The Frog Cypher: An Adventure Novel (Sam Harris Series Book 2)

by PJ Skinner

  He paused to ask Socrates for a refill.

  ‘Our fame spread. An American travelled to Sierramar to meet me. He wrote a book about the treasure and his part in one of our infamous treks up the bleak mountain peaks to search for clues. He was not very complimentary about our behaviour but anyone who knew us said that it rang true. And we knew it. When Jorge died of a heart attack, I was left bereft and without funding. To tell the truth, my hunt has been on hold for a few years now. I have tried to go straight but running a bar was probably not the best way to stay sober.’

  He grinned wickedly and raised his glass. Sam looked across the table, through the maze of empty glasses glistening in the late afternoon sunlight.

  Mike was transfixed by Alfredo’s stories. He muttered, ‘If only I had the money,’ a couple of times.

  Alfredo accepted the adoration as his due.

  They were both very drunk.

  Sam slipped off for a siesta in the hammock outside her cabin and was woken in the early evening by mosquitoes dining on her hands. Swearing, she hopped out of the hammock into the cabin and shut the door. She had a shower with water that was warmed by the sun in the pipes that lay across the sand. When this warm water ran out, she was forced from the shower by a considerably colder supply of water from the well at the beach. She sprayed herself from head to foot in repellent and then dressed in a baggy t-shirt and linen trousers, which were almost clean. She slipped on a pair of flip flops and walked to the restaurant.

  Mike and Alfredo were back at, or had never left, the table, which had been cleared, except for a couple of fresh drinks. They were involved in an intense debate about the treasure.

  Sam slipped onto the bench on Mike’s side of the table. But the two men were absorbed in their conversation and did not acknowledge her. Socrates came over to the table.

  ‘So, linda, what can I get you?’

  ‘I’d like a gin and tonic and a shrimp ceviche, please.’

  ‘A double?’

  ‘Yes please.’

  She sat watching the bats, staring at the stars and trying to spot the planets. Her input was definitely not necessary in the conversation the men were having and, anyway, she was too tired to talk. Her drink arrived. She moved to a quiet corner table where she ate her food and sipped her drink in peace. She reviewed the events of the past few weeks, avoiding the horror of the near-rape by Wilson as something she could not process without help from Gloria. She raised a glass to herself and drank deep, the alcohol keeping thoughts of Wilson at bay in the inner recesses of her mind. A warm thrill ran through her as she considered the luck that had brought her to Sierramar.

  She could see the future now, just out of reach, but finally tangible. Life with Mike was obviously going to be rather unprofitable but she was learning to be a real geologist and she would soon be unstoppable. All the doom and gloom she had felt about her career, after being rejected for her gender, had floated away and been replaced by a certainty that gave her strength. It rippled through her body, making her hairs stand on end. She was on her way now. When she got up to leave, Mike and Alfredo looked as if they would not last much longer, either. She waved her thanks at Socrates and crept off to bed.

  The next morning, she got up and ran down to the sea in her swimming costume. The water was cold. She squeaked when it hit her thighs. There was a strong current. Sam was not a very good swimmer, so she just made a couple of feeble attempts at swimming parallel to shore in shallow water. The waves broke over her head, making her cough and snort. The salt water ran down her throat burning it. She hated the sea. She only liked swimming in a pool or a calm river. Judging that she had done enough to justify being at the beach, Sam came out of the water and marched along the sand to her cabin.

  She noticed Alfredo lying in the hammock outside his cabin, watching her from under the brim of his hat. She waved. He raised a limp hand to acknowledge that he had seen her. He looked very rough. Sam felt great and she was very hungry. The sea air had done wonders for her appetite. She got dressed and wandered up to the restaurant to see if she could muster up some breakfast. There was a big, fat, jolly woman in the kitchen, who understood Sam’s famished look without any need for conversation.

  ‘Buenos días, mi señorita, quieres desayunar?’

  ‘Breakfast? Yes, please,’ answered Sam in her best Spanish. ‘Two fried eggs, fried ripe plantains, toast, juice and tea.’

