Cry in the Night (12 page)

“Then I suppose he whispered, ‘Help, I’m a prisoner in my own home.’”

Jerry was far too close to all of it to think that was funny.

“No, we’d have a lot more to go on if he had,” Jerry said seriously. “But he slipped a small piece of paper into the man’s hand. That man is my boss and that was the first hint of something happening up near Tlaxcala.”

“What did he write?”

Jerry looked around the lake. Other boats floated peacefully on the placid green water. No one paid any attention to us.

Still, Jerry spoke softly. “I remember it word for word, I’ve studied it so often. He wrote: ‘I suffer from an anguished heart, old friend, torn between loyalty to my family and my duty to my country. Perhaps the weakness of age will excuse my lack of resolution. Beware foreign museum agents near Tlaxcala. Request thorough study of all jewelries leaving Mexico. I have appealed to my old friend, Vicente Rodriguez, but I have heard nothing. God grant that I am wrong. Yours in sorrow, Tomas Herrera.’”

We were both quiet for a moment. Lake water slapped gently against the boat. From the shore we heard happy shouts of children kicking a ball. But both of us were listening to the words just spoken, sorrow-laden words.

An old man, fearing for his country’s past. An old . . . I reached out abruptly and touched Jerry’s knee. “What does it mean in Spanish,
El Viejito
?”

“The old gentlemen. Often that’s what Mexicans call a grandfather.”

El Viejito. Yes, of course. Tony was afraid it was he who had torn apart the doll. The girls were trying to protect their grandfather and they had been warned not to speak of him.

I had a sudden picture of an old man, worried, fearful, trying to do his duty as he saw it, but even he did not know who it was in his family that he should fear.

Gerda? Juan? Tony? Señor Ortega?

Señor Herrera didn’t know. Was he trying to find out when he wrote Dr. Rodriguez, the head of the Mesoamerican section in my museum? Señor Herrera had received no answer.

Why?

I recalled Dr. Rodriguez, plump, smiling, amiable. Could he connive to smuggle a treasure out of Mexico?

“I can’t believe it,” I said suddenly. “Dr. Rodriguez wouldn’t set me up to come down here and be in danger. It’s too fantastic.”

Jerry shook his head. “Nothing’s too fantastic when a fortune in gold is at stake. There’s not much gentility beneath the surface of the museum trade.”

“You talk in terms of someone being willing to kill me to keep me from getting the treasure.” I remembered the bullets but it still seemed impossible. “That’s murder.”

“Yes,” Jerry agreed. “It wouldn’t be the first murder.”

Chapter 11

Jerry told me of the short life and violent death of Raúl Muñoz. I listened, appalled, and knew that I had stumbled into or deliberately been thrust into a dangerously grim business. It was doubly chilling to realize how the death of Raúl Muñoz had almost passed unnoticed.

People in villages don’t talk to outsiders. If Jerry or an inspector of police had gone to Tlaxcala to ask about rumors of treasure, they would have learned very little. But people talk among themselves and if an unobtrusive stranger listens and never presses, he may learn many things.

It was in midwinter, not long after the old gentleman had pressed his note of distress into a friend’s hand, that a young man, a quiet young man from Orizaba, or so he said, came to Tlaxcala. He was an assistant to Inspector Enrique Gonzales of the antiquities divisional. But no one there knew that.

The young man learned a good many things about the Ortegas. One of the first interesting facts was of the death of a young ranch employee, Raúl Muñoz. The stranger thought hard about this. Policemen have a feel for unexpected deaths.

Raúl died at the end of November. That would have been shortly before El Viejito, Tony’s grandfather, wrote his sad, disturbing letter to my museum, the letter that was never answered.

Raúl had been different in November, some of the villagers remembered. No one, to be truthful, liked Raúl much. He was too ambitious, too self-serving. But you had to give him his due. Orphaned at seven, raised by an older brother, he had done well. Some of the credit belongs to his older brother Lorenzo, who had worked for years for the Ortegas and found a job for his little brother. Raúl had managed on his own to impress the foreman of the Ortega ranch and to come to the attention of the family. Everyone felt, though, that he had gotten above himself when he began riding with the señora. If he hadn’t reached too far, they seemed to think, he would still be alive. For it was on a horseback ride that he had apparently fallen to his death. He had grown up riding mules up and down the treacherous trails. But horses and mules are different animals altogether.

No one knew what happened that bleak November day. He had gone out alone. The horse came back late that afternoon, riderless. It took a week to find his body.

Had anyone else ridden out on the Ortega ranch that afternoon?

