The Copper Egg Read online

  Claire wasn’t the sort of person to have lots of friends. People were surprised at that, as if blond people naturally bonded with everyone. She used to have that sort of life, but once she hit her thirties, her hair couldn’t decide if it wanted to be blond or brown. Brown seemed to be winning, which Claire liked to blame for having fewer friends, even though she knew that made no sense. But then she didn’t have to pay attention to her mom and believe that it might be her depressed personality that pushed people away.

  Claire had counted Hudson as a friend, but they’d drifted apart. Sochi had been her closest friend, obviously. Maggie and Drew from college would always be in her life, even though they often went months without connecting. But the one good friend she could always count on, especially in Peru, was Denis Valerga.

  Saturday afternoon as Nancho dropped Claire off at Denis’s house, she bent down to Nancho’s open window. “Are you sure you don’t mind waiting around?”

  “I have many cousins. My cousin Mariposa lives a few miles away, so I will visit her family. Just text when you’re ready.”

  Denis Valerga lived on the eastern edge of Trujillo in a sprawling home set into the dramatic foothills of the Andes. Stark and modern, the all-white home was the perfect backdrop for Denis’s collections of pre-Columbian antiquities. Every item mounted on his walls, displayed on simple pedestals, or set into professionally lit niches, had been purchased from looters.

  Claire would be hard-pressed to explain to other archaeologists why she and Denis had such a strong bond. Part of it was a love for the cultural treasures buried up and down the Peruvian coast. She loved that he used his great wealth—earned from the sugarcane industry—to keep Peru in Peru.

  Part of it was the trust they shared. No matter what the topic, they were always open and honest. No lies. No secrets. They’d agreed to that the day they’d stood in the Trujillo airport watching Denis’s daughter Liza board her flight to Jacksonville.

  Liza came out to her father when she was twenty-one. He’d already figured it out and admired her courage and determination to be herself. But after two difficult years, he worried that Peru’s conservative attitude was crushing her spirit. Claire shared his concern. Liza had insisted on being out and proud, but it was proving dangerous. Even the police constantly harassed her, only stopping short of physical harm because she was a Valerga.

  Denis had come to Claire, his face rigid with fear, for advice. She called her cousin Randy in Jacksonville, and two weeks later, Liza went to live with Randy and his boyfriend Mike. Five years later, Liza was now twenty-eight and living happily with Heather, a fourth-grade teacher. Liza called Claire every Christmas. Helping Liza still made her swell with pride.

  After Liza had boarded her plane to Jacksonville, Denis had turned to Claire and held both her hands. “The greatest gift I give to my three children is my honesty and my absolute loyalty. I hereby pledge the same to you, with my deepest gratitude.”

  With that, she became part of Denis’s family. With her parents constantly running off to their next crazy adventure, it had been nice having a Peruvian family.

  “Mi hija, at last you have returned,” Denis said as Claire stepped into his welcoming arms, pleased he still called her his daughter. She returned the hug as well as she could, given Denis’s impressive bulk. He wore his usual garb—featherlight trousers with a tunic, and simple sandals. He smelled of eucalyptus, and other than a little more gray in his slicked-back hair, he hadn’t changed. Denis moved with quiet confidence.

  “You look great,” Claire said.

  “As do you. The extra pounds look good on you.”

  She laughed. “You weren’t supposed to notice.” A new Paracas textile hung on the wall behind him, the red and orange tones still brilliant, the fabric showing men fishing in long reed canoes. “Very nice.”

  Denis shrugged. “My latest.”

  “Looted.”

  Now he laughed. “You weren’t supposed to notice.”

  They talked nonstop for an hour. Describing her job took about three seconds, but she enjoyed entertaining him with the story about tracking down the Egyptian necklace Bob had accidentally packed into a crate heading for Brussels.

  After he’d told her all about Liza and her brothers, Roberto and Miguel, he leaned closer and took her hand. “I never believed the headlines, the lies they told about you. Yet you left before I could tell you this. And you dropped off the face of the earth, not replying to any texts or calls.”

