“Right. The shining white city that the conquistadors first saw was razed and Mexico City rose on the same site.”
“How does that concern the Ortegas and me four hundred and fifty years later?”
“The Ortegas have a huge sheep ranch near Tlaxcala in a little mountain village, east of Mexico City.”
“What does Tlaxcala have to do with this treasure?”
“Everything. Cortés’s main allies were the Tlaxcalans. Without them he might never have defeated the Aztecs. The night the Aztecs drove the Spaniards out of Tenochtitlán, the survivors struggled and fought their way toward Tlaxcala. They holed up there and licked their wounds and planned the attack on Tenochtitlán.”
“That still doesn’t spell treasure.”
“But it does,” he said earnestly. “That night, called the Noche Triste, some of Cortés’s men grabbed up as much treasure as they could carry. The Tlaxcalans carried, literally, the king’s fifth, the share that was intended for Charles V. This treasure had belonged to Moctezuma’s father, Axayacatl. None of it survived. Most was lost in the lake as the Spaniards and Tlaxcalans tried to fight their way across the causeway to safety. What little was salvaged was used by Cortés or melted down. There has always been a secret hope that some of that load of gold survived and will be found, perhaps when a tunnel is dug in construction in the part of the city that rests on the old lake bottom. Perhaps it will be found somewhere along the line of retreat that the Spaniards took to Tlaxcala.”
His vivid blue eyes shone with excitement.
He had my attention now. Four hundred and fifty years is a long time. Not nearly as long a time elapsed from the burial of the Egyptian boy-king Tutankhamen to the discovery of his tomb. As every archeologist knows, nothing survives better than gold.
Gold is not destroyed by age or weather like wood and leather and cloth. Gold glistens as brightly, shines as brilliantly whether it was worked five years ago or five thousand years ago.
I thought quickly of some of the most famous golden treasures that had survived the ages. There was the incredibly fabulous Treasure of Tutankhamen, which enthralled the world when Howard Carter found the tomb in 1922. There was Schliemann’s Treasure of Troy, discovered in one of archeology’s most exciting moments only to be lost to history in the closing days of World War II. Some said it was once hidden in Pomerania. Others were sure it was put for safekeeping in a huge bunker in the Berlin Zoo and destroyed when the bunker was hit by bombs. Others said no, the gold disappeared when the Russians captured Berlin. There was the Treasure of Dorak, a collection of delicate and elegant ancient jewelry, which briefly came to light in Turkey, then disappeared again.
The Treasure of Axayacatl. Had anything like it ever been discovered in the Americas? “There is quite a field of study in Mesoamerican metalwork, isn’t there? Some of it must have survived.”
“Only a little. There was a good find at Monte Albán. A lot has been learned from written sources in the early Colonial days. But of actual pieces of Aztec gold, we have just a handful.”
“So, if someone found a secret cache of jewelry from the days of Moctezuma, it would be a huge achievement.”
“The archeological discovery of the century,” he exclaimed.
“It would be worth a lot of money?”
He laughed a little. “More money than you and I will ever see in a lifetime. Enough money to bring out the pirates.”
“You think the treasure has been found? Near Tlaxcala?”
“I’m sure of it.” Then he hedged a little. “At least something has been found, something damned valuable.”
“How do you know?”
He hesitated. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and took one, then absently offered them to me. I shook my head and waited while he struck the little wax match against the box and lit his cigarette. He pulled on it, then asked obliquely, “How well do you know the Ortegas?”
“Not at all,” I said quickly. “They asked me to be their guest because I delivered the manuscript. I was invited because I came from the museum. The invitation had nothing to do with me personally.” I hesitated, then explained. “I accepted because I didn’t really have enough money to stay very long in Mexico if I had to pay my way at a hotel.”
He understood that. He worked for a museum, too.
“I almost moved out after the first night, though.”
“Why?”
