Plunder of the Sun Read online

  The traveler’s checks, then. Naharro had known I was carrying them before he laid his trap. Either Jeff or Raul could have told him, because they had both seen me try to cash one in the poker game aboard the Talca. But Jeff was a lone wolf, and it had been Raul who was buying Julie’s limonadas that morning.

  I said, “You told Raul.”

  She nodded. Her eyes sparkled. She was cold sober, and so pleased with her nastiness that she was bubbling to tell me everything, to twist the knife for all it was worth.

  “He asked me why I hated you. He told me how you had hit him. He hates you, too, and his cousin hates you. Everyone hates you.” The words came out in an eager rush. “They wanted to get something you had stolen from them. He wouldn’t say what it was, but it was small, and I told him about seeing you put something in the safe with your name on it. He said he knew how to get it, then, and kissed me, a nice kiss, the one you didn’t want, and after he left I sat here waiting for you to come in so I could see your face. It paid for everything! It made me happy, happy, happy…”

  She choked, jumped to her feet, and ran.

  I went back to the desk.

  The clerk eyed me curiously. I was trying to keep my face from giving me away, but my mouth felt tight and dead when I spoke to him.

  “Is Señor Cornejo still in the hotel?”

  “No, señor. He checked out earlier this evening.”

  “And Señorita Benavides?”

  “She left at the same time.”

  It was all I needed to hear.

  When I reached Naharro’s house, the lights were on in a room I recognized as his study from the heavy rejas over the windows. I rang the bell.

  Ana Luz opened the door.

  I pushed by her without a word. She didn’t try to stop me, or raise a fuss when I walked down the hall to the study. Naharro sat at his desk, the lamplight shining on his bald head, bending over the slips of paper I had left with him. He looked up with a frown that changed to a broad smile.

  “Señor Colby! What a pleasant surprise!”

  “Where is the manuscript?”

  “Ah, yes. The manuscript.” He pushed his chair away from the table, stretching. “You think I have it, and you want it back. You can prove a good title to it, no doubt?”

  “I can prove enough title to it to charge you with forgery and theft tomorrow morning. Somewhere in this house there is a typewriter that matches the typing on the note with my signature forged to it. I take either the typewriter or the manuscript with me when I go.”

  “That is a stupid thing to say, for several reasons.” Naharro held up a yellow hand and counted on his fingers. “The typewriter is not in the house. You have no title to the manuscript. You smuggled it out of one country and into another, twice breaking the law. You are a foreigner in a city where I have influence. And finally, you have forced your way into my house without invitation and threatened to carry my property away with you, like a common thief.” He nodded at something behind me. “My son could shoot you now with impunity.”

  I turned around.

  Raul was holding a gun on me from the doorway. It was the same gun he had used in the hotel in Lima, and his knuckles looked the same, cramped and tight. His mouth was set hard. Ana Luz stood behind him.

  Naharro’s voice at my back said, “There are several other things you should know, Señor Colby. You would never have had a chance to use the manuscript. To do archaeological research in Peru, you must first have a permit from the National Institute of Archaeology. I am a member of the Institute, and I would have seen to it that you never received such a permit. Had you found anything in spite of that, you would never have been able to take it out of the country, or dispose of it here. Your whole attempt was hopeless from the start. I advise you to leave Peru quietly and go back where you came from.”

  I was tired of looking at Raul’s knuckles. I turned back to face Naharro.

  “They are convincing arguments, don Ubaldo—particularly the gun. Was it by your orders that Alfredo Berrien died? Did he also break into your home and threaten to steal your property?”

  “Alfredo Berrien died because his time had come to die. I had nothing to do with it.”

  “Perhaps your criatura had something to do with it. Perhaps the police would like to know how it happened that she was the nurse who gave him his last sleeping pill.”

  “The police have already satisfied themselves about his death. If you have any thought of going to them, I urge you not to, for your own sake. And now I have said all I intend to say to you. Will you leave quietly?”

  “I have more cuttings in my pocket. Why don’t you steal those, as well? They are easier to read than the original.”

  Raul moved, behind me. But Naharro was too smart.

  He said, “They are not important, Raul. I have enough of them to make the others worthless. He hopes that you will come within his reach, which might be unwise. Stay well behind him when you show him to the door.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” Raul said. “¡Adelante!”

  I didn’t budge. He said unemotionally, in English. “I’d like to kill you, Colby. He doesn’t want it that way, or I’d shoot now and enjoy it. But don’t think he’ll stop me if you’re troublesome. Move!”

  I moved.

  He backed away from the doorway to let me by, and followed me at a safe distance. Ana Luz went ahead to open the street door.

  As I passed her, going out, I said, “I hope you get credit for this. I can see why you wanted your freedom. Is guagua here the one you were supposed to marry?”

  Guagua means “baby,” a child in arms, too small to do anything but yell and suck and wet his pants. It wasn’t much of an insult, but it was the best one I could think of. I would have given everything I owned to get Raul within reach, just then. I wanted to feel his bones crack in my hands.

  Ana Luz said levelly, “I am sorry that we are enemies. It is not my…”

  “Shut up!” Raul’s voice was choked. “Get out, Colby!”

