When the ferry arrives, its leading edge of wood coming to rest on the gravel drive, Canek slowly pulls the car down the small drive and onto the ferry. An old ferryman patiently waits for Canek to situate the car in the middle before he begins to twist the crank that winches the wire that drags the ferry back across the river. The water is calm and the ferry barely ripples as the old man draws us forward with each turn of the crank. Canek and the ferryman talk in a language which is decidedly not Spanish. “We were speaking Mopan,” he says. “This village is Mopan Maya. I am Yucatec Maya but I know this dialect as well as my own.”
When the ferry reaches the far bank, Canek drives the Trooper off onto another drive, takes a sharp right, and begins the climb up the rough, rock-strewn road that will take us to the ancient fortress. Canek tells me we are only a mile and a half from the Guatemalan border. After a long uphill drive we reach a parking grove. When Canek steps down from the car he pulls from it a canteen of water and a huge machete, which he slips into a loop off his pants.
“That’s a fancy knife,” I say.
“The jungle overgrows everything in time,” he says.
As we climb the rest of the way, mosquitoes hover about my face and from all around us comes the manic squall of wildlife. The jungle rises along the edges of our path, green and dark and impenetrable. Canek, ever the perfect guide, offers me the canteen he carries and I stop to drink. Finally, out of the dark canopy of jungle we come upon the ceremonial plaza of Xunantunich.
The plaza is bright with sun, verdant with grasses and cohune palms and the encroaching jungle, as flat as a putting green. At the edges of the plaza hummingbirds hover among brilliant tropical flowers, darting from one bright color to another. Rising from the verdant earth in great piles of plant-encrusted rock are the remains of huge Mayan structures. There is something frightening in the immensity and the solidity of these ancient things, once hidden by centuries of jungle growth, like painful truths that have been unearthed. And dominating it all to our left, like the grandest truth of all, is El Castillo, a huge man-made mountain of rock.
Canek gives me the tour, as authoritative as if he had lived here when the plaza was still alive. He shows me a ceremonial stone bench in one of the temples and a frieze of a king and his spiritual midget in the little museum shack. “Midgets are sacred to the Maya,” says Canek. “They are the special ones, touched by God as children, which is why they have stopped growing. They are able to journey back and forth between this world and the underworld. Some still claim to see the sacred little ones walking along the roads.” He takes me to the residential buildings off the plaza, hacking with his machete through the jungle to get us there, and shows me the ball yard, a narrow grassy alley between the sloping sides of two of the temples. “The games were largely ceremonial,” says Canek, “and the ceremony at the end involved the sacrifice of the losers.”
“And I thought hockey was tough,” I say.
We make our way around the grounds until we face the immensity of El Castillo, which towers above us, cragged and steep, stained green with life, banded with a reconstructed frieze of beige.
“Can we climb it?” I ask.
“If you wish.”
“Let’s do it.”
I take a drink of water and we begin to ascend the long wide steps along the north side of El Castillo. The thing we are climbing is a ruin in every sense of the word, churned to crumbling by the jungle, but as we turn from the wide steps and climb off to the left and around, past the huge ornate glyphs of jaguars reconstructed on that side, the structure of the artificial mountain becomes clearer. It is a tower built upon other towers, an agglomeration of buildings perched one atop the next. From the path on the east side the vista is magnificent but Canek doesn’t stop here. He takes me around to the south side, where a set of steps leads to a wide plateau. We scoot around a narrow ledge to a balcony with steep walls on either side and a broad view east, into the jungles of Belize.
“You can go farther up,” says Canek.
“Let’s go then.”
“You should go alone, Victor. It is better alone.”
