was wind, too, funnelling through the gorge, whining through the girders and causing the whole structure to tremble. The sun came and went, thunder clouds growling and swirling up the valley.

  I didn’t like it. Twice the road had been cut and we hadn’t even started the climb up to the pass. I could hear boulders grinding on the river bed and the grumble of thunder was like the sound of distant gunfire.

  Ward slipped down into the driving seat again and slammed the roof shut. ‘You’re turning back, are you?’

  ‘Of course not.’ And then, as he started the engine again, he turned to me and said, ‘If the sight of a storm in the Andes scares ye, what’s yer reaction goin’ to be when we’re headed into the pack with a Southern Ocean gale up our backsides?’ He stared at me very hard for a moment. ‘Think about it, laddie.’ This with a grin on a lighter note. ‘There’s no room fur cold feet on the sort of expedition we’re embarkin’ on.’ He reached for the gear lever and we began to move slowly off the bridge.

  I sat back, wide awake now and cursing the man for goading me so unpleasantly. But at least I had the sense to keep my mouth shut, and shortly afterwards we were able to leave the railway and get back on to the road. The surface was dirt, but despite all the water the going was good. It looked as though a grader had been over it just before the Amazonian rains had spilled over the Andes.

  ‘Last night two Indians in a pick-up came down from Chilete.’

  I didn’t say anything, though the way he had said it made it clear he expected some comment.

  ‘They went as far as the railway crossin’ on the other side of the tunnel, talked to the man on duty at the halt there, then turned back. That was before the road was cut. They said things were bad up at Chilete with several houses already fallen into the river.’ He looked at me, obviously annoyed by my silence. ‘Well, say somethin’, can’t ye? Don’t just sit there, sulkin’.’

  ‘I’m tired,’ I said. ‘And I just don’t see the point of pressing on through that muck.’ I nodded towards the black murk of cloud that blocked off the valley and all but the lower slopes of the mountains. ‘Apart from the storm, we don’t know what the road is like, how bad it will be when we reach the pass.’

  ‘It’s not the road that worries me. It’s those two men.’ We were climbing now, the lower slopes of the mountains patched with the terraced green of small rice fields. We passed through Tembladera, a scattering of houses clinging to the mountain side. ‘They knew about us, the type of vehicle we were drivin’, and they instructed the keeper of that crossin’ to tell us the road over the pass was open, that it was okay.’

  ‘Why?’ The question was wrung out of me by the absurdity of it. ‘Why should they do that? How did they know about us?’

  ‘Telephone. From our friend in Lima. They were both of them from Chimbote.’

  That was the filthy coastal town smelling of fish oil where I’d taken over the driving. ‘All the more reason why we should turn back.’

  He snorted. ‘All the more reason why we should go on.’ And he added, ‘Ah’d like to have a wee chat with those two, find out a bit more about them. Reach into the back, will ye, and open up that parcel of books. There’s a knife in the pocket of my anorak.’

  It was one of those all-purpose knives with a flick blade sharp as a razor. I slit along the seam of the cardboard wrapper where it had been taped over. Inside were three fat volumes of Mark Twain tied together with gold tape and a card with Complemento de Librerío Universal on which had been written in green ink primera editión. ‘How ever did these get to Peru?’

  He glanced at me sideways, smiling. ‘Ah told ye it was useful when travelling to enter antiquarian as one’s occupation.’

  ‘First editions of Mark Twain! They must be worth quite a bit – in America.’ But what was he going to do with them in this economically bankrupt country?

  ‘Cut the gold tape and pull them apart. They’re not quite what they seem.’

  I didn’t need to pull them apart. As soon as I had cut the tape the bottom volume dropped into my lap. The centre of it was a plastic mould in which the metal of an automatic gleamed snugly. The upper volume I had to prise loose from the middle one. It contained ammunition in three spare magazines, also a very light plastic armpit holster. Ward glanced in the rear-view mirror, then all round, finally pulling up in the middle of the road. ‘Ye’ll have to give me a hand.’ He opened his door and got out, leaving the engine running.

  I didn’t move. I just sat there, my brain numb.

  He was taking off his anorak. ‘Well, come on, man. It’s damp out here.’ He was in his shirt sleeves staring through the side window at me. ‘Come on, damn ye. Move it!’

  I looked at him, feeling I had reached the end of the road. ‘If you want to play cops and robbers,’ I said, choosing my words carefully, ‘you’ll have to do it without me.’

  He reached in and wrenched the little bundle of plastic bands out of my hands, and I sat there, silent, watching as he fumbled the bands into position with the little cup to hold the weapon under his right armpit. It took him a little while, but he got it fixed in the end, then held out his dummy hand for the gun.

  I should have told him to go to hell. I should have flung the damned thing out of his open door so that it would bounce down the mountainside up which the road was climbing. Instead, I handed it over to him. I don’t know why. Thunder rumbled high above us, the clouds reaching down towards us, wisps of mist sweeping down the valley.

  He had put his anorak on again, no sign of the gun, no bulge as he climbed in and we started on up the mountain road, windscreen wipers slashing back and forth. ‘Getting quite chill out there.’

