by Lyn Hamilton
After beers were ordered, and Steve still hadn’t said much of anything, Tracey prodded him. “Talk to us, Steve! What’s the problem? Who or what were you chasing?”‘
He made a face, a sort of tired grimace. “In a word,” he sighed, “or I guess two words, el Hombre. The fellow the folks around here refer to as el Hombre .”
El Hombre? The Man. There was someone wandering around here who called himself the Man? I wanted to laugh out loud, but something in Steve’s manner stopped me.
“What a dopey name!” Tracey exclaimed. “Who is he really, and why would anyone want to call himself that?”‘ she queried, undeterred by the expression on Steve’s face.
He sighed. “El Hombre? Beats me. Maybe he doesn’t want people around here to know his real name although why he should care, when he’s so open about what he does, I couldn’t really say. Perhaps he just thinks it makes him sound rather grand. His name is Etienne Laforet. French. From Paris. He’s an art dealer, owns a swank Parisian gallery on the Left Bank. He’s also sleaze, big-time. I haven’t seen him around here in a couple of years, but he used to come at least once a year, and sometimes twice. His modus operandi is always the same. Blows into town in a big, expensive car, visits a few bars and restaurants making a big show of throwing money around. Once he’s made sure everyone sees he’s got wads of cash, he finds himself a place to stay, parks his very flashy and expensive car—this year it’s a gold Mercedes—right out front so everyone will know where he is, and then he just sits and waits.”
“Waits for what?” I asked. “And isn’t that a little dangerous, showing off your wealth like that around here? Isn’t he asking for trouble?”
Steve looked at me as if I was naivete personified. “He’s not asking for trouble. He is trouble. No one messes with him. He’s waiting for people to bring him stolen artifacts, of course. They have to know he’s here, that he’s ready to buy, and where to find him.”
“By stolen artifacts, you mean… ?” I asked.
“Pretty much anything pre-Columbian. He specializes in Moche.”
“Are you saying that he sits around waiting for people to bring their stolen goods to him, right out in the open? Like in a hotel lobby or something?”
“A house. He usually rents a house, and that’s what he’s done this time. The little white one with the round window on the second floor over on Calle seven near the hardware store. I followed him there this afternoon. It has a high wall surrounding it, with a large tree in the front yard, and no windows overlooking it from the other side of the street. So no one can see what’s going on in the patio or the door. But there’s a place to park out front, so everyone can see his car and know he’s there. Perfect setup.”
“Where are the police in all this? Can’t they do something about it?”
“Perhaps they could. But they don’t. Maybe it’s can’t, maybe it’s won’t. This guy has a reputation for being ruthless, and people around here are really afraid to take him on.”
“But they deal with him!”
“Yes,” he sighed. “They do.”
“But you can’t take Moche artifacts out of the country,” I offered.
Steve gave me another are-you-new-to-this-planet look. “Obviously there are ways,” he said. “He’s never been caught with anything on him when he flies home to Paris, I can assure you.”
We all thought about that for a while, Steve staring moodily into his beer. “I thought maybe he wasn’t going to show up here anymore,” he said finally. “He’s been farther south the last couple of years, and nothing much of any interest has turned up in these parts that I’ve heard about. I wonder what it means that he’s here again. I’ll have to make some enquiries, I guess.”
I wasn’t sure what making enquiries meant, but I didn’t have long to think about it. There was a bit of a stir in the entrance to El Mochica, and Steve turned to look at the door.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said, throwing money on the table to cover the bill, his beer still unfinished. “This place just lost its charm.”
I was sitting with my back to the doorway, and turned my head slightly to see what had brought on this abrupt gesture on Steve’s part. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw silhouetted against the bright light from outside, the figure of a man. I looked back at Steve to ask if the shadow I’d seen was el Hombre, but I didn’t need to speak. Steve’s face said it all. By the time we’d reached the door, el Hombre had disappeared into the lounge off to the right of the entrance and was not to be seen.
Dinner that night was more subdued than usual, Steve’s black mood affecting us all. On Ines’s day off, which corresponded with our break from the dig as well, the team, minus Pablo, who spent his time off in town with his family, and Hilda, who spent the day in her room, drinking herself into a stupor, no doubt, and sometimes with the addition of a student or two, crowded into the little kitchen to prepare the evening meal together, and it was normally a rather rowdy affair.
Ralph, a bachelor, liked to cook, and did it reasonably well. His responsibility was the main course, polio, chicken, which he cooked in what he always referred to as the “devil’s handmaid,” the propane oven, because of its propensity to shut off at the critical moment. I was responsible for the appetizer, and tried to master Ines’s papas a la Huancaina, potatoes in a cheese, onion, and hot pepper sauce that I’d found so appealing the first night. Tracey’s specialty was flan, or creme caramel, so she made dessert. Steve supervised, a responsibility that included keeping the cooks’ glasses filled. While the results never measured up to Ines’s feasts, on the couple of occasions we’d done this, we invariably declared the meal a triumph, and in a way it was. Sometimes the power went off, usually the stove quit: There was always some obstacle to be overcome to carry it off. Tracey, as always, had one of us take a tray up to Hilda, to leave outside her door, but as often as not it was not touched by morning.
