Plunder of the Sun Read online

  Double doors at the end of the dining room swung open. Heads turned. There was a startled silence, a gasp, and then a scramble.

  It was a private showing among friends, so only six cops were on hand, with ropes strung to keep the crowd from getting too close to the tables on which the collection stood under floodlights. You can see it today in the Inca Museum, although you have to get special permission to look at it. It was beautiful stuff after they finished polishing it. Not all of it was polished then, but enough had been done to make a lot of archaeological mouths water. One sun-disk, cleaned and burnished like a mirror, must have weighed thirty pounds, solid hammered gold. The corn-plant statues were the finest workmanship, perfect reproductions of the stalk and leaves in gold, the ear and its tassel in silver sheathed with a gold husk, less than two feet high overall but complete in every detail, as finely made as a fine watch. Other pieces were studded with emeralds as big as your thumbnail. Some of the animal statuettes had jade eyeballs set in silver, others were just chunks of solid, soft gold.

  I thought of the golden vicuña, and counted the pieces. There were ninety-four. It must have wrenched Naharro to give up that last piece, but he had compensated himself for it, in a way, because a printed card on one of the tables read:

  The Treasure of Amarú

  Discovered in Cuzco Province by Al Colby and Ubaldo Naharro, I.N.A.

  April, 1948

  I was reading the card when Julie came over to where Ana Luz and I were pressed up against the ropes. I had never liked her so much as I did when she held out her hand to Ana Luz and said, in clumsy Spanish, “I am glad for you. I heard that you—obtained—what you wish for. I hope you will be very happy.”

  Ana Luz said, “Gracias,” and meant it.

  “Glad for me, too?” I showed Julie the check.

  “Oh, yes. I’m glad for everyone.”

  She didn’t look it. Her smile was mechanical. I said, “How are you getting along with Raul?”

  “All right.”

  “You don’t seem very happy about it.”

  “It’s not Raul. It’s don Ubaldo. He still thinks I’m a tramp.” She sighed unhappily. “I’ve tried everything. I’ve been so damn ladylike that it hurts. I’ve even given up smoking because he doesn’t approve of it. I just can’t get anywhere with him.”

  “Why not run off with Raul, if you really want him? Let the old man soak in his own juice. You’ve got enough money for two, haven’t you?”

  “It isn’t money. Raul won’t do anything without his father’s approval. He’s been under don Ubaldo’s thumb all his life, just like…”

  She stopped, looking sideways at Ana Luz. I said, “She doesn’t understand English. You couldn’t hurt her feelings anyway.”

  “…just like she was. That’s what makes Raul the way he is—or the way he seems to be most of the time, sullen and disagreeable. He isn’t, really. Underneath, he’s sweet and nice, when I get him away from his father. He’ll be wonderful as soon as don Ubaldo goes to Chile, but I still can’t…”

  “When is don Ubaldo going to Chile?”

  “Tomorrow or the next day.”

  “What for?”

  “I don’t know. Business, I guess.”

  “How long is he going to be away?”

  “I don’t know.”

  My mind began to tick again.

  There was more to it than I had thought. Fourteen gold statues weren’t going to satisfy Naharro. He wanted everything. He didn’t believe the other nine sheets of parchment were irretrievably lost, any more than I did. His speech had been a smokescreen, as much for my benefit as for the Institute’s. He must have got hold of the name of the hacendado who wrote the letter to the museum, and now he was leaving for Chile. I didn’t think it was a coincidence that the hacendado was chileno.

  I turned to Ana Luz.

  “What was the name of the hacendado who sold the parchment to Berrien?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Weren’t you there?”

  “We met in the park, as you and don Alfredo did, and he was careful not to mention names. You know how cautious he was, even with me, whom he trusted—unwisely.”

  “The hacendado was of Santiago?”

  “I don’t think so. He must have come from out of town. We waited two days for him to keep the appointment.”

