Sanibel Flats

by Randy Wayne White

"That must be the mountain pass where Alvarado made his forced march with the Kache. It was probably all jungle back then. Had to be a hell of a tough trip. Made them kill other Maya just so they could eat. That's the route they took when they went hunting for the Tlaxclen. The lake where you expect to find this Zacul character is just beyond those mountains, isn't it?"

  "Right. About another twenty miles on the map. A heck of a lot farther by mountain road. "

  "And that's the lake where the Tlaxclen priests lived?"

  "So the story goes."

  Tomlinson was nodding, smiling, pleased with himself. "See how it's all fitting, man? It's like some magnet is drawing us. Right down the path. Can't you feel it? Doc, I can close my eyes and hear the conquistadors' horses coming. I can hear their damn armor rattling. The Kache probably waded this river to get a closer look at this wild-looking Spaniard with long blond hair dressed in metal. Alvarado had to seem like someone from outer space to them, riding an animal they'd never even seen before. It's no wonder they thought he was a god. And they maybe stood right where we're standing now watching him and his little army coming with absolutely no idea in hell that the culture of a hundred generations would be destroyed within just a few weeks." Tomlinson's eyes opened. "There's something about these hills, man; something about this country. The jungle holds onto things. It absorbs events. Five hundred years is just a blink of the eye in country like this, and things echo for a long, long time. Go ahead. Try it. Close your eyes and listen."

  Ford said, "I'll let you do the cosmic listening. I've got to make a phone call. "

  "Suit yourself, man, but it's all still right here. A place like this, lost spirits linger."

  They drove toward the heart of the town, then parked and walked because the streets were narrow and filled with people and slow-moving carts. Thursday was market day in Utatlan, a big event for all of the people who lived in the surrounding mountains; a day of bartering and drinking. The main street dead-ended in a plaza bordered by shops and old stone buildings. In the center of the plaza was a small park with a fountain, a few trees, and several stela—standing stone slabs covered with Mayan hieroglyphics. Traders had set up their booths in the plaza, and everything was for sale: live chickens, goats, wild mountain fruit, hardware, bolts of handwoven cloth, baskets of herbs, coffee beans; all these smells blending with the smoke of small cooking fires and the sharp odor of incense.

  Forming the back of the plaza was a stone cathedral, four hundred years old, cracked by earthquakes, its stone steps scooped by the comings and goings of a million souls. Men in pantaloons and colorful shirts marched up and down the steps swinging censer cans of burning copal leaves while their women knelt on the floor inside the church lighting rows of candles and burning small offerings to gods known only to themselves. The mumbled chants in guttural Mayan added a percussion backdrop to the noise and wild laughter of the marketplace, and the smoke pall drifting over the plaza swirled in the cool mountain sunlight.

  "The Catholic priests let them do that? Burn offerings on the floor of the cathedral?" Tomlinson's head was turning this way and that, trying to take in everything at once as they moved through the crowd, both of them a head taller than the earthen-faced Mayas who glanced up at them, expressionless. "Any way you slice it, that's paganism, man. According to the church, anyway."

  "The priests leave town on market day," Ford said.

  Tomlinson laughed, like it was a joke.

  "No, I mean it. In these mountain villages, the priests physically leave town on market day. It's their way of pretending not to know about the religion the Indians practice. If the priests tried to put a stop to it, the Indians wouldn't show up at mass on Sunday. So the priests compromise by ignoring it. The one thing they won't let the Indians do is sacrifice live animals inside the church. Most of these little towns have some secluded spot for sacrifices. A place with an altar, a cross, and usually some kind of stone Mayan deity figure set up. When the Indians want to make a blood offering, they go there. "

  "Catholicity. I like that. My respect for the church just went up a notch, man."

  "I'm sure the folks in Rome will be relieved to hear."

  "Hey, I've got a right to judge. I was raised in the church, man; furthermore, I liked it. When I was a teenager, I wanted to be a monk; live in an abbey and sing Latin songs."

  "That I believe."