That night, for the first time since I’d arrived at the Hacienda Garua, when everyone had retired for the night, I took the little Moche man out of his tissue wrapping and studied him once again. Every time I looked at him, I saw more to admire. He was exquisite really. The workmanship was extraordinary, the more so every time I looked at him. His necklace of tiny beads, each one handmade, and each just a little bit different, was so beautifully done, it almost took my breath away. I couldn’t imagine the attention to detail, the amount of time that must have been spent by some artisan, in making just one ear spool for someone, someone important no doubt. I wrapped it very carefully again and put it in its hiding place, behind a loose board in the cupboard. Was Etienne Laforet, I wondered, the connection I was looking for?
Later I heard the whispers again, and this time I got up quietly and went out to the railing. Three people were talking by candlelight at the front door. Steve was one, the other was the man I’d caught sight of for only a moment in the headlight of Ines’s brother’s motorcycle, the man of the arches, and the third figure, I saw this time to my surprise, was Hilda. Straining, I could pick up only snippets of their conversation.
“We can’t let him get away with this,” I heard Hilda say. Then, “Get Montero. Get him to talk to his brother.”
More murmuring. “I’ll go to Lima if I have to,” Steve said.
Then, something apparently settled, the man of the arches slipped back out into the darkness, the candle was extinguished, and Hilda and Steve headed for the stairs. I quickly pulled back into my room and pushed the door almost shut. I heard Hilda’s footsteps a minute or two later, limping slightly.
Very early the next morning, well before dawn, I wakened to a quiet but persistent tapping at my door. “Rebecca, it’s Hilda,” she whispered. “Get dressed quickly and come downstairs.”
I staggered out of bed—all this wandering around in the night was robbing me of my rest—threw water on my face, pulled on my jeans and a T-shirt, and headed downstairs. Steve, Hilda, and Ralph were already downstairs, and even Carlos Montero was there. Only
Tracey was nowhere to be seen.
“Ralph, you come with me,” Hilda barked. “Carlos has brought us another van, and we’ll use that. Rebecca, you go with Steve. Carlos, have you got the letter?” Carlos nodded and handed an envelope to Steve.
“Okay, let’s get cracking,” Hilda ordered. “Steve, you and Rebecca can get something to eat on the way.”
I looked at Steve, more than one question forming in my sleep-drugged mind. “I’ll explain as we go,” he said as we headed for the truck.
Within minutes we were heading south on the Panamericana. Steve was driving at a good clip, but fortunately the road was relatively clear this early. “We’re going to Trujillo,” he said. “I need to be at the INC offices when they open.”
The INC. The Instituto Nacional de Cultura. All this to call on a government office?
“We’re moving,” he said. “The site, I mean.
We’re closing up shop where we are and moving to another site about a mile away. At least I hope we are. I need to get a credencial, a license, for the new dig. Carlos got a letter from his brother, the mayor, supporting us, and the mayor and Carlos have called ahead, so the people at the INC will be expecting us.
“I may have to fly to Lima, though, to the head office, so that’s why you’re with me. You can drive the truck back today if need be.”
“I thought you were pleased with the way the project is going,” I said. “And why the big rush all of a sudden?”‘ Steve slowed only slightly as we pulled into Campina Vieja. Local farmers were beginning to bring their products to market, and Steve had to dodge a few carts and motorcycles as we blasted through town.
“I have a,” he hesitated for a second, “an informant, shall we say, a huaquero by the name of Arturo—I won’t give you his last name, it’s not important—who…”
“Huaquero?” I interrupted. “Is that what I think it is? A tomb robber?”
“Right. The Incas didn’t have a word for god, just a word for sacred—huaca, hence huaqueros, robbers of sacred places. Long tradition in these parts. Could be the Incas themselves engaged in it, plundering the tombs of earlier cultures. Whole families around here are involved in it, and have been for generations. They’re really good at it too, I’d have to say. Know what to look for, maybe better than we do, and are experts at the techniques for recovering the stuff. Pablo, our foreman, used to be a huaquero par excellence as a matter of fact. We’ve won him over, and now he’s a real asset to us. A couple of his men were huaqueros as well. We hope by giving them a job and teaching them about their culture, we’ll keep them on the straight and narrow.”
That seemed to be a somewhat risky assumption, I thought.
“So what do they—the huaqueros, I mean—do with what they find? Sell it on the black market?”
“Yes, in some cases; in others it’s considered legit, in a manner of speaking. What I mean to say is that there are ways to own artifacts in this country quite openly, and huaqueros profit from it.”
“But doesn’t letting people own antiquities here just encourage looting?”‘ I asked.
