by Lyn Hamilton
We were wandering around on the upper level of the market, munching happily on alfajores, sublime little shortbread sandwiches with a sweetened condensed milk filling, as we walked about.
“Yuk!” Tracey said. “He’s back!”
Yuk? I turned to see a round-faced, middle-aged man in grey slacks and a pink, short-sleeved shirt, the buttons of which strained against a belly of some proportions. He was waving and yahooing at Tracey from two aisles away.
At closer range, Carlos Montero, our sponsoring angel, proved to be a man with bad teeth, his smile a flash of gold fillings, and what can only be described as roving hands. No wonder all the women on the project had winced when they heard from Lucho that his uncle’s return from Trujillo was imminent.
If I thought at my age I was immune, I was soon disabused of that. Any female, no matter her age, size, or general disposition, was apparently appealing to Senor Montero.
“Rebecca, this is Senor Montero, our sponsor, to whom we owe so much,” Tracey said brightly. From where I was standing, I could see her fingers crossed behind her back. “Senor Montero, this is Senora MacCrimmon, the latest addition to our team.”
“Senor Montero,” I said, trying to sound enthusiastic, “I’ve heard so much about you.” That much was true. “Steve has told me about the wonderful reproductions you make at Paraiso,” I went on. “I do hope I’ll have a chance to come and see your factory sometime.”
Montero gave me a smile that was essentially a leer and kissed my hand, holding it way too long for comfort. “And are you an archaeologist too, senora? Such an admirable profession. How I wish I had been able to study archaeology myself, but my family was not wealthy, and it was necessary for me to begin working with my father and older brother when I was very young.” He shook his head sadly, still holding my hand. I pulled it away and Montero turned his attention to Tracey, who was looking very fetching in white, a cool blond ice princess in white sleeveless tee, linen pants and sandals, thin chains of gold at her wrist and her neck.
Carlos liked what he saw obviously: He was practically salivating. “And how is Senorita Tracey?” he asked in a greasy tone.
“Just ducky!” she replied in as pleasant a manner as she could muster. “And how about you, Senor Montero?”
“Carlos, please. You must call me Carlos,” he oozed. “I am extremely well. And may I dare hope that in my absence you have been successful in finding some excellent artifacts, or God willing, even, perhaps, a tomb?”
“Nothing really exciting, Senor Montero,” Tracey said, assiduously avoiding his attempts at familiarity. “You won’t have got your money’s worth this week, I’m afraid.”
“But it is not the money,” he said unctuously, making a pretense of appearing pained at the mere thought. “My sponsorship is all in the name of scholarship.”
“Of course,” we both muttered.
Getting nowhere with Tracey, he turned back to me. “It would be a great honor to personally show you around Paraiso, senora. I do hope I will have that pleasure very soon.”
Tracey began to make excuses, and after a few more minutes of expressions of appreciation for Senor Montero’s great generosity and commitment to scholarship, and a promise of mine that I would come for a visit, we began to take our leave. Tracey, wisely as I was to learn, backed away from him. Naively, I turned around, bringing my first encounter with Montero to a close with a sharp pinch on my derriere. So unfamiliar was I to such treatment—I hadn’t had my bum pinched since I’d been backpacking my way through Italy at the age of eighteen—I actually said nothing. Being a quick study, however, I vowed to back out of Senor Montero’s presence thereafter.
“The word yuk, colorful though it may be, does not begin to describe that man. Carlos Montero goes way beyond yuk!” I hissed at Tracey when we were out of earshot. “Now I see why you don’t think Lucho is so bad. I mean, he only points a gun at you. This fellow drowns you in drivel and then pinches your rear.”
Tracey giggled. “Oops. Should have warned you about that.” I glared at her, but then I had to laugh.
Armed with Montero’s invitation, I found an excuse to visit Paradise the following day. The hacienda didn’t have a telephone, and part of Montero’s so-called sponsorship included the use of his telephone and fax machine. Steve asked me to send a fax to one of his colleagues back home to ask him to try to find an X-ray machine he could borrow to help in the study of Benji.
The Fabrica Paraiso was on the far side of the highway, just a little north of the turnoff to the road to the hacienda. It was a sprawling complex of faded pink buildings that housed the factory, a body shop, and a small gas station. Montero was quite the local businessman.
There was no sign of Montero in the body shop or at the gas pumps, so I entered the farthermost building through a doorway marked on either side by rather large ceramic pots decorated with Moche- style drawings. Just inside the door, in the dark little entrance-way, was a table on which were displayed a number of ceramic items, including three or four pots with stirrup-shaped handles, and various ceramic animals, most notably sea lions and deer. The entranceway led to the right, and I turned into a row of three little rooms, one leading into the next.
The second room had been set up as a little exhibit, with large poster boards on the walls that explained how Moche ceramics were made. Before I had time to look around, however, a timid little woman approached me quietly, as I glanced in the cabinets. “Can I help you?” she asked.
“I’m looking for Carlos Montero,” I said. “Steve Neal has sent me, from the archaeology project,” I added. Heaven forbid Montero should think I’d come for personal reasons. I heard Montero grunt as he hefted his not inconsiderable paunch out of a chair in the next room and came to see who was looking for him.
