Then she went from shelf to shelf, applying the long, soft bristles of a duster on the wares. Tami cleared the inevitable accumulation of cobwebs, occasional insects that made the deer heads on the walls their home.
When her rounds were over, she could then go in the back where Mr. Rodriguez slouched on a sofa watching TV, an unread newspaper over his lap, and root beer in his hand. She'd say good morning, and Roddy would ask if she had a good night. Was there a man in her bed? Did the man prove his worth in bed? Would Tami take recommendations? And some other old man trivial stuff like that.
Tami made her own joke by saying, "As long as it isn't yourself that you are recommending."
She'd be at the back of the counter to receive customers that almost always never came until late in the afternoon. Students mostly, research book heads, and sometimes when she was fortunate, a journalist looking to authenticate some information in old newspapers. Newspapers dated as far back as 1932; pamphlets, three pages long of news details of the Colombian war, and a dispute over the Amazonas department and its capital Leticia.
Tami found them to be incredible killjoys. She read Richard Renshaw's The Day it Rained to kill time. But time hardly ever died when you needed it to the most. By late morning, she could hear old Roddy's guttural snore, froglike and quite uncomforting.
Tami turned her novel on its face on the counter, checked through the hazy glass windows to make sure no one was about to come into the shop. Then she started towards that stairway at the back, beside the pile of carpets. She looked in on Roddy on the couch. His head had fallen on his shoulder. Soon dribble would drip down his blue kaftan. The TV was still on. A politician had promised the people of Cuzco something new in the coming season.
"Roddy?"
Roddy was dead to Tami as far as her hearing was concerned. Good. She went up the stairs. The wood made disjointed tones under her feet. Roddy hadn't brought her up here as part of the tour. Now she knew why.
She stood in front of a room without a door. The room was full of trashed furniture, old books, broken artifacts, papers, old clothes, and a thick smell of dry decay. She spat on the floor between her feet.
Tami pushed a broken grandfather chair out of the way with her feet.
Where the wood fell off, a big old book lay in its place. Tami recalled seeing an encyclopedia once. Gabriel, her late husband, had brought it home one rainy night. He had bought it from a store like this. Gabriel hadn't told her why he needed a book you couldn't read for fun. This book looked just like Gabriel's encyclopedia. Only this one had a Spanish title.
A Comprehensive History of Peru.
Tami picked up the book. There was a heap of other things there, an assortment of unwanted stuff, debris from an old man's fall from youth.
The cover was thick with dust. Tami blew them off, and she closed her eyes and held back the tickling of an impending sneeze deep in her nose.
She sat on the stair and flipped the pages for twenty minutes, allowing herself some fascination with Peruvian history. A tennis racket-shaped artifact thought to be extremely valuable caught her attention. She stared at it for a full minute before closing the book and returning it to its place in the rubble.
As she was about to leave, something under the rubble caught her eye again. It was the head of some artifact, the rest of it hidden under an old mattress.
The bell rang downstairs as she was about to go down to see.
She promised to check again as she went down to attend to the customer.
But Tami Capaldi would forget about the artifact until two days later.
—
Further off down this street, and incidentally so, a beaten Ferrari, pumped beyond recognition, pulled up in front of the auto shop where Leno sat with his other friends mourning the heat.
Reno had long recovered from the loss of his gold. Although, he suspected that the said loss occurred between the time he arrived in town from the hills and when he went to sleep on the bench in the shop. But he was happy to be alive. His mother didn't have to come looking for him; he wasn't missed that much.
When Reno was gone, Leno went over to the telephone and called a friend. That friend stepped out of the scrap Ferrari.
That friend was called Lee. He wasn't Asian by any stretch of resemblance. These kids just thought up a hard name for themselves, and this particular one thought Lee was a hard name.
Lee bounced into the shop in old timberland shoes, tight denim shorts that choked his penis against his left thigh. He also wore a white tank top that lost its elasticity around the neck long ago.
