The Antiquities Hunter

by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff

  Inside the walls were a cluster of temples—stepped pyramids all. The landscape around them was lush and verdant, but not overgrown as I’d imagined it would be. Blame it on the movies. In my imagination it had looked like a scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark. In reality it was more like a natural park—not groomed, but well kept. Jungle shrubbery had been thinned throughout the site, while the trees were left to grow in graceful copses. The temples arose from among them like staircases to the clouds, lofty, solid, awe-inspiring. It was tempting just to stand there with my mouth hanging open, staring at them. But Marianna would never be so nebbish, so I pretended vague interest and followed Cruz through the picture-postcard scenery.

  On one end of the compound was a ball court. It was peopled at the moment with a group taking pictures. I got the feeling the Mayans would have loved American football, although they probably would have thought today’s players were pretty wimpy to wear all that padding. Beyond the ball court, the roof of the largest pyramid seemed to float above the trees.

  Cruz nodded at it. “The Acropolis.”

  It had a front porch. A long gallery with pillars upholding a sloping roof.

  “Are those shingles?” I asked as we approached.

  “Thatch.”

  “Surely the archaeologists didn’t find it like that.”

  Cruz laughed. “Of course not. It’s a reconstruction, although the temple up there was fairly well preserved. They buried it in fill.”

  “They?”

  “The Mayans. The same sort of thing was done at other sites as well. The most famous being Rosalila.”

  “Okay, that one I remember. A temple inside a temple inside a temple. Reminds me of the babushka dolls my mom is always sticking in my pockets.”

  He turned and looked at me. “Babushka dolls? You mean those nested dolls? The Russian ones?”

  I nodded, my eyes on the expanse of stone and thatch that thrust out of the lush green of the forest. I half expected someone in a feathered kilt to come out and wave to us from the balcony railing.

  “Why does your mother put Russian nesting dolls in your pockets?”

  “For luck. Mom likes to think of herself as a volkhovnitsa—a witch. Not that she’d admit it, of course. She prefers to hide behind her PhD in Russian history. Pretends she only has an academic interest in materia magica. Before I left on this trip, she actually sprinkled holy water on my Harley.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. She blessed my gun too.”

  “She sounds . . .” He hesitated.

  “It’s okay, you can say it. She’s eccentric. So’s my dad, so they’re a good match.”

  “Your dad was a police detective.”

  It wasn’t a question. I didn’t recall having discussed it with him, so I assumed he’d done some more homework on me. I wondered how much homework. I wondered if he knew, for example, how my dad had come to retire early.

  “Yeah. Now he pretends to be Sherlock Holmes. He’s mostly harmless. Although . . .”

  “Although what?”

  We’d stopped at the foot of the Acropolis and I turned to face him. “That day at the headlands he and his Sausalito Irregulars were also providing, shall we say, covert backup for the stalker surveillance.”

  He was stunned. I could tell by the way he didn’t move for a five count. “Those weren’t NPS agents?”

  “There were three NPS agents, one in the parking area, one stationed by the trailhead, the other where the walking path met the road. Anybody else you saw that seemed . . . covert was one of my dad’s guys.”

  “Ex-cops?”

  “Two ex, two off duty, and one assistant ME.”

  He shook his head. “Who called them in?”

  “Nobody. Dad just wanted to make sure I had enough backup.”

  “You almost didn’t.”

  “Which is the perfect segue to me asking why you were there, doing Madison Baumgarner impersonations.”

  “My job didn’t end just because you caught me out. I was following Rose. Imagine my piqued interest when I realized that someone else was also following Rose, rather aggressively, in fact. As if he very much wanted her to know it. Anything else you’d like to know?”

  I considered asking how much he knew about my brief career in law enforcement, then told myself it didn’t matter. I gestured at the Acropolis. “Up the stairs?”

  He nodded and led the way. The handful of other folks wandering the ruins looked like students. Except for the ones that looked like professors. Both were oblivious to anything but the ruins and each other, which was just fine by me.

