“How?”
“You have a laboratory in Valladolid. I may want to send one of my people there. Is that convenient?”
“Sure,” said Deborah. “What about the dig?”
“You can excavate in other parts of the site,” he said, shaping a slightly apologetic smile but offering no room for negotiation.
“And the stolen grave goods,” she said. “You’ll look for them?”
“Of course,” he answered, “but the homicide—if it is one—will be the priority. We can talk to—what do you call the people who sell stolen goods?”
“A fence?”
“A fence, si,” he said, smiling. “But...” He shrugged.
“You can’t just start a search?” she asked, knowing she sounded desperate and stupid.
“Where?” he replied, smiling not unkindly. “Look around you, Miss Miller. The Yucatan is isolated villages and small towns separated by miles of jungle. There are paths that only the local people know, and many ancient Mayan structures so remote that no one but the snakes and vultures know them. You know the city of Uxmal?”
“Of course,” said Deborah. Uxmal was the great Mayan site of the Puuc region south of Merida, a vast complex of imposing buildings, carved stonework, and colossal pyramids. According to legend, one of them, the Pyramid of the Magician, had been built overnight by the dwarf son of a witch from nearby Kabah. Deborah had hoped to see it before she left, but now, who knew what the next day would bring.
“It has been there for a thousand years,” he said. “But it was ignored by the Spanish after the conquest and forgotten by all but the locals until archaeologists ‘rediscovered’ the site a hundred and seventy years ago. It is easy to lose things here. And when they are lost, they stay lost for hundreds of years.”
“But our things haven’t been lost,” said Deborah. “They have been stolen.”
“True,” said the policeman, smiling, “but that difference may be...unhelpful. I do not know how well you know the local people, Miss Miller, but I can assure you that they know how to keep secrets to themselves, sometimes for centuries. After all, Uxmal was not truly lost either,” he said, looking down to the notebook in which he had been writing. “The Maya always knew where it was.”
The conversation over, Deborah walked up toward the acropolis figuring she could find a quiet spot somewhere in the central compound where she could think and get away from the questions and accusatory looks. She replayed the events in her head. If they’d just moved the artifacts to the lab to get them into safekeeping, none of this would have happened.
Deborah sighed. Figuring she may as well use the time, she rewatched the recording of the grave goods on her laptop. When she got to the close-up of the bundle that had turned out to be the child’s bones, she found the moment that gave her the best look at the ring and paused the playback.
She opened her editing software and transferred the image to a new window. It was digital video, so the image degeneration was minimal even when she enlarged it to fill the screen. The ring was quite clear: yellow metal and slim, like a signet ring with what looked like a seal or crest on the boss. It was diamond shaped and intricately molded into four quadrants, the upper right and lower left marked with tiny circles, while the other two sections were scored with what looked like a checkerboard. Beneath the diamond was an elliptical shape like an eye. It didn’t look like any Mayan symbol she had ever seen. It looked, as Rylands had said, like a European coat of arms, albeit an unusual one.
An idea struck her. She ran quickly over to the structure with the cell phone tower and climbed up to the top without stopping. She activated her web browser and started looking for anything on heraldry. Commercial sites devoted to tracking family crests and selling versions of them in badges, posters, and rings came up first. There was a function to search alphabetically by family name, but she could find no provision to search by the elements of the coat of arms itself.
She tried other search terms: “coats of arms,” “family crest,” “shields,” “escutcheons.” Most of the sites that came up were similarly searchable by name only, but then she found one that showed thumbnails of the coats of arms and the names associated with them. It was divided by country. She chose Spain: perhaps the ring had belonged to someone who had come with the colonists. She suspected Rylands was right, and that the hand buried with the ring had not belonged to a Mayan child interred a thousand years ago.
There were pages of Spanish crests: beautifully ornate shields adorned with castles and lions, crowns, birds, and all manner of weapons and symbols like fleurs-de-lis, pages and pages of them. Her eyes flickered as she processed the thumbnails, eight to a line, twenty lines to a page. Patiently, she scrolled through the whole website.
It was actually quick work, because nothing looked close to the design on the ring. In fifteen minutes she had seen all the Spanish emblems the site had to offer, and come up empty. She knew that the search was far from exhaustive, that there would be shields not recorded there, but it felt like progress. She began on the German coats of arms.
The German shields didn’t look—to her untrained eye—significantly different from the Spanish, and there were at least as many. She waded through them, page by page, no longer dazzled by their drama and whimsy, now seeing only that they were not what she was looking for.
“Hey!” called a voice from below.
She looked down and saw a man she didn’t recognize and Alice trailing behind him. He was well built, even athletic, and looked furious.
Deborah frowned and began the slow climb down the tower without answering. He started shouting before she reached the bottom.
“You want to tell me what the bloody hell is going on here?” he yelled.
Deborah said nothing till she reached the ground, steeling herself to remain calm.
“I’m sorry,” she said politely. “You are?”
“He’s the photographer,” Alice said. “Nick. From England.”
“OK, Nick from England,” said Deborah. “What’s your problem?”
