The Codex Read online

  The moon was setting behind the wall of jungle, and darkness suffocated the river. Tom flicked on the flashlight to see what lay ahead, guiding the boat around snags and riffles. A growing cloud of mosquitoes whined around them. They seemed to be sweeping up thousands as they traveled.

  “I don’t suppose you have a can of bug repellent in one of those pockets of yours?” Tom asked.

  “As a matter of fact, I did manage to snag my fanny pack in the jeep. I shoved it in my pants.” She fished the small pack out of an enormous pocket on her thigh and unzipped it. She began rummaging through, pulling out a miscellany of things—a bottle of water-purification tablets, some packs of waterproof matches, a roll of hundred-dollar bills, a map, a chocolate bar, a passport, some useless credit cards.

  “I’m not even sure what’s in here.”

  She began sorting through the jumble of items while Tom held the flashlight. There was no bottle of bug stuff. She swore and began putting everything back. As she did so, a photograph fell out. Tom shined the light on it. It showed a strikingly handsome young man with dark eyebrows and a chiseled chin. The grave expression that furrowed his dark eyebrows, the firm full set of his lips, the tweed jacket, and the way he tilted his head all showed him to be a man who took himself very seriously indeed.

  “Who’s that?” Tom asked.

  “Oh,” said Sally. “That’s Professor Clyve.”

  “That’s Clyve? Why, he’s so young! I imagined him to be some dotty old man in a cardigan puffing on a pipe.”

  “He wouldn’t be happy to hear you say that. He’s the youngest full professor in the history of the department. He entered Stanford at sixteen, graduated at nineteen, and had his Ph.D. by the time he was twenty-two. He’s a true genius.” She carefully tucked the photo back into her pocket.

  “Why are you carrying around a photo of your professor?”

  “Why,” said Sally lightly, “we’re engaged. Didn’t I tell you?”

  “No.”

  Sally looked at him curiously. “You don’t have a problem with that, do you?”

  “Of course not.” Tom felt his face flushing and hoped the darkness would hide it. He was aware she was glaring at him in the dim light.

  “You seemed surprised.”

  “Well, I was. After all, you’re not wearing an engagement ring.”

  “Professor Clyve doesn’t believe in those bourgeois conventions.”

  “And it was okay with him that you just come on this trip with me—?” Tom broke off, realizing he had said exactly the wrong thing.

  “You think I have to get permission from ‘my man’ to go on a trip? Or are you somehow implying that I’m not to be trusted sexually?” She tilted her head, looking at him with narrowed eyes.

  Tom looked away. “Sorry I asked.”

  “So am I. Somehow I thought you were more enlightened than that.”

  Tom busied himself driving the boat, hiding his embarrassment and confusion. The river was silent; the swampy night heat flowed past them. A bird cried in the darkness. In the silence that followed, Tom heard a noise.

  Tom immediately switched off the engine, his heart pounding. The sound came again, the sputter of an outboard starter being pulled. A hush fell over the river. The boat coasted.

  “They found some gas. They’re coming after us.”

  The boat was starting to drift back down with the current. Tom unshipped a pole from the bottom of the boat and stuck it in the water. The boat swung a little to the current and steadied. Holding the boat still in the current, they listened. There was another sputter and then a roar. The roar subsided into a hum. There could be no doubt: It was the sound of an outboard.

  Tom went to restart their engine.

  “Don’t,” said Sally. “They’ll hear it.”

  “We can’t outpole them.”

  “We can’t outrace them either. They’ll be on us in five minutes with that eighteen-horse.” Sally flashed the light along the wall of jungle on either side of the water. The water extended into the trees and spread out, drowning the jungle. “We can hide instead.”

  Tom poled the dugout toward the edge of the flooded forest. There was a small opening—a narrow lane of water that looked like it might have been a stream in drier times. He poled up it, and the boat promptly bumped into something: a sunken log.

  “Out,” Tom said.