“I’m still not sure what happened. I heard a scream.” I told him about the cry that had brought me out of my sleep, how I had waited for it to sound again, and my decision finally to go and make sure that no one lay injured in the patio. I hated telling him the rest of it for it certainly revealed me as less than brave. But I did. I explained how I started down the stairs and heard the click of a closing door and how I turned to run back up the stairs only to sprawl ignominiously. It was, of course, a little anticlimactic to describe how the light came on and Tony introduced himself and showed me the peacocks.
“You don’t think it was a peacock?”
“I’m sure it wasn’t.”
“What was it?”
“I can’t imagine. It certainly wasn’t Tony or Señora Ortega or Señor Ortega or Juan or the twins. I can’t imagine a servant in that household making that kind of noise and, if they had, why would Tony have lied about it? Pretended it was a peacock?”
Jerry was watching me intently. “What about the old gentleman?”
“What old gentleman?” I asked blankly.
“Señor Herrera.”
“There’s no one of that name there.”
“Oh yes,” Jerry said quickly. “If you haven’t met him, then someone is keeping him under wraps, and that means a hell of a lot.”
“Who is he? Why should he cry out in the night?”
“He is Tony Ortega’s grandfather, his mother’s father. He is a retired professor of Mexican history, an authority on the Aztecs. He may have cried out in the night because of you.”
“That doesn’t follow at all. I’ve told you, I’ve never seen him.”
“It follows beautifully. They may be keeping him hidden, but that doesn’t mean he may not know what is happening in the house. You arrived late that evening and when the word finally reached him of the visitor’s identity, he wanted to see you.”
“Look, Jerry,” I said as patiently as I could, “I’ve never met this man, never even heard of him, so why should he care a fig if I’m visiting his family’s house?”
“You represent your museum. He knows or suspects that someone in the family is trying to sell something immensely valuable. He’s afraid it’s the Treasure of Axayacatl.”
I looked at Jerry doubtfully. “If he’s there in the house but sort of being kept a prisoner, how can you know whether he suspects something like that?”
“No one has seen him alone since Christmas. Not one of his old friends has been permitted to visit him. He is not well, they are told when they call. He has not spoken to anyone.”
“Why are you sure he isn’t sick? How can you claim that he suspects anything at all?”
“There was a dinner in his honor,” Jerry said quietly, “shortly after the Feast of the Epiphany. He came to that and made a short speech in response to a plaque presented to him. He shook hands with the man who handed it to him.”
“Then I suppose he whispered, ‘Help, I’m a prisoner in my own home.’”
Jerry was far too close to all of it to think that was funny.
“No, we’d have a lot more to go on if he had,” Jerry said seriously. “But he slipped a small piece of paper into the man’s hand. That man is my boss and that was the first hint of something happening up near Tlaxcala.”
“What did he write?”
Jerry looked around the lake. Other boats floated peacefully on the placid green water. No one paid any attention to us.
Still, Jerry spoke softly. “I remember it word for word, I’ve studied it so often. He wrote: ‘I suffer from an anguished he
art, old friend, torn between loyalty to my family and my duty to my country. Perhaps the weakness of age will excuse my lack of resolution. Beware foreign museum agents near Tlaxcala. Request thorough study of all jewelries leaving Mexico. I have appealed to my old friend, Vicente Rodriguez, but I have heard nothing. God grant that I am wrong. Yours in sorrow, Tomas Herrera.’”
We were both quiet for a moment. Lake water slapped gently against the boat. From the shore we heard happy shouts of children kicking a ball. But both of us were listening to the words just spoken, sorrow-laden words.
An old man, fearing for his country’s past. An old . . . I reached out abruptly and touched Jerry’s knee. “What does it mean in Spanish, El Viejito?”
“The old gentlemen. Often that’s what Mexicans call a grandfather.”
El Viejito. Yes, of course. Tony was afraid it was he who had torn apart the doll. The girls were trying to protect their grandfather and they had been warned not to speak of him.
I had a sudden picture of an old man, worried, fearful, trying to do his duty as he saw it, but even he did not know who it was in his family that he should fear.
Gerda? Juan? Tony? Señor Ortega?
Señor Herrera didn’t know. Was he trying to find out when he wrote Dr. Rodriguez, the head of the Mesoamerican section in my museum? Señor Herrera had received no answer.
