Plunder of the Sun Read online

  It must have been two hours before Jeff showed up, although it seemed longer. He was driving three furry burros with rawhide packsaddles on their backs. Strapped across one of the packsaddles were shovels, a pick and a crowbar.

  He kicked the burros through the gap in the mud wall. Tacho picked up their trailing nose-ropes and tied their heads to their ankles to hobble them.

  Jeff said, “Tacho, we will sleep here tonight. Where is your woman?”

  “I sent her away.”

  “Find her and tell her to buy food.” Jeff gave him a handful of soles. “Meat, rice, tea. A bottle of pisco. Have her clean the hut.”

  Tacho looked at the money in his hand, then at Jeff again, waiting. Jeff gave him another couple of soles. He closed his hand over the money and slouched away.

  I said, “You can sleep in there if you want to. Too many lice for me.”

  “We’ve got to keep under cover, and this is the best place to do it. We’ll be gone before dawn.”

  “What’s your idea?”

  “Find the boulder today. Knock it over before sun-up tomorrow, when nobody will see us working.”

  “Does Tacho know enough to keep his trap shut?”

  “He’s all right. He’s done jobs for me before. You don’t have to worry about him.”

  I thought: I’m not worried about Tacho. All I said was, “When do we start?”

  “As soon as he gets back.”

  Tacho was back in fifteen minutes. The road past his house led on up the hill where I knew the fortress to be. I couldn’t see the fortress, but the hill wasn’t high. I had climbed steeper hills before. When Jeff told Tacho to strip the packsaddles off the burros and fix pads for riding, I looked at the animals’ bony backs and said, “Why don’t we walk?”

  “A lot of reasons. Climbing at this altitude is hard on the heart, unless you’re used to it. And we’re both too big to pass as Indians, on foot. A couple of gringos nosing around the ruins would attract too much attention.”

  “You think you’ll look like an Indian on a burro?”

  “If I didn’t know what I was doing, I wouldn’t be doing it.”

  He went into the hut.

  When he came out, he carried an armful of ponchos and a couple of chullos, the knitted caps with ear-tabs that the altiplano Indians wear. He gave me a poncho and a chullo. They both smelled as if dogs had been sleeping on them. But when we had slipped our heads through the neck-slits in the ponchos and pulled the chullos down over our ears, I could see that he did know what he was doing. Only somebody who got close enough to notice our shoes would have known that we were anything but a couple of Quechuas.

  “Sit back on the burro’s rump, the way an Indian does,” Jeff said shortly. “Ready?”

  “Let’s go.”

  We rode single file up the road, Tacho jogging along in front, Jeff behind him. I stayed in the rear. The burros were just barely big enough so that my feet didn’t drag, but they got us up the hill. It was the middle of the day, siesta time. We didn’t meet anyone, except for a station wagon full of tourists going back toward town. One of the tourists snapped a picture of the three picturesque Indians on their donkeys as we pulled aside to let the car pass. The road looped back and forth a couple of times and came out on a level hilltop where the ruins of the fortress of Sacsahuamán huddled like a crouching dog watching over the town below.

  The fortress had been pretty well wrecked. Only the largest stones remained. I could see why the conquistadores hadn’t bothered with them. Some of them must have weighed fifty tons. They were irregularly shaped, but squared off and fitted together smoothly all around like a jigsaw puzzle, if you can imagine a jigsaw puzzle with pieces the size and weight of box cars. We had come up on the north side of the ruin, and as we rode along the outer wall I saw what a tremendous job it had been to make that fort what it was once. You couldn’t have wedged a pin in the joints between the stones. There was no mortar. The joints were only lines marking the juncture of perfectly matched pieces of rock, fitted together so tightly that even the rain of centuries hadn’t been able to seep in and separate them. Inside the outer wall was a second and a third, as tight and well-built as the first. Inside the third wall was a mound of rubble and grassy earth, nothing more.

  Half to himself, Jeff said, “Under the second wall. It might be within twenty yards of us right now! If we had a case of dynamite…”

  “If we had a case of dynamite, we’d blow ourselves right off this hill and into the jug. Stick to what we have, and don’t talk like a fool!”

