The Moche Warrior

The burial ceremony is soon to begin. All is in readiness. The Great Warrior’s body is prepared, clothed in a shirt woven of the finest white cotton, his face painted red, color of blood, color of life.

In the huaca, the chamber is completed, walls lined with adobe bricks, the thick boards of the coffin floor already in place.

The others who will go with him on his journey, the women, dead long ago and bone brittle in their shrouds and cane coffins, are taken from the palace. Soon they will be placed in the tomb.

The fishermen and the sea lion warriors have come in from the sea with their spondylus shells and their offering vessels. They assemble at the foot of the huaca, in the great courtyard, surrounded by the murals of a thousand other ceremonies.

The procession of llamas, backpacks laden with conch shells, draws near. Iguana awaits them. The plumes of his bird headdress shimmer, his lizard face and almond eyes are watchful. The Decapitator also waits.

5

I was in Manhattan before ten the next morning. I’d left a brief note for Moira, walked out to Parliament Street, and hailed a cab for the airport. There I’d taken all the money the bank machine would let me have, not nearly enough as it turned out, and caught the first flight of the day to New York, boarding at the last minute and feeling like a fugitive, which I guess I was in some ways.

I suppose, looking back on what I did from that moment on, that a stranger could be forgiven for thinking that I, not Alex, was the one with the serious bump on the head. Be that as it may, irrationally or not, I did the only thing I could think of. I went to find the origin of the box of objects that I was convinced was at the root of all my problems. I had packed only a small carry-on bag, fully intending to be back in Toronto by early evening, before anyone, most particularly Sergeant Lewis, had noticed I was gone.

Ancient Ways Gallery was located on the West Side, close to the American Museum of Natural History. Cautiously I had the cab drive past it (there was no sign of life at the place at this hour) and then let me out at the museum. I’d called from the airport: A recording told me gallery hours were noon to six Tuesday to Friday, noon to five on Saturday. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Partly to kill time, and partly to do research—I was not, after all, in Manhattan to take in the sights—I went into the museum and headed for the Americas section.

The card had said that the stolen pot was a pre-Columbian replica. That covered a lot of territory. Even the words “made in Peru” on it didn’t narrow it down completely. The only Peruvian pre-Columbian civilization I knew anything about was the Inca, but I knew enough to understand that there had been lots of civilizations in that part of the world before the Inca empire had its heyday. I worked my way quickly through the Mexican and Central American sections, pausing just long enough to confirm that the pot, as I remembered it, didn’t fit there. The artifacts from South American cultures were located at the end of the section.

It took about an hour, but eventually I had a name I felt reasonably comfortable with. Just to make sure, I took a quick cab ride across Central Park to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and took in the art of the Americas section there as well. By the time I’d seen what there was to see there, I was convinced I was on the right track.

I went to the museum bookstore, purchased a couple of books on the subject, and headed for the café for a coffee, a muffin, and a quick read. I had what I wanted.

Moche.

The Moche, I learned, were a people who ruled over the north coast of Peru during the first 500 years of the Common Era, long before the Inca had ever been heard from. The empire stretched from the Piura Valley in the north to the Huarmey Valley in the south, from a capital city which is now called Cerro Blanco. The Moche culture is known in archaeological circles for its engineering feats, primarily the building of fabulous adobe pyramids and lengthy canals which brought water from the mountains to the coastal desert where their empire was located; its political mastery of a large area as one of the first definable states in that part of the world; and artistically for masterpieces of craftsmanship in pottery and metals.

There was now absolutely no question in my mind about it. I had seen with my own eyes pottery that matched the stolen pot in style and execution, and ear flares of gold and turquoise that were, to my untrained eye, identical in style to the little ear flare I had in my handbag. And if I needed further corroboration, I had it. The books I had purchased showed photographs of a magnificent necklace of gold and silver beads, each bead in the shape of a perfect peanut.

As carefully as I could, I took the little ear flare out of my bag to take a better look at it. The little gold man with his gold scepter stared back at me mutely. I turned the piece over and over again in my hand. “So what do you have to say for yourself?”‘ I softly asked the little man.

In my business, you learn to spot fakes. You have to. The point is that you can take as many courses about antiques as you like, and I have taken several, but when it comes right down to it, you just have to develop a sixth sense about objects. I’ve learned to look at furniture, for example, to look at the metal hardware, the way the boards are planed, the kinds of nails and other fastenings that are used. But a really good craftsman can fool even a museum curator, and in the end you rely on your gut on some of the things you see. Sometimes, even after you’ve checked out everything you can think of, objects still just don’t feel right, and, taught by an expert, my friend Sam Feldman, I’ve learned to go with this feeling.

Before he opened his own gallery, Sam was a museum conservator. He told me that in his early days at the institution, a mere neophyte, he’d gotten the feeling a particular artifact, the centerpiece in an exhibit, was a fake. He tried to tell the curator of the exhibit and was roundly chastised. On his last day of employment at the museum, now a noted expert in his field, he went back to the curator and told him again. Once again Sam was told he was wrong, but he found on his next casual visit to the museum that the offending piece had been removed from the exhibit. “You see!” he told his students. “I was right. They will never admit it, but I was right. That’s why you go with your gut.”

This time the process was reversed. This object was supposed to be a fake. Maybe it wasn’t.

The piece looked in pretty good condition for something that was at least 1500 years old. Generally I would have said it looked way too good. The gold was nice and shiny, and overall the piece was in very good repair. But there were places where the gold, probably hammered on, was worn away, and the turquoise inlay was not of a uniform color. Carefully I edged a fingernail into one of the cracks between the inlays. There was dirt, but I wasn’t sure that proved anything. A good forger would know enough to rub a little dirt into the piece.

The question was, where had my little friend been for 1500 years? If he’d been well cared for in a museum, that might explain his relatively pristine condition. Or if he’d been hidden away somewhere, in a tomb for example. This might explain it. The Moche lived in the coastal desert, and arid conditions would limit corrosion.

For a while I just sat there looking at him. He was really sweet, if it’s possible to say such a thing about a little gold man on a pre-Columbian ear flare. His eyes bulged out of carefully cut eye sockets, and around his neck he had a necklace, ceremonial I would have thought, made up of tiny heads: owls most likely. Each of the beads had been made separately, then strung together, so they moved when you touched them. The scepter could easily be removed from his hand. His sturdy little legs showed muscle markings that were quite extraordinary. Under his nose was an ornament in the shape of a crescent, and it too moved when you touched it. I thought you could easily imagine the body under the garments, and that my little man could even be said to have a personality.

I reached my conclusion, and I couldn’t really explain why I hadn’t done so before this, except, of course, that I’d purchased it from a reputable auction house. The point was, no one could afford to make such a little masterpiece these days, replica or not. No one could afford to forge it, either. And even if someone had the patience and time and resources to do so, most of us couldn’t afford to buy it. The vase and the peanut might or might not be genuine. I didn’t have them anymore, so I couldn’t say. This little man, however, was genuine Moche, and Edmund Edwards had some explaining to do.

Before I left the museum, I went into the gift shop and bought a large pin in a Celtic pattern. I asked the saleswoman for a box—a big box—for it, saying it was a gift. She was very obliging in finding the right size box. On the steps outside, I put the brooch on my shirt and took the little gold man, carefully wrapped in tissue, and put him into the box with the card identifying it as a reproduction Celtic brooch. It wouldn’t fool anyone who knew anything whatsoever, but I was getting nervous walking around with this potentially very valuable antiquity in my purse.

By ten to twelve I was in position across the street and down a bit from Ancient Ways. It was a very warm August day in Manhattan, and it felt as if rain, perhaps a thunderstorm, would soon blow through. About five minutes to noon, an older man, grey of hair and unsteady of gait, shuffled down the street and opened the security gate with some difficulty. He had on way too many clothes for the heat of the day, as older people often do. It looked from that distance as if he had seriously arthritic hands and knees. He opened the door, but closed it immediately behind him, and the closed sign remained hanging in the door for several minutes.

