Andy went back to the images and displayed the close-up image on the back of the capstone that he had used to digitize the river segment and then showed the digitized image in the computer. He overlaid the digitized river segment image onto a digital hydrologic layer of streams and rivers for Texas.
“As you can see, there is no match of the segment to any water tributaries in Texas.”
“That is because it is not a water tributary, it is a trail,” André said. “I am surprised that a young man of your skills did not understand that you were comparing a historical etching to a modern day map of your rivers. It is like, how you say, comparing apples to oranges. A river will change over the centuries.”
“Well, damn,” Andy said and slapped his forehead. “Why didn’t I think of that?” He played his role well and I was proud of him.
“Well done, Andy” Afet said. “Where do you think the trail is?”
That was my cue. “Thanks, Andy. I’d just like to mention that Andy will be getting his Doctorate in Geographic Information and Science from the University of Texas soon. Thanks to him we still have the map even after the destruction of the capstone.”
I heard André aide say something snide in French. Even if I didn’t understand what he said, I could tell by the curve of the mouth it wasn’t complementary.
Then there was a round of applause and especially noisy from the doorway to Emily’s Office. Emily had come out to listen to him. I had embarrassed Andy, but I didn’t care. He deserved it after taking the insult from André de Lionne, which I would make sure André paid for.
“Before we break to have lunch, André, tell us what you expect to find with the map.”
I didn’t really expect him to tell me. It was more to gauge his reaction. He wagged his index finger at me.
The finger wagging was a diversion to give him time to think about his answer to the question, or as my cynical mind told me, maybe he didn’t really know what he would find.
“Okay, then. This is after all still a negotiation, right? Tell me instead, André, how you knew about the Spanish cistern?”
“It’s not a Spanish cistern, Max. It’s French,” he said.
I heard Hannah gasp. “Of course! The La Salle wreck discovered in 1995 in Matagorda Bay.”
André nodded and then looked at me proudly. “Do you not know your Texas history? René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, established a colony and fort in 1685 not far inland from the coast and he explored much of this area of Texas down to the Rio Grande.”
Well the truth of it was my knowledge of Texas history was a little short before the fall of Alamo in 1836. “I know the Bay well. I fish it often,” I said to give myself some cover. I also knew that one of La Salle’s ships, the one they recovered, had run aground on the Texas coast because La Salle had miscalculated his longitude on his way to the Mississippi River. I had visited the La Belle site when I was down there fishing off Padre Island. The man was my guest and I wasn’t going to offend him by asking how the hell anyone could miss the mouth of the Mississippi River.
“Okay, then, let’s eat,” I said.
André de Lionne wasn’t ready to let it go, though. He had a point to make about the French being here first, so I didn’t argue as he remained seated where he was. “A group of the colonists were killed by Indian savages not far from here while crossing what you now call the Guadalupe River. A shrine was constructed in honor of the victims and the cistern was eventually built by the French in Louisiana to serve travelers on the trade route to Mexico City from New Orleans,” André said.
“You mean on the Old Spanish Trail?” I asked.
Before he could respond, Hannah must have picked up on his bragadocious nature and said, “I think the Spanish finally drove the French out of this area around 1688.” Bless her heart.
André ignored her. “French colonization of Texas is well documented in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Did you know it was a French cousin of German Prince Carl Solms who helped the Mainzer Adelsverein to fund the migration of settlers to form a New Germany in Texas in 1844. You could say the French helped establish the city of New Haven in Solms County,” he said and smiled. “I am hoping the map will lead to the discovery of the first French Settlement remains. I had a distant relative in the first group of colonists. It would give my family great pride to say that we settled Texas before the Germans. Shall we eat, now?”
I was sure glad I didn’t have to do business with the man, beyond today. I hoped James Lee knew what he was getting into. The man had to have the last word, no matter what. I could see him and James Lee butting heads right out of the chute. I decided to keep the match between the river segment on the capstone to the Motagua River in Guatemala to myself and tack on an extra fifty thousand dollars to the price for insulting Andy.
