Wild Meat (12 page)

According to Mario, the Mexican authorities were satisfied that the discovery in the old mission consisted of nothing more than what he’d shown them during their visit, but Stephen had remained cautious. If anyone still doubted Mario’s story, it would be easy enough to find out that Stephen and the clergyman had been phoning and emailing each other, and that Stephen had bought Mexican car insurance just a few days before Mario was questioned. If the right authorities on both sides of the border were ever persuaded that this might be a case of trafficking in stolen artifacts, someone might well show up at Stephen’s door with a search warrant.

So the goods had gone into hiding. The storage space contained keepsakes common to Stephen’s extended family, and had been rented in the name of his cousin, who had a different surname. Although Stephen contributed to the cost of the storage space, no bills for the rental came to his house, and nothing in any records showed a connection to the orange garage.

And the inquiries had come, starting with a couple of voicemail messages a month after his return from Baja. The first had been congenial enough:

“My name’s Martin Hamer, and I’m calling regarding the possible importation of archaeological material from western Mexico. My firm works in cooperation with the folks who maintain the Index of Antiquities. We help them out with records of any objects that may be in transit. Soooo—if you could give me a call back….”

Stephen had ignored that message. The next one had been more aggressive.

“This is Jennifer Clifford calling on behalf of U.S. affiliates (again, not naming her own employer) of Mexico’s
Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia
. We believe there has been a shipment of important historical artifacts from Mexico into the United States. Please bear in mind, Mr. Stokes, that if you have any information regarding this situation, your full cooperation is a matter of legal obligation.”

A pause, the tapping of a keyboard, and a moment later she was clearly reading off a script.

“Anyone who participates in the transportation of such materials without the consent of the proper governing bodies, as well as anyone who abets this crime by withholding information, is in violation of several U.S. federal laws, including the National Stolen Property Act, the Archaeological Resources Protection Act, and other restrictions relating to United Nations conventions on cultural property. Mr. Stokes, call me back as soon as possible to resolve this matter….”

The calls had kept coming for nearly a year, along with letters and even a cordial visit, without a warrant or any kind of badge, to Stephen’s decrepit city apartment. Stephen had denied knowledge of any artifacts other than the trivial but interesting items that Mario had willingly shown to INAH.

He had remained far too spooked to do much probing into the bundle. It was partly nerves and partly practicality that kept him from exploring further. He could hardly handle the material at all without the risk of doing even more damage. And there was simply no acceptable way to explain his possession of the items to any professional conservationists who could work on preserving or restoring them. The best he’d been able to do on his own was to move everything into an airtight storage container and leave it untouched.

He’d opened a few of the envelopes, taken digital photographs, and left the memory card in the storage space. No way was he going to put any of it onto his hard drive.

The only person he’d confided in was his cousin Elaine, a physical anthropology professor
at Point Brumosa University down on the central coast. Stephen had gone to Point Brumosa as an undergrad and had taken some of Elaine’s classes before settling on history as his major.

Elaine’s research dealt with hominids from two to three million years ago. Not the earliest of early humans, but getting back there pretty far. Anyone who dealt with the fossil record from that period also knew something of the variety of non-human primates that had come and gone in the intervening eons.

Stephen had let Elaine in on the Baja secret right from the beginning because there was something about the images that screamed
primate
. Not big primates, as in apes or humans, or even monkeys. He had in mind a category of much smaller primates, most of them nocturnal, called “prosimians,” which included bush babies and lorises from Africa, and tarsiers from Southeast Asia. He’d shown her the photos and repeatedly tried to get her excited, with limited success.

“If these pictures really are from the Middle Ages,”
Elaine had argued, “then they’re from a time when people seriously believed in all sorts of fantastic creatures that lived out past the horizons. How about the headless men with faces in their chests? And animals that had the head of this and the body of that and the tail of something else?”

But Elaine had finally admitted that the drawings didn’t quite have the feel of mythical beasts. They seemed to be meant as realistic representations of something the artist had actually seen. One piece even depicted a stand on which an entire set of bones had been mounted, similar to the way modern museums display fossil skeletons.

Because of the drawings, Stephen’s interest in primates and evolution had slowly rekindled, although most of the Baja envelopes remained unopened in the orange garage.

He’d come to think of that airtight box as the kind of ancestral mummy that native Andean people once stored in caves and brought outside to be venerated on the most important feast days. The feast day for this particular mummy, it seemed to him, might not come for many years.

But in fact, it had arrived this blazing summer morning.

* * *

The cats kept clamoring for food and attention, and the iguana on the bookshelf sneezed. Stephen promised he would tend to them soon, but first he wanted to microwave yesterday’s coffee and read a little news online.

Browsing the headlines, he found a lengthy article about an Australopithecus find in Chad. The story provided links to other articles involving Africa, and to a forum called PrimateWeb, where messages were posted by anyone with an interest in non-human primates. Institutions were listed after the participants’ names: Dublin Zoo, Melbourne Primate Research Center, University of Arizona Anthropology Department….

No affiliation appeared after the name Caroline Yi, only an email address. Most of her posts dealt with poaching near logging camps, but one gave a description of an animal carcass she had seen but failed to photograph. She asked for help identifying it.

No one had posted a helpful reply, and Stephen doubted anyone would. The combination of features Ms. Yi described was too improbable for the scholars on this forum to take seriously.

After all, Stephen had gotten nowhere trying to persuade his cousin Elaine that an animal of very similar description might really exist.