  I didn’t say anything.

  ‘How far up d’ye reckon we are, a thousand feet?’

  He was trying to ease my mind, to make me feel it was all right and quite normal for a man to have a gun in an armpit holster in Peru. ‘Just in case.’ I could have said it for him. In case of what? ‘Are you going to use it?’ The words seemed dragged out of me, my voice subdued.

  A pause, then very gently, ‘Only if Ah have to.’

  ‘And what constitutes have to?’

  ‘Ah’ll know when the time comes. Let’s leave it at that, shall we?’

  He drove in silence then and I closed my eyes, pretending I was asleep, my head nodding, and all the time my mind reaching forward to the future, trying to visualise what it would be like on the boat. That he’d use the gun if he had to I was quite certain. But why did he feel the need of a gun? What gave him the right to have it? And the way it was delivered to him, so neat, so innocent-seeming a package. Somebody had acquired it. On his instructions? Somebody had gone to considerable trouble and expense to acquire the books and have them hollowed out, then delivered to the car hire people just before our plane arrived. It all added up to an organisation, but what organisation?
Who did they represent – a government, the Mafia, some drug ring? Cocaine? Was he mixed up in cocaine smuggling?

  We never saw Chilete until suddenly we were in among the grey ghosts of houses, the road rutted now and full of mud. The sound of water, when Ward rolled down his window, was a solid roar that overlaid everything.

  He pulled up and we could look down through the grey cloud-mist to the centre of the village where an old stone bridge and several houses were crumbling into the river. There was a little group of men gathered outside what looked like a café, Indians some of them, their faces dark and sombre as they stood arguing over the ruins of their village. ‘Maybe they’ll know if there’s been any traffic over the road.’ Ward got out and strode down the mud-sodden road to join them. I stayed by the vehicle, wondering what to do. But I knew the answer to that. There wasn’t anything I could do and, knowing that, I was conscious of my own inadquacy, weighed down by a sense of helplessness.

  Perhaps it was the village. There was something about Chilete and the cloud-mist drizzle of that dreadful morning that was utterly depressing. The last point of habitation before the pass and every dwelling a-gleam with water as though the whole place was deluge-cursed and waiting to fall into the river. I felt not only miserable, but strangely scared, as though the pass above me was in itself a terrifying manifestation of dark imaginings, like the entrance gate to the place where the dead wait in limbo.

  ‘Two of them came in yesterday evenin’.’ Ward was back, climbing into the driving seat. ‘The word is that five or six miles further on we’ll find the new road washed out. Apparently it’s entirely blocked with mud and rocks.’ He started the engine. ‘But the old road is still passable. They’ve put stone markers at the intersection.’

  ‘Who were they? The same two Indians who talked to the railway crossing keeper?’

  ‘I guess so. The laddies back there had never seen them before. They thought they were probably road maintenance men from the Cajamarca region.’

  The tumbled ruin that was Chilete disappeared almost immediately, swallowed up by the mist, as we drove out along the broad, freshly graded road, the walls of a valley gorge closing in. ‘How far to the pass?’ I asked him, but he didn’t answer, peering into the grey void as the road doubled back on itself, climbing steeply. There were hairpin bends and soon we were lipping the edge of a two-thousand-foot drop, the river below occasionally glimpsed through ragged wind-torn holes in the cloud.

  It was like that all the way to the intersection where the new road swung away to the right, the way blocked by stones placed in a line across it. They were not large stones, merely a warning. The old road ran straight on along the gorge edge. As far as surface was concerned, and even width, there was little to choose between them. Ward checked, a momentary lift of his foot on the accelerator, then he was powering straight on. ‘Shorter this way,’ he said. ‘That’s what they told me, anyway.’

  ‘But less convenient,’ I muttered. ‘How long before we get back to the proper road?’ More frequent glimpses now, through swirling cloud, of the river far below. Half a dozen parrots cut a brilliant green streak across our bonnet before disappearing into the looming darkness ahead. Lightning flashed, followed almost instantaneously by the sharp crack of thunder. ‘What do we do if this road is blocked?’

  He didn’t answer and shortly afterwards he slowed for a right-hand bend, his body bent forward, the dummy hand clamped tight on the steering wheel. He took it slowly in four-wheel drive, the road much narrower here, the outer edge of it crumbling away. Round the bend it broadened out again with just room for two vehicles to pass, but ahead was the deep V of a side gorge with water pouring down it, spilling a flood across the road. He braked then, bringing the vehicle to a stop and sitting there, the engine ticking over. He wiped his face with one end of the brightly coloured sweat rag he wore round his neck, staring at the problem ahead. ‘Know what Ah’d like right now? Ah’d like a nice cool pint of that Southwold brew.’

  ‘Adnams?’

  ‘Aye. Yer part of the world and one of the best bitters –’ His words were cut short by a clap of thunder very close.

  But it wasn’t thunder. It was something else, more like a cannon, and before the echo of it had died away, there was a rumbling sound, growing to a roar. In the same instant Ward had revved the engine and rammed the gear lever home. The vehicle shot forward, and as it did so the first rocks from above came hurtling down onto the track just behind us.

