Cry in the Night (11 page)

He pushed back his chair and started to get up.

“Oh, that’s all right,” I said angrily, “you needn’t stand for me. After all, your henchman just finished shooting at me. I think the time for any courtesies had passed.”

He took off his glasses and watched me unblinkingly with his sharp blue eyes.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Of course you don’t,” I agreed smoothly. “You don’t know a thing about somebody shooting at me on the Avenue of the Dead. Or the doll. Or the letter. Nothing at all.” I was so angry I could scarcely talk. “How stupid do you think I am? You are disgustingly self-righteous. I’d like to know what’s so fine about scaring someone with a gun; that’s what I’d like to know. If you do one more thing, just one, I’m going to the American embassy.”

With that I turned and banged out of his office, slamming the door so hard it rocked in its frame, and ran down the hall. I was outside in the clear bright air, running past balloon vendors, when I heard my name shouted.

“Sheila, stop! Stop!

I didn’t stop.

I hurtled down the wide, shallow steps and plunged toward Reforma, three lanes each way and the cars moving so fast only a fool would cross without a light.

I reached the center median. Horns squalled. Tires screeched. Then he was beside me, grabbing my arm. “Wait a minute. You’re going to get run over.”

I yanked my arm away and ran on. There was a lull. Just time enough to cross.

He had my arm again when we reached the other side. I pulled away and said through clenched teeth, “If you touch me once more, just once, I’ll scream.”

He didn’t touch me again but he stayed right beside me, following me down an asphalt path into Chapultepec Park. I walked quickly past a kiosk with a green plaster top and bright orange-backed chairs. I hurried a little faster and turned onto the walk that skirted the soft green waters of the lake.

I stopped and faced him where a huge boulder jutted out into the lake, narrowing the walk. “I’ll scream if you try anything.”

He shoved a hand through his thick hair. “Dammit, will you relax.”

I started to turn away, but he reached past me to touch the boulder and his arm barred the way. “Who shot at you?” he demanded.

I glared at him. “Your man.”

“Don’t be a fool. I’m an archeologist. Not the local Mafia chieftain.”

“You threatened me yesterday. Warned me to get out of Mexico. The note at the airport didn’t work. Or the doll. Today you sent someone after me with a gun.”

I ducked down, slipped under his arm. I was around the boulder, almost back to where the walk widened, when my sandal slipped on a wet rock. I stopped and stood on one foot to massage my ankle.

He was right behind me and reaching out to help. I shook him off impatiently. “Thanks, I’ll do it myself.”

“I need to talk to you.”

I faced him again.

“It’s a little late for talk. But, if you’ll leave me alone, promise not to set me up for target practice, we’ll call it quits. I won’t complain to the embassy and you can pursue whoever is after your precious artifacts because, in case you still have any doubts, it isn’t me.”

“It isn’t that easy.”

I glared at him. “Why not?”

“I didn’t send anybody after you with a gun.”

“Oh, no, of course you didn’t.” I tried again to slip past him but this time he half pushed half pulled me off the path and plumped me down on a low stone wall and did a little glaring of his own.

“Listen, Sheila, I lost my temper when I found you in my museum yesterday. We are pretty sure someone from a U.S. museum was in Mexico this week to pick up one of the most fabulous archeological treasures in the world. When Mexico customs told me you were at the Ortegas’, well, it had to be you.” His vivid blue eyes held mine, questioning, seeking. Slowly his face changed. “By damn, I don’t believe it’s you after all.”

“No. It’s not me. So you can call off your dogs.”

“If you aren’t the one . . .”—he spoke slowly, almost to himself—“why would anyone shoot at you? Unless, of course”—and his voice quickened with excitement—“they made the same mistake. That means . . .” His words fell away. He was figuring, thinking hard, and I didn’t understand any of it.

“What are you talking about?” My voice was sharp and thin.

