Aaron Elkins - Gideon Oliver 05 - Curses! Page 3

  "It's fantastic,” he said sincerely. “I was dead wrong. Congratulations."

  Under its sheen of sweat, Howard's beefy, dissipated face was deeply flushed. He wiped perspiration from his upper lip with the tip of an old paisley bandanna tied around his throat and laughed.

  Howard Bennett laughed easily and often. His loose, jovial personality was an asset for his one-of-a-kind vocation: directing excavations manned by well-heeled amateurs as keen on vacationing as on digging. After a day at the site he was always game for an evening at the nearby Club Med or even a four-hour round trip to Merida, to the Maya Excelsior Bar, or La Discotheque, or the Boccacio 2000. At the Maya Excelsior, in fact, he was a Saturday-night fixture; he sat in with the small band, playing jazz clarinet, at which he was extraordinarily proficient.

  He had had a brief university career; three years at three different institutions. He'd been a lackluster teacher, a less-than-responsible faculty member, and an indifferent researcher. But his formidable field methodology put him in demand as an excavation supervisor, and he was, to Gideon's knowledge, the only person who did this sort of thing for a living. He'd been on Latin American digs for over ten years now, the last two at Tlaloc. In that time he'd been back to the United States only twice, to renew his passport and visas. For more than a decade he had lived a gypsylike existence in Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize.

  Gideon had briefly worked with him three years before, at a Mixtec site in Oaxaca, and had been worried about him then. Now it was worse. Howard's centerless, hard-living existence was showing: He was putting on weight, his features were getting blurry, and he was now finishing off a couple of beers at lunch in addition to his evening drinking. And he wasn't very interested in talking about archaeology with Gideon. His conversation ranged from griping about how miserably archaeologists were paid to frank envy of the way some of the rich amateurs could afford to live. For Howard, ten years of rubbing shoulders with high-living stockbrokers and businessmen had not been salutary. He was drinking more, deteriorating mentally and physically, and drifting deeper into professional obscurity.

  At least he had been, until this startling find. He grinned at Gideon, blond eyebrows beetling. “What does it remind you of?"

  "Palenque,” Gideon said quietly.

  "Yeah,” Howard breathed. “Palenque!"

  It would make anyone think of Palenque, the elegant ruin three hundred miles to the south in the even denser jungles of Chiapas. There, in 1952, in the staircase of a somewhat larger pyramid under a somewhat larger temple, Alberto Ruz Lhuillier had also found a room sealed behind a false wall, also containing a stone chest, much bigger than this one, with a finely carved lid. Inside had been one of the great finds of Meso-American archaeology. It was the skeleton of the ruler known as Pacal, lying regally on his back, swathed in the rich trappings of a Mayan lord: necklace laid upon necklace, enormous earrings, funerary mask, and diadem, all of polished jade; intricately carved rings on all ten fingers; a great pear-shaped pearl; a jade bead delicately placed between his teeth as food for his journey; a jade statue of the sun god at his feet to accompany him.

  Howard stared hungrily at the chest. “What do you think is in it?” he asked Gideon and laughed again. His stiff, straw-blond hair was dark with sweat, as furrowed as if he'd been swimming. Gideon didn't like the feverish-looking red patches on his cheeks, or his vaguely reckless manner.

  "Not much; the interior dimensions can't be more than two by two,” Gideon said reasonably, but Howard's excitement was practically crackling in the dank air, beginning to get to him. He felt the beginning of an ache at his temples and made himself relax his knotted jaw muscles. “If it's another royal burial I'm afraid they've scrunched him up a little to fit him in."

  It was meant to ease the atmosphere. Harvey laughed dutifully, and a few of the crew members snickered, but Howard brayed; a nasal yawp that made the others glance uncomfortably at each other.

  "You know what I'm going to do?” he said abruptly. “I'm going to get the lid up. Right now.” He rubbed his hands together mirthfully while sweat dripped from his chin. He turned to the laborer and spoke tersely in Spanish.

  "Avelino, I want a tripod with a hand winch rigged up. And some bracing poles. Go tell the others."