  “Where did he stay in Santiago?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Caramba, you must know something about him. Would you recognize him if you saw him again?”

  “Surely. He was very ugly. One of the ugliest men I ever saw.”

  I thought fast. I might be able to get the name from the museum, but it would take time—time I couldn’t afford to waste if I was going to beat Naharro. And I was too much in the public eye just then to be able to ask questions at the museum without somebody wondering what it was all about.

  I said, “Ana Luz, is the Chilean visa on your passport still good?”

  “I think so. It was for three months.”

  “Will you do me one favor before you leave South America?”

  She said simply, “You do not have to ask that question.”

  “Come back to Chile with me and help me find the hacendado.”

  “When?”

  “Now. Tonight, if we can get a plane.”

  “I will have to pack a bag and change clothes.”

  “Go do it now. I’ll meet you in the lobby in half an hour.”

  She turned away without a word and pushed through the crowd.

  All this time Julie had stood there looking puzzled. She had not been able to follow the conversation, but she could tell that I was stirred up about something. I said, “You really want Raul, Julie? You’re sure he’s the man for you?”

  “I’m sure—if I can get him away from his father.”

  “Then hang on to the leash until you hear from me. I may be able to buy him for you!”

  The crowd was still too interested in the Treasure of Amarú to notice the guest of honor sneaking away early.

  19

  The breaks were with me that night. My papers were in order, I still had enough dollars left to pay for the tickets, and the DC 6, the big sleeper-plane, left for Santiago at midnight. It was half empty. I let the ticket clerk see the sling on my arm while I booked passage for Al Colby, North American, tourist, and Ana Luz Benavides, Peruana, nurse.

  I took the sling off after the plane had left Limatambo airport and was snoring south through the night. I needed both hands, because Ana Luz couldn’t draw. I sketched the oudine of a head and spent an hour fitting in a dozen different noses over a dozen different mouths until I got a face that she said resembled the hacendado—perhaps the hairline a little lower here, the eyebrows heavier. When I had finished lowering the hairline and thickening the eyebrows, I had something ugly enough to satisfy her.

  “It’s recognizable,” she said. “How will you use it?”

  “Try all the hotels, first. Afterward, the banks. Berrien paid him five thousand dollars, American, for the parchment. That many dollars should have left a mark somewhere.”

  “And if you find him?”

  “Trace the manuscript back until I find it or know that it’s really lost.”

  “The treasure means so much to you, then?”

  “The reward for its discovery does. And I would like to beat don Ubaldo. He leaves for Chile tomorrow or the next day.”

  “Why do you dislike don Ubaldo so much?”

  I stared at her. She said, “He is not a bad man, only selfish. He would give his life to find the manuscript. Why do you not let him have it? You have already made enough money to satisfy an ordinary man.”

  “There is more to be made the same way. And I will turn anything I find over to the Republic, not keep it for my own enjoyment, as he would. He has no thought of sharing anything. He wants to own it, as he owned you.”

  “You do not know him. He would not have kept the treasure. He wanted the glory of f
inding it, yes. The thing that hurt him most was to see your name before his on the card that announced the discovery.”

  “There would have been no announcement if he had found it.”

  She said again, “You do not know him. He is not a miser, to surround himself with gold for his secret pleasure. He wants his name to be known to the world as that of a great archaeologist.”

  “So do I, then.” She was beginning to irritate me. I couldn’t understand her standing up for the old robber. I said, “You’d better get some sleep. We’ll have plenty to do tomorrow.”

  “Very well. Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  The sleeper got into Santiago at nine-fifteen. Half an hour later we had cleared through customs and were working the hotels with my sketch. We tried the best ones first, then the second-class joints, then the scratch-houses. Ana Luz knew the date he had been in town, so it was only a matter of laying down the picture with a few pesos and asking a question. But nobody recognized the ugly face. If he had put up at one of a hundred pensiones or at a private house, the search was hopeless from that angle.

