by PJ Skinner
‘Alfredo, are you okay?’ asked Mike. ‘What is all this stuff?’
‘Treasure,’ mumbled Alfredo. ‘It’s the treasure, Mike.’
‘What do you mean, treasure? I don’t understand. I thought it was in the mountains.’
‘It’s the photograph. The one of the snake.’
‘What has a photograph of a snake got to do with treasure?’
‘The steps. The steps,’ said Alfredo addressing Sam. ‘You found the steps.’ He was bright-eyed with excitement.
Gloria called the waiter over and ordered a soup nicknamed Wake the Dead, generally used as a hangover cure. She moved the documents into a pile and made room for the soup. She asked for a large pot of coffee. Alfredo was now dumbstruck with what appeared to be shock. When the soup arrived, Gloria made him try some. Soon, he was eating as if he had not seen food for days. The soup disappeared. Gloria poured Alfredo a large cup of coffee with lots of sugar.
Sam and Mike sat in silence, with their minds racing. It was torture to wait for Alfredo to finish his soup and coffee.
After what seemed an age, Alfredo breathed deeply and sat back in his chair. He looked around the restaurant. Most people had left, and the few remaining occupied tables were out of earshot. Now, he leaned forward and asked Sam to give him the photo again. She handed it over, still unable to understand what the excitement was about.
He spoke in a conspiratorial manner, in a very low voice. Sam, Mike and Gloria leaned in to hear what he had to say.
‘The steps - they’re the key,’ he said. ‘The key to the lost treasure of the Incas. Sam, where did you take this photo?’
Sam was flummoxed. ‘I’ve no idea. Wilson would know, or Don Moises,’ she said. ‘They’re upriver from Riccuarte. I’m sure we could find them again.’
‘What’s so special about the steps?’ asked Mike.
‘We can’t talk here,’ said Alfredo. ‘Let’s go back to the flat in Avenida Miranda. We can spread the material out on the floor and I will lead you all through the story.’
‘Okay,’ said Mike, ‘let’s go.’.’
Mike paid the bill and then they all piled into the car and drove to his flat. No one spoke. There was a grim determination in Gloria’s driving. She swung the car into its space in the underground garage so close to the wall that they had to squeeze out past the pillars. They trooped into the lift.
Marta was surprised when the four of them appeared in the doorway, as she had been planning to slip away for the afternoon and do some shopping. But she quickly recovered.
‘Marta, we’re going to need to use the floor of the sitting room as a large display area. Can you ask Tati to give it a good sweep?’ asked Mike
Marta went to the kitchen to look for Tati and a brush.
‘Tati, please can you sweep the floor and make a large pot of tea?’ said Marta. ‘We will need the big cups.’
Everyone stood back as Alfredo laid his documents out in order on the newly swept parquet flooring.
‘Tell Tati to go home please, Marta,’ said Mike. ‘We won’t need her again today. You should go home, too.’
‘Oh Mr Mike, please don’t send me home. I promise not to tell.’
‘You swear it?’
‘Cross my heart,’ she said.
‘This is important. You can’t tell anyone,’ said Mike.
‘Okay, boss. I promise.’
Sam could see that Tati was not happy to be sent home. She looked resentful as she left and Marta stayed.
Once they all had a cup of tea and were perched on the low window sills along the picture window of the sitting room, Alfredo was ready to talk.
‘There has always been a lot of talk of El Dorado and ancient treasure troves in Latin America but there appears to be at least a grain of truth to one particular story about Inca gold. The tale goes that in 1532, when the Spanish commander Pizarro captured Atahualpa, the great Inca chief, he demanded a huge ransom for his release. A great convoy of Atahualpa’s people, led by his half-brother Rumiñahui, set off carrying an enormous treasure trove to pay for his freedom. However, the Spanish reneged on their deal and executed Atahualpa before the convoy could arrive. The news reached the convoy when they were high up in the mountains of Sierramar. Rumiñahui decided to hide the riches where the Spanish would never find them. The legend says that the treasure was taken up secret pathways and was hidden deep in the mountains. Then all the bearers committed suicide.’
