by Lyn Hamilton
I wouldn’t normally read someone else’s mail, but something caught my eye.
Hello, Tracey, dear, the letter began. It was wonderful as usual to hear from you yesterday. You seem to be making such nice new friends, and your work sounds absolutely fascinating. Hearing about your discovery of the huaca, and the possibility there might be a tomb there is so exciting. We feel as if we’re right there with you every step of the way. And to think your stuffy old mother thought you should be a nurse. (Just kidding, dear. I never thought you’d be a nurse!)
Buy yourself something nice with the money, and if you need anything, call right away.
Ted sends his love too. We miss you. Love, Mom
It was all very innocuous, endearing really, except for one thing: the words, embossed in silver across the top of the white linen paper. Mr. and Mrs. E. G. Edwards.
Of course it wasn’t Dougall, I thought, Tracey’s name. Ted was Tracey’s stepfather. Ted Edwards, one of those names where the last name and first name are similar, like Ken Kennedy or Tom Thompson. Ted Edwards, Ed Edwards, or was it Edmund Edwards? In that split second, I knew I had made a deadly assumption or two. Tracey’s stepfather, I suddenly knew with certainty, was Edmund Edwards of Ancient Ways in New York. Edmund Edwards was alive. He was not the old man in the gallery in New York, as I’d assumed. He was the proprietor, the recipient of stolen antiquities. He might even be the mastermind of the whole operation.
I’d left my business card at the gallery, and so he knew my name. But he’d known it before I ever got to New York. He would know me as the person who had bought his pre-Columbian antiquities at Molesworth & Cox, taken them right from under his nose, or more accurately, under the watchful eyes of his henchman, the Spider. He might not yet know me as Rebecca MacCrimmon, but he would. His stepdaughter would tell him, once they compared notes and she knew my real name. And he would not, could not, rest until I was dead.
I dashed out of the hacienda and back to the site. Leaping from the truck, engine still running, I yelled up at Steve, “Where’s Tracey?”
Steve looked down at me. “Don’t know. Don’t care.” He gave me a tired smile.
I cared. And there was only one place I could think she would be.
The policeman lay next to the door of the ruin, unconscious most certainly, and probably dead. The padlock was gone. I pushed the door open carefully and looked inside. A flicker of light came through the holes in the matting on top of the staircase.
As quietly as I could, I crept down the staircase. The treasures of the Moche warrior lay out on the table, glinting in the light. It must be pure gold, I thought, unalloyed, because it hadn’t corroded at all. It was priceless, a fortune. Tracey was stuffing a large sack with the gold as fast as she could.
I stepped off into the water at the bottom of the step and she turned to face me.
“Rebecca!” she exclaimed. “I’m so glad you’re here. I came over to make sure everything was all right, and the guard is dead! You’ve got to help me get the treasure out before someone steals it.”
My, she was cunning, and very, very convincing. An hour ago, I’d have believed her. “I’ll help,” I said. “I’ll hold the sack, and you put the stuff in it.” Where guile is concerned, I like to think I’m a match for anyone.
She hesitated for a moment, but then handed me the sack, still grasping it with one hand all the time. I wondered what she’d do when the sack was full. I didn’t have long to wait. As she crammed the last piece of gold into the sack, Tracey reached into her handbag, dropping her hold on the treasure sack for just a second. She’s going for the gun, I thought, the missing gun. It was now or never. I grabbed for the handbag and knocked it out of her hand as hard as I could, then watched as the gun arced upward and splashed into the water.
We were holding the sack with both hands now, pulling and tugging to get it, like two little kids fighting over a toy. Tracey gave a great pull on it, and I let go. She stumbled backward and, hitting her shoulder on the rock wall of the chamber, lost her grip. The sack opened, dumping its contents onto the floor of the chamber. Ear spools, necklaces, gold and silver peanuts, back flaps, gold pectorals, beads in the shape of spiders tumbled into the pool of water. The gilded bells jangled as they fell. The ripples blurred the edges of the gold, made it shimmer.