  The water was only a foot deep, but underneath it was another two feet of mud, which they sank into with a flurry of bubbles. A foul stench of marsh gas rose up. The back of the boat was still sticking out into the river, where it would be instantly spotted.

  “Lift and push.”

  They struggled to get the nose of the boat up on the log and then, heaving together, pushed the boat across. Then they scrambled over it themselves and climbed back in. The sound of the Evinrude grew louder. The soldiers’ boat was coming up the river fast.

  Sally picked up the second pole, and they both poled forward, deeper into the flooded forest. Tom switched off the flashlight, and a moment later a powerful light came blinking through the trees.

  “We’re still too close,” said Tom. “They’ll see us.” He tried to pole, but the pole sank into the muck and stuck. He jerked it out and laid it in the bottom of the boat, grabbing some hanging vines instead and using them to pull the boat deeper into the forest, halfway into a thicket of ferns and bushes. The Evinrude was almost on them. The spotlight flashed through the forest just as Tom grabbed Sally and pulled her down to the bottom of the dugout, and they lay side by side, his arm around her. Tom prayed that the soldiers wouldn’t see their engine.

  The sound of the motorboat grew very loud. The boat had slowed down, and the spotlight was probing the forest where they were hidden. Tom could hear the crackle of a walkie-talkie, the murmur of voices. The spotlight lit up the jungle around them like a movie set—and then slowly moved on. Blessed darkness returned. The sound of the engine passed and grew fainter.

  Tom sat up in time to see the flash of the spotlight in the forest up ahead as the boat went around a bend. “They’re gone,” he said.

  Sally sat up, brushing her tangled hair out of her face. The mosquitoes had gathered around them in a thick, whining cloud. Tom could feel them everywhere, in his hair, crawling into his ears, trying to get up his nose, crawling down his neck. Each blow killed a dozen, instantly replaced. When he tried to breathe, he breathed mosquitoes.

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” Sally said, slapping.

  Tom began pulling dry twigs off the bushes around them.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Building a fire.”

  “Where?”

  “You’ll see.” When he’d collected a pile of twigs, he leaned over the side and scooped up some mud from the swamp. He patted it into a pancake on the bottom of the dugout, covered it with leaves, and then built a small teepee of sticks and dry leaves on top.

  “Match.”

  Sally handed him a match, and he lit the fire. As soon as it was going well, he added some green leaves and twigs. A curl of smoke drifted up and gathered in the still air. Tom plucked a large leaf from a nearby bush and used it as a fan to wave the smoke over Sally. The furious cloud of mosquitoes was driven back. The smoke had a pleasant smell, sweet and spicy.

  “There’s a nice trick,” said Sally.

  “My father showed it to me on a canoe trip in northern Maine.” He reached up, yanked some more leaves off the bush, and added them to the fire.

  Sally took out the map and began examining it by flashlight. “It looks like there are a lot of side channels to the river. I think we should stick to those until we reach Pito Solo.”

  “Good idea. And I think we’ll have to pole from now on. We can’t risk using the engine.”

  Sally nodded.

  “You tend the fire,” said Tom. “I’ll pole, and then we’ll switch off. We won’t stop until we reach Pito Solo.”

  “Right.”

  Tom pushed the boat back int
o the river and poled close to the flooded forest, listening for the motorboat. Soon they came to a small side channel winding away from the main one, and took it.

  Tom said, “Somehow I don’t think Lieutenant Vespán had any intention of bringing us back to San Pedro Sula. I think he planned to have us fall out of his helicopter. If it weren’t for that missing part, we’d be dead.”

  19

  Fenton looked up into the vast canopy that arched above his head and noted that night was falling in the Meambar Swamp. With it came the whine of insects and a steamy miasma of rot that rose up from the shivery acres of muck that surrounded them, drifting like poison gas among the giant tree trunks. Somewhere in the depths of the swamp he could hear the distant shriek of an animal, followed by the roar of a jaguar.

  It was the second night in a row that they could find no dry land to camp. Instead, they had tethered the dugout under a group of giant bromeliads in the hope that their leaves would help keep out a steady rain. They did no such thing, instead channeling the rain into streams that could not be avoided.

