The Arraignment

by Steve Martini

  “And this ain’t the Rosetta thing you was talking about?”

  Ibarra shakes his head.

  “That be worth more, right?”

  “You cannot put a value on the Mejicano Roseton.”

  “Tell us about it?” I say.

  “I take it you have never seen a picture of the Mayan codices?”

  “Uh . . . ah . . .” Herman looks at him.

  “They are books made of tree bark that has been flattened and covered with a lime paste, like the stelae. The pages are folded like an accordion and painted in vivid colors with hieroglyphs.

  “There are only four of them known to be in existence. They are located in various museums around the world: Dresden, Madrid, Paris. One is in the hands of a private collector. They are the only remaining books of Mayan history written by the original scribes. All of the others were destroyed by Spanish missionaries. The books were believed by the Spaniards to be tools of the devil.

  “A Franciscan missionary, his name was Diego de Landa, he burned hundreds of the Mayan books in the great auto-da-fé in 1562.”

  “What the fuck’s a auto dafay?” says Herman “The Inquisition. The Spaniards burned the books, along with the Mayan scribes who wrote them, so that the books could not be re-created.”

  “What’s this got to do with this Rosetta thing?”

  “I am getting to that. Before de Landa burned all of the Mayan books, about forty years earlier, a group of Spaniards were shipwrecked in the Caribbean off the coast of what is now Mexico. They were washed up on a beach on the Yucatán not far from here, and they were captured by the Mayas. All of them were put to death, except two. A man named Gonzalo Guerrero and a shipmate named Jerónimo de Aguilar. These two survived. They lived with the Maya in captivity for eight years, until the Conquistador Hernán Cortés, the man who conquered the Aztecs, heard about them and paid a ransom.

  “De Aguilar went back and became the translator for Cortés. He became very important in the conquest of the Mayas.”

  “The other man, Guerrero, did not go back. He had married a daughter of one of the Mayan rulers and became a Mayan warlord.”

  “He went native,” says Herman.

  “Yes.”

  “And he taught the Mayas the battle tactics of the Spaniards. Leading a Mayan army, he defeated the Spaniards at a place called Cape Catoche. When the Spanish government learned of this, they wanted him dead.”

  “But what’s this got to do with the Rosetta?”

  “This man Guerrero lived and fought the Spaniards for twenty years until they killed him in 1536. They shot him with an harquebus, a kind of primitive musket. Guerrero knew that sooner or later the Spaniards would kill him. He also knew that they would destroy Mayan civilization as he knew it. So he had the scribes prepare a secret codex. A great Mayan book of hieroglyphs. This not only told their history and listed their rulers, but it also described the various city states that existed before the Spaniards came and how they interacted with one another.

  “But the important part, what no one had ever done before, because they could not, was that Guerrero translated the hieroglyphs into Spanish. He included this translation as part of the codex.”

  “The Mexican Rosetta,” I say.

  “Yes. People have been able to work out a majority of the hieroglyphs, but they cannot be absolutely certain they are correct. And there are still twenty maybe thirty percent of the hieroglyphs that remain a mystery. These are the more complex and important ones. They may reveal things about the Mayas that have been lost and forgotten for centuries.”

  “You know a lot about this,” says Herman. “Why?”

  “I have been trying to purchase the Mejicano Roseton for three years. Without success. I have made a great deal of money constructing buildings and doing business. I wanted the Mejicano Roseton to remain in this country. It is part of its heritage.”

  “So who has it?” I ask.

  He shakes his head. “For years it was believed to be in the possession of Indians in Chiapas. The Mexican government has been dealing with a kind of indigenous independence movement there for some time. About ten months ago, I was told that it had been sold, to raise money for arms and food. The Mexican Army was closing in on the Indians. They did not want it to fall into the hands of the government, where it would be put on display in Mexico City. So they sold it.”

  “And you don’t know who bought it?” I ask.

  “No. But I believe that my sons may have it.”

