by David Dodge
“Then it’s impossible for me to give it to you until I know what it is. I’m sorry.”
The light went out of her face. She stood up, picked up her bag, and walked away without another word.
The Faucett Airline had a ticket office there in the hotel. A flight left for Arequipa the next morning. I bought a ticket and wired for a reservation at the Hotel de Turismo. Then, because I didn’t feel like sitting around thinking of dead men and the tears in Ana Luz’s eyes, I bought a copy of Prescott’s book in a library on La Colmena and took it to the vermouth, the late afternoon movie, at the Metro. After the vermouth, I had a good dinner and went back to the hotel ready to read about Incas, quipus, Quechuas and conquistadores and see if I could get a clue of some kind to the mysterious manuscript.
The room smelled smoky when I opened my door. I walked in, like a fool, and closed the door behind me. When I turned on the light, Jeff was sitting on the bed pointing a short-barrelled belly-gun at me.
“You sure took your time getting here,” he said.
He had his feet on one of my shirts. The room was mussed up just the way Berrien’s cabin had been, except that Jeff had put the mattress back on the bed so he could sit on it.
I said, “How did you get in?”
“It’s a trade secret. Where is it?”
“Where is what?”
“The package.”
“What package?”
“Don’t stall me. I know you have it.”
“What makes you think so?”
“Berrien didn’t have it. I thought he had slipped it to the nurse, at first, but after I tailed her here from the ship and saw her talking to you, I knew that you were the sleeper.”
“I didn’t see you around when we were talking.”
“You weren’t supposed to. Let’s have it.”
He snapped the fingers of his free hand.
I said, “Did you kill Berrien?”
“That’s a dumb question. Why pick on me?”
“You were the guy in his cabin.”
“Is that so?”
“Nobody else on the ship could have socked me that hard.”
“All right, I was in his cabin. He was dead when I found him.”
“He was alive when you found him. You pointed that gun at him and he died of fright.”
“It’s all the same to me if you buy it or don’t buy it. I’m just telling you he was dead.” He snapped his fingers again. “Now unload—and be careful with your hands.”
He made a lifting motion with the muzzle of the belly-gun.
I reached for the package in my inside coat pocket, using only my finger tips, and tossed it to him. He looked at the broken seals before he put it in his own pocket.
“Make anything out of it?”
“Not yet. I was hoping to find somebody who could.”
“You don’t have to worry now. It’s in the right hands.”
He stood up, motioning me over toward the bed with the gun muzzle.
“I ought to put you to sleep good and proper, but I’m too soft-hearted to slug you,” he said. “I’m just going to tie you up for a while. Don’t get any ideas about putting up a struggle, though, or I might change my mind.”
“Soft-hearted John,” I said. “How did you figure on getting it off the ship if you had found it in Berrien’s cabin?”
“Swim ashore when we rounded La Punta. What do you care, anyway? You ask too many questions. Lie down.”
I lay down on the bare mattress. Jeff used four of my best neckties to spraddle me out with my wrists and ankles tied to the bed frame. I could have broken his neck with a kick after he finished tying my hands and started to work on my feet, but I was a soft-hearted John myself and didn’t want to hurt him. I wished I had when he finished the job and sneered at me.
“Like taking candy from a baby. You didn’t even muss my hair.”
“What’s the percentage?” I nodded my head, which was all I could move, at his gun. “You’re holding the cards.”
“You’re damn right I am.” He patted his pocket. “I know how to play them, too. Now open your mouth, like a good boy.”
He fed me a necktie, and tied a second one around my head to keep me from spitting the first one out. When he was finished, he shoved the gun down inside his belt and waved good-bye from the door.
“So long, junior. You can work out of it if you try hard. See you around.”
I worked out of it in fifteen minutes. It cost me a little skin off my wrists. I was picking at the hard knots on my ankles when somebody knocked.
“In a minute,” I shouted. “I’m tied up.”
