Curses! (7 page)
"Well, at least they've saved us some work,” Gideon said, brushing the dirt from his knees and standing up. “We'd just have had to redig those steps ourselves."
"That's a point,” Abe said equably.
"I don't understand you two!” Julie exclaimed. “How can you stand there so calmly? There have been looters in here! Who knows what they got away with?"
"They didn't get away with anything,” Gideon said. “At least I don't see how they could have. They didn't do any new excavating. All they did was re-dig a few steps that we'd already excavated before the cave-in. We'd gotten down thirteen steps below the landing, if I remember."
"Twelve, according to the site report,” Abe said. “Altogether, twenty-four down from here.” He looked at Julie. “So all they did was clear away some more of the rubble that fell down when Howard, that bum, caved in the tunnel."
"Oh.” Julie subsided, looking unconvinced, and peered down into the dim shaft. “Is that where you found the chest? On that landing?"
Gideon flicked on his flashlight again and the three of them walked down together. “Here it is.” The heavy chest was still in the little chamber, four massive limestone slabs standing on their edges around a fifth slab that served as the base, all of it grit-coated and painfully empty. The mutilated lid, since patched together, was now in the Museum of Anthropology in the capital.
Gideon played the beam of light over the walls of the once-sealed room. No more fairyland down there; no pristine crystal cave. The stalactites and stalagmites were still there, but they had turned a dingy gray, thickly scummed with lichen and pulpy fungus. After a millennium of perfect preservation, five years of exposure to the fecund air of Yucatan had turned what had once seemed like glittering cascades of ice into nasty excrescences. There were even a few pallid, frightened-looking plants in crannies here and there, cowering deep inside a pyramid, ten feet below the surface of a sealed, windowless, lightless building.
"So what were they looking for?” Abe said, as much to himself as to anyone else as they walked back up the stairs. “With a thousand places to hunt for treasure, what's so special about Tlaloc? And why dig under the temple, where it's already been dug once?"
"Could they have heard about the possibility of another sealed room at the bottom?” Gideon asked.
"No, no, this I doubt very much. De Waldeck's book was never translated from the French, and as far as I know there are only two copies, the one I saw at Dumbarton Oaks and one in Paris. No one ever even mentions it in the literature. Only by luck did I stumble on it myself. Besides, another sealed room is a long shot, no more. And even if there is one, who says there's anything in it worth robbing? No, if I was a looter I could spend my time a lot better."
"The two of you keep assuming they knew exactly what they were doing,” Julie said, “but they probably just heard some stories about the codex being found here and decided to do a little exploring on their own."
"Maybe so,” said Abe. “Anyway, they gave up before they got very far, thank God."
Julie gestured at the tools that had been left behind. “I wonder if you frightened them off when you reopened the dig last week."
"That seems like a reasonable possibility,” Abe said agreeably.
It didn't to Gideon. He could think of two reasonable possibilities, and neither of them was the one Julie had suggested. When he had taken a look at the spade he had found that the clumps of dirt sticking to the blade were just that: dirt. No fungi, no webby tufts of mold. So it was highly improbable that it had been lying untouched for very long in this dark, moist dungeon of a room. Even the heaps of dirt and rubble looked fresh, although a few of them were starting to turn a woolly gray here and there.
Assuming that these moldy piles were the earliest, he estimated that the digging had begun—not ended—about a week ago, or even less. And to all intents and purposes it was still going on.
That meant, he told the others, that someone had been burrowing away in here
since
the dig had reopened. So either some very careful looters had been managing to evade Abe, the crew, and the guards, or...
Or one of the crew had been jumping the gun and excavating the temple on his own.
"Or her own,” Julie corrected.
"Or their own,” Abe said, “but let's not jump the gun ourselves. Why the crew? Let's stick with outsiders. Maybe they worked at night when nobody was around. What's so impossible about that?"
"But then where are their lamps?” Julie asked. “If they left their other tools, why not their lights?"
"Because if they came and went at night, they'd need them to get back to wherever they were going.” Abe folded his arms and studied the gouged-out stairwell, squeezing his lower lip between his fingers. “If these are all the tools they had, then there's maybe...say, ten, twelve hours digging they did here. Eight if they had two people instead of one. Gideon, you would agree?"
Gideon agreed. ‘
"So, that's what, two nights’ work at most? Not so hard for some robbers to wait until we locked up and then come in and do their dirty work for a couple nights."
"I agree they probably did it at night,” Gideon said, “but I still don't think it was outsiders. Outsiders have had a deserted site to dig in at their leisure since 1982. Why wait till it's crawling with people? No, if this has really been done in the last week, and I'm betting it has, then I'm also betting somebody on the crew's responsible."
"But that just doesn't add up,” Julie said. “If anybody would know that those steps have already been excavated, they would. They were here."
"That's true,” Gideon admitted. “It doesn't add up, whatever way you look at it."
Unexpectedly, Abe laughed brightly. “A puzzle,” he said. “Come on, it's dinner time, and then we got our curse to hear about.” He nudged a pile of rubble with his toe. “This we can talk about later."
Bernadette Rose Garrison, Professor of Pre-Columbian Languages at Tulane's Middle-American Research Institute, did not fit the layman's idea of a leading scholar of ancient Mayan. Or Gideon's either. A severe, dowdy black woman in her fifties, with her hair pulled back into a bun, she sported the only set of pince-nez Gideon had ever seen on a live person. She might have made a perfect office manager, diligent and prim, or maybe a supervising social worker, or a sternly uncompromising loan officer. Her manner was unceremonious—"call me Bernie,” she had said when they were introduced at dinner—but imposing enough so that only the most self-confident (Abe, for instance) had taken her up on it. Gideon, easier to intimidate, stuck with “Dr. Garrison,” which she seemed to find entirely suitable.
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?