“No, this is home,” Raul corrected her. He shot his dark eyes up toward Sax Castle. It perched upon a steep mount of rock and gravel that reached a substantial elevation above the town. The afternoon sun shone fully into his eyes and Madalina was spellbound by the child’s beauty. His long eyelashes cast shadows inside the yellow-brown of his irises and his skin was without blemish. “Sax Castle once belonged to a race of dark-skinned people who’d been of the Muslim religion. But it is way older than the Moors. Did you know that?” he asked her.
Madalina was amazed by his knowledge of castles. But there was one he mentioned previously that had her wondering since he first told her about it. “Tell me about the one Mara took you to in Germany. That one sounded bigger than this one.”
“Oh,” he chirped, “that was Wewelsburg, the one where the people wanted to be like King Arthur.”
“And Mara took you there on holiday?” she asked. Raul shook his head, very intrigued by the shapes he could make in his slowly thawing dessert.
“She collected me there, actually. From there I started living with her,” he said matter-of-factly without meeting Madalina’s eyes. She gasped at the realization that he had not always been with Mara, while she thought all the while that the angry woman was his foster mother or something of that sort. “And before that? Who were you with?”
“Others. A few. They come and go. Some pass me on to others, and some steal me away. Some,” he looked at Madalina with a blank expression, “even kill to take me.”
Her heart stopped. Tears came, but she quickly looked away, pretending to admire the colossal castle on the hill. Raul had finished his sloppy work of art. He slid the pudding bowl toward her with a smile. “There. All done.”
Relieved that he was not half as upset as she was, she feigned happiness. “Wow, I’m impressed!” she sniffled with a smile, noting the detail of the makeshift building he had fashioned. It was a remarkable likeness of a temple, a rectangular base with step-like elevations growing narrower toward the top. “Is this another castle?”
Raul replied, “No, that is home.”
“Where is home?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he replied, shrugging and pulling the bowl back towards him to break the artwork onto his spoon before it became too mushy.
“Then how do you know it’s home, darling?” she pried, absolutely spellbound by his answers. Like riddles, they teased her deduction and she became quickly addicted to unraveling them one by one.
“I just know,” he mumbled through a mouthful of ice cream. Madalina could take no more. She decided to just come out and ask the child what she wanted to know most, what perplexed her above all other things. “Raul, why did you come willingly with me when I took you?”
“Because Mara is dead,” he answered plainly. “No use staying with a corpse. How would she take care of me?” He frowned. “Besides, I like you, Madi. You’re not mean like she was. I think you really care about me, so you are one of the good ones of all the women who took me away.”
Madalina was dumbstruck. He knew. He knew all along, she thought to herself. There was more to find out and now that he was speaking freely she took the opportunity. “Why do they take you?”
“They can’t help it,” he replied, munching happily. His words were far from trivial, but he talked as if he were discussing a trip to the zoo. Madalina felt her heart ache. She could not stop the tears now, but she grabbed her napkin and quickly wiped her eyes. What he was saying was so profound that she felt doomed and redeemed at the same time for the unnatural urge to save him. Her voice choked when she tried to articulate, desperately combating the crying spell she felt.
“All of them? They can’t help but take you? Why, Raul? Are you doing something to manipulate their thoughts?” she asked.
He scoffed. “No. I don’t do that. That’s what the doctor does when Mara took me to see him. I do nothing. Really. But I’m not stupid just because I am small. I can see that those who take me don’t know why they do it.” His revelations made her shake in terror.
“W-wh-at doctor, my darling?” she asked carefully.
“The psychologist in Sagunto. I was there only once. Mara had a fight with him and we left. Just like you. She was hiding me at the motel when you found us,” he recounted, scraping the bottom of the bowl to gather the last milky drops onto his spoon. Madalina’s eyes were bloodshot and drenched, her cheeks streaked with tears, but stronger than the awe she was under at the boy’s revelation, was the betrayal from a Judas she knew she shared with Raul.
“Dr. Sabian?” she stammered.
“Sí,” Raul confirmed, slamming the truth into her mind like a sledgehammer.
“Jesus Christ!” she hissed softly into her hands, covering her face. “No wonder. No wonder.”
“What’s wrong?” the child asked her. His voice was tender and fraught with concern, but she could not see him as she cried into her hands. Suddenly Madalina felt Raul’s hand brush her temple, his small attempt at consoling her. “Do you want some of my milkshake? It will make you feel better.”
How can he be so wise and still so much a child? she wondered, basking in his compassion. How can he know so much and still be so carefree?
“No thank you, darling,” Madalina said, still weeping softly. “I’m a little sad, but I’ll be fine in a few minutes. Um,” she sniffed and drew her hands from her flushed face to blow her nose with another napkin from the dispenser, “how do you know what your home looks like if you’ve never been there?”
The question came out of her before she’d given it much thought, similar to her inadvertent actions back in Sagunto. Madalina reckoned that such inquiries were the result of a subliminal need for answers that trumped propriety.
“Have you ever just known something but you could not explain to your parents where you got it from?” he asked her, cupping his little hands around the wet glass of the milkshake. “Sometimes I get homesick, but because I have no idea where it is, I can’t cry about it. I want to cry sometimes, because I miss my home, but from as long as I remember I’ve never been home,” he explained with difficulty.
