The Moche Warrior

Still the decapitator waits, tumi blade in one hand, the other still empty. And with him the Priestess, with hair of snakes, she who holds the golden cup that soon will contain the sacred liquid, the blood of sacrifice.

While they wait at the huaca, we prepare the Warrior’s shroud. Three woven cloths will cradle him. The golden helmet with its feathered plumes, the gold and silver back flaps, the gilded bells, are placed first.

The litter that will support him on his descent lies beneath him. He rests on a second headdress, a gold crescent crowned by flamingo feathers. In his right hand we place the golden scepter, symbol of his earthly power, in his left, the silver, smaller. A gold ingot rests on his right hand, a silver on his left.

On his face we place five gold masks, on his feet, silver sandals. Three pairs of ear flares accompany him: one pair the sacred white-tailed deer, the second golden spiders, the third a feline head that represents the creature that can cross the line between the two worlds marked by the double-headed serpent—the world of now, the world of the ancestors.

Three pectorals of shell beads, thousands of them, in cream and green, pink and white, we have placed on his chest, wristbands to match on his arms.

Next comes his necklace of peanut beads, as always gold on his right, silver his left, sun/moon, earth/sea duality; then a second necklace of gold spiders and a third of discs of gold and turquoise.

To cover him we place his banners, his standards, symbols of his earthly powers: rough cotton onto which we have sewn golden discs and his image, the image of the warrior god. Then the shroud is wrapped around him.

The offerings are all assembled; the guardians, those among us who will accompany him, have been chosen.

Soon the ceremony in the great plaza will begin.

8

Even as I pondered which path to take, all the players in this macabre little drama, as if moved by some invisible director’s hand, were, like me, being drawn to take their place upon the stage. Some were driven by desperation, others compelled by avarice and greed, still others by obsession, and there were those still blissfully unaware of the role others, more malevolent, had chosen for them. Like stock characters in a modern morality tale—the Hero, the Villain, the Temptress, the Witch, the Magician, the Fool—from the four corners of the globe, we assembled in Campina Vieja to play the roles assigned us.

It was a concept, I’ve since thought, that would have resonated with the Inca, who called their huge, yet short-lived empire, Tahuantinsuyo, Land of the Four Quarters. At the time of the first European contact with the Americas, Tahuantinsuyo was the largest nation on earth. At its center was the glittering city of Cuzco, the navel of the Inca universe, just as Campina Vieja was to become the heart of this drama.

From the northern quarter, if you count my point of origin, Chinchaysuyu for the Inca, came I, the Narrator perhaps, or worse yet, the Fool. For me, the journey from the comforting cocoon of Lima, possessing as it does that essence that all large cities share, was an exercise in shedding my old identity, along with preconceptions, as a snake sheds its skin. It was not so much that the journey was extraordinary, just one filled with quirky moments, that made it clear that Rebecca wasn’t in Kansas anymore.

The flight to Trujillo had been uneventful, unless you count playing bingo rather than watching a movie an event, and I found the Vulkano bus station without difficulty. A bus trip in that part of the country, apparently, is an exercise in participative democracy. Passengers preoccupied themselves with shouting instructions to the driver, telling him he was lingering too long at any given stop, or that he wasn’t driving to their particular specifications.

We were on the Panamericana Norte, the Pan-American highway, that hugs a narrow strip of desert crisscrossed by river valleys, most of them dry, between the sea on one side and the Andes on the other. From time to time we’d pass a little town, sometimes a small forest or some farmland, but by and large the land on either side of the highway was desert, very dry. Sometimes I could see tire tracks leading off the highway, in what appeared to be a straight line to nowhere. In the distance are the mountains, looming up out of the sand. As austere as it may sound, it was actually quite beautiful, the colors of the desert, the golds, browns, the burnt greens, cinnamons, and dusty rose, playing against the blue-green of the sea, and the hundreds of greys, greens, navy blues, and purples of the mountains.

And what of the other characters? the other quarters? From the south, Collasuyu, comes the Magician.

With the help of several vocal backseat drivers, the bus driver stopped regularly to disgorge passengers and pick up others, sometimes in little towns, more often than not at a marker—a little stand or a sign— at the side of the highway.

At one of these stops, a young couple loaded down with enormous backpacks got on. They both looked about fifteen to me, but to be realistic I’d put them in their early twenties. Gringos. She wore jeans with holes at the knees; a halter top that revealed her suntanned middle and a hint of navel; lots of jewelry, most notably silver rings on every finger and a pair of long silver earrings that looked vaguely Navaho; and a halo of long wavy hair around a small face that gave her the appearance of a Titian Madonna. He had hair almost as long as hers, cutoff jeans, a T-shirt frayed at the shoulders where the sleeves had been removed, and a neat little row of tiny safety pins in one ear. On one arm he had a large tattoo with a skull and crossbones and a succinct suggestion that the Establishment—such an antiquated term—perform an anatomical impossibility on itself. As they passed my seat, I idly wondered if their parents, particularly hers, knew where they were and what they were doing. Advancing middle age can be tiresome.

Several moments after the bus started rolling again, the young man walked to the front of the bus and, turning to face the crowd, pulled out a deck of cards. He spoke no Spanish, and, with the exception of me, no one else on the bus spoke English, but he kept up a patter that would have made a showman proud, and soon had everyone’s attention as he demonstrated several card tricks. After that, he took a newspaper, asked in sign language for one of the men sitting in the front seats to check it out carefully, folded it into a cone shape, and then, pulling a bottle of water out of a bag he carried with him, poured the water into the cone. He then very quickly inverted the cone over the head of the nearest passenger, who ducked away, much to the amusement of the other passengers. No water came out of the cone. There was a smattering of applause. He grinned, and then, still talking, poured water out of the cone and back into the jar.

There was even louder applause this time and I could certainly see why. While I’m not exactly a fan of magic acts, I had to admit the young man was very good. He had no sleeves in which to hide anything, and I was close enough to be able to watch him pretty carefully. I could not see how he had done it. He did a couple of other tricks, one with a coin, and another with a plastic tube, both of them equally baffling. As he came to the end of his performance, the young woman made her way from the back of the bus with a baseball cap and began to collect tips. I could see that those ahead of me had given very small coins, brown ones which I knew to be almost worthless by North American standards, and although I knew I had to be careful with money, I gave the Peruvian equivalent of about three dollars. The young woman looked suitably impressed with my generosity as my coins dropped into the hat, and a few minutes after the act was finished, the young man plopped into the seat beside me.

“Speak English?” he asked. I nodded. He was an American.

“The name’s Puma, after the wild cat that roams around here,” he said. “My girlfriend’s name is Pachamama. That’s the native word for Mother Earth. They aren’t our real names,” he added, “just ones we’re using for now.”

I would never have guessed. Not that I could be judgmental. “I’m Rebecca,” I said, taking his proffered handshake and complimenting him on his magic act.

“What are you doin‘ in the back of beyond?” he said. “If you don’t mind my asking.”

“I’m going to work at an archaeological site,” I replied.

“Wow!” he exclaimed. “Amazing!”

“How about you?” I asked politely.

“We’ve been doin‘ the sites, Inca mainly, down south. But now we’re gonna join a bunch of people, a commune sorta, not too far from here. We’re gonna grow our own food and stuff.”

How sixties, I thought. “What a lovely idea,” I said.

He looked carefully at me to see if I was kidding, and apparently concluded I was taking him sufficiently seriously. “I’ll tell you a secret,” he whispered solemnly. “We’re here to ‘excape’ the end of the world.” Inwardly, I groaned.

“There’s gonna be a huge ‘pocalypse, you know,” he added. He didn’t appear to know or care that apocalypse starts with an “a.” “Earthquakes, fire, volcanoes, floods, everything. Followed by nuclear holocaust.” It sounded like overkill to me.

“Right at the stroke of midnight on December 31, 1999,” he went on. “I seen it, in my head, I mean. All the capitalist countries, the United States, Europe, everything, will be destroyed. You’re lucky to be here.”

We were silent for a moment or two after that conversation stopper. Then he went on. “I’m a little worried about your archaeology site, now that I think about it. You might find a tomb or something and unleash some terrible curse.”

“I’ll try not to do that,” I replied.

“Good.” He grinned, getting up and heading back to his seat. “Thanks for the donation.”

I turned back to watch the scenery flashing by. Peru, it seemed to me, was a land of geographic extremes, from the world’s driest desert, the Atacama in the south; to some of the richest ocean waters, teeming with marine life, created by the cold Humboldt from Antarctica and the warmer Pacific current coming south; to the Andes, the world’s second greatest mountain range. In this part of the world, there are no foothills. You could crawl out of the Pacific, cross a few miles of arid desert, and come upon a wall of rock rising almost vertically from the desert floor. Beyond that is the rain forest, in some cases, in others huge grassy plateaus and jagged valleys.

The area is unstable, geologically speaking, with the oceanic Nazca plate sliding under the South American continental plate at a rate that, while imperceptible to us, is the fastest tectonic activity anywhere. It is this action that created the Andes and an extraordinarily deep ocean trench off the coast. It is also the reason for a geological instability that results in bad earthquakes on a reasonably regular basis and sporadic volcanic activity. Puma’s and Pachamama’s choice of Peru as a place to avoid the cataclysmic upheavals of Armageddon was, from that standpoint, a poor one.

This is Moche country, I thought and marveled at it. How could such a remarkable civilization, capable of the art I had seen and held, flourish in such an inhospitable place? I wondered. But it had. Around 100 B.C., some kind of political alliance coalesced in the Rio Moche Valley, then spread north. Enormous complexes were built at Cerro Blanco, a capital city dominated by two enormous pyramids, the Huaca de la Luna and the Huaca del Sol, temples of the Moon and the Sun.

For several centuries, the Moche consolidated their position by building ceremonial and administrative centers in the river valleys—control of water being absolutely critical to their empire in such an arid part of the world—to the north and south of their capital. They had a system of canals, high up in the Andes, that diverted water from the river chasms in the mountains to irrigate the desert lands.

The Moche had a complex social structure, with an elite, a warrior class, artisans, and commoners; they practiced elaborate rituals, many of them involving human sacrifice; buried their most important citizens with treasures that rival the Egyptians; and had a vivid mythology, tantalizing hints of which remain.

Late in the sixth century, though, environmental catastrophe began to wreak havoc on the northern coastal desert. Long periods of blistering drought interrupted by sudden and devastating flooding destroyed much of Cerro Blanco and other Moche cities. There were attempts to rebuild, but the damage to the empire proved irreversible, and gradually the Moche culture faded away to be replaced by others. And it was a very long time before the grandeur of that period became known and appreciated once again.

It occurred to me, as I pondered the rise and fall of civilizations, that I might better spend my time contemplating events a little closer to home. I felt I hadn’t always been thinking as clearly as I might like in the last little while, not since I’d found Alex barely conscious in the shop, and the charred body of Lizard, and certainly not since my grisly discovery at the Ancient Ways Gallery in New York.

I could laugh at Puma’s notions about “ ‘pocalypses” and the dangers of unleashing curses from tombs, but there was no question I felt that all the bad things that were happening were linked to some Moche artifacts, and that strange things had started happening right after I’d acquired the so-called replicas. Furthermore, almost everyone who had some association with them, however tenuous, had endured some unfortunate happening in their lives, some of them coming to a very bad end indeed. Even A. J. Smythson, the late owner of the Smythson Gallery, who hadn’t actually acquired them but was supposed to, had died a horrible death.

The point was, I didn’t believe in curses, not when I was being rational, anyway.

And now here I was on a bus headed for the purported point of origin of at least one of these artifacts, the flared vase from Campina Vieja. I was almost three hours north of Trujillo, four or five hundred miles north of Lima, and a lifetime away from the people I cared about.

This is nuts, I thought. Go home. You can persuade Rob of Alex’s innocence and yours. He’s angry, but he’ll get over it, and he will help put this right.

“Campina Vieja,” the driver called out. I’d arrived at my destination, good idea or not. I disembarked. So did my two young friends.

Steve Neal had said that he’d be in town to meet me, and he was as good as his word. For the very few minutes I had to wait for him, I did a quick survey of my surroundings. I was in a reasonably large town and across from a bustling open-air market. I also watched the two young hippies—really there was no other word for them, as outdated as the term might be—try to negotiate their onward journey to the commune.

The preferred method of transport in Campina Vieja appeared to be motorcycle taxi. Puma and Pachamama carefully counted out their change—they were obviously broke, even more so than I—and then tried to negotiate the fare with one of the drivers near the bus station.

They were at a serious disadvantage, not speaking Spanish, and dealing with a destination that was either unknown to the driver, or one which he didn’t want to go to. Eventually they picked up their packs and started to walk. Shortly after, Steve Neal pulled up in a grey Nissan truck.

For the next half hour or so, Steve did a few errands around town, giving me a running commentary on the place as he did so. We picked up four large plastic cubes of water, a tank of propane and some kerosene, and then we were headed out of town on the northbound Pan-American highway once again. A couple of miles out of town, I saw up ahead of us the two young people, trudging along the edge of the road. They were covered in dust, and the young woman, in particular, looked tired.

As reluctant as I was to pursue this relationship—inhabitants of communes waiting for the end of the world are not exactly my cup of tea—my maternal instincts, usually dormant, were roused, they looked so forlorn. I told Steve about them, and he pulled on the shoulder several yards ahead of them, and I got out and waved. The two of them ran to catch up to us.

“Steve,” I said, “these are my new friends Puma and Pachamama.”

I could see mirth touching the corners of Steve’s eyes and mouth, but he managed to control himself. “How do you do,” he said gravely, shaking their hands in turn. I explained where they were headed, and Puma showed him some directions. “Throw your stuff in the back and hop in,”‘ he said, gesturing to the backseat. “We have one stop, but it’s on our way.” The two grinned ear to ear with gratitude.

Puma sat up front with Steve, while I took the backseat with Pachamama. She didn’t have very much to say, but I noticed Puma was doing card tricks for Steve, which must have been a little distracting.

A few miles out of town, Steve made a left turn on a dirt road that ran between two buildings. Standing in front of one of them was a tiny woman, skin very brown and wrinkled, wearing a brown felt hat the shape of a lamp shade, an embroidered blouse covered by a brown vest, a short full skirt of navy blue over leggings, and black work boots. Her dark hair, streaked with grey, was twisted into two long, thick plaits. Beside her were two very large woven baskets in bright colors, pink and orange and green. Steve pulled the truck up beside her, loaded the baskets in the back, then helped her up into the back of the truck as well.

“Ines Cardoso,” he said, getting back behind the wheel. “Our cook. With our dinner,” he added.

About half a mile down the dusty road, he pulled off the road again, and we bumped down what was essentially a cart path in the general direction of a clump of trees. I could see a few primitive huts to one side, some laundry flapping in a breeze, a fenced-in area beside them where a few tired stalks of corn were growing. “Here we are. The commune,” Steve said. My heart sank for my two young friends.

