Michael Cadnum // Fiction

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Criminal Lovers

 Rigo hurried over to the field phone, and gave me a confident, reassuring gesture, patting the air, like he had seen dead bodies every morning of his life.

            Against every professional instinct, I rolled the corpse over.  He was still alive, to my shock,  bleeding from a cut in his throat, its lips blue.  His lips.  I knelt, mentally running through the resuscitation video I’d watched at years before.  I blew air into his mouth and it came out his neck.

            He died, and I put a piece of clean canvas tarp over his face.

            I felt terrible, but I felt that Spain was full of its own problems.  I wish he had died somewhere else, and I didn't want to hear any more about him or his enemies.  The previous chief archaeologist, the one before me, had been injured in a fall from Merida’s Puente Romano, the span across the Rio Guadiana a month earlier.  Too much of the local tinto, too much misguided scientific zeal, had led to a nighttime climb.  He was expected to live, now that he was out of his coma, but he was being sent back to Dallas.  Rigo had said that he was good man, “Good like you, Doctor," which I should have taken as a warning.

            For me the Spanish dig was a dream job, after years of pick-and-shovel spells in England, excavating middens and bridgeheads.  I was still an under-published, peripatetic American archeologist, in a field that was more muscle and patience than glamour.  I had a few weeks almost entirely to myself, before the graduate student volunteers showed up, and retired people from Arizona and Alberta who paid good money to work the dig.

            Our dig was across from the Teatro Romano in the city of Merida.  I could see the cornices and arches of the tops of ruins as I waited for the police, and Rigo put his hand on my arm.

            He said, “I‘ll take care of everything."

            The year was 1989, and terrorism was a local affair, Basques and Leftists and neo-Fascists stabbing each other in the pre-dawn.  Sometimes an anti-NATO splinter group spray-painted OTAN no on the crumbling limestone walls of the red light district.  There was a lot of anger around, but most of it was a pose.

            In throwing myself into a career in the field, I was bent on escaping my father’s perennial health problems in, California, a bad heart that made me expect a phone call from his new wife any day with the final, dreaded tidings.  I couldn’t stand to see him die.  I wasn’t proud of this emotional fact, built it was the truth.  I kept myself out of the U. S. as much as possible, and I stayed very busy.

            When they arrived, the two impeccably uniformed men in their sharply-creased tan uniforms approached the fresh corpse on something like tiptoe.  The dead man was lying on a just-excavated flooring, mosaics fitted together into what we hoped would be a pattern, the lovely image of Juno, perhaps, or Mercury. 

            Before I employed any of my rough Spanish, I had my passport out of the rip-stop nylon pouch at my belt, and the yellow permit signed by Dr Vallesca.  The officers looked at my passport photo, and gazed into my face, comparing the beaming innocent embossed with the U. S. State Department seal with the sunburned, regretful foreigner they saw before them.

            “Are you discovering treasure, Doctor?” asked the younger policeman in very good, American-accented English.

            People are always asking me what did you find, as though the joy of troweling soil were not enough for them.

            “Not yet, Officer," I said, with a little bit of a nod--almost a bow--showing respect for his uniform.

            We were excavating what we knew would be an ancient  bath.  “We will find a hot room, where the Romans sweated,” I explained, “and a cold room where they felt refreshed.”

            Rigo took over at that point.  He was a cultivated Merida native who had had a degree in electronics, and had spent his working life abroad.  He was something of a ladies’ man, I thought, always smelling of expensive aftershave.  His job as aide de camp to me was a way of enjoying a productive and interesting retirement.  He had onceworked for McDonnell Douglas in California, wiring intake ducts on fighter jets.

            “Ask them,” I said, “not to disturb the site."

            “A woman is coming," said Dr Vallesca, leaning down from the edge of the excavation.

            Uniformed soldiers often made a point of stopping their taxis and smoking cigarettes while I swept dust into a neat pile, and carefully shoveled it into the blue plastic buckets.  Men in handsome dark suits, workers with spattered with paint and plaster--it was considered a manly form of curiosity, observing what the archaeologist was up to.

            Female visitors were a little more out of the ordinary.

             “You will show her the images you found,” said Dr Vallesca meaningfully.  "She is an important news reporter.  She has contacts in high places."

            Several days days had passed since the dead man had been lifted up out of the shadowy dig, and more of the mosaics had been painstakingly uncovered.  Rigo had heard a few details about the murdered man, but for the most part I tried to pretend the bloody death had never taken place.

            “A woman at last,” Rigo was saying.

            “She is a journalist," said Dr Vallesca, with a degree of impatience.  He was a dapper, soft-voiced man.  He made an effort of conquering his disappointment at being assistant minister of archeological digs in out-of-the-way-places by dressing and speaking with an air of unquenchable perkiness.  “She has,“ he added. “impressive credentials.”