“My problem,” he said, “is that I just flew across the Atlantic to photograph something that isn’t here, and I’d like to know what you are going to do about it.”
“Look,” she said. “I’m sorry you’ve had a wasted journey, but I’ve got a lot on my mind right now. I suggest you go get settled in at the hotel in Valladolid. We’re all going to be leaving soon anyway.”
He seemed to see her exhaustion and something of his anger drained.
“Can you just tell me what happened?” he said.
Deborah sighed, blowing out the air like a diver steeling herself on a high board.
“Walk with me,” she said.
He nodded, and Alice piped up. “I’ll come too.”
“No,” said Deborah. She caught the edge in her voice and tried to soften it, but it was too late. “They could use a hand loading the gear,” she said.
Alice pouted and shrugged in that way she had that was something between like I care and up yours. Then she snapped her playful grin on. “Bye, Nick,” she said.
“Oh. Right,” said the Brit. “Bye.”
Deborah began walking back toward the Twins.
“Seems like you’ve made a friend,” she said.
He nodded dismissively. “So,” he said. “This theft. The girl said something about a child’s hand?”
Deborah told him the story as they walked, staring straight ahead, recounting it all like it was something she had read. She never looked at him, and when she got to the end, she just kept walking in silence, as if he wasn’t there.
“Sounds like you’ve had a rough couple of days,” he said.
She wasn’t sure why he was suddenly trying to be nice, but she thought she’d take it. The last friendly word she’d gotten lately was from Adelita.
“You could say that,” she said.
“Hence my saying it,” he said. His smile was at least three parts apology. She noticed that the Brit was handso
me, tall, and powerful-looking in ways archaeologists and photographers generally weren’t. She wasn’t in the least interested—her problems were just too big—but she could see why Alice had been tailing him.
She blew the air out of her lungs again, throwing her head back and shutting her eyes again. When she looked at him again, he was turned slightly away and staring into the trees, as if on alert for something.
“Sorry,” she said. “I really don’t know what happens next. It doesn’t help that this is the first real dig I’ve been in charge of, and Bowerdale—Martin Bowerdale—clearly thinks I’ve screwed everything up royally.”
“How could someone breaking in and stealing stuff be your fault?” he said.
“That’s what I said, but...I don’t know. I feel—”
She stopped herself. She didn’t know this guy. She wasn’t about to tell him what she felt.
He nodded, as if he already knew.
“I could use a drink,” he said. “I’m guessing you could too. What do you say, after we get back, you point me in the direction of some sleazy neighborhood watering hole and...?”
“I don’t think so,” said Deborah. “Thanks, but I don’t really feel like a drink tonight.”
“Then you can watch me have one,” he said, undaunted. “Come on.”
“I actually have a room in the village so I’m not even staying in town. And the others will be better company. Alice, for one...”
“Ah yes,” he said. “Miss Alice. I can tell her all about the nineteen eighties. As an archaeologist, she’ll love that.”
Deborah laughed in spite of herself.
“She probably will at that,” she said. “If she’s interested in conversation.”
“I’m sure she’s a vestal virgin,” said the Englishman, straight-faced. “So what do you say? A wee dram to welcome me to the team?”
“No, I’m sorry,” she said. “I have too much to do.”
He pulled a pained face.
“Another time, perhaps,” he said.
“Perhaps,” she replied, turning and walking quickly away before she could change her mind.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The dream was always the same. He was riding up front in a captured military truck abandoned by the Dutch UN peacekeepers outside Srebenica. Dimitri—so he now called himself—remembered the day, knew what had happened that day in Bosnia, but the dream was different, loaded with dread and a sense of impending disaster that he had not felt at the time. He had been smoking, and one of the guys had been recounting what Mladic had said to him that morning before they had gone to the school in Konjević Polje. They had been joking and sharing a flask of vodka that one of the regular army soldiers had given him. Dimitri and his men were Scorpion paramilitaries, locals called Chetniks.
By the time the truck had reached the school, the separation of the men from the women and children had already happened, so Dimitri didn’t see much of it. Not there, anyway. He had seen it before, particularly in Potocari, and he had grown immune to the pleading and crying. But in the dream the women and children were still there, following the truck somehow, visible in the side-view mirrors when he looked back, a column of them, somehow keeping pace with the truck no matter how fast they drove.
When they got out into the fields, they pulled over, and it was Dimitri’s job to open up the back of the truck and get the men out. Some of them were blindfolded and had to be helped down, others had their hands lashed behind their backs. Few of them had any shoes or anything else they could use as a weapon. It was weirdly quiet, and, for the most part, they all did what they were told. Mostly the men ranged from their late teens to their sixties, though there were a few old men and boys among them too. Dimitri didn’t know why and didn’t ask. Clearly they’d pissed someone off.
They had stayed quiet as they walked single file to the ditch between the field and the woods, and the air was damp and full of the scent of the wet grass and trees, and that scent filled the dream too. A hundred yards or so away were the women and children, all silent and watching, always maintaining the exact same distance and never blinking. In reality, of course, they hadn’t been there. That, like the raw and dragging horror, was just in the dream.