We disembarked, and Puma and Steve unloaded the bags from the back of the van. I smiled at Ines, who was staring at me. She didn’t smile back.

I hugged both the kids and, in a moment of weakness, slipped the Peruvian equivalent of about twenty dollars to Puma, then watched as they headed toward the encampment. “Don’t forget what I told you,” Puma called back to me. “About December 31 and everything.” How could I forget when I was being reminded about it everywhere I went?

“I won’t. And thanks for the advice.”

“Thanks for giving them a ride,” I said to Steve. We were alone in the truck. Ines, although there was now plenty of room, preferred to sit in the back.

“No problem. They’re not much older than my kids, you know. My son’s in college, and my daughter is just finishing high school. I know this puts me solidly in the camp of male chauvinist pigs, but I particularly wouldn’t like to think of my daughter in that place.” He glanced over at me. “By the way, I saw what you did.” I feigned innocence. “Feeling flush, are you?”

“No,” I replied. “Actually, I’m feeling broke. But it’s all relative. You’re going to see that there’s a roof over my head, and you’ll feed me. I’ll manage.”

He sighed. “I don’t much like the idea of their staying at that place,” he repeated.

“They’ll be okay,” I said, somewhat hesitantly. “Is there something other than their general comfort you think they need to worry about?”‘

“Not really,” he replied, just a tad too quickly. “Have I conveyed to you how absolutely delighted I am that you accepted this position?” he went on, changing the subject. I smiled.

“Really, I mean it,” he said. “I’m a field man, not a businessman. I’m itching to be out there at the site. But there’s so much to be done, just to keep this project running, and I’m second on the totem pole. Hilda, Dr. Schwengen, is the head of this project, really, although she and I are called codirectors. Have you heard of her? No?” he said, looking at my blank expression. “She’s the high priestess of field archaeology in this part of the world. Austrian, originally, but she emigrated to the States when she was very young. Done some wonderful work on Inca sites, cleared a whole city up in the mountains almost single-handed, fighting off banditos in the process. Something of a legend, is our Hilda. She’s now turned her attention to the Moche. So far, though, we’ve come up dry.”

“Is this your first year here?” I asked, changing the subject.

“Fourth,” Steve replied. “Fourth and last unless we can come up with something spectacular. The grant I got for this dig runs out at the end of this season, and unless we can bring in another sponsor or two— we’ve got one small one to help out this year—we’re done here. I’ve talked to a couple of the Peruvian banks, but sponsors look for something a little more exciting for their money than what we’ve found so far. The stuff we’ve found is all really interesting; we’ve uncovered a workers’ cemetery and what was probably a village populated by craftspeople.”

“But that sounds fascinating,” I interrupted him.

“Oh, it is,” he replied. “But it’s not glamorous. We’ve learned a lot about early Moche times, but sponsors want something more exciting than that, and they know it’s possible. There have been terrific finds a little north of here. Sipan, for example. Those tombs were just spectacular. I’m biased, of course, but I think they’re the New World equivalent of King Tut’s tomb. Enough gold and silver to keep a Croesus happy. That’s what sponsors want. I’m still convinced, though, there’s something big here, and so’s Hilda. I have a feeling in my bones this is the season we’ll find it. All the signs are right. Hope so, anyway, as much for Hilda as for myself.”

“That’s terrific,” I said.

“It is. I should warn you about our sponsor, though. One Carlos Montero. He’s the mayor’s brother and owner of one of the few big businesses in town. This is essentially a one-factory town, by the way.”

My ears pricked up. Steve went on. “As you can see, there isn’t much here. Fishing certainly, some farming. And Carlos and us. As for Carlos…” He paused for a second or two. “Let’s just say that political correctness has not reached the northern coastal desert of Peru. Carlos and a lot of the local men around here think that if a woman is out on her own, she’s fair game. I wouldn’t take in any of the local bars at night without a guy present, if I were you. The women on the project find Carlos a bit of a pain, I should warn you, always hitting on them. We try to make sure you women aren’t left alone with him for long.”

“So what does Carlos do, if anything, when he’s not bothering women and being the mayor’s brother?” I asked.

“Owns the local factory, one with the rather amusing name of Fabrica des Artesanias Paraiso, which means paradise as you probably know, the Paradise Crafts Factory,” Steve said. “They make reproductions of Moche artifacts, and ship them all over the world.”

Now this is interesting, I thought to myself.

“Montero supports our work here,” Steve went on. “I’d be hard-pressed to make ends meet without him. He makes a donation of some substance every year, and lends us tools and workers from time to time. I rent the truck from him, and he gives us a good rate. It’s generous of him, but not a bad deal for him either. Let’s just say we have a rather symbiotic relationship. He helps us financially and in kind. We agree to let him see whatever we find before it’s shipped off to Lima, and we kind of turn our backs while he photographs it in some detail, so he can make reproductions later and be first on the market. Most of the souvenirs of Moche objects that you find around here are manufactured in his plant.”

“Is yours the only dig he does this for?” I asked.

“The only one this year. He supported a dig the Germans did south of here for a few years. Got some lovely stuff from there. Montero usually does ceramics. He’s got a mold maker who can do a quick mold right from the photograph, and then the factory churns them out by the hundreds, if not thousands. He’s got a chain of little dealers that sell it for him. They hang around the tourist sites and flog the stuff. You know the sort: Wanna buy a watch, mister? That kind of thing. They look like independent dealers, but they’re just as often as not Montero’s people. He’s doing very well, and thinking about branching out into gold and silver reproductions, because the Germans found the tomb of a Moche priestess, lucky sods.” He paused. “Do we detect a hint of professional jealousy here, you’re wondering?”

I laughed. “Maybe just a whiff. But go on.”

“Okay. Some of Montero’s stuff is kind of tacky, I’m afraid. It offends me slightly to take his money, but not enough to stop taking it. The Germans pulled up stakes last year and didn’t come back this season, so now we’re the recipients of all of Montero’s largesse. There’s a little work still going on way down south, but essentially we’re the only project in these parts this year.”

“Does Montero make replicas too? In addition to reproductions, I mean,” I asked in what I hoped was a casual tone.

“I suppose he might. Anything to make a buck. He’s just a bit obsessed with being big man about town, biggest house, biggest car, that kind of thing. Probably competing since childhood with his brother, the mayor,” Steve replied. “But replicas are high ticket items, really expensive to make, as I suppose you know. I kind of see Montero as the mass producer of cheap merchandise, junk, dare I say it.”

I didn’t probe further, even though I wanted to. The flared vase that was supposed to have originated from Campina Vieja hadn’t looked like junk to me, but I decided I’d asked enough about Montero and his Fabrica Paraiso for the time being. If Carlos Montero really was a bigwig in town, I was going to have to be careful with my questioning.

“Why didn’t the Germans come back again this year?” I asked out of mild curiosity.

“The weather, I expect,” Steve replied. “You’ve heard of El Nino?” I nodded. El Nino was the name given to a periodic climatic event that caused changes in the currents in the Pacific. The phenomenon is named El Nino for the Christ child, because the warm currents associated with it tend to come around Christmastime. When, for a number of reasons, the warm currents stay around longer than usual, they cause tremendous changes in water temperature, and therefore weather on land, not just in Peru, but all over the world.

“Well, we’re in for a big one. I don’t think those of us who live in large North American cities truly appreciate the kind of climatic and therefore social changes weather conditions like El Nino cause,” he went on. “We catch glimpses of how vulnerable we can be to weather during droughts in the Midwest, flooding or ice storms in other places, but to a certain extent we’re protected from major weather patterns. Not so down here.

“In the desert, you can really be at the mercy of the elements. There was terrible flooding here during the last El Nino, people killed in mud slides. And then there’s the cholera that tends to come along with the flooding. I should add this is not an entirely new phenomenon. You can see evidence of it in the archaeological record. It may even have been these kinds of weather patterns that ended the Moche empire. Anyway, another El Nino is on its way, and we’re seeing the climatic and social changes that come with it. Fish stocks are down. The warmer than normal water is killing the sea plants and fish. One of the Peruvian workers on the site estimates the fishing is off by almost eighty percent. That means that the people who make their living fishing are in a bad way. Some of them are trying to turn to a little farming to keep going.

“At the same time, we’ve got drought elsewhere, so people are on the move. In some cases, they are just moving in and taking over land near the coast here and starting to farm it.

“Needless to say, the locals are not happy with the new arrivals—they call them invasores, invaders— particularly since good land is hard to come by, and fishing is all but gone. The newcomers, unfortunately, are armed in some cases, and there have been a couple of very nasty confrontations. Times like these push people to the limit.

“And the rain hasn’t even started here yet. It’s winter here, remember. Normally we can get in and out in a season before there’s any rain, but it’s raining already in Chile, so we may have to pack up early and go home. That’s why we’re the only team in these parts this season. The others decided to give this year a pass. And I confess it’s one of the reasons I worried a bit about those two kids we picked up on the highway. I don’t think the campesinos, the local farmers, will be any more pleased to see these young invasores than they will the people from inland, and even if they don’t mind, our young friends could get caught in the cross fire.

“We’re being extra careful ourselves. We try to stick together as a group out at the site, and always have at least two of us at the hacienda at any time. It is, as you’ll see, a little isolated.

“I haven’t scared you with this, have I? We just have to take precautions, that’s all. And there is some good news in this, by the way. It’s made it a lot easier to get Peruvian workers on the dig, with so many people looking for work. Small as we are, archaeology is getting to be the major employer in this town, what with our project and Montero’s crafts factory on the other side of the highway.”

We sat in silence for a few minutes, as I digested all this. The road was following what appeared to be a very wide ditch on our left, several hundred yards wide, which I eventually realized was a riverbed, with only a trickle of water in the center of it. We were heading, I knew, in the direction of the sea, so this ditch, it would appear, was near the mouth of the river. The road was deserted. There were no houses lining it, and only the occasional clump of trees to the right. From time to time we would see someone, in one case a man riding a donkey, but otherwise the place was just about empty. Our truck left clouds of dust in its wake.

After a mile or so of bumping along like this, we came up to a small woodland and passing that turned right several hundred yards, then drove across a concrete irrigation canal and over a slight hill.

I don’t think I will ever forget my first view of the Hacienda Garua. Steve had said the hacienda was a little isolated, but that didn’t come anywhere near describing it. It seemed to me to be overwhelmingly lonely, a huge old house, once very grand, that had fallen into decay. The house was angled, I could see, to take in the breezes and a view across the river’s mouth to grassy dunes and the sea beyond. The hacienda was two storeys, with a beautiful carved wood door, the carving now dry and cracked and broken. There were large windows on the main floor only, with wood shutters, several of them pulled tight, a couple of them hanging askew on rusty hinges and banging against the wall in the breeze.

The house had once been yellow ochre, I could tell, but the paint was now faded and cracked. In front of the house was a fountain, a stone cupid holding a conch shell, silent and dry. Off to the right on the edge of the woods were the remains of a small building, a little folly perhaps, a place once used to enjoy the outdoors. Now it was a shell, a row of archways leading nowhere. Dust swirled in the yard as Steve pulled the truck up to the door and cut the engine.

The place had an air of a ghost town, somehow, even though I knew it was inhabited. As I approached the door, I half expected to hear music and voices from within, the clink of silver and crystal from some ghostly party held a century before. Instead, all I could hear was the sound of a dog barking somewhere and the distant crowing of a rooster. I stood there, just looking at it, almost overwhelmed by the desolation, as Steve began to unload the back and help Ines with her baskets.

Slowly, and somewhat reluctantly I admit, I walked through the huge door and a large entranceway to find myself in an interior courtyard, open to the sky. If houses can be said to have a personality, this one was introverted, its energy directed inside. While the outside of the house was austere, architectural features were reserved for the interior. The courtyard floor was fashioned of large polished stones—marble, I thought—under the dust. Several were cracked and worn. There was an open hallway, verandahlike, on all four sides of the courtyard and on both floors, raised slightly above courtyard level and reached by three marble steps on each side of the entranceway and an equal number in the center at the end facing me.

The verandahs were held up by Italianate columns, and lined with wrought iron railings, white paint peeling, and the walls showed signs of the same yellow ochre of the exterior. On all four sides of the main floor, and three on the second, several rooms, judging from the number of doors and windows I could see overlooking the courtyard, led off these verandahs. The second floor, on the end straight ahead of me and opposite to the entranceway, was open at the back to catch the breezes, and I could see the sky, grey and overcast beyond.

I heard footsteps behind me. “Hands up, turn around slowly, or I’ll shoot,” a voice growled.

9

For heaven’s sake, Lucho! Do you have to be a complete dork?“ a woman’s voice exclaimed.

I carefully inched my head up and to the right until I could see a young woman leaning over the railing on the floor above. “Put that thing away, you idiot,” she said to someone I couldn’t see. “Lucho,” she said, glancing at me but tossing her head in the general direction of whoever it was behind me, “is practicing to be a terrorist.”

“A freedom fighter,” the man’s voice said peevishly. “And I’m not practicing, I’m training. Training to be a freedom fighter.”

“A freedom fighter, of course,” she said, grinning at me. “I forgot. You must be Rebecca, aren’t you?” she asked.

I nodded, not yet having regained control of my vocal cords.

“Hold on a sec,” she said, turning away from the railing.

Hold on a sec? I’d hold on a sec. My feet were still rooted to the ground in sheer terror. I heard sandals clicking on the stairs, and then she reappeared from one corner of the courtyard.

“I’m Tracey. Tracey Dougall. The paleo. Tea?”

The paleo? Tea? After that welcoming party, surely scotch would be more appropriate. But I’d take what I could get. “Sure,” I managed to say.

Steve Neal wandered in. “Good. I see you’ve already met a member of the team.” He gave both Tracey and me a nice smile, but the real warmth, regrettably, was directed toward Tracey. No wonder. She was gorgeous. Young—still in her mid-twenties, I’d say—blond, hair cut very short and spiky over a beautifully shaped head, great cheekbones, wide eyes, full mouth, perfect teeth, flawless complexion, she was one of those people who have come out on top in the genetic sweepstakes. She was wearing black tights with a black halter top, sandals with platform soles, and a large denim shirt, a man’s probably, open but tied at the waist. It would be easy, I thought, to dislike this woman.

“Tracey’s my prize doctoral student,” Steve said, still smiling. “She’s in charge of the lab.” Smart too, I thought. With very little effort on my part, I thought, mere dislike could be elevated to pure hatred.

“Lucho’s been playing freedom fighter with Rebecca,” she said to Steve.

Steve’s shoulders slumped in exasperation. “Lucho, get out here!” he ordered. From behind the door came a short, rather tubby young man, dressed head to toe in camouflage gear, his face speckled with a dark stubble, curly hair barely concealed by a Fidel Castro style hat, a gun belt winding a rather circuitous route around his paunch. As silly as he appeared, though, the gun looked real enough to me.

“Give me that thing,” Steve ordered.

Lucho cringed. “How can I guard this place without a gun, Senor Doctor Neal?” he whined.

