Madalina could feel pearls of sweat form on her brow as she thought of what her brother was about to do. Why would he commit suicide right in front of her? Was this some sort of punishment, she wondered. There was, of course, no way that she would let him go through with it. Sabian knew nothing. Only Madalina and her brother knew that Javier was allergic to nuts, among other things.
Raul came back with a bowl of peanuts in his hand and an ashtray in the other. “They won’t let me take two, but they said I could split it by using the empty ashtray,” he giggled. He looked at Javier. “I take the ashtray! You can have the bowl!”
“No problem.” Javier winced in an attempt to smile at Raul.
Madalina’s eyes stretched, bloodshot and wet as she fought inside herself whether to trust her brother or interrupt the preposterous intention.
“What’s going on?” Dr. Sabian suddenly asked as Raul tucked into his meager snack.
“Nothing,” Madalina answered evenly in a shivering tone. Her eyes did not leave her brother’s face for an instant as she watched him chew on two handfuls of peanuts. “I just cannot believe how sick my brother looks. I feel so guilty for leaving him.”
“You did what you had to,” Dr. Sabian comforted her just like he used to when memories of her abusive husband drove her into insomnia and panic attacks.
“I did not have to do anything, doctor,” she said, looking at the sly psychologist for the first time. “What about murder and kidnapping is not a choice? Doing what you have to do is normally reserved for survival and protection. Nothing I did to this boy’s caretaker or to him was something I had to do.”
“I am sure you had your reasons for feeling that you had to take him,” Dr. Sabian said in that annoying tone of arrogance he used to condescend. “Perhaps it was a need to feel powerful in a world where you were always the victim.”
“Oh fuck you, Sabian,” Javier suddenly blurted, spitting tiny fragments of peanut all over the table as he spoke. His lips had begun to grow thinner, unable to cover his teeth completely, and this made it difficult not to spit while he tried to talk. “Don’t vilify my sister for something she had absolutely no control over! You will not make her feel guilty for this! And especially that bullshit about needing to feel powerful. Spare me! You and I both know she is nothing like that. She took Raul to save him from an abusive bitch!” He leaned over the table and glowered hard into Sabian’s eyes with his discolored, milky irises. Dr. Sabian recoiled slightly from the hideous deadness of the young man’s angry eyes. Javier sneered. “She felt the need to do it because she was unknowingly turned into a minion for some insidious plot! Your sick ideals, you son of a bitch!”
“Oi mate, keep it down, will ya?” an Australian patron hollered from the bar.
Javier lifted an open palm in apology. “Thanks mate,” the tourist said and carried on talking to his friends. Javier whispered in Sabian’s face. “You are nothing but a fucking pedophile.”
“Javier,” Madalina reprimanded her brother. “Easy.”
In the same threatening position he had addressed Dr. Sabian, Javier turned to his sister. “Tell me, Madi, do you see anything unusual yet? I have scarfed handfuls of peanuts and look at me.” He leaned back and spread out his arms like a crucifix. “See? Do you see?”
She had to concede that his physical reaction to the nuts bore no resemblance to what normally happened when he consumed them. By now, his face would have ballooned, his eyes would have swollen shut, and he would have been fighting to breathe through a constricted windpipe. His lips would be blue and he would be wheezing, and here right in front of her, nothing. Madalina looked at her brother’s facial features. Much as they were distorted into a man she could hardly recognize, there was no sign of the telltale symptoms he was supposed to exhibit.
He was right. His brain did not know what his body was eating — or that his body was eating. The thought made her sick to her stomach and she held down a convulsion of nausea.
“Oi, inaquosum!” Dr. Sabian exclaimed. “Can you please stop upsetting your sister?”
But Madalina knew that her brother’s outlandish claim had to be true. She looked at Raul, who was slowly eating his nuts one by one, and wondered why she would have felt so compelled to take him. The boy looked up at her with his beautiful big dark eyes, but he did not smile. Quickly he looked to Sabian and back to Madalina, and something in his eyes changed. Madalina construed it as a realization, a change of mind somewhere in his innocent wisdom.
“You are helping the police, then?” she suddenly changed the conversation, sounding uncharacteristically strong as she directly addressed her former therapist. Without noticing, Dr. Sabian was now forced to comply with her requirements if he wished to uphold his charade.
“They called me in, of course, to be a character witness. They also asked for your sessions, which I was forced to surrender to them. I am here to help. The police have no idea I have come to see you, so you can relax, my dear.” In a darker tone he added, “Nobody knows where you, or the boy, is.”
“Just the way you want it, right?” Javier grunted, drinking down a half glass of water Madalina had abandoned when they first entered. Raul looked at the young man. “I am so sorry for you, Javier.”
Javier set the empty glass down and asked why. Raul replied, “You are the martyr.”
25
Enemy Waters
“There is a traitor among us, Sam,” Purdue said, wincing as he carefully secured Vincent’s body to be hoisted up to the Cóncord.
“Should we stay down here?” Sam asked. “We don’t know where the killer is. For all we know they could be waiting just outside the wreck so that they can ambush us like they did with Vincent.”
“I honestly cannot decide. We can’t stay down here forever. But on the other hand, it will conserve oxygen while we are not using our cylinders. Better not to go up yet, not before we can think of a way to survey the situation,” Purdue suggested.
“Aye, I’m with you. I’d rather wait here for nothing than to get my fucking throat cut. It’s par for the course when you get involved in treasure hunting, but I really thought this time was going to be different,” Sam admitted.
“Oh Sam, it’s always the same. Haven’t you learned by now? No matter how amicable the parties are, where gold is involved men become mad,” Purdue said. He sat back and sighed. Against their better judgment, the three men had removed their units and breathing apparatuses to better maneuver the prizes they had come to package for the hoist. Purdue kept his eye on the heavy gear they still had to reassemble and put on. “We should get that on in case the killer, or killers, come in here, Sam.”
They stood in the solitude of the old boiler room, both looking at the frightful corpse of the late Captain Vincent Nazquez. The robust and charismatic leader was a great loss, but what made it profoundly sad was the fact that he never got to see the fulfillment of the Inca Prophecy he so deeply believed in. Purdue thought of his last words and at once he knew what they could do while waiting for the attackers they expected.
“Sam, he said we must melt her,” Purdue cried. “Do you realize what that means?”
The bewildered journalist ran his fingers through his dark hair and shrugged, “That he assumed we have a furnace on hand?”
Purdue lunged forward with a glimmer of enthusiasm in his eyes. “It means that there is something of worth inside the statue, something that can withstand temperatures higher than 1000 °C. Gold typically melts at about 1064 °C, so if we melt her down we should find the true relic matching the prayer stick inside.”