Plunder of the Sun Page 15

  I was sipping my drink when Ana Luz came into the sala and sat down beside me.

  Conversation between us was difficult to start, as always. I finally said, “Would you like a rum punch?”

  “No, thank you. Don Ubaldo doesn’t like…”

  She stopped. Her eyes widened. In a tone of complete surprise, she said, “Why, I can have a rum punch if I want to.”

  “Claro. Or anything else you want.”

  She hugged herself.

  “I can’t believe it. All my life—oh, I can’t believe it! To be able to go where I like, do as I wish, answer to no one. If only they catch Jefferson! Do you really think they will catch him?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “It was the bargain you made.”

  “I made no bargain with don Ubaldo, except to tell him what I knew in exchange for his promises.”

  She shook her head.

  “The treasure will have to be recovered. Otherwise…”

  “Otherwise nothing. He said you were free.”

  “No. I am not free—yet. Not truly free. But soon—I hope—I hope—oh, I’m afraid to think of it!”

  She hugged herself again, wrapping her arms tightly across her breast as if she were embracing something precious. I sipped my rum punch, knowing I could never convince her that Jeff’s capture was not part of the bargain. Don Ubaldo had cared as carefully for her mind as he had for her health.

  Raul and Julie came into the sala together. Raul was sullen, Julie miserable. I was beginning to think that I might be doing her a dirty trick in turning Raul loose for her. When I asked them if they wanted a drink, he answered shortly that she’d have a hot lemonade and he’d have a rum punch—but he’d buy the round. It wasn’t a friendly gesture. He just didn’t want to be obligated to me. I said I didn’t care who paid for it. Then don Ubaldo came in and made the same offer. I accepted again. With three hot drinks in me, I should have felt good.

  But I didn’t. I couldn’t stop worrying about Jeff. He was smart. Would he walk into the trap? Or was he bearing it down to the seacoast right now, while we sat around like dummies? I knew that everybody else in the room was thinking the same thing. Don Ubaldo sat down for a while, and then got up to pace nervously in front of the fire, back and forth, back and forth. Ana Luz watched the blaze, dreaming. Raul stared at his glass. Julie looked from the fire to Raul to me to Ana Luz to don Ubaldo and back along the same round, alone and excluded and unhappy until Raul’s hand—they were sitting side by side—half-indifferently closed over hers. And when I saw the expression that came into her face, I thought, You little two-bit tin god, damned if you haven’t got something. I don’t know what it is, but…

  There was a flash of light through the window, a scream of brakes as a car roared to a halt outside the hotel. Somebody yelled something I didn’t catch, except for my own name. Everybody jumped. The comandante burst into the sala, his face red with cold, his eyes blazing.

  “We’ve found a body!” he shouted. “I think it’s the Indian, Tacho! It answers your description! Come along!”

  I jumped to my feet. Even at the moment, Ana Luz’s reaction was automatic. She said, “Wait! Your shoulder! I’ll get a blanket,” and hurried away.

  She tucked the blanket around my cast and shoulders after we had all piled into the car outside. Nobody stayed behind. It was a big car, a station wagon, but even then it was crowded, with a guardia driving and another standing on the running board. We roared away from the hotel, splashed up a muddy street, past the railroad station and down toward the lake, following a rutted track that led off across the flat barren shore toward the brightly lighted mole where the night boat for Bolivia waited, and then turned away to skirt the dark lake shore for half a mile to a patch of reeds growing at the water’s edge.

  Two guardias waited for us near the reed patch. One carried an oil lantern. The other held the wrist of a scared Indian, muffled to the eyes in poncho and chullo, a scarf around his neck and mouth to keep out the night air and his legs bare to the knees. His feet and ankles were covered with black mud.

  The lantern light fell on a body lying face down in the mud. A hurried attempt had been made to bury it there. I saw the shallow hole scooped out among the reeds, and the red stain of blood floating on black water. The poncho that covered the body had a big blotch of blood under the left shoulder blade. When the guardia with the lantern lifted the body so I could see the face, a trickle of blood and coca-stained saliva drooled from the muddy mouth.

