Where Tigers Are at Home by Jean-Marie Blas de Robles Page B

girl. One day the devil slumbering inside me might well wake up. Especially when lured by such charms …”
    “What is it you want, you nincompoop?”
    “I wanted to see you alone. Without Milton, that is. You know that he gets shit-scared as soon as he feels obliged to leave his office. He’s only come with us so he can reap the glory of my discovery and flatter Mauro’s father by looking after his son personally. If he hears what I’ve got to tell you he’d be quite capable of cancelling everything on the spot.”
    “There’s a problem?”
    “There is. The simple fact is that the guy I’d made an agreement with to go upriver has changed his mind. He won’t hear of hiring out his boat to us anymore. And do you know why? You’ll never guess. They say there’s some crazy guys blocking the river above Cuiabá. Even the police won’t go there—they fire machine guns at anything that moves …”
    “But that’s ridiculous!”
    “Traffic in crocodile skins, it appears. A whole gang of them from Paraguay. They’ve even got a little landing-strip in the forest. And since it’s a pretty lucrative business, they don’t hesitate to use any means to make sure they’re left in peace.”
    “You believe all this, do you?”
    “I don’t know. Everything’s possible out here.”
    “But the police, dammit?”
    “Simple—they’ll get a slice of the cake.”
    “And there’s no way of going around the area? Really, it’s beyond belief.”
    “None at all. I’ve studied the maps with Ayrton, the fisherman who brought me the fossil last year. The arm of the river with the deposit starts twelve miles higher up and it doesn’t connect with anything negotiable. The only way of getting there would be to disembark downstream and walk through the jungle for forty or forty-five miles … It’s out of the question.”
    Elaine was devastated. Knowing Milton, it would be the next plane back to Brazilia. “What are we going to do, then?” she asked, stunned.
    “For the moment nothing. But we keep quiet. Not a word to Milton; nor to Mauro, either. You never know. I’ve made some other contacts and I’ll have a reply this afternoon. OK?”
    “OK,” Elaine said with a disappointed expression.
    “Go and get dressed. We’re meeting on the terrace in ten minutes.”
    LEANING ON HIS elbows at the window of his room, Mauro was drinking in the unfamiliar landscape he was seeing for the first time. The Beira Rio Hotel stood beside the river, on the short strip of old structures bordering the bank at that point. From his lookout post the student could see the Pantanal marshes stretching out forever to the east. Twittering flocks of unfamiliar birds flew across a sky that was cloudless, but of a hazy blue. The silty and perfectly smooth water of the Rio Paraguay looked like a yellowing mirror, tainted in places with rust or suspicious patches of mold. It was difficult to believe that this loop of still water could be part of the great river by which the lumberjacks sent their huge rafts of timber down to Buenos Aires or Montevideo. Floating as if by some miracle were small craft made up of bits and pieces, an old two-decker gunboat and the patrol boat of the river police, all moored to trees or worm-eaten posts driven into the bank. Long aluminum barges turned over on the grass among dugout canoes and ropes threw off a dazzling light.
    Like every geology student, Mauro had taken part in numerous field studies during his course but this was the first time he was part of a real research project, and, what is more, with the cream of the university. Dietlev Walde had become famous two years ago by discovering, together with Professor Leonardos and other German geologists, an unexpected fossil in a Cormubá quarry: a polyp comparable to
Stephanocyphus
, which had already been identified in certain regions of the world, but distinguished from it by important structural differences, notably by the presence of secondary polyps.