“Tony.” I said his name aloud. How could it be so silent? There should be some sort of sound. There was nothing.
When I stepped beneath the central arch it was like sliding into subterranean water, into total darkness. I felt before me, both hands outstretched, and took one cautious step after another. Finally, my fingers touched weathered wood. Splinters pricked my skin. I patted the wood gently. I touched the cold metal of a bolt. I slid the bolt free and pulled the door out. The door moved with a feathery, sighing creak.
I looked inside and was surprised that I could see. The door opened onto a courtyard. Bright shining stars showed, once again, hard-packed dirt and black walls broken only by an occasional door. It was so barren and lay so quietly in the chill light of the stars that the courtyard might have lain undisturbed for a hundred years.
Desperately I looked back at the MG. The abandoned car was there so Tony must be somewhere near. If I shouted, if I called to him, would he hear? Raúl’s brother was somewhere near also, a killer who moved as quietly as a deer.
My throat closed upon the call I wanted to make.
I saw a faint luminous patch on the ground on the far side of the courtyard. The area of light was so small and indistinct that I blinked and squeezed my tired eyes and looked again. The small patch was there.
I stared, puzzled and uncertain. Why should there be a square of light in the ground? But the light was the only hint of human presence. I began to move across the hard dirt of the courtyard. With every step I took, the small square of light became more distinct. I was so tired, and my mind had been buffeted by so many shocks, that I was mystified by that patch of light, unable to guess what it could be.
When I was close enough to see a trapdoor thrown back and the protruding rungs of a ladder, I realized I was looking at an opening to a tunnel of some sort. I knelt beside the square opening and smelled musty dryness of long-closeted air.
Now, for the first time, I heard sounds.
Someone spoke softly in Spanish. The tone was unmistakable, a taunting, daring sound. Shoes scuffed against dirt and there was the noise of struggle, thumps and grunts and wheezing breaths. I swung over the side of the opening and started down the ladder. I dropped the last half dozen feet to land in a painful heap on hard earth. I pushed myself up and ran down a curving tunnel toward a gleam of light and sounds of combat.
The tunnel opened out into a cavernous room dimly lighted by a single bulb dangling from the center of the vaulted ceiling. On the far side of the cellar were several rows of wine racks. In the shadows of the first and second row, I saw them. I stumbled to a halt and my hands reached out to the cool plastered wall of the tunnel for support.
Raúl’s brother, one hand held stiffly against his side, leaned against the end of the first wooden rack. Blood dripped down from that stiff arm, ran in a thick red rivulet to spatter onto the earthen floor. He stood between me and his unmoving victim. I could see the bright shine of black shoes, the dark gray limpness of trousers.
I was too late, too late, forever too late. I turned away and pressed against the curving wall of the tunnel. The wall itself seemed insubstantial. The mind and body can absorb only so much and I was far beyond the limit of my endurance. I had tried hard, very hard, and my struggle had been for nothing. I had found warmth in Tony’s black eyes and the touch of his hand. Now, because of me, his body lay limp on a dirt floor. He would never again look up curving stairs and smile at a woman. He would never again sit at his desk and pit his judgment against his competitor’s. He would never again pour wine into his companion’s glass and look across the table, his dark eyes intent and measuring.
Sick at heart, I raised my head to look back into the cellar. I looked, then strained harder to see. Those shoes, that crumpled length of cloth. Did it really look like Tony?
But it had to be Tony. His MG sat outside. I held tightly in my right hand his medal of Saint Christopher. It was foolish to hope, hideous to open myself again to the shock of finality.
Raúl’s brother moved, stiffly, doggedly. I realized with vindictive delight that he was seriously wounded. He dragged his right leg across the floor as if any movement were painful. He clasped his left arm against his side.
I now saw the fallen man clearly. Suddenly I knew who lay there. I edged back into the tunnel, trying to move like a shadow. I eased back one step, another.
If he turned his head he could see me.
I saw his right hand then. Bloodied fingers gripped the knife. Blood rushed down his arm, splashing onto the floor.
I was almost safe in the darkness of the tunnel when the shout came.
