Island of Thieves

by Josh Lacey

  “Ha-ha.”

  “You should try it. Just once. You might like it.”

  “I have tried it,” I said. “I didn’t.”

  “Did you have real coffee? Or that instant junk?”

  “Both. I didn’t like either.”

  “I suppose you’re still very young. Wait till you’re a bit older and your tastes have developed. Then you’ll start to appreciate the finer things in life.”

  Sometimes my uncle could be very patronizing.

  After breakfast, we checked out of the hotel and drove back to the shop. Uncle Harvey parked the car on the opposite side of the street and we sat there for fifteen minutes, watching people come and go, looking for any sign of Otto’s men. We assessed everyone: the guy with a squawking chicken in each hand, the woman with a baby tucked into her woolen shawl, even the little old lady who could only walk with the aid of a wooden stick. Any of them could have been spying for Otto, but my uncle was sure they weren’t. I hoped he was right.

  We went into the shop, which was a junk shop in the real sense of the word. It was crammed full of old trash, as if someone had just scooped up whatever they happened to find—rusty farm implements, computer keyboards, chairs, clothes, books, postcards, old phones—and dumped all of it in here, not stopping to wonder if anyone might be interested in buying it. Sitting in the middle of all this junk was a creepy-looking man with a twirly mustache and eyebrows that met in the middle. He was reading a newspaper. When we came through the door, he gave us a long stare over the top of his paper, then said, “Buenos días.”

  “Buenos días,” replied my uncle. “My name is Harvey Trelawney. I was here a week or so ago. Do you remember me?”

  The man inspected Uncle Harvey for a moment, then smiled. He was missing both his front teeth and he spoke with a lisp. “You are Inglés? You buy the jewels? Yes?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Welcome. My name is Rodolfo, and this is my shop. Please, come, sit. You want to buy one more necklace?”

  “Actually, no, I’m not interested in another necklace. I wondered if you could tell me a little more about this.” Uncle Harvey opened his blue folder and took out the piece of paper. “When you sold me that necklace, it came wrapped in this piece of paper. I didn’t actually look at it till I got back home. But once I did, I realized the words are English.”

  “Inglés? Yes?” Rodolfo was intrigued. He held the paper carefully with both hands and carried it over to the light. “Very interesting. You want more?”

  “Have you got more?” asked Uncle Harvey.

  “No.”

  “Can you get more?”

  “Is possible.”

  “Oh, come on, Rodolfo. Let’s not play games. Where did you get it? Can you remember?”

  “Of course.”

  “So where was it?”

  Rodolfo smiled. “For the necklace, you get a good price, no? How much? Two hundred dollars?”

  “Seventy,” said my uncle.

  “Seventy. That is a good price.”

  “Oh, I see. It’s like that, is it? Well, here you go.” My uncle opened his wallet and pulled out a ten-dollar bill.

  (Here’s a piece of free advice from Uncle Harvey: Wherever in the world you might be going, it’s always best to travel with American currency. In an emergency, everyone wants dollars. He had five hundred of them in his wallet. Plus a grubby stash of the local currency—soles.)

  He offered the money to Rodolfo. “Will you tell us where you got it?”

  “Of course. But ten dollars . . . This is not a good price.”

  “How much do you want?”

  “Let us say . . .” Rodolfo paused for a moment. “A thousand dollars.”

  “A thousand! Are you crazy? I’m not asking for much, Rodolfo. Just a little tiny piece of information. Go on, take my ten dollars and tell me what I want to know.”

  They went back and forth like this for a few minutes and eventually agreed on twenty dollars. Rodolfo pocketed the money, handed the page back, and told us what he knew. It wasn’t much. He had bought the necklace from an old man, a farmer, who came into the shop.

  “What’s his name?” asked my uncle. “Where does he live?”

  “I show you. Come, we will go there together, you and me.”

  “We don’t need a guide,” said Uncle Harvey.

  “Yes, yes. You must have guide. This place is difficult. Is dangerous. You need one guide. I will help you.”

