Face to the Sun Read Free Page B

in contact with him. He had passed through Sandhurst and remained an officer and a gentleman with a respect for power and none
at all for life. He was at his best when he had an excuse to appear British and would chat to me as if we were sitting in a London club while I was stimulated by the added thrill that I might be
about to leave Government House on a stretcher for a faultlessly arranged post-mortem. He should have known that I was accustomed to fatherly administration and trusted me to keep my mouth shut; it
had been quite unnecessary to give me twenty-four hours’ notice to leave the country.
    So my earlier instinctive conjecture of the reason why the lady of Harrods had not revealed the loss of the golden sun to the police had not been far wrong. It must be well known to historians
of the Spanish Conquest and had to be returned, minus the tasteless central emerald, to the shrine from which it had been borrowed. Of course the loan might have had an indefinite term. Requests
from a Father of the Country are generally obeyed without argument.
    The natural explanation was that her husband didn’t know that she had taken it abroad. In Malpelo she probably wore it only for prestige – a gala night at the opera, for example, or
a party for the generals of the Republic on Independence Day. It emphasised her unity with Malpelo and her position as official Mother of the Country. The folly of taking it with her to Europe
would have been due only to feminine vanity: the vision perhaps of an invitation to dinner at Buckingham Palace. The sun would certainly have made a spectacular lid to her cavernous cleavage.
    I had been wondering how on earth I could return her jewels and collect a reward without walking straight into a police trap. The position now was somewhat different. I was the only person in
London – apart from her daughter – who knew she had with her a national treasure and had lost it. Obviously she did not want to risk the unpredictable anger of a Father of the Country.
Nor did I. So our interests were the same: to keep the British police right out of it. Besides the romantic story of her past, that obliging paper had given me the essential information that she
was staying at Claridge’s. There I had to contact her. I spent the morning in the British Museum examining Andean exhibits. There was nothing resembling my sun, but I came across a casual
reference to a golden disk which had been the banner and supreme god of the Inca Empire. So again I gave myself a very satisfactory lunch in the hope that claret and a brandy would continue to
provide inspiration. They did. My sun could be a miniature or model of the god.
    Wearing gloves I tore off the headline of the news­paper report and wrote on the back of it in small capitals and with my left hand:
    I SEE THAT THERE WAS ONE LOSS WHICH YOU DID NOT MENTION.
    WHAT AM I TO DO WITH IT?
    REPLY TO HARRY. BOX 715, SAME PAPER.
    I posted this to Miss Juana Romero at Claridge’s, choosing her maiden name since I was pretty sure that she would receive a number of such letters from cranks or former
friends or lovers, inspired by the newspaper article. She would read these from curiosity or in the hope of running across an old companion, and if the police had advised her to show them all
suspicious communications she could pocket mine before handing them over.
    Two days later I opened the paper eager to see if feminine ingenuity had any proposal for exchanging the sun for money which would ensure there were no police witnesses.
    HARRY. ASK FOR LADY MCMURTRIE.
    On the face of it that offered no guarantee and was detestably risky. Lady McMurtrie’s could be packed with detectives. But in my sudden excess of nervousness I had
forgotten that on no account must police be allowed to know of the loss of the golden sun. She had been intelligent enough to understand that this opening move was to arrange time and place for a
meeting where the transaction could be