Finally, at about twenty after twelve, he came and unlocked the front door, and turned the sign around to show the place was open for business. I crossed the street and entered.

Even by my standards of housekeeping, which let’s just say will never earn me a Nancy Neatness Award, the place was a mess. The carpet was old and worn, and quite frankly dirty. The desk at the back, where the old man sat, was covered in junk, papers strewn haphazardly about, coffee stains on his invoice book and everything else. He fit right in: His jacket looked as if it had gravy stains on the lapel, and his hair, what was left of it, was unkempt and unclean. Under his jacket, he wore a grey knit vest, a moth hole prominently featured. As I stood there, the phone rang, and the old man pushed stacks of paper around to find it. By the time he’d located it, on the floor under the desk, it had stopped ringing.

The merchandise was impressive enough, what you could see of it. Glass cases lined the walls, each of them packed with treasures. On top of each of the cases were various objects too large to be placed within: some very impressive African sculptures, including what looked to be a Benin bronze figure, and some really lovely wood carvings. There was no particular theme that I could see, except that everything was old, very old, and to my eye at least, authentic. In the middle of the room was a large table, also piled high with merchandise.

I idly picked up a small figure, a lovely little blue faience statue about six inches high, and had a closer look. It was, I knew, a ushabti, a representation of a deceased person, probably one of some importance, that would have been placed in an Egyptian tomb many hundreds if not thousands of years ago, to be a servant of sorts to the deceased. It is always fascinating to hold a few thousand years of history in the palm of your hand, but one always has to ask the question in these circumstances: Is it legal? I turned the figure over. On the back were tiny little numbers in black ink: museum catalogue number, I thought. Possibly deaccessioned, possibly not.

I turned toward the desk to see the proprietor’s eyes, almost hidden behind thick, thick glasses, focused on me. On the wall behind him were a couple of old prints and right over his head an extraordinary blade mounted on black fabric and framed in gold. It was not a knife as we know it, with a thin blade and handle. Rather it was one piece, almost bell-shaped, with a thick handle that led to a crescent-shaped blade. It was about six inches high, gold in color, with a string of tiny turquoise beads threaded through a hole in the handle. It was, I was almost certain, a tumi, a ceremonial blade used by the ancient peoples of Peru, perhaps for sacrificial purposes.

“Hi,” I said, moving over to the desk. “Are you Edmund Edwards?”

“Who wants to know?” he asked irritably.

I handed him my business card. I don’t know why I did that, exactly, other than that I felt I had to establish my credentials before proceeding. It was a gesture, however, that in retrospect I would come to regard with profound regret. The old man looked at the card very carefully, then peered back at me. “I’m a dealer from Toronto,” I said, just in case he was unable to read the card. “I’m in New York on a buying trip for a client of mine, who shall, if you don’t mind, remain nameless.”

“Anything in particular you’re interested in?” he asked, apparently satisfied.

“My client collects pre-Columbian art almost exclusively,” I replied.

“Big field. Hard to get. Expensive,” he replied.

“Money is no object here,” I said. He opened a small card case of the recipe box variety and thumbed laboriously through it, peering at each card myopically. The box was overstuffed, and at one point, as he tried to pull a card up, several of them flew up and scattered across the desk. Finally, he arose from his chair with some difficulty and shuffled over to the table in the middle of the room. There did not appear to be any particular system for cataloguing what he had, but he seemed to know where everything was. He started to look under the table, leaning heavily on the side of it, but wasn’t up to the task.

“Under there,” he grunted. “In the middle. The stone. Part of a stela from Copan. Nice piece.”

I bent down and pulled the object out from under the table. It was a very heavy stone piece, beautifully carved, and it was probably what he said it was, I decided: Maya, from Copan. I also decided that he shouldn’t have had it.

“Very nice,” I said, “but…”

“Or this,” he said, opening one of the glass cabinets and removing a splendid terra-cotta of an Aztec god, also probably authentic.

“Very nice as well,” I said. “However, my client has a specific interest. Moche. Anything Moche: terracotta, metals. Do you ever come across that kind of thing?”

“Very hard to get,” he mumbled.

“Well, yes,” I said. “That’s why I’m here. A.J. Smythson sent me. From Toronto. Do you remember him? Anton James Smythson?”

The phone rang again, and the old man started shuffling around looking for it.

“It’s on the floor,” I said. “Under the desk.” He just looked at me. “The phone,” I said. Light dawned, and the old man leaned over. The phone stopped ringing as he grasped it and wheezed into the old headset. The caller had evidently hung up again. Once again he turned to a second card box and started rifling through it. I decided he was not looking for objects this time, he was checking the name Smythson. He paused at a card. This is hopeless, I thought.

“How is Anton?” he asked at last.

Oh, dear, I thought, what now? “Not quite as peppy as he used to be,” I replied.

“Not many of us are,” he said. That was true, of course, but most of us were a little more energetic than A. J. Smythson at this very moment, even Edmund Edwards.

“No, I guess not,” I replied. We looked at each other. Already I knew more about Edwards than I had a few moments ago: He wasn’t a close friend of Smythson. Sam Feldman had told me Smythson’s friends called him A. J., not Anton. “Anton told me you were once able to get him some Moche. You mailed him a couple of pieces, three actually, in with some other stuff, a couple of years ago.”

The old man looked very wary now. “Don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “It’s illegal. Moche. Can’t take it out of Peru.”

“As I said, that’s why I’m here,” I said, giving him what I hoped was a conspiratorial look. “How about that tumi?” I said, pointing to the blade on the wall behind the desk. “Is that Moche, or later, Inca, maybe?” I asked, trying to sound somewhat knowledgeable.

He looked me up and down. The phone rang again. “Come back later,” he ordered. “About three.”

There did not seem to be much else I could do. “The floor,” I called back to him as I left the shop. “The phone is on the floor.”

It’s not often I would comment on the freshness of the air in New York, but after a few minutes in that shop, even the oppressively heavy air of the city felt good. As I turned back to look at the shop, I could see the old man at the door. He changed the sign to closed and locked the door behind him. I watched for a few minutes, but the closed sign remained firmly in place. Either he kept the world’s shortest business hours, or I’d upset Edmund Edwards.

It was by now about one p.m., and I had a couple of hours to kill. I turned back toward Central Park West, determined to find somewhere to have lunch, in the park perhaps. I found a bench to perch on for a few minutes while I figured out where to go. As I sat there I watched a middle-aged woman dressed up in what appeared to be a Viking costume, a long plait of blond hair tumbling from a helmet with plastic horns on it, harangue passersby. Some Norse cult apparently. She was suggesting that we repent our sins, most notably by offering her money, I gathered, so that we’d all go up to heaven when the end of the world, now very imminent, came upon us. How nice, I thought, just like home.

As I idly looked about me, I was very surprised to see the old man shuffling across the street. He hadn’t come from the direction I would have expected, which probably only meant there was a back door to his shop. Cautiously I arose from the seat and, keeping well back, began to follow him.

As we both shuffled along, I began to feel really silly. It was difficult for me to move slowly enough that I didn’t catch up with him, and he stopped frequently and looked behind him, forcing me to turn and pretend I was going the other way. The only thing that was saving me, I thought, was his vision, which judging from his glasses, which looked like the proverbial pop bottle bottoms, was not very good.

After a block or two, he turned into the park, and I did the same. It was easier here. There were lots of people just strolling along, and the trees afforded me some cover. Finally the old man stopped and sat down on a bench. He took a bag from his pocket and started throwing crumbs in the general direction of a couple of birds.

