Island of Thieves (7 page)

“But I
am
worried,” I said. “We can't drive all night. Where are we going to stop? Are we going to sleep out here? In the car?”

“Oh, calm down,” said Uncle Harvey. “We'll find somewhere.”

“How do you know?”

“Because we will. Trust me, Tom. I've been in situations like this enough times before. Something always turns up.”

I didn't believe him—I thought we would have to spend the whole night sleeping in the car—but not long afterward, the road curved and our headlights gleamed over a small building. A shepherd's shack, perhaps, or an old abandoned barn. It looked uninhabited; there weren't any lights in the windows. But it had four walls and a roof, and that was enough for us.

“We'll sleep there,” said Uncle Harvey. “We can carry on at dawn. I don't like driving on this road in the dark.”

“Me neither.”

A bumpy path led through the fields to the shack. As we shuddered and juddered up to the front door, an old couple appeared in the doorway. They must have heard our engine and seen our headlights. The building wasn't a barn. Or abandoned. Someone lived there.

We got out and talked to them.

That morning, I'd found a useful phrase in the back of the guidebook:
Teine un cuarto?
Do you have a room? I repeated it several times. The old man nodded and grinned, his teeth gleaming in the candlelight.

Uncle Harvey pulled a few bills from his wallet and offered them to the old man, who handed them to his wife. She flicked through them, counting them quickly, then pushed open the door and welcomed us inside.

The farm had no electricity, so there was no phone, no TV, no lights, and no heating. That night was cold. There was no moon. A few candles and a flickering fire provided the only light and heat in the house. The old folks had eaten already, but they gave us some leftover boiled potatoes mixed with chopped raw onions. That doesn't sound very appetizing, I know, but it was surprisingly tasty. We couldn't speak a word of one another's languages, but we managed to communicate with a few signs and gestures, explaining we were
“Americano”
and asking if they had sold a necklace to Rodolfo. They shrugged their shoulders, not understanding what we were trying to say, and gestured for us to finish our potatoes.

I was sharing a room with Uncle Harvey. We went to bed in darkness, lighting our way with a little stub of a candle, so we couldn't see much more than the outline of the two beds that the old woman had prepared for us. Actually, they weren't really beds at all. They were just thick woolen blankets spread out on the ground, plus a couple of cushions each. I thought I'd never be able to sleep.

A voice came out of the gloom. “Night, Tom.”

“Good night, Uncle Harvey.”

“Don't call me that.”

“Sorry. Good night, Harvey.”

“Good night.”

There were no curtains over the window,
and no glass, either, so I don't know what woke me first, the sunlight or the noise of chickens cackling and scuffling in the dust outside. My hip ached. My legs, too. That's what happens when you spend the whole night sleeping on a cold stone floor.

I glanced at my uncle. He was still snoozing.

I needed to pee, but I didn't want to wake him, so I decided to stay in bed as long as I could. I lay there, mulling over the events of the last couple of days, wondering if I'd made a terrible mistake, flying halfway around the world with my uncle. I was just wondering if I'd ever see my own home again when my eyes focused and I suddenly realized what I was looking at.

I sat up and stared. Then I laughed aloud.

I threw aside the blanket, stepped across the room, and shook Uncle Harvey's shoulder.

He groaned and rolled over. “Urgh. What time is it?”

“Look at this,” I said.

He reached for his watch. “Oh, it's too early. Leave me alone.” And he pulled the blanket back over his head.

“You've got to look at this.”

“Give me five more minutes.”

“Come on. Take a look.”

With a sigh, he sat up. “What's the problem?”

I pointed at the wall. “Look at the wallpaper.”

“What about it?”

“Just look at it.”

Uncle Harvey peered at the wall. He rubbed his eyes and stared harder. Then he threw aside his blanket too and sprang to his feet. “I don't believe it!”

“You see?”

“Ha! This is fantastic! You're a genius!”

“Thanks.”

