Plunder of the Sun Read online

  I realized that he was there to keep an eye on me, see what I would do next. That made it easy. I told the clerk that I was leaving the next day for Mollendo, by train, and to call me early. As I slunk past the cantina, I was careful not to meet their eyes.

  Julie laughed at my beaten-down look, a loud, long, mocking laugh that followed me up the stairs.

  12

  Raul couldn’t follow me around town, of course. But don Ubaldo wasn’t taking any chances. There was another man on my tail when I left the hotel in the morning. He was a young cholo, not very good at the job. I had him spotted before I had gone two blocks.

  He followed me to the railroad station, where I bought a ticket for Mollendo. The day’s train had already gone, and the next one left the following morning. I didn’t have to ask questions about anything else, because a schedule was posted beside the ticket window. A day train for Juliaca and Cuzco left in one hour.

  It would have to be cut fine, but it could be done. The cholo missed the camioneta I caught grinding up the hill toward town, not because I tried to lose him but because he wasn’t on his toes. I dropped off at the bank, got my girl-show magazine out of hock, and slipped it inside my shirt in the manager’s office while I was using his telephone.

  Jeff’s voice sounded dopey when I got him on the line. I said, “Make any progress?”

  “Not much. I finished what can be done. Where are you?”

  “At the bank. The train leaves for Cuzco in an hour. I had company, so I bought a ticket to Mollendo. Get down to the station and buy two tickets. Better make them second-class, and get on the train early to hold the seats.”

  “O.K. What kind of company did you have?”

  “An amateur. I’ve already lost him, but he may pick me up again. If anything goes wrong, I’ll meet you in Cuzco.”

  “O.K. Ask for Tacho Peralta’s house, near the fortress.”

  My cholo was waiting for me at the hotel when I got there. If I’d had the time, I would have liked to give him a couple of lessons. He was leaning against a tree in the parque opposite the hotel, reading a newspaper. Instead of having the paper folded into a manageable size around whatever he was reading, he held it open in front of his face, like a woman hanging up washing. I suppose he had bored a hole through the paper so he could watch what was going on. His arms must have ached.

  Nobody I knew was in the lobby or the cantina. I told the clerk that I had missed the Mollendo train, but that I would be taking the next one, early the following morning, and would pay in advance for the day so I could clean up my account and not have to waste time at the last minute. The cholo was still hanging up washing while I packed my bag, carried it down the back stairway and through the kitchen, out behind the hotel to where the road coming up from town made a sweeping circle short of the desert barrier marked by the irrigation ditch, looped the hotel, and started back where it came from. I was on the first camioneta that came around the circle. I could have reached out the window and knocked the cholo’s hat over his eyes as we went by, but I didn’t.

  I made the train with ten minutes to spare. Jeff flipped his hand at me from the window of one of the second-class carriages. He had two seats that he was holding only because he looked too tough to argue with. The train was already full, Indians and cholos, mostly, with a few shabby white collars and a couple of priests in their heavy wool sutanos. The car stank with the smell that exists only on the desert side of Peru, where the population is heavy and water is too valuable to waste on washing. It was a dead, rancid smell that even the breeze from the open windows wouldn’t blow away.

  Jeff said irritably, “What was the idea of going second class? We’ll have eight or nine hours of this stink before we reach Juliaca.”

  “We’ll change there. Naharro will check up to see that I’m on the Mollendo train tomorrow. When he learns that I’m not, he’ll ask around. He’ll expect me to travel first class, and he may waste enough time to give us another day’s leeway. We’ll need it.”

  “We’ll earn it, too.” Jeff moved closer to the open window. “Give me the print.”

  I gave him one print. The other was inside the lining of my suitcase, for emergencies. His gun was in my hip pocket, also for emergencies. I hoped that he wouldn’t make me use either of them.

