Authors: Nero Newton
After most of an afternoon, she managed front and back views that seemed to be about right. She took the evening to craft a picture of the limbs and head that was more schematic than realistic. Late the next morning
, she photographed her drawings and sleep-walked through the gelatinous heat to the CyberCafé Pirogue.
CHAPTER
SIX
Hugh
Sanderson could never remember the names of the two guards from the logging camp. Marcel had told him at least twice, but he had never been able to commit African names to memory at the best of times. Like Amy Kellet, he thought of the two men simply as Tall Guard and Barrel Guard.
On paper, the
guards were now part of the mansion’s security team, but in reality they still worked with Marcel. Their rounds took them from the officially abandoned logging camp, to the Free Forest Campground, to the mansion, and to the warehouse space that Hugh had just bought in the city.
Marcel was the new overseer of the Sanderson Free Forest Campground, a patch of land that the timber company had leased from the government a year and a half earlier, providing a free campground for eco-tourists. It had been a big part of the company’s green-image campaign and still was, but now the campground served a much more useful purpose.
Marcel had actually come up with a few good ideas. He had been the one to suggest that Sanderson call his secretary from the logging camp and say that he was down with malaria, that he would be in a clinic for a while before getting back to the office. Sanderson had eagerly gone along with that plan because it had let him avoid going back to work right away. He had needed some time to consider the opportunity before him.
The guards were still subordinate to Marcel, and this was a dynamic that Hugh might eventually be able to use to sow disharmony among his new partners, if that ever became necessary. For now, he let the situation play out without much interference. Everything had been working too well for him to want to bruise it. Income was beginning to surpass the costs of operation, and it had only been a few weeks. Independence from big brother William, from a life focused on tree trunks and band saws, would take a few years at this rate. But Hugh was already thinking of steps that would radically speed the process up. He just had to coax the vision into clarity.
It sometimes irked Sanderson that Marcel and the spidery old man had gotten into the habit of making suggestions about what
he
should do, rather than simply taking orders, but that was temporary. He suspected that his new partners still thought he was hopelessly dependent on them, but soon Marcel, the old man, and the guards would realize that they needed Hugh Sanderson much more than he needed them. The venture could not expand without the capital, without the equipment and transport that he provided. The nature of their enterprise had briefly created the illusion that the normal dynamic had been derailed, that the man with the money had become the desperate one. But the man with the money would soon be regaining control.
The guards and Marcel were now standing in the anteroom to
Sanderson’s office at the mansion. On a low coffee table Tall Guard placed a plastic grocery bag containing something in the shape of a small brick. Barrel Guard and Marcel stood behind Tall Guard, watching Sanderson unwrap the parcel.
The brick was
a stack of money, all fifty- and hundred-euro notes. Marcel and the guards must have gone to a bank and swapped their small change for big bills, just so they could impress the boss with a more substantial-looking package.
It worked. Sanderson was plenty impressed, particularly considering that some had probably been skimmed off the top already. He riffled the bills and guessed the sum came to forty- or fifty-thousand euro.
“Fifty-two thousand euro,” Marcel said. “In only four days.”
Sanderson nodded. “And, as I understand it, the only reason I didn’t see a stack like this last week or the week before was because of expenses.”
Barrel Guard looked at Marcel, listened to a couple of words in French, then turned back to Sanderson. “A lot of expenses, sir. On gasoline, on the big refrigerator, on repairs to the truck after somebody at the campground smashed the windshield.”
“So we made enough to cover all those expenses just last week
and the week before, and we’ve made fifty-two grand in the first half of this week.” Sanderson beamed at his guests. “Gentlemen, this is fantastic.”
“And even more good news,” Marcel said. “The females is popping!”
“Pregnant ones?” Sanderson asked. “The babies are coming out?”
“That’s right, sir,” Barrel Guard said. “There were a few born early on because the mothers were already pregnant when we caught them, but these new babies are the first ones that we know were made in the cages.”
Sanderson understood. Not only could the animals be born in captivity; they could conceive in captivity, too. That was very good.
Barrel Guard said. “Some were two at a time. I think it is because we feed them very much. They like living in the cages because they don’t have to find food. They just wait. The ones we caught already pregnant, they gave us only one baby at a time. But most of
the others are doubles.”
“Then keep feeding them a lot,” Sanderson said. “What’s it been? How many months?”
“The old man and his partners caught the first ones back when they were clearing the road into the camp,” Barrel Guard said. “I think it has been six months now.”
“How many new ones have…popped?” Sanderson asked, wondering where Marcel, with his awful English, had picked up that expression.
“Eight babies come from five females in the last three weeks,” the big guard said.
Marcel added,
“And maybe more soon, but sometimes is hard to tell. They live in the dark, and when we put light in the cages, they….” He pantomimed an animal recoiling, hiding its head with its forelegs. “But when they are getting really big, then you can see. Maybe six or seven more mamas already getting big now.”
Now the pieces fell into place, and Hugh realized what the next step had to be.
CHAPTER SEVEN
A day
after she sent her sketches to the curious person in Oakland, Amy finally found a reply in her inbox. The guy had sent some images of his own, and when she opened them, a thousand questions stampeded through her mind. Did the guy know what kind of animals these drawings were meant to be? Where had he come by these pictures? Why were they done in those archaic styles?
