The Devil's Garden (15 page)

I made the bank with three or four others. We pressed together, penned as though by an electric fence. The far end of the jetty had completely disappeared into the water; the rest had risen up
in a broken twist.

Kim had climbed up and stood wiping her hands on the backs of her trousers. She looked at me. I saw fear tighten her features for a second.

‘Whatever they’re doing, they should have organized this,’ I said. ‘Stay close.’

We pushed our way along the path, past groups of men. Felipe caught up with us and I took my pack from him. There was a rumbling in the sky and the canopy was filled with unfamiliar sounds, as
if every bird in the forest were in a rising panic. The insects were screaming.

We were almost at the clearing when it broke. Water fell in great vertical streams – solid ropes that battered us even as we struggled on. Mud was being born from mud – oozing in all
directions, a measureless and filthy creature rising up from the forest floor. Men ran past us, cowering, though to no purpose. Some dissolved into the trees, many others we now saw were huddled
and crammed and jostling several deep in the shelter of the
comedor
. We stopped short, too waterlogged and disbelieving for haste to matter. I wiped my eyes. There, at the top of the steps,
sat the Judge.

He was alone behind our heavy dining table, which he had repositioned to the fore. And from this vantage he looked down to where we stood in the mire like some great prelate presiding over an
uneasy rabble. The curtain of water that marked the boundary of the
comedor
’s shelter fell between us. Thickened papers slopped and slid from the table into the mud, congealing,
destroyed.

‘It’s not enough,’ he shouted, pointing both index fingers to the sky. ‘A flash squall – over as quickly as it has begun – it’s not enough. You’ll
know when the real storms come.’

The normal sounds of the forest had been deluged and there was only the racing wet swish of the rain. Barely twenty paces apart and we had to bellow at one another to be heard.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘It’s good news, Doctor. Good news.’ The pointed fingers became two open palms. ‘They’re pouring in from everywhere. They’re coming out of the forest to
register. I give them knives. I give them televisions – those that bring more than a dozen. And now we are no longer looking for them. They are looking for us.’

‘The jetty has collapsed.’ I took a few steps closer to the bottom of his stairs. ‘There’s chaos down there. People could have been killed. Children. Where’s the
Colonel?’

‘If they are already registered, Dr Forle, then we will be able to attest to their deaths.’ His voice seemed to resonate up from inside the sound of the rain. ‘If not, then the
question arises: have they truly died? Indeed, have they truly lived?’

There was a bottle on the table. Felipe started forward, then stopped, stranded between us.

Again, I shouted: ‘Where’s the Colonel?’

‘He’s gone out – ethnic cleansing. I would have gone with him but for my work. I didn’t realize he was such a great friend of yours.’ The Judge leant forward,
reaching lazily at the papers – some floating away on a mini-stream, some draped forlornly on the stairs. ‘Why are you so angry, Dr Forle? I thought you were a great democrat – a
democrat-
izer
. And look at the face of our beautiful Miss Van der Kisten. Oh, the confusion. Did you ever see such confusion? But surely we are all in agreement – even science must
make way for our wonderful democracy. This is what is
supposed
to happen all over the world – no? Isn’t democracy the great hope of all mankind? Or have I misunderstood
everything? Have a drink.’

Already the rain was easing.

‘Tell these people to go.’

‘Go where? Go where? We are here. Where they go – is here. We are here – where they go. This is it. This
is
where they go.’ He sat back and stretched out his arms.
‘We must register. We need more opinion. More voices. More votes. We are all going to decide everything together for the good of everyone. All nine billion of us.’

His laughter sounded like a bird.

The Judge raised his voice again, a little louder for each step we took away from him. ‘This love affair with the individual is a disaster, Doctor. Yes. Yes. Look at us. We’re all
obsessed with ourselves. We can’t think about anything else for more than a minute. And your tribe is the worst. You have created this – the age of hypocrisy. This will be your legacy:
hypocrisy in everything.’

Kim and I held on to one another’s arms. It was difficult to pull our boots up from the mud. Behind us, I heard Felipe fall. I turned back to help him up. And I saw that the Judge had
risen and was standing behind the table.

II

The forest was the loudest I had ever known it, thronged and teeming with newly emergent life after the rain; and even inside my hut, the air smelt of the wet earth.

