Aaron Elkins - Gideon Oliver 05 - Curses! Read online

  She sat at the head of a huge, grim table of sixteenth-century Spanish design, her neatly typed notes before her. Surrounding the table were ten massive chairs of mahogany and dark, stiffened Leather, presumably also meant to evoke the Spanish past, but looking like nothing so much as 1930s-style electric chairs. All were filled, one by Dr. Garrison, eight by the members of the Tlaloc crew, and one by the formidable Dr. Armando Villanueva, deputy director of the Institute Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, who had arrived unannounced from Mexico City only two hours before for the express purpose of being present at Dr. Garrison's translation. That, and to exercise the Institute's prerogative of stringent review.

  This latter function had been made clear at dinner by the portly, outspoken Dr. Villanueva himself. He had stood up at the head of the table and bluntly explained that in his private opinion Horizon had permanently compromised itself in 1982, that he believed it should not have been permitted to reopen the excavation, and that he had articulated these views with great vigor but had been overruled. That being as it was, he bore no grudge but would of course be obliged to see to it that the strictest standards were maintained. To this end, they could expect close scrutiny from him as to signs of irregularity.

  After the meal, talking to Gideon and Abe, he had made an attempt at bluff cordiality. “Well,” he said, “how do things go at Tlaloc? Is there anything interesting to report?"

  Abe and Gideon exchanged a quick, mutually understood glance: This was not the best of all possible times to mention the clandestine digging that had been going on under the Temple of the Owls.

  "Don't look at me,” Gideon had said. “I just got here."

  "Interesting?” Abe had said blandly. “No, no, nothing interesting; all very routine."

  Now, with everyone gathered in the Mayaland's reading room over coffee and dessert, Dr. Garrison consumed the last of her banana ice cream and glanced austerely at her buzzing audience, waiting for their undivided attention.

  Gideon took the opportunity to look them over too. One of them, he was almost sure, had been up nights digging under the Temple of the Owls, searching for—what? And why?

  Sitting directly opposite him was Leo Rose, as rumply and cheerful as ever. A few damp, four-color brochures stuck out of a pocket as usual, ready to be handed out at a moment's notice. Leo ran a land-development firm that seemed to specialize in unlikely endeavors. Currently they were selling lots on the desolate rim of the Salton Sea. ("Desert Shores Flexivillas!” blared the pamphlet he had already pressed genially on Gideon. “Opulent Time-share Haciendas on the California Riviera!") The last time, Gideon remembered, it had been a luxury golf resort on the outskirts of Tijuana.

  Leo noticed Gideon looking at him and raised his cup. "Bueno-bueno," he mouthed. It was a joke from the earlier dig. Leo had shown a marvelous ability to get along in Mexico with no communication skills beyond a spirited bueno-bueno, a lively arsenal of hand gestures, and a great, honking laugh that first alarmed then delighted the tiny Yucatecans.

  Between Leo and Gideon, at the far end of the table from Dr. Garrison, was Harvey Feiffer, Gideon's old student, who had left anthropology for “communication systems technology engineering” a few months after the previous dig. Fearsome and incomprehensible as this field was to Gideon, it had been the right move for Harvey, who had finally found his niche.

  So he had explained, bragging understandably to his ex-professor when they had chatted before dinner, and Gideon had seen no reason to think otherwise. Toupeed now, and running to fat, the thirty-one-year-old Harvey had apparently leaped willingly into a precocious middle age. He was married, with one child and another on the way; he had just bought a house in an upper-middle-level-executive suburb; and he was now “in the marketing end of things,” soon to be promoted to corporate division head in the Atlanta company he worked for. And that wasn't all, Harvey puffed happily. In fourteen more months he would have worked for CompuServe for five years, at which time his contributions to the retirement plan would be vested, and his stock-option purchases automatically matched, dollar for dollar, which would provide a very tidy nest egg when he retired in 2017.

  But his hard-driving new style had taken a toll, he confessed to Gideon. Several months before, he'd gone to his doctor complaining of chronic stomach pains. A pair of incipient ulcers had been diagnosed, and he had been ordered to get away from things, to take a few weeks off from work and family pressures. Luckily, the opportunity to take part in the dig had come along at just the right time.

