by Lyn Hamilton
I tried to talk to Puma about it. He was always very contrite, saying there was something else he’d had to do, and I had a feeling there was something he wasn’t telling me, but that was about it. Gradually, we all took the attitude that with Puma, like the magician he was, it was sometimes you see him, sometimes you don’t.
I was assigned to help Pablo, working beside him to catalogue all the little pottery shards he uncovered, making notes on the depth, the exact placement, and bagging and tagging them all. We started work right at dawn, and worked until the wind and the dust made it impossible to continue. Then we hauled everything back to the lab, and worked well into the evening cataloguing the day’s finds.
Even Lucho was called up for action, made to haul sand and staff the sieve. His complaining and shuffling drove us all crazy, but we needed him to work. What that meant was that the hacienda was left unguarded at least part of the day, before Ines came to make supper.
Tracey’s prediction that there would be no more incidents was regrettably not correct. While Rolanda Guerra might be gone, his family was not, and, as I had feared, they took to hanging around the site, watching us work with a real malevolence in their stance. They plainly blamed us for Rolando's death, even though the police had made it clear to them that Rolando was looting illegally: He’d been caught red-handed after all, albeit almost dead at the time. The Guerra family, however, saw it differently. In their eyes, Rolando had been forced to take desperate measures because of us, measures that had ended his life prematurely.
The situation came to a head one day when I returned to the hacienda with Ines to find an axe through the beautifully carved front door, and a message for us sprayed across the front of the house. What the painter lacked in artistry, he made up for in brevity and clarity. Asesinos!—murderers—the message read. Lucho returned to his post as guard of the hacienda forthwith; Cesar Montero, the mayor, had a police guard posted on the site for a couple of days to deter the culprits, and Carlos, the landlord, tutted and clucked, and then sent a crew over to paint it out.
With all this drama and activity, it took me a while to realize that I hadn’t seen Puma recently. With some irritation, I headed over to the commune to get him. Nothing appeared amiss when I first got there. The place looked pretty much the same, laundry flapping in the breeze, a couple of the commune members working away at the far end of the garden. I checked the kitchen. Pachamama wasn’t there. Then I went to their little hut. There was only one sleeping bag—Puma’s, I thought, but he wasn’t in it. All of Pachamama’s belongings appeared to be gone. Everyone else was out working, so I headed for the main house once again and knocked on Manco Capac’s door. He was a minute or two in opening it, but cordial enough when he saw me. “Come on in,” he said. “Beer?”
“Not right now, thanks,” I replied.
“Mind if I do?” he asked, opening a little refrigerator in his room in anticipation of my reply.
“Of course not,” I said, idly thinking as I watched him reach for the beer that his refrigerator reminded me of the one I had at home, that is, virtually empty. Two thoughts then struck me: one, that this was the first time I’d thought about my home in a rather long time; and two, that there was a significant difference between his refrigerator and mine. While mine tended to yogurt well past its best-before date, various half-empty jars of heaven knows what, a couple of tins of tuna and salmon, and if I was lucky, white wine, his was rather more aristocratic: champagne, Perrier-Jouet if I wasn’t mistaken, judging by the flowers on the bottle—I’ve heard it’s lovely—and a couple of jars of a rather distinctive shape and color that I decided held caviar. There were a couple of other tins too, which, on closer examination I was sure, would prove to contain pâté. Not your average supermarket peppercorn pâté, either. Real foie gras, from France. Manco Capac might have come to live a back-to-basics life in Peru, but his definition of basic, in the food department at least, was definitely upmarket. It was also more than a little expensive.
Maybe, I thought, as he opened his beer, he’s treated himself to these things because he has a cold. Come to think of it, though, didn’t he have the sniffles last time I was here? Maybe he has allergies, or maybe, and now light began to dawn, maybe his expensive tastes also run to cocaine.
