by Lyn Hamilton
That seemed to be a somewhat risky assumption, I thought.
“So what do they—the huaqueros, I mean—do with what they find? Sell it on the black market?”
“Yes, in some cases; in others it’s considered legit, in a manner of speaking. What I mean to say is that there are ways to own artifacts in this country quite openly, and huaqueros profit from it.”
“But doesn’t letting people own antiquities here just encourage looting?” I asked.
“It does. Drives me crazy. But you have to understand looting a little, don’t you? You’ve seen how poor this area is. If you’re lucky, you can make a lot more money at looting than you can fishing or farming, that’s for sure. It’s easy for us, coming from nice rich nations, to tell people they should donate whatever they find to a museum. The people I really blame are the buyers, especially the dealers. They’re the ones who encourage this kind of thing, the ones who make the big money on the finds too, I might add. Scum, in my opinion. At least some of them, Laforet first among them. But don’t get me going on this subject,” he said, looking as if he was in serious danger of diving into a depression again.
“You were telling me about Arturo,” I prodded. “Right,” he said. “Arturo first came to me last season with some artifacts he’d found. I’d seen him hanging around watching, and eventually he showed up at the hacienda and asked me to assess some stuff for him, give him some idea of what it was worth.
“He had a couple of really nice ceramic pieces: Moche, a stirrup-spout vessel in the shape of a sea lion, complete with shell eyes, and another beaker with fine-line drawings. Most certainly genuine. They were looted, of course. There was no other way he could have got them. But he offered to tell me where he’d found them in exchange for my assessment of them. So I made a deal to get to study the fine-line vase for a day or two, before giving him my assessment.”
I said nothing. “I know what you’re thinking,” he went on. “But looting goes on all the time, and I’m powerless to stop it. I figure this way at least I get a chance to study the stuff before it disappears into the black market.”
I thought that one over for a minute. There were pros and cons to this argument, and the ethics seemed a little murky to me, but what did I know? After all, I was misrepresenting myself to these people, and had all along. I was also the proud possessor of a genuine Moche artifact that I had not yet got around to donating to a museum.
“Anyway, Arturo’s back again this season, and brought me another couple of pieces to look at. This time he’s got a real find: a little copper figure of a warrior, judging from the attire, and a really beautiful ceramic in the shape of a duck.
“Last night Arturo came to tell me that one of the local farmers, guy by the name of Rolando Guerra, is building a wall around a piece of property on the edge of the algarrobal, the carob tree forest. He’s told the locals that he’s just protecting his land from invasores, but Arturo tells me he’s almost certain the fellow has found something, and that he’s building a wall around it so that no one will see him looting it. The fact that the Guerra family are known huaqueros, have been forever, would be proof enough, but add to that the fact that Arturo’s ceramic and warrior come from that same area, and that pretty well clinches it. The campesino may indeed have found the big one.”
“And the big one is?”
“A tomb. An undisturbed tomb of an upper-class person, someone important. That’s the most exciting find of all in our field, and down here, it could be really spectacular. For years people studied the scenes on Moche pottery, not realizing that the scenes depicted real occurrences or rituals. For example, a lot of Moche pottery shows a scene in which captives are brought before a god, or a warrior king or priest of some kind, who often sits on a litter. In front of him there is another warrior who is half man, half bird. Behind him there is a woman, a priestess, holding a cup. Behind her there is often another figure with an animal face, usually feline.
“What’s interesting is that no matter how often this scene is depicted and no matter the artist, the figures in it are similar. It’s been compared to the Crucifixion or the Nativity in our culture, something that’s been depicted by many people over the centuries, but always with common elements that we all recognize. In the same way, the scene I’ve described is obviously a ritual of some importance to the Moche, and although they had no written language, and we therefore have to surmise what’s happening, it’s usually referred to as the Sacrifice theme. It’s a little gory: Captives have their throats slit, and it is probably their blood in the cup.”
