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I’d heard a radio interview in which Karp-Toledo had referred to Bingham as a huaquero, a grave robber. Did she still feel that way?

“Of course. What’s the difference between Bingham and a huaquero at this point? Nothing. Bingham was very clever at marketing himself. He managed to make himself look like the discoverer. That’s a legend that needs to be completely thrown out.”

At that moment a short man, wearing a dark blue suit with no tie, approached us, introduced himself and sat down with some colleagues at an adjacent table. It was Alejandro Toledo, the ex-president of Peru. I felt like I was meeting with the Peruvian government in exile, which had set up headquarters between Cookbooks and Self-Improvement.

“In 2007–2008 the INC was finally allowed to go to the basement of the Peabody and do a proper inventory,” she said. “Yale said there were five thousand pieces; the INC counted more than forty thousand.” Karp-Toledo’s allies in Peru had since made quite a bit of hay with this alarming-sounding discrepancy; news accounts in Peru sometimes hinted that Bingham had secreted away a hoard equal to Atahualpa’s ransom. The truth, as Karp-Toledo acknowledged, was just a difference in accounting. What Yale counted as a single lot of human remains, Peru might count as dozens of fragments.

Karp-Toledo roiled the waters further in 2009 when she was invited to speak on campus by the Yale Political Union. From the podium she brandished a 1916 letter from Bingham to Gilbert Grosvenor that read: “The objects found do not belong to us, but to the Peruvian government, which allowed us to take them from the country under the condition that they be returned.” He wasn’t, in fact, referring to the specific items he excavated in 1912, but Karp’s insinuation was clear—Bingham knew that what he’d taken from Peru was a loan, not a gift.

Aside from a small group of scholars, administrators, and lawyers at Yale, almost everyone with an interest in Machu Picchu agreed that the artifacts Bingham took should be returned. There has long been, however, some (politically incorrect) doubt about Peru’s ability to take proper care of its antiquities. The National Museum in Lima was notoriously robbed of hundreds of irreplaceable objects in the late 1970s. The Museo Inka in Cusco had twenty-two gold pieces stolen in 1993. One well-known explorer I spoke with recalled handing mummies and artifacts over to the INC, only to return later and learn that they’d been lost or stolen. In 2008, a pair of vendors operating a souvenir shop off the main plaza in Cusco was found with 690 Inca and pre-Inca artifacts; they’d been hawking them on the Internet. Even Karp-Toledo agrees that thanks to the thriving huaquero industry, it’s an open secret in Peru that artifacts can be bought easily. I’d seen collections in private homes that rivaled what the Peabody owned.

Which is not to say that Yale’s stewardship had been flawless. Bingham sent boxes of remains from his 1914–15 Expedition back to Peru without any documentation, making them almost useless to researchers. When Burger and Salazar first saw the Bingham collection in the 1980s, much of it was deteriorating after decades of neglect. Karp-Toledo had no doubts. “It’s absolutely certain that Peru can take care of these artifacts.”

The latest chatter I’d heard in Lima was that Karp-Toledo was pushing the conflict over the Bingham pieces to keep her husband’s name in the news as he contemplated another run for the presidency. I asked as diplomatically as possible if perhaps Bingham was being used as the whipping boy for other interests.

“He has been demonized by some specialists—fairly,” Karp-Toledo said, but declined to name any names.

In that case, could she think of anything nice to say about Bingham?

“I think the politician in him ate the adventurer in him. That’s too bad. If I were to give Bingham credit for one thing, it was that he brought knowledge of Machu Picchu to the world.”

We stood to leave. I noticed that her military T-shirt had writing on it. “What does it say?