by David Dodge
Jeff slammed the book shut.
“That was written a hundred years ago.” His eyes burned. “Today, it would be nearer thirty million—just the bullion alone. Nobody can say what the stuff would be worth in its original form—plate, jewelry, statues, ornaments that collectors and museums all over the world would bid for. You saw that pot I picked up in Mollendo, two dollars worth of silver with animal figures hammered into it. I sold it yesterday morning in Lima for seven thousand five hundred soles—and I could have got more by shopping around except that I was in a hurry to follow you. That was silver. This is gold—pounds of it, tons of it, mountains of it, nobody knows how much! Nobody can say what it’s really worth! Pick a figure out of the air!”
“I still don’t get it. What does the manuscript have to do with Pizarro’s loot, if he got away with it? Didn’t he take it out of the country?”
“He took what he could get. It was a drop in the bucket compared to what he missed! Every ounce of gold in Peru—and there were mines working all over the country—belonged to the Incas, the ruling family, because they were children of the sun and gold was the sun’s tears. They had no currency and no need for it. They made statues with it, vases, ornaments, jewelry. They paved the floors of their temples with it. In Cuzco, they ran gutters of solid gold around the Temple of the Sun to carry off rainwater, and set gold plates into the stone walls just for sparkle. Silver was so common that the conquistadores used it to shoe their horses. When Pizarro killed Atahualpa and set out to loot Cuzco, the Inca priests knew what was coming. They hid tons of treasure, fifty times as much as they had sent down to Cajamarca for the ransom—buried it, dumped it into lakes, threw it into rivers—before they ran. The high priest, the Villac Umu, kept a record of the hiding places so that it could be recovered after the Spaniards were driven out of the country. He couldn’t write, but he made a quipu, a message-string, to help him remember the details. When he died, he passed instructions and the quipu on to his successor. There was nobody to follow the second high priest. The line died with him. But he had learned to write. He wrote the whole story on a dozen pieces of parchment, wrapped them around the quipu, and died holding the message in his hand because he had no one to give it to.”
“How many pieces of parchment?”
“Twelve. You ought to know. You’ve got them.”
“That’s right. Go ahead.”
“The message disappeared when the last high priest died. Garcilasso de la Vega, who was a nephew of Atahualpa, spent a lifetime looking for it, and wrote a history of the Conquest in which he tells the story. But nobody ever heard of the manuscript again until some fool hacendado in Chile wrote to the National Museum of Archaeology in Lima saying he had come across a strange parchment and an Incan quipu that might interest the museum, at a price. While the museum was fiddling around trying to make up its mind, Berrien got wind of it somehow. I was keeping an eye on Berrien because—for my own reasons—and when he went to Chile himself, I knew it was something big. He never traveled any more than he had to. I followed him. He paid the hacendado five thousand dollars American for the thing. I found that out afterward, talking to the hacendado. From what he told me, and from what I knew about Berrien, there was only one manuscript he would have paid that much for. I booked passage on the Talca so I could get it away from him. You know the rest of it.”
I didn’t know the rest of it. I said, “What was your grudge against Berrien, and why were you keeping an eye on him?”
“It doesn’t matter now.”
“It matters to me. Let’s have it.”
He shrugged.
“He gypped me on a deal. He was a fence. The government lays first claim to all archaeological discoveries, and Berrien made good money buying stuff, or taking it on consignment, from sharp-shooters who picked up odds and ends here and there and couldn’t dispose of them any other way. I was one of the sharpshooters. I opened a chullpa, a grave, up near Macchupicchu, and found a couple of pretty good pieces of jewelry—small stuff, gold and emeralds, easy to market. Berrien took it from me on consignment. The next thing I heard, the government had confiscated it. Berrien said his foot slipped when he tried to sell it, but I found out afterward that he had made a deal to surrender my stuff if they would look the other way while he disposed of some other stuff of his own. I was going to pinch the manuscript from him at my first chance, and he knew it.”
“Did you kill him?”
“I told you once, no. He was dead when I got into his cabin. Before he learned I was aboard, I found out from the nurse that she gave him sleeping pills, and I was watching his porthole all night from the messroom to see his lights go off. I was about five minutes behind you and the Englishman when you left the game. I ducked into Berrien’s cabin, closed the ports, and searched the place. I knew he was dead and not sleeping when I lifted him out of his bunk to move the mattress. It made me nervous, or I wouldn’t have knocked over the bell. You came rushing in with the nurse, and I clipped you. That’s all.”
I took a couple of minutes to chew over what he had told me. He sat and watched me, while the little gray doves went BH-A-A-A-CK! at each other in the trees over our heads and the snow-capped peaks of the sierra behind the town turned pink and rose from the reflection of a sunset that looked like the fires of hell burning on the horizon—or the flames with which the conquistadores had burned Incas alive after they stopped being useful. Prescott’s blood and thunder was still on my mind.