For a second or two an unbidden image of Edmund Edwards, blood streaming all over his desk, and Lizard, Ramon Cervantes, garroted, leapt into my mind, but I resolutely stuffed the images back down into my subconscious and concentrated on what Steve was saying.
“The first warrior, for example, always wears a cone-shaped headdress with a crescent on it and rays coming out of his headdress and shoulders, a crescentshaped nose ornament, and large round ear ornaments. He almost always has a dog at his feet.
“The priestess always wears a headdress with two large plumes, and her hair is in long plaits that end with serpent heads. The fourth warrior wears a headdress with long flares that have serrated edges. You get the idea.
“The extraordinary thing is that these people have been found,” he enthused. “Walter Alva came across the tomb of the warrior priest and the bird priest at a place called Sipan. Christopher Donnan and Luis Jaime Castillo found the priestess at San Jose de Moro. They’d been buried in exactly the same regalia as that depicted on the ceramics!”
“I’m not sure I understand this,” I said. “Do I understand you to say that the people depicted on the pots were real people? And if so, you’re telling me they’ve been found. So why keep looking?”
“Good question. For certain the rituals on the ceramics were carried out in real life, and yes, real people held the positions. But the rituals were probably repeated over a very long period of time. Think of them as the British monarchy: the king or queen with the ermine cape, scepter, orb, the crown jewels. If you were new to this planet, it wouldn’t take you long to figure out that these people whose picture you saw in post offices and government offices were something special. You might even realize, if you looked at historical photos, or if you stuck around awhile, that more than one person held this position, because they all wore the same regalia. In other words, the crown goes with the position. Now imagine that when one of these monarchs died, all that stuff, the crowns, the scepter, everything, was buried with them. Then—”
“Then you’d have to make all these things over for the next one!” I exclaimed. “Exactly.”
“Good heavens,” I said. “That would mean a lot of gold and silver over five centuries or so.”
“It would indeed.” Steve smiled. “And I just want to find a little of it. Not to keep, of course, but Hilda’s and my reputations would be secure, there’d be years of research to be done on what we found, and we’d not have nearly as much trouble finding the money for our research.”
”Are there many undisturbed tombs left to be found?” I asked. “You’ve told me about the huaqueros, the tomb robbers, and it sounds as if they’re not only good at it, but have been at it forever.”
“That’s true. Thousands of Moche tombs have probably been looted since the Europeans arrived on the scene, and relatively few, maybe in the low hundreds, have been professionally excavated. So much has been lost to us permanently. But there is some good news on that front. The Inca have a story about their origins that says that before the Inca, the world was populated by savages essentially, people who lived in caves, clothed themselves in animal skins, had no religion, no villages, and so on. The Sun God is supposed to have been pretty disgusted by this, and sent one of his sons and one of his daughters to earth—they arrived in Lake Titicaca. They’re told to put a rod in the ground and wherever it sinks right in they are to settle. This they do, and they eventually arrive in th
e area of Cuzco, build the city, and teach the people how to farm and weave and so on—civilize them, in other words.
“Now, whether or not they believed that story, the Inca were somewhat successful in persuading the Spanish that the Inca empire was the first, and that before it there were only these primitive, unorganized people. This was patently untrue, of course, as we now know. There were lots of very sophisticated cultures long before the Inca were even heard of. But what that meant was that the Spanish were not out there looking for gold beyond what could be found in the Inca cities. Not that they needed to, either. There was plenty of gold there to keep them occupied. So that helped a little.
“As for now, it’s just a battle against time, which we—the good guys, I mean—are losing, in my opinion, despite the fact that the Peruvian government has made it illegal to export any Moche artifacts, and a number of countries, including the U.S., have signed agreements supporting this. So we keep on looking, and sometimes we find what the huaqueros have missed, or we get a chance like this one.
“So I’m going to the INC to try to get a credencial, or extend the one I’ve got, for that site, and start digging before the wall goes up. I figure this may explain why Laforet’s in town. Guerra must have some way of contacting him, and told him he’d found a tomb. And I’m just not prepared to lose another one to pond scum!”
