Curses! (11 page)

"Ah, come on. Coming up with ideas isn't any fun. I'd rather criticize yours."

On the veranda a fluid tenor had joined the guitarist; a sweet, soft version of “El Venadito” floated up to them. They reached across to clasp hands and slowly rocked, listening to the old folk song.

Gideon sighed, took a long, sleepy stretch, and stood up. “Ready for bed?"

"Whew, again? The tropics really agree with you, don't they?"

"I was thinking,” he said, “of going to sleep.” He held out his hand to lift her out of her chair, and pulled her into his arms. She rubbed her forehead against his cheek and slid her hands slowly up and down his back.

"On the other hand,” he said, “I suppose I could be coaxed."

Julie smiled at him. “Why don't we finish our brandies and then see how we feel? Or if you're still awake."

"Good thinking."

Inside the room, they pulled the louvered balcony doors shut behind them, and Gideon crossed to the front door to flick on the light and start the slow ceiling fan they liked to have on when they slept. Not for the breeze, which was nil, but the lazy tropical ambience.

"Is that something you dropped?” Julie said, pointing toward his feet.

He looked down to see a white sheet of paper folded into quarters on the red-tiled floor. “No, someone must have slipped it under the door."

The brief message was centered on the page.

—The Gods of Tlaloc

After he had stared at it for a few seconds Julie took it from his hand and read it. “I don't...is this supposed to be funny?"

"I don't know. Personally, I thought the bloodsucking coatimundi had more going for it."

"Do you think it's really a threat? A
death
threat?” Gideon shook his head slowly back and forth. “I just—Christ, what am I thinking of!” He flung the door open and leaped out into the hallway.

But no one was there, of course. The tiled hallway gleamed emptily at them, peaceful and benign, and the potted plants weren't big enough for anyone to hide behind. When he came back into the room, Julie's face was anxious.

"Hey,” he said softly, putting his arms around her again and pulling her close, rocking slowly back and forth with her. “Hey, there isn't anything to worry about, believe me. Really."

She lifted her head from his shoulder to throw him a mute, skeptical look.

"No, honestly,” he said. “Threatening letters are just so much bluster. No one takes them seriously. I certainly don't, and with all the forensic work I do, I get a lot of these things."

She looked at him again, this time with surprise. “You do?"

"Sure, all the time."

Well, twice. Once he'd been scheduled to testify that the skeleton of a Mafia figure found in Lake Michigan showed signs of strangulation. The other time had been when he was going to give evidence on the identification of a dope racketeer whose face and fingerprints had been scraped off before he'd been dumped in the desert near Las Vegas. Both times he'd gotten anonymous letters explaining in repellent detail just what would happen to him if he showed up in court.

"And they never amount to anything?” Julie asked, not looking overly convinced. “Nope, never."

Well, once. The night after his testimony in the Mafia murder someone had fired two shots through the door of his room in the Holiday Inn, but he hadn't been there at the time. It was only Gideon's second case for the FBI, and he had been thrilled.

"What about the time someone mailed you a letter bomb?” Julie said. “What about the time someone set that monstrous dog on you? On us, rather. How about—"

"We're talking about threatening letters,” he said sensibly. “People who write threatening letters don't follow through. Never.” Or was he laying it on too thick? “Well, almost never."

She gazed at him doubtfully.

"It's an accepted fact,” he told her. No question about it."

It wasn't that he was feeling especially brave, but how could anyone get very excited about this silly note? The two he'd received in the past had been poisonous; explicit enough to bring on a sweat just from the reading. This one was so...quaint, so juvenile.
This is not a joke. The Gods of Tlaloc.
Almost certainly a joke was just what it was, probably by the same person who had put the coat in the work shed.

Besides, what he had told Julie was true. People who wanted to kill you, killed you. They didn't write you letters about it.

He grinned at her. “Come on, Julie. Would I lie?"

She was not reassured. “Why,” she wondered, addressing a window over his shoulder, “do these things happen to him? They don't happen to other people. They only happen when he's around. Curses, death threats..."

"It didn't used to happen to me. I don't do it on purpose."

