Suddenly he got down on to his hands and knees and disappeared beneath the table, completing his resemblance to a dog. All I could see were the seat of his pants and the soles of his shoes; his pants were all right, but his shoes needed repairing. After a while he backed out, gave me a grin, and put his finger to his lips again. He beckoned, indicating that I should join him, so I squatted down, feeling a bit silly. He flicked a switch and a narrow beam of light shot from the little torch he held. It roamed about the underside of the table and then held steady. He pointed, and I saw a small grey metal box half hidden behind a crossbeam.
He jerked his thumb and we climbed out from under the table and he led me at a quick walk out of the room, down the passage, and into Fallon’s study which was empty. ‘We’ve been bugged,’ he said.
I gaped at him. ‘You mean, that thing is…’
‘…a radio transmitter.’ He took the stethoscope from his ears with the air of a doctor about to impart bad news. ‘This gadget is a bug finder. I sweep the frequencies and if there’s a transmitter working close by this thing howls at me through the earphones. Then, to find it, all I have to do is watch the meter.’
I said nervously, ‘Hadn’t you better shut up about it?’ I looked about the study. ‘This place…’
‘It’s clean,’ he said abruptly. ‘I’ve checked it out.’
‘Good God!’ I said. ‘What made you think there even might be anything like that?’
He grinned. ‘A nasty suspicious mind and a belief in human nature. I just thought what I’d do if I were Jack Gatt and wanted to know what goes on in this house. Besides, it’s standard procedure in my business.’ He rubbed his chin. ‘Was anything said in that room—anything important?’
I said cautiously, ‘Do you know anything about what we’re trying to do?’
‘It’s all right—Fallon filled me in on everything. We stayed up pretty late last night.’ His eyes lit up. ‘What a hell of a story—if true!’
I cast my mind back. ‘We were all standing around that table talking about the trays. It was then I broke the news that they were really mirrors.’
‘That’s not too good,’ said Harris.
‘But then we went into the projection room,’ I said. ‘And I demonstrated what would happen when you bounced a light off the mirrors. Everything else was said in there.’
‘Show me this projection room,’ said Harris. So I showed him, and he donned his stethoscope and spent a few minutes twiddling the knobs on his gadget. At last he unclipped the earphones. ‘Nothing here; so there’s a good chance that Gatt knows only that these things are mirrors but can’t know the particular significance.’
We went back into the study and found both Fallon and Halstead. Fallon was unsealing a large envelope, but stopped dead when he heard what Harris had to say. ‘The conniving bastard!’ he said in some wonder. ‘Rip out the goddamn thing.’
‘Hell, no!’ objected Harris. ‘I want that transmitter left where it is. It will be useful.’ He looked at us with a slow smile. ‘Do any of you gentlemen fancy yourselves as radio actors? I think we can feed Jack Gatt quite a line. All you have to remember is to say nothing important in that room.’
Fallon laughed. ‘You’re quite a conniver yourself, Harris.’
‘I’m a professional,’ said Harris easily. ‘I don’t think we’ll make it a live show; there’d be too much chance of a slipup. This calls for a nicely edited tape which we can feed into that microphone.’ He paused. ‘I’ll keep an eye on that room. Someone will have to change the batteries; they won’t last for ever.’
‘But where is it transmitting to?’ asked Halstead.
‘Probably the car that’s parked up the road a piece. Those two guys have been staked out there for a couple of days now. My guess is that they have a receiver linked to a taperecorder. I won’t bother them until they’ve swallowed the story we’re going to concoct, and maybe not even then. It’s one thing knowing something, but it’s even better when the opposition doesn’t know that you know it. My advice is to come the innocent bit. You’re not supposed to know that Jack Gatt even exists.’
Fallon was right about Harris; he was the most deceitful man I’ve ever met, and an accountant is no stranger to wool-pulling. When I came to know him better I’d trust him with my life, but I wouldn’t trust him not to know more about me than I did myself. His business was information and he gathered it assiduously, on the job and off it. He had a mind like a well-organized computer memory but, unlike a good computer, he tended to play tricks with what he knew.
