Golden Relic

by Lindy Cameron

  “Given the circumstances I admit it’s unlikely, but perhaps we should consider that his murder is not related to this, this, whatever it is we’re looking for here.”

  “Now that is far-fetched. ‘If you are reading this my fears have been realised. I am no more’,” Sam quoted.

  “Yes yes,” Maggie acknowledged. “But tell me what you know about Lloyd.”

  “He was dedicated, professional, generous, argumentative, not very social and obviously loved a good mystery,” Sam stated. “And I’ve found a ‘complete works’.”

  “Me too.” Maggie sat down on the floor to reach the leather bound book on the bottom shelf.

  “Find anything yet?” asked Sam, turning the pages carefully.

  “No. Getting back to Lloyd; he was also practical, analytical, and usually quite down to earth, except that he believed strongly in premonitions, of which he claimed to have had more than a few,” Maggie continued, as she too flicked through the pages. “He was also scared of flying. He may have had a premonition that he wouldn’t make it home from Peru.”

  “That might be a workable theory if he’d left the package for you with his lawyer six months or 10 years ago and not, coincidentally, in the same week he turned up murdered.”

  “I suppose so,” Maggie muttered, fiddling with some pages that appeared to be stuck together. Prising the top corner away she discovered the entire mid-section of the book had been glued to conceal the cut-out hiding place of a long narrow, black box.

  Maggie silently lifted the hinged lid and stared in disbelief at the contents. She glanced over at Sam and, making what she hoped was the right decision for the time being, Maggie removed the long and heavy object, slipped it into her pocket and closed the box again.

  “I’ve found something, Sam,” she said excitedly. “A secret compartment, with a box.”

  “What’s in the box?” Sam asked leaping up to join her.

  “Oh. Nothing,” Maggie lied dejectedly, standing to place the heavy book on the desk.

  The box, about 16 centimetres long by six wide and lined with red velvet, was indeed very empty. So Sam reached over and removed it from the cavity in the book. Underneath was a small printed card. It read:

  Talk to Hamlet’s late messengers.

  “Bloody hell,” Sam complained. “This is never ending.”

  “I wonder what the box was for,” Maggie said, trying to sound innocently curious.

  “Well, unless someone beat us to it,” Sam said, “it’s my guess the box is a decoy to hide this latest clue. We are now, I think, looking for a copy of Rozencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.”

  “Oh great,” Maggie said, turning back to the shelves. She felt awful but it was obvious there was a hell of a lot more to all of this than just Lloyd’s murder.

  “You know,” Sam said, returning to the couch, “what with the murder, exotic poisons, sabotage fantasies, and all this literary legerdemain I really feel like I’m being dragged into a clich��.”

  “A what?” Maggie asked. “Found it,” she added, waving a copy of Stoppard’s play.

  “A B-grade movie clich��; you know one of those dangerous webs of murder, deception and intrigue.”

  “Well,” Maggie laughed, “I think it just became an international clich��.” She collapsed onto the couch next to Sam before adding, “unless of course this three-month-old bit of mail is just a bookmark.” She handed Sam an envelope, addressed to Marsden and posted from Cairo on the 28th of May, 1998.

  Sam lifted the flap and removed a piece of cardboard, on which was taped a key. “It looks like a safety deposit box key,” she said. “Oh, and this is useful,” she added, removing the only other thing in the envelope. “A postcard of the Nile Hilton. Just what we need.” She turned it over to find yet another enigmatic message, this time scrawled in purple ink:

  Safe no more. Inform MM.

  Am going to seek the finder. N.W.

  “This is getting really tedious,” Sam growled. “Who the hell are MM and the finder? Marsden’s other note said ‘safe no more’ and ‘return to the finder’.

  Maggie shook her head. “I don’t know, but N.W. could be Noel Winslow. He’s a mystery writer and an old friend of ours. He lives in Cairo but it could take a bit to track him down.”

  “Where do we start?” Sam asked.

  “The telephone. There is one here, somewhere. Lloyd could do without power but not a phone.”

  Sam glanced around the room and then stood up. “The phone plug,” she said, following the cord along the wall, under one of the armchairs, around the leg of the desk to the window seat, where she found the phone buried under a pile of magazines. “Who do I call first?”

