The Vivero Letter

by Desmond Bagley

  'But it got to the right man -- Gerryson,' I said. 'How did be get hold of it?'

  'I wondered about that myself,' said Harris. 'And I gave Gerryson a thorough going-over. His reputation isn't too good; the New York cops are pretty sure he's a high-class fence. One curious thing turned up -- he's friendly with Jack Gatt. He stays at Jack's house when he's in Detroit.'

  He leaned forward. 'Now, this is a purely hypothetical reconstruction. The burglar who did the Halstead residence found himself with the Vivero letter; it was no good to him because, even if he realized it had some value, he wouldn't know how much and he wouldn't know where to sell it safely. Well, there are ways and means. My guess is, it was passed along channels until it came to someone who recognized its value -- and who would that be but Jack Gatt, the cultured hood who owns a little museum of his own. Now, I don't know the contents of this letter, but my guess is that if Gatt was excited by it then he'd check back to the source -- to Halstead.'

  'And what about Gerryson?'

  'Maybe that was Gatt's way of getting a second opinion, said Harris blandly. 'Mr. Fallon and I have been talking about it, and we've come to some conclusions.'

  Fallon looked sheepish. 'Er . . . it's like this ... I ... er ... I paid $2,000 to Gerryson for the letter.'

  'So what,' I said.

  He avoided my eyes. 'I knew the price was too low. It's worth more than that.'

  I grinned. 'You thought it might be ... is the word hot, Mr. Harris?'

  Harris winked. 'That's the word.'

  'No,' said Fallon vehemently. 'I thought Gerryson was making a mistake. If a dealer makes a mistake it's his business' -- they take us collectors to the cleaners often enough. I thought I was taking Gerryson, for a change.'

  'But you've changed your mind since.'

  Harris said, 'I think Mr. Fallon got took. I think Gatt fed the letter to him through Gerryson just to see what he'd do about it. After all, he couldn't rely on Halstead who is only another young and inexperienced archeologist. But if he gave the letter to Mr. Fallon, who is the top man in the business, and then Mr. Fallon started to ran around in the same circles as Halstead, Gatt would be certain he was on the right track.'

  'Plausible, but bloody improbable,' I said.

  'Is it? Jack Gatt is no dumb bunny,' said Harris earnestly. 'He's highly intelligent and educated enough to see a profit in things that would be right over any other hood's head. If there's any dough in this Gatt will be after it.'

  I thought of the golden gutters of the roofs of Uaxuanoc and of the king's palace plated with gold within and without. I thought of the mountain of gold and the burning sign of gold which Vivero had described. Harris could very well be right.

  He said, 'I think that Halstead and Mr. Fallon have been trailed wherever they've been. I think that Niscemi was one of the trailers, which is why he was on the spot when your golden tray was discovered. He tipped off Gatt, and Gatt flew across and made your brother an offer for it. I've investigated his movements at the time and it all checks out. When your brother turned him down flat he told Niscemi to get the tray the hard way. That wasn't something that would worry Jack Gatt, but he made damned sure that he wasn't even in the country when the job was pulled. And then Niscemi -- and whoever else was with him -- bungled it, and he got himself killed.'

  And Gatt was the man whom that simple Devonshire farmer, Hannaford, had liked so much. I said, 'How can we get at the bastard?'

  This is all theoretical,' said Harris. 'It wouldn't stand up in a law court.'

  'Maybe it's too theoretical,' I said. 'Maybe it didn't happen like that at all.'

  Harris smiled thinly, and said, 'Gatt has this house under observation right now -- and Halstead's house in the city. I can show you the guys who are watching you.'

  I came to attention at that and looked at Fallon, who nodded. 'Harris is having the observers watched.'

  That put a different complexion on things. I said, 'Are they Gatt's men?'

  Harris frowned. 'Now that's hard to say. Let's say that someone in Mexico is doing Gatt a favour -- the Organization works like that; they swap favours all the time.'