“Senora MacCrimmon,” he exclaimed, his face breaking into a smile. “What a great pleasure!” I stayed well back as I asked him if he wouldn’t mind sending the fax for us.
“Consuelo,” he ordered, “get Senora MacCrimmon a soft drink. Have a seat,” he said, gesturing toward a chair as Consuelo, who I decided was Montero’s wife, poor thing, brought me an Inca Cola, a drink that is very popular in Peru, but which tastes to me like bubble gum in a glass. One sip was enough from my perspective. To cover up this lack of social graces on my part, I asked Montero if I could have a look around the factory while he took care of the fax.
At Montero’s “of course” and gesture toward the back, Consuelo led me past Montero’s desk and through a door into a very large work area where maybe twenty people turned from their work to look at me as I came in. It looked like any large industrial building anywhere: very high ceilings, open to the rafters, with louvered windows high up for light and ventilation. Ventilation in particular was needed, because at one end of the place, to my right, there was a very large kiln blasting away. On either side of the kiln were large doors open to cool the room.
Filling about half the room, opposite the kiln, were several long tables at which workers, a number of them young women, were painting ceramic vessels in preparation for firing. At the far end of the room, to the left, there was a drafting table set up at which worked a middle-aged man.
I wasn’t really quite sure what to look for, now that I’d got there. Earlier I’d decided, sitting in the museum cafe in New York, that Campina Vieja was the point of origin of some Moche artifacts that were being passed off as fakes, but which were, in fact, authentic. There was only one crafts factory in town, and I was in it. So I looked around for anything suspicious, for locked doors, large pieces of equipment or packing that would cover up a trapdoor, some telltale sign of a hidden room. I couldn’t see a thing. Other than the two garage-type doors on either side of the kiln, there were only three others: One was open to the back to let in some air—the kiln made the place stifling, another door was the one I’d come through from Montero’s office and the rooms at the front, the other led to the washroom.
The storage area, situated in the same are
a as the kiln, was quite open; rows of metal industrial shelving about eight feet high were lined with various ceramic objects arranged by type. One cabinet had rows of identical fish, another had rows of Moche warriors, still others were plants, animals, and so on in various stages of finishing. Nearer the kiln there were some figures that were still wet clay, others with a first firing only, others decorated but not yet finished, and then a packing area for the finished product. I’ve visited similar places in my line of work, and it looked perfectly normal to me.
I took a quick look through one of the doors to the outside and saw what was left of a building about 500 yards away, four brick walls in various states of decay, no roof on it, and no windows on this side. It might have been a storage area at one time, I supposed, or a very small house, but now it could serve no useful purpose, whatever it once was.
Montero joined Consuelo and I shortly thereafter. He shooed his wife away and took over her duties as tour guide. He proved to be very knowledgeable about Moche ceramics, and how they’d originally been made. He told me that the Moche were the first in this part of the world to use molds, that the most common form of Moche pottery were vessels that had spouts in the shape of stirrups, and how it was possible to date the pottery, particularly in the southern part of the Moche empire, by the length of the spout and the type of lip on it.
He also explained in detail how his operation worked, with evident pride. “This is the starting point,” he said, standing beside his draftsman, who he referred to as Antonio. “Antonio here does drawings from photographs of artifacts, and designs the molds. You see, he is drawing a beaker with scenes of a deer hunt. Over here,” he said, moving to another part of the shop, “the molds are made, and here,” he said, gesturing expansively about the room, “are my artists who decorate the pieces in accordance with the drawings.
“I’m very proud of my people,” he went on. “They do wonderful work. Here, see this stirrup-shaped vessel in the shape of a fish, the detail.” The young woman working on it smiled shyly. “Some pieces we make are inexpensive, for the tourists, but in other cases, such as this one, what we do are not strictly speaking reproductions: Rather they are original pieces done in the Moche style. I think these are works of art, really. Don’t you agree?”
I did, and I said so. Carlos’s people were very talented artists, and watching their deft strokes as they drew intricate designs on the ceramic surface was a pleasure, albeit one I’d have enjoyed more under different circumstances. “Do you do replicas at all, Carlos?” I asked. “Exact copies of Moche ceramics?”
“You mean use the original methods of manufacturing?” he asked. “No, we like our electric kiln far too much for that.” He smiled. “In reality, we can’t afford to make replicas. I can’t make money on them, because they’re so labor-intensive and expensive to do.”
We walked the full length of the room, Montero chattering away as we went. He showed me where the shipments were packed, told me what museum shops carried some of his work, and so on. It was a revelation to me, not so much what Montero was telling me about Moche craftsmanship—Ralph had already told me a great deal about ceramics—but that he was so knowledgeable and so proud of the work that was being done. I suppose I’d assumed on the basis of his previous behavior that he was an ignorant man, but he wasn’t at all. He was obviously a much more complex person than I’d thought.
He spoiled it all, right at the end, of course, with a lecherous little squeeze, but I suppose I was already getting used to his particular way of dealing with the opposite sex. I merely extracted myself from his clutches and said my good-byes.