  The door slammed behind me.

  I set out for the pensión, walking fast.

  I wasn’t licked yet, but the time had passed when I could handle the job alone. I had to get a translation of one of my remaining prints in a hurry, and Jeff was the only man I knew of who could do it. Whether I liked it or not, I would have to cut him in.

  He cut himself in. He was waiting for me near the tree where I had bumped into him before, but on the other side of the walk, in the shadow of a high hedge. As I went by, he mousetrapped me with an arm around my throat, his hand over my face to pull my head back and his knee in the small of my back.

  “I thought you’d be along, smart guy!” he snarled in my ear. “Let’s see you wiggle out of this one!”

  I did my best. I tried to pull him forward, hoping to reach through my legs and catch his ankle, but his knee in my back gave him too much leverage. He had me in a clamp like a vise. My ears began to roar. I took hold of his wrist with both hands, but he had locked it tight with his other hand. I was strangling, drowning in a black whirlpool of noise, my chest bursting. I pried at his fingers, got one of them loose, and was trying to find enough strength to break it when the oxygen gave out. The whirlpool took me away.

  11

  The night air felt good in my lungs when I opened my eyes. I was lying on grass, looking up at stars that showed through rents in the cloudy sky. The dark bulk of the hedge was still there. From its position, it seemed to me that I should be lying on the pavement where Jeff had jumped me, instead of on grass. I puzzled over it for a while, too tired to move. My throat hurt.

  It was a couple of minutes before I felt like sitting up. I had been hauled through, or under, the hedge into the field on the other side. I could hear the running water of an irrigation sluice. There was nothing to see. When I stood up, I had no shoes on.

  I groped around in the dark until I found them. The insoles had been torn out, and the cuttings were gone. So was everything that had been i
n my pockets—money, keys, passport, traveler’s checks. He hadn’t left me so much as a cigarette. Even the lining of my coat had been ripped loose.

  The hike to the pensión put me back into shape, except for the sore throat. I stumbled a little, at first—my legs felt like boiled spaghetti—but pretty soon I was going along good, stepping high and breathing deeply. Where the shadows were dark and nobody could see me, I shadow-boxed to tighten my loose muscles. By the time I reached the gate of the pensión garden, I was all right again, except for my throat.

  The gate was closed for the night. A hunchbacked concerje, wrapped in a gunnysack, sat motionless on the steps inside. I croaked at him through the wicket until he woke up and let me in.

  “Has the big gringo come in?” I asked him. My voice was like a bullfrog’s.

  “Fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Which is his room?”

  “The second floor, up the outside stairway. Beyond that I cannot tell you.”

  “It is enough.”

  A dim light glowed over the stairway that led to the second floor. It was a shaky thing, added on after the building had been turned into a pensión, and it swung under me with each step. I went up heavily and slowly. At the top, there was a short hall with four doors. One, which was open, led to a bathroom. Two of the others, badly fitted in their frames, showed no cracks of light. The third did. I pushed at it.

  It swung open. I followed it in, barely catching myself from falling. Jeff, sitting at a table on which all my stuff was spread out, looked up at me, grinning his wolf grin. The belly-gun lay near his hand.

  “Well, well,” he said. “Junior again. Back for a rematch?”

  I blinked at him. He had the cuttings spread out in front of him, and was trying to line them up into some kind of sequence. He looked so pleased with himself that I guessed he hadn’t got far enough along to find out that what he had didn’t mean anything.

  I weaved over to the table and reached clumsily for the slips with my left hand. He didn’t bother with the gun. I looked too easy for that. When he stood up to smack me, I hooked a right at his chin, as hard as I could throw it. He went headfirst over the back of his chair and hit the wall. Before he could get up, I landed on his chest and was softening him up with both hands, taking out on him not only the sore throat and spaghetti legs he had left me but all I had put up with from Naharro and his son and his criatura. It didn’t do Jeff any good, but it helped me.

  After he stopped struggling, I climbed off and recovered the things he had taken out of my pockets. The cuttings and Naharro’s list I left on the table, but I took the gun. There was a pitcher of water in a basin on a nightstand near the bed. I poured it on him until he sat up and shook his head.

  “How did you like the rematch?” I croaked.

  He didn’t say anything, just sprawled there in the puddle I had made for him, blinking groggily. I said, “That was just to make us even. Before you try to jump me again, I’m giving you your piece. Naharro foxed me out of the manuscript. I need your help.”

  It woke him up better than another splash from the pitcher would have done. He said, “What happened?”

  “My throat hurts too much to answer questions now. I’ve got a photograph of the parchment in a bank vault downtown. How long will it take you to translate it?”

  “A day. Two days. I can’t tell until I see it. But if Naharro has the original…”

  “We’ve got to beat him out, that’s all. The photograph is clearer than the original. He’s already translated part of it from those clippings you found in my pocket, but he doesn’t know that I still have a complete print, and he hasn’t any reason to hurry. We can head him off if we work fast.”

  “Can you get the print tonight?”