  He worked all day on the translation, humped over in his corner of the seat with a suitcase balanced on his knees, but he made no real progress because he kept falling asleep. I had to shake him awake half a dozen times. He had been up most of the night, working on the cuttings I had left with him, and the change in altitude knocked him out as effectively as a pill. The climb was terrific. The rattletrap train chugged and growled its way up out of the desert and across mile after bare mile of rocky, rolling puna, the high grassland of the Andean altiplano, twisting back and forth along grades that called for every ounce of steam in the engine’s leaky boiler. I couldn’t let Jeff sleep. Naharro would be close behind us, for one thing, and for another I had to know if three pieces of parchment out of the middle of the manuscript were enough to take us somewhere or just a tantalizer. I hadn’t forgotten that Berrien, who knew his business, had paid five thousand dollars for them. But with the fever on me, I had to know what it was he had bought.

  Whenever he could stay awake, Jeff copied his translations from the cuttings to the whole print, tearing the cuttings into shreds and tossing the shreds out the window. He had finished with the cuttings and was scowling at what he had on the print when I asked him for the fourth or fifth time if he was making any progress.

  “We get something,” he said.

  “What? How much? Where is it?”

  “I can’t tell yet. The stuff was hidden in batches. This part of the manuscript covers an inventory of one batch, directions for finding a second inventory, and something over.”

  “Are the directions for the second batch complete?”

  “Looks like it. Shut up and leave me alone.”

  I left him alone. I didn’t even wake him after he fell asleep again, because the soroche, the mountain sickness, got me. My ears were ringing like doorbells when we reached the pass at Crucero Alto, fifteen thousand feet up, a bare, windswept, chilly clutch of huts in a shallow valley where even the herds of llamas feeding along the tracks huddled together for warmth and company. I had been living too long in the lowlands to make the change easily. My head ached, my arms and legs were like lead, I could barely see for the spots that danced in front of my eyes. If Jeff had been awake to notice what shape I was in, see how easy it would have been to take the gun from me, yank me off the train and knock me over the head behind the nearest snowdrift, things would have worked out differently for both of us. But he slept on, and after we passed the peak and started down, I snapped out of it.

  He finished the job in a grimy pensión in Juliaca, where we had dinner. We were still on the altiplano, better than two miles high, and the air was so cold that I bought mittens and a muffler from an Indian woman at the railroad station and wore them while I ate. Jeff hardly touched his food. All through dinner he cursed and muttered over the last few knots that still held the puzzle together. He was jittery from fatigue and gold-fever, and his jitters infected me. Before he finished, I was hanging over his shoulder, watching the message grow, word by word. It wasn’t only the altitude that made my breath come short and hard when I saw what was written on those three pieces of four-hundred-year-old pergamino.

  This is how they read:

  “…plate from the Hall of the Rainbow to the extent of fifty arrobas; six heavy vases of gold embossed with serpents; silver in bars, unworked; statues of the llama, in gold and silver; golden footwear and mantles of gold beads from the House of the Virgins of the Sun; other gold and silver ware. All this from the report of Huetín, who was put to the torture afterward by the Spaniards and died without speaking.”

  “The fourth. Beneath a boulder in the bed of the River of Amarú, eighty-four finely wrought pieces from the garden of the Temple of th
e Sun, including images of the llama, the vicuna and the alpaca, in gold; images of the maize plant, in gold and silver; images of the quinua plant, in gold; images of the sun, in gold, and the moon, in silver; flower pieces of gold with emeralds and turquoise; images of snakes, lizards and birds, in gold. The boulder, which is shaped like an egg erect on its large end, lies at a distance of one thousand varas toward the south from the southernmost point of the outer wall of the fortress of Sacsahuamán, and must be toppled away from the stream bed, after first cutting the hillside away to permit its fall and then removing a keystone at its base. All this from the report of Zaran, who was afterward put to the torture by the Spaniards and died without speaking.”

  Jeff’s voice cracked at the end. I licked my lips. My mouth was dry.

  “Just like that,” I said foolishly. “Eighty-four pieces. What’s the rest of it?”

