The Last Mayan (The Alan Graham Mysteries)

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The Last Mayan (The Alan Graham Mysteries) Page 8

by Malcolm Shuman


  It was just after dark when we started along the beach for dinner at the restaurant. Blackburn had preceded us, calling cheerily for us to come as he passed our hut, and a few seconds later we’d seen April go past, not walking with him, but close enough behind to have him in sight. I went out onto the beach and looked up the beach at them, waiting for Pepper.

  Yes, it was certainly possible. Their cabañas were next to each other and that made it easy … Well, it was no concern of mine.

  A scrawny yellow cat appeared from the bushes and stared at me, to see if I was going to feed it or throw a rock. Then I heard Minnie’s voice.

  “Kanmiz, where are you? Come to Mama.” She appeared from behind her cabaña then, something I took to be food in her hand. “There you are, you bad boy.”

  She saw me and stopped. “Not you, Alan.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “I was talking to Kanmiz there. It means yellow cat in Mayan, I understand.”

  “Well”—I laughed—“actually it means snake cat. You have to give it a hard k sound. But then you have to give the vowel the right intonation or you may be saying hammock cat, or hammock broom, or sky broom, or sky cat, or—”

  “What an impossible language. It’s all I can do to get by in Spanish.” She set the scraps down in front of the cat and it considered whether to eat it.

  “Well, I’m not so particular,” Minnie said. “Ready to go up to dinner?”

  Pepper came out then and we walked along together, passing the closed huts of José Durán and, at the end, Paul Hayes.

  “I guess Paul and Jose are already up at the restaurant,” Minnie said. “Getting a jump on cocktail hour.”

  But she was wrong, at least about Hayes, because as we reached the top of the steps we saw him in earnest conversation with the landlord. The American saw us coming, said something, and I saw Geraldo raise his hands, as if in exasperation.

  “Buenas tardes, don Alan,” he said. “Señoritas.” I thought his smile was forced.

  Hayes’s face broke into a grin. “Well, everybody ready for some relleno blanco?” he asked and followed us into the dining area.

  I watched the others during dinner, curious both about Hayes’s behavior and about Eric and April. Maybe I was just a dirty old man. Or maybe I wanted to think that Pepper’s love for me was something special and that, despite absolute knowledge to the contrary, such cases were rare.

  But Blackburn and April, though they sat beside each other, showed no signs of affection, though I knew that didn’t prove anything. As for Hayes, he drank more beer than was usual for him and by the end of the meal was tipsy, regaling us with stories of a trip he’d once made to Brazil: Durán, on the other hand, drank sparingly and more than once his eyes met mine and then darted away, as if there were something on his mind. Once or twice I saw a frowning Geraldo, bustling about, giving orders to the two waiters but I didn’t see the man called Jordan. When the meal was over, I excused myself and started out for a walk on the beach. After talking with Minnie at the site, I had a sense of dread that I needed to walk off. Or was it the talk with Minnie, after all? Last night’s dream kept popping into my mind, grabbing my attention with gnarled, rootlike fingers.

  I stopped just outside the door, breathing in the warm night air. All at once I sensed someone behind me and turned.

  José Durán was standing a few feet away, but when he saw me turn he looked away.

  I was about to start toward him when a hand plucked my arm.

  “Doctor, momentito, por favor.”

  I looked down and saw the stricken face of Geraldo Gonzales Pech.

  “What is it?” I asked. “Is there a problem?”

  “Sí, Doctor.” He threw up his hands and I followed him into the little cubicle that served as his office. He shut the door and slumped into the chair behind his desk. “How long have you known me, Doctor? Fifteen years? Twenty?”

  “More or less.”

  “And you know that I’m an honest man.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “And I run a good, decent restaurant and I only rent cabañas to respectable people and I hire only servants that can be trusted.”

  “Certainly.”

  “Then why are all these things happening?” He threw up his hands.

  “You mean the dead man on the beach?”

  “Sí, but there’s more. One of my servants has run away, a little girl I hired just three weeks ago. You try to help these people and look what happens!”

  “Probably eloped with her boyfriend,” I said. “But surely you can find someone else.”