  She wanted to ask for yoghurt as well but could not remember the word in Spanish. When her breakfast arrived, it had yoghurt anyway with a big spoonful of granola. Perfect. Sam ate everything except the plates. She was ravenous after all those miserable half-eaten meals of tinned tuna and rice. She drank two cups of tea and a glass of passion fruit juice. Then, feeling bloated, she staggered back to her cabin and fell asleep in her hammock.

  She was still asleep when Mike tapped her on the shoulder and said, ‘Sam, wake up. We’re going to the airport now.’

  She was surprised and saddened by this news. She did not remember Mike telling her they would be going so soon. Groggy with sleep, she got to her feet and went inside to pack her bag. It did not take long but by the time she walked to the restaurant, Mike and Alfredo were already sitting in a taxi with the engine running. Sam did not get the sudden rush until Mike told her that the plane left in just over an hour.

  The ancient taxi did not look as if it had the legs to make it to the airport in time. But they got there with half an hour to spare and were not the last passengers on the plane. Mike and Alfredo sat together. Sam sat beside a very pretty woman, who spent the whole flight touching up her makeup.

  Gloria was at the airport in Calderon to collect them. She looked her best, as she had dressed up for an earlier lunch with her friends from school.

  ‘Gloria, this is Alfredo,’ said Mike. ‘He’s a treasure hunter.’

  Gloria knew who Alfredo was but he did not hang around with her group of friends.

  ‘A pleasure,’ said Alfredo, who took her hand and kissed it in his most gallant manner. Gloria blushed and in her confusion, almost drove off without Sam, who was putting her bag into the boot of the car. Sam raised an eyebrow at her when she slammed on the brakes and leaned out of the window with an apologetic shrug. Gloria dropped Mike and Sam off at the flat in Avenida Miranda and drove off chatting to Alfredo, who had a big smile on his face. Sam crossed her fingers and hoped that maybe Gloria could be distracted from her hopeless quest of the successful Diego by a successful quest for the hopeless Alfredo.

  ‘Home, sweet, home,’ she remarked to Mike.

  He grunted, ‘I wonder what’s in the fridge.’

  She lugged her bag into the utility room at the back of the kitchen. Tati was not there, so she left her dirty clothes in a pile by the large sink. Mike told her that he had not purchased a washing machine because ‘it put maids out of work,’ something he had heard from Gloria

  ‘Mike, you can’t buy a washing machine in Calderon if you have a maid,’ Gloria had said. ‘The maids resent washing machines as usurpers and are liable to sabotage them. Tati has almost no cleaning to do and she’s had to hand wash clothes since she was a small girl. She has a full-time job working for you and is very happy with her lot.’

  Sam went into her room and shut the door. Soon, she was luxuriating in a hot shower and thinking about supper.

  VIII

  The next day, Sam and Gloria went to the one-hour photograph shop to drop off Sam’s pictures of the trip for developing. There was a long queue. Sam got impatient at the glacial pace at which the staff worked. Gloria made her laugh by asking, ‘What’s wrong with you, gringa? It’s called one-hour photograph because you have to queue for an hour to hand in your film.’

  Despite the difference in cultures, Sam and Gloria had a sense of the absurd in common and were becoming firm friends. Sam admired Gloria’s unplanned existence, while Gloria admired both Sam’s ability to adapt to any environment and her punctuality. It was a learning experience for both of them.


  The next stop was the geography institute to buy some maps. There were no jolly teenage soldiers guarding the entrance this time. The jaundiced men guarding the gate made them park outside on the street and walk up the steep hill to the entrance. Sam laboured in the thin air, as her time at sea level had lowered her tolerance to the high altitude again.

  As usual, the purchase of the maps seemed to take forever. The Coronel, who seemed less tolerant of their impatience, kept them waiting even longer than usual for his signature. This did nothing for Sam’s humour and even Gloria seemed irritated that he had not responded to her best smile.

  They returned to the shop to collect the photographs but it was closed for lunch. Worse still, they got back to the flat to find that they had been given the wrong maps at the IGM. A final trip to collect the photographs confirmed Gloria’s fears. The photographs were not ready and would not be ready until someone got around to developing them.

  ‘Sam, you gotta stay calm. If they notice that you’re impatient, they’ll get nervous because you’re a gringa. They think you will shout things they don’t understand.’

