I quickly stuffed the remaining papers into my brief case. We had hardly left the inside office when a terrific crash came from the front. At once the crowd noises, which had been barely audible in the office, became loud.
Joshua opened the door to the foyer and stepped through. There was a dull impact, and he staggered back. He had lost his uniform cap, and blood ran down his scalp. A brick had hit him. Bottles, bricks, stones, and pieces of concrete were raining into the foyer through the picture windows, most of whose glass lay in fragments on the tiled floor. One of the date palms by the entrance was burning briskly. "Keep back!" said Evans. "It's suicide to step out there."
"Has this place a back door?" I asked. "Yes. Let's try it."
When we came to the back door, however, it transpired that it had to be opened by two keys, and Joshua had only one of them. None of the others on his ring fitted. After Joshua had fumbled in a dazed sort of way, Evans took the keys from him and tried them with no more success. The door was a solid affair, with a steel frame and small panes of laminated glass, so we could not hope to batter our way out. I said:
"If we went back to the front and put out the inside lights, so they couldn't see us to aim, we might make a break."
Robert Hopkins, looking as if he were about to faint, staggered after us. When we got to the foyer again and put out the lights, the rain of missiles continued. The floor was ankle deep in stones, bricks, and broken glass. I do not know where the rioters got such an inexhaustible supply.
With the lights out, we could see our assailants. About a third or a quarter were girls, and all were in the ragged barb that symbolized rejection of bourgeois values. They formed a loose semicircle in front of the bank. Off to the left I saw the gleam of brass buttons, but the police stood idly by.
To escape, we should have to bull our way through the line. While throwing things, the rioters chanted some slogan, which, after a while, I made out to be: "Fuck the system! Fuck the system!"
"Oh, boy," snarled Evans, "if I only had a machine gun and plenty of ammo!"
Little flames appeared in the ragged line. One of the flames soared up in a parabola and struck the outside of the building. There was a burst of yellow flame.
"Fire bombs," I said.
Another gasoline-filled bottle, with a lighted wick, sailed sparkling through the air. This one came in through one of the gaping picture windows and spread its flame around the foyer. Papers and curtains began to burn.
"Now we'll be roasted for sure," said Evans. "I said there was too much goddam wood in this building. What'll we do?"
Another Molotov cocktail whizzed into the building. The heat became oppressive, and the smoke made us cough. Beyond the flames, I saw firemen wheel up a truck and run a hose out to a hydrant. No sooner had they attached it, however, than several students attacked it with axes and machetes and soon had it in shreds. The firemen retreated from the shower of missiles.
"Goddam cops!" breathed Evans. "Look at 'em, standing back and just watching? They're afraid to do anything, because then every pinko journalist in the country will tell how the brutal Fascist pigs killed some innocent children who were just having fun."
"We'll have to take our chance and run through the fire and rocks and everything," said Robert Hopkins, shivering. "Maybe, if I yell I'm one of them, they'll let us through."
Crash! went the missiles, while the flames flashed and crackled.
"Just a second," I said. I stepped aside, turned my back, and fished Armando out of my case.
"Armando," I muttered, "if you get us out of this with whole skins, I'll sacrifice a rabbit to you."
Hardly had I spoken when there was a brighter flash and a deafening crash of thunder. It seemed to come from right overhead. In my part of the country, when that happens, you look out to see if a nearby tree has been struck by lightning. Then came a terrific down pour, with more lightning and thunder.
The idealists scattered in all directions. The firemen attached another hose. A couple ran up and sprayed the gasoline fires with chemicals, while others hosed down the outside of the building and then the foyer. Coming out, we got hosed, too, and emerged dripping, coughing, and sputtering. I did not mind, even though it meant leaving San Romano a day late.
As a Northeasterner, I was used to thunderstorms. I did not then realize that, in most of California, they are so rare that when one occurs, people telephone radio stations to ask if there has been an earthquake. Therefore it was not surprising that the mob dissolved quickly in the face of the strange meteorological assault.
Young Robert was subdued as I drove him home; fortunately nobody had thought to burn my car. Perhaps he learned something from the experience.
That, however, was not the end of the tale of Armando. When I got home, I put the statue back on my desk. At once our television set acted up again. Placing waxen flowers in front of the statue did no good.
When the real flowers burst into bloom, I tried a sprig of forsythia on Armando, and then some lilacs and azaleas. The television set still balked, nor could the service man fix it. Priscille said:
"Daddy, he's mad about something. What did you do to stir him up?"
I thought. "Come to think of it, when we were trapped in that burning bank building, I promised to sacrifice a rabbit to him if he's save us. He did, but I haven't made the sacrifice."
"Then we've got to give it to him or do without the TV. Go buy us a rabbit. I'll help you kill it."
"Damned if I will! No five-inch piece of rock is going to tell me what to do."
The television remained out of action. In addition, we had a run of accidents and petty disasters. I sprained my ankle at my regular Sunday morning game of tennis and limped for a fortnight. Our lawn tractor broke down. So did our clothes washer, our electric stove, our dishwasher, our vacuum cleaner, and our furnace. The Buick developed a flat. It was a revolt of the robots.
I decided to take the statue to the archaeology department of the Museum of Natural Science. I told an archaeologist there, Jack O'Neill, how I had come by the figurine, adding:
"I was sure it was a modern fake, or I wouldn't have bought it. I don't want to encourage clandestine digging. But I do want to know what I've got."
"Leave it here a few days," said O'Neill. When I went back the following week, he said: "This is a funny one, Mr. Newbury. On your time scale, it's a real antique; but on mine, it's a modern fake."
"How do you mean?"
"All our tests—chemical, fluorescent, and so on—indicate that this thing was made about the mid-nineteenth century. It's a common pattern. I can show you dozens, almost identical, in our storage vaults.
"The catch is that the originals were made in pre-Columbian times. In the sixteenth century, the Spanish forcibly converted the Quiche' peoples to Catholic Christianity, so the making of these idols stopped. It was revived in the present century as a means of making a fast quetzal off the tourists. Some peasants dig up the original molds used in casting the ancient figurines and cast new statues in them."
"That would make the new casts only fifty per cent fake," I said.
O'Neill smiled. "It's better than having them dig up the real old ones and ruin them as evidence. But in the nineteenth century, Guatemala had been Christian for four centuries, while on the other hand there weren't enough tourists to furnish a market."
"Do you suppose some pre-Conquest cult had survived in the hills and continued to make these things?"
He shrugged. "Maybe. Or perhaps some enterprising Quiche farmer made it to sell to John Lloyd Stephens or Zelia Nuttall or one of their successors, when archaeologists began poking around the Mayan ruins in the last century." O'Neill looked thoughtful. "Would you sell this?"