by David Dodge
I said, “I’ll make you an offer. I’ll give you a piece of whatever it is—I won’t say how much, but it will be something—if you blow. Get out of Arequipa and leave me alone. Otherwise you can go lay an egg.”
He gave me a hard, level stare. Abuela came out on the porch and yelled that we were late for lunch, and if we didn’t want to eat according to schedule we could move up to the hotel any time we felt like it.
“I’ll take my chances,” Jeff said shortly.
He turned on his heel and walked away.
I didn’t go in to lunch. I spent the afternoon and most of the evening locked in my room operating on one of the prints with a razor blade. It was a slow, tricky job, and took a lot of patience to cut each word clear without clipping another. A little more than two-thirds of the words were in Quechua. All of these I had to cut out and jumble up so that Naharro wouldn’t be able to make anything out of them.
There were two hundred and seventeen slips of paper when I finished cutting, each with one word on it. I couldn’t number the slips of paper I was going to hand him, because it would have given away the sequence, but I had to keep the sequence for myself. While I was trying to work out a scheme, I realized that I was as hungry as a wolf. It was after dinner-time, a second meal missed. I expected Jeff to be making another try at me soon, and I was too tired to think up a safe hiding place for the stuff in the pensión. I didn’t want to walk out through the garden, either, because the trees and bushes along the path grew thickly enough to cover anybody who felt like knocking me over the head and going through my pockets. I stuffed the pergamino and the photographic prints, cut and uncut, between the pages of the picture-magazine, slipped it inside my shirt, put a razor and toothbrush in my pocket, and left by way of the window. At the last minute I took Prescott along for company.
There was a ten-foot drop from the window to a cobblestoned alley running along the back of the pensión. The alley was dark, so I didn’t see the irrigation ditch until I landed in it, ankle deep. I was pretty messy when I reached the hotel, but I felt a lot safer.
They had a room open this time. Before I registered, I borrowed a fresh envelope and went to the washroom to take the magazine out of my shirt and the pergamino out of the magazine. I put the pergamino in the envelope, sealed it, wrote my name across the flap, and gave it to the clerk to put back in the safe. I still had work to do on the prints.
The clerk was twirling the dial of the safe when a hand slipped into the crook of my arm.
“Mystery man!” Julie murmured. “Am I glad to see you!”
8
She was done up like a Christmas tree—over-ripe mouth, beads of mascara thick on her eyelashes, green eyeshadow, a hat with a trailing drape that wound twice around her throat and hung down her back. The only thing missing was a man on a leash.
She said, “Oh, am I glad to see you! Twenty-four hours more in this place and I’d go crazy.”
“No playmates?”
She made a contemptuous gesture that took in the hotel and all of Arequipa.
“A bunch of jerks. I never saw such a country. Do you know where I’ve been?”
“No.”
“Macchupicchu. It was bad enough in Cuzco, but after that I spent three hours bumping over a railroad track in a gasoline baby buggy and another hour on a mule, all to see a bunch of old rocks up on a mountain—with a party of schoolteachers, too. Not a pair of pants in the crowd but the guide, and he stank. It rained coming back, too.”
“Why do you go to those places?”
“Oh, you meet such interesting people, traveling around.” She dug her pointed fingernails into my arm. “Like you. Buy me a drink, mystery man.”
“One. I haven’t had dinner, and I’m hungry.”
“So am I.”
We had two drinks, and then I had to take her to dinner. I couldn’t get rid of her. She was facing a four-day wait in Arequipa for a seat on the Lima plane, and I was the only unattached man on hand. She babbled on about Cuzco and Macchupicchu and the passes the traveling salesman had made at her during the train ride up from Mollendo and the horrible old witch at the pensión who had insulted her and the passes another man had made at her in Cuzco and the passes that a cute boy would have made at her at the hotel in Cuzco if he hadn’t been with that sniffy nurse, the one that had been on the ship…
I stopped eating.
“Berrien’s nurse?”
“I don’t know what his name was. The sick man who had the middle cabin. He wasn’t there, just the nurse and this cute boy named Raul. He was awfully cute. He didn’t need a nurse around, either, but she watched him like a hawk. Whatever happened to the sick man?”