Why?
I recalled Dr. Rodriguez, plump, smiling, amiable. Could he connive to smuggle a treasure out of Mexico?
“I can’t believe it,” I said suddenly. “Dr. Rodriguez wouldn’t set me up to come down here and be in danger. It’s too fantastic.”
Jerry shook his head. “Nothing’s too fantastic when a fortune in gold is at stake. There’s not much gentility beneath the surface of the museum trade.”
“You talk in terms of someone being willing to kill me to keep me from getting the treasure.” I remembered the bullets but it still seemed impossible. “That’s murder.”
“Yes,” Jerry agreed. “It wouldn’t be the first murder.”
Chapter 11
Jerry told me of the short life and violent death of Raúl Muñoz. I listened, appalled, and knew that I had stumbled into or deliberately been thrust into a dangerously grim business. It was doubly chilling to realize how the death of Raúl Muñoz had almost passed unnoticed.
People in villages don’t talk to outsiders. If Jerry or an inspector of police had gone to Tlaxcala to ask about rumors of treasure, they would have learned very little. But people talk among themselves and if an unobtrusive stranger listens and never presses, he may learn many things.
It was in midwinter, not long after the old gentleman had pressed his note of distress into a friend’s hand, that a young man, a quiet young man from Orizaba, or so he said, came to Tlaxcala. He was an assistant to Inspector Enrique Gonzales of the antiquities divisional. But no one there knew that.
The young man learned a good many things about the Ortegas. One of the first interesting facts was of the death of a young ranch employee, Raúl Muñoz. The stranger thought hard about this. Policemen have a feel for unexpected deaths.
Raúl died at the end of November. That would have been shortly before El Viejito, Tony’s grandfather, wrote his sad, disturbing letter to my museum, the letter that was never answered.
Raúl had been different in November, some of the villagers remembered. No one, to be truthful, liked Raúl much. He was too ambitious, too self-serving. But you had to give him his due. Orphaned at seven, raised by an older brother, he had done well. Some of the credit belongs to his older brother Lorenzo, who had worked for years for the Ortegas and found a job for his little brother. Raúl had managed on his own to impress the foreman of the Ortega ranch and to come to the attention of the family. Everyone felt, though, that he had gotten above himself when he began riding with the señora. If he hadn’t reached too far, they seemed to think, he would still be alive. For it was on a horseback ride that he had apparently fallen to his death. He had grown up riding mules up and down the treacherous trails. But horses and mules are different animals altogether.
No one knew what happened that bleak November day. He had gone out alone. The horse came back late that afternoon, riderless. It took a week to find his body.
Had anyone else ridden out on the Ortega ranch that afternoon?
No one knew; it was such a time ago. Anyway, what difference did it make? No one had mentioned seeing Raúl.
A word here, a phrase there, a slowly assembled picture of an agile, eager young man trying hard to please. A flashing smile, quick nervous gestures, but ultimately there was more to him than that. Beneath the surface effort to please was a tough, hungry spirit.
It was after he had been a month in Tlaxcala that the quiet young man from Orizaba first heard the word gold and heard it in conjunction with Raúl.
The quiet young man had picked up a day’s work as a casual laborer, loading hand-quarried rock onto a truck. When the work was done, he and the driver sat beneath a scrubby tree. It had been a warm day for February and the quiet young man had shared his beer and listened, impassive, as the driver, at his ease and expansive, pointed to a lightning-shattered tree, just barely in view from the dusty road, and said, “It was there, in an arroyo, that they found the body of Raúl Muñoz.” The old man had paused and stared at the rugged rocky terrain, fit only for nimble goats and sheep. “He ran up and down those trails as a boy. They say the horse must have thrown him. Funny, though—he’d ridden that same horse all year.” The old man’s voice dropped almost to a whisper. “He was thrown the day after he spoke up in the bar and said he was going to be rich, that he’d found gold in the hills.” The old man’s eyes were dark, unreadable. “If there is gold in the hill, it doesn’t belong to any man; the gold belongs to the gods.”
