River of Death

Hiller lifted his gun a perceptible inch. If he’d lifted it only one millimetre it would have carried sufficient significance for Serrano who was in an increasingly apprehensive state of mind. ‘I’m not sure,’ Hiller said, ‘that I like being followed around.’

‘Jesus!’ Serrano’s apprehension had become very marked indeed. ‘You’d kill a man for a thing like that?’

‘What are vermin to me?’ Hiller said carelessly. ‘But you can stop knocking your knees together. I’ve no intention of killing you—at least, not yet. I wouldn’t kill a man just for following me around. But I wouldn’t draw the line at shattering a kneecap so that you couldn’t totter around after me for a few months to come.’

‘I won’t talk to anyone,’ Serrano said fervently. ‘I swear to God I won’t.’

‘Aha! That’s interesting. If you were going to talk who would you talk to, Serrano?’

‘Nobody. Nobody. Who would I talk to? That was just a manner of speaking.’

‘Was it now? But if you were to talk, what would you tell them?’

‘What could I tell them? All I know—well, I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure—is that Hamilton is into something big. Gold, diamonds, something like that—he’s found a cache somewhere. I know that you’re on his track, Mr Hiller. That’s why I am following you.’

‘You know my name. How come?’

‘You’re a pretty important man around these parts, Mr Hiller.’ Serrano was trying to be ingratiating but he wasn’t very good at it. A sudden thought appeared to occur to him for he brightened and said: ‘Seeing we’re both after the same man, Mr Hiller, we could be partners.’

‘Partners!’

‘I can help you, Mr Hiller.’ Serrano was eagerness itself but whether from the prospect of partnership or the understandable desire not to be crippled by Hiller it was difficult to say. ‘I can help you. I swear I can.’

‘A terrified rat will swear to anything.’

‘I can prove what I say.’ Serrano seemed to have regained a measure of confidence. ‘I can take you to within five miles of the Lost City.’

Hiller’s initial reaction was one of astonishment and suspicion.

‘What do you know about it?’ He paused and recovered himself, ‘Well, I suppose everybody’s heard about the Lost City. Hamilton’s always shooting off his mouth about it.’

‘Mebbe so. Mebbe so.’ Serrano, sensing the change in the atmosphere, was almost relaxed now. ‘But how many have followed him four times to within a few miles of it?’ If Serrano had been at the gambling table he’d have leaned back in his chair, his trump card played.

Hiller had become very interested indeed, even to the extent of lowering, then pocketing, his own gun.

‘You have a rough idea where it is?’

‘Rough?’ Immediate danger past, Serrano invested himself with an air very close to benign superiority. ‘Close is more like it. Very close.’

‘Then if you’ve come all that close why don’t you go looking for it yourself?’

‘Look for it myself!’ Serrano looked almost shocked. ‘Mr Hiller, you must be out of your mind. You don’t understand what you’re talking about. Have you any idea what the Indian tribes in the area are like?’

‘Pacified, according to the Indian Protection Service.’

‘Pacified?’ Serrano gave a contemptuous laugh. ‘Pacified? There isn’t enough money in the country to make those desk-bound pansies leave those lovely air-conditioned offices in Brasilia and go see for themselves. They’re terrified, just plain terrified. Even their field-agents—and there are some pretty tough cookies among them—are terrified and won’t go near the area. Well, four of them did go there once some years back, but none of them ever returned. And if they’re terrified, Mr Hiller, I’m terrified too.’

‘That creates quite a problem.’ Not surprisingly, Hiller had become quite thoughtful. ‘An approach problem. What’s so special about those bloodthirsty people? There are many tribes who don’t care all that much for people from the outside, what you and I would regard as other civilised people.’ Apparently Hiller saw nothing incongruous in categorising himself and Serrano as ‘civilised’.

’Special? I’ll tell you what’s special about them. They’re the most savage tribes in the Mato Grosso. Correction. They’re the most savage tribes in the whole of South America. Not one of them has moved out of the Stone Age so far. In fact, they must be a damned sight worse than the Stone Age people. If the Stone Age people had been like them they’d have wiped each other out—when those tribes up there have nothing better to do, they just go around massacring each other—to keep their hand in, I suppose—and there would have been no human left on this planet today.