“He died on the ship. What…?”
“Oh, no! I missed all the excitement. How did it happen?”
“He just died. He had a bad heart. What were the nurse and the cute boy doing in Cuzco?”
“What do you think?” She looked at me slyly. “She didn’t wait long to get a new man, did she?”
“Look. If I tell you I know they weren’t in Cuzco just for whatever you think they were there for, can you give me some idea of what they were doing? Did they explore the ruins? Did they go on to Macchupicchu? Did they just hang around the hotel, or what?”
Her eyes narrowed as her featherbrain realized that I was seriously interested. She said, “What do you care, mystery man?”
“I want to know what they were doing.”
“Why?”
“It’s my mystery.”
“I’ll bet that’s what you were doing up on the roof of the ship that night—spying on the nurse.” She smiled wickedly. “Peeping Tom! You should have peeked into my cabin. You would have seen something.”
“I’ll bet I would have, too. What were they doing in Cuzco?”
“You’ll have to trade. Tell me why you want to know, first.”
“She’s my grandmother.”
“I suppose that…”
She stopped. Her eyes sparkled mischievously. She clapped her hands.
“Now I’ve got something that you want, mystery man. Oh, you’re going to have to be nice to me! Tonight we’ll see what kind of excitement there is in this graveyard, and tomorrow…”
“Tonight I’ve got work to do.”
I signaled to the mozo as I stood up. She wasn’t going to tell me anything useful, and she was beginning to get in my hair.
She got in my hair even more when I picked up the picture-magazine holding the photographs. She grabbed it out of my hand.
“So that’s the kind of work you do.” She flipped it open and whistled. “Some…”
The rest of it was almost a shriek. Several people in the dining room turned around to stare. I hadn’t intended to hurt her, but I must have clamped down pretty hard, because I didn’t want her to turn another page and see the prints. When I took the magazine out of her hand, she bared her teeth at me, rubbing her wrist.
“I like rough men, but not too rough,” she said softly. “Don’t ever hurt me like that again, damn you.”
We left the dining room together. She went into the cantina without another word. I went on up to my room.
I had thought out a scheme by then. With a second print of the manuscript as a record sheet, I numbered all the Quechua words in sequence, one to two hundred and seventeen. Then I sorted out the slips that corresponded to numbers one, four, seven, ten, and so on, seventy-two in all. I numbered these on the back from one to seventy-two, but I picked them up at random, so that number one was marked 54, number four was 17, number seven was 33, the sequence mixed all around. As I numbered the slips, I wrote their markings down opposite the true numbers on my control sheet. When I got through, I had one-third of the slips ticketed as neatly as a cold deck of cards. Naharro would have a fine time making anything out of them. And I still had two-thirds of the slips to give him after he finished with the first batch, plus all the Spanish words.
After I had finished, I put the stuff back in the magazine, r
olled up the carpet, and slipped the magazine under the spot where a leg of the bed rested. I put the carpet back, the bed on top of the carpet, myself on the bed, and Prescott’s book on my chest for good measure, with two pillows behind my head and the reading lamp arranged just right.
This time I skipped over the bloody parts and stuck to the stories of treasure. According to Prescott, who didn’t sound like a sucker for tall stories, the Incas had more gold than they knew what to do with. Even the conquistadores never realized how big a jackpot they had hit. Prescott quoted dozens of stories of loot hidden from the Spaniards, although he seemed to find some of the yarns hard to swallow. I didn’t learn anything new about the quipu of the high priest, but there was one tale which Prescott borrowed from an earlier author with his own comment that “…the tradition, in this instance, he thinks well entitled to credit. The reader will judge for himself.”
This was the story:
“It is a well-authenticated report, and generally received, that there is a secret hall in the fortress of Cuzco where an immense treasure is concealed, consisting of the statues of all the Incas, wrought in gold. A lady is still living, dona Maria de Esquivel, the wife of the last Inca, who has visited this hall, and I have heard her relate the way in which she was carried to see it.
