The Ruins

This Is a Borzoi Book
Published by Alfred A. Knopf

 Copyright
© 2006 by Scott B. Smith, Inc.

 All
rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a
division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House
of Canada, Limited, Toronto.

 
www.aaknopf.com

 Grateful
acknowledgment is made to Alfred Publishing Co. for permission to
reprint an excerpt from "One," words and music by
Harry Nilsson, © 1968 (Renewed)
Unichappell
Music, Inc. Copyright assigned in the U.S. to Golden Syrup Music. All
rights on behalf of Golden Syrup Music administered by Warner-Tamerlane
Publishing Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

 Knopf,
Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random
House, Inc.

 Library
of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 Smith,
Scott, [date]

 The
ruins : a novel / Scott Smith.—1st ed.

 p.
cm.

 eISBN-13:
978-0-307-26604-0

 eISBN-10:
0-307-26604-4

 1.
Cancún
(Mexico)—Fiction. 2. Mayas—Fiction. I. Title.

 PS3569.M5379759R85
2006

 813'.54—dc22     
2005057782

 This
is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or
dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

 v1.0

 For
Elizabeth, who's known horror

 I
want to thank my wife, Elizabeth Hill, my editor, Victoria Wilson, and
my agents, Gail
Hochman
and Lynn
Pleshette
, for
their very generous assistance in the completion of this book. The
following people also read the manuscript in a still-unfinished state
and offered criticism and comments that were invariably helpful:
Michael
Cendejas
,
Stuart
Cornfeld
,
Carlyn
Coviello
,
Carol Edwards, Marianne
Merola
,
John
Pleshette
, Doug
and Linda Smith, and Ben Stiller. I thank them all.

Contents

 
Title
Page

 
Dedication

 
Begin
Reading

 
Also
by Scott Smith

 
Copyright
Page

 ALSO
BY SCOTT SMITH

 A
Simple Plan

 T
hey met
Mathias on a day trip to Cozumel. They'd hired a guide to
take them snorkeling over a local wreck, but the buoy marking its
location had broken off in a storm, and the guide was having difficulty
finding it. So they were just swimming about, looking at nothing in
particular. Then Mathias rose toward them from the depths, like a
merman, a scuba tank on his back. He smiled when they told him their
situation, and led them to the wreck. He was German, dark from the sun,
and very tall, with a blond crew cut and pale blue eyes. He had a
tattoo of an eagle on his right forearm, black with red wings. He let
them take turns borrowing his tank so they could drop down thirty feet
and see the wreck up close. He was friendly in a quiet way, and his
English was only slightly accented, and when they pulled themselves
into their guide's boat to head back to shore, he climbed in,
too.

 They
met the Greeks two nights later, back in
Cancún
,
on the beach near their hotel. Stacy got drunk and made out with one of
them. Nothing happened beyond that, but the Greeks always seemed to be
turning up afterward, no matter where they went or what they were
doing. None of them spoke Greek, of course, and the Greeks
didn't speak English, so it was mostly smiling and nodding
and the occasional sharing of food or drinks. There were three
Greeks—in their early twenties, like Mathias and the rest of
them—and they seemed friendly enough, even if they did appear
to be following them about.

 The
Greeks not only didn't know English; they couldn't
speak Spanish, either. They'd adopted Spanish names, though,
which they seemed to find very amusing. Pablo and Juan and Don Quixote
was how they introduced themselves, saying the names in their odd
accents and gesturing at their chests. Don Quixote was the one Stacy
made out with. All three looked enough alike,
however—wide-shouldered and slightly padded, with their dark
hair grown long and tied back in ponytails—that even Stacy
had a hard time keeping track of who was who. It also seemed possible
that they were trading the names around, that this was part of the
joke, so the one who answered to Pablo on Tuesday would smilingly
insist on Wednesday that he was Juan.

 They
were visiting Mexico for three weeks. It was August, a foolish time to
travel to the Yucatán. The weather was too hot, too humid.
There were sudden rainstorms nearly every afternoon, downpours that
could flood a street in a matter of seconds. And with darkness, the
mosquitoes arrived, vast humming clouds of them. In the beginning, Amy
complained about all these things, wishing they'd gone to San
Francisco, which had been her idea. But then Jeff lost his temper,
telling her she was ruining it for everyone else, and she stopped
talking about California—the bright, brisk days, the trolley
cars, the fog rolling in at dusk. It wasn't really that bad
anyway. It was cheap and
uncrowded
,
and she decided to make the best of it.

