15th March, 1933 — Bolivia. Somewhere short of the Fifth Pillar, written by firelight on a knee that won’t stay still.
Started the day walking up and down a mule train introducing myself to nurses, which is about as good a way to start a day as I know. Ended it looking at something black and enormous moving through the trees toward us, so I suppose that’s a fair summary of how quickly things turn out here.
Dr. Arsini was leading us down to the aid camp — good man, nervous sort, the kind who apologises for things that aren’t his fault. I’d got as far as reaching out to shake his hand, more to steady him than anything, when a rifle took him square between the eyes. Didn’t hear the shot until after, if that makes any sense. One moment he was mid-sentence. The next he wasn’t anyone at all.
I’d like to say I did something clever. I mostly stood there covered in a good man’s blood while Shen hauled me down behind a log by the collar. Credit where it’s due — the rest of them had their wits about them a great deal faster than I did. Dobson had a tree. JP, God love him, went flat in the open like the ground had personally insulted him and somehow came out of it. And Matilda — new to me as of about four hours prior — put a bullet through the one dressed as a general before anyone else had worked out he was worth shooting first.
Five of them, all told. I got up and hit the general once — cleanest punch I’ve thrown all year — and turned round to find four shotguns pointed at my chest, which is not a position I recommend. Tried my Spanish. It has never once worked and it did not work then either, except that one of them managed to blow his own gun up in his own face, which I am prepared to take partial credit for on the grounds that intimidation doesn’t have to be intentional to count. Dobson and JP did the actual winning. Matilda and Shen finished the last one between them — she put him down, Shen made certain of it. Nobody on our side so much as scratched. I still don’t entirely understand how.
Here’s the part I haven’t stopped thinking about. Under the mask — and it was a mask, human skin stretched over something else entirely — the general wasn’t a man at all. Scaled. Old in a way that has nothing to do with years. Shen called them the serpent people, said they’ve been asleep under the ground since before anyone kept records of anything. I’ve been in some strange corners of the world. I have never had my idea of “person” tested quite that hard, quite that fast.
Dobson went through Arsini’s things — turned up a letter for a Dr. Gomez at the camp, and papers with the Foundation’s own letterhead on them, which is its own small unpleasantness to sit with. I went through the general’s pockets and found a map that meant nothing to me and not much more to Shen. Held onto it anyway. Seemed important. Turned out to matter a great deal, as it happens — more on that shortly.
We hadn’t gone far before Matilda was up a tree rigging JP’s aerial and got into an argument with a monkey, who settled it by dropping a pistol on JP’s head that is not from anywhere I’ve ever heard of. JP wouldn’t stop turning it over in his hands like it might explain itself. Dobson tried firing it once and went quiet in a way I haven’t seen from him before. That went straight into a coat pocket and nobody’s mentioned it since, which I suspect means everyone’s thinking about it constantly.
Got New York on the wireless not long after. I’ll admit I let JP handle the talking — tried the password “Ocelot,” which turned out to be a password to precisely nothing, and had to argue his way past a very suspicious man in an office several thousand miles away before anyone believed we were who we said we were. Once they did, the news wasn’t cheerful: a temple exposed by shellfire, something loose that needs handling, and a mummy of all things that Caduceus wants brought home to New York. Twelve hours if we need resupply. Filed all that away under Problems For Later and pointed the mules at camp.
Camp itself was a genuinely lovely reception after the morning we’d had — Dr. Gomez and his people practically in tears with relief. Dobson went straight to auditing the books, which I gather is simply how the man relaxes. JP found their wireless dead and got his hands filthy fixing it — turned out someone had gone to the trouble of sabotaging it, a detail I keep turning over and don’t much like the shape of. Shen sat with our prisoner. I did the rounds, thanked everyone I could find twice, and met a fellow named Juan, who runs things for the local people and speaks a great deal better English than my Spanish deserves.
