“Who’s that?”
“Bartolomé de Las Casas.”
Chapter 16
SAN DIEGO
Sam and Remi stepped out to the curb at the airport and found Selma waiting for them in the Volvo sedan. Zoltán was sitting sedately on the backseat of the car. Remi ducked into the backseat and sat beside Zoltán, who licked her face while she hugged and petted him. “Zoltán. Hianyoztal.”
“What did you say?” Selma asked.
“I said I missed him. I missed you too, but you aren’t a Hungarian dog.”
“Likewise, I’m sure,” said Selma. “Hi, Sam.”
“Hi, Selma. Thanks for coming to meet us.”
“It’s a pleasure. Zoltán and I have been moping around the house since the robbery at the university. David Caine calls every day, but I told him you’d get in touch when you were home.”
“That reminds me. We won’t be here long. We’re going to Spain,” said Sam. “But first we want to meet with you and David. We can bring one another up to date on everything and then get busy on the next step.”
“All right. When we’re home, I’ll get going on your reservations,” said Selma. “It’s a shame you’re leaving. While you were in Guatemala, the workmen completed the painting and finish work. Your house is, well, your house again.”
“No carpenters, painters, or electricians left?” said Remi.
“Not one,” Selma said. “I even had a cleaning crew in to be sure there’s not a dimple of a bullet hole, a microscopic stain from a drop of blood, or a sliver of broken glass anywhere. Everything’s new.”
“Thanks, Selma,” said Remi. “We’re grateful.”
Sam said, “We’ll try to keep it nice by not discharging firearms in the living room.”
Remi said, “Selma, I want you to spend some time with me before we meet with David Caine. I need to know everything you’ve got about Bartolomé de Las Casas and about the four known Mayan codices.”
“I’ll be delighted,” said Selma. “I’ve been hoarding information on those topics since you were in Mexico.”
Six hours later, they were on the ground floor of the house, sitting around the conference table. In the center was a photocopy of the letter from Bartolomé de Las Casas.
Sam said to David Caine, who had just arrived, “I think Remi would like to start.”
“I just want to say thank you to Selma for having photographed the letter before turning it over to me,” David interjected.
Remi began. “By the time the Dresden Codex’s existence became widely known, an Italian scholar had made a tracing of it. Before the Madrid Codex ever got to the Museo América de Madrid, a French abbot made a copy. The Paris Codex was copied by the same Italian scholar who traced the Dresden. Somebody at the Bibliothèque Nationale actually threw the original in a bin in a corner of a room, which damaged it, so it’s a good thing there was a copy.”
“An interesting set of coincidences,” said David Caine. “Where are you going with it?”
Remi said, “We know that this codex was at one point in the hands of Bartolomé de Las Casas. This letter proves that he touched it, that he knew it was important and thought it must be saved.”
Selma said, “We know that he was a passionate defender of the native people’s rights and a believer in the value of their cultures and that he studied and spoke their languages.”
David Caine slapped his hand to his forehead. “Of course! You’re saying there’s a chance that Las Casas might have made a copy.”
“We can’t be sure,” said Remi, “but we think it’s worth checking.”
“It’s a long shot,” said Caine. “As far as I know, there’s no mention in any of his writings of his making a copy of a Mayan book. He does mention seeing the priests burning them.”
“That would be a good reason not to mention his copy,” said Selma. “Books weren’t the only things getting burned in those days.”
Remi said, “After Las Casas left the mission at Rabinal, he became bishop of Chiapas, Mexico. From there, he went back to the Spanish court, where he was a very powerful adviser on issues having to do with the Indians in the colonies. And here’s the promising part. When he died in 1566, he left a very large library to the College of San Gregorio in Valladolid.”
David Caine considered. “You know, I think your observation about human nature may be right. Everybody in Europe who saw the importance of the Mayan codices seems to have made a copy. Even I made photographic copies. It was practically the first thing I did. If only I hadn’t given them up to those fake officials.”
Selma quickly diverted the conversation back to Las Casas. “Then we’re agreed. We know Las Casas saw it and was somebody who would have wanted a copy. If he made one, then it was almost certainly kept with his own books and papers rather than, say, submitted to the Spanish court. His books and papers are in Valladolid, Spain. If the copy existed, and if it’s been in a library in Spain all this time instead of the hot, humid Guatemalan jungle, then it will probably have survived.”
David Caine said, “That’s a lot of ifs. But to bolster the argument a bit, we know he would not have left any susceptible or incriminating papers in the New World, where his enemies, the Franciscans or the encomiendas, could find them. He definitely would have taken them with him to Spain.”
Remi said, “A lot of ifs, all right, but each one has a lot of arguments in its favor and not many against.”
“Let’s call it an educated, long-shot guess,” Selma said. “It really should be checked.”
Sam said, “Okay, Selma. Please make arrangements to get Remi and me to Valladolid. Make us a copy of the letter so we can recognize his handwriting if we see it.”
* * *
Sarah Allersby sat in the giant office of the Empresa Guerrero in the old part of Guatemala City. It had once been the business office in the capital of the powerful and wealthy Guerrero family. They had occupied the building from colonial days, until the modern civil war bled many of its businesses and made the younger generation leave for lives of leisure in Europe. The office was near the Palacio Nacional because the big ranching families, of necessity, had been involved in the government.
