Golden Relic

by Lindy Cameron

  “Enrico, we don’t need a lecture,” Maggie remarked.

  “Forgive me, it is not often I get to speak of my real job.”

  “What do you do with all this information you collect?” Sam asked.

  “Add it to an inventory of the artefacts and few remaining treasures of my country held by foreign museums. I have been using exhibitions like Marcus’s as a cover for nearly 15 years.”

  “Why all the secrecy?” Sam asked. “Why can’t you just rock up to the Museum of Victoria, flash your credentials and say ‘show me what you’ve got’?”

  “If it were only that easy,” Vasquez sighed, lighting another cigarette. “But I have no more authority in your country than you do here, Detective.”

  “I wasn’t talking about your police badge,” Sam said. “If you’re respected enough in your other job to have been curating exhibitions all over the world then surely, just out of professional courtesy, the museums you’ve been visiting would provide you with the information you’re seeking. It’s my understanding that most institutions these days are in favour of the repatriation of cultural material. It’s even on the agenda for ICOM ‘98.”

  “The fact that it is on the agenda as an issue to be resolved indicates just how widely the concept of de-accessioning is actually accepted.”

  “He’s quite right, Sam,” Maggie commented. “It may be generally accepted as the right thing to do, but there are some things that some museums will never want to give back.”

  “And, as I said before Detective Diamond, many museums do not know what they have, and some of their curators would like to keep it that way. My concern is with those items that are not on display or already part of a public claim or dispute.”

  “Like the what’s-a-name bracelet that Maggie was mediating in Paris,” Sam suggested vaguely.

  “Exactly,” Vasquez said, his face registering amusement rather than surprise at the suggestion. “We knew where that artefact was and were already negotiating its return, so it was not part of my inventory or of concern to my department - until it was stolen, of course.”

  “What do you do with this inventory?” Maggie asked.

  “My colleagues in Heritage Retrieval use my information to begin negotiations with foreign museums for the return of items that belong to us. This approach is occasionally successful but not often enough, so we sometimes employ other tactics.”

  “Like what?” Maggie asked carefully, as if she already had an inkling of his answer.

  “My department sometimes sends in extraction agents,” Vasquez stated.

  “Extraction agents?” Sam queried. “What���”

  “Burglars, ” Maggie explained. “He means they send in burglars.”

  “You make a list of things and then you steal them?” Sam was incredulous.

  “I only make the inventory, Detective. My colleagues ‘retrieve’ that which was stolen from us.”

  “Good grief,” Sam said and glanced at Maggie. “You don’t seem surprised.”

  “Oh I am,” Maggie assured her. “There have been rumours going around for years about the existence of so-called Relic Recovery Teams. They were blamed every time there was an otherwise unexplained breakin at a museum. It’s also a standing joke when pens or staplers go missing from our desks that an RRT must be responsible.”

  Vasquez laughed heartily. “I would like to point out Maggie,” he said, “that we are not the only ones who do this. Most countries that have had their culture plundered by foreigners have a secret Retrieval Department of some kind, and employ agents to reacquire their property.”

  “If it’s secret, Se��or Vasquez, why are you telling us? You must realise you have just put the kibosh on your career as a spy.”

  Vasquez shrugged. “A recent promotion means I am no longer a field agent. And my government will, naturally, deny all knowledge of what I have just told you, so the information is useless.”

  “That means,” Sam said thoughtfully, suddenly suspicious of Vasquez’s whole story, “that you can’t prove anything that you’ve just told us.”

  “You are correct. The nature of my work would necessitate a denial of my existence as well.”

  “Enrico, you didn’t hijack the Tahuantinsuyu Bracelet did you?” Maggie asked.

  Vasquez laughed. “No Maggie, I did not. I was in Melbourne at the time. And I swear that neither my department nor my government was responsible. But the theft of the Tahuantinsuyu Bracelet is the reason I am here - following you.”

  Maggie looked meaningfully at Sam who obligingly turned to Vasquez with a puzzled frown. “Does this bracelet have any special significance?” Sam asked.