  “Just draw us a map,” said Uncle Harvey.

  “Is not possible.”

  “Why not?”

  “Is not possible. Come, we go now. I will guide you.”

  “I’ll pay you for a map.”

  “How much?”

  “How about another twenty dollars?”

  “How about five hundred?”

  They were going at it again, arguing over the price. Rodolfo also asked all kinds of questions, trying to discover why my uncle was so interested in the necklace and the paper, but Uncle Harvey told him nothing. Eventually Rodolfo seemed to realize that he wasn’t going to get anywhere and agreed on a fee of forty more dollars. Uncle Harvey handed over the money and Rodolfo drew a map for us, showing the rough location of the old man’s farm, four or five hours’ drive away. Before handing over the map, he made one final attempt to join us, saying that the mountains were very dangerous and without his help we would probably spend days driving up the wrong roads, getting lost, wasting time, failing to find whatever it was that we wanted so desperately. Uncle Harvey smiled, folded up the map, and said, “Thanks for your concern, Rodolfo, but you don’t have to worry about us. We’ll be fine.”

  9

  We drove for hours along tiny roads that led us out of the lush valley and up into the hills. The air grew colder, and with each bend of the road, the craggy mountaintops looked a little closer. A couple of hours from the town, we passed a patch of old brown snow, and then, soon afterward, another newer, cleaner, whiter patch. I complained about the cold, but Uncle Harvey refused to turn on the heater in the car. He said it used up too much fuel. He reluctantly agreed to stop by the side of the road so I could get a sweatshirt from my bag in the trunk.

  Rodolfo’s map was so vague that we weren’t quite sure when—or if—we would reach our destination, but after about five hours of steady driving, we came to a rickety old house clinging to the side of the valley. It fit the description Rudolfo had given us. Geese and chickens were wandering freely through the yard, and an evil-looking mule was tethered to a post. Two scrawny dogs sprinted to meet us, snarling and growling so ferociously that I was seriously worried they were going to take a chunk out of my leg. They were followed by an old woman, bent double, leaning on a wooden stick. She shushed the dogs and blinked as if she was trying to remember where she might have seen us before.

  Uncle Harvey talked to her in simple English, asking about the necklace. She shook her head, not understanding a word, and started jabbering away in her own language. He shrugged his shoulders and said, “No entiendo, no entiendo.” They went on like this for a minute or two, and then he yanked a piece of paper and a pen from his pocket and drew a picture of a necklace. He opened his wallet and pulled out a handful of bills. Seeing the money, the old woman grinned and put up her hand, telling us to wait there, and hobbled into her house. She came back a few minutes later carrying a long silver necklace with a neat little cross on the end. It was nice enough, but not what we were looking for.

  “Muchos gracias,” said Uncle Harvey, handing the necklace back to the little old lady. “Adiós.” He winked at me as if to say: There you go—I can say a few words of the local lingo. All is not lost.

  We drove up into the hills, higher and higher.

  We passed a man standing by the side of the road with a donkey and a wicker basket filled with potatoes. We showed him the picture of the necklace. He shook his head and waved us onward.

  The car plunged through deep puddles and bounced over potholes, shaking us i
n our seats.

  The air was colder. The sky was darker. The mountains towered over us.

  We stopped at every farm, quizzing the owners, asking if they had sold a silver necklace to Rodolfo, the antiques dealer with the twirly ’stache.

  No one spoke any English, so our conversations took ages. We had to say everything in sign language and drawings and the few words of Spanish that Uncle Harvey managed to remember.

  We were offered a lot of jewelry. One farmer tried to sell us a goat. Another offered us each a glass of warm milk.

  Wherever we went, I heard the word gringo. Uncle Harvey told me what it meant. Gringo is the Spanish word for a foreigner, a tourist, a white person. In other words: us.