He didn’t wait. He pushed the door open, stepped in, kicked the door shut with his heel, and pointed another gun at me. It was my other pal from the Talca, Raul.
“Give it to me!” he said. “Quickly.”
He was nervous. I didn’t like the way he handled the gun. His knuckles were too tight. I said, “I haven’t got it. Jefferson beat you to it.”
“Don’t lie!”
“Look around the room. I didn’t tie myself to the bed like this just to keep from walking in my sleep.”
I was still working on the knotted neckties. He looked around the room, saw my clothes lying on the floor where Jeff had tossed them, and realized that he was too late. The gun drooped. It lifted again when I got my ankles free and stood up.
“Put it away,” I said. “If you can find Jeff, use it on him.”
“That cojudo! How long ago was he here?”
“Quarter of an hour. Now beat it, will you? I’m washed up with the whole business.”
His eyes glittered. He shifted the gun to his left hand.
“Not quite. I haven’t forgotten that you hit me, Colby.” He took a step forward. “I owe you something for that.”
“Get any ideas about paying me back, and you’ll either have to pull the trigger or I’ll take your peashooter away from you and feed it to you butt-first.”
He stopped. He wanted to hit me, but not enough to take the chance that I would argue about it. I wasn’t just being reckless. I knew he wouldn’t pull the trigger—not there in the hotel. He finally made a half-hearted search of the room, still holding the gun on me, kicking my clothes around with his foot and messing them up even worse than Jeff had left them.
I said, “How’s your illegitimate distant cousin this evening?”
His lips tightened. I said, “Tell her that Jeff was the man in Berrien’s cabin. He says that Berrien was dead when he got there, so that extra sleeping pill may not have been such a good idea after all.”
He pretended not to hear. I tried again.
“And tell her that any time she wants you slapped around, just let me know. I’ll be glad to cooperate.”
That got him. He called me five of the dirtiest names in the Spanish vocabulary as he backed out of the room and pulled the door shut between us.
I locked the door, picked up my clothes, threw them into my suitcase; made the bed, and crawled in. Reading didn’t interest me any more. I went to sleep thinking of the quipu and the three sheets of pergamino safely tucked away in the big hotel safe downstairs, and hoping that Jeff would enjoy the comic book I had wrapped up in the package he had worked so hard to get.
6
Arequipa was unexplored territory to me. I knew Lima and the towns along the coast pretty well, but not the Peruvian highlands. It was early Sunday morning when the plane put me down at the airport, and the church bells were ringing. The drive into town, five or six miles from the airport through irrigated terraces of bright-green alfalfa and yellow-green stands of corn, was a concert of bells and jackasses, thousands of them, all screaming at once to welcome the sun. Nobody welcomed me, not even the Hotel de Turismo. They had my wire, but no room.
I wanted to park what I was carrying more than I wanted to park myself. I said to the clerk, “Do you have a safe?”
“A small one, señor.”
“Would it be possible to leave an en
velope with you for safekeeping?”
“There would be a small charge by the management.”
“Clearly.”
I had left the quipu in Lima, figuring it was just extra weight as long as no one could read it. I wrote my name across the flap of the envelope holding the three sheets of pergamino and gave it to the clerk, along with a ten-sol bill the management would never see. After I watched him put the envelope in the safe, I asked him where I ought to go to find a place to hang my hat. He recommended a pensión down the street.
I wasn’t too happy about it when I set out for the pensión. South American pensiones are mostly scratch-houses. I expected to end up at a flea-bin like some of the others I had stayed at, full of smells and dirty kids, with chickens wandering through the comedor. What I found was half an acre of overgrown garden surrounded by a high wall, with a big rambling barn of a house set down in the middle of it. A crusty old dame sitting on the porch eyed me as I came up through the garden lugging my bag.
“What’s your name, sonny?” she asked me, before I could say hello. Her voice had a New England twang.
“Al Colby. I’d like…”
“Had breakfast?”
“Notyet. I…”
“Better get along inside, then. Eat your meals on time or you don’t eat. Leave your bag there.”