Clete had outdone himself and I knew I would lose that man one day. Catering was in his blood now and he was showing off with the addition of some smoked venison sausage along with the brisket and ribs. It was a banquet fit for a French King, at least in my mind. Cooking brisket was an art form in itself and a hell of a lot harder than preparing steak tartare.
I sat with Tankut, André, and James Lee. I made sure everyone had room at the long table to sit down to. We were eating inside in the largest conference room at the Meeting Center. I figured after the last outdoor cookout that the French weren’t used to eating out of paper plates in their laps.
André was older than I was and probably in his late-seventies. There was no mistaking the man pretending to be him was either a younger doppelgänger or a younger family member, probably a cousin, contrary to what Tankut had said. The resemblance was just too striking; even he was a hired actor.
“I understand that you’re a descendant of family that was associated with the Knights Templar,” I said.
“Yes, my family escaped the purge and was on board one of the eighteen vessels waiting at La Rochelle port in 1307 AD. They managed to make their way out of France and begin a new life. They eventually came back, as all good Frenchmen do,” he said.
“Does the map have anything to do with the Templar Knights?” James Lee asked.
André had a rib in the fingers of each hand and pretended to be engrossed in eating, but I could tell he was thinking and trying to avoid James Lee’s direct question. Eating with his hands was obviously an uncomfortable experience for him. When I had finished my rib, I tore a paper towel off the roll sitting on our end of the table and passed it to him. He nodded his thanks and quickly wiped his hand as if he was embarrassed with the grease of a good rib on his hands. Poor man, I thought to myself, he doesn’t know what he’s missing. I should have sucked my fingers clean to make him feel more comfortable.
Emily came in from the copy room, whispered something into Hannah’s ear, and then sat down in her place at the table. Hannah wiped her hands and then excused herself and went into the copy room.
I noticed that Andy was engrossed in conversation with Afet to the exclusion of everyone else at the other end of the table. I figured that was why Emily was now seated at the table. I knew I was going to hear about Afet showing up from Emily before the sun set that day. If the boy didn’t keep his wits about him, I’d be blamed for anything that happened.
I excused myself and walked to the middle of the table behind Sunny.
“Hey, guys. I thought I’d better check on the children’s end of the table. Is everybody getting enough to eat?” I said to play with them. I could tell from the looks I got from Emily she didn’t think I was funny. Where she was seated, she couldn’t hear the conversation going on between Andy and Afet. They were huddled over together like a couple of teenagers.
Everyone agreed that Clete knew what he was doing and the food was better than Bob’s Ribs. That was the supreme compliment in Solms County and I knew it would make him proud.
“You’re in charge of the roast this year, Andy. Feel free to make use of his talents,” I said to interrupt them.
“I don’ know, Grandpa. Maybe I should watch again this year.”
“You’re as ready as you’ll ever be. It’s time to hand the shindig off to someone younger. I’m counting on you, this Thanksgiving.”
“Thanks, I guess.”
“What’s he talking about?” Afet asked.
“It’s a family tradition. Every few years we gather for Thanksgiving and have a big outdoor cookout. Everyone brings dishes and Dad roasts a pig from the ranch in a pit. This year, Andy will be in charge of roasting the pig,” Emily said proudly.
“And Clete,” Andy added.
He didn’t mind shooting the hog, but I knew he hated the messy part of gutting and prepping the hog for the roasting. He just liked the fun part of the hunt and sitting around drinking beer while we waited on the hog to cook in the pit. It was going to be hard, come Thanksgiving, to keep my nose out of it. I had been in charge of it since I started the tradition long before Andy even came along.
“Anyone that needs to make a pit stop, now’s the time. We’re almost ready to head out to the Pape Ranch and the cistern site,” I said and walked back to the grownup end of the table.
I saw Hannah and Emily exchange looks after Hannah returned to the table. I heard her say, “Come on, girls first.”