“You’re a soldier, you’ll think of something,” Steve said in a placating but firm tone. “Now give me the gun.” With more than a little reluctance, Lucho handed it over. “Now take Ms. MacCrimmon’s bag to her room. The blue one,” he added, pointing to a room on the second floor.

“He’s a bit slow,” Tracey mouthed at me, as Lucho picked up my bag and began shuffling toward the stairs. “And…” She tapped her index finger on her forehead. “Cuckoo.”

“He’s harmless,” Steve said as Lucho slunk away. “He wouldn’t have hurt you. Really. However, we’d better find someplace safe to put this, somewhere our freedom fighter won’t find it. Can you think of a place in the lab, Tracey?”

Tracey eyed the weapon with distaste. “Sure,” she said. “Give it to me.” She took it very cautiously, holding the grip gingerly between thumb and forefinger well out from her body, barrel pointed toward the ground. Guns did not appear to be Tracey’s thing. I liked her better than I had thought I might.

“Come on, Rebecca,” Tracey said. “We’ll drop this horrid object in the lab, and then we’ll get Ines to make us some tea and I’ll give you a hand unpacking. My room is next to yours. It’ll be fun. Like college.”

“Enjoy your last few hours of leisure.” Steve grinned at me. “I’m putting you to work first thing tomorrow. Let me know where you hide the you-know-what, Tracey,” he said as Lucho shuffled back into view on the balcony above us. Dealing with Lucho, apparently, was like dealing with a very small child. As in let’s put the g-u-n in the w-h-a-t-e-v-e-r.

Tracey waited until Lucho was again out of sight before leading me to a room off the courtyard to the right of the main door. The lab was a large room with trestle tables along both walls, plus one large table right in the middle of the room. On the left, what looked to be a complete skeleton was stretched out full length on the table, its head resting on a black velvet pillow. “That’s Benji,” Tracey said, following my glance. “Super, isn’t he?”

“Big Benji,” a voice said, and I turned to see a tall, greying man coming through a door off to the right. “As you can see, he is, or was, rather tall. I’m Ralph,” he said, extending his hand. “Welcome to the Hacienda Nowhere.”

“Ralph Woolsey, Rebecca MacCrimmon,” Tracey said, doing the introductions. “Ralph is our ceramicist, University of Southern California. Rebecca—”

“I know who Rebecca is.” Ralph laughed. Ralph too was rather tall, with a relaxed and easygoing manner, and a nice firm handshake. “Steve has talked about little else for the last two days except how he’s found this wonderful woman who is going to get us all organized. I can only say that if you can get us even remotely organized,” he added, his arm sweeping around the room, “you are a wizard indeed.”

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Tracey said. I looked about me. Actually, it seemed pretty orderly to me, in a chaotic sort of way. On the left there was Big Benji and assorted other bones. “That’s my domain,” Tracey said, following my glance. “I’m working on my doctoral thesis in paleoanthropology. I’m the bone person on the project. We’re learning some interesting things about the state of people’s health in Moche times from my friend Benji here. Look,” she said, grasping Benji’s skull and holding it up to my face. “Nice teeth! The other side of the room, as you can see,” she said, waving the skull in Ralph’s direction, “is Ralph’s.”

Ralph’s side of the room was covered in pottery shards, some soaking in large pans of water. A couple of pots were being carefully restored, broken piece by piece. About halfway along the wall was a photo setup with a camera on an arm over the table, and a computer, of the laptop variety. “How are you on computers, Rebecca?” Ralph asked. “We’re kind of hoping you can help us with the cataloguing of all this stuff.”

I took a quick look. It was the computer and software that I used in the shop. How long ago and far away that seemed. “Fine,” I replied, collecting myself after a moment or two of incipient homesickness. “This will be no problem.” Both of them looked rather delighted. They might not have been quite so thrilled had they known I was thinking how easy this made it for me to check up on their records in search of a flared Moche pot and a turquoise and gold ear ornament.

At the back of the room there was a pile of boxes, each marked with the year, the initials CV for, I assumed, Campina Vieja, and Caja, box in Spanish, and then a number. “What are these?” I asked.

“Boxes of catalogued artifacts taken from the site,”‘ Tracey replied. “We study them, catalogue and store them in these boxes. At the end of each season, they’re packed up and shipped to Lima to the INC, the Institute Nacional de Cultura. One requires a credencial, a permit, to do archaeology in Peru,” Tracey went on. “Credenciales are issued by the INC, and everything found on archaeological projects in Peru becomes INC property.”

She walked over to the pile of boxes. “Speaking of storage, how about Caja ocho, Box eight?” she said, holding the gun up carefully, then laying it in the box. “Will you two remember that? Remind me to tell Steve too,” she said, “and to take it out before we ship, of course. I doubt the INC would be too impressed by finding a very new gun in with the artifacts from our project! Now let’s see what we can do about getting you settled, Rebecca. Don’t tell Lucho about Caja ocho, Ralph,” she admonished as we left.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he replied, smiling at her. Ralph too, judging by the warmth of his smile, was an admirer of Tracey.

Tracey led the way to the kitchen and imposed on Ines to make us a cup of tea. Dinner was well under way by now, but Ines seemed to like Tracey and put the kettle on, and the two of them chattered away while it heated. Ines was still not speaking to me.

The kitchen looked reasonably complete. There was an acid-green refrigerator, propane according to Tracey, a range in cobalt blue, with a little propane stove as backup, a sink and all the usual accessories. I don’t know what I expected out here, but clearly it was something more primitive. Dinner, whatever it was, smelled delicious.

Armed with cups of tea, Tracey and I had a quick tour of the place, and then went upstairs. The Hacienda Garua was essentially a square, with a ground level courtyard, and rooms opening onto it on two floors, all of them off tiled hallways that were open to the courtyard and lined with beautiful wrought iron railings.

The rooms on the main floor were raised slightly, three steps, from the ground level, for some reason. Esthetics perhaps, or to protect them from floods, which were hard to imagine in such a desert climate, although not, according to Tracey and from what I’d heard from Steve, unprecedented. At the back, opposite the door, was the dining room and the kitchen. To the right was the lab and some storage space. To the left, at the back was a little sitting room, a library of sorts with a few worn but comfortable armchairs, lots of books, and a writing desk. The first room to the left of the main entrance was Lucho’s. His door featured a skull and crossbones on it and a warning not to enter. With the exception of the kitchen, which was tucked into a corner at the back of the hacienda, all rooms had not only doors, but windows that opened to the central courtyard, and it was possible to walk all the way around the square on either floor.

Stairs led from the ground floor to the second in the two back corners of the courtyard, at the opposite end from the entrance. The women’s rooms were situated on the second floor on the right-hand side as one came through the main door, the men’s to the left. My room, the blue room, was at the far end of the right-hand hall, joined to Tracey’s, the yellow room, by a shared bathroom. Hilda Schwengen’s room was the first on the right from the main door, and featured, according to Tracey, real windows, that is windows that opened to the outside at the front of the hacienda.

The counterpart of Dr. Schwengen’s on the men’s side was Steve Neal’s. Next to him, working toward the back, was Ralph’s, and then a room that was used by visiting scholars, and sometimes, Tracey told me, by one Ricardo Ramos, a Peruvian archaeologist who was, I gathered, a friend and colleague of Steve’s.

Hilda and Steve, I was told, had private bathrooms, the rest of us shared small bathrooms with toilet and sink. There were communal showers at the back of the second floor, the women’s on the right, the men’s on the left.

“The hacienda was built in the late 1800s,” Tracey said, in answer to my query. “It belonged to a wealthy family, who had, I’m told, the most amazing parties in the courtyard. But the water ran out, and the house had to be abandoned,” she said, “until about thirty years ago, when someone opened it for a short period of time as an inn. It was way too isolated to be successful, and the owner went bankrupt.”

“Who owns it now?” I asked.

“Carlos Montero,” she replied, making a face. “Awful man. An old lech. His father held the mortgage on the place, so he got it when the inn closed. You’ll meet Carlos soon enough, maybe too soon for your taste. He likes to hang around. But you’re a lucky girl. He’s gone to Trujillo and won’t be joining us this evening.”

As she spoke, I was unpacking Rebecca’s duffel bag, placing everything on the bed.

“You didn’t bring much,” Tracey said dubiously, eyeing my rather pathetic little heap of belongings.

What could I say? That I was on the lam, using someone else’s identity and someone else’s clothes? “I didn’t know I was coming until the last minute, so I didn’t have much time to pack,” I said lamely. “Even so,” I said, peering into the tiny cupboard, “there doesn’t seem to be any way to hang this stuff up.”

“Oops,” Tracey said. “That’s because I scoffed all the hangers. I brought more than enough clothes for both of us. I’ll lend you some of my stuff. I’ve got lots. Come on into my room and see.”

I smiled nicely, even though it was quite apparent to me that I had about twenty pounds on Tracey, and knew nothing would fit. But she was right about one thing: She’d brought lots of clothes, enough for an army really. Her room was crammed with clothes, shoes, photos, stuffed animals, and trinkets of all kinds.

“I really love my work,” she said, noticing me looking around. “But I hate being away from home, so I always pack lots of stuff, so I feel sort of as if I’m home. I miss my mom and my stepfather, my brother, my pals, my boyfriend Jamie,” she said, pointing to photos of each in turn. “I phone home once a week, and sometimes twice. I even miss my car,” she said, handing me a photo of the vehicle in question. Well, who wouldn’t? I thought. A Saab convertible. I too might miss such a car, should I ever make enough money to own one. Tracey was beautiful, smart, and apparently rich as well. But not spoiled somehow, I thought. “Here,” she said, tossing some clothes on her bed, “some hangers.”

Just then we heard Steve call from below, and went out onto the hallway. “Cocktails,” he yelled so all could hear, “now being served in the lounge.”

Hilda Schwengen was in the little lounge, sitting ramrod straight in a rather uncomfortable-looking chair, a halo of smoke winding sinuously around her head from the cigarette she held between long, elegant fingers. On the table beside her there was a very large drink, scotch, I thought, no water, no ice. She did not get up as I came in. In fact, she did not so much as lean forward when we were introduced. Instead, she extended her hand, palm turned down slightly, in such a way that for a moment I felt I was expected to lean over and kiss it. Perhaps, I thought, she believes her own publicity, about being a legend, the high priestess of Peruvian archaeology, as Steve had described her. She was tall, I thought, and very slim, with a long neck and aristocratic cheekbones. She was wearing an off-white linen shirt and pants with a silver metal belt. Her hair, silver-grey, was long and worn tied back loosely.

“Welcome to the Hacienda Garua and to our little project,” she said to me, her tone gracious, but her voice rubbed raw by the smoke of a million cigarettes. “I understand Lucho pulled a gun on you when you arrived,” she said. “I really must apologize on behalf of my staff. You must have been terrified.”

“It was certainly an exciting start to my work here,” I agreed. Everyone laughed, Steve appeared at my elbow, bottle of scotch in hand, and the party began. Everyone on the directors’ team squeezed into the little room and chatted away about the day, what they’d found, what they hadn’t. I got to meet Pablo Vela, the foreman, a nice young man, medium height and thin, with a beginning moustache that was quite fetching. He lived in town, he told me, but had dinner at the hacienda every evening to plan the next day. “Better food here than at home.” He laughed. In honor of my arrival, the students who lived and normally ate in town had been invited to dinner: Alana, Susie, Janet, and Robert, students from the University of Southern California, George, David, and Fred from Texas AM. The only person missing was Lucho, who preferred to stand guard outside, preparing himself, apparently, for the rigors of the life of a freedom fighter. Against what or whom he was guarding us, no one said.

Although the tiny room was packed and the scotch flowed freely, cocktails at the hacienda were, that evening and others to follow, a rather subdued affair, more ritual than anything else. Everyone made a point of going over to talk to Hilda, deference in their manner, who always sat the same way in the same chair, cigarette in one hand, glass of scotch in the other. Everyone, I should say, except Tracey, who stayed as far away from the legend as she could in such a small space.

When Ines appeared at the door, we went in to dinner. And what a meal it was. First there was a spicy corn and sweet potato sopa, which Ines served from a large tureen on the sideboard, followed by large platters of corvina, a type of sea bass, I was told, in a walnut sauce, avocado slices smooth as silk, marinated vegetables, and sliced potatoes covered in a sauce I didn’t recognize but instantly fell in love with. All of us tucked into the food with real gusto, except for Hilda Schwengen, who pushed her food around her plate between gulps of scotch. Several times I saw her look down the table in the general direction of Tracey, who was talking in an animated fashion to Pablo and Steve. There was something in that glance that gave me pause. I couldn’t interpret it, but I knew it wasn’t friendly. Perhaps it was simple jealousy. Tracey was certainly someone who could arouse envy in almost anyone, were it not for the fact that she seemed to me to be genuinely friendly. But I’d just got here; maybe Hilda knew something I didn’t. Ralph too, I noticed, watched Tracey a great deal more than was necessary, confirming my earlier impression that he was more than a little besotted.

In any event, a few minutes into the meal, Hilda arose from her seat at the head of the table, almost all her food left on her plate, and excused herself. Hefting the half filled bottle of scotch off the side table, she left the dining room. I could hear her slow steps on the stairs and on the upper hall as she made her way to her room.

For a moment, no one said anything until Tracey broke the silence. “Ines,” she said, “please take a tray up to Dr. Schwengen, will you?”

“She doesn’t eat,” Ines replied.

“I know,” Tracey said quietly, “but take it up anyway.”

If Hilda didn’t eat, she was missing a good thing, I decided, as Ines’s food continued to flow from the kitchen. Then Tracey left the room, and I began to wonder what was really going on here, but she returned minutes later with her hands behind her back.

“I’ve been saving these for a special occasion,” she said, “and I think Rebecca’s arrival and her narrow escape from death at the hands of the ferocious freedom fighter Lucho must qualify. Ta dah!” she exclaimed, and produced from behind her back three very fine bottles of wine. Now, how could you dislike someone like that? I thought to myself, and judging by the chorus of cheers that greeted the gesture, we agreed on that. From then on the conversation and the noise level rose considerably. Everyone had an archaeological adventure to tell, each more exciting and more unbelievable than the last. Steve and Tracey told stories of helping the police with their investigations of crimes long hidden; Pablo told tales of townspeople angered by the archaeological digs taking place in their region, robbing them of their livelihood, the illegal traffic in artifacts. The students had funny stories about the primitive conditions under which they’d lived from time to time.

But the best story was reserved for last: the time Hilda Schwengen held off four banditos. Hilda and Steve were heading back to town in an open Jeep on a narrow country road lined by high embankments, not far from one of their dig sites, when four men leapt from the bushes into the path of their car, brandishing metal pipes and, in one case apparently, a sword. Steve and Hilda were ordered to get out of the vehicle. Hilda calmly reached over, pulled a gun out of the glove compartment, and started shooting over their heads. “I believe they thought she was a poor shot,” Steve said amid much laughter. “Even I thought so. I was cowering on the floor of the Jeep… if you can imagine someone my size cramming himself into that small a space. Which I did. But Hilda kept firing, and eventually it occurred to them she might get lucky and hit something, so they turned tail and ran.”

