Plunder of the Sun Page 9

  I was so busy patting myself on the back that I didn’t see Jeff until I was level with him. He was leaning against a tree, half a block from Naharro’s house. He fell into step with me.

  I said, “You never give up, do you?”

  “No.”

  “Have any trouble tailing me this time?”

  “I knew you were doing business with Naharro. When I found out that you had skipped, I came here and waited until you showed up.”

  “When did you find out that I had skipped?”

  “Early this morning. I searched your room.”

  I had to laugh. He said it as if he were telling me that he had come around to borrow a match.

  “Figure on trying to search me next?”

  “I’ll get to that when I think it will do some good. I came to tell you that Raul Cornejo is in town.”

  “Why tell me?”

  “Didn’t you say that he tried to take it from you in Lima?”

  “I told him you got it. Maybe he’s looking for you.”

  “I hope he is.” Jeff grinned, an ugly grin. “I’d like a little trouble. I’m ripe for it. But you’d better be careful.”

  “What do you expect to get for the tip—a kiss?”

  “The hell with you!” His face flushed. “I don’t care if you rot! I just don’t want anybody to get that manuscript from you before I do. I don’t know how Cornejo got into this, but if he tried once he’ll try again.”

  “Is Berrien’s nurse with him?”

  “I didn’t see her. I only saw him for a minute. He tried to get in at the pensión this morning, but the old bruja was booked up a week in advance. He went on to the hotel.”

  “Did he see you?”

  “Nobody sees me when I don’t want to be seen.”

  We walked back to the pensión together.

  Jeff knew a shortcut, a twisting, cobbled callejón so narrow that we had to squeeze against the wall when we met a string of pack llamas laden with firewood, ugly animals that stank and spat at us as they passed. I thought Jeff had picked the callejón as a good place to make another play for whatever he thought I was foolish enough to be carrying with me, and I was careful not to let him get behind me. But he didn’t try anything, just trudged moodily along with his thoughts. It was a strange feeling, walking with a man who wanted nothing more than to cut my throat but was going out of his way to see that nobody else did it.

  Once he said abruptly, “I hope you know what you’re doing with Naharro. He’s a fox.”

  “It’s white of you to worry about my business.”

  “I’ve got a piece of your business.”

  “You think.”

  “I’ve got a piece,” he said doggedly. “Don’t kid yourself that I’m not going to get it, either. You’ll make it easier on yourself if you take me in. I’ll get it, one way or another.”

  “You hope.”

  He didn’t say any more.

  At the pensión, I packed my clothes and told Abuela I was moving to the hotel. She grumbled about good-for-nothing guests who moved in just long enough to dirty the linen and then moved right out. I didn’t tell her that her guests found it too easy to search each other’s rooms for my comfort.

  When I went out through the garden with my bag, Jeff watched me go. Halfway up the hill to the hotel—it was only a short walk—I looked back. He was standing at the gate of the garden, still watching me. He lifted his hand when he saw me turn around. The wave said: I’ll be seeing you.

  And as if having him on my back wasn’t enough to keep me busy, the first person I bumped into at the hotel was Ana Luz. She was coming out the door as I went in. I wasn’t surprised to see her, knowing that Cornejo was around, but I had been wondering what had brought them down from Cuzco. I hoped it was because they had learned that Jeff was in Arequipa, and still thought he had the manuscript. If that was it, helping the mistake along would be a good way to keep them all occupied.

  Ana Luz didn’t show any surprise at seeing me. She looked right through me. I lifted my hat. She nodded coolly and started to pass, but I stopped her.

  “Excuse me, señorita. I would like a word with you.”

  “I thought that we had our last words in Lima, señor.”

  “Perhaps a few more would be an advisable precaution on my part. Does your presence in Arequipa have any connection with my own?”

  “None at all.” She wasn’t tall enough to look down her nose at me, but she tried.

  “I am glad to hear it. I wanted to be sure you knew that the object in which you expressed an interest is no longer in my possession, and that any further approaches by you or your cousin, with or without firearms, would be a waste of time—until I recover it. I explained all this to Señor Cornejo at one time, but if he has not told you…”

  “Nothing about you interests me in the least, señor. Believe me.”

  I bowed and stepped aside to let her pass.

  I wasn’t satisfied with one slap in the mouth, so I gave Julie her turn at bat as soon as I had sent my bag up to my room. She was sitting at a table in the cantina, alone and sober, drinking a limonada. She had given up the merry-widow hat and the green eye-shadow. In a print dress that brought out the points of her good figure, with her blonde hair combed and neat, she looked pretty good—even kissable. And lonely. I stopped at her table.

  There was a half-empty glass in front of the chair opposite her. I said, “May I sit down?”

  “No.”

  She didn’t even lift her head. I think she smelled me. Her nostrils were distended, white at the edges.

  “You look nice this morning.”

  “Go away.”

  “I’m just being friendly. If you haven’t anything to do this afternoon…”

  “I have plenty to do this afternoon. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t do anything with you.”

  “Don’t be nasty, Julie. I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings last night.”

  She looked up then.