‘Suicide? That’s horrible,’ said Marta. ‘Why did they do that?’
‘So that they could never tell where it was hidden, of course. Decades later, a Spanish adventurer called Valverde married an Inca princess, a descendant of Rumiñahui. The story goes that she led him to the treasure. He was said to have removed a part of it and returned to Spain a wealthy man. Upon his death, he left a written route to the treasure, describing the landmarks on the way in great detail. This route has been the blueprint used by all of the treasure hunters since then. But no one else has found their way back to it. A British botanist named Richard Spruce (after whom the tree is named) arrived in Sierramar in 1860. His book, Notes of a Botanist on the Amazon and Andes, gave further details of the treasure hunt that took place after the death of Valverde. Various adventurers came close or even claimed to have found the treasure over the years. But all perished before returning to claim the booty.’
‘Do we know what sort of treasure it is?’ asked Mike.
‘Well, the last person who claimed to have found the treasure died on a ship carrying an expedition force that was returning to Sierramar to remove the treasure. His name was Barth Blake. He’d described the treasure as being in a cave: “There are thousands of gold and silver pieces of Inca and pre-Inca handicraft…life-sized human figures made out of beaten gold and silver, birds, animals, cornstalks, gold and silver flowers. Pots full of the most incredible jewellery. Golden vases full of jewellery.” Blake died before he could give anyone information on the whereabouts of the treasure. He had talked about ascending some steps cut into the rock. He hadn’t mentioned any mountains, although it had been assumed that he’d used the Valverde map to get to the treasure. But no one has seen it since. It was thought that the treasure was lost.’
Alfredo paused, as if considering this.
‘But what if the map is no longer valid?’ he asked. ‘Maybe the treasure had been moved after Valverde found it. Had Blake stumbled across it somewhere else? Blake’s description of the steps exactly matched those in the photograph that Sam took. They had a frog cypher on them not usually seen on Inca monuments. The cypher represented a king or leader.’
Alfredo stopped talking and fumbled through his papers, producing a line drawing of an Incan design showing the cypher. He held it up. Mike was speechless. Sam opened her handbag and took out the photograph again. Sure enough, she could see the same cypher carved into the steps, only visible because the late afternoon sunshine was hitting the rock at an angle. She was astonished.
‘I-it’s identical,’ she stuttered. ‘Identical.’
Everyone took turns comparing the drawing of the cypher to the photograph. They all agreed that it was indeed the same one.
‘Mike, we may have discovered the resting place of the lost treasure of the Incas. We have to send another expedition to find it. Imagine the historical value of a treasure like that,’ said Alfredo.
‘I can’t even guess how much something like that would be worth,’ said Mike.
‘So are we going to go for it?’ asked Sam.
‘Of course we are,’ said Mike. ‘Alfredo, we have some discussing to do. The rest of you, go home and please don’t talk about this with anyone.’
‘Not even our families?’ asked Marta.
‘Not even with the Pope,’
IX
Marta went home on the bus. She was buzzing with suppressed excitement. She managed to keep her secret all through the evening and into the next morning. There was no one at home old enough to understand the significance
of the frog cypher or the trials of Atahualpa. Also, her telephone had been cut off because she had forgotten to pay her bill that month.
Marta was divorced and lived with her three-year-old son, who was obsessed with cartoons on the television and always wanted to see ‘just one more, Mummy.’ He was a wilful child who took after his mother in character and after his father in looks. Sometimes it seemed to Marta that she could not bear to look at her son because it brought back all those feelings of shame and humiliation she associated with her ex-boyfriend.