“Have you got a…?”
“Twenty soles a day. Don’t tip the servants. They’re a worthless bunch of hounds, and I don’t want ’em getting ideas. Run along, now.”
“Thanks. Where…?”
“You want breakfast or don’t you?”
Right there I gave up trying to slip a word in edgewise. She was an American, the boss of the joint, who had lived in Arequipa for sixty years. Everybody called her Abuela, grandma. She ran a clean place and kept her guests, mostly tourists, wondering how long it would be before they found their bags out in the street. If she didn’t like their table manners, she told them so. I heard from one of the guests that Julie, the blonde fluff who had left the Talca at Mollendo, had stopped off overnight at the pensión on her way up to Cuzco. Right in the middle of dinner, the old dame told her she looked like a fallen woman, and went on to lecture the other guests for a solid hour on the evils of lipstick. She didn’t like interruptions, either. If you dropped a fork, she put the evil eye on you.
I never gave her any trouble. I had breakfast by myself that first morning on the terraza, up on the roof. There was a tremendous snow-capped volcanic cone rearing up behind the town, probably five or ten miles away but looking so close in the thin mountain air that it practically kept me company while I ate. It was all the company I wanted. The prefectura wouldn’t be open on Sunday, so I didn’t have to check in right away, and I probably couldn’t find Naharro until Monday if I tried. All I had to do for the rest of the day was lie around in the garden, eat, sleep, and read The Conquest of Peru.
Up until then, about all I knew of the Conquest was that Francisco Pizarro had managed it, and that his bones rested in a glass case in the first chapel to the right as you enter the cathedral facing the Plaza de Armas in Lima. If Mr. Prescott did him justice, he was the number-one gangster of all time. With a handful of men, fewer than two hundred when they captured the ruling Inca in the middle of his own armies, he conquered the West Coast of South America from Chile to the equator, carried off loot worth tens of millions of dollars, and wiped out an entire civilization in the space of a few years, leaving a record of treachery, cruelty, double-dealing, greed, bravery and shortsightedness unequaled in the history of the world. The book was a thriller in blood and gold. I forgot that I was looking for something that might make Berrien’s manuscript have meaning, and just read, comfortably sprawled in a chair under a tree in the quietest corner of the garden.
Jeff found me there, late in the afternoon.
He moved quietly. I didn’t know that he had caught up with me until he said, “Hello, smart guy.”
I closed the book. He said, “You want to hand it over without a fuss, or shall I take it away from you?”
I held out the book. He slapped it from my hand.
“Don’t give me any more trouble! Hand it over!”
“I forget where I put it.”
He looked around the garden to make sure we were alone. His face was nasty.
“O.K. I’ll just bounce you a little until you remember.”
I suppose that he hadn’t mixed with anybody of his own class for so long that it made him careless. Or maybe he thought that because I hadn’t put up a struggle the first time, I would let him rough me around this time without argument. Anyway, he came at me as wide open as a man in a barber chair.
I stood up and hit him about an inch below the breastbone. It didn’t knock him out, but it paralyzed him. He went down like a plank and lay there, struggling to breathe, his face the same dirty blue Berrien’s had been during his attack. While he was still helpless, I felt inside his belt, to be on the safe side. The gun wasn’t there.
“Keep your hands off me after this,” I said. “I’m tired of being pushed.”
When his lungs began to work again, he got up and brushed his pants. I had picked up the book, but I didn’t open it. I didn’t know what he was going to do. Neither did he. The punch in the belly had cooled him down without curing him. We stood there, eyeing each other like a couple of gamecocks getting ready to jump and slash with the spurs. Little gray doves in the trees over our heads went BR-A-A-A-CK! at us, urging us to fight.
I said, “Before you get any new ideas, I’m not carrying it with me and you can’t find it. I knew you’d follow me, sooner or later.”
He grunted, making another swipe at his pants. The tension began to ease.
“How did you pick up my trail?” I said.