She shrieked, leaned over, and like some female Midas, started clawing at the gold. I grabbed her by the scruff of the neck and dragged her the few feet to the door into the tunnel. She struggled, but I was fighting for my life, and I knew it. I shoved her into the tunnel and slammed the door shut. As I closed the door, I heard her gasp, something I attributed to the sight of Carlos Montero. It gave me the moment I needed to push the table the couple of feet to the door. I piled the crates on top of the table, and one under, and watched as she tried desperately to push the door open. It would do her good, I thought, to be entombed with one of the victims of her little scheme. After a few seconds of effort, though, she stopped. I could hear her footsteps receding. She was going for the other end of the tunnel. There was a possibility that she had unlocked that end before going down the staircase. She might have been planning to leave that way, and gone first to unseal it.
I hauled myself up the spiral staircase and made for the other end of the tunnel to head her off. It was almost dawn, a wedge of light showing to the east. The shortest route to the trapdoor was through the algarrobal, and I plowed right in, never thinking about the danger.
The forest was still dark, the grey light of early morning not yet penetrating the branches of the trees. I kept my eye on the light at the far end of the woodland, and kept going, trying not to step in or brush through the thorns. It was deadly quiet in the woods, the only sound the hiss of the rain and the rasping of my breath, loud in my ears, as I struggled on.
I should have realized there was someone else there. Tracey’s gasp as she saw the body of Carlos Montero should have told me she hadn’t put him there. But I was too tired to think. I did not hear the quick footsteps until it was too late. I felt hands whip over my head, then a belt tighten around my neck. Gasping, I clutched at the belt, trying to pull it away from my throat. I felt a blackness around the edges of my consciousness, a high-pitched ringing in my ears. A sharp crack echoed in my head, but I could not tell if it came from within me or without.
Just as suddenly as it had tightened, the belt loosened, and the man I knew only as Spider crashed to the forest floor.
Jorge Cervantes, Lizard’s brother, a dark, avenging angel, stood in the algarrobal, framed against the approaching light of dawn. Slowly he lowered his gun. “May you rest in peace, now, Ramon,” he whispered. “May you rest with God.”
Epilogue
I believe absolutely in the right to a fair trial, in the presumption of innocence until guilt is proven. While I am aware that my actions have been known to belie my words, I do not believe that people should take the law into their own hands. I am convinced that to do so is to embark on a downhill slope that ends in the primeval swamp of anarchy. Having said that, I confess two things. One, I believe Etienne Laforet and the psychopath for hire, Spider—whose real name, in a stroke of irony of cosmic proportions, was Angel, Angel Fuentes—got exactly what they deserved. Two, I confess that the application of the system of justice that I so strongly believe in falls short of my expectations from time to time.
It would be the next day before the Mercedes would be found again. It had come to a stop way downstream, almost as far as the hacienda, Laforet dead, drowned, at the wheel. The man who always got away hadn’t quite made it this time.
A few days later, police in several countries simultaneously raided Ancient Ways and all of Edmund Edwards’s affiliate galleries, including Laforet’s. They recovered over 500 antiquities that were illegally acquired. One of them was a florero with serpents snaking around the rim. The gallery owners, by and large, are pleading ignorance, and litigation to determine ownership of the artifacts will go on, no doubt, for years. Peru may
someday, one hopes, get at least some of them back.
In China, I’m told, looters of antiquities are sometimes put to death. Not that I’m advocating that, of course, but I can’t help thinking about it as I follow Edmund Edwards’s journey through the courts.
Edwards and his stepdaughter are being defended by one of those flashy, expensive lawyers that lots of money can buy. Edwards has been charged with the only crime the police think will stick: not disclosing the true value of shipments to customs. The inadequacy of the laws that should prevent looting and illegally trafficking in artifacts leaves me speechless: The difficulty, I am told, is that the crime occurred in another country, not the U.S., and Edwards can only be charged under U.S. law for the crime committed there. If convicted, he will be fined and possibly jailed for a short period of time, nothing that will come close to justice, in my opinion. I gather, however, that in the social circles he travels in, his reputation is severely sullied. That may be the only penalty he’ll care about.
