Wild Meat by Nero Newton

antique paper stand up to this treatment.
    “It…the material’s brittle,” Stephen croaked. “You’ve probably shattered half of it already. See?” He pointed to the disintegrating top edge of a faded monochrome drawing.
    “It’s a little late to worry about that.” Mario reached right over Stephen’s arm to gather up more items. “I don’t think they believed my story that all I found was a handful of old letters.”
    Anything small enough to fit in a transparent folder was already in one, and that provided some protection, but Mario should never even have touched the stuff. He’d hidden it so Stephen could come and take a look before it all got handed over to the authorities, and in the two weeks since Mario’s phone call, Stephen had been more anxious for summer vacation than his sixth-graders. Now he wished his friend had just followed the rules and called in the experts, who would have handled the material with white cotton gloves, placed it in shock-free containers for transportation, and stored it in a tightly controlled environment. Exposure to the wrong temperature or level of humidity, even for a short time, would damage the material irreparably.
    Somehow the experts had heard about the find after all. The word had gotten from the local grapevine all the way to Mexico City, to the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, and they’d called Father Mario Torres with a lot of questions just before Stephen arrived.
    “They wanted to know why I’d pulled it out of the rubble myself in the first place,” Mario had explained. “I told them I didn’t want to slow down repairs to the foundation, now that a work crew was finally here.”
    And tonight it looked like the Instituto Nacional intended to surprise Mario, showing up a few days earlier than they’d said they would. Probably with a couple of Federales . If they learned how much he’d really found, they would never believe that he had some innocent reason for not reporting it right away.
    Stephen glanced through the doorway again but couldn’t spot the headlights.
    From behind a set of shelves, Mario produced a suitcase as big as him and probably older. He opened it on the tabletop, and Stephen’s gut gave another twist when he saw more stacks of envelopes. The freshly packaged items went on top of them.
    “This is everything they won’t see,” Mario said, and snapped the suitcase shut. “I’m holding on to some pretty interesting things to show my visitors when they get here. A couple of landscape drawings with views of the mission when it was only half built, and there really are a few letters from a monk’s relatives in Andalusia. I might be able to convince them there was nothing else.”
    “Where are you going to hide the rest?”
    “In the trunk of your car, with you at the wheel, rolling down a little path that begins behind the house. After five or six kilometers, it connects with the same road you drove up today.”
    Stephen felt a crawly contraction of flesh below the waist. He was twenty-nine, and Mario had to be over sixty, but Mario always managed to make him feel like a fussy old professor being goaded into something risky.
    A few hours ago, he had been skittish at the sight of an empty police jeep parked in the little village surrounding the old Spanish mission, uncomfortable just knowing that a friend of his possessed these treasures. Now Mario wanted him to…well, steal them. And smuggle them out of the country.
    Back home, most of Stephen’s friends were not fellow teachers from the middle school, but other amateur paleographers who shared his obsession with archaic texts. He would have gladly helped send someone to jail for doing what Mario had just asked of him.
    Sweat flooded down from his scalp in spite of the dry air . His dense, dark brown beard itched like crazy.
    “If you’re so determined not to hand them over,” he said, “then why not just stash them somewhere?”
    Mario shook his head.