“Didn’t you tell me that it takes a year or two to get a license?” I asked.
“It usually does, hence the letter from the mayor to support the application. I’m stopping off in town to pick up a friend of mine, a Peruvian archaeologist by the name of Ricardo Ramos, who I hope will come with me and help me plead my case. Hilda is heading to Carlos’s place to use his telephone to try to get in touch with Ramos. Hopefully he’s in town, and we’ll be able to find him.
“God, I’d like to find one for Hilda,” he said a moment later. “You aren’t seeing her at her best, you know. She can be a lot of fun. But she had a terrible accident last year; she fell off a ladder into a pit we were digging. Hurt her back very badly. This will be her last season. I’m not sure she should be here at all, she’s in such pain. That’s why she drinks. I assume you can’t have helped notice how much she drinks.”
“I’ve noticed,” I said. “She and Tracey don’t seem to get along too well,” I added. If Steve was feeling this talkative, I figured I’d keep going.
“No,” Steve sighed. “Tracey’s an up-and-comer, that’s for sure. Knows what she wants and gets it. Hilda may consider her a bit of a threat under the circumstances. That’s the only thing I can think of that would explain it. Tracey wanted to do fieldwork this year, but Hilda said her services were required in the lab. Tracey’s disappointed and probably said so. I don’t want you to think badly of Hilda, no matter what it looks like. She’s done absolutely dynamite work down here, from a scholarly perspective. What happened to her is really unfortunate, and it’s one of the reasons we’re all working hard this year. We’d like to find something really great for her.”
We made really good time to Trujillo, stopping only once to get gas at a Shell station. It was barely nine o’clock when we roared around Trujillo's Plaza de Armas, with its brightly painted buildings and a rather extraordinary, and disproportionate, statue of an athlete atop a column. Steve soon pulled up to the door of a dark red building. A tall, angular man with an incipient beard was leaning against the doorjamb. He walked toward the truck as we pulled up, and climbed into the backseat.
“Buenos días,” he said.
Steve reached into the backseat and shook his hand. “Hilda found you, I see,” he said. “Ricardo, this is Rebecca MacCrimmon, Rebecca, this is Dr. Ricardo Ramos.” We smiled at each other. I liked him immediately. “Did Hilda give you the details?”
“Some.” Ramos looked at his watch. “Let’s go get a coffee. The INC office doesn’t open until nine-thirty. You can fill me in, in the meantime.”
We found a little chifa and got some coffee, and for Steve and me, toast with marmalade. Steve told Ramos all about his visitations from Arturo. Ramos didn’t seem to find anything unusual in an archaeologist dealing with a huaquero, I noticed. Then Steve unfolded a map and spread it out on the table. “Hacienda,” he said, stabbing his finger on the map. “Current site.” He pointed again. “And here, the new site. Arturo says the locals call it Cerro de las Ruinas.”
Cerro de las Ruinas, hill of ruins. Steve pulled an aerial photograph out of his briefcase. “Let’s have a closer look,” he said. “This was taken recently, about two months ago.” We all peered at the aerial photograph. I could follow the riverbed, and soon found the hacienda and the site we were currently working on. Where Cerro de las Ruinas was concerned, we had to do some searching.
“Got it!” Ramos exclaimed finally. “Right here,” he said, pointing. I looked at the spot he was indicating. I could make out the trees quite easily, and then, right beside them, a shadow that indicated there might be a wall. On one side of the wall, shaded by the trees, there was a dark outline that Ramos said was a hill. It was difficult for me to make it out, but they had the training, I didn’t, so I just tried to get my bearings. A little farther along, on the other side of the wall, I could see the roofs of some little huts. The commune, I thought suddenly. So Guerra was Puma’s farmer, the fellow he thought was building a wall between himself and the commune. Presumably it wasn’t having a commune in his backyard that was bothering Guerra so much. It was the prospect of anyone at all nearby seeing him hauling treasures out of the ground.
“So what do you think?” Steve asked.
