The Babylon Rite. Tom Knox

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      4

       Pan-American Highway, north Peru

      Every second or third time Jess closed her eyes, she experienced it again: the truck slamming into the garage, the dirty black pornographic fireball, the terrible aching crash of glass and silence and screams. She opened her eyes. Enough of this: she had to stay alert: because she was driving, taking the road north out of Trujillo, the Pan-American Highway.

      Pan-American Highway was a very grandiose name for what was, in reality, just a dirty, narrow, trash-littered blacktop, slicing through the wastes of the Sechura Desert. The route was long and monotonous, punctuated only by the odd strip of green as a river descended from the Andes, and the odd desultory greasy township, where drivers paused at gas stations to refuel their huge trucks, full of Chinese toys and pungent fishmeal, being ferried south to the factories of Trujillo and Chimbote and Lima.

      One such truck was headed her way now: arrogantly dominating the road. She swerved to give it room, catching the ammoniac scent of the fishmeal as it swept past, shaking her pick-up.

      Who the hell would drive a truck into a gas station in Trujillo? She winced, once again, at the images: like grainy internet videos projected on a wall. She didn’t want to watch but she had to watch.

      Jessica lifted the truck a gear, and replayed in her mind the terrible moment, and her questionable reactions. Should she have done something else? Anything else? What exactly? After the fireball had subsided, she had wrenched herself free from the man holding her down, the man who had saved her life, and sprinted over the road, shouting Pablo’s name.

      But the smoke had been so thick, and so hot, and so burning. Unable to get near, she’d choked and stumbled in the violent blackness. Then the police had swept in, sirens shrieking, nightsticks waving. Fearful of further explosions, they had angrily pushed people from the scene, down the road, away from the burning carcass of the building and the truck. So there was nothing she could have done for Pablo, and she had done nothing. But the guilt abided.

      And then she’d seen it. Tossed a hundred metres by the wild explosions was an entire Moche pot, miraculously unharmed, lying on a greasy verge next to a burned plastic oil canister from the Texaco garage.

      The pot was unusual: a spouted jug in the form of two toads copulating. This was maybe all that was left of the Casinelli collection, yet she couldn’t bear to pick it up.

      After that, she’d done her duty: weeping, occasionally, in her hotel room at night; giving her evidence to the police by day. Dan had called many times, very attentively, and she had been grateful to hear a consoling voice. Now, a week later, she was heading back to work. Determined but rattled.

      Her hands trembled for a moment on the steering wheel of her long-term rented Hilux. She needed a break, and she definitely needed a cooling drink, a Coke, some water, even an Inca Kola, even if it did taste like bubblegum drool. Anything would do. Slowing down, she drove past a row of shanty slums, houses of reed and plastic, people living in the middle of nowhere.

      It was barely more than a hamlet, and a pretty impoverished one at that. Adobe bricks lay drying on the roadside, like hairy ingots of mud. The settlement was surrounded by a cemetery so poor it had hub caps for gravestones, the names daubed thereon in red paint. She knew what to expect in a desert village like this: restaurants where the chicken soup cost twice as much if the chicken was plucked; dire and rancid tamales served on plastic plates.

      But she had no choice. This was north Peru. It was always like this, everywhere, a satanic part of the world: no wonder the civilizations that emerged here had been so insane. The landscape was evil, even the sea could not be trusted: one day serving up endless riches of anchovy and sea bass and shark, the next offering El Niño or La Niña, and wiping out entire civilizations with drought or flood, leaving rotten corpses of penguins strewn across the beach.

      The image of the burning garage filled her mind once more: she thought of her dead father and she didn’t want to know why.

      ‘Señorita?’ a dirty barefoot kid looked hopefully at her gringa blonde hair as she climbed out of the Hilux. ‘Una cosita? Señorita?’

      ‘Ah. Buenas …’ Jessica deliberated whether to give the kid a few soles. You were not meant to. But the poverty gouged at her conscience. She handed over a few pennies and the lad grinned a broken-toothed grin and did a sad barefoot dance and gabbled in Quechua, the ancient language of the Inca: Anchantan ananchayki! Usplay manay yuraq …

      Jess had no idea what he was saying. Thank you kindly? Give me more, Yankee dogwoman?

      It could be anything. She barely understood Peruvian Spanish, let alone this Stone Age tongue. Braving the boy with a half-hearted smile, she headed for the nearest cantina advertising the inevitable pollos.

      Inside it was, of course, dingy: a few plastic tables, the whiff of old cooking oil. Three men in cowboy hats were sharing one dirty glass of maize beer served from an enormous litre bottle. The men glanced at her from under their hats, and turned back to the shared liquor. The first man poured a slug, and guzzled, and tipped a little on the dirt floor, making an offering to Pachamama, the mother bitch of the earth, with her dust that ate cities.