  “No one wants to work here now. They’re all afraid. And now there’s this business with don Pablo.”

  “What business?”

  “He’s saying that while he was gone today someone broke into his cabaña and stole from him.”

  “So that’s what the two of you were talking about.”

  “Exactly. He was asking about my employees.” Geraldo wrung his hands. “He will be telling everyone that it was one of my people who broke into his cabaña.”

  “Was anything stolen?”

  “He only said someone went through his papers. Why would any of my people go through his papers? Doctor, if the word gets out that guests aren’t safe here …”

  “I’ll talk to Dr. Hayes,” I said. “Maybe I can find out what happened and calm him down.”

  “Would you?” Geraldo’s face brightened and he shot up from his chair and grabbed my hand with both of his. “Thank you, my friend.”

  I walked down to the beach. There was a light on in Hayes’s hut and a smell of cigar smoke floated out on the breeze. From inside came the sound of a Scott Joplin ragtime tune.

  “Paul?”

  A second later the door opened and Hayes was inviting me in, his pumpkin face glowing from the liquor.

  “Alan, just in time to have a little toast.”

  He offered me a glass and a rum bottle and I poured in just enough to toast with.

  “What are we celebrating?”

  “That it wasn’t taken.” He flopped back into his hammock and I took the single folding chair.

  “What wasn’t taken?”

  He grinned slyly, rocking backward and forward. “What they were looking for.”

  “Paul, Geraldo’s pretty upset. He thinks his business is going to be ruined if people go around saying it isn’t safe to stay here.”

  “Well, it isn’t, goddamn it. But I didn’t say I suspected any of his people. I just said he needed to put better locks on the doors. He just took it to mean I was accusing his maid. He’s like all Latins—sensitive as hell.”

  “I might be, too, after a murder on my beach. The killers could still be around here.”

  “That body could’ve drifted in from anywhere. It was just Geraldo’s bad luck it washed up here. Screw Geraldo. He’s doing fine from this expedition. I happen to know what Eric’s paying him and it’s twice what any local would give him for these rat traps.”

  He must have seen the expression on my face because he reached out then to pat my arm. “Oh, I know he’s a friend of yours. Everybody in archaeology rents from Geraldo. Hell, Jose’s known him almost as long as you have. Everybody from INAH in Mexico City stays here when they’re in these parts. Geraldo’s not going belly up anytime soon.”

  “I hope not.”

  “But I’m glad you dropped by. I’ve been meaning to talk to you.” He reached over with the bottle and filled my glass. “Drink up. You’re going to need it before the night’s out.”

  TWELVE

  “You’ll appreciate it, too,” Hayes said, “because you know Mayan.” He snorted. “All these other archaeologists, digging down here for almost a hundred years, and how many of them ever took the trouble to learn more than a few words? Is it any wonder they never cracked the hieroglyphs? That it was epigraphers, linguists, people trained in languages, that did it, instead of excavators?”

  “And you have something new on th
e glyphs.”

  He gave the hammock another shove. “Yes and no.”

  “Paul, talk plain.”

  “Can I trust you, Alan?”

  “I don’t know. Are you going to confess a murder?”

  His grin widened. “No. Something worse.” He paused to let the statement take effect. “At least as far as the academic world is concerned.”

  “Oh? Plagiarism? Doctored data?”

  “God, no, Alan, much worse than that: an unpopular theory.”

  “Oh. You think the world was created in six days.”

  “Don’t patronize me, Alan. I may be drunk, but I’m not that drunk.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Forget it.” He swung back and forth for a few seconds, as if waiting for me to try to pry out further details, but I kept silent. Finally he reached over and refilled his glass. I watched him drink and when he’d finished, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “You’ve heard of John Dance Williams.”

  “The British explorer. Sure.”

  “He visited this area in the years just before the Second World War. He was an Englishman with a Sandhurst education. The army sent him to British Honduras—what’s now Belize—but he resigned his commission for reasons nobody knows. Some kind of scandal, probably. Afterward he just sort of went native and roamed British Honduras, Guatemala, and southern Mexico—a kind of soldier of fortune.”