Wonderful, I thought. Here I am in Manhattan, one of the most fabulous cities in the world, and instead of lunching somewhere elegant, I’m hiding behind a tree, watching an old man with bad eyes and flat feet feed pigeons. I felt like a fool. What I really should be doing, I knew, was flying home before the Toronto police figured out I had left.

I started to leave and indeed had traveled several yards in the opposite direction before something made me turn back. I saw that someone had come over to the old man and, standing with his back to me, was leaning over to talk to him. I wondered if this was a coincidence, or if the old man had arranged to meet someone. And if this meeting was planned, had it anything to do with my visit to the shop?

Suddenly the visitor straightened up and turned to look around him. I pulled back to where I hoped I couldn’t be seen. What I saw made me at once nervous, but also certain I was onto something. It was the man who’d reminded me of a spider when I’d last seen him, lurking behind a potted palm at Molesworth Cox and watching as Lizard, now deceased, had tried to buy the box of what was supposed to have been junk, but which might have been almost priceless treasure. If the Spider was here, and talking to Edmund Edwards, a return visit to Ancient Ways was definitely called for.

I found a cafe for a bit of lunch and did a little more reading on the Moche while I waited. Shortly before three I was back in position across the road from the gallery. The closed sign was still in the door.

About three-thirty, the closed sign hadn’t moved, and I was beginning to get impatient in the oppressive air. I walked across the street and tried the door, but it was locked. I couldn’t see inside. I decided to take a bit of a walk to try to find the back entrance, which I was certain must exist because of where I’d seen Edwards, and eventually found an alleyway. I’d counted the doorways from the corner, so I was able to conclude which building was Ancient Ways. All the others had gates that were securely locked, but the gate to the back door of the gallery was slightly ajar. I walked in. The back door was closed but not locked, and I knocked a couple of times before opening it and calling inside. “Is there anyone here? Mr. Edwards?” I called out.

I stepped inside. I was in a tiny vestibule, beside a flight of stairs leading to the second floor, the wall of which blocked my view of the desk at the back of the showroom. I noticed a security system panel inside the door, and a red light was flashing. Did that mean I’d just tripped the alarm? If I had, it was a silent one. Indeed, the store was eerily silent, considering the noise of the busy city outside. I could hear an old clock ticking away, and as I looked toward the window in the front, dust motes swirled in the light.

I listened very carefully. There was no other sound. How careless to go out and leave the back door open like this, I thought. There were some quite lovely pieces hidden amongst the junk, and it struck me that leaving the back door open was an even poorer idea in New York than it was in Toronto, and I knew firsthand just what a bad idea it was in Toronto. “Mr. Edwards?” I called out again. It occurred to me that perhaps he was a little deaf, so I called out even louder. Nothing.

I took three or four steps forward into the showroom.

What I saw then I will never forget as long as I live, a ghastly little tableau that will remain with me forever: Edmund Edwards was dead, throat slit. Blood had spattered across the desk and onto the carpet in front of it. An overturned teacup had spilled its contents, and the tea and the blood had mingled, creating little rivers of brownish pink all over the desk. There was no need to wonder about the weapon that had been used for this atrocity. The gold tumi, wrenched from its mounting, was gone.

I felt as if I’d been standing there for some time, unable to tear my eyes away from the awful sight, but it was probably only for a few seconds. I was pulled back to reality by the tiniest of sounds: a very slight creak over my head, as if someone, upstairs, had shifted his weight slightly. I stood very quietly, then heard it again, this time closer to the stairs. I ran across the room, unlocked the front door, and dashed into the street, footsteps now pounding down the stairs behind me.

I flagged a cab and leapt in.

“Bit of a hurry, lady?” the driver said. “Where to?”

The truth was, I didn’t have a clue. I got him to take me to the Plaza Hotel, thinking in my overheated brain that it would be unthinkable for anyone to kill me in the Plaza Hotel, and ran into the lobby, cutting through it and out the side door by the Oyster Bar in my idea of a diversionary tactic. Then for an hour or two, I just tried to blend into the crowd.

An observation I would make about New York is that you can always tell the natives from the visitors. I don’t know what it is, a way of walking, perhaps, or more likely a style of dressing. Moira would know. She has the kind of job that requires knowing what’s in and what’s not. Mine isn’t, which is just as well, because under normal circumstances I wouldn’t know haute mode from a hot fudge sundae. I just know that New Yorkers look like New Yorkers, and the rest of us don’t.

Whatever the reason, I felt that I stuck out like a sore thumb. I’d brought only a change of underwear, a cosmetics bag with a few essentials, and a clean shirt, which I changed into in the ladies’ room in the Trump Tower, the elegant sound of a grand piano and a waterfall tinkling in the background. Then I bought a New York Yankees baseball cap from a street vendor, and pulled it over my head. I wore my sunglasses even though it was now raining. Haute mode indeed.

I realized after a couple of hours of this that I really had to pull myself together and think what I would do. A baseball cap and sunglasses would hardly be sufficient cover, and obviously I had to go somewhere. Home was my first choice. There was one small problem with that. I knew I’d left my business card with Edmund Edwards, now deceased. I tried visualizing the desk again, to see if I could recall if the card was where I left it. I couldn’t remember, the rivers of blood blotting everything else out. If it was still there, and the police found it, I could be implicated in the murder. Even if I could talk my way out of that one, the Spider—if indeed it was he who had killed the old man, and I was quite convinced that he had—would have my name too. Perhaps the Spider already knew it, I thought, from Molesworth Cox. They were known to be discreet, but it wouldn’t take much to read the list of auction attendees at the front desk. I’d done it myself more than once. But of course he knew it, I thought. He’d found the shop already: Who else could have killed Lizard?

The upshot was I couldn’t stay there and I couldn’t go home. I knew that the police, Rob in particular, would try to protect me as a witness to this horrific event. But the Spider, I was quite sure, was a truly brutal and determined killer. And not just brutal, I thought, although he was that. I thought of the pathetic body of Lizard, hands tied behind his back, looking as if he’d begged his executioner to spare him. And Edwards, a shortsighted, rather befuddled old man, whose throat had been slit with a ceremonial knife. To my mind, the Spider was someone who enjoyed killing. He knew where I worked, and could easily find out where I lived. Even if he worked alone, which I very much doubted, the police couldn’t protect me forever. That pretty well left me one destination, if I hoped to figure out enough about the situation in which I found myself to extricate myself from it. There was, however, one stop along the way. I raced to the curb and hurled myself in front of another cab—perhaps I was beginning to look like a New Yorker at last—and jumped inside.

“The airport, JFK,” I gasped. “As fast as you can.”

Once there, I checked the departures and approached a counter. “Mexico City. I’d like a ticket for the next flight to Mexico City,” I said. After all, what good are old loves, if you can’t call upon them in a crisis?

6

If any one of my acquaintances would know how to shake a tail, police or otherwise, it was the former love of my life, Mexican archaeologist Lucas May. Make that Congressman Lucas May.

One quick phone call was all it took to persuade him to meet me at the Museo Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, a place we’d frequented many times on our trips to Mexico City when we’d been together. We’d go to see the exhibits, then find ourselves some lunch to eat in the park surrounding the building.

I cut through the strikingly handsome courtyard and, picking the Maya section, began to look carefully at the exhibits, as if I were a real tourist. I felt his presence immediately. It’s amazing really, how you can do that, when you’ve been as close as he and I once were.

“Hi,” I said, turning around.

He looked completely different. I hadn’t seen him for almost two years, not since he’d dumped me—there is no other word for it—to pursue a political career, getting himself elected to the Mexican Congress. Then he’d been an archaeologist, his hair too long to be fashionable, and dressed almost always in black jeans and T-shirts, wearing his work boots most of the time. Now he wore a grey tropical-weight suit, white shirt, and grey and silver tie. His hair was cut short, and he looked very businesslike and almost a little prosperous, maybe just a tiny bit heavier than he’d been when I knew him. He took my arm and led me out of the museum and into the park.

