Somehow, we ended up grappling. I had his wrist in my left hand and he had mine in his. That was when I saw the tattoo on his forearm—just for a second, before his sleeve slipped down again to cover it. But it was long enough for me to realize I had seen its like before.
I must have been thinking too much about the tattoo and not enough about Pony Tail, because he twisted his wrist free and slugged me in the chin. It wouldn’t have been so bad except the back of my head hit something behind me.
Everything went black for a second. By the time I recovered, Pony Tail was gone.
Using the wall behind me, I pulled myself to my feet. Suddenly, I heard someone shout.
Looking back over my shoulder, I saw a police officer appear in the mouth of the alley. He was wearing the red vest of the Merchant City and he had a hand stick in his fist.
For a moment, he looked ready to grab me with his free hand. Then he must have seen the bracelet on my wrist.
“Investigator?” he asked.
“Colhua,” I said. I pointed to the far end of the alley. “He went that way. But you won’t find him.”
The officer pelted past me anyway.
After a few minutes, I felt better. Battered, but better. By then, the police officer had come back empty-handed. Pony Tail had gotten away—not just from me, but from the Merchant City police.
Unfortunately, my mysterious caller was no longer on the line.
Well, I thought as I buzzed Necalli to tell him what had happened, that could have gone better.
I had a lead, though. And maybe more, if the guy I had rushed off the phone decided to forgive me and call back.
Most large cities in Mexica had two or three prison houses. They were featureless, red-brick buildings relegated to the least desirable parts of town.
Aztlan had only one prison house—a fact on which we prided ourselves. What’s more, it had been built just four cycles earlier with private money—that of a grateful citizen, whose identity had been withheld from the time the project was announced.
One rumor said the citizen was Lolco Molpilia.
In any case, the Aztlan Prison House was one of the nicest-looking structures in District One, made of pale, rough-hewn sandstone with greenish-blue bands of copper separating each level from the one above it. A real treat for the eye, especially at dawn and dusk, when the sun’s rays turned the sandstone a soft pink.
But inside, where the inmates were, Aztlan’s prison house was like any other, stark and gray with row upon row of individual cells, each one barred and windowless. Not the kind of place one would want to find oneself for any length of time.
As an Investigator, I found myself there a lot. There was always an inmate who could supply information for a price—usually a token reduction in his or her sentence, which it was in my power to grant—and I took advantage of the resource as often as I could.
Sometimes such information turned out to be useless. But on more than one occasion I had broken open a case with it, which was why I went straight to the prison house from my little adventure with Pony Tail in the Merchant City.
Escorted by a guard, I passed through the petlacalli—the outermost cell blocks, set aside for those who had committed relatively minor offenses like illicit gambling, public drunkenness, and chocolate trafficking. The maximum for someone in the petlacalli was three and a half cycles but the sentence was often less, depending on the generosity of the judge who presided over the case.
Moving deeper into the prison house, my escort and I passed through the teilpiloyan, the layer of cell blocks occupied by Aztlan’s debtors—men and women who owed money either to the Empire’s tax collectors or to other citizens, and couldn’t or wouldn’t pay up. If they changed their minds or found the wherewithal to take care of their debts, they would be released. If not, they would find themselves in the prison house for a long time.
When debtors owed money to the nobility, it was a different story. Then they wound up in the innermost block of cells, called the cuauhcalli—what had been known in ancient days as Death Row. Of course, hardly anyone was executed anymore—few, even, of the murderers, rapists, and seditionists incarcerated there alongside the debtors, though most people thought they should be.
The Emperor decided most things in Mexica, including how severe to make a penalty for criminal misconduct. And like his father before him, he was the merciful sort.
It was because of the Emperor’s mercy that Ichtaca Nochtli was still alive. Nochtli was one of the leaders of the First Sun cult that had cropped up during the last Fire Renewal—the one that marked the end of the Fourth Sun—and terrorized the people of Aztlan.
Like Ancient Light, First Sun had been a religious cult. And like Eren’s people, they had harkened back to a more primitive way of honoring the gods.
But, despite what I had said to Eren the other day in the Interrogation Center, that was where the resemblance ended.
First Sun hadn’t marched around pyramids trying to make a statement about modern society. They had confronted people in the streets, approaching them in groups of four or five, and tried to shame them into renouncing their evil ways. More often than not, those they confronted were prominent subjects of the Emperor—food brokers, tax collectors, and so on.
When Nochtli’s people didn’t get the results they wanted, they got rougher. They didn’t just shame the Emperor’s subjects, they beat them up. And when even that didn’t work, they cooked up a plot to kill the High Priest—whom they believed was the source of their troubles—on the evening of the Fifth Unlucky Day.
Thanks to my father, Itzcoatl survived.
After Nochtli and the others in First Sun were caught, he was given forty cycles. It was a heavy sentence. But then, the judge had wanted to warn people against twisting arms in the name of the gods, and the Emperor must have agreed.
When Nochtli saw me through the bars of his cell door, he gave me a gap-toothed grin. The officers who had apprehended him all those cycles ago hadn’t been gentle. Then again, it could have been worse. One of Nochtli’s friends in the cult had lost a kidney.