The wallpaper wasn't wallpaper at all. It was pages from a journal—from
the
journal—written in the same spidery handwriting as the page in Uncle Harvey's blue folder.

He stood on his bed and ran his hands over the wall, stroking the paper, then found a loose corner and gave it a gentle tug.

I said, “Shouldn't we ask those old folks before we tear down their wallpaper?”

“I suppose we should,” said Uncle Harvey, sounding surprised, as if the thought had never occurred to him.

He pulled on his clothes and went next door. I could hear him trying to communicate with the old couple. He returned soon with a pan of boiling water. “I bought the lot,” he said. “For twenty dollars.” He winked at me and got to work.

Removing the wallpaper took most of the morning.

Uncle Harvey did it alone. He didn't trust me to help. He said I'd rip the pages. I thought he was actually much more likely to mess them up than I was, but I didn't complain. He was having a miserable time, steaming and pulling and scraping each page millimeter by millimeter. The room got hotter and hotter. His face went bright red and big pools of sweat spread across his shirt.

Some of the pages faced outward, showing their words to the world, and others had been stuck facedown to the wall. As he peeled them off, Uncle Harvey couldn't help leaving a few scraps behind, littering the plaster with tiny bits of paper and the faded impressions of old ink. We'd just have to hope those weren't the words that we needed.

The old woman summoned us for breakfast. It was a loaf of bread, two boiled eggs, and a tin of sardines, shared between the four of us and served on cracked white plates. She gave us cups of coffee, too. Uncle Harvey said his was disgusting, but he drank it anyway. I didn't touch mine.

We went back to work. The old folks popped their heads around the door to watch what we were doing. They whispered to each other. I could imagine exactly what they were saying.
These foreigners are crazy! If they've got so much money to throw around, why do they want this old wallpaper? Why don't they just go to the market and buy themselves a few nice fat goats?

While my uncle was finishing off the wallpaper, I searched the rest of the house, hunting for any final pages that might have eluded us.

I found five.

The first was folded and wedged under a table, stopping it from wobbling.

Another was jammed in a crack in a window, keeping out a draft.

The third, fourth, and fifth were in the bathroom.

They were on a shelf just to the side of the toilet, held in place by a stone. There was a roll of grubby toilet paper there too, but I suppose they kept the pages for emergencies. The nearest shop must be miles away.

Great. That would be just our luck. There's priceless treasure buried on an island, but we can't find it because a Peruvian peasant wiped his butt with the directions.

I came out of the bathroom and ran into the old man, who was carrying a bundle of sticks in his arms. He dumped his sticks by the fire, pointed at the papers in my hands, and said something that I couldn't understand.

“Sorry,” I said. “Don't speak Spanish.”

He kept talking to me in the same lingo.

“I don't know what you're saying,” I said. “But I guess there's not much point in telling you that, because you don't know what I'm saying either, do you?”

He grabbed ahold of my sleeve and tugged me toward the door.

I asked him what he was doing, but he just answered in Spanish. He obviously wanted me to follow him.

I thought I might as well. Why not? What was the worst that could happen?

We walked out of the house and up the field to an ancient barn.

The old man pushed the door. It creaked open. There was a rancid stench of manure. We stepped inside.

The floor of the barn was a mass of mud and straw. Junk was piled everywhere. The same family must have lived at this farm for years, and I could imagine that they had used this place to dump whatever they didn't want but couldn't bring themselves to throw away. My eyes rested on broken chairs and wooden ladders with missing rungs and various lengths of rope and an old bath and a sheep's skull and a bicycle and rusty old pipes and a piece of paper. Scrunched and scrawled with words in black ink.

I was just about to dart forward and pick it up when I noticed another. And another. And more of them; ten, twenty, fifty, trodden into the mud, buried under boxes, jumbled among everything.

The old man was grinning.

“Dollars,” he said. “Dollars.”

“You want more dollars?”

“
Sí, sí.
Dollars.”

“No problem. You can have more dollars.”

