The Last Mayan (The Alan Graham Mysteries)

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The Last Mayan (The Alan Graham Mysteries) Page 7

by Malcolm Shuman


  “Cabrón!” he yelled and swung at me.

  I leaned back, brushed into April, and the blow glanced off my chin.

  April gave a little shriek. “Jose!”

  He came toward me then, head down, and I stepped out of the way, but he grabbed me around the waist and bore me back against the stone wall that marked the edge of the street. I kneed him to get free and was straightening when another movement caught my eye.

  Two soldiers were standing at the end of the block, automatic rifles cradled in their arms, and a smaller man in starched fatigues was striding toward us.

  “What are you people doing?” Teniente Tapia demanded.

  TEN

  No one spoke and Tapia stopped in front of us. “I asked a question and I require an answer.”

  “It was an accident,” I began but he cut me off.

  “Señor, you’re drunk,” he accused Durán. “I can smell it.”

  “We’re archaeologists, working at the site here,” I explained. “We were invited to a rain ceremony in the village. There was some drinking and—”

  Tapia exhaled loudly. “And so you decided to act like the villagers. Señores, I am not a village policeman. I am here because of reports of illegal activity. But I warn you, this is dangerous country. Behave yourselves.”

  Durán looked away and I promised the officer it wouldn’t happen again.

  Durán and I wandered back to Santos’s place, taking opposite sides of the little lane. As we got to the front gate we were hailed by Blackburn, coming toward us with Hayes and Minnie. “Did you find her?”

  I explained about the sick woman. “Pepper’s helping her get the woman to the van. I’ll go into Chetumal with them to find the doctor.”

  Blackburn nodded. “Sure. But what happened to you two? Did you have to tackle the girl when you found her?”

  “I tripped,” I said.

  Blackburn looked over at the Mexican.

  “I fell against the doctor,” Durán said.

  “Look,” I said, “what’s more important is the army’s here. We ran into a patrol. They claim they have a report of illegal activity.”

  “Like last time, eh?” Hayes asked, taking out a cigar and snipping off the end. “Who was the leader, by the way? Not a short little bastard who strutted like a turkey?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Tapia.”

  Hayes jammed the cigar into his mouth. “Mark my words, that little bastard’s not your run-of-the-mill corrupt official. He has the makings of a fine fanatic or I miss my guess.”

  “Maybe the country needs a few,” I said and nobody disagreed.

  It was almost eleven when Pepper, April, and I got back to the cabañas. The doctor in Chetumal, a fat-faced little man named Gómez, had given the sick woman a shot of penicillin and some quinine tablets, on the theory that one of the two ought to work. Then we’d picked up some baby formula at a grocery and driven back to the village, where we unloaded the woman, made sure that child and mother were comfortable, and then drove back to the main highway and on to our camp.

  “I wonder if she’ll live,” April said in a faraway voice as we stopped in Geraldo’s parking lot. “That doctor didn’t seem to know much.”

  “We did what we could,” I said, “and that was the doctor she wanted to see.”

  “At least she didn’t ask to see the h-men,” Pepper said.

  “He probably wouldn’t have treated her,” I said. “Some of these guys have a pretty sharp eye for what they can handle.”

  “You were great with that baby,” I told April, shutting off the engine. “You seem to have a way with kids. The little girl, Xmari, didn’t want you to leave.”

  “I’ve always loved children,” she said. “When I was in high school …”

  “Yes?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I’m here now. I’m going to be an archaeologist.”

  “Not if you don’t want to be,” Pepper said.

  April gave a little laugh. “You don’t know my old man.”

  We collapsed into our hammocks that night, too tired to worry about lurking drug smugglers, and I dreamed I was walking along a jungle trail, trying to find Pepper. It was nearly dark and I knew I had to find her before the last light, because there were things lurking in the darkness. I called out, but there was no reply, only a jabbering of monkeys in the branches high above.

