Face to the Sun (5 page)

McMurtrie struck me, on no evidence but the wrong half of a telephone conversation, as the sort of highly intelligent Scot who adopted, when he chose, the imperturbability of
English convention. I decided to talk to him. We each had information which would be of interest to the other, and I was sure that for the sake of his wife and mother-in-law he would not inform the
police.

I called him next day at the Hyde Park Hotel, saying that I had been present when he spoke to Lady McMurtrie the day before and would much appreciate a word with him. He did not hesitate and
fixed an appointment for the evening. Evidently, Carlota had given Harry a good character or at any rate assured him that Harry had no more interest in blackmail.

I had expected Sir Hector to be something of the Latin American adventurer. I was quite wrong. He was fair-haired, bald on top and had the cheerful striding appearance of an active farmer
combined with the unmistakeable self-confidence of a university don.

We settled down over drinks and I gave him shortly and shamelessly the story to date.

‘I cannot condemn you. My own morality is no better,’ he said. ‘I accept, through my wife, a considerable allowance from General Heredia which is most useful since I myself
have no capital to support my hobby of archaeology beyond some worthless square miles of hill farming. So my conscience is raw, because I would rather see him before a firing-squad than cash his
cheques. At the same time, I cannot help admiring my mother-in-law though she is composed of nothing but flutterings and vanity.’

‘May I ask how you met her daughter?’

‘Working in the Malpelo Museum. The General, I think, was impressed by the respectability of a British archaeologist and thought a baronet sat in the House of Lords and could influence the
Foreign Office when there was a row with them.’

He went on to explain that I had certainly been kidnapped by a wholly inexperienced cell of Los Retadores messing about in London to keep an eye on United States propaganda which insisted that
Heredia’s opponents were all communists. Felipe Montes, the first chap who interviewed me, was a left-wing idealist and a polo player. From my description, Sir Hector said, he seemed to have
taken a commando course before joining the London cell. The thug, whose head I had used as a battering-ram, passed as a porter and was probably glad to have something to do. The silvery voice
undoubtedly belonged to Teresa, a deadly little piece who fascinated our newspaper men but was more at home in the mountains with a Kalashnikov. She’d be ready to dynamite Claridge’s if
it was the only way of keeping the Punchao out of Heredia’s hands.

‘But is it really so important?’ I asked. ‘After all, it’s only a scaled-down copy.’

‘Think of it as an ensign like the swastika or the Red Cross. It’s seventeenth-century work and the Spanish or Italian genius who made it had the original in front of him.’

‘You think it had not been melted down with the other golden treasures of the Incas?’

‘There are hordes of Indians and mestizos who believe that it was not. I was always amazed how groups around it in the museum were hypnotised by it. It was theirs, you see, their own art,
the emblem of the godhead of the ancestors. If my father-in-law can identify it with his government, he’ll die in his bed.’

‘Is there any way we can get it back so that he doesn’t know that Doña Juana walked off with it?’

‘What’s this?’ he laughed. ‘You seem more interested in saving my mother-in-law from the consequences of her folly than in democracy for Malpelo. Well, I might be able to
put it back in its museum case, but what’s the good? Juana must put it back exactly where she found it. And only she can describe where that was. Heredia does not know yet that it is missing.
He’s reviewing troops in the north – so we have time.’

‘Were you a curator at the museum?’

‘Lord, no! I was studying the canals which once led the streams from the High Andes down to the coast.’

‘Then you are not directly interested in the Punchao?’

‘Let me put it frankly. Los Retadores would not hesitate to destroy that divine, mystical beauty for the sake of politics. I’m damned if I let them. But that means I am helping to
keep Heredia in power. Why? Because some of the money he steals from the people goes to support my mother-in-law, my wife and myself. We are both thieves, my dear Mr
What’s-your-Name.’

‘When is the next flight to Malpelo?’

‘Tomorrow night. She is quite safe till then. Claridge’s police and the Embassy have been warned of a possible plot to steal that tiara. I know the house where you were detained. The
tenants are plain exiled citizens of Malpelo and nothing is known against them. But I will see they are watched. And somebody from the Embassy will be at Heathrow to see her and any parcels through
Customs.’

‘And when she arrives will the Retadores know that she may be carrying the Punchao?’ I asked.

‘Yes, of course.’

‘What excuse can she give for leaving so soon after arrival?’

‘She heard of the cell of Retadores and was afraid of assassination.’

I asked him if there was in fact any such risk.

‘Very unlikely. Heredia’s vengeance would be appalling. There are better chances of grabbing the Punchao before it’s back in its place. Imagine the fuss on her arrival!
Functionaries, footmen, and, in her private apartments, a troop of lady’s maids! She is going to find it hard to enter her husband’s office, and may offer a dozen chances for the
Punchao to disappear in the crowd. That’s why I am travelling with her. Why don’t you come too as a friend and colleague of mine? I’ll pay your fare and when you come home I
promise to find you a job and you can invest your two hundred thousand without a care in the world.’

Apparently, Juana had accepted Hector’s explanation that they needed a second guard and that I was the only desperado who knew the whole story and could be trusted to keep his mouth shut.
It was a tempting offer. I replied that I might accept it if he would tell me what earthly use I would be to him in Malpelo.

‘Rather like the conjurer’s stooge. There is sure to be a moment when dear Juana plays the fool with the Punchao, and I may need help to make it disappear.’

‘I don’t want to be thrown in with the state jaguars.’

‘You’d have their whiskers off them before they noticed it. Give me your passport and I’ll have it visaed as my assistant.’

I was stupidly alarmed at giving away my identity. He appreciated my hesitation and pointed out that there could be no conceivable connection between his old archaeological pal and black
crocodile bags. Only two of the London Retadores had seen my face long enough to recognise it. One of them was almost certainly in hospital, and the other, Felipe Montes, would be politely detained
at the consulate at the time when passengers to Malpelo checked in.

