'Your idea of using the mint inspector's papers is foolish and stupid. It is exactly the sort of loco idea that has gotten me close to the gallows so often.'
'Then we will do it?'
'Of course.'
ONE HUNDRED AND FOUR
We studied the mint inspector and his servant at great length, making them walk and talk.
'This is how an actor prepares his part,' Mateo said, tapping his head. 'Makeup and costume do not make an actor. It is the mental attitude.' He gestured at the mint inspector. 'Notice that when this worthless dog of a bureaucrat talks to you, how he lifts his nose as if disdaining your lowly odor? How he walks stiffly like he has a stick up his ass? Now watch this.' Mateo paced back and forth for a moment. 'What do you see, Bastardo?'
'I see a man with wary eyes, watching for a surprise attack, one hand on his sword, his step bold.'
'Exactly! But the creature I am to impersonate has spent his life in the safe haven of the king's treasure. He is a man of numbers, not action. He has permanently stained his fingers with ink and has a callus between his fingers from holding a quill. His eyes are bad from reading documents in candlelight, and he has to bend down close to read anything. But of the greatest importance, because he carries the king's authority in a matter more dear to the king's heart than the treasure to be found in his mistresses' bed, the little swine of an inspector is caught up with his own importance. Hiding behind the king's authority, having stained his hands with ink rather than blood, he has the audacity to be rude to even caballeros who could slice him into pieces.'
Now that Mateo pointed out the man's characteristics, I could see the truth of his statements. And his own acting ability. I remembered, too, how impressed I had been when I saw Mateo on the stage as the mad prince of Poland.
'Now, Bastardo, watch the servant, see his hesitant step, the way he looks down when the eyes of authority are on him, the way he flinches when spoken to harshly, his whine when he has been caught at wrongdoing.'
Eh, I, too, was an experienced actor. Did I not play the role of lepero trash in Veracruz? An indio faker with the Healer? A gentleman-cousin of the don's? It would be easy for me to assume the guise of a mere servant. I demonstrated my ability for Mateo.
'No, you stupid bobo! You are supposed to be a servant, not a whimpering lepero. Servants are humble, not sly.'
We left the mint inspector and his servant in the hands of our three fellow banditos and left for the City of Mexico with their clothes and papers. We didn't know if we would need the inspector again, and warned our men that if any harm came to him, we would skin all three banditos and pack their carcasses in salt.
Mateo insisted that we travel to the city with him in a mule litter and me on a donkey, maintaining our disguises in terms of our speech and actions even when we were alone. I was taller than the servant, and I looked ridiculous with my long legs almost touching the ground. I felt like Don Quixote's 'servant,' Sancho. But I carefully avoided comparing Mateo to the knight-errant.
To match the inspector's hair, I reddened Mateo's hair with a bark juice indias used to color mantas. The inspector had a small monocle, a piece of ground lens he could put up to one eye to inspect papers with. Mateo would keep the glass up to his eye during much of the visit. He had told me that he wanted to make sure he wasn't recognized when we returned to the city someday as a gentlemen.
I used the disguise taught to me by the Healer: a pinch of flower dust that would make my nose swell up and distort my face. No one noticed a servant, but I wanted to ensure that at the least they would search for one with a big nose.
Mateo composed a story he would use at the mint limiting our interaction with the employees. 'The mint director will want to entertain the inspector, soften him up with fine wine and maybe even female companionship. We will tell him, however, that our trip from Veracruz was delayed because I got an attack of the black vomit. I am now not only in a hurry to get out of this accursed colony and return to Spain, but I must inspect the mint without delay so I can be in Acapulco in time for a sailing to Lima.'
Finally we crossed onto the causeway and entered the city. Hard as I tried to focus on the mint, images from the past intruded into my thoughts. Had I seen faces from the past, Elena, Luis, de Alva, or even Isabella, I do not know that I would have been able to keep my composure—or my dagger in its sheath.
Mateo walked stiffly into the mint like a man with a sword handle up his rear.
I came behind him, shuffling my feet a bit as if I was too lazy and too stupid to pick them up and put them back down. I carried his kidskin bag that contained his letter of authority and instructions.
We soon discovered that the mint director was not in. He was in Zacatecas, reviewing the procedures used to prepare and ship the silver bars that made their way to the mint and ultimately to the treasure fleet.
The assistant director greeted us with great apprehension.
'Five years ago we endured a surprise inspection,' he complained, 'and nothing but lies were sent back to the Council of the Indies about our management. We run the finest mint in the Empire of Spain at the least expense.'
Mateo was irritably haughty. 'We shall see how efficient your operation is. Our sources report that your stamping operation is mismanaged, rife with peculation, and that silver is systematically shaved from all bullion passing through your mint.'
The poor man nearly had a coronary. 'Lies! Lies! Our coins are works of art. Our bars are true weight!'
I did not know anything about the bars, but the gold and silver coins looked like fine art to my avarice lepero eyes.
Prior to leaving the real mint inspector, we had obtained some information from him about the operation of the mint, roasting his feet over a fire for a time until the information flowed from his mouth.
The mint had several functions. Bars of silver mainly, but also some gold and copper were shipped from the mines to the mint. At the mint, the assayers were in charge of weighing and determining the purity of the precious metals, the treasurers collected the king's fifth from the value, and the engravers turned some of the bars into thousands of coins.
The mint was supposed to only coin silver reales and copper maravedies of several denominations, but it was well known that it occasionally did stamp gold. The maravedies had little value, a handful could barely buy a few tortillas. The silver reales ranged in size from a quarter reale to eight reales, popularly known as pieces of eight.
Like the other government positions, the director of the Casa de Moneta, the House of the Mint, was a position purchased from the king. While mint fees for assaying and stamping supplied income for the director, the income was supplemented by cheating.
The mint inspector had revealed what he was looking for after we toasted his feet over a campfire: gold residue to indicate the mint was illegally coining gold in defiance of the exclusive royal license granted to mints in Spain; evidence that coins were being tossed in a cloth pouch to grind off minute amounts of silver. The process was called 'whirling' because indio workers would whirl the coins in the pouches for hours. The loss of silver from the process was too small to affect scales, yet when a tiny bit of silver was ground off of tens of thousands of coins by this method, the silver dust became significant.
More significant was the use of altered scales for weighing, and under the table deals in which the weights were understated. Less weight meant less of the king's 20-percent tax collected. Of course, the mint director and the owner of the silver split the thefts.
Mateo and I, as seasoned criminals, were better equipped to uncover nefarious acts than the bureaucratic mint inspector. Given the time, we would have uncovered each and every way the mint people were cheating, but our duty was not to find their criminal activities—we were there to plan our own.
Our interest was in security measures and the location of the treasure within.
The building was more secure than a castle. The walls were two feet thick. There were no windows on the ground level. The second-floor windows had iron bars. Both the lower and upper floor were wood. Only one exit door existed, and it was more than a foot thick and located in front of the building. No buildings bordered the mint on any side. Two guards slept in the building at night. Everyone who entered was searched upon exiting.
The silver and gold was stacked in bars on iron shelves and heavy iron tables. It sat there in the open, ready to be carried off, by anyone who could walk through walls.
There were only two ways to breach the security at night: batter down the door or blow a hole in the wall. Either method would bring a hundred of the viceroy's soldados running.