Fallon ripped open the envelope. ‘Let’s get down to business. These are the X-ray prints—life size.’ He sorted them out and gave us each two prints, one of each mirror.
They were very good, startling in clarity of details that had only been hinted at in the screened reflections. I said, ‘Mrs Halstead was right; these are words around the circumference.’ I looked closer. ‘I can’t read Spanish.’
Fallon took a reading glass and mumbled a bit to himself. ‘As near as I can make out it goes something like this. On your mirror it says: “The path to true glory leads through the portals of death.” And on my mirror: “Life everlasting lies beyond the grave.”’
‘Morbid!’ commented Harris.
‘Not very precise instructions,’ said Halstead ironically.
‘It may mean something,’ said Fallon doubtfully. ‘But one thing is certain; this is definitely the coast of Quintana Roo.’ He moved the magnifying glass over the print. ‘And, by God, cities are indicated. See those square castle-like things?’
I sensed the air of rising excitement. ‘Those two at the top must be Coba and Tulum,’ said Halstead tensely. ‘With Chichen Itza to the west.’
‘And there’s Ichpatuun on Chetumal Bay. And what’s that south of Tulum? Would that be Chunyaxche?’ Fallon lifted his head and stared into the middle distance. ‘A city was discovered there not long ago. There’s a theory it was the centre of the seaboard trade on the coast.’
Halstead’s hand stabbed down. ‘There’s another city indicated just inland of it—and another here.’ His voice cracked. ‘And here’s another. If this map is accurate we’ll be discovering lost cities by the bushel.’
‘Take it easy,’ said Fallon and laid the print aside. ‘Let’s have a look at Uaxuanoc.’ He took the other print and stared at it. ‘If this corresponds to the small circle on the large-scale map then we ought to be able to pinpoint the position.’
I looked at my copy. Hills were indicated but there was no scale to tell how high they were. Scattered over the hills were crude representations of buildings. I remembered that Vivero had said in his letter that the city was built on a ridge lying east and west.
Halstead said, ‘The layout looks like a mixture of Chichen Itza and Coba—but it’s bigger than either. A lot bigger.’
‘There’s the cenote,’ said Fallon. ‘So this place would be the temple of Yum Chac—if Vivero is to be believed. I wonder which is the king’s palace?’ He turned and grasped a large cardboard tube from which he took a map. ‘I’ve spent a lot of time on this map,’ he said. ‘A lifetime.’
He unrolled it and spread it on the desk, weighing down the corners with books. ‘Everything the Mayas ever built is marked here. Do you notice anything odd about it, Wheale?’
I contemplated the map and said at last, ‘It looks crowded in the south.’
‘That’s the Peten—but that was the Old Empire which collapsed in the eleventh century. The Itzas moved in later—new blood which gave the Mayas a shot in the arm like a transfusion. They reoccupied some of the old cities like Chichen Itza and Coba, and they built some new ones like Mayapan. Forget the south; concentrate on the Yucatan Peninsula itself. What looks funny about it?’
‘This blank space on the west. Why didn’t they build there?’
‘Who says they didn’t?’ asked Fallon. ‘That’s the Quintana Roo. The local inhabitants have a rooted objection to archeologists.’ He tapped the map. ‘T
hey killed an archeologist here, and built his skeleton into a wall facing the sea as a sort of decoration—and as a warning to others.’ He grinned. ‘Still want to come along?’
The grey little man inside me made a frightened squawk but I grinned back at him. ‘I’ll go where you go.’
He nodded. ‘That was a while ago. The indios sublevados have shot their bolt. But it’s still not a pleasure trip. The inhabitants tend to be hostile—both the chicleros and the Chan Santa Rosa Indians; and the land itself is worse. ‘That’s the reason for this big blank space—and Uaxuanoc is plumb in the middle.’
He bent over the map, and compared it with the print ‘I’d put it about there—give or take twenty miles. Vivero didn’t have the benefit of a trigonometric survey when he did this scrawl; we can’t rely on it too much.’
