Beautiful Sacrifice (25 page)

“Nice?” Mercurio laughed. “The censer is beautiful and you know it.”

“Of course,” she said, studying it.

The pottery’s central motif was an intricate cutout of an idealized Maya skull, mouth open. Snakes wrapped around the cranial dome, heads pointed up to the heavens. The figure was repeated three more times around the pottery. The inside was black with smoke, probably from sacred copal, the hardened but not fossilized remains of tree sap. The outside showed traces of blue that could have been painted glyphs, faded now.

There was no piece missing in the censer that would match what Hunter and Jase had found in the murdered janitor’s room. None of the glyphs had the squared, jagged lines, a sigil sacred exclusively to Kawa’il.

The blackware vases were perfect—suspiciously so to Lina, but it wasn’t her collection, so she said nothing. Their glyphs were outlined in red. Kawa’il’s sigil was absent.

Hunter absorbed each artifact in turn. The ornamental carved stones were new to him.

“What’s their purpose?” he asked aloud.

“Perhaps good luck, perhaps simple offerings flung into a sacred cenote,” Mercurio answered. “I haven’t had time to translate the glyphs, which appear to be Terminal Classic on first look.”

Hunter switched his attention to tiny pottery faces, misshapen and broken, as though cast aside. “These?” he asked.

“Supernatural faces,” Lina said when Mercurio didn’t answer. “Some of the many, many gods of the Maya. They look like imports from the highlands. Anywhere from Classic to Late Terminal Classic. Probably cenote offerings.”

“Very good,” Mercurio said in surprise. “But then, you always had an enviable eye. Are you certain I can’t lure you to the Yucatan full-time?”

“Quite certain,” Lina said absently.

Her attention was on pots with knobby animal feet at the bottom. Again, probably made as offerings to one god or another. But it was a string of pale, carved jade beads that made her breath stop. The beads looked like a snake swallowing its own tail. Some of the beads were chipped or cracked, but it didn’t detract from the impact of the whole.

Lina had seen only one thing like the beads—a big jade medallion of a jaguar head wreathed in a feathered snake devouring its own tail. The piece probably had been part of a priest’s regalia. She had found it at one of her father’s digs.

The piece had vanished into her father’s scholarly collection. She wondered if he had ever written the article he had talked about doing on the jade. If he had, it hadn’t been published in any source she knew. And she knew all of the scholarly ones as well as some that were more shadowy.

“This is extraordinary, Mercurio. Where did you get it?” she asked

“I traded for it,” he said.

Hunter managed not to laugh out loud. He’d bet that the beads were—at best—a gray-market trophy.

Lina frowned. “Was the previous owner Mexican?”

“He had the requisite papers,” Mercurio said. “The beads came from the first dredging of Chichén Itzá. One of the worker’s descendants sold them for cash before anyone had dreamed up antiquities laws. Someone strung the beads. The result came down through the years in a Maya family. They sold it to pay for doctors for their son.”

“You’re very fortunate they came to you,” Lina said carefully.

“Yes.”

She waited, but Mercurio said no more.

Listening with a small part of his attention, Hunter had ruthlessly moved from artifact to artifact while Lina and Mercurio danced around the subject of questionable provenance. Obviously Mercurio wasn’t into the Caesar’s wife strategy of business.

“What’s that?” Hunter asked finally. “Paper?”

Instantly Lina was at his side. “Looks like it. Birch bark.”

There were fragmentary symbols on one side of the piece. She couldn’t read them. There simply wasn’t enough left.

“What is it?” Hunter asked.

“It looks like a bit torn from a Maya codex, but…” She shook her head. “All of the five surviving codices are accounted for. This could be a fragment from one of them.” Her tone said it was unlikely. “Bishop Landa and his soldiers were very thorough. If there were any books they didn’t find and burn, the climate eventually destroyed them. Five hundred years in a jungle…” She looked at Mercurio and raised one dark eyebrow. “Any comments?”

“The paper came in the same lot as the beads,” he said. “The owner said it was a fragment of an unknown codex.”

“You believed him?” Hunter asked.

“No,” Mercurio said bluntly. “That would be too much. Simply fantastic.”

“Understatement,” Lina said. “Proof of an ancient, unknown codex would rock the Maya world like a nuclear bomb. Finding a sixth surviving book is the holy grail of every Maya archaeologist.”

