The Antiquities Hunter

by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff

  “I wish to establish a more direct conduit. One that is far more stable and certain.” He glanced from me to Cruz. “Not long ago, I was informed that the newest of my American operatives had been murdered, and his . . . inventory stolen. What the murderers did not get, I assume the authorities did. I have had to cease operations. It is simply not safe to continue.”

  We both knew who he meant. Did he suspect that we knew? Were his eyes just a bit too sharply trained on Cruz’s face? Was he fishing for a reaction? Was I being unduly paranoid?

  “Do you have any idea who might have murdered your operative?” asked Cruz. “Surely you don’t think it merely coincidence?”

  “I fear that a certain associate might have noticed that this person was trafficking artifacts from Bonampak B and took matters into his own hands. The operative, I belatedly realized, was an unwise man and reckless. He rather liked to flout authority.”

  That could have been a reading of the late Ted Bridges’s horoscope.

  “You fear,” Cruz guessed, “that this associate may connect you to the murdered operative?”

  Revez turned from Cruz to me, his eyes over-bright in the glow of his lamp and said, “Marianna, with your fiancé’s investment in this enterprise, I can establish direct contact with buyers in the U.S. I will no longer need my associates or, indeed, my other investors. And if Mr. Catalano is willing to finance a major excavation, we can have this place picked clean within a year.”

  “At which point, you will disappear?” suggested Cruz.

  “Only if necessary. If my involvement in this were to become a legal issue.”

  “Can you hide this place from the authorities for a year with a full-scale excavation going on?” I asked.

  “I have already kept it hidden for two. True, I have not brought in heavy machinery. But in a site such as this, bulldozers and backhoes are not what is needed. What is needed is manpower, small machinery, a security system, and a means of lifting larger amounts of artifacts out. Currently, I have not the resources to do a tenth of what is needed.” He gestured down the corridor. “Let me show you.”

  The ancients weren’t idiots. They had obviously intended that any vandals or robbers greedy enough to enter would die of starvation or go stark raving straitjacket long before they got to the really juicy stuff. The place was a labyrinth of close, chill passages—some of which were barely wide enough to accommodate a full-sized man. I was lost within seconds of leaving the main hall. We turned this way and that for what seemed like miles, while I tried to imagine what the maze of corridors might look like from above . . . and became increasingly aware of how much earth and stone and jungle was pressing down on us.

  If this had been a natural cave, I wouldn’t have cared, but the fact that it was manmade and probably held together with nothing but friction and prayers made me jinky, notwithstanding that it had withstood time and jungle vines for uncounted centuries.

  I glanced repeatedly at Cruz to see how he was reacting to this. His face was grim, his eyes unreadable. Occasionally he met my gaze; mostly he watched Revez the way I imagine a mongoose watches a cobra.

  Revez set the whole thing up like a true showman. At the end of a journey that had me wishing for my good old Girl Scout pocket compass, breadcrumbs, or a ball of bewitched twine, he led us to a doorway that reminded me eerily of the Bedstead from Hell in the tomb at Ek Balam. A huge mouth yawned before us, its long tongue forming a series of shallow steps. Its lips were blood red, its fangs pearly white, its bulging eyes yellow and blue. It looked like a stylized puma.

  To the right of the doorway was a frieze that had been left intact. A line of five obviously male figures dominated it, and as seems common with these things, looked as if they were doing the Hokey Pokey.

  “That,” Revez told me, “depicts the royal succession at Yaxchilán and Bonampak. We left it intact because of the difficulty of removing it without destroying the context.”

  Cruz moved to stand next to me beneath the frieze. “It begins with a depiction of God K.”

  “That was his name?” I asked. “God K? What kind of name is that for a god?”

  Cruz did not crack a smile. “Actually, his name was Ah Bolom Tzacab and he was, to all intents and purposes, the patron god of the royal house. God of agriculture and lord of rain and thunder.”

  “He has a leaf in his nose,” I observed. “At least, I hope it’s a leaf.”

  Revez laughed and pointed to the figures Hokey-Pokeying to God K’s right. “These illustrious fellows are Shield Jaguar I, Bird Jaguar IV, and here is the god-king whose treasure house this is—Shield Jaguar II. His son, Tah-Skull III, is depicted as a child.”

