Solimeos, page 20
“I didn’t know what else to do.”
“Sorrow, Axel. Deep and terrible sorrow.”
“I know. I’ve always known. Raven—?”
“That’s why I keep you here.”
Chapter Twenty-One
At noon the next day, Dietrich and I continued the search for Solomon on Dr. Hermann’s mountain, along the old roadway down to the river. For two hours, Cabloco gauchos, my father, and I grappled with stubborn rock. They were still at it as Dietrich and I sat in the shade of a small tent. Pouring water over our heads, we drank greedily, watching Okok and the miniature donkey Raven had given him make their precipitous way toward us.
Okok wore a large and frayed straw hat, as did his donkey. He carried a satchel of books, a guitar, and our lunch. Smiling, he took off his hat, passed the satchel to Dietrich, who seemed to be expecting it, and said, “Mrs. Baron has drunk the tea. She slept for hours, then ate a fine breakfast, which I did also, and went back to sleep. I set up a hammock in her bedroom. Maria rocks her. The shaking stopped. I do not know if it is ended. Maria sent this lunch.” From the donkey’s saddlebag, he produced paper bags of sandwiches.
Okok settled himself in the shade of his donkey, which shook off his straw hat and proceeded to eat it. Okok offered me a fruit juice, patted a place under the donkey for me, and said softly, “Sit with me, Young Baron.” In the shade of the donkey, Okok lay back, his hands behind his head.
I sat against the donkey’s rear legs and brushed flies from his belly.
Even as he wolfed down his sandwich, Dietrich tried to watch every stroke of the men working in the stone hole. When they finally finished, he dropped into the hole. From where I sat, I could see him examining each loosened stone, tossing them off the causeway. I wasn’t needed.
When the donkey had finished eating his hat, Okok lovingly scratched the stiff hairs between his donkey eyes. The donkey let loose a series of snorts and whinnies and wheezes. Okok laughed. However, when he looked up at me, he sighed. “This Raven. Her spirit is trapped in fear.”
Dietrich shouted, his voice crackling with excitement. “Look what we found! It’s a factory. A goddamned factory, a foundry. This is incredible. Axel, come!”
Okok and I followed Dietrich’s voice into the now-larger hole. We wriggled into a lit stone tunnel, then joined my father in a vast room. He was ecstatic. “Stairways, catwalk, columns. What’s this? It’s a building, not a mountain. Or perhaps a pyramid. The jungle hides many. Great cities everywhere. We may well be inside a pyramid!
“Capstones, cornices!” Dietrich shouted as I regarded the room in awe. “Perfectly fitted. No mortar. Worktables. Not a mine. It is a factory for thousands. Look, it goes on and on. Axel! A hundred furnaces, sulfur, fire. Ankle chains in the walls. So they had slaves.” Dietrich held up a sheet of metal in a large, oxhide shape.
I knew what it was: ancient money. Hundreds were stacked in a herringbone shape, laid out on brushwood. “This is for trade,” Dietrich said. “Oxhide because each is worth the value of an ox. And we know who Ox is. What was it the ship’s captain said about the conveyor belt? The current?”
“If someone left Spain, they would arrive at the mouth of the Amazon.”
Dietrich waved his lantern at the wall. “Writing, Axel. Phoenician, Hebrew. Get over here and make notes. On this wall, we have a bill of lading in clay. Yes.” He wet his finger and licked the clay. “Here we are: Phoenician!” he shouted, exhilarated, as he stumbled over the letters. “My God! Six hundred bronze chariot wheels, four spokes, helmets, bronze, ten thousand shields of bronze, weapons of bronze, forty garments, sleeveless, linen.” Dietrich challenged the ceilings. “Does anyone have any further doubt that Solomon’s ships crossed the Atlantic?”
Okok and I followed Dietrich into an immense, vaulted, circular room, all stone, with capped doorways, a dozen of them leading out from the center, wheel-like, vast, into further rooms. The floor was studded with stone hammers. I felt cold air from a ceiling of rock: ventilation. In the center where we stood, astonished, were lines of stone worktables constructed of a horizontal slab with two uprights.
Dietrich’s footsteps echoed on the hard clay floor, his voice, in all his sepulchral glory, booming through the darkness. “Drainpipes! Ventilation! More oxhides of copper. Oxhides, the coin of the god Og.”
“Are you feeling all right, Dietrich?”
