Authors: Nero Newton
PART TWO
CHAPTER ONE
THREE YEARS AGO…
Stephen tried to catch the parchment that had slipped out of the plastic cover, but it kept changing directions like a falling leaf and finally hit the tabletop edgewise, snapping into six pieces.
He eased the fragments back into the clear folder as gently as he could, and for a final few seconds admired the tightly packed
rotunda
lettering and the sadly fractured drawing. Mario took the folder from him and slid it into an ordinary manila envelope that already looked overstuffed. The envelope went onto a growing stack.
“Mario, you can’t do this.”
No answer.
Stephen looked at the material spread out on the table, hoping to fix some of it into his memory. A low-wattage bulb gave the room a candlelit appearance, but
even in dim light the images were striking. Richly colored pieces showed the animals dressed in elegant, courtly clothing, but restrained with chains and metal collars. Below them was a detailed rendering of a skeleton with long hind feet like a kangaroo and enormous eye sockets that belonged to something nocturnal.
Gone. Into another envelope, and Stephen thought he heard a faint crunch.
Out on the patio, just before sunset, Mario had shown him a line drawing of the same sort of creature bound to a post atop a mound of firewood. That drawing had been an appetizer, and this table should have been a weekend-long feast, but the bobbing lights in the distance had put an end to that plan.
Stephen turned to look out the open doorway and saw the headlights vanish and reappear twice.
“They seem close,” Mario said, “but don’t forget all those hairpin turns and the two hills they’ll need to go around. We’ve got about fifteen minutes before I have to chase you out of here.”
More plastic folders went into envelopes.
Most of the texts were in fairly modern scripts, pretty much what Stephen had expected from the colonial period, but there were also spiky gothic forms that long predated the Spanish Conquest. Mario hadn’t mentioned anything like that in his phone call. There was stuff here from the Middle Ages, all packed off to Mexico for some reason and sealed within the masonry of the mission floor.
A stony knot in Stephen’s gut grew tighter. He was finally seeing what had pulled him a thousand miles down the map and up into the desert mountains of southern Baja, and now Mario was not only packing the prize out of sight, but wrecking it in the process.
Thick vellum that had once been pliable, sturdy, and expensive was now bone dry and buckling. Most vulnerable was the paper, which meant nearly all of the colonial pieces. No way could antique paper stand up to this treatment.
“It…the material’s brittle,” Stephen croaked. “You’ve probably shattered half of it already. See?” He pointed to the disintegrating top edge of a faded monochrome drawing.
“It’s a little late to worry about that.” Mario reached right over Stephen’s arm to gather up more items. “I don’t think they believed my story that all I found was a handful of old letters.”
Anything small enough to fit in a transparent folder was already in one, and that provided some protection, but Mario should never even have touched the stuff. He’d hidden it so Stephen could come and take a look before it all got handed over to the authorities, and in the two weeks since Mario’s phone call, Stephen had been more anxious for summer vacation than his sixth-graders. Now he wished his friend had just followed the rules and called in the experts, who would have handled the material with white cotton gloves, placed it in shock-free containers for transportation, and stored it in a
tightly controlled environment. Exposure to the wrong temperature or level of humidity, even for a short time, would damage the material irreparably.
Somehow the experts had heard about the find after all. The word had gotten from the local grapevine all the way to Mexico City, to the
Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia,
and they’d called Father Mario Torres with a lot of questions just before Stephen arrived.
“They wanted to know why I’d pulled it out of the rubble myself in the first place,” Mario had explained. “I told them I didn’t want to slow down repairs to the foundation, now that a work crew was finally here.”
And tonight it looked like the
Instituto Nacional
intended to surprise Mario, showing up a few days earlier than they’d said they would. Probably with a couple of
Federales
. If they learned how much he’d really found, they would never believe that he had some innocent reason for not reporting it right away.
Stephen glanced through the doorway again but couldn’t spot the headlights.
From behind a set of shelves, Mario produced a suitcase as big as him and probably older. He opened it on the tabletop, and Stephen’s gut gave another twist when he saw more stacks of envelopes. The freshly packaged items went on top of them.
“This is everything they won’t see,” Mario said, and snapped the suitcase shut. “I’m holding on to some pretty interesting things to show my visitors when they get here. A couple of landscape drawings with views of the mission when it was only half built, and there really are a few letters from a monk’s relatives in Andalusia. I might be able to convince them there was nothing else.”
“Where are you going to hide the rest?”
“In the trunk of your car, with you at the wheel, rolling down a little path that begins behind the house. After five or six kilometers, it connects with the same road you drove up today.”
Stephen felt a crawly contraction of flesh below the waist. He was twenty-nine, and Mario had to be over sixty, but Mario always managed to make him feel like a fussy old professor being goaded into something risky.
A few hours ago, he had been skittish at the sight of an empty police jeep parked in the little village surrounding the old Spanish mission, uncomfortable just knowing that a friend of his possessed these treasures. Now Mario wanted him to…well, steal them. And smuggle them out of the country.
Back home, most of Stephen’s friends were not fellow teachers from the middle school, but other amateur paleographers who shared his obsession with archaic texts. He would have gladly helped send someone to jail for doing what Mario had just asked of him.
Sweat flooded down from his scalp in spite of the dry air
. His dense, dark brown beard itched like crazy.
“If you’re so determined not to hand them over,” he said, “then why not just stash them somewhere?”
Mario shook his head. “They’re going to ransack this place, my friend. They’re concerned about people selling artifacts.” He patted the suitcase. “Imagine the value of this on the black market.”