“Collectors, too?” Hunter asked.

“Of course,” Mercurio said.

“It could never be displayed,” Lina said at the same time. “You could have a stack of provenance going back to Bishop Landa himself, and Mexico would still scream patrimony.”

“Not all collectors would care,” Hunter said.

“But gossip goes through solid stone walls,” Lina pointed out. “A sixth Maya book is a secret that I can’t imagine being kept.”

“Okay. You see anything here that looks like the photographs?”

“No.”

“What photographs?” Mercurio asked.

Watching the other man, Hunter reached into one of the cargo pockets on his new pants. He spread the photos across an empty worktable and turned to watch Mercurio. The man came to a point, all but quivering like a bird dog as his eyes swept from photo to photo, then began again for a more leisurely look.

“Well cared for,” Mercurio said. “The photographer should be fired.”

Hunter waited.

So did Lina. She didn’t need Hunter’s neutral expression to know that he wanted her quiet right now.

“Anything else?” Hunter asked when Mercurio remained silent.

“What is their provenance?” Mercurio countered.

“Zero.”

The other man didn’t look surprised.

“You missing any pieces from your digs?” Hunter asked.

“None that I know of. Certainly no artifacts of this quality. My digs share a similar style—especially with that scepter, but I’ve found nothing like that mask. Is it real or of modern manufacture?”

“I don’t know,” Lina said. “I’ve never studied the artifact itself, only the photos.”

“And you think I have?” Mercurio asked, looking at her. “You flatter me,
querida
. I have found some hints of Kawa’il, some sigils on goods. But I can’t prove they weren’t imported from Yucatan. In fact, anything regarding Kawa’il can’t be proved beyond academic doubt as indigenous to my Belize digs.”

“Then why is Philip…” Her voice dried up.

“So paranoid about my digs?” Mercurio’s smile was different from his earlier ones. Harder.

“Yes,” Lina said.

“Because he is not quite sane. Digs of this quality and apparent age”—Mercurio gestured to the photos—“have only been discovered on Reyes Balam land. I don’t know what your father has found since I left. Certainly he never found artifacts of this magnificence when I was with him,
querida
.”

“If you wanted to buy them, who would you go to?” Hunter asked, his eyes the color of winter ice. He was really tired of hearing the other man call Lina “darling.”

“To you, of course,” Mercurio said. “You’re the man with the photos.”

“These photos are as close as I can come to the real thing,” Hunter said. “Who would you try next?”

“Cecilia Reyes Balam,” Mercurio said.

“Not Simon Crutchfeldt?” Lina asked. “Or Philip?”

“If Crutchfeldt owned these, he wouldn’t keep them long enough for word to get out,” Mercurio said. “He is a businessman as much as he is a collector. Only a collector would be fool enough to keep artifacts such as those. As for Philip, if he had them, I would be the last to know. He wouldn’t spit on my grave. Vindictive bastard.” Then, quickly, “My apologies, Lina.”

“Not necessary.” Her voice, like her face, revealed no emotion.

“That takes care of the obvious suspects,” Hunter said. “Anyone else?”

“Carlos, of course,” Mercurio said. “But, assuming those artifacts are as good as they look, he wouldn’t sell them.”

“He’d give them to the museum,” Lina said.

Carlos laughed softly. “Such beautiful innocence,
querida
. It is one of your greatest lures.”

“I don’t find it alluring to be called naive,” she said evenly. “Are you saying Carlos would sell those artifacts on the black market?”

“No. I’m saying that the only way Carlos would let go of those artifacts is if he had better pieces in his collection.”

“We have nothing to equal them in the museum,” Lina said.

Mercurio’s smile was both gentle and amused. “You must be the only person in Mexico who doesn’t know that Carlos has a personal collection, and I’m not referring to your Houston museum.”

“So he might know about these artifacts?” Hunter asked quickly.

The quick flare of temper in Lina’s eyes had warned him that she was reaching her limit on being patronized by Mercurio ak Chan de la Poole. That was fine with Hunter, but they had more questions to be answered before he let her shred the handsome Mexican.

“Carlos?” Mercurio shrugged. “He is a man who keeps his own counsel. Lina’s
abuelita
might know. She and Carlos are close.”

