The Moche Warrior (19 page)

I did, and I said so. Carlos’s people were very talented artists, and watching their deft strokes as they drew intricate designs on the ceramic surface was a pleasure, albeit one I’d have enjoyed more under different circumstances. “Do you do replicas at all, Carlos?” I asked. “Exact copies of Moche ceramics?”

“You mean use the original methods of manufacturing?” he asked. “No, we like our electric kiln far too much for that.” He smiled. “In reality, we can’t afford to make replicas. I can’t make money on them, because they’re so labor-intensive and expensive to do.”

We walked the full length of the room, Montero chattering away as we went. He showed me where the shipments were packed, told me what museum shops carried some of his work, and so on. It was a revelation to me, not so much what Montero was telling me about Moche craftsmanship—Ralph had already told me a great deal about ceramics—but that he was so knowledgeable and so proud of the work that was being done. I suppose I’d assumed on the basis of his previous behavior that he was an ignorant man, but he wasn’t at all. He was obviously a much more complex person than I’d thought.

He spoiled it all, right at the end, of course, with a lecherous little squeeze, but I suppose I was already getting used to his particular way of dealing with the opposite sex. I merely extracted myself from his clutches and said my good-byes.

As I left the place, I had a very quick look in the body shop. It looked like a body shop just about anywhere, a storey and a half, open right to the roof, two service bays, and lots of mess. Nothing whatsoever looked suspicious.

That night, as usual, Hilda Schwengen disappeared soon after dinner commenced, not to be seen again all evening. Lucho continued to creep around the place, looking, I was sure, for his gun. I’d caught him in the lab, looking through the boxes, earlier in the day. Also as usual, after everyone had turned in for the night, I heard whispered conversations below me, and the creak of the main door, the click and squeak of doors on the second floor opening and closing.

I thought of the visit I’d had that day to Paraiso. I could find absolutely nothing wrong with the place. I could see no places to hide caches of priceless Moche artifacts, although I supposed someone could deliver them at the last minute and slip them into the packing cases. But then what? How did they get them out of the country? I thought about all the shipping I’d done from foreign countries for the shop. I regularly filled containers for shipping by sea, and I supposed I could have put illegal objects in the containers if I chose to. But it would be a risk at both ends I’d get caught. Lizard, of course, had been a customs agent, but surely he couldn’t be the one to check every single box from Paraiso through customs. Was there someone somewhere in a museum shop waiting for the shipment and whisking the real thing out? How difficult would this be to organize, I wondered, and my conclusion was very difficult. And how, then, did the objects end up at Molesworth & Cox?

Perhaps it wasn’t Paraiso, after all, I thought. If not, though, then the only other prospect in these parts was the archaeological project I was working on. I decided I needed to know a lot more about what was going on at the Hacienda Garua. On the face of it they were a friendly and relaxed group. Just beneath the surface, though, there were tensions. Hilda disliked Tracey, that I could tell, but why, I didn’t know. Ralph was more than a little entranced by Tracey, but Tracey was with Steve, and Ralph could hardly help but know it. Was this just all the stuff of soap opera, the result of a small group of people isolated together far from home, or was it something more than that?

Then there was the nocturnal visitor and the man in the arches who might or might not be the same person. I decided I needed to attack this problem on two fronts: to go back to Paraiso when no one was there, and to learn a lot more about this project. It was time Steve and I had a little heart-to-heart chat.

11

It haunts me still. Sometimes I dream I am standing on a distant planet, or a desolate moon, perhaps, or some spent asteroid hurtling erratically through space. The dusty surface is pockmarked with the craters of a thousand meteorites. A single hill rises from the surface, its sides streaked, ravaged, by some ancient storm. There is no one there. Someone once inhabited this lonely place, I know, a very long time ago. The cratered surface is littered with their bones. There are other reminders too: here and there a scrap of ancient fabric, and at my feet a plait of dark hair, bleached red by the light of a distant sun seen dimly through the haze. In my dream I hear their ghostly whispers in the mist; I feel their touch in the wind-whipped dust that stings my face. Cerro de las Ruinas.

