Plunder of the Sun Read online

  Ana Luz was the first one to come back. She looked so stiff and uncomfortable that I couldn’t help smiling. It was bad luck that she happened to see me then, because she turned a bright, angry pink. I was sorry about the smile. It’s humiliating enough to be stripped to the skin and peered at by strangers without having other strangers laugh at you. It was the second time I had made her blush, without meaning to either time.

  Berrien came back from the search looking the same as ever, ready for burial. Ana Luz wheeled him through the aduana and out to the pier where the Talca was tied up. I followed along.

  They hoisted Berrien and his wheel chair up to the boat deck with a winch. The nurse and I had to climb the gangplank and a couple of ladders to get there, dodging cables most of the way. The ship had finished working cargo, and stevedores were already lowering the strongbacks into place in the hatches. An hour later we put to sea.

  The Talca didn’t have much in the way of passenger accommodations, just the cabins on the boat deck and a few steamer chairs cluttering the deck between the cabins and the lifeboats. Passengers were supposed to eat with the officers. Berrien couldn’t make it up and down the ladder to the messroom, which was on the main deck, so he and Ana Luz had their meals in his cabin. I met the other passengers at dinner the first night out.

  Three of them were North Americans, two men and a woman. The men had gringo written all over them. I don’t know just what it is about North Americans, but you can tell them a mile off, wherever you meet them and whatever language they happen to be talking. There’s something in the way they carry themselves. These two had it. One said he was a traveling salesman for a United States manufacturer of pressure-cookers. I forget his name, but a traveling salesman is a traveling salesman, whether you find him kicking around South America or in a country store in Kansas. He told jokes in three languages, played poker with me and the ship’s officers, and called the captain by his first name inside of two days. The other man was a big, rangy, hard-faced fellow who looked as if he could have played pro football for a living at one time. He didn’t say what his business was. His name was Jefferson, Jeff to the traveling salesman first and to the rest of us later. He played good poker, a little loose but not reckless, and didn’t talk much.

  The gringa was a young blonde piece making a tour of South America on her own. She painted her mouth square at the corners, like a comic-strip glamor girl. She didn’t speak any Spanish and didn’t have to, because there would always be some guy hanging around to translate for her. During the first day out she had the third officer showing her how to weave a string belt. He had to put his arms around her from behind to manage the strings, and she did everything she could, short of biting his ear, to make him realize he was holding something real nice. She was that type. Her name was Julie.

  The other passengers were a middle-aged Peruvian official of some kind and his wife, both fat and contented with each other, and a tall beaknosed Englishman named Harris who said Good morning, Good afternoon and Good evening once a day each. It was just an average passenger list—on the surface. I found out that something was going on beneath the surface when Berrien learned that Jeff was aboard.

  Berrien had another attack just after reaching the ship, and stayed in his cabin during the first two days at sea. He had a hand bell that he rang, when he wanted Ana Luz, so she could spend her time outside in the sun on the boat deck and still be within call. Jeff paid her a lot of attention. He spoke easy Spanish, and Julie the dizzy blonde kept the other unoccupied males from giving him any competition. She tried to add Jeff to her string as well. He wouldn’t play—with her. But any time Ana Luz was on deck, Jeff was pretty sure to show up. She didn’t encourage him or discourage him. He was there just the same.

  On the third afternoon, he came up to the boat deck after lunch and took one of the steamer chairs near Berrien’s cabin. He was waiting for Ana Luz to show after she had snugged Berrien down for his afternoon nap. This time Berrien himself came out of the cabin, walking, holding Ana Luz’s arm and taking slow, careful steps. He saw me first—I was leaning against one of the lifeboats—and then Jeff. He stopped dead.

  I thought he was going to have another attack. Ana Luz, who was watching his feet, looked up quickly at his face, then at Jeff. She was puzzled, Berrien was scared. That was all I could make out of their expressions during the few seconds before Jeff said, “¿Qué tal, Alfredo? ¿Como estás?”

