The Moche Warrior (24 page)

“Thanks,” he said. We talked for a few more minutes about the work, about his children of whom he was obviously very proud, about the approaching El Nino. Then he got up from his chair and came over to mine. Leaning over, he kissed me. It was a nice kiss, the kind that makes you think you might not mind making the guy’s breakfast for a while. We parted company at the top of the stairs, leaving me wondering what was going on. I like to think I am not lacking in self-confidence, but I try to temper it with a firm grasp on reality. The point was, a contest between me and Tracey for a man was not one I’d expect to win. Was I doing the same thing I’d thought Steve was doing, having self-doubts about a member of the opposite sex, or was there something more calculated happening? There was something about the conversation, I thought, that didn’t ring entirely true, but perhaps it was just that there was so much left unsaid.

The Hacienda Garua contingent hung in. Even Ralph decided to stay. The trouble was, most of the Peruvian crew wouldn’t come back to work at the site. If they’d thought the place evil with a few relatively harmless accidents, this latest incident hadn’t improved their impression of the place one bit. Pablo stuck with us, as did Ernesto, surprisingly enough, the fellow who’d cut himself so badly. I’d heard he had a wife and four children, so maybe a few evil spirits were not enough to deter him from earning his living. Tomas too agreed to stay on. The students all stayed, with the exception of Robert, who said he’d had enough and headed back to Lima.

The one positive aspect of all this was that I was able to get Puma a real paying job. When the Peruvian workers disappeared, Steve tried to carry on with the small team he had, but the work slowed considerably.

“I’ve just got to get more manpower out here,” he groaned. “We’ll never get this done.”

“I have an idea,” I said. “How about Puma? He couldn’t do the technical work, but he can carry the dirt and work the sieve. He could sure use some money, if there was some way we could pay him.”

“I pay the Peruvian crew,” Steve said, “and with several of them gone, there’ll be some money. When can he start?”

The answer was right away. “Amazing!” Puma said. “Working on an archaeological site! Do you think we’ll find treasure?”

“You never know,” I replied. “And even if we don’t, this way you’ll be able to make sure we don’t unleash some terrible curse.”

I’d meant it as a joke, of course, but Puma heartily agreed with me.

Puma, as it turned out, was a willing and hard worker—when he showed up. In the first place, he wasn’t an early riser. While the rest of us started work as soon as it was light, Puma usually turned up a little rumpled-looking, late in the morning. Some days he didn’t show up at all. It was annoying because we were sorely shorthanded, and everyone left had to pitch in. Steve didn’t seem terribly perturbed by it: He said it was pretty standard behavior for a boy that age, and that Puma would be paid when he showed up, and not when he didn’t.

I tried to talk to Puma about it. He was always very contrite, saying there was something else he’d had to do, and I had a feeling there was something he wasn’t telling me, but that was about it. Gradually, we all took the attitude that with Puma, like the magician he was, it was sometimes you see him, sometimes you don’t.

I was assigned to help Pablo, working beside him to catalogue all the little pottery shards he uncovered, making notes on the depth, the exact placement, and bagging and tagging them all. We started work right at dawn, and worked until the wind and the dust made it impossible to continue. Then we hauled everything back to the lab, and worked well into the evening cataloguing the day’s finds.

Even Lucho was called up for action, made to haul sand and staff the sieve. His complaining and shuffling drove us all crazy, but we needed him to work. What that meant was that the hacienda was left unguarded at least part of the day, before Ines came to make supper.

Tracey’s prediction that there would be no more incidents was regrettably not correct. While Rolanda Guerra might be gone, his family was not, and, as I had feared, they took to hanging around the site, watching us work with a real malevolence in their stance. They plainly blamed us for Rolando’s death, even though the police had made it clear to them that Rolando was looting illegally: He’d been caught red-handed after all, albeit almost dead at the time. The Guerra family, however, saw it differently. In their eyes, Rolando had been forced to take desperate measures because of us, measures that had ended his life prematurely.

