Every once in a while the river quickens and Canek is forced to jump out of the canoe and take hold of the front rope and drag the canoe through swift water, the rope digging into his shoulder as he struggles forward. I offer half-heartedly to help but Canek waves me off and shoulders me upstream until the river calms enough for him to jump back in and pick up once again his pole. In those moments, with my suit and dry shoes, with Canek dragging me upriver, I feel every inch the ugly colonialist. Call me Bwana. We have passed women washing clothes on rocks and children swimming. A boy riding bareback on a great black horse crossed the river in front of us a mile or so back, but now we are alone with the water.
The jungle rises about us in walls of dense green, punctuated by the yellow-tipped crimson of lobster claws or star-shaped white blossoms, and the world behind those walls is alive with the sounds of animals scurrying and birds cawing. The trees overhead are thick with hairlike growths in their crooks, which Canek tells me are wild orchids. Little yellow fish leap out of the tropical waters and flat-headed kingfishers, dark blue with bright white collars, skim across the water’s surface. Something oblong and heavy slips into the river before us. Mosquitoes hum around us, as well as other bugs, thicker, hunchbacked, and black. Botlass flies, Canek tells me. One of them tears into my neck, drawing blood. The bite swells immediately.
In my briefcase, wrapped in plastic to protect it from any water that might seep into the case during the course of our journey, is the original of the letter to his child written three quarters of a century ago by Christian Shaw. As I travel through this ancient Mayan jungle I can’t help but wonder if the strange sense of revelation I felt atop El Castillo in the ruins of Xunantunich was somehow similar to what Christian Shaw first experienced at the bedside of the terribly wounded Corporal Magee. Beth, who has lately made a study of these things, said that in Shaw’s letter she saw the beginnings of a spiritual ideology reminiscent of the Vedanta, one of the classic systems of Indian philosophy, which teaches that the multiplicity of objects in the universe is merely illusory and that spiritual liberation comes from stripping the illusion and attaining a knowledge of the self as simply another manifestation of the whole. Beth told me the ideas in the Vedanta are not too far removed from what Jacqueline Shaw was learning from Oleanna at the Church of the New Life. I don’t know Vedanta from Valhalla from Valium but I think it more than a coincidence that Christian Shaw and his granddaughter were both suicidal before finding in a nascent spirituality something to save them. They were both trapped by the materiality and wealth and crimes of the Reddmans and longed for an understanding richer and deeper than that which surrounded them as members of that ill-fated clan. One can’t help but feel that they were on the edge of some sort of solution and Beth continues to pursue a similar path for her answer, though I still can’t figure out what it is an answer to.
But it wasn’t the change effected on Christian Shaw in that hospital in France that was most revelatory about the letter, nor was it his confession of his knowledge and acquiescence in the death of Charity Reddman at the hands of her sister Faith, though that confession answered many question about the fate of the Reddmans. No, the most interesting aspect of the letter was a name, the name of Shaw’s fellow patient at that hospital in France, the name that was to be given to the bastard child of Christian Shaw and Emma Poole, the name that pointed with clean precision to the man who had perpetrated the latter-day massacre of Reddmans. It is this man whom I am hunting, against whom my default judgment was issued, and who is the sole beneficiary of the Wergeld Trust from which I intend to wrest my fortune. Morris found out the meaning of Wergeld for me. We had thought it was a family name, but it was something else entirely, discernible from any dictionary. In feudal times, when a man was killed, a payment was made as recompense to avoid a blood feud that would result only in more killing. This payment was called a Wergeld. Faith Reddman Shaw’s attempt to pay for the crimes of her father and satisfy the blood yearnings of the sole grandson of Elisha Poole had obviously failed.
The river is peaceful now and full of beauty. We pass a tree with bright red and black berries hanging down in loops, like fine coral necklaces. Two white egrets float by; a black vulture sits above us, hunchbacked and deprived. Something like an ungainly arrow, yellow and blue, shoots across the gap in the canopy above us and I realize I have just seen a toucan. The trees here are infested with the parasitic orchids, thick as moss, a few hungry red blooms spilling down, and as I look up at them something drops loudly into the quiet of the river. I turn around, startled.
“What was that?” I ask.
“Iguana,” says Canek Panti.
Above me I notice a pack of thick-bodied lizards crawling along the outstretched branch of a tree. They are playing, scampering one around the other, and suddenly another falls off, splashing into the river. As I sit in the canoe, watching the iguanas and heading ever closer to the murderous lizard I am chasing, I can’t help but see the parallels in the death struggle over the Reddman fortune and the war between Raffaello and Calvi for control of the Philly mob and its river of illegal money. How much all have sacrificed to Mammon is stunning. For now the mob is at peace, the deadly battle for control fought and decided on Pier Four of the Naval Shipyard. What was surprising was that, with all the missing soldiers, there wasn’t much fuss in South Philly. Oh, there was some talk about a war, and the Inquirer’s mob correspondent raised some questions in an article, but it all subsided rather quickly and life went on as if the dead had never been born. I am out of it now, just as I wanted to be out of it, and am grateful as hell for that.
There was a final meeting with Earl Dante at Tosca’s in which the rules of my separation were made clear. Files were handed over, vows of secrecy were established. We looked at each other warily. He didn’t trust that I wouldn’t betray him if I had a chance to make a nickel out of it and I didn’t trust that he wouldn’t kill me just for the sport when came his ascendance to absolute power.
“One other thing,” I said, after my obligations under the separation arrangement had been made clear. “I promised Peckworth that you would reduce his street tax.”
“Why did you promise such a thing to that pervert?” Dante asked.
“It was the only way to find out what I needed to find out.”
“We already knew what it was you were finding out.”
“But I didn’t know that. Why did you get him to switch his story in the first place?”
“This was a problem for us, not for some headline-happy prosecutor. We knew how to handle it on our own.”
“I promised him you’d lower his street tax.”
He stared at me for a long moment. Then he dropped his eyes and shook his head. “Stay out of our business,” he warned before he agreed.
My last job for the mob was an appearance as Peter Cressi’s counsel at his trial for the attempted purchase of all those guns, the crime that started this story for me in the first place.