Десмонд Бэгли - The Vivero Letter

Halstead’s voice was like a lash. ‘That’s a lie!’

Fallon shrugged. ‘That’s the way it was.’

So far we hadn’t reached any point at which the tray was important, but here was the first mention of the deep-rooted quarrel between these two men, and that might be of consequence so I decided to probe. ‘What was the quarrel about?’

‘He stole my work,’ said Halstead flatly.

‘The hell I did!’ Fallon turned to me. ‘This is one of the things that crop up in academic circles, I’m sorry to say. It happens like this; young men just out of college work in the field with older and more experienced workers — I did the same myself with Murray many years ago. Papers get written and sometimes the younger fellow reckons he’s not given due credit. It happens all the time.’

‘Was it true in this case?’

Halstead was about to speak up but his wife put her hand on his knee and motioned him to silence. Fallon said, ‘Most certainly not. Oh, I admit I wrote a paper on some aspects of the Quetzaecoatl legend which Halstead said I stole from him, but it wasn’t like that at all.’ He shook his head wearily. ‘You’ve got to get the picture. You’re on a dig and you work hard all day and at night you tend to relax and, maybe, drink a bit Now, if there’s half a dozen of you then you might have a bull session — what you English call “talking shop”. Ideas fly around thick and fast and nobody is ever certain who said what or when; these ideas tend to be regarded as common property. Now, it may be that the origin of the paper I wrote happened in such a way, and it may be that it was Halstead’s suggestion, but I can’t prove it and, by God, neither can he.’

Halstead said, ‘You know damn well that I suggested the central idea of that paper.’

Fallon spread his hands and appealed to me. ‘You see how it is. It might have gone for nothing if this young fool hadn’t written to the journals and publicly accused me of theft. I could have sued the pants off him — but I didn’t. I wrote to him privately and suggested that he refrain from entering into public controversy because I certainly wasn’t going to enter into an argument of that nature in the professional prints. But he continued and finally the editors wouldn’t print his letters any more.’

Halstead’s voice was malevolent. ‘You mean you bought the goddamn editors, don’t you?’

‘Think what you like,’ said Fallon in disgust. ‘At any rate, I found my de Vivero file had vanished when Halstead left. It didn’t mean much at the time, and when it did start to mean something it wasn’t much trouble to go back to the original sources. But when I started to bump into the Halsteads around every corner I put two and two together.’

‘But you don’t know he took your file,’ I said. ‘You couldn’t prove it in a law court.’

‘I don’t suppose I could,’ agreed Fallon.

‘Then the less said about it the better.’ Halstead looked pleased at that, so I added, ‘You both seem free and easy in throwing accusations about. This isn’t my idea of professional dignity.’

‘You haven’t heard the whole story yet, Mr. Wheale,’ said Mr.s Halstead.

‘Well, let’s get on with it,’ I said. ‘Go ahead, Professor Fallon — or do you have anything to say, Dr. Halstead?’

Halstead gloomed at me. ‘Not yet.’ He said it with an air of foreboding and I knew there were some more fireworks ahead.

‘Nothing much happened after that for quite a while,’ said Fallon. ‘Then when I was in New York, I received a letter from Mark Gerryson suggesting I see him. Gerryson is a dealer whom I have used from time to time, and he said he had some Mayan chocolate jugs — not the ordinary pottery jugs, but made of gold. They must have come from a noble house. He also said he had part of a feather cloak and a few other things.’

Halstead snorted and muttered audibly, ‘A goddamn feather cloak!’

‘I know it was a fake,’ said Fallon. ‘And I didn’t buy it. But the chocolate jugs were genuine. Gerryson knew I’d be interested — the ordinary Mayan specialist doesn’t interest Gerryson because he hasn’t the money that Gerryson asks; he usually sells to museums and rich collectors. Well, I run a museum myself — among other things — and I’ve had some good stuff from Gerryson in the past.

‘We dickered for a bit and I told him what I thought of his feather cloak; he laughed about that and said he was pulling my leg. The chocolate jugs were genuine enough and I bought those. Then he said he wanted my opinion on something that had just come in — it was a manuscript account by a Spaniard who had lived among the Mayas in the early sixteenth century and he wanted to know if it was genuine.’

‘He was consulting you as an expert in the field?’ I said. I saw Katherine Halstead lean forward intently.

Fallon nodded. ‘That’s right. The name of the Spaniard was de Vivero, and the manuscript was a letter to his sons.’ He fell silent.

Halstead said, ‘Don’t stop now, Fallon — just when it’s getting interesting.’

Fallon looked at me. ‘Do you know anything about the conquest of Mexico?’

‘Not much,’ I said. ‘I learned a bit about it at school — Cortes and all that — but I’ve forgotten the details, if I ever knew them.’

‘Just like most people. Have you got a map of Mexico?’

I walked across the room and picked an atlas from the shelf. I drew up the coffee table and laid down the atlas turned to the correct page. Fallon hovered over it, and said, ‘I’ll have to give you some background detail or else the letter won’t make sense.’ He brought down his finger on to the map of Mexico close to the coast near Tampico. ‘In the first couple of decades of the fifteen-hundreds the Spaniards had their eyes on what we now know as Mexico. There were rumours about the place — stories of unimaginable wealth — and they were poising themselves to go in and get it.’

His finger swept in an arc around the Gulf of Mexico. ‘Hernandez de Cordoba explored the coast in 1517 and Juan de Grijalva followed in 1518. In 1519 Hernan Cortes took the plunge and mounted an expedition into the interior and we know what happened. He came up against the Aztecs and by a masterly mixture of force, statesmanship, superstition and pure confidence trickery he licked them — one of the most amazing feats any man has ever done.

‘But having done it he found there were other worlds to conquer. To the south, covering what is now Yucatán, Guatemala and Honduras was another Amerind empire — that of the Mayas. He hadn’t got as much gold from the Aztecs as he expected, but the Mayas were dripping with it if the reports that came up from the south were true. So in 1525 he marched against the Mayas. He left Tenochtitlan — now Mexico City — and hit the coast here, at Coatzacualco, and then struck along the spine of the isthmus to Lake Petén and thus to Cobán. He didn’t get much for his pains because the main strength, of the Mayas wasn’t on the Anahuac plateau at all but in the Yucatán Peninsula.’

I leaned over his shoulder and followed his exposition alertly. Fallon said, ‘Cortes gave up personal direction at that point — he was pulled back to Spain — and the next expedition was led by Francisco de Montejo, who had already explored the coast of Yucatán from the sea. He had quite a respectable force but he found the Mayas a different proposition from the Aztecs. They fought back, and fought back hard, and Montejo was no Cortes — the Spaniards were trounced in the first few battles.

‘With Montejo was Manuel de Vivero. I don’t suppose Vivero was much more than a common foot soldier, but something funny happened to him. He was captured by the Mayas and they didn’t kill him; they kept him alive as a sort of slave and as a mascot. Now, Montejo never did pacify Yucatán — he never got on top of the Mayas. Come to that, nobody ever did; they were weakened and absorbed to some extent, but they were never defeated in battle. In 1549, twenty-two years after he started out, Montejo was in control of barely half of the Yucatán Peninsula — and all this time Vivero was a captive in the interior.