  The guardia let the body fall at my nod.

  “It’s Tacho,” I said. “How long has he been dead?”

  “Not very long.” The comandante was hot with excitement. “This Indian says the body was warm when he found it. He was stealing reeds to make a balsa—the lake reeds are dying out, and cutting them is prohibited—when he stumbled over it. He had to go see a priest before he could make up his mind to report it, so we lost about an hour. But he can’t have been dead more than two or three hours, at the most. Jefferson is in Puno now! We’ve got him!”

  Behind me, Ana Luz drew a long breath.

  I said, “I hope so. But you had better tip off the guard to be on the alert.”

  “I’ve already done it. Their instructions are to shoot anybody who doesn’t stop at a challenge. We’ve caught him now! He can’t go back the way he came, and if he tries to take the boat to Bolivia he’s finished.”

  “I hope so. Didn’t anybody hear the shot?”

  “There wasn’t any shot. He was knifed—in the back. Your friend Jefferson is going to hang.”

  One of the guardias took the Indian, scared dumb, off to the town lockup on a charge of cutting reeds—a big patch had been slashed out of the middle of the clump near Tacho’s body—and the other guardia stayed behind with the lantern to watch the body until it could be removed. Raul took Ana Luz and Julie back to the hotel in the station wagon. The comandante, don Ubaldo and I walked along the lake shore to the mole where the steamer was getting ready to shove off for Guaqui, on the Bolivian side.

  It didn’t leave on time, that night. A sergeant with a squad of men was in charge of the mooring lines when we got there, paying no attention to the complaints he was getting from passengers, crew and captain. The comandante split the squad into couples and sent them over the ship.

  She was pretty big for a ship that must have come up from sea level in pieces, certainly big enough to hide a stowaway. I went along with the comandante to watch the search. The job took about an hour, including the time we spent listening to the captain, a boliviano, grumble about his sailing time while he trailed us around and did his best to get in our way without making it too obvious that he hoped we wouldn’t find whatever we were looking for. But the search was a good one. We drew a blank. The surly captain got his clearance, lines were cast off, the steamer chugged away into the dark. The comandante and I went back to where don Ubaldo waited on the mole.

  “That’s all we can do tonight,” the comandante said. “The town is sealed tight. In the morning we’ll start a house-to-house search.”

  “When does the next boat leave?” don Ubaldo asked.

  “A freight vessel sails in the morning. I am posting a guard to check every man and every bit of cargo that goes aboard her.”

  I said, “Suppose he gets by you, somehow, and reaches the Bolivian side. Can’t you bring him back on a murder charge?”

  The comandante shrugged.

  “Legally, yes. Actually, they do not like us in Bolivia. They still blame Peru because we were unable to prevent Chile from stealing their coastal provinces during the War of the Pacific. And their police would not have the same interest we have. With the treasure he is carrying, he would have little difficulty in buying his way free. But I assure you that he will never escape Peru now. I suggest that you both go back to the hotel and get some sleep. I will call for you in the morning.”

  He left us to give orders to the sergeant.

  Don Ubaldo and
I walked back from the mole to the hotel, without a word to say to each other. It wasn’t more than a quarter of a mile, but my legs were shaky before I got there. The cast and the steel corset were heavy under my blanket.

  Raul, Ana Luz and Julie were waiting in the sala. I said, “Nothing,” and flopped down in a chair, worn out.

  Julie said, “Who was the—dead man?”

  “An Indian who helped us dig up the gold.”

  “Why did he kill him?”

  “I don’t know. Unloading excess baggage, I guess, the way he tried to do with me. One man has a better chance to get away than two.”

  Julie shuddered.

  “He seemed so—ordinary, on the ship. I never thought…”

  She didn’t finish it. We sat around, looking at the fire for another half hour, and then I had to move or pass out in my chair. I got up and said I was going to bed.

  “I’ll help you take your clothes off,” Raul said.