  “That don’t make any sense,” says Herman. “Why the note telling you to bring it?”

  “Herman, let him finish.”

  “What note?” says Ibarra.

  “Never mind. Go on.”

  “It is just that I found out that my sons were negotiating with this man Metz to deliver the Mejicano Roseton to an American buyer. According to the information I had, this buyer was represented by Mr. Rush.”

  “That’s why you wrote the letter?”

  “Yes. I wanted him to know that I knew what was going on. And that I intended to stop it.”

  Nick’s only contact to the world of art and collectibles was through Dana. And the only one she knew with connections sufficient to peddle something on the scale of the Rosetta was Nathan Fittipaldi.

  “But something of the scale of the Mexican Rosetta would be impossible to display in a museum. Even a private collector would have to hide it,” I tell him.

  “Private collectors, people who have that kind of money, often have private collections; they show a few trusted friends and keep it as a secret. There are those who would be willing to exercise patience, to hold it and wait. A museum might possibly take it.”

  “They’d never be able to exhibit it. The Mexican government would be all over them.”

  “Probably. But it would come down to a legal claim,” says Ibarra. “The museum would probably say that the Rosetta had been in a storage crate for decades. I have heard that such things happen. It shows up as an indistinct item on an old bill of lading. The document may date to the nineteen twenties.”

  “Meaning that the item was found in an earlier expedition?”

  “Exactly. Museums have warehouses filled with such items. They might not catalogue them for decades. Who is to say it wasn’t there? They simply claim that they did not realize its significance until they opened the crate and examined its contents. Of course my government would demand its return. But it is unlikely that they would succeed. The Indians of Chiapas might complain and tell the world that they sold it only months before, but who is going to listen to them?”

  “So you think your boys got it?” says Herman.

  Ibarra shrugs his shoulders. “I believe it is a possibility.”

  “Maybe we should go down and ask ’em.” Herman looks at me.

  “The last time we went down there, we had three cars and six men with guns. This time it’s just you and me.”

  “Yeah, but last time I wasn’t motivated,” says Herman. “Besides, people at that trailer look like they just crawled outta mud huts. The brothers wouldn’t be able to trust ’em in the jungle with bullets. Their guns probably all rusted up.”

  “I don’t know. The one they had pointed at the back of your head looked pretty good.” I turn my attention back to Ibarra. “What do you know about a place called Cobá?”

  “It’s an archeological site. Very large, more than seventy kilometers square, I believe. Maybe two hours south of here, in the jungle. Why?”

  “Does it draw a crowd, many tourists?” I ask.

  “No. Very few in fact. Most of what is there remains to be discovered. It is still covered by jungle. They don’t expect to uncover it all for perhaps another fifty years.”

  “That’s why they picked it,” says Herman.

  “Who?”

  “Your sons, if they’re to be believed,” says Herman.

  “Have you ever been there, to Cobá?”

  “Yes. Two or three times.”

  “Do
you know a place there called the Doorway to the Temple of Inscriptions?”

  He thinks about this for a moment. “The tourist literature, they give all kinds of names to these ruins to get the tourists excited. You know, get them thinking about men with whips and fedoras in leather jackets so they will visit.”

  “What else did the note say?” I look at Herman.

  “Place had painted walls or something.”

  “Oh, you mean Las Pinturas. Yes, I know where that is. A stone structure with a small room on top. Inside of this room there are columns with painted hieroglyphs and inscriptions carved on the walls. They retain some of the dyes and stains put on by the Mayas.”

  “Could you take us there?”

  “I suppose I could.” He looks at Herman, probably thinking that a trip to Cobá is better than getting shot.

  “You got any people can help us?” says Herman.

  “What, to kill my sons?”

  “No, no. They show up, I do that. Less you wanna help. I’m thinkin’ maybe drive cars, play lookout. I mean somebody ain’t gonna sit and stare at whipped cream on a camera all afternoon.”

  “I have people,” says Ibarra.

