Page 12 of The Children of Eve (Charlie Parker #22)

CHAPTER XII

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 was still in 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 harmed others, 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 United States 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 only R and without a return address. He wished the older man well; if Bilas was a 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 of law, 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 for huaqueros , looters who left 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 between huaqueros and prospective buyers. Bilas knew by name many of the leading huaqueros and 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.

Partly, Bilas blamed his internist. The previous year, Bilas had been diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, which caused the internist, Dr. Minhas, to inquire whether Bilas was dealing with high levels of anxiety. Bilas was tempted to reply that, as a smuggler, anxiety was part of the job description, but decided that Dr. Minhas might have filed that under TMI: too much information. Still, Bilas admitted that, yes, his line of work—“I’m in imports and exports”—did have its associated pressures, though he believed he’d been handling them well, all things considered. Dr. Minhas begged to differ and indicated that Roland Bilas was well on his way to a stroke unless he instituted some profound life changes. Dr. Minhas’s recommendations included regular exercise, a better diet, and practicing mindfulness, none of which appealed to his patient.

But Dr. Minhas also advised that, at fifty-seven, Bilas might like to consider working less if he could afford it. The difficulty was that Bilas couldn’t afford it. True, he made a decent living, but laundering the proceeds to hide them from the IRS meant taking a hit of twenty-five to thirty percent, and he had overheads in the form of travel expenses, bribes, and losses due to breakage, theft, and seizure. If Bilas wanted to relax, never mind retire, he needed to begin properly feathering his nest, and fast, before a blood vessel burst in his brain. In this regard, as in others, he and Antonio Elizalde had much in common.

So Roland Bilas, like Elizalde, had involved himself in the sourcing—well, theft, to be scrupulously honest about a dishonest act—and transportation of an unusual hoard, for which he’d been generously recompensed. Bilas subsequently reinvested a generous percentage of those funds in a selection of fine erotic Moche pottery dating from AD 100 to 700, with accompanying paperwork and invoices describing them as replicas, nothing to see here, Officer, etc. To further obscure their origin, Bilas acquired two additional pieces that were replicas, with similar paperwork, from one of which he’d permitted the tape to come away, making it more accessible in the event of a search. One of those replica pieces was in his carry-on bag along with a genuine ceramic, and the other was with the three remaining originals in his checked baggage. An expert with time to compare and contrast would be able to spot the difference between the real and the fake, but fingers crossed, it wouldn’t come to that. Customs and Border Protection had more important matters with which to occupy their time, given that some five thousand pounds of drugs were seized at U.S. ports every day, with ten times as much getting through undetected. A little perspective here, fellas.

But the ceramics were the support act, not the main show. That honor fell to a pair of immaculately preserved mantas from the pre-Incan Nazca culture, for which Bilas had paid $35,000 apiece, with the expectation of earning five or six times as much from the right buyer. Bilas had wrapped the textiles in polycaprolactone/polystyrene sheaths infused with extract of chamomile oil to guard against contamination by microorganisms before fixing the resulting packs between the interior hard shell of his suitcase and a layer of padding, ostensibly to protect his “replica” ceramics from damage. Finally, he had arranged for the goods to be transported from Peru to Mexico because Mexican customs officials were less watchful than the Peruvians.

It was set to be among the more lucrative runs of Bilas’s career. He’d taken a chance by returning south of the border so soon, but the mantas were special. If he didn’t move on them immediately, the seller would try to offload them elsewhere, which wouldn’t be difficult. And it wasn’t as though Bilas could just wire the money and ask for the mantas to be FedExed to him because a) the seller had no interest in leaving a trail at his end and b) Bilas might as well have sent a personal invitation to the FBI’s Art Crime Team to come visit him and make themselves at home.

So Bilas had gone to Mexico City, but stayed only two nights. He’d also made an appointment with a private dental clinic in Polanco for a consultation about possible implants and crowns to provide a plausible reason for such a short trip, should anyone elect to question him upon his return. As for the officials at Mexico City International Airport, they’d displayed no interest in the Moche ceramics as the items passed through the scanner in his carry-on bag. Similarly, the checked baggage had been placed in the hold without a hitch, although Bilas didn’t start to relax even a little until the wheels left the ground.

Then he landed at LAX, and from the moment he entered the terminal, he felt eyes on him. He couldn’t pinpoint the source and therefore couldn’t be sure he wasn’t overreacting because of the value of the cargo. But that cargo, and the money tied up with it, meant he couldn’t just walk away. Even if he did, they’d take him before he left the terminal, whether he picked up his bag or not. Bilas knew that random searches by customs officials rarely uncovered high-value goods; targets were usually identified before they even took their carry-on bag from the overhead lockers on the plane. If they were onto him, there was nothing he could do about it. He could only hope that the false paperwork would cut the mustard, and the mantas’ sheathing, which had been constructed as a perfect fit for the case, would remain unrevealed. But with each step he took, more hope fell away, so that by the time he reached the baggage carousel, he was resigned to his fate. When they came for him, just as he began walking toward the exit, he was almost relieved.