“I’m in a bit of a jam, Lucas,” I said.

“I know,” he said. “They’ve called already.”

“They?”

“The Canadian authorities. Fellow by the name of Sergeant Robert something or other I can’t pronounce. RCMP.”

“Luczka,” I said, pronouncing it Loochka. He nodded. “How did he find me before I even got here?”

“He didn’t say. Did you use a credit card for the ticket?” I nodded. “Bad idea,” he said.

“Yes, but there was this small problem called lack of cash. I know it’s my turn to treat lunch,” I said, “but I’m trying to be frugal, being a fugitive and all.” He went and bought us enchiladas from a stand.

“Tell me about it,” he said.

I took the little gold man out of my bag and handed it to him.

He looked at it carefully. “Funny,” he said finally. I just looked at him. If there was something funny about all this, I’d be more than glad to hear it.

“Funny how it happens,” he said again. “Didn’t know much of anything about this stuff,” he went on, “until a couple of weeks ago. I read about it in an archaeology newsletter. Then a day or two ago, an old friend, a fellow archaeologist, mentioned it too.” He looked at me. “Ear spool. Moche, I would think,” he said. He looked at it again. “Real Moche, that is.”

“I figured,” I said.

“These are, apparently, much in demand on the black market. A pair of ear spools like this sold for about $150,000 U.S. not so long ago in Asia, according to this friend of mine. It’s illegal to take Moche artifacts out of Peru,” he added.

“I figured that too. But obviously someone did it. Not very successfully perhaps. It ended up in a box of junk at an auction. But someone did get it out of Peru.” I told all that had happened. “I don’t want to do anything that would put you in a bad position, Lucas. You’re an important person now. But I need a new identity, and I need to get to Peru. I want to take the little Moche man back to Peru, and figure this all out. It’s the only way I can think of to extricate myself from this situation.”

He sat very quietly, looking off in the distance. As I watched him, I felt such a pang of regret. His hair had a lot more grey in it, and he looked so tired, and perhaps more than a little disillusioned, the exhaustion of a highly moral man in a line of work in a country not noted for its morality, I thought. I wanted to reach out and touch his face and stroke his hair and tell him everything would be all right. He’d always been such a crusader for the rights of the indigenous people of the Yucatan; he’d even, I was reasonably sure, been a member of a local guerrilla group operating out of the forests outside of Merida where we’d met. But then he’d been persuaded to take the political route, to get himself elected, and to work for his people that way. Never one to do anything by halves, he’d told me he couldn’t do that and maintain our relationship, and I’d been the part of his life that was sacrificed.

“This maybe is not working out as well as you’d hoped,” I said hesitantly. “The life of a politician, I mean.”

He just looked at me, then turned away again, his gaze focused on the treetops, and when he finally spoke again, his voice was bleak. “Perhaps not,” he said. “I’m not making many friends, that’s for sure. And the things you see sometimes…” His voice trailed off. I didn’t probe anymore. The thing about Lucas was that he told you what he wanted to tell you. I’d learned to live with that.

“You were always very good about not asking me about my secret life,” he said finally. “But I suppose you know I was not above a little resistance, shall we say, from time to time.”

I waited.

“I really appreciate the fact that you didn’t ask about it, and that you didn’t try to argue with me when I told you our relationship had to end. I’ve deluded myself into thinking you would have regretted that decision,” he said.

“You didn’t delude yourself,” I said. Actually I’d been more than a little upset with him.

“The thing is, when you do the kind of work I used to do, you have to have a plan. An escape plan, if you follow me.”

“Lucas,” I said. “You’re in politics now. I don’t want you to do anything that would compromise you.”

He laughed, but it was a laugh with no humor in it. “Compromise me? When I think of what I have seen some of my fellow elected representatives do! Helping someone on the run from the police is a minor indiscretion barely worth noticing, believe me,” he said bitterly.

“Here,” he said, taking an old silver coin out of his pocket. “Take this. I’ll give you the money for the cab. Go to this address,” he said, scribbling an address on a piece of paper, “and go to the flat on the main floor. There will be an old woman there. Show her the coin. She’ll take care of you. Do whatever she tells you, even if you don’t like the idea, okay? It will take a few days, but if you really want to go to Peru, we’ll get you there.”

“I know this is pushing it a little, but could you get me as close as possible to a place called Campina Vieja?” I asked.

He actually smiled slightly. “I’ll do my best,” he said.

He stood up. It was time to go. He walked me to the street and a cab stand, and gave the driver an address. I got into the cab. His black mood softening, he leaned in the back window and planted a gentle little kiss on my lips.

“If this political stuff doesn’t work out,” he said with a tired little smile, “I may need to leave Mexico in a hurry myself. I’ve heard Canada is good. Hard to get citizenship, though. Would you know a nice Canadian woman who’d marry me?”

“Maybe,” I said. The cab pulled away. I didn’t look back. Moira would be pleased.

Four days and nights I spent in a tiny room in the back of the building where the old woman lived. The building looked like any other in that part of town, distinguished only by the fading pastels, that had been chosen for the stucco, the color peeling under the hot sun. This building was pale aqua. I gave her the coin, as instructed, and after looking at both it and me very carefully, she led me up three flights of stairs, pulling her bent figure up each step, leaning heavily on the railing.

The room was small but adequate: a small bed, a desk and chair with one tiny lamp, a ceiling fan. The shutters were pulled against the heat of the day. There was a shower, for which I was grateful. The old lady did not speak to me, whether because she could not or would not, I do not know. But she saw to my comfort. A tray of food arrived regularly: fresh warm tortillas, always, and eggs or sopa, and cheese, sometimes a little wine or beer.

At night, before the little lamp was turned on, she pulled heavy dark curtains across in front of the shutters. No one was to know I was there. After I turned out the light, I opened the curtains and lay on the bed, watching through the cracks in the shutter, a soft pink glow which I think must have come from the neon sign of a cantina, because I heard music and voices and the clatter of dishes until very late at night.

The days and nights blurred together, the days known by the sunlight against the shutter, the night by the pink neon. Mainly I slept, exhausted, feeling safe for the first time in days, confident that neither the police nor the Spider would find me there. Sometimes I dreamt, though, and the horrible pictures of Edmund Edwards and Lizard hovered on the edges of my sleep.

Sometimes my dreams were of an arid desert, where bleached skeletons and blackened brush dotted the landscape, where no living thing could be seen.

On the second day a man came to see me. He told me to sit on the edge of the bed, and pulled the desk and the chair up to me, so that he could sit across from me. He turned the little lamp on my face and looked at me very carefully, turning my head one way and the other. He asked me to stand up and walk around. Then he got up and left, as suddenly and silently as he’d arrived.

He was back again the next night with another, a hunched over old man, a serape and hat making him indistinguishable, who stood out of the light in a corner. The first man pulled up the desk and chair as usual, but then took my handbag and emptied it onto the desk in front of us.

He went through everything in my purse, everything. He took my wallet and emptied it. He took the U.S. money and carefully divided it into two piles, putting half back on my side of the table and half in his pocket. “Credit cards,” he said, and cut them up one at a time. “Passport,” he said, then, “driver’s license.” These he didn’t cut up, but tucked them away carefully in his pocket.

On the fourth night, the man arrived with his companion once again, but this time I knew who it was and smiled into the darkness in the corner. The first man handed me a package of hair color, and gestured for me to go into the bathroom and use it. In a few minutes my strawberry blond hair was brown. I stared at a stranger in the mirror.

He handed me a U.S. passport, and the picture in it looked more or less like the stranger in the mirror.