It was a story, I could tell, that had been told time and time again until it had reached almost mythic proportions. It was also apparent to me as the story was being recited that there was a great deal of affection as well as reverence for Hilda, no matter how she appeared to me.

It was a really enjoyable evening, the first I’d had in a while, and I began to relax just a little, enough so that I’d kicked off my shoes and sat curled up in the chair. As we all sat around the table enjoying the camaraderie, the power went out. This was, apparently, a reasonably regular occurrence, because candles and matches were right at hand. The evening was getting cool, however, and I decided to get my sweater from my room to cover my shoulders. I padded up the stairs in my bare feet, enjoying the feel of the cool marble on my toes, and careful not to make any noise to disturb Hilda. As I got to my room, I noticed the door was partly open, not as I had left it, and I thought I could see a flicker of candlelight within. Carefully, I eased my way very quietly around the door.

Ines was there, her back to me, a candle flickering on the night table. She was touching each article of clothing I had left on the bed, and I thought I heard her whispering. When each piece had been touched in turn, she straightened, and without turning around, she said, “So you’ve come at last, as it is spoken.” Then turning to look at me, rigid in the doorway, she whispered, “Cuidado al arbolado!”‘ Beware of the woods. “If you are to succeed, you must survive the woods.”

Suddenly there was a gust of wind, the candle went out, a door banged sharply. I turned, distracted by the noise. When I turned back, she was gone, although I was blocking the door. I looked to see if she had gone through the little bathroom to Tracey’s room, but could not see her there. It was perplexing and unsettling.

I went back downstairs a few minutes later, and Ines was there, cleaning up in the kitchen. She didn’t say anything to me; in fact, she didn’t acknowledge my presence in any way. Shortly thereafter, her brother, Tomas, came to take her home and Steve, Tracey, and I walked her to the door. Tomas had a little motorcycle taxi, a bike with a seat in the back. Ines climbed on and sat primly, her hat pulled down firmly, her bag clutched in front of her. As her brother, whom I’d not met, wheeled the bike around to head back into town, I saw a figure caught for a moment in the beam of the headlight, standing under one of the ghostly arches of the little folly outside. He was a workman, a campesino or farmer, perhaps, judging from his clothes, and he was holding something in a sack—burlap, I thought, or plastic—a rice sack most likely. He quickly melted back into the shadow of the arches as the beam passed by.

Strange place, I thought.

Later that night, I lay in bed unable to sleep, although perhaps I dozed. The episode with Ines preyed on my mind, as did the vision of the man under the arches, and so I started at every little noise. At some point, I began to realize that the breeze had begun to whisper, and I got up quietly and went to the door, opening it just a crack. There were indeed voices, whispers, down below. I sensed, rather than saw, the big front door open a little and someone slip in. A match flared for a second or two just as I moved to the railing to see who was down there. Steve, I thought, a stranger and someone else I couldn’t see. The conversation was short and it seemed, an angry one, and then the second person, whoever he was— the man of the arches perhaps?—slipped out again. I was back in my bed, door closed tight, before Steve reached the second floor.

A moment or two later, I thought I heard Tracey’s door, next to mine, click shut. I got up once again and looked out. The night sky was fairly bright, despite the haze, and I caught a glimpse of Tracey gliding along the balcony on the opposite side of the courtyard. She went right down to the end, and although I waited for a few minutes more, didn’t return. Steve and Tracey. I wasn’t surprised, but it was a little disappointing just the same.

10

I first made the acquaintance of Senor Carlos Montero, owner of the rather preciously named Paradise Crafts Factory, and my personal choice for man most likely to have smuggled Moche artifacts out of Peru, a few days after I’d arrived. It was not an auspicious start to the relationship, as I recall, and certainly not one that improved his standing in my eyes, Montero more than living up to his advance billing from the women on the project. But at least it afforded me an excuse to visit the factory, something I’d been trying to accomplish since I’d first arrived.

The problem was that my life as Rebecca was seriously cutting into the time I needed to solve the problems of my real life. In the morning I rose to the crowing of the rooster in the yard outside the hacienda, not long after five a.m. By six, I’d washed, the degree to which I did so dictated by the state of the water supply, I had the coffee on, some fruit, bread, and peanut butter out on the table, as the team, yawning, made their way to the kitchen, such as it was. Shortly after six, I drove into town, picked up Pablo, the foreman, at one end of town, and a group of students studying with Steve and Hilda who were billeted in a small apartment building right in town. Some piled in the back of the truck, others in the cab. I then drove them to the site, a dusty area just a few hundred yards off the Panamericana, dropped them off, and headed back for a marker on the highway, where I picked up the team of Peruvian workers, eight in all, and ferried them to the site. Then I returned to the hacienda. By that time, Steve would be eager to get going, and Hilda, who apparently thought there were three food groups—caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol—would be well into the cigarettes and coffee she lived on all day. I’d take them out to the site to join the others.

At seven-thirty or so, I picked up Ines Cardoso at the highway and took her to the market in Campina Vieja to buy groceries. While she was doing that, I picked up whatever supplies were needed for the hacienda and the dig: scotch every day, drinking water almost always, film for the cameras, rope, wood, chains, propane for the refrigerator, whatever. As soon as that was done, I headed out to the site to assist with the work there, dropping Ines and her bundle of groceries off at her home. She didn’t mention the incident in my room in the whole time I was there, and neither did I. I didn’t think she’d explain herself if I asked, and furthermore it was difficult to take a warning about the woods very seriously when there were so few trees around.

When I wasn’t running errands, I worked in the lab. Every single artifact at the site, no matter how small or insignificant they might look to me, was sent back, usually in a plastic baggie with a tag on it with details of where it had been found. Each article had to be entered into the computer on a template designed for that purpose: the first cut at information included location, depth in ground, size, material, and a description of some sort. Then there was a more detailed template, depending on the type of material, which was much more specific. Here Ralph and Tracey tried to classify the material by period and culture—middle Moche for example. It was painstakingly detailed work for them. For me it was a kind of mindless activity, simply taking the information given me and entering it in the appropriate place on the template.

At some point every day, and sometimes more than once, I’d pick up the little bags of whatever artifacts had been found at the site, delivering them to Tracey and Ralph, who worked all day in the lab.

If I had a moment to spare, I worked at the site, sometimes as what is called a digger assistant, working under the supervision of Steve or Hilda. The excavation site was about twelve feet square marked off in sections by a grid of string. I was occasionally allowed to clear areas of the site, but usually I either helped with the recording of the artifacts that had been found—by and large, ceramic shards—or carried debris from the pit to the sieve. The sieve was made of a large piece of mesh, about two and a half feet square, framed and mounted on legs, so that it was about waist height. The debris was placed on top, and then the frame was rocked back and forth on its legs so that the dirt fell through, leaving tiny artifacts on the top. These were recorded and bagged to take back to the lab. Nothing, I learned, is removed from a site until it’s been mapped on a grid of the site, recorded, and often photographed.

On a hot day, I was supposed to be out at the site between two and two-thirty to bring everyone back; on a cooler day they worked a little later. Not much though. In the afternoon, the breeze, which would normally be welcomed in the heat, gained in intensity until the dust whipped and swirled around the site. It got in your eyes, your clothes, your hair. You could taste it in your mouth. Worse yet, on a bad day, it drifted back into the excavation, covering up much of the day’s work.

At five every day, I’d be back out at the highway to pick up Ines at her place, to bring her to the hacienda to finish preparing dinner. In between I ferried people and supplies between the site, town, and the hacienda as needed.

At some point every day I went to the commune to check on my two young charges, as I quickly came to think of them, Puma and Pachamama. I rather surprised myself with this sentimental attachment to the two kids. I didn’t quite know how they had wormed themselves into my affections, but it seemed they had.

They’d been assigned a little hut, and Pachamama, with the help of the other members of the group, very quickly made it quite habitable, for a hut, that is. They’d found some woven rugs somewhere which were nailed to the walls to keep the dust and sand out, and someone had lent them a little wooden table and a couple of stools. They were still sleeping in their sleeping bags but had a little platform to put them on. Puma immediately set himself the task of learning Spanish, although it was hardly necessary for life on the commune, the inhabitants being, by and large, Americans. He spoke Spanish to me whenever I visited, and while it was certainly rudimentary at this stage, I thought he showed some real facility for the language.

The head of the commune was a man, who, in a fit of hubris, had named himself Manco Capac, after the first Inca king, said to be the son of the Sun and the Moon. When I asked him why he’d chosen the name, he replied, “Whatever works,” a statement I began to realize was the motto of the commune. That, and “go with the flow.”

Manco Capac was not a tall man, rather short, in fact, about my height, but what he lacked in stature, he made up for in presence. He’d been an actor at one time, apparently, before he became the original Inca reincarnated, and it showed. He had a large head, in proportion to his body, moved with a certain grace, as if he’d studied dance, and had a voice that commanded attention. He had piercing eyes, an unusual shade of blue; rather splendid cheekbones; and grey hair pulled back into a very long braid at the back. I’d have put him in his early fifties. One of the other commune members, a middle-aged man who had inexplicably chosen the name Moonray—I gathered that taking an alias was part of the ritual of leaving one’s past life behind—told me that Manco Capac had been on the verge of a brilliant career in Hollywood, when he’d become sickened by the excess, and come to Peru to get back to basics. I could certainly understand someone being sickened by Hollywood, but Manco Capac, imposing though he might be, didn’t look familiar to me, so how close to the verge of success he had actually been was debatable. Failed actor seemed more likely.

The commune consisted of a group of small huts, where most lived, and a main building, with water and electricity, where the kitchen and eating area were located, and in the back of which Manco Capac resided. About twenty people, of all ages, shapes, and sizes lived there, and everyone was given a job. Pachamama worked in the kitchen, and Puma, who struck me as not being particularly bright, but a sweet kid, was assigned a lot of the grunt work, such as finding wood, or clearing more land for the primary activity which, according to Moonray, was farming. At least they called it farming. Gardening is what I’d call it, and difficult gardening at that. The soil was very sandy, and the commune sat on the edge of a clump of trees, algarroba or carob trees with beautiful spreading branches, but some of the nastiest thorns I’d ever seen. They covered the ground beneath the trees and would tear through thin soles in a flash. All in all, it had an indelible air of the sixties, right down to the faint whiff of marijuana.

Never having been one inclined to togetherness, I’d often wondered what people saw in such a lifestyle, and for some reason I decided that in Puma I’d found a kindred spirit in that regard. Pachamama liked the bustle of the main house and the kitchen, made friends easily, and seemed to regard all of this as a bit of a lark. I had a feeling that when she’d had enough of the life of the commune, she’d just blithely move on. But on more than one occasion I’d found Puma alone on the edge of the property, deep in thought. Not wanting to startle him, I’d watched him from a distance.

The place was peaceful and very quiet, the silence broken only by some distant voices singing in the commune and the chink and scraping of a trowel nearby. Puma looked up finally and saw me. “Hear that sound? Farmer over there,” he said, gesturing behind the commune. “Putting up a wall between us and him. Not too keen on us, I’d say. I offered to help, but either he didn’t understand me, or he didn’t like me. I’m not sure which. He should learn to go with the flow like Manco Capac says. I told him about the ‘pocalypse too, but I don’t think he understood that either.”

Lucky man, I thought.

He smiled slightly, as if he could read my thoughts. “Reminds me of home, that sound. I lived near a quarry.”

For a moment I saw him for what he probably was: a homesick kid a long way from home. It was a feeling I could understand. “Why don’t you pack up and go home, Puma?” I asked him. “Is it the money? Do you need money to get home?”‘

He looked at me for a moment, and I thought, as the rims of his eyes went red, that he might cry. “ T can’t go home right now. I don’t have any money, but it’s not that. I just can’t go home right now.”

“Neither can I,” I said. We sat in silence for quite a while.

“Is there any chance you’d have any time to help me out with the work I have to do at the project, Puma?” I said at last. “I have a little trouble loading the water cubes and the propane tanks into the back of the truck, and could sure use some help.” It was hardly subtle, and Puma, bright though he wasn’t, saw through it immediately, but he agreed right away.

After that I stopped regularly at the commune, not once a day, but often enough, and if he didn’t have any communal chores to perform, I drove him into town. Town with Puma was an experience, particularly the market, where all was grist to his mill. Avocados, oranges, bananas, pots, pans, scarves disappeared and reappeared to the amazement of all, particularly the children. No matter his Spanish was rudimentary, his magic spoke for him, and we were never without a little crowd about us.

I decided I’d been wrong in thinking him not very bright. He was poorly educated, yes, and a little weird, marched to a different drummer as it were, but he had a phenomenal knowledge of history, and regaled me with stories of the conquistadores and the Inca, in particular, that breathed life into textbook history. On a few of these trips, he tried to engage me in conversation about the ‘pocalypse,“ and whether or not I believed in past lives, but I refused to be drawn into the discussion. Neither of us spoke of home.

I offered to pay him to help me with my work, but he refused. So I sent him on errands, to pick up the water, several yards of rope, or whatever, and told him to keep the change from the bills I gave him. That seemed to be acceptable to him, didn’t offend his pride. It was a silent pact of some kind, I think, between two people who, for their own reasons, in both cases unstated, couldn’t go home just then.

It was on one of those many trips to town that I met Carlos Montero. On that particular occasion I’d driven Puma and Pachamama into town so they could spend a little of Puma’s hard-earned cash on some ice cream, and Tracey to the Telefonico del Peru office to call home. After her phone call, Tracey and I left Puma juggling oranges for the children, and went to the market to search out some supplies she needed for the lab. I was rather enjoying myself, I recall, taking in all the smells, sights, and sounds of a busy marketplace.

Campina Vieja is a pleasant place, not pretty, perhaps, but always interesting, one of many such towns strung like little beads along the Panamericana. It has the requisite Plaza de Armas in front of the church, this one so small it is difficult to get back far enough to fully appreciate the statue of the conquering hero at its center, in this case, Simon Bolivar, one of the liberators of Peru. Day and night, the little square is a hive of activity. In the evenings, couples come to pass the time, strolling in tight little circles around Bolivar. A rabbit warren of streets, more lanes really, radiates out from the square. Not wide enough for our truck, many of them, they are the domain of little motorcycle taxis that ply their trade up and down and around the town.

The market is more expansive than the rest of the town, situated as it is in a large open area. But once inside, the aisles take on the character of the laneways elsewhere: crowded, noisy, busy all the time, almost claustrophobic in their closeness.

We were wandering around on the upper level of the market, munching happily on alfajores, sublime little shortbread sandwiches with a sweetened condensed milk filling, as we walked about.

“Yuk!” Tracey said. “He’s back!”

Yuk? I turned to see a round-faced, middle-aged man in grey slacks and a pink, short-sleeved shirt, the buttons of which strained against a belly of some proportions. He was waving and yahooing at Tracey from two aisles away.