Those blue eyes looked back at me, focused on me. He shook his head a little. “The Ortega Treasure, of course. Don’t you see, someone else thinks you are in Mexico to buy it. And they are willing to kill to stop you.”

Chapter 10

The Ortega Treasure.

I suppose ever since that frightful scene yesterday in Jerry’s museum that I had expected something like this. Still, my heart twisted at his words. The Ortega Treasure.

Jerry had me by the arm now and he was hustling me along the sidewalk. “You’d better get out of Mexico today. I’ll get you to the airport. You can tell me everything you know on the way.”

I stopped, braced myself, and refused to move. “I’m not running away. Not for you or anyone.”

His hand tightened on my arm. “By how far did the bullet miss you?”

“Bullets,” I corrected. I remembered the ominous, chilling popping sounds and dust spurting near me. So near. I remembered the sound of the bullets and the savaged pieces of the doll on my bedroom floor. Fear squeezed air from my lungs. If it wasn’t Jerry Elliot’s man who had shot at me, who was it? Why?

“Come on,” he commanded. “We’ve got to talk.”

This time I didn’t pull away or hang back. He rented a rowboat, all the while watching sharply around us. Before we stepped in, he took off his coat and, without a word, handed it to me to hold. When we were settled in the boat, he rowed rhythmically and swiftly. The hair on his arms glistened like gold in the sunlight. He rowed easily and somehow that surprised me. But, of course, there were many things I didn’t know about Jerry Elliot.

A dozen pulls on the oars and we were in the center of the shallow lake. There could not have been a more peaceful or private spot in all of Mexico City. The green water was as smooth as a pottery glaze.

“All right, Sheila. Tell me everything.”

I described my shock at that first light pop, my frantic scramble down into and up out of the depression, my breathless dash for the safety of the hills, and my relief at finding the parking lot. And then the man who half circled the Mercedes before riding off on his motorcycle.

“He must be the one who shot at me.” I told of the gun in his hand and that he was the same man who had watched me from the shadows at the airport.

Jerry shook his head slowly. “You certainly stirred up somebody. That’s very interesting.”

“Interesting is one way to describe it,” I said dryly.

Jerry, with characteristic single-mindedness, nodded in agreement. “Right. It puts everything in a different perspective. Of course,” he mused, “it’s probably all to the good that it happened. Otherwise, we might never have known there was a third party after the treasure until it was too late.”

I looked at his attractively ugly face and knew that here was a man who had his priorities clearly in order and I surely had not made the ranking.

“But you’ve made me waste a lot of time,” he said abruptly.

I stared at him in disbelief. Then I sputtered, “There’s just no pleasing you, is there? Look, this boat ride isn’t my idea. I’ll be glad to be on my way.”

He looked puzzled. “You take everything too personally.”

“I don’t know how else I should respond.”

“I meant that we’ve wasted a lot of time on you, checking up on you, thinking you were in Mexico to buy the treasure.”

“I’m sure sorry.”

“Yeah, so am I,” he agreed.

I could cheerfully have strangled him.

“We’ll have to adjust all our thinking,” he continued. “Let’s take it from the first so I can get everything clearly in mind. To begin, why are you in Mexico?”

“I’ll be damned if I know,” I said bitterly.

He didn’t understand that, of course.

I spread my hands helplessly. “I almost mean what I said, Jerry. One day, about a month ago, there was a notice on our main office bulletin board. It announced a free trip to Mexico in exchange for delivery of a package for the museum.”

He was watching me closely now. “Didn’t that seem odd to you?”

I shook my head quickly. “Not at all. The Ortegas requested return of a manuscript they had loaned to the museum. The only reason I got to make the trip was because the request made Dr. Freidheim mad and he didn’t want anyone from the Mesoamerican section serving as the courier.”

He wanted to know everything I could tell him about Karl Freidheim. It wasn’t much. Freidheim was second in the department. He was an autocrat.

“Ambitious?” Jerry asked.

I shrugged. “I suppose so. I don’t know much about him.”