  The trail split and for a long time I stared at the ground, trying to find signs that would tell me which way to go. But there were no signs.

  Most people, I knew, went to the right in such a situation, so maybe she had, too. I started down the right fork.

  There, in front of me, was a towering pyramid, dappled with late evening sunlight, and on the temple facade at its summit was a long-snouted rain god’s nose.

  I called her name again and it bounced back to me from the stone walls. I started forward, toward a low archway into the inner courtyard of the pyramid complex, and as I did a sense of dread overwhelmed me, as if I had entered the den of some indescribable horror.

  I came out into the courtyard and saw the low platform in the center: a sacrificial altar. Things were whirring past my head now, emitting a low howling, and I sensed that they were the souls of the sacrificial victims. All at once I didn’t care about Pepper, I only wanted to escape. I whirled and ducked back through the archway to the outside and saw her, standing at the place where the trail spilled out of the jungle. She was smiling—not the tolerant, good-natured smile of a woman whose lover has made a fool of himself, but a lascivious smile that grew as she opened her arms and motioned for me to come to her. I hurried forward and it was only as she put her arms around me that I sensed the trap and heard her voice, in Spanish:

  “Alan, creías que me podías escapar? Did you really think you could get away?”

  I felt her arms turning to vines as she drew me against her thorny bosom, and I woke up with a scream.

  “What is it?” Pepper was shaking me. “What happened? Is there somebody outside?”

  “No, just a nightmare,” I said, as the fog fell away. “I dreamed about a Xtabai.”

  “A what?”

  I rubbed my eyes. “It’s Mayan folklore. A man out walking at night sees a beautiful woman. She calls out to him and when they embrace she turns into a tree with thorny branches and strangles him.”

  “Did you recognize this … Xtabai?” she asked.

  “No,” I lied.

  “Well, you’re getting back into this with a bang. Get some sleep. I promise I’ll keep guard against this bogey-woman.”

  The next day, as we worked, I thought about the nightmare. The conventional psychological interpretation was that the Xtabai represented guilt, because she usually appeared to a man who was where he shouldn’t be, like coming home from his lover’s house late at night or staggering back drunk from the cantina. So what was I feeling guilty about? I tried to recall the dream exactly. The phantasm had been Pepper—or had it? The more I thought, the more it seemed the image hadn’t been clear. Pepper was blond, and the Xtabai had had dark hair, like a Mayan woman—or a Mexican.

  Felicia.

  I was feeling guilty because I was back down here, with Pepper, at the same place where things had gone to hell with Felicia. But why? Was I blocking something out? Was there something that had happened with Felicia that should make me feel guilty, something I’d repressed for fifteen years?

  Xtabai, literally She of the Rope, a reference to the ancient Mayan goddess Xtab, the goddess of suicides. For the Maya, the rope was the preferred way of killing oneself, hence the gnarled, strangling limbs of the phantasm.

  “What’s wrong?”

  I realized Pepper was staring at me from her side of the excavation pit.

  “You look like you’re about to keel over,” she said. “Do you need to sit down in the shade?”

  I shook my head. “I’m okay.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Before I could answer, Minnie O’Toole appeared at the edge
of our excavation, wiping her face with a handkerchief. “Do you want to come see what I found?” she asked.

  I nodded and hoisted myself out of the pit, past the two workers who were screening our back dirt.

  “José says it’s jade: I wish Eric was here to see it, too.”

  Pepper and I walked through the baking sun to a flat-topped rubble mound with a trench going through the middle of it and a makeshift Visquine cover propped over the end of the trench for shade, while the workers up top stood under a poplar tree, waiting to resume their screening. Durán was down on his knees, carefully brushing something with a little painter’s brush, and Paul Hayes stood at the top of the trench rocking slightly on his heels.

  “Nice little Classic-period artifact,” he said. “May be something to this site yet.”

  I stood back, not wanting to crowd Durán, but Minnie pushed me forward.