He gives me a drink of water. I look again down from the balcony and realize I am already over a hundred feet above the plaza. I take another drink and then head back, across the narrow ledge, to the south side. It appears there is no way up but then I spot a narrow set of stairs cut into the stone. I climb them, one hand brushing the wall, to a ledge where I find a similar set of narrow stairs, this set leading up to a high room, stinking incongruously of skunk. There is no way out of that room, but I follow the ledge to the west, to another room, with a set of steep stone stairs spiraling up through a hole cut into the room’s ceiling. I grab the steps above me to keep me steady and begin my climb. Slowly I rise through the ceiling and then step onto a narrow plaza with five great blocks of stone, seated one next to the other, like five jagged teeth. I am so relieved to be again on solid ground that it takes me a moment to calm myself before I look around. When I do my breath halts from the sight.
I can see so far it is as if I can see through time. I trace the indentation of the river as it flows through the jungle. In the distance to the east is San Ignacio and the rest of Belize. But for a slight haze I’m certain I could see the ocean. To the west is the absolute green of the wilds of the Petén region of Guatemala. I am being held aloft by the ruins of a temple thousands of years old and for a moment I feel informed by the ancient wisdom of those who built and worshiped in this edifice. There is more to the universe than what I can see and feel, this ancient knowledge tells me, more than the shallow limits of my own horizons, and this limitlessness, it tells me just as surely, is as much a part of me as my hand and my heart and my soul. It comes to me in an instant, this knowledge of my own infinitude, as solid as any insight I have ever held, and disappears just as quickly, leaving the unattached emotional traces of a forgotten dream.
I wipe the sweat from my neck and wonder what the hell that was all about. I figure I am suffering from dehydration and should quickly get to the hotel in San Ignacio, suck down some water, relax, take it slow for a day or two before continuing my search. But I look around and think again on what it was I thought I understood. The story of the corpse we found beneath the garden behind the great Reddman house twists and turns through love and war and ever more death, but it also contains one man’s understanding of his place in the universe that gave solace and serenity and maybe even something akin to forgiveness. For the first time since I learned of it I have an inkling of what it might have done to him to see the world and his life that way. Jacqueline Shaw, I think, was looking for the same sort of understanding during her time with the Church of the New Life, as was Beth after her. There are truths, I know with all certainty, that I will never grasp, but that doesn’t make them any less true. And some of those truths might be the only antidote to the poison that passed like a plague through the Reddman line.
And as I spin around and look once more at this grand vista I know something else with an absolute certainty. I don’t know how I know it, or why, but I know it, yes I do. What I know for certain is that the man for whom I am searching is somewhere down there, somewhere hiding in the wild green of that jungle.
And I’m going to find the bastard, I know that too.
31
MORRIS KAPUSTIN WAS SITTING at my dining room table with his head in his hands. He had a naturally large head, Morris did, and it seemed even larger due to his long peppered beard and mass of unruly hair, the wide-brimmed black hat he wore even inside my apartment, the way his small pudgy hands barely covered his face. His black suit was ragged, his thin tie was loose about his neck, he leaned forward with his elbows on the table and his tiny feet resting on the strut of his chair, listening with great concentration. Across from him sat Beth, who was explaining her most recent meditative exercises to him. On the table between Beth and Morris was the metal box Caroline and I had disinterred from the garden behind Veritas the night before. Deep
ridges slashed through the surface of the metal where I had futilely chopped at the box with the shovel. It sat there, dirty and crusted, still unopened, large with mystery.
“We start with a small seed,” said Beth. “We place it before us and meditate upon it, thinking all the while of the plant that will grow from the seed. We visualize the plant inherent in the seed, make it present to us and in us, and then meditate on that visualization, allow our soul to react to it. Eventually, we begin to see the life force in the seed as a sort of flame.”
“And this flame, what does it look like?” asked Morris.
“It’s close to the color purple in the middle, with something like blue at the edges.”
“And you’ve seen this hallucination?” I said.
Beth looked up at me calmly. “Yes,” she said.
“Fascinating,” said Morris, the final “ng” sounding like a “k.” “Simply fascinating.”