  Claire wasn’t sure Denis was ready for the truth, but they’d promised honesty to each other. “Well, here’s the thing.” She met Denis’s kind eyes, cocoa brown in a pale face. “The headlines—and the stories that went with them—were, for the most part, true.”

  He grunted in surprise. “You actually heard voices?”

  “One day I…well, it’s not important how it started, but just that it did. I began to hear voices speaking Quechua. Those voices led me to the five tombs I discovered.”

  Denis leaned back, folding both hands over his chest. “If we were in America or some European country, I would be concerned about your mental health, but this is Peru. We inhale the same air as our ancestors inhaled for centuries. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I told no one for weeks. It was just too weird. But after the fifth tomb, and all the attention I was getting as the archaeologist with the golden touch, I had to tell someone. I told Sochi. We had a fight about…about something else…then Sochi…” She clamped her jaw shut.

  Denis’s eyes widened. “She didn’t!”

  Claire nodded, surprised to be filling with anger so quickly. “She told the press.”

  “Mi hija, I am so sorry. But these voices. Tell me what you hear.”

  “That’s the thing! They’re gone.”

  “I am relieved to hear this.”

  “But it’s a good news/bad news sort of thing. The voices are gone, but I’d been planning to use them to help me.” How did she bring up Chaco’s tomb without sounding even crazier than a woman who heard voices of the dead?

  The solution rested in her pocket, so she removed the three eggs and handed them to Denis. His breath quickened as he looked them over. Then she handed him the note, suddenly wanting the eggs back in her hand. Her fingers actually twitched, but she resisted the urge to snatch back the copper egg.

  “The deeper etchings are obviously Chimú, but what are these lighter scratches?”

  “Don’t know. But am I crazy to think that these eggs really could have come from King Chaco’s tomb?”

  Denis gave her a conspiratorial smile and handed back the eggs and the note. Then he leapt from the sofa with the energy of a much younger man. “Come.”

  As Claire followed him down the hall, she stopped to examine a Chimú water vessel, noticing that the black glaze was especially shiny for the period.

  “Don’t look at that too closely,” Denis said with a chuckle.

  She shot him a look. “Seriously?” Carefully, she lifted it from its wall niche and examined it further, then snorted. “Denis, it’s a fake!”

  He shrugged. “Liza needed some way to focus her artistic skills in high school, and she continues to help me out now and then from America. It’s her hobby.” He winked. “But she prefers the term ‘reproduction’ to ‘fake.’”

  Wild. Hearing that the premier collector in all of Peru displayed “reproductions” was akin to learning that the Smithsonian’s Hope Diamond was really made of plastic.

  One of Denis’s many rooms was devoted solely to maps. He opened the top drawer of an antique map chest and pulled out a thick file. “Since you left Peru, my sons have also left the nest. So when I have time on my hands, I research my newest hobby.” He spread out several handmade maps. “One day I asked myself: If King Chaco’s tomb actually existed, where might it be?”

  “Denis, you’ve done all the research.”

  Two hands the size of catcher’s mitts landed gently across the maps. “If you find it, my fee for
this information is one gold item.”

  He would find a way to acquire such an item illegally, so Claire might as well save him the risk. At her brisk nod, he removed his hands. Together, they studied his maps of known tombs.

  He had overlaid the photocopied maps with a square grid, then X’d through those pieces of the grid that didn’t need searching.

  “This is so much work. How did you put this all together?”

  “Finding Chaco’s tomb has always been a secret obsession. I read all the material written by the Spanish missionaries. I visited each grid to see if it had been developed or not.” He separated three maps from the pile. “I’ve eliminated the area between Chepen and Pacasmayo. And I checked most of the area south of Chan Chan to Chimbote.”

  “But what about the far northern coast?” She ran her finger all the way up to Punta Sol near the border with Ecuador.

  “The material written by the missionaries puts Chaco’s city farther south, somewhere along this thirty-mile stretch of coast. His city was much, much smaller than Chan Chan, so it has gone undetected. The missionaries wrote of Chaco’s large and impressive tomb, but they never mentioned a location for either the tomb or his city.”

