01 _ Xibalba Murders, The (20 page)

Jonathan left after a light supper, and we all retired early, exhausted from the ordeal. Francesca, I knew, would not sleep until Alejandro was back at home, but she was persuaded to try to get some rest.

I had hidden Don Hernan’s diary in a plastic bag behind a panel in the bathroom that allowed access to the pipes. I took it out now and, climbing into bed, started to read through it.

Other than several references to meetings with Gomez Arias, the most recent a week before my arrival in the Yucatan and Don Hernan’s subsequent disappearance, there was little of any note. He’d missed a dentist appointment and a meeting with his banker. My arrival date was also noted. Nothing very unusual here.

Don Hernan was a doodler, and the margins of every page were covered with his scratchings. Most were just geometric designs, the kind lots of people do while sitting in boring meetings or talking on the telephone. On the last page, however, Don Hernan had made three very detailed and intricate drawings.

One was of a woman in a mantilla holding a child. The second was of a Maya warrior wearing a costume complete with feather tail and a large ballooning headdress topped by a bird with elaborate tail feathers. The warrior carried a spearthrower and a club. Above the warrior was a Mayan hieroglyph that I took to be the warrior’s name.

The third was even more elaborate. It looked like two serpent or dragon figures joined at the tail, rather like a great gaping jaw hinged at the bottom to form a
U.

I believed I could identify both of these drawings, given a chance, either from the books in Don Hernan’s office or in Antonio’s library. I wondered whether the
museo
key I had would get me into the library, since it was not possible for me to go during normal business hours.

I took a piece of hotel notepaper, which was of the airmail variety and therefore perfect for my purposes, and traced the last two drawings carefully. I then put the diary back into its hiding place and tried to sleep.

I must have fallen asleep almost immediately, but awoke about two a.m., as I had begun to do almost every night. I lay in the darkness for a while, and then once again felt the impulse to go out in the dark.

I dressed, then slipped down the stairs to the front and looked outside. The television van was still there, but all the lights were out, and I could see two people in the front seat of the van, silhouetted against the streetlights.

Both appeared to be sound asleep. The other reporters seemed to have left for the night, although I had no doubt they would be back in the morning. There was, however, a police car on the street, and its occupants were very much awake, reading newspapers by the car light.

I returned to my room, and went out again through the bathroom window. I waited for several minutes, hidden in the tree, until the security officer we had hired completed his patrol of the perimeter of the property and disappeared around the corner.

Then I was off and running away from the hotel, down the darkened residential streets toward the
museo.
Once again I waited in the darkness of the little garden at the back, and then went in through the back door. This time I went down to the basement, trying in the darkness to retrace the route I had taken with Antonio Valesquez a few days earlier.

Even the emergency lighting was not on down here at night. I switched on my flashlight and made my way past the storage shelves that lined all the hallways. As I turned the corners grotesque faces and figures of Maya gods seemed to leap out at me, caught in the beam of my flashlight.

I remembered that this was Ix, day of the night sun, the Jaguar God, that passed through the underworld each night. It felt as if the
museo
came alive at night, and these statues really were the gods of the underworld, waiting for their human victims. I’ll admit I was terrified, but I pressed on.

Antonio had said that the last time he had seen Don Hernan, he had been greatly excited or agitated about something, and he had been leaving the fragments room. It was there that I headed, although I had no idea what to look for.

I let myself in, and found the little desk in the middle of the room where, I knew, in the daylight, someone was cataloging the collection on the computer.

I pulled down the blind that covered the glass in the doorway and taped it into place, then I turned on the little desk light. I was reasonably sure that the security guard would do little more than take the elevator to this floor and shine his light around from there. It was too creepy a place for him to do much more than that.

It is amazing what you can learn about people from their desks. The owner of this desk was a woman by the name of Maria Benitez. That much was easy to ascertain: there was a nameplate on the desk. Senora Benitez had four lovely children, three boys and a daughter, their photographs all lined up where she could see them while she worked. She doted on her youngest, the little girl. A crayoned stick drawing of a house, a mother, and child—the tree in the yard, the people, and the house all exactly the same scale, in the style of children everywhere—was given a prominent place on the desk.
For Mommy, love, Frida,
it said.

Maria Benitez was a very neat and organized person, and the orderly desk reflected that. I turned on the computer and logged on using her name. Then there came the prompt I was dreading:
password.
I tried the usual stuff, first name spelled backward, Merida, the name of the
museo. Incorrect password,
the screen flashed.
Try again.
I wondered how many tries you got before you got locked out entirely.

I looked around the desk again. My eyes fell on the child’s drawing.
Frida,
I typed.

I was in.

It took me a while to figure out how the collection was being cataloged. In time I realized that objects were coded by type, but also by location. I kept running back and forth between the computer and the drawers that I had opened by taking the key from the desk drawer as I had seen Antonio do when we were last here. I found I could list by type of object—tools, weapons, pottery fragments, etc.—but also by drawer. I could, I found, punch in a drawer number, and a list of its contents would appear. This would be useful in assisting someone doing research who wanted to know what a particular object in a particular drawer was, I guessed.

I opened one drawer, checked the contents, then went back to the computer and typed in the number. There were twelve objects in the drawer, I counted, and twelve items appeared on the screen.

I tried another drawer number. Ten objects, ten names on the list. I scanned the list to see if anything looked unusual.

I then tried the objects themselves.
Terra-cotta,
I typed, and several drawer numbers showed up on the screen. I ran to the drawers, and indeed, the drawers listed did contain pottery fragments. A couple of pieces were marked out on loan.

I kept looking. I had no idea what I was looking for.

Something out of the ordinary. I tried typing
codex
. Nothing.

I tried
stela
. Several drawers held fragments of stone stelae.