  ‘But they’re going slowly on purpose.’

  ‘It’s not that. They’re just not used to someone being in a hurry.’

  Sam was frustrated. The pace of life in Calderon was such a contrast to London. Sierramarian inefficiency was really getting to her. Gloria, on the other hand, took it on the chin and accepted the mañana culture with good humour and a cigarette.

  Sam had taken such an intense dislike to Wilson that she found it impossible to talk to him. Mike noticed the frost between them.

  ‘So what’s up with you and Wilson?’ he asked.

  Sam had kept the incident at Arenas bottled up. She snapped back at him.

  ‘Nothing’s up Mike. Unless you count the fact that he tried to assault me on the trip to Riccuarte. I really don’t want to work with him anymore. Can’t we use someone else?’

  Mike looked annoyed.

  ‘Seriously, someone else? This is Sierramar you know. And what the hell is wrong with you, anyway? Why didn’t you tell me about this before? Do you think I’m psychic? It can’t have been that bad, if you haven’t told me yet. He didn’t do anything to you, did he? He only tried?’

  ‘No, he didn’t do anything in the end,’ she said. But, she thought that was only because she had incapacitated him.

  ‘Well then, what’s your problem? He’s the best geologist we’ve got. You have to realize that the differences in our cultures can result in strange interpretations. Maybe he misunderstood something you did. Just be more careful.’

  Sam was upset that Mike dismissed her so abruptly but she did not want to make an enemy of him. She was not sure why she had not told him at the beach. Perhaps she was ashamed. After all, she had said that she was perfectly capable of looking after herself and now she was suggesting that she was not. She had a job and that was a lot more than most recently graduated geologists. She was getting paid and although it was a miniscule amount, she was paying off her university debts bit by bit. She did not know that Mike had totally forgotten this part of the bargain. Her father was in charge of her bank account while she was away and soon realised that Mike was not depositing any money. He pragmatically set up a direct debit from his own account for the same amount and kept it quiet from Sam and his wife. He knew how to keep a secret.

  When she realised that Mike was not going to do anything about Wilson, Sam decided to deal with it her way. She never spoke to Wilson unless she had to and then only in words of one syllable. He, on the other hand, was behaving like a teenager in love and sending her cards with pink teddy bears on them, begging for another chance. There was nothing Sam hated more in the world than disgusting fuchsia monstrosities on cards or cuddly toys. She was positively allergic to them. With Sam, there were no half measures. She was not a nuanced thinker at this stage of her life. There were only two colours: black and white. She considered women who collected cuddly toys to be mentally defective in some way. She thought that men who gave them were paedophiles or morons. Wilson could not have picked a better way to make her feel nauseous and to alienate her even further.

  One morning that week there was a strike. Strikes in Sierramar were a serious matter. Sam did not realise this and wanted to go out to the shops. She rang Gloria and asked to be picked up.

  ‘Oh no, chica. I can’t pick you up this morning. Everyone stays indoors on strike days. The strikers throw stones at private cars that dare to break the strike. You can only go by taxi but even then the streets are often blocked with barricades and burning tires. If the strike is bad, the shops can get looted.’

  ‘So it’s more like a riot, then? What’s it about?’

  ‘This particular strike is due to a large devaluation of the national currency. The students are the main perpetrators of the violence. They throw Molotov cocktails at the police, who respond with tear gas and baton charges. The students don’t care about the currency. They just love to riot and to stone the police, so they don’t have to go to classes.’

  The strike was over by lunchtime, so Sam and Gloria ventured out to the Banana Verde for lunch. There were burning tyres in the centre of town but the streets were deserted. They had been due to collect the photographs but the shop was closed because of the strike. They stayed in Gloria’s house instead, chatting and laughing.