‘We’re not stopping,’ Kim said. ‘And we are not going home.’

‘We’re not,’ I nodded.

She cursed violently. ‘We shouldn’t have gone to the party. We’ve wasted five days. Every day here is a day we should be working.’

I lit my desk lamp.

‘We’ve been behaving like tourists,’ she continued. ‘Like students on some rancid gap year.’

For different reasons, anger had consumed us both. We had washed together: Kim first while I kept station outside. Then Felipe. Then me. But time had not so far tempered the mood. Now, we were
avoiding the
comedor
.

I sat at the desk and reached for my cigarettes. She was right. But I could not concentrate or deal with anything. The residual cocaine rushes were still coming and going; and with them a
paranoia that I knew and discounted, knew again, and again discounted. My own emotions were intolerable to me again. And I had begun to suspect something in Kim’s attitude to Quinn. Apart
from her ill-masked fury at being ‘abandoned’ at the party, her reaction to my conversation with Wilson had surprised me with its vehemence. I should have found her, she said. I should
have come back and got her straight away. What had this man seen? Who was he? The last leg of the journey back from Laberinto in our little boat with her and Felipe had been hell.

I offered her a cigarette. ‘Did you see the Colonel or any of the soldiers?’ I asked.

‘No. Why?’

‘Me neither. I think that’s good.’

‘Is it? I wish the Colonel would come back and clear up this mess.’

‘On his own, I can deal with the Judge.’

She looked up. ‘Can you?’

‘Yes.’

The matches were damp. I threw her my lighter.

‘Good,’ she said. ‘Because we
will
finish the work whatever it takes. We’ve been messing about—’

‘Kim, I know. I know I know I know.’ My voice rose and I forced myself to calmness. ‘Believe me, I feel as bad as you do. Worse. I knew Cameron for fifteen years. Longer. We
spent most of our working lives together. He more or less kept me alive. So don’t think—’

I was interrupted by a knock on the door. I stood. There was the unfamiliar chink of crockery. Then Felipe came in backwards carrying a heavy tray, his smile like a ceremonial mask.

‘I thought you would want to eat here tonight,’ he began. ‘Don’t worry. Don’t worry. Almost everybody seems to have gone. But there are still a few people about.
And, my goodness, the
comedor
is covered in mud. Tomorrow is going to be one big clean-up.’

‘Thanks, Felipe,’ I said. ‘We were going to come over.’

‘No need.’ He busied himself unnecessarily with plates. ‘In any case, Estrela has locked herself in the store room so there’s nothing to eat except this, which I had to
beg off her. Would you believe it? She has made a bed on the floor. I had to speak to her through a crack in the door!’

I felt a surge of affection for Felipe. He was behaving like a head waiter following an atrocious accident with the soup – and it was contrived and ridiculous and silly. But it was
working.

‘She wanted me to say which person slept in which hut to prove that it was me!’

I glanced at Kim. The ire was softening.

Felipe opened the beers with a flourish. ‘Even then she would not unlock the door. She would only pass all of this through the window.’ He handed me a bottle. ‘Please, I have
already eaten.’

‘Thanks, Felipe,’ I said, again. ‘You’re a good man.’

I ate at my desk in silence. Kim balanced her plate on her knees. Bats were squeaking. My appetite was returning. I was glad to be clean at least.

Felipe sat on the bed, sipped at his water and talked while we sawed the meat into edible strips. The Station would be empty by morning, he reckoned. All the families had vanished with the rain.
A few men were still sitting on the steps of the
comedor
. He believed they were Matsigenka. Everyone was friendly. They were talking among themselves. He wished Sole or Lothar or Tord were
here so that he could have spoken with them. There was no sign of Cordero, Lugo or any of the soldiers – just the Judge. He had not been down to the river since the storm. What a mess. The
Judge seemed not to care in the slightest. He was playing chess with a woman.

‘What’s left of the bar?’ I asked, swigging deeply at my beer.

‘I checked that, Doctor.’ He smiled. ‘It seemed OK, it seemed OK.’ He nodded vigorously. ‘I think the Judge may have taken a bottle or two but we will still have a
few good ones left.’