  Gideon frowned. This was a tricky operation, better left until the next day when preparations could be more calmly made. He began to say something but changed his mind. No director liked having his authority contested in public, and the leadership of the dig belonged in Howard's hands. Gideon was only there for a few weeks, strictly to analyze the skeletal material. Besides, it was always possible that Howard knew what he was doing.

  For the moment it seemed that he did. His directions were concise and accurate, and the tiny Mayan workmen were used to lifting heavy things in cramped spaces. Working efficiently, they spoke quietly to each other in their soft, rustly language. In twenty minutes they had one edge of the lid raised three or four inches, enough to force several wooden rods under it to prop it up.

  Howard jumped forward as soon as they were in place, his flashlight already flicked on. He knelt in front of the chest like a man before an altar and shone the light into the narrow opening, leaning forward to get his eyes up against the crevice. For long seconds there was no sound other than the clinking of the metal flashlight barrel against the rim of the chest as he moved it along.

  He peered into the chest without saying anything, forearms braced against the rim, forehead leaning on them. The only sound now was an erratic flutter above their heads, like spattering fat: insects igniting against the lights. Nobody in the crew spoke, nobody moved. If they were like Gideon they weren't even breathing. Howard's back was to them, his soft, slabby shoulders buttery with sweat. He looked, thought Gideon, as if he were well on the way to melting into a greasy puddle at the foot of the chest, like something out of H. P. Lovecraft.

  "Jesus Christ,” he said; tight-voiced and expressionless. “Gideon, look at this."

  Swallowing hard, his neck aching with anticipation, Gideon moved forward, not sure whether Howard was looking at the find of the century or the letdown of his life. When he stepped into the recess, stalagmites crunched underneath him, a startlingly crisp sensation in the mucky heat. He dropped to one knee beside Howard while the others watched avidly. Howard shone the light into the chest for him.

  Gideon leaned intently forward, profoundly grateful for his life. What other occupation offered moments like this?

  Once he got used to the bobbing shadows from Howard's trembling flashlight his reaction was piercing disappointment. There was nothing in the chest but a few dusty, common objects like hundreds of other objects from dozens of other digs: a few jade beads in a heap; a pair of ear ornaments made from scallop shells; two painted plates; and two slim, rectangular, neatly folded bundles of bark lying side by side, also daubed with paint. They all had value from a scholarly point of view, but they were definitely not the find of the century. Why in the world had the Maya gone to such elaborate trouble to hide and preserve this homely junk?

  But Gideon was a physical anthropologist; bones were his specialty, not artifacts. Howard was an archaeologist, and he knew better. The flashlight jerked in his hand.

  "A codex!” he whispered thickly.

  Gideon looked again and of course they weren't simple bundles of bark at all. Now he could see the glyphs across the tops of the leaves and the comicstrip—like panels with their gaudy drawings as the beam from Howard's flashlight picked them out. It was a Mayan codex, a pre-Conquest Mayan “book,” lying on its spine, opened in the middle so the two halves lay flat.

  His lips parted for speech, but he couldn't think of anything to say. Maybe it was the find of the century after all. At least in Mayan archaeology.

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  Chapter 4

  * * * *

  Literally of the century. There were only three other Mayan codices in existence, and the last one had been found in 1860. All of them
were owned by state libraries—in Dresden, Madrid, and Paris—and none were yet completely translated. Assuming that the subject matter of this one was like the others', the fund of knowledge about Mayan ceremony, religion, and language had just been increased by a whopping thirty-three-and-a-third percent.

  Howard invited the rest of the crew into the recess to have a look. Whether more than one or two had any idea of the significance of what they saw was doubtful, but they peered through the slit into the stone chest in respectful silence, then backed off a few steps to leave the two anthropologists to their professional talk.

  "God, do you know what that must be worth?" Howard exclaimed with a rumble of laughter.

  A telling comment, but not quite up to professional standards; not in Gideon's view. Its market value was irrelevant; the codex was the property of the Republic of Mexico and properly so. It would never be sold.