  “It’s right there, where José’s working.”

  Durán stopped and got to his feet. I saw a tiny, half-moon-shaped piece of greenish stone.

  “It’s a blade,” he said and for the first time I saw something besides resentment in his eyes. “Someone deposited it here as an offering over a thousand years ago.”

  “Is it part of a burial, then?” I asked.

  The Mexican nodded. “I think so. But just now I want to photograph it in place and then we’ll clear away a little more of the loose soil around it.”

  I looked at the area where he’d been working: It was as clean and free of debris as any excavation I’d ever seen, something that would photograph perfectly. As someone who always had trouble keeping his own units clean, I felt admiration for his skill.

  “Is that what you would do, Dr. Graham?” His tone was sarcastic and I felt myself flush slightly, despite the heat.

  “Arqueólogo,” I said, using his professional title, “I don’t think I could contribute anything to the fine job you’ve done.”

  He gave me a sidelong glance, then nodded. “Muy bién. I’ll get the menu board and the camera.”

  I started away and realized Minnie was right behind me.

  “I hope you two are making up.”

  “What?”

  She smiled. “I caught a glimpse of that business yesterday, but I didn’t say anything. I just went on back and pretended to run into Paul and Eric. I figured Jose was just drunk. But …”

  “But what?”

  We stopped under a tree beside the van, where the equipment was stored. “I may just be a homely librarian from Iowa, but too much has been happening in the last few weeks for me to take much as a coincidence.”

  I picked up the camera. “And?”

  “You don’t have to be on an expedition to see what happens to people under pressure. I saw it happen in my own library. They brought in a new director, cut the budget, and nobody knew whose job would be the next to go. People started acting in ways they never would have ordinarily—and they slept on clean sheets, in air conditioning!”

  “Well, I have to admit it seems like Jose resents me, but I don’t know why, unless Pepper’s told him so much about me …”

  “She’s been complimentary, of course, but, so far as I can see, perfectly accurate: She said you were a gentleman, ‘the old kind,’ I think were her words, and that you seemed to undervalue yourself. But she said you’d also managed to start up and develop a business and keep people employed even though you weren’t trained as a businessman.”

  “Actually, my old professor, Sam MacGregor, started the business and his reputation got most of the clients.”

  Minnie folded her arms. “She also said you couldn’t accept a compliment.”

  I shrugged. “Call it upbringing.”

  “You know, Alan, she and I have had some pretty interesting girl-to-girl chats.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “You don’t have to get embarrassed. She just told me you have some insecurities, because you’re a little older than she is. And she told me she knew you were reluctant to come down here because you’d had a bad experience here years ago.”

  “Sounds like you know my life history.”

  “No, I really don’t. But I do know that girl loves you, probably more than you realize, and whatever doubts you have, you need to put them aside. I don’t know what happened a long time ago, but this is now. You can’t live in the past. I learned that, if I’ve learned anything.”

  “Archaeologists always live in the past,” I said, trying to make a joke of it.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Yeah. Well, thanks, Minnie.”

  “Don’t thank me for anything yet. Thank me when it’s all over.”

  “When what’s all over?”

  “The field season. I’m telling you, Alan, I sense undercurrents here.”

  “Well, it’s not encouraging to have the army all over the place and people turning up dead in the lagoon,” I said. “But that doesn’t have anything to do with us.”

  “I don’t know. I still feel something. Oh, you can laugh and call me a crazy old fool, but I have a good sense of people.”

  “I’m sure.”

  She leaned toward me, lowering her voice, though no one was nearby. “I have a feeling that Paul knows a lot more than he’s letting on.”

  “About what?”

  “Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? But all these trips here and there and everywhere, just to look at old manuscripts. I’ve tried to get him to tell me more, but he always puts me off, says it’s too technical. And then there’s April.”

  “What about her?”

  “She’s not here today.”

  “She had some stomach problems,” I said. “We all get that down here from time to time.”

