There was nothing for him to do but lie still and wait. The sniper hadn't seen him burrow up in the brush; if he had, there would have been more shots. For all the man knew, one of his bullets had found its mark, and his target was already dead or mortally wounded. As long as the assailant maintained a high opinion of his own marksmanship, Quincannon had a chance. And how long he maintained it depended on how well Quincannon played possum.
The sounds of movement stopped somewhere above—on top of the knoll, he thought, by one of the oaks. A rotting log blocked his view, and he didn't dare shift position to gain a better vantage point; as quiet as it was, and as close as the sniper was, the slightest noise would betray the fact that he was still alive. He forced himself to remain motionless. There was cold sweat on his body now; the skin along his back rippled and crawled. If the man up there saw him and decided to fire again, to make sure of his kill….
A long, agonizing minute crept away. Then, mercifully, the shuffling movements started again—slow, measured steps coming downhill toward the deadfall. No more than thirty feet away… no more than twenty-five … no more than twenty—
There was a sudden sharp crack as the man's foot came down on a piece of brittle wood, a sound as loud in that electric stillness as a pistol shot. Quincannon reacted without thinking, again on reflex and instinct; he had one move, one chance, and there would be no better time for it. He shoved off the ground with his left hand, reared up on his knees with the Remington jabbing through the brush in front of him. The assailant had startled himself by stepping on the stick or twig, had looked down automatically at his feet; and that made him vulnerable. By the time he heard and saw Quincannon, brought his rifle to bear, it was too late for him to do anything but die.
Quincannon shot him twice. Would have shot him three times except that the third bullet hit the rifle just as it discharged, sent it spinning free, and rendered the return shot harmless. The man twisted, toppled, skidded downward on his face to within a few feet of the deadfall—a dead fall of his own.
Shakily Quincannon gained his feet. The Remington felt heavy and slippery in his fingers; there was a brassy taste in his mouth. He took several deep breaths, extricated himself from the brush, moved up to where the sniper lay. He turned the man over with his foot, looked down into blank staring eyes and a familiar countenance. He was not surprised at the sniper's identity. He should have been, at least a little, but he wasn't. The only emotion he felt was a dull, smoldering anger.
The man who had tried to kill him was Pablo, the other guard on the hacienda gate.
FOUR
QUINCANNON HOLSTERED HIS revolver, stepped around the body of the dead mestizo, and climbed to the crest of the knoll. The anger continued to smolder in him; he used it like fuel to burn away the cold and the aftermath of sudden violence.
The claybank horse, frightened by the shooting, had pulled loose of its picket and run off into the marsh, where it had come close to getting itself mired. He went down there, spoke gently to the animal to keep it still, finally succeeded in catching the reins and leading it out to firmer ground. Then he mounted, turned to the north, forded the creek, and veered overland through the orchard. When he reached the main road, he kicked the horse into a hard gallop all the way uphill to the hacienda.
There were no guards on the gate when he clattered through. He drew sharp rein, swung down. The door to one of the house's ground-floor rooms opened and Barnaby O'Hare appeared, drawn by the noise of his arrival. O'Hare came out into the courtyard. And the expression on Quincannon's face, the damp and grass-stained condition of his clothing, seemed to startle him.
“Mr. Quincannon, what on earth—”
“Where is Velasquez?”
“Why… I don't know. I haven't seen him for the past hour. Has something happened? You look—”
Quincannon pivoted away from him, hurried up the stairs to the second-floor gallery. There was no one in the parlor when he entered; the house seemed unnaturally quiet. He drew his revolver again, went to the closed door to Velasquez's study, and threw it open—standing back and to one side as he did so, out of the line of fire from within.
But there seemed to be no need for his caution or his weapon. Velasquez sat unarmed in the chair before the fire, his hands on his knees; he turned his head at the sudden opening of the door but made no other movement. His posture was that of an old man, a cripple incapable of movement without assistance. Firelight flickered over his face, creating shadows and highlights that gave his skin the look of tallow about to melt.
“So,” he said in a thin, dead voice. “Pablo did not succeed.”
Quincannon entered the study, shut the door behind him. He might have holstered his pistol then, but he didn't; he let it hang down at his side instead. There was no trust left in him today, not even of his own perceptions.
“Pablo is dead. You should have sent more than one man.”
“It does not matter now.”
“No? Why doesn't it?”
“Time,” Velasquez said. “Time.”
“It has run out for you, if that's what you mean.”
“Run out. Yes.”
“But you didn't think so earlier, when you gave Pablo his orders.”
Velasquez lifted one hand, let it fall again to his knee. “I believed then that your death would give me a little more of it—a little more time.”
“Because I was close to the truth,” Quincannon said bitterly. “And the truth is you killed Luis Cordova and stole the document his father wrote. No one has ever been after Don Esteban's artifacts but you.”
“Stole the document? No, señor. It is rightfully mine, as the artifacts are rightfully mine.”
“Was it also your right to take Cordova's life?”