No one knew; it was such a time ago. Anyway, what difference did it make? No one had mentioned seeing Raúl.

A word here, a phrase there, a slowly assembled picture of an agile, eager young man trying hard to please. A flashing smile, quick nervous gestures, but ultimately there was more to him than that. Beneath the surface effort to please was a tough, hungry spirit.

It was after he had been a month in Tlaxcala that the quiet young man from Orizaba first heard the word
gold
and heard it in conjunction with Raúl.

The quiet young man had picked up a day’s work as a casual laborer, loading hand-quarried rock onto a truck. When the work was done, he and the driver sat beneath a scrubby tree. It had been a warm day for February and the quiet young man had shared his beer and listened, impassive, as the driver, at his ease and expansive, pointed to a lightning-shattered tree, just barely in view from the dusty road, and said, “It was there, in an arroyo, that they found the body of Raúl Muñoz.” The old man had paused and stared at the rugged rocky terrain, fit only for nimble goats and sheep. “He ran up and down those trails as a boy. They say the horse must have thrown him. Funny, though—he’d ridden that same horse all year.” The old man’s voice dropped almost to a whisper. “He was thrown the day after he spoke up in the bar and said he was going to be rich, that he’d found gold in the hills.” The old man’s eyes were dark, unreadable. “If there is gold in the hill, it doesn’t belong to any man; the gold belongs to the gods.”

The old man wouldn’t say more. Not a word. But now, with something definite to go on, the quiet young man unobtrusively asked more questions, a few of this one, a few of that one. Very slowly he recreated Raúl Muñoz’s last night to live.

Raúl had swaggered into the little tavern in midafternoon. He drank tequila. He drank as the sun slipped behind the mountain. He made no friends that last night. From men who had been present in the tavern, the story emerged piece by piece.

“He was full of himself. So big, you understand.”

“He laughed at us. He laughed and said we were poor because we did not look for riches.”

“He said he would be as rich as a king because he knew when to act.”

Finally, his words so thick they could barely be understood, Raúl Muñoz said he had seen with his own eyes the gleam of gold softer than the shine of the sun on an angel’s wing.

Some of the men taunted him for they were angry at his drunken arrogance. If he had found treasure, he must prove it. Where was this gold?

The very tequila that loosened his tongue now cloaked him with the cunning of the drunk. He shook his head slowly from side to side. Someday they would know he spoke the truth. He was going to be richer than a king.

None of them ever saw him again. In little more than a week, the church bells tolled his farewell.

He was nineteen when he died.

The men in Tlaxcala have often talked about treasure and hunted it. Some wondered after Raúl’s death, but soon the talk fell away. So many had hunted treasure and no one had ever found it. Once they were sure that gold was hidden in an overgrown mound not far from town. They dug all one long night, hoping to see the bright gleam of gold, and there was nothing but the worn remains of an ancient temple.

It was warm in the drifting boat in the middle of the smooth green lake, but coldness touched me. The sunlight did nothing to dispel it.

“You think it was murder?” I asked.

“Don’t you?”

“Why?”

“Gold,” he said softly.

“Someone found the treasure,” I said slowly, thinking it out, “and Raúl discovered it?” I shook my head and answered my own question. “That doesn’t make sense. If anyone found some fabulous treasure, they’d make sure no one came upon them with it. It’s all too fantastic.”

Jerry rubbed his cheekbone thoughtfully. “I have a feeling that nothing in all of this has happened accidentally. I don’t absolutely discount coincidence, but I think a very careful mind is at work. I don’t, for example, think you are involved in this by chance.”

I jerked up my head.

He shook his head quickly. “We are always talking at cross-purposes, aren’t we? I don’t mean I’m still suspicious of you, Sheila, but think about it for a minute. This must be the sequence.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “Someone, some member of the Ortega family, discovers a treasure and contacts someone in your museum. Señor Herrera finds out. He writes his old friend, Dr. Rodriguez, who has often spoken out against antiquities smuggling.” Jerry glanced at me. “Not all your people are bad.”

I bristled a little at that. There is the other side of the coin in this question of protecting archeological treasures. But I knew that I would never again be able to argue it, not when I remembered the murder of Raúl Muñoz.

“So we have someone at Tlaxcala and someone in New York making plans,” Jerry continued. “Now, if it’s the usual situation, neither one will trust the other. They will have to meet and make the exchange. The museum person knows very well the danger of gossip and how word can leak out and the spoor bring the sharks. That’s where you come in, Sheila.”

I must have looked absolutely blank.