My plans to interrogate Steve were delayed by an incident in the market that heralded the arrival in Campina Vieja of one of the most unprincipled people I have ever met. Pond scum, Steve called him. It was a chance encounter that hurled us headlong on a collision course with disaster. At the time I didn’t know whether the events that unfolded were diverting me from my course, or were instead another strand in the tangled web that I was attempting to unravel. Not that it mattered what I thought: I found myself drawn along with everyone else.

When it happened, Steve, Tracey, and I were on the upper level of the market, surrounded by clusters of bananas piled five or six feet high, searching for the perfect avocados to bring back to the hacienda to serve on Ines’s day off. We’d come into town to shop, for Tracey to make one of her telephone calls home (I thought all these calls were a little obsessive, but perhaps I was jealous), and for a little R&R. We were wandering around together, just enjoying ourselves, when Steve stopped so suddenly, Tracey almost ran into him.

“Shit!” I heard him mutter as he squinted off into the distance. “Tell me I’m seeing things. Shit!” he said again.

Then, as Tracey and I stared after him, he broke into a trot and, calling back over his shoulder to us, said, “I’ll meet you at the El Mo in an hour.” We watched as he dodged through the crowds, down some steps to the market’s lower level, and then, ducking under a tarpaulin that flapped behind one of the stalls, disappeared from view.

“What was that all about?” I asked Tracey.

“Haven’t a clue,” she said blithely. It took a lot to worry Tracey, I noticed.

Perhaps growing up beautiful, rich, and smart gives you a feeling of invincibility. “Not a happy camper, though, is he?” she asked. “What’ll we do now?”

“Finish the shopping, I guess, then we’ll go have a beer and wait for him.” I shrugged. If Tracey wasn’t worried, then why should I be?

It took us quite a bit longer than we’d anticipated to get to the cafe cum bar and restaurant we were to meet at, El Mochica, better known as the El Mo. We still had a bit of shopping to do, and a couple of times we ran into some of the students—it was a day off for everyone—then Puma and Pachamama, and stopped to chat. When we entered the bar, Steve was already there. He was slumped in his chair and didn’t even look up as we came in.

After beers were ordered, and Steve still hadn’t said much of anything, Tracey prodded him. “Talk to us, Steve! What’s the problem? Who or what were you chasing?”‘

He made a face, a sort of tired grimace. “In a word,” he sighed, “or I guess two words,
el Hombre.
The fellow the folks around here refer to as
el Hombre
.”

El Hombre?
The Man. There was someone wandering around here who called himself the Man? I wanted to laugh out loud, but something in Steve’s manner stopped me.

“What a dopey name!” Tracey exclaimed. “Who is he really, and why would anyone want to call himself that?”‘ she queried, undeterred by the expression on Steve’s face.

He sighed. “
El Hombre?
Beats me. Maybe he doesn’t want people around here to know his real name although why he should care, when he’s so open about what he does, I couldn’t really say. Perhaps he just thinks it makes him sound rather grand. His name is Etienne Laforet. French. From Paris. He’s an art dealer, owns a swank Parisian gallery on the Left Bank. He’s also sleaze, big-time. I haven’t seen him around here in a couple of years, but he used to come at least once a year, and sometimes twice. His modus operandi is always the same. Blows into town in a big, expensive car, visits a few bars and restaurants making a big show of throwing money around. Once he’s made sure everyone sees he’s got wads of cash, he finds himself a place to stay, parks his very flashy and expensive car—this year it’s a gold Mercedes—right out front so everyone will know where he is, and then he just sits and waits.”

“Waits for what?” I asked. “And isn’t that a little dangerous, showing off your wealth like that around here? Isn’t he asking for trouble?”

Steve looked at me as if I was naivete personified. “He’s not asking for trouble. He
is
trouble. No one messes with him. He’s waiting for people to bring him stolen artifacts, of course. They have to know he’s here, that he’s ready to buy, and where to find him.”

“By stolen artifacts, you mean… ?” I asked.

“Pretty much anything pre-Columbian. He specializes in Moche.”

“Are you saying that he sits around waiting for people to bring their stolen goods to him, right out in the open? Like in a hotel lobby or something?”