  I nodded. “I read his travel book, but it was a long time ago. He was a good observer of Mayan life.”

  “As you know, he picked up a couple of Mayan languages— Yucatec and Mopán—and he was fluent in Spanish, of course, though in those days damn few of the Maya in these parts could speak Spanish.”

  Another world, I thought, without roads, electric lights, telephones …

  “When the Germans went into Poland in ’39 he saw what was coming and went back to England. He enlisted in a regiment as a private, the same way Lawrence of Arabia did after the First War. He was killed during a secret commando operation in Norway.”

  I waited, knowing he was too wound up now to stop.

  “For most of my career,” Hayes said, “I’ve had a certain interest, but I’ve kept it to myself, because it was a career wrecker. You know the academic world, Alan: People talk about intellectual freedom, but an unpopular idea is a stake through the heart.”

  “That happens,” I agreed.

  “But a few years ago a friend of mine in England who knows about my interests found a letter from Williams, written just a few weeks before he died, to a professor at Oxford. He made a copy of the letter and I’m going to show it to you.”

  Hayes pushed himself out of the hammock, padded across the cement floor to a little metal lockbox, and, with a key that was attached to a cord around his neck, opened the box and removed an oilskin pouch. He opened the pouch, took out a piece of folded paper, and passed it over to me.

  I leaned forward to get the benefit of the bare overhead bulb and opened the paper.

  It was a photocopy of a document in cursive script, but even as dim as the letters were I could make out the words:

  May 21, 1942

  Hodder on Binford

  Kent

  My dear Wilfrid:

  I regret that we never had the opportunity to finish our conversation, because I feel that you deserve an answer to some of the questions you posed about what you regard as my “fantastic hypothesis.” I shall shortly be shipping out and I have a feeling that unless I set this in writing now there may not be another opportunity.