  “Yeah. Seen your people.” Herman slips his pistol back into the fanny pack and drops it in the bag. “Still I suppose we better go back upstairs, wake up ladle-head. See if he figured how to undo his belt buckle yet.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  We pull out of the parking lot at the glass pyramid just after four in the morning, nearly two hours before dawn.

  Herman is scrunched up on a couch that runs the length of the passenger compartment along one side of Ibarra’s stretch limo.

  We left the black Suburban in a private area of the hotel’s underground garage. The cops in Cancún and probably the Mexican Federal Judicial Police will be looking for the two Suburbans that are now missing from the scene of Julio’s murder. Residents in the condo are sure to have seen the three vehicles parked there together.

  In the front seat are Ibarra’s driver and another man, not quite as large as Herman, broad shoulders and a steely look.

  Behind us is another vehicle with four security men. Three other vehicles with security left the hotel a half hour ahead of us. We are slated to meet at a point along the highway, at which time I will transfer into one of the other cars and drive by myself to the parking area at Cobá.

  Herman, Ibarra, and his people will approach the archeological site from a different direction along back roads. If all goes according to plan, they will be in place around the structure Ibarra calls Las Pinturas before I arrive. Some of his men are equipped with high-powered rifles and laser scopes to pick up heat signatures of people hiding in the bush. Ibarra has assured me that they are qualified marksmen.

  We are unable to go to the police, since Pablo cannot be certain that his sons have not bribed some of the local authorities. Even if they haven’t, it is likely that the police would hold me for questioning well past the time set in the note, in which case Ibarra’s sons would kill Adam.

  Sitting in the seat next to me, Pablo Ibarra tries to brief me on the terrain and what I will find when I get there. I can tell he is worried, a father on the verge of a violent collision with his sons, taking no joy in what he must do.

  “I hope and pray that they are not there,” he says. But I can tell that the note that was shoved under Herman’s hotel room door, telling me to bring the Rosetta to Cobá, leaves little doubt in his mind.

  “What I do not understand is why they think you would have it,” he says.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Unless perhaps it is because of your association with this man Rush. Did my sons know about this?”

  “I didn’t tell them.”

  “None of it makes any sense.”

  When I told him about the aerial attack at the Casa Turquesa, Ibarra scanned early editions of the local newspapers. He was looking for the names of the two men in the ultralight to see if he might recognize them. The brothers used ultralights over the jungle to look for ruins. Divers pulled the two bodies from the water late yesterday. But Ibarra didn’t recognize either name.

  He has put together a package wrapped in cloth and tied with twine. Covered, it could pass for the Maya’s ancient book unless you had specific knowledge of its dimensions, which we do not. Once its cover is removed, however, not even the untrained eye would be fooled by the two plywood boards with paper between them.

  I try to catch some sleep as we roll along the highway that connects Merida, the old Spanish Colonial capital, with Cancún.

  I doze. It seems like only a few minutes when I feel a bump and wake up. We are rolling slowly, maybe twenty miles an hour, through a village along the highway.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing,” says Ibarra. “Topetóns. Speed bumps. They put them on the highway coming into the villages so that people slow down.”

  We come to another one, more like a hill than a bump. The long limo is now forced to come to a near stop to keep from dragging its rear end or losing its suspension. Herman sleeps right through this. I look at my watch. I’ve been asleep for twenty minutes.

  The road to Merida is two lanes, one in each direction. Even at this hour, before five A.M. there are a few people moving about in the small settlements off the highway. Lights are on in some of the tiny cinder-block houses with their corrugated metal roofs. I have seen buildings like this before, on the islands of the Caribbean. They are fashioned to withstand hurricanes and tidal surge. The walls will stand. You can find your roof later or pick up someone else’s.

  Except for the areas hacked out for human habitation, the low jungle engulfs everything within view. The even, verdant canopy is unbroken but for the occasional banyan tree that pokes through toward the sky and the indomitable microwave towers with their red lights blinking in the distance. To the east the faint glow of morning is already beginning to define the clouds.