He had left her pregnant at nineteen and run off with another girl, who lived one street away and had a green card for the USA. Marta had to face her disapproving neighbours and disappointed family when they discovered that she was pregnant. Even worse was the knowledge that he had never intended to marry her. How could she compete with that hussy and her right to live in the States? Life was not fair. Marta ceased to trust from that day forth, rightly assuming that a lot of her friends and family knew that her boyfriend was playing away but had failed to warn her.
She got pregnant the first time she slept with him, which was on the night he asked her to marry him. How incredibly corny! How could she have fallen for that old chestnut and on St Valentine’s Day, too? Despite all the warnings from her mother about having sex before marriage, she had fallen for the oldest trick in the book. Now she had a son to remind her. He was the spitting image of his father, poor lad. It was not his fault she could not look at him.
The next morning, she got ready, taking a lot of time with her makeup, as she did every morning. She blew her hair dry and fixed it into place with a cancerous [does hairspray give you cancer?] amount of hairspray. Satisfied that she looked her best, she took the bus into work, bursting to tell someone what she knew. She let herself into Mike Morton’s apartment and slipped into the kitchen. She was rewarded with the sight of Tati, bent double over the washing board, punishing Sam’s jeans.
Tati was a very pretty coffee-coloured mulatto. She came from the coast and brought the sunshine with her. Her lithe body danced over the task with all the enjoyment of a job well done. She looked up when she heard the hurried tick-tack of Marta’s high heels on the tiled kitchen floor.
‘Good morning, Señora Marta,’ she said. ‘How are you today?’
‘Very well, thank you, Tati,’ she said. ‘And you?’
‘I’m okay. A little concerned about last night. I don’t know why Mr Mike made me go home when everyone else was there. I’m afraid that I’ve done something wrong and might be fired, so I’ve come early to clean the clothes with all my might, so he can see me working hard.’
‘I’m sure you haven’t done anything wrong, Tati. Mike would have told me.’
‘I thought that he’d noticed that I had taken home the remains of a chicken that they had for lunch this week. It was mostly bones but I took it without asking. I didn’t sleep last night worrying about it. I should have asked him but I thought no one would notice.’
‘I’m absolutely sure that it’s not that, Tati. You don’t need to worry. If you make me a cup of coffee I will tell you all about it. Okay?’
Tati wrung out the jeans and hung them over a drying rack. She wiped her hands on her apron and padded into the kitchen in her flip-flops. She made them both a cup of strong coffee with lots of sugar. Marta struggled to keep her composure, while Tati spooned the sugar into the cups and stirred it extra slowly.
‘Thank you, Tati,’ said Marta, straining at the seams with impatience. ‘That’s good coffee.’
‘So, what’s up with Mr Mike and Mr Alfredo then, Señora Marta?’
‘Last night after you left, Alfredo told us about the lost treasure of the Incas. Apparently it belonged to Atahualpa and was going to be used to pay his ransom. But he was murdered first and it disappeared.’
Tati shifted in her chair.
‘It turns out that Sam took a picture of a frog that Alfredo thinks might have something to do with the treasure. I didn’t really understand that part. I think she said it was in the jungle.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, Alfredo is a treasure hunter and he has lots of books about treasure, so he must be very clever. He seems sure that Sam has found something very interesting and Mike wants to go and look for the treasure himself. Well, not himself, but he wants Sam and Alfredo to go, I think. Isn’t that amazing?’
She paused, breathless. She sat back and waited for Tati to beg her for more details. She was disappointed. Tati seemed oddly unimpressed by this tall tale.
‘That treasure story is a myth. I read it in the newspaper. There’s no treasure any more. It was all stolen by the Spanish, or someone, I’m not sure who. I can’t remember. Anyway, I don’t believe it still exists. So do you know why Mr Mike sent me away?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps because we were speaking English. Aren’t you interested in the treasure?’
No, it’s none of my business. I’m worried about losing my job. I have to finish the laundry.’
‘But Tati...’