The old man wouldn’t say more. Not a word. But now, with something definite to go on, the quiet young man unobtrusively asked more questions, a few of this one, a few of that one. Very slowly he recreated Raúl Muñoz’s last night to live.
Raúl had swaggered into the little tavern in midafternoon. He drank tequila. He drank as the sun slipped behind the mountain. He made no friends that last night. From men who had been present in the tavern, the story emerged piece by piece.
“He was full of himself. So big, you understand.”
“He laughed at us. He laughed and said we were poor because we did not look for riches.”
“He said he would be as rich as a king because he knew when to act.”
Finally, his words so thick they could barely be understood, Raúl Muñoz said he had seen with his own eyes the gleam of gold softer than the shine of the sun on an angel’s wing.
Some of the men taunted him for they were angry at his drunken arrogance. If he had found treasure, he must prove it. Where was this gold?
The very tequila that loosened his tongue now cloaked him with the cunning of the drunk. He shook his head slowly from side to side. Someday they would know he spoke the truth. He was going to be richer than a king.
None of them ever saw him again. In little more than a week, the church bells tolled his farewell.
He was nineteen when he died.
The men in Tlaxcala have often talked about treasure and hunted it. Some wondered after Raúl’s death, but soon the talk fell away. So many had hunted treasure and no one had ever found it. Once they were sure that gold was hidden in an overgrown mound not far from town. They dug all one long night, hoping to see the bright gleam of gold, and there was nothing but the worn remains of an ancient temple.
It was warm in the drifting boat in the middle of the smooth green lake, but coldness touched me. The sunlight did nothing to dispel it.
“You think it was murder?” I asked.
“Don’t you?”
“Why?”
“Gold,” he said softly.
“Someone found the treasure,” I said slowly, thinking it out, “and Raúl discovered it?” I shook my head and answered my own questio
n. “That doesn’t make sense. If anyone found some fabulous treasure, they’d make sure no one came upon them with it. It’s all too fantastic.”
Jerry rubbed his cheekbone thoughtfully. “I have a feeling that nothing in all of this has happened accidentally. I don’t absolutely discount coincidence, but I think a very careful mind is at work. I don’t, for example, think you are involved in this by chance.”
I jerked up my head.
He shook his head quickly. “We are always talking at cross-purposes, aren’t we? I don’t mean I’m still suspicious of you, Sheila, but think about it for a minute. This must be the sequence.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “Someone, some member of the Ortega family, discovers a treasure and contacts someone in your museum. Señor Herrera finds out. He writes his old friend, Dr. Rodriguez, who has often spoken out against antiquities smuggling.” Jerry glanced at me. “Not all your people are bad.”
I bristled a little at that. There is the other side of the coin in this question of protecting archeological treasures. But I knew that I would never again be able to argue it, not when I remembered the murder of Raúl Muñoz.
“So we have someone at Tlaxcala and someone in New York making plans,” Jerry continued. “Now, if it’s the usual situation, neither one will trust the other. They will have to meet and make the exchange. The museum person knows very well the danger of gossip and how word can leak out and the spoor bring the sharks. That’s where you come in, Sheila.”
I must have looked absolutely blank.
“Don’t you see?” Jerry asked impatiently. “You are the decoy, the stalking horse.” He nodded, sure he had hit on it. “A cat’s-paw.”
I almost laughed at the quaint, old-fashioned word. Cat’s-paw. I could imagine this gray-and-black-striped paw with pale pink pads, claws neatly sheathed.
Jerry didn’t see my quick smile. Head bent, tousled hair falling down over that high forehead, he was intent upon his thoughts. “That’s it, of course. One of the Ortegas requests the return of the manuscript. You bring it down and you are so publicly, so blatantly linked with your museum that you are bound to be noticed. It worked.” He nodded, admiring the skill of it. “It worked like a charm. We noticed you, suspected you. More important, it brought out his competition, the other seeker after the treasure.” Jerry’s blue eyes narrowed. “It showed that word had leaked out, that they would have to be very careful indeed about the ultimate transfer of the treasure.”
Cry in the Night Page 11