So much had happened that I had thought I was beyond feeling anything. I was wrong. Vivid joy swept me. Then, sheer horror.
The shout was hoarse with fear. “Sheila! Sheila!” Running feet thudded. The sounds came from another tunnel opening on the other side of the cellar, an opening near the wine racks and the body. And the killer.
Raúl’s brother stared at the dark mouth of that tunnel opening, head lifted, watching as an animal watches. He hunched his shoulders, slowly lifted his right hand, the hand with the knife.
“Sheila, are you here? Juan, where are you? Answer me.”
I screamed his name.
At first the words were thick in my throat, my voice a ragged whisper. Fear sucks breath out of your lungs. I pushed out the words. My voice grew stronger and stronger. “Tony, go back. Get out of here. Get the police. He has a knife. He killed Juan and he will kill you. Tony, get out, get out, get—” I ran across the earthen floor, stumbling and crying and screaming. I caught the killer’s arm, heard his gasp of pain. I tried to bend back his hand.
He grabbed me and flung me at the ground.
I slammed down and there was no air left to scream a warning. As I landed, I struggled to get on my feet. I scrambled toward him and managed to catch one leg, clawing at his ankle, crooking my arm around his legs.
He stumbled.
For one wild victorious moment, I felt him flail for balance.
He almost fell, but then he steadied, catching himself. One hand plunged down, grabbed my hair, a great thick handful, and yanked viciously.
My head snapped back. I let go of his legs and he was free.
He didn’t look down at me. He shouted. The hand with the knife swung down toward my face.
I saw the silver flash of the blade and, sharp and painful, the point of the knife snagged below my ear. I didn’t dare struggle.
Tony skidded to a stop no more than five feet away, a look of desperate fear etching deep lines in his haggard face.
The three of us froze into deadly tableau.
The point of the knife moved back to my ear. I felt a prick and the warmth of blood on my throat.
Tony yelled and started to move.
The knife moved from my ear, touched my throat.
The soft voice of the killer stopped Tony a foot away.
Tony answered and held up his hands.
Raúl’s brother nodded and pulled the knife away from my throat. He let me go and I tumbled back on the floor. I lay on that hard-packed earth, raised up on one elbow.
Tony spoke, quickly, emphatically. “Sheila, listen carefully.”
Raúl’s brother interrupted. “I will tell her. So she will make no mistake.” It was an effort for him to speak. But any hope that we might be able to overcome him were shredded by his words. “Miss, you understand, if you give me trouble, I kill you. I already tell Tony, I kill you quick if he tries to get me. You understand?”
“I understand.” My voice was faint but steady.
“Take your belt”—he pointed to my navy blue patent-leather belt—“and tie Tony’s hands. Tie them in front so I can see.”
As I took off the belt, I realized the right side of my dress was wet and sticky. I couldn’t see the blood against the navy blue, but I felt sick. I knew he had cut only my earlobe, and earlobes bleed furiously, but still I felt sick. What would he do once I tied Ton
y’s hands? Would he push me aside and stab Tony? I held the belt in my hands, hands smeared with blood.
There was blood everywhere around me. Blood on my neck and shoulder and hands. Blood on the man who stood, knife in hand, so near me. Blood on the floor.
I held the belt and looked at Tony.
He understood my fears without any words at all. “It’s all right, Sheila. Do as Lorenzo says. He has promised not to hurt us if we do as he says.”
I looked behind Tony at the long crumpled length that was his dead brother. “How can we trust him?”
Lorenzo saw my glance. “I told Juan the treasure was mine. I told him. But Juan laughed and said he had warned Raúl away and now he was warning me.” Lorenzo’s face was suddenly implacable. “Juan killed my brother.”
And tonight Lorenzo’s sister brought me to the alleyway. Did she know what he planned? Or did she think she was simply arranging a meeting?
Juan had killed Raúl. Lorenzo had killed Juan, not for treasure alone, but to avenge his brother’s murder.
Tony stretched out his hands and nodded at me.
I stepped close to him and wrapped the belt around his wrists. When it was fastened, I slipped my hands up his arms to his shoulders. There was a faint tinkle of metal.