  “Bien, gracias.” Berrien had recovered himself, although his face was graver than usual. “¿Como estás tu?”

  “Bien.”

  Berrien began to walk again, carefully putting one foot in front of the other until he and Ana Luz had rounded the corner of the far cabin and were out of sight.

  I said to Jeff, “Who’s your friend?”

  “His name is Berrien.”

  “He looks like a sick man.”

  “He is—the crook!”

  Jeff hauled his long frame up out of the deck chair and went down the ladder to the main deck so he wouldn’t have to talk any more. I would have liked to know what it was in particular that made him think Berrien was a crook, and where he had known him well enough so that they used the Spanish “thou” to each other.

  Berrien and Ana Luz came around the other end of the cabins, starting a second lap. The Peruvian couple, the Englishman, Julie and the salesman were digesting their lunches in steamer chairs ranged along the cabin bulkhead, the Peruvians dozing, the Englishman and the salesman looking at Julie’s legs. She had her skirts up too high and was pretending to be asleep, all innocence. If she had pulled her skirts down, they would all have gone to sleep and Berrien could have passed me the message he wanted to give me. As it was, he moved his head an inch in the direction of his cabin the second time he shuffled by.

  There was nothing I could do about it until dinner time. I stalled until everybody else had gone down to the messroom, then ducked into his cabin.

  He was sitting up in the wheel chair. Ana Luz was reading poetry to him, her voice low and soothing. It was the formal Spanish verse that is all meter and no rhyme, like waves in a pond. His eyes were closed. She was reading:

  Para mi corazón basta tu pecho

  Para tu libertad bastan mis alas

  Desde mi boca llegará hasta el cielo

  Lo que estaba dormido sobre tu alma.

  She finished the verse before she put the book down. I wondered whose idea it had been to pick that particular poem for a nurse to read to a hopeless invalid. It translates this way, more or less:

  For my heart, thy breast is enough

  For thy liberty, my wings are enough

  From my mouth, that which has slept on thy soul

  Will arise to the sky.

  Berrien opened his eyes when she stopped reading.

  I said, “¿Que quiere?”

  “Speak English.” He looked worried. “Where is the package?”

  “In a place where nobody will be able to get it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  I was as sure as anybody would feel with the thing digging a hole into his armpit, but I only said Yes.

  “Good. You will have to be very careful with it. There is a man aboard the ship who would do anything to get it.”

  “Jefferson?”

  “How did you know?”

  “You jumped when you saw him.”

  “I am afraid of him. He would stop at nothing to get it away from me. Nothing.”

  “He doesn’t look like a collector of antiques.”

  “He is a thief. He would steal anything that could be sold.”

  “Does he know what you have?”

  “He knows or suspects. He has been trying to get information from Ana Luz.”

  “How much information does she have to give him?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Does she know what it is, or how much it’s worth, or anything else about it?”

  “Of course not.” He was surprised at the question. “She only
knows that you are carrying a package for me, and that we must all be discreet.”

  “Do you talk English with me because you don’t trust her?”

  “I have no reason to distrust her. I talk English with you because I am a cautious man by nature. But you need have no worry on her account.”

  “She doesn’t understand English?”

  “No.”

  All this time Ana Luz had been pretending to read poetry. Her eyes hadn’t moved once. If she wasn’t able to make any sense out of what we were saying, she was trying hard.

  I said, “Thanks for the tip. I’ll be careful.”

  “I am counting on you, Mr. Colby.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  I went down to dinner.

  Afterwards Jeff, the salesman, the Englishman, the radio operator, the skipper and I played poker until midnight. Jeff was glum and reckless. He lost a couple of big pots on bluffs that didn’t work, and won a couple of bigger pots on what I thought were bluffs but didn’t have enough cards to investigate. His kind of play made the game too rich for my blood. At midnight, the radio operator and I gave up our seats to the steward and the first officer.