  He hadn’t ever thought of anybody else in his life. I knew he wasn’t thinking of my comfort now. He wanted to talk about something. In my room, I let him help me with buttons and shoelaces until he got around to what was bothering him.

  “What’s going on?” he said abruptly.

  I was brushing my teeth. He sat on the edge of the bathtub, watching me. I said, “What’s going on with who?”

  “Ana Luz. My father. Me. You. Julie. All of us.”

  “You haven’t talked to your old man?”

  “I don’t have to talk to him to know that something is happening. What’s it all about?”

  I rinsed off the toothbrush and hung it on a hook.

  “I’ve been reshuffling the deck a little,” I said. “An ace and a deuce don’t go well together. You’re the deuce. Ana Luz is the ace.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I bought Ana Luz from you and your father, that’s all. She isn’t going to marry you.”

  He nodded craftily.

  “I knew you wanted her, ever since that night on the ship. You weren’t in her cabin just because you knew she had been in yours. You thought you had something to trade with. But she was too much for you, wasn’t she? I saw those marks over your eyes, even if nobody else did. You…”

  I still had a good punch left in my right hand. I let him have it. He fell over into the bathtub and cracked his head against the wall. His eyes went out of focus for a couple of seconds. When they steadied again—he was balanced on his shoulders, his feet up in the air—I said, “I can lick you with one hand, guagua. I’d just as soon do it now as any other time. Get up.”

  He crawled out of the bathtub. I took another crack at him. He ducked under it and slid through the bathroom door. I had to go sideways through the door, because of the cast, and he got away before I could catch him.

  But one punch was better than none, and I had been saving it up for him for a long time.

  17

  I cooled down while I was dabbing iodine on my knuckles. There was no heat in the rooms, but when I crawled into bed I found that somebody had put a hot-water bottle between the sheets. I wondered if it was Ana Luz or the hotel management. Probably Ana Luz. She really was an ace, that girl. If I never accomplished anything else, I had done something to free her from Raul. If I had freed her. She’d never feel free in her own mind unless we caught Jeff and recovered the treasure. But we had to catch him now. He was trapped. Or was he? I wasn’t as sure of it as the comandante was. And if he did give us the slip, get away to Bolivia somehow, everything I had done had been a waste of time. I would have spent five or six hundred dollars of my own money and three weeks of my time for nothing. The money and the time didn’t amount to much. The important things were what I had promised Ana Luz, and hoped to do for Julie. Playing God isn’t a good thing if you can’t deliver. I remembered Julie’s face when Raul had held her hand, and Ana Luz’s face as she hugged herself in front of the fire, afraid to think of what might be hers because it wasn’t hers yet. Lying there in the dark, so tired I couldn’t sleep, I saw Naharro’s face as it had been when he told me how much the recovery of the treasure meant to him; Jeff’s face, with the wolf grin, looking at me over the pistol, the hammer going back; Tacho’s face, empty and ugly, blood and saliva trickling from his mouth; Berrien’s face, calm and peaceful in death. Dead man, live men, thieves, liars, murderers, cheats, their lives tied to three hundred pounds of metal and polished stones.

  The sleep I got that night was only an occasional doze. My mind wouldn’t stop going around in the squirrel cage. I couldn’t find a comfortable position in the steel corset, and when I did drop off, the altitude brought me awake gasping for breath, so that I had to sit up and take deep gulps of air. My shoulder itched inside the cast. I wanted a cigarette, didn’t have any within reach, and was too cold to get out of bed and look for them. I wanted a drink. I wanted it to be morning, so the search could start. I wanted to get it over with, one way or another. I wanted to get out of Puno, get out of Peru, go somewhere, anywhere…

  The dawn came at last. When it was light enough to see, I got up, shivered clumsily into my clothes, and wrapped a blanket around my shoulders. Frost was thick on the thatched roofs of the mud huts under the hotel window, and glistened whitely on the sparse grass of the flat sloping down to the lake shore. Lights were still on at the mole, where another steamer had tied up during the night.