Halstead shook his head. ‘It’s going to be one hell of a job.’ He looked up and found me smiling. I couldn’t see what was going to be difficult about it. I’d been browsing through Fallon’s library and studying the pictures of Mayan cities; there were pyramids the size of the Washington Pentagon, and I didn’t see how you could miss seeing one of those.
Halstead said coldly, ‘Take a circle twenty miles across—that’s over three hundred square miles to search. You can walk within ten feet of a Mayan structure and not see it.’ His lips drew back in a humourless smile. ‘You can even be walking on it and not know it. You’ll learn.’
I shrugged and let it pass. I didn’t believe it was as bad as that.
Fallon said worriedly, ‘What I don’t know is why this man Gatt should be so interested. I can’t see any conceivable motive for his interference.’
I regarded Fallon in astonished silence, then said, ‘The gold, of course! Gatt is a treasure hunter.’
Fallon had a baffled look on his face. ‘What gold?’ he said dimly.
It was my turn to be baffled. ‘You’ve read the Vivero letter, damn it! Doesn’t he describe the king’s palace as being plated with gold? Doesn’t he go on and on about gold? He even mentions a mountain of gold!’
Halstead gave a shout of laughter and Fallon looked at me as though I had gone out of my mind. ‘Where would the Mayas get the gold to cover a building?’ he demanded. ‘Use a bit of common sense, Wheale.’
For a moment I thought I had gone crazy. Halstead was laughing his head off and Fallon was looking at me with an air of concern. I turned to Harris who spread his hands and shrugged elaborately. ‘It beats me,’ he said.
Halstead was still struggling to contain himself. It was the first time I’d seen him genuinely amused at anything. ‘I don’t see what’s funny,’ I said acidly.
‘Don’t you?’ he said, and wiped his eyes. He broke into chuckles. ‘It’s the funniest thing I’ve heard in years. Tell him, Fallon.’
‘Do you really think Uaxuanoc is dripping in gold—or that it ever was?’ Fallon asked. He too was smiling as though an infection had spread to him from Halstead.
I began to get angry. ‘Vivero said so, didn’t he?’ I picked up the prints and thrust them under Fallon’s nose. ‘You believe in these, don’t you? Vivero placed cities where you know there are cities, so you believe him that far. What’s so bloody funny about the rest of his story?’
‘Vivero was the biggest liar in the western hemisphere,’ said Fallon. He looked at me in wonder. ‘I thought you knew. I told you he was a liar. You’ve heard us discussing it.’
I told myself to relax, and said slowly, ‘Would you mind spelling it out again in words of one syllable?’ I glanced at Harris who, by his expression, was as puzzled as I was. ‘I’m sure that Mr Harris would like to be let in on the joke, too.’
‘Oh, I see,’ said Fallon. ‘You really took the Vivero letter at its face value.’ Halstead again broke into laughter; I was getting pretty tired of that.
Fallon said, ‘Let’s take one or two points in the letter. He said the de Viveros were of ancient lineage and had been hammered by the Moors so that the family fortunes were lost. He was a goddamn liar. His father was a goldsmith—that’s true enough—but his grandfather was a peasant who came from a long line of peasants—of nobodies. His father’s name was Vivero, and it was Manuel himself who added on the aristocratic prefix and changed it to de Vivero. He did that in Mexico—he would never have got away with it in Spain. By the time Murville visited the Mexican branch of the family the myth had really taken hold. ‘That’s why he couldn’t believe that a de Vivero had actually made the tray.’
‘So he was a liar on that point. Lots of people lie about themselves and their families. But how do you know he was lying about the gold? And why should he spin a yarn like that?’
‘All the gold the Mayas ever had was imported,’ said Fallon. ‘It came from Mexico, from Panama and from the Caribbean islands. These people were neolithic, they weren’t metal workers. Look at Vivero’s description of their weapons—wooden swords with stone edges. He was right there, but the stone would be obsidian.’
‘But the Mayas had gold,’ I objected. ‘Look what they found when the cenote at Chichen Itza was dredged.’ I’d read about that.
‘So what did they find? A hell of a lot of gold objects—all imported,’ said Fallon. ‘Chichen Itza was an important religious centre and the cenote was sacred. You find sacred wells all over the world in which offerings are made, and cenotes are particularly important in Yucatan because water is so precious. There were pilgrimages made to Chichen Itza over a period of hundreds of years.’