“You’re kidding. You’re the parish priest, for Christ’s sake.”
“I’m also a rabble-rouser from the Guatemalan civil wars, and there are people in this diocese who would like to see me boiled in oil. If they’re the ones who told INAH that I’d found something, you can bet they’ve painted me with horns and fangs.”
Mario grasped the suitcase handle in one tough old hand, pulled it off the table, and stumbled a couple of steps as it swung on his arm. Probably forty pounds there. Stephen imagined all those envelopes sliding and slamming to a halt, their fragile contents crumbling. They probably looked like smashed cornflakes by now.
The older man put his free hand around Stephen’s arm and led him outside to the car. A breeze had picked up, and the whole hillside rustled in its scratchy, brittle, desert way.
“They’re probably close enough to hear the engine,” Mario said, “so just put it in neutral and roll. It’s solid downhill for three kilometers. Keep your lights off, too. There’s enough of a moon coming up for you to see where you’re going.”
Stephen sagged against his ancient Honda Civic.
Mario squeezed Stephen’s stress-hardened shoulders, opened the car door, and prodded him inside. “I didn’t mean for it to happen this way,” he said. “But here’s your choice: take the suitcase like I’ve suggested, or I throw it over the cliff this minute, and in the morning I hike down and burn it. I’m not going back to jail for this. If it were a matter of sheltering villagers from storm troopers again, I’d risk prison in a heartbeat, but not for this. I can’t blame you if you don’t want to take the risk, since I’m not willing to. But either way, you’ve got to leave now.”
Stephen could not have said whether he made his choice because he wanted to save the goods or because he didn’t want to chicken out in front of a guy who’d been thrown into Guatemalan jails half a dozen times under military rule, who’d had both his arms and most of his ribs busted by uniformed goons in the jungle highlands.
He felt his arm wetly push the gearshift to neutral.
“Drive south to La Paz,” Mario said. “Take the car ferry to the mainland and head home from there. Now go.”
The car was already pointing down a slight grade, and Stephen could see the trail straight ahead. He released the brake and crunched his way into darkness, startling a coyote just around the first big rock.
CHAPTER
TWO
Amy had begun to think she wouldn’t spend the rest of her life looking as though she’d been flogged. The long gouge and other scrapes on her back were already fading to pale pink lines. There might be some mottled scarring from when she’d been thrown on her side
by the big chimp, and the constellation of claw marks on her shoulder would probably be around for good, but that was all.
Now b
ack in Dakar, Senegal, she spent a lot of time in her sunny room in the same cheap flophouse she’d been staying at when Robert had dropped out of contact.
The place had no WiFi, free or otherwise, so most afternoons she would head for the CyberCafé Pirogue. The café took up the first floor of a building probably constructed in the 1920s. It had dim lighting and dark walls, which gave it the feeling of a basement dance club. The interior constantly smelled as though it had just been repainted, although no fresh paint was otherwise in evidence. The ancient windows were murky with a resinous amber smudge, and the ceiling fan never managed to blow away a layer of sawdust that covered the floor in a corner near
a small door that appeared to be lacquered shut. The darkness made the place cozy and anonymous, perfect for relaxing and tracing the impact of the photos and other files she’d sent out from Prospérité.
Barely a week after her return to Senegal, she typed her pseudonym, “Caroline Yi,” into a news-search engine and found over sixty links to English-language sites alone. The activist websites were already humming with talk of resurrecting the boycott that Sanderson Tropical Timber had narrowly avoided eighteen months earlier. Some green groups, the ones that had praised Sanderson’s voluntary reforms, had balked at first, but
others were coming around. Amy knew she had made this happen, and that made it easier to think of her lacerations as battle scars.
Caroline Yi’s story about a strange animal carcass on
the logging truck had met with less enthusiasm. She’d posted a description of the creature on a site called PrimateWeb, which was a forum for primatologists, tropical forest ecologists, physical anthropologists, and any other professionals whose research involved primates.
After a week of checking responses to her request for help identifying the animal, Amy was glad she hadn’t used her real name.
The more polite comments on PrimateWeb were gentle suggestions that she’d seen a deformed monkey, or some other kind of carcass that had been so battered as to become unrecognizable. One person said she was probably sick with a tropical fever and had hallucinated it. Another recommended that she quit sneaking handfuls of the medicine man’s magic bark.
So screw th
em all if they couldn’t see that she was handing them what might be the find of a lifetime. Let someone else rediscover the creatures in the future and take the credit, instead of these skeptics. She had other things to think about.
Now that she’d done some damage to Sanderson Tropical Timber,
and her wetlands work here in Senegal was done, she could forget about Sanderson and Equateur and put her time to different use. For starters, there was a group of Mexican and U.S. activists working hard to slow down commercial overfishing in the Sea of Cortez. Amy had helped them out before, and it looked like they were hurting for cash to keep up the fight. She planned to meet with their organizers once she got back to California, and she would head back there as soon as her battered face looked a little less shocking.
CHAPTER
THREE
In a less than affluent patch of Oakland, Stephen Stokes’s cats woke him up and complained that breakfast was late.
He couldn’t remember what he’d just been dreaming, but knew it had something to do with his friend Mario Torres, so it probably involved little devil-monkeys creeping out of basements in the desert. Some nights he dreamed of seeing them appear in corners of the rented storage space that his nieces called the “orange garage,” because of the color of its roll-down door. The orange garage was where he kept the hardly-explored and partially-ruined bundle of drawings, letters, and documents from Baja.