Tracey continues to maintain that she was trying to save the artifacts, not steal them, an argument rather difficult to make when one’s stepfather is on trial for his involvement in the matter. It remains to be seen whether her charmed life will continue.
So far the police have been unable to prove a link between Edwards and the murder of his employee at Ancient Ways, an old man by the name of Stanislaw Wozzeck. I’m sure it was Spider who actually did the deed, but in my personal system of justice, they’re all guilty of his death. The murder of A. J. Smythson in Toronto is being reexamined in the light of what we now know.
Lucho, who is nowhere near as dumb as he appeared to be, has been charged with murdering his uncle. We think that Carlos Montero followed the electrical cord to the staircase, and discovered what his nephew was up to. For that he had to die.
I am not, apparently, the first to discover a relationship between the smuggling of drugs and the smuggling of artifacts. Both require stealth, lonely runways, and totally unscrupulous people from customs agents on down the line. Using the commune as a cover for his drug operation, Manco Capac made monthly drug runs at the new moon, when the night is darkest. He started buying antiquities as a hedge against slumps in the drug market, when various governments crack down on dealers and he’d have to lie low for a while. This eventually put him in contact with Laforet, whose operation was in temporary disarray because of the loss of three of his pre-Columbian objects, and later, a glitch in his preferred method of smuggling resulting from a change of heart of a customs agent named Ramon Cervantes. An unholy alliance was born.
Manco Capac’s real name—and it has struck me many times since how so many of us were hiding behind aliases—is James Harrington, and his various activities are going to put him in a Peruvian jail, the conditions in which I can only imagine, for a long, long time.
Jorge Cervantes has proven to be a gold mine of information. He told the authorities that Carla convinced Ramon, in the name of providing a more secure future for their children, to supply signed and stamped but otherwise blank customs documents to Laforet, used, of course, to expedite special shipments from Fabrica des Artesanias Paraiso out of the country, and to look the other way when the shipments came through. Lucho added a crate or two to Paraiso’s quite legal shipments from time to time, and used the stolen forms to accommodate the difference.
Jorge says that Ramon, whom I’ll never call Lizard again, somehow found out that drugs were also involved, and round about the time he found his wife and his brother together, determined to set things right. The police think it was Stanislaw Wozzeck, the old man at Ancient Ways, who told him that three of the Moche artifacts were up for auction in Toronto. Ramon took all the money he had and set out to try to buy the artifacts back and return them to Peru. When he couldn’t buy them at auction, in desperation, he tried to steal them from my store. Such disloyalty to an employer is not brooked in this conspiracy, and the Spider, who’d followed him to Toronto, killed him there.
Jorge, consumed with guilt about what had happened to his brother, pulled himself out of his alcoholic haze and began to follow first Carla, then Carla and her companion, to Trujillo, where he lost them for a while, then on to Campina Vieja. It was he I kept catching glimpses of near Laforet’s house and in the marketplace. He also saw Spider visit el Hombre, and later followed him to Paraiso. He saw Spider kill the police guard and reached some conclusions about what had happened to his brother. His timing, in my estimation, was perfect.
Carla Cervantes batted her eyelashes at every man she came across, maintaining she knew absolutely nothing of all this. No charges against her have been laid. Last I heard she was living in a nice little apartment facing the sea in Huanchaco, near Trujillo. Her rent is being paid by a wealthy Peruvian businessman, who visits when his wife isn’t looking. Some women just have the knack. Ramon and Carla’s three children remain with her sister, although I understand Jorge and his wife, now reconciled, are trying to gain custody.
On a brighter note, Wayne Colton—he’ll always be Puma to me—decided he liked Peru, felt quite at home really, a state of affairs he credits to his former life as the friend of Atahualpa. He’s put together a really fine magic act as Wayna Capac the Magnificent, which he does weekends at a hotel in Miraflores. He dresses up in an Inca costume that Steve and I helped fund, and the tourists just love him. He’s off drugs, and has made a deal with his brother to gradually pay off the money he “borrowed.” From his labored, handwritten letters, I gather he’s getting along just fine. Pachamama, Megan Stockwell, has gone home.
