The Golden Keel / The Vivero Letter

by Desmond Bagley

  ‘I thought that was what this was all about,’ he said. ‘Buried treasure in ruined cities.’

  ‘There you are,’ I said. ‘What makes you think Gatt believes any different? He may be an educated man, but he’s no archeological expert. I’m not an illiterate myself, and I believed in buried treasure. I didn’t have the technical knowledge to know Vivero was lying, so why should Gatt? Of course he’s after the gold. He has the same mentality as the Conquistadores—just another gangster unwilling to sweat for his money.’

  Fallon looked surprised. ‘Of course. I hadn’t allowed for the lay mind. He must be told the truth.’

  Harris wore a crooked smile. ‘Do you think he’d believe you?’ he asked sardonically. ‘Not after reading the Vivero letter, he wouldn’t. Hell, I can still see that king’s palace all shiny in the sun, even though I know it’s not true. You’d have a whale of a job convincing Gatt.’

  ‘Then he must be a stupid man,’ said Fallon.

  ‘No, Gatt’s not stupid,’ said Harris. ‘He just believes that men who spend as much time as you have on this thing, men who are willing to spend time in the jungle looking for something, are looking for something very valuable. Gatt doesn’t believe that scientific knowledge is particularly valuable, so it must be dough. He just measures you by his own standards, that’s all.’

  ‘Heaven forbid!’ said Fallon fervently.

  ‘You’re going to have trouble with Jack,’ said Harris. ‘He doesn’t give up easily.’ He nodded to the prints on the table. ‘Where did you have those made?’

  ‘I have an interest in an engineering company in Tampico. I had the use of a metallurgical X-ray outfit.’

  ‘I’d better check up on that,’ said Harris. ‘Gatt might get on to it.’

  ‘But I’ve got the negatives here.’

  Harris looked at him pityingly. ‘What makes you think those are the only negatives? I doubt if they’d get it right first time—they’d give you the best of a series. I want to see what has happened to the others and have them destroyed before Gatt starts spreading palm-oil among your ill-paid technicians.’

  Harris was a professional and never gave up. He had a total disbelief in the goodness of human nature.

  II

  Fallon’s way of organizing an archeological expedition was to treat it like a military operation—something on the same scale as the landing on Omaha Beach. This was no penurious egghead scratching along on a foundation grant and stretching every dollar to cover the work of two. Fallon was a multimillionaire with a bee in his bonnet and he could, and did, spend money as though he had a personal pipeline to Fort Knox. The money he spent to find Uaxuanoc would have been enough to build the damn place.

  His first idea was to go in by sea, but the coast of Quintana Roo is cluttered up with islands and uncharted shoals and he saw the difficulties looming ahead so he abandoned the idea. He wasn’t troubled about it; he merely chartered a small fleet of air freighters and flew his supplies in. To do this he had to send in a construction crew to build an airstrip at the head of Ascension Bay. This eventually became his base camp.

  As soon as the airstrip was usable he sent in a photographic reconnaissance aircraft which operated from the base and which did an aerial survey, not only of the area in which Uaxuanoc was suspected to be, but of the entire provinces of Quintana Roo and Yucatan. This seemed a bit extravagant so I asked him why he did it. His answer was simple: he was cooperating with the Mexican Government in return for certain favours—it seemed that the cartographic department of the State Survey was very short on information about those areas and Fallon had agreed to supply a photo-mosaic.

  ‘The only person who ever took aerial photographs of Quintana Roo was Lindbergh,’ he said. ‘And that was a long time ago. It will all come in very useful professionally.’

  From Ascension Bay helicopters set up Camp Two in the interior. Fallon and Halstead spent quite a lot of time debating where to set up Camp Two. They measured the X-ray prints to the last millimetre and transferred reading to Fallon’s big map and eventually came to a decision. Theoretically, Camp Two should have been set up smack on the top of the temple of Yum Chac in Uaxuanoc. It wasn’t, of course; but that surprised nobody.

  Halstead favoured me with one of his rare smiles, but there didn’t seem to be much real humour in it. ‘A field trip is like being in the army,’ he said. ‘You can use all the mechanization you like, but the job gets done by guys using their own feet. You’re still going to regret coming on this jaunt, Wheale.’