  "But then I found out about the Beatles."

  "I believe that, too."

  "Catholicism is great. They got a franchise everywhere."

  "Uh-huh." Ford had stopped. "That little restaurant with the veranda look okay to you?"

  "Sure, anyplace is okay with me. As long as they got beans and rice."

  "Then why don't you go on in and order for us and I'll try and find the public phone."

  "I'd bet long odds there isn't one. This little town is still in the bronze age, man."

  "You'd lose. When Pilar was involved in the government, she saw to it that every village with a population of more than five thousand had at least one public phone, a public health facility, and a school."

  Ford left Tomlinson at the restaurant and headed off through the crowd alone. He had to stop three people before he found one who spoke Spanish and could tell him where to find the phone. It wasn't a phone booth with neon lighting. The public phone was inside a house where a short fat Mayan woman sat in attendance. She dutifully noted Ford's call, accepted coins in payment, contacted the overseas operator and told her that the call was to Washington, D.C., person-to-person to Donald Piao Cheng, collect. The operator said it might take a while to get the call through and the Mayan woman assured Ford she would send a runner for him when the call was completed.

  Ford ate rice, red beans, and boiled chicken at the little restaurant and drank Masaguan beer served in a liter bottle with a ceramic top. Tomlinson was saying he was anxious to get back to the plaza and take a look at those Mayan stelae, and Ford said he could take his time because they would spend the night in Utatlan. He didn't want to chance stumbling onto Zacul's army after dark and getting shot before they could find a messenger to forward their offer of an exchange. Tomlinson said that was good; he needed a break from all that traveling. Ford said it wasn't going to be much of a break because they were going to spend their free time going over how Tomlinson was going to react to the questions Zacul would surely ask him.

  "Damn, man, we went over and over that stuff for the whole six hours it took us to get here."

  "If we had six days, Tomlinson, it still wouldn't be enough time. If Zacul isn't absolutely convinced you're an expert on pre-Columbian artifacts he's going to kill us. It's as simple as that. No judge, no jury, no trial. He'll just take us out and shoot us."

  Tomlinson, finishing his beer, said, "I don't know what you're so worried about, Doc. I bullshitted my way through Harvard on all kind of subjects I didn't know."

  Ford said, "It's just that Harvard has a different grading system. With Zacul, it's strictly pass or fail."

  The Mayan woman sent a boy to get him, and Ford followed the boy through the market to the little house and picked up the phone. Donald Cheng was waiting. "Doc? Jesus Christ, Doc, you sound like you're about a million miles away. What's that echo? You in a plane or something?"

  "No, at the base of a mountain. In Masagua—which is strictly between you and me. Did you get to the auction? Tell me you went to the auction, Don. "

  "I went to New York. I went to the auction. That painting you described to me never came up for sale—not that I'm surprised."

  "You didn't leave early—-"

  "Just to make a phone call. I had to go out and call an agent friend of mine with New York Customs. And I bet a hundred bucks you know exactly why."

  Ford said, "Oh?" and then waited.

  "You said the guy holding the auction, this Benjamin what's-his-name character, Benjamin Rouchard, might be a little shady. Well, he's at least a little shady. Along with paintings, this guy was selling stuff he shouldn't have
been selling. Jade carvings of jaguars, parrots, these weird little stone statuettes with nasty-looking faces and great big schlongs. He had about a dozen pieces on the block and a couple hundred more in the back room. I guess he was moving it out slow; didn't want to flood the market. You know what some of that crap sold for?"

  "A lot," said Ford.

  "Yeah, it's very popular with interior decorators these days. Pre-Columbian art is illegal, expensive, and bizarre, which makes it chic. One of the statuettes went for just under ten grand. And there was no documentation on any of it. No bills of sale, no statements of provenance, no shipping manifest, nothing. Smuggled goods. We're going to get one of our experts to verify the stuff as authentic, but I think it's real. That's why the high rollers come to his auctions. They know Rouchard sells only the real stuff. All Aztec."