The situation came to a head one day when I returned to the hacienda with Ines to find an axe through the beautifully carved front door, and a message for us sprayed across the front of the house. What the painter lacked in artistry, he made up for in brevity and clarity.
Asesinos!
—murderers—the message read. Lucho returned to his post as guard of the hacienda forthwith; Cesar Montero, the mayor, had a police guard posted on the site for a couple of days to deter the culprits, and Carlos, the landlord, tutted and clucked, and then sent a crew over to paint it out.

With all this drama and activity, it took me a while to realize that I hadn’t seen Puma recently. With some irritation, I headed over to the commune to get him. Nothing appeared amiss when I first got there. The place looked pretty much the same, laundry flapping in the breeze, a couple of the commune members working away at the far end of the garden. I checked the kitchen. Pachamama wasn’t there. Then I went to their little hut. There was only one sleeping bag— Puma’s, I thought, but he wasn’t in it. All of Pacha-mama’s belongings appeared to be gone. Everyone else was out working, so I headed for the main house once again and knocked on Manco Capac’s door. He was a minute or two in opening it, but cordial enough when he saw me. “Come on in,” he said. “Beer?”

“Not right now, thanks,” I replied.

“Mind if I do?” he asked, opening a little refrigerator in his room in anticipation of my reply.

“Of course not,” I said, idly thinking as I watched him reach for the beer that his refrigerator reminded me of the one I had at home, that is, virtually empty. Two thoughts then struck me: one, that this was the first time I’d thought about my home in a rather long time; and two, that there was a significant difference between his refrigerator and mine. While mine tended to yogurt well past its best-before date, various half-empty jars of heaven knows what, a couple of tins of tuna and salmon, and if I was lucky, white wine, his was rather more aristocratic: champagne, Perrier-Jouet if I wasn’t mistaken, judging by the flowers on the bottle—I’ve heard it’s lovely—and a couple of jars of a rather distinctive shape and color that I decided held caviar. There were a couple of other tins too, which, on closer examination I was sure, would prove to contain pate. Not your average supermarket peppercorn pate, either. Real foie gras, from France. Manco Capac might have come to live a back-to-basics life in Peru, but his definition of basic, in the food department at least, was definitely upmarket. It was also more than a little expensive.

Maybe, I thought, as he opened his beer, he’s treated himself to these things because he has a cold. Come to think of it, though, didn’t he have the sniffles last time I was here? Maybe he has allergies, or maybe, and now light began to dawn, maybe his expensive tastes also run to cocaine.

When I pulled back from this edifying stream of consciousness—it’s amazing what the little light in a refrigerator can do for your thought processes—I found him looking at me closely.

“Would you like something else?” he said. “I have only champagne and, of course, caviar.” He laughed. “Birthday present from my family, actually, but it sounds impressive, doesn’t it? Don’t tell the others, or I’ll have to share.”

Good comeback, I thought, and very convincing, but it should be. He’s an actor. Apparently he was a good enough actor to fool the other members of the commune into thinking he shared their taste for the simple life.

“I came to see Puma and Pachamama,” I said, changing the subject. “But I can’t find either of them.”

“Gone,” he replied.

“What do you mean, gone?” I asked.

“Just gone. Disappeared. Poof.” He paused. “He’s a magician. Poof. Get it?”‘

I got it. “Very amusing. Would you have any idea of when exactly they went poof?” I said through clenched teeth. I could hear a certain tone creeping into my voice, one a certain shopkeeper normally reserved for suppliers who didn’t deliver on time, and parents who allowed their children to bring drippy ice cream cones into her store.

“Last night. Maybe the night before, actually. I can’t remember exactly.”

My, what a short memory! “Did you see them go?”

“Nope.”

“And did you report their disappearance?”

“Nope. Why would I? People come and go. There is nothing to stop them. Our philosophy here is go with the flow.”

That expression again. “Two kids disappear in the night,” I hissed, “and all you can say is go with the now?”

Well, it beats asking people to commit suicide together so they can beam up to some spaceship or something, doesn’t it?“ he snapped, and I thought that for a second I had seen the real person under go-with-the-flow Manco Capac, one who despised what he was doing and the people he was with. ”People are free to do what they wish here,“‘ he said, his voice returning to normal. ”Those two kids, as you call them, are young adults. People stay here as long as they need to, and if they wish to, they move on.“

“But Puma’s sleeping bag is still here.”