  I had a last cigarette with the radio operator on the boat deck. He was a chunky, friendly man, an ex-navy brass-pounder. He said he had a bottle in his cabin if I felt like a small one before turning in.

  “Thanks, no, Sparks. I’m tired. Some other time.”

  “Me, too.” He yawned until his jaws cracked. “I’ve got to roll out at four A.M. to work traffic. Me for the sack.”

  We said good night. He went to the radio shack. I went to my cabin.

  Fifteen minutes later, after I had crawled into my bunk with the package tucked under my pillow, the radio key began clattering.

  I had the after cabin on the port side, right around the corner from the radio shack, so Sparks’ fist was practically in my ear. It didn’t bother me. I was already in that half-conscious state where you start dreaming before you are really asleep. I was back in the army, a headset over my ears, sitting around in a circle with half a dozen other buck privates while the Signal Corps sergeant in the middle of the circle tapped out practice messages to us on a buzzer. He was a brute, that sergeant. He thought anybody who couldn’t take forty words a minute ought to be on permanent K.P. Right in the middle of a message to one man, he’d break in with the next man’s name and start a new message, hoping to catch somebody asleep. You had to be on your toes, listening for your name to pop into the middle of a sentence. He was sending something to the man across the circle from me when the buzzer said C-O-L-B-Y.

  I grabbed my pencil and pad, but it was no use. He was sending too fast. I couldn’t make head or tail of the message. He bared his teeth at me over the key, his big ham of a hand beating away like a riveting gun, faster and faster, nothing but a blurred buzz of sound in the head-set, and I thought: Another week of K.P. for you, Al. You’re in the Army now, you’re not behind a plow, you’ll never get rich…

  I snapped awake. The key was still going. I jumped out of my bunk and ran to the bulkhead that was the partition between my cabin and the radio shack. The sound was fainter there. It was better at the porthole, but not good enough. By the time I got into a pair of pants, the key had stopped.

  From the doorway of my cabin, it was easy to muscle up onto the roof of the superstructure. There was a bright moon. The snowy peaks of the Andes, a hundred miles from the coast along which we were sailing, were like a bridge of clouds across the horizon, but I didn’t waste any time on the view. I could see the whole ship aft of the bridge. The only movement I could make out was the lookout on the bridge wing, sneaking a smoke. I walked all around the edge of the superstructure, looking for a reflection of light from the cabins below. They were all dark, except for the radio shack.

  When I finished my round, I squatted down by the water tank on top of the radio shack and waited for somebody to come out of the door below. Nobody did. There were no more messages. The antenna lead-in coming up through the roof stopped humming when Sparks shut off the power. I heard him knocking around down below for a couple of minutes, and then his light went off.

  My feet were bare, so I didn’t make any noise dropping to the deck. I whispered “Sparks!” through his porthole.

  His bunk creaked. “Who is it?”

  “Colby.”

  “What do you want?”

  “The drink.”

  His light went on. He got out of the bunk to open the door. He looked surprised when he saw me there in nothing but a pair of pants, but he let me in and reached for the bottle under his bunk.

  I said, “What I really want is to know what was in the message you just sent.”

  He filled two shot-glasses with whiskey, held them at eye-level to see that they were equal, and handed me one.

  “None of your business. Salud.”

  “Salud. If it wasn’t my business, I wouldn’t be asking.”

  “Then the rule book says I can’t tell you. Have another?”

  “One is enough for me. How much would it cost to have you forget the rule book for a couple of minutes?”

  He smiled at me—with his mouth, not his eyes.

  “You don’t try to bribe a man when you’re drinking his whiskey, laddie. Go back to bed.”

  “Tell me who sent the message, then.”

  “The rule book says no.”

  “Was it ship’s business or a private message?”

  “The rule book covers that, too.”

  “Was it a man or a woman?”

  He poured himself a second drink before he answered.

  “What’s it to you?”

  “My name was in it.”

  “You read code?”