  Vasquez threw his hands out, “It belongs to us,” he declared. “The Chileans had it and refused to return it, now some unknown person has it. I intend to get it back.”

  “What makes you think we know anything about it?” Maggie asked, trying to look perplexed.

  “A curious set of circumstances led me to believe that you were on the trail of the hijackers.”

  “What circumstances?” Maggie snorted.

  “Firstly, the disagreement that Professor Marsden and I had on the day of his death,” Vasquez said. “As I explained to you Detective Diamond, that conversation was quite heated because Marsden and I held completely opposite views regarding the return of cultural property. When I brought up the subject of the Tahuantinsuyu Bracelet, however, the Professor suddenly became agitated, even angry. He said he had no desire to continue the debate. Then he left the building.”

  “Why did you mention the bracelet?” Sam asked.

  “It was topical,” Vasquez shrugged. “Everyone knew Maggie was in Paris mediating the dispute.”

  “Lloyd often just walked away from things he could no longer be bothered with,” Maggie said.

  Vasquez nodded. “At the time, I thought that was the case. In retrospect I realised he had reacted specifically to my mention of the bracelet.”

  “So?” Sam asked. “Maybe the dedicated collector was sick of having the topic thrown at him.”

  “Possibly, but the very next morning,” Vaquez said, “I learned that the Tahuantinsuyu Bracelet had been stolen. Later that day I discover, when you bring me in for questioning, that Marsden had been murdered. Two days later you, Maggie, arrive in Melbourne fresh from your mediation of the ‘Inca trinket fiasco’, and three days after that you both leave the country. This to me is very odd when you at least, Detective Diamond, are supposed to be investigating a murder.”

  “Se��or Vasquez you cannot possibly have any idea what I am supposed to be doing.”

  “Granted. Does that mean I am right then? You are on the trail of the hijackers.”

  “We are not,” Maggie stated emphatically. “And I really wish people would stop putting my name and that ‘incident’ in the same sentence, as if I am responsible for it,” she complained.

  “I am investigating Professor Marden’s murder,” Sam said, “so it’s beyond me why you think these apparently unrelated events mean we were looking for a stolen bracelet.”

  “I do not like coincidences,” Vasquez pronounced.

  “I don’t know anyone who does,” Sam laughed. “But let me try and figure out a possible scenario for your logic here. After thinking about this ‘curious set of circumstances’ you decide, perhaps, that Professor Marsden, in his desire to collect one last great thing, masterminded the hijacking in Paris. Then along comes Maggie who, somehow, discovers her friend’s part in the theft and rushes to Melbourne to tell him this is ‘just not on, old boy’, only to find she is too late because one of his co-conspirators has decided to bump him off before fleeing the country. Maggie then manages to convince me that we should go gallivanting around the world on a quest for some stolen artefact.”

  Vasquez’s dark eyes were shining as if he was hearing exactly what he wanted to hear.

  “Enrico, she is kidding,” Maggie said, as she and Sam collapsed in laughter.

  “But why e
lse would your investigation of a murder in Melbourne take you to Egypt and Peru?”

  “Se��or Vasquez, as you cannot prove to me that you are anything other than a Peruvian curator and a suspect in my murder investigation, I am not likely to divulge the reasons for our being here. And if the little story I just invented bears any resemblance to your reason for being here then I’d have to leap to the conclusion that you are the alleged co-conspirator in the hijacking and would therefore qualify as the prime suspect in the Professor’s murder. So, should I arrest you now?”

  Vasquez was horrified. “I swear I had nothing to do with the Professor’s death or the theft of the bracelet. I realise I am disadvantaged by the fact that, right now, I cannot prove I am who I say I am, but why would I make it up?”

  “I don’t have the faintest idea,” Sam said. “But why would you expect me to believe you?”

  “Why not? You expect me to believe you are not on the trail of the Tahuantinsuyu Bracelet just because you say so,” Vasquez said. “But if you are not, then why would a known dealer in stolen antiquities attack you in Cairo?”