“It does. Drives me crazy. But you have to understand looting a little, don’t you? You’ve seen how poor this area is. If you’re lucky, you can make a lot more money at looting than you can fishing or farming, that’s for sure. It’s easy for us, coming from nice rich nations, to tell people they should donate whatever they find to a museum. The people I really blame are the buyers, especially the dealers. They’re the ones who encourage this kind of thing, the ones who make the big money on the finds too, I might add. Scum, in my opinion. At least some of them, Laforet first among them. But don’t get me going on this subject,” he said, looking as if he was in serious danger of diving into a depression again.
“You were telling me about Arturo,” I prodded.
“Right,” he said. “Arturo first came to me last season with some artifacts he’d found. I’d seen him hanging around watching, and eventually he showed up at the hacienda and asked me to assess some stuff for him, give him some idea of what it was worth.
“He had a couple of really nice ceramic pieces: Moche, a stirrup-spout vessel in the shape of a sea lion, complete with shell eyes, and another beaker with fine-line drawings. Most certainly genuine. They were looted, of course. There was no other way he could have got them. But he offered to tell me where he’d found them in exchange for my assessment of them. So I made a deal to get to study the fine-line vase for a day or two, before giving him my assessment.”
I said nothing. “I know what you’re thinking,” he went on. “But looting goes on all the time, and I’m powerless to stop it. I figure this way at least I get a chance to study the stuff before it disappears into the black market.”
I thought that one over for a minute. There were pros and cons to this argument, and the ethics seemed a little murky to me, but what did I know? After all, I was misrepresenting myself to these people, and had all along. I was also the proud possessor of a genuine Moche artifact that I had not yet got around to donating to a museum.
“Anyway, Arturo’s back again this season, and brought me another couple of pieces to look at. This time he’s got a real find: a little copper figure of a warrior, judging from the attire, and a really beautiful ceramic in the shape of a duck.
“Last night Arturo came to tell me that one of the local farmers, guy by the name of Rolando Guerra, is building a wall around a piece of property on the edge of the algarrobal, the carob tree forest. He’s told the locals that he’s just protecting his land from invasores, but Arturo tells me he’s almost certain the fellow has found something, and that he’s building a wall around it so that no one will see him looting it. The fact that the Guerra family are known huaqueros, have been forever, would be proof enough, but add to that the fact that Arturo’s ceramic and warrior come from that same area, and that pretty well clinches it. The campesino may indeed have found the big one.”
“And the big one is?”
“A tomb. An undisturbed tomb of an upper-class person, someone important. That’s the most exciting find of all in our field, and down here, it could be really spectacular. For years people studied the scenes on Moche pottery, not realizing that the scenes depicted real occurrences or rituals. For example, a lot of Moche pottery shows a scene in which captives are brought before a god, or a warrior king or priest of some kind, who often sits on a litter. In front of him there is another warrior who is half man, half bird. Behind him there is a woman, a priestess, holding a cup. Behind her there is often another figure with an animal face, usually feline.
“What’s interesting is that no matter how often this scene is depicted and no matter the artist, the figures in it are similar. It’s been compared to the Crucifixion or the Nativity in our culture, something that’s been depicted by many people over the centuries, but always with common elements that we all recognize. In the same way, the scene I’ve described is obviously a ritual of some importance to the Moche, and although they had no written language, and we therefore have to surmise what’s happening, it’s usually referred to as the Sacrifice theme. It’s a little gory. Captives have their throats slit, and it is probably their blood in the cup.”
For a second or two an unbidden image of Edmund Edwards, blood streaming all over his desk, and Lizard, Ramon Cervantes, garroted, leapt into my mind, but I resolutely stuffed the images back down into my subconscious and concentrated on what Steve was saying.
“The first warrior, for example, always wears a cone-shaped headdress with a crescent on it and rays coming out of his headdress and shoulders, a crescent-shaped nose ornament, and large round ear ornaments. He almost always has a dog at his feet.
“The priestess always wears a headdress with two large plumes, and her hair is in long plaits that end with serpent heads. The fourth warrior wears a headdress with long flares that have serrated edges. You get the idea.
“The extraordinary thing is that these people have been found,”‘ he enthused. “Walter Alv
a came across the tomb of the warrior priest and the bird priest at a place called Sipan. Christopher Donnan and Luis Jaime Castillo found the priestess at San Jose de Moro. They’d been buried in exactly the same regalia as that depicted on the ceramics!”
“I’m not sure I understand this,” I said. “Do I understand you to say that the people depicted on the pots were real people? And if so, you’re telling me they’ve been found. So why keep looking?”
“Good question. For certain the rituals on the ceramics were carried out in real life, and yes, real people held the positions. But the rituals were probably repeated over a very long period of time. Think of them as the British monarchy, the king or queen with the ermine cape, scepter, orb, the crown jewels. If you Were new to this planet, it wouldn’t take you long to figure out that these people whose picture you saw in Post offices and government offices were something special. You might even realize, if you looked at historical photos, or if you stuck around awhile, that more than one person held this position, because they all wore the same regalia. In other words, the crown goes with the position. Now imagine that when one of these monarchs died, all that stuff, the crowns, the scepter, everything, was buried with them. Then—”
