Island of Thieves (2 page)

I had a couple of questions—what's a gringo, for instance?—but Uncle Harvey didn't give me a chance to ask anything.

“The necklace was wrapped in a piece of paper,” he continued. “I didn't really look at it. I just stuffed it in my pocket and hurried back to the hotel. Next morning, I had an early start. I packed the necklace in the bottom of my suitcase, and that's where it stayed till I came home. In the evening I had a date with that girl. I dug out the necklace. I'd stuffed it in a sock, still wrapped up. I was just about to throw the paper away, but something caught my attention, I don't know what. Call it instinct, call it luck, call it whatever you want, but I happened to notice one of the words on the paper was written in English. As soon as I saw that, I sat down and started working out what it said.”

He opened a blue folder and took out a single sheet of crinkly, browned paper.

“Here it is. This is what I found.” Uncle Harvey wiped the table with his sleeve and laid the paper carefully in front of me.

It was covered in black marks. Leaning down and looking at them, I realized they were letters. Words. Sentences. So tightly packed and squiggly that every one was an effort to decipher. At the bottom of the page there were two tiny sketches: a gull and a flower. I inspected them for a second, then pored over the spiky writing.

This is what I read:

 

12th. This daie we went ashore and toke stoke of muche fine fruit, no one knows the name. We procured wode too.

13th. Sailed Northwards.

14th. The same corse.

15th. About three aclock we found a frigate bownd for Panama. She was laden with Spanish clothes and honie and maize and wyne and much gold and more silver, too much for our owne shippes to carry. Our Captayne sent the crew ashore in a pinnace and we tok the frigate and we sailed to the South.

16th. We came to anchor among some islands. One of them we had visited before, some days earlier, and it was named by our Captayne the Islande of Theeves for the nature of the natives. Here we did land and got a lyttle water. There was not a native to be seen. Our Captayne took the pinnace ashore and I went with hym and six men also, who were sworne by God to be secret in al they saw. Here we buried five chests filled with gold and three more chests filled with silver. We placed them at the Northern tip of the Islande in a line with the

 

That was where it ended. In midsentence. Just when it was getting interesting. I turned over the page, but there was nothing on the other side. I looked at my uncle. “This is cool.”

“I know.”

“So what are you going to do when you get to Peru?”

“Go back to that shop and find the man who sold me the necklace.”

“Has he got the rest of the pages?”

“I don't know.”

“Why don't you call him?”

“I don't know his number. I don't even know his name. That's why I've got to go back there and find him.”

I couldn't help laughing. “So this whole thing might be a waste of time?”

Uncle Harvey shrugged. “Life is about risk.”

“You can't just fly to Peru because of a piece of paper!”

“That's exactly what your father would say.”

“It's what anyone would say.”

“Not me.”

“But it might be a forgery! Or a joke! Maybe someone wrote this a week ago for a play or a costume party!”

“They didn't.”

“How do you know?”

“I've had it tested. I had the same doubts as you, Tom. I thought it couldn't possibly be genuine. But who on earth would fake a piece of old English parchment and place it in a junk shop halfway up a mountain in the middle of the Andes? Would they do that just on the off-chance that an Englishman might happen to wander past? And if so, why? None of it made much sense, but I knew there was something going on here. Something interesting. So I packed it up and sent it to a friend of mine, a professor at Edinburgh University. He has access to all the latest wizardry. Here's what he said . . .”

He reached for his computer, opened it up, fiddled around for a moment, and turned the screen to face me. Then he pushed back his chair and stood up. “I'm going to pack. My flight leaves this evening. Once I've got my stuff together, we'll talk about keys and I'll show you how to work the locks.”

He sauntered out of the room, leaving me to read this e-mail:

 

FROM:
Professor Theodore Parker

TO:
Harvey Trelawney

SUBJECT:
Gold & silver

 

Hi Harv

I've read your parchment and sent it back registered post, but couldn't resist emailing you immediately to tell you my thoughts.

I'd love to know where you got it! But won't ask. Better not to know? Anyway, as promised, I've subjected it to a battery of tests and am happy to report all seems kosher.

Not wanting to bore you with too much detail, I shall simply tell you that this paper was almost certainly written between 4 and 500 years ago. I could have a go at dating it more precisely, but that would be intuition/guesswork and you probably don't want that.

Of course, there are a couple of provisos that any cautious scientist (i.e., me) should attach to this result.

1st—the tests could be wrong. However, this is very, very unlikely. One test could certainly be wrong, maybe even two, but I've done all available and they won't all be duds.

2nd—someone might be fooling you. Improbable but not impossible. But let me tell you one thing: if this is a forgery, it's pretty much the most sophisticated I've ever seen.

I could make a few wild guesses about the writer. Young, male, educated. But that would not be scientific and so I'll leave all such speculation to you.

Hope this is useful.

Call me when you're next up here and we'll sink a few jars.

Theo

 

I closed the computer and put the piece of paper back in the blue folder and realized that there was one terrible problem about my week of freedom in the big city. I didn't want it. If I stayed here I'd spend the whole time wishing I were somewhere else.

I went to the next room. A suitcase was open on the bed. Clothes were scattered everywhere. My uncle was kneeling on the floor, sorting through shoes.

“Uncle Harvey?” I said.

“Please don't call me that.”

“Why not?”

“Because it makes me sound like a character in an Enid Blyton novel.”

“Oh. Sorry. What should I call you?”

“How about Harvey? That is my name, after all.”

“Um, Harvey, can I ask you a question?”

“You can ask me whatever you like.” He picked up a sandal and a sneaker, then discarded them both and threw a pair of flip-flops into his suitcase.

“Can I come with you?”

“Where?”

“Peru.”