“I did not mean to kill him. I went to talk to him, nothing more. I was afraid your way would be too slow. But he was very frightened, and I was very angry. He told what his father had done; he gave me the traitor's letter—all but the last page. He said the last page had been lost years ago. I didn't believe him then. I struck him. He fought me in his fear; it must have been then that he tore off the scrap you found. It was only after I returned to the St. Charles that I noticed it was missing. But I did not think it was in his hand; I thought it had also been lost years ago.”
Quincannon felt in his coat pocket. The slender metal cone was still there, and he drew it out. “Cordova tore this from you, too,” he said. “From one end of the string tie you were wearing that night. I noticed the tie in the bar at the St. Charles; the ends clicked together once when you moved.”
“I knew you would remember what it was and where you had seen it. It was only a matter of time.” The ghost of a mirthless smile played at the edges of Velasquez's mouth. “Time,” he said again.
Quincannon said, “I should have known all along it was you. I should have known for certain yesterday afternoon. Here, in this room, you asked if I had any idea who had taken the document from Cordova's study. But I said nothing to you about a study; I said only that I had found Cordova dead in his lodgings.”
A small fit of coughing seized Velasquez. When it ended, he said, “You are a good detective. If you weren't—”
“If I weren't, you wouldn't have tried to have me killed.”
“A desperate measure. But I told you: it was only for time that I did it. Now …” He shrugged emptily. “Now, it does not matter. It was all for nothing. There can never be enough time.”
“Why do you keep talking about time?”
“I am dying,” Velasquez said without inflection. “The doctor in Santa Barbara … it was him I saw that night, before I went to Cordova's.… He told me I have only a short while to live. A few weeks, no more.” He coughed again. “Cancer, señor. Now do you understand?”
Some of the anger went out of Quincannon. He moved closer to Velasquez, into the warmth of the fire. The Remington felt heavy in his hand, but still he did not pouch it. “Yes,” he said, “now I understand.”
&
nbsp; “It was not for me that I wished to recover the artifacts. It was for my wife and daughter. This ranch is not so successful as it might appear. There are debts … too many debts. Doña Olivia will be forced to sell after I am gone. Rancho Rinconada de los Robles will be no more.”
“The artifacts may still be recovered—”
“No, they will not be. They are lost forever.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because of the missing page. Luis Cordova did not have it; I would have found it if he had, or you would have. He did not lie. It was lost.”
“The rest of the letter isn't enough? Not even with the words on the torn corner?”
“No. Last night, all night, I studied the two pages. The missing directions cannot be reconstructed.” Contempt animated Velasquez's voice as he continued. “Most of the letter is an apology to the traitor's wife. He was sorry he had stolen the statue of the Virgin Mary. He was sorry for his betrayal of Don Esteban. He begged her and God to forgive him. He did this terrible thing only for her sake and that of his child.”
“Just as you did a terrible thing for the sake of your wife and child,” Quincannon said. “Is there really so much difference between you and Tomãs Cordova?”
“A foolish question. I am not a traitor.”
“What are you, then? A martyr like you believe your father to be?”
“I am Felipe, son of Don Esteban. I have given him a small measure of vengeance.”
A coldness like the touch of dead fingers brushed Quincannon's neck. There was no longer any anger left in him. He felt nothing toward the dying man in the chair, not even pity.
“You're proud of what you've done,” he said flatly. “There is not a shred of remorse in you, is there.”
“Remorse? Why should there be? I ended the life of a traitor's son—a coward and a thief himself. He kept the statue all those years. He did not return it to my family. He did not give us the traitor's letter.”
“Perhaps he was ashamed.”
“Bah. It is we who were shamed by him and his father.”
“And Pablo? Do you feel remorse for him? Or don't you admit he died because of you?”
“He died because he was loyal,” Velasquez said. “As Don Esteban's servants died for him. His death is an honorable one.”
“What would mine have been? Would you have found honor in murdering me, too?”
Velasquez made no reply. But none was needed: Quincannon knew the answer. He was a gringo, and in the eyes of Felipe Antonio Abregon y Velasquez, son of Don Esteban the martyred nobleman, all gringos were the enemy. Use one if it suits one purpose; kill one if it suits another. There is never any regret in the death of an enemy.
A silence built between them. Velasquez stared into the fire with his dull, empty eyes. Outside, the wind began to buffet the house, rattling shutters; it would not be long before the storm broke. The air in the room, Quincannon thought, was like the air outside: heavy, oppressive, static with an aura of repressed violence. He found it difficult to breathe, as if there were no longer enough oxygen—or enough space—for the two of them to share.
Velasquez seemed to feel the same sense of suffocation. He said without turning his head, “I would like to be alone now, señor. You will please leave for a few minutes.”
A thought entered Quincannon's mind, made him hesitate. But only for a moment. He refused to take hold of the thought, let it slide away into a recess of his consciousness. He backed to the door, not looking anymore at the dying man in the chair, and left the study. And it was not until he closed the door that he finally holstered his revolver.
Barnaby O'Hare was waiting when he stepped out onto the gallery. The historian's moon face was troubled. “Is everything all right, Mr. Quincannon?”
Quincannon said nothing. He moved to the railing, stood staring into the courtyard. The day had turned very dark; the sky overhead boiled with thick, black-veined clouds. As he watched, the first drops of rain began to pelt down.