When I pulled back from this edifying stream of consciousness—it’s amazing what the little light in a refrigerator can do for your thought processes—I found him looking at me closely.
“Would you like something else?” he said. “I have only champagne and, of course, caviar.” He laughed. “Birthday present from my family, actually, but it sounds impressive, doesn’t it? Don’t tell the others, or I’ll have to share.”
Good comeback, I thought, and very convincing, but it should be. He’s an actor. Apparently he was a good enough actor to fool the other members of the commune into thinking he shared their taste for the simple life.
“I came to see Puma and Pachamama,” I said, changing the subject. “But I can’t find either of them.”
“Gone,” he replied.
“What do you mean, gone?” I asked.
“Just gone. Disappeared. Poof.” He paused. “He’s a magician. Poof. Get it?”
I got it. “Very amusing. Would you have any idea of when exactly they went poof?” I said through clenched teeth. I could hear a certain tone creeping into my voice, one a certain shopkeeper normally reserved for suppliers who didn’t deliver on time, and parents who allowed their children to bring drippy ice-cream cones into her store.
“Last night. Maybe the night before, actually. I can’t remember exactly.”
My, what a short memory! “Did you see them go?”
“Nope.”
“And did you report their disappearance?”
“Nope. Why would I? People come and go. There is nothing to stop them. Our philosophy here is go with the flow.”
That expression again. “Two kids disappear in the night,” I hissed, “and all you can say is go with the flow?”
“Well, it beats asking people to commit suicide together so they can beam up to some spaceship or something, doesn’t it?” he snapped, and I thought that for a second I had seen the real person under go-with-the-flow Manco Capac, one who despised what he was doing and the people he was with. “People are free to do what they wish here,” he said, his voice returning to normal. “Those two kids, as you call them, are young adults. People stay here as long as they need to, and if they wish to, they move on.”
“But Puma’s sleeping bag is still here.”
“So maybe he’s planning to come back!” The man shrugged.
“Do you know their real names?”
“No. Choosing a new name here is part of casting off our former lives, our former hang-ups, to express the unspoiled part of ourselves. We choose new names so we can go forward.”
There didn’t seem much point in continuing a conversation that had gone out of style by the seventies, so I left him to his caviar and champagne, and quite possibly, his drug habit.
I started back to the site, but didn’t get very far. It really bothered me, thinking about the kids. I knew they weren’t really kids, but they were so naïve, and not terribly bright. I couldn’t believe they’d just leave, Puma in particular, and not send me a message. He knew where I was, at the hacienda, and I’d have thought he’d have come there if they were in trouble. Maybe Manco Capac, whatever his name was, was right. They’d just decided to move on. They didn’t owe me an explanation, really. I wasn’t their mother, although occasionally I felt as if I were. I felt somehow bereft, though. It seemed they’d become, when I wasn’t looking, an important part of the fabric of my new life.
The fact was I didn’t like this Manco Capac, and I didn’t trust him at all. It wasn’t just that he used an alias. The only difference between him and me in that regard was that he’d gotten to choose his. Mine, I’d been assigned. But anyone who picked the name of the first Inca, son of the Sun God, had a personality disorder of some
sort, I felt certain. There was something patently false about the man. Communes weren’t really in style anymore, I didn’t think, and even if they were, you didn’t come to live on a commune to eat caviar. It didn’t make sense. The more I thought about him, the more worried about the kids I got, and the worse I felt about not listening to Puma, probing more. Hiding behind my own alias, I hadn’t even asked him his real name.
Guilt is a powerful motivator. I turned the truck around and headed back into town to make enquiries. Campina Vieja was far enough off the beaten track as far as tourism went that people like Puma and Pachamama should have been easy to spot, and I hoped someone would recall having seen them.