“A house. He usually rents a house, and that’s what he’s done this time. The little white one with the round window on the second floor over on Calle seven near the hardware store. I followed him there this afternoon. It has a high wall surrounding it, with a large tree in the front yard, and no windows overlooking it from the other side of the street. So no one can see what’s going on in the patio or the door. But there’s a place to park out front, so everyone can see his car and know he’s there. Perfect setup.”

“Where are the police in all this? Can’t they do something about it?”

“Perhaps they could. But they don’t. Maybe it’s can’t, maybe it’s won’t. This guy has a reputation for being ruthless, and people around here are really afraid to take him on.”

“But they deal with him!”

“Yes,” he sighed. “They do.”

“But you can’t take Moche artifacts out of the country,” I offered.

Steve gave me another are-you-new-to-this-planet look. “Obviously there are ways,” he said. “He’s never been caught with anything on him when he flies home to Paris, I can assure you.”

We all thought about that for a while, Steve staring moodily into his beer. “I thought maybe he wasn’t going to show up here anymore,” he said finally. “He’s been farther south the last couple of years, and nothing much of any interest has turned up in these parts that I’ve heard about. I wonder what it means that he’s here again. I’ll have to make some enquiries, I guess.”

I wasn’t sure what making enquiries meant, but I didn’t have long to think about it. There was a bit of a stir in the entrance to El Mochica, and Steve turned to look at the door.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said, throwing money on the table to cover the bill, his beer still unfinished. “This place just lost its charm.”

I was sitting with my back to the doorway, and turned my head slightly to see what had brought on this abrupt gesture on Steve’s part. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw silhouetted against the bright light from outside, the figure of a man. I looked back at Steve to ask if the shadow I’d seen was
el Hombre,
but I didn’t need to speak. Steve’s face said it all. By the time we’d reached the door,
el Hombre
had disappeared into the lounge off to the right of the entrance and was not to be seen.

Dinner that night was more subdued than usual, Steve’s black mood affecting us all. On Ines’s day off, which corresponded with our break from the dig as well, the team, minus Pablo, who spent his time off in town with his family, and Hilda, who spent the day in her room, drinking herself into a stupor, no doubt, and sometimes with the addition of a student or two, crowded into the little kitchen to prepare the evening meal together, and it was normally a rather rowdy affair.

Ralph, a bachelor, liked to cook, and did it reasonably well. His responsibility was the main course,
polio,
chicken, which he cooked in what he always referred to as the “devil’s handmaid,” the propane oven, because of its propensity to shut off at the critical moment. I was responsible for the appetizer, and tried to master Ines’s
papas a la Huancaina,
potatoes in a cheese, onion, and hot pepper sauce that I’d found so appealing the first night. Tracey’s specialty was flan, or creme caramel, so she made dessert. Steve supervised, a responsibility that included keeping the cooks’ glasses filled. While the results never measured up to Ines’s feasts, on the couple of occasions we’d done this, we invariably declared the meal a triumph, and in a way it was. Sometimes the power went off, usually the stove quit: There was always some obstacle to be overcome to carry it off. Tracey, as always, had one of us take a tray up to Hilda, to leave outside her door, but as often as not it was not touched by morning.

That night, for the first time since I’d arrived at the Hacienda Garua, when everyone had retired for the night, I took the little Moche man out of his tissue wrapping and studied him once again. Every time I looked at him, I saw more to admire. He was exquisite really. The workmanship was extraordinary, the more so every time I looked at him. His necklace of tiny beads, each one handmade, and each just a little bit different, was so beautifully done, it almost took my breath away. I couldn’t imagine the attention to detail, the amount of time that must have been spent by some artisan, in making just one ear spool for someone, someone important no doubt. I wrapped it very carefully again and put it in its hiding place, behind a loose board in the cupboard. Was Etienne Laforet, I wondered, the connection I was looking for?

Later I heard the whispers again, and this time I got up quietly and went out to the railing. Three people were talking by candlelight at the front door. Steve was one, the other was the man I’d caught sight of for only a moment in the headlight of Ines’s brother’s motorcycle, the man of the arches, and the third figure, I saw this time to my surprise, was Hilda. Straining, I could pick up only snippets of their conversation.