‘There are three tribes up there, Mr Hiller. First, there are the Chapates. God knows they’re bad enough, but all they do is use their blowpipes, pump a few curare-tipped poison darts into you and leave you lying there. Almost civilised, you might say. The Horenas are a bit different. They use darts that only knock you unconscious; then you’re dragged back to their village and tortured to death—this, I understand, can take a day or two-then they cut off your head and shrink it. But when it comes to sheer savagery, the Muscias are the pick of the bunch—I don’t think any white man has ever seen them. But one or two of the outside Indians who have met them and survived say that they’re cannibals and if they see what they regard as being a particularly appetising meal they dump him alive into boiling water. Something like lobsters, you know. Go looking for a lost city surrounded by all those monsters? Why don’t you go looking? I can point you in the right direction. Me, I only like cooking pots from the outside.’

‘Well, maybe I’ll have to do a little more thinking on that one.’ Absently, almost, he handed Serrano back his gun. Hiller was no mean psychologist when it came to gauging the extent of a man’s cupidity. Hiller said: ‘Where do you live?’

‘A room in the Hotel de Paris.’

‘If you saw me in the bar there?’

‘I’ve never seen you before in my life.’

An unbiased guidebook to the better taverns of South America would have had some difficulty in finding the space to list the bar of the Hotel de Paris, Romono, in its pages. The bar was not a thing of beauty. The indeterminately coloured paint, what little there was of it, was peeling and blistered, the splintered wooden floor was blackened and filthy and the rough-cut softwood bar bore the imprint of the passage of time. A thousand spilt drinks, a thousand stubbed-out cigars. It was not a place for the fastidious.

The clientele, fortunately, were not of an overly fastidious nature. Exclusively male and dressed for the most part in scarecrow’s clothing, they were rough, uncouth, ill-favoured and hard-drinking. Especially hard-drinking. As many customers as possible—and there were many—pushed up to the bar and consumed huge quantities of what could only be described as rot-gut whisky. There was a scattering of bentwood chairs and rickety tables, largely unoccupied. The citizens of Romono were mostly vertical drinkers. Among the currently vertical were both Hiller and Serrano, separated from each other by a prudent distance.

In such surroundings, then, the entrance of Hamilton did not provoke the horror-stricken reaction that it would have in the plusher caravanserais of Brasilia or Rio. Even so, his appearance was sufficient to cause a marked drop in the conversational level. With his tangled hair, a week’s growth of matted and bloodied beard, and ripped and blood-stained shirt he looked as if he had just returned from the scene of a successfully if messily executed triple murder. His expression-as was indeed customary with him—lacked anything in the way of encouragement towards social chitchat. He ignored the stares and although the crowd before the bar was at least four deep a path opened magically before him. In Romono, such a path always opened for John Hamilton, a man very obviously held, and for a variety of good reasons, in considerable respect by his fellow citizens.

A large, very fat barman, the boss of the four men serving nonstop behind the bar, hurried forward towards Hamilton. His egg-bald pate gleamed in the light: inevitably, he was known as Curly.

‘Mr Hamilton!’

‘Whisky.’

‘God’s name, Mr Hamilton. What happened?’

‘You deaf?’

‘Right away, Mr Hamilton.’

Curly reached under the bar, produced a special bottle and poured a generous measure. That Hamilton should be thus privileged apparently aroused no resentment among the onlookers, not so much because of their innate courtesy, of which they had none, but because Hamilton had demonstrated in the past his reaction to those who interfered in what he regarded as his own private business: he’d only had to do it once, but once had been enough.

Curly’s plump, genial face was alive with curiosity as were those of the bystanders. But Hamilton was not a man to share confidences as everyone was well aware. He tossed two Greek coins on to the bar. Hiller, who was standing close by, observed this and his face grew very still indeed. His face was not the only one to assume sudden immobility.

‘Bank’s shut,’ Hamilton said. ‘Those do?’

Curly picked up the two shining coins and examined them with an air of unfeigned reverence.

‘Will those do? Will those do! Yes, Mr Hamilton, I think those will do. Gold! Pure gold! This is going to buy you an awful lot of Scotch, Mr Hamilton, an awful lot. One of those I’m going to keep for myself. Yes, sir. The other I’ll take and have valued in the bank tomorrow.’

‘Up to you,’ Hamilton said indifferently.

Curly examined the coins more closely and said: ‘Greek, aren’t they?’

‘Looks like,’ Hamilton said with the same indifference. He drank some of his Scotch and looked at Curly with a speculative eye. ‘You wouldn’t, of course, be dreaming of asking me if I went all the way to Greece to get those?’

‘Certainly not,’ Curly said hastily. ‘Certainly not. Will I will I get the doctor, Mr Hamilton?’

‘Thanks. But it’s not my blood.’