I checked a couple of cafes I’d seen them in, and then the bus station, where the ticket agent said he had no recollection of them, but that I could check back in a day or two with the other ticket agent who’d been on duty the previous three days. The other alternative, he said, was to wait for the buses to go through and
to ask the individual drivers and attendants. There was no time for that: It could take days before I’d checked them all. An ice cream vendor outside the bus station
said he’d seen someone who resembled my description of Pachamama, but that she had been alone.
I determined that I’d have a private chat with Steve to see what he could suggest. I didn’t want to go to the police personally, not just because I wasn’t sure how much scrutiny my passport would stand up to, but also because not knowing what the kids’ real names were would make it just a little difficult to fill in a missing persons report. I thought Steve might want to talk to the authorities, though. He’d always shown a more than casual interest in how the two kids were getting along.
When I got back to the site, however, there was no opportunity for that discussion to take place. As I pulled up, I could see the whole bunch of them waving at me from the top of the huaca, and soon, at their instructions, I was heading up there to join them. They were almost dancing with excitement, and with good reason. They had found very promising signs of a tomb, an area about ten feet long and eight feet wide lined with adobe bricks, and what looked to be the outline of timbers, the vigas that would roof the chamber. The center was still filled with earth, but it was clearly a different color and texture.
“This is the lining of a burial chamber, I’m almost certain,” Steve explained for my benefit. “With this kind of structure, a large brick-lined chamber, it’ll be a tomb for someone important. The Moche didn’t build these kinds of chambers for just your average guy. I expect the roof timbers will have collapsed under the weight of all this earth, but I think it may just be an untouched tomb, although we can’t be absolutely sure until we get there.”
“There’ll be flying femurs tomorrow!” Ralph crowed. “Please, please, let there be untouched ceramics for me.”
Only Hilda was quiet, perhaps because of the effort it took her to climb the huaca, or because she felt it was almost too much to hope for.
By now it was getting late, and Hilda called a halt to the day’s work. I had to run my usual taxi service into town for the workers and students, although I could do it in one trip now with all the defections, while Steve took the others home in our second truck, thereby eliminating another opportunity for me to speak to him.
Dinner was a fairly raucous affair, and for a change Hilda stayed for most of it, helping to plan the next day’s work. “What makes everyone so sure they’ve found an important person’s tomb?” I asked Ralph.
“Because of where it is, and the type of tomb it is,” he replied. “First of all it’s right in the huaca. That says a lot. Also, the Moche appear to have had a range of burial procedures and rituals which depended, by and large, on the individual’s status, in much the same way we do. Some of us are buried in simple graves with wooden markers, others with elaborate headstones and the finest coffins,” he said.
“For the Moche, the commonest form—the grave with a simple wooden cross, if you will—would be a pit burial, just a shallow grave really, with a few burial goods interred with them. The middle class, if we can use that term, would have had more elaborate burials. A shaft would have been constructed down several feet, then a chamber hollowed out, sometimes to one side, like the foot on a boot. The bodies were lowered down the shaft, either horizontally or vertically depending on the size of the shaft, and placed in the chamber. We know that much from Moche ceramics, my specialty.” Ralph smiled. “Burial scenes are depicted on several that we know of, and they show the bodies being lowered into the chambers by two ritual or perhaps mythological beings, Iguana, someone with the face of a lizard, and Wrinkle Face, a being with a very wrinkled face, as the names imply.
“For the higher status individuals, and this is what we’re hoping for here, large chambers were constructed, large enough to hold the individual, lots of grave goods, some very elaborate, and other sacrificed animals, like llamas or dogs, and individuals, perhaps their retainers in life. Sometimes there are even guardians, bodies placed in niches above the principal body. So these graves are much larger, they have been known to have adobe walls, and they are more likely to have timber roofs. The presence of these three things, a large chamber, the adobe walls, and the roofing, is what makes us pretty excited about what tomorrow may bring.”
“So what will this look like, if we get in?” I asked.
