Entangled (34 page)

Murgh dived low and tackled Hond’s legs. As his momentum carried them both to the ground he locked his huge hands around the younger man’s throat. Hond punched him about the head, brought his knee into his stomach and got on top of him. But it made no difference. Murgh just clung on to his throat, keeping him at arm’s length and squeezing the life out of him.

Hond’s struggles weakened, his face turned purple and his eyes bulged.

Iquitos was dirty and poor but Leoni didn’t care. She felt liberated here. Suddenly out of danger. Thousands of miles away from her parents and their minions, their tame lunatic asylums and their hired thugs.

(And from Jack.)

On the morning after their arrival, while Bannerman met with his anthropologist friend Mary to finalise their arrangements for the research, Leoni and Matt explored the quaint, faded city that seemed as hot and humid as a sauna bath. Everywhere there were flyblown and neglected buildings – paint peeling off, mildew rotting the walls – which had once been ornate and opulent.

They stopped for lunch in a crowded noisy snack bar off the Plaza de Armas but Matt ordered only fruit. ‘Are you some kind of fruitarian?’ Leoni asked.

He said he wasn’t. It was just that according to some studies he’d read it was a good idea to follow a pure and simple, mainly vegetarian diet prior to an Ayahuasca session – and their first session at Mary Ruck’s lodge in the jungle was scheduled for tomorrow evening.

Leoni cancelled the order she’d just placed for a large hamburger with bacon and cheese and substituted fresh fruit. She then had a long and inconclusive conversation with Matt about the nature of reality and the problem of parallel universes which left her feeling useless and stupid. He had a lot to say on the physics of the subject that she just didn’t get at all. The guy was very smart and she was afraid he would conclude she wasn’t on his intellectual level.

Perhaps this was why he showed no sign of any romantic interest in her. Maybe she just bored him stiff?

The other thing he wouldn’t do was talk about himself. During the morning he’d resisted every attempt by Leoni to get him to spill the beans about his fortune or to provide details of his own life.

By mid-afternoon the heat and humidity became insufferable and they returned to the hotel to siesta in their separate rooms.

Leoni tried and failed to doze off.

She had a nagging presentiment at the back of her mind that there was something she was supposed to do and around five p.m. she ventured out alone in a garish three-wheeler taxi to revisit Belem, the city’s main street market. She couldn’t quite say why she felt drawn there. She just knew she had to go.

Although the temperature was more comfortable now, there was less produce on display and the crowds were much thinner than when she’d explored the market with Matt in the heat of the morning. But as she walked up and down the narrow cloth-shaded alleys between the stalls, breathing in ripe smells of fish and pineapples, splashing through shallow pools of water where buckets had been sloshed, Leoni saw that the Pasaje Paquito, the quarter of the market devoted to medicines derived from plants, was still buzzing.

Here every stall exhibited colourful bundles of aromatic roots, leaves and herbs in large plastic buckets. There were sheaves of thick mapacho cigarettes rolled with wild Amazonian tobacco so strong it was believed to have the power to ward off evil spirits. And there were literally thousands of hand-labelled bottled extracts touted as remedies for AIDS, constipation, diabetes, flatulence, impotence, infertility, business failure, malign spells cast by sorcerers, and any number of other conditions real and imaginary.

Leoni did not feel at all threatened or endangered by Iquitos. The people were naive, curious and kindly and even the gentle doe-eyed children who had begun to follow her everywhere, plaintively asking for small sums of money, were not an annoyance.

Her favourite was eleven-year-old Ramon, small and tough, a
mestizo
with red-brown skin, missing front teeth, a bent nose, and the roguish grin of a jungle elf. Since her arrival the evening before, when he had first attached himself to her, she had contrived to hand him close to twenty dollars in small bills and to buy him and his friends three huge meals of hamburgers and fries. She’d seen him sprinting after her when she left the hostel in the taxi a little earlier and wasn’t surprised when he appeared at her side in the Pasaje Paquito, hardly out of breath, having run the intervening mile through the town. ‘Give
me one dollar,’ he said at once, and turned his huge gap-toothed smile on her.

She aimed a mock blow at him: ‘It’s always money, money, money with you, isn’t it, Ramon?’ she protested. ‘If I had no money, I don’t think you’d run ten feet to see me.’

He grinned again and repeated his demand: ‘Give me one dollar, lady. No mother. No father. Very hungry.’

Leoni began to haggle with a stallholder over the price of a love potion – she had half a mind to try it out on Matt – when something tugged at her attention.

Literally
tugged.

It felt very personal and intrusive, like fingers digging into her mind. She turned in the direction of the pull and her eyes fell on a striking figure standing in a shop doorway – a man, tall and strongly built, wearing an elegant white tropical suit.