So I handed over my passport. He read off my real name, Edmond Hawkins, and asked:

‘Any relation to the great admiral?’

‘Direct descent on the wrong side of the blanket.’

‘Splendid! It’s time there was another Hawkins to raise hell on the Spanish Main.’

At the airport there had been no sign of my kidnappers and I settled down comfortably with absolute confidence that nobody had any interest in tracing the Edmond Hawkins,
obscurely arrived from Africa, even as far as Gower Street, let alone Malpelo. I was sitting next to Hector McMurtrie with Doña Juana in front of us with a row to herself. She was carrying a
large and luxurious box of chocolates which she placed on the rack immediately above her seat where we two could also keep an eye on it. Hector spent much of the flight briefing me – since I
was to pass as an archaeologist – with some elementary facts about the politics of Central America and the cultural influence of the great civilisations of Mexico and Peru.

We arrived just in time. President Cayetano Heredia was expected to return to his capital next morning, having scattered the
guerrilleros
into the mountain forests, burned their villages
and turned his troops loose on their women who struggled behind the rearguard, weighed down by pots, pans, bedding and babies. Well, my African had fathered his country by the same methods and the
result was stark peace. For such peace, how high a price is justified?

Heredia was not modest when exhibiting his power. The airport was lit up. A squadron of cavalry was lined up below the steps of the aircraft to welcome and escort his wife. Hector assured me
that he and I would be expected to join the party and we were ushered to a second car, behind Juana’s, surrounded by the glittering men and polished horses of the escort. I could understand
that the city was so impressed by shows of such presidential magnificence that it forgot the anger and anarchy of the mountains.

I checked in at the chief hotel and then joined Juana and her son-in-law, who was naturally staying at the palace, for a triumphant glass of champagne in her private apartment. She cleared out
her personal staff and when the three of us were alone said with her most winning and still girlish giggle:

‘Now it’s time for us to have a chocolate.’

‘You’d better visit his office alone,’ Hector advised. ‘I noticed that when we passed the President’s office there was an armed guard on the door and if he knows
his job he won’t let Edmond Hawkins in.’

‘He will do what I tell him,’ Doña Juana said superbly. ‘But perhaps it would be easier for him if Mr Hawkins stops here in the room. We shall not, I hope, be more than
a minute.’

She rose from her chair with what the Hollywood of her youth believed was majesty, flourished a key and with the chocolate box under her arm made for the door followed by Hector. Meanwhile, I
amused myself by inspecting the portraits of three early twentieth-century presidents and one of Cayetano Heredia. I did not expect such a contrast. Heredia stood in field uniform against a
background of happy peasants in a neat village. His face was a military mask revealing only the inevitability of such content and prosperity under his command. The other three were all sashed and
frock-coated, one sitting at his desk, one presiding over an admiring congress, one merely standing gracefully at some kind of civic reception – all with the thin-lipped faces of grandees of
Spain, unintelligent perhaps, but obedient to the rules of Religion and Law.

I turned round to face Juana, a suddenly pathetic sight like a partly inflated, wrinkled balloon, and a Hector with a set face no longer coloured by the wind and sun of the Scottish moors. So
far as I remember his words, here they are:

‘Yes, that chocolate box had been carefully packed and the Punchao del Dia intact and beautiful. I could swear that the circle of little suns winked at us. It had been standing upright in
a domed glass case – the sort of case they use to display some rare stuffed bird – and that was contained in a wooden cabinet pillared and hand-carved with the heads of little
beasts.

‘Well, Juana unlocked the cabinet, lifted the glass case and put the Punchao back, expecting it to stand up,’ he went on. ‘But it would not; it fell flat. It had no base to
stand on. She looked to me for help and the supposed masculine skill with metals and gravity. I couldn’t see how the hell it ever did stand up, and told her to try to remember exactly how it
had been when she took it away. She hadn’t seen that there was any problem. Now that she thought about it, she believed it stood on two lower rays of the sun. That was impossible. The rays
were not thick enough and their points were fine. I supposed that it had somehow been held upright by the glass case and I looked for a hole in the side or back of the Punchao where some tiny
support could have been. No sign. Then a protrusion or a hole in the base where it had stood? I asked Juana if she was sure that it was upright and was answered by a mother-in-law’s standard
look of contempt.

‘I ran my fingers over the base to feel for any sort of support which eyes had failed to see. Nothing. Then, as a wild theory, a magnet in the wooden cabinet? But a magnet wouldn’t
work on gold. By God, I began to think that the Punchao still had some mystical power until I remembered that it was only a model of the original. Well, we closed the wooden cabinet, leaving the
Punchao on the floor of the inner glass case, and locked the door of the office. I explained to the sentry that Juana’s wails were due to anxiety for her gallant husband.’

Well, if Hector couldn’t find the solution it was unlikely that I could; in their desperation, however, they looked for advice from Hawkins, the Government Analyst or Hawkins, the
accomplished thief. I suggested that the only course was for Juana to admit that she had longed to take a close look at the Punchao – just curiosity which killed the cat – had taken it
in her hands and couldn’t put it back as it was. Would darling Cayetano tell her how it stood upright? Innocent enough story which would also account for her fingerprints if he wanted them
taken.

‘What about yours and Carlota’s?’ Hector said to me.

‘If you or Doña Juana have recovered enough to warn me when he is thinking of calling in an expert from the police, I shall be over the frontier and you won’t see me for
dust.’

‘Which frontier? You’ll need a mule for most of them.’

‘Kindly leave me one tied up ready in the hotel patio.’

I said the usual exaggerated farewells to Juana and took the official car to my hotel, and much needed sleep.