Jerry frowned. “That all sounds on the level. Why did the Ortegas want the manuscript back now?”

“I don’t see how the manuscript has anything to do with a man shooting at me or some lost treasure,” I said irritably.

“It must,” Jerry insisted. “I don’t believe in coincidences. Don’t you see? It’s all too pat. At the very time that we think an American museum is hooked up with the Ortegas to smuggle out a treasure, you show up with a manuscript as an excuse for a visit.”

“But I’m not here to smuggle anything. It has to be a coincidence. Now it’s time for you to tell me what I’ve stumbled into. What treasure? How does a treasure link up with the Ortegas? And with my museum?”

“Treasure,” he repeated softly. “It’s quite a word, isn’t it? You see pirate chests filled with shiny doubloons and a Jolly Roger flapping in the wind. It’s still an accurate picture. Every treasure brings out the pirates. The only difference today is that a rogue wears a well-cut suit and has soft hands and probably has a suite of offices with a Vermeer in the waiting room.”

“What kind of treasure?” I looked at him skeptically.

“The Treasure of Axayacatl.”

It didn’t mean a thing to me.

He smiled a little. “Mexican history isn’t your thing.”

“No. I did a little reading before I came. Cortés arrived in 1519 and marched across the country, hunting for gold. Cortés moved into Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital. Moctezuma deferred to him because he thought the bearded white man might be the god Quetzalcoatl returning. The Aztec people finally had enough of it and, after Moctezuma was killed, they drove the Spaniards out of their city. Cortés eventually came back and fought. Before it was over, most of the Aztecs were dead and the city was a heap of rubble.”

“Right. The shining white city that the conquistadors first saw was razed and Mexico City rose on the same site.”

“How does that concern the Ortegas and me four hundred and fifty years later?”

“The Ortegas have a huge sheep ranch near Tlaxcala in a little mountain village, east of Mexico City.”

“What does Tlaxcala have to do with this treasure?”

“Everything. Cortés’s main allies were the Tlaxcalans. Without them he might never have defeated the Aztecs. The night the Aztecs drove the Spaniards out of Tenochtitlán, the survivors struggled and fought their way toward Tlaxcala. They holed up there and licked their wounds and planned the attack on Tenochtitlán.”

“That still doesn’t spell treasure.”

“But it does,” he said earnestly. “That night, called the Noche Triste, some of Cortés’s men grabbed up as much treasure as they could carry. The Tlaxcalans carried, literally, the king’s fifth, the share that was intended for Charles V. This treasure had belonged to Moctezuma’s father, Axayacatl. None of it survived. Most was lost in the lake as the Spaniards and Tlaxcalans tried to fight their way across the causeway to safety. What little was salvaged was used by Cortés or melted down. There has always been a secret hope that some of that load of gold survived and will be found, perhaps when a tunnel is dug in construction in the part of the city that rests on the old lake bottom. Perhaps it will be found somewhere along the line of retreat that the Spaniards took to Tlaxcala.”

His vivid blue eyes shone with excitement.

He had my attention now. Four hundred and fifty years is a long time. Not nearly as long a time elapsed from the burial of the Egyptian boy-king Tutankhamen to the discovery of his tomb. As every archeologist knows, nothing survives better than gold.

Gold is not destroyed by age or weather like wood and leather and cloth. Gold glistens as brightly, shines as brilliantly whether it was worked five years ago or five thousand years ago.

I thought quickly of some of the most famous golden treasures that had survived the ages. There was the incredibly fabulous Treasure of Tutankhamen, which enthralled the world when Howard Carter found the tomb in 1922. There was Schliemann’s Treasure of Troy, discovered in one of archeology’s most exciting moments only to be lost to history in the closing days of World War II. Some said it was once hidden in Pomerania. Others were sure it was put for safekeeping in a huge bunker in the Berlin Zoo and destroyed when the bunker was hit by bombs. Others said no, the gold disappeared when the Russians captured Berlin. There was the Treasure of Dorak, a collection of delicate and elegant ancient jewelry, which briefly came to light in Turkey, then disappeared again.