He reached up awkwardly, his hands together, to clasp my right hand. He loosened my fingers and touched the Saint Christopher medal.
“I found the MG and I took the medal. Because it was yours.” My fingers closed around his. “I was trying to warn you.”
“You thought I had come in the MG?”
I nodded.
“Juan took my car,” Tony explained. “He apparently headed for Tlaxcala the minute we realized you were missing. It took me a little while to get the story straight. The twins told me everything when we couldn’t find you, but by that time Juan was already gone. I shook the story out of Gerda.” His face was dark and angry. “She told me you were sent to Mexico so that it would appear you were the buyer.”
“That’s why Lorenzo grabbed me. Tony, what are we going to do? He thinks I have money to buy the treasure. He brought me here to show it to me, but I managed to slip away when we got off the motorcycle. He followed. I hid and he tried to persuade me to come out. He never stopped talking about the money. He kept calling to me. Then the MG came. Both of us heard it. That was when he ran away. He was afraid someone had come for the treasure.”
Lorenzo spoke then, but neither of us answered. I think he had been listening hard trying to follow, but his English was not quite good enough to catch and understand all we said.
“I didn’t know it was Juan in the MG,” I said. “I thought somehow you had come for me. So I ran. I was terrified for you. I knew he was a killer. He killed the night watchman in the alley behind your house.”
“You knew that?” Tony demanded. “Yet you came after him?”
“I thought it was you in the MG,” I said simply.
I looked up at him. I made no attempt to mask how I felt. For a moment, we saw in each other’s eyes more than words say. For that magical space in time, we were alone together and nothing around us mattered, not the poor crumpled body of Juan, not the dangerous wounded hulk of Lorenzo, not the dim, musty, cavernous room where Death, that grinning bony lady, was in command.
Chapter 16
The knife parted us, the knife and Lorenzo’s angry, desperate voice, ragged with strain.
We did as he commanded for we knew he was very near to slashing us down. He had nothing to lose.
He motioned for Tony to sit down with his back against the wall. He had me lash Tony’s feet with a dog’s leash he’d found nearby.
When I was done, he said, “I will show you now, miss. You will see that I tell the truth.”
I stared at him stupidly and could not imagine what he meant.
Impatience and a hot, desperate anger flickered in his eyes. “The gold; when you see the gold, you will give me the money.”
The gold, and money, much money, money I didn’t have. If I could persuade him that I had the money somewhere else, perhaps I could entice him away from here, away from Tony. When he discovered I had lied, I would die. There would be a final moment when he would know he’d been tricked.
But Tony would be safe.
My tongue edged out to wet dry lips. I nodded. “Gold,” I repeated. “Yes, the gold.”
He relaxed and almost managed a smile. His lifeblood still dripped steadily down. How could anyone lose so much blood and still live? If we held on, time and blood might run out for Lorenzo.
His chest pulled in and out, in and out. He stepped back a pace and leaned on the wine rack, hiding Juan’s body. I was grateful for that. Poor Juan, who had flirted with death, teased death, and finally been claimed. He had danced too near the edge of the precipice, beckoned on by a fascination he could not deny.
“Now, miss”—and I wondered if Lorenzo knew his voice was weakening—“go past Juan, all the way to the end of the casks. I followed him today, saw him go that way. After he left, I checked and found the suitcase.” He pointed to the opening between two wine racks.
I had to step over Juan to enter that space. I didn’t let myself look closely at him. Even so, I saw too much, saw one hand twisted, lying palm up as though relaxed in sleep, saw the glisten of the earth by his head and knew his blood spread there.
Nineteen years old and brought down because he dared to taunt death. But I knew, as I stepped past him, that if it had not been Lorenzo’s knife, Death would have found him in a fast car or on a hurtling motorcycle or while challenging wild surf. That thought helped me walk down the darkening passage between the wine racks, helped me find a suitcase deep in the last shadow, gave me strength to pull and tug the heavy case all the way back to the light. I hefted the case over Juan and pushed it all the way to Lorenzo.