I had a driver’s license, Kansas, and the exit part of a Mexican tourist card already filled in. I also had a wallet bulging with money I didn’t recognize, Peruvian soles. And no credit cards.

Suddenly the man in the corner threw off his poncho. It was Lucas. “I have a message for you from a friend of yours, the policeman. Not a bad fellow really, for a policeman.” He looked at me.

“He says that should I be speaking to you—I said I would be surprised if I did—I should tell you that you should come home. That he will do his best to straighten everything out. He also says to tell you Alex will be all right.

“We could get you home too, you know. Send you north rather than south.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’ve come this far, and I think I’ll see it through.”

“So you’re still set on doing this.” He sighed. I told him I couldn’t really think what else to do, although I had a pang of doubt as I said it. He handed me a sealed envelope. “Do not open this,” he said. “Give it to the person it is addressed to without opening it. It will serve as an introduction.”

“Where will I find this person?” I asked.

“Just follow the instructions,” he said. “You will find what you need to know, when you need to know it. We will get you to the land of the Moche. After that you are on your own. Can you do this?”‘

“I think so,” I said “Can you find some way of telling Moira where I am? Without anyone else knowing, I mean?”

“Yes,” he replied. “I will.”

“Be careful,” I said.

“I think I’m the one who’s supposed to say that,” he said, then he hugged me, pulled the robe back on, and disappeared into the darkness of the stairwell. I had a feeling I might never see him again.

The next morning the old woman handed me a packed suitcase, battered and covered in travel stickers, and then I was driven to the airport. I was told to go to a specific wicket at a specific airline and ask for Antonieta. She handed me a package. In it was a ticket for the next flight to Lima.

Just before I left, I called Clive’s store, collect. I reasoned it was the last place anyone would expect me to call, and even if they traced it, I’d be long gone before they could do anything about it. I told Clive I’d be calling back in ten minutes and he was to get a move on, go down the street to Moira’s salon and bring her to the phone. For once he did what I asked.

Moira wasted no time. “Heard from Lucas,” she said. “I figured you’d find some way to call. This is what I’ve been able to worm out of Rob so far. The dead man in your storage room’s name is, or was, Ramon Cervantes. Senor Cervantes worked for the government. A customs agent, as it turns out, just as you thought. He lived with his family, a wife and three children, in Callao,” she continued.

“Where’s that?” I interrupted.

“Suburb of Lima, I think. That’s as much as I know.”

“That’s good,” I said. “How’s Alex?”

“Better. He’s out of intensive care, but he still can’t remember what happened that night. They’re keeping him in the hospital, doing some tests, but I think the doctors are confident he’ll recover.”

“And the police? Are they still investigating Alex?”

“Alex, and you now too,” she replied. “I’m trying to get that awful man Lewis off the case,” she added.

“I knew he’d rue the day he got on the wrong side of you, Moira,” I said, “but how are you going about this?”

“I’ve put Rob on it,” she replied. “Told him what he needs to do.”

“And how did you manage that?”

“I just told him that I considered him to be personally responsible for your disappearance, and that if anything happened to either you or Alex it would be on his head, that’s all,” she said. “Subtlety is, of course, my middle name.”

I laughed, then the enormity of what I was about to do caught up with me.

“You may not hear from me for a while, Moira,” I said. “I’m not sure where this will take me.”

“I know. Just make sure I hear from you sometime,” she said briskly. I guess you don’t get to own the most successful salon in the city by being subtle, or sentimental.

Then I, no not I, Rebecca MacCrimmon cleared immigration and customs, and boarded the plane.

7

Carla Montoya Cervantes sits in the darkened room at the top of the stairs, shutters pulled against the light, her face puffy with tears. She is pretty in a soft way, a slight plumpness hinting at sensuality, eyes and hair dark against skin she shields from the sun in the belief that paleness appeals, rosebud lips held in an almost perpetual pout, except, that is, when she’s angry, when her eyes narrow, and the pout flattens out into a thin, hard line.

And she is angry now. Such an ineffective man, that Ramon, no ambition, no drive to better himself or her. Way too old for her too. She needs someone with more energy. Papa told her not to marry Ramon. He warned her Ramon would never amount to anything, that she deserved better. But Ramon adored her, would do whatever she asked, and, when it came right down to it, what was she to do, with the first of three squalling babies on the way? There would have been more than three too, if she hadn’t put her foot down, banishing him to the living room. Thank God her sister has taken the children for a few days. They are so noisy, needy. She must have silence, time to think.

What is she to do? He was ineffective to the end, Ramon, left her with the children and no prospects. There is Jorge, his brother, of course. She could marry him. What would that accomplish? More drive, more ambition perhaps, but still, not exactly the match of the century, is he? It’s unfortunate Ramon saw her and his brother together, truly unfortunate, though why he should run off like that, to such a far-off place… For what? It was harmless enough.

Papa was right. She is meant for better things than this, this hovel, the smell of cooking from below, the smoke of rancid oil permeating everything, the furniture, her hair, her clothes; the children always crying, and the noise of the street, like the bad air, working its way through the cracks in the shutters. She should be living in Miraflores, or San Isidro, perhaps, just off embassy row. A little house with roses in the front yard. Pink, she thinks. Pink roses, the house clean and white and cool, the windows fronted by white wrought iron grillwork, delicate metal tendrils climbing a fence, just like the beautiful homes of Trujillo where she grew up. A nanny for the children.

So if not Jorge, what or whom? She will have to think of something, and soon. Senor Vargas, the landlord, despite his infatuation with her, is too much the businessman to let her stay for long without payment. She had better not open the door. She would kill Ramon, really she would, if he wasn’t dead already. Taking all their money—her money, really, he would never have made the arrangements on his own—when they were just beginning to get ahead, with the promise of more to come. And flying off to Canada! How exactly is she to pay to have his body shipped back home? Maybe she’ll leave him there. She won’t wear black for him, either. It doesn’t suit her. She’s meant for prettier things. Papa told her.

She sighs. There is only one answer. She’ll have to go and talk to the Man. She doesn’t like him: There is something about him that frightens her. But what choice does she have? After all, he owes her, doesn’t he? Without her pleading, Ramon would never have helped the Man with that little problem he had. Yes, that is the answer. She will go and see the Man.

The sun apparently does shine in Lima from time to time. I didn’t see it. For about nine months of the year, the city is blanketed in a grey pall that consists of mist from the sea, the garua, and pollution from millions of cars and factories. It is a damp, gritty greyness that burns your throat and lungs and eyes, and oozes its way into your soul.

Lima also, to my eyes at least, has the air of a city besieged. Every building, every parking lot, is watched by at least one guard, some of them armed. Restaurants have guards to watch over patrons’ cars while they dine; a home with even the slightest hint, a mere whiff of wealth, has a twenty-four-hour civilian guard. Children are escorted to and from school.

And there is something to fear, make no mistake about it. Terrorists, for example; internationally prominent, like Sendero Luminoso, the Shining Path, and another, named for an Inca leader, Tupac Amaru, responsible for the occasional bombings, hostage takings, and other acts of terrorism. But perhaps even more frightening than terrorists are the desperate, the millions of poor and unemployed who left their homes in the countryside to come to the city in search of a better life, only to find themselves worse off, by far, living in wretched shantytowns on the outskirts of the city, without water, sewage treatment, or electricity.

Perhaps to compensate, Limenos have painted their city the most astonishing hues, colors to banish the greyness and anxiety: sienna, burnt umber, cobalt, and the purest ultramarine, and shades the color of ice cream, soft pistachio, creamy peach, French vanilla, and cafe au lait.