  “Do you have children?” says Ibarra.

  “One. A daughter. She’s fifteen.”

  “It is difficult.”

  “Yes.” I have thought about Sarah and wondered what she will be doing in a few hours. Mostly I have been wondering whether I will ever see her again.

  To think I could unravel the reasons behind Nick’s death was arrogant. To risk the security of the only family that Sarah has left was foolish beyond belief. If I were divorced perhaps, but I am not. I am widowed.

  Harry was right, a single parent has no business doing what I am doing. And now it’s too late. By my actions, I have placed others in jeopardy: Harry in the hospital and Adam now in the hands of Ibarra’s sons. There is no turning back.

  We turn off the highway at a place called Nuevo Xcan and head into the deep tropical forest. Here the road narrows, with vegetation nibbling at both edges of the asphalt. The road runs like a ribbon through jungle growth that becomes visibly more dense and taller with each kilometer.

  The leafy green is impenetrable. It rises up like a wave in a sea of darkness on both sides of the car. We rocket along at seventy miles an hour, gliding over slight undulations only to find more road stretched out in front of us, a seemingly endless thoroughfare to nowhere.

  The long springs of the limo lift us over a slight rise. On the highway ahead I see the taillights of two cars parked in the middle of the road blocking it.

  “It’s all right.” Ibarra sitting forward in the seat. “It’s my people.”

  The limo comes to a fast brake, the security car right on our bumper. Herman slides forward on the seat and finally wakes up.

  “What’s goin’ on?”

  “Time to switch cars,” I tell him.

  “Shit, we already there?”

  “Not quite. How far is it?” I ask Ibarra.

  “Just a few miles. You will turn off to the right. You can’t miss the road. There should be a sign to the archeological zone.”

  The limo rolls to a stop behind the other two cars in the middle of th
e road, and we get out. The trailing security car pulls up behind us, and two men dressed in camouflage fatigues get out and stand near the open doors, surveying the road behind them and occasionally glancing into the jungle overgrowth alongside the road. One of them is holding an assault rifle.

  Up in front, Ibarra’s people are standing around on the road, two of them looking at a map spread out on the hood of one of the cars. The car doors are open, and some of the men are taking the chance to smoke a last cigarette before going in. They are wearing flak jackets, and two of them are holding scoped rifles.

  Herman is walking next to me. “Rifles ain’t gonna be much good in the jungle,” he says. “Less they get an opening in the brush. I knew I shouldn’t a listened to these people. I shoulda brought the shotgun, the MP-5.”

  “I think it’ll be all right. They look like they know what they’re doing.”

  “Yeah.”

  Ibarra waves me forward, toward one of the cars with an open door.

  I start to walk.

  “Hey.”

  I turn and Herman is looking at me.

  “Ain’t you gonna say good-bye?”

  “I wish you were coming with me.”

  “I could get in the backseat, lie down,” he says.

  “Right. They wouldn’t see that. Besides, I have to go a ways on foot. Their people would pick you up before you could follow me thirty feet.”

  “Probably. Here. You better put this on.” He’s holding a lightweight green jacket in his hand.

  “I’m not cold.”

  “I know. Just trust me. Take it. White shirt you got on is gonna light you up like a lantern out there in the jungle.”

  I take the jacket and slip it on.

  Herman zips it up, almost jerking me off my feet, pats the collar down, paws like a bear. “You don’t wanna give ’em nothing makes a target on your chest.”

  “Right.”

  “There’s a little something for ya in the pocket,” he says.

  I reach in.

  “Other side.”

  I dig it out. It’s a small gun-metal blue semiautomatic pistol.

  “My backup piece. Figure you’re gonna need it more than me. Walther PPK .380. Six shots, so don’t get carried away. And don’t go shootin’ at nothin’ beyond ten, twelve feet. Waste of time, besides you just draw attention to yourself. Little switch on the side. You hit it, it turns red side out. Then it’s hot.”