“I guess I can relate a little, but not exactly like you,” she replied, calming her upset. “When I was in high school I had no friends as well, so I used to hide in the library and just look through books. Sometimes I would see places in other countries that I’d never visited, but it felt as if I came from there. Only I did not because I’ve always lived in Spain. Is that what you mean?”
“Si, but I was there. I remember. I just don’t know where it is.” Raul shrugged.
“How old were you?” she asked. “When you were at this place?”
He looked at her in befuddlement, unable to answer her. Glaring brown eyes stared incoherently through her and she could tell that he was trying to give her a decent reaction. “I don’t know when I was there, otherwise I must have had a memory before I was three because I was three when the first woman stole me from our house in Argen…um, Argentia?”
“Argentina?” she gasped. Raul giggled sheepishly, “Sí! I’m stupid. Sí, Argentina.”
“Were you born there?” she kept throwing him the questions that just seemed to appear in her mouth.
He laughed. “I don’t know where I was born! Geez, I can’t remember the things that happened to me when I was a baby, you know.” The little boy’s snickering warmed her heart, and she laughed with him, electing to leave him be for now. He had provided her with enough shocking and wonderful information—information she would take quite a while to process thoroughly enough to put the pieces of the puzzle together for a solution.
At once she heard a familiar voice that cheered her heart with a start.
“Hola Madi.” It came from behind her in the small diner, shaking her to the core.
“Javier?” she whispered. But Raul was facing her, and by his expression, he wasn’t sharing the same joy she was feeling for her brother’s arrival. In fact, the child looked both terrified and an
gry. Madalina turned in her seat, but what she saw standing there was not her responsible older brother. It was a conniving mind-killer and an emaciated husk of what her brother once was.
Behind her, Madalina heard Raul mutter in his native Quechua, “Intiq qari.”
22
Alliance
Nina had trouble sleeping. After hearing the dreadful news over a myriad of news channels that her two closest friends had probably perished in a terrible seaborne crash, her mind could not stop racing. She was on her way to Spain, not sure exactly where she would start looking for Purdue and Sam, but she did not care. As long as she did not have definitive proof that they were dead, she would keep searching. Of all people she knew them best and had a hard line to their way of thinking.
After the crash was reported, Nina had contacted Purdue’s assistant and various offices of his, only to learn that he was indeed missing and had not yet contacted any of them. The same went for Sam. His cell phone number informed her that the subscriber was not available, something Sam’s phone would never normally say. At worst, it would go to voice mail. This confirmed her fears that the two men may truly be lost, but she refused to write them off as dead and gone.
After her Glasgow to Dublin flight, she connected almost immediately to her Madrid flight, leaving her exhausted by the time her plane touched down on the wet runways of the Madrid–Barajas Airport. The rain was unusual for this time of year in Spain, but after the recent heat wave, it was not too surprising.
Nina had barely switched on her cell phone when a whole list of missed calls came through on her phone. Her demeanor lifted instantly, assuming it would be either Sam or Purdue telling her that they were safe and sound and keeping a low profile for some reason. They would do such a thing. In fact, it would be odd if they behaved normally. All the calls were from a landline in Sagunto, which could very well have been the boys. Of all the calls, the last that came from that number was on her voice mail.
Hastening, she punched in her code and listened.
“Hola, this is an urgent call for Dr. Nina Gould the historian,” a male voice opened. His English was decent, but his accent was very heavy and she had to strain to understand. It was a call from a Sagunto police officer, Capt. Sanchez, urgently needing her expertise in an ongoing homicide investigation. Nina sighed. Feeling disappointed, she hung up the phone before the message was completed.
“I don’t have time for this,” she muttered, hardly able to stay awake anymore. She decided to return the call from the unknown number once she got to Málaga, but first she had to freshen up and get something to eat at one of the airport restaurants. While she was having an order of lasagna and espresso her phone rang incessantly inside her leather sling bag. She would check the call to make sure it was not Sam or Purdue, but noticed that the police captain was unbelievably persistent.
“Come on, nothing can be this urgent,” she said with a mouth full of food as she answered the phone, hoping it would repel his efforts. But it had quite the opposite effect.
“Dr. Gould? Dr. Gould! Dios mío, I have been desperate to speak to you,” he gasped in delight.
“Um, hang on,” she replied, and took a moment to swallow her food. “Listen, Capt. Sanchez, I appreciate that you need to get my advice on something, but I am extremely busy right now.”
“Please, Dr. Gould, I will not take more than five minutes, I think, of your time. Please. As we speak I am leaving to a town in Alicante where something terrible is about to happen between a suspect and a very nefarious member of the Black Sun, and I have to know before I get there,” he implored in one fell swoop without as much as taking a break to breathe.
“Wait, what?” she asked abruptly. She had to make sure that she’d correctly heard the name of the organization that had almost claimed her life a few times. “The Black Sun did what?”
“You see, I need to know what they are, what they aim to do, before this young woman and the little boy come to harm . . . ,” he insisted, but Nina stopped him. She had an idea.