Jeff would have made a good conquistador himself. He was tough, ruthless and gold-hungry. I didn’t know whether or not to believe his story about Berrien, but I was pretty sure he wouldn’t have let the old man’s life stand in his way of getting the manuscript—or anybody’s life, including my own. He was going to be troublesome if I didn’t cut him in. And I needed help to find out if my three pieces of the manuscript were enough to lead to something. The only real question in my mind was whether I wanted Jeff’s help or somebody else’s.
I said, “Did you know that the nurse was trying to get the package away from me?”
“No.” He was plainly surprised. “How did she get on to it? Berrien was as close-mouthed as a clam about his business.”
“She knew about it, all right. I think she sent a radio message to that young peruano, Cornejo, to meet the ship at Mollendo and give her a hand. He tried to take it from me with a gun in Lima the same night that you did.”
“I wonder who he is? I know all the collectors in Peru. I never heard of anybody named Cornejo.”
“He might be another sharp-shooter.”
“I know most of the sharp-shooters, too. He must be a new one. But if he’s trying for it, you’re going to need the kind of help I can give you.” Jeff held out his hand. “Make a deal with me, Colby. Give me half and I’m your man. I can translate the manuscript as well as anybody else, I know the racket inside out, and I can handle plenty of trouble. How about it?”
I looked at his outstretched hand. It had been a fist when it knocked me silly in Berrien’s cabin. And I still remembered the hard knots it had tied around my wrists and ankles.
I said, “I’ll think about it—carefully.”
7
Besides jackasses and church bells, another sound I learned to associate with Arequipa was the gurgle of running water. The municipalidad, city and surrounding farms, sprawled along the bed of a river that poured down out of the sierra and laid a twisting green streak across the bare desert that stretches from the Andes to the sea throughout the length of Peru. Every inch of the river bed was under cultivation. The Arequipeños had tapped the river higher up with an irrigation ditch that brought the water by gravity to a point above the town, and night and day you could hear water gushing through sluices down across the chacras, the garden patches that fed eighty thousand people and their livestock. The irrigation ditch marked a line like a stretched string between the bare, burned desert above and the rich greenness of market gardens and alfalfa patches below.
One
of the sluices fed the garden of the pensión. It ran under my window. The night after I talked to Jeff, I finished reading Prescott. The last few hundred murders, tortures, burnings and massacres were too much for me. I fell asleep and dreamed that I was listening to the gurgle of a stream of blood flowing through a gold trough that started in the Temple of the Sun in Cuzco and ended somewhere outside my dream. A lot of people were in the dream: Pizarro, Atahualpa, Berrien, Ana Luz, Cornejo, Jeff. There was fighting, and men in golden armor on silver-shod horses chopped at me with jeweled swords while I tried to run with half a ton of gold in my arms. I woke up dripping with sweat that I thought was my own blood, for a minute. I hadn’t had a nightmare like that since I was a kid.
But it would have taken a lot more than a nightmare to stop me after I had listened to Jeff’s story of the last high priest. When I had checked in at the prefectura, I looked up Ubaldo Naharro’s address in the phone book. His house turned out to be a big place in the Vallecito district, between the plaza and the river. It was built of sillar, the solidified volcanic ash that cuts like hard cheese. The entrance was an Incan temple doorway, flat lintel and all, covered with intertwined carvings of animal figures, faces, vines, snakes and what have you. One of the snakes had a pushbutton where his eye should have been.
I pushed it. A chola with no front teeth let me in, asked my name, and went to call don Ubaldo.
He surprised me. From what I knew about old-line conservative peruanos, I expected to get at the best a stiff bow and a chilly, polite welcome, probably standing in the hall while I told him my business. Instead, he shook my hand, took me into his study to talk, and offered me one of the black stinkers peruanos call cigarettes. If he was the crook that Jeff had said he was, at least he had good manners.
The study was quite a place. The walls were lined with books in five languages, mostly about Incas and the Conquest. I recognized a translation of Prescott among the others. The windows were barred with heavy iron rejas. On top of the bookcases stood a gold florero, something like the one Berrien had taken out of Chile, a gold ceremonial mask, several good silver pieces, and a stone idol. A tall glass case in the corner held a mummy, all skin and bones except for gold breastplates, a hammered plate of gold over the loins, and gold jewelry at the ears, neck, wrists and ankles. A feather mantle in good condition was framed on the wall. On the desk stood a microscope, a big reading glass, and an old leather-bound book falling apart at the seams.
Naharro himself was a stocky man with the yellow skin and swollen eyelids that go along with chronic liver trouble. He was as bald as a cueball, either because he had no hair at all or shaved what little he did have. His lack of hair made it hard to judge his age. He was quite a bit older than I was. That was all I could make out of him.
He spoke castellano like a Spaniard. After the preliminaries, I said, “A man at the Inca museum in Lima gave me your name. He told me that you could read ancient Quechua.”
“That is true.”
“I have a document, partly in Quechua, that I want translated. Can I hire you to do it?”
“What is the nature of the document?”
“I’m not sure. That is why I want it translated. I think that it dates from about the time of the Conquest.”
“I can translate it for you, if it is readable. I will charge you nothing. Such things are my interest.”
“You will not know what it says.”