  We climbed up into the shade of the Acropolis’s thatched porch. The roof protected a façade covered completely with amazingly intricate carvings.

  “This is the White Temple,” Cruz told me. “Inside is the tomb of Ukit Kan Le’k Tok’, a king of Ek Balam.”

  “Huh. Easy for you to say.” I squatted before a low platform the size of a California King mattress. It was supported by a row of grinning stone faces interspersed with undulating scrollwork. “And these are his subjects?”

  He hunkered down next to me. “Those are the skulls of the dead in the Underworld. The Mayans conceived of the Underworld as being under water. They also believed it had nine separate Hells.”

  “Groovy. So the scrolly things are waves?”

  “Waves and water lilies.”

  “Sweet.”

  Cruz smiled, a bit indulgently, I thought. “Different culture; different take on death. The Mayans, not unlike the Hindus, saw death, destruction, and decay as being inseparable from life.”

  “Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, Shiva the Destroyer,” I murmured.

  “Exactly. And Kali, the embodiment of both death and birth. The two seeming extremes in one entity. There’s a temple at Palenque that depicts maize leaves sprouting from a skull. Out of death—life.”

  “They must have loved compost.”

  “I think it’s a singularly well-rounded point of view, myself. Yin and yang eternally joined in a single symbol.”

  I turned and found him looking at me very gravely as if it were important that I understand this concept.

  “I get it,” I assured him. “It’s very Zen.”

  “You’re Buddhist?”

  “My father’s Buddhist—more Nichiren than Zen—Mom’s Russian Orthodox. So I’m sort of a Russian Orthodox Buddhist.”

  “Who carries babushkas in her pocket and has a blessed gun.”

  I reached into the pocket of my khaki capris and pulled out Dad’s tanuki and Mom’s Saint Boris, holding them out for inspection.

  He laughed. “I’ve got to meet your parents.”

  “No you don’t. Okay, Dad maybe. But Mom . . .” I shivered at the very thought. “Trust me, you don’t want to meet Mom. She’ll cut off pieces of your hair while you’re not looking and do all sorts of bizarre things with them.”

  “Like?”

  “Roll them in lumps of wax and drop them into hot liquid. Burn them. Toss them into the air to see where they fall.”

  He looked legitimately puzzled. “Why?”

  “You don’t wanna know,” I said and got to my feet, turning my attention to the façade of Ukit’s little memorial. “Wow, this is in incredibly good condition.”

  Okay, I admit it. It was a dodge. In part. But the place really was in amazing condition; the stonework looked as if it had been carved yesterday.

  “That’s because the temple is part of the burial. It was created for the purpose of preserving the king’s remains and so it was buried with him under tons of rubble and limestone fill.”

  I stepped closer to the door. It looked like a mouth lined with ornate teeth. The platform I’d been examining, I realized, was the protruding lower jaw. “The king’s inside the monster? Eaten by Death?”

  Cruz nodded, then stood and pointed up at the creature’s face. There were some figures perched on it—one on its right eyelid, a larger one on its muzzle. There was
also a place on the left side of the huge face where it appeared a figure had been hewn away, leaving a rough patch of stone to mark its passing. And the largest figure in the group, I realized, was headless.

  “Pothunters?”

  “Yes. But here, they take more than pots. Here, they take the head of the king.” He pointed at the headless figure atop the creature’s nose. “That was an effigy of Ukit Kan Le’k Tok’, himself. The tomb inside has been similarly vandalized—little bits of it carried away to be sold to the highest bidder. I sometimes wonder . . .”

  “What?”

  “Perhaps it is treasonous, but I’ve sometimes wondered if my own government might be behind, if not the looting itself, at least the laxity with which it is prosecuted. Mexico is not a wealthy nation. And these treasures command a hefty price on the black and gray markets.”

  I looked up at him, trying to read his face. “If you’re right about that—if the pillaging is institutionalized—then what can we do here?”

  He met my eyes, his own grimmer than the death’s-heads poking from the limestone façade. “Whatever we can.”