  I had the distinct impression that he was waiting for me to fall flat on my face when we got out in the field. He was the kind of man who would laugh himself silly at someone slipping on a banana skin and breaking his leg. A primitive sense of humour! Also, he didn’t like me very much.

  While all this was going on we stayed at Fallon’s place outside Mexico City. The Halsteads had given up their own place and had moved in, so we were all together. Pat Harris was around from time to time. He departed upon mysterious trips without warning and came back just as unexpectedly. I suppose he reported to Fallon but he said nothing to the rest of us for the quite simple reason that everyone was too busy to ask him.

  Fallon came to me one day, and said, ‘About your skindiving experience. Were you serious?’

  ‘Quite serious. I’ve done a lot of it.’

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘When we find Uaxuanoc we’ll want to investigate the cenote.’

  ‘I’ll need more equipment,’ I said. ‘The stuff I have is good enough for an amateur within reach of civilization but not for the middle of Quintana Roo.’

  ‘What kind of equipment?’

  ‘Oh, an air compressor for recharging bottles is one of the biggest items.’ I paused. ‘If the dives are more than a hundred and fifty feet I’d like a stand-by recompression chamber in case anyone gets into trouble.’

  He nodded. ‘Okay; get your equipment.’

  He turned away and I said gently, ‘What do I use in place of money?’

  He stopped. ‘Oh, yes. I’ll ask my secretary to arrange all that. See him tomorrow.’

  ‘Who is going down with me?’

  ‘You need someone else?’ he asked in surprise.

  ‘That’s a cardinal rule—you don’t dive alone. Especially into the murky depths of a hole in the ground. Too many things can go wrong underwater.’

  ‘Well, hire somebody,’ he said a little irritably. This was a minor part of the main problem and he was only too eager to get rid of it.

  So I went shopping and bought some lovely expensive equipment. Most of it was available locally, but the recompression chamber was more difficult. I saw Fallon’s secretary about that and a few telephone calls to the States produced a minor flap in the far-flung Fallon empire; it also produced a recompression chamber on the first available air freighter. Maybe that piece of equipment was an extravagance, but it’s one thing getting the bends in England where the port hospitals are equipped to handle it and where the Navy will give a hand in an emergency, and it’s quite another thing to have nitrogen bubbling in your blood like champagne in the middle of a blasted wilderness. I preferred to play safe. Besides, Fallon could afford it.

  I ended up with enough gear to outfit an average aqualung club, and normally I should have been full of gloating at the opportunity to handle and use all those efficient and well-designed tools of the diver’s trade—but I wasn’t. It had come too easy. This wasn’t something I’d sweated for, something I’d saved up to buy, and I began to see why rich people became bored so easily and began to indulge in way-out entertainments. Not that Fallon was like that, to give him his due; he was all archeologist and very professional.

  Then I rounded up Katherine Halstead and took her down to the pool. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Show me.’

  She looked at me in surprise. ‘Show you what?’

  I pointed to the scuba harness I had brought down. ‘Show me that you can use that thing.’

  I watched her as
she put it on and made no attempt to help her. She seemed familiar enough with it and chose the belt weights with care, and when she went into the water she did it the right way without any fuss. I put on my own gear and followed her and we drifted around the bottom of the pool while I tested her on the international signals which she seemed to understand. When we came out, I said, ‘You’re hired.’

  She looked puzzled. ‘Hired for what?’

  ‘As second string diver on the Uaxuanoc Expedition.’

  Her face lit up. ‘You really mean that?’

  ‘Fallon told me to hire someone—and you can’t come along as a passenger. I’ll tell him the bad news.’

  He blew up as predicted, but I argued him into it by saying that Katherine at least knew something about archeology and that he wouldn’t get an archeological diver this side of the Mediterranean.

  She must have worked on her husband because he didn’t object, but I caught him looking at me speculatively. I think it was then that he was bitten by the bug of jealousy and began to have the idea that I was up to no good. Not that I cared what he thought; I was too busy drilling his wife into the routine of learning how to use the air compressor and the recompression chamber. We got pretty matey and soon we were on first name terms. Up to then I’d always called her Mrs Halstead, but you can hardly stick to that kind of thing when you’re both ducking in and out of a pool. But I never laid a finger on her.

