Curses!

by Aaron Elkins

  When he got to the bottom, Worthy looked apprehensively at both of them. “Where's Howard? Have you seen him?"

  No, definitely not good news.

  "What do you mean, have we seen him?” Leo said. “Where is he?"

  Worthy clutched Gideon's arm, an uncharacteristic gesture. “It's terrible up there—it's—it's—"

  Gideon was off, taking the steps of the pyramid two at a time. Worthy gave a little whimper and scrambled up behind him, trying to keep up, to catch his breath, and to explain, all at once.

  "He said—Howard said—he heard something...about an hour ago. He took that wretched gun, and a crowbar too, and went to check..."

  "You didn't go with him?” Gideon called over his shoulder without slowing down.

  "He said not to. He said he'd do a...do a patrol himself. You know the way the man is..."

  Gideon did indeed. He reached the top and ran across the weedy, stonelittered terrace to the temple. In every direction the dense mat of tropical forest stretched to the flat horizon, a bleak irongray in the fading light.

  It was black inside the windowless temple. He switched on the flashlight he'd brought with him,

  Worthy caught up to him. “He was gone so long...I began to wonder. I went to check. And when I got here I found—I found—"

  It wasn't necessary for him to tell what he'd found. Gideon stood rock-still, disbelieving, the flashlight beamed directly at the square opening in the stone floor.

  There was no landing below. There was no passage. There were no steps, or none after the top two or three. All there was was a square space filled with rubble and jumbled blocks of worked stone.

  Behind them Leo clumped bulkily through the entrance. “Oh, shit,” he said. “The whole goddamn thing caved in. I knew it."

  It was true. The secret passage that the Maya had excavated down into the rubble-packed pyramid—and then filled with more rubble to hide it—had collapsed. The years Horizon had spent digging out the stairway had been undone in seconds. It was all buried again, the way the Maya had wanted it in the first place.

  Worthy stared at Gideon. His lips twitched. “Where's Howard?” he said. “Where's the codex?"

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Chapter 5

  * * * *

  "And that's the whole story,” Gideon said. “Good-bye Howard, good-bye, codex.” They were on their third cup of coffee. “Nobody's seen them since. If he's really managed to sell it, he's probably in Rio living like a millionaire. Change that; if he's sold it, he is a millionaire."

  "But how can you be sure he took it?” Julie asked. “Maybe the stairwell just caved in on it. It was already pretty shaky, right? Maybe the codex is still there, under all the rubble. Maybe Howard is still there—"

  "No, we dug it out, or rather the police did, all the way back down to the landing. Took them two days,” Gideon remembered. “Police dig faster than archaeologists."

  "And when they got there they didn't find anything?"

  "Well, the chest itself was still there. He'd smashed the lid to pieces to get it off. That was a crime in its own right. It was a hell of a piece of art."

  "Maybe the cave-in smashed it."

  "No, it was done with the sledgehammer. He left it upstairs on the temple floor, with some of the other tools. The police matched a couple of the gouges on the lid with the head of the hammer. “ He shook his head, freshly pained at the memory. “That beautiful, beautiful carving."

  Julie commiserated silently, caressing the back of his hand.

  "The earrings and plates and things were still inside,” he went on, “crushed by the cave-in—or maybe by the sledge for good measure; who knows—but the codex was gone."

  "And Howard just disappeared into the jungle?"

  "He disappeared into the friendly skies of Aeromexico. While we were all standing around gawking at the cave-in, he must have been doubling back to the hotel. The police found the crowbar near the path. Anyway, he picked up some stuff from his room, ripped off a van from the parking lot, and took off. They found the van at the airport in Merida a few days later."

  "What about the gun?"

  "Never seen again."

  "And now you really think he's living the high life somewhere?"

  "That I'm not so sure about. We put together a committee of anthropologists from Latin America and the States—I guess I was the prime mover—to keep him from selling the codex. The Committee for Mayan Scholarship. “

  Julie giggled. “Sorry, I didn't mean to laugh, but what could a committee do?"

