Десмонд Бэгли - The Vivero Letter

When we finally reached the surface, he asked, ‘Everything okay?’

‘Everything is fine,’ I answered, and swore as I stubbed my toe on an air bottle. ‘Look, Joe: tip all these bottles over the side. Gatt might start to get ideas — he might even be a diver himself. He won’t be able to do a damned thing without air bottles.’

We rolled the bottles over the side and they splashed into the cenote and sank. When we got ashore I was very tired but there was still much to do. Smith and Fowler had done their best to armour the hut, but it was a poor best although no fault of theirs. We just hadn’t the material.

‘Where’s Fallon?’ I asked.

‘I think he’s in his own hut.’

I went to look for Fallon and found him sitting morosely at his desk. He turned as I closed the door. ‘Jemmy!’ he said despairingly. ‘What a mess! What a godawful mess!’

‘What you need is a drink,’ I said, and took the bottle and a couple of glasses from the shelf. I poured out a couple of stiff tots and pushed a glass into his hand. ‘You’re not to blame.’

‘Of course I am,’ he said curtly. ‘I didn’t take Gatt seriously enough. But who would have thought this Spanish Main stuff could happen in the twentieth century?’

‘As you said yourself, Quintana Roo isn’t precisely the centre of the civilized world.’ I sipped the whisky and felt the warmth in my throat. ‘It’s not out of the eighteenth century yet.’

‘I sent a message out with the boys who left,’ he said. ‘Letters to the authorities in Mexico City about what we’ve found here.’ He suddenly looked alarmed. ‘You don’t think Gatt will have done anything about them, do you?’

I considered that one, and said at last, ‘No, I shouldn’t think so. It would be difficult for him to interfere with them all and it might tip off the authorities that something is wrong.’

‘I should have done it sooner,’ said Fallon broodingly. ‘The Department of Antiquities is goddamn keen on inspection; this place will be swarming with officials once the news gets out.’ He offered me a twisted smile. ‘That’s why I didn’t notify them earlier, I wanted the place to myself for a while. What a damned fool I was!’

I didn’t spare him. ‘You had plenty of warnings from Pat Harris. Why the hell didn’t you act on them?’

‘I was selfish,’ he said. He looked me straight in the eye. ‘Just plain selfish. I wanted to stay while I could — while I had time. There’s so little time, Jemmy.’

I drank some whisky. ‘You’ll be back next season.’

He shook his head. ‘No, I won’t. I’ll never be back here. Someone else will take over — some younger man. It could have been Paul if he hadn’t been so reckless and impatient.’

I put down my glass. ‘What are you getting at?’

He gave me a haggard grin. ‘I’ll be dead in three months, Jemmy. They told me not long before we left Mexico City — they gave me six months.’ He leaned back in his chair. ‘They didn’t want me to come here — the doctors, you know. But I did, and I’m glad I did. But I’ll go back to Mexico City now and go into a hospital to die.’

‘What is it?’

‘The old enemy,’ said Fallon. ‘Cancer!’

The word dropped as heavy as lead into the quiet hut and there was nothing I could say. This was the reason he had been so preoccupied, why he had driven so hard to get the job done, and why he had stuck to one purpose without deflection. He had wanted to do this last excavation before he died and he had achieved his purpose.

After a while I said softly, ‘I’m sorry.’

He snorted. ‘ You’re sorry! Sorry for me! It seems as though I’m not going to live to die in hospital if you’re right about Gatt — and neither is anyone else here. I’m sorry, Jemmy, that I got you into this. I’m sorry for the others, too. But being sorry isn’t enough, is it? What’s the use of saying “Sorry” to a dead man?’

‘Take it easy,’ I said.

He fell into a despondent silence. After a while, he said, ‘When do you think Gatt will attack?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But he must make his move soon.’ I finished the whisky. ‘You’d better get some sleep.’ I could see Fallon didn’t think much of that idea, but he said nothing and I went away.

Rudetsky had some ideas of his own, after all. I bumped into him in the darkness unreeling a coil of wire. He cursed briefly, and said, ‘Sorry, but I guess I’m on edge.’

‘What are you doing?’

‘If those bastards attack, they’ll be able to take cover behind those two huts, so I took all the gelignite I could find and planted it. Now I’m stringing the wire to the plunger in our hut. They won’t have any cover if I can help it.’

‘Don’t blow up those huts just yet,’ I said. ‘It would come better as a surprise. Let’s save it for when we need it.’

He clicked his tongue. ‘You’re turning out to be quite a surprising guy yourself. That’s a real nasty idea.’

‘I took a few lessons out in the forest.’ I helped him unreel the wire and we disguised it as much as we could by kicking soil over it. Rudetsky attached the ends of one set of wires to the terminals of the plunger box and slapped the side of it gently with an air of satisfaction. I said, ‘It’ll be dawn fairly soon.’

He went to the window and looked up at the sky. ‘There’s quite a lot of cloud. Fallon said the rains break suddenly.’

It wasn’t the weather I was worried about. I said, ‘Put Smith and Fowler on watch out at the edge of the camp. We don’t want to be surprised.’

Then I had an hour to myself and I sat outside the hut and almost nodded off to sleep, feeling suddenly very weary. Sleep was something that had been in short supply, and if I hadn’t had that twenty-four hour rest in the forest tree I daresay I’d have gone right off as though drugged. As it was I drowsed until I was wakened by someone shaking my shoulder.

It was Fowler. ‘Someone’s coming,’ he said urgently.

‘Where?’

‘From the forest.’ He pointed. ‘From over there — I’ll show you.’

I followed behind him to the hut at the edge of the camp from which he had been watching. I took the field glasses he gave me and focused on the distant figure in white which was strolling across the cleared land.

The light was good enough and the glasses strong enough to show quite clearly that it was Gatt.

There was an odd quality in the light that morning. In spite of the high cloud which moved fast in the sky everything was crystal clear, and the usual heat haze, which lay over the forest even at dawn, was gone. The sun was just rising and there was a lurid and unhealthy yellow tinge to the sky, and a slight breeze from the west bent the branches of the trees beyond the cleared ruins of Uaxuanoc.

As I focused the glasses on Gatt I found to my disgust that my hands were trembling, and I had to rest the glasses on the window-sill to prevent the image dancing uncontrollably. Gatt was taking his time. He strolled along as unconcernedly as though he were taking his morning constitutional in a city park, and stopped occasionally to look about at the uncovered mounds. He was dressed as nattily as he had been when he flew into Camp One, and I even saw the tiny point of whiteness that was a handkerchief in his breast pocket.

Momentarily I ignored him and swept the glasses around the perimeter of the ruins. No one else showed up and it looked as though Gatt was alone, a deceptive assumption it would be wise to ignore. I handed the glasses to Rudetsky, who had come into the hut. He raised them to his eyes, and said, ‘Is that the guy?’