Restless Soul - Alex Archer [30]
Annja’s grip was firm and her eyes like daggers. “Zakkarat, nothing here is ours. This belongs to history. It must be—”
Zakkarat jerked his hands free. The lines on his face were tight and more pronounced in his ire. “Nothing here is yours! This is my country, Annjacreed. And these things might belong to history, but even you can see that this treasure has nothing to do with the Hoabinhiam hunter-gatherers or their coffins and pieces of pots. Old? Yes, the treasure is that, but it is not the same as the coffins. It does not belong here. See?” He pointed to something on the ground at the base of one of the Buddha statues.
“Annjacreed, I do not think the Hoabinhiam were so foolish as to smoke. Or if they were, they would not have smoked Chinese cigarettes.”
A crumpled cigarette pack lay on the ground. Near it was a spent pack of matches, a candy wrapper and behind the crate an empty clipboard.
“Clearly,” Annja returned through clenched teeth. “Clearly these things do not belong together.”
“Stolen, all this treasure likely is, Annjacreed,” Zakkarat continued. He bent and scooped up some of the errant pearls and pocketed them. “So I am stealing only from thieves. How is that wrong? I was not a wealthy man when we started out this morning, Annjacreed. I am not like a famous TV woman with baht to spare.”
He paused to examine one of the dark pearls. “But I am rich now. My family will want for nothing, and you will not stop me. You do not have the right to stop me.”
Annja fumed. “There might be a finder’s fee but for now we take nothing,” she said. “You take nothing,” he corrected. “Me? I will take what I can carry…which is next to nothing when you look at all of this. What I take is nothing. What I take will not be missed.”
He continued to speak, but it was in Thai and she couldn’t understand him.
Then he spun away and strode toward Luartaro’s dropped backpack. He opened it and dumped the contents, then proceeded to stuff it with bejeweled and ivory trinkets. He tried to put the watermelon-size Buddha in, but couldn’t lift the statue.
Luartaro put a hand on Annja’s shoulder. “I’m not sure you should stop him, you know,” he said quietly. “The authorities—”
“Yes, we can call the authorities when we get out of here, and we can well report him. Maybe we should. But I don’t know.” Luartaro took a picture of Zakkarat still trying to lift the gold Buddha.
“We should.” Her voice was softer and sad. She sympathized with Zakkarat. Here was an opportunity to live well. If she was in his position, would she do anything differently? “We should report him,” she said again.
“We’ll have time to talk about it on the walk back to the resort…or the ride if we can find his Jeep. We’ll have to go into town, you know, to call people about this.”
She nodded. “I…I’m not done here yet, Lu.”
“And I wager you’ll not get Zakkarat out of here until he is so loaded down he can barely walk.” He took several more pictures of Zakkarat, who had finally given up on the Buddha and was taking instead a polished horn with monkey faces carved on it. “And best we take a good long look at as much as we can now in case the authorities don’t let us back in. We do have to tell the authorities about this.”
“Yes, we do.” She returned to examining the treasure, glancing over her shoulder at Zakkarat and deciding that he could stuff as much as would fit in the pack, but he wasn’t leaving with it.
She was pleased Luartaro thought as she did—that the Thai authorities had to be told about this place so it could be protected. But she was confident she would be allowed back in. She would be persuasive if she needed to be, and the promise of a television special or documentary always lured people into saying yes.
“Coins!” She heard Zakkarat exclaim. “Old, gold ones.”
Everything here is old, she thought, though admittedly some pieces in the treasure belonged to a more recent age than the ancient coffins. But some pieces were also likely older than the coffins.
Was this what had troubled her? The treasure from different