He knew of the alloy, a mixture of copper, silver, and gold. He’d seen artifacts made from the reddish purple metal.
“They loved the smell when the oil from their skin reacted with the
“So you’re saying they would not have a gold mine?”
“I don’t know, Bene. They definitely used gold. So a source of it might have been important. What I do know is that two hundred tons of gold were shipped to Spain from the New World in the hundred years after Columbus. Some of that came from Jamaica, and tens of thousands of Tainos died because of it.”
Clarke went silent and stared at the drawings revealed by the lights.
Bene was drawn toward them, too.
“They would dip sticks into charcoal mixed with fat and bat droppings.” Frank’s voice had gone low. “So simple, yet see how the work lasted.”
“Who knows of this place?”
“No one outside our community. Maroons have come to this place for a long time.”
He, too, felt a special closeness here.
Frank turned and handed him a scrap of paper. Before they’d started up the mountain, the colonel had disappeared briefly inside the museum.
He’d wondered why.
“That’s Columbus’ signature.” Frank shone his light on the writing. “It’s a complicated mess that says much about the man. What’s important are the X’s.”
He’d already noticed. Both hooked. Just like the one from the grave, in the Spanish documents, the museum, and on the wall outside.
He stared at Clarke. “You never told me any of this before.”
“We be doomed, Bene. Like two hundred years ago, Maroons fight among themselves too much. We become our own enemy. The government knows that and, like the English long ago, they keep us bickering. That way they don’t have to listen to our complaints. I try, but the other colonels are hard to please.”
He knew all of that was true.
“You, Bene, are a man the colonels respect. But they also fear you. They know what else you do. They accept your money, but they know you kill people.”
“Only when there is no choice.”
“That’s how Maroons have justified it since we first fled to the mountains. Every runaway slave said the same thing. ‘Only when there be no choice.’ Yet we have killed so many.”
Here, underground, standing with this learned man, he decided to be honest. “I do what must be done. Violence is the only thing some understand. It’s true, I make money off gambling, whores, dirty movies. Nothing ever sold to or involving children. Nothing. My women must see a doctor and be clean. I have rules. I try to make it right.”
Clarke raised a hand in mock surrender. “No need to convince me, Bene. I don’t care.”
But he felt a need to justify himself.
Were the duppies working on him?
“Be who you are, Bene. It’s all we can do.”
Normally he would never question himself, but this place was definitely affecting him.
“I believe that the hooked X is the mark of Columbus,” Frank said. “A sign to an important place. Perhaps even to the lost mine itself.”
“In this cave?”
The colonel shook his head. “This was not it. They marked here for a reason. What? Who knows. The real place is unknown.”
Simon had talked of Columbus, the lost mine, and the Levite, supposedly revealing all that he knew. But never had he mentioned Columbus’ signature, or anything else that Frank Clarke had just said.
Because he did not know?
No way.
Simon knew a lot. Enough to be in Florida doing something with some man and his daughter. A woman who wrote a magazine article about Columbus, which he’d not read.
Time to correct that mistake.
“Everyone wants to preserve us,” Frank said. “They talk of Maroon culture, and of us, as if we’re gone. But we’re still here.”
He agreed.
“If you find the lost mine, Bene, perhaps you’re right. That wealth can be used to change our situation. Money is always power, and we have neither. Unlike other Maroons, I never blamed the Jews for profiting from us. We