He hollered, “My man, Leno!”
Leno shook hands with him. Lee threw the rest of his greetings to the other workers.
"Did someone die?" Lee asked.
Leno said everything was as yellow as peaches. Leno looks at the Ferrari. "Any more problems with the crankshaft?"
"Crankshaft's okay," Lee said, "but I'd like if it bounced like those cars in the movies, you know, the backside bumps up like so."
Lee demonstrated with his lean buttocks and thin hands. Lee was a scrawny boy but with enormous strength in his body. He leaned towards Leno's ear. "I work for him now."
"For who?"
"Oscar."
"No."
"Yes, and I start tomorrow.”
"Doing what?"
Lee shrugged. "You know, anything he asks me to do."
Leno sighed too. He has known Lee from grade school. The boy had lost his father in a factory accident where he worked in the battery company in Cusco. Some explosion from gas or whatever; the facts were now hazy. Lee had easily slipped into life in the street while Leno had gone on to work one small job after the other. Then, one day last month, Lee had ridden the Ferrari up to the auto shop to be fixed. He'd bought it off a warlord’s son.
But his news was not as heartbroken for Leno as he expected. As long as Lee was in the street that he knew, it was okay.
"Come on, there's something I need to show you," Leno said. "Go wait in your car. I'll get it."
Lee rubbed his palms together like a gangster would and bounced back into the hot sun where his car was. Leno carried the bag with Reno's golden cat in it.
The car was baking hot. Leno started sweating immediately.
"Here." He pulled out the cat.
"Oh my God, where did you get this from?"
"It doesn't matter, as long as I didn't steal it."
"Jesus!"
"Can you sell it?"
"That's gold, man."
Leno frowned. Lee hadn't even touched the thing. "How'd you know?"
"Give it to me." Lee grabbed at it.
Leno pulled back. He stuffed it in the bag again. In the auto shop, the two friends watched with curiosity. They would tell him after that Lee was bad company to keep.
"How'd you know it is gold?"
Lee rolled his dark eyes. "Okay, Pietro Oscar runs gold, alright. And since I joined his crew, I've seen a bit too many of these things. I have an eye for it. Even Oscar knows. And I think he might put in the game to run dope or one of these for him."
"Or maybe weapons."
Lee rolled his eyes again. "The big guys run weapons."
Leno exhaled. He looked through the battered windshield of the car and wondered how Lee saw through it. It was like staring through a torrential downpour. The car smelled of weed and skin. Maybe Lee slept in it too.
"Okay, I'll give it to you, sell it for what it's worth, and we'll split it."
Lee grinned.
"I don't want you showing it to Oscar, alright?"
"This is between us, Leno. This is our break."
"Yeah, man."
Leno got out of the oven car. He stuck his head in the window and repeated his request.
"Don't show it to Oscar."
Lee grinned again. "Never, ever!"
He left the auto shop and drove straight to Pietro Oscar's near the hill and submitted the golden cat.
—
Mary Luca was
skeptical. Her skepticism was a later reaction, much like a buyer's remorse. She'd gone from her enthusiasm at seeing her dream of working in Peru come through. Also, she hoped to meet a supposed legendary woman in her quarters, and she hoped to see Olivia's face in an article on the internet. There, everything just felt deflated.
It was a low-quality photo, but the writing was original, written with an unempathetic voice and with an almost sardonic tone. The woman came off as someone who enjoyed going against the system. She had to be to enjoy doing what she does.
Charles Potter had called Olivia Newton Lara Croft.
There was nothing Lara in Olivia's features. Mary debated some more with herself before making a move to call Olivia in Miami.
When Olivia answered the call, Mary said, "Hello, miss Newton, I'm Mary Luca from the University of Florida. I'm calling on the recommendation of Charles Potter. You know him?"
"No, I don't," said the soft voice.
Mary hesitated for a second. "I'm sorry. How about Ted Cooper?"
"That one I know, and he's dead."
"Yeah."