One of the cats was sharpening her claws on the edge of a vinyl armchair, really ripping the crap out of it, but Stephen didn’t notice. He
even forgot all about his usual hour-long morning run.

A person he’d never met was trumpeting information nearly identical to the content of his dark secret, and the academic world wouldn’t listen to her.

The young male tabby was on the kitchen counter, loudly tearing open a plastic bag of bread rolls. The iguana knocked a lamp off of the bookshelf in its quest for a sunnier basking spot. Stephen was aware of none of it.

The day had come for the mummy to be brought out of its concrete cave – the whole mummy, or as much of it as was still intact. The threatening inquiries on behalf of INAH had stopped almost two years ago, and Stephen had nearly all of summer vacation left. It was time to do some research.

He headed off to a friend’s place to borrow a set of studio spotlights, then went to the orange garage, and finally home to his apartment. After many deep breaths, he started slicing envelopes open.

More than half the envelopes were ones that Mario had sealed up and loaded into the big suitcase before Stephen ever arrived in Baja, so their contents were entirely new to him. There were new texts and new images and, to his relief, not too much crumbled debris so far.

He stayed up half the night with his digital camera in hand, begging forgiveness of the paleography gods for blasting the sensitive old drawings and documents with bright light.

The big guard with the broken nose checked the sheet of paper he’d found in the American woman’s Land Rover. A squiggle of red ink had been added at the end of Avenue 9, where he now stood. Nothing on the map indicated what was located at the red squiggle, but it wouldn’t take long to narrow the possibilities. The “Avenue,” a broad strip of oiled dirt, was only a block long

It had been weeks since the woman appeared in the camp, and he’d been waiting eagerly to follow up on this. Marcel had kept him busy with the animals – the cages, the feeding, the capture of new stock. Finally, he’d managed to get some free time during one of his delivery runs into the city. The American woman probably wouldn’t be in Prospérité any longer, but this seemed like a sensible place to begin tracking her.

Suntanned young foreigners strolled in twos and threes, wearing denim pants and loose cotton shirts. Some carried backpacks, glancing from battered guidebooks to signs over doorways. A few of the women wore colorful wraps that covered their hips and legs, like the Indian ladies in the marketplace across town.

Most of the places here offered lodgings. A sign on the door of the Auberge Gecko advertised a café and bar on the second floor. The Pension Baobab had the outline of its namesake stenciled on its front door, although none of those fat-trunked trees grew in Equateur.

He was close; he could feel it, and he knew Sanderson would be happy. The others, especially Marcel, had given up on finding the woman, but the guard had convinced Sanderson of the need to track her down.

A few days earlier, Marcel, the old man, and both guards had been at Sanderson’s mansion just outside the city, discussing their new arrangement. Sanderson had mentioned that the woman was making trouble for them again, rousing the people he called “tree heads” to hurt the company’s business. She’d used yet another name this time around, but it had to be the same person because of the dates during which she claimed to have been at the logging camp.

Sanderson also let his four new partners use a small extra office for “market research.” Sanderson’s infusion of capital into the operation had caused it to expand with astonishing speed.

The big guard had searched for more information on Caroline Yi, discovering that the woman was also telling scientists all about big nocturnal animals in the rainforest of Equateur. No one seemed to be interested in her story so far, but if they ever started paying attention, there would be adventurers and scientists combing the place, looking for the animals, and that would be the beginning of the end.

The guard had shown Sanderson this evidence and had convinced the boss that the woman needed to be tracked down. It was possible that she didn’t know what purpose the animals served, that she was just some curious nature lover, but no one wanted to count on that. 

So Sanderson had told the big guard, “See what you can do.”

The clerk in a place called the Hotel d’Or grew tense when he saw the enormous visitor stride in through the small front door. The guard produced a police ID that he’d borrowed, for a price, from a real policeman he knew. He asked whether the clerk remembered a guest named Francine Whelk.

The clerk did not, nor was the name Caroline Yi familiar. The big guard described the woman he was looking for, and suggested that she might have disappeared for a few days after checking in. The clerk replied that people often paid for several days’ stay in advance before going on tours in the bush. That way they could leave some of their bulkier possessions behind. He could not remember everyone who did that.

The clerk did, however, remember one woman who had paid in advance for two weeks, left for a few days, and returned in terrible condition. Badly injured, filthy, and deathly sick, she had gone to a clinic and then checked out
of her lodgings for good later that night.

The clerk reached for the open three-ring notebook on the counter and turned back a few pages.

After each guest’s name were the dates he or she had checked in and out, country of origin, passport number, and the bearer’s city of residence.

The big guard had never heard of Amy Kellet’s home city, but knew the name California. He left the Hotel D’or feeling exhilarated.

CHAPTER FIVE

The lone message in Caroline Yi’s inbox was from some
body in Oakland who described himself as an amateur historian. The guy insisted he’d seen pictures of animals just like the ones Ms. Yi had described. He asked if she could possibly sketch the creature and email him a scan. Amy almost didn’t respond, but finally decided that dialogue with another amateur was better than none at all. She began sketching on ruled paper in a spiral notebook.

She didn’t like drawing because she’d never been good at it. She could create a
somewhat recognizable image of something in front of her, given enough time, but had never practiced enough to be able to get it right in fewer than a dozen tries. Drawing from memory was even worse. Crumpling paper after paper, she fumed at herself for not getting a photo of the animal.