            “We will,“ said Rigo,“ make her feel welcome and appreciated.”

            Sylvia turned out to be one of those international hybrids, her American accent softened by years of living in London.  She was attractive, but she had the manner of being a woman in a hurry, taking pictures with a slim little Nikon before she bothered to ask permission.

            “Actually, I‘d rather you didn‘t,” I said. 

            “The flash is off,” she said.

            The mosaic images--which turned out to be elaborate depictions of Jupiter having sex with mortal women--were still caked in dirt, but you could see that this portion of the bath had been wildly decorated with erotic art.  I was a little surprised, but not disappointed.  I could see an article authored by me in Smithsonian, with a soft-focus on the more explicit mosaics.

            My passion for her was, just then, extremely thin.  Her dismissive tone, and the way she bent down to photograph the sky god taking his pleasure, made me dislike her more than a little.

            But I did what I could to show her the town.  In fact, I was polite.  I encouraged her to buy her the lottery ticket sellers out side the ancient temple of Diana--no one was impervious to the competing ticket sellers, women calling out with an urgent cheer that there was good money to be won.  The tickets were emblazoned with green and yellow lizards.   I told her that the lively-looking reptile symbolized  how quickly good luck could dart away.

            Sylvia lanced me with her curious gaze.  "Can it?" she asked.

            "Or," I suggested, "you could rub its belly.  Hypnotize it."

            "Then it wouldn't escape," she said, giving me what I had to interpret as the very beginning of a flirtatious smile.

            "No," I said.  "Then it would be safely in your hand."

            I took her to my local haunts, places where handsomely dressed men and women chain smoked and drank nightly until dawn.  We drank my favorite brand, Focking Gin, in the bar where teenaged girls danced with each other to out-of-date American pop.  We walked under the ancient Roman aqueduct Los Milagros, kicking trash with every step, and when we came up the pretty white skeleton of a small carnivore--perhaps a cat--she said, “He was a labor organizer from Leeds.”

            “This little skeleton?”

            “The dead man you found.  A leftist railroad man, robbed and garroted."

            I felt the sudden coldness of her explanation of events, which I had heard expressed more gently by Rigo.  I sensed, not for the first time, how far from home any traveler could suddenly find himself. 

            “I spoke with the police,” she said.  “I’m working on an article, she said, “for the Sunday Times.  The theme will be:  an activist killed by street thugs and flung down among the ancient rubble."

            I might have been a little crestfallen.  I had thought, naturally, she had been working on an article about a virile archaeologist discovering erotic marvels in the warm Spanish sun.

            "That's quite a theme," I offered, trying to disguise my disappointment.

            "There's only one real theme, in my experience," she said.

            "What's that?"

            "The world is run by violent people."  She smiled, as though this was all attractive small talk.  "Governments and crooks."  

            My apartment overlooked the Circo Romano, a vast oval field.  It was bordered by houses sporting multicolored laundry, and sheep and goats grazed the wild rye.    Joggers had worn a brown wrinkle around the ghost of the stadium. 

            To my surprise she said it was a pretty room, and regarding my view, she said, "I love animals."

            Without clothes, Sylvia was all leg, the sort of figure admired by the Romans, who learned to admire it from the Greeks--small breasted, ample through the hips, but definitely built like a women ready to hurry along and leave someone like me as quickly as possible. 

            We gave up on understanding each other, but enjoyed each other in long post-coital strolls past the girl’s school of Saint Eulalia, up the street of John Lennon, to the fat, sun-weathered stones of the arch of Trajan.

            When it was time for her to go back to London, she left a bottle of gin on my pillow, tied with a red ribbon, and her address on a Post-it, a street in Hammersmith.  I missed her already, but that very week the volunteers arrived, a dozen of them, and I was busy giving lessons in how to shake the soil-screen, with a sharp eye for the occasional coin and fragment of pagan divinity.

            “Your lover is a criminal,” said Dr Vallesca.

            I had the impression that my employer had waited for just the right moment to share a rich morsel of gossip.  My musco pollo had just arrived, golden and succulent, and Dr Vallesca poured me some more red wine with an air of knowing weariness to trump my New World naiveté.

            “I don’t have a lover,” I said.  Not any more, I thought.

            “The reporter.  She was boarding the Talgo in Madrid," he said, referring to the rapid train that ran north toward Barcelona.  “A metal detector sounded its alarm, and she was discovered with a hoard of miniature bronzes."

            I expressed dismay and curiosity.

            “She had in her suitcase,” he said, “a statue of Apollo, and a pretty depiction of Juno, along with a very sporting Priapus."

             I was speechless. 

            “I have had your assistant arrested,” said Dr Vallesca, with a glance up at me from his plate of entremes, radishes and green onions, just to see how I was absorbing all this. 

“They were in league, the two of them.”

