Cash Cassidy Adventures: The Complete 5-Book Series (Plus Bonus Novels)
Page 18
Along the quays, many boats lay moored. Parts of the quayside had been turned into a market too.
Cash spent several hours walking around the harbor, sampling some of the merchandise when it was offered. When the sun was at its highest point, she walked over the Koningin Emmabrug and walked along the shore. Much of the boulevard there had the white sandy beach running along it that had made Curaçao such a popular tourist destination for years. She stepped down onto the sand and took off her boots.
She sighed when she felt the warm sand between her toes and walked on, boots in hand. It was wonderful to walk without the walking boots she had been wearing day in, day out, for weeks now.
When her stomach began to growl, Cash returned to the hotel and she sat down to dinner. A waiter made a remark on the state of her clothing, and she looked at her attire. It could do with a wash, she reckoned. When she sat down in her room, she went naked so all her clothes could be washed. Somehow going naked after days of wearing the same attire felt as liberating as walking barefoot in the sand. Cash threw the balcony doors open and she stepped out. She stood by the railing and looked out. She saw the people below and she laid her hands in her neck. She breathed deeply and pushed out her chest, arching her back and stretching out. She smiled at the thought that maybe somebody would see her. She was not an exhibitionist, not by any means, but somehow it pleased her to think of it. Let them look, she reckoned, there are worse things to look at. So she stood there on the balcony, wondering what might happen next.
Cash picked up her laptop and moved outside to the sun bed on the balcony. She sat there and tried to write. A story formed in her head, a story based on the things she saw before her now. She began to type and she soon had several pages filled. Then she stopped. She tried a few lines again, but they did not work. It simply did not fit the way she wanted them to go. Frustrated, she set the laptop aside and went to her bag. She took out the thin book she had taken along all this way and she sat down on the balcony again. She had not picked it up since she got to Bogotá, but now she started on the second chapter. She had read the book many times, but the jokes Voltaire made and the stupidity and naivety of Candide and Pangloss struck her again. She mused on each paragraph and simply sat back and relaxed, letting the pleasure of the satire flow over her.
After the earthquake in Lisbon, she picked up her computer again. Suddenly the connections came back and her fingers flew over the keys. She typed for another hour and then she laid her naked body between the clean sheets.
The next morning, she walked into the town again, her clothes clean and fresh. She walked past the harbor, all the way past the Aquarium and along the salt pans. Just before the buildings started again, she sat down in the sand and opened her book.
That morning she continued reading. She was waiting for something, though she did not know for what. It was as though she were waiting for a sign of what would be next for her. She was stuck, at least until there was some way of getting a new passport, she was stuck. That morning, Tim sent her an email saying he would come over, but she had no desire to share these past weeks with him. Nor did she want to go back yet. Something told her she was supposed to do something else, and her husband had no place in that plan, whatever that plan was.
Cash sighed and opened the book again. She kept reading. But at one passage, about halfway through the book, she was disturbed. A gull flew close over her head and then shot off into the distance. It flew toward the Venezuelan coast and then turned to race along the coast. She picked up the page where she left off and she suddenly knew what she had been waiting for. She grinned and looked at the words on the page again. The first words of the next sentence. The words formed a name, and she knew that was what she was going to find next. The words were El Dorado.
Chapter Three
“There is some debate among historians concerning the exact origin of the legend of El Dorado. The Spanish conquistadors Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada and Sebastián Benalcázar as well as the German explorer Nicolaus Federmann each claimed in their memoirs to have been searching for El Dorado when they converged near present-day Bogatá in the late 1530s; however, the first written description of the legend comes from the Spanish historian Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, who wrote in 1541 in his Historia General y Natural de las Indias, Islas y Tierra Firme del Mar Oceano of a story he had heard from the Muisca Indians of Columbia telling of a native leader who each morning had gold dust applied to his entire body, which he washed off each night before sleeping. Although de Oviedo could not confirm the veracity of this story of the chief he dubbed “El Dorado,” he reasoned that it was certainly plausible, considering the enormous quantities of gold that had been found in the previous two decades in Mexico and Peru.”
—http://www.enotes.com/topics/legend-el-dorado
When Cash got back to the hotel, there was a letter waiting for her. It was the travel papers the British embassy had arranged so she could make it to Trinidad and the Australian embassy to the Caribbean. She still did not have any money to get there, but she was sure she could find a way if she wanted to. Or a way would be found for her.
A way showed itself to her the next morning, when someone at another table at breakfast was telling a friend that her credit card had been stolen and she needed to block it. Cash grinned and reckoned she might try that tack. She checked the time and realized she could still call her bank in the UK.
They were hesitant to replace her debit card for a while, but the man who answered her call knew her well and eventually was persuaded her story was real. Or at least, he was persuaded to pretend it was real. He promised to send the new card to the hotel in Willemstad.