  “I read enough to recognize my own name. I didn’t get any of the rest of it, and I’m interested.”

  “It could have been ship’s business. The passenger list, maybe.”

  “I thought you worked your traffic at four A.M.”

  “I didn’t say it was ship’s business. I said it could have been. Now go to bed and let me sleep, laddie.”

  It was no use trying to get anything out of him. The rule book was a lot more important to him than I was. I thanked him for the drink and went back to my cabin. I didn’t even think of the damn package until I got back in my bunk and found it still there under my pillow, where anybody could have pinched it while I was out prowling around.

  Lying in the dark, I checked over the probabilities. If the message had been ship’s business, it didn’t interest me. But I didn’t think that Sparks would have stayed awake to transmit ship’s business at midnight unless it was an emergency, and I couldn’t think of an emergency that would involve me except the boilers blowing up. If it was private business, one of the passengers had been so anxious to get a message off that night that he—or she—had waited up until Sparks left the poker game, and talked him into sending it inmediatamente. Counting out the poker players we had left below—I could find out in the morning if anybody had quit the game within a couple of minutes after we did—it left the Peruvian couple, Julie, Ana Luz, and Berrien.

  Before I went to sleep, I plastered the package to my ribs with enough adhesive tape so that anybody who wanted it would have to take me with it.

  3

  Nobody had quit the poker game until three o’clock. I learned that from Jeff, who had won a potful of money, mostly from Harris, the Englishman. My list still included only four names.

  Julie cornered me after breakfast. The salesman was tagging her, but she got rid of him by asking him to bring a sweater from her cabin. As soon as he left us, she stuck out her lip at me and looked sly.

  “What were you doing up on the roof last night?”

  “Where were you?”

  “Looking at the moon from a deck chair.”

  “Anybody with you?”

  “The mate—the cute one.”

  “Did he see me?”

  “He was too busy. What were you doing?”r />
  “Getting my exercise.”

  “It’s a funny way to get exercise. But I like the way you look with your shirt off.” She ran a red, sharply pointed fingernail up my forearm. “Nice muscles.”

  “The third mate has nice muscles, too. Did you tell him that you saw me?”

  “I haven’t told anybody—yet. You’re kind of a mystery man, aren’t you? I like mystery men.”

  “That’s good. Did you happen to see anybody go in or come out of the radio shack just before you saw me?”

  “I couldn’t see the radio shack. All I saw were those beautiful muscles in the moonlight.” She looked at me from the corners of her eyes. “Where are you taking them, mystery man?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “I was just thinking that you might be going to Lima. I’m going to be in Lima in about a week, after I go up to Cuzco and poke around a lot of moldy old Inca ruins. I might let you take me out, some time.”

  “I’d like that.”

  She nodded solemnly. “But you’ll have to tell me what you were doing up on the roof.”

  “What if I don’t?”

  “I might tell somebody about it.”

  “Go right ahead.”

  She was disappointed. The salesman came back with her sweater before she could say any more.

  She was probably just what she seemed to be, but I didn’t cross her off my list until she left the ship at Mollendo to take the train to Arequipa, a hundred miles up in the sierra on the way to Cuzco. The salesman decided that he had business in Arequipa and left with her, although his ticket was good to Callao.

  We were fourteen hours in Mollendo unloading cargo. Everybody went ashore except Berrien and Ana Luz. Berrien couldn’t have gone ashore even if he had wanted to, because Mollendo is a shallow-water port, the second best in Peru and one of the worst in the world. Ships have to anchor half a mile off shore and unload into lighters. Passengers are taken off in a launch. From the launch you go ashore by way of a bos’n’s chair on a cable let down by a donkey engine on the pier. The launch rocks a lot, and the chair kicks you two or three times in the seat of the pants while you are fitting yourself into it. After you reach dry land, there is a stiff climb—too stiff for a wheel chair—up a cliff to the town. And after you get to the top, it isn’t worth it anyway.