Peter Guttridge
Two To Tango
Chapter One
He wore mud-splattered workman's trousers and a hostile expression. I wore Armani and a cheesy grin. He probably wondered what this guy was doing dressed up to the nines balanced on a slippery, rickety plank above a foul-smelling latrine on the banks of the Amazon.
I might have been wondering the same but my mind was on other things. Specifically on the long knife in his extended right hand. My smile faded. Three hours in the Amazonas and already the trip was a disaster.
Things had started to go wrong the minute the plane landed at Leticia, where Colombia dips its toe in the piranha-infested waters of the Amazon. Two hundred kilos of cocaine had just been found at the airport in a consignment of fish bound for Bogota. My friend Bridget and I were obliged to stay in our plane with the other passengers, the air conditioning turned off, whilst the authorities investigated the slip-up.
The slip-up being that some customs officer had been stupid enough to find the cocaine. Everybody knew that large volumes of it were shipped out of Leticia every day from cooking factories in the jungle. The authorities were bribed more than enough to look the other way. Whoever had found the shipment clearly wasn't with the programme.
Bad luck for him. The zealot would be demoted by the end of the day, dead by the end of the week.
'It's nothing to do with me,' I said indignantly when I saw Bridget looking at me.
'It was your idea to come here,' she said, wafting the airline magazine in front of her face in a vain attempt to shift the sluggish air.
'My idea for me to come here. Your idea to tag along.'
She flared her nostrils.
'I don't tag.'
'I still don't understand why you didn't visit your friend in Cartagena as planned.'
'I changed my mind, okay?' She gave me a steely look. 'You have a problem with that?'
'Absolutely not,' I said quickly, sinking lower into my seat.
When we finally got out of the plane, the humidity in the air on the tarmac wasn't noticeably less. I was perspiring heavily by the time we reached the baggage hall. I could feel the sweat soaking into the collar of my jacket. Damp patches appeared under my arms.
A squat, chubby man wearing a baseball cap was holding up a piece of cardboard on which our names - Nick Madrid and Bridget Frost - were crudely scrawled. His trousers were at half-mast and he wore a creased blue shirt, tight over his bulging belly.
We signalled him over. Introductions were brief. His name was Joel, our guide for our trip on the Amazon. Bridget looked at the itinerary clutched in her hand.
'Let's get to the hotel and those Welcome Cocktails, Joel,' she said briskly.
'No hurry, Mrs Bridget,' Joel said, looking askance at her pile of luggage. 'Hotel three hours upriver.'
'What?' Bridget said, looking down at the itinerary again.
'Boat leaves in one hour.'
'We've got to go on a boat?'
'Bridget, we're on the Amazon for God's sake,' I said. 'How else do you think we're going to get around?'
It sounded romantic to me. I imagined either a power boat to whisk us to our hotel or maybe one of those old paddle steamers, like in the Herzog film, Fitzcarraldo. Perhaps I could buy a panama hat to go with my rather stylish linen suit. I considered a fly whisk but I wasn't sure if I was on the right continent for that.
'Take us to the nearest bar then,' Bridget said before stomping off, head high. Joel and I looked down at her luggage. He halfheartedly took hold of the handle of her largest case. Given that it was almost as tall as he was, I took it from him and staggered off after Bridget.
We left the luggage at Joel's travel agency and went to buy my panama in a shop along the street. Then Joel suggested we have our drink in a bar on the waterfront in Peru. The border with Peru is a five minute bus ride west of Leticia. The port almost merges to the east with neighbouring Marco in Brazil.
The bus - actually a battered old transit van with two lumpy bench seats - took us from the clean, modern, single storey buildings of the Colombian town to a rundown waterfront. Joel led us on foot along a dusty street into a shanty town of food stalls and open-walled bars with tin roofs. Hard eyes watched impassively as we went by.
We stepped carefully on rough gangplanks across the muddy shallows of the river to reach a bar on stilts. We plopped down at a table overlooking sluggish brown water.
Joel and I were both soaked with sweat. Bridget restricted herself, by force of will alone I'm sure, to a wet sheen. I had been hoping to present myself as a man of the world but with sweat dripping off my ears I looked your average red-faced Englishman abroad.
Here the Amazon wasn't much wider than the Thames at Westminster. Rusty, rotting hulls were sunk into the mud along the opposite shore. An old wooden steamer lay on its side beside a modern, drab green gunboat that bristled with guns fore and aft.
Dug-out canoes were pulled half out of the water on both banks. On an upturned hull beside the bar children took turns at diving into the turbid waters.
We got through two jugs of beer in half an hour: Joel was a man after Bridget's heart, although he was the only one belching, loud and often. Half-Indian half-passing sailor, he turned out to be fluent in six languages and have a fondness for quoting George Bernard Shaw. So much for first appearances.
He tried hard to impress Bridget but his Shavian wit was rather undercut by the blasts of beery breath he belched over her as he spoke.
"It's a cultural thing," I whispered to her as Joel called for another jug of beer.
Bridget ignored me. Nothing new there then. She was busy ogling a half dozen fit-looking Caucasian men huddled at a nearby table drinking beer and talking little.
I braved the wobbly gangplank which led to the lavatory. The lavatory was a rudimentary affair. Very rudimentary: a hole in the floorboards. I looked through it at the foul sludge below.
I recalled visiting my great uncle in a little village called Earby when I was a kid. He had a long drop toilet in a shed at the bottom of his garden. It comprised a wooden seat with a hole in the middle fixed above a stream in a ditch some four feet below. The stream ran under each of his neighbour's outhouses in turn.
The foreman who gave my great uncle a hard time in the local factory lived a couple of doors downstream. Once I waited for him to go into his outhouse then I crept into my uncle's, set fire to a crumpled newspaper and dropped it into the stream where it drifted, blazing, down to the unsuspecting foreman.
I was halfway across the garden before I heard his roar of pain, back in the house before he fell cursing out of the outhouse, trousers round his ankles, one hand on his singed bum.
I was smiling at the memory when I turned to leave and came face to face with man with the knife.
'Deutsch?' he said.
'No. Sorry.'
'Americano?'
'No, sorry. I'm English. And you are...?'
'Give me your money or I'll break your face,' he said, raising the knife.
'That's not actually correct,' I said, without thinking. 'I think you mean, "Give me your money or I'll cut your face".'
'Give me your money or I'll cut your face.'
'That's better,' I said weakly.
I stood there for a moment, unsure what to do. I was in a confined space, with no room for manoeuvre against a knife. Not that I knew how to manoeuvre against a knife. I thought I'd try trembling instead. It seemed to come naturally.
He took a step towards me and raised the knife higher. I am an Englishman abroad, I thought. A certain standard of behaviour is expected of me, especially faced with danger. I gave him my wallet. Well, there's no point being a damned fool about it.
He took it, then moved forward again.
He had only taken a couple of steps when another man appeared in the doorway behind him. This man reached round my would-be assailant and grabbed his wrist. The knife clattered to the floor. The next moment the robber went through the wall into the mud below.
I looked at my rescuer. He was from the table Bridget had been ogling. Slim build, neat black hair, bright blue eyes. He held out his hand. My wallet was in it. I took it gingerly.
'Thanks,' I said.
'Nice duds but I should go easy on the Armani around here,' he said, in a strong London accent.
'You're English,' I said. I always state the obvious when I'm in shock.
'Only between you and me,' he said, grinning. 'And I'm dying for a piss.' He walked past me. 'If I were you I'd get your little party on the road to wherever you're going.'
'We're going to Puerto Naneiro,' I said.
The man looked over his shoulder at me.
'That a fact?'
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