  “The international operator for the number of the Cairo Museum,” Maggie said, wandering over to sit in the desk chair. “You’d better check what time it is there too.”

  Sam did as suggested and wrote the number on a notepad by the lamp. “It’s 5 am today. It’s a bit early to be calling anyone. But if this guy’s a writer why are you calling the museum?” Sam pushed some of the piles aside so she could sit down on the window seat but then had to cope with a landslide of magazines as she tried to move something hard that was jabbing her in the leg.

  “Noel is also an anthropologist but he found he was a much better fiction writer than he was a scientist. So he combined the two passions of his life into a series of anthropological detective novels. The last time I saw him he was still doing some consultancy work at the Cairo Museum; so Ahmed Kamel, one of the curators, may know where to find him. Noel might, however, be off researching his next book, so he could be in Turkey or South America or god knows where.”

  “Manco City,” Sam said.

  “Never heard of it,” Maggie said absently, as she flicked through Marsden’s address book. “But then I suppose Noel is writing fiction so anything is possible. What made you suggest that?” she asked, finally looking up to find Sam holding a picture frame.

  “This. It seems to be a picture of a bunch of people standing in a place you’ve never heard of,” Sam stated, turning the frame around. “It says Manco City 1962. There was one of these in the Professor’s office but the picture was missing.”

  “How very odd,” Maggie said, studying the photograph in which 16 people, men and women, had posed to record what was apparently a significant event. They were standing or kneeling, in three rows, in front of a stone archway through which could be seen the overgrown ruins of a multitude of buildings. The camera had captured a variety of expressions in that moment in time, but there was no doubt they were all extremely pleased with themselves.

  “Do you know any of them?” Sam asked.

  “Yes. I worked with some of them the year before this was taken, and with various combinations of them at other times since.” Maggie pointed to a young man standing in the back row. “That’s Lloyd. He would have been 29-years-old then. Good looking wasn’t he? Next to him is Noel Winslow, the writer I was just talking about; in front of them is Jean McBride, who recently retired from the museum in Edinburgh. Beside her is Alistair Nash, the friend I told you about who died in the car crash; and that bear of a man looking so smug on the end there is Pavel Mercier. He’s���”

  “Author of Anthropomorphic Entities and the Andean Supernatural Realm,” Sam stated. “I saw it in the Professor’s office,” she added, in answer to Maggie’s questioning look.

  “The weird thing,” Maggie continued, “is that I don’t know where this photo was taken. There really is no such place as Manco City. Unless���1962?” she asked herself. “Unless they thought they’d found Vilcabamba.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Do you know anything about the Inca?”

  Sam shrugged. “Just what I learnt in primary school.”

  “Ah well, make yourself comfortable Sam, but do tell me if you think I’m just rambling on like Daley Prescott,” Maggie smiled.

  “In 1532 the Spanish led by Pizarro conquered the Inca
s at Cajamarca, held the thirteenth and reigning king, Atahualpa, to ransom for a room full of gold and then executed him anyway on the spurious charge of treason. Their conquest succeeded for two reasons. One was horses and superior weaponry, the other was the fact that Tahuantinsuyu itself was in political turmoil.”

  “Tahuantinsuyu?” Sam queried.

  “The Incas called their empire Tahuantinsuyu or ‘Land of the Four Quarters’. It was an administrative name referring to four huge sectors, aligned to the cardinal points and arranged around Cuzco, the capital. The word was also symbolic of the immense size of the empire which included modern-day Peru and vast areas of what is now Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina.

  “Prior to his death Huayna Capac, the eleventh Inca, divided the empire between his two sons, giving the north around Quito, which is now in Ecuador, to his bastard son Atahualpa, and the south around Cuzco to the rightful heir, Huascar. The sibling rivalry of the two kings degenerated into a fratricidal civil war of which Atahualpa emerged victorious, after drowning his half-brother, just before the arrival of the conquistadors. So although Atahualpa had reunited Tahuantinsuyu, there was resentment amongst the Incas of Cuzco who believed Huascar was the rightful king.