  That accounted for the size difference between the fourth and fifth figures. “Oh. I thought he was just especially short.”

  Revez escorted Cruz and I to the jaguar-mouth doorway then and made us walk up the tongue and step through the jaws into a chamber as dark as the inside of a hat. Then he took the lamp and disappeared into the passage behind us. As he slid past me in the dark, he ran his fingers lightly across the nape of my neck.

  I shuddered.

  “What?” Cruz whispered.

  “Nothing,” I murmured. I mean, really, a little unwanted touching was better than having him use the cover of hat-blackness to attempt to throttle me.

  Cruz shifted toward me and gave my hand a squeeze.

  The lights went on. Lots of lights, strung on standards made of PVC pipe and aluminum. The place was silent as a tomb, appropriately enough, so I assumed they ran on batteries. And what they illuminated . . .

  I moved down the puma’s throat and into its stomach, dimly realizing that I was still holding Cruz’s hand. I dropped it and kept moving, my eyes on the walls.

  The murals ran down one side of the room and up the other, so vivid they seemed to stand out in 3-D. The figures were life-size and engaged in all sorts of activities from the mundane to the fantastic, from the erotic to the grotesque.

  “The life of a king,” said Cruz in a hushed voice. “The life of Shield Jaguar II.” He pointed to a panel to the right of the doorway. “His birth here.”

  Hocked up like a hair ball by a dragon? I thought irreverently. This was not something Marianna Esposito would say, so instead I offered, “His mother was quite the Dragon Lady.”

  “Poetic license. The dragon is the portal to the Underworld, remember. You are born into this world from the Underworld; you return to it when you die.”

  I had a sudden, vivid image in my mind of Cruz Sacramento Veras not in jeans and khaki jacket, but in the leathery, feathery regalia of a Mayan warrior-king. He looked silly. But then anyone would look silly in that getup.

  “And here,” he was saying, “he learns to hunt, he plays ball, he ascends to the throne. Here, the bloodletting ceremony when he marries; again, when he fathers a child . . .” He did a slow 180, tracing the story with his finger. “He makes war and conquers, he accepts the submission of the conquered, he offers adoration to the gods, he dies.”

  “And is gobbled up by the dragon,” I noted.

  “Incredible.” Cruz shook his head. “I’ve never seen anything like it. The scale . . .”

  “Yes, the scale,” echoed Revez, stepping down from the back of the puma’s tongue to join us in his tummy. “And therein lies the problem. How do you remove all of this?”

  I smiled and turned to face him. “With about twenty-five million dollars worth of logistical aid. But it’s a bit hard to present this as a wedding gift.” I waved at the murals.

  Revez took my hand again and tugged me to the end of the hall. What I had taken as a little painted doorway turned out to be the real deal. When I say “little” I do not exaggerate. This was a portal even a munchkin would find constricting. Nonetheless, Revez got down and worked his way through on his elbows, dragging his legs behind. I was able to do it on hands and knees. I don’t know how Cruz navigated it, but he came out covered with dust.

  When I was upright once mor
e, I thought I had passed out in the tunnel and was hallucinating. The chamber into which I had emerged was literally a treasure trove, containing a vast accumulation of artifacts stacked with seeming care—metal, stone, wood, ceramic, jeweled and carved, painted and plain. They lay on tiered shelves of stone block. They lined the steps leading up to a sarcophagus which was, itself, brimming with booty. In the lights mounted high in the corners of the room, the gold and gems boggled the eyes and the mind. I’d stepped out of reality onto a movie set.

  Cruz leaned over and picked up two artifacts from the steps of the sarcophagus, holding one in each hand and turning them in the light.

  “These are from two completely different eras. And this . . .” He nudged a heavy, ornate plate with one foot. “. . . this is not even of the same culture.”

  Even I could tell that. Like Revez and my fictional fiancé, Shield Jaguar II was apparently a connoisseur of pre-Columbian art.