“Well,” Ramos said, rubbing the stubble on his chin, “it’s hard to be certain there’s anything worthwhile there from this photograph. On the other hand, you’re right about the Guerra family. I certainly wouldn’t mind being a burr in their saddle for a change, instead of the other way around.” He paused, then shrugged. “Let’s go for it!” he said. Steve grinned.
“We’ll have to go for the preemptive strike,” Ramos added. “With the Guerras, one whisper about this, and they’ll have the whole family out digging the place up and destroying everything in their path before we can get there.”
“So let’s go, then,” said Steve, looking at his watch.
At 9:30 the two men disappeared into the INC offices, and I was left to mind the truck.
About an hour later the two men emerged. “Let’s roll,” Steve said, getting behind the wheel. “The airport. We’re going to Lima! The people here are calling ahead. They’ll see us as soon as we can get there.” I could sense his excitement.
At the airport, I saw them right to the gate. There was a flight already boarding.
“Head back for Campina Vieja, will you, and tell Hilda. I’ll get a message to you sometime tonight via Montero. If it’s a no, then I’ll make my own way back from Trujillo on the bus. If it’s a yes, time will be of the essence, and I’ll need you to meet the plane, okay?” I nodded.
“Are you okay with this, really?” he asked.
“I am. I’ll stand by,” I replied.
“Don’t speak to anyone except Hilda, Ralph, or Tracey about this, will you?” he said. “Of course not,” I said.
“You’re a gem!” he said, hugging me. “See you tomorrow one way or the other.” He turned toward the aircraft, but then turned back, and much to my surprise, hugged me again. I watched as the two men crossed the tarmac and went up the steps to the aircraft.
I drove carefully back to Campina Vieja, not wishing a run-in with the police for any reason. I went first to the site, and Hilda came over to the truck as soon as I pulled up, dust swirling. I told her what had happened.
“We’re trying to look nonchalant,” she said, irony in her voice. “So no one will guess anything’s up, not even the students. We’ve told them that Steve had to go to Trujillo on business, so you drove him, and that Ralph and I are filling in for him for the day. I took Ines into the market this morning, but I’ll leave it to you to pick her up as usual. Don’t sa
y anything at dinner while Pablo’s there, will you?”
I could feel myself getting caught up in the excitement. It was almost impossible to avoid. All this secrecy and plotting, the rush to Trujillo. Tracey, for some reason, wasn’t looking as interested as I would have expected; in fact she was a little withdrawn. I wondered whether the hug from Steve meant all was not well with the two of them. The rest of us could barely do justice to Ines’s meal of sopa and fish and brown sugar pudding while we waited.
Pablo and Ines eventually left for home, and as soon as they were gone, we got down to planning how we would approach closing down one site and moving to the next with the greatest of speed. The idea was to spring the credencial on Guerra before he knew what was happening. Superstitiously, we kept saying we’ll do this and that, if we get the credencial, as if planning for it might prevent it from happening.
“I think I hear a truck!” Ralph exclaimed, and we all strained to listen. The front door creaked open, and Lucho’s shuffling steps could be heard crossing the courtyard at the slowest pace imaginable. Tracey, I saw, had her fingers crossed. Lucho handed Hilda an envelope. “My uncle sent me over with this,” he said.
We all stared at the envelope, Hilda included, for a moment or two. I felt like an actor at the Academy Awards. Then she ripped it open, scanned it quickly, and raised her fist in triumph.
“We’re on the move!” she exclaimed. A spontaneous roar of approval erupted from our lips.
I didn’t get much sleep that night. There were so many things to think about: the next day’s plans, of course, but also the arrival in town of a known buyer of antiquities. After a few hours’ tossing and turning, and reaching no conclusions, I crept quietly down the stairs, shoes in hand, and eased my way out the door. It was still dark, about 5:30 in the morning. As quickly and as quietly as I could, I started the truck, threw it into gear, and swung it around to head out. As I did so, the beam caught Hilda in her upstairs window, her arm raised as if in a benediction, a curious sort of blessing. I gunned the engine. Operation Atahualpa was under way.