At closer range, Carlos Montero, our sponsoring angel, proved to be a man with bad teeth, his smile a flash of gold fillings, and what can only be described as roving hands. No wonder all the women on the project had winced when they heard from Lucho that his uncle’s return from Trujillo was imminent.

If I thought at my age I was immune, I was soon disabused of that. Any female, no matter her age, size, or general disposition, was apparently appealing to Senor Montero.

“Rebecca, this is Senor Montero, our sponsor, to whom we owe so much,” Tracey said brightly. From where I was standing, I could see her fingers crossed behind her back. “Senor Montero, this is Senora MacCrimmon, the latest addition to our team.”

“Senor Montero,” I said, trying to sound enthusiastic, “I’ve heard so much about you.” That much was true. “Steve has told me about the wonderful reproductions you make at Paraiso,” I went on. “I do hope I’ll have a chance to come and see your factory sometime.”

Montero gave me a smile that was essentially a leer and kissed my hand, holding it way too long for comfort. “And are you an archaeologist too, senora? Such an admirable profession. How I wish I had been able to study archaeology myself, but my family was not wealthy, and it was necessary for me to begin working with my father and older brother when I was very young.” He shook his head sadly, still holding my hand. I pulled it away and Montero turned his attention to Tracey, who was looking very fetching in white, a cool blond ice princess in white sleeveless tee, linen pants and sandals, thin chains of gold at her wrist and her neck.

Carlos liked what he saw obviously: He was practically salivating. “And how is Senorita Tracey?” he asked in a greasy tone.

“Just ducky!” she replied in as pleasant a manner as she could muster. “And how about you, Senor Montero?”

“Carlos, please. You must call me Carlos,” he oozed. “I am extremely well. And may I dare hope that in my absence you have been successful in finding some excellent artifacts, or God willing, even, perhaps, a tomb?”

“Nothing really exciting, Senor Montero,” Tracey said, assiduously avoiding his attempts at familiarity. “You won’t have got your money’s worth this week, I’m afraid.”

“But it is not the money,” he said unctuously, making a pretense of appearing pained at the mere thought. “My sponsorship is all in the name of scholarship.”

“Of course,” we both muttered.

Getting nowhere with Tracey, he turned back to me. “It would be a great honor to personally show you around Paraiso, senora. I do hope I will have that pleasure very soon.”

Tracey began to make excuses, and after a few more minutes of expressions of appreciation for Senor Montero’s great generosity and commitment to scholarship, and a promise of mine that I would come for a visit, we began to take our leave. Tracey, wisely as I was to learn, backed away from him. Naively, I turned around, bringing my first encounter with Montero to a close with a sharp pinch on my derriere. So unfamiliar was I to such treatment—I hadn’t had my bum pinched since I’d been backpacking my way through Italy at the age of eighteen—I actually said nothing. Being a quick study, however, I vowed to back out of Senor Montero’s presence thereafter.

“The word yuk, colorful though it may be, does not begin to describe that man. Carlos Montero goes way beyond yuk!” I hissed at Tracey when we were out of earshot. “Now I see why you don’t think Lucho is so bad. I mean, he only points a gun at you. This fellow drowns you in drivel and then pinches your rear.”

Tracey giggled. “Oops. Should have warned you about that.” I glared at her, but then I had to laugh.

Armed with Montero’s invitation, I found an excuse to visit Paradise the following day. The hacienda didn’t have a telephone, and part of Montero’s so-called sponsorship included the use of his telephone and fax machine. Steve asked me to send a fax to one of his colleagues back home to ask him to try to find an X-ray machine he could borrow to help in the study of Benji.

The Fabrica Paraiso was on the far side of the highway, just a little north of the turnoff to the road to the hacienda. It was a sprawling complex of faded pink buildings that housed the factory, a body shop, and a small gas station. Montero was quite the local businessman.

There was no sign of Montero in the body shop or at the gas pumps, so I entered the farthermost building through a doorway marked on either side by rather large ceramic pots decorated with Moche- style drawings. Just inside the door, in the dark little entrance-way, was a table on which were displayed a number of ceramic items, including three or four pots with stirrup-shaped handles, and various ceramic animals, most notably sea lions and deer. The entranceway led to the right, and I turned into a row of three little rooms, one leading into the next.

The second room had been set up as a little exhibit, with large poster boards on the walls that explained how Moche ceramics were made. Before I had time to look around, however, a timid little woman approached me quietly, as I glanced in the cabinets. “Can I help you?” she asked.

“I’m looking for Carlos Montero,” I said. “Steve Neal has sent me, from the archaeology project,” I added. Heaven forbid Montero should think I’d come for personal reasons. I heard Montero grunt as he hefted his not inconsiderable paunch out of a chair in the next room and came to see who was looking for him.

“Senora MacCrimmon,” he exclaimed, his face breaking into a smile. “What a great pleasure!” I stayed well back as I asked him if he wouldn’t mind sending the fax for us.

“Consuelo,” he ordered, “get Senora MacCrimmon a soft drink. Have a seat,” he said, gesturing toward a chair as Consuelo, who I decided was Montero’s wife, poor thing, brought me an Inca Cola, a drink that is very popular in Peru, but which tastes to me like bubble gum in a glass. One sip was enough from my perspective. To cover up this lack of social graces on my part, I asked Montero if I could have a look around the factory while he took care of the fax.

At Montero’s “of course” and gesture toward the back, Consuelo led me past Montero’s desk and through a door into a very large work area where maybe twenty people turned from their work to look at me as I came in. It looked like any large industrial building anywhere: very high ceilings, open to the rafters, with louvered windows high up for light and ventilation. Ventilation in particular was needed, because at one end of the place, to my right, there was a very large kiln blasting away. On either side of the kiln were large doors open to cool the room.

Filling about half the room, opposite the kiln, were several long tables at which workers, a number of them young women, were painting ceramic vessels in preparation for firing. At the far end of the room, to the left, there was a drafting table set up at which worked a middle-aged man.

I wasn’t really quite sure what to look for, now that I’d got there. Earlier I’d decided, sitting in the museum cafe in New York, that Campina Vieja was the point of origin of some Moche artifacts that were being passed off as fakes, but which were, in fact, authentic. There was only one crafts factory in town, and I was in it. So I looked around for anything suspicious, for locked doors, large pieces of equipment or packing that would cover up a trapdoor, some telltale sign of a hidden room. I couldn’t see a thing. Other than the two garage-type doors on either side of the kiln, there were only three others: One was open to the back to let in some air—the kiln made the place stifling, another door was the one I’d come through from Montero’s office and the rooms at the front, the other led to the washroom.

The storage area, situated in the same area as the kiln, was quite open; rows of metal industrial shelving about eight feet high were lined with various ceramic objects arranged by type. One cabinet had rows of identical fish, another had rows of Moche warriors, still others were plants, animals, and so on in various stages of finishing. Nearer the kiln there were some figures that were still wet clay, others with a first firing only, others decorated but not yet finished, and then a packing area for the finished product. I’ve visited similar places in my line of work, and it looked perfectly normal to me.

I took a quick look through one of the doors to the outside and saw what was left of a building about 500 yards away, four brick walls in various states of decay, no roof on it, and no windows on this side. It might have been a storage area at one time, I supposed, or a very small house, but now it could serve no useful purpose, whatever it once was.

Montero joined Consuelo and I shortly thereafter. He shooed his wife away and took over her duties as tour guide. He proved to be very knowledgeable about Moche ceramics, and how they’d originally been made. He told me that the Moche were the first in this part of the world to use molds, that the most common form of Moche pottery were vessels that had spouts in the shape of stirrups, and how it was possible to date the pottery, particularly in the southern part of the Moche empire, by the length of the spout and the type of lip on it.

He also explained in detail how his operation worked, with evident pride. “This is the starting point,” he said, standing beside his draftsman, who he referred to as Antonio. “Antonio here does drawings from photographs of artifacts, and designs the molds. You see, he is drawing a beaker with scenes of a deer hunt. Over here,” he said, moving to another part of the shop, “the molds are made, and here,” he said, gesturing expansively about the room, “are my artists who decorate the pieces in accordance with the drawings.

“I’m very proud of my people,” he went on. “They do wonderful work. Here, see this stirrup-shaped vessel in the shape of a fish, the detail.” The young woman working on it smiled shyly. “Some pieces we make are inexpensive, for the tourists, but in other cases, such as this one, what we do are not strictly speaking reproductions: Rather they are original pieces done in the Moche style. I think these are works of art, really. Don’t you agree?”

I did, and I said so. Carlos’s people were very talented artists, and watching their deft strokes as they drew intricate designs on the ceramic surface was a pleasure, albeit one I’d have enjoyed more under different circumstances. “Do you do replicas at all, Carlos?” I asked. “Exact copies of Moche ceramics?”

“You mean use the original methods of manufacturing?” he asked. “No, we like our electric kiln far too much for that.” He smiled. “In reality, we can’t afford to make replicas. I can’t make money on them, because they’re so labor-intensive and expensive to do.”

We walked the full length of the room, Montero chattering away as we went. He showed me where the shipments were packed, told me what museum shops carried some of his work, and so on. It was a revelation to me, not so much what Montero was telling me about Moche craftsmanship—Ralph had already told me a great deal about ceramics—but that he was so knowledgeable and so proud of the work that was being done. I suppose I’d assumed on the basis of his previous behavior that he was an ignorant man, but he wasn’t at all. He was obviously a much more complex person than I’d thought.

He spoiled it all, right at the end, of course, with a lecherous little squeeze, but I suppose I was already getting used to his particular way of dealing with the opposite sex. I merely extracted myself from his clutches and said my good-byes.

As I left the place, I had a very quick look in the body shop. It looked like a body shop just about anywhere, a storey and a half, open right to the roof, two service bays, and lots of mess. Nothing whatsoever looked suspicious.

That night, as usual, Hilda Schwengen disappeared soon after dinner commenced, not to be seen again all evening. Lucho continued to creep around the place, looking, I was sure, for his gun. I’d caught him in the lab, looking through the boxes, earlier in the day. Also as usual, after everyone had turned in for the night, I heard whispered conversations below me, and the creak of the main door, the click and squeak of doors on the second floor opening and closing.

I thought of the visit I’d had that day to Paraiso. I could find absolutely nothing wrong with the place. I could see no places to hide caches of priceless Moche artifacts, although I supposed someone could deliver them at the last minute and slip them into the packing cases. But then what? How did they get them out of the country? I thought about all the shipping I’d done from foreign countries for the shop. I regularly filled containers for shipping by sea, and I supposed I could have put illegal objects in the containers if I chose to. But it would be a risk at both ends I’d get caught. Lizard, of course, had been a customs agent, but surely he couldn’t be the one to check every single box from Paraiso through customs. Was there someone somewhere in a museum shop waiting for the shipment and whisking the real thing out? How difficult would this be to organize, I wondered, and my conclusion was very difficult. And how, then, did the objects end up at Molesworth Cox?

Perhaps it wasn’t Paraiso, after all, I thought. If not, though, then the only other prospect in these parts was the archaeological project I was working on. I decided I needed to know a lot more about what was going on at the Hacienda Garua. On the face of it they were a friendly and relaxed group. Just beneath the surface, though, there were tensions. Hilda disliked Tracey, that I could tell, but why, I didn’t know. Ralph was more than a little entranced by Tracey, but Tracey was with Steve, and Ralph could hardly help but know it. Was this just all the stuff of soap opera, the result of a small group of people isolated together far from home, or was it something more than that?

Then there was the nocturnal visitor and the man in the arches who might or might not be the same person. I decided I needed to attack this problem on two fronts: to go back to Paraiso when no one was there, and to learn a lot more about this project. It was time Steve and I had a little heart-to-heart chat.

11

It haunts me still. Sometimes I dream I am standing on a distant planet, or a desolate moon, perhaps, or some spent asteroid hurtling erratically through space. The dusty surface is pockmarked with the craters of a thousand meteorites. A single hill rises from the surface, its sides streaked, ravaged, by some ancient storm. There is no one there. Someone once inhabited this lonely place, I know, a very long time ago. The cratered surface is littered with their bones. There are other reminders too: here and there a scrap of ancient fabric, and at my feet a plait of dark hair, bleached red by the light of a distant sun seen dimly through the haze. In my dream I hear their ghostly whispers in the mist; I feel their touch in the wind-whipped dust that stings my face. Cerro de las Ruinas.

My plans to interrogate Steve were delayed by an incident in the market that heralded the arrival in Campina Vieja of one of the most unprincipled people I have ever met. Pond scum, Steve called him. It was a chance encounter that hurled us headlong on a collision course with disaster. At the time I didn’t know whether the events that unfolded were diverting me from my course, or were instead another strand in the tangled web that I was attempting to unravel. Not that it mattered what I thought: I found myself drawn along with everyone else.

When it happened, Steve, Tracey, and I were on the upper level of the market, surrounded by clusters of bananas piled five or six feet high, searching for the perfect avocados to bring back to the hacienda to serve on Ines’s day off. We’d come into town to shop, for Tracey to make one of her telephone calls home (I thought all these calls were a little obsessive, but perhaps I was jealous), and for a little RR. We were wandering around together, just enjoying ourselves, when Steve stopped so suddenly, Tracey almost ran into him.

“Shit!” I heard him mutter as he squinted off into the distance. “Tell me I’m seeing things. Shit!” he said again.

Then, as Tracey and I stared after him, he broke into a trot and, calling back over his shoulder to us, said, “I’ll meet you at the El Mo in an hour.” We watched as he dodged through the crowds, down some steps to the market’s lower level, and then, ducking under a tarpaulin that flapped behind one of the stalls, disappeared from view.

“What was that all about?” I asked Tracey.

“Haven’t a clue,” she said blithely. It took a lot to worry Tracey, I noticed.

Perhaps growing up beautiful, rich, and smart gives you a feeling of invincibility. “Not a happy camper, though, is he?” she asked. “What’ll we do now?”

“Finish the shopping, I guess, then we’ll go have a beer and wait for him.” I shrugged. If Tracey wasn’t worried, then why should I be?

It took us quite a bit longer than we’d anticipated to get to the cafe cum bar and restaurant we were to meet at, El Mochica, better known as the El Mo. We still had a bit of shopping to do, and a couple of times we ran into some of the students—it was a day off for everyone—then Puma and Pachamama, and stopped to chat. When we entered the bar, Steve was already there. He was slumped in his chair and didn’t even look up as we came in.

After beers were ordered, and Steve still hadn’t said much of anything, Tracey prodded him. “Talk to us, Steve! What’s the problem? Who or what were you chasing?”‘

He made a face, a sort of tired grimace. “In a word,” he sighed, “or I guess two words, el Hombre. The fellow the folks around here refer to as el Hombre .”

El Hombre? The Man. There was someone wandering around here who called himself the Man? I wanted to laugh out loud, but something in Steve’s manner stopped me.