“Colhua,” he said, “to what curiosity do I owe the pleasure?”
The guard took his hand stick out of his pouch, just in case Nochtli decided to give him a hard time, and tapped a code into a pad on the wall next to the cell. A moment later, the door slid aside.
Nochtli moved to the back of his cell, so there would be no mistaking his inclination to be cooperative. I went in, and the door closed behind me.
“Five minutes,” I told the guard.
“Five minutes,” he acknowledged, and walked away.
“Have a seat,” said Nochtli, indicating the only chair in the room. As I took it, he sat down on his bed.
“I’m looking for a name,” I said. “A guy with a First Sun tattoo. I thought you might know him.”
Nochtli shrugged. “What does he look like?”
I told him. After I mentioned the pony tail, a light came on in his eyes.
“Sound familiar?” I asked.
He nodded. “Olintecke. Luc Olintecke.” He smiled to himself. “I thought he’d be dead by now.”
“Why is that?”
“Olintecke was crazy. I mean, people said everyone in First Sun was out of his mind, but in Olintecke’s case it was true.”
“Out of his mind . . . in what way?”
“There wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do for the cause. Drink spit, run naked under the moon, brand the bottoms of his feet—you name it.”
“He did all those things?”
Nochtli thought for a moment. “I never actually saw him drink spit. I just heard about it.”
Crazy, all right. “He wasn’t with you the night you were arrested. Why not?”
His answer was interrupted by a loud exclamation from one of the other cells. Nochtli’s mouth twisted and he shouted back, his voice echoing throughout the cell block.
“I apologize,” he said, turning to me again. “My neighbors can
be a pain in the ass sometimes. Now, what was your question?”
“Why wasn’t Olintecke with you when you were arrested?”
“He was too unpredictable. We couldn’t trust him.”
“Then you’d gone out without him before?”
“Definitely,” said Nochtli. “You know, it’s funny.”
“What is?” I asked.
“That he’s still out there and the rest of us are in here.”
I nodded. “Ironic. So, if you wanted to find this Olintecke, where would you look?”
Nochtli thought for a moment. “There was another guy. . .
what was his name? Xiuh? Yeah, that’s it. When we started First Sun he was right there with us, but he faded out of the picture pretty fast. Never knew what happened to him until after we got put away. I heard he became a silversmith in the Merchant City, and that Olintecke was working for him, making pickups and deliveries and such.”
“Xiuh,” I repeated. “First name?”
He thought again, but came up empty. “Sorry.”
“It’s all right. There can’t be too many silversmiths with that name.” I got up. “You’ve been a big help.”
He smiled again, exposing his broken tooth. “Big enough to shave a couple of moons off my sentence?”
“Sure,” I said.
“In that case, come by any time.”
I felt a little chill climb my spine. By then, the guard was waiting outside Nochtli’s cell.
“See you around,” I said.
“Sure,” said Nochtli.
A moment later I was out in the corridor, and the door to his cell was closing behind me.
As I made my way down the corridor past the other cells, I heard Nochtli call after me: “Gods take pity on you, Colhua.”
It was a typical First Sun thing to say. And as far as I could tell, he had said it sincerely.
Chapter Eight
As soon as I left the prison house, I looked up Xiuh the
silversmith. His first name was Atl, apparently—like my teammate on the Scale Beetles. And just as Nochtli had said, the guy had a place in the Merchant City—not far, in fact, from Molpilia’s offices.
By the time I got there, the sun was near the horizon. Every west-facing pane of glass in the Merchant City was a drop of molten gold, giving Tonatiuh back his full glory before he had to descend into the Lands of the Dead.
Xiuh was a plump man with two chins and an odor of sweat about him—maybe more so because he was talking with an Investigator. His shop was full of silver trinkets, but none of them were nice enough to fetch more than a few beans.
He knew Olintecke, just as Nochtli said he might.
“He worked for me as a delivery man,” he said. “But I haven’t seen him in a couple of cycles. Why do you ask?”
I didn’t tell him that Olintecke was part of a murder investigation, knowing it might make discourage him from being entirely open with me. “Why did he stop working here?”
“Actually,” said Xiuh, “I fired him. He was getting mixed up, showing up at the wrong times or making deliveries to the wrong places. My business isn’t so good that I can afford to piss off my customers.”
“Any idea why he started getting confused?” I asked.
“None. He just seemed distracted, as if there was something else on his mind.”
Something like First Sun? I wanted to ask. But I still didn’t want to put the silversmith on his guard. I might need to talk to him again sometime.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll get in touch with you if I need you.”
“Anything I can do to help,” he said.
As I left his shop, I buzzed Necalli to tell him we needed to find Olintecke. He said he would put out an all-points call.
I was on my way to the rail line, thinking I would be right on time at Aunt Xoco’s, when my buzzer went off. Thinking it was probably Necalli getting back to me about something, I answered it: “Colhua.”
“Is this a better time?” asked the voice on the other end—the same one that had called me earlier, after I spotted Olintecke’s reflection in the flower shop window.