  “I beg your pardon?” Sam asked.

  “The Turkish gentleman that my cousin saved you from,” Vasquez said with a smile.

  “The Mexican was your cousin?”

  “Obviously he is not Mexican,” Vasquez pointed out. “And it was he who discovered you had left Cairo for Peru, which is why I am here.”

  “Well,” Sam said calmly, “I would appreciate it if you would pass on my thanks to your cousin for following me around. That Turkish bloke, however, was only after my money.”

  “Yes, of course he was,” Vasquez stated.

  “Well,” Maggie pronounced, “I don’t know about you two but it seems we’re just sitting around here not believing each other. I suggest we give up and call it a night.”

  “Good idea,” Sam said, then smiled and added, ‘We could meet back here in the morning with a whole new set of implausible stories for each other if you like, Se��or Vasquez.”

  “Very amusing, Detective Diamond.”

  Sam and Maggie, hoping that Vasquez had come across them in the street by accident, wandered back to the Hotel Royal Inca by a circuitous route to make sure he wasn’t following them. By the time Pavel returned two hours later, they still had not decided whether Vasquez had been telling the truth, in which case he’d betrayed half a dozen state secrets in his attempt to find out what they were doing in Peru, or whether he had simply fed them an inspired collection of lies to cover the fact that he was the one they were after.

  “I hope that he does not know I am here with you,” Pavel said. “That would ruin our plan.”

  “Oh, and that would be terrible,” Maggie commented.

  “Maggie, darling, this will work.”

  “Pavel, darling, it is a ridiculous plan.”

  “Both of you darlings please stop arguing,” Sam begged.

  “Did you get the impression that he knew about the Hand of God?” Pavel asked.

  “No Pavel, but then as we said we have no idea whether to believe him or not. Personally I vote for ‘not’ but Sam thinks his story is silly enough to be true.”

  “I don’t know what I think any more,” Sam admitted, lying back on the bed. “But I have been wondering whether the person behind all of this might be someone from the original dig in 1962.”

  “No way,” said Pavel.

  “How can you be sure? You said most of your porters ran off, and the others left with half your team who were desperate to get out of there.”

  “Yes they were desperate - with fear. But I trusted their word and, having worked with most of them over the years since then, I have no reason to doubt them. Besides apart from the Guardians everyone else left before we came up with our plan to protect the Hand.”

  “I have to get something off my chest, Pavel,” Maggie interrupted. “I understand why it never occurred to you to consider just how preposterous your plan was, but I can’t for the life of me fathom why Lloyd or Noel and especially Alistair not only went along with it in the first place but never came to their senses. As a plan it ranks highly amongst the most idiotic ideas of all time.”

  “Maggie, Maggie, if you had been there, you would have gone along with us.”

  “I doubt it. But if I had, I would have realised sooner rather than later sometime in the last 36 years just how ridiculous the whole thing was.”

  “Please credit us with some sense, my dear. We talked many times over the years about who we would turn the Hand over to when the time was right, the problem was the time was never right. It seemed that each time we settled on a possible new Guardian he would die or transfer to India or be arrested on fraud charges. It was quite bizarre. The last time Alistair brought it up was the night before the Cuzco earthquake in 1986. He never mentioned it again.”

  “Pavel, for goodness sake, you don’t think the Hand was responsible for these things?”

  “I couldn’t say one way or the other, Maggie. But as I said, you had���”

  “I know, you had to be there to understand.”

  “Maggie I accept that you don’t believe in these things but let me give you an analogy that you might be able to understand. You are, are you not, a lapsed Catholic?”

  “You know I am a devout atheist,” Maggie stated.

  “But I guarantee you can’t tell me, in all honesty, that you could stand in the Vatican and scream out ‘this is all bullshit’.”

  “That’s not the same,” Maggie said, straightening her shoulders.

  “Why, because you think God might just get you in then end?”

  “All right, okay, I get your point.”