I realized that Felipe’s attitude was merely a different expression of what Kim and I were both starting to think: that the Judge’s return was a colossal inconvenience, but that
alone. Chaos, not disaster; the real apprehension had always been the soldiers.

‘Will you let me know when the Judge goes to bed?’ I addressed Felipe. ‘I don’t think there is much point speaking to him tonight. He was drunk four hours ago.’

‘Or pretending to be,’ Kim murmured.

‘I will come and have a look and talk with Estrela. We can see what needs to be done.’

Felipe stood, seemingly glad of his charge. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I will start now with the
comedor
. And tomorrow – tomorrow hopefully Sole and Jorge will be back to
help us and we can make everything spick and span.’

‘Thank you, Felipe.’

He left and I sipped from my bottle.

Kim put down her knife and fork with mock solemnity. ‘Do you know what kind of meat this was?’ she asked.

‘Monkey,’ I said. ‘Or some kind of rodent, maybe.’

She made the face of the delighted gourmet then rose and placed her plate on top of mine and sat back down with the tinned pears Felipe had bought.

After a while, she said: ‘Dr Quinn would love all this.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean he would have wanted to know which of these people was from which tribe. For all we know,there could be Mashco Piro making first contact. Smoke. I don’t mind.’

I lit a cigarette and said: ‘Cameron used to tell me that of all the amazing things in nature, the thing that amazed him the most was how such a staggeringly intelligent species could make
such a mess of running the world which gave rise to its existence. One time he went on a television panel just to expose how little the other guests – politicians, senior journalists, the
usual crowd – how little they knew about the human story. He said that not teaching anthropology in schools was like locking people in the basement of their own lives and making them think
the abuse was normal.’ I watched a moth fret the netting where the window was ajar. The light asked it in, the smoke warded it away. ‘Is there anything you want to say to me,
Kim?’

She looked up from her pear-spooning hunch. ‘Such as?’

‘Anything.’

She returned my look with a level gaze. ‘Nothing. Except . . . can I use the computer tonight? I could do with an hour or two. I feel the need to connect.’ She blew her hair.

‘Sure. Do you want me to come with you?’

‘No. I’m fine.’ She put down her bowl by the chair and indicated that she wanted a second cigarette of her own.

‘Can you hear the bats?’

She smiled. ‘I was just thinking – thank God we’re not studying them: all of this again – but at night and airborne.’

‘There are plenty of nocturnal ants,’ I said.

She stood and lit her cigarette, her tomboy’s grin returning.

‘Do you want Felipe to sleep on your floor?’ I asked.

‘No thanks. Do you?’

I smiled. ‘OK. Here, take another.’

‘Thank you, Doctor. You seem to have imported all the vices.’

‘It’s my pleasure.’

She picked up her bottle. Perhaps it was just that I was beginning to see her as she truly was, or perhaps she was becoming even stronger and more self-reliant before my eyes – a woman
with purpose and the surety that purpose brings. But our relationship was changing and I saw clearly that she would surpass me in science – and that this work would be hers to push into other
disciplines and on as far as she wanted to go. A woman once told me that she believed confidence to be the greatest aphrodisiac, and she was not far wrong, but confidence comes and confidence goes,
and in the end it is purpose that surpasses all; purpose in a purposeless world.

She hesitated at the door. ‘What are you going to do tomorrow?’

‘Tomorrow,’ I said, ‘I am going to sort things out.’

III

However brief and insufficient the rain, when I rose the dawn felt cooler. I dressed and stepped out into the clearing. Clouds had slept in the forest. The rivers would be
wreathed in mist.

The lab padlock was undone and for a moment I was ready to blame Kim. But I had forgotten that Lothar had his own keys; and there he was – sat in the dry room, his weathered face bathed in
the pale blue light of the screen.

He half turned in the chair. ‘Good morning, Herr Doktor,’ he said. His smoker’s cough rattled him a moment. ‘How was the party?’

I hesitated.

‘But you’re still alive anyway – and this is a good thing. After Machaguar.’

‘I am. I’m still alive.’ For a moment I thought I might tell him everything. Some part of me called out for his shriving.

‘You have to see these things.’ His lips curled but for the first time the rubbery grin was not wholly natural.