Lorenzo leaned against the wine rack, his face gray now. Blood still ran down his arm to drip on his pants, pattering into an ever-widening stain at his feet.
Tony and I needed time.
“Open it,” Lorenzo directed.
I knelt beside the suitcase. Seeing it in the light, I felt a little twist of surprise. The suitcase was big, perhaps four feet tall and a hand’s breadth in width, but it was made out of some kind of cardboard. The bag was scuffed and dirty. A huge water stain discolored one side. The suitcase had originally been a brownish cardboard. Dirt and mildew had colored it an overall dingy gray.
I wondered why Juan and Gerda had put the treasure in such a messy container. It never occurred to me that the treasure might have been hidden in this flimsy cardboard grip. Not if it were the fabled store of Aztec gold. Cheap. That was the word for this suitcase. Imitation leather straps buckled at the top. They were rotted and frayed. The big clasp in the center was tarnished yellow-green.
It was easy to open, however. The old straps slipped free quickly and the clasp snapped up. It must have been opened and closed a good deal recently. I laid the case on its side, lifted the lid, and looked down at yellowing humps of old newsprint. A queer electric tingle raced up my back as I saw old yellowed newspaper and recognized distinctive, unmistakable typescript.
I didn’t know what the clumps of old newspaper held, but I knew that nothing I had guessed was right.
My hands shook a little as I picked up a rounded lump and began to unwrap the decaying newspaper. My excitement must have communicated itself to Tony and Lorenzo. They both watched intently as I unwrapped and unwrapped. I was reminded of the child’s game where something quite small is swathed again and again. The last sheet of newspaper fell away, its small German print barely discernible.
A bracelet fell into my hand.
My breath caught and held for an instant. I looked at a simple but spectacularly beautiful piece of jewelry and knew it at once. At the same time, sure as I was of its origin, I felt it couldn’t possibly be so.
The gold was the color of butter. Even in the dim light of that cellar, the bracelet glowed with the un
mistakable fire of gold.
“You see, miss, Raúl spoke truly, did he not? This must be the gold of the gods.”
I shook my head.
Before I could speak, he yanked me around and the knife was sharp against my throat. His face was drawn, his shirt wet with sweat and blood. “It is gold!” he shouted. “It is gold!”
“Yes,” I breathed.
Slowly the prick against my skin eased.
The knife fell away, but still he loomed above me, his eyes angry and desperate and sick.
“Yes, Lorenzo,” I said slowly, soothingly. “Yes, it is gold. Very valuable gold.”
That calmed him. He moved slowly back to lean once again against the wine rack. He moved slowly, tiredly, as a wounded animal when the end of the hunt is near.
“If this treasure”—I waved my hand at paper-wrapped lumps in the suitcase—“is what I think it is, it is even more valuable than anyone knew.”
I spoke calmly enough, but I was far from calm. Valuable. How do you set a worth on treasure thought lost forever? How do you put a money value on one of the oldest, most incredible finds in archeology?
To find Aztec gold would be to reach back four hundred and fifty years into the past and touch a craftsman’s work. But this bracelet linked me to a goldsmith in the third millennium BC. If I was right, I held in my hand a piece from one of the world’s most ancient and beautiful treasures.
When I saw more, I would know. I laid down the spiral bracelet, a heavy shining wire of gold that looped around a wrist three times to end in conical knobs, and reached into the cheap suitcase for another clump of yellowing newsprint.
This time I looked at the dateline and once again that queer tingle of excitement ran through me. The date was April 8, 1945.
My mind ran back like a skittering mouse, back through mounds of dates, and placed this particular time. April 8, 1945. The Russians were battering toward Berlin in the grim spring of 1945. Russians were coming from one direction, the Allies from the other. In Berlin itself, bombs fell day and night. Ordinary Berliners were dying by the thousands. Luckier ones, important Nazis and the last-ditch defenders, had some protection. Objects valued more than people had the most protection. The world’s deepest, safest bunker had been built in the Berlin Zoo. Atop it were placed powerful guns. The Allies’ bombs sought that bunker and the animals of the zoo began to die like their fellow Berliners.
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