“There are several questions, actually,” I said.
“Another is, do you think there could be anything to this?” I pulled Puma’s letter out of my T-shirt pocket and handed it across to her. “I know he sounds nuttier than a fruitcake, and there’s no question he’s a tad, shall we say, delusional,” I said, watching the skeptical expression on her face as she read. “But I know him,” I went on. “He’s not particularly bright, although he’s actually quite a talented magician, and he’s kind of sweet. I mean, look where he says he wants to find the treasure to feed all the world’s hungry children,” I said, pointing to the place in the letter. “And when you talk to him, you don’t get the impression that he’s dangerous or anything, or even that he is totally out of it, by any means.”
“So what are you saying?” Hilda asked.
“I’m saying, what if there is a treasure trove around here? And if there is, who knows about it?”
“A better question might be, does this treasure, assuming it exists, have anything to do with Montero and Paraiso?” Hilda said. “I have no idea what the answers to these questions might be.”
“I don’t either, but I do still think I’m right about the way the artifacts are being taken out of here,” I said. “Obviously I’m wrong about the leader. But if not Montero, then who? With Montero dead, we have nothing.”
“We’re not going to solve this tonight,” Hilda said, standing up carefully and stretching. “It’s time we got some sleep. But you say we have nothing. That’s not entirely true. We have Etienne Laforet, an art dealer and known buyer of illegal artifacts, and he’s right here in Campina Vieja, blatant as they come. There has to be a good reason for him to stay a few days. With him we have two problems. We’ve never been able to catch him with any Moche pieces on his person—and believe me, the Peruvian authorities have searched him more than once when he left the country—nor in his gallery. Plainclothes officers have been in. This means he’s probably not in this alone.
“Ideally what I’d like to do is take an artifact to him, get him to buy it, and then watch what he does— a sting, if you get what I mean. Which brings me to the second problem: We don’t have a suitable artifact to use. I can’t risk a piece from a museum collection, and while I might be able to sneak something out of this lab, we haven’t found anything he’d buy, I don’t think. He only takes high-end stuff. We don’t have anything to deal with,” she said, shaking her head.
“Oh, but we do,” I replied.
16
Over the Pacific, off Peru’s shores, a huge, warm, moist body of air begins to move slowly toward land. As it hits the shore it becomes the garua, the mist from the sea, swirling over the sand of the desert. But it does not stop there. It moves across the land to the wall of rock called the Andes, and somewhere, high in the mountains, the garua turns to rain. Torrents of rain. Slowly at first, then faster and faster, the rocky gorges fill with water, hurtling downward. Waterways, both ancient and modern, built to tame it, now strain to contain it, and fail.
Just as dark was falling the next evening, Hilda and I were standing in the shadow of the awning of the hard-Ware store, watching Laforet’s house. To help conceal ourselves, we’d dressed in dark colors, she in a navy turtleneck and trousers, I in jeans and a large black sweater I’d borrowed from Tracey. There were lights on in the house, but none at the front door, to provide the anonymity Laforet’s visitors required, no doubt. We’d told the others we were going into town to call Steve’s ex-wife and children, and not to wait up for us.
It had been a rather strange day. Not one word was heard about Carlos Montero. Lucho shuffled around the hacienda as usual. There were no visitations from the police. Around two, Hilda went over to Paraiso. I told her exactly where to look. “Nothing,” she said on return. “No cord. No Carlos.” She paused. “Are you sure… ?”
“Absolutely,” I replied.
“I went in and asked Montero’s wife, that timid little thing, Consuelo, where he was,” Hilda went on. “She said Trujillo. He’d left her a note: typewritten. Anyone could have typed it, of course. Machine sitting right out there.”
I thought soon enough alarms would go off, about Montero but also the others. Someone was bound to notice eventually that Campina Vieja was becoming the terrestrial equivalent of a black hole, sucking people into oblivion. Not that day, though, it seemed.
We’d decided I’d be the one to go into Laforet’s, Hilda being better known in these parts than I, and with a reputation to protect where archaeological objects were concerned.
After about forty-five minutes of watching, and seeing absolutely nothing, and with Hilda getting uncomfortable standing so still, I whispered to her, “Time to beard the lion in its den.” I slipped across the street and up to the door, the Moche ear spool, which Hilda had declared to be the perfect bait, wrapped in a soft handkerchief of Steve’s, tucked into a canvas tote bag.
After I’d knocked, the curtains in a dark upstairs room stirred slightly before I heard footsteps inside coming toward the door. It opened a crack, someone looked at me, as I held up my bag and tried to look furtive, which wasn’t difficult, and a man’s voice farther back in the house said, first in French, “Entrez-Come in.”
As the door opened and I saw who was standing there, sheer apprehension almost made me change my mind and run away. A young woman greeted me, dressed in one of those outfits that young women occasionally wear these days, where—and I know this will position me solidly in the camp of old fuddy-duddies—it’s difficult to tell whether it’s a dress or a slip, a very short pink satin number with shoestring straps, over irridescent silk stockings. Her long nails were painted black, her dark hair was piled up on her head, and she swayed provocatively on very high-heeled, black, patent-leather sandals as she led me toward the back of the house. Carla Cervantes, Lizard’s widow, gave no indication she recognized me. Although it was unnerving to see her here, it made me think that while I did not yet understand how or why, the pieces in this puzzle were snapping into place.
I entered a darkened room, an office, with a desk and only one light source, a desk lamp that cast a pool of brightness on the desk in front of me but did nothing much to illuminate the rest of the room. For a second or two I thought I was alone, until I realized that a man was there, el Hombre, presumably, his chair swiveled around to face the back wall, so that I was addressing the back of his head. “You may leave us now, Carla,” the voice said in heavily accented Spanish, and the young woman shrugged and left, closing the door behind her as she went. I could hear her heels clicking down the hall and then up the stairs to the second floor.
“Are you the man they call el Hombre?” I asked. Hilda and I had decided that I should pretend I didn’t know his real name.
“I am,” the voice replied in English. “Why are you here?”
“I have,” I stammered, “something I want to sell, and I’m told in town you might buy.”
“Name?” he demanded.
“I’d rather not say,” I replied. I heard a soft chuckle.
“Put it on the desk, in the light,” he instructed, and I placed the little Moche man in the circle of light.
With a creak, the chair swiveled toward the light, and I caught my first glimpse of the man they called el Hombre. Second, actually. Predictably, considering who had opened the door, I found myself face-to-face with Carla Cervantes’s pal in the hotel in Lima. I remembered him well. The question was, did he remember me?