Tati marched off to the sink. Marta understood that Tati had been worried about her job but she could not understand why she did not seem interested in the treasure and had dismissed it out of hand as a myth. Usually, Tati was the first one to gossip about superstitions, rumours and miracles. Marta was frustrated by this apparent change of heart but she had never understood Tati. She assumed that she was in a mood or had her period.
So Marta remained frustrated, still carrying her secret, which felt as yet unshared due to the reluctance of Tati to participate in speculation and rumour. She sulked at her desk all morning and sighed when Mike and Sam left to go to lunch with Gloria. She filed her nails and re-did her makeup. Just when she was considering telephoning her sister to tell her instead, the phone on her desk rang, making her jump.
It was Wilson looking for Mike. She told him that Mike was at lunch but he seemed reluctant to hang up. She allowed him to chat her up for about fifteen minutes, while she considered her options. Wilson was part of the company. Surely it would be okay to tell him the story of the cypher? She hesitated.
‘So, what’s new with you, princess?’ asked Wilson.
‘I have a secret. But I can’t tell you what it is.’
‘A secret? Well, if it’s secret, maybe you shouldn’t tell me,’ he replied, knowing she was dying to tell him and hoping the reverse psychology would have its usual effect.
‘Well, I don’t know if it’s secret from you. Do you cross your heart and swear on the Virgin that you won’t tell anyone, ever?’
‘Cross my heart and hope to die,’ said Wilson, with as much sincerity as he could muster.
Marta launched into her story.
‘You know that Sam took some photos on the trip with you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well I noticed there was a carving in one of them, of a frog and Alfredo got very excited and said that it was the treasure.’
‘The treasure?’ asked Wilson, suddenly realising that this was no ordinary secret, ‘What treasure?’
‘That’s what we said. What treasure?’
‘And what did Alfredo say?’
‘About what?’
‘About the treasure?’ asked Wilson through gritted teeth.
‘Oh, he said that it was from the Incas and they had hidden it from the Spanish, I think.’
‘So where is the treasure?’
‘I don’t know. I think Sam knows. She thinks that Don Moises would know, or you.’
‘That I know? Are you sure?’
‘She said something about steps.’
‘Steps?’
‘Inca steps.’
‘The Inca steps. Is that all?’ he asked brusquely.
This was more like the reaction Marta was expecting from Tati. But she felt ill at ease with Wilson’s sudden change of tone. He seemed almost too interested.
‘That’s all I remember. Now, you can’t tell anyone. Promise me,’ she said, now nervous. In the back o
f her mind somewhere, she remembered that Gloria had told her never to trust Wilson but not why.
‘Don’t you worry your pretty head about it. I have no intention of telling anyone your secret, on my honour,’ he said.
Marta was now very worried. ‘But you won’t do anything silly will you? I shouldn’t have told you anything. Gloria told me that you…’ She trailed off.
‘Gloria said what about me?’
Marta knew she was on shaky ground. ‘Oh, nothing,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to go now. Bye, then.’
***
Wilson put down the phone. On the one hand, he was feverishly excited. He had been honest in one respect: he had absolutely no intention of telling anyone else about the treasure. It would solve all his problems forever. From that moment on, he plotted how he would make it his and his alone. On the other hand, he had a problem. He had suspected that Gloria knew more about him than she was letting on. Now he was sure. He would have to get rid of her before she spilled the beans and ruined his prospects of staying in his job with Mike. If Mike knew the truth about him, he might fire him. This was Wilson’s last chance. It was Gloria or him. He must get rid of Gloria without causing suspicion.
***
Meanwhile, Sam had managed to get Gloria to stay after lunch and have a coffee with her in the restaurant before going back to the office. Gloria was not hard to persuade and appeared glad that her new friend seemed to be adapting better to ‘Calderon time.’
Sam wore an old, blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a pair of ancient denim jeans. Her face was free of makeup and her fingernails free of polish. Her green eyes were serious.
‘So, chica, what’s up?’ asked Gloria.