  “I don’t know. I’m going to try. There’s one other thing. Berrien only had three pieces of the parchment. As far as I could tell, they were right out of the middle of the twelve. They may not be worth a damn, or they may take us somewhere. If we find anything, we split fifty-fifty—but I market the stuff.”

  Jeff got up and dried his face and hair with a towel before he said anything to that.

  “What do you know about marketing it?”

  “I know that the government will give us a reward for discoveries—maybe not as much as we could get somewhere else, but enough. I’m not going to try to smuggle it out of the country.”

  “Leave it to me, then. I’ve got connections in La Paz, in Bolivia. I’ve taken stuff out before, across Lake Titicaca from Puno…”

  “We’re not going to take it out, across Lake Titicaca or any other way. I’m telling you now. I don’t want to run up against the government. If there’s anything at all to find, we’ll make a fair piece of change out of it and still be on the right side of the law.”

  He rubbed the towel over his hair, frowning. I said, “We do it that way or not at all. Make up your mind.”

  He shrugged.

  “O.K. But you’re a sucker. Why cut the government in?”

  “Because I like to travel around these countries under my own name.”

  It hit. His lips tightened. He had had another name, once—a name that belonged to a man with better use for a sound knowledge of archaeology and the Quechua language than sharpshooting for odds and ends of Incaic jewelry to palm off on a shady fence like Alfredo Berrien. But all he said was, “O.K. You’re the boss.”

  He put out his hand. We shook.

  “Now I’m going downstairs and use the phone,” I said. “Have you got anywhere with the cuttings?”

  “Not yet. I was trying to sort them.”

  “The sequence doesn’t mean anything. Naharro’s translations of the batch you found in my pocket are on that sheet of paper. The slips that were in my shoes haven’t been translated yet. Go to work on them while I see if I can wake up the bank.”

  It took me four phone calls to get hold of the bank manager at his home. He had already gone to bed and didn’t like being waked up by a bullfrog croaking at him over the telephone. The vault had a time lock, anyway.

  Jeff was scowling at Naharro’s list of translations when I got back to his room, comparing it with the slips that had been translated. He shook his head as I came in.

  “Naharro foxed you in more ways than one. These are all sour. Nobody living can tell you what most of these words are without seeing the context. He’s put this one down as campo, open field, but it can mean a closed patio, or even a closed room. And this one means ‘south,’ nothing but ‘south.’ He’s put it down as ‘west.’”

  “He was stringing me along until he could get hold of the parchment himself. He knew what I had even before I showed up in Arequipa. Cornejo is his son.”

  “How did you find that out?”

  “By busting into Naharro’s house to get the manuscript back from him, and having Cornejo run me out with a gun just before you jumped me.”

  “Uh, huh. That’s why I never heard his name. I knew Naharro had a son, but he sent him to college in the States and I never ran into him. Who is the phony nurse—a daughter?”

  “A criatura. Her mother gave her to Naharro when she was a kid.”

  “I wouldn’t mind having a criatura like that myself.” Jeff grinned admiringly. “I suppose Naharro planted her on Berrien so she could tip him off whenever Berrien got onto something good. He must have been stealing stuff right out from under Berrien’s nose. I told you he was a fox.”

  “Or a snake. That’s a dirty way to do business.”

  “The whole racket is dirty business. It’s the only way you can play it. The minute you sink a spade into a burial mound without a permit from the government, you’re outside the law. From then on, it’s cutthroat.”

  “Why not get a permit, then?”

  Jeff laughed.

  “You don’t know Peru. No, we’ll pay a little fine when the time comes—after we get the stuff.”

  He was in good humor, now that he was on the right side of the manuscript. Even the mouse I had
planted under his eye didn’t seem to bother him. He rubbed his hands and went back to work with the cuttings, correcting or qualifying Naharro’s translations first. He didn’t have Naharro’s reference books and didn’t seem to need them. Occasionally a word would stump him, but he put it aside and went on to the next, saving the doubtful one until he could study it in context.

  I watched him for a while, yawning. I had had a full day. He finally said, “I’ll be working on these all night. Why don’t you go back to the hotel and get some sleep? One of us has to get up early and find out when the train leaves for Cuzco. I can work on your prints on the train, and it won’t hurt to let Naharro know you’ve pulled out—say, for Lima, or some other place that isn’t Cuzco.”

  “It’s an idea. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  I started for the door. Without looking up from his work, he said, “How about my gun?”

  “I feel safer with it.”

  “Safer from what?”

  “Everything.”

  “Get one of your own, then.”

  “I like yours.”

  I left him with that to think over and went down the rickety staircase and out through the dark garden to where the hunchbacked concerje crouched in his gunnysack, shivering with cold, by the gate. He would sit there all night, every night, to earn five or ten soles a week—unless he was another criatura, and got only the rice for his belly and the gunnysack to keep himself warm. I wondered if he knew that his ancestors had worn golden crowns and called themselves sons of the sun.

  It surprised me to see Raul in the cantina at the hotel. Julie was with him, still sober, as far as I could tell, which was even more strange. That they were together didn’t mean anything, because two people like that would come together like two raindrops, wherever they met. But Raul should be having more important work to do than buying limonadas for a gringa.