  Halstead never called me anything but Wheale.

  III

  I liked Pat Harris. As a person he was slow and easy-going, no matter how mistrustful and devious he was when on the job. Just before we were due to leave for Quintana Roo he seemed to be spending more time at the house and we got into the habit of having a noggin together late at night. Once I asked him, ‘What exactly is your job, Pat?’

  He ran his finger down the outside of his beer glass. ‘I suppose you could call me Fallon’s trouble-shooter. When you have as much dough as he’s got you find an awful lot of people trying to part you from it. I run checks on guys like that to see if everything is on the up and up.’

  ‘Did you run a check on me?’

  He grinned, and said easily, ‘Sure! I know more about you than your own mother did.’ He drank some cold beer. ‘Then one of his corporations sometimes has security trouble and I go and see what’s going on.’

  ‘Industrial espionage?’ I queried.

  ‘I guess you’d call it that,’ he agreed. ‘But only from the security angle. Fallon doesn’t play dirty pool, so I stick to counter-espionage.’

  I said, ‘If you investigated me, then you must have done the same with Halstead. He seems a pretty odd type.’

  Pat smiled into his beer. ‘You can say that again. He’s a guy who thought he had genius and who has now found out that all he has is talent. That really disappoints a man—settling for second best. The trouble with Halstead is that he hasn’t come to terms with it yet; it’s really griping him.’

  ‘You’ll have to spell it out for me,’ I said.

  Pat sighed. ‘Well, it’s like this. Halstead started out as a boy wonder—voted the graduate most likely to succeed and all that kind of crap. You know, it’s funny how wrong guys can be about other guys; every corporation is stuffed full to the brim with men who were voted most likely to succeed, and they’re all holding down second-rate jobs. The men at the top—the guys who really have the power—got there the hard way by clawing their way up and wielding a pretty sharp knife. There are a hell of a lot of corporation presidents who never went to college. Or you have guys like Fallon—he started at the top.’

  ‘In his business,’ I said. ‘But not in archeology.’

  ‘I’ll give you that,’ said Pat. ‘Fallon would succeed in anything he put his hand to. But Halstead is a second-rater; he knows it but he won’t admit it, even to himself, and it’s sticking in his craw. He’s eaten up with ambition—that’s why he was going solo on this Uaxuanoc thing. He wanted to be the man who discovered Uaxuanoc; it would make his name and he’d salvage his self-respect. But you twisted his arm and forced him in with Fallon and he doesn’t like that. He doesn’t want to share the glory.’

  I contemplated that, then said cautiously, ‘Both Fallon and Halstead were free in throwing accusations at each other. Halstead accused Fallon of stealing the Vivero letter. Well, we seem to have cleared up that one, and Fallon is in the clear. But what about Fallon’s charge that Halstead pinched the file he’d built up?’

  ‘I think Halstead is guilty of that,’ said Pat frankly. ‘Look at the timetable. Fallon, out of interest’s sake, built up a dossier of references to the Vivero secret; Halstead knew about it because Fallon told him—there wasn’t any need to keep it under wraps because it didn’t seem all that important. Fallon and Halstead came back to civilization after a dig, and Halstead found the Vivero letter. He bought it up in Durango for two hundred dollars from an old guy who didn’t know its value. But Halstead did—he knew it could be the key to the Vivero secret, whatever that was. And apart from that it was archeological dynamite—a city no one had even heard of.’

  He reached out and opened another bottle of beer. ‘I checked on the date he bought it. A month later he picked a quarrel with Fallon and went off in a huff, and Fallon’s Vivero dossier disappeared. Fallon didn’t think much of it at the time. As I say, the Vivero file didn’t seem so important, and he thought Halstead might have made a genuine error and mixed up some of Fallon’s papers with his own. And he didn’t think it worth his while to add to the grief that Halstead was stirring up just about that time. He thinks differently now.’

  I said slowly, ‘It’s all very circumstantial.’