Then the shooting started and the men began dropping. It had been almost comically undramatic. Dimitri was a good shot and had rarely needed more than one round per person. When the truck was empty, others had come, and Dimitri had helped out with the lining up of the prisoners and the shooting. He lost track of how many times he changed the magazine in his assault rifle. And that was how it had been: methodical, businesslike. There had been some laughter and some hysterics, but for the most part it was just a job, like carrying the crates of bottles that had been his first wage back in the crappy little Belgrade bar his uncle had owned before the war.
In the dream, he went about the shooting itself with the same focused composure he’d managed on the actual day, but there was that nagging sense of darkness and fear underneath, though he couldn’t stop what he was doing and didn’t see why he should. It came from the presence of the women and children who had no business being in the dream at all. They had started getting closer once the shooting started, and as they inched across the field to the road where the trucks were parked, he became surer that his gun wouldn’t work on them. He didn’t know why, but he was certain, so they had to finish up and get out before the women and children reached them. If they didn’t, they’d be as defenseless as the men they were routinely executing. It made no sense, but he felt a power in them that he would not be able to stand against if they reached him. He had to finish up the shooting and move on quickly.
But the job wouldn’t end. Just as they finished dealing with the contents of one truck, another would arrive, and the colonel would start handing out fresh ammunition and telling them to get on with it. Dimitri warned them about the women in the field, but it was like no one else could see them, and after a while he had tried shooting at them to drive them back. For a moment it looked like it was working, but they came on anyway, unaffected by his bullets as he had known they would be.
It was then, always then, as the children and their mothers started to hedge him about so that he could no longer aim his weapon, their eyes locked on him as he tried to find a way back to the truck, that he woke up, sweating, his heart racing.
This time his phone was ringing too.
He took the call and made some notes, then hung up. It had been a mistake not to get a room with air-conditioning. He had never experienced heat like it, not at night anyhow, and with the memory of the dream still only just under the surface, he doubted he would get back to sleep. He sat on the edge of the bed and looked through his phone messages and the notes he had made from previous calls.
People were queuing up now, and that made him smile, even if some of them were probably terrorists. To Dimitri, who had never been a religious or nationalist zealot, it was all about money. If the goods were anything like he was told, he was about to make a fortune. Even if they weren’t quite as billed, or if he sold only information rather than the items themselves, he was looking at a shitload of money by any standards. Where it came from, he didn’t care. Hell, he’d sell to the Americans if they’d pay him enough, and they might, if only to keep the goods from falling into unwanted hands.
Dimitri smirked at the thought of so many eager buyers and flipped open a folder full of data printouts: phonon and photon transmission, particle vibration measured in terms of frequency and amplitude tied to temperature increase, and, most importantly, scattering rates estimated from phonon-phonon interactions and lattice imperfections. The science meant little to him, but he knew the implications for power and cooling cycles, and it wasn’t surprising that they had piqued a lot of curiosity. Sure they might be duds, useless for the purpose he was selling, but there was enough in those sheets of paper to have the price doubling by the moment, and there was something marvelous about their recurring question: How do we know you haven�
��t faked the data? Because he could no more fake this shit than go to the fucking moon. All he had to do now was get hold of the goods before anyone else got wind of where they were, and he would get spectacularly rich. It seemed like the best way to do that was to eliminate the middleman and just help himself; no more dealing with that weasel Clements and his archaeologist pal. The archaeologist—Bowerdale, his name was—might still prove useful, but why pay someone to get what he could take for himself?
He lay back on the cheap pillow, grinning to himself, and popped out a cigarette from the pack on the nightstand. He considered trying to go back to sleep, but even imagining his massive success wouldn’t keep the dreams at bay. He opted to smoke instead, and thought about the cherry-red Enzo Ferrari that would be the first thing he’d buy when the deal went down. Then he cleaned and oiled his guns and shuffled through the TV stations till he found Bugs Bunny cartoons dubbed into Spanish. He didn’t speak much, but they were still pretty good. The voices were funny, and you could get the gist.
At dawn he would make for Ek Balam. It would be a good day.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The motorbike had done well. Better than Eustachio had expected. It was noisy and slow, but in the black Yucatan night, slow was good. There were too many potholes and the headlamp was set high so the road right in front of him was dark. One bad bump and the bike would throw him. Still, he was nearly there.
Eustachio knew he would have been missed, knew also that he would probably be arrested as soon as he returned to the village. He had known as much before he left, and that was OK. He would tell them nothing, would deny having touched the contents of the tomb, would say he couldn’t imagine where they were now and—eventually—they would have to let him go. Anyone could have taken the grave offerings. He even had a cousin near Uxmal who would swear he had spent the night with him, that he had been visiting family because there was nothing for him to do on site till the new find had been dealt with. He would say that over and over until the authorities had to produce real evidence or release him. It might take a while, and Eustachio knew what kind of treatment he might get from the police, but that didn’t matter.
Tears of the Jaguar Page 9