I watched her, Afet, Ariana, and Emily head for the restrooms. I supposed that was an unintended commentary on Shawn’s bathroom etiquette. Sunny gathered up Katie and headed for the small kitchen area to wash her hands. Though, she had more sauce and grease on her face than she did on her hands. Katie loved her ribs as much as I did. I sat back down next to Tankut. “Did you have enough, my friend?”
“Yes, it was very good. James makes it a point to take me to the many places in Houston that serve Texas Bar-B-Que when I am in town. Did you know there was a Texas Bar-B-Que Trail? That is such an interesting concept. Only in Texas!”
“I was going to try the same thing with the Pape Ranch, except it was going to be a trail of Hill Country caverns stretching from San Antonio to Austin; and maybe with a couple of wineries thrown in to stop at along the trail. I thought it was a pretty interesting concept, too.”
“It wasn’t economically feasible,” James Lee interjected.
“Sometimes you just have to close your eyes and hope for the best, right, Tankut?”
I could see he was conflicted. He didn’t understand I was messing with him. Neither he, nor James Lee were businessmen who operated on chance or luck. They were business partners in many ventures together because they thought alike. I had put Tankut on the spot. I winked at him and changed the subject.
“Before we visit the ranch, let me tell you what my thinking is on this, André. I think your offer is a fair price for the property in today’s market. James Lee and I have invested a lot in the land reclamation of the ranch. I don’t want to see that money and effort go to waste if you’re going to let the ranch sit idle. It needs to be looked after to keep it from being overrun again. Your plans for the ranch bother me enough to give me pause.”
I could see the concern on James Lee’s face, as well as Tankut’s. It was time to raise the ante in the negotiations.
“You want a guarantee that your land reclamation company can maintain the ranch, no?” André said.
“At least until we finish the work in progress. I was thinking more along the lines that you’re getting a ranch that is worth your offer and a map that is worth something monetarily that I can’t get my arms around yet? I think we should separate the two items. I’ll sell you the map and keep the ranch.”
Tankut’s concern turned to a slight frown on his face. It was subtle, but it was there. He wasn’t much of a poker player. He obviously had more invested in finalizing this transaction than either James Lee or I knew about. I wondered if Tankut and André were in a partnership for what they would find from the map and had left James Lee out of the loop, my cynical mind suggested to me.
“Why don’t we go see the cistern and the ranch, then we can discuss the details of the sale,” André’s assistant offered.
“Sounds good to me,” I said.
“May I use your facilities,” André asked.
“Certainly. I think the ladies should be about finished. George, would you show the men where the restrooms are?”
James Lee remained seated with me. Sticky hands didn’t bother him. After they left the table, he looked at me with a serious expression on his face. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know for sure. I think our friends from France and Turkey think they’re about to pull something over on us. It’s obvious that André is buying the ranch because he wants the map. So that means the map is worth what….at least half the seven million to him? Let’s deal the hand and see how it plays out.”
“Hold on, I trust Tankut,” James Lee said.
“So, do I. Nevertheless, I think Tankut may have a vested interest in seeing this sale go through.”
James Lee shrugged like it didn’t matter. “We both do. I told you about my joint venture with André. It’s only a five percent stake, but I’m sure there will be other future opportunities. The same goes for Tankut, though, I suspect he’s more heavily invested than I am with André’s international operations. He rarely takes less than twenty percent of any deal.”
George walked back over to the table. “He was on his phone right away,” he said to James Lee. “Sticky hands and all.”
“Can you travel in one of the other vehicles with Hannah and check something out while we drive out to the ranch?” I said to James Lee.
“Sure. Just tell me what’s going on.”
“Okay, so André doesn’t know about the Motagua River Valley. He thinks the map is to some lost French Settlement. Me, I think the map and the jade Death Mask are linked, but not to Spanish gold or a Templar treasure. I doubt André knows the history of the Death Mask or what I know about it, so he wouldn’t know about the linkage. The linkage is the jade; or more specifically, the origin of the jade. I’d like to know if he has any business dealings in China, just to be sure my thinking on this is correct.”