  I began to wonder if we’d made a mistake. Maybe we should have stuck with Otto. He might be a murderous criminal, but at least he could speak Spanish. Or should we have accepted Rodolfo’s offer? With him in the car, guiding us, would we have found the farm hours ago? Thinking about Rodolfo, I wondered if he’d sent us on a wild-goose chase. He must have guessed we were searching for something valuable. Wouldn’t he be tempted to take it for himself? He could have pocketed our money, drawn a fake map, pointed us up the wrong mountain, and waited till we were out of sight, then headed off in the right direction himself, going back to the guy who had sold him the necklace. Meanwhile we’d spend a few days driving around some completely different part of the Andes, searching for a farm that didn’t even exist.

  The sun sank behind the mountains. Darkness flooded the sky. Our headlights illuminated a little slice of road ahead of us and nothing more. One false move and our wheel would slip over the precipice, taking the rest of the car with it. Uncle Harvey could only drive about five miles an hour. I was tempted to get out and walk. I probably would have gotten there quicker. And I wouldn’t die if the car went over the edge of the cliff.

  “We’re lost,” I said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Uncle Harvey. “I know exactly where we are.”

  “Where are we?”

  He didn’t answer that.

  “What if we run out of gas?” I said.

  “We won’t.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Sure as eggs is eggs,” said Uncle Harvey.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means we’re going to be fine and you should stop worrying so much.”

  “But I am worried,” I said. “We can’t drive all night. Where are we going to stop? Are we going to sleep out here? In the car?”

  “Oh, calm down,” said Uncle Harvey. “We’ll find somewhere.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because we will. Trust me, Tom. I’ve been in situations like this enough times before. Something always turns up.”

  I didn’t believe him—I thought we would have to spend the whole night sleeping in the car—but not long afterward, the road curved and our headlights gleamed over a small building. A shepherd’s shack, perhaps, or an old abandoned barn. It looked uninhabited; there weren’t any lights in the windows. But it had four walls and a roof, and that was enough for us.

  “We’ll sleep there,” said Uncle Harvey. “We can carry on at dawn. I don’t like driving on this road in the dark.”

  “Me neither.”

  A bumpy path led through the fields to the shack. As we shuddered and juddered up to the front door, an old couple appeared in the doorway. They must have heard our engine and seen our headlights. The building wasn’t a barn. Or abandoned. Someone lived there.

  We got out and talked to them.

  That morning, I’d found a useful phrase in the back of the guidebook: Teine un cuarto? Do you have a room? I repeated it several times. The old man nodded and grinned, his teeth gleaming in the candlelight.

  Uncle Harvey pulled a few bills from his wallet and offered them to the old man, who handed them to his wife. She flicked through them, counting them quickly, then pushed open the door and welcomed us inside.

  The farm had no electricity, so there was no phone, no TV, no lights, and no heating. That night was cold. There was no moon. A few candles and a flickering fire provided the only light and heat in the house. The old folks had eaten already, but they gave us some leftover boiled potatoes mixed with chopped raw onions. That doesn’t sound very appetizing, I know, but it was surprisingly tasty. We couldn’t speak a word of one another’s languages, but we managed to communicate with a few signs and gestures, explaining we were “Americano” and asking if they had sold a necklace to Rodolfo. They shrugged their shoulders, not understanding what we were trying to say, and gestured for us to finish our potatoes.

  I was sharing a room with Uncle Harvey. We went to bed in darkness, lighting our way with a little stub of a candle, so we couldn’t see much more than the outline of the two beds that the old woman had prepared for us. Actually, they weren’t really beds at all. They were just thick woolen blankets spread out on the ground, plus a couple of cushions each. I thought I’d never be able to sleep.

  A voice came out of the gloom. “Night, Tom.”

  “Good night, Uncle Harvey.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “Sorry. Good night, Harvey.”

  “Good night.”

  10

  There were no curtains over the window, and no glass, either, so I don’t know what woke me first, the sunlight or the noise of chickens cackling and scuffling in the dust outside. My hip ached. My legs, too. That’s what happens when you spend the whole night sleeping on a cold stone floor.

