‘How can you be sure?’
‘I just am,’ she told him stiffly. ‘That has nothing to do with him. But why all these questions? I thought you believed it was just an accident.’
Andriama gestured vaguely. ‘I am a mountain man. These nights in Tulear are too hot for me. I cannot sleep. My brain makes circles; it makes patterns. I tell you, I think, that people are sometimes taken for money near here.’
‘Kidnapped?’
‘Exact! Yes! Kidnapped.’
‘But you also said that hadn’t happened with my father and sister. You gave some very good reasons. I forget exactly-’
‘Yes. Three reason.’ He held up his thumb. ‘People know your father not have big money.’ Up came his index finger. ‘Why take your father and sister? Kidnappers need someone back home to raise money for them.’ The middle finger. ‘No one receive a ransom demand.’
‘That sounds convincing to me.’
‘But!’ Andriama spread all his fingers now. ‘What if these kidnappers never mean for your father to pay?’
Rebecca swallowed. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘What if they mean for you to pay? You are success. You are rich. Your father is proud man, he tells everyone how big success and rich you are. Perhaps these bad peoples hear of this. Perhaps they think, if they take him, you will come home and they will make you pay.’
‘Wouldn’t I have heard from them by now?’
‘Yes!’ beamed Andriama. ‘You would.’
There was silence. Rebecca could hear her heart pounding. ‘What are you suggesting?’ she asked, trying to be imperious, but her mouth was so dry that it came out as a treacherous croak.
‘I think it is clear exact what I suggest.’ He leaned forward. ‘We find no bodies yet. In a drowning like this, we expect to find bodies by now.’
Her outrage was genuine. ‘How dare you say that?’
‘I sorry.’ He didn’t look it. He dipped another sugarlump into his hot chocolate until it had soaked brown, then he popped it in his mouth and crunched it with evident pleasure between his stubby molars. ‘You visit my good friend Mustafa Habib two nights ago. You stay with him two hour.’
‘You’ve been watching me?’ He shook his head to deny her charge. Rebecca frowned. ‘You’re watching Mustafa.’Andriama shook his head again, but his grin betrayed him. She asked: ‘Why are you watching your good friend Mustafa?’
‘Is privilege of being police that we are the ones who ask the questions,’ answered Andriama. ‘What you talk about with Mustafa?’
‘That’s private.’
‘Mustafa very busy man this weekend. He visit people. He ask for money, big money. My people hear whispers that this money is ransom money.’
‘I know nothing about any money Mustafa might be raising,’ said Rebecca. ‘I suggest you ask him, not me.’
Andriama nodded. ‘We will.’
‘Anything else?’ asked Rebecca. ‘If not, I’ll-’
‘Sit! Sit!’ he said. ‘Listen: We not like kidnapping in this country. We make it stop, everyone safer. But very difficult to make stop when people pay. It encourage others. So! We pass new laws. You know these laws?’
‘This has nothing to do with me.’
‘These laws say is criminal not just to ask money for kidnap, but also to pay money for kidnap. We put people who pay in jail.’
‘You’re lying,’ said Rebecca weakly.
‘Oh yes, is true.’ He held up his hand, spread his fingers. ‘Five years.’ He dipped more sugar into his chocolate, watched greedily as it turned brown. ‘You know our jails? We have one in Tulear.’ He turned and pointed down one of the nearby streets. ‘I show you, if you wish. They not like English jails, nice, lots of room, bathroom and shower, one television each, doctor, lawyer, family, friends visit every day. Our jails nasty jails. Men, women all together, wash and make shit together.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘A pretty girl like you, I worry for her.’
‘Are you threatening me?’
‘Me? No. I give information, travel information. And is not just jail you must think about. If we know Mustafa collects money, bad peoples know also. Greedy peoples. They think maybe this their chance to make themselves rich. When Mustafa gives you money, they-’
‘I’ve had enough of this.’