  They could do plenty. They had made it their business to see that every potential buyer of the codex they could think of—every museum, every library, every auction house and gallery, even every private collector—was informed of how it had gotten into Howard's hands. They had contacted over four thousand institutions and individuals, and gotten articles in all the relevant journals and magazines.

  "And we did a lot more than that. We made it clear that whoever bought it, or a piece of it, would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law—which was maybe pushing it a little, because there isn't any enforceable international law on buying stolen archaeological material."

  "And you were successful? He wasn't able to sell it?"

  "Not as far as we know. It wasn't too hard to scare possible buyers, you see, because this would have been the first and only Mayan codex ever available on the open market, or any market. So anyone who bought any Mayan codex had to know that he was buying this one. No one could claim ignorance."

  "I bet Howard was a little annoyed."

  "I sure as hell hope so. Look, the clouds have lifted."

  The plane was beginning its descent now, sliding down over the huge green bulge of Yucatan. There wasn't much to see. A virtually featureless world, neatly bisected: pure bright-blue sky above, hummocky green jungle below. Not a building in sight; no roads, no electrical towers. No rivers even, for northern Yucatan, lush as it is, has none. All the water is underground, in the enormous caverns yawning beneath the limestone crust. The only variation in the green was an occasional flat, circular gleam of olive brown, like a plastic disk stuck on a relief map to represent a pond. In a sense these were the ponds of Yucatan, the famous cenotes; sinkholes where the fragile limestone had collapsed to reveal the water table below.

  "I'm still not clear about the cave-in,” Julie said. “Was it an accident or what? Why didn't Howard get caught in it himself?"

  "He didn't get caught because it wasn't an accident. He purposely knocked down the props to cave it in, hoping we'd think he might be buried down there and waste a day or two digging for him instead of hunting for him. Which we did."

  "But how can you possibly know that?"

  "He told us."

  "He...?"

  "Told us. He mailed us a letter from Merida before he flew out. Two pages, very cool and offhand. Said he really hated to smash the lid, but what else could he do, and he apologized for taking somebody's van but he couldn't very well call a taxi, could he, and the van would be found unharmed in Slot Number Something at the airport. And of course he'd do everything he could to find someone who'd buy the codex whole so he wouldn't have to cut such a wonderful thing up into little pieces. Itty bitty pieces, I think he said."

  "Gideon, he sounds a little crazy."

  "I wouldn't be surprised. Not that being crazy lets him off the hook, the bastard."

  "The louse,” Julie agreed.

  The landing patter had begun, muffled by the heavy thrum of the engines. “The captain has turned on the no-smoking sign. Please fasten your seat belts and return your tray tables..."

  Obediently Gideon folded the table back into the seat in front of him. “Anything else you want to know?” By now he was glad he'd told her the story. She was right; he should have done it a long time ago.

  "Well, I do have one question, but you're going to think it's pretty dumb.” She grinned at him. “Something tells me I'm going to have a lot of silly que
stions over the next couple of weeks."

  Gideon smiled back at her. He loved her silly questions. “Your questions are never dumb. Merely ignorant."

  "Oh, thanks, that's a relief. All right, then, just what is a codex? A manuscript? A book?"

  "That's right. From the Latin caudex, meaning a split block of wood, kind of like a shingle, which the Romans coated with wax and then inscribed."

  She looked at him quizzically. “You know the damnedest things."

  "I,” he said with dignity, “am a full professor. My mind is replete with scholarly arcana, some of which, I can safely say, are even more useless than that."

  "I know. It's ruining our social life. Nobody wants to play Trivial Pursuit with us."

  He laughed. “Anyway, the term came into general use to mean anything with pages, as opposed to a continuous scroll. A Mayan codex looks pretty much like a modern book, with covers and pages that turn, except it's made out of one long strip of paper—pounded bark, rather that's folded accordian-style. You can pull it all out like a folding screen."

  "That's interesting,” she said. “And they're really so valuable?"

  "They're so valuable that nobody knows what one's worth. There are only three others, and none of them is in private hands. Over a million dollars I'd guess, even on the black market. Maybe four times that if you cut it up and sold the pages separately.” He grimaced. “Perish the thought."