  We did not leave Bonampak B empty-handed. Felipe allowed me to wander the trove to find a suitable wedding present for my fabricated fiancé. My poor, not-used-to-this-kind-of-thing senses overloaded after the first ten artifacts I encountered at close range. I hadn’t even seen things like this on museum tours. I was used to antiquities that looked . . . well . . . antique. These looked as if the craftsman had just spit-polished them and set them on the shelf.

  I was afraid Felipe would find my weak-kneed reaction to his largesse suspicious, but he was too busy packing up a king’s ransom worth of artifacts of his own and hauling them out to the Humvee to notice my wide-eyed wonder. After herding my wits back into some semblance of order, I chose a two-foot-tall statue of gold and turquoise that reminded me strikingly of the effigies of Krishna that frequent Indian shrines.

  “You don’t think this might be from India, do you?” I asked Cruz, who was admiring my choice of gift as he prepared to store it in the back of the Hummer.

  He gave me a look that would have driven a lesser woman to scarf an entire sixteen-ounce box of Mallomars.

  “You have to admit, it really does look like Krishna,” I added defensively.

  He wagged his head. “Yes, it does. But it is not Krishna. It is Bird Jaguar IV, father of Chel-Te-Chan Ma-K’inah.”

  “That’s got a nice rhythm to it. Again in inglés?”

  “Shield Jaguar II. Chel-Te-Chan Ma-K’inah was his birth name. Shield Jaguar, or Itzamnaaj Balam, was his dynastic name.”

  “Yeah, well, his daddy looks like Krishna to me. Do you think there might have been some crossover? Trade?”

  “Between India and the Yucatán?”

  “Don’t laugh. What about those big stone heads they found in Veracruz? The ones they thought were Olmec. Some of them look African or Asian.”

  The expression on his face shifted subtly. “You find these things of interest, do you?”

  “Well, sure.” I glanced toward the treasure temple from which Revez would soon appear after closing up shop. “‘Sis’ has always been into archaeology and folklore. Granted, on a different scale than this. Even as a teenager I knew more about potsherds and middens than was probably healthy.”

  “While as an adult you know more about choke holds and defensive blocks than a young woman should have to.”

  He sounded . . . rueful.

  I gave him a questioning look. “Considering how we’d defend ourselves if this turned out to be a trap set for two nosy agents?”

  “Most definitely. But . . .” He checked the temple again. “Revez seems to take us at face value, else . . .”

  “Else, he would have shot us while we were blindfolded?”

  “Morbid, aren’t you? I was thinking, realistically, if he didn’t trust us, and if he wasn’t desperate for an immense inflow of cash, he wouldn’t have brought us out here at all—blindfolds or no.”

  “Or let me take our little friend here.” I nodded at the statue.

  His eyes caressed the golden effigy. “We know a good deal about Bird Jaguar IV. After a contested accession, he had a long and apparently fortunate rule at Yaxchilán. Of his son, we know much less. There is some mention of him at Yaxchilán, some at Bonampak, but here . . .” His gaze returned unfocused to the pyramid. “This, perhaps, is where Itzamnaaj Balam is to be found at last.”

  Revez hove into sight around the corner of the overgrown building. I stretched up on tiptoe, put my lips to Cruz’s ear, and whispered, “It belongs in a museum.”

  Chapter 18

  An Inexhaustible Supply of Tails

  The sun was lowering itself toward the horizon when we touched down at the helipad in Palenque. The plan was to fly back to Cancún that evening—Revez was rather leery of having his pilfered haul sitting in the Raven overnight.

  “Do we have time for a pit stop?” I asked brightly, as my feet touched terra firma. (There is nothing like being suspended from four way-too-thin rotor blades to make one appreciate the beauty of solid dirt.)

  Revez raised an eyebrow at me. “A pit stop?”

  I froze for a second, realizing that Gina had somehow poked her nose out from behind her sleek Marianna mask. Over Revez’s shoulder, Cruz gave me a warning look. I felt my face flushing.

  I laughed. “That’s what Geoff always says. It means I need to use the ladies’ room.”

  “If it will help you dispel some of that interminable energy you seem to have, most certainly. I feel old and decrepit just looking at you.” He was smiling when he said it and I suspect he knew that even in crumpled, dirty khakis he looked neither old nor decrepit. “It will take some effort to move cargo to the jet, at any rate. I’ll arrange for it.”

