No?
Says he has been having nightmares. Nightmares about the Moche god, coming to cut off his head!
Except of course technically, the Moche cut off their hands, as well, and their feet. As we now know.
Larrys sigh was derisive, yet resigned. Thats the damn crux, isnt it? They did it to themselves, voluntarily. I have no conceptual way of understanding this-
The Aztecs self-mutilated.
Larry accelerated into a traffic gap, between two green and red motokars. OK, yeah sure, they spiked their penises with cactus thorns. They drew blood from their ear lobes. They scarred themselves. And lots of cultures scarify, Jessica. But this crazy-ass Moche shit is on a whole new level cutting off your own healthy hands? To impress? To please the gods? Why? And then theres the sex, the kinky stuff. Sex with skeletons? Sodomizing each other during horrible ritual murder? Its like like they must have been getting off on it. All the torture.
Clearly. But the eroticism is a leitmotif throughout the culture, Larry victims and perpetrators are all involved, all sexualized. We have the evidence of the murals. The aroused naked prisoners, brothers and sons, brothers and and fathers
Clearly. But the eroticism is a leitmotif throughout the culture, Larry victims and perpetrators are all involved, all sexualized. We have the evidence of the murals. The aroused naked prisoners, brothers and sons, brothers and and fathers
So they flay them and torture them and tie them up, their own sons and brothers, and then they slowly bleed them to death, and then someone drinks the blood from a special cup, and as all this is going on someone else thinks, hey, I know, lets have anal sex in the same room at the same time just in case it gets a bit goddamn boring.
And all this while the rest of the people are singing and dancing and watching, yep, it is incredibly bizarre.
And then they bring in the pumas. They have sex with pumas.
We dont know the puma sex was consensual.
Ah, no. Muy stupido. Larrys laugh was wild and bitter. Might have been puma rape, right? Now theyve really crossed the line. Sodomizing old corpses, cool; drinking your brothers blood, thats fine and dandy; but puma rape? Heck. Someone call PETA!
The pick-up took a turning, at speed. They were closer to the centre of the city now. The buildings fled past. A red Nova Scotia bank, a white concrete evangelical church, then a statue to a fat, forgotten general in an anonymous and dusty plaza jammed with imprisoned traffic.
Larry sighed. Its just beyond beyond anything Its just way out there.
Yep. And Dan still doesnt quite buy it, hes still resistant. Emotionally. He doesnt believe it really happened, and if it happened well then he wants to blame it on El Nino. He cant actually come out and say the obvious: that that this is just what the Moche did. Stuff they liked to do. Chop off their own hands, or feet, or noses. Mutilate themselves.
A pink San German bus was passing them on the right, stuffed to the broken windows with poor tired people: weary fish-workers and bag-clutching housewives staring soulfully at the gringos in the Chevrolet.
So you fault him for this?
Actually, yes, I do.
Why? I thought you two were in love.
There was a long silence. Jessica blushed, fiercely. Is it that obvious?
Larry laughed. Yes. Its that obvious. Everyone in Zana knows about you and the boss, babe. Youre not very good at sneaking around, you two. But dont worry! He laughed again. Were all happy for you. You make a nice couple! And Dan is a very decent man and he was kinda lonely before you came along So its a good thing. Dont fret.
She shrugged, half-embarrassed, and yet half-pleased. Dont know what to say. But I want you to know it doesnt affect the science, for either of us. Thats separate, were still professionals. And Dan and I disagree on the Moche.
How?
I think he is hampered by political correctness. Like so many academics of his generation. Take cannibalism.
If you insist.
These days, if you believed most senior anthropologists and archaeologists, cannibalism never happened. Never ever, or hardly ever, and certainly not when poor brown people are being discussed.
Right.
Yet we know for sure that cannibalism has been, through history, a pretty widespread phenomenon. Dozens of cultures have recorded it, from the Anasazi to the Sumatrans to the Maori. Fiji. New Guinea. The Amazon. Scientists have even found bones, with saw marks on them, next to human middens with evidence of human flesh digested by human alimentary canals. And yet the bien pensant ethnologists still say oh no, its racist, how can you accuse these poor people of such horrible things, perhaps a bear came in and used a knife?
They were much closer now. The streets were definitely older and narrower, low-slung Spanish colonial buildings painted dirty orange or red, flickered past.
OK, Jess. But look at it the other way. Accusations of cannibalism were also, like, used as a neat way to disparage non-Europeans, right? So the questioning of cannibalism is a justified reaction to that, to the racist jokes about boiled missionaries, decades of horrible eugenics, fuzzy-wuzzies with bones through the noses.