  "It could be the most significant Mayan find since Palenque,” Gideon said stuffily, as much for the crew's benefit as Howard's.

  It didn't do much to enlighten Howard. “I could get you two million bucks for that tomorrow,” he said. “Easy."

  He laughed again and stood up. “Let's get on with it.” He turned to give instructions to the foreman on completing the delicate process of levering up the lid and getting it off without damaging the intricate inscriptions.

  Gideon retreated to an unoccupied corner of the landing and watched quietly, occasionally wiping the sweat from his eyes. He was no expert in this kind of work, which had more in common with engineering than with anthropology.

  Neither was Howard, it turned out. As he and the laborers grunted, pouring sweat, to wedge more poles under the lid, something went wrong. One of the poles was tapped too sharply with a sledgehammer and popped out like a cork to clatter on the floor. The great lid teetered to the right, swayed on its ropes like a colossal pendulum while the workers fought to balance it, and then, with agonizing slowness, tipped and went grinding ponderously over the rim of the chest with a sound like that of the last terrible block sliding into place at the end of Aida. It smashed into the wall, one of its richly carved corners crumbling away. That was bad enough, but on its way it also bumped against one of the props that had been erected as shoring while the passageway was dug out.

  The prop was knocked off its footing, and for a breathless moment it hung askew, suspended from the crossbeam above it. Then the crossbeam groaned and came down, and it seemed as if half the vaulted ceiling followed with a roar and a billow of sour, choking dust. There were frightened shouts, but when the coughing stopped they found, amazingly enough, that none of the big, wedge-shaped stone blocks had hit anybody, although everyone had been showered with the rubble that the ancient Maya had used to fill their interior walls. Gideon came out of it with another dent in his straw hat and a scrape on the back of his hand. One of the crew had broken his watch; another had chipped a tooth somehow. Almost everyone was coughing and spitting.

  While Gideon was still checking to make sure they were all right, Howard hissed sharply; a sigh of relief.

  "It's okay,” he called shakily, meaning the codex.

  It had been shielded by the lid, which still lay across the chest at an angle. Only Gideon seemed to notice that the wonderful bas-reliefs had been chipped by falling rock in four or five places. Add those to the broken corner, and a gloriously preserved find was now just another piece of moldering Mayan art. And it was going to get worse if Howard persisted. But surely he would quit now and sit down to do some planning.

  But no. “All-right,” he said in a way that told Gideon he was just getting started. “All right now."

  He spat dirt from his mouth, leaned over the chest, and shoved his sleek arm under the lid as far as he could, grimacing with the effort. But he could only get it in up to his elbow, and with a grunt of frustration he jerked it out. He got to his feet and stared sullenly at the lid, as if it were keeping him from the codex out of stubborn perversity. Two angry-looking welts from the rough stone ran down his forearm, slowly oozing blood. Apparently he hadn't noticed.

  "I'm going to need everyone's help,” he said. “Preston, Gideon, Leo, you three—"

  Gideon decided there had to be a confrontation, like it or not. “Howard—” He had to stop to wipe the dust from his lips with the back of his hand. Perspiration had turned it to a gritty mud. “I think we'd better stop right now and get everyone out of here. This place is going to need more shoring up."

  Howard turned on him. “Are you out of your mind? Just leave the codex?"

  "It'll wait. Somebody's going to get killed if we stay here."

  And that was only part of it. There was the material itself. Howard had already mutilated the magnificent lid, and now he was trying to haul out the codex with all the delicacy of a nineteenth-century grave robber. You didn't simply reach in with sweaty fingers and grab a precious thing like that. Before the contents of the chest were touched they had to be recorded, photographed, drawn in situ. And the codex had to be studied to see what its state of preservation was before it was removed and exposed to the outside air. Howard knew all that, damn him. He was letting his excitement get the better of him.

  For a moment the director glared at him. Then it was all sweet, slippery reasonableness. “Now, Gideon, don't get melodramatic. Nobody's going to get killed. Don't you think I know what I'm doing?"

