The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [218]
Leaning their backs against the gray immense blocks of perfect stone that had been so long ago so precisely, patiently carved, and that now lay haphazardly toppled beside the hiking path, the young couple ate their picnic on the last weekend of their honeymoon. They had hiked in from their hotel in Cuzco, a sixteenth-century convent a few blocks from a Spanish cathedral built on top of an Inca palace. They’d spent a week with no phone calls, no television, no papers. But now Dan was looking at a Miami newspaper another guest at the hotel had given him.
News of the world, Dan told his bride. Annie was eating fruit and bread, cheese and sausage, leaning into him. Under this blue sky, in this sun, news of the world sounded ordinary: the American economy was weak, Bush’s job performance rating was 51 percent negative, a consortium of major news organizations was expected on September 12 to release its findings that Al Gore had in fact won the vote recount in Florida. Israel was meeting with Palestine and the top U.S. utilities analyst had just reported that Enron Corporation was about to implode.
Dan and Annie found the local Miami stories more interesting.
On the society page, Melissa Skippings announced her engagement to local stockbroker and tarpon fisherman, Tucker Bradley. Miss Skippings, formerly chief administrator of the Golden Days Center for Active Living on Ficus Avenue in Miami, would be moving with her husband to Japan.
Danish wreck salvage divers employed by the Cuban government had made an astonishing discovery while exploring a sunken sixteenth-century Spanish galleon, a vessel sunk in a storm in 1549 while sailing in a twenty-ship fleet past the Archipiélago de los Colorados to Havana. The divers had focused their attention on a particular cay after a local student, cleaning a conch shell on the beach there, had found inside the conch, to his astonishment, a 135-carat cut and polished star ruby.
The star ruby had been appraised at $12.6 million. Divers immediately returned to the site. There on the fourth day of diving, they uncovered beneath the seabed a few rotted ribs of the Spanish ship La Madre del Salvador. Over the next week, teams of divers recovered cannon balls, an astrolabe, an ivory comb, a steel mirror. Most importantly, under an enormous bronze cannon, they came upon a crushed chest with rusted and barnacled ironwork, bearing the escutcheon of Don Carlos de Tormes. Tormes was believed by scholars to have been traveling to Spain in La Madre in order to give a statue known as La Reina Coronada del Mar, the Queen of the Sea, to his sovereign Philip II.
Under a rusted anchor nearby, divers in fact found a crushed gold statue. But it was so smashed that it took a while to identify it as the Virgin Mary holding a baby. Salt water had seeped into the leather chest for centuries. The wood had mostly dissolved into nothing but ocean. On the other hand, the broken pieces of gold glistened as luminously as they had the day the Inca artist had fashioned them to fit the head and heart of the Mother of God.
The newspaper article said that the Cuban government was claiming ownership of the broken artifact and of the star ruby. They would be added to La Reina’s relics already in the Museo Habana: the statue of the Virgin Mary (both the Cuban government and the FBI had kept very quiet about the fact that the “gold” statue was a gold-plated reproduction and the “sixteenth-century” casket allegedly containing a “Holy Thorn”—while real silver—was not sixteenth-century silver), and the very real two emeralds, three rubies, six sapphires, and two diamonds.
Museo Habana officials said the discovery raised questions about the authenticity of the so-called Reina Coronada del Mar “relic” that was currently on display in the Church of the Sacred