As I left the place, I had a very quick look in the body shop. It looked like a body shop just about anywhere, a storey and a half, open right to the roof, two service bays, and lots of mess. Nothing whatsoever looked suspicious.
That night, as usual, Hilda Schwengen disappeared soon after dinner commenced, not to be seen again all evening. Lucho continued to creep around the place, looking, I was sure, for his gun. I’d caught him in the lab, looking through the boxes, earlier in the day. Also as usual, after everyone had turned in for the night, I heard whispered conversations below me, and the creak of the main door, the click and squeak of doors on the second floor opening and closing.
I thought of the visit I’d had that day to Paraiso. I could find absolutely nothing wrong with the place. I could see no places to hide caches of priceless Moche artifacts, although I supposed someone could deliver them at the last minute and slip them into the packing cases. But then what? How did they get them out of the country? I thought about all the shipping I’d done from foreign countries for the shop. I regularly filled containers for shipping by sea, and I supposed I could have put illegal objects in the containers if I chose to. But it would be a risk at both ends I’d get caught. Lizard, of course, had been a customs agent, but surely he couldn’t be the one to check every single box from Paraiso through customs. Was there someone somewhere in a museum shop waiting for the shipment and whisking the real thing out? How difficult would this be to organize, I wondered, and my conclusion was very difficult. And how, then, did the objects end up at Molesworth & Cox?
Perhaps it wasn’t Paraiso, after all, I thought. If not, though, then the only other prospect in these parts was the archaeological project I was working on. I decided I needed to know a lot more about what was going on at the Hacienda Garua. On the face of it they were a friendly and relaxed group. Just beneath the surface, though, there were tensions. Hilda disliked Tracey, that I could tell, but why, I didn’t know. Ralph was more than a little entranced by Tracey, but Tracey was with Steve, and Ralph could hardly help but know it. Was this just all the stuff of soap opera, the result of a small group of people isolated together far from home, or was it something more than that?
Then there was the nocturnal visitor and the man in the arches who might or might not be the same person. I decided I needed to attack this problem on two fronts: to go back to Paraiso when no one was there, and to learn a lot more about this project. It was time Steve and I had a little heart-to-heart chat.
11
It haunts me still. Sometimes I dream I am standing on a distant planet, or a desolate moon, perhaps, or some spent asteroid hurtling erratically through space. The dusty surface is pockmarked with the craters of a thousand meteorites. A single hill rises from the surface, its sides streaked, ravaged, by some ancient storm. There is no one there. Someone once inhabited this lonely place, I know, a very long time ago. The cratered surface is littered with their bones. There are other reminders too: here and there a scrap of ancient fabric, and at my feet a plait of dark hair, bleached red by the light of a distant sun seen dimly through the haze. In my dream I hear their ghostly whispers in the mist; I feel their touch in the wind-whipped dust that stings my face. Cerro de las Ruinas.
My plans to interrogate Steve were delayed by an incident in the market that heralded the arrival in Campina Vieja of one of the most unprincipled people I have ever met. Pond scum, Steve called him. It was a chance encounter that hurled us headlong on a collision course with disaster. At the time I didn’t know whether the events that unfolded were diverting me from my course, or were instead another strand in the tangled web that I was attempting to unravel. Not that it mattered what I thought: I found myself drawn along with everyone else.
When it happened, Steve, Tracey, and I were on the upper level of the market, surrounded by clusters of bananas piled five or six feet high, searching for the perfect avocados to bring back to the hacienda to serve on Ines’s day off. We’d come into town to shop, for Tracey to make one of her telephone calls home (I thought all these calls were a little obsessive, but perhaps I was jealous), and for a little R&R. We were wandering around together, just enjoying ourselves, when Steve stopped so suddenly, Tracey almost ran into him.
“Shit!” I heard him mutter as he squinted off into the distance. “Tell me I’m seeing things. Shit!” he said again.
Then, as Trace
y and I stared after him, he broke into a trot and, calling back over his shoulder to us, said, “I’ll meet you at the El Mo in an hour.” We watched as he dodged through the crowds, down some steps to the market’s lower level, and then, ducking under a tarpaulin that flapped behind one of the stalls, disappeared from view.
“What was that all about?” I asked Tracey.
“Haven’t a clue,” she said blithely. It took a lot to worry Tracey, I noticed.
Perhaps growing up beautiful, rich, and smart gives you a feeling of invincibility. “Not a happy camper, though, is he?” she asked. “What’ll we do now?”
“Finish the shopping, I guess, then we’ll go have a beer and wait for him.” I shrugged. If Tracey wasn’t worried, then why should I be?
It took us quite a bit longer than we’d anticipated to get to the cafe cum bar and restaurant we were to meet at, El Mochica, better known as the El Mo. We still had a bit of shopping to do, and a couple of times we ran into some of the students—it was a day off for everyone—then Puma and Pachamama, and stopped to chat. When we entered the bar, Steve was already there. He was slumped in his chair and didn’t even look up as we came in.