  Fallon said, 'I'll have to do something about Gatt.'

  Harris asked curiously, 'Such as?'

  'I swing a lot of weight,' said Fallon. 'A hundred million dollars' worth.' He smiled confidently. 'I'll just lean on him.'

  Harris looked alarmed. 'I wouldn't do that -- not to Jack Gatt. You might be able to work that way with an ordinary business competitor, but not with him. He doesn't like pressure.'

  'What could he do about it?' asked Fallon contemptuously.

  'He could put you out of business -- permanently. A bullet carries more weight than a hundred million dollars, Mr. Fallon.'

  Fallon suddenly looked shrunken. For the first time he had run into a situation in which his wealth didn't count, where he couldn't buy what he wanted. I had given him a slight dose of the same medicine but that was nothing to the shock handed him by Harris. Fallon wasn't a bad old stick but he'd had money for so long that he tended to handle it with a casual ruthlessness -- a club to get what he wanted. And now he had come up against a man even more ruthless who didn't give a damn for Fallen's only weapon. It seemed to take the pith out of him.

  I felt sorry for him and, more out of pity man anything else, I made conversation with Harris in order to give him time to pull himself together. 'I think it's time you were told what's at stake here,' I said. 'Then you might be able to guess what Gatt will do about it. But it's a long story.'

  'I don't know that I want to know,' said Harris wryly. 'If it's big enough to get Jack Gatt out of Detroit it must be dynamite.'

  'Is he out of Detroit?'

  'He's not only out of Detroit -- he's in Mexico City.' Harris spread his hands. 'He says he's here for the Olympic Games -- what else?' he said cynically.

  Five

  As I dressed next morning I reflected on the strange turns a man's life can take. Four weeks previously I had been a London accountant -- one of the bowler hat brigade -- and now I was in exotic Mexico and preparing to take a jump into even more exotic territory. From what I could gather from Fallon the mysteriously named Quintana Roo was something of a hell hole. And why was I going to Quintana Roo? To hunt for a lost city, for God's sake! If, four weeks before, anyone had offered that as a serious prediction I would have considered him a candidate for the booby-hatch.

  I knotted my tie and looked consideringly at the man facing me in the mirror: Jemmy Wheale, New Elizabethan, adventurer at large -- have gun, will travel. The thought made me smile, and the man in the mirror smiled back at me derisively. I didn't have a gun and I doubted whether I could use one effectively, anyway. I suppose a James Bond type would have unpacked his portable helicopter and taken off after Jack Gatt long ago, bringing back his scalp and a couple of his choicest blondes. Hell, I didn't even look like Sean Connery.

  So what was I supposed to do about Jack Gatt? From what Pat Harris had said Gatt was in an unassailable position from the legal point even if he had given the word to Niscemi. There wasn't a single charge to be brought against him that would stick. And for me to tackle Gatt on his own terms would be unthinkably stupid -- the nearest analogy I could think of was Monaco declaring war on Russia and the United States.

  What the devil was I doing in Mexico, anyway? I looked back on the uncharacteristic actions of my recent past and decided that the barbed words of that silly little bitch, Sheila, had probably set me off. Many men have been murdered in the past, but their brothers haven't run around the world thirsting for vengeance. Sheila's casual words had stabbed me in the ego and everything I had done since then had been to prove to myself that what she had said wasn't true. Which only went to show I was immature and probably a bit soft in the head.

  Yet I had taken those actions and now I was stuck wife the consequences. If I quit now and went back to England, then I suppose I'd regret it for the rest of my life. There would always be the nagging suspicion tha
t I had run out on life and somehow betrayed myself, and that was something I knew I couldn't live with. I wondered how many other men did stupidly dangerous things because of a suspected assault on their self-respect.