  “Wouldn’t they have been in the same location?” In Chan Chan, when a ruler died, he was entombed with wives, concubines, llamas, and riches, then the tomb was closed.

  “Not always. We know that much from the missionaries. A ruler’s tomb could be built well outside of a city.” Denis rubbed the gray stubble on his chin. “I have narrowed it down to three areas. The first is here, south of Pacasmayo.”

  Claire studied the map. Most of the grids had been X’d. Only five had small, perfectly formed question marks. Denis had also marked the more than seventeen archaeological sites that stretched north from Trujillo—Galendo, Huaca Prieta, Mocollope, Caballo Muerto, among others. She could avoid those spots, since they’d already been excavated.

  “Okay,” she said. “What’s the second area?”

  He switched maps. “The second is on either side of Chicama.”

  This map had more question marks than Xs, so it hadn’t been intensely searched.

  He flipped to another map. “Here’s the third area, along the five-mile stretch north of Chan Chan, including Chan Chan itself.”

  Claire shook her head. “Almost all of that area has been excavated to some extent. And didn’t I read that La Bruja sin Corazon has been working north of Chan Chan?”

  Denis shrugged. “She is all over.”

  “Sounds like a real bandit.”

  “Bandit to some, savior to others. She is not nearly as dangerous as Carlos Higuchi.”

  “Why do you say that? They both sound horrible.”

  “Higuchi has developed too much influence with our country’s ministers. He’s been behind many pieces of legislation—both national and regional—that favor his businesses. He’s also rumored to be behind a number of unsolved murders.”

  They took the maps back into the living room and Denis refilled their wine glasses. “I read about him before I came,” Claire said. “What’s his story? Is he native Japanese, or born here?”

  “Japanese-Peruvian,” Denis said, “which might explain why he punishes Peru by looting, then smuggling everything out.”

  “Why punish Peru?”

  “Do you know anything about what happened in Peru during WWII?”

  She shook her head and settled back against the cushion.

  “The Japanese came here in 1899 as laborers, but many of them worked their way into professional life. It was mostly men who immigrated from Japan so they married local women and their children became Peruvians. I think by 1930 almost half ran their own businesses.”

  “Enterprising people.”

  “Then WWII came along. Once Japan entered the war, your country put its Japanese citizens in internment camps. Then the Americans began to panic about all the people of Japanese descent in Peru and other South American countries, thinking they might help the Japanese. So America made a deal with Peru: We’ll give you all sorts of wonderful military equipment if you’ll gather up your Japanese to put in our internment camps.”

  Claire grimaced. “Wait. Peru sent its people to prison camps in the U.S. in exchange for tanks?”

  “The camps were in Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, and a few other states I can’t remember. I am not proud of this, but in our defense, the same thing was happening elsewhere in South America. We arrested most of the Japanese-Peruvian families and sent them to U.S. camps.”

  “Was Higuchi’s family involved?”

  “Don’t know, but if his family was here during WWII, they must have been.”

  “Well, if mine had been, I’d have a chip the size of Mt. Everest on my shoulder.” She wondered if having a chip that large made a person dangerous or just pissed off.

  She checked her watch, then nodded toward the wine bottle. “If we reach the bottom of that, I won’t be able to sleep tonight.” She texted Nancho to pick her up.

  As they stood, Denis rested a hand on her shoulder. “I do not know if I truly believe Chaco’s tomb exists, or if I am just indulging in a childhood fantasy. I cannot guarantee any of these three maps will help you.”

  “Denis, you’ve given me a place to start. Without the voices, I must do this the old-fashioned way, with research and skill and lots of luck.”

  “You’ll also need this.” He pulled a brand new metal detector from a nearby closet.

  Claire whistled. “A Garrett 2500 Pro. Nice.”

  “Do you need a dig kit?”