  Customs at Merida International Airport meant being waved through by a sullen woman in an olive-drab uniform, who was sipping from a can of Dr. Pepper and looking as if she wanted to be someplace else. As they walked through the glass doors into the waiting room and the moist heat of Yucatan, Julie said: “Gideon, there's a man looking at us in a funny way. Is it someone you know?"

  Gideon followed her gaze toward a display of giant Kahlua bottles in the window of the duty-free shop. In front of it a bony man with a vaguely vexed expression around the eyes, a severely trimmed but scraggly goatee, and a pinched, prunish mouth was looking at them, one hand raised and motionless, with the index finger primly and economically extended. The sandy goatee was new, but the rest was familiar. Gideon smiled and waved.

  "That,” he said, “is Worthy Partridge, and he's not looking at us funny. He always looks like that."

  "Is that really his name?” she asked, as they made their way toward him.

  "I think the whole name is Kenneth Worthy Partridge, but he just uses the last two. He writes children's books, and he figures it looks good on the covers. You know, Mother Goose, Peter Rabbit, Worthy Partridge."

  "A children's writer?” Julie asked disbelievingly. “He doesn't exactly look like a man who loves kids."

  He didn't love kids, and he wasn't overly keen on grownups either. Despite Worthy's dazed and ineffectual performance on the night that Howard had disappeared with the codex, Gideon remembered him as a sharply critical man given to faultfinding and sweeping generalizations: “The Mayans were dopes.” “All lawyers are crooks.” “Children have only two motivations—selfishness and greed."

  With allowances made for these sometimes startling pronouncements, Gideon had liked him, or at least enjoyed his presence. He seemed to be one of those people who had decided on a personality role early in life and then found himself typecast, unable to move on to something else. But there were occasional glimmers of a nimble intelligence, and every now and then a wry, desiccated sense of humor would peep unexpectedly out.

  He was not feeling humorous this afternoon. When he was introduced to Julie he nodded without smiling, and when Gideon asked him how the dig was going, his reply was dour and terse.

  "The dig,” he said, “is cursed."

  Gideon very nearly laughed, but managed to cough discreetly instead. It was going to take a while to get used to Worthy Partridge again.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Chapter 6

  * * * *

  But this time it wasn't hyperbole. The excavation at Tlaloc had been cursed, literally and emphatically. In the sixteenth century. By the Maya.

  And in case there should be any doubt about it they had left a written copy at the site. Worthy gave them the details as he started up the tan Volkswagen van that served as the dig runabout.

  "We found it when we started to clear the Priest's House. There was a niche in the entryway, right next to the new skeleton, and in it was this little pamphlet wrapped in bark. A curse,” he said with a grimace, as if it had been put there as a personal affront to Worthy Partridge.

  "Mm,” Gideon said, looking dreamily out the window.

  For a while, when he'd been dredging up those rotten memories, he'd wondered if returning had been a mistake. But now, watching the neat, white, all-in-a-row suburbs of Merida give way to brilliant jungle and immense henequen plantations with their colonial haciendas, once grand but now weathering romantically, it didn't seem like a bad idea at all. After the muted greens of the Pacific Northwest, the colors were astonishingly bright and varied under a brassy Mexican sun, and even the warmth—sticky, but nothing like the mind-numbing heat of June—was only a minor annoyance.

  "A pamphlet?” Julie said. “Do you mean a codex?"

  "I don't believe so,” Worthy said uncertainly. “Dr. Goldstein said it was more like the books of Chim Bom Bom or somebody. Sis Boom Bah, Rin Tin Tin, some such absurd name."

  "The Books of Chilam Balam,” Gideon said. “Post-Conquest books, written by the Maya on Spanish paper. The conquistadores taught the native scribes how to use European script to write down the Mayan language. The idea was to make it easier to teach them Christianity, but of course the Maya jumped at the chance to write all kinds of things."

  "Hold on,” Julie said. “I feel an ignorant question coming on. Didn't they already know how to write? What about that codex? What about those calendars they carved?"