Beside him O'Hare said diffidently, “Mr. Quincannon?”
“Yes. Everything is all right.”
“You seemed so upset a few minutes ago …”
“I was. Not any longer.”
“Then you found Señor Velasquez?”
“I found him.”
“He isn't ill, is he?” O'Hare asked. And when Quincannon didn't answer, “I've been afraid he might be. He wouldn't speak to me when I returned. He … well, he acted strangely. He sent his wife and daughter away, you know.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Did he tell you why?”
“No,” Quincannon said. “But I know why now.”
“Perhaps he needs a doctor …”
“There is nothing a doctor can do for him. Nothing anyone can do.”
Lightning flashed in the distance; thunder cracked. Quincannon watched the rain, listening.
Inside the house, inside the study, there was a noise like a small sharp echo of the thunder: a single pistol shot.
O'Hare said, “Oh my God!” and ran for the door. Quincannon stayed where he was and watched the rain, no longer listening.
PART VII
1986
ONE
I SET THE photostats of Quincannon's notes aside and sat staring at a spider that was spinning a web on one of Sam's straggly rosebushes. This final installment of the detective's story had left me with a curious and conflicting assortment of emotions.
Disappointment, of course, because for all his efforts he had not uncovered the hiding place of the Velasquez treasure. Sorrow, for the participants in the tragedy that had befallen the once-proud family. It was a sorrow that extended to the dead: to Felipe Velasquez, whose life had been twisted and finally destroyed by his obsession with finding the missing artifacts; to his wife, Olivia, the innocent bystander. But I particularly felt a keen sympathy for the still-living Sofia Manuela: From the way she had spoken of her father, the “great man,” it was apparent her mother had not told her that Felipe had died a suicide and a murderer. But I wondered if at some point Sofia had found out at least part of it; if perhaps that knowledge—rather than sentiment—was why she could never bear to look through the papers in the wooden box she kept under her bed.
To me, Felipe Velasquez had been a strange man. We were of the same culture, descended from the same people, but his attitude of hatred and superiority toward Anglos was something I couldn't fathom—even for those times. Of course I'd felt some resentment of Anglos in my lifetime; it hadn't been easy growing up in Santa Barbara, where even the poorest of them seemed to have so much; I still hurt when I remembered running home from school in tears because a classmate had taunted me about my mother cleaning her mother's house for a living. But hate Anglos? Feel inferior or superior to them? No. Maybe the difference between me and Felipe Velasquez—besides the obvious one of time and circumstances—was that I hadn't been raised to hate.
In spite of my sadness and disappointment over the outcome of Quincannon's case, I also felt an even greater excitement than before. In his informal notes, there had been more richness of detail, and he had indulged in a fair amount of speculation; it was as if he'd used these notes to order his thoughts before setting down the bare and still-confusing facts for the final time. Reading them, it was easy to sense Quincannon's anger and frustration.
The question of the whereabouts of those artifacts remained as nagging and tantalizing as when the case had begun. It was clear from Tomás Cordova's letter that they had been buried somewhere near Maria Alcazar's—Don Esteban's first wife's—grave, but her headstone had never been located, and the rancho's pueblo had been thoroughly searched by the family in the years after Fremont's troops had destroyed it, with no trace of the treasure ever turning up.
Where was the treasure, then, if not somewhere in the pueblo? Had it been taken away by Luis Cordova or his mother? No, there was absolutely no evidence of that. And—unlike Quincannon, who I assumed was not Catholic from the way he had phrased certain
things in his report—I was not surprised that the Cordovas had not used the knowledge passed along in Tomás's letter or turned the information over to the Velasquez family. Shame would have prevented both actions. As described in the detective's words, Luis and his mother were extremely religious, the staunchest of Mexican Catholics. They would no more have stolen religious artifacts than they would have spit on the statue of the Virgin Mary that Tomás had taken, and they would certainly not have desecrated a graveyard looking for them. Nor would they have allowed outsiders—especially the Velasquezes—to know of Tomás's crime. That was the reason Luis had lied to Quincannon, had been so frightened when the detective came asking about the statue. The gold figure had been a terrible burden to Luis all the years he had harbored it, and perhaps it had even been a relief when it was stolen.
My reasoning explained Luis's and his mother's behavior, but it still didn't answer the question of what had happened to those remaining artifacts. And the more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that nothing actually had happened to them. They had to be in their original hiding place even now; otherwise some of them would have turned up somewhere, at some time. There were too many of them, and most were too distinctive for them to have gone unnoticed and unrecognized.
Más aliá del sepulcro … donde Maria. Beyond the grave … where Maria….
I looked down at the picnic table where the other documents that had been in the package from the public library were spread: copies of the personal letters, the diaries, perhaps even photographs. But I'd save those for later, maybe for when Sam returned from wherever he'd gone; right now I was too restless and excited to go through them. I felt an urgent need to go to the ruins of San Anselmo de las Lomas once more, to stand in the graveyard as Quincannon had done, to try one last time to unlock the meaning of those haunting words.
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