  We continued our tour, Cruz acting as guide and lecturer, and pointing out other places where the pothunters had struck. One of the most obvious was a doorway flanked by painted figures that were almost Egyptian in style. There had apparently been three rows of them at one time. Now there were two—the lowest (and easiest to reach) had been cleanly hacked away. I could even see the smooth bore of a masonry drill along one side. In all, I figured the missing pieces must be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars—possibly millions.

  “You think we’re going to see some of the missing bits of Ek Balam tonight after dinner?” I asked Cruz as we wandered back to our vehicle.

  He looked up through the canopy of sun-filtering green and it struck me that his ancestors had walked here. Had lived here. Had built this. It was his in a way I had no personal referent for. But I understood Rose and her quest for her grandmother’s bones. Maybe that meant I understood Cruz Veras, just a little.

  “It wouldn’t surprise me,” he said, then glanced sideways at me and laughed. “‘My God,’ she thought, ‘I’m shackled to an anthro-geek! Shoot me now.’”

  “Actually, I was trying to empathize with you. I do empathize with you. Because of Rose. And Mom. And I’d say you’re more crusader than geek.”

  He bowed. “Too kind.”

  We climbed back into our trusty SUV to return to Cancún and our dinner date with Felipe Revez.

  The concierge began signaling me the moment we entered the hotel lobby, then met me halfway to his desk, clutching a piece of paper. “An urgent message, Ms. Esposito,” he told me, holding out the note. “Your brother-in-law wanted to be sure you got it the moment you came in.”

  I started to reach for it, but my hand froze somewhere between here and there. Cruz took it and thanked the concierge with a crisp five-dollar bill that seemed to appear out of nowhere.

  My eyes on the note, I was only peripherally aware of the concierge returning to his station. I looked up at Cruz with no idea what my face was doing. Whatever it was, it prompted him to grasp my elbow firmly and steer me across the lobby and into the elevator, where we were blessedly alone.

  I leaned against the wall of the elevator while he opened the note. He didn’t prolong the moment. “It says: ‘Your sister left a brief message. She hung up before I could talk to her, but it’s something.’”

  I hiccupped and burst into tears.

  Chapter 13

  My Dinner with Felipe

  My face was a train wreck by the time we got back to the suite. What makeup I’d put on had dissolved in the salty monsoon. I disappeared into my bathroom on the pretext of cleaning up. About fifteen minutes later, I’d cried out all my angst, kissed my various oberegi for good luck, and called Dave by cell phone to verify the contents of his message.

  The news wasn’t as good as I’d hoped. Rose hadn’t fully regained consciousness, not even momentarily, but had merely bobbed toward it for a minute or two. Still, as Dave said, it was something.

  I hung up and changed into one of Marianna’s silk outfits—a vivid saffron off-the-shoulder number that made me feel, perversely, like a Buddhist monk.

  Cruz was standing out on the balcony admiring the sunset when I reappeared. He apparently had acute hearing, because he turned before I was even fully into the living room.

  “Better?”

  “Yeah. Better. Even got rid of the hiccups. Look, I’m really sorry about all that.” I nodded in the general direction of the elevator.

  I couldn’t see his face in the shadow of the setting sun, but he sounded puzzled. “Why are you apologizing? Your best friend has been in a coma for over a week. I take it she showed a glimmer of consciousness?”

  I explained what I’d gleaned from Dave, putting as cheery a face on it as possible. “I don’t usually indulge in histrionics.”

  “I believe,” he said, “that machismo is supposed to be a male affectation. An Hispanic male affectation, at that.” He studied me for a moment longer, then added, “You don’t have to prove yourself, Gina. I know you’re capable of pulling your own weight on this sting. Rose has faith in you. Ellen has faith in you. I see no reason why I shouldn’t. Now, you should probably go put on your makeup. We’re due up at Revez’s penthouse in about half an hour.”

  “I’m wearing makeup.”

  “Let me see.”

  He came fully into the room to draw me into the bedroom where the row of lights around the vanity lit my face in less lurid hues than a Cancún sunset. After an entire two seconds of scrutiny he shook his head.