“And then we concentrate on a mature plant and immerse ourselves in the thought that this plant will someday wither and decay before being reborn through its seeds. As we concentrate on the death and rebirth of this plant, banishing all thoughts other than those of the plant, we begin to see the death force inherent in the plant, and it too is like a flame, green-blue in its center and yellow-red at the periphery.”
“I can’t believe you’re buying into this crap, Beth,” I said.
“I’ve seen it,” she said. “Either that or my lentil casserole was spiked.”
“And now, after you’ve seen all this,” said Morris, “what are you supposed to do with all that you are seeing?”
“I don’t know that yet,” said Beth with a sigh. “Right now I’m struggling to develop my spiritual sight so that, when the truth does appear, I’ll be ready to perceive it.”
“When you perceive something a little more than these flamelike colors,” said Morris, “then you come back to me and we’ll talk. The spirit world, it is not unknown to Jews, but these colors, they are no more than shmei drei. Just colors I can see every day on cable.”
Morris Kapustin was my private detective. He didn’t look like a private detective or talk like a private detective or act like a private detective but he thought like the best private detective you’ve ever dreamed of. I liked him and trusted him and, after Beth, the list of those whom I actually liked and trusted was rather short. Like all good things in this life I had first had him rammed down my throat. A group of insurgent clients had thought a settlement offer I had jumped at was less than their case was worth. They ordered me to hire Morris to find a missing witness. Morris found him, which increased the value of the case tremendously, and in the process he sort of saved my life. Since then he had been my private dick, my spiritual adviser, and my friend. I had thought I would do my dance around the Reddman fortune without him but, after discovering that skeleton the night before, I realized that the mysteries were deepening beyond my minimal capacities and that I needed Morris.
“I think,” I said to Beth, “that Morris is pretty firmly entrenched in a spiritual tradition a few thousand years older than your Church of the New Life. I’m sure he’s not interested in your New Age rubbish.”
Morris picked his head up out of his hands. “On the contrary, Victor. It is just such rubbish that interests me so much. Did you ever hear, Victor, of Kabbalah?”
“I’ve heard of it,” I said, though that was about the limit of my knowledge. Kabbalah was an obscure form of Jewish mysticism, neither taught nor even mentioned in the few years I attended religious school before my father quit the synagogue. It was said to be ancient and dangerous and better left untouched.
“Your meditation, Beth, this is not a foreign idea to Jews. The Hassidim, they chant and sing and dance like wild men and they say it works. I always thought it was the way they drank, like shikkers in a desert, but maybe it is something more. And this is what I find, Miss Beth. Every morning, in shachris, when I strap on my tefillin and daven, I find often something strange it happens. Some precious mornings all the mishegaas around my life, it disappears and I find myself floating, surrounded by something bright and divine and infinite. The Kabbalists, they have a term for it, the infinite, they call it the Ein-Sof.”
“But that’s very different,” said Beth. “We’re being trained in our meditation to focus and join with a great emptiness, not a deity of some sort.”
“Yes, of course, that is a difference. But there are those who claim that any true knowledge of the infinite, it is so beyond us that we can only experience the Ein-Sof as a sort of nothingness. The Hebrew word for nothing, it is Ayin, and the similarities in the words are said to be of great significance.”
“How come I never learned any of this?” I asked.
“This is all very powerful, very dangerous. There were people, very devout people, great rabbis even, who were not ready to ascend into certain of the divine rooms and never returned. The rabbis they think maybe you should get off your tuchis and learn more about the bolts and the nuts of our religion before you start to potchkeh with the Kabbalah. Maybe learn first to keep the Shabbos and keep kosher and learn to daven every day. They have a point, Victor, no? These are not games or toys. They take intense commitment. True devotion comes from following all God’s mitzvoth. The righteous, they reach a point where every act in their daily rituals is full of meaning and devotion and life itself, it becomes like a meditation.”
“If this is all so darn terrific, how come I never saw it being hawked on an infomercial?”
“Not everything in this world can be bought, Victor,” said Beth.