  We tried the banks after lunch. I had had an account with the Bank of London and South America before leaving Santiago. I re-opened the account and asked the manager to collect my seven hundred and fifty thousand soles in dollars.

  He laughed.

  “It will take a month. You couldn’t find that many dollars for sale in one piece on the whole West Coast. Some days we don’t pick up a hundred dollars worth of exchange in all of Santiago.”

  “Suppose I wanted to trace five thousand dollars that might have been sold here about a month ago. How would I go about it?”

  “Check or cash?”

  I asked Ana Luz. She said, “Cash.”

  The manager looked doubtful, but he rang a bell and sent his secretary to bring a big loose-leaf book showing daily exchange figures for all the banks in Santiago. While he was riffling the pages, he said, “The exchange is controlled, of course, but currency needn’t have gone through a bank. If it was a private sale, there’s no way to trace it. What was the date?”

  “Just about thirty days ago. Not longer, maybe a few days less.”

  “On the fifth—that’s thirty days—National City bought fifty-three hundred. Nothing big on the sixth. Nothing big on the seventh. On the eighth, we bought seven thousand. On the ninth, National City bought nearly nine thousand, Banco de Chile bought sixty-five hundred. On the tenth, nothing over five thousand. Of course, if it was sold in pieces, these figures don’t mean anything either. The eleventh was Sunday. On the twelfth—”

  “Wait a minute. I want to write those down.”

  After I got the figures, it was just footwork and good luck that we happened to talk to the clerk who had done business with our man. It was at the Banco de Chile, or we might not have learned anything even then. American and English banks are tougher about giving out information, as I knew from experience. But the clerk was young enough to be impressed by Ana Luz’s good looks. When she showed him the sketch—I was counting on her to get farther with bank clerks than I could—he didn’t shake his head as the others had done. He just looked doubtful.

  “The nose is not quite right,” Ana Luz said. “He is uglier even than the picture. He had five thousand dollars to sell, about a month ago.”

  “What is your interest in him, señorita?”

  “Señora.” She didn’t blink an eye. “He is my husband.”

  I winced. We didn’t know enough about him to take a chance like that. The clerk winced with me, but it was only the beauty-and-the-beast angle that hurt him. He said, “What is it that you wish to know?”

  “The name he is using now, and where he lives. I must find him. Our child—our only child…”

  She put her handkerchief to her mouth.

  It was pretty crude, but it worked. The clerk asked a few more questions, weakening all the time. Ana Luz gave him some kind of a story about being deserted with a small child and no money. I didn’t hear all she said, because I had my shoulders hunched up around my ears, waiting for the clerk to call a guard and have us thrown out in the street. But he fell for it. Our man wasn’t a regular customer he had to protect, and the Chilean law helped us. Sellers of foreign exchange had to give their names and addresses to the buyers. The clerk looked the name up in his records, wrote on a slip of paper, and handed the paper to Ana Luz with a tear of sympathy in his eye.

  She gave me the paper when we were out in the street. The name was Enrique Martinez Castro. The address was a post-office box number in Linares, a small farming town in the south.

  Up until that minute, I hadn’t thought about saying good-bye. We had been together so long, gone through so much together, that it seemed natural to have her with me. Seeing the address like that made me realize that she would be going one way and I another. But I didn’t know how to make the break. She had never been easy to talk to, even when we had nothing final to say to each other. I suppose she felt the same way I did. We walked, silently, until we reached the river, turned east, and finally came to the Parque Forestal.

  I was too busy thinking to notice where we were going. Ana Luz stopped me with her hand on my arm.

  “Do you recognize this place?”

  I looked around. The view of the river was familiar. So was the path, and the bench at its edge.

  I said, “This is where I first talked to Berrien.”

  “Yes. Let’s sit down for a minute.”

  “I’m sorry if I tired you. I was thinking.”

  “I’m not tired. But let’s sit down.”