“What a dopey name!” Tracey exclaimed. “Who is he really, and why would anyone want to call himself that?”‘ she queried, undeterred by the expression on Steve’s face.

He sighed. “El Hombre? Beats me. Maybe he doesn’t want people around here to know his real name although why he should care, when he’s so open about what he does, I couldn’t really say. Perhaps he just thinks it makes him sound rather grand. His name is Etienne Laforet. French. From Paris. He’s an art dealer, owns a swank Parisian gallery on the Left Bank. He’s also sleaze, big-time. I haven’t seen him around here in a couple of years, but he used to come at least once a year, and sometimes twice. His modus operandi is always the same. Blows into town in a big, expensive car, visits a few bars and restaurants making a big show of throwing money around. Once he’s made sure everyone sees he’s got wads of cash, he finds himself a place to stay, parks his very flashy and expensive car—this year it’s a gold Mercedes—right out front so everyone will know where he is, and then he just sits and waits.”

“Waits for what?” I asked. “And isn’t that a little dangerous, showing off your wealth like that around here? Isn’t he asking for trouble?”

Steve looked at me as if I was naivete personified. “He’s not asking for trouble. He is trouble. No one messes with him. He’s waiting for people to bring him stolen artifacts, of course. They have to know he’s here, that he’s ready to buy, and where to find him.”

“By stolen artifacts, you mean… ?” I asked.

“Pretty much anything pre-Columbian. He specializes in Moche.”

“Are you saying that he sits around waiting for people to bring their stolen goods to him, right out in the open? Like in a hotel lobby or something?”

“A house. He usually rents a house, and that’s what he’s done this time. The little white one with the round window on the second floor over on Calle seven near the hardware store. I followed him there this afternoon. It has a high wall surrounding it, with a large tree in the front yard, and no windows overlooking it from the other side of the street. So no one can see what’s going on in the patio or the door. But there’s a place to park out front, so everyone can see his car and know he’s there. Perfect setup.”

“Where are the police in all this? Can’t they do something about it?”

“Perhaps they could. But they don’t. Maybe it’s can’t, maybe it’s won’t. This guy has a reputation for being ruthless, and people around here are really afraid to take him on.”

“But they deal with him!”

“Yes,” he sighed. “They do.”

“But you can’t take Moche artifacts out of the country,” I offered.

Steve gave me another are-you-new-to-this-planet look. “Obviously there are ways,” he said. “He’s never been caught with anything on him when he flies home to Paris, I can assure you.”

We all thought about that for a while, Steve staring moodily into his beer. “I thought maybe he wasn’t going to show up here anymore,” he said finally. “He’s been farther south the last couple of years, and nothing much of any interest has turned up in these parts that I’ve heard about. I wonder what it means that he’s here again. I’ll have to make some enquiries, I guess.”

I wasn’t sure what making enquiries meant, but I didn’t have long to think about it. There was a bit of a stir in the entrance to El Mochica, and Steve turned to look at the door.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said, throwing money on the table to cover the bill, his beer still unfinished. “This place just lost its charm.”

I was sitting with my back to the doorway, and turned my head slightly to see what had brought on this abrupt gesture on Steve’s part. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw silhouetted against the bright light from outside, the figure of a man. I looked back at Steve to ask if the shadow I’d seen was el Hombre, but I didn’t need to speak. Steve’s face said it all. By the time we’d reached the door, el Hombre had disappeared into the lounge off to the right of the entrance and was not to be seen.

Dinner that night was more subdued than usual, Steve’s black mood affecting us all. On Ines’s day off, which corresponded with our break from the dig as well, the team, minus Pablo, who spent his time off in town with his family, and Hilda, who spent the day in her room, drinking herself into a stupor, no doubt, and sometimes with the addition of a student or two, crowded into the little kitchen to prepare the evening meal together, and it was normally a rather rowdy affair.

Ralph, a bachelor, liked to cook, and did it reasonably well. His responsibility was the main course, polio, chicken, which he cooked in what he always referred to as the “devil’s handmaid,” the propane oven, because of its propensity to shut off at the critical moment. I was responsible for the appetizer, and tried to master Ines’s papas a la Huancaina, potatoes in a cheese, onion, and hot pepper sauce that I’d found so appealing the first night. Tracey’s specialty was flan, or creme caramel, so she made dessert. Steve supervised, a responsibility that included keeping the cooks’ glasses filled. While the results never measured up to Ines’s feasts, on the couple of occasions we’d done this, we invariably declared the meal a triumph, and in a way it was. Sometimes the power went off, usually the stove quit: There was always some obstacle to be overcome to carry it off. Tracey, as always, had one of us take a tray up to Hilda, to leave outside her door, but as often as not it was not touched by morning.

That night, for the first time since I’d arrived at the Hacienda Garua, when everyone had retired for the night, I took the little Moche man out of his tissue wrapping and studied him once again. Every time I looked at him, I saw more to admire. He was exquisite really. The workmanship was extraordinary, the more so every time I looked at him. His necklace of tiny beads, each one handmade, and each just a little bit different, was so beautifully done, it almost took my breath away. I couldn’t imagine the attention to detail, the amount of time that must have been spent by some artisan, in making just one ear spool for someone, someone important no doubt. I wrapped it very carefully again and put it in its hiding place, behind a loose board in the cupboard. Was Etienne Laforet, I wondered, the connection I was looking for?

Later I heard the whispers again, and this time I got up quietly and went out to the railing. Three people were talking by candlelight at the front door. Steve was one, the other was the man I’d caught sight of for only a moment in the headlight of Ines’s brother’s motorcycle, the man of the arches, and the third figure, I saw this time to my surprise, was Hilda. Straining, I could pick up only snippets of their conversation.

“We can’t let him get away with this,” I heard Hilda say. Then, “Get Montero. Get him to talk to his brother.”

More murmuring. “I’ll go to Lima if I have to,” Steve said.

Then, something apparently settled, the man of the arches slipped back out into the darkness, the candle was extinguished, and Hilda and Steve headed for the stairs. I quickly pulled back into my room and pushed the door almost shut. I heard Hilda’s footsteps a minute or two later, limping slightly.

Very early the next morning, well before dawn, I wakened to a quiet but persistent tapping at my door. “Rebecca, it’s Hilda,” she whispered. “Get dressed quickly and come downstairs.”

I staggered out of bed—all this wandering around in the night was robbing me of my rest—threw water on my face, pulled on my jeans and a T-shirt, and headed downstairs. Steve, Hilda, and Ralph were already downstairs, and even Carlos Montero was there. Only Tracey was nowhere to be seen.

“Ralph, you come with me,” Hilda barked. “Carlos has brought us another van, and we’ll use that. Rebecca, you go with Steve. Carlos, have you got the letter?” Carlos nodded and handed an envelope to Steve.

“Okay, let’s get cracking,” Hilda ordered. “Steve, you and Rebecca can get something to eat on the way.”

I looked at Steve, more than one question forming in my sleep-drugged mind. “I’ll explain as we go,” he said as we headed for the truck.

Within minutes we were heading south on the Panamericana. Steve was driving at a good clip, but fortunately the road was relatively clear this early. “We’re going to Trujillo,” he said. “I need to be at the INC offices when they open.”

The INC. The Instituto Nacional de Cultura. All this to call on a government office?

“We’re moving,” he said. “The site, I mean.

We’re closing up shop where we are and moving to another site about a mile away. At least I hope we are. I need to get a credencial, a license, for the new dig. Carlos got a letter from his brother, the mayor, supporting us, and the mayor and Carlos have called ahead, so the people at the INC will be expecting us.

“I may have to fly to Lima, though, to the head office, so that’s why you’re with me. You can drive the truck back today if need be.”

“I thought you were pleased with the way the project is going,” I said. “And why the big rush all of a sudden?”‘ Steve slowed only slightly as we pulled into Campina Vieja. Local farmers were beginning to bring their products to market, and Steve had to dodge a few carts and motorcycles as we blasted through town.

“I have a,” he hesitated for a second, “an informant, shall we say, a huaquero by the name of Arturo—I won’t give you his last name, it’s not important—who…”

“Huaquero?” I interrupted. “Is that what I think it is? A tomb robber?”

“Right. The Incas didn’t have a word for god, just a word for sacred—huaca, hence huaqueros, robbers of sacred places. Long tradition in these parts. Could be the Incas themselves engaged in it, plundering the tombs of earlier cultures. Whole families around here are involved in it, and have been for generations. They’re really good at it too, I’d have to say. Know what to look for, maybe better than we do, and are experts at the techniques for recovering the stuff. Pablo, our foreman, used to be a huaquero par excellence as a matter of fact. We’ve won him over, and now he’s a real asset to us. A couple of his men were huaqueros as well. We hope by giving them a job and teaching them about their culture, we’ll keep them on the straight and narrow.”

That seemed to be a somewhat risky assumption, I thought.

“So what do they—the huaqueros, I mean—do with what they find? Sell it on the black market?”

“Yes, in some cases; in others it’s considered legit, in a manner of speaking. What I mean to say is that there are ways to own artifacts in this country quite openly, and huaqueros profit from it.”

“But doesn’t letting people own antiquities here just encourage looting?”‘ I asked.

“It does. Drives me crazy. But you have to understand looting a little, don’t you? You’ve seen how poor this area is. If you’re lucky, you can make a lot more money at looting than you can fishing or farming, that’s for sure. It’s easy for us, coming from nice rich nations, to tell people they should donate whatever they find to a museum. The people I really blame are the buyers, especially the dealers. They’re the ones who encourage this kind of thing, the ones who make the big money on the finds too, I might add. Scum, in my opinion. At least some of them, Laforet first among them. But don’t get me going on this subject,” he said, looking as if he was in serious danger of diving into a depression again.

“You were telling me about Arturo,” I prodded.

“Right,” he said. “Arturo first came to me last season with some artifacts he’d found. I’d seen him hanging around watching, and eventually he showed up at the hacienda and asked me to assess some stuff for him, give him some idea of what it was worth.

“He had a couple of really nice ceramic pieces: Moche, a stirrup-spout vessel in the shape of a sea lion, complete with shell eyes, and another beaker with fine-line drawings. Most certainly genuine. They were looted, of course. There was no other way he could have got them. But he offered to tell me where he’d found them in exchange for my assessment of them. So I made a deal to get to study the fine-line vase for a day or two, before giving him my assessment.”

I said nothing. “I know what you’re thinking,” he went on. “But looting goes on all the time, and I’m powerless to stop it. I figure this way at least I get a chance to study the stuff before it disappears into the black market.”

I thought that one over for a minute. There were pros and cons to this argument, and the ethics seemed a little murky to me, but what did I know? After all, I was misrepresenting myself to these people, and had all along. I was also the proud possessor of a genuine Moche artifact that I had not yet got around to donating to a museum.

“Anyway, Arturo’s back again this season, and brought me another couple of pieces to look at. This time he’s got a real find: a little copper figure of a warrior, judging from the attire, and a really beautiful ceramic in the shape of a duck.

“Last night Arturo came to tell me that one of the local farmers, guy by the name of Rolando Guerra, is building a wall around a piece of property on the edge of the algarrobal, the carob tree forest. He’s told the locals that he’s just protecting his land from invasores, but Arturo tells me he’s almost certain the fellow has found something, and that he’s building a wall around it so that no one will see him looting it. The fact that the Guerra family are known huaqueros, have been forever, would be proof enough, but add to that the fact that Arturo’s ceramic and warrior come from that same area, and that pretty well clinches it. The campesino may indeed have found the big one.”

“And the big one is?”

“A tomb. An undisturbed tomb of an upper-class person, someone important. That’s the most exciting find of all in our field, and down here, it could be really spectacular. For years people studied the scenes on Moche pottery, not realizing that the scenes depicted real occurrences or rituals. For example, a lot of Moche pottery shows a scene in which captives are brought before a god, or a warrior king or priest of some kind, who often sits on a litter. In front of him there is another warrior who is half man, half bird. Behind him there is a woman, a priestess, holding a cup. Behind her there is often another figure with an animal face, usually feline.

“What’s interesting is that no matter how often this scene is depicted and no matter the artist, the figures in it are similar. It’s been compared to the Crucifixion or the Nativity in our culture, something that’s been depicted by many people over the centuries, but always with common elements that we all recognize. In the same way, the scene I’ve described is obviously a ritual of some importance to the Moche, and although they had no written language, and we therefore have to surmise what’s happening, it’s usually referred to as the Sacrifice theme. It’s a little gory. Captives have their throats slit, and it is probably their blood in the cup.”

For a second or two an unbidden image of Edmund Edwards, blood streaming all over his desk, and Lizard, Ramon Cervantes, garroted, leapt into my mind, but I resolutely stuffed the images back down into my subconscious and concentrated on what Steve was saying.

“The first warrior, for example, always wears a cone-shaped headdress with a crescent on it and rays coming out of his headdress and shoulders, a crescent-shaped nose ornament, and large round ear ornaments. He almost always has a dog at his feet.

“The priestess always wears a headdress with two large plumes, and her hair is in long plaits that end with serpent heads. The fourth warrior wears a headdress with long flares that have serrated edges. You get the idea.

“The extraordinary thing is that these people have been found,”‘ he enthused. “Walter Alva came across the tomb of the warrior priest and the bird priest at a place called Sipan. Christopher Donnan and Luis Jaime Castillo found the priestess at San Jose de Moro. They’d been buried in exactly the same regalia as that depicted on the ceramics!”

“I’m not sure I understand this,” I said. “Do I understand you to say that the people depicted on the pots were real people? And if so, you’re telling me they’ve been found. So why keep looking?”

“Good question. For certain the rituals on the ceramics were carried out in real life, and yes, real people held the positions. But the rituals were probably repeated over a very long period of time. Think of them as the British monarchy, the king or queen with the ermine cape, scepter, orb, the crown jewels. If you Were new to this planet, it wouldn’t take you long to figure out that these people whose picture you saw in Post offices and government offices were something special. You might even realize, if you looked at historical photos, or if you stuck around awhile, that more than one person held this position, because they all wore the same regalia. In other words, the crown goes with the position. Now imagine that when one of these monarchs died, all that stuff, the crowns, the scepter, everything, was buried with them. Then—”

“Then you’d have to make all these things over for the next one!” I exclaimed.

“Exactly.”

“Good heavens,” I said. “That would mean a lot of gold and silver over five centuries or so.”

“It would indeed.” Steve smiled. “And I just want to find a little of it. Not to keep, of course, but Hilda’s and my reputations would be secure, there’d be years of research to be done on what we found, and we’d not have nearly as much trouble finding the money for our research.”

“Are there many undisturbed tombs left to be found?” I asked. “You’ve told me about the huaqueros, the tomb robbers, and it sounds as if they’re not only good at it, but have been at it forever.”

