Lost Empire

Marcott asked, listened to Dumadi’s response, then said, “It’s the Orizaga family coat of arms.”

“Does he know what it means?”

“No.”

“No one ever talked about what it might mean?”

“No,” Marcott replied. “He says it’s always been part of the family. He assumes it was important to Orizaga, and that’s good enough for him.”

Sam flipped through Remi’s manila envelope and withdrew Wendy’s version of the Quetzalcoatl bird from the Chicomoztoc illustration. He handed it to Dumadi. “Does that mean anything to him?”

Marcott asked, listened. He smiled and replied, “Which part, the ugly snake or the bird?”“The bird.”

Dumadi sat back down with a groan, then replied.

“It has no particular meaning to him,” Marcott said. “It’s just a bird. He’s seen them in zoos.”

“Here?” Remi asked.

“He doesn’t remember where, exactly. He saw one when he was a child. His father called it a helmet bird because of the bulge on the back of its head.”

Sam opened his mouth to speak, hesitated, then said, “What is it? What’s it called?”

“A maleo. Dumadi says he recalls they’re much prettier than your drawing. Medium sized, black back, white breast, yellow skin around the eyes, and an orangish beak. Sort of like a colorful chicken.”Dumadi said something to Marcott, who translated: “He wants to know if this drawing has anything to do with Orizaga.”

“It does,” said Sam.

“It reminds him of a story about Orizaga. Would you like to hear it?”

“Yes, please,” Remi replied.

“Like most of their family stories, the details may have changed over time, but the gist of it is this: Near the end of his life, Orizaga was known by most of the people in Palembang, and they were fond of him. They were also sure he was possessed by a mischievous spirit.”“Why?” asked Sam.

Marcott listened. “It’s similar to what I told you back at my home. He wandered the jungles a lot, talking about caves and gods, and that he’d come here to find the home of the gods . . .You get the idea. No one was afraid of Orizaga; they suspected this mischievous spirit was having fun with a poor old man.

“The day Orizaga disappeared, he a

CHAPTER 40

JAKARTA, INDONESIA

“HOW SURE ARE YOU ABOUT THIS, SELMA? ” SAID SAM.

He and Remi were sitting on their bed in their suite at the Four Seasons. The day before, shortly after leaving Dumadi’s house and parting company with Robert Marcott, they’d boarded a Batavia Air charter at Palembang’s Sultan Mahmud Badaruddin II Airport for the two-hundred-fifty-mile hop across the Java Sea to Jakarta. The Four Seasons seemed a decent place for a base of operations.Selma said over the speakerphone, “I confronted him. He admitted it.”

“That crafty SOB. I wonder if he’s even got grandkids in London going to college.”

“Or if he’s truly dying,” Remi added.

“Both are true. I checked. He’s still a con man, in my book.”

Of the many unanswered questions and curiosities surrounding Sam and Remi’s adventure, one had been plaguing Selma in particular: How had Rivera and his boss, President Garza, known the Fargos would be in Madagascar? What had prompted the note-and-notify bribe? Selma believed there were only two possibilities: Cynthia Ashworth, keeper of Constance Ashworth’s letters, or Morton, proprietor of the Blaylock Museum and Curiosity Shop. These had been Sam and Remi’s greatest sources for research material. Somewhere along the line, had Rivera and Garza tapped these sources as well?

Cloaked in her best “bad cop” impression, Selma started with Morton, claiming she knew he’d sold Blaylock material to others and that if Morton didn’t come clean she was going to take him to court. Morton broke down within two minutes, Selma said.

“He didn’t know Rivera’s name or how he’d come to know about the museum, but about five years ago he and a few of his goons showed up, asking questions about Blaylock and the Shenandoah. Morton says he didn’t particularly trust Rivera, and he suspected they’d get rough with him if he didn’t cooperate, so that night he moved all the important material out of the museum’s storeroom and hid it in his home. Sure enough, the next morning he arrived at the museum to find it had been ransacked.

“Rivera showed up a few hours later, pleasant as can be. During the night Morton had scrounged up some of Blaylock’s papers-pages from his journal, the original manuscript of the biography, random drawings and maps-”“The Moreau Madagascar map,” Remi predicted.

“Yes. He’d seen the tiny writing on it and tore away that section and gave the bigger piece to Rivera. Morton says that seemed to satisfy Rivera. They completed the transaction, and Rivera left. Morton, being the clever fellow he is, figured Rivera wasn’t quite done, so he moved the Blaylock material again, out of his home to another location.”“And that night his house was burglarized,” Sam said.

“Right. Morton made it a point to stay out all night with friends. The ruse worked, he said. Rivera never returned.”

“And then we show up five years later, asking the same questions.”

“Why didn’t he pull the same trick on us?”

“He said he liked you. And he wanted to retire and take care of his grandkids. When you offered sixty thousand instead of twenty, he decided to throw it all in and hold nothing back.”“Then we don’t know what Rivera knows, do we?” asked Remi.

“No,” Sam replied. “By dumb luck, Morton sold him enough to send him down some paths and make some progress, but not enough to finish it. Now with us in the picture, Rivera and Garza can tag along to the end. We have to expect they’re going to show up-if they haven’t already.”“Which brings me to my next point,” said Selma. “We finished decoding the rest of Blaylock’s letters to Constance. Care to guess the date of his last letter?”

“No,” replied Sam.

“Even the year?”

“Selma.” “Eighteen eighty-three.”

Remi replied, “That means he was out here chasing his treasure for eleven years. My God.”

“What about the letters in between?” Sam asked.

“There were only a few a year after Blaylock captured the Shenandoah II . As was his habit, the plain text part of the letters was mostly travelogue . . . the rakish man of adventure. In the letters, he duplicates almost all the tall tales from Morton’s biography. They were window dressing. One of his coded messages to Constance suggests he was convinced Dudley and the others had discovered his lie about the Shenandoah II and were after him.”“Were they?”

“Not as far as I can tell. And if they did know, they probably wouldn’t have cared. The Shenandoah II was gone. She was no longer a threat. Blaylock had done his job.”“Back to his last letter,” Sam prompted.

“Right. It’s dated August 3, 1883, and was posted from Bagamoyo. I’ll quote the relevant part directly:

“Have at last discovered the clue for which I’ve been praying. With God’s help I will discover the fountainhead of my great green jeweled bird and collect my long-delayed reward. Sailing tomorrow for Sunda Strait. Expect 23-25 day voyage. Will write again as possible.“Yours,

“W.”

“You said the Sunda Strait, correct?” Sam asked.

“Yes.”

Sam paused. He closed his eyes for a moment, a half smile on his face. Remi asked, “What is it?”

“Blaylock left Bagamoyo on August 3, 1883. Based on his estimated transit time, he would have arrived in the Sunda within a day or two of August twenty-seventh.”“Okay . . .”

“The Sunda Strait was where the Krakatoa volcano was. August twenty-seventh was the day it exploded.”

CHAPTER 41

ASHISTORY BUFFS, SAM AND REMI WERE WELL FAMILIAR WITH the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa. The archipelago, which covers roughly eight square miles of ocean, sits almost dead center in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra and consisted of three islands prior to the cataclysm: Lang, Verlaten, and Rakata-the largest island in the group and home to the three volcanic cones collectively known as Krakatoa. Having undergone three major eruptions in the centuries prior to 1883, Krakatoa was no stranger to turmoil.