The Treasure of Axayacatl. Had anything like it ever been discovered in the Americas? “There is quite a field of study in Mesoamerican metalwork, isn’t there? Some of it must have survived.”

“Only a little. There was a good find at Monte Albán. A lot has been learned from written sources in the early Colonial days. But of actual pieces of Aztec gold, we have just a handful.”

“So, if someone found a secret cache of jewelry from the days of Moctezuma, it would be a huge achievement.”

“The archeological discovery of the century,” he exclaimed.

“It would be worth a lot of money?”

He laughed a little. “More money than you and I will ever see in a lifetime. Enough money to bring out the pirates.”

“You think the treasure has been found? Near Tlaxcala?”

“I’m sure of it.” Then he hedged a little. “At least something has been found, something damned valuable.”

“How do you know?”

He hesitated. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and took one, then absently offered them to me. I shook my head and waited while he struck the little wax match against the box and lit his cigarette. He pulled on it, then asked obliquely, “How well do you know the Ortegas?”

“Not at all,” I said quickly. “They asked me to be their guest because I delivered the manuscript. I was invited because I came from the museum. The invitation had nothing to do with me personally.” I hesitated, then explained. “I accepted because I didn’t really have enough money to stay very long in Mexico if I had to pay my way at a hotel.”

He understood that. He worked for a museum, too.

“I almost moved out after the first night, though.”

“Why?”

“I’m still not sure what happened. I heard a scream.” I told him about the cry that had brought me out of my sleep, how I had waited for it to sound again, and my decision finally to go and make sure that no one lay injured in the patio. I hated telling him the rest of it for it certainly revealed me as less than brave. But I did. I explained how I started down the stairs and heard the click of a closing door and how I turned to run back up the stairs only to sprawl ignominiously. It was, of course, a little anticlimactic to describe how the light came on and Tony introduced himself and showed me the peacocks.

“You don’t think it was a peacock?”

“I’m sure it wasn’t.”

“What was it?”

“I can’t imagine. It certainly wasn’t Tony or Señora Ortega or Señor Ortega or Juan or the twins. I can’t imagine a servant in that household making that kind of noise and, if they had, why would Tony have lied about it? Pretended it was a peacock?”

Jerry was watching me intently. “What about the old gentleman?”

“What old gentleman?” I asked blankly.

“Señor Herrera.”

“There’s no one of that name there.”

“Oh yes,” Jerry said quickly. “If you haven’t met him, then someone is keeping him under wraps, and that means a hell of a lot.”

“Who is he? Why should he cry out in the night?”

“He is Tony Ortega’s grandfather, his mother’s father. He is a retired professor of Mexican history, an authority on the Aztecs. He may have cried out in the night because of you.”

“That doesn’t follow at all. I’ve told you, I’ve never seen him.”

“It follows beautifully. They may be keeping him hidden, but that doesn’t mean he may not know what is happening in the house. You arrived late that evening and when the word finally reached him of the visitor’s identity, he wanted to see you.”

“Look, Jerry,” I said as patiently as I could, “I’ve never met this man, never even heard of him, so why should he care a fig if I’m visiting his family’s house?”

“You represent your museum. He knows or suspects that someone in the family is trying to sell something immensely valuable. He’s afraid it’s the Treasure of Axayacatl.”

I looked at Jerry doubtfully. “If he’s there in the house but sort of being kept a prisoner, how can you know whether he suspects something like that?”

“No one has seen him alone since Christmas. Not one of his old friends has been permitted to visit him. He is
not well
, they are told when they call. He has not spoken to anyone.”

“Why are you sure he isn’t sick? How can you claim that he suspects anything at all?”

“There was a dinner in his honor,” Jerry said quietly, “shortly after the Feast of the Epiphany. He came to that and made a short speech in response to a plaque presented to him. He shook hands with the man who handed it to him.”