  For a short period I had talked big. I had browbeaten a millionaire into doing what I wanted him to do, but that was only because I had a supreme bargaining counter -- the Vivero mirror. Now Fallon had the mirror and its secret and I was thrown back on my own resources. I didn't think he'd break his promises, but there wasn't a thing I could do if he reneged.

  The grey little man was still around. He was dressed in some pretty gaudy and ill-fitting clothes and he wore his disguise with panache, but he wished to God he wore his conservative suit and his bowler hat and carried his rolled umbrella instead of this silly lance. I pulled a sour face at the man in the mirror; Jemmy Wheale -- sheep in wolf's clothing.

  My mood was uncertain and ambivalent as I left the room.

  I found Pat Harris downstairs wearing a stethoscope and carrying a little black box from which protruded a shiny telescopic antenna. He waggled his hand at me frantically and put his finger to his lips, elaborately miming that I should be quiet. He circled the room like a dog in a strange place, crisscrossing back and forwards, and gradually narrowed his attention to the big refectory table of massive Spanish oak.

  Suddenly he got down on to his hands and knees and disappeared beneath the table, completing his resemblance to a dog. All I could see were the seat of his pants and the soles of his shoes; his pants were all right, but his shoes needed re-pairing. After a while he backed out, gave me a grin, and put his finger to his lips again. He beckoned, indicating that I should join him, so I squatted down, feeling a bit silly. He flicked a switch and a narrow beam of light shot from the little torch he held. It roamed about the underside of the table and then held steady. He pointed, and I saw a small grey metal box half hidden behind a crossbeam.

  He jerked his thumb and we climbed out from under the table and he led me at a quick walk out of the room, down the passage, and into Fallon's study which was empty. 'We've been bugged,' he said.

  I gaped at him. 'You mean, that thing is . ..'

  '. . . a radio transmitter.' He took the stethoscope from Ms ears with the air of a doctor about to impart bad news. 'This gadget is a bug finder. I sweep the frequencies and if there's a transmitter working close by this thing howls at me through the earphones. Then, to find it, all I have to do is watch the meter.'

  I said nervously, 'Hadn't you better shirt up about it?' I looked about the study. 'This place ...'

  'It's clean,' he said abruptly. 'I've checked it out.'

  'Good God!' I said. 'What made you think there even might be anything like that?'

  He grinned. 'A nasty suspicious mind and a belief in human nature. I just thought what I'd do if I were Jack Gatt and wanted to know what goes on in this house. Besides, it's standard procedure in my business.' He rubbed his chin. 'Was anything said in that room -- anything important?'

  I said cautiously, 'Do you know anything about what we're trying to do?'

  'It's all right -- Fallon filled me in on everything. We stayed up pretty late last night.' His eyes lit up. 'What a hell of a story -- if true!'

  I cast my mind back. 'We were all standing around that table talking about the trays. It was then I broke the news that they were really mirrors.'

  That's not too good,' said Harris.

  'But then we went into the projection room,' I said. 'And I demonstrated what would happen when you bounced a light off me mirrors. Everything else was said in there.'

  'Show me this projection room,' said Harris. So I showed him, and he donned his stethoscope and spent a few minutes twiddling the knobs on his gadget. At last he undipped the earphones. 'Nothing here; so there's a good chance that Gatt knows only that these things are mirrors but can't know the particular significance.'

  We went back into the study and found both Fallon and Halstead. Fallon was unsealing a large envelope, but stopped dead when he heard what Harris had to say. The conniving bastard!' he said in some wonder. 'Rip out me goddamn thing.'

  'Hell, no!' objected Harris. 'I want that transmitter left where it is. It will be useful.' He looked at us with a slow smile. 'Do any of you gentlemen fancy yourselves as radio actors? I think we can feed Jack Gatt quite a line. All you Save to remember is to say nothing important in that room.'

  Fallon laughed. 'You're quite a conniver yourself, Harris.'