“Why?” Hunter asked. “She’s two generations older than he is.”

“He is the only reasonably direct male descendant of the Reyes Balam line,” Mercurio said. “He is the focus of the backward villagers who see him as a conduit to the old gods.”

“He’s CEO of a cement company,” Lina said. “Not real godlike.”

“To you and me, no. He is just one more spoiled son of an old family. The villagers are more foolish. They look for anything to make their dirt-scratching lives more important.”

“Take a good look at those photos,” she said impatiently.

Mercurio’s disdainful attitude toward poor Maya villagers was one of the major reasons she hadn’t let their relationship go beyond a few dates with him. Despite his handsome face, fit body, and love of field archaeology, Lina couldn’t see him as a potential mate.

Too bad Mercurio didn’t feel the same way.

“What do you see?” Lina pressed. “What do you think the function of the artifacts was?”

“Is that cloth really a god bundle?” Mercurio countered.

“I don’t know,” Lina said.

He looked at Hunter.

“Same here,” Hunter said. “That’s why we knocked on your door.”

“If I assume that the artifacts are as represented in the pictures,” Mercurio began.

“This isn’t a peer review,” Lina said. “You’re not being recorded or judged or asked to buy or sell. Spare me all the academic qualifiers.”

“So direct,” Mercurio said. “So American.”

About time you noticed,
Hunter thought sardonically.

“I’m not the starry-eyed teenager you knew on the digs,” she said. “I’m way past that.”

“You were beautiful, a bird just learning to fly.” His voice was like a stroke, his eyes hot with memories.

“That was years ago,” she said. “The pictures are now.”

Hunter measured Mercurio like an undertaker sizing up future business.

Lina’s dark eyes watched the other man, hoping he would accept that she had long outgrown her crush on her father’s handsome assistant.

“People are dead because of those artifacts,” Hunter said. “We don’t want any more deaths on our hands.”

But his tone said he wouldn’t mind some of Mercurio’s blood on his knuckles.

Mercurio studied the photographs again, his mouth flat rather than seductive. “Were they found together?”

“At the Texas-Mexico border,” Hunter said. “Where they’d been before that is unknown.”

“I can’t tell you anything Lina can’t.” Mercurio shrugged. “They came from Reyes Balam land.”

She started to protest.

Hunter cut across her. “What is their function?”

“Religious,” Mercurio said. “Specifically, sacrificial. The quality of the knife, the scepter, the mask, the Chacmool, the incense burner—it all speaks of priest-kings communicating with gods. If there ever was a cult of Kawa’il, these goods belonged to its high priest.”

“Why couldn’t they have come from Belize?” Lina asked.

“I have several digs in Belize, most of them close to historic villages, places where traders came from the Yucatan peninsula to conduct business. Two of my digs are deeper in the jungle. Some of the sites have wall paintings. There is even one—just one—with the sigil of Kawa’il.”

Lina’s breath came in and stayed.

“The sigil is on the order of Mexico City graffiti,” Mercurio said, shrugging. “It is a crude statement that someone was there at some time with some paint. I’ve never found artifacts of high quality produced on any post–Terminal Classic site in Belize. Everything I’ve found is crude, made in the shadow of Yucatec memories by untrained people who barely survived the onslaught of the Spanish. The people who lived there were Maya, yes, but they had no greatness left in them. Like the villages today. Their gods are gone, and it shows in the poor rubble of their lives.”

“Yet you have that scrap of paper,” Hunter said. “Paper is the product of a high civilization.”

“Or the remnant of what once was,” Mercurio said. “If the scrap is from Belize, it was carried there.” He looked up from the photos, took Lina’s chin lightly in his hand, and turned her to face him.

Hunter eased forward, ready to deck the touchy-feely archaeologist.

“If I’d found artifacts as good as those in your photos,” Mercurio said, “I’d have quit my post and started my own foundation. Money to sponsor my digs would have flooded in.
Madre de Dios, National Geographic
would have me on speed dial! Do you understand what I’m saying yet? If real, that mask alone is better than anything the Aztecs made, and they’re considered the pinnacle.
Who has those artifacts?
”

“If we knew, we wouldn’t be here,” she said, stepping away from his grasp. “Thank you for your time.” She turned to Hunter. “We’d better go. My family will be impatient to meet you.”