Steve jumped into the conversation with enthusiasm. “Moche dead are normally buried flat on their backs, arms at their sides, with the head usually facing more or less south and away from the shaft. They were wrapped in cloth, then enclosed in some kind of cane sleeve or tube, although there wouldn’t be much of the cloth or the cane left, probably. The head normally rests on a plate of some kind, its material related to the status of the individual, a gourd for the lowliest, a gold disc for the most powerful. The feet are often in sandals, silver ones for the big guys, much more humble ones for those of lower status. If we’re really lucky and it’s a warrior priest or something, he’ll be wearing the full regalia—ear spools, the headdress, back flaps, necklaces, everything. Actually, I don’t even want to think about this, in case it jinxes us.” Steve laughed.
“How do we think the huaqueros missed this one?” I asked. “If indeed they did.”
“If is a good way to put it,” Steve replied. “Remember what I told you about Moche pyramids. They were built platform on top of platform. There could be individuals buried in the different levels. It’s possible that huaqueros found a tomb higher up in the structure and figured that was it.”
It was at this point that Hilda decided to retire for the night, this time without the scotch bottle, a development I considered real progress, and perhaps an indication of just how important she felt the next day’s work would be. The rest of us sat around for a while waiting to see Ines off. Tomas was a little later than usual, and I figured once Ines had left, everyone would start to head upstairs to get some rest for the big day ahead and I might have an opportunity to have a quiet word with Steve about Puma and Pachamama.
When Tomas came to pick up Ines, however, he brought with him bad news. Gonzalo Fernandez, the night guard at the site, had walked off the job. Just after dark, Fernandez had seen, according to Tomas, an apparition of an owl, a creature associated with death in this part of the world. This was not just any owl, apparently. This one was several feet tall. Furthermore, the Guerra family had paid him a visit after we’d left to go back to the hacienda and told Fernandez he’d be dead by morning if he stayed.
Steve slumped in his chair and sighed. “Well, I guess there’s nothing for it. I’m sleeping at the site tonight. Tracey, Rebecca, where’d you put the gun?”
“Caja Ocho, in the lab,” Tracey replied. But there was no gun in Caja Ocho.
“That was the number, wasn’t it?” she asked me.
“Definitely,” I replied. We searched through several boxes. No gun.
“It must be Lucho,” Tracey said. “Where is he?”
But Lucho swore u
p and down he didn’t have it. He even invited us into his room to see, but the place was such a mess, it would have taken us hours to search it.
“Never mind,” Steve said. “It was only a precaution. Just thought I might bag me a seven-foot owl. Something for the record books.” He grinned as he headed out the door, loaded down with a couple of blankets and a pillow.
“I’ll take the second truck, Rebecca,” he called back. “Maybe you wouldn’t mind bringing me back here for breakfast and a shower after you drop off the students, so I can leave this truck at the site. Don’t use all the hot water in the morning, you guys,” he called from the cab of the truck as he pulled away.
But in the morning, Steve was gone.
14
Carlos Montero stood in his office, beads of sweat breaking out on his brow and upper lip. “Missing!” he exclaimed. “How can that be? I haven’t heard from him, no.” He looked nervous to me, the way he wiped his brow a couple of times with a large pink handkerchief. It was warm in there, but perhaps not that warm.
“I’ll make a couple of calls, why don’t I?” he said.
You do that, I thought. I was rapidly reaching the conclusion that there was something terribly wrong in Campina Vieja, and that a single sinister thread had been snaking its way through all the events of the past several weeks, from the death of Lizard in my shop, Edmund Edwards in his, to the disappearance now of Steve, Puma, and Pachamama. And Montero, I was convinced, was part of it.
When I had first arrived at the site that morning, I’d thought Steve, while I could not find him, must be somewhere nearby. The bedding he’d taken with him was still there, the pillow still bearing the imprint of his head in a rather endearing sort of way, the blankets tossed aside as if he’d arisen in a hurry. There was certainly no sign of violence or an accident of any kind.
