The policeman stuffed the ragged bit of paper into Euhler’s palm and closed his fist over it. He left the book on the bed, then left Euhler and the bedroom, returning to the living room and then the home office. He sat down at the computer keyboard and pressed a random key. The waterfall animation disappeared and there was a dark blue screen and a line of text that said, Password, please, with a flashing cursor below it.
He found a pencil and a little pad of paper in the desk drawer and went into the living room. He stood in front of Euhler’s prize photograph and jotted down both Mont Tendre’s height-1,679 meters-and the coordinates below it-46°35’41”N 6°18’36”E.
He removed the extraneous material and came up with a string of numbers-167946354161836-which he then entered on the keyboard. The screen cleared again and took him to a directory, which he proceeded to copy onto a dozen CD-ROMs he found in a box in the desk.
He switched off the computer, then stared down at the digital combination lock on the desk safe. On the off chance it would work he entered 1679-the height of Mont Tendre. Nothing happened. He tried the reverse, 9761, and the door clicked open. There was a passport, several dozen Krugerrands, and a respectable stack of high-denomination euros.
The only other thing in the safe was a bundle of letters and photographs, tied up in a predictable red ribbon. The pictures were pornographic and the letters were as well; even though Saint-Sylvestre’s German was mediocre he could figure out what Ich mochte Sie saugen and lassen Sie uns wie Tiere bumsen meant.
In the pictures Lenny appeared to be the submissive while his young, blond and very muscular friend was the dominant. The letters were all headed, mein su?er liebster Liebling Lenny, and signed, Ihr liebevolles baby, Lutzie. Love letters from one man to another. He went back into the living room and did some housekeeping, emptying glasses and putting them in the dishwasher as well as removing any other signs that Euhler had entertained a guest that night.
He returned to the bedroom and saw that Euhler had both vomited and lost control of his bowels. Either his heart had slowed to a stop under the effects of the multiple drugs or he had suffocated on his own vomit. One way or another, the banker was dead. Saint-Sylvestre dropped the letters and the ribbon on the floor beside the bed, leaving the impression that reading them had been Euhler’s last act before ripping his maudlin little epigraph from the book collection, then downing the pills with his mojito-party boy to the end.
It all looked authentic enough and there was no reason to suspect foul play. An aging homosexual took his own life knowing that things were never going to get any better than they’d been with Ihr liebevolles baby, Lutzie. If Lutzie was very unlucky the police would track him down and ask a few questions, but that would almost certainly be the end of it.
Satisfied, Saint-Sylvestre used his cell phone to look up flights from Zurich to Vancouver. He found a Swissair flight out of Zurich to Paris in an hour and a half, and a red-eye Air Canada flight that would get him to Vancouver at seven in the morning, Pacific time.
He picked up the old stock certificate off the coffee table, folded it and put it into the inside pocket of his jacket. He took one last look around, Euhler out of his thoughts, his mind now thinking about twin sisters in an old folks’ home halfway around the world. He left the apartment, closing the door softly behind him.
21
The children marched them through the jungle in perfect military order, the smallest taking point thirty or forty feet ahead, one on their left, one on their right and the fourth coming up behind, the too-large weapon held firmly at port arms, ready to cut them down at the slightest indication of resistance.
It was he who had relieved Peggy of her camera and now wore it across his chest, looking like a sort of fearsome tourist child waiting for Mowgli or Baloo to appear on the trail before him.
They walked without speaking and when they communicated it was through hand motions and whistles. Their attention was on their environment and their prisoners, their faces devoid of emotion, or perhaps, thought Holliday, they had no emotion left.
When he was ten his uncle had bought him a perfect replica of a Buntline Special, the Colt Peacemaker with the twelve-inch barrel that legend had it Wyatt Earp used. The enormous handgun must have looked ridiculous to any adult, but there was no sense of that with their four young jailers. The AK-47s seemed horribly normal being carried by these kids. The four children guarding them would commit cold-blooded murder without hesitation. The oldest couldn’t have been more than twelve.
They walked through the forest for an hour, and then two. At first Holliday thought they were heading for the distant trio of hills that seemed to struggle up out of the jungle but then they turned away. Coming over a small ridge he saw the river and between them and the water the smoking ruins of a village.
A few minutes later they reached the bottom of the rise and Holliday saw the first human remains, a human arm, male, sliced off close to the shoulder, marrow yellow where the bone had been crushed, blood in the dirt and sand congealing on the stump, the hand flexed as though clutching for a beggar’s offering that would never come. A few yards down the path was a head, split almost in two with the sweeping cut of a blade, taking off the head at the eyebrows and opening it like a softboiled egg.
Rafi threw up and Peggy began to cry silently. Strangely Eddie began to sing; the tune was familiar-“Auld Lang Syne”-but the words were different. Spanish, crooned like a lullaby, whispered so softly Holliday doubted that anyone else had heard.
Por que perder las esperanzas
de volverse a ver,
por que perder las esperanzas
si hay tanto querer.
The words must have had some fierce meaning for the Cuban, because his jaw was hard and Holliday could see the big sinus vein bulging across his forehead: as they continued along the path and into the smoking remains of the village there was more and more carnage-an infant that had been covered in gasoline and then thrown into a campfire, several male bodies staked out on the ground covered with hacking bloody cuts, several men, women and girls strung up from tree branches with piano wire that had almost decapitated them, the smell of blood and feces everywhere and above it all the sound of wailing children. Holliday could see them down at the riverbank. They were tied together in a row, about fifteen of them, the rope then attached to the stern of one of their big dugouts. A dozen older children, fourteen or fifteen years old, were waiting at their paddles, apparently for some signal.
Their four guards led the prisoners around the smoldering wreckage of a large hut, probably the common “longhouse” or dormitory for single men. Beyond it was a Russian UAZ Jeep knockoff in old-style jungle camo. Sitting on the hood of the vehicle was a dragonheaded man wearing a blue-and-orange New York Knicks jersey and old-fashioned black-and-white high-tops with a pair of worn green-on-green fatigues pushed into them. Holliday could see a very expensive-looking cobra tattoo in three colors on his right shoulder.