  “You intend to let the airport staff handle your crates?” Cruz asked.

  “To do otherwise would invite suspicion. It will be treated like normal cargo.”

  And what, I wondered, constituted “normal” cargo in this neck of the rainforest?

  Cruz acquiesced and expressed the need for some refreshment. When he offered to escort me to the restrooms, I smiled, tucked my arm through his, and waved a jaunty “see-ya-later” at Felipe.

  The Palenque Visitor’s Center was about twenty yards distant. We’d crossed less than half that when Revez shouted at us to wait. We turned to see him walking briskly toward us.

  I glanced at Cruz. His jaw looked like it had steel-belted musculature under the smooth bronze skin. Revez’s presence could completely jink up our data handoff.

  “You’re not overseeing the loading?” Cruz asked.

  “I have a trusted employee assigned to it,” Felipe said and appropriated my free arm.

  I waltzed to the visitor’s center with a handsome, if dusty, Latino on each arm. An embarrassment of riches that was wasted on someone with my emotional baggage. As we neared the modern-ancient stone-and-wood buildings (imagine Mayan art deco), I spied a couple of familiar faces in the open plaza.

  “Oh, look!” I said, pointing with my chin. “It looks like they’re filming something over there.”

  Indeed it did. Near a fountain on the rectangular plaza, a film crew of four (lights, camera, sound, action) was staging candid interviews with anyone who wandered across their path. The director and cameraman I recognized (Greg and Rodney, respectively), the audio and lighting engineers were strangers to me.

  We didn’t wander across their path so much as we wandered near it. I stopped to watch where we stood a pretty good chance the director would see us when he lined up the shot he was working on—a couple of college girls who looked as if they’d been hiking all day.

  “My God,” I said loudly, “I’d never get within twenty feet of a camera if I had leaves in my hair.”

  “Then you’d best not get within twenty feet of that one, corazon,” Cruz told me. “You’re wearing an entire ecosystem.”

  “I’m not!” I laughed.

  The director looked up from checking his lighting and shushed me, a finger to his lips.

  I disengaged myself from my escorts and ran my fingers through my hair. “I’m off
to make repairs,” I told them and headed for the visitor’s center.

  A glance back over my shoulder informed me that Cruz and Felipe were meandering toward the thatch-roofed open-air cantina, where a swarm of tiny white lights had just winked on against the approach of twilight.

  I did a quick but thorough cleanup job, reapplied my makeup, brushed the leaves out of my hair, and dusted off the worst of Bonampak B’s grime. I left the ladies’ room just in time to see Cruz enter the men’s facility across the way. I nodded at him and went to join Felipe at a little table in the plaza.

  As I passed the film crew, the director was just thanking his last two guests for their patience and time.

  He turned to his crew then and said, “Okay, guys, that’s a wrap for today. We’re losing the light. Time for dinner anyway.” He checked his watch. “Past time. Look, you guys start packing up, I’m going to hit the john.”

  I slid into the chair next to Felipe and gratefully accepted the drink that awaited me—iced tea with milk, sugar, and a sprig of mint. I pretended not to watch Greg Sheffield, Director of Documentaries, cross the plaza to the men’s room and wondered which of my two gentlemen friends had remembered my choice of beverage.

  “Is that what you would have ordered?” Felipe asked. His tone told me that Cruz had beaten him to the punch.

  “It’s perfect, Felipe. Thank you. I’m parched.”

  He merely inclined his head and sipped his own drink—something dark and heavy with rum. I could smell the warm, coconut-y perfume from where I sat.

  Cruz rejoined us a minute or two later to take up his own tall glass of iced tea—no sugar, with a twist of lemon. I, too, can pay attention to such things.

  “How long do you expect the transfer to take?” Cruz asked.

  “They’re most likely done. We can go back any time you like.” Felipe looked to me for that determination.

  “If you don’t mind,” I said, leaning back in my chair and combing my hair back from my face with my fingers, “I’d really love to just sit here for a bit and soak up the twilight and the view.”