  The Teacher lay in the bottom of the dugout, in the rain, huddled against the heap of supplies, wrapped in a wet blanket and shivering despite the suffocating heat. The cloud of mosquitoes that enveloped them in a mewling fog was especially thick about his face. Vernon could actually see them crawling about his mouth and eyes. Vernon reached out and spread some more deet on his face, but it was a hopeless task. If the rain didn’t wash it off, the sweat did.

  He glanced up. The two guides were in the front of the boat, playing cards by flashlight and drinking. They had hardly been sober since the beginning of the trip, and Vernon was horrified to discover that one of the ten-gallon plastic jugs that he thought contained water was actually full of homemade aguardiente.

  Vernon hunched over, swaying and hugging himself. It wasn’t quite dark; night seemed to be coming very slowly. There was no sunset in the swamp: The light went from green to blue to purple and then black. At dawn it was reversed. Even on sunny days there was no sun, just a deep green gloom. He felt desperate for a bit of light, a breath of fresh air.

  After four days of wandering in the swamp, their guides had finally admitted that they were lost, that they had to turn around. And they had turned the boats around. But they only seemed to go deeper into the swamp. This certainly wasn’t the way they had come. The guides were impossible to talk to; although Vernon spoke Spanish fairly well and the guides knew some English, they were often too drunk to speak any language. For the past few days, the more lost they seemed to become, the more loudly the guides denied it and the more they drank. And then the Teacher had gotten sick.

  Vernon heard a curse from up front. One of the guides threw down his cards and staggered to his feet, rifle in hand. The boat rocked.

  “Cabrón!” The other one had swayed to his feet, gripping a machete.

  “Stop,” Vernon yelled, but as usual they ignored him. They cursed and came together in a drunken scuffle; the rifle went off harmlessly, there was more grunting and scuffling, and then the two guides, none the worse for their altercation, settled back down in the boat, gathered up their spilled cards, and redealt as if nothing had happened.

  “What was that shot?” the Teacher asked belatedly, opening his eyes.

  “Nothing,” said Vernon. “They’re drinking again.”

  The Teacher shivered, drawing the blanket tighter. “You should take away that gun.”

  Vernon said nothing. It would be stupid to try to take away their gun, even when they were drunk. Especially when they were drunk.

  “The mosquitoes,” the Teacher whispered, his voice quavering.

  Vernon squirted some more deet into his hands and gently smoothed it over the Teacher’s face and around his neck. The Teacher sighed with relief, gave a quick shiver, and closed his eyes.

  Vernon pulled his wet shirt about himself, feeling the heavy rain on his back, listening to the sounds of the forest, the alien cries of mating and violence. He thought about death. It seemed that the question he had been seeking an answer to all his life was about to be answered for him, in an unexpected and quite horrifying way.

  20

  For two days, a deep and protective cloak of mist lay on the river. Tom and Sally poled upstream, following winding side channels and keeping a strict policy of silence. They traveled day and night, taking turns sleeping. They had little to eat except Sally’s two candy bars, which they rationed, bit by bit, and some fruit Sally collected on the way. They saw no sign of the soldiers pursuing them. Tom began to hope that they had given up and gone back to Brus, or had gotten hung up somewhere. The river was riddled with sandbars, mudbanks, and sunken logs to hang up a boat. Waono had been right.

  The morning of the third day the mists began to lift, exposing two dripping walls of jungle lining the blackwater river. Shortly thereafter, they spied a house on stilts built over the water, with wattle walls and a thatched roof. Beyond that a riverbank appeared, with granite boulders and a steep embankment—the first dry land they had seen in days. A dock appeared at the water’s edge like the one at Brus—a rickety platform of bamboo poles lashed to slender tree trunks sunk in the muck.

  “What do you think?” Tom asked. “Should we stop?”

  Sally stood up. A boy was fishing from a platform with a small bow and arrow.

  “Pito Solo?”

  But the boy had seen them and was already running away, abandoning his rod.