The central square in every Peruvian town, and Lima is no exception, is called the Plaza de Armas. In Lima, the plaza is a striking yellow ochre broken only by the grey stone of the governor’s palace and the intricately carved wood casement windows on the buildings surrounding the square. And like every Plaza de Armas, it is a hive of activity, filled with ambulantes, people who come in from the shantytowns to hawk candy and drinks on the sidewalks; money changers with their calculators and wads of bills, giggling schoolgirls weighing themselves, for a small fee, on scales on the corner; street cleaners dressed head to toe in brilliant orange, stooping and sweeping in an almost compulsive rhythm—the hustle and bustle of everyday life in the city.

A large statue of the Spaniard Francisco Pizarro on horseback once graced the center of the square. Spain, its lust for gold and empire unsated by successful conquests in the more northern Americas, sent Pizarro to bring the mighty Inca Empire to its knees, a stroke of history that earned him his position of honor in the Plaza de Armas. As the saying goes, sic transit Gloria mundi: Pizarro’s horse’s rear faced the cathedral. The Church was not amused, and so Pizarro and his horse were relegated to a small side square just off one corner of the plaza. Now it is the inhabitants of the building that bears the conqueror’s name and the patrons of the cafe at street level who get to look up the backside of Pizarro’s horse.

I was in that cafe for what amounted to a job interview, unbelievable though that seemed to me. I was to meet someone by the name of Stephen Neal, archaeologist and former classmate of Lucas’s. I’d spoken to him briefly on the telephone, and we’d arranged to meet. He sounded pleasant enough on the phone, but I had no idea what he looked like. To facilitate our meeting, he’d told me he had fair hair, what was left of it, and a beard. I had been about to tell him I was a strawberry blonde when I caught myself. “Brown,” I’d told him, “my hair is brown.” Being someone else required, I found, eternal vigilance.

Who was Rebecca MacCrimmon? I wondered. Did she really exist? If she did, did she look like me, or at least like the person—pale skin almost transparent against the dark brown hair—that I had really seen for the first time, stared at length at, in the mirror of the tiny, run-down but clean hotel off the Plaza San Martin? If she was a real person, was she still alive, her passport and driver’s license taken like mine, or lost perhaps, in some Mexican adventure, then put to other uses? Or was she dead, her identity transferred to me after her demise? No stranger to adventure, I had never felt like this before, cut off from something so personal, so basic, as my name.

It was a disorienting experience in a way I cannot describe, and yet somehow oddly liberating. Rebecca didn’t have bills to pay, meetings to go to, and, more importantly, she didn’t have an ex-husband she still had rather ambivalent feelings about, who’d had the bad taste to open a shop right across the road from her. She wasn’t slowly going bankrupt, and best of all, neither she nor any of her friends were being investigated in a murder case, nor was she being pursued by a cold-blooded killer.

On the other hand, it did have its hazards. I’d assured the airline personnel that I had, indeed, packed my own bag and it had never left my sight, a statement that was patently untrue, and one that constituted a leap of faith in Lucas and his compatriots that left me breathless. What if a security guard asked me to describe its contents? I had no idea what it contained. I was nervous as I cleared immigration on my way out of Mexico, then again as I entered Peru. Would they catch me with some seemingly innocuous question about my life? Even my clothes felt as if they would betray me, although the jeans and the denim shirt fit just fine.

On the plane, I sat, eyes squeezed tightly shut, my hands gripping the seat arms, reciting over and over in my mind, like some feverish mantra, my new name, my birth date, my home. I pretended to sleep, too nervous to eat, and unwilling to hold a conversation with my seatmate, lest I betray myself in some way. When, as the plane began its descent into Lima, the flight attendant touched my arm, calling me Senora MacCrimmon and handing me an envelope, my heart leapt into my mouth.

But then there I was in my little hotel room, clean and tidy but threadbare. I circled the bed looking at the suitcase which lay there unopened, like someone else’s abandoned bag turning endlessly on an otherwise empty baggage carousel. Inside was the new me: another pair of jeans, two pairs of khaki mid-thigh length shorts, an Indian cotton skirt in blacks, aquas, and rose, a turquoise Indian cotton blouse to go with it, a light cotton sweater, weatherproof jacket, and a pile of T-shirts. There was some utilitarian cotton underwear, including socks, a long T-shirt that would double as a nightie, a pair of sandals, running shoes, and work boots. I regarded the shoes and boots with unease. In my experience, shoes generally fall into one of three categories: almost comfortable, uncomfortable, and excruciating. At home there was a collection of footwear that would give Imelda Marcos pause, testament to an almost obsessive pursuit of the perfectly comfortable pair of shoes. I tried on the sandals and running shoes: They fell into the almost comfortable category, much to my relief. The boots I would leave until later.

Rebecca MacCrimmon was a bit older than I, forty-five to be precise, although with what I’d been through in the past few days, looking older than I was did not seem an insurmountable problem. She was, I decided, a bit of a hippy at heart, a child of the sixties who had not succumbed to the acquisitiveness and self-absorption that had overwhelmed many of our generation. Her T-shirts supported various causes: The first urged one and all to save the rain forest; another, and this one brought a smile to my face, proclaimed archaeologists to be better lovers; the third asked the world to save the whales. I held the whale T-shirt up to me. It was clear my first purchase would be a new shirt. No one with my generous proportions, I decided, should ever have to wear a picture of a whale.

Money was a problem, of course. I couldn’t be running out to replace my wardrobe. I had some cash, the equivalent of about $400, but I had no credit cards, the absence of which I felt keenly. Credit cards, I decided, had become my personal security blanket. I would have to be very careful with money, that was certain, but I would buy a new shirt nonetheless. Because, as it turned out, I had job prospects.

The letter I’d received on the plane told me that my application to work at an archaeological site in northern Peru was being seriously considered, and that I was to contact Dr. Stephen Neal, codirector of the project, on my arrival in Lima. The letter informed me that if I were the successful candidate, I would be expected to report for duty on August 28, two days hence. The letter said that my lodging and meals would be covered, but that unfortunately there were no funds available to pay a salary, however small. As compensation, however, there was the privilege of working with someone of the caliber of the other co-director, Dr. Hilda Schwengen, whoever that was. The signature on the letter was that of Stephen Neal, and a postscript added, much to my relief, that the successful candidate would also receive transportation to the site from Lima.

For a moment or two, as I sat in the cafe and waited to meet my soon-to-be employer, my attention was diverted by a crowd of uniformed schoolchildren, wearing red blazers and navy slacks and jumpers, on an outing in the square. “Ms. MacCrimmon, by any chance?” the voice asked, and for a moment I was about to say sorry, no.

I liked Steve Neal immediately. He had a kind of large, rumpled look, a warm handshake, a friendly and open face, with eyes that crinkled at the corners when he laughed, which he did a lot.

“Beer?” he asked as he sat down. “Dos cervezas, por favor,” he said to the waiter, as I nodded. “Pilsen Trujillo,” he added.

“So how do you like Lima so far?” he asked. “And how is Lucas? I hear he’s taken up politics. I suppose archaeology does tend to get a little political from time to time.” He laughed.

“Both Lucas and Lima are fine,” I replied, handing him the letter Lucas had given me for him. I waited while he read it. As I’d promised, I hadn’t looked at it, but my curiosity was piqued as Neal’s eyebrows raised ever so slightly at one point in the text.

“Okay,” he said, carefully pouring his beer. “Let’s talk about the job.”

This was the moment I had been dreading. Lucas had done exactly what he said he would do. He had got me to Peru and had provided me with a way to get to Moche country. The rest was up to me. But I was certain the first question would be from which august institution of higher learning had I received my degree in archaeology or anthropology. My degree was in English. The second question would undoubtedly be, tell me what you know about the ancient cultures of the north coast of Peru.

Unfortunately, my experience in archaeology was limited to spending a few pleasant afternoons with Lucas on sites he was digging. He’d let me help with the work, under his supervision, but no one would ever call me an archaeologist.