  He almost fired back at me, not quite. We were both on edge.

  We took our direction from the sun. It was noon. Tacho, who did the pacing, started in the longest shadow cast by the outer wall of the fortress and struck off down the hill, going away from town. Jeff and I kept to our burros and the road, which wandered away in a southerly direction. Below us, in a shallow valley planted with wheat, a stream flowed toward the hill on which the fortress stood, made a right angle toward the west, skirted the base of the hill, and curved off toward town. Tacho’s straight path down the hill touched the stream at the bend. But he didn’t stop there. He kept going, drawing farther and farther away from the stream-bed into the green wheat.

  Jeff said nervously, “The direction must be off.”

  We were jogging down the road, kicking the burros into a bumpy trot to cover the mile or so of curves which Tacho was shortcutting in a straight line. I said, “The direction is all right by the sun. What does a vara mean to Tacho?”

  “A yard. A short pace and a half.”

  “It could be less. A vara doesn’t have to be a yard.”

  “I know it. But it wouldn’t be less than two and a half feet, and even that would take him past the stream. Something is wrong.”

  “Can he count?”

  “I’m counting for him. Shut up!”

  Tacho was still plodding on through the wheat, angling across a shallow swale that sloped down the far side of the little valley. The wheat was divided into small patches by irrigation ditches and low rock walls that he jumped or climbed without changing his direction. He was in the middle of a patch that lay a good two hundred yards from the stream-bed when Jeff whistled.

  Tacho stopped. There wasn’t a boulder near him, nothing but a solid checkerboard of green wheat-patches rippling in the wind.

  The road crossed the bottom of the swale and looped away out of sight over the shoulder of the hill above it. The little valley slept quietly in the sun. Nobody was in sight. We left the burros at the side of the road and waded through the knee-high wheat to where Tacho stood.

  Jeff said again, “The direction is off.”

  “Not more than a few yards. The nearest point of the stream is just about southwest of the fortress. Are you sure the manuscript said south?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then it’s our distance.”

  “Even if we cut the vara down to two and a half feet, it still leaves us in the wheat. There isn’t a boulder in sight, or a stream—unless you count rock fences and irrigation ditches.”

  Jeff yanked angrily at the ear-tabs of his chullo.

  I said, “Let’s stretch the vara out, then. Let’s follow the ditches and see where they come from.”

  We left Tacho where he was and followed the ditches up the swale. Two hundred paces farther on, at the top of the slope, there was an irrigation sluice from which water ran down into the ditches in the wheat patches. The sluice was a rock-lined trough, full of slow-running muddy water.

  I said, “The rock-work looks old enough to be Inca. Could the word have been translated ‘sluice’ or ‘ditch’ instead of ‘stream’?”

  “It could have been. If that’s it, we’re beat. There aren’t any boulders here either.”

  Jeff scowled, sighting along the straight line of the sluice. It came down from somewhere up above, cutting across the top of the swale to empty finally into the stream which turned away below the fortress toward the town—
the stream which should have been due south of the fortress but which flowed from the southwest and was fed by a sluice coming from the southeast.

  Something about the sharp line that the sluice cut across the upper edge of the green wheat fields made me think of the irrigation ditch that brought water and life to Arequipa. I walked twenty yards up the hill and saw the answer.

  Jeff was still standing there, scowling, when I came back. I said, “They moved the stream. They sidetracked it up above and ran a sluice along the crest here so they could plant the creek bottom. Our distance was right. It’s down below.”

  Jeff grunted. “I don’t see any boulder.”

  “I don’t either. But I’m not going to quit until I’ve made sure it isn’t there.”

  It was there. It took us half an hour to find it. At the joining of two of the rock walls that separated the wheat into patches, not more than fifty feet from the point at which Tacho had stopped his pacing, the cornerpost was a smooth, rounded stone growing from the earth. The ground had silted up around it, after years of irrigation to bring water and soil down from above, so that it was pretty well buried. But it was in the bottom of the swale, where the stream had flowed four centuries before. And its rounded peak still pointed at the sky. The egg was still balanced on its heavy end.