  Gideon was silent.

  "We can have it out in fifteen minutes if everybody cooperates.” Howard's voice edged upward. “We can't just leave it here unprotected!"

  "We can get guards,” Gideon said.

  As Howard opened his mouth to answer, a beam let out a sharp, popping crack somewhere above them, and dirt showered from the ceiling onto the top steps. A few pebbles skittered down the stairs toward them.

  "Uh, I think Gideon's right,” Leo Rose said tentatively. Leo had been a building contractor at one time, and knew about these things. “This whole thing could come down any minute.” A few others murmured agreement.

  "Guards?” Howard said with a husky chuckle; he was going to try treating it as a joke. “Now just where in the hell are we supposed to get guards we can trust by tonight?"

  "Tonight we can guard it ourselves,” Gideon said. “We can take turns.” He put what he hoped was an implacable expression on his face. The quicker this was over, the better; he just wanted everybody out.

  Howard continued to smile at him, but in his cheek a sinew popped. And all at once, he threw in the towel.

  "All right, fine,” he said genially, as if the whole thing struck him as a silly quibble he could afford to be magnanimous about. “Let's go, everyone."

  Once outside, he reestablished his authority. “We'll take turns standing guard all night; four-hour shifts, two people per team, men only."

  "Why only men?” one of the three women demanded. Howard ignored her. “I'll take the first shift. Worthy, you take it with me."

  "Me?” Worthy Partridge was a prunish, middle-aged writer of children's stories. “I'm afraid I know very little about standing guard."

  "What is there to know? All right, now—” He stopped, scowling and suspicious. Avelino Canul, the Mayan foreman, was hovering nearby, paying close attention.

  "What do you want, Avelino?” Howard asked in brusque Spanish. “You can go home now. You too, Nas. All of you."

  Respectfully the foreman explained that they were waiting for their pay. It was Friday.

  Muttering and impatient, Howard patted the rear pockets of his tan shorts. “Hell, I forgot all about it,” he said, slipping into English. “I left my wallet at the hotel."

  "We should wait until Monday?” Avelino asked hopefully. This was not the first time it had happened, and Howard had made a practice of giving them a little something extra for the inconvenience. By Mayan wage standards, it was considerably more than a little something.

  Howard nodded curtly and waited for them to go. “Now, the rest of you go on back and get some dinner. Gideon, yo
u and Leo take the next shift. Be back at—what time is it now, anyway?"

  "A little after five,” Worthy told him.

  "Okay, be back at nine. Worthy and Joe, you're on at one to four. Then you and me, Preston, from four to eight.” He paused and looked accommodatingly at Gideon. “How's that? Does that meet with your approval?"

  Gideon hesitated. He would have been happier taking the first shift himself; Howard could use some time to settle down. And Worthy wouldn't have been his first choice as a partner. But he'd already won the big battle, and he didn't feel like having another argument. Besides, the chances of temple robbers materializing in the next four hours to steal a codex that had been discovered less than two hours ago were remote, to say the least.

  "Okay,” he said. “We'll see you at nine."

  * * * *

  "Something's wrong here,” blurted Leo, not normally the most intuitive of men.

  It was ten to nine. They had returned to the site under a sultry, darkening sky to find the work shed empty, Howard and Worthy nowhere to be seen. On the work table was the empty, cracked holster of the old .32 caliber revolver that Howard kept at the site as protection against bandidos. The lights were on, the generator humming. An opened but untouched bottle of Coca-Cola rested on the floor near a chair.

  "They're probably just looking around,” Gideon said. “That's all."

  "Yeah, sure, that figures."

  All the same they glanced uneasily at each other and began walking quickly across the plaza toward the temple. They had reached the foot of the pyramid when they heard scraping noises above them and looked up into the half-darkness to see Worthy floundering sideways down the steps.

  "Gideon!” he called. “Leo! My God!"

  He came perilously close to slipping on the uneven stones, righted himself after some gawky flapping with his long arms, and continued coming down with more care. “My God,” Gideon heard him murmur again. “Oh, dear Lord."