Page 16 of The Children of Eve

“And had they?”

“Just his lost phone.”

So her boyfriend had dropped one phone, wasn’t answering another, and had fallen from sight, leaving behind what appeared to be all his worldly goods. But once again, it was me to whom Zetta was speaking and not the police.

“I’m waiting,” I said.

“For what?”

“For the punch line. I know it’s coming.”

She played with her drink again, giving her something else to do with her hands while she debated what to reveal and what to conceal.

“I noted the passcodes for both his phones.”

Wow. I was no analyst, but I thought Zetta might have trust issues.

“And why did you do that?”

“Because I’ve been stung before by guys who cheated on me or lied about who they were, where they went, what they were doing when they got there, and with whom.”

“It sounds like you need to be more selective about your boyfriends.”

“I blame my upbringing. I’d hoped Wyatt might be different, so I took his word about the military thing. The passcodes were just a precaution.”

“And was he different?”

“I could only read opened messages and emails, but he seemed to be. All I found on the Android was stuff relating to BrightBlown.”

“Anything on the Nokia?”

“A short series of contacts in the address book, but only as letters, not names, and no calls were listed as either made or received. Those contacts had been deleted when the phone was found. One text message was left in the inbox, which Wyatt hadn’t deleted.”

She took the Nokia from the bag, entered the code, and showed me the message. It consisted of a single word:RUN.

CHAPTERXII

Roland Bilas figured he was screwed the moment he disembarked the afternoon flight from Mexico City to LAX. Actually, he suspected he might already have been screwed before boarding, but Bilas always worried when he was working. A man could become convinced that everyone in uniform was looking at him, so either he began looking in turn at everyone in a uniform or he tried not to pay attention to anyone in a uniform while simultaneously being aware of their presence. The trouble was that studied avoidance seemed to draw their attention more rapidly than a direct gaze, as though acting innocent released some kind of pheromone that trained customs officers could scent, causing the pack to descend.

Most of the time, there was no reason to be nervous, other than the fact that smuggling was an illegal act and illegality brought nervousness as a matter of course. Bilas didn’t know anyone in his business who was nerveless. No, correct that: he didn’t know anyone nerveless who wasstillin business. He could name a couple who were in jail and a few who were dead, but a certain degree of tension, like a moderate amount of stress, was healthy in the criminal world, both being conducive to long-term survival.

Not that Bilas liked to think of himself as a criminal. His view was that criminals represented a category of individuals who harmedothers, and Bilas did his best to restrict the harm he did in every aspect of his life. After all, he wasn’t moving narcotics or weapons, or offering to transport desperate folk across the border only to abandon them in the desert. In fact, he didn’t even use drugs, didn’t own a gun, and felt that anyone from Latin America who wanted to work in the good old U.S. of A. should be facilitated, not least because Bilas didn’t care to clean his own hotel bathroom, bus his own table, or deliver his own Chinese food. While he could probably have listed on the fingers of one hand those on whom he wished real misfortune, none were poorer or less powerful than he.

Thus, Roland Bilas considered himself to be, by most standards, a relatively good guy. The likelihood that some in police circles would have disagreed with him was neither here nor there. It was simply a matter of perspective. Bilas, while waiting for his flight, had found his gaze drawn to the television screen in the departure lounge, only to quickly avert it when faced with apartment blocks being demolished by Russian missiles or, because this was Mexico, dismembered human remains being disinterred from under buildings or discovered in garbage bags by the side of the road. Back in 2022, Bilas had spent a week in an upscale hotel on Playa Condesa in Acapulco. On the afternoon of his departure, the outgoing tide had revealed a body roped to a cement anchor, the kind of event that inevitably cast a shadow over an otherwise happy vacation, even if vacationing contentedly in Mexico required the exercise of a certain willful blindness to a hundred homicides a day.

Bilas loved Mexico and its people, but when it came to human butchery, he took the view that the country was seriously fucked. He used to argue with Antonio Elizalde about this, once their transactions were concluded and Elizalde had opened a bottle of something old and curious to celebrate. Elizalde would respond to criticism of his nation by pointing to the number of gun fatalities in the United States, or the high rates of maternal mortality among Black women in what was supposed to be a first-world country. Bilas would retort that nobody in the UnitedStates was making a busload of forty-three trainee teachers vanish, or murdering women at the rate of ten a day, and so a free-spoken evening would pass for both men.