But its bad science. Science should be science. Uninfluenced by politics.
I agree. But maybe not everyone is as ruthlessly clear-headed and ambitious as you. Larry was half-smiling, obviously teasing. And Jessica, you gotta recall the emotional context.
How?
Dan has been studying the Moche for a decade. Its like they are his family. The Moche are his people. Now someone comes along
Me?
Yes. His smart and ambitious young girlfriend. And you say uh-oh sorry, Dad was a sex-killer and Mom liked threesomes with goats. Hes offended on behalf of his family. The Moche. So just go easy, Jess. Youre vindicated. Be magnanimous.
All right. Jess permitted herself a nervous laugh.
You had any thoughts about the gunman? Larry asked quietly. Dan wont even talk about it.
Been trying to not think about myself, if Im honest.
Sure. But, didnt you say you got some scuttle on this dude? This
McLintock guy?
Hes a Scottish historian. Or he was.
Killed himself recently?
Yes.
Coincidence? The suicide?
Jess shook her head. Ive no idea. Perhaps. Theres a cached Facebook page about it. Deleted but still readable. Its strange. But the thing is He was a historian of medieval Europe. Its difficult to see a connection between him and the Moche in eighth-century Peru. Fifteen thousand miles away. She was one kilometre away from her destination. Yet that is definitely who the gunman named. Archie McLintock. A dead Scottish medievalist. Who recently drove into a wall. About the same time someone killed Pablo.
A silence in the cabin. The squeal of brakes. Larry was pulling over. All very sinister. I might ask for a raise if there are gonna be evil assassins. Anyway. Were here, babe. The supermercado.
Jess alighted from the Chevy pick-up, smiling. Thanks for the lift, Larry.
Larry lifted a dismissive hand. Hey, the company was good. We all need to stick together. Buzz me on the cell when youve finished shopping and Ill pick you up later. Stay safe.
The Chevy pulled out. Jessica watched it depart into the dust and melee. Then she turned and waited; then glanced at the burbling noise of the shadowy market across the square from the modern supermercardo.
Thats where she was really headed; she didnt want the Roski supermarket: that was a ruse. Jess felt a need to keep her investigations to herself right now. She wanted the witches market, inside the town market. She wanted to ask about ulluchu, and she reckoned that maybe, just maybe, some of the people here, descendants of the Moche themselves, might know something about it. The blood of the unknown Moche god.
Immediately she crossed into the darkness, she was lost in the bustle and the shouting and the odours. Boiling tripes in cauldrons. Piles of yams and dirty potatoes and lurid red peppers and secondhand mannequins with gouged-out eyes wearing terrible nylon clothes. Headless, goosepimpled chickens sprawled on blood-smeared counters. Women in bowler hats sat at rough wooden benches eating skewered beef hearts, anticuchos, under a saccharine portrait of Jesus in a luminous toga. Here was the corner which led to the witches market proper. She paused.
A baby was lying on the floor of the market. Just lying there, face up, in nylon swaddling. Staring quietly at the ceiling, all alone, with damp concrete beneath him. Peruvians often did this, especially native women just left babies on the ground to go off to do their shopping. Probably the baby was fine. Yet the sight was reflexively painful for a Westerner: it broke every taboo, abandoning a child on the dirty floor of a crowded market, where it could be crushed or run over or kicked.
The least she could do was put something under the baby, protect it somehow. She had to do something. Hurrying across the dirty concrete, she rushed up to the blank-faced child and as she did she wondered if something was wrong. The babys face, the way it wasnt doing anything, it was just a doll, was it just a doll? And then she saw blackness.
She was grabbed and hooded, roughly. Musty sweat and horror flared her nostrils, she kicked out and screamed; heard a suppressed curse, voices raised. The hood tightened like a noose around her neck, her arms were lashed. Jess was being kidnapped.
26
Barbican, City of London
Everything is in position? Everyone?
Ibsen was sitting nervously in the front seat of his Met car, listening to his police radio, hanging from a hook on the dash.
A radioed voice came over, loud and distinct: DS Larkham sitting in another car two hundred metres down Whitecross Street.
Yes, sir. We have his flat on surveillance. Kilo 1 and Kilo 2 are right outside.
Armed response at the ready?
Yes.
And the door, youre sure its the only one?
Yes, sir. Checked a dozen times. If he comes out we will see him.
Ibsen sat back, half-satisfied, and watched some noisy London schoolkids swinging satchels at each other, ambling in that loud, sweary, litter-chucking, end-of-school way that was so typical and so persistently annoying to anyone over eighteen. The air was freezing outside, bitterly icy, and the sky was that pure, expectant whiteness that precedes a heavy snowfall.