  On Leo's other side were Preston and Emma Byers. Preston was an extraordinarily handsome man, with limpid blue eyes and a profile as chiseled and handsome as Paul Newman's. Naturally, Gideon had taken an immediate dislike to him, but it had been hard to maintain. Preston was the most self-effacing of men, mild, retiring, and sweet-natured, with a perpetual expression of gentle perplexity on his classic features; an unprofound, amiably dull man who seldom spoke unless spoken to.

  At fifty, he had changed little. His attractively graying hair had receded a bit in front, but he had made up for this by letting it grow a little longer in back; not in a wild sort of way, of course, but in an unobtrusive little fill that fell neatly over his collar. He was a onetime distributor of commercial kitchen equipment who had answered a start-your-own-business advertisement in a trade magazine many years before and somehow wound up building a modest fortune from a chain of fast-food restaurants in the Midwest. (Burger Bopper? Wiener Beaner? Gideon could never remember.)

  Gideon had little doubt that the easygoing Preston owed his business success to the hard-driving woman beside him. Worthy had once referred to them as a Beauty-and-the-Beast marriage in reverse, and with reason; Emma was as homely as Preston was good-looking. Muscular, coarse-haired, red-faced, and plain, she used no make up or jewelry, but made up for her lack of bodily adornment by wearing clothes as up-to-the-minute as a mannequin's. Today she had on a buttery yellow outfit of baggy pants and loose overshirt with buttons in the back, circled at the waist by a wide, drooping belt of red leather.

  The effect was surely not what she intended. Emma and her outfits never seemed to go together. They were out of joint, vaguely wrong, even a little unsettling, like a cowboy wearing glasses.

  And, finally, sitting on Julie's other side, near Abe, there was Worthy Partridge. Alone among the coffee drinkers, he was having tea, and engaged at the moment in neatly lifting a teabag from the cup, wrapping the string around it to extract the last of the liquid, and placing the bag in a flip-top receptacle he carried with him for the purpose. The saucer of lime wedges that had come with the tea was contemptuously ignored.

  Worthy claimed he drank tea because it helped ease the chronic constipation that afflicted him. Worthy was the only American he knew—the only one he had ever heard of—who managed to remain constipated when he came to Mexico.

  Leo, Harvey, Preston, Emma, Worthy. Which of them had been up nights excavating the stairwell? He couldn't realistically imagine any of them doing it. What conceivable reason could they have? They had already helped dig it out with their own hands once. Of course they all knew about Abe's idea that there might be another hidden room, but surely they understood that the notion was more sizzle than substance, that the likelihood was slim, and the chance of another treasure even slimmer. Or did they? And even if they did, might they not think that even a slim chance at a million-dollar treasure was worth a few nights’ lost sleep?

  Either way, it didn't much matter anymore. Abe had engaged guards to watch over the site at night, and the official stairwell excavation was about to reopen. There would be no more secret digging. Still, Gideon would dearly have liked to know what had been going on.

  He turned in his chair and gave his attention to Dr. Garrison, who had just cleared her throat meaningfully.

  "Copies are now being made for each of you,” she said, “but I think we should begin without waiting further. Dr. Villanueva and I must leave for Mexico City in less than an hour. An ear
ly-morning press conference has been scheduled."

  She straightened her pince-nez and folded her hands before her on the table. “I have rendered this material in as exact and literal a manner as possible, leaving interpretation to others,” she explained. “The polysynthetic Mayan characteristic of reliance on verbal nouns has necessarily been transformed into our own grammar. Beyond that, I have tried to be consistent with the historical conventions that have applied to previous works. I can assure you,” she added unnecessarily, “that I have used no poetic license."

  She began to read aloud with a velvety Georgia accent curiously at odds with her precise diction.

  "'The day Katun Thirteen Ahau,'” she intoned. “ Itzamna, Itzamtzab is his face during its reign.’”

  Julie leaned over to Gideon and whispered: “This is a translation?"

  Gideon spread his hands but said nothing. Explaining the Mayan system of dating would be hard enough with a couple of hours at his disposal. There wasn't much sense in trying to do it in an aside.