“Never better. What a discovery. Furnaces everywhere!” Dietrich led us into a larger room with curving ceilings supported by enormous stone columns. “On that wall, a sacred ibis. Egyptians were here too.” He picked up a hammer, passed it to me. “Soil pounders of the Bronze Age. Look at this. They have found the same hammer all over the world.” He turned away into another curve of whatever we were in. “Skeletons everywhere. Human bones with human teeth marks.” He lifted a femur, thrust it at me. They buried their dead in their bellies.” I jumped backwards into the dark. “Victory, victim, victual. A simple food supply: Work slaves until they die, then feed them to the remaining slaves. We never went that far.”
Okok and I followed Dietrich from room to room as he worked his way back along drainpipes. I was frightened; Dietrich was fearless.
I felt my heart pounding in my neck. Or was it a reverberation from the stone hammers of the slaves who had worked, suffered, and died here?
We approached an inner wall and found an anomaly. This wall was man-made, with square bricks. “Dietrich, these bricks…they are the same as our house.” As we felt along the wall for an opening, Okok came up from behind, startling us.
Grabbing our lanterns, he snapped them off and pushed us down to the floor with great force. Alert now beyond the strangeness of the interior wall, I became aware of the smell of smoke and the sound of chanting.
“Indian ritual?” I whispered to Dietrich.
Okok twisted my head to the right, toward a light flickering through a crack in the wall’s mortar. There was another cavern just beyond. “Your people,” Okok said to me in the old language.
On our bellies, we crawled to the light and peered through the crack.
The light came from a large, round, high-ceilinged chamber. I remembered Dr. Hermann saying all the houses were connected by underground tunnels. This must be one of them. Staring through the crack in the wall, I did not want to see what I saw.
Torches burned in wall sconces. Twelve figures in masks and black robes in a ring of polished stone chairs. And in a stone pit before them, in the center of the room, was Dr. Hermann’s two-headed waitress, her four braids now growing iron gray with age, her four arms outstretched as an Oriental goddess, standing, spinning, spinning, and speaking in strange voices, many of them male, all in German.
Two masked figures lay inert on the chamber floor, perhaps dead.
The dozen masked figures chanted. I smelled incense on the smoke, or drugs. A faint ring of light increased in brightness and form, circled the pit, hung above it, growing brighter and brighter, then defused. The chanting stopped.
Still, the two-headed waitress turned and spoke in voices not her own.
Finally, one of the men stood and moved to her, ordering, “Stop.”
“It’s Dr. Hermann,” I said to Dietrich. “I recognize his voice.”
“Willi, the sacrifice, please.” Dr. Hermann moved forward, intoning in a deep, resonant, and cadenced voice, his sincere voice, not the dangerous singsong: “Get up, oh son of the Aryan race. Wake up the strength of the god who sleeps in your interior. Defy and get over the curse of the world.”
Dietrich sighed. “So, it’s gone this far. Where will it sink to sleep and rest, this murderous hatred, this fury?” I knew Dietrich was now speaking of the Furies’ rage, the rage of Achilles. He dropped to the dirt floor.
Willi, unrobed, unmasked, in uniform, wearing leather jodhpurs and a cluster of medals on his chest, dragged a screaming girl into the chamber.
I grabbed Dietrich’s collar and hissed, “They have a girl.” I squinted to see better. “She’s a white girl. Where did they get her?”
Dietrich scrambled back to our viewing point. “What’s this? Who is she?”
“Numi, Awa!” the girl screamed.
Okok pressed his face into my back. “She calls for Numi, Chief of the Shamburo tribe.”
Light-skinned, the girl wore a small breechcloth and many red and yellow woven bracelets around her wrists and ankles. She was young, slim, innocent, barely curved. Her breasts in the flickering candlelight seemed like small buds, flowers. I couldn’t see her face.
“A slave,” said Okok.
Dr. Hermann pulled her down to the floor of the crypt and sang out: “Release the Aryan blood by the sacrifice of…of this girl.”
Dietrich was next to me, pressing against my shoulder, gripping my arm. “Do not try to save her, Axel. Do nothing stupid.”
What happened to “A man does what a man must do”?
As if someone had opened a window, a wind, a storm of wind, blew dust into our faces, and, quicker than a heartbeat, one of the masked men in black screamed, clutching his heart, falling over in his chair.