Still quite unsure how to proceed, and even more indecisive about working with a woman with Olivia's pedigree, Mary Luca held her breath. She covered the mouthpiece of the telephone with her palm and exhaled.
"She's a bitch," she whispered to her office.
"Hello?"
"Yeah, I'm here. Sorry, I was carried away by something else," Mary lied. "I'd like to meet you, Miss Newton."
"What for? Is this about Ted?"
Mary Luca detected a drop in tone or a rise in emotions. She wasn't sure, but the person on the other side of the line was a woman, and a woman always knew when another one swallowed pain or tried to mask it.
"No, not at all. It concerns another matter that I believe would interest you very much."
Mary Luca told Olivia to pick a spot. The woman picked up Wendy on SW Avenue; Mary said it was okay.
"I'll meet you there."
3
Peru
Leno was going out of his mind. Lee had not shown up as he promised to when Leno called him that morning. Lee had said that he'd be at the auto shop at 10 am. That was early enough before he showed up at Mr. Pietro Oscar's estate for the day’s runs. Lee's been put on a car detail of bootleggers. He'd be driving the truck while others would be dropping the contrabands off. As he told Leno, he was on his way to becoming a big shot in the game.
Leno didn't care about the game, or driving bootlegger trucks. He wanted his money.
"What money?"
"What money!?" Leno had hissed into the phone because his mother was within earshot, right there in the kitchen preparing lasagna for the small family. "What'd you mean, 'what money?' What happened to the gold I gave to you yesterday?"
"But it was only yesterday. Chill out, man. It's not even in circulation yet—"
"What circulation?"
"You don't know how these things work, son."
"Son? Who's your son? I'm older than you with two fucking years. You don't call me son! And get me my gold. Ain't selling anymore, you hear me!"
"Alright, Leno, 10 am, today, okay?"
"Better make it good!"
And he slammed the phone in the cradle. He didn't want to, but he would have smiled through an open heart surgery without any anesthesia than be cool with the phone at that moment.
"You having trouble at work?" his mama asked.
"Its cool, Mama."
He ate his food and fumed. He showered and fumed, and he was still raging three hours later. Sometimes you didn't have to see trouble happen before you knew the process had already gone halfway through.
Something is wrong, I know it, I shouldn't have trusted that stupid Lee, Leno mourned. Thinks he's some big shot now. Fool.
—
Pietro Oscar was forty-seven years old. He was the grandson of Aurelius Aguilera, a Peruvian general who built his wealth from scratch with the spoils from the Columbian civil war. Aurelius was a small man with a big head of dark curly hair, Peruvian to the spongy core of his marrows, and as vicious as warlords came. He died of some unknown poison in a whorehouse in his eighties, his penis buried in the whore's mouth, and his grip around the girl's neck. The man was such a fighter and would possibly go down with his killers. Pietro liked to tell others, proudly, that he never knew his own father. He never knew who or perhaps where he was from. His mother never talked about the snitching motherfucker—as Pietro so eloquently loved to describe him—and Oscar didn't care one way or the other. Is he dead?
"Well, he better be," he'd say and cackle.
Pietro liked to tell these stories when he was sober, or when he thought one of his workers was trying to steal from him. He simply shot the offender in the neck when he was drunk; that way, he remembered nothing of it and slept just fine.
He had just finished regaling Lee with one of these stories, and he was, thankfully, not drunk. He was sitting in his cinema-sized living room, wearing army camouflage, his curly black hair cut short. Charcoal black eyes gazed affectionately at one of the naked girls walking back to the minibar with a bottle of Moet.
Two goons with guns and mean faces stood on either side of him. Young Lee, Leno's friend, stood before him.
"So now, Lee, my man, tell me the truth. Where did you get this cat from?"
"It's not a cat, boss."
Pietro turned the golden cat head this and that way. "Well, it looks like a cat to me, and you don't have any business telling me what you think. I tell you what to do and what to think, okay?"