  “No, I brought my own.” Her kit—pins, cords, tape measure, line level, notebooks, and plastic bags for sherds and other finds—hadn’t gotten any use since she’d left Peru.

  Denis made photocopies of his maps and a few pages of notes. “I entrust these to you.”

  “I will tell no one.” Claire pulled the eggs from her pocket. “And the knowledge that I possess these three possible artifacts from the tomb of King Chaco?”

  Denis placed his hand over his heart. “I will tell no one.”

  Claire left, excited to have a place to start looking, even if the area to search was daunting.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Claire

  Monday, March 20

  The day dawned perfect for a treasure hunt—clear blue skies, temperatures warm enough for Claire’s standard clothing choice—two tank tops, cargo shorts, and hiking boots. She hated wearing anything else. If it’d been chilly she’d have gone with cargo pants and a denim shirt over the tank tops. It had been a relief to leave all her DC office clothes hanging in her closet at home.

  Last night, Claire’s head had swum with Denis’s information about the Japanese in Peru, so she’d spent the evening reading more about it. While she avoided sympathy like you’d avoid an erupting volcano, Claire did let herself wallow around in some empathy for the guy. But still, resentment over mistreatment didn’t excuse anyone from murder and mayhem.

  She stood in the courtyard of her hotel waiting for Nancho, who was taking her treasure hunting. La Casa del Sol—House of the Sun—was a former colonial mansion, two stories high and painted a warm brick red. The pilasters and elaborate pediments around the heavy wooden doors were painted bright white, as were the decorative grills over the first floor windows. She’d been enchanted since the first time she’d seen it. In fact, when she took the job at Chan Chan, she lived here for a month until she found an apartment. The courtyard was outlined by red and white Moorish arches and filled with palm trees and flowering bushes. In the far corner, a cool archway led to a staircase with a swirling iron railing and her room.

  That room clearly demonstrated that Señora Nunez, the hotel’s owner, cared nothing for decorating principles, instead mixing orange and yellow woven rugs with scrolled iron floor lamps and lacy tablecloths and drapes. The room was a mash-up of colonial Spanish—elegant and refined—and Peruvian bold. Claire loved it.

  When Nancho drove up, she pushed hard
against the nine-foot high door to shut it; it tended to swell in the heat and scrape against the flagstone.

  Their starting point was Pacasmayo, which was about thirty miles north of Trujillo. Pacasmayo was located near the Jequetepeque River, one of more than a dozen rivers flowing through the desert like green, irrigated ribbons, reaching from the mountains down to the coast. Several Chimú cities had been built near the river.

  Using the coordinates on the map and the GPS on her phone, Claire had Nancho drive them to the first X in Denis’s grid, at the edge of a small town. Other than a dog barking in the distance, the community seemed asleep or gone.

  She loaded up her battered leather bag, slung it over her chest, and handed Nancho the metal detector. “We’ll trade off, one using the probe pole, the other the detector. Just swing this baby from side to side, like this. When it starts to beep, stop and call me over.” They spread out across the dusty ground, covered mostly with rocks, and a few bushes determined to survive without much rain.

  The detector hummed happily in Nancho’s hands. Claire stopped every ten feet and punched the ground with the probe. The only thing she discovered was that punching the ground with the probe hurt. She hadn’t searched for treasure this way for a very long time.

  “Mrs. Claire?”

  “Yes, Nancho.”

  “What am I to tell people that we are doing during the day?”

  Claire stopped walking. “Is your wife worried?”

  He looked at her, eyes wide. “No, of course not, Mrs. Claire. But I just…I need to know if I should admit that we are looking for King Chacochutl’s tomb.”

  She cursed, then bent over for a second. “Seriously?”

  “Yes, I am serious.”

  Claire groaned. Sarcasm flew over Nancho’s head with the same velocity that poetry zoomed over hers. But how the hell did anyone know what she was doing? “How did you know we were looking for Chaco’s tomb?”

  “I was with my cousins last night. As I have mentioned, I have many. They asked if I was just going to drive you around, or if I was going to help you search for Chaco’s tomb.”