“Don Carlos, the lady’s husband, did not maintain a style of living becoming his high rank. Dona Maria sometimes reproached him, declaring she had been deceived into marrying a poor Indian under the lofty title of Lord or Inca. She said this so frequently that don Carlos one night exclaimed, ‘Lady! do you wish to know whether I am rich or poor? You shall see that no lord nor king in the world has a larger treasure than I have.’ Then covering her eyes with a handkerchief, he made her turn around two or three times, and, taking her by the hand, led her a short distance before he removed the bandage. On opening her eyes, what was her amazement! She had gone not more than two hundred paces and descended a short flight of steps, and she now found herself in a large quadrangular hall, where, ranged on benches round the walls, she beheld the statues of the Incas, each of the size of a hoy twelve years old, all of massive gold! She saw also many vessels of gold and silver. ‘In fact,’ she said, ‘it was one of the most magnificent treasures in the whole world!’”
I closed the book on that. Except for the one quotation, Prescott had never mentioned an Inca named don Carlos, even as one of the stooges set on the throne by the Spaniards after they murdered Atahualpa. And I remembered how Naharro had sniffed at stories of lost treasure. But I couldn’t stop thinking of those statues, each the size of a twelve-year-old boy, all of massive gold. I found myself trying to estimate what a twelve-year-old boy would weigh if he was made of solid gold. There had been fourteen genuine Incas. Figuring gold at twenty times heavier than twelve-year-old boys, and twelve-year-old boys at a hundred pounds flat, to be conservative, I got a ton of gold for each statue. Fourteen tons was twenty-eight thousand pounds. Twelve troy ounces to the pound—no, wait a minute. That’s a troy pound. Say fifteen troy ounces to a regular pound—fifteen times twenty-eight thousand—two hundred and eighty thousand plus one hundred and forty thousand—four hundred and twenty thousand ounces—call it four hundred thousand—gold was about thirty-five dollars an ounce—thirty-five times four hundred thousand—fourteen million dollars—two hundred and ten million soles…
I rolled off the bed and went into the bathroom to splash cold water on my face and hands.
The bug had bitten me. I knew why Jeff’s voice had been hoarse and his eyes glittering while he was telling me of Atahualpa’s ransom. Up until then, I had been playing around with Berrien’s manuscript because I hadn’t found anyone with a good claim to it. It gave me something to do with my time, and I still had a thousand dollars to milk out of it. I stopped thinking about the thousand dollars that night, and began to dream of gold, the metal, yellow and soft and heavy, in big shining chunks. I didn’t consciously think of it as my gold, or Berrien’s gold, or Peru’s gold. It didn’t matter whose it was. I just wanted to find it, handle it, see it glitter. I had that fever that cursed Midas.
A knock snapped me out of the pipe dream. I made sure that no bulge showed under the carpet before I turned the key.
It was Julie. She smelled of whisky. Her lipstick was smeared, and her green-shadowed eyes had a glassy look. She pushed by me into the middle of the room.
“H’lo,” she said sullenly.
“Hello.”
“What are you doing?”
“Reading.”
“Looking at pictures of girls?”
“Reading a book.”
“Why don’t you come down to the cantina and have a drink?”
“It’s too late.”
“I think you’re just sniffy, like that sniffy nurse. You’re stuck on her, aren’t you?”
“No.”
“You are, too. It’s a waste of time. She’s got a boy friend.”
“That’s good.”
“You think you’re smart, don’t you?”
“No.”
“Yes, you do. You think you’re just the smartest guy in the whole world—just too smart and too good for anybody.”
She fumbled with her purse, got it open, found a pack of cigarettes, and spilled most of them pulling one out. I held a match for her. She almost burned her false eyelashes off getting a light.
“You think I’m a tramp, don’t you?”
“No.”
“You do, too. Everybody thinks I’m a tramp, just because I like to have fun. Everybody else has a family or a father or a mother or a brother or somebody that wouldn’t let horrible old women tell them that they wear too much lipstick.” She was beginning to cry. “I haven’t got anybody. Nobody cares if I’m a t-tramp or how much lipstick I wear or anything. N-nobody cares. Nobody even wants to buy me a drink in the c-cantina.”