Showed him the map. Wish I hadn’t, almost — his face went somewhere I haven’t seen a face go before. Called it the language of the sleeper and burned it in front of me without so much as asking. Shen remembers the shape of it, thank God, because that’s all we’ve got left now. Juan told us tonight was some kind of ceremony — the Festival of the Sleeper, he called it — out at a place called the Fifth Pillar, and that we were welcome to come along and see for ourselves. Seemed like exactly the sort of door I ought to walk through.
Small hiccup back at the medical tent — our “general” wasn’t nearly as unconscious as advertised and made a run for it the second the doctors went near him with a needle. Got past Shen, past Dobson’s revolver, and very nearly past me before I ran him down and put him back to sleep the old-fashioned way. Third time today I’ve hit that man. I’m starting to feel almost affectionate about it.
Evening march out to the Pillar took us past what used to be a proper battle — Bolivians and Paraguayans both, and something had gone through the lot of them that no rifle made. Tracks the size of dinner plates, if you could call them tracks. Fifteen feet at the shoulder, near enough, judging by the stride. JP picked up a flamethrower off one of the bodies without a word and has been carrying it like an old friend ever since. Can’t say I blame him.
We’re at the Pillar now. Or what’s left of it — it was already broken when we arrived, split clean down the middle, and Juan’s face when he saw it told me everything I needed to know about how badly that isn’t supposed to happen. There’s something coming through the treeline. Black. Big. Moving like it’s got all the time in the world, which is somehow worse than if it were in a hurry.
That’s as far as I’ve got. I’ll finish this properly if there turns out to be a later.
Undated — En route. Hotel stationery, two different inks.
Rex’s notes on Bolivia — scrawled down before he forgets, then added to later.
The war bit
Chap at the aerodrome in Santiago — ex-RFC, flying for one side or the other, wouldn’t say which — reckons Bolivia and Paraguay have been going at it for three years now over a stretch of scrubland nobody wants to actually live in. Everyone thought there was oil under it. Sounds like there might not be, which if true is a hell of a thing to have fought a war over.
He said Bolivia should be winning on paper — more men, more money, German officers running things — but keeps losing anyway because the Paraguayans know the ground and the Bolivians don’t. Something about the highland boys not coping with the heat down in the Chaco. Makes sense — you take a man off a mountain and drop him in an oven, he’s not going to be at his best.
The place itself
La Paz is apparently absurdly high up — the barman at the hotel in Santiago laughed and told me to “bring a second pair of lungs.” Ha. We’ll see who’s laughing when I beat him up a hill.
The Chaco itself sounds miserable — thorns, no water, nothing to shoot at except each other. A Red Cross fellow passing through said more men have died of thirst and typhoid than bullets, which is a rotten way to go for soldiers who signed up for something more heroic-sounding.
Practical stuff (Dobson would want this bit)
- Papers. Everyone says papers. Twice.
- Fuel’s apparently worth more than money out there — black market runs the whole show
- Checkpoints staffed by very young, very tired men with rifles — advice was “smile a lot and don’t make sudden movements,” which, frankly, is my approach to most situations anyway
- Foreign advisors everywhere — German, some others — nobody seems to ask too many questions about who’s advising whom
The bit that’s actually bothering me
Nobody I’ve spoken to has heard anything from the Caduceus camp radio in about a week. Chap at the aerodrome just shrugged and said “wireless goes quiet all the time out there, atmospherics.” Didn’t sound like he believed it either.
Should be simple. Drop, check, extract. Vivienne would tell me not to say things like that out loud.
One more thing — LANGUAGE
Spanish is the one to have, apparently. Everyone official speaks it — army, government, hotels. I have been assured my Spanish is “coming along,” which I believe is what people say when they mean the opposite.
Tried out a phrase on the barman last night — told him confidently that I was “embarazado” about something-or-other, meant to say embarrassed. Turns out that means pregnant. He did not correct me until I’d said it three times. JP nearly fell off his stool laughing, which is rich coming from a man who still can’t order a beer in English without sounding personally offended by the concept.