  Somebody—I don’t know whether it was Jeff or me—let out his breath in a long sigh. That was all. We replaced the stones we had taken from the wall to make sure we were on the right track, and went back to where the burros were munching mouthfuls of stolen wheat.

  A guide was taking another party of tourists through the fortress when we plodded by, the ponchos high around our necks to hide our faces. I heard him telling the tourists of a legend about fourteen solid-gold statues buried somewhere beneath, their feet. He laughed as he told it, and the tourists laughed with him. They were too grown-up for fairy stories.

  I thought a lot about those statues during the after-noon. We stayed under cover in Tacho’s hut, waiting for time to pass. There wasn’t anything for us to talk about. We were in a kind of state of suspended animation, wound up like alarm clocks, waiting for the hour hand to reach a certain point and trip the release that would set us off. I could feel the tight spring coiled inside me. The burros in the yard switched their tails at flies and nuzzled the short grass growing between the cobbles. When night came at last, Tacho’s woman turned up from somewhere carrying a blackened five-gallon kerosene can. She made a fire in the can inside the hut. There was no chimney, and the smoke hung thickly at shoulder height, but even then the hut was cold. A chill had come into the air as soon as the sun went down. I was grateful for the smelly poncho and the chullo to pull down over my ears.

  I learned, that night, why a poncho is made the way it is, with a slit for your head and no sleeves. You can scratch yourself without exposing your arms to the cold. Jeff’s poncho was either cleaner than mine or he was more accustomed to lice than I was, because he scratched about half as often. But even Tacho, who must have been solid scar tissue from bites, pawed himself once in a while. We squatted on the bare dirt around the fire-can, our heads an inch below the smoke-level, and scratched, while Tacho’s woman boiled a chicken with rice and made tea.

  She never said a word. Neither did we. Once the baby the woman carried slung across her back in a dirty rebozo began to yell. The woman looked frightened. I don’t know why, unless she could feel the tension stretching between Jeff and me across the fire, and was afraid of breaking it. She pulled the baby around in front and let it suck while she served us food. Afterward she brought in armloads of wood for the fire and then disappeared.

  I never want to spend another night like that one. Neither Jeff nor I slept. We squatted on either side of the fire-can, huddled in our ponchos, moving only to stretch our legs or scratch. Tacho dozed, waking occasionally to throw more wood into the can. Once he scraped a handful of ashes from the coals to mix with a fresh wad of coca. It was his food, drink, blanket, bed and family. It sustained him the way gold-fever was sustaining Jeff and me. We never relaxed for a second. The light from the fire was just enough to let me see Jeff’s eyeballs shining unwinkingly. I knew his thoughts as well as he thought he knew mine, the same old simple arithmetic: eighty-four divided by two is forty-two, eighty-four divided by one is eighty-four.

  The night wore on, colder and colder, hour after hour. The burros stamped and snorted with cold outside the hut. Jeff watched me, I watched him, we waited. His gun made a lump in my belt. The only thing that really worried me was the fact that I couldn’t remember how long it had been since I had had typhus shots. The lice were pretty bad. If there was a rat louse mixed in with the others, it would be a poor joke to die with forty-two pieces of Inca gold on my hands. Eighty-four divided by two is forty-two, eighty-four divided by one is eighty-four.

  Jeff’s eyes glittered as the fire flared in the can. I shifted the gun to a more comfortable position. Time passed.

  A cock flapped his wings five times somewhere outside, the beats as loud as handclaps in the still, cold air, and crowed. Another cock answered from half a mile away. A third, farther off, picked it up, and the ¡quiquiriquí! went off across the countryside, cock answering cock until the sound was a whisper in the distance.

  Jeff said, “Tacho!”

  The Indian grunted and came awake. Jeff said, “What time is it?”

  Tacho sniffed the air. The cock crowed again, with the same preliminary loud beat of its wings. One of the burros brayed, complaining at the cold.

  “Two,” Tacho said.

  “We’d better get started,” Jeff said to me. “We’ll have to finish the digging before light.”