"I know,” she said and managed a wry smile. “It's some kind of gift. My theory is that you give off some kind of electrical field that attracts weirdness. Oh, Gideon!..."

She hugged him tightly, then stepped back. “What are you going to do?"

"I don't know. I suppose the police ought to be told. I'll do it tomorrow."

"Tomorrow?"
She looked at him disbelievingly.

"Julie, we're in the middle of nowhere. The nearest cops who know what they're doing are the state police in Merida. Anyhow, there isn't any hurry. The note says to leave Yucatan or I'll die, right? Obviously, it can't mean for me to leave right now, this minute. How could I? I'm sure I've got a few days. It's only logical."

"Yes, but I don't think you can assume whoever wrote this is logical."

There he agreed with her. “Tell you what. Let's wait until the morning anyway. We'll talk to Abe about it at breakfast and take it from there."

She started to disagree, then nodded and began to take off her watch. “Okay, you're right. I'm probably making a mountain out of a molehill."

"Note?” Abe said, his eyebrows sliding up.

He reached for it over his breakfast plate of
frutas frescas
—sliced papaya, pineapple, and watermelon, along with an unpeeled little banana; and of course a few lime wedges. He patted first one pocket of his shirt, then the other, then his hip pockets.

"They're hanging around your neck,” Gideon offered delicately.

"I know, I know.” He propped his reading glasses on the end of his nose. “Of course around my neck. Where else should they be?"

He studied the sheet for a long time. “I don't like it,” he said at last.

"I'm not too wild about it myself,” Gideon said.

Abe began to unpeel the banana. “I'll tell you what. I have to go into Merida this afternoon anyway, to the university library. I'll stop at the state police and give them this. We'll see what they have to say."

That was fine with Gideon, who began to attend to his scrambled eggs and ham.

Julie, who hadn't gotten used to the muddy brown eggs of Yucatan ("It's because of what they feed the chickens,” Worthy had told her darkly), was toying with her toast and coffee. “Abe, it has to be somebody from the crew, doesn't it?"

"I'm sorry to say so, but it looks like it. Who else even knows Gideon is here? Who else knows about the curse?"

"It was in the papers,” Gideon pointed out. “Garrison was on her way to a press conference in Mexico City, remember?"

"Yesterday morning. You think somebody read about it in the newspapers and came running to Yucatan the same day to slip a note under your door? No, I'm afraid Julie's right."

Gideon sighed and slid his plate away. “I suppose so.” He glanced at a table across the room where a few of the staff sat. Harvey gave him a cheerful wave. Preston smiled and nodded his leonine, empty head. “Which doesn't make me terrifically happy. But I still think it's just another dumb joke. Like the coati."

"And the digging that was going on? That was also a joke, you think?"

Gideon shook his head. He didn't know.

"What do you think, Abe?” Julie asked.

"Mm,” Abe said. He was looking carefully at the note again. “'Gideon Oliver, leave Yucatan or you will die,'” he read aloud slowly. “'This is not a joke. The Gods of Tlaloc.'” He looked sharply up at them. “Does this seem familiar to anybody else, or just to me?"

"Not to me,” Julie said.

But Gideon hesitated. When he'd first read it there had been a momentary glimmer of recognition, a feeling that he'd seen it before. He'd discounted it as a random association; it was not the world's most original death threat.

"I don't think so, Abe,” he said.

"Yeah,” Abe said after another moment of peering at it. “I'm probably imagining it.” He put a hand on Gideon's forearm. “Listen, Gideon, I'm sure you're right, it's just a joke, but all the same you'll be careful, yes? Why take chances?"

"I'll be careful, Abe."

Abe nodded and wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Good.” He took a long last look at the letter, holding the glasses to his temples with his hands.

"You're sure it doesn't look familiar?"

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The Hotel Mayaland is situated near a small secondary entrance to Chichen Itza. It sits on a quarter-mile-long spur of pavement that is little-used except by hotel guests walking to and from the ruins. At a little before eight-thirty on most nights, thirty or forty people from the hotel wander lazily along this pleasant path into Chichen Itza for the English-language sound-and-light show.