“They knew at the Bolívar that you had left in a Faucett jitney. I followed you to the airport and asked questions.”
“Did you enjoy the comic book?”
He grinned, suddenly.
“I underrated you. I guess I’ve been underrating you all along. Let’s make a deal.”
“What kind of a deal?”
“I’ll give you five thousand dollars for it.”
“No.”
“What will you take?”
“It isn’t mine to sell.”
“It isn’t anybody’s to sell. You just happen to have it, and I want it.”
“I don’t know what it’s worth, then. I’ve got to find out what it is before I do anything with it.”
“How are you going to find out?”
“I don’t know.” I showed him the title of the book I had been reading. “If I get a chance to finish this without any more interruptions, I may make something out of it.”
He didn’t take the hint. He said, “You’ll never get anything out of that.”
“Then I’ll have to find somebody who can translate the—whatever it is I’ve got.”
“The manuscript. Never mind the smokescreen. I know what it is.”
“…the manuscript, and see what it says. There’s a man here in Arequipa who can read Quechua…”
“Not Naharro? You’re not going to Naharro?”
“That’s what I had in mind.”
He groaned.
“You damn fool, Naharro has been after it as long as I have, as long as Berrien has. Every collector in Peru has been looking for it for years. The minute you turn it over to Naharro for translation, you’re through. He can tell you it’s a recipe for apple strudel, if he wants to. You’ll never know the difference, and he’ll have it.”
“He won’t have anything that will do him any good, the way I’m going to give it to him.”
“How are you going to give it to him?”
“It’s another trade secret—like opening hotel-room doors.”
“He’ll piece it together, however he gets it. Don’t go to Naharro, whatever you do. He’s a bigger crook than Berrien ever was. Give it to me. Sell it to me. Or come in with me and I’ll make you more money
than you can count in a million years! We’ll go partners! I tell you, if you give me two days alone with that manuscript, I’ll lead you to…”
He shut up. He had almost become excited enough to spill the beans. I was holding my breath, waiting for him to go on.
I said, “What is it?”
“Why should I tell you?”
“Because I may give you a piece of it, if you play ball. I know the thing is worth money. I’ve got it, and unless an heir to Berrien’s estate turns up, I’m going to keep it. You might be able to cut yourself in by telling me what you know.”
“Half?”
“I’ll tell you when I know how much half is worth.”
“Millions,” Jeff said hoarsely. “Ten millions, twenty millions, fifty millions, God knows how much.” He saw my expression, and grabbed the book from my hand. “You think I’m talking through my hat. How far have you got with this?”
“I’ve covered the first two thousand murders.”
“Did you get to Atahualpa’s ransom?”
“Not yet.”
He opened the book and went through the pages as if he were hunting for something on familiar ground.
“Atahualpa was the last Inca, except for a string of Spanish stooges and hopefuls. Pizarro captured him in Cajamarca. To buy his freedom, Atahualpa offered to fill a room with gold as high as a man could reach. The room—here it is: ‘The apartment was about seventeen feet broad by twenty-two feet long, and the line around the walls was nine feet from the floor. This space was to be filled with gold, but it was understood that the gold was not to be melted down into ingots, but to retain the original form of the articles into which it was manufactured, that the Inca might have the benefit of the space which they occupied. He further agreed to fill an adjoining room of smaller dimensions twice full with silver, in like manner, and he demanded two months to accomplish all this!’”
Jeff flipped a couple of pages.
“The rooms were never filled. Pizarro killed Atahualpa before Atahualpa’s cargadores finished bringing the stuff down from Cuzco, his capital. Pizarro figured he might as well take Cuzco himself and make a clean sweep. But what there was in that one room melted down, according to Prescott, to ‘one million three hundred and twenty-six thousand, five hundred and thirty-nine pesos de oro, which, allowing for the greater value of money in the sixteenth century, would be equivalent, probably, at the present time, to near three millions and a half of pounds sterling, or somewhat less than fifteen millions and a half of dollars.’”