“That’s true. Thousands of Moche tombs have probably been looted since the Europeans arrived on the scene, and relatively few, maybe in the low hundreds, have been professionally excavated. So much has been lost to us permanently. But there is some good news on that front. The Inca have a story about their origins that says that before the Inca, the world was populated by savages essentially, people who lived in caves, clothed themselves in animal skins, had no religion, no villages, and so on. The Sun God is supposed to have been pretty disgusted by this, and sent one of his sons and one of his daughters to earth—they arrived in Lake Titicaca. They’re told to put a rod in the ground and wherever it sinks right in they are to settle. This they do, and they eventually arrive in the area of Cuzco, build the city, and teach the people how to farm and weave and so on—civilize them, in other words.

“Now, whether or not they believed that story, the Inca were somewhat successful in persuading the Spanish that the Inca empire was the first, and that before it there were only these primitive, unorganized people. This was patently untrue, of course, as we now know. There were lots of very sophisticated cultures long before the Inca were even heard of. But what that meant was that the Spanish were not out there looking for gold beyond what could be found in the Inca cities. Not that they needed to, either. There was plenty of gold there to keep them occupied. So that helped a little.

“As for now, it’s just a battle against time, which we—the good guys, I mean—are losing, in my opinion, despite the fact that the Peruvian government has made it illegal to export any Moche artifacts, and a number of countries, including the U.S., have signed agreements supporting this. So we keep on looking, and sometimes we find what the huaqueros have missed, or we get a chance like this one.

“So I’m going to the INC to try to get a credencial, or extend the one I’ve got, for that site, and start digging before the wall goes up. I figure this may explain why Laforet’s in town. Guerra must have some way of contacting him, and told him he’d found a tomb. And I’m just not prepared to lose another one to pond scum!”

“Didn’t you tell me that it takes a year or two to get a license?” I asked.

“It usually does, hence the letter from the mayor to support the application. I’m stopping off in town to pick up a friend of mine, a Peruvian archaeologist by the name of Ricardo Ramos, who I hope will come with me and help me plead my case. Hilda is heading to Carlos’s place to use his telephone to try to get in touch with Ramos. Hopefully he’s in town, and we’ll be able to find him.

“God, I’d like to find one for Hilda,” he said a moment later. “You aren’t seeing her at her best, you know. She can be a lot of fun. But she had a terrible accident last year; she fell off a ladder into a pit we were digging. Hurt her back very badly. This will be her last season. I’m not sure she should be here at all, she’s in such pain. That’s why she drinks. I assume you can’t have helped notice how much she drinks.”

“I’ve noticed,” I said. “She and Tracey don’t seem to get along too well,” I added. If Steve was feeling this talkative, I figured I’d keep going.

“No,” Steve sighed. “Tracey’s an up-and-comer, that’s for sure. Knows what she wants and gets it. Hilda may consider her a bit of a threat under the circumstances. That’s the only thing I can think of that would explain it. Tracey wanted to do fieldwork this year, but Hilda said her services were required in the lab. Tracey’s disappointed and probably said so. I don’t want you to think badly of Hilda, no matter what it looks like. She’s done absolutely dynamite work down here, from a scholarly perspective. What happened to her is really unfortunate, and it’s one of the reasons we’re all working hard this year. We’d like to find something really great for her.”

We made really good time to Trujillo, stopping only once to get gas at a Shell station. It was barely nine o’clock when we roared around Trujillo’s Plaza de Armas, with its brightly painted buildings and a rather extraordinary, and disproportionate, statue of an athlete atop a column. Steve soon pulled up to the door of a dark red building. A tall, angular man with an incipient beard was leaning against the doorjamb. He walked toward the truck as we pulled up, and climbed into the backseat.

“Buenos dias,”‘ he said.

Steve reached into the backseat and shook his hand. “Hilda found you, I see,” he said. “Ricardo, this is Rebecca MacCrimmon, Rebecca, this is Dr. Ricardo Ramos.” We smiled at each other. I liked him immediately. “Did Hilda give you the details?”

“Some.” Ramos looked at his watch. “Let’s go get a coffee. The INC office doesn’t open until nine-thirty. You can fill me in, in the meantime.”

We found a little chifa and got some coffee, and for Steve and me, toast with marmalade. Steve told Ramos all about his visitations from Arturo. Ramos didn’t seem to find anything unusual in an archaeologist dealing with a huaquero, I noticed. Then Steve unfolded a map and spread it out on the table. “Hacienda,” he said, stabbing his finger on the map. “Current site.” He pointed again. “And here, the new site. Arturo says the locals call it Cerro de las Ruinas.”

Cerro de las Ruinas, hill of ruins. Steve pulled an aerial photograph out of his briefcase. “Let’s have a closer look,” he said. “This was taken recently, about two months ago.” We all peered at the aerial photograph. I could follow the riverbed, and soon found the hacienda and the site we were currently working on. Where Cerro de las Ruinas was concerned, we had to do some searching.

“Got it!” Ramos exclaimed finally. “Right here,” he said, pointing. I looked at the spot he was indicating. I could make out the trees quite easily, and then, right beside them, a shadow that indicated there might be a wall. On one side of the wall, shaded by the trees, there was a dark outline that Ramos said was a hill. It was difficult for me to make it out, but they had the training, I didn’t, so I just tried to get my bearings. A little farther along, on the other side of the wall, I could see the roofs of some little huts. The commune, I thought suddenly. So Guerra was Puma’s farmer, the fellow he thought was building a wall between himself and the commune. Presumably it wasn’t having a commune in his backyard that was bothering Guerra so much. It was the prospect of anyone at all nearby seeing him hauling treasures out of the ground.

“So what do you think?” Steve asked.

“Well,” Ramos said, rubbing the stubble on his chin, “it’s hard to be certain there’s anything worthwhile there from this photograph. On the other hand, you’re right about the Guerra family. I certainly wouldn’t mind being a burr in their saddle for a change, instead of the other way around.” He paused, then shrugged. “Let’s go for it!” he said. Steve grinned.

“We’ll have to go for the preemptive strike,” Ramos added. “With the Guerras, one whisper about this, and they’ll have the whole family out digging the place up and destroying everything in their path before we can get there.”

“So let’s go, then,” said Steve, looking at his watch.

At 9:30 the two men disappeared into the INC offices, and I was left to mind the truck.

About an hour later the two men emerged. “Let’s roll,” Steve said, getting behind the wheel. “The airport. We’re going to Lima! The people here are calling ahead. They’ll see us as soon as we can get there.” I could sense his excitement.

At the airport, I saw them right to the gate. There was a flight already boarding.

“Head back for Campina Vieja, will you, and tell Hilda. I’ll get a message to you sometime tonight via Montero. If it’s a no, then I’ll make my own way back from Trujillo on the bus. If it’s a yes, time will be of the essence, and I’ll need you to meet the plane, okay?” I nodded.

“Are you okay with this, really?” he asked.

“I am. I’ll stand by,” I replied.

“Don’t speak to anyone except Hilda, Ralph, or Tracey about this, will you?” he said.

“Of course not,” I said.

“You’re a gem!” he said, hugging me. “See you tomorrow one way or the other.” He turned toward the aircraft, but then turned back, and much to my surprise, hugged me again. I watched as the two men crossed the tarmac and went up the steps to the aircraft.

I drove carefully back to Campina Vieja, not wishing a run-in with the police for any reason. I went first to the site, and Hilda came over to the truck as soon as I pulled up, dust swirling. I told her what had happened.

“We’re trying to look nonchalant,” she said, irony *n her voice. “So no one will guess anything’s up, not even the students. We’ve told them that Steve had to go to Trujillo on business, so you drove him, and that Ralph and I are filling in for him for the day. I took Ines into the market this morning, but I’ll leave it to you to pick her up as usual. Don’t say anything at dinner while Pablo’s there, will you?”

I could feel myself getting caught up in the excitement. It was almost impossible to avoid. All this secrecy and plotting, the rush to Trujillo. Tracey, for some reason, wasn’t looking as interested as I would have expected; in fact she was a little withdrawn. I wondered whether the hug from Steve meant all was not well with the two of them. The rest of us could barely do justice to Ines’s meal of sopa and fish and brown sugar pudding while we waited.

Pablo and Ines eventually left for home, and as soon as they were gone, we got down to planning how we would approach closing down one site and moving to the next with the greatest of speed. The idea was to spring the credencial on Guerra before he knew what was happening. Superstitiously, we kept saying we’ll do this and that we get the credencial, as if planning for it might prevent it from happening.

“I think I hear a truck!” Ralph exclaimed, and we all strained to listen. The front door creaked open, and Lucho’s shuffling steps could be heard crossing the courtyard at the slowest pace imaginable. Tracey, I saw, had her fingers crossed. Lucho handed Hilda an envelope. “My uncle sent me over with this,” he said.

We all stared at the envelope, Hilda included, for a moment or two. I felt like an actor at the Academy Awards. Then she ripped it open, scanned it quickly, and raised her fist in triumph.

“We’re on the move!” she exclaimed. A spontaneous roar of approval erupted from our lips.

I didn’t get much sleep that night. There were so many things to think about: the next day’s plans, of course, but also the arrival in town of a known buyer of antiquities. After a few hours’ tossing and turning, and reaching no conclusions, I crept quietly down the stairs, shoes in hand, and eased my way out the door. It was still dark, about 5:30 in the morning. As quickly and as quietly as I could, I started the truck, threw it into gear, and swung it around to head out. As I did so, the beam caught Hilda in her upstairs window, her arm raised as if in a benediction, a curious sort of blessing. I gunned the engine. Operation Atahualpa was under way.

12

Did he hear it? The soft swish of the sand as it began its descent, slowly, first a trickle, then faster and faster, filling the void. Did he turn from his work at the sound, now a soft rumble, to see his fate sealed, or, dazzled by what he had found, did he work on, oblivious of what was to befall him? Did he scrabble at it, not comprehending at first, thinking that with a few short strokes he’d be free? Or trapped, did he curse fate, as the air slowly ebbed away?

I’d gassed up the truck in town on my way back to the site the previous day, so, throwing caution to the winds, I just floored it, trimming a full twenty minutes off the drive to Trujillo. By 8:10 I was at the gate, impatiently scanning the skies for the incoming aircraft. Steve and Ricardo were on standby for the flight, so I wasn’t sure they’d made it. If they hadn’t, I was to wait there until they did. The flight was a few minutes late, but as soon as the steps were rolled up and the door opened, Steve and Ricardo, who’d maneuvered themselves to the front of the plane, bolted down the steps and across the tarmac.

Seeing them coming, I headed for a Telefonico del Peru booth, where, upon my arrival, and in what I considered a stroke of brilliance, I’d posted an out of service sign. Using Hilda’s phone card, I called Montero. “We’re on our way,” was all I said before slamming down the receiver and waving to the two men.

By nine we were back on the highway. I drove again. Steve and Ricardo hadn’t had even as much sleep as I had, so they dozed while I drove. The trip back was slower, with lots more traffic, and I had to ease up considerably in the towns, now crowded with people. A couple of times I caught myself pounding the wheel in frustration.

Just a little before noon, I pulled the truck up in front of a yellow building on the main street of Campina Vieja. Waiting there were Carlos Montero and an older, slimmer version of the man, His Honor, the mayor, Cesar Montero. They climbed into the backseat of the truck, and to make room Steve climbed into the back. Two policemen on motorcycles, exactly one half the town’s police force, pulled ahead of me, and I wheeled the truck away from the curb and back onto the highway until we reached the dirt road which led to the site. Hilda, Tracey, and Ralph all saw our dust and were waiting for us when we got there.

The truck had barely come to rest when Steve was up and out the back, yelling, “Okay, let’s roll!”

Ralph and Hilda had briefed the students just a few minutes earlier, and the place was abuzz. Three students—Susan, George, and Robert—and a couple of the Peruvian workers crammed into the back of the truck with Steve, and the cavalcade pulled away again. Ricardo sat up front with me, Tracey sat in the backseat with the two Monteros (one could only hope the mayor was not as bad as his brother), and, as we pulled away, I heard Hilda and Ralph begin directing the remaining students and crew to start filling in the excavation with the back dirt just as fast as they could.

The truck and its police escort pulled out onto the highway again, heading north. About a mile farther along, we turned left off the highway at a small marker and bounced along what was not, to my way of thinking, a road, just a dusty trail in the sand. I just concentrated on not getting off the track and bogged down. Ahead of us I could see the algarrobal, the thorn tree thicket. We circled to the right around it, and on the far side pulled to a stop, police lights flashing. Then everyone was out of the truck and running— all of us, that is, except Carlos and Cesar, who hung way back—toward what appeared to be a very ordinary hill.

Two things about that moment I will never forget: the expression on Rolando Guerra’s face, and my first sight of Cerro de las Ruinas.

Seeing what must have looked like a horde of howling banshees, Guerra reached for a rifle, but before he could do that, the police, guns out, shouted at him to get his hands up. Steve and Ricardo went up to him and shoved their credential in his face. The police quickly searched Guerra’s truck and a little lean-to on the property, and looked along the wall. There was nothing. No mounds of looted artifacts, just a pile of bricks, a trowel, a shovel, a jacket.

For a moment or two, I thought that we’d made a mistake, that we were terrorizing a simple farmer trying to protect a little piece of land. Then, for just an instant, I saw a look of pure hatred, then sly cunning flash across Guerra’s face. He was guilty of something, all right. Whatever it was he was up to, he was up to no good.

But there was no reason to detain him. The police told him the archaeologists had the right to dig the land, and that he would have to leave. In a bit of an anticlimax, Guerra picked up his tools, his rifle, and jacket, and pulled away in a beat-up old Chevy truck, without so much as a backward glance.

All of us, exhausted from the waiting, the anticipation, the adrenaline rush, looked about.

“What a mess!” Ramos said.

Over to our right was what appeared to be a bare hill, only one small bush clinging to life on the slope. I shaded my eyes to see the top. It was flattened irregularly, and the sides were streaked with deep vertical cuts that appeared to be the result of torrents of water in a time long before.

There was a large flat area in front of the hill, its surface marred by depressions of all sizes that made me think of the pockmarked surface of the moon. Scattered across the sand, which now in the late afternoon was swirling about the site, were shards of pottery, black and terra-cotta, and almost unbelievably, fragments of bone. A plait of dark hair, bleached red, lay forlornly on the edge of a crater.

“What is this?” I gasped.

“Huaqueros,” Steve said. “They’ve been digging here. That’s what the depressions are, the places they’ve dug. Some are very old, others very recent. Looters look for metals, so if they come across ceramics, or bones, they just toss them.”

“Such disrespect for the dead!” I exclaimed.

Steve nodded. “The Anasazi in the States call looters robbers of the dead. A good name, isn’t it? You aren’t entirely right about their disrespect for the dead, though,” he said, reaching down and picking up a couple of unsmoked cigarettes. “They left these, you see. Seriously,” he said, sensing my skepticism. “Huaqueros often leave an offering like this so they won’t be cursed.”