  “Pizarro took advantage of that, and enlisted the support of Indian tribes who had been subjugated by the Inca, so that when he and his tiny army of 168 Spanish soldiers marched on Cajamarca they were actually accompanied by a great many Indian auxiliaries.

  “As I said before Atahualpa was put to death but Pizarro recognised the advantages of having an Inca ruler under Spanish control, to ensure the obedience of the native people, so he enthroned one of Atahualpa’s younger brothers as Sapa Inca. When this child king was poisoned, Pizarro appointed Manco Capac, the brother of Huascar, as fifteenth Sapa Inca. This was a smart move because the Incas of Cuzco opened their gates to the invading Spaniards believing them to be liberators because they had defeated Atahualpa and restored the rightful Inca line.

  “Manco Capac, who by the way is the father of that dude Tupac Amaru that Hercules mentioned last night, was given his own palace, the conquistadors took over most of the other Inca palaces in Cuzco and things were relatively peaceful in the empire for about three years. In fact when Quisquis, one of Atahualpa’s surviving loyal generals, tried to invade Cuzco the Spanish and Manco Capac’s Inca warriors fought side by side to drive him back beyond Quito. Am I boring you yet, Sam?”

  “No, not at all,” Sam stated.

  “Good. Apart from looting the empire of all the gold they could find, the Spanish began dividing up the ‘Land of the Four Quarters’ between themselves, becoming governors of regions that would later become Peru, Chile, Bolivia and Ecuador. When Manco realised the Spanish were never going to leave his land, he escaped from the city, rallied tens of thousands of Inca warriors and laid siege to Cuzco for 12 months. When Spanish reinforcements arrived, Manco and about 20,000 followers retreated to the central Andes of Peru from where they continued to provoke uprisings.

  “Manco founded a new Inca capital in a region of almost impenetrable jungle northwest of Cuzco, where he built a city called Vilcabamba. He fought the invaders for nine years before being murdered by a supposed ally. Three of his sons, in succession, ruled Vilcabamba and waged irregular guerrilla warfare for three decades. In 1572 a large Spanish force set out to destroy Vilcabamba but the Incas set fire to and abandoned the city. However the last Sapa Inca, Tupac Amaru, was captured and taken back to Cuzco where he was put through a show trial and beheaded in the town square.”

  “What happened to Vilcabamba?” Sam asked.

  “The jungle reclaimed it and it became the stuff of legends - a lost city, the last stronghold of the last Inca kings.”

  Sam tapped the photograph. “Despite your story, you don’t think this Manco City is Vilcabamba, do you?”

  “Maggie shook her head. “Not unless Pavel, and all the people in this photo, decided not to tell the world of their discovery. Archaeologists had been looking for the city since the 1830s. Hiram Bingham thought he’d found it when he discovered Machu Picchu in 1911. In fact Bingham did find Vilcabamba, west of Cuzco near Esp��ritu Pampa, the Plain of Ghosts, but dismissed it because it was so less imposing than Machu Picchu.

  “In 1964, two years after this photo of Lloyd’s was taken, an American explorer named Gene Savoy retraced Bingham’s steps to Esp��ritu Pampa re-found the lost city of Vilcabamba. The ruins covered two square miles and were, in turn, covered in trees and vines.”

  “So where do you suppose this picture was taken?” Sam asked.

  “I’ve no idea. It’s definitely Inca architecture though, the stonework is unmistakable. I know Pavel’s team found a couple of ceremonial centres northwest of Machu Picchu in 1962. Maybe they did think this one was Vilcabamba, or Manco’s city, but further research proved them wrong.”

  “Why weren’t you with them?” Sam asked.

  “I was in Luxor that year. I went into archaeology because of a passion for all things Egyptian but in 1961 Jean McBride asked me to travel with her to meet up with an expedition she was joining in Peru. I ended up staying for the duration, becoming enthralled with that part of the world and its history and consequently changing the course of my life. I blame Pavel entirely for that. But, I had to finish some work in Luxor in 1962 before I could embrace my new passion and all the study that went with it.”

  “That explains An Interlude in Hatshepsut’s Kitchen,” Sam smiled.