  Jeff read:

  “The fifth. In a chamber beneath the second wall of the fortress of Sacsahuamán, many large objects too cumbersome to remove before the arrival of the Spaniards, including large ceremonial vessels from the Temple of the Sun, in gold; statues of the Incas, in gold…”

  Jeff threw the paper at me with an angry sweep of his arm.

  “And that’s all,” he snarled. “What a haul we’d make with the next sheet of parchment! The statues of the Incas! Do you know what that means?”

  I knew what it meant. It meant that Prescott’s story hadn’t been just another fairy tale. It meant that Don Carlo’s lady had seen what she claimed to have seen—fourteen statues, each the size of a twelve-year-old boy, all of massive gold! Fourteen tons of gold in the statues alone, not including large ceremonial vessels from the Temple of the Sun, and other objects too cumbersome to move!

  I ran my hand over my face. It came away wet.

  “Where is the fortress of Sacsahuamán?” I said.

  “Right above Cuzco, on a hill. The Spaniards wrecked it for building stone.”

  “Then they probably found the room with the statues in it.”

  “Not if it’s under the wall. Some of the stones are as big as freight cars. They couldn’t budge them. And there’s no record of a discovery like that. If we could hit that one…”

  Jeff smacked his hands together.

  “We’ve got to find the rest of the parchment, that’s all. Are you sure Berrien didn’t have it?”

  “He didn’t take it out of Chile.”

  “Then we’ve got to go back to Chile. We’ve got to talk to the hacendado who sold it, and trace it back. Even with one more page…”

  “The first thing we’ve got to do is get those eighty-four pieces out from under that rock. Naharro isn’t going to wait. Tomorrow morning, when he learns that I didn’t take the Mollendo train, he’ll be right on our tail. How far is it from here to Cuzco?”

  “The nocturno train leaves here at nine o’clock. We’ll get in at seven or eight.”

  “How fast can Naharro follow us—by plane, say?”

  “He can’t. The plane comes direct from Lima. He could make it in a day and a night by hard driving, if the roads are in shape.”

  “Then we’ve got a clear day and a half to count on—with luck.”

  Jeff nodded. He watched me without a word while I picked up the print with his translation on it, folded it, and put it in my pocket.

  “One thousand varas south of the south wall of the fortress of Sacsahuamán, under an egg-shaped boulder,” I said. “Half for you, half for me.”

  He nodded again, slowly.

  “We’d better see about catching the nocturno.”

  He nodded again.

  We left the pensión and trudged back to the railroad station in a biting wind that swept across the barren puna to chill our bones. We didn’t talk any more. And when the nocturno pulled out for Cuzco, we slept in separate compartments.

  That was my idea. I suppose I was getting old, but it was a dirty racket, and the arithmetic was simple: eighty-four divided by two is forty-two, eighty-four divided by one is eighty-four.

  I didn’t want to shoot Jeff if a locked door between us made it unnecessary.

  13

  The nocturno was late getting into Cuzco. At nine o’clock the train was still winding down a pretty, well-watered valley laid out in garden patches and pastures where cattle and sheep grazed side by side with llamas and alpacas. The Incas had picked a good place to establish their capital. There on the eastern slope of the Andes, the bare puna had given way to a fertile country of hills and rivers, high enough to be above the jungle and yet below the frost line of the snow-capped peaks surrounding it. The rock terraces with which the Incas had lined the hillsides were still under cultivation, row after row climbing the steep mountain sides up to the snow-pack that gave them irrigation and brought life to the valley.

  I had plenty of time to look at the scenery. Jeff and I hadn’t said ten words to each other since leaving Juliaca. I knew how the arithmetic was going on in his head. He was a crook himself, and because he was a crook he had to figure me the same way. From his viewpoint, the only logical thing to do was to beat me out of my share before I beat him out of his. All I wanted to do was get the stuff, get rid of it, give him his cut, and brush him off, but there was no way to convince him that I was on the level. I was in the position of a man who knows he is going to be slugged and can’t slug first. It was hard on the nerves.

  When the train puffed into the little station at Cuzco, he spoke for the first time that morning.

