It was all very innocuous, endearing really, except for one thing: the words, embossed in silver across the top of the white linen paper. Mr. and Mrs. E. G. Edwards.
Of course it wasn’t Dougall, I thought, Tracey’s name. Ted was Tracey’s stepfather. Ted Edwards, one of those names where the last name and first name are similar, like Ken Kennedy or Tom Thompson. Ted Edwards, Ed Edwards, or was it Edmund Edwards? In that split second, I knew I had made a deadly assumption or two. Tracey’s stepfather, I suddenly knew with certainty, was Edmund Edwards of Ancient Ways in New York. Edmund Edwards was alive. He was not the old man in the gallery in New York, as I’d assumed. He was the proprietor, the recipient of stolen antiquities. He might even be the mastermind of the whole operation.
I’d left my business card at the gallery, and so he knew my name. But he’d known it before I ever got to New York. He would know me as the person who had bought his pre-Columbian antiquities at Moles-worth Cox, taken them right from under his nose, or more accurately, under the watchful eyes of his henchman, the Spider. He might not yet know me as Rebecca MacCrimmon, but he would. His stepdaughter would tell him, once they compared notes and she knew my real name. And he would not, could not, rest until I was dead.
I dashed out of the hacienda and back to the site. Leaping from the truck, engine still running, I yelled up at Steve, “Where’s Tracey?”
Steve looked down at me. “Don’t know. Don’t care.” He gave me a tired smile.
I cared. And there was only one place I could think she would be.
The policeman lay next to the door of the ruin, unconscious most certainly, and probably dead. The padlock was gone. I pushed the door open carefully and looked inside. A flicker of light came through the holes in the matting on top of the staircase.
As quietly as I could, I crept down the staircase. The treasures of the Moche warrior lay out on the table, glinting in the light. It must be pure gold, I thought, unalloyed, because it hadn’t corroded at all. It was priceless, a fortune. Tracey was stuffing a large sack with the gold as fast as she could.
I stepped off into the water at the bottom of the step and she turned to face me.
“Rebecca!” she exclaimed. “I’m so glad you’re here. I came over to make sure everything was all right, and the guard is dead! You’ve got to help me get the treasure out before someone steals it.”
My, she was cunning, and very, very convincing. An hour ago, I’d have believed her. “I’ll help,” I said. “I’ll hold the sack, and you put the stuff in it.” Where guile is concerned, I like to think I’m a match for anyone.
She hesitated for a moment, but then handed me the sack, still grasping it with one hand all the time. I wondered what she’d do when the sack was full. I didn’t have long to wait. As she crammed the last piece of gold into the sack, Tracey reached into her handbag, dropping her hold on the treasure sack for just a second. She’s going for the gun, I thought, the missing gun. It was now or never. I grabbed for the handbag and knocked it out of her hand as hard as I could, then watched as the gun arced upward and splashed into the water.
We were holding the sack with both hands now, pulling and tugging to get it, like two little kids fighting over a toy. Tracey gave a great pull on it, and I let go. She stumbled backward and, hitting her shoulder on the rock wall of the chamber, lost her grip. The sack opened, dumping its contents onto the floor of the chamber. Ear spools, necklaces, gold and silver peanuts, back flaps, gold pectorals, beads in the shape of spiders tumbled into the pool of water. The gilded bells jangled as they fell. The ripples blurred the edges of the gold, made it shimmer.
She shrieked, leaned over, and like some female Midas, started clawing at the gold. I grabbed her by the scruff of the neck and dragged her the few feet to the door into the tunnel. She struggled, but I was fighting for my life, and I knew it. I shoved her into the tunnel and slammed the door shut. As I closed the door, I heard her gasp, something I attributed to the sight of Carlos Montero. It gave me the moment I needed to push the table the couple of feet to the door. I piled the crates on top of the table, and one under, and watched as she tried desperately to push the door open. It would do her good, I thought, to be entombed with one of the victims of her little scheme. After a few seconds of effort, though, she stopped. I could hear her footsteps receding. She was going for the other end of the tunnel. There was a possibility that she had unlocked that end before going down the staircase. She might have been planning to leave that way, and gone first to unseal it.
I hauled myself up the spiral staircase and made for the other end of the tunnel to head her off. It was almost dawn, a wedge of light showing to the east. The shortest route to the trapdoor was through the agarrobal, and I plowed right in, never thinking about the danger.
The forest was still dark, the grey light of early morning not yet penetrating the branches of the trees. I kept my eye on the light at the far end of the woodland, and kept going, trying not to step in or brush through the thorns. It was deadly quiet in the woods, the only sound the hiss of the rain and the rasping of my breath, loud in my ears, as I struggled on.
I should have realized there was someone else there. Tracey’s gasp as she saw the body of Carlos Montero should have told me she hadn’t put him there. But I was too tired to think. I did not hear the quick footsteps until it was too late. I felt hands whip over my head, then a belt tighten around my neck. Gasping, I clutched at the belt, trying to pull it away from my throat. I felt a blackness around the edges of my consciousness, a high-pitched ringing in my ears. A sharp crack echoed in my head, but I could not tell if it came from within me or without.
Just as suddenly as it had tightened, the belt loosened, and the man I knew only as Spider crashed to the forest floor.
Jorge Cervantes, Lizard’s brother, a dark, avenging angel, stood in the algarrobal, framed against the approaching light of dawn. Slowly he lowered his gun. “May you rest in peace, now, Ramon,” he whispered. “May you rest with God.”
Epilogue
I believe absolutely in the right to a fair trial, in the presumption of innocence until guilt is proven. While I am aware that my actions have been known to belie my words, I do not believe that people should take the law into their own hands. I am convinced that to do so is to embark on a downhill slope that ends in the primeval swamp of anarchy. Having said that, I confess two things. One, I believe Etienne Laforet and the psychopath for hire, Spider—whose real name, in a stroke of irony of cosmic proportions, was Angel, Angel Fuentes—got exactly what they deserved. Two, I confess that the application of the system of justice that I so strongly believe in falls short of my expectations from time to time.
It would be the next day before the Mercedes would be found again. It had come to a stop way downstream, almost as far as the hacienda, Laforet dead, drowned, at the wheel. The man who always got away hadn’t quite made it this time.
A few days later, police in several countries simultaneously raided Ancient Ways and all of Edmund Edwards’s affiliate galleries, including Laforet’s. They recovered over 500 antiquities that were illegally acquired. One of them was a florero with serpents snaking around the rim. The gallery owners, by and large, are pleading ignorance, and litigation to determine ownership of the artifacts will go on, no doubt, for years. Peru may someday, one hopes, get at least some of them back.
In China, I’m told, looters of antiquities are sometimes put to death. Not that I’m advocating that, of course, but I can’t help thinking about it as I follow Edmund Edwards’s journey through the courts.