Apparently up on the Altiplano a lot of the locals speak Quechua or Aymara first and Spanish second, if at all — which explains why half my “confident” Spanish gets me nothing but a patient, blank look. Fair enough. I’d probably look the same if some enormous foreigner marched up and announced he was expecting.
Down in the Chaco itself, if we cross paths with anyone from the other side, it’ll be Guaraní. And somewhere in all this there’s apparently Germans wandering about advising people, so if I hear officers barking something that sounds like a man clearing his throat aggressively, that’ll be why.
Note to self: let Shen Liang do the talking wherever possible. Or Dobson. Anyone, really.
18th January, 1933 — New York City. Hotel Commodore, room 614. 1:20am.
Dinner with Whitmore ran five hours. Anyone who keeps me at a dinner table that long is either the most interesting person I’ve met this decade or ordered the wine very well. In Whitmore’s case, both.
The Caduceus Foundation I knew by reputation — medical aid, field hospitals, the kind of outfit that turns up in places governments have already left. Good work, serious people. Whitmore said they had a mission going into Bolivia and that my particular set of skills — his words — made me a useful addition. He was diplomatic about which skills specifically. I gathered it was less the acting.
I asked how they’d heard of me. He smiled in the way that people smile when the answer is longer than the question warrants and said simply: your reputation precedes you. Which could mean any number of things, most of them true and some of them embarrassing.
Bolivia. I’ve never been. The Altiplano, the river country east of the cordillera — genuinely interesting terrain. And medical aid work is honest work, which is more than I can say for the last three Republic Pictures scripts.
I’ve agreed to a preliminary engagement. Writing it here because I always write things down, and because the things I don’t write are always the things I wish I had.
The crème brûlée was exceptional.
7th September, 1932 — Culver City, California. Republic Pictures lot, commissary.
Extraordinary day. Was doing a fight scene with a bloke called Henderson — who has never been within a thousand miles of a genuine wetland — when the director called cut and said I needed to pull my punches more convincingly. I said: I ampulling them. He said: Yes, but you need to pull them so the camera can tell you’re pulling them. I said: Mate, you’re asking me to fake-fake a punch. He said, without missing a beat: Welcome to Hollywood.
Had lunch with Miss Fontaine and her friend Gloria, who is from somewhere in Ohio and has a laugh that could strip paint off a battleship, which I mean entirely as a compliment. Gloria asked me if Australians were really as strange as they appeared in the serials. I said the serials had it about right except that real Australians complain more and tip less. She seemed to find this satisfactory.
The picture business is peculiar in ways I am still cataloguing. Everyone here is performing something — not just on set, but in the commissary, at lunch, walking to their car. The trick seems to be to perform exactly who you already are, which gives you about a three-week head start on everyone who has to invent themselves from scratch. My head start is running out. I may need to actually learn to act.
Or I could do another Pacific crossing. The boat’s in Newport and I haven’t sailed anything bigger than a dinghy in eight months. That’s probably long enough.
22nd March, 1927 — South Pacific. 340nm east-northeast of the Solomons.
Day eleven. Hadley’s got the squits something terrible and has been mostly useless since Noumea, which leaves me and young Tommy on watch rotation, which leaves us both operating on about four hours’ sleep and the kind of temper that gets things said that can’t be unsaid. I told Tommy this morning that if he left the jib cleat uncleated one more time I would personally feed him to whatever was following us off the port quarter. He asked what was following us.
That is the question, isn’t it.
It’s not a shark. Wrong movement — too deliberate, too straight. Been there two days. I’ve been at sea long enough to know when something is tracking you versus when something is just going the same direction. This thing is tracking us. It’s about the size of a decent dinghy, which rules out most things I know the name of.
Wrote it up in the log as “unidentified marine animal, probable oarfish or similar pelagic species, minimum 5m.” The log is a legal document and I am not going to write in a legal document that something I cannot identify has been following my boat for two days at a consistent distance of thirty yards and that it changed course to match us when I jibed this afternoon.
The sea is enormous and mostly empty and the bits that aren’t empty are full of things we haven’t named yet. That used to seem romantic to me. Tonight it seems mostly just true.