It put Cash in a very good mood, a good mood that was only disturbed by her foolishly answering a call from her husband. She stopped herself from cutting him short, but she did not actually listen to anything he had to say. All her answers were on auto-pilot. She felt ashamed of that, but she really could not be bothered to even listen to his protests, his reprimands and his outpourings of his love for her. She simply did not wish to listen to it. She knew what she was going to be doing, and she really did not want to go back to Wales and plan. It had to be now, something told her that. And she would not waste any time on Tim's worries. The only real answer she gave him was when he said he might take a few days leave and come to Curaçao to see her. The answer was “You don't have to do that. And it would take away from the holidays we've got planned for the summer. Don't come here.” She was sure he would not listen to that.
She crossed the Koningin Emmabrug again and followed the De Ruyterkade, the quay named after the famous Dutch naval hero who raided the Chatham docks. She followed the shore of the Waaigat, and then down a street to her right she found the Curaçao Public Library, or Openbare Bibliotheek. There was a lot of information to be found on the Internet, but for some things you still had to go to a library, Cash had found.
She looked into every reference to El Dorado she could find. She was particularly interested in any link to Voltaire's story. Generally people thought the place called El Dorado, or the chieftain it might be named for, was in Colombia, but Voltaire had placed it in Guyana. Since nobody had ever found it, she reckoned there might be something to Voltaire's story.
Not that Cash reckoned Voltaire himself had ever set foot in South America without the whole world knowing. After all, Voltaire was known to have been the lover of King Frederik the Great of Prussia. But there had to be a reason for placing the site of El Dorado in the Guyana area. Somehow, someone must have given him the idea to put Candide and Pangloss in El Dorado on the other side of the continent.
Not to her surprise, all mention of El Dorado was in folkloristic books and in the sparse Spanish journals. After two hours she got bored looking for it in the books and she began randomly looking through the books in the library's archive. One archived book there that drew her particular attention was the journal of a Dutch skipper, who had come to live in Willemstad. From the first pages s
he found that the man had been a slave trader and had come to sail between Willemstad, with its huge slave market, and the South American mainland.
She could not check anything out of the archive, but she solved that by taking pictures of the pages. It took a while, but she got all the pages. Why she did that, she did not know, just that it was actually an interesting book and she wanted to read it. Most of the time in the library had been a waste, when it came to researching at least. But at least there was something interesting that came from it.
Back in the hotel she transferred the pictures to her laptop and began reading the journal. It intrigued her to say the least. The Dutch slaver had seen things most people could not dream of, and he had heard things that were far beyond common knowledge.
She put the journal on hold to go to dinner and when a handsome American tourist then offered her a drink, she hung around the bar a bit longer. The man was obviously trying to pick her up, but she made it clear she was married and not interested. He seemed put off and ready to leave when they had finished their drinks, but Cash's free spirit and her easy manner kept him there. It was always easy for Cash to make friends that way, a cup and a kind word worked miracles.
The man told her he was actually over from Puerto Rico, where he lived. He had come to live there two years ago and was searching the whole area for minerals and resources. The American government knew there was oil off Puerto Rico, but they needed to find a way to extract it without pissing off the other Caribbean nations. He mumbled about the State Department wanting their new international tax policy to succeed. Cash understood instantly and laughed. It had been all over the news, and of course drilling for oil in waters also claimed by countries on which depended the success of that policy would not be the greatest idea.
So, the man explained, he had been given a paid vacation for a while and he had come to travel the area. He had decided he would start in Suriname and then go to every country he could visit on his way back to Puerto Rico. Guyana had followed, then Aruba and now Curaçao. He would have to skip all the French islands because there were different travel regulations. He cursed the French at that and Cash laughed.
She asked him what he was doing on his vacation and he grinned. The same as he would be doing otherwise, he said. She wondered whether he had found anything interesting.
“No,” the man said. “Though one of the river mouths I passed seemed very bright. I didn't think much of it at the time, but now I think there might have been gold dust washing along that river there, and quite a bit of it too.”
“Which river was that?” Cash asked, making conversation.
“Can't remember the name. But it's the one on the border between Surinam and Guyana.”
Cash nodded and drank her drink. Something began to form in her mind.
Cash was surprised to find a reference to a golden river in the journal too. The Corantijn, it said, always shone in the sun. They had tried to find gold there, but found none. Yet there was a sheen in the mouth of the river after its waters had run dark with mud.
She lay back on the bed and thought. The El Dorado spoken of by Voltaire was located behind a waterfall on a river in that area. Maybe it was possible, just possible, that she could find it. And even if she could not, it would be a great journey to inspire a great tale.
So she picked up her laptop and began planning.