It was still tinny, still hard to hear. And as before, the number was untraceable.
“Yes,” I said. “Sorry about before.”
“It’s all right.”
“Can you tell me who you are now?”
“I prefer not to.”
“How do I know the information is dependable if you won’t identify yourself?”
“Hear me out and judge for yourself.”
I didn’t want to scare the guy away, if it even was a guy. So I said, “All right.”
“It’s not the cultists who are responsible for those murders. It’s Molpilia, the developer.”
Molipila? “How do you figure that?”
“He’d like you to believe that the de-sanctification of those pyramids will hurt him in the pouch. But in fact, it’s the other way around. If they hadn’t been de-sanctified, they would have ruined him.”
I didn’t get it. “He went on the Mirror—”
“Misdirection,” said my mystery caller. “Forget it and think about this. Molpilia’s a luxury builder. The Patecatl, the Xilonen, the Itztli. . .they’re all his. He’s never built in anything but a high-income district before. Why start now?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “You’re the one telling the story.”
“Because he got a special, one-time sweetheart deal from the Empire to build pyramids in districts other developers wouldn’t touch. You with me?”
“Sure.”
“Of course, he had to build these pyramids on a fast track so they would open in time for the Fire Renewal. That way, the Empire could demonstrate its regard for the common people during the Five Unlucky Days—a time when the winds of dissent and rebellion were likely to blow their strongest.”
“If you say so.”
“And in exchange for his cooperation, Molpilia received huge tax breaks with regard to not only his new properties, but his other properties as well—amounting to a sum considerably greater than what he had ever made as a builder.”
“Good for him,” I said.
“It was very good for him. Critical, you might say. You see, Molpilia had been putting big beans on ullamalitzli for many cycles, and—because he wasn’t very good at it—losing a lot more than he won. His debts had become more than even he could handle. The Empire was aware of this, of course. It knew that Molpilia would do anything to stay out of the prison house. And with the Empire’s help, he did.”
“A happy ending.”
“It should have been. Molpilia’s windfall was precisely enough to wipe the slate clean and keep him out of debtors’ court. Except he couldn’t resist using some of it to bet on Ixtapaluca versus Malinalco.”
I recalled the game. After all, it was just a few moons earlier. Malinalco had been the better team by far. It should have won going away, but Ixtapaluca pulled it out at the last moment. The upset of the cycle.
“Molpilia had put his beans on Malinalco. He believed he couldn’t lose.”
“Yet he lost,” I said, seeing where this was going. “Suddenly, he was back where he started from. Except now he had the additional burden of having to build low-income pyramids, which would take forever to return his investment.”
“Exactly. For reasons that should be painfully obvious, Molpilia didn’t want to renege on his deal with the Empire. So he used what resources he had left, cut corners wherever he could, and made the pyramids look as if they were nearing completion—even though he didn’t have the beans to actually finish them.”
Eventually, he would have been found out. The Empire was slow to act sometimes, but it knew a half-finished pyramid when it saw one.
“He was a dead man,” said my informant, “unless he found a way to keep his problem from becoming public. And what better way to stall a construction project than to de-sanctify it?”
“At the expense of human lives.” A cold-blooded pla
n, to say the least. Yet I could see Molpilia being capable of it if the stakes were high enough.
It was interesting, I thought, if it was true. But I would need evidence before I could pursue it. “And you know this how?” I asked.
“Never mind that. Just see to it that Molpilia gets what’s coming to him.”
Then the line went silent.
I looked back at the building where Molpilia had his offices. It towered over the edifices around it, resplendent in the dying sunlight. As resplendent as the pyramids he had built over in Aztlan.
And yet, as much as Molpilia had made, he had lost most of it in the ball court. Or so my caller had insisted. Big beans, he had said. For many cycles.
If that was true, had I scored some of the goals that had been Molpilia’s undoing? Had I cost him a pile one night? Maybe more than one night? It felt strange to look at it that way.
In the ball court, all the players saw were the ball, the other team, and the stone walls. We never thought about the fans, much less the betting parlors.
At least, I hadn’t.
Pecking a number into the face of my buzzer, I called Necalli again. He would want to hear about this.
Because I couldn’t think of anything but the murders, I almost missed the rail stop near Aunt Xoco’s place. Fortunately, I looked up just in time to get off. It was a good thing. Otherwise there would have been one more murder for the force to investigate . . .
Mine.
I was hoping my aunt wouldn’t faint at the sight of me. She didn’t. She didn’t even stop in the middle of setting out her statuettes. All she said was, “You look terrible.”
“Don’t get upset, Aunt Xoco. I just—”
“Upset?” She laughed. “You think I’ve never seen bumps and bruises, Maxtla? You think your father never came home from work looking like a carriage ran him over—and then backed up and ran him over again?”
I recalled a couple such times. But my father always made light of it—at least to me.
“Who did it?” Aunt Xoco asked, the same way she might have asked if I had seen the Emperor on the Mirror the other day.
“I don’t know,” I said. “They were wearing masks.”
Aztlan: The Last Sun Page 8