Steve is already making plans for his next season at Cerro de las Ruinas. If he can get the funding, and he probably can, with the work he’s been doing on the recovered Moche treasure, he’s planning to hire the entire Guerra bunch to work with him at the site. They’re guarding it for him until he returns. Tomas has signed on for the next season as shaman and worker, Ines as cook. No matter what it was I saw, or thought I saw, on the river that night, I’m happy to think of Tomas and Ines guarding Steve’s work.
I think Steve’s still a little embarrassed about his relationship with Tracey. It has not escaped his notice that she used him for her nefarious purposes. With his rumpled good looks and boyish grin, however, I’m sure when he’s ready there will be women lined up to help him get over it. I’m thinking I might even be one of them.
Hilda will have to give up on fieldwork, but the events of the last little while have, for some reason, given her a kind of peace about her circumstances. She’s accepted a position with a prestigious museum as executive director, and is planning, as soon as she can, to mount a splendid exhibit of Moche art. She’s already telling Steve she’ll never forgive him if the treasures of Cerro de las Ruinas are shown first somewhere else, and me that my presence at the opening is required. I think I just might go.
As for me, when it was all over, I called the people I needed most to talk to: Moira and Rob. Rob Luczka flew all the way to Lima to bring me home. It was really nice of him, all things considered, and he saved me a lot of time and trouble. It would have been a daunting prospect to get home without a passport or money. Having a Mountie for a friend has its advantages, it must be said. It was a long trip, and we had a lot to talk about, a lot of fences to mend, but for the first little while we stuck to small talk. Finally I tried to tell him how sorry I was about everything, about the guilt I felt regarding all that had happened, right from the start, and about how, trying to put it right, I’d just gotten in deeper and deeper. He stopped me.
“I’m the guilty one,” he said. “I know you left, tried to solve this yourself, because I wasn’t there for you. I was a policeman, and a very rigid one at that, when you needed a friend. You were upset, understandably, over what had happened, and I should have known that. If it is any consolation to you, I have not slept a full night since you left, and my daughter is barely speaking to me. I wanted to follow you, but that fellow, that old friend of yours, Lucas, wouldn’t tell me where you were. I
figured Peru, of course, and I had the records of current entries to the country searched, but your name didn’t turn up. Lucas kept telling me that if you wanted me to know where you were, you’d tell me.”
He smiled suddenly. “Thanks for calling me, finally.” He paused for a minute or two. “Are you still mad at me?”
“No,” I replied. “Are you still mad at me?”
“No,” he said. “Are you still in love with Clive?”
“Nope,” I replied, and meant it.
“How about Lucas?”
“No,” I said. “Over him too.”
“Do you fancy that Steve fellow?”
“Maybe,” I said.
He sighed. “Well, as the song goes, two out of three ain’t bad, I guess.”
“I don't know how I feel about Steve,” I repeated. “But I called you.” And that is where we’ve left it for now.
I do feel slightly guilty about it, though. Ms. Perfect, Rob’s pal Barbara, has left him. She did not take kindly to his emptying out the joint bank account and heading off to Peru to get me. I’m not sure it was the money part of it that was really bothering her, either.
I have a feeling Sarah Greenhalgh is beginning to question whether she’s cut out for retail. Needless to say, having someone murdered in your shop, then having the store trashed and burned, and your partner, suspected of insurance fraud, disappear for a few weeks hasn’t helped much. I won’t be surprised if she asks me to buy back her share of the business. If she does, the outcome will, I expect, be determined by the mood of my bank manager.
The best part is we’re back in business. The insurance man, Rod McGarrigle, delivered the check personally, and I had the satisfaction of seeing him grovel. There is that to be thankful for, and, more than anything, the fact that Alex has recovered fully from his injuries. Sometimes I just stand in the store, looking about me, thinking how happy I am to be there, with Alex puttering about in the back, friends nearby, and my cat in the window.