“So maybe he’s planning to come back!” The man shrugged.

“Do you know their real names?”

“No. Choosing a new name here is part of casting off our former lives, our former hang-ups, to express the unspoiled part of ourselves. We choose new names so we can go forward.”

There didn’t seem much point in continuing a conversation that had gone out of style by the seventies, so I left him to his caviar and champagne, and quite possibly, his drug habit.

I started back to the site, but didn’t get very far. It really bothered me, thinking about the kids. I knew they weren’t really kids, but they were so naive, and not terribly bright. I couldn’t believe they’d just leave, Puma in particular, and not send me a message. He knew where I was, at the hacienda, and I’d have thought he’d have come there if they were in trouble. Maybe Manco Capac, whatever his name was, was right. They’d just decided to move on. They didn’t owe me an explanation, really. I wasn’t their mother, although occasionally I felt as if I were. I felt somehow bereft, though. It seemed they’d become, when I wasn’t looking, an important part of the fabric of my new life.

The fact was I didn’t like this Manco Capac, and I didn’t trust him at all. It wasn’t just that he used an alias. The only difference between him and me in that regard was that he’d gotten to choose his. Mine, I’d been assigned. But anyone who picked the name of the first Inca, son of the Sun God, had a personality disorder of some sort, I felt certain. There was something patently false about the man. Communes weren’t really in style anymore, I didn’t think, and even if they were, you didn’t come to live on a commune to eat caviar. It didn’t make sense. The more I thought about him, the more worried about the kids I got, and the worse I felt about not listening to Puma, probing more. Hiding behind my own alias, I hadn’t even asked him his real name.

Guilt is a powerful motivator. I turned the truck around and headed back into town to make enquiries. Campina Vieja was far enough off the beaten track as far as tourism went that people like Puma and Pacha-mama should have been easy to spot, and I hoped someone would recall having seen them.

I checked a couple of cafes I’d seen them in, and then the bus station, where the ticket agent said he had no recollection of them, but that I could check back in a day or two with the other ticket agent who’d been on duty the previous three days. The other alternative, he said, was to wait for the buses to go through and to ask the individual drivers and attendants. There was no time for that: It could take days before I’d checked them all. An ice cream vendor outside the bus station said he’d seen someone who resembled my description of Pachamama, but that she had been alone.

I determined that I’d have a private chat with Steve to see what he could suggest. I didn’t want to go to the police personally, not just because I wasn’t sure how much scrutiny my passport would stand up to, but also because not knowing what the kids’ real names were would make it just a little difficult to fill in a missing persons report. I thought Steve might want to talk to the authorities, though. He’d always shown a more than casual interest in how the two kids were getting along.

When I got back to the site, however, there was no opportunity for that discussion to take place. As I pulled up, I could see the whole bunch of them waving at me from the top of the huaca, and soon, at their instructions, I was heading up there to join them. They were almost dancing with excitement, and with good reason. They had found very promising signs of a tomb, an area about ten feet long and eight feet wide lined with adobe bricks, and what looked to be the outline of timbers, the vigas that would roof the chamber. The center was still filled with earth, but it was clearly a different color and texture.

“This is the lining of a burial chamber, I’m almost certain,” Steve explained for my benefit. “With this kind of structure, a large brick-lined chamber, it’ll be a tomb for someone important. The Moche didn’t build these kinds of chambers for just your average guy. I expect the roof timbers will have collapsed under the weight of all this earth, but I think it may just be an untouched tomb, although we can’t be absolutely sure until we get there.”

“There’ll be flying femurs tomorrow!” Ralph crowed. “Please, please, let there be untouched ceramics for me.”

Only Hilda was quiet, perhaps because of the effort it took her to climb the huaca, or because she felt it was almost too much to hope for.

By now it was getting late, and Hilda called a halt to the day’s work. I had to run my usual taxi service into town for the workers and students, although I could do it in one trip now with all the defections, while Steve took the others home in our second truck, thereby eliminating another opportunity for me to speak to him.