  “Pardon me for saying so, but you look less like Marianna and more like Gina at the moment. You need more.”

  “I’m afraid to try more,” I admitted. “I don’t wear a lot of makeup normally, and I’m afraid if I get more liberal with the brushes, I’ll end up looking like a bad mime.”

  “Sit down.” He took me by the shoulders and settled me on the vanity stool, then reached for Marianna’s makeup kit, an ornate velvet box chock full of colorful hues.

  I groaned. “Oh, please. Don’t tell me—you worked in a beauty salon after school when you were a kid.”

  He bent to scrabble in my toolkit, unsuccessfully hiding a smile. “I did stage makeup for a repertory theater group. And I have three older sisters.”

  “You watched them do their makeup?”

  “I found the process fascinating.”

  “And they let you?”

  “Not exactly.”

  He had me tilt my head back, then began to apply makeup with deft strokes of puff and brush and pencil. His ministrations made me nervous. It was like sitting in a dentist’s chair. And, as happens when I sit in a dentist’s chair, my hands balled into tight fists.

  “Relax,” he told me. “I promise I won’t poke your eye out or make you look like a cheap tart.”

  “Oh, please, no. Make me look like a very expensive tart.”

  “You empathized with me because of your mother, you said,” he recalled as he worked. “Why your mother?”

  I accepted the sudden change of topic as a ploy to relax me. “I mentioned that Mom’s an academic.”

  “A doctor of history, yes?”

  “Yeah. She teaches at SFSU. I think her studies—history, folklore, arcana—I think they’re her way of reclaiming her personal history. She came to the U.S. when she was twelve with her parents and her paternal grandmother. Her parents wanted their family to be thoroughly American. So they changed their name from Arkhangelski to Arkham. Then they changed their daughter’s name from Nadezhda to Nancy.”

  “That’s a bit extreme, isn’t it?”

  “That was just the beginning. They changed her name; they changed her language—she was to speak only English at home; they sent her to an elocution coach to get rid of her accent; they had her hair styled in the latest fashion. And they took her to a Protestant church. But the worst thing, I think, was th
at they tried to keep her away from great-gramma. She was a bad influence, they said. Always going on about the old country, the old ways, the old beliefs.”

  “So naturally her grandmother became a coconspirator,” Cruz guessed.

  “Coconspirator and heroine. I don’t know why Russian parents would try to keep their kids from doing anything by force. If Russia has a national virtue, it’s stubbornness. That’s something all the elocution coaches and hair stylists in the universe can’t change. Mom hung out with great-gramma at every opportunity, listening to her tales, absorbing her sense of the religious and the magical. She did more than listen—when she was thirteen she bought a tape recorder and recorded every story great-gramma could remember. And when she’d exhausted that source, she moved on to the nearest college library. By the time she was a sophomore in college, she’d changed her name back to the Russian, but used the diminutive, Nadia, so as not to fluster the natives. And she’d read every musty tome on Russian magic she could find. She even started writing one of her own. She did her master’s thesis on comparative magic and her doctoral dissertation on magic in the Christian church. But it’s more than just an academic pursuit to her. The PhD is just a smoke screen to give her a reason to immerse herself in the Motherland. She never thought of herself as Nancy Arkham. Not for one second.”

  I chuckled, recalling something Dad had told me when I was fifteen. One of those things we tell our teenagers to embarrass the crap out of them.

  “What?” Cruz asked, sweeping a brush across my right eyelid.

  “When I was born, Mom folded a lock of my hair inside a piece of linen, wrote my name on it, and hid it under the altar at Our Lady of Kazan cathedral. When Dad told me that, I was mortified.” I affected a teenager’s petulant whine: “‘Mom, how could you? How embarrassing! What if the priest finds it? What will he think?’ ‘He’ll think I’m a witch,’ she told me. ‘But it’s all right. There were at least five little packets of linen under his altar. One family he might expel. Five is a pogrom.’”