  I left the hotel quietly and walked down to the mole, frozen mud and grass crackling under my feet. The comandante was already on the job, giving instructions to the sergeant and his squad of soldiers. They all looked cold and tired. The lake was like glass, without the faintest swell to rock the steamer tied up at the mole—the steamer that was Jeff’s only chance of escape. The hunt had begun.

  “It may take some time,” the comandante said. “There are a couple of thousand houses. But I have men working in toward the center of town from all sides, and he can’t skip around like a flea with three hundred pounds of gold. We’ll find him before long.”

  “When does the steamer leave?”

  “As soon as she’s loaded. My men were on hand when she tied up. They’re checking everything that goes on her. Let’s go aboard and have coffee.”

  We had coffee, in the salon. It was served, grudgingly, by a mozo who didn’t like Peruvians or gringos, a boliviano from the way he scowled at the comandante’s uniform. The comandante got a lot of scowls. The ship’s captain wasn’t around to grumble at us, but most of the crew were bolivianos, still fighting the War of the Pacific. It was easy to see that they weren’t on our side, even if they didn’t know what the excitement was all about.

  We finished our coffee and went back to the mole. Loading was slow, because of the inspection. The sergeant was already getting complaints that the ship wouldn’t make her sailing time. He went stolidly on with his job.

  The comandante said, “There’s nothing for us to do here. I want to see how the search is going. Come along.”

  He had the station wagon waiting. We drove up toward town until we met the first batch of guardias working their way in toward the central plaza, house by house.

  Except for the hotel, the railroad station, and a few big buildings in the center of town, Puno is mostly mud and thatch, one- or two-room huts. Two guardias went into each hut, their rifles ready, while the rest of a squad waited outside. There would be a cackle of Indian indignation from inside the hut, and then the two guardias would come out, join their companions, and fan out to pass the hut on both sides, moving on to the next house or stable or chicken hutch, whatever lay in their way. The comandante and I trailed along.

  The sun came up across the lake, red and gold through the cold mist rising from the water. Fishing balsas, clumsy-looking reed boats, some with straw sails, began to put out from the shore. The town lay in the bight of an inlet, low headlands stretching out into the lake on either side, and the fishermen in the balsas paddled slowly for the mouth of the inlet, out toward the deep water of the lake where fish
were to be caught.

  I said to the comandante, “Is somebody checking those balsas out?”

  “Of course.”

  The sun rose higher. The search went on, hut by hut, street by street. I saw soldiers helping the guardias. The soldiers were all young kids, conscripts in shabby brown uniforms from the town cuartel, having a whale of a time doing something besides drill. One of them must have had an itchy trigger finger, because we heard a shot down the street and ran to investigate. It was a false alarm, a baby wailing in fright, its mother yelling curses, nobody hurt. We followed along as the ring grew smaller, closing in on the plaza like a clenched fist.

  The steamer hooted from the mole, a series of short, impatient blasts on her whistle. The comandante looked at his watch. A messenger on a burro came trotting down the street, pulled up in front of the comandante, saluted without getting out of his saddle, and said, “The steamer is ready to leave, señor comandante. Is it permitted?”

  “Everything has been checked?”

  “Everything. The sargento reports all in order.”

  The comandante bit his thumbnail. The steamer hooted again, as impatiently as before. The comandante said, “Very well. Tell the sargento to leave two men at the mole and bring the rest of the squad here—after the steamer has sailed.”

  The man on the burro saluted, wheeled his animal, kicked with his heels, and trotted away.

  The comandante bit his thumbnail again. We followed along behind the searchers.

  “I’m nervous,” the comandante said frankly, minutes later. “I don’t like this. We’re getting too near the center of town.”

  “No chance that he’s slipped aboard the ship?”

  “None. That’s a good sergeant.”

  “How about the railroad?”

  “The station is under guard. Everything is under guard. Carajo, he must be moving along ahead of us. But with all that weight…”

  The steamer’s whistle interrupted him with two final triumphant hoots. Her lines were in. She was ready to sail.

  “Those balsas…”