The Babylon Rite. Tom Knox

      1

       Trujillo, Peru

      It was a very strange place to build a museum. Under a Texaco gas station, where the dismal suburbs of Trujillo met the cold and foggy deserts of north Peru, in a wasteland of concrete warehouses and sleazy cantinas. But somehow this sense of being hidden away, this strange, sequestered location, made the Museo Casinelli feel even more intriguing: as if it really was a secret museum.

      Jessica liked coming here, whenever she drove down to Trujillo from Zana. And today she had remembered to bring a camera, to gather crucial evidence.

      She opened the door at the rear of the garage and smiled at the old curator, who stood, and bowed, as courteous as ever. ‘Ah, Señorita Silverton! You are here again? You must like the, eh, naughty pottery?’ Her shrug was a little bashful; his smile was gently teasing. ‘But I fear the keys are in the other desk … Un minuto?’

      ‘Of course.’

      Pablo disappeared into a room at the back. As she waited, Jessica checked her cellphone, for the fifth time today: she was expecting an important call, from Steve Venturi, the best forensic anthropologist she knew.

      A week ago, she had arrived in Trujillo – taking a break from her studies amongst the pyramids of Zana; she’d brought with her a box full of fifteen-hundred-year-old Moche bones. This package had in turn been despatched to California, to her old tutor in UCLA: Venturi.

      Any day now she would get Steve’s answer. Was she right about the neckbones? Was her audacious insight correct? The anxiety of waiting for the verdict was increasingly unbearable. Jess felt like a teenager awaiting exam results.

      She looked up from the silent phone. Pablo had returned from his vestibule flourishing two keys, one big, one small. As he offered them, he winked. ‘La sala privada?’

      Jessica’s Spanish was still pretty mediocre, and for that reason she and the kindly curator normally conversed in English – but she understood that phrase well enough. The private room.

      ‘Si!’

      She took both keys from Pablo and saw how he noticed her slightly trembling hand. ‘It’s OK. Just need a coca.’

      Pablo frowned. ‘La diabetes?’

      ‘I’m OK. Really.’

      The frown softened to a smile. ‘See you later.’

      Jess descended the steps to the basement museum. Fumbling in the darkness, she found the larger key, and opened the door.

      When she switched on the light it flooded the room with a reassuring glow, revealing an eccentric and exquisite treasure trove of ancient Peruvian ceramics, pottery, textiles and other artefacts – gleaned from the mysterious cultures of pre-Colombian Peru: the Moche, the Chan Chan, the Huari, the Chimu.

      The light also shone on a dried monkey foetus, grimacing in a bell jar.

      She tried not to look at it. This thing always creeped her out. Maybe it wasn’t even a monkey, maybe it was a dried sloth, or some human mutation preserved as a gruesome curio by Jose Casinelli, forever offering the world its sad little face.

      Briskly she walked past the bell jar, and bent to the glass cabinets, the vitrines of pottery and treasures. Here were the stone pestles of the Chavin, and here the exquisite burial cloths of the Nazca in faded violet and purple; to the left was a brief, poignant line of Quingnam writing, the lost language of the Chimu. She took out her new camera and adjusted the tiny dial to compensate for the poor-quality light.

      As she worked, Jessica recalled the first time she had come here, six months ago, when she had begun her sabbatical: researching the anthropology of the pre-Columbian

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