  The next day, Gloria and Sam finally collected the photographs of the trip. Sam gave the shop assistants her brightest smile as she left, having learnt something from Gloria about how to make friends and influence people in Calderon. They went to meet Alfredo and Mike for lunch. The two men had formed a close friendship after their trip to the beach. They were also both obsessed with the treasure and rarely spoke of anything else. Sam was getting to know Alfredo a little better due to his constant presence in the office. Alfredo dressed his compact frame in the clothes of a Devon country farmer. He was the archetypal Byronic hero, rebelling against convention, self-destructive, passionate, arrogant and charismatic. Although he claimed to loathe the English, it was obvious that his was a love/hate relationship. He was a charming man with a history of bad luck that was almost always self-inflicted. He loved to tell tall tales. He ripped his shirt open in the office one afternoon, making the buttons fly in all directions. He had a large, livid scar on his left shoulder. The flesh was all shrivelled, purple and pulled around a central hole, like a large pair of pursed lips or, as Mike remarked, an arsehole.

  ‘Do you see this scar?’ Alfred asked. ‘Do you know how I got it?’

  ‘Whoa! That’s some scar,’ said Sam, who had a few herself from playing hockey. ‘How did you get it? Did someone stab you with a poker?’

  Alfredo laughed

  ‘Ha! Nothing that exciting. I once fell into a drunken sleep under a poisonous tree in the Galapagos. While I was asleep, the sap of the tree dripped onto my shoulder and started to eat away at it. My friends had found me with a large hole in my flesh, still sound asleep under the deadly tree. I was rushed to hospital, and my arm was saved by an emergency operation to cut out the poisoned flesh. So the moral of the story is not to sleep under a poisonous tree.’

  ‘Or not to get so drunk that you don’t wake up when your flesh is melting?’ said Mike.

  In case Sam was in any doubt about the truth of this story, Alfredo made her touch his scar. She shivered with horror as her finger slipped into the puckered hole. She had to believe him.

  Once they were all seated at the table in the restaurant, they turned to the subject of the treasure. Sam was bored by all the treasure talk and opened the envelope of photographs. She was pleased at how they had come out and was sharing them with Gloria, who examined them without much enthusiasm. She seemed much more interested in looking at Alfredo from under her thick eyelashes.

  Sam got to the photograph of the snake with the frog in its mouth. It was not great but you could see what it was if you looked closely.

  ‘Mike,’ she said, ‘you must lo
ok at this photograph. Can you see what it is?’

  Mike gave the picture a cursory glance and passed it to Alfredo. Alfredo glanced at it and was about to give it back to Sam when he went pale. He brought the photograph up to his face and screwed up his eyes.

  ‘Mike,’ he said, ‘lend me your glasses.’

  Mike gave him the reading glasses and examined his friend closely. ‘Do you feel alright, Alfredo? You have gone a very funny colour.’

  Alfredo peered at the photograph.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ he muttered. ‘Holy crap and all the saints.’

  He stood up, letting the photograph fall to the floor. He made for the door of the restaurant, pushing his way past the waiters and out into the street. He got straight into a taxi and drove away at high speed.

  There was silence at the table for a moment.

  ‘What the fuck just happened?’ asked Mike.

  ‘Search me,’ said Sam. “Maybe he forgot something.’

  ‘Maybe he wasn’t feeling well,’ said Gloria. ‘He’d gone a very funny colour. Maybe he’s afraid of snakes.’

  Sam picked up the photograph from the floor. She gently blew on it to remove any dirt and looked again at the snake. Great photograph! What had prompted Alfredo’s weird behaviour? Perhaps he had been drinking before he came to lunch. It would not have been unusual.

  ‘Shall we order?’ she asked. ‘I’m sure we’ll find out what’s wrong one way or another.’

  ‘Yes, I’m starving,’ said Mike. He signalled to the waiter to come over to the table and they ordered their food.

  When their order arrived, they ate with gusto and forgot all about the strange incident with Alfredo. Sam and Gloria shared a crème caramel for pudding and they all ordered coffee.

  They were all contemplating their coffees and sighing contented after-lunch sighs when Alfredo appeared in the door of the restaurant, as suddenly as he had left. He had with him a great sheaf of papers and documents in various stages of repair, a plastic bag of similar materials and books hanging from his arm. The plastic bag was old and greying and looked likely to split at any minute. Alfredo was sweating. He had a strange fanatical look on his face and did not notice that his appearance was drawing comments from the other customers. He staggered over to the table. A waiter, who had been watching his progress, leapt forward to remove the various plates, glasses and empty cups from the table. Alfredo dropped his documents on the not-very-clean tablecloth. Sam could see how they came to be so stained and torn.