Through all of the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries, a man in the Guerrero family would push out his chair from the big mahogany desk in the office, take his hat and cane from the rack near the door, light a cigar, and walk up the street to government headquarters to protect and further the interests of the Guerrero family companies. The building had an impressive but low baroque façade, a set of double doors that were so heavy that Sarah Allersby had to have an electric motor installed to help her push them open, and floors of antique tiles made and decorated by the same craftsmen who had done the Iglesia de La Merced. The ceilings were fifteen feet high, and every few feet a big lazy fan still provided the proper subtropical atmosphere even though the air it circulated was air-conditioned to seventy-two degrees.
Sarah used a 1930s-era desk telephone with a scrambled line that was checked by her security people twice each day to detect a change in ohms of resistance that would indicate a listening device. She said, “Good morning, Russell. This line is safe so you can speak freely.”
The man on the other end had a contract with the Estancia Guerrero, but Sarah’s family had used his services many times in the years before they had acquired the Guatemalan holdings. He was the man who had impersonated an FBI agent in San Diego. “What can I do for you, Miss Allersby?”
“It’s more trouble over the item we picked up in San Diego. Sam and Remi Fargo have been here in Guatemala and even managed to find their way onto the Estancia. They’ve been defaming me and my company to anyone who will listen. They seem to think that the marijuana operation on the Estancia is mine, as though I were some tawdry drug dealer. They wanted the police to search my house and all of my properties, if you can imagine.”
“Is there any chance the police will do that?”
“Of course not,” she
said. “But I can’t simply ignore them. They left for the United States yesterday. I know they won’t get anywhere with the authorities here, but I have no way of knowing what they can do there. I need to have them watched for a while.”
“Certainly,” he said. “There are two ways to go about this kind of thing. We can simply hire some local San Diego private detectives. That would mean leaving a record that we had hired them and taking the risk that they might have to reveal who hired them in court sometime. Then there’s—”
“The other way, please,” she said. “What we’ve already done in San Diego could generate terrible legal problems. And I worry about this Sam Fargo. He’s vindictive. He won’t be able to let this go. And if he wanted to, his wife wouldn’t let him. I think she’s developed a jealous fear that I’m a threat to her marriage. She’s got nothing going for her but her looks, and as soon as somebody prettier is around, she knows she’s in trouble.”
“All right,” Russell said. “The Fargos haven’t seen me. I can do this myself with one good man. We can be in San Diego in a couple of hours.”
“Thank you, Russell. I’ll have some money sent to your company to cover the initial expenses.”
“Thank you.”
“Just knowing you’re personally paying attention to the problem will make me sleep better. I’m just one person, and I can’t be expected to pay attention to everybody everywhere who wants to harm me.”
“Would you like to set a limit on how expensive this gets?”
“No. If they leave the United States, send people wherever they go. I want to know where they are. And I never want them suddenly showing up on my doorstep again. But I don’t want to leave a record that I had them followed. I really can’t have them ruining my reputation.”
Russell was already preparing for the trip while he listened. He took a suitcase out of his closet and set it on the bed. “I’ll let you know as soon as there’s anything to report.”
“Thank you, Russell.”
Next, Russell called the number of Jerry Ruiz, the man who had impersonated the Mexican Minister of Culture when they had confiscated the codex. “Hi, Jerry. This is Russ. I’d like you with me on a surveillance job.”
“Where?”
“It’s back in San Diego, but it could go anywhere from there. We’re to keep track of a couple, period. We can split what Sarah gives us, even.”
“It’s for her? Okay, I’m in.”
“I’ll pick you up in a half hour.”
Russell hung up and returned to his suitcase. He packed the sets of clothes he used for surveillance — black jeans and navy blue nylon windbreaker and black sneakers, baseball caps in several colors, some olive drab hiking pants that unzipped into shorts, a couple of sport coats in navy and gray, some khaki pants. He and Ruiz would fly down and rent a car and after a couple of days he would turn it in and get another one. He had found over the years that even a minor change in his appearance had a dramatic effect. Just putting on a hat and a different jacket made him a new person. Alternating drivers, getting out of the car and sitting at a restaurant table, made him invisible.
He completed his packing by throwing in some equipment: a shooter’s 60-power spotting scope, with a small tripod, and his personal weapons and some ammunition. He knew that Ruiz would come prepared. Ruiz habitually carried a pistol, even in Los Angeles, and had a boot knife, because that was the way he had come up. He had been a collector for a street gang as a teenager and then he became a cop for a while. It was a strange twist that as he’d come into middle age, he had begun to look like a Mexican politician or a judge. His appearance made him a good man for the job. He wasn’t automatically a suspect. He was also fluent in Spanish and that helped many times.
When Russell took this kind of job, he liked to have more time to prepare, but he would manage. He threw in his passport, five thousand dollars in cash, and a laptop computer. He closed his suitcase and went out to his car. He locked the house, then stopped for a second to be sure he’d forgotten nothing essential. Then he got into the car and drove toward Ruiz’s house, thinking about the job.
