Десмонд Бэгли - The Vivero Letter

He stirred impatiently. ‘All right, it’s a deal. I’ll tell you everything you want to know — but privately. I don’t want Halstead in on it.’

‘Not a chance,’ I said. ‘Anything you want to tell me, you do it here and now in this room — and that applies to you, Halstead, too.’

Halstead said in a cold rage, ‘This is monstrous. Am I to give away the results of years of research to this charlatan?’

‘You’ll put up or you’ll shut up.’ I stuck out a finger. The door’s open and you can leave any time you like. Nobody is keeping you here. But if you go, that leaves Fallon with the tray.’

Indecision chased over his face and his knuckles whitened as he gripped the arms of the chair. Katherine Halstead took the decision from him. She said firmly, ‘We accept your conditions. We stay.’ Halstead looked at her with a sudden air of shock, and she said, ‘It’s all right, Paul; I know what I’m doing.’

‘Fallon — what about you?’

‘I guess I’m stuck with it,’ he said, and smiled slowly. ‘Halstead talks about years of research. Well, I’ve put in quite a few years myself. It wouldn’t surprise me if we both know all there is to know about the problem. Heaven knows, I’ve been falling over this pair in every museum in Europe. I doubt if the pooling of information is going to bring up anything new.’

‘I might surprise you,’ said Halstead sharply. ‘You have no monopoly on brains.’

‘Cut it out,’ I said coldly. ‘This confessional is going to be run under my rules, and that means no snide comments from anyone. Do I make myself quite clear?’

Fallon said, ‘You know, Wheale, when I first met you I didn’t think much of you. You surprise me.’

I grinned. ‘I surprise myself sometimes.’ And so I did! Whatever had happened to the grey little man?

It was an astonishing, incredible and quite preposterous story, and, if I did not have a queer and inexplicable photograph up in the darkroom, I would have rejected it out of hand. And yet Fallon was no fool and he believed it — and so did Halstead, although I wouldn’t have bet on the adequacy of his mental processes.

I ruled the proceedings firmly while the story was being told. Occasionally there were outbursts of temper, mostly from Halstead but with a couple of bitter attacks from Fallon, and I had to crack down hard. It was quite apparent that, while none of them liked what I was doing, they had no alternative but to comply. My possession of the tray was a trump card in this curious and involved game, and neither Fallon nor Halstead was prepared to let the other get away with it.

Fallon seemed to be the more sensible and objective of the two men so I let him open the account, asking him to begin. He pulled his ear gently, and said, ‘It’s hard to know where to start.’

I said, ‘Begin at the beginning. Where did you come into it?’

He gave his ear a final tug, then folded one thin hand on top of the other. ‘I’m an archeologist, working in Mexico mostly. Do you know anything about the Mayas?’

I shook my head.

‘That’s a great help,’ he said acidly. ‘But I don’t suppose it matters at this stage because the preliminaries had nothing to do with the Mayas at all — superficially. I came across several references in my work to the de Vivero family of Mexico. The de Viveros were an old Spanish family — Jaime de Vivero, the founder, staked his claim in Mexico just after the time of Cortes; he grabbed a lot of land, and his descendants made it pay very well. They became big landowners, ranchers, owners of mines and, towards the end, industrialists. They were one of the big Mexican families that really ruled the roost. They weren’t what you’d call a very public-spirited crowd and most of their money came from squeezing the peasants. They supported Maximilian in that damn-fool effort of the Hapsburgs to establish a kingdom in Mexico in the eighteen-sixties.

‘That was their first mistake because Maximilian couldn’t stand the pace and he went down. Still, that wasn’t enough to break the de Viveros, but Mexico was in upheaval; dictator followed dictator, revolution followed revolution, and every time the de Viveros backed the wrong horse. It seems they lost their powers of judgement. Over a period of a hundred years the de Vivero family was smashed; if there are any of them still around they’re lying mighty low because I haven’t come across any of them.’ He cocked an eye at Halstead. ‘Have you come across a live de Vivero?’

‘No,’ said Halstead shortly.

Fallon nodded in satisfaction. ‘Now, this was a very wealthy family in its time, even for Mexico, and a wealthy Mexican family was really something. They had a lot of possessions which were dispersed during the break-up, and one of these items was a golden tray something like yours, Wheale.’ He picked up his briefcase and opened it. ‘Let me read you something about it’

He pulled out a sheaf of papers. ‘The tray was something of a family heirloom and the de Viveros looked after it; they didn’t use it except at formal banquets and most of the time it was locked away. Here’s a bit of gossip from the eighteenth century; a Frenchman called Murville visited Mexico and wrote a book about it. He stayed on one of the de Vivero estates when they threw a party for the governor of the province — this is the relevant bit.’

He cleared his throat. ‘“Never have I seen such a splendid table even in our French Court. The grandees of Mexico live like princes and eat off gold plate of which there was a profusion here. As a centrepiece to the table there was a magnificent array of the fruits of the country on golden trays, the most magnificent of which was curiously wrought in a pattern of vine leaves of exquisite design. I was informed by one of the sons of the family that this tray had a legend — that it was reputed to have been made by an ancestor of the de Viveros. This is unlikely since it is well known that the de Viveros have a noble lineage extending far back into the history of Old Spain and could not possibly have indulged in work of this nature, no matter how artful. I was told also that the tray is supposed to hold a secret, the discovery of which will make the recipient wealthy beyond measure. My informant smiled as he communicated this to me and added that as the de Viveros were already rich beyond computation the discovery of such a secret could not possibly make them effectively wealthier.”’

Fallon dropped the papers back into the briefcase. That didn’t mean much to me at the time, but I’m always interested in any secrets concerning Mexico so I copied it out as a matter of routine and filed it away. Incidentally, that bit about the noble lineage in Old Spain is phoney, the de Viveros were social climbers, men on the make — but we’ll come to that later.

‘Pretty soon after that I seemed to run into the de Viveros no matter which way I turned. You know how it is — you come across a strange word in a book, one which you’ve never seen before, and then you come across it again twice in the same week. It was like that with the de Viveros and their tray. Coming across references to the de Viveros is no trick in Mexico — they were a powerful family — but, in the next year I came across no less than seven references to the de Vivero tray, three of which mentioned this supposed secret. It appeared that the tray was important to the de Viveros. I just filed the stuff away; it was a minor problem of marginal interest and not really in my field.’

‘Which is?’ I asked.

‘The pre-Columbian civilizations of Central America,’ he answered. ‘A sixteenth-century Spanish tray didn’t mean much to me at the time. I was busy working on a dig in south Campeche. Halstead was with me then, among others. When the dig was finished for the season and we’d got back to civilization he picked a quarrel with me and left. With him went my de Vivero file.’