“Capt. Sanchez, I am in Spain currently,” she began to explain.
“Oh, fantastic! Can we me . . .?” he interrupted her.
“Listen!” she barked. “My apologies for being a bitch, but I have two dear friends missing, I have not slept in about two days, and I have no idea where to even begin looking for them. Now, I might have a solution for both of us,” she offered in a milder tone.
“I’m listening,” he replied.
“Alright, Captain. I’m at the airport in Madrid, the Madrid–Barajas airport,” she said.
“Sí, sí,” he mumbled, clearly busy grappling for a pen and paper on the other side of the line.
“If you could meet me here, I can postpone my flight to Málaga and first help you,” she suggested. “But in return I need your help and resources to help me find my friends. Do we have a deal?”
“I’ll do you better,” he said hesitantly, and then corrected his phrase. “I’ll do you one better, okay? If you help me with this information, I will take you myself to where you must go and ask my colleagues to make a search party, if you want.”
Nina was more than satisfied. “Captain Sanchez, we have an accord. What time will you be here?”
23
Don’t Keep a Lady Waiting
Sam could hardly keep up with the excited chatter of his two companions on the main deck. Vincent was ecstatic. There was no trace of his bad temper as he related the macabre tale of the road to the ultimate discovery Purdue had made in the boiler room adjacent to the galley. It was Sam’s task to not only take pictures and interview the crew and captain on the find, but also to capture their accounts on his old-fashioned voice recorder. However, the latter was made exceedingly difficult by the excitement of the two expedition partners and their zest.
“Hang on, hang on,” Sam halted Vincent. “A full-sized statue of what again? You have to slow down a wee bit, alright?”
The skipper caught his breath and sighed, smiling like some pervert. “She’s beautiful, and what is more, Sam, she survived the horrid intentions of the conquistadors to melt her down into a golden sludge to make more coins.”
Purdue waited his turn, resisting the urge to have a glass of sparkly just yet. He intended to dive again, which would be counterproductive if he drank alcohol. With glee, he watched Sam recording the elated words of the passionate relic hunter from the better side of sun symbolism. But his eyes wandered.
Over the aging day’s ripples he studied the waters, and for the first time since the accident, that which had pestered Sam’s psyche long before his dawned on him as well. The recollection of it all overwhelmed him, now, being in the same close vicinity where his own staff members had been brutality claimed by a sinister fate and the monsters that served it.
“Purdue! Wake up, lad!” Sam hollered near him.
Purdue turned and smiled, effectively concealing his minor brush with a bad memory. “Is it my turn now?”
“Aye,” Sam affirmed, saluting the skipper who was walking to the cockpit to chat with his co-pilots.
“Before we do my interview,” Purdue said under his breath, “tell me what he told you about that statue. Do you think that it is the match to the prayer stick?”
Sam glanced back to see if Vincent was near before he responded. He pulled the tall explorer aside to share. “He said that it was part of the sacking of Cuzco, Peru, after the abduction of the Inca emperor, Atahualpa. Apparently, it ended up in the poor bastard getting killed anyway in 1533, even after he paid the Spanish conquistador, Francisco Pizarro, more than the ransom required to buy his freedom. On top of that, they raided the Inca temples and pillaged their greedy way through the towns, killing for silver and gold.”
“Ah!” Purdue nodded, trying to remember the details and why Vincent was raving about the statue. “How did the statue survive then?”
“He doesn’t know,” Sam replied, looking through his written notes of the captain’s words. “But here is the in
teresting part . . . .”
“The Nazis found her during one of their terror campaigns in Spain?” Purdue jested, though in truth he thought it was a probability.
“Close,” Sam winked. “An Allied soldier by the name of Harold Barnard . . . Sub-Lieutenant Harold Barnard of the British Commonwealth, assisted the Waffen-SS in obtaining the statue from a Catholic convent near a small town called Cuacos de Yuste, in . . . you guessed it . . . Spain.”
“Bingo!” Purdue grinned. “I bet if Nina were here . . . .”
“No way, Purdue, no,” Sam protested.
“. . . we could help Vincent locate the matching relic much quicker,” Purdue continued without relent.
“No, just no,” Sam snapped. “Leave her out of this for once.”
“So we still don’t know where to look for the other piece,” Purdue explained, trying to soften Sam up to the idea of consulting Nina.
“We’ll figure it out. After all, it’s none of our concern, really. Our part is more the creepy fucking mummy hoard, isn’t it?” Sam lowered his voice and leaned in to Purdue. “Let Vincent sort out his El Dorado . . . Inca prophecy thing of world peace with his yellow princess, mate, and let us concentrate on the weird shit you decided to bring me here for, eh?”
“You know what I’m like when it comes to mysterious relics and ancient history, old cock,” Purdue reminded his friend.
“Aye, lest I forget,” Sam groaned.
“I’ll tell you what,” he told Sam, “once we’ve brought her up with my portable mass grave of bodies, we can take it step by step. And you might be vehemently opposed to this, but who would be the best person to help us get to the bottom of the mummy phenomenon on these German soldiers?”
The Inca Prophecy Page 13