"I decided to kill the man who had hired me as his underling: Diego Montes. They called him Ah Aranha, the Spider. Montes had grown to depend on my cunning; he lived like an ignorant beast, little more than a bloodsucking insect, thoroughly corrupted, a despoiler, stealing life from everything he touched; a whoremaster, running strings of girls kidnapped from Indian villages in the interior, selling them until their looks collapsed, then casting them into the street like garbage. His face, the rattle of his septum as he breathed through his mouth, the drugs and liquor he ingested massively, even the stuporous way he ate, disgusted me. Carrying out his death sentence came to represent the supreme expression of my free will.
"I crept into his villa one night and cut his throat with a razor while he slept. It required little effort; I severed the vocal cords first so he couldn't cry out. When he woke, I pinned his body to the bed and watched the life drain out of it."
Lost in cool reflection, Jack looked as if he might be recounting a story about a book he'd read once. Doyle couldn't move.
"I felt calm. Empty. As pitiless as that eagle with a rat clutched in its talons. I sensed the presence of no sacred spirit or a soul leaving the body; no angels watched us from on high. And no remorse. All I felt was the harsh indifference of the jungle. I had the confirmation I was looking for. My experiment was a success.
"With one complication: a witness, a woman who had gone to wash up in the next room. I heard her move as I was about to leave. It was Rina."
Doyle must have looked startled.
"That's right, the same beautiful, ridiculous girl I'd been living with. Terrified by the crime she had seen me do. She was a whore now; Montes had recruited her. She cried and told me how she had fallen into that life in despair when I abandoned her. I should have killed her, too, right then, but her presence seemed so fortuitous, I reasoned it could not be coincidence, it must have a meaning that would eventually reveal itself. I suppose what actually influenced my decision most was a kind of tenderness. So I let her live. Helped her escape the house. Even made plans to take her with me when I left the country, which I intended to do immediately.
"And I was right. My finding her did have meaning. Two days later, twenty men who worked for Diego Montes captured me as I was waiting to board a ship to Belize. Rina was supposed to meet me at the docks; I had left her alone for half an hour to buy a hat and she had betrayed me. She cared nothing for me. But this was her free will at work, you see. Available to us all; no inconsistency.
"They clapped chains on me and threw me into a cage, a pit dug into the clay in the yard of the local prison, its mouth covered with steel plates. Darkness was not exactly the hardship to me that they anticipated. But this time without water, and the temperature during the day reached one hundred and twenty degrees. The guards used it as a latrine. Three days passed before they spoke to me. They wanted a confession; Rina had already identified me as the killer, but they were determined to hear it from my lips.
"When they thought the pit had sufficiently softened me up, they brought me into a room, empty, save for a square block of white marble in its center. Stained red. Arm and leg irons at its base. They secured me kneeling before this stone and laid my hands out across its surface. The guards took turns, stepped up onto the block and walked on my hands. Stomped on them. Some danced. Dropped heavy stones. I could hear the sinews snap, bones cracking, watched one finger as they crushed it beyond recognition, all pulp and matted fiber. This went on for hours. They enjoyed their work; skilled and honest craftsmen. I realized they did not intend to kill me until I had confessed; an odd outburst of fastidiousness.
"But I would not cooperate. The pain somehow remained manageable, and I had grown to fancy this free life of mine; I was in no mood to give it up so easily, so I continued to protest my innocence. Hands are extremely personal parts of our bodies, aren't they? Their abuse made me very, very angry. Finally, when I feigned an unconsciousness from which I couldn't be revived, they slipped the irons off and dragged me from the room.
"I kicked the first one, here, the bridge of the nose. A kill. A second tried to pull his gun; I sent him crashing out a window and followed him out before the others could fire a single shot. His body cushioned my fall. As alarms sounded and shots missed me, I ran to a corner of the yard where they stacked provisions. A stairway of barrels took me to the top of the wall and over.
"The prison was set on a peninsula, ocean on three sides. I made it to the jungle before they cut off the road. They were reluctant to follow me at night; their pursuit fell away the deeper I went. Undergrowth became too thick; I took to the river, upstream with the incoming tide. When dawn broke, I was miles inland; they would never find me. Now the pain began; I gathered medicinal herbs—roots, some bark; using my teeth, primarily—to treat my hands, numb the pain. Infection set in quickly in that dank, humid air. I couldn't chance a return to the city for a doctor; my friends, the En-aguas, the native people upriver, had knowledge of these things. Six days to reach them. By then I was half-dead. Spiking fever. Delirious."
Jack laid his hands out on his knees, fanned the remaining fingers, looked down at them dispassionately.
"Their medicine man cut off the two most damaged fingers.
Saved the others; I have no memory of it. When I woke two days had passed. My hands were covered with salve, bound with a compress of leaves. They asked no questions, I told them nothing; brutality was routine in their view of the outside world. Two months passed before I was strong enough to travel. Three of them paddled me downriver by canoe, disguised as a priest; the birth of Father Devine. They would take me north to Porto Santana, where I would take a tramp steamer to the Indies. But first I had business in Belem.
"With my friends' help, we filled the bottom of a wagon with black powder stolen from the military depot. Then I tracked down Rina in Belem. Working in a brothel. Drugs, looks decaying, her little life already failing towards a sad predictable finish. I took her out of there, tied her to the seat of the wagon, a gag in her mouth. Never said a word to her: What was there to say? There were no words. I looked into her eyes for a long time. She understood perfectly.
"At dark we sent two mules trotting towards the prison with the wagon behind; guards saw Rina on board and took the wagon inside their gates. They didn't see the burning fuse concealed beneath the floorboards and with her screaming no one heard it hiss. But you could hear the explosion for fifty miles."
Sparks paused, swallowed a deep breath. Circles under his eyes, black as paint. Was there regret behind his words? Doyle couldn't hear it, only the throbbing of his own heart.
"I was on board that ship the next morning, carrying papers taken from a man who had died upriver: a Dutch businessman, Jan de Voort. My story: traveling home after an accident ruined my hands. Another white European consumed by the jungle. Shall I go on?"
Doyle nodded: Who knew if Sparks would ever expose this wound again? Hold your tongue, he told himself. Remember how a patient left to ramble so often unwittingly reveals the secret of his ailment. He refilled his glass, hoping Jack would not notice how severely his hands trembled.
"I took my time moving north through the islands: Curacao Antigua. Hispaniola. No destination in mind. Soaking up sun. Rebuilding my hands, thrusting them again and again into hot sand. Drinking a great deal of rum. A new woman in each place, making conquests. Leaving when I tired of them, which never took long; they all want to heal a man in such a state. So predictable and tiresome. I couldn't bear that first bloom of disappointment on their faces when they realized no part of me was theirs.