  Dr. Garrison continued. “'Those who come here to this place Tlaloc to disturb our bones and the dust of our bodies, let them know that many punishments will come to them. These are the punishments that will come to them.

  "'First, the bloodsucking kinkajou will come freely among them.

  "'Second, the darkness will be sundered and turned to light, and the terrible voices of the gods will be heard in the air, and there will be a mighty pummeling of the soul so that the spirit languishes and faints. Their treasures will be lost and their batabobs and ahlelobs will desert them...’”

  The pince-nez were plucked off. “I'm afraid I have no wholly unambiguous referents for batabobs and ahlelobs in this context."

  "The batabob was the governor of the area, the big chief,” Abe said promptly. “The ahlelob, I think, was the assistant chief."

  She looked at him. So did Gideon, to whom it came as a surprise that Abe knew something about the Mayan language. No, not a surprise; an item of interest, maybe. Gideon had been astonished too many times by the range of his knowledge to be surprised anymore.

  Under Dr. Garrison's uncompromising stare Abe smiled and shrugged modestly. “I guess I read it somewhere?"

  "Thank you.” With her index finger she found her place again.

  "Maybe we can get him to play Trivial Pursuit with us,” Julie whispered to Gideon.

  "Not with me,” Gideon muttered back.

  "'Third, the one called Tucumbalam will turn their entrails to fire and bloody flux.’”

  This caused Worthy to grimace and push the rest of his ice cream away.

  "'Fourth, the one called Xecotcavach will pierce their skulls so that their brains spill onto the earth.’”

  "Yuck, I'm grossing out,” Leo announced, shoveling ice cream into his mouth.

  Emma leaned stiffly toward him, her face intense. “Sh!” she whispered sharply. “This isn't a joke!"

  Gideon frowned. Dim memories stirred. Wasn't it Emma who had belonged to some oddball group dedicated to the otherworldly theories of Von Daniken, or Velikovsky, or someone like that? Yes, it was, he recalled. Once she had cornered him into a long, dippy discussion of how it was that a carved, five-thousand-year-old Japanese Dogu figure wore what could only have been an astronaut's helmet and goggles. ("And, as you must know, Dr. Oliver, goggles hadn't even been invented in the Stone Age!") He had spent much of his subsequent time in Yucatan trying to stay out of her way without offending her.

  Leo mimed a good-natured apology and quieted.

  Dr. Garrison had paused coolly at the interruption. Now she continued the litany of calamity.

  "'Fifth, the beast that turns men to stone will come among them from the Underworld.

  "'And all this will be only the beginning of their vexation by the devil, for the Lords of Xibalba will come and gouge out their eyes, and cut off their heads, and grind and crumble their nerves and their bones, and torment them until they die and are no more.

  "Only thus will Vucub-Came be satisfied, and Holom-Tucur, who has a head but no body, and Balam-Quitze, and the Lord Hun-Hunahpu, and Gekaquch, and the Lords Zibakihay and Ahquehay, and the Lords..."

  "Do you suppose this goes on much longer?” Julie whispered.

  "I don't think so,” Gideon said. “It's only one page long."

  Balam-Arab, and Mahucatah, and even Ah Puch, who never tires.’”

  "Mayan god of death,” Gideon murmured knowledgeably, impressing Julie with another bit of arcana pulled from who knew where.

  "'And when all this is done and the light turns to darkness for all time, there will be terrible mourning and crying..."

  Dr. Garrison paused, letting the somber words hang on the air. By now the lush, rhythmic Georgia accent seemed to suit them. “Mohh-nin'...and crahh-in'..."

  "'For it will be,'” she concluded mellowly, watching her audience and not the paper, “'the end of the cigar.’”

  "The end of the cigar,” she repeated, cutting off any possible incipient ripple of laughter, “is a Mayan metaphor for closure, for the end of life."

  She removed her pince-nez and with her thumb and forefinger slowly rubbed the indentations in the bridge of her nose. “For the end,” she said, “of everything."