  “Eric’s not here, either.”

  “He’s the project director. I’m not on site all the time at home, either: You have to write field notes, buy supplies, make calls home, fill out customs forms …”

  “What I’m saying is, when one’s not here, usually the other isn’t, either.”

  I turned slowly toward her, trying to decide how to respond. “You think there’s something between them?”

  “Would that be so surprising?”

  “Probably not. On digs there’s a tendency to play musical beds—or hammocks. And it wouldn’t be the first time the director moved on some single female.”

  “No.” She smiled and lifted the menu board from its place in one of the metal toolboxes. “And her father’s rich.”

  I hefted the camera and started back into the sun.

  ELEVEN

  That evening, as we swam just before dinner, I told Pepper about what Minnie had said.

  “And their cabañas are next to each other,” I said.

  “I don’t believe it. Eric’s not, well …”

  “Anybody can be tempted,” I said.

  “You’re thinking about that Cynthia woman you met during that Corps project in Jackson.”

  “Sure.” The fact was, there was a time when I’d thought about her a lot, though nothing had happened. “I’m just saying Eric’s human.”

  “I’m not saying he isn’t,” she said, circling lazily in the water. “But I still think if there’s any romance in April’s life, it’s between her and Jose. All you have to do is look at his reaction yesterday at the Chhachaac when he saw you with your hand on her arm.

  “Well, maybe he considers himself her protector.”

  I kicked and rolled over onto my back. In the distance I could see the little line of cabañas, first Hayes’s, close to the steps that led up to the restaurant and Gonzales home; then Durán’s, with the door closed; Minnie’s, where I thought I saw her outside in a white smock, probably feeding her cats; then the hut Pepper and I shared; then April’s, and finally, at the far end, between our house and the big lab structure, the hut belonging to Eric Blackburn.

  We’d looked in on April when we’d gotten back and she’d said she felt better. Blackburn, however, had gone into Chetumal, though f
or what reason she didn’t say.

  I tried to envision the two of them together, but it didn’t work. For one thing, he was older than she was by at least ten years.

  I glanced over at Pepper, ten years younger than I was, and muttered to myself.

  “Did you say something?” she asked and swam over.

  “No.”

  “So have you decided if you knew the murdered man?” she asked.

  “It hasn’t come to me, if I do,” I said. “But I keep wondering why he washed up here, of all places.”

  “They must’ve kidnapped him from somewhere else,” she said, treading water, “and dumped him in the lake. Or do you think he was in a drug smuggling gang and they got into an argument on a boat?” She swam out a few more strokes. “That would mean the smugglers were probably unloading somewhere near here, not up the coast. And why would they be unloading on a lake? That doesn’t make any sense. Unless they were landing on the beach, then trekking west across the strip that separates the bay and the lake. But there are still a couple of rivers to cross.”

  “Don’t go out so far,” I called.

  “Why? It’s wonderful.”

  “Yeah, but you never know.”

  “Never know what? Oh, you’re thinking of those Mayan legends about water creatures that live down in the depths and grab people.”

  “That’s ridiculous. I just meant that if you got a cramp …”

  “ … you might not be able to save me. What if you got a cramp?”

  “I don’t get cramps. Let’s head for shore.”

  “In a minute.”

  She was taunting me, of course. I looked back at the cabañas, just seven little pebbles now, with Geraldo’s skiff barely visible bumping against the diving board.

  If someone had dumped the man at the northern end of the lake, he might have floated down this far, but why would he have been wearing a life vest? He had to have been in a boat …. Geraldo was right. It had to have been a warning.

  But to whom?

  Unless, of course, he’d been killed here and the vest had been a ruse for some reason. In that case, the killer might be closer than any of us thought …

  At the top of the cliff I glimpsed movement and saw a dark-colored vehicle stopping in front of Geraldo’s. The Rover. Eric Blackburn was back.

 

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