  I creaked to my feet. My legs were as stiff as boards until I stamped the circulation back into them. Jeff and I silently ate what was left of the boiled chicken, handing the pot back and forth and scooping with our fingers. Tacho’s breakfast was a fresh wad of coca leaf and wood ash.

  Jeff wiped his greasy hands on his poncho when he finished eating.

  “I’m driving now, whether you like it or not,” he said curtly. “This is my racket. I’ll tell you what to do and when to do it. If anything goes wrong, it’s every man for himself.”

  “Fair enough. But don’t let anything go wrong.”

  Because I was tired of the silent cutthroat game we had been playing, and wanted to bring it out in the open, I took the gun from under my poncho and examined it in the light from the fire-can. It was a .38, double action. There was one empty chamber in the cylinder. I tried the trigger-pull on the empty. The hammer came back easily and slipped smoothly off cock. It was a gunman’s gun, made for business. I slipped it back inside my belt.

  “I’m ready, any time,” I said.

  Jeff said something. It may have been a curse. I saw his lips move, but I didn’t hear the words because one of the burros in the yard brayed again as a packsaddle hit his back. Tacho was saddling up.

  It was bitterly cold outside. The moon had gone down, but the stars were like lanterns. In the east, Venus glowed so brightly that she cast a shadow. A few street lights burned in the city. Above us, the hill of the fortress was a black curtain against the stars. We straddled the burros’ rumps, behind the packsaddles, and kicked them out through the gap in the mud wall. Tacho’s burro carried the tools, clinking metallically in the darkness.

  Once we had started, the minutes seemed to pass quickly. We jogged up the hill, past the dark bulk of the ruined fortress, and down the winding road into the shallow valley where the wheat grew. The irrigation ditches were still running. This time we took the burros with us, over rock walls and ditches to where the job was to be done. Tacho, by smell or by instinct, led us straight to the egg-shaped rock.

  “All right,” Jeff said. “Let’s work fast. Tacho, clear these stones away. Colby, start digging on that side. I’ll take this one.”

  I pulled the poncho off over my head, shivered at the bite of the cold air, and reached for a shovel.

  I wasn’t col
d for long. The ground was soft and spaded easily, but the bottom land had silted up until two-thirds of the boulder was buried. We had to cut the slope down five feet to reach the keystone. I found it with my fingers, a tapering wedge of rock. There was no mistaking it, even in the dark. The cut edges were as smooth and straight as the sides of a wedge of cheese.

  “I’ve got the keystone.” My heart was thumping, partly from the effort of digging at that altitude, partly from something else. “It’s tight. It will have to be knocked loose.”

  “We’ve got to clear a space for the rock to fall, first.”

  We dug for another hour before the pit was ready. It had to be long enough and deep enough to take the full mass of the boulder when it fell, because if the base didn’t clear whatever it covered when we toppled it, there would be nothing to do but dig a new pit. And the sky was growing gray in the east.

  Tacho dug like a machine. Without his poncho he was as thin as a skeleton, except for the big chest of the high-altitude native, yet he moved more earth than Jeff or I. The coca gave him energy without intelligence to go with it. He had to be told where to dig, and when to stop. He was an animal, like one of the burros munching wheat at the edge of the pit, but without him we would never have finished the job before daylight. As it was, there was enough light in the sky for us to see each other clearly when at last the pit was finished and the base of the boulder cleared of dirt.

  The stone was eight feet high, almost perfectly egg-shaped. Seen in the clear, it was balanced slightly off vertical, the center of gravity away from what had been the stream bed, so that an attempt to push it over into the stream, the natural way to try to move it, would have stalled a bulldozer. The keystone on the opposite side acted as a wedge to hold it from going the other way.

  Somebody had to get down in the pit to knock the keystone loose. I picked up the crowbar, intending to give it to Tacho. It would be too easy for Jeff to slam me over the head with a spade while I worked. But he grabbed the crowbar from me.

  “I’ll do it.” He was breathing hard. “You’ve got the gun, and it’s light enough for some of these Indians to be taking a look at their ditches. Get up on top and keep a lookout.”