For some reason I couldn’t take my eyes off the plait of hair. It seemed so vulnerable, pathetic almost, lying there on the surface like that. Steve watched me. “Human hair lasts for thousands of years in the ground,” was all he said. It should never have been disturbed, I thought. For some reason, seeing that plait of hair affected me in a way that Ines’s warning hadn’t.

Cuidado al arbolada! To succeed, you must beware of the woods. Slowly I turned my head to the left. There was a wooded area, filled with carob trees, or algarroba, the branches heavy with thorns. Were these the woods? Don’t be ridiculous, I told myself.

“Do you think we’re too late?” Tracey asked, leaning down and picking up a small piece of bone. The sound of her voice pulled me back to reality. “Do you think they found and looted the tomb?”‘

“Don’t know,” Steve replied, shielding his eyes, as I had, and scanning the hill. “It’s a huaca, all right. They’ve been digging on the top. You can see the depressions. Practically flattened it too. But if they found something, and removed everything, then what was Guerra doing putting up that wall? Let’s have a look around. Maybe we’ll try a couple of test trenches at the foot of the huaca.”

“Are you saying that hill is a huaca?” I asked.

“Yup,” Steve replied. “To you it looks like a hill. But remember, the people of this area built their structures of adobe brick, which is essentially mud brick, not stone. So this was once a pyramid-shaped building. The furrows you see running down the sides would be caused by torrential rains, past El Ninos, perhaps, over the intervening centuries, which would, in a sense, melt the brick. See, there’s another little one over there, and there.” I looked in the direction he was pointing. There was indeed a smaller hill, or huaca, off in the distance, a couple more even farther away.

“Okay, let’s take a quick look around,” Steve called to the group. “We’ll start in earnest tomorrow.”

The group had barely started out when what proved to be the first of many accidents happened. “Ouch!” Tracey yelled, and started hopping around. We all went to her aid, and it was quickly apparent what was causing her distress. She’d stepped on one end of a dead branch of a thorn tree; the branch had swung up, and one of the thorns had imbedded itself in her leg, a little above the ankle, just over the top of her boot. It had gone right through her sock and into her leg. Tracey was hurting, that was obvious. Both Steve and I tried to remove it, but we couldn’t dislodge it.

We took her in to the doctor in Campina Vieja. He had to freeze the spot and cut the thorn out. She hobbled out of the office, white-faced, a large bandage on her leg. “Very nasty, those thorns,” the doctor said. “Keep the foot elevated as much as possible, and if the redness and swelling moves past here,” he said, pointing to a spot a few inches up her leg, “bring her back. Had to put two stitches in, so she’ll have to come back in ten days to get them out.”

“Sorry about this.” Tracey grimaced. “I mustn’t have been paying attention.”

By ten o’clock that night, Tracey was running a fever and her ankle was badly swollen and red. I took a tray up to her at dinnertime, but she was unable to eat. In the night, she called out a couple of times, once for her mother, the second time for Steve, and I rushed to her bedside. After that, I took a candle into her room and sat at her bedside for an hour or two. Around about three, Steve tapped on the door. “Saw the light,” he whispered. “How is she doing?”

“She’s running a temperature and having bad dreams, I think. We’d better get her back to the doctor first thing in the morning.”

“See if you can get her to take a couple of these,” Steve said, handing in a bottle of pills, antibiotics. I woke Tracey and managed to get her to take two, along with a couple of aspirin for the fever.

I sat with her awhile longer, hoping she would rest better, but she continued to sleep fitfully. There wasn’t enough light to read, so I entertained myself by looking around the room, which was jam-packed with reminders of home. There were photos everywhere: her darling car, top down, Tracey behind the wheel waving; a very attractive photo of her with a nice-looking young man, Jamie, her boyfriend; a dog looking playful in a Santa hat; and a family photo with Tracey, a young man who was probably her brother, the dog again, and an attractive couple I knew to be her mother and stepfather. She called them Ted and Mary Anne, although I noticed she’d reverted to Mommy in her dreams. They were all standing in front of a very elegant home, two storey, red brick, pillars at the entrance, and what was probably a sweeping, circular drive. There was also a photo of Tracey, Ted, and her mother at a podium with a Save Our Museum, Save Our Community sign above them, with her father presenting a check, it looked to me.

Pillars of the community, that family, I decided. I didn’t really know much about them, of course. I was a little old for the college dorm thing, and while we got along just fine, I hadn’t encouraged the sharing of little confidences with Tracey, because, as Rebecca, I didn’t have any to share. I wondered if it had occurred to Tracey that I didn’t have a single photograph of anyone with me, and if it had, if she found that strange.

By the next morning she wasn’t any better, and Steve asked me to stay around the hacienda as much as possible to keep an eye on her. I did pick up Ines as usual and took her in to the market. When I told her how ill Tracey was, Ines insisted on going to a part of the market I’d never been, known to the locals as that of the witch doctors. This section of the market was darker than the rest, and smelled very strongly, but not unpleasantly, of herbs. The stalls had bunches of dried herbs hanging from every rafter, fresh ones piled high on tables. Some, like the tiny flowers of chamomile, I recognized, others I did not. There were vials of various herbs and roots in some kind of liquid, and various objects, talismans of some sort, offered for sale. Ines stopped at one stall, which appeared to be unstaffed, until a very old man, skin wrinkled more than I would have thought possible, hobbled out of the darkness at the back. Ines explained the problem, and he mixed up a packet of various dried herbs and gave them to Ines with instructions.

Tracey was no better when we got back, and the swelling was getting perilously near to the point where the doctor had said to bring her back in. By this time she’d had another round of antibiotics, but I knew they’d take a while to kick in and I was getting really worried. Ines carefully measured out some of the herbs, made a tea of them, which she then strained, and got Tracey to drink it. Within twenty minutes, Tracey had fallen into a sound sleep. “She’ll be fine now,” was all Ines said.

And she was. Partway through dinner that night, she appeared at the dining room door. “I’m starving,” she said, and we all beamed.

“Wonderful stuff, that penicillin,” Steve exclaimed, but I knew better. In a pinch, I was sticking with Ines. By the following day we were more or less back to normal. Ricardo Ramos had headed back for Trujillo, saying he’d come back and give us a hand in a few days. Tracey and Ralph were at work in the lab, and I went back to the site in the algarrobal. The team had very quickly dug a couple of test pits at the foot of the huaca but had come across nothing that would warrant more extensive work, and thus had begun work on the huaca, the hill itself. I heard a shout and, shielding my eyes from the very bright sun, could make out Steve, a black shadow against the light, waving at me from the top. “Come on up!” he called, and I climbed up the forty or fifty feet to the summit. Here too was massive evidence of looting, large pits, some of them reasonably fresh-looking, marring the surface. “I’d have to say someone’s been here before us,” I said ruefully, picking up a potsherd that looked recently broken even to my untrained eye. “Does this mean we’re too late?”

“Not necessarily,” Steve said. “The Moche built their huacas in stages, platforms on top of platforms. So even if huaqueros have found a tomb here and cleared it out, it doesn’t mean there isn’t another below that, which would be an even earlier burial. We’re starting to clear this area now,” he said, gesturing toward the activity around us. “Jose,” he said, stopping for a moment, “move that back dirt farther away, please. We don’t want any cave-ins. And, people,” he added, “remember, go for the mancha.”‘’‘

“The mancha?” I asked dubiously. “What kind of stain would we be looking for?”

“From what we’ve been able to glean from Moche art, and from what we’ve seen on previous digs, we know the Moche had particular ways of burying their dead. It varied a little depending on the status of the particular individual being buried, but essentially it involved digging a shaft and then a chamber down some distance. On Moche pottery, you can see depictions of bodies being lowered down these shafts and then sideways into the chambers. Once the body—or bodies, as the case may be—was placed in the tomb, the shaft would be sealed up. But its position can be determined by the appearance of the soil which differs from its surroundings. In other words, the mancha or stain. So we look for this mancha, which, with a little luck, will reveal the presence of a shaft, and hence a tomb.”

“We seem to learn a lot about the Moche from their art,” I said.

“Well, they had no written language, so they couldn’t leave us ritual texts. But I think their art, like the scenes and rituals on their ceramics and the murals in the huacas we’ve been able to uncover, are an extraordinarily vivid record of the times.” Then he grinned. “For some inexplicable reason, and with absolutely no evidence yet to support it, I have a good feeling about this place! Now I gotta get back to work.” He waved to Hilda, who was down below, supervising the photography of the two test pits before they were filled in.

I stood at the summit and surveyed the surroundings: the algarrobal, the thorn tree forest, dark and brooding, hiding its secrets in the shade of the broad, umbrella-like branches of the trees, and way off in the distance, if I shielded my eyes, the sweep of the dunes and then the sea. In the other direction, I could see the silver thread of the Panamericana, and along the trail that led to the site, a little caravan of motorcycles and a couple of trucks, dust billowing in their wake.

“Steve,” I called out. “I think we have company!” Steve looked in the direction I was pointing.

“Trouble!” he yelled down to Hilda, as the convoy moved closer.

The vehicles pulled up, blocking the way out, and a gang of campesinos, Rolando Guerra among them, made their way toward the site. They were armed with shovels and axes, which they waved threateningly in Hilda’s direction. “Get out of here or you’re dead,” one of them yelled.

“You get out of here, or you’re dead,” Steve yelled from the top of the huaca. He had grabbed a short shovel and, balancing it on his shoulder, was holding it as if it were a rifle. The men looked up, but blinded by the sun, would see only what I could just a few minutes ago, a dark figure silhouetted against the light. “I mean it,” he yelled. “Get out of here.” Pablo, behind Steve, grabbed another shovel and mimicked Steve’s stance.

For a moment, nobody moved. I held my breath. Then one of the men, an older man who’d held back a little from the pack, said something I couldn’t make out. Slowly they all got back in their trucks or on their motorcycles, and gunning the engines, then circling around menacingly a couple of times, finally pulled away.

“Whew,” Steve said, putting down his shovel. “Sure was worried the sun might go behind a cloud!” A titter of nervous laughter swept through the group.

“That was brilliant,” I said, admiration in my voice.

“Oh, I’m not just a pretty face.” He grinned. “But to think that just a moment or two before they arrived, I was cursing because the sun was so hot. They’re just bullies, that’s all,” he added. “Nothing to worry about, really.”

I wanted to believe him, so I did.

For the rest of that day, and the next, the work on the site progressed at a steady pace, with hopeful signs, according to Pablo, all around.

The following day, however, the second accident occurred. While we were working away, there was a crack, and the ladder on which one of the men, Jesus Silva, was standing to set up the camera, collapsed. Jesus was hurled into one of the pits and just lay there, conscious but groaning in pain. It was only with real difficulty that we were able to get him out. We stretched him out on the back of the truck, and I drove as carefully as I could into town. He had, as it turned out, dislocated his shoulder and cracked three ribs, and would be off work for the balance of the season.

It was about then that the rumors of evil spirits began to surface among the Peruvian crew. “This is a bad place,” I heard one of the men, Javier Franco, telling the others. “We should not be here.”

“I don’t believe in evil spirits,” Steve told me. “Come over here.”

I walked over to where he was examining the ladder that had collapsed under Silva. I looked where he pointed. There was a crack right below the metal hinge which held the two sides of the ladder rigid when opened.

“So it was defective, is that what you’re telling me?” I said. “I feel terrible. I bought that ladder, and I thought I’d inspected it pretty carefully before I took it. I must have missed the crack.”

“Look again,” he said, and after a moment or two I saw what he was getting at. There were no splinters at the break, except right at the end. In fact it was so neat a break that one would have to assume it had been cut, almost all the way through.

“Guerra?” I asked.

“He’d be our number one suspect, wouldn’t he?” Steve replied. “Maybe I’ll just go have a chat with the mayor and suggest to him that the police have a little talk with our friend Rolando.”

After that, though, the accidents came thick and fast. Ernesto Santo, another worker, cut his hand quite badly, a freak accident involving the metal mesh on the sieve that required several stitches. Javier himself, the fellow who thought the place was haunted, accidentally walked backwards too far and slid down the side of the slope, badly scratching his leg.

I put it all down to hysteria, self-induced accidents brought on by the belief in evil spirits, but the effect had on the group was real enough. They were all Petrified. Steve then hired Tomas Cardoso, Ines’s brother, who was also a chaman, a shaman, to help protect the site from evil spirits. That kept the team working awhile longer.

In contrast to all the drama around the accidents, however, the work on the site was going exceedingly well. About a week into the work on the summit, a loud shout and a cheer went up, and we all rushed up the hill. Even Hilda, who tended to supervise from down below, climbed up painfully but as fast as she could. And there it was, a circle in the earth quite distinct from that around it. “The mancha!” Pablo yelled.

“You’re right!” Steve exclaimed, after examining it closely. “We start digging down, here!”

I’d have been inclined to just dig straight down the shaft, but that’s not the way it works in archaeology. Earth is removed, layer by layer, inch by inch, everything carefully recorded before it’s removed. The earth was, as always, taken to the sieve, which we’d set up on top of the hill.

When I expressed some impatience to Hilda, she replied, “As you can see, archaeology is inherently destructive. When we’re done here, we will have destroyed a huaca that survived for centuries before we arrived. You can never put it back exactly as it was. So it must be done right the first time, or the whole archaeological record is lost.” I could see what she meant. We were removing a large portion of the side of the hill, cutting down from the top. “Safety is of paramount importance,” she went on, “particularly when we’re working on a slope. The back dirt has to be taken well away from the site, to a place where it can’t slide back onto the workers. Cave-ins are a real concern in these conditions. You have to ensure the walls are well shored up as you go.”

I hoped the workers wouldn’t hear her saying that. It was all they would need to really set them off.

The really good news was that there was no further sign during the daylight hours of Rolando Guerra and his pals, several of whom, I gathered from the talk among the workers, were members of the Guerra family. But the signs of his presence were evident almost every morning. One day it was a pig’s head on a pike stuck into the ground, another time a skull and cross-bones painted on the side of the shed. Once the man-cha had been found, Steve hired Gonzalo Fernandez, brother of one of the other workers, to stay in the little hut at night to watch the site. With Laforet in town, Steve reasoned, there’d be a surge in looting activity. For a few days, at least, the harassment stopped.

But we didn’t for a moment think Guerra was gone.

Then one morning, there was the most terrible accident of all. There were signs that morning that someone had come onto the site at night, not from the trail but from the other side, from the road by the commune, climbing over the wall. From the top, a cap and jacket were spotted lying on the sand several yards up the incline. Someone had been digging on the far side of the huaca from where we were working. Fernandez, guarding the way from the trail and the side of the huaca we were working on, had heard nothing. Some °f the back dirt from our excavation had been dislodged and had fallen down the back of the hill. Steve climbed down to have a look at the damage, as the rest of us peered over the edge. Then Steve began tearing at the earth with his bare hands, calling for workers with shovels to come right away. They cleared away the sand as quickly as they could. To no avail. Rolando Guerra was unconscious, buried in sand, his hands still clutching a little copper statue of a Moche warrior. He died later that day in the hospital, a victim of his own greed.