Harris said, ‘You can’t put up a public fountain in New York without people throwing money into it.’
‘Exactly,’ said Fallon in a pleased voice. ‘There seems to be a primitive attraction to water in that sense. Three Coins in the Fountain—and all that kind of thing. But the Mayas had no gold of their own.’
I was confused. ‘Then why the hell should Vivero say they had?’
‘Ah, that puzzled me at first, but Halstead and I discussed it and we’ve come up with a theory.’
‘I’d be pleased to hear it,’ I said sourly.
‘Vivero found something—there’s no doubt about that. But what it was, we don’t know. He was cryptic about it because no doubt, he didn’t want to give the secret away to anyone who might read that letter. The one thing he was quite clear about was that he wanted to reserve the honour of discovery for his sons—for the de Vivero family. So if he couldn’t actually tell his sons this mysterious secret then he had to find some other way of attracting them—and that was what they would confidently expect to find. Gold!’
I slumped in my chair dejectedly. ‘And why would the Spaniards be expecting to find gold where there wasn’t any? You’ve got me going round in circles.’
‘It’s simple enough. The Spaniards came to Mexico looking for plunder—and they found it. They raided the Aztecs and found gold in plenty in the temple treasuries and in Montezuma’s palace. What they failed to realize was that it wasn’t a continuing supply. They weren’t deep-thinking men and it never occurred to them that this hoard of gold which they had looted from the Aztecs had been built up over centuries, a little year by year. They thought there must be a major source, a huge mine, perhaps. They gave it a name, They called it Eldorado—and they never stopped looking for it. It didn’t exist.
‘Consider these Spanish soldiers. After they had looted the Aztecs, Cortes divided the spoils. When he had received and swindled his captains, and the captains had put their sticky fingers into what was left, there was little enough for the common soldiers. A gold chain, perhaps—or a wine cup. These men were soldiers, not settlers, and always on the other side of the hill was Eldorado. So they attacked the Mayas, thinking this was Eldorado and, after the Mayas, Pizarro attacked the Incas of Peru. They brought down whole civilizations because they weren’t prepared to sweat and dig the gold from the ground themselves. It was there, right enough, but it certainly wasn’t in Yucatan. The Mayas, like the Aztecs, certainly had plenty of gold, but not in such quantities that they could
cover buildings or make rainwater gutters from the stuff. The nobles wore small pieces of gold jewellery and the temple priests used certain gold implements.’
Harris said, ‘So all this talk about gold by Vivero was just a come-on to get his boys moving?’
‘It seems so,’ said Fallon. ‘Oh, I daresay he did surprise the Mayas by melting gold and casting it. That was something they hadn’t seen before. I’ll show you a piece of genuine Mayan goldwork and you’ll see what I mean.’ He went to a safe, unlocked it, and returned with a small gold disk. ‘This is a plate, probably used by a noble. You can see it’s very nicely chased.’
It was very thin and flimsy looking. The design was of a warrior holding a spear and a shield with other figures bearing odd shaped objects. Fallon said. ‘That probably started out as a nugget found in a mountain stream a long way from Yucatan. The Mayas beat it flat into its present shape and incised that design with stone tools.’
I said, ‘What about the mountain of gold? Was that another of Vivero’s lies? Couldn’t there have been a mine?’
‘Not a chance,’ said Fallon decisively. ‘The geology is dead against it. The Yucatan Peninsula is a limestone cap—not auriferous at all. No other metals, for that matter—that’s why the Mayas never got out of the Stone Age, smart though they were.’
I sighed. ‘All right, I accept it. No gold.’
‘Which brings us back to Gatt,’ said Fallon. ‘What the hell is he after?’
‘Gold,’ I said.
‘But I’ve just told you there is no gold,’ said Fallon exasperatedly.
‘So you did,’ I said. ‘And you convinced me. You convinced Harris, too.’ I swung round to face Harris. ‘Before you heard this explanation did you believe there was gold in Yucatan?’
The Golden Keel / The Vivero Letter Page 38