  As you know, while I was in Central America I suffered several bouts of malaria-paludismo, as they call it down there. The last time was in Bacalar in June of ’39. I cannot adequately describe to you the sensations that the disease causes. First a malaise, then a fever, then terrible chills, and finally delirium. For a week I lay in my hammock, not knowing whether it was night or day. It is not an experience I recommend. Dr. Carrillo, the local medico, took care of me. During this time he recounted to me the many ruins he had visited in the interior, while making the rounds of some of the villages: The Maya are a very pragmatic people and they will utilize the services of their native healers alongside those of modern medical men without any sense of contradiction. Carrillo had an assistant, a boy named Jildo, who came from the interior and who knew the locations of many of these ruins. When I was sufficiently recovered, Jildo took me by horse to a little Cruzob village forty or fifty miles inland. As I explained to you, the Cruzob are the children and grandchildren of the rebellious Maya who worshipped the talking cross and tried to drive out the ladinos in the middle of the last century and they’ve stayed pretty well hidden in the jungles ever since, expecting an attack of the dzulob, which is what they call the ladinos. They are receptive to British and Americans, however, because they have the notion that English speakers will some day bring them guns and allow them to push the ladinos off the peninsula. Each of these little villages has its own priest or interpreter of the cross and each one of these gentleman has his own sacred book, which is kept in the thatched temple hut or balam nah, as they call it. The men of the village serve turns as guards to protect the holy of holies, though now this is largely a formality, since a sudden invasion by Mexicans is, to put it mildly, somewhat unlikely. This Jildo introduced me to his uncle, a man named Eleuterio Euan, the village witch doctor or, as they term it, h-men. I was only in the village a day before I was struck down by another attack of the paludismo and for the next two weeks my mind is a blank, unless you count some rather fantastic nightmares of Mayan gods and goddesses, which stemmed, no doubt, from an excess of exposure to the culture! I am told that don Eleut applied herbs and potions, and I gradually recovered, though whether his medicines were the reason or whether it was a natural process I am not able to say. In any event, a friendship developed between us and he gradually came to trust me and to appreciate my interest in the history and culture of his people. Gradually, he explained the meanings of some of the old prophesies and how an ancient prophet, or chilan, had foretold the coming of the Spanish before the actual arrival of the first Conquistadores. One day, which I well remember, we were walking through the village plaza—really little more than a cleared space surrounded by pole-sided, thatched huts—and he volunteered, quite suddenly, that I reminded him of the stranger from the prophesies who arrived here from over the water in a remote time. Then, for the first time, he went into the temple hut, brought out his old handwritten book, and read to me how this stranger had come here in Katun 10 Ahau, which is the designation they give for one of their periods of 7200 days, which, in our calendar, comes to a stretch of about 20 years. It said this stranger had come from the east and that he was the vassal of a great king, and that after the stranger had been in Yucatán for a while, he, too, was made a king, because there were no more sons of the royal lineage, and he stayed and married an Indian woman and had children by her. He died, finally, in a great battle, inside the city walls, protecting his people. Then don Eleut said there was a site in the interior, not far away, where this foreign king had lived and reigned, and he promised that one day he would take me there. I sensed that I could not press him on it and, in fact, I must admit that I wondered if the old man was actually bending the sacred words a bit to flatter me. Maybe he still nourished the old delusion that some English speaker would bring guns and money and he hoped to persuade me that I should be that man! Nevertheless, there was nothing to do but wait until he felt it was time. The time came a week or so later, when we were walking in the forest and quite suddenly came upon a ruined building. This was no surprise, because ruins are everywhere, but this building seemed to be in excellent condition, except for some minor destruction by vines and tree roots. Then, as I stood there, with monkeys chattering in the trees above us, I realized there were other buildings, just visible through the foliage, and I knew that this was quite possibly another great undiscovered site. Many of these ruins, of course, were visited by Gann and others, so I ask
ed Eleut if other English speakers had come here before. He smiled and led me along a trail, past several stone buildings in as good condition as the first one, and he pointed out a raised causeway that resembled a road, elevated about a meter or two above ground level. I can hardly describe to you the eerie sensation, being deep in the jungle, with parrots squawking in the trees above, and the rustling sound of creatures in the underbrush. It was as if this place had been deserted yesterday and all the inhabitants whisked off to some other level of existence. Vines hung like snakes from the gnarled tree limbs and I had the sense of eyes peering at us from deep within the recesses of the temples. At last we came to a central plaza, and I stepped around a line of toppled limestone obelisks, all bearing the carved visages of gods and covered with hieroglyphs. At the end of this plaza, set upon a platform of stone, was a single temple, slightly larger than the rest, with a roof adornment that resembled latticework, disappearing into the tops of the trees. The broad stone steps that led to the top of the platform were broken by the forest growth but, following my guide’s example, I managed to scramble my way to the top until I stood on the porch of the temple itself.

  That was when I saw the masques.

  It would be difficult to describe the impression this made on me, to see a line of human heads, one above the other, on each side of the central doorway into the inner temple. There were three of these sculptures on each side, and all were remarkable enough that I felt they might come to life at any moment, peering out from the stone framing of the door. These were typically Indian, with almond eyes and the large noses that one sees among today’s indigenous inhabitants. All had ear ornaments and some had glyphs carved in their cheeks. It was, however, the seventh head, which was placed directly above the door, that interested me the most. As I stared at it I felt I was looking at my own face. That may sound like a bit of an exaggeration and, Wilfrid, I know you may think I was still suffering from the fever. But what I mean to express is that the features of this sculpture were perfectly European and it clearly had a moustache and full beard, which, as you know, is almost unheard of among the indigenous peoples. I turned to Eleut and saw him smiling and he told me then that we had reached the site, which he called Lubaanah, meaning “fallen house” in Maya, because some of the temples have collapsed due to the undergrowth. He showed me a mural on the interior of this porch, and, though the art work was shaded by the roof and the jungle, I managed to make out a line of warriors in battle. The effect was incredible—colorful lines of naked bodies, armed with spears, spear throwers, and bows, in a fight to the death with some Indian enemy, and there, in the forefront, the king. You will probably think I am exaggerating, but, Wilfrid, I can tell you that his face was identical with the one in the seventh mask. The beard was quite visible and they had painted his body white, as if his skin were lighter than theirs.

 

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