Julie and Gideon decided to take in the show. Abe wasn't due back from Merida until ten o'clock, when they were to meet for coffee. The entrance to the grounds was a narrow opening in a chain-link fence erected across the road, guarded by a querulous, one-legged ticket-taker in a wheelchair. The fence itself was draped with tourist merchandise, mostly T-shirts with spurious Mayan motifs. In front of them the genuine Mayan vendors, three dark, round women in nightgownlike
huipiles,
huddled unobtrusively. By the weak light of a few bulbs wound through the fence, some thin children of eight or nine played a scuffling game of soccer with a miniature ball, calling to each other in Mayan and Spanish.

Two slightly older boys with small palm-fiber baskets worked the incoming crowd, displaying a surprising English vocabulary.

"Hello, mister, wanna buy a snake? What kind you want? I catch one special for you. With a stick."

"Who'd want to buy a snake?” a chubby American boy of ten asked the harried-looking woman with him. A reasonable question, Gideon thought.

"They catch them for a snake farm, Jared,” the woman told him. “They're not supposed to sell them to tourists, but they do."

"There's no such thing as a snake farm,” the boy said with knowledgeable contempt.

"Not that kind of farm. They extract the venom to use for snakebites. Isn't that interesting?"

"You're full of baloney,” Jared said.

There were no takers for the snakes, and no one seemed to be buying T-shirts either. The Mayan women slumped passively on low stools, hardly lifting their eyes from the ground.

"Let's buy a couple,” Julie said. “T-shirts, I mean."

Gideon nodded. “Let's."

Julie liked one with a reproduction of a mural on it. Gideon pointed out that it was based—loosely—on one from Teotihuacan, not Chichen Itza, but she stuck with it anyway.

"What about you?” she asked. “How about the one of that man all dressed in feathers?"

"Quetzalcoatl? No, thanks, but, you know, I kind of like that one there, with that naked girl spread-eagled on the altar, ready to have her heart cut out. Very artistic."

"You have to be joking. I hope you're joking."

"No, I think it's very colorful. But, okay, I'll settle for the one with the picture of El Castillo."

From the gate it was a leisurely five-minute walk to the site. There was a light bulb strung from a tree every fifty feet or so, enough—barely—to keep them from stumbling off the path and into the scrub but not so bright that they couldn't see the stars.

They had taken the path to the site several days before, but that had been in the afternoon, and the ruins had come gradually into view through the branches. Now, however, at the end of the path the central plaza of Chichen Itza opened before them with throat-catching suddenness, chalky, vast, and silent in the starlight. El Castillo, the great, temple-topped central pyramid, loomed on their right, infinitely more overwhelming than it was in the daytime, a stupendous, bleakly gleaming tower of gray ice. Beyond it, obscured by a wispy night fog, was the blood-soaked Temple of the Warriors and its Thousand Columns. Ahead of them was the immense ball court, and all around, invisible but felt, the jungle, biding its time, waiting to swallow everything up again when the cycle of time decreed.

It was enough to stop Julie in her tracks. “Oh, my,” she said quietly. “Will you look at that?"

Gideon squeezed her hand, not above a slow, rolling shiver of emotion himself.

To their left, things were on a friendlier, more human scale. There was a long double row of battered, folding metal chairs set out on the grass, starkly but ineffectively lit by a single lamp behind. At one end of the rows was a wagon where soft drinks and candy were sold. Most of the chairs were already filled by people bussed in from Merida especially for the show, and the ground was littered with food wrappers and plastic cups, some of them probably left from the Spanish-language performance at seven.

The only seats Gideon and Julie could find together were at the far end of the second row, next to Jared and the harried-looking woman.

"Don't I get any candy or anything?” the boy was complaining as they sat down. “How about a Mars Bar?"

The woman emitted a muttered groan under her breath but got up promptly.

"And a Coke or something!” the boy yelled after her. Then he turned to Gideon and Julie. “That's my mother,” he announced. I live in Puerto Vallarta when I'm with her, but I spend the summers with my dad in Connecticut. They're divorced."