“Maybe not,” I said, “but have you seen what the stuff Cher sells can do for your hair? Tell me something, Beth. If your friends are so exclusively devoted to the spirit world, why are they so anxious to get their mitts on Jacqueline’s five-million-dollar death benefit?”
Beth looked at me for a moment. “That’s a good question. I’ve been wondering about that myself.”
“Until we find an answer,” I said, “I think you should be extra careful. They might just be as dangerous as they think they are.”
“That’s exactly why I set it up so you’re the one who’s going to ask Oleanna all about it.”
“Oleanna?”
“Tomorrow night, at the Haven. I told her you had some important questions.”
“And the great seer deigned to meet with me?”
“It’s what you wanted, right?”
“Sure,” I said, suddenly and strangely nervous. “What is she like?”
“I think you’ll be impressed,” said Beth, laughing. “She is a very evolved soul.”
“Her past lives were thrilling, no doubt,” I said. “She was a queen or a great soldier or Nostradamus himself. Why is it no one ever sold insurance in their past lives?”
“You should not be scoffing so quickly,” said Morris. “Someday, when you are ready, I’ll tell you of the gilgul. As Rebbe Elazar ha-Kappar once said, ‘Those who are born are destined to die, those who are dead are destined to be brought to life again.’ Be aware, Victor, there is much to learn in this world, and not all of it can be found in the Encyclopedia Britannica.”
I stared at him. “Did you ever go to college, Morris?”
“Aacht. It’s a shandeh, really. I regret so much in this life but that I regret most of all. No. I had plans, of course, when I was a boy, the Academy of Science at Minsk, they took Jews, they even taught in Yiddish, and the whole of my family we were saving each day zloty for my fee. I was to be an intellectual, to sip slivovitz in the cafés and argue about Moses Mendelssohn and Pushkin, that was my dream. Then of course the war, it came and plans like that they flew like a frying pan out the window. Just surviving was education enough. I won’t go through the whole megillah, but no, Victor. Why do you ask such a thing?”
“Because I could just see you hanging out in the dormitories, eating pizza, drinking beer from cans, talking all night about the cosmic mysteries of life.”
“And Push
kin, we could maybe discuss Pushkin?”
“Sure, Morris. Pushkin.”
“I don’t even like the poetry so much, I must admit, but the sound of the name. Pushkin, Pushkin. I can’t resist it. Pushkin. Sign me up, boychick, I’m in.”
“He is less the skeptic than you, Victor,” said Beth. “At least he listens and takes it seriously.”
“I tried it, Beth, really I did, I sat on the floor and meditated and examined myself and my life like a detached observer, just as you suggested.”
“How did it make you feel?”
“Before or after I threw up?”
“You know, Victor,” said Morris. “A very wise man once said that nausea, it is the first sign of serious trouble in this life. Very serious. Such nausea, it should not be ignored.”
“What, now you’re quoting Sartre?”
“Sartre, Schmatre, I’m talking about my gastroenterologist, Hermie Weisenberg. Maybe what you need is a scope. I’ll set it up for you.”
“Forget the scope.” I gestured at the box. “You sure you can open it?”
“I can try.”
“I thought Sheldon was coming.” Sheldon Kapustin was Morris’s son and a trained locksmith. “I asked for Sheldon.”
“Sheldon, he was busy tonight. He’s of that age now that I want for nothing to get in the way of his social life. A man my age, he should have granddaughters, no? So don’t be disturbing my Sheldon. Besides, who do you think taught him such about locks anyway?”
“You, Morris?”
“No, don’t be silly. A master locksmith named McCardle, but this McCardle he taught me too. Victor, this girl, when is she coming, nu?”
“Any minute now,” I said, and just as I said it my buzzer rang.
Caroline, when she entered the apartment, was nervous and closed. She came right in and sat on the couch, away from the table and the box. She crossed her legs and wrapped her arms around herself. As I introduced Morris and Beth to her, she smiled tightly and lit a cigarette.
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