  I glanced at my uncle. He was still snoozing.

  I needed to pee, but I didn’t want to wake him, so I decided to stay in bed as long as I could. I lay there, mulling over the events of the last couple of days, wondering if I’d made a terrible mistake, flying halfway around the world with my uncle. I was just wondering if I’d ever see my own home again when my eyes focused and I suddenly realized what I was looking at.

  I sat up and stared. Then I laughed aloud.

  I threw aside the blanket, stepped across the room, and shook Uncle Harvey’s shoulder.

  He groaned and rolled over. “Urgh. What time is it?”

  “Look at this,” I said.

  He reached for his watch. “Oh, it’s too early. Leave me alone.” And he pulled the blanket back over his head.

  “You’ve got to look at this.”

  “Give me five more minutes.”

  “Come on. Take a look.”

  With a sigh, he sat up. “What’s the problem?”

  I pointed at the wall. “Look at the wallpaper.”

  “What about it?”

  “Just look at it.”

  Uncle Harvey peered at the wall. He rubbed his eyes and stared harder. Then he threw aside his blanket too and sprang to his feet. “I don’t believe it!”

  “You see?”

  “Ha! This is fantastic! You’re a genius!”

  “Thanks.”

  The wallpaper wasn’t wallpaper at all. It was pages from a journal—from the journal—written in the same spidery handwriting as the page in Uncle Harvey’s blue folder.

  He stood on his bed and ran his hands over the wall, stroking the paper, then found a loose corner and gave it a gentle tug.

  I said, “Shouldn’t we ask those old folks before we tear down their wallpaper?”

  “I suppose we should,” said Uncle Harvey, sounding surprised, as if the thought had never occurred to him.

  He pulled on his clothes and went next door. I could hear him trying to communicate with the old couple. He returned soon with a pan of boiling water. “I bought the lot,” he said. “For twenty dollars.” He winked at me and got to work.

  11

  Removing the wallpaper took most of the morning.

  Uncle Harvey did it alone. He didn’t trust me to help. He said I’d rip the pages. I thought he was actually much more likely to mess them up than I was, but I didn’t complain. He was having a miserable time, steaming and pulling and scraping each
page millimeter by millimeter. The room got hotter and hotter. His face went bright red and big pools of sweat spread across his shirt.

  Some of the pages faced outward, showing their words to the world, and others had been stuck facedown to the wall. As he peeled them off, Uncle Harvey couldn’t help leaving a few scraps behind, littering the plaster with tiny bits of paper and the faded impressions of old ink. We’d just have to hope those weren’t the words that we needed.

  The old woman summoned us for breakfast. It was a loaf of bread, two boiled eggs, and a tin of sardines, shared between the four of us and served on cracked white plates. She gave us cups of coffee, too. Uncle Harvey said his was disgusting, but he drank it anyway. I didn’t touch mine.

  We went back to work. The old folks popped their heads around the door to watch what we were doing. They whispered to each other. I could imagine exactly what they were saying. These foreigners are crazy! If they’ve got so much money to throw around, why do they want this old wallpaper? Why don’t they just go to the market and buy themselves a few nice fat goats?

  While my uncle was finishing off the wallpaper, I searched the rest of the house, hunting for any final pages that might have eluded us.

  I found five.

  The first was folded and wedged under a table, stopping it from wobbling.

  Another was jammed in a crack in a window, keeping out a draft.

  The third, fourth, and fifth were in the bathroom.

  They were on a shelf just to the side of the toilet, held in place by a stone. There was a roll of grubby toilet paper there too, but I suppose they kept the pages for emergencies. The nearest shop must be miles away.

  Great. That would be just our luck. There’s priceless treasure buried on an island, but we can’t find it because a Peruvian peasant wiped his butt with the directions.

  I came out of the bathroom and ran into the old man, who was carrying a bundle of sticks in his arms. He dumped his sticks by the fire, pointed at the papers in my hands, and said something that I couldn’t understand.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Don’t speak Spanish.”