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Chapter 8

  * * * *

  Humming to himself, beginning to relax, even enjoying the feel of the sweat pooling at the small of his back, Gideon snipped with the pruning shears here, there, tugged gently at a sturdy brown root, and sat back on his heels to study the situation a little more.

  It was good to be working with his hands again, good to have a new skeleton to himself. (He had been guiltily relieved when Harvey somewhat shamefacedly announced his preference for nonskeletal work this time.) He snipped again, tugged again, and with an exclamation of satisfaction freed a gnarled three-inch root segment and tossed it through the doorway behind him. He laid the shears down next to the machete.

  Machetes and pruning shears were hardly tools of the trade, but in the scrubby, stubborn jungles of Yucatan you couldn't get very far without them. Vines and roots were everywhere, flourishing and intrusive, and every archaeologist of the Maya had had the frustrating experience of working for days to free something, then becoming preoccupied with something else for a week or two, and returning to the original stela or carving to find it more deeply embedded in vegetation than before. All the major sites employed teams of machete-wielding workmen to chop back the jungle continually. Without them the long-lost cities would be engulfed again in a few seasons—as indeed many of them had been.

  The lichen-stained skeleton in the entryway of the Priest's House had been there a lot longer than a season or two; longer than a century or two. The dead gray color of the bone, the dry, crumbly edges, the absence of even a dehydrated shred of tendon or ligament all suggested three to four hundred years. The vegetation was a clue to time too. Intrusive as it was, it couldn't have taken less than three centuries to choke the vestibule the way it had. There were fungous gray plants hanging from the roof—where you could see the roof—pulpy mosses oozing from the mortar of the stone walls, tightly packed trunks and roots and vines everywhere, springing from the inch or two of black soil and rotting vegetable matter that had blown in over the centuries, a grain or two at a time, to cling anywhere it could.

  And the skeleton had surely been there longer than the vegetation. That was obvious from the way the roots of some of the oldest plants, gnarled, bulbous, woody monsters with warped and blackened leaves, twined around and through the bones. Sometimes they sprang from the bones. Wormlike tendrils crawled from the eye sockets and the nasal cavity, from the shoulder joints and the vertebral foramina; even from the braincase, erupting in a thick, ugly snarl from the foramen magnum, the hole at the base of the skull through which the spine joins the brain. The leisurely violence of their grip had slowly splintered many of the bones and twisted the skeleton into grotesque contortions. The pelvis was c
racked and turned backward, the skull almost upside down.

  He had used the machete to chop some elbow room for himself, but for the last two and a half hours he'd been working more delicately, with shears, knife, and dental pick. Now, although he still had a long way to go, he'd pruned enough to have his first close look.

  The skeleton was on its left side, curled in the fetal position. This was archaeology's most commonly encountered burial position—it required the smallest hole—but this body hadn't been buried. It lay on the stone floor just inside the entryway, squarely blocking it. He could see a few scattered jade beads beneath it, and near one forearm was a thin, crumpled metal bracelet. The clothing had long since rotted away.

  It was a male this time; Harvey would certainly have pointed out the overhanging brow ridge, the sturdy mastoid processes, and the rectangular orbits of the skull. And through a net of straw-colored root tendrils, much of the pelvis could be seen. That too was distinctively masculine. Gideon didn't have to apply the anthropologist's literal rule of thumb for the greater sciatic notch—(stick your thumb in it; if there's room to wiggle it, it's female; if not, it's male)—to see that there was hardly room for a pinky, let alone a thumb. Besides, a disc of obsidian gleamed darkly in the dark tangle beneath the skull, and it was the stern Bishop Landa himself who had noted disapprovingly that “the men, and not the women, wear mirrors in their hair."

  It seemed to be a man of middle age. Too early yet to come up with anything precise, but the cranial sutures were almost obliterated except for a few spots on the Iambdoid, so he had probably been in his forties anyway, an estimate supported by the carious, deeply worn brown teeth. (The Maya had lived on stone-ground corn—which meant that they consumed a lot of corn-ground stone as well—and the result was molars that were often eroded to raw little stumps by the time they were thirty. Anyone who thought that dental cavities had come in with refined sugar had never seen an early American Indian skull.)