Sarah Allersby was on the verge of taking a big step toward learning who she was. That was the way he thought about it. He had worked for many bosses over the years and he had seen the way they learned. They started out with the proposition that they were better than other people and therefore had a responsibility to lead them. In exchange for that brave work, they gained most of the available wealth. Once they had the wealth, it was theirs, and they had a right to protect it and the privileges it bought. If that was true, then they also had a right to get more in the same way — or, really, in any way, including taking it. They got involved in businesses that killed people indirectly, where they didn’t have to see it. Diego San Martin, the drug lord who paid Sarah for the security of being able to raise marijuana on the land of a rich, respectable woman, had killed people. He was probably killing people all the time. Little by little, she was getting used to the idea that it didn’t matter. Russell had met Sarah’s father after Mr. Allersby had already reached that point. Russell’s first job for the older Allersby was to kill a man — a business rival who was preparing to file a patent infringement suit.
Russell knew, although Sarah hadn’t taken the step yet, that she was very nearly ready to buy the deaths of these Fargo people. That could happen at any time. It occurred to him that he had better stop at the office and pick up a couple of additional items. He drove to the back of the building and went up the exterior stairway, unlocked the door and turned on the light.
He went to a locked filing cabinet and opened it. He took a pair of razor-sharp ceramic knives, which wouldn’t set off metal detectors, and a diabetic’s travel kit, with needles and insulin bottles, in a leather case. The insulin in the bottles had been replaced with Anectine, a drug that surgeons used to stop the heart. They would restart it with Adrenaline, but, of course, restarting hearts wasn’t the business Russell was in so he had none of that. He opened the leather case and looked at the prescription date. It was the new one, only a month old. He took the kit with him and put it in his suitcase.
As Russell drove on toward Ruiz’s house, he felt better. When Sarah got around to recognizing what she really wanted done, Russell and Ruiz would be able to take care of it without uncertainty or delay. Upper-class customers like her hated uncertainty, and they hated waiting. They wanted to be able to signify their will and have it carried out right away, like gods.
Chapter 17
SAN DIEGO TO SPAIN
Remi and Sam boarded their plane out of San Diego two days later. The flight took them to New York JFK, where they had to wait for their next plane to leave for Madrid in the late evening. The flight brought them into Madrid-Barajas Airport early in the morning.
When they had been hiking in Guatemala, they had tried to look like ecotourists or history buffs so they’d brought only well-worn tropical clothes, which they had rolled up and carried in their backpacks. This time, they were traveling as a pair of rich American tourists who couldn’t possibly be doing anything serious.
They had bought new matching luggage that looked as expensive as it was. Each piece had an embossed leather tag sewn on that said “Fargo,” and one was packed with the Brioni suits Sam had bought a few months ago in Rome, the other with some of Remi’s fashionable dresses, shoes, and jewelry. Remi brought a Fendi perforated-leather sleeveless dress with a nude silk lining she’d been saving, a Dolce & Gabbana floral-print dress, and a short J. Mendel silk crew-neck dress that had made Sam watch her walk all the way across the room when she’d tried it on.
Also inside their bags were small digital spy cameras, two embedded in watches and two in clear eyeglasses. They knew that if the copy of the codex existed, they would not be able to remove it from the building, and getting permission to photograph it would be at least difficult and maybe impossible. Even worse, just asking permission would announce to the rest of the world that the copy existed and would
soon reveal what it contained.
They flew first class on the transatlantic flight, and, when they arrived, they took a taxi to the Chamartin station and boarded the streamlined Alta Velocidad Española bullet train to Valladolid. The train took only an hour and ten minutes to cover a hundred thirty miles, including passing through a seventeen-mile tunnel. Selma had made a reservation for them at the Zenit Imperial Hotel, a fifteenth-century palace next to the Town Hall and the Plaza Mayor. She also downloaded a digital version of a guidebook to Valladolid on Remi’s iPad.
Sam and Remi spent their first day exploring the city, validating their appearance as rich tourists who had time to spare. The modern city of Valladolid is a manufacturing and communications center and a major grain market, but they entertained themselves by seeking out the old city, where the remnants of the Middle Ages still stood.
Remi read from a guidebook as they walked from place to place. “The Spanish conquered the city from the Moors in the tenth century. Unfortunately, they forgot to ask the Moors what Valladolid meant, so we don’t know.”
“Thanks for that,” said Sam. “Anything else on the list of missing facts?”
“Scads. But we do know Valladolid was the chief residence of the kings of Castile. Ferdinand and Isabella were married here and Columbus died here. Cervantes wrote part of Don Quixote here.”
“I’m impressed,” said Sam. “And I’m serious.”
Their last stop was the Colegio de San Gregorio, where Las Casas lived for several years after he returned from the New World. They walked to the front of the great stone building as Remi checked her guidebook. “The portal to the chapel — the building in front of us — was built by Alonso de Burgos, confessor to Queen Isabella, in 1488. The chapel itself was finished in 1490.” She looked down at the stones of the pavement. “So, right now, we’re standing where Columbus, Queen Isabella, and Ferdinand probably stood.”
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