“The Chinese! Well, shit, I should have known that. André has extensive copper mining operations in Africa. His smelters produce cobalt. Cobalt is used to make alloys for jet engines and gas turbines, some types of stainless steels, and in medicine. The Chinese are trying to corner the market in cobalt. Not a lot of people know that. They are buying up everything that has anything to do with cobalt mining, including actual governments in Africa. It would be just like André to be playing us with that story about a French Settlement. He probably knows about the real location of the map and thinks a cobalt mineral deposit is located in Guatemala or maybe a copper deposit. They could have discovered the copper back when the Spanish first arrived and the map points to a location.”
“Well, that’s an angle, I wasn’t thinking about,” I said to slow him down. James Lee was not a man to be taken advantage of a second time. “I thought maybe he was trying to buy the map because whatever is there would prove early contact between China and the Maya in Central America. The Death Mask could rewrite history as we know it. I doubt many people would be happy that China discovered America first. So, what do you want me to do? I don’t want to screw up your business dealings with André.”
He thought a moment. “I like your plan. Sell the ranch and the map, separately.”
“You don’t want in on whatever is down in Guatemala?” I asked.
“You know that expression about politics and bed fellas; business is the same way. I don’t begrudge Tankut anything. But I will have a geologist on the way down there by tomorrow along with our map, count on it. In the meantime, stall on selling the map and the ranch. I’m going to talk to someone I know with connections in China.”
. . .
After our tour of the ranch and the cistern site, and our guests had left, I was helping Hannah, Shane, and Andy, get the Meeting Center back to normal. Emily had given us our marching orders to have it ready f
or business the next day.
I had brought everyone up to speed on what James Lee and I had discussed and that I was going to sell the capstone map images to André de Lionne in one week and hold off on the sale of the land. That seemed to please Shane and Hannah.
“Did Emily, tell you?” Hannah said.
“Tell me what?”
“She noticed it while making copies of the French diary. One of the pages had been cut out. Just flipping through the diary you wouldn’t notice it, but when she splayed it out on the copier, the copy machine picked up the edge of the missing page.”
“That’s interesting. So he’s holding something back. I’ll ask him about it before we close the map sale.”
“Did you read about those Chinese pictograms from the ancient Chinese Shang Dynasty etched into the rocks at the Petroglyph National Monument in Albuquerque, New Mexico? That could put the Chinese here in America thirty-five hundred years ago,” Andy said to Hannah as he wiped down one of the tables.
“I did. What an exciting discovery. Imagine an expedition traveling so far inland. The evidence just keeps accumulating.”
“I’ll say. The brass artifacts that were found in Alaska dating back to 600 A.D. certainly confirms the trade that was going on between Asia and the Americas long before the Europeans arrived. The reason I bring it up is because of my interest in cartography, especially early map making. One of these days maybe I’ll be able to afford a real antique map,” he said.
I made a mental note. I knew what I was going to get him for Christmas this year.
“I’ve read of this Chinese 1418 Map of the Americas that was published, supposedly seventy years before Columbus arrived. There are some that say Chinese Admiral Zheng He used the map to sail a fleet of seventy vessels to America in 1421.”
“What do you mean, supposedly?” Shane asked.
“Some people question the map’s authenticity. I’m of the opinion the map maker, used many sources of information to compile the map, including European maps that were in existence long before Columbus ever set sail. That was the way map making worked back then. Cartographic plagiarism was an accepted practice and necessary to advance geographic and navigational information. In those days, a cartographer wasn’t necessarily an explorer or a sailor who traveled the world. A 1418 map with western information and cartographic cartouches doesn’t mean the map is a fake; it could be a compendium of the ancient and the new by the map maker. But that’s not the point. Authentic or not, we know Asians, probably the Chinese, were here long before the Europeans.”
The Turbulence of Butterflies (Max Howard Series Book 6) Page 37