  "Those are hieroglyphs,” Gideon explained. “Pictures, basically, or extremely simple symbols—one dot equals one, two dots equal two. A picture of a house means house. They're much more primitive than the spoken language—a kind of shorthand—and there are a lot of things they can't express. They're also harder for us to understand; we still can't read most of them. But these other books are translatable by anyone who understands old Mayan. It's fascinating, really—"

  He caught himself and stopped. Unsolicited lectures were one of the professorly hazards to which he was easy prey. “What kind of curse is it?” he asked Worthy. “What does it say?"

  "Oh, your basic run-of-the-mill curse,” Worthy said with a shrug. “You know, ‘He who violates this sacred temple will perish horribly.’ This Professor Garrison from Tulane has been down here working on the translation, and that's all she'd tell anybody until she got it completely finished. Scientists,” he concluded, “are prima donnas."

  As usual, a Worthy Partridge dictum had a way of ending a conversation with a clunk, and Julie and Gideon settled back to watch the scenery go by. They were deep in Mayan country now: thick, scrubby jungle and tiny roadside villages with names like Xlokzodozonot, Xlacab, and Tzukmuk—collections of twenty or thirty primitive thatch-roofed houses with reed or stuccoed walls. No toilets, no running water. Most had no doors, so that the three people in the air-conditioned van could look inside as they went past and see a clay floor, a few sticks of furniture, a hammock, a naked child or two. Pigs, chickens, and skinny dogs wandered aimlessly across the highway, contemptuous of the traffic.

  It was Worthy himself who resumed the discussion, but it wasn't much of an improvement. “She's already finished the translation, but we've had to sit around twiddling our thumbs waiting for you because Dr. Goldstein wanted you to be there."

  Clunk.

  Gideon made a try at keeping things going. “How's the writing, Worthy? Are you still doing that series on the little girl and her fish from Finland?"

  "Iceland. No, I'm considering a new adventure series featuring Paco and Pablo—two little boys from ancient Mayan times. What do you think?"


  "Uh...I hate to split hairs, but I know you like to be accurate, and Paco and Pablo aren't ancient Mayan names. They're Spanish."

  Worthy treated him to a brief, mordant glance. “What would you suggest, ‘Zactecauh and Yxcal Chac Go to the Fiesta'? ‘Ahpop Achih and Gucumatz Find a Friend'?"

  Gideon sighed and returned to the scenery.

  At a sign that said "Chichen Itza, Zona Arguelogica," Worthy swung around a turkey having a leisurely peck at something in a mud puddle and turned right.

  "Chichen Itza?” Julie said. “Are we going to Chichen Itza?"

  "No,” Gideon explained. “We're going to the Hotel Mayaland, which is just outside the back entrance to Chichen Itza. That's where we all stay. Tlaloc is less than a mile beyond, to the north."

  Five minutes later they pulled up in front of the long, yellow main building of the hotel. Gideon remembered it with pleasure; a welcome oasis of cleanliness and civilization in one of Mexico's most undeveloped areas. Through the great entrance arch they could look across the elegant open lobby and down a long veranda paved with gleaming tiles and lined with pillars. Under big lanterns hanging from the veranda roof, groups of people were having cocktails at low glass tables.

  "Like it?” he asked as they stepped down from the van.

  Julie continued to take in the scene. Small, dark, white-jacketed waiters moved agilely among the tables, threading their way between lush potted plants. At the open-air registration desk a festive party of a dozen or so Germans was being checked in.

  "Ah,” she said finally, “the jungle; the raw, brooding, primitive sense of isolation..."

  * * * *

  Waiting for them on the dresser in their room was a wicker basket of yellow dahlias, an ice bucket stuffed with brown bottles of Montejo, the slightly bitter local beer, another ice bucket with glasses in it, and a note from Abe: “Welcome to Yucatan, what took you so long? Relax, wash up, go sit out on the balcony, have a few beers. And save one for me. I'll stop by at 5:00."

  They followed his instructions to the letter, and at 4:45 they were in wrought-iron rocking chairs on the ample, deeply shaded balcony outside their room, their second beers at their sides. They had showered and changed to fresh clothes, and now they tipped contentedly back and forth, breathing in the thick, fragrant air and listening to the hollow chuckling of unfamiliar birds in the trees.