  “We’d better split up. Naharro knows by now that you didn’t take the train to Mollendo, and he may have a spotter here. We don’t want to be seen together.”

  “We don’t want to get too far apart, either.”

  He didn’t pretend to misunderstand me. He said, “I’ve got to round up burros and tools. I’ll meet you at Tacho Peralta’s shack, across town on the slope below the fortress. Ask your way. If I don’t show up for a couple of hours, don’t get excited.”

  He picked up his bag and swung off the train on the side away from the station.

  I didn’t have to reach for my bag. A cholo climbed in through the window of the train before it stopped and beat another cholo, who had used the door, to the bag by a nose. The first cholo had a banged-up Ford parked outside the station. He drove me up to town and through narrow, cobbled streets that almost shook my liver loose, pointing out the remains of Inca palaces and temples with one hand while he slammed the horn with the other. He had his mind on a big tip from the gringo tourist. This was the Street of the Seven Snakes, and that was the Palace of Inca Yupanqui, and over there was the wall of the Temple of the Sun, whiz-bang through the alleys so fast that all I saw was the soft-drink signs over the century-old stone doorways. Two hundred thousand people had lived in Cuzco during the days of the Incas, according to the cholo. There were about twenty thousand left, from the smell, plus a lot of llamas. It had rained there during the night, and now the sun shining on the muddy cobbles raised a stink that was terrible. The Indians on the street were dirty, undersized and ragged. Scrawny dogs and rickety kids were everywhere. It was hard to imagine Cuzco as it had been once, a city of kings, blazing with gold and jewels.

  The cholo thought I was crazy when I told him to take me to Tacho Peralta’s house. He knew where it was, but I had to repeat the name twice before he would drive me there instead of to the tourist hotel. Was I sure I didn’t have Tacho mixed up with somebody else?

  I said I was sure. He gave up building himself a tip and dumped me off at the last of a straggle of huts that climbed a steep hill at the far edge of town.

  I could see why he had wondered if I knew what I was doing. Tacho’s hut was made of mud, with a thatched roof. A mud wall crowned with spikes of growing cactus shut it off from the road. There was no gate, just a gap in the wall that led into a small, dirty yard where chickens pecked aimlessly. A couple of mangy dogs came yapping and snarling at my ankles. I kicked them away, kicked them away again, and slipped the belt out of m
y pants when they made a third try.

  Their howls brought a skinny Indian in a poncho out of the hut. He had the empty face and cloudy eyes of a coca chewer. The wad of leaf in his mouth bulged his cheek. Even from a distance I could see the louse nits in his greasy hair.

  I said, “Are you Tacho Peralta?”

  “Who wishes to know?”

  “A friend of Señor Jefferson.”

  “I am Tacho.”

  He waited for me to say something else, if I felt like it. He wasn’t curious. All that mattered to him was the cud in his mouth.

  I said, “He asked me to wait for him here. I came with him on the train.”

  The Indian let it seep in for a minute. His jaws moved. Finally he said, “Enter.”

  I picked up my bag and followed him.

  I wished I hadn’t as soon as I got inside. The hut was as dirty as he was. There was no floor, only bare earth. A woman sat in a corner nursing a baby. She looked up indifferently when I came in. Her exposed breast was dirty, spotted with rash.

  Tacho said, “Go away.”

  She got up, supporting the baby in the crook of her arm, and left the hut without a word. Tacho said, “Sit down.”

  I took the bench the woman had been sitting on. It was the only piece of furniture in the hut, except for a water olla and a bed cluttered with a huddle of smelly ponchos. Tacho leaned against the wall.

  It took him five minutes to dredge up a sentence.

  “Don Cheff sent no message.”

  “Don Jeff will be here soon.”

  We waited. When the smell of the place got to be too much for me, I went out into the chicken-littered yard and looked at what I could see of Cuzco: tile roofs, corrugated iron and church towers. Tacho followed me, chewing his coca. From his skinny bare ankles and wrists, he had been on the stuff a long time. You don’t need to eat when you chew coca, or drink much either, or think, or do anything else. You just chew.