  ‘Most evidence is,’ said Pat. ‘Crimes are usually committed without witnesses. Another thing that inclines me to think he did it is his general reputation in the profession.’

  ‘Not good?’

  ‘A bit smelly. He’s under suspicion of faking some of his results. Nothing that anyone can pin on him, and certainly not enough to justify him being drummed out of the profession publicly. But certainly enough for anything he produces in the future to be inspected mighty carefully. There’s nothing new in that, of course; it’s been done before. You had a case in England, didn’t you?’

  ‘That was in anthropology,’ I said. ‘The Piltdown man. Everyone wondered why it didn’t fit in to the main sequence and there was a lot of theory-twisting to jam it in. Then science caught up with it when they developed radiocarbon date testing and discovered it was a fake.’

  Pat nodded. ‘Some guys do that kind of thing. If they can’t make a reputation the straight way, they’ll make it the crooked way. And they’re usually like Halstead—second-raters who want to make a quick name.’

  ‘But it’s still circumstantial,’ I said stubbornly. I didn’t want to believe this. To me, science was equated with truth, and I didn’t want to believe that any scientist would stoop to fraud. And maybe I didn’t want to believe that Katherine Halstead was the kind of woman who would marry a man like that.

  ‘Oh, he hasn’t been found with dirty hands,’ said Pat. ‘But I guess it’s just a matter of time.’

  I said, ‘How long have they been married?’

  ‘Three years.’ The hand holding his glass suddenly hovered halfway to his lips. ‘If you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking, my advice is—don’t! I know she’s quite a dish, but keep your hands off. Fallon wouldn’t like it.’

  ‘Quite a thought-reader, aren’t you?’ I said sarcastically. ‘Mrs Halstead is safe from me, I assure you.’ Even as I said it I wondered how far that was true. I was also amused at the way Harris had put it—Fallon wouldn’t like it. Pat’s first loyalty was to his boss and he didn’t give a damn about how Halstead might react. I said, ‘Do you think she knows what you’ve told me—about her husband’s reputation?’

  ‘Probably not,’ said Pat. ‘I can’t see anyone going up to her and saying, “Mrs Halstead, I have to tell you your husband’s reputation is lo
usy.” She’d be the last person to find out.’ He regarded me with interest. ‘What made you push her on to Fallon in this diving caper? That’s twice you’ve made the boss eat crow. Your credit’s running out fast.’

  I said slowly, ‘She can control her husband where other people can’t. You know the foul temper he has. I’ve no intention of spending my time in Quintana Roo keeping those two from assaulting each other. I’ll need some help.’

  Pat cocked his head on one side, then nodded abruptly. ‘You just might be right. Trouble won’t come from Fallon, but Halstead might stir something up. I’m not saying he’s nuts, but he’s very unstable. You know what I think? I think if he gets a fraction too much pressure on him one of two things will happen—either he’ll split right open like a rotten egg, or he’ll blow up like a bomb. Now, if you’re in a pressure situation, either way brings you grief. I wouldn’t rely on him in a jam, and I’d trust him as far as I could throw the Empire State Building.’

  ‘Quite a recommendation. I’d hate to have you write out a testimonial for me, Pat.’

  He grinned. ‘Yours might be a bit better. All you have to do, Jemmy, to get a hundred per cent score is to stop being so goddamn unobtrusive and neutral. I know you English have a reputation for being quiet, but you push it too far. Do you mind if I speak frankly?’

  ‘Can I stop you?’

  He snorted with laughter. ‘Probably not.’ He lifted his glass. ‘I’m probably just cut enough to tell the truth—it’s a failing of mine which has earned me a couple of black eyes in my time.’

  ‘You’d better go ahead and tell me the worst. I promise not to sock you.’

  ‘Okay. You’ve got some iron in you somewhere, or you wouldn’t have been able to strongarm Fallon the way you have. He can be a tough guy to handle. But what have you done since? Fallon and Halstead are running things now and you’re sitting on the sidelines. You’ve twisted Fallon’s arm again over Mrs Halstead—something that doesn’t matter a damn, and he’ll remember it. What the hell are you doing on this jaunt, anyway?’