            Before I could ask further, he added, with a courtly choice of words, “Right before my unseeing eyes Rigo Gomez was stealing.”

            “Before mine, you mean,” I said, feeling shaken.

            “The responsibility,” he said grandly, “is entirely my own.”

            I felt betrayed and illuminated at once.

            “I want to talk to Rigo,” I said.  “When he’s out of jail.”

            Rigo never went to jail.  At the time I suspected a bribe.

            Some similar arrangement got Sylvia out of her trouble, as well. 

            Or perhaps in the policeman’s world of murder and sorrow, a pilfered miniature bronze here and there does not really matter.  Maybe I had come to the same conclusion, despite my hurt feelings, by the time Rigo wandered into my hospital room, looking like a man on his way to a party--a starched shirt, a sports coat worn over his shoulder, cape-style, his hair dyed-fresh-black.

            “I am apologizing,” he said.

            I was about to say, no need for that, but out came, “Thank you, Rigo.”

            I had been injured the day before when the scaffolding collapsed.  I had been climbing up the yellow piping to help volunteer who had been stung by one of the mock-scorpions, a variety of beetle which looked and acted like the unpleasant arachnid, without the least trace of venom.

            In a comical but brutal series of slow motion events I had fallen off the scaffolding, and lay half-stunned as the steel pipes rattled and rang down upon me, my life saved by my yellow hardhat.

            “I had those pieces of old art around for years,” he said. 

            “They were fake?” I asked, feeling a stab of revengeful hope against Sylvia.

            “No, of course not,” said Rigo.  “They were genuine--but not from our site.” 

            I didn’t want to ask any more questions.

            “I felt bad about cheating you in two ways," he said.

            I didn’t know quite what he meant until he turned to go and I asked, “Where are you off to, Rigo, all dressed up like that?"

            “London,” was his response.  He gave me a wink.  "Hammersmith."

            Dr Vallesca showed me the article in the Sunday magazine weeks later, a richly illustrated story on “Treasure Hunter to the Gods,” with the by-line, Sylvia Pursley, and a photo of Sylvia--my Sylvia--looking even more beautiful than she did in real life.

            Rigo looked robust and dashing in his photos, posing with a shovel beside the dig in Merida.  The erotic mosaics were disclosed to the newspaper-reading public, and I was not mentioned.

            Shortly after that the bombs began, night after night of explosions ripping the doors off cars parked outside the bus station.   At night I woke to the pop-pop-pop of automatics, the diminutive pistols the angry factions put to use, shooting opposition leaders in the head.  There was trouble at the site, too.  The hypocaust, part of the Roman heating system, collapsed, nearly trapping the volunteer from Seattle, whom I rescued from a dusty, unpleasant death.

            Early one morning Dr. Vallesca knocked on the door of my apartment, and handed me an envelope containing a Ministry of Archeology check--more than they actually owed me.

            “We are closing the dig,” he said.  “Too much sabotage.”

            “What do you mean ‘sabotage;?” I heard myself ask wonderingly.

            “My friend," he responded, “surely you don’t think all these calamites have been accidents!”

            I moved back to California.  I missed the white, graceful-and-ungainly storks of Merida, nesting on the arches of the old city.  I missed Spain, its color, its cynical vivacity.  I was offered a teaching job at San Jose State, and I considered settling down. I bought a Camry and rented an apartment in Daly City.

            What gave my faith in life a fresh start was the statue of Mercury, arriving in pieces over a period of weeks, hidden in shipments of handmade cups and saucers from Spain.  It would be fair to charge that the divine image was smuggled, but by whom I cannot say.

            I suspected Rigo, sending the me the fragments unbidden, but I could respect Dr Vallesca with equal logic.  The Messenger to the Gods looked to his right, a smile of welcome on his face.  One hand stretched forth to touch his guest, a motion of friendship, but one that kept the visitor at a distance, too.

            When I sat at my desk to write Sylvia I could never think how to ask, “Was it you?”

            Selling the piece would prove difficult, I reasoned, without proof of provenance, and besides--how could I bring myself to part with it?

            When I visited my father in Redwood Convalescent he was always under the impression that I had just arrived from abroad.

            “What are you finding?” he asked.

            “Gods in little pieces,” I answered the last time he asked.  

            “I’d like to see one of them,” he said.

            I sat there looking out at the early season Bay Area rain thinking that it wasn‘t impossible, what with bubble wrap and the outsized cartons you can buy.  I could bring the statute of Mercury in so my father could have a look at the ancient divinity.

            “You could put him right there,” he continued, “with a view of the parking lot,” the last thing I ever heard him say.

Michael Cadnum’s thirty-first book The King's Arrow (Viking, 2008) is based on a true story--the mysterious death of  King William II of England.  Cadnum welcomes questions and comments at his website www. michaelcadnum. com.

Date of Publication: 01 May 2008