When
had they been done? Why were some of the animals dressed up? Why were others so elaborately chained?
This was her animal, alright, but the quality of the drawings couldn’t have been further from her clumsy sketches. The artwork reminded her of a coffee-table book someone had given her mother, a collection of animal illustrations created centuries before modern taxonomy. She recalled luscious colors and exquisite calligraphy, letters that swooped and curled, strings of words forming circles or spiraling around the creature
they described. The drawings in front of her now were not so lavishly decorated, but they were striking.
Far too excited not to call the
phone number listed in the email right away, she pulled a disposable cell phone from her daypack and dialed. A groggy voice answered. Within ten minutes she had recounted her experience at the logging camp, and a guy named Steve had told her a story about a colonial mission in Mexico, a story that involved his…well, it sounded like
stealing
centuries-old documents and artwork. If that was true, he was taking one hell of a chance in telling a complete stranger about it.
“Bought a disposable cell phone just for this purpose, and used a public computer to email you earlier,” he explained. “But I initiated contact, not you. I really don’t think you’re a federal agent.”
“And I’ll assume you’re not a goon from the logging company.”
“
Thanks,” he said. “And congratulations: you’re the fourth living person to have set eyes on these images. You’re also are the only one anywhere to have seen both the pictures and the real thing. Have you smelled them, too?”
“What?”
Steve was silent for a moment, then seemed to be reading aloud. “A stench like that of the wild carnivore’s den, of a badly kept stable, or of the small beasts of this New World that expel a foul mist to blind the attacking dog.” His tone changed back to a conversational one. “I’m translating from seventeenth-century Spanish. The small beasts in that last line are probably skunks. Does that sound about right? Something like skunk and urine and a generally sharp, dirty animal smell?”
Amy thought about the odor that had assaulted her in the truck cab, right after something grabbed her shoulder through the window. And there had been a very fleeting whiff of something nasty when she was looking over the pile of bushmeat a day and a half later.
Stephen said, “Another source says it’s somewhere between rotten flesh and an unwashed man.”
“That’s right. I hadn’t mentioned the smell to anyone.” She took a long breath. “So, Steve
, how are these animals connected with Mexico?”
“It looks as though a small group of colonial clergy had quite a bit to do with the
creatures for a while. Long before that – before the discovery of the New World – people had been raising them in Europe. The pieces in this collection date from about the thirteenth to the eighteenth century.”
“How can you tell?”
“Language usage and lettering style sometimes make it easy to date written material. I was a history major, focusing on the Spanish Conquest, and I also had to know a lot about the centuries leading up to the Conquest, so I’ve got pretty fair knowledge of certain parts of the Middle Ages. Plus I took a shine to paleography, which is a fancy way to say reading very old writing.”
“You said someone had been raising these animals,” she said. “Were they domesticated?”
“I don’t know about domesticated, but they were kept. They were cared for and bred by people specially trained for the task. They maintained painstaking records of each animal’s pedigree. It looks like bloodlines were very important to anyone who bought or sold them.”
“
But how did all that medieval material end up in Mexico along with the colonial stuff?”
“As a matter of fact, I believe I’ve just worked that out.”
Steve sounded rather proud of himself. “I think the colonial and the earlier pieces were all kept in the same archive somewhere in Europe. Someone stole it all and was threatening to use it to fan anti-colonial sentiment in New Spain. There’s a note that looks like a kind of cover letter for the whole package, written in the late 1700s. I don’t have it in front of me, but it goes something like:
‘Brother, here is what you asked for. My rather poor copies of its contents have been sent where you wished. I trust you know what to do with these if the presentation of my copy fails to forestall the deportation.’
The mention of a deportation must have referred to the Jesuits – they got kicked out of all Catholic countries for several decades, and they were also kicked out of all of those countries’ colonies. The southern part of Baja was the last place in the New World they were expelled from when their order was suppressed.”
The guy was practically hyperventilating with excitement, and Amy had to ask him to slow down. This was far more information than she’d ever expected to get in response to Caroline Yi’s inquiries, and of a very different sort.
“I think I’m missing something here,” she said. “How would exposing something about these animals have helped the Jesuits prevent this action against them?”
“That’s part of what I don’t know yet. But they apparently believed that exposure would embarrass either the Church, or the Spanish Crown, or both. Mexico was only a few decades from independence at the time, and if the colony had broken from Spain earlier, the Jesuits might have had a sanctuary in the New World. Maybe their plans involved hooking up with someone involved in the incipient independence movement; I don’t know
yet. And I haven’t figured out just what it was about our mystery animals that they thought would be so earth-shaking. But whatever they had in mind, it never panned out. The expulsion went ahead, right on schedule, and these drawings and letters were never retrieved from their hiding place in Baja.”
Amy looked at the image on her screen again. The animal looked even more like the creature she’d seen than her own sketch did. The artist absolutely must have seen the same kind of animal.
“What about the pictures with the dressed-up animals?” she asked. “How old are those?”
“
Various ages. There’s one with a caption explaining that the animals were clothed as part of a celebration. Someone important was finally becoming a grandfather, and his friends threw him a party. The furry creatures were part of the entertainment.”
“So they were, what, show animals?”
She heard a series of clinks like a spoon on a cup, then tiny beeps, then crackly interference.