  "Mayan," said Ford.

  "Hah! Caught you, you bastard. I knew you knew. That's why you pumped me about all those laws. Why didn't you just come out and tell me?"

  "You're about to find out, old buddy."

  "If it has something to do with that woman artist, you wasted your time being tricky. She was just an innocent bystander as far as we're concerned. We nailed Rouchard and we're checking his records to see if we can pull in any of his partners. But we don't want the woman—unless you count the way some of the guys were drooling when they looked at her. Which I guess explains why you suddenly became an art lover."

  "Rouchard is in jail?"

  "Oh, hell no. He's out on bail, first offense and all."

  "Which means he could be out of the country by now. "

  "He could be. It's not like he was smuggling in coke or heroin or something. But it's the sort of arrest we like to make to keep our neighbors to the south happy. Lets them know we care about preserving their rich and colorful history and all that shit. As if I care personally, but it's illegal and this guy was doing it in a big way, so I'm glad you steered me in even if you did it in your own weird, convoluted way."

  Ford looked at the Mayan woman sitting there looking out the window, listening to him but not seeming to understand. He pressed the phone closer and said, "I want to know what else you found there, Don. It's important. There's one particular thing I'm looking for—"

  "So now we're getting down to it: the real reason you didn't want a well-organized bust walking into that auction. You want something. Now it's becoming clear—"

  "I do want something. It's a manuscript. Very old, written on parchment with no end boards and not very long—maybe forty, fifty pages in script; archaic Spanish with rough illustrations, hand drawn. I don't know for sure that Rouchard had it, but if he did, he may not even have known it was valuable. He'd probably want some expert to appraise it before he tried to figure out how to peddle it. It may have been in that back room with the other stuff. Or his home. Did you find anything like that?"

  There was a long silence before Cheng finally said, "Well, yeah. I think maybe we did. I'm pretty sure we did. One of the agents showed me something like that. There was so much stuff I didn't look at any of it too closely, but I remember seeing—" "I want it, Don. I need that book. I need it in a big way." "Doc, I can't do that. You know I can't. That stuff all has to be catalogued and tagged as evidence. When we're done with it, it'll be returned to the rightful country if provenance can be established. That's the way the antiquities act reads."

  "You made the bust late last night, Don. You mean to tell me your people have already catalogued all that stuff—"

  "You know damn well we haven't. We didn't even get the search warrants signed until late this morning. That's why you sent me to an art auction and not a bust, isn't it? You were buying yourself time just in case this book you wanted happened to be there—"

  "That's exactly what I was doing. I didn't want to have to ask you to take an article already catalogued and tagged as state's evidence. That would be against the letter of the law, Donald, and I knew what your answer would have to be. But now that manuscript—if it's the piece I need—is just sitting in a room—"

  "Yeah, a room that we've legally sealed."

  "Right. But the article hasn't been catalogued so it's not yet considered evidence."

  "Ah, shit, Doc, you're really reaching. You must really want that manuscript."

  "I do. I'll tell you why later, but I need it just as soon as you can get it to me. You still owe me a big favor, Don. Do you remember why?"

  "You know goddamn well I remember. I will always remember. "

  "I'm calling in that favor now. But you have my word that I won't sell the manuscript for profit and that it'll be returned to the proper people in the proper country."

  "Meaning Masagua."

  "Yeah, Masagua."

  There was another long silence. Donald Piao Cheng was a man who did everything by the book, followed every letter of the law, and this wasn't coming easily. "Well," he said slowly, "we've got plenty of other stuff on the guy. Like I said, there are a couple hundred pieces boxed in that room. And the really important evidence is the stuff he'd already auctioned off."

  "I appreciate it, Don. I really do."

  "But Christ, you don't want me to try and get it to you while you're out of the country?"

  "I wish you could. But you can't. Not safely, anyway."

  Ford asked Cheng to describe the manuscript in more detail and then, convinced that it was the Kin Qux Cho, gave him the address in Florida to which he should have it couriered.