  Sam who had been pacing the room, stopped in front of Pavel. “You say you trusted the team members who left ahead of you, Pavel. Have you considered that one or more of your Guardians also trusted them, perhaps enough to reveal what you all decided in 1962?”

  “I suppose it is possible,” Pavel acknowledged.

  “Which means there might be as many as five other people who know about the Hand being spread around the world. And if just one of them told someone else then there’s no way of knowing how many people really know about it.”

  “But why would they tell anyone?”

  “Oh, Pavel don’t be so naive,” Maggie said. “Not everyone spends the rest of their life looking under the bed for monsters because they got spooked by a horror movie one night.”

  “It could have been an accident,” Sam suggested. “One of them, even one of your Guardians, could have got drunk at a party one night and started telling a tall tale about a golden relic, a wicked curse and a strange plan that was put in motion to protect the descendants of the last Inca king. It’d make a great bedtime story too.”

  “It seems possible Pavel, that half the world might know your little secret,” Maggie teased.

  “Oh merde, but this cannot be so.”

  “Let’s consider the possibility for a moment,” Sam said, rummaging around in her pack. She pulled out a notebook, placed it on the table in front of Pavel and opened it to the page, marked by the photo of Manco City, where she had listed the names that Maggie had identified. “Which one is William Sanchez?” she asked sitting on the edge of the bed, and resting her elbows on her knees.

  Pavel pointed to the man beside Noel Winslow in the back row. “And that is Barbara Stone, the other Guardian,” he said tapping the woman sitting in the front next to one of the porters. “She lives in San Francisco,” he added.

  “San Francisco?” Sam repeated. “When was the last time you spoke to her Pavel?”

  Pavel shook his head. “Maybe the end of 1996. Why?”

  Sam took a breath. “The Life and Death show was in San Francisco in June of last year.”

  “Oh my god,” Pavel exclaimed. “We must find out if she is all right. Oh no, but she was moving, I don’t know where to. This is dreadful.”

  “It’s much too late to do anything tonight Pavel
,” Maggie said, taking hold of his hand. “Tell us who the other two men in the photograph are.”

  Pavel glanced at the list of names and then back at the photo. “The man next to Sanchez is Dwight Jones and the big fellow in the front is Elmer Rockly. I’m sure you’ve met him, Maggie.”

  “Shit,” Sam said, dropping her head into her hands.

  “Now what?” Maggie asked.

  Sam sat up and glanced from Pavel to Maggie. “You remember how I asked Rivers to check the internet for any odd incidents that coincided with the exhibition tour dates?”

  “Yes, and he had some information on a failed suicide and a fire or something,” Maggie said.

  “An art broker by the name of Dwight Jones died in a gallery fire in New York on March 15, 1997,” Sam said quietly. “And a man named Elmer Rockly was killed in a hit and run snow mobile accident in Anchorage on July 6 last year.”

  “I am going to throw up,” Pavel moaned, making a dash for the bathroom.

  Sam and Maggie sat and stared at each other in silence until Pavel returned 10 minutes later.

  “I have brought this on us, haven’t I?” he said, sitting down and staring at the list of names, to which Sam had added Sanchez, Stone, Jones and Rockly. “I feel very old and tired,” he added, before ripping the page from the notebook. He screwed it up and threw it across the room.

  “This is not your fault, Pavel,” Maggie insisted. “And we’re all tired. We should go to bed.”

  “You know,” Sam said, ignoring the suggestion, “I think that whoever is doing all this doesn’t actually know who the Guardians are.”

  “You mean they’re just tracking down everyone who was there,” Pavel said.

  “Yeah, or everyone in this picture, which amounts to the same thing,” Sam said.

  “Who took the photograph?” Maggie asked.

  Pavel shook his head. “Pah, I don’t remember. Maybe one of the porters.”

  “What was the situation you had that made you decide to fake your death?” Sam queried.

  Pavel laced his fingers together and stared at the floor. “I had been, um, having an affair with a woman, a married woman here in Cuzco,” he confessed.