In the melee, a warrior wearing a majestic crown of yellow feathers leapt into the crypt. He took the girl in his arms and carried her away.
“Awa,” Okok whispered with fear. “That is Awa, Numi’s son.”
Oddly, none of the men in their chairs moved or reacted to the attack. They must have taken heavy drugs. Only Dr. Hermann and Willi were active and upright.
Dr. Hermann scrambled to the inert figures laid out on the floor, tearing the mask off one. I recognized the face of the “Refrigeration” specialist. Dr. Hermann lifted another hood. It was a woman with yellow, piano-key teeth.
Madame Wanda, with a yellow feathered arrow in her chest.
Dr. Hermann took small Willi by the shoulders and, with the back of his hand, chopped him across the face. “I told you I need a Jew. This won’t work.”
“You achieved the ring of light, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”
“How can I release the power of the Aryan blood unless I kill a Jew? How can I contact Hitler?”
“Where am I going to find a Jew for you in this jungle?”
I heard a sharp intake of breath from Dietrich. My blood turned to ice.
In the dark, barely breathing, we crawled back toward the exit, Okok leading.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Numbed by our singular realizations, we emerged into the sunlight and sank to the earth, our heads in our arms, bent by the brutality and lunacy of what we’d seen. Sweat, dust, tears rolled down our faces, striped our shirts. Now we poured water over our heads as if to cleanse ourselves.
“Evil, evil,” Okok intoned. “They make holes in the sky,” he called as he left us to go sit under the shade of his donkey.
“Poor Madame Wanda,” I said.
My father’s head fell to his chest. “Hermann must have known about that cavern. He bricked it off from the tunnel. In his quest for his damned Aryan language, what other momentous facts has he hidden from me? We’re as doomed as that damned gypsy. My work will be lost. These madmen will never let me go.”
“Dietrich, there is something…. This cavern and its ancient writing show we are following the right trail.”
“My lectures,” he muttered, and I knew in his head he was picturing himself a scholar being admired and lauded. He lifted his head sharply, focused on some distant spot while his mind filtered my idea. Then he turned to me. “Ask Okok where we might find a remnant of Solomon.”
“He called the Amazon Solimeos.”
“Just so. We’ll fight madness with madness.”
Okok, out of deference to us, remained under his donkey, covering his eyes with his hands, pulling down his frayed straw hat. I beckoned him to rejoin us and explained what it was that we sought.
“Ah, Solomao.” Okok paced before us, rubbing his chin. “And with this relic of Solomao, you will then leave our land? Could such a treasure draw the Nazis out of O Linda? That would be a good thing for all the jungle people. First, speak with Numi. That is no easy task. His tribe is isolated, scorning any contact with outsiders. Even so, there is little that Numi doesn’t know.” He spread his arms over us. “You will find something. Solomao is everywhere. Maybe your Hitler too.”
I was not about to dissuade him that we had meant the relic was only for the three of us: Dietrich, Raven, and myself. But I intuitively knew that, if we escaped to Israel, Dietrich would turn the Occult Bureau Colony over to the Nazi hunters. He would identify and locate them not because of veniality or morality, but absentmindedness.
So perhaps, ultimately, Okok could be correct that he would be getting rid of all of us. A relic of Solomon could rid O Linda of Dr. Hermann and his men, as well as the von Pappendorfs.
I helped Okok onto his donkey. “Will you come with us to find Numi?”
“Young Baron, wherever you are, I am. But Mohammed knows the way best. Ask Mohammed.”
“Mohammed can’t walk.”
My father spoke up. “We can carry him!”
Okok was arranging the expedition into the forest to see Numi. Since it was the rainy season and the forest was flooded, travelling by canoe was faster and safer than trekking in. At my father’s behest, I drove to the Hideaway. Inside, the bar buzzed with fans and flies. A handsome native warrior, dripping in orange beads and painted in an elaborate mosaic of black paste, sat cross-legged in the shadows, against a wall, drinking a Coca-Cola. He glanced up as I came into the room, then looked away as if I were toxic. Helen the parrot presided over the bar.
A massive, nearly naked Indian woman, her body shaped in inner tubes of gleaming fat, was leaning into Mohammed’s hammock, washing his feet. I was surprised to see an Indian woman inside the Hideaway.
I stood over Mohammed, cleared my throat.
Mohammed held up a chubby finger as the woman finished his big toe and moved away.