As for the second topic: As recently as two weeks ago, I had only a passing interest in the ancient cultures of Peru, and that related solely to studies I had done a few years back on the Maya in Mexico and Central America. In a gesture that I knew was futile, I had spent the morning before my job interview dashing around Lima from museum to museum. The sum total of my knowledge to date was that there were a number of cultures that had inhabited the northern coastal desert of Peru long before the Inca and the Spanish conquest, including Chancay, Chimu, Chavin, Moche, and Lambayeque, but that, in my opinion, the Moche were the most brilliant craftspeople of them all. If anyone was capable of the artistry that made the little gold man I still carried with me, it was a Moche craftsman.

I had seen rooms of ceramics, textiles, and metal-work made by these peoples and had been quite overwhelmed by the artistry and technique they had shown. I had even seen rooms filled with Moche erotic ceramics, by and large couples in positions I can only describe as anatomically challenging. Some of these ceramics had depicted one member of the twosome as a death skull and skeleton. The guard on the room had told me this meant the Moche thought too much sex would kill you. The current status of my love life being what it was, I had decided this was not something I needed to spend much time worrying about.

As entertaining as my museum tour might have been, the point was that if I were asked the question, Can you tell late Moche from Lambayeque? the answer quite clearly was no.

The question Neal posed took me completely by surprise.

“I don’t suppose you know anything about running a business,” he said, speaking in Spanish. “Paying bills, wages, dealing with government authorities, that sort of thing? The point is, I’m an archaeologist, not a businessman, and all the organizational stuff I have to do is getting me down. I’ve got some really good lab people, good workers on the site, but no one to keep the whole show running smoothly.”

Did I know something about running a business? Of course I did. I’d been running my antiques and design business for about fifteen years, with only one interruption. I needed to approach this with a certain amount of caution, of course. I’d decided that the only way to survive as Rebecca MacCrimmon was to keep her background as close as possible to my own. That way, I would be less likely to get caught out in a contradiction. Rebecca was from Kansas; her driver’s license said so, and I had only passed through Kansas once. That one I would have to be very careful about. But running a business? Who was to say Rebecca MacCrimmon didn’t have business experience?

“I have a fair amount of business experience,” I replied carefully in my best Spanish. “I had my own business for a number of years. Retail. I sold furniture. I didn’t have a lot of staff, but I had some, and they always got paid. The bills did too. I am also accustomed to dealing with customs officials and agents, bankers, tax people, accountants, and shippers. I can honestly say that I never missed a shipping deadline through a fault of my own.” I paused. “Although I’ll admit it was close a few times.” I laughed.

“You’re hired,” he said.

“I am?” I replied in surprise.

“Sure,” he said. “Your Spanish is good, Lucas says you can be trusted—trusted absolutely, actually— and you can take the work I hate off my hands. That’s good enough for me.” He laughed. “Lucas says in his letter he is asking me for a favor. Don’t tell him, but I think he may have been doing me one!

“You know the terms—transportation to the site, room and board once you get to the site. I know it’s not much. Will you do it? Do we have a deal?” he said, extending his hand across the table. I took it.

“We have a deal. When do I start?”

He spread a map out on the table. “We’re working at a site here,” he said, pointing to what appeared to be a blank spot on the map, “between Trujillo and Chiclayo. Early to middle Moche site. Showing a lot of promise. The closest town is Campina Vieja.”

Good old Lucas, I thought: right to Campina Vieja. I must have started, though, because Neal hesitated for a few seconds before continuing. “You can fly to Trujillo, and then you’ll have to find the Vulkano bus station and take the Trujillo/Chiclayo bus. The buses run almost hourly, and they’ll stop at Campina Vieja if you ask them.

“I’m flying back to Trujillo tonight, so why don’t you fly out tomorrow sometime and have a look around Trujillo—there’s some interesting Moche and Chimu sites to see there—then take the bus the following morning. I’ll be in town for much of the day and I’ll keep an eye on the bus stop. Just sit yourself down on the bench if I’m not there when you arrive: I’ll be along and drive you out to the site. We’ve taken over an old hacienda and set up operations there. You can meet the rest of the team, including the boss, Hilda, when you get there.

“Now let’s go and see about getting you an airline ticket,” he grinned, “before you change your mind. What do you prefer to be called, by the way?”

I almost made a mistake, I felt so relaxed in his presence, but I caught myself in time. As I hesitated he said, “Do you prefer Rebecca or something like Becky?”

“Rebecca,” I said. “Definitely Rebecca.” After Neal and I had parted company, as the sun began its rapid descent into darkness, as it does this close to the equator, I paid a final visit to the place where, according to Rob Luczka, the man I had called Lizard, Ramon Cervantes, had lived. It had not been all that difficult tracking the place down, there being only one Ramon Cervantes listed in Callao. As I had on two previous occasions, I hailed a colectivo, that particularly Peruvian mode of public transit, a private minibus or van that plies a regular route, a sign in its front and side windows indicating its destination. In addition to the driver, there is an assistant who opens the sliding door and signals the number of empty seats with his fingers. The van barely stops to pick you up and drop you off, but it’s cheap, and it gets you there, weaving its way through Lima’s appalling traffic, pollution, and noise.

Ramon Cervantes, I was now certain, was not a wealthy man, living as he had on a dark little street in a part of Lima out near the airport that I would characterize as decidedly modest, a neighborhood that reeked of rancid cooking oil and thwarted aspirations. The streets, unlike many of the streets in the old part of central Lima, were paved, although badly rutted and potholed. Ramon had lived in a flat that one reached by going up a dark and dirty staircase running between a malodorous restaurant and an engine repair shop. At street level, the visitor was overwhelmed by the dinginess of the location, but if one stepped back, across the street, one could see, on the second floor, vestiges of Lima’s colonial past in the large windows fronted by wrought iron railings, and the swirling plaster wreaths and garlands along the roofline above them. The shutters on the apartment to the left of the staircase were closed tight.

On my first visit, shortly after my arrival in Lima, I had climbed the dark steps to a second-floor landing. There were two apartments, one on either side of the staircase. On the door to the right was a little name-plate, not Cervantes, and on the other, a black ribbon tied to the door knocker. I knocked, tentatively at first, then louder. No one answered, and there was no sound from within. I waited outside for a few minutes, watched closely by a Chinese woman in a little chifa, or Chinese restaurant, across the street.

On my second visit, I was greeted by the same silence and lack of an answer. This time I took a seat in the chifa across the road where I could watch the staircase, and ordered a beer. After a few minutes, the Chinese proprietor came over to my table. “Who are you looking for?” she asked. I told her I was looking for Senora Cervantes.

“That tart,” she said. “Senora Cervantes you call her. Very fancy. She’d like that. Thinks she’s better than the rest of us, always putting on airs. But around here she’s just Carla. Or sometimes just the tart.” She used the word fulana. Spanish has as many words for those who ply the world’s oldest profession as we do in English. “She’s in there,” she went on. “Won’t answer the door. Worried it will be the landlord. She can’t pay the rent, you know. Or her brother-in-law, who blames her for what happened. Her husband’s dead.”

“I heard,” I said. “Too bad.”

“Too bad for her, that’s for certain. Maybe not for him. For him, perhaps, a blessing. Left her with three kids. She’s sent them away, you know, to her sister in Trujillo. She shouldn’t have kids. No patience with them. Too much of a child herself. Took all their money, did that husband of hers, what there was of it, and went off somewhere far, Canada I think, and then up and died.”

Clearly my newfound friend didn’t miss much, and didn’t mind whom she told about it either.

“Why would he do that, I wonder,” I said.

She snorted. “Die, you mean? Or go to Canada? The only thing to wonder about is how he got enough money to go there in the first place, and why he didn’t go sooner. Found her with someone. His own brother. A fine man, Ramon Cervantes. He didn’t deserve that, I can tell you. A real tart, that one.”