She squinted. At first he seemed to be youthful but his face was partly in shadow and at second glance she saw he might be closer to forty than twenty. She caught a glimpse of hooded dark eyes, sallow skin, high cheekbones, a wispy beard, and black hair that hung down lank and straight over his shoulders. He held Leoni’s gaze for a long moment and again she felt that strange, intimate
tug
within her consciousness. Then he turned his back on her and vanished inside the shop.

‘Who was that?’ she asked Ramon, who was still tagging along beside her, waiting for a dollar.

‘Who, missus?’ An evasive look crossed the little boy’s face and was gone in a fraction of a second, but Leoni saw it.

‘That man, the one in the white suit.’ She pointed at the empty shop doorway. ‘You
saw
him, Ramon! Don’t pretend you didn’t! He was just standing there, looking at me. What’s his name?’

But Ramon clammed up. He seemed afraid. He had seen no one, he said. And when Leoni marched over to the shop it was empty, its shelves stripped of produce. A back door, leading to another of the market’s many alleys, was swinging open.

What was going on? Where had the mysterious stranger disappeared to? And how had he got inside her head like that?

Suddenly she felt it was imperative to find him – that he, indeed, was the reason she had been summoned back to the market this afternoon.
A grim certainty descended on her that if she left here without speaking with him something vital would be lost.

Leoni was still peering out of the back door of the shop. In one direction the alley led to town, in the other to the riverside. On instinct, she ran towards the river.

The market was closing around her now, stallholders packing up to go home as evening fell, hundreds of small boats loading passengers and produce. She dodged around three snarling dogs fighting over scraps, splashed through a foul-smelling puddle and caught a glimpse of the man’s white suit in the gloaming just ahead.

‘Hey, you,’ she called out after him. ‘Mister. Wait a minute.’

He never deviated or looked back but just plunged ahead, leading her deeper and deeper into the warren of mean slums lining the riverbank to the south of the wharves and the market.

Daylight was leaching rapidly from the sky, a sinister velvet tone settling over everything, and the warm air, moist and rank, was filled with the sound of night insects.

Leoni shuddered, no longer sure what had impelled her to follow a complete stranger into a slum.

In the middle of the
Amazon.

The last rays of the sun picked out the fabric of his white suit amongst the shadows in a narrow alley between tin-roofed shanties. And as though in response to her attention she felt again that strange demanding
tug
within her mind.

At the end of the alley was a narrow wooden pier, no more than four feet wide, built on stilts like many of the shanties and extending fifty feet out over the waters of the Amazon. There was just enough light for Leoni to see the man she’d been following. He was standing about halfway along the pier, looking down at the water.

She felt a small hand grasp her own and jumped with shock, suppressing her yelp of fear when she saw it was Ramon. His eyes looked big as saucers. ‘Better come away, missus,’ he whispered. ‘That man not good.’

Leoni looked along the pier again but the darkness was now complete and she could no longer see the man in the white suit.

There was a soft
splash.

Had he dived?

She squinted into the darkness but it was as though he had never been there.

Later, as she returned to the hotel, an inner voice prompted her to mention none of this to Matt and Bannerman.

They were her friends but there was no reason why they had to know every foolish thing she did.

Ria was at war with herself. Every instinct of love and family loyalty commanded her to break the age-old code of single combat and attack Murgh, but honour held her back.

Honour! What was honour when Hond’s life was at stake?

Yet still she could not intervene.

For if she did the code was unbending on what must happen next. The fight would be stopped, Murgh would be declared the victor, his terms –
‘The Uglies burn with Ria beside them’
– would be enacted at once, and Hond’s life would be his to take by any manner of execution he chose.

So one way or the other, whether or not she stopped Murgh strangling Hond now, it was certain they were all going to die. She’d just resigned herself to the obvious conclusion –
might as well die honourably
– when Brindle’s thought-voice rang out inside her head: ‘Fight not over yet, Ria!’

And her brother returned from the dead.

He was still on top of Murgh, and Murgh was still throttling him at arm’s length, but now, with a violent effort, choking and spluttering, Hond found his feet and jerked himself upright, pulling the other man after him. For an instant Murgh’s two-handed grip on his throat was loosened and Ria heard Hond draw in a huge, shuddering breath. Then he used his greater height to punch downwards hard and fast, a chopping right-hand blow that crashed into the side of Murgh’s jaw and continued down between his arms in a single fluid swirl. At the end of it Hond dropped his shoulder, as though he were reaching for the ground, then reversed his direction, smashed his elbow back into Murgh’s face, and, at last, tore free of his stranglehold.

Neither man immediately resumed the attack. Hond was gulping in air. Murgh’s nose looked broken and was spouting blood. For a count of twenty they circled one another.

Ria feared Murgh might still have some fight left in him but was relieved to see there was none. His one strategy had been to get his hands round Hond’s throat and strangle him to death right at the beginning. But that had failed and now he just looked old and out of ideas.

They circled again. Hond was recovering his strength and when Murgh lunged at him he slipped aside, kicked him as he shot past and sent him stumbling.