  “I don’t want to talk to you,” she said levelly. “I don’t want to have anything to do with you. If you stay here, I’m going to call the manager and tell him that you’re molesting me.”

  Somebody came up behind me. I thought it was a mozo, and I was glad she spoke only English.

  “I can’t be that bad,” I said.

  “I told you not to hurt me twice.” She still spoke in the same controlled, monotonous tone. “Raul, will you throw this man out, please?”

  I turned around.

  Cornejo was right behind me. His eyes were bright. He looked from my face to Julie’s, then back at me. It wasn’t lack of inclination that made him hesitate to take up her offer. I could feel him bristling, like a porcupine.

  I said, “All right,” and walked away.

  With everybody in Arequipa damning my eyes and anxious to put a spoke in my wheel, I had to be extra careful. Raul and Ana Luz might or might not believe that I still had the manuscript, but Jeff knew. He was good at searching rooms, too. I locked my door, got the picture-magazine out from under the carpet, and numbered the remaining hundred and forty-five slips as I had numbered the first batch, making two separate sets. One set I divided into halves, laying them flat under the insoles of my shoes. The other set I dropped loose in my pocket. I wasn’t over-confident about the shoes as a hiding place, but if anybody jumped me and got away with it, he should have no good reason to suspect that he wasn’t getting all there was to get when he went through my pockets. And I still had two other complete prints of the manuscript, the numbered control sheet and an unmarked one.

  But I couldn’t leave the prints lying around, and when I took them downstairs in their girl-show cover, Raul and Julie were still in the cantina. Julie didn’t look up as I went by. Raul did. It was like seeing a snake’s head lift from its coils. I couldn’t go near the hotel safe while he was watching me, so I took the prints downtown to the Banco de Credito and saw them locked away in a fire-proof vault. With that off my mind, I had nothing to do but kill ti
me until evening.

  It was the longest day I ever killed. I cashed a traveler’s check at the bank, and then didn’t know what to do with the money. There was no way to spend it, except for a couple of crummy movies, and I didn’t feel like sitting still. I couldn’t find a bowling alley, or a billiard table. Finally somebody told me there was a golf course at the edge of town.

  The golf course was better than nothing, but not much better. It was above the irrigation ditch, spread out over the desert hills, nothing but sand—fairways, greens, rough, bunkers, everything the same. Lines of white stones marked the fairways. I rented a bag of battered clubs from an old woman who had a key to the deserted clubhouse, and played eighteen holes. The nevada had crept down from the mountains by then, and a thick blanket of woolly gray cloud hung low over the hills, cutting the mountain peaks off at their bases. The course was empty and cold. There wasn’t a blade of grass or a tree within miles. A dry, chilly wind blew across the hills, lifting sand that filled my eyes and ears. I couldn’t hit a decent ball off the loose ground, or plant my feet properly, or do anything right. I was sour, the way you go sour with dice or cards, when the law of probabilities stops working for you and you can’t do anything but lose. It may have been only the combination of that barren landscape, the dusty wind, the gloomy overcast, the strange gray light, but more and more the feeling grew on me that my luck had run out. Something serious was going to go wrong. Either the manuscript would turn out to say nothing, or an earthquake would wreck the bank vault, or Jeff would out-figure me somehow. I could feel trouble coming as plainly as you smell rain on a wet wind.

  It was sundown when I finished three-putting the last gravelly green. I paid off the old woman who had loaned me the clubs and went back to Naharro’s house.

  The chola said that don Ubaldo had visitors, and sidetracked me into a gloomy waiting room. I waited for five minutes before he showed up.

  He wasn’t sullen any more. He gave me the same handshake that I had got the first time I met him, before I had crossed him up with my scheme. I asked him how he was getting along with the translation.

  “Very well. I will finish what I have in a few hours.”

  “No difficulties?”

  “More than there would have been if I could have worked from the original.” He chuckled, putting his hand, liver-spotted and yellow, on my arm. “It was a clever device you invented, the cutting. I confess that I am really curious to know what the manuscript says, with its talk of precious metals and torture. I suppose there is no chance that I may see it?”

  “Not until I have a full translation.”

  “I thought not.” He chuckled again. “Perhaps it will turn out to be only another legend, and then you will sell it to me for my collection. In the meantime, I am afraid that I still need some time to finish what you have given me. Perhaps you will come back later. Or, better yet, join me in an early dinner. Afterward you can amuse yourself as you please while I finish the work.”

  “What of your visitors?”

  He waved his hand.

  “They have gone.”

  I accepted his invitation, because I was anxious to get the translation from him as quickly as possible. I still smelled trouble.

  But I almost forgot to worry during dinner. Naharro’s food was good. His liquor was good, too, and he was an interesting talker. I listened to him discuss the Conquest for half an hour, and enjoyed it, before he made a polite gesture to turn the conversation over to me.

  “You are a student of Peruvian history, Señor Colby?”

  “An amateur only. I find the story of the Conquest very interesting.”