I tried typing
weapons.
Two drawers contained weapons. I looked at the first. There were bits of flint spear points. Fifteen items listed, fifteen in the drawer.

I checked the second drawer’s listing. Nineteen items. I checked the drawer. I counted, then counted again. Twenty items. Maria Benitez had made a mistake.

I looked at the contents. They were various fragments of flint and obsidian blades.

Hardly breathing, I tried to reference the descriptions to see what had been missed. I printed off a copy of that drawer’s list and went to the drawer to check it item by item.

But I knew which one was extra. It was the beautifully carved blade at the back. There will be nine, Lucas had said. Nine blades for the nine Lords of Darkness. Only eight had been found in the cave. This had to be the ninth.

What did this mean? Perhaps someone exploring the cave a long time ago had found it and had given it to the
museo,
not realizing there were more treasures to be found at the site. Maybe it was from a different place entirely, which I couldn’t know because it had not been cataloged properly.

At first I could not bring myself to pull the thought that was forming in my unconscious and examine it carefully. Senora Benitez was a meticulous cataloger, and it would be unthinkable for her to miss the biggest and most beautiful object in the drawer.

I lifted the blade from the drawer and looked at it very carefully. When you have spent so much time in the darkness, color vision is not good, and eyes need time to adjust to the light from a flashlight, but in my imagination I saw the blade drenched in blood.

I knew, as well as I would know if I had examined the blade under a microscope, that this was the weapon that had killed Don Hernan. Someone had hidden it in plain sight. Someone who had access to the
museo
and the curatorial and storage spaces. Someone so ruthless that they could kill a man, bring his body to the
museo,
and place it in his office, and then calmly hide the murder weapon in the fragments room.

This could have been anyone who worked at the
museo,
Ernesto and Antonio among them. It could be anyone with research privileges. I wondered if there was a logbook of visitors, other than staff, who had been in this room.

I searched the desk, and found it. The visitors’ book. I scanned the names of people who had been there in the days surrounding the time that Don Hernan’s body had been found. Most of the names meant nothing. Two of them I knew.

Jonathan Hamelin and Lucas May.

tears in my eyes, i close the drawers and the cabinet, log off the computer, and turn off the desk lamp. Stumbling in the darkness, I find the door, remove the tape, and roll up the blind, then make my way back to the main floor and the street.

Now even the darkness is dangerous. I believe I can find sanctuary with Dona Josefina, amid the whiteness and the silence and the calm of the hospital. But when I get there, a police car is outside, its blue light flashing directly in my eyes.

I run back to the hotel, shadows lunging at me as I go. I do not know who the enemy is, only that there is one, and he is close to me.

As I near the hotel the shadows take human form and grab me from behind. I am choking. The world becomes very, very dark and I fall. I hear a whirring sound, a shout, and the shadows move away.

I sit, my back to the stone wall of the inn, and fight for breath. Don Santiago, also gasping from exertion, sits in his wheelchair. Unable to sleep, and seeing that the reporters are all gone, he has chosen this time for some solitude on the street outside the hotel.

He has saved my life.

I find I am still holding the knife. I am very frightened.

MEN

I spent the next day jumping at shadows and trying to pull together the tatters of my self-confidence so that I would be able to do what I knew I must.

Santiago had wanted to call the police, of course, but both of us soon realized that since I was not supposed to be out of the hotel at all, this would not be helpful for me.

He was unable to tell me anything about my attacker, other than that he wore a cape, black gloves, and a black mask, hardly unusual for Carnaval. Santiago promised me he would not tell the rest of the family about the attack. They had enough to worry about as it was.

I returned to my room and tried with limited success to get some more sleep. I had my recurring dream again, chasing the rabbit, this time through the streets of Merida, then falling through space, watched by a black-hooded creature with the face of an owl, the death bird. Once again the voices of the Lords of Xibalba surrounded me as I fell. It was not a restful night.

Late in the morning Isa brought me coffee and toast, plus, as a special treat, she said, the
International Herald Tribune
and one of the large Mexico City newspapers. Jean Pierre had apparently braved the crowds of reporters outside to get these for me.

The
Herald Tribune
was a gloomy edition. The main feature was about the sorry state of the world economy. Falling oil prices, unstable currencies, and plummeting stock markets seemed to be the order of the day.

There was a special feature about Mexico that talked about the efforts, so far unsuccessful, to prop up the nose-diving peso and restore confidence in the Mexican economy and its political leaders. One of the factors contributing to the lack of confidence in Mexico was more guerrilla activity in Chiapas and the government’s inability to reach an agreement with the rebels that would end the fighting. Much was made of the fact that the rebel forces appeared to enjoy the support of the church, an interesting reversal from earlier times, I thought.

The Mexico City paper contained coverage of the Children of the Talking Cross affair, as it had come to be known, but not, mercifully, as much as the local media, which is probably why Jean Pierre had picked it instead of the local rag. The article, which I read despite my growing aversion to this kind of coverage, also referenced the trouble in Chiapas, speculating that there might be a link between the Children and the Zapatistas, an idea I found quite ludicrous, considering that it was probably just Alejandro and his friends playing at being rebels.

The Mexico City paper also carried very gloomy economic news. The stock market in Mexico City was extremely volatile, but the trend was by and large down, and hysteria reigned as fortunes were being lost almost daily.

I began to think about Gomez Arias, and wondered how all this would affect him. An unstable currency wouldn’t help any of his businesses, which seemed to be exclusively Mexico-based. Maybe an increase in tourism due to the low peso would make his hotel the big moneymaker of his portfolio, although I had never heard of the hotel business being the sure way to financial security. Hotels seemed to be changing hands and closing all the time. He was certainly still giving extravagant dinner parties.