Uncle Harvey shook his head. “I'm sorry, Tom. That's just not possible.”

“Why not?”

“Because I'm going alone.”

“That's not a reason.”

“How about this then: I
want
to go alone.”

“You'd have more fun with me, Uncle Harvey.”

“Don't call me that.”

“Sorry. But it's true. Can't I come too? Please? I've always wanted to go to South America.”

“Even if I wanted you to come with me, which I don't, there's one very good reason why you can't. You don't have a ticket.”

“I could buy one.”

“Or a passport.”

“Yes I do. Dad made me bring it in case you weren't here and they had to take me to Nassau.”

Uncle Harvey sighed. “Look, Tom. You seem like a very nice kid, and I'm sure we'd have a wonderful time together. If I was going on holiday I'd take you. I really would. But this isn't a holiday. I have enemies in South America. Bad things might happen. Stay here, Tom. Explore the city. You'll have a wild time. We'll go traveling together another year, all right?”

You might think I was dumb to argue. You might be saying to yourself,
What's wrong with this guy? Who wouldn't want a week alone in an apartment in New York City? Without parents. Without teachers. Without his irritating little brother or his know-it-all older sister. Why didn't he just shut up and take the keys and have the best week of his life?

Well, I thought all that too. And then I thought:
Gold and silver. Buried. On an island. In Peru. That's where I want to be. That's what I want to see.

I pleaded and cajoled and begged, but my uncle kept saying no.

I said I'd pay for the flight myself, but he just laughed, which was fair enough. I only had twenty dollars in the world, and that was what Dad had given me to last a whole week in New York.

I promised to be helpful and useful and worth taking too, but he shook his head and said he was quite sure that he'd rather be alone.

I said he couldn't leave me here, because I was too young. It was illegal. What if Social Services found out? They'd call the police, who would arrest Uncle Harvey and throw him in jail for child abuse.

That was when he started looking worried.

I spoke in the deep voice of a TV newscaster: “Now we're going live to New York City, where our correspondent can give us more details about the evil British uncle who left his nephew to rot all alone in a top-floor apartment.”

“That's not funny,” said Uncle Harvey.

“Look on the bright side,” I said. “You'll be famous.”

“Don't be ridiculous.”

“You'll be on the front page of every newspaper in the country.”

“Oh, stop it.”

“They'll have your mug shot,” I said. “You know, the one that the police take after you've spent a night in the cell, when you're looking unshaven and dirty and very, very guilty.”

“Don't try to blackmail me,” said Uncle Harvey. “There's no point. You are not coming with me, and that's final.”

New York to Lima is about 3,500 miles.
We did it in twelve hours. An hour in a taxi to JFK, an hour getting through security, two hours waiting in the departure lounge, and eight hours on the plane.

Have you ever been on an eight-hour flight?

If you haven't, don't bother. It's miserable from start to finish.

Sure, you get free meals, but they're gross, and you get a console attached to the seat with about five hundred different movies, but you don't want to watch any of them because you're so desperate to go to sleep, but you can't get to sleep because the seats are so uncomfortable, so you spend the whole night shuffling and groaning and twisting and turning, and then, when you finally drop off, they switch on the lights and wake you up, and you don't know where you are or what time it is. Then you look at your uncle and you realize he's still snoozing like a baby, because he has a blanket over his knees and an inflatable pillow wrapped around his neck and earplugs in his ears and a mask covering his eyes, and you think:
Why didn't he offer all that stuff to me?

I sat beside him, crammed into my seat, wriggling and fiddling, trying to get comfortable. When I wasn't watching movies or attempting to sleep, I read
Lonely Planet: Peru.
I'd persuaded Uncle Harvey to buy me a copy at the airport. He told me it wasn't worth it. He said guidebooks were for wimps. But I wanted to know some basic information about where we were going.

Peru is twice the size of Texas. Did you know that? And it's one of the most diverse countries in the world. It has mountains, desert,
and
tropical jungle. Plus a coastline that is 1,500 miles long.

Today was Tuesday. We'd arrive in Lima on Wednesday morning. Our flights home left next Monday night, arriving in New York on Tuesday—giving me just enough time to race back to Uncle Harvey's apartment, open the door to Mom and Dad, and compliment them on their tans.

We had five full days in Peru. Five days to search 1,500 miles of coastline and find the Island of Thieves. Oh, and we didn't have a plan.

Five days, 1,500 miles, and no plan. What could possibly go wrong?

Uncle Harvey finally woke up when the plane landed. He pulled off his eye mask, plucked out his earplugs, and stretched his arms. “Ahhhh! I'm ready for a huge breakfast. How about you, Tommy-boy? Are you hungry?”

“I've had breakfast already. They gave us some about an hour ago.”

“Was it disgusting?”

“Yes, it was, actually.”

“Then you deserve another. We'll go to the Café Florés. It's one of the few places in Lima that serve a decent cup of coffee.”

“I don't like coffee.”

“Why not?”

“I don't know. I just don't like the taste.”

“How perverse. Oh, well. They do good toasted sandwiches, too. Or maybe you'd like to try the national dish of Peru?”

“Sure,” I said. “What is it?”

“Guinea pig and chips.”

“Yeah, right.”

“I'm not joking,” said Uncle Harvey. “You can't leave Peru without tasting their national dish. They take a guinea pig, chop him in half, open him out, and fry him on a griddle. Delicious! But I suppose it's not the best thing for breakfast. We'll try some tonight.”

“No way,” I said. “I am not eating guinea pig.”

Uncle Harvey just smiled, that same irritating smile, the one that said:
I know more than you do.
I could see he was quite confident that by the end of the week I would have eaten a guinea pig. And asked for seconds.