He looked at me sharply. “What do you mean?”
“You will not see the entire document. You will see portions of a photograph containing the words I want translated in such order as I may give them to you.”
He didn’t like that. He said, “It would be impossible. Without knowing the sentence structure, nobody could make a translation.”
“You could tell me if a particular word meant horse or dog or rabbit, couldn’t you?”
“Probably. But…”
“That is all I want. I can connect the words myself.”
“Is the document so—secret, then?”
“I have reason to believe that it contains valuable information.”
“A guide to lost Inca treasure, perhaps?”
“Perhaps.”
He shook his head.
“There are hundreds of such stories, señor. Every borrachón on the West Coast has one he will sell you for a drink and a handful of soles. I have investigated several of them myself. They are all fairy stories. But if you believe that there is something in the document which I may turn to my own use, I can assure you that my reputation as a…”
“I do not question your reputation, señor. It is simply that I do not want anyone but myself to know what the document says. I am willing to pay whatever fee you wish to charge for a translation on my own terms.”
I thought he was going to turn me down. He fiddled with the microscope on the table, making the barrel slide up and down on its guides, frowning at nothing. Finally he said, “Do you have the material with you?”
“No. I will bring it tomorrow, if you accept my offer.”
“Bring what you wish in the morning. I will see what I can do, although you make it unnecessarily difficult.”
“And the fee?”
He waved his hand.
“The fee is not important. Perhaps I will charge you nothing.” He looked at me under what would have been his eyebrows if he had had any. “Another of my interests is working puzzles.”
I wasn’t afraid that he would make anything out of the puzzle I was going to give him. I went back uptown and hunted around the plaza until I found a store in the Portal de Flores that stocked photographic supplies. The place was jammed full of electrical equipment, radios, record players, cameras, books, magazines, all the luxury imports that ninety-five percent of the population couldn’t touch in a million years. There was a sign over one of the counters that guaranteed twenty-four-hour delivery on films left for development.
I asked the girl who came to wait on me if there was a dark-room attached. She thought I was making her some kind of a proposition, at first, but she finally called the manager. He said yes, there was a dark-room. He was pretty doubtful about letting me use it. We settled at twenty-five soles an hour, plus costs.
I went on up to the hotel, got the envelope out of the safe, and took it back to the dark-room. The house photographer volunteered to give me a hand. I didn’t see any harm in it, as long as I was there to make sure he didn’t get away with an extra print. We peeled off our coats and went to work.
He had a pretty good set of equipment. We photographed each sheet of parchment separately, first with a floodlight square on, then at an angle and finally from behind. When we blew the prints up to about double the original size, one set looked as good as the original. I was ready to quit.
The photographer said, “I can do better if you wish me to, señor.”
“How?”
“Here, where the ink has faded. And here, where it has flaked away. With infra-red, I can bring back the scratches of the pen, if they are there.”
“Is there infra-red film in Arequipa?”
“Of a surety. We stock it here in the almacén.”
He went to get it.
It was pretty old, but we tried it. We borrowed half a dozen electric heaters from the front of the store, searchlight-shaped things with a polished metal reflector focusing the rays of a single heating element, and set up the whole battery on a table in the darkroom. It got so hot in that stuffy little cubbyhole when all six heaters were going full blast that I was afraid the film emulsions would melt. But the photographer, his shirt sticking to his back and his face streaming sweat in the dull red glow of the heaters, shot a whole pack of film at my three pieces of pergamino before we got out and cooled off.
When we developed his negatives, I knew I could throw my own away. The infra-red had picked up every scratch that the pen had made. It had picked up a lot of other scratches, too, as well as the crisscross of lines made by the fiber of the parchment itself, bu
t the message was there—complete, as far as it went. There was still no beginning and no end.
We made three blow-ups of the film. I burned everything else in a wastebasket and gave the photographer fifty soles for his help. After I had settled up with the boss, I carried the wet prints away with me in a picture magazine lined with blotting paper. The magazine was one of those Mexican things with a bosomy woman on the cover, full of smutty jokes and pictures of girls in G-strings and black stockings. It was the right size to hold the prints, whatever anybody thought of my literary tastes.
I was so anxious to get started that I didn’t bother to go back to the hotel to leave the pergamino in the safe. I wished I had when I ran into Jeff, prowling restlessly around the garden of the pensión. He couldn’t have known what I was doing, but he suspected plenty.
“Where have you been?” he growled at me.
“What’s it to you?”
“You’ve been to see Naharro, you sucker. You might as well donate the manuscript to him and go home.”
“You might as well go home yourself. I’ve got everything under control.”
His eyes narrowed. They flicked uncertainly to the magazine under my arm, then back to my face.
“I thought I was going to get a cut.”
“Maybe you are. That doesn’t mean I need your help.”
“You think you can handle it yourself?”
“I know I can handle it myself.”
I wanted to brush him off, once and for all. I didn’t trust him, and he made me nervous hanging around. I didn’t trust Naharro, either, but I could handle one crook better if another one wasn’t sniffing at my heels all the time.