 There
were four of them in all: Amy and Stacy and Jeff and Eric. Amy and
Stacy were best friends. They'd cut their hair boyishly short
for the trip, and they wore matching Panama hats, posing for photos arm
in arm. They looked like sisters—Amy the fair one, Stacy the
dark—both of them tiny, barely five feet tall, birdlike in
their thinness. They were sisterly in their behavior, too, full of
whispered secrets, wordless intimacies, knowing looks.

 Jeff
was Amy's boyfriend; Eric was Stacy's. The boys
were friendly with each other, but not exactly friends. It had been
Jeff's idea to travel to Mexico, a last fling before he and
Amy started medical school in the fall. He'd found a good
deal on the Internet: cheap, impossible to pass up. It would be three
lazy weeks on the beach, lying in the sun, doing nothing.
He'd convinced Amy to come with him, then Amy had convinced
Stacy, and Stacy had convinced Eric.

 Mathias
told them that he'd come to Mexico with his younger brother,
Henrich
, but
Henrich
had gone missing. It was
a confusing story, and none of them understood all the details.
Whenever they asked him about it, Mathias became vague and upset. He
slipped into German and waved his hands, and his eyes grew cloudy with
the threat of tears. After awhile, they didn't ask anymore;
it felt impolite to press. Eric believed that drugs were somehow
involved, that Mathias's brother was on the run from the
authorities, but whether these authorities were German, American, or
Mexican, he couldn't say for certain. There'd been
a fight, though; they all agreed upon this. Mathias had argued with his
brother, perhaps even struck him, and then
Henrich
had disappeared. Mathias was worried, of course. He was waiting for him
to return so that they could fly back to Germany. Sometimes he seemed
confident that
Henrich
would eventually reappear and that all would be fine in the end, but
other times he didn't. Mathias was reserved by nature, a
listener rather than a talker, and prone in his present situation to
sudden bouts of gloom. The four of them worked hard to cheer him up.
Eric told funny stories. Stacy did her imitations. Jeff pointed out
interesting sights. And Amy took countless photographs, ordering
everyone to smile.

 In
the day, they sunned on the beach, sweating beside one another on their
brightly colored towels. They swam and snorkeled; they got burned and
began to peel. They rode horses, paddled around in kayaks, played
miniature golf. One afternoon, Eric convinced them all to rent a
sailboat, but it turned out he wasn't as adept at sailing as
he'd claimed, and they had to be towed back to the dock. It
was embarrassing, and expensive. At night, they ate seafood and drank
too much beer.

 Eric
didn't know about Stacy and the Greek. He'd gone to
sleep after dinner, leaving the other three to wander the beach with
Mathias. There'd been a bonfire burning behind one of the
neighboring hotels, a band playing in a gazebo. That was where they met
the Greeks. The Greeks were drinking tequila and clapping in rhythm
with the music. They offered to share the bottle. Stacy sat next to Don
Quixote, and there was much talking, in their mutually exclusive
languages, and much laughter, and the bottle passed back and forth,
everyone wincing at the burning taste of the liquor, and then Amy
turned and found Stacy embracing the Greek. It didn't last
very long. Five minutes of kissing, a shy touch of her left breast, and
the band was finished for the night. Don Quixote wanted her to go back
to his room, but she smiled and shook her head, and it was over as
easily as that.

 In
the morning, the Greeks laid out their towels alongside Mathias and the
four of them on the beach, and in the afternoon they all went jet
skiing together. You wouldn't have known about the kissing if
you hadn't seen it; the Greeks were very gentlemanly, very
respectful. Eric seemed to like them, too. He was trying to get them to
teach him dirty words in Greek. He was frustrated, though, because it
was hard to tell if the words they were teaching him were the ones he
wanted to learn.

I
t turned out that
Henrich
had left a note. Mathias
showed it to Amy and Jeff early one morning, during the second week of
their vacation. It was handwritten, in German, with a shakily drawn map
at the bottom. They couldn't read the note, of course;
Mathias had to translate it for them. There wasn't anything
about drugs or the police—that was just Eric being Eric,
jumping to conclusions, the more dramatic the better.
Henrich
had met a girl on the
beach. She'd flown in that morning, was on her way to the
interior, where she'd been hired to work on an archaeological
dig. It was at an old mining camp, maybe a silver mine, maybe
emeralds—Mathias wasn't certain.
Henrich
and the girl had spent
the day together. He'd bought her lunch and they'd
gone swimming. Then he took her back to his room, where they showered
and had sex. Afterward, she left on a bus. In the restaurant, over
lunch, she'd drawn a map for him on a napkin, showing him
where the dig was. She told him he should come, too, that
they'd be glad for his help. Once she left,
Henrich
couldn't stop
talking about her. He didn't eat dinner and he
couldn't fall asleep. In the middle of the night, he sat up
in bed and announced to Mathias that he was going to join the dig.