We went back to the house to find my uncle, who handed over another forty dollars, and everyone was happy.

I allowed myself only a quick peek
at each of the pages as I removed them from the barn. They were all covered with the same dense black handwriting, which was pretty much impossible to read. The spelling was crazy too. A teacher would have gone through the whole thing with a red pen.

For instance:
The tayl snapt of in the myddle.

Or:
In the nyght yt thundereth and rayneth but the after noone is fayr and hote and drye but clowdy.

The pictures were nice, though. There was at least one on every page and sometimes two or three: a fish, a bird, a flower, a man's face. The things that you'd see on a voyage up the coast of Peru, stopping every few days to go ashore and trade with the natives or gather fresh water. They were more like doodles than serious drawings. As if the writer had knocked off a little scribble whenever he was wondering what to write next.

The final few pages were trampled into the mud or stuffed between bricks. Up in the rafters I could see a couple of white scraps. I fetched a ladder, jammed it against the wall, climbed the rickety rungs, and pulled out a single sheet of creased old paper. I couldn't imagine how it had gotten up there.

I crept down to solid ground. Leaving the ladder propped against the wall, I walked out of the barn, unfolding the page. The sunshine blinded me for a moment, but then I noticed a funny little picture of a deer with bandy legs and two tiny horns. Next to it, in the text, my eye was drawn to an ornate capital G, the first letter of a word.

I could actually read the whole word.

It said
Golden.

I could read the next word in the sentence too.

Hinge.

What's a golden hinge?

Would you find one on a chest filled with gold? Or a chest
made
from gold? A solid-gold chest—that would be worth a fortune!

Or did it mean something else entirely?

I read the whole sentence, trying to puzzle out the words on either side of the “golden hinge,” but the handwriting was so curly and scrawled that I could distinguish only a few letters here and there. An “n” or an “m.” An “o.” A “t.” An “ant.” An “st.” A capital letter that might have been an “F” or a “P.”

I didn't give up. Letter by letter, I deciphered the entire sentence. Eventually I got back to the word that had first attracted my attention. Reading it again, I realized I had misread one of the letters. It wasn't a “g.” It was a “d.” I had read “Hinge,” but the word actually said “Hinde.”

What's a hinde?

Dunno.

And what on earth is a “Golden Hinde”?

Oh.

The Golden Hinde.

Better known without that extra “e” as the
Golden Hind.

We spent a whole year doing British history at school, so I knew the name, just as I knew the names of Walter Raleigh and William Shakespeare and Mary Queen of Scots. The problem was, apart from their names, I couldn't remember much else about any of them. If only I'd spent all those lessons listening to Mrs. McNab instead of staring out the window.

No, wait a minute. I did remember one thing. A hind is a female deer. That explained the picture. And the
Golden Hind
was a ship, captained by Sir Francis Drake.

What did I know about Drake?

I could summon up a picture of a guy with a little goatee beard.

Oh, and a fact! A useful fact! The sort of fact that would get me a big smile from Mrs. McNab. Sir Francis Drake was the first Englishman to sail around the world.

The writer of these pages might have been a sailor who accompanied Drake.

Or even Drake himself.

I piled up the pages and took them inside. Uncle Harvey was just finishing up. The room looked terrible. Plaster was peeling from the walls and the ceiling was dripping with condensation from all the boiling water, but apparently the old folks didn't mind. For sixty dollars, they would have let us rip the whole house to shreds.

I showed him what I had discovered. The drawing of the young deer and the words “Golden Hinde.” And I told him my theory.

Uncle Harvey took the page from me and pored over the words. Then he looked up. “This is very interesting. You might be onto something. I have to confess, Tom, I don't know very much about Francis Drake. Do you?”

“We did him at school, but I've forgotten it all.”

Uncle Harvey tapped his forehead as if he were trying to dislodge a blocked chunk of information. “Wasn't he the first man to sail around the world?”

“I don't think he was the first man,” I said. “But he was the first Englishman.”