Dear me, I thought, poor Lizard. But how does finding your wife in flagrante delicto with your brother get you to an auction in Toronto and a gory and premature death in my storage room?

The woman from the chifa had more to tell me. She paused only long enough to get me another beer, unasked for. Buying from her was, I gathered, how I was paying for this information.

“But it’s no use feeling sorry for Ramon, is there? No use feeling sorry for the dead. It’s his brother I feel sorry for now: Jorge. Consumed with guilt. Just consumed with it. Drinks like a fish at the bar down the street, then comes and stands under the window watching for her. I call her a tart, but he calls her a witch, a bruja. Claims she bewitched both him and his brother, made them do bad things. His wife has left him now. Taken his kids too. Him, I feel sorry for.

“There,” she said, pointing to a young man, obviously drunk and disheveled, passing in front of the chifa. “Jorge.” We watched him lurch by. She was right: He looked pathetic indeed. A few moments later, when Jorge could no longer be seen, she went on. “As for her, when she does come out, she’s not dressed like a widow, that I can tell you. Disgraceful. Lots of loud colors: Pink’s her favorite. If she’s shedding tears, it’s for herself, and not for him. She’ll do all right, of course. Men like to look after her. First her father doted on her, then Ramon, the poor man. Not good enough for her, was he? A good man with a steady government job would be enough for most of us, wouldn’t it?”

“She goes out these days, does she?” I asked in what I hoped was a disinterested tone. The woman didn’t answer. I ordered a cheese sandwich to go with the beer. It was the cheapest bribe on the menu.

“At night,” she said, setting the grilled cheese sandwich in front of me. “After the landlord closes up his office down the street and goes home to Montericco. Then she usually goes out. About eight or nine.”

And so it was that I was back in Callao at night. I was a little uneasy about being out alone in this part of town, but the chifa was still open, and I ordered a coffee and a creme caramel while I waited to see what would happen.

Around seven-thirty, my newfound Chinese friend nudged my arm and pointed to a rather rotund middle-aged man heading down the street. As he passed the Cervantes residence, I saw him look up for a moment or two at the darkened apartment. “The landlord,” she whispered. “Going home. Now watch the shutters carefully.” I did, and a few minutes later I could see that a dim light had been turned on inside. The chifa owner gave me a knowing look.

About three quarters of an hour later, I heard, rather than saw, someone on the stairs, and a young woman entered the street.

“The tart,” the Chinese woman hissed, tossing her head in the direction of the woman. I quickly paid the bill and followed the young woman.

As my informant had predicted, Carla Cervantes was not dressed for a funeral. Instead she was wearing a pink dress, sleeveless, with narrow straps and a neckline that swooped rather low. The dress was, in my opinion, a little unfashionable, and more than a little tight on her, although I’ll admit I’d give my eyeteeth to be able to look like her in that dress. I could not help but note that all the men in the street gaped at her as she went by, and not one of them took any notice whatsoever of me, despite the fact that I was the only gringa on that street at that moment, testament, indeed, to the allure of Sefiora Cervantes.

At the end of the street was a busy avenue, and after a moment or two, Carla flagged down a colectivo headed for Miraflores. I immediately hailed a cab and asked the driver, a young man in jeans and a T-shirt advertising a rock group I’d never heard of, possibly the one on the tape in the car, to follow that colectivo. He jumped on the accelerator in his enthusiasm for the project, and whipped into the traffic, horn blaring, bouncing both me and his audiotape collection from side to side in the backseat like dice in a box. From time to time, he would turn to grin at me and quite unnecessarily point out the colectivo only one or two car lengths ahead. I held on to the door handle for dear life.

The colectivo turned off a side road, took a couple of backstreets, then turned down a ramp that led to what Limenos call the Ditch, a sunken expressway that cuts diagonally across the face of the city. A few minutes later, the colectivo pulled off another ramp and then dropped Carla at the door to one of the swankier hotels in Miraflores, in itself one of the poshest parts of Lima. I followed her through the glass doors into the hotel bar to the left of the main door, and took a seat at a table three away, but with a clear view of Carla and the man she had obviously come to meet.

He was much older than she was, sixty perhaps to her late twenty-something. He was not Spanish. He looked European to me, in the way he dressed, although with a Spanish rock video blasting from a large screen at one end of the bar, I could not hear him speak, until he called over the waiter and ordered a martini for his lady friend. French, I decided. I ordered a glass of white wine, and tried to look as if I belonged there. Surveillance, I would have to say, is not something in which I have any expertise.

I do like to think, however, that after fifteen years in retail, I can read body language pretty well, and this particular conversation, although I could not hear it and did not dare move closer, was an interesting one. The man, dressed in a tan suede jacket over charcoal-grey slacks, a yellow shirt, and a rather stylish cravat, leaned well back in his chair at first, distancing himself from his companion and keeping his face in relative shadow. One hand rested on his knee; the other he kept well to his side, between his thigh and the arm of the chair. Throughout most of the conversation, which lasted almost an hour, his body language said that he was not very interested in what Carla had to say.

She, on the other hand, was trying very hard to be persuasive. I had the feeling she had a proposal to make to him, and that she did not know him that well. First there was a lovely smile as she leaned toward him, then, when that appeared to have no impact, dainty tears and blowing of nose into a lace hanky. Still the man remained unmoved. Pouting was next, and then as a last resort she wriggled just enough to let one pink strap slide off her shoulder. The man leaned forward and smiled. It was not, I thought, a nice smile, rather one of victory, or perhaps anticipation.

Through all of this, I nursed my one little glass of white wine, and tried to look as if I were waiting for someone, glancing at my watch from time to time, and pretending to be a little impatient. The price of wine by the glass was so outrageous in this hotel that I had no intention of ordering another, no matter how long the two of them sat there. I ate every peanut from the little crystal bowl on the table, determined to eke out my time there and get my money’s worth. Being alone in a foreign country without the comforting presence of a credit card is an experience I would not wish to repeat.

Shortly after the shoulder strap incident, it was apparently time to leave. Carla’s companion signed the bill, thereby indicating he could afford to be a guest in this hotel. It was only then that I noticed that his right hand, which he used to hold the bill while he signed with his left, was missing the little and ring fingers.

They left the bar together. I didn’t really need to follow them any farther. It didn’t take a genius to figure out where they were headed. But I followed them just the same, at least as far as the elevator. As I went past their table, I tried to read the signature on the bill, before the waiter swept it away, but the light was too low and the signature appeared to me to be illegible. I could see the room number quite clearly, however: room 1236. I saw the two of them enter the elevator, then to confirm my suspicions, I watched the numbers over the door. It went directly to the twelfth floor. The widow Cervantes appeared to be dealing with her grief quite well.

I left the hotel and looked for a colectivo to take me back downtown, catching as I did so a brief glimpse of a man standing to the side of the entrance-way, who slipped into the darkness when I looked his way. Although I couldn’t say with any certainty, I could have sworn it was Ramon’s brother, Jorge.

The question was, what now? In my impulsive and one might well say ill-advised journey to solve the nasty situation in which I found myself, I had only two clues: a name, that of Ramon Cervantes, whose widow was now upstairs behaving badly—one could only assume—with a man I’d never seen before, and whom I had no reason to suspect had anything whatsoever to do with all this; and a little piece of jewelry that was probably genuine Moche. I could continue to follow the name—that is, I could wait and see where, and with whom, the widow Cervantes went next; I could go and search out Jorge, to see what light he could shed on what had happened to his brother; or I could follow the artifact, take the job in Moche territory and see what I could find.

I chose to follow the artifact. As some would say, when you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there. Personally, I prefer a line penned by the poet Robert Browning: Everyone soon or late comes round by Rome, he wrote. Rome, in this instance, was a little town in northern Peru called Campina Vieja.