"Yes, boss."
"Now, stop thinking about how this beauty here isn't a cat but a tennis racket, and tell me where you found it. Did you jack it from a poor fellow? You're running your own game already?"
"No, boss, err, this guy, my friend, he wants me to sell it. So I thought you might buy it—"
Pietro Oscar cackled. He looked at his goons. "This boy is running game already, man. You hear what he's saying? He'd like to sell to me, man."
The goons laughed too; one of them even shook his head in righteous indignation at such a presumptuous notion.
Lee's stomach squirmed. Pietro's eyes had gone from that benign Peruvian black to monstrous, cold grey.
"Who's this friend of yours?"
"Leno!" he blurted.
"Good, let's go visit him. Maybe he's got more beauties like this."
—
Miami.
Wendy's wasn't what it used to be. Maybe because summer hadn't arrived just yet. Olivia Newton waited for Mary Luca at her customary table in the corner, by the window. From there, she saw the double doors, the pretty waiter named Claire, and old Wendy himself whenever he came out of the kitchen in the back to see how his business was doing. Wendy was bulkier now, so business was good. Come summer, it would be better.
And hotter.
Olivia was writing off genre to ease her writer's block. The Republicans still don't think anything about global warming. Not until folks burst into flames on the street, she thought. She was writing an article for her new blog, Right in Your Faces, titled—"Look, The Sun Is Falling From the Sky.” She planned to publish also in the Miami Daily. Cohen would love it.
Rome, England, and dead bodies on the highway, the Templars gold, all of it was in the recent past. Life was good, and quite oddly, life was cinematic, movie-like. She'd thought assassins would still come knocking on her door with guns, silenced for secret murders.
He shut her mini laptop when she saw the tall woman walk into the restaurant. She wore her hair in a ponytail, no makeup—she was beautiful, she didn't need it—white t-shirt, and black denim pants. She should be thirty or younger. When she saw Olivia, she smiled. Dimples dipped in her cheeks. Olivia loved dimpled faces.
"Hi."
"Hello," said Olivia, and she gave the woman her hand to shake.
Olivia got a whiff of Chanel and some other deodorant. This was a simple woman. Career-driven, yes. By the way her neck hung, her intense gr
ey eyes.
"Thank you for meeting me on such short notice, Miss Olivia—"
"Just, Olivia, please."
Mary Luca smiled. "Okay, nice. Olivia, you can call me Mary."
She pulled a folded paper out of her pocket. It opened into a spread of a map that covered half the table. Olivia moved her laptop and a cup of tea to the side; Mary apologized for the inconvenience.
She touched the spot where the map was dark green with vegetation; the word Peru was written in bold black letters.
"Patrick Coleman, I gathered, went to this place in Peru called Machu Picchu. It's a historical site, plenty of Inca ruins." Mary looked at Olivia's face. "And Inca treasure. We think Patrick found something there."
"He said so?"
"Unfortunately, he can't be reached. He published an article on his findings in the New York Times shortly before he went radio silent. Probably gone under the earth. That happens a lot with archeologists."
"What are they like, do you know?"
"You're talking about the locals?"
"Yeah."
"I don't know, I've never been down there myself. Although I was doing a little research about the area—"
"Machu Picchu—the Lost Kingdom of Treasures. I have seen your article and read it too. It was good."
Mary Luca smiled. Her eyes crinkled, and she pursed her lips bashfully. But Olivia sensed her pleasure at the compliment.
"You do background checks on people you meet, and you should."
Olivia said pointedly, "You have done yours, I'm sure."
"Yes, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation."
"What exactly do you want from me?"
Mary Luca breathed deeply. She crimped the map back into her pocket. She clasped her fingers together and leaned forward on the table. She didn't speak immediately.
Olivia waited.
"Patrick Coleman found an Inca temple. The temple of treasures. We didn't know if this temple was real until I read his article two days ago in the New Yorker—"
"Who's we?"
The Inca Temple Page 4