“Don’t you see?” Jerry asked impatiently. “You are the decoy, the stalking horse.” He nodded, sure he had hit on it. “A cat’s-paw.”

I almost laughed at the quaint, old-fashioned word.
Cat’s-paw.
I could imagine this gray-and-black-striped paw with pale pink pads, claws neatly sheathed.

Jerry didn’t see my quick smile. Head bent, tousled hair falling down over that high forehead, he was intent upon his thoughts. “That’s it, of course. One of the Ortegas requests the return of the manuscript. You bring it down and you are so publicly, so blatantly linked with your museum that you are bound to be noticed. It worked.” He nodded, admiring the skill of it. “It worked like a charm. We noticed you, suspected you. More important, it brought out his competition, the other seeker after the treasure.” Jerry’s blue eyes narrowed. “It showed that word had leaked out, that they would have to be very careful indeed about the ultimate transfer of the treasure.”

Cat’s-paw. One person used as a tool by another, a decoy. Suddenly it didn’t seem funny at all.

“Do you have your tourist card with you?”

I looked at him blankly. He must have thought I was dim-witted, but his grasshopper leaps from one topic to another always left me floundering. “My tourist card?”

“Your tourist card, is it with you?” he repeated impatiently.

I nodded. Yes, my tourist card and traveler’s checks were in my purse.

“Good. The thing to do, right now, is get you on a plane to New York. Out of Mexico. There’s no need for you to stay here and be in danger.”

I didn’t say anything for a minute. Go home now? A part of me welcomed that thought, hungered for the comforting anonymity of New York. But, almost to my own surprise, I was shaking my head.

“No,” I said sharply.

“Look, Sheila, you’re lucky those shots on the Avenue of the Dead missed you.”

I shook my head stubbornly.

“He might be luckier next time.”

“I want to know. I have to know.” For the first time I knew I was angry.

“Know what?” He was lost now.

“A cat’s-paw, you said. Someone at my museum moved me like a chess piece, set me up to draw fire. I can’t walk away, pretend nothing happened.”

“Don’t worry,” he said reassuringly. “We’ll catch whoever it is.”

Would they? Right now, right this minute, one of the Ortegas could be meeting someone from my museum. Who was it? What familiar face would I see if I were at the cautious meeting?

“We’re keeping watch on the family. The most likely person is Antonio Ortega.”

“Not Tony. I can’t believe that.”

“Why not?” Jerry asked, surprised and a little wary.

Why not, indeed? Hadn’t I been wrong about him once? But he was kind and respectful to his father (what about Gerda, though?) and gentle with his sisters and there was no taint of cruelty in his darkly handsome face.

Cruelty. I saw again Juan’s narrow face and the wild light in his eyes.

“Gossip has it that the Ortega trading company is in trouble. An extra million or so might make the difference,” Jerry said.

Gossip is more often wrong than right, I thought defensively. And wasn’t all business a gamble? Down one minute, up the next?

But I was slowly nodding my head. “I see.” Yes, reluctantly, I could believe that Tony would go to great lengths to save the family firm. Not for personal gain, but for family salvation. But murder? I recoiled at that. No, not Tony. If the boy, Raúl, had been murdered to protect the treasure, Tony could not be involved.

I held on to that certainty as Jerry continued to talk. “. . . a bad time for some of the smaller trading companies. There are shortages everywhere, breakdowns in manufacturing, lack of raw materials—”

“You can’t be sure it’s Tony.” I had to interrupt finally.

Jerry shrugged. “No, but who else is there? Who especially that Señor Herrera would wish to protect?”

Juan, I thought quickly. Tony’s father. Even Gerda.

“We’ll watch all of them,” Jerry said soothingly. “That’s our job. You don’t need to worry any more. Now, I’ll get you out to the airport. We won’t go by the house for your suitcase. You can call from the airport and ask them to ship your things, explaining an emergency made it necessary for you to return to New York.”

“The exchange could be taking place right now,” I said abruptly.

Jerry’s bony face tightened. “Right. So I need to hurry.” And he began to row swiftly toward shore.

“But if it hasn’t happened,” I said smoothly, “and I’m there in the house, watching all of them, there’s a better chance we might be able to stop it.”

He paused in midstroke. The boat swerved a little to the left. He straightened it, but his eyes never left my face.

“It could be very dangerous,” he said slowly.

I’m not sure even now what my true reasons were. Anger at being used? Stiff Scot pride that forbade running? Determination to root out banditry from my museum?

Or was it a muddled attempt to help Tony even though I had no real reason to believe him innocent? I had nothing more than an instinctive, stubborn faith that he could not be the one.