Two days later her new debit card arrived from the UK, and on the same morning she received an email from Tim saying that he was coming over. She swore and slammed the laptop shut. She grabbed her card and ran into town. She rushed to the airport to buy tickets and she waited in line to buy a plane ticket to Paramaribo. As she approached the desk with her travel papers, she began to think. She might do well to get her passport first, even if she did not have to. So instead she bought a ticket to Trinidad first. She bought it for the next day. Deliberately. The flight to Trinidad would leave an hour after the flight from Amsterdam will arrive. She would be checking in about the same time as Tim would arrive on the island. That way there was minimal chance of running into him, and there was no way he would try to stop her.
After the airport, Cash went into town. She decided she would need some things that she had not deemed necessary, or which might have been a liability, when she was in Colombia. One would be a means of accessing the Internet when she was in the jungle. And then she reckoned a change of clothes might be in order. It might be a good thing to be able to scrub up when she needed to arrange things in a town.
She found an electronics shop close to the inner harbor of Willemstad and found the satellite equipment she needed there. After that she headed into the city proper. She did not want to spend a lot of time or money on buying clothes, especially because she would have to take it all into the jungle with her. She bought a little black dress and a pair of pumps for more formal occasions and then took her time to find a thick cotton blouse and another pair of shorts. She ran into the Hunkemöller shop too, finding some underwear. If things went pear-shaped, she did not want to have to resort to running around naked again. Not when she could not control her environment. As a last thing, she bought a bikini and a wraparound skirt. Wearing jungle clothes on the beach was not great.
She went to dinner at the hotel and then began packing. She could not fit everything into her backpack, but she pulled her shoulder bag out of the bag and began stuffing things into that. Her laptop went into that, as did her papers. When she looked at it, she was annoyed by the damage the purse sustained from being crammed into the backpack. She laughed when she realized that was probably the most girly thought she had had in a month. Even her thoughts about clothes that day had all been completely practical.
Chapter Four
“Drawing on both the myth of the “City of Gold” and Cortes’ historical arrival in Mexico, The Road to El Dorado, an animated feature from DreamWorks, is a fast and furious tale of two Spanish con men who are unwitting stowaways on Cortes’ ship and end up locating the mythical city of El Dorado, defeating its villainous high priest and saving the city from discovery (and plundering) by the Spanish conquistadors.”
—The Road to El Dorado (2000) by Josh Jones
Cash was up early to have breakfast. She spent the morning going over her things and then she made sure to be at the airport just past noon. She checked in and made sure to go straight to the gate. When she saw the crowd coming from the Arkefly flight from Amsterdam, she slid down in her chair and hid behind her backpack. From the corner of her eye, she saw Tim walk past. He looked worried. For a moment she felt a pang of emotion and she wanted to get up and shout out his name. But she resisted the impulse and kept herself hidden. If she talked to him now, he would make her come home, instead of going on the quest she had just thought out for herself.
She boarded the Surinam Air flight to Port of Spain and landed there a few hours later. When she turned her phone on she saw the messages again. And just as she punched in the code to listen to her voicemails, the phone rang.
“Hi, pet” She answered Tim casually.
“Pat, I'm at your hotel. They say you're not here.” Tim sounded angry.
“My hotel? I haven’t checked in, you silly sausage.”
“Your bleeding hotel on Curaçao.”
Cash was glad he could not see her grin as she answered him now. “Curaçao? You've got it all wrong, pet. I'm just in Port of Spain.”
There was silence on the line for a moment.
“Isn't that Trinidad?”
“Yes, it is. Glad you remembered your geography lessons from Eton.”
Tim sighed. “Don't play games, Pat. I've been worried sick about you.”
“I know you have been, but you shouldn't have. Don't need help, I'm perfectly fine taking care of myself.”
“You were missing for a month!” Tim sounded angry now.
“Yeah, and I'm right now, aren't I?”
“Fucking hell, Pat!”
“I'll see you when I see you. Love you.”
She had arranged a hotel room at a very high price, a price which surprised her. But when she got to the city, she understood. She also forgot about Tim completely. There were still tickets available for the first in the series of One Day Internationals between the West Indies and Australia. It suited her perfectly well to spend the day watching the cricket.
She loved the game. It reminded her of playing games of backyard cricket back in Australia, before her family moved to South Wales. Even the smell of beer and barbecue reminded her of that.
Best of all, Australia won by two runs.
The next day she went to the Australian embassy to pick up her new passport, which had been prepared for her. There were fingerprints and a picture to be taken and included, but the ground work had been done. Late in the afternoon it was ready; she got a call and went down to pick it up before heading to the airport and getting her tickets to fly to Paramaribo.
She went to catch her plane the evening after, two days after the cricket match, in a sea of gold and green. She spoke to some of the other Australians and found they were heading to Jamaica for the next match in two days’ time. As she sat there, talking, a familiar person appeared before her.