‘-they come for you,’ insisted Andriama. ‘Guns, knives. They cut your throat, here to here, for money like this.’
Rebecca rose to her feet. ‘How dare you talk to me this way!’
‘Because I want to help you,’ said Andriama. ‘Tell me what happen and I do everything I can. What chance have you, alone?’ He leaned forward, tapped the tabletop. ‘Listen-these kidnappers watch what you do. Already they see you talk with me today. They think now for sure we work together.’ He spread his hands to show her the obviousness of what he was saying. ‘You have nothing to lose.’
‘Jesus!’ exclaimed Rebecca. She walked unsteadily away, hands on her head. What a mess this was becoming! She consulted her watch. Nine fifty, still no sign of Mustafa or the kidnappers. Andriama was finishing his pastry, watching her closely. She hurried for her Jeep, her nerves jangling. A stone had got into her right shoe and now pressed against her heel. She tried to pick it out but lost balance, had to put her hand against the wall.
A phone began to ring nearby. Rebecca looked around. Some Madagascans eked out a tenuous living renting out their mobiles. One such man was sitting at a school-desk on the pavement, fanning himself with an old newspaper. He had no chin at all, as though a team of crack surgeons had cut out his jawbone and stitched his Adams apple directly back to his lower lip. Rebecca watched with a sense of premonition as he answered his phone, listened for a few moments, then held it out to her. ‘C’est pour vous,’ he said.
THIRTY-FOUR
I
Knox had too much to do to spend the morning in the boathouse basement, but he was still in something of a daze as he went back up the steps, locked the steel door then hid it again behind its plasterboard facade.
First things first: he was anything but an authority on Chimu ceramics. He certainly couldn’t make a determination of so small and damaged a fragment with any confidence. And even if it was Chimu, it didn’t mean it had come from the same wreck as the Chinese ceramics. It could theoretically have come from some other wreck, or even just have been brought here by a collector, and then been lost.
But the chances of that…
Knox had occasionally come across the Chimu while working as an Egyptologist. The Early Chimu-better known as the Moche-had been pyramid builders too, and so once or twice he’d been asked about the possibility of cultural crossover. On such occasions, he’d usually smiled politely and pointed out that the Early Chimu had built their pyramids well over a thousand years after the Egyptians. More to the point, they’d lived in Peru.
It was one thing to imagine a Chinese ship sailing west from the Cape to within sight of South America, then turning back. It was another altogether to have them heading south down the east coast and then reaching the Pacific through the Straits of Magellan a hundred years before Magellan did. Yet that was what this fragment implied.
The Chimu of the black ceramics were a much later people than their pyramid-building forebears. They’d first come to notice in the early tenth century, but it had only been in the fourteenth that they’d become a major regional power. They’d worshipped the moon and the sea, had sacrificed their own children. When Francisco Pizarro and the Spaniards had sailed south from Panama on their voyage of discovery to Peru, it had been off the port city of Tumbez that they’d first anchored; and though the Chimu had themselves recently been absorbed into the Inca Empire, Tumbez had still been in essence a Chimu city.
A colleague of Pizarro’s called Pedro de Cieza de Leon had written a vivid account of that first contact. It had always struck Knox as curious. Dozens of men had paddled balsa-wood rafts out to Pizarro’s ship, bringing fresh fruit, fish and llama meat to trade. Once on board, they’d exclaimed excitedly over the crowing of a rooster, the beards of the Spanish men, the blackness of the slaves. That is to say, it hadn’t been this great foreign ship in itself that had so amazed them, but the detail of it. Pizarro was the first European to venture so far south; and though Magellan and his fleet had already passed Tierra del Fuego on their circumnavigation, they’d left the coast behind far further south. Maybe word had already reached the Chimu about these strange people from across the seas, but, if so, they’d been impressively relaxed about it, for the Spanish had taken death and disease and the brutal pursuit of gold with them wherever they’d gone. So maybe, just maybe, other strange visitors had arrived in great ships before. Visitors without beards or black skins.