But Bilas hadn’t met Elizalde on this latest trip. Elizalde had thought it best for them to remain out of contact, even allowing for his imminent medical treatment. Bilas had sent him a good-luck card, signed onlyRand without a return address. He wished the older man well; if Bilaswasa criminal, then he, like Elizalde, was one from a more civilized time.

Flying from Mexico to the United States invited a degree of attention from the authorities, but Bilas had never yet set off any alarm bells. Primarily, the uniforms were looking for narcotics, as well as targeting those individuals with no right to enter the country, and Bilas didn’t check either of those boxes. He was a second-generation American, a little overweight but not trying to hide it. He dressed smart-casual for flights, always carried a book in one hand as he proceeded through customs, and wore his glasses on a nylon cord around his neck. He was polite with the authorities, but not excessively so, and any search of his bags would have revealed only a fondness for the kind of souvenirs set to reside on a shelf before being broken during a spot of careless dusting. His reading material evinced an amateur’s fascination with the history of Central and South America, and entry tickets to various temples and archaeological sites of interest served as bookmarks throughout.

The best kind of smuggling does not resemble smuggling at all, in that there is no apparent attempt at concealment. Bilas’s business was the smuggling of antiquities, many acquired to order for collectors untroubled by the legalities of acquisition. His particular area of expertise was Peru, particularly pre-Hispanic cultural artifacts. Unauthorized excavation of Peruvian archaeological digs and the exportation of pre-Hispanic treasures had been prohibited by legislation since 1822, and successive Peruvian administrations had added to that body oflaw, even as government officials were assisting with export documents and shipping arrangements, often due less to corruption than a lack of awareness of the unique nature of what was being sent abroad. With so many sites still to be explored, and with too many artifacts already unearthed to ever be able to display more than a fraction, permitting duplicates or near-duplicates to be exported had, for many years, seemed no great sin.

So it was that Hiram Bingham III—who, in 1911, made public the existence of Machu Picchu, even as one of his workers was tasked with erasing from its stones the names of Peruvians who had visited the site before him—was permitted to transport thousands of human bones, pottery, and other items to Yale University, along with a quantity of gold concealed in a trunk, in return for vague promises that the hoard would be repatriated should the Peruvian authorities ever submit such a request. The Peruvians quickly realized, to their cost, that taking Americans at their word was a bad idea, and control, once ceded, was hard to regain. When they asked for the Machu Picchu cache to be restored to them, they received forty-seven cases of human remains, none of them from Machu Picchu, and so began almost a century of stalemate.

The Peruvians might have lived to regret their earlier decision to facilitate Bingham, but they did learn from it. Repatriation proceedings were expensive, difficult, and time-consuming, so it was better not to have to repatriate antiquities at all. In 1981, a memorandum of understanding was signed between Peru and the United States, allowing the Peruvians to be informed of any seizures by U.S. Customs, followed by the immediate return of those items, with U.S. officials aided by a list featuring general descriptions of Peruvian treasures in seven categories. Admittedly, the agreement essentially ignored items that had been smuggled into the United States before the signing of the agreement, but the perfect was the enemy of the possible. Those battling the smugglers had bigger fish to fry, not least the sheer quantity of sites, many of them in remote areas, that were easy prey forhuaqueros, looters wholeft their spoor in the form of scattered bones, ransacked altars, and a marked absence of textiles, ceramics, and gold.

Which was where Roland Bilas came in, because a considerable expanse of territory, much of it occupied by voracious middlemen, lay betweenhuaquerosand prospective buyers. Bilas knew by name many of the leadinghuaquerosand their bosses—because everyone except God worked for somebody—and maintained a spreadsheet of collectors in Europe, North America, and Asia, as well as their preferences and wish lists, so he was ideally positioned to put the appropriate item into the appropriate hands for the appropriate price. Because Bilas had a reputation as a fair dealer, he had managed to prosper without leaving too much wreckage behind. This was as much a conscious decision on his part as a consequence of any better aspect of his nature. The existence of genial souls like Antonio Elizalde notwithstanding, the acquisition and sale of antiquities was by no means always a civilized trade. The easiest way to make it one was to pay properly and promptly, and charge no more than the market could bear—even a little less, which might encourage return business. Greed, in Bilas’s experience, was the great undoer, and much misfortune could be laid at its door. Roland Bilas was that rare breed: a man who understood the meaning of enough, or had until recently.

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