When I had his full attention, I shouted to him over the loud hum of fans that I’d come to invite him on an expedition to an uncontacted tribe deep in the jungle. It was believed they had emeralds and diamonds. We sought a relic of Solomon’s.
He was less surprised by our quest than I had expected. “When I was trading on the river, I heard stories of Solimeos—they even call the Amazon that.”
“Yes, I know. Okok told me. He also said you are the best guide we could have.”
“True, to be sure,” said Mohammed, “but I can’t walk.” He signaled the woman to turn down the noisy fans.
“Okok is making arrangements,” I said. “Kupis will carry you in your hammock. Name your price. Dietrich says he’ll double it. He agrees with Okok, says you’re the only trader on the river who can handle a wild tribe.”
“In the jungles are many isolated, uncontacted tribes. They can be pretty dangerous.” Mohammed closed his eyes. “Tell your old man I want enough money to get out of here, to buy a small place in Rio and get medical treatment. Have my stomach stitched up.” Mohammed took my hand in his beefy paw. His camel eyes were dark, limpid. “Hey, kid, do you think I can trust your father? I’ve had dealings with him in the past. I’m not so sure.”
I didn’t know what I should say so I said nothing.
“Here’s the story,” Mohammed continued. “I won’t go if Dietrich goes. He’ll bring trouble. His eyes…you know his eyes, there’s nothing in them. Nazi, not see. How’s that? Nazi, not see. Jungle people will surely kill your father if they see what I see.”
“Alright,” I said. “Let’s say Dietrich doesn’t go with us.” That may be preferable, I thought. “How long would it take?”
“I’d say about two or three days, rowing above an old rubber station. Now, while the forest’s flooded, we could sail up to a river station, hire dugouts and rowers, then row in easy, couple of days. So, Young Baron, where are we going?”
“Shamburo. Numi.”
“Jesus, Young Baron, that’s dangerous. Numi’s okay, but his son Awa is a cannibal. Very dangerous, but they cannot be described as uncontacted. Who said that?”
“Okok.”
Mohammed laughed. “Numi trades goods with Pastor Ken, though he is also too proud to let anyone know he’s made any kind of deal with the hated white man.” Mohammed lifted up on an elbow, blew his nose into a red silk handkerchief.
The nearly naked Indian woman ran to pick up the handkerchief and give him another as he continued, “At least a dozen or more years ago, it is said that a white woman in the forest had a pair of twin girls. Twins are very dangerous. Bad luck for the tribe. They must be killed. One died right away, but the other lived. Pastor Ken somehow got hold of this girl baby. Numi said she was theirs, but Pastor Ken and his wife, Kathy, wouldn’t give her back to them. Awa brought a war party to the mission. Pastor Ken didn’t want to give them the baby. Finally, they made a deal. The Shamburo got the baby girl, and somebody got a yellow diamond the size of a spotlight.”
Stunned, I remembered the diamond flashing on Dietrich’s hand soon after Raven returned, saying she had lost her baby.
“Awa agreed to keep the baby alive until she was full grown, and in return Pastor Ken would send rice and pots and pans and knives and chocolate. Pastor Ken gave her lessons too, I hear. She read Charles Dickens novels and the Bible, so she speaks English.
“I’ve had emeralds from that area, big, gorgeous ones, six, seven carats. So we take the yacht up river into the Saudade, then get to an old rubber station and hire rowers and dugouts and look for a white cliff. That’s Shamburo territory. The white cliffs are about two days’ sail from the last rubber outpost. That’s where I traded in my glory days, at the rubber outpost. Nothing surprises me on that river. There are creatures we don’t know wandering deep within. Who knows what they are, where they come from? Everyone’s been in and out of here for thousands of years. You go deeper, you find huge villages, roads, bridges. Civilized. Thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people. Cultivated fields, cultivated forests. That’s why all these tribes speak different languages. They come from different places. Blue eyes. Jews, Greeks, Irish. This was the garbage dump. Slaves, all that shit, colonies. You hear this stuff up and down the river. Everyone’s got stories. Listen, up in Titicaca they have the same reed boats as in Mesopotamia. A tribe north of here has two-nosed dogs. Won’t sell them. Tried to buy a bitch and a dog. Double-nosed Andean Tiger Hounds. This is God’s kitchen, and he cooked up some real messes.”