  Leaning forward I had a view of it in the side mirror, the bend we had just rounded obliterated by a great mass of avalanching rock and mud that went spilling down over the edge to disappear into the cloud vapour below. ‘Christ!’ My voice was barely audible above the noise of the slide and the sound of our engine. My eyes were on the far side of the valley where the track was clear and unbroken to the next turn above the main gorge. If we could make it through the torrent to the bend ahead … ‘What is it?’

  Ward had jammed on the brakes. ‘Ye take her. See ye on the other side of the bend, if ye make it.’ He was out in a flash, scrabbling for a foothold on the steep side of the track. Above him was a path of sorts trailing along the mountainside.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked him again, shouting to make myself heard above the grumble of thunder and the sound of water. ‘Where are you going?’

  His only answer was a wave of the arm, signalling me to drive on. He was climbing like a goat, moving with extraordinary speed. And then I lost him among the boulders and small trees that marked the course of the torrent.

  By then the noise of the avalanche had died away, only the echoes of it reverberating across the valley, and when I shifted into the driving seat and looked back, the road behind us had ceased to exist. Where the bend had been there was now nothing but a piled-up, slithering mass of wet glistening rubble. I looked up the line of the torrent. No sign of Ward. He had disappeared entirely, leaving me to wonder what the hell he was playing at. I was on my own now, faced with that half-obliterated turn at the V-point of the side gorge where water pouring over the track was eating away at the surface.

  There had been a bridge there once, or perhaps a culvert. I could just make out part of the stonework, though most of it was under water. I checked the four-wheel drive lever, eased off the brake and started forward. No good putting it off. At any moment the whole track might go.

  When I reached the turn I found half of it gone already. The roar of the water coming down the gully drummed at my ears as I inched the Toyota into the bend. It was virtually a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn and very sharp, the culvert blocked with stone and the remains of a small tree, so that the full volume of the water coming down the gully was swirling across the track to disappear over the edge, thundering down into the main gorge of the Jequetepeque. There was only just room to scrape through between the roots of the tree and the edge.

  I inched forward. Did I take it slow or fast? How deep was the water? Was it deep enough to sweep the vehicle over the edge? The nearer I got to it, the deeper it looked. And what was the track like underneath? Would it hold up for the half-minute or so it would take me to drive across? The devil of it was the vehicle was a left-hand drive, so that I was on the side that would go over the edge first.

  I hesitated, and as I did so a big stone that marked the outer edge of the track began to move. I didn’t wait. I let in the clutch and gripped the wheel, taking it gently, not using too much power and just willing the tyres to maintain a grip on the rotten surface below the water.

  I was about half-way across when I felt the rear begin to swing sideways under the weight of the torrent. I gunned the engine then, slipping the clutch slightly, clawing for a hold. That way I had the power ready to hand and as the front wheels began to grip a solid surface and the snout of the Toyota reared up, I banged the clutch in with my foot hard down. Something clanged by the back axle, a rock presumably, and then, with the back still slithering sideways and the rear left wheel beginning to race as it fell off into
space, the vehicle gave a sort of shudder and we were out, clear of the water and on a hard surface again.

  That was when I saw it, right in front of me, a large lump of rock bang in the middle of the track. I stopped, the roar of the torrent drumming in my ears. The rear of the Toyota was only just clear of the water as I jumped out, checking to see if it would be possible using the low gear to push the rock over the edge. The inner side of the track was almost sheer at this point, brown broken rock glistening with water, and I could see at a glance where the rock had come from, a gaping hole oozing mud as though a giant molar had been extracted.

  Lightning forked across the black belly of the clouds, and the rock that had moved as I was negotiating the bend had disappeared into the gorge below, the torrent running smooth as it lipped the broken edge of the old roadway. Still no sign of Ward, the cloud-mist hanging grey over the mountainside above. I felt very alone at that moment, stuck there on that track somewhere in the Andes, my body chill with sweat and my hands still trembling with the nervous tension of getting safely through the rutted mud of the bend.

  I was just getting back into the driving seat when there was a shout and a figure emerged from the gully about fifty metres above me. It wasn’t Ward. This was a much slighter man with a broad-brimmed hat and a poncho over his shoulders. He was moving fast down the side of the gully, Ward appearing suddenly behind him. ‘Hold him!’ The shout echoed in the rocks and at the same moment the man saw me. He checked, but only momentarily, then he had jumped down onto the track a knife in his hand.

  There was only one thing for me to do and I dodged behind the Toyota. He went past me, running. But then he stopped. Ward was angling across the slope above to cut him off. I reached into the door pocket and pulled out the heavy wheel nut spanner. By then Ward was coming down onto the track, his false arm and dummy hand hanging limp at his side.

  I think it was the realisation of his disability that decided the man to go for him first. He was already advancing up the track as Ward slithered down onto the flat surface of it. The knife flashed, a steely glitter as lightning struck again across the far side of the gorge, the crackle of it hitting the rocks and followed almost instantaneously by a single shattering crash of thunder.