  “Let’s give it a try,” said Tom. “If we don’t get something to eat, we’re finished.” He poled into the dock.

  Sally and Tom jumped out, and the platform creaked and swayed alarmingly. Beyond, a rickety gangplank led to a steep dirt bank, which rose out of the flooded jungle. There was nobody to be seen. They scrambled up the slippery embankment, slipping and sliding in the mud. Everything was soaking wet. At the top was a small open hut and a fire, with an old man sitting in a hammock. An animal was roasting on a spit of wood. Tom eyed it, smelling the delicious aroma of roasting meat. His appetite was tempered only slightly when he realized it was a monkey.

  “Hola,” said Sally.

  “Hola,” said the man.

  Sally spoke in Spanish. “Is this Pito Solo?”

  There was a long silence while the man looked at her blankly.

  “He doesn’t speak Spanish,” said Tom.

  “Which way is the town? Donde? Where?”

  The man pointed into the mist. There was the sharp Cry of an animal, and Tom jumped.

  “There’s a trail here,” Sally said.

  They started up the trail and soon came to the town. It sat on a rise above the flooded rainforest, a motley collection of wattle-and-daub huts with roofs of tin or thatch. Chickens strutted away from them, and skinny dogs slunk along the walls of the houses, eyeing them sideways. They wandered through the village, which seemed deserted. It ended as quickly as it began in a wall of solid jungle.

  Sally looked at him. “What now?”

  “We knock.” Tom picked a door at random, knocked.

  Silence.

  Tom heard a rustle and looked around. At first he saw nothing, and then he realized that a hundred dark eyes were peering at him from the jungle foliage. They were all children.

  “I wish I had my candy,” Sally said.

  “Take out a dollar.”

  Sally removed a dollar. “Hello? Who wants an American dollar?”

  A shout went up, and a hundred children burst from the foliage, shouting and jostling, their hands extended.

  “Who speaks Spanish?” asked Sally, holding up the dollar.

  Everyone shouted at once in Spanish. Out of the hubbub an older girl stepped forward. “Can I help you?” she said, with great poise and dignity. She looked about thirteen and was pretty, wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt, a pair of shorts, and two gold earrings. Thick brown braids went down her back.

  Sally gave her the dollar. A great ahhh of disappointment went up from the group, but they seemed to take
it with good humor. The ice, at least, was broken.

  “What is your name?”

  “Marisol.”

  “That’s a nice name.”

  The girl smiled.

  “We are looking for Don Orlando Ocotal. Can you take us to him?”

  “He went away with the yanquis more than a week ago.”

  “Which yanquis!”

  “The tall angry gringo with the bites all over his face and the smiling one with the gold rings on his fingers.”

  Tom swore and looked at Sally. “Sounds like Philip got our guide first.” He turned back to the girl. “Did they say where they were going?”

  “No.”

  “Are there any grown-ups in town? We’re going upriver and we need a guide.”

  The girl said, “I will take you to my grandfather, Don Alfonso Boswas, who is the head of the village. He knows everything.”

  They followed her. She had about her an air of self-possession and competence, reinforced by her straight posture. As they passed among the crooked huts, there was a smell of cooking that made Tom almost faint with hunger. The girl led them to what looked like the worst hut in the village, a leaning pile of sticks with almost no mud remaining in the cracks. It was built next to a muddy expanse that served as the town plaza. In the middle of the plaza stood a bedraggled cluster of lemon and banana trees.

  The girl stood aside at the door, and they stepped inside. An old man sat in the center of the hut, on a stool too low for him, his bony knees sticking out of the great holes in his pants, a few wisps of white hair coming off his balding skull in random directions. He was smoking a corncob pipe, which had filled the hut with a tarry smell. A machete lay on the ground next to him. He was small and wore glasses that magnified his eyes, giving him a wide-eyed look of surprise. It was impossible to imagine he was the chief of the village; he looked, instead, like the village’s poorest man.

  “Don Alfonso Boswas?” Tom asked.