  We sat. She folded her hands, just as she had done the first day, and looked off at the river. It was a long time before she spoke.

  “When are you going to Linares?”

  “Tonight, if I can arrange it. I have to get there before Naharro does.”

  “You are still determined to beat him?”

  “Nothing has happened to change my mind.”

  “You do not change your mind easily.”

  “No.”

  She said slowly, “I would do anything to change your mind about this thing.”

  “Why? What do you owe Naharro?”

  “Nothing. You paid my debt. But I lived in his household for twenty years, grew up in it, looked on him as a father. He was kind to me, whatever I have said about him. And I know his mind. I know what the discovery of a treasure would mean to him. To you, it is only a means of earning a reward. To him…”

  “Why do you…?”

  “Please, let me finish. You do not understand why I feel as I do, after he made me into the cheat I was, to serve his purposes. But that is one of the reasons I am saying this. Can’t you see how important it was to him, so important that he did what he did to me, whom he loved in his way—made me hate him, want to get away from him, made me dream only of freedom?” Ana Luz turned to face me, putting out her hand pleadingly. “You have already done so much. Can’t you do this one other thing? Perhaps the manuscript is lost forever, and you are only wasting your time. If it is not, let him find it. Let him have the little glory of seeing his name on a printed card instead of yours. You already have seven hundred and fifty thousand soles. Does it make you a better man than he is because you are greedy for money while he is greedy for fame? Do you think…?”

  “We met here,” I said. “It’s as good a place as any to say good-bye.”

  She shook her head.

  “No. You are angry with me. I will not say good-bye to you this way.”

  “You can say good-bye any way you like. I don’t want to hear anything else.”

  “Not that I am already more grateful to you than ever a woman was to a man before?” Her voice had changed, grown softer. “Not that if you did this one other thing that I ask, I would willingly spend my life paying you for it? Not that I would go anywhere you wished, do anything you wished, never ask for another thing…”

  There was only one thing left for me to do. I
reached into my pocket, took out the paper that had Martinez Castro’s name on it, tore it in half, tore the halves across, and threw them away.

  “Does that satisfy you?” I stood up. My throat was so tight that I thought I would choke. “If it does, stop talking of payments! I didn’t buy a criatura from Naharro. I bought your freedom and gave it to you. You owe me nothing. You owe him nothing. You owe nobody anything, now, neither obedience nor gratitude nor loyalty. Naharro said it once, I say it again: You are your own mistress. You are free to do what you wish.”

  She looked up at me wordlessly. There was an expression on her face that I had never seen there before. It was almost—I don’t know how to describe it. Shock isn’t quite the word. It was more like a suspension of feeling than feeling itself, the kind of a blank look you see in a man’s eyes during the few seconds after he has opened a telegram and the message is seeping in, when you can’t tell whether he is going to laugh or cry or ask for a gun to blow his brains out or tell you that he has won the Irish Sweepstakes.

  The anger grew on me. She had seen me throw away what might have been a fortune, and yet she still didn’t realize that I was trying to cut her loose, once and for all, from any sense of obligation that remained in her mind. I said, “For God’s sake, stop thinking like a criatura! Nobody owns you! Nobody is going to demand anything from you that you don’t want to give! Can’t you get it through your head that you are free—of Raul, of Naharro, of me, of everything! What more do you want?”

  Her eyes closed for a moment. When they opened again, the dead look had left her face. She smiled.

  “Nothing more.”

  She stood up, put her arms around my neck, pulled my head down, and kissed me.

  The kiss lasted a long time. Somebody laughed, going by on the path. I didn’t see who it was, because when Ana Luz finally let go of my neck and stepped back, no one was in sight. And I wasn’t angry any more.

  “That was not a payment.” Her voice was low and quiet, almost sad. “You are a fine man, Al Colby. I will never forget you.”

  She turned away. I watched her slim figure, erect and graceful, disappear around a bend in the path before I sat down again. She didn’t look back.