  Maggie laughed. “I would kill for a memory like yours, Sam.”

  “I would kill for a cup of coffee.”

  “Well if you think we’ve found all there is to find here, we may as well head back to town.” Maggie checked her watch. “You’ll have most of the afternoon to get ready for your date.”

  “It is not a date, Maggie.”

  “Whatever you say, dear.”

  “Oh please don’t. My sister Jacqui gives me that look when she thinks she knows better.”

  “Perhaps she does, Sam. Does she share your gift for remembering things?”

  “No, she shares my house. Jac and I couldn’t be more different. She dresses like a tart, goes out with gay sailors and reads romances. I’m still trying to work out which of us was switched at birth.”

  “Interesting,” Maggie commented. “I think I’d like to meet her sometime.”

  “Oh no you wouldn’t,” Sam insisted, “she’s quite deranged.”

  Sam had tried on her entire wardrobe three times before finally settling on a close fitting, elegant black cocktail number with a dark purple flash that began discreetly at the waist on the right hand side and swept around to the hemline at the front. Shoes were going to be a problem though; she hadn’t worn heels in three years.

  “Well, well, well, so you are a girl,” Jacqui observed from the doorway.

  “I’m surprised you can tell the difference any more, Jac,” Sam returned.

  “Very funny. Where are you going on a Sunday dressed liked that?”

  “I’ve got a date with an archaeologist.”

  Jacqui raised an eyebrow. “I thought you said what’s-her-name wasn’t that sort of date.”

  “She isn’t. This is a different archaeologist. Ah, the doorbell. Would you let him in while I finish.”

  Jacqui disappeared but returned moments later, her eyes wide. “Sam. There is the most gorgeous man standing in our lounge room.”

  “Well don’t leave him there all by himself, Jacqui. I’ll only be a minute.”

  “I wouldn’t know what to say to him.”

  You and me both, Sam thought. “Ask him about his exhibition,” she suggested; which is exactly what Sam did the moment she was alone with Marcus Bridger in his car. Discussion of his show maintained the conversation almost all the way to the Regency Hotel. And Rigby had been right, Bridger did know the right people to ask about getting his exhibits on an earlier flight from Paris.

  “I’m quite passionate about de-accessioning,”
Bridger stated in response to Sam’s question about where he stood on the issue of the return of cultural property. “It’s my belief that countries should be in possession of their own cultural heritage. But there are still museum curators and private collectors all over the world who, inexplicably, believe they have the right to horde the treasures and artefacts of cultures not their own.”

  “What happens with something like Inca artefacts though? Whoa! Watch out,” Sam cried as Bridger took too sharp a turn into the hotel’s carpark, narrowly missing the booth.

  “Sorry,” he apologised, though he looked more shaken by the near miss than Sam did. “I’ve spent the last couple of months driving on the other side of the road. You were saying?”

  “If the Inca Empire encompassed what is now five different South American countries, which one do you return the cultural material to?”

  “That situation does pose a dilemma. The same applies to relics from the Persian Empire which at its height extended from Iran to India and Europe. And I’m not suggesting museums give everything back. Rightful ownership would have to be verified. But why are you interested in Inca artefacts?”

  “I’m not really,” Sam fibbed, as they got out of the car. “It’s just that Marsden was dead against returning any of his Andean antiquities and Maggie was telling me she’d just been in Paris mediating a dispute between museums in Chile and Peru over the ownership of an Inca artefact.”

  “Ah, the now infamous ‘Inca trinket fiasco’,” Bridger laughed. “That dispute, even before the theft, indicated that the concept of returning cultural property is saddled with a host of problems. If Peru and Chile can’t agree on who really owns a bracelet that one of them already possesses, then you can imagine how hard it is to make decisions about the collections held by foreign institutions.”

  “So do you advocate returning only those things that are requested?” Sam asked.

  “Yes. Doing anything else would be nigh on impossible, but doing anything less would be unenlightened. Don’t you think?” Bridger ushered Sam into the lift.

  “Oh I agree,” Sam said. “But what about the argument that if all Inca artefacts were returned then the rest of the world would be denied easy access to the remnants of an incredible civilisation?”