  'I'm a professional,' said Harris easily. 'I don't think we'll make it a live show; there'd be too much chance of a slip-up. This calls for a nicely edited tape which we can feed into that microphone.' He paused. 'I'll keep an eye on that room. Someone will have to change the batteries; they wont last for ever.'

  'But where is it transmitting to?' asked Halstead.

  'Probably the car that's parked up the road a piece. Those two guys have been staked out there for a couple of days now. My guess is that they have a receiver linked to a tape-recorder. I won't bother them until they've swallowed the story we're going to concoct, and maybe not even then. It's one thing knowing something, but it's even better when the opposition doesn't know that you know it. My advice is to come the innocent bit. You're not supposed to know that Jack Gatt even exists.'

  Fallon was right about Harris; he was the most deceitful man I've ever met, and an accountant is no stranger to wool-pulling. When I came to know him better I'd trust him with my life, but I wouldn't trust him not to know more about me than I did myself. His business was information and he gathered it assiduously, on the job and off it. He had a mind like a well-organized computer memory but, unlike a good computer, he tended to play tricks with what he knew.

  Fallon ripped open the envelope. 'Let's get down to business. These are the X-ray prints -- life size.' He sorted them out and gave us each two prints, one of each mirror.

  They were very good, startling in clarity of details that had only been hinted at in the screened reflections. I said, 'Mrs. Halstead was right; these are words around the circumference.' I looked closer. 'I can't read Spanish.'

  Fallon took a reading glass and mumbled a bit to himself. 'As near as I can make out it goes something like this. On your mirror it says: "The path to true glory leads through the portals of death." And on my mirror: "Life everlasting lies beyond the grave."'

  'Morbid!' commented Harris.

  'Not very precise instructions,' said Halstead ironically.

  'It may mean something,' said Fallon doubtfully. 'But one thing is certain; this is definitely the coast of Quintana Roo.' He moved the magnifying glass over the print. 'And, by God, cities are indicated. See those square castle-like things?'

  I sensed the air of rising excitement. Those two at the top must be Coba and Tulum,' said Halstead tensely. 'With Chichen Itza to the west.'

  'And there's Ichpatuun on Chetumal Bay. And what's that south of Tulum? Would that be Chunyaxche?' Fallon lifted his head and stared into the middle distance. 'A city was discovered there not long ago. There's a theory it was the centre of the seaboard trade on the coast.'

  Halstead's hand stabbed down. There's another city indicated just inland of it -- and another here.' His voice cracked. 'And here's another. If this map is accurate well be discovering lost cities by the bushel.'

  Take it easy,' said Fallon and laid the print aside. 'Let's have a look at Uaxuanoc.' He took the other print and stared at it. 'If this corresponds to the small circle on the large-scale map then we ought to be able to pinpoint the position.'

  I looked at my copy. Hills were indicated but there was no scale to tell how high they were. Scattered over the hills were crude representations of buildings. I remembered that Vivero had said in his letter that the city was built on a ridge lying east and west.

  Halstead said, 'The layout looks like a mixture of Chichen Itza and Coba -- but it's bigger than either. A lot bigger.'

  There's the cenote,' said Fallon. 'So this place would be the temple of Yum Chac --
if Vivero is to be believed. I wonder which is the king's palace?' He turned and grasped a large cardboard tube from which he took a map. 'I've spent a lot of time on this map,' he said. 'A lifetime.'

  He unrolled it and spread it on the desk, weighing down the corners with books. 'Everything the Mayas ever built is marked here. Do you notice anything odd about it, Wheale?'

  I contemplated the map and said at last, 'It looks crowded in the south.'

  That's the Peten -- but that was the Old Empire which collapsed in the eleventh century. The Itzas moved in later -- new blood which gave the Mayas a shot in the arm like a transfusion. They reoccupied some of the old cities like Chichen Itza and Coba, and they built some new ones like Mayapan. Forget the south; concentrate on the Yucatan Peninsula itself. What looks funny about it?' This blank space on the west. Why didn't they build there?'