“I’ll buy you a drink tomorrow. You’ve had too many for tonight. Go to bed and sleep it off.”
“I don’t want to go to b-bed.” She wiped her eyes, smearing the mascara. “I’m lonely. I want somebody to talk to.”
She sat down with a bump, nearly missing the chair.
I said, “You can’t stay here.”
“Why can’t I?”
“Because I won’t let you.”
“Going to throw me out?”
She smiled, a slow, drunken, smeary smile.
I couldn’t stand her around much longer. I took the smoldering cigarette away from her and put it out.
“Let’s go to your room. Where is it?”
“What do we want to go to my room for?”
“Never mind. Where is it?”
The smeary smile came back; sly, understanding, expectant. She said, “Down the hall.”
I took her by the arm.
We didn’t meet anyone in the hall, luckily. Once she stumbled and fell into me, knocking the draped hat sideways. I put my arm around her and half carried her to the door. She had the key in her purse. I got it out, unlocked the door, and pushed her inside.
Before I could find the light, she put her arms around me. I held her with one arm, afraid that she would fall, and reached for the light switch with the other. When the lights came on, her eyes were closed. Her head hung back on her shoulders, so that I could see where a line of sun-tan makeup ended on her throat. She mumbled something.
“What?”
“Kiss me, mys’ry man.”
“Open your eyes.”
They opened. I took her by the shoulders and turned her around so that she was facing the mirror of the peinador.
It was a big mirror, nearly full length, and it gave her a good view—smeared lipstick, smeared mascara, cockeyed hat, loose mouth, glassy eyes, rumpled clothes, everything. She rocked there for seconds, looking stupidly at herself.
“Who wants to kiss that?” I said.
Her eyes changed. She put her hands over her face and turned blindly away. The bed caught her below the knees. She fell forward on it, still with h
er hands covering her face.
I lifted her legs up on the bed, took off her shoes, and ran my hands over her to see if she was wearing anything that would stop circulation. She wasn’t. I put a blanket over her and opened a window.
She was looking at me when I stopped at the door. I could see only one eye. It wasn’t fogged, or stupid, or drunken. It was as unblinking and full of hate as a pointed gun barrel.
I switched off the light and closed the door, sure that she would have forgotten all about it by morning.
9
Early the next day, I took my seventy-two numbered slips of paper to Naharro. The toothless chola showed me into his study, where he was waiting for me. I spread the slips out on his desk.
“You can list the translations by number,” I told him. “If there are any duplications, make a cross reference.”
He looked at what I had brought him, his swollen eyelids drooping, and stirred the slips around with his finger.
“Is this all?”
“No. I’ll bring you others when you have finished with these.”
“I suppose the numbering has been arranged?”
“Yes.”
“You do not trust me.”
I didn’t argue with him. He stirred the slips again, picked one up, and studied it.
“Come back tomorrow morning. I will have the translations for you then.”
“Can’t you do it sooner than that?”
“Whatever it is that your document concerns, señor, you say it dates from the Conquest. After four hundred years, another day or two cannot matter much.”
“I am anxious to know what it says.”
“This evening, then. I cannot promise anything earlier.”
“This evening.”
I left him still playing with the slips of paper. His liverish face was sullen.
It was all the same to me how he felt, as long as he did the job. I felt pretty good about everything. It was a bright, clear morning. Later in the day the nevada, the gloomy overcast of the sierra’s short rainy season, would come down from the mountain peaks and hang over Arequipa like a moldy blanket, but at that hour there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, literally or figuratively. In another couple of days I would have the translation of the manuscript and be on my way to wherever it took me. Jeff could be sidetracked when the time came for it, or even sucked along as a decoy for Ana Luz and Raul, who apparently knew enough about the story of the hidden gold to realize that the search for it would have to start in Cuzco. But that was all they knew, and I was pretty sure I could handle them, in Cuzco or anywhere else. Anybody smart enough to manage a crafty old codger like Ubaldo Naharro shouldn’t have any trouble with those two.