  “It is very interesting. But the history of the empire which the conquistadores destroyed is even more interesting. Imagine, if you can, a truly social community—a despotism, it is true, where the Inca was a god on earth, an absolute ruler of his subjects, but a society in which no one was idle, no one went hungry, no one suffered want. Except for the Inca, who owned everything, no one was rich and therefore no one could be poor. The empire was based on a policy of peaceful conquest, negotiation, understanding, community of effort. The Incas preferred to construct roads and fine buildings, rather than wage war. They fought courageously enough if they had to, even when Spanish guns and horses proved to be too much for them, but theirs was essentially a country of peace and prosperity. Greed was unknown, because no man could lose what he had not nor strive for what could never be his. Currency did not exist. Think of that, señor. Imagine a society with no need for money, and compare it with our poor country today, backward, undeveloped, dependent on imports for its life but with no way open to earn the credit which it must have for its survival. Our whole economy is geared to your American dollars, for which we must pay fourteen, fifteen, sixteen to one—when they are available. I myself have offered sixteen to one this week without finding a single seller.”

  I almost laughed at the way he had worked the conversation around from the Inca empire to the subject of dollars. Everybody wants dollars in Peru, and they usually get at it in the same roundabout way, so the seller won’t see how anxious they are and hold them up. But it explained his change from sullenness to cordiality, which had puzzled me, and his soles were as good as the next man’s.

  I said, “I have some traveler’s checks, if you are in the market.”

  “Traveler’s checks would be excellent. What do you ask?”

  “The bank paid me fifteen this morning. You can have them at the same rate.”

  “That seems fair. Very fair indeed. Could you sell me—let me see—three hundred dollars?”

  I countersigned three traveler’s checks. He paid for them in cash, forty-five hundred soles in big bills that he dug out of an iron box. My traveler’s checks went into the iron box, which he carried away with him to some hole of its own. When he came back, five minutes later, the dinner was over.

  I read his copy of Prescott and drank coffee with anís while he worked on the translation. The wait brought back my jumpiness. It took him a little more than an hour to finish, mumbling over the reference books he had spread out under a lamp on the table in his study. A lot of the slips were duplications, so he had only about fifty words written down on his list when he gave it and the slips to me.

  I handed him the batch I was carrying in my pocket.

  “Can you finish these by tomorrow night?”

  “I think so. This is all?”

  “There will be one more set, the last.”

  His heavy eyelids drooped. He chuckled.

  “You are a careful man, Señor Colby. I am glad that I do not have to do business with gringos more often. They are too clever for me. Shall I call you a taxi, or will you walk?”

  “A taxi. Your soles would make good bait for bandits, and the streets are dark.”

  I wasn’t as afraid of bandits as I was of Jeff and my jinx, but Naharro didn’t have to know that.

  He called a taxi.

  When it let me off at the hotel, I looked over the lobby and the dining room to see if I could spot Raul or Ana Luz before I went to the desk. They weren’t in sight. Julie still sat in the cantina, just where she had been that morning, twirling the lemonade glass in her fingers. She kept her eyes on the glass as I went by.

  I meant to make another try at apologizing after I had got rid of what was in my pocket. She must have been pretty miserable, sitting there alone. I said to the clerk, “Give me the envelope from the safe. I have something to add to it.”

  The clerk stared at me.

  “But, señor! I gave it to your messenger, not half an hour ago.”

  It was like being hit from behind with an ax. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t open my mouth, or lift a hand, or think. While I stood there, bleeding to death inside, Julie began to laugh.

  10

  She was still laughing when the clerk, seeing my expression, handed me a short, typewritten note. It said, in Spanish, “Please deliver to the bearer the article you keep for me in the safe,” and was
signed with my name. The signature looked like mine.

  The clerk said, “I hope nothing is wrong, señor. I compared the signatures carefully before I surrendered the envelope.”

  I began to function again—not much, but enough to talk. I said, “Who brought the note?”

  “A muchacho of the street.”

  Julie’s laughter was getting hysterical. I walked into the cantina and sat down opposite her. The laughter shut off like a stream of water.

  “I’ve been waiting for hours to see your face when you heard that it was gone.” She licked her lips like an animal. “Oh, it was good! It was wonderful!”

  She began to laugh again.

  I let her have it out while I examined the signature of the note. From the slight unsteadiness of the pen scratches that should have been sharp and firm, and the thinness of the paper, I could see that it was a tracing. But it was smaller than my normal signature. It hadn’t been taken from the hotel register. I thought back, trying to remember what else I had signed—the book at the pensión, a form at the Banco del Credito, a traveler’s check…

  Naharro!

  Naharro, his liverish eyelids drooping, his bald head wagging in admiration, chuckling over the gringo’s cleverness while I wrote my name three times for him in the cramped space left for my countersignature on the traveler’s checks, and then sat around for an hour drinking his anís while he made use of them!

  I put my hand over my eyes and tried to think, while Julie’s laughter went on and on and on. She was the only one who could have known that I had something in the safe. She had seen me put it there, the first night. But she didn’t know Naharro, and she didn’t know what I had. There had to be an intermediary, a connection of the two points somewhere. Jeff—or Raul and Ana Luz. Jeff was the only one of the three who knew Naharro—as far as I knew. There was a lot I didn’t know.