  FIFTEEN

  Men in the gutters were being peed upon.

  At first dark, the Mayan men put down their copal censers and picked up bottles of aguardiente. They had been drinking all afternoon but, with the start of the festival which always concluded market day, they began to drink in earnest. The Maya were not loud and jolly drinkers, nor did they drink in violent packs. These small men in striped pantaloons were intensely alone as they drank, gulping straight from the bottle, throwing their heads way back. They drank as if it were a punishment, as if seeking oblivion. When they finally fell, their friends rolled them into the gutters for, traditionally, it was the duty of the women to rouse their sons or husbands and get them home. But the women would not bother to try until late that night or the next morning, and so now the village dogs sniffed the fallen and, with great ceremony, lifted their legs to pee.

  Ford sat on a bench in the plaza watching the dogs, watching the activity while Tomlinson kept up a running commentary on the glyphs he was tracing from a stone stela. Torches illuminated the plaza but Tomlinson had to use a flashlight to decipher the nuances of etchings which had survived nine hundred or more years of weather. This was Tomlinson at his best, taking written materials and cross-referencing and crosschecking them against a memory and intellect that, considering his past, should have long since been rendered just one more warped record from the generation of Flower Children.

  Tomlinson was saying "Figuring out the date of this thing is a real bitch, man. You have no idea; no idea at all. See this?" The stone stela was about two feet taller than Tomlinson, and the main figure—a profile of some long-gone Mayan chieftain or god—was bordered by hundreds of blocks of intricately carved figures. "These here are the calendar glyphs. You read them in blocks of four, the first glyph in the top line, the first glyph in the next line, then the second glyph in the top line, and the second glyph in the next line. So on and so on, like that. See this thing that has four petals like a flower? This was their figure for zero. Problem is, the Maya saw time as an unending march into the future. Zero can mean the beginning of something, but it can also mean the completion. But see how the flower petal is affixed to this thing here, that kind of looks like the head of a bat? In glyphs, a bat face means very tired; the end of something. Then you have these three bars and four dots. That's the number nineteen, almost like Roman numerals. So this block of glyphs is telling a kind of story: that something came to an end or began during the nineteenth katun. A tun is a three hundred sixty—day year; a katun is twenty of th
ose years; so the nineteenth katun would be . . ." He was actually doing the math in his head. ". . . three hundred and eighty years before or after something. You following me so far?"

  Ford said, "Nope." He was watching people in the market form a loose semicircle around the steps of the Catholic church, readying themselves to participate—as they did each week—in a dance which had become ritual in the isolated Mayan villages of Central America, the Dance of the Conquest. This was no spontaneous dance inspired by the bottles of aguardiente. It was an articulate drama, refined over hundreds of years, that depicted the coming of the conquistadors. Each village supported its own small industry dedicated to carving masks and sewing costumes, with each new generation serving its apprenticeship.

  Why the villages of Masagua continued to perform the dance, Ford did not know.

  There were about a dozen dancers, and he watched as they filed down the street, shaking their rattles, already lost in the identities of the masks they wore. The conquistadors had angelic faces, painted blond hair, blond mustaches, and each bore a close-lipped smile that resembled a mannequin's leer. Some of the conquistadors were strapped into cloth horses. But the masks depicting the Maya, as through some strange act of self-flagellation, were grotesque caricatures of humanity, more demon than man.

  The Maya on the street showed no emotion as they parted to let the actors pass.

  Ford said over his shoulder, "You need to watch this, Tomlinson."

  Tomlinson was still concentrating on the glyphs. "You don't see why learning to read these dates is so important, do you, Doc?"

  "No, but I don't have to see it. You're the one who's going to have to convince Zacul."

  "What I'm talking about goes beyond Zacul, man. I'm talking about my work; I'm talking the Kin Qux Cho. Do you realize no one has completely figured out the Mayan calendar? Scholars know even less about the Mayan writing system— pretty amazing when you consider that the people who devised the glyphs and the language are still around. You know why I think it's so important to crack the code?"