Curses! (2 page)
"What's the crew like?"
"The crew...I didn't tell you?"
"Tell me what?” Gideon asked warily.
"Don't be so suspicious. They're all amateurs, that's all. Old friends of yours."
"I thought the government was insisting on professionals this time."
"When we get down to the technical stuff, yes. But for the first couple of weeks it's just clean-up and preliminaries, so we gave the ones who were here in 1982 a chance to come again if they wanted to. On us. From the original nine, five came back, including your old student Harvey Feiffer. We thought we owed it to them, considering the
tsuris
they had before."
Tsuris
was trouble, of course. Gideon's knowledge of Yiddish had grown considerably in the last ten years, for Abraham Irving Goldstein had not forsaken the accent, let alone the vocabulary, of his pushcart-peddling days. Sometimes impenetrable, often hardly noticeable, it had never completely disappeared. Whether this was a statement of identity, a whimsical eccentricity (one among many), or a plain, honest-to-goodness accent, no one knew for sure, not even Gideon. Maybe not even Abe. If anyone had the temerity to ask how it was that a world-renowned scholar, a master of seven languages, sometimes spoke with an accent out of
Abie’ s Irish Rose,
Abe's response was unvarying. His eyes would grow round, his forehead furrow into a million parchmentlike wrinkles. “Accent?” he would echo, astounded. “What kind accent?"
"So?” he said. “When you'll be here? Tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow?"
Gideon laughed. “We have to get our things organized, get tourist cards—"
"You can't do that this afternoon?"
"This afternoon is already taken up.” Gideon rubbed the small of Julie's back and smiled up at her. The fact that he was desperate to be on a dig hardly meant that he had lost all sense of proportion. “Besides,” he added firmly, “there's a monograph I want to finish up. We'll be there at the end of the week. Friday. How's that?"
A fractional hesitation. “Friday? You couldn't make it a little sooner?"
"Like when?"
"Like tomorrow?"
"What's the rush, Abe? The bones will still be there Friday."
"It's not just the bones. Something's bothering me here. I need your opinion."
"Well..."
"Also,” Abe said with the singsong wheedle that meant the clincher was on its way, “we turned up some new Mayan written material. Garrison from Tulane rushed down here to work on the translation, and she's almost finished. I asked her to hold off on her presentation so you could be here for it, but she has to go back the day after tomorrow. I don't have to tell you it's a historic thing, but, of course, if you can't make it, you can't make it."
Gideon was silent.
"Of course it's only a few leaves, post-Conquest,” Abe pressed on, “but still, something like this doesn't happen every day."
Or every year, or every decade. Well, Gideon could always take the monograph along. “Okay,” he said, “I'm convinced. We'll be there tomorrow."
"Good. Wonderful. There's funding to pay your fare—Julie's too, if she's willing to do a little work—and we'll put you up at the hotel. Meals too. A salary I can't come up with. I'm not getting paid, why should you?"
"No problem.” Gideon was more than satisfied. He'd have paid their own way if he'd had to. “Abe, tell me, what's bothering you there?"
"Listen, Gideon, this call's costing plenty. When you get here I'll explain. Let me know what time you'll be here and someone will pick you up at the airport in Merida."
"Okay, Abe, thanks. See you tomorrow, then. If we can get a plane."
When he hung up, Julie clasped her hands lightly about his neck, her forearms resting on his shoulders. “We're going to Yucatan?"
"Uh-huh. How about that?"
"It's wonderful. I've always wanted to see it. But what are
you
so happy about? I thought you hated the tropics."
"Where do people get these ideas? A dig is a dig. And January won't be that bad down there.” He pulled her head down to kiss her. “Anyway, Yucatan is something else. It's unique, you'll see. The jungle, the ruins...once you get away from Merida there's a raw, primitive elemental sense of isolation, a—"
"Did you know,” she said, never one to be moved by lyric prose, “that you have dried shaving cream behind your ear?"
They were five hours into the flight, high in a clean blue sky above a cloud layer of undulating white.
"It's like looking down on a giant bowl of Cream of Wheat,” Julie observed in one of her weaker conversational attempts.
"Mm,” Gideon said. He had worked intermittently and unproductively on “A Reassessment of Middle Pleistocene Hominids” while Julie dawdled with equal lack of result over her quarterly report. Now they both stretched and yawned at the same time.
Julie closed her manila folder and made another stab.
"Does Tlaloc mean something, or is it just a name?"
Gideon willingly gave up on the monograph and shoved it into the pocket on the back of the seat in front. “It's the Nahuatl term for the god of rain; the one the Maya called Chac."
"Nahuatl?"
"An Uto-Aztecan language, closely related to Pipil."
"Oh, Pipil,” Julie said. “Thanks for clearing that up. Tell me, if it's a Mayan site, why doesn't it have a Mayan name?"
"Because, as anybody who's studied anthropology should know—"
"I was merely an anthro minor. I'm afraid I never got around to Pipil and Nahuatl."
"Well, in the tenth century, the Toltecs, who were Uto-Aztecan, came down to Yucatan from central Mexico and conquered the Maya—or were assimilated by them, depending on whether you take a short or a long view. In any case, most of the famous Mayan ruins in Yucatan are more Toltec than they are Mayan. Chichen Itza, for example."
"Are you saying that Tlaloc isn't really a Mayan site, then?"
"No, it's Mayan all right, but with a Toltec overlay. Oh, the way you might say Strasbourg is really a German city, but with a French overlay."
"I'm not sure how much the French would appreciate that."
"I'm not sure how much the Maya appreciated it."
The lunch cart, which had been making its halting way up the aisle, had finally reached Row 24. Neat little plastic trays with hinged plastic lids were set down before them: a salad of salami, cheese, red peppers, and string beans; a roll; a two-inch cube of chocolate cake; a dozen red grapes in a pleated paper cup.
The thick-bodied man in the aisle seat next to them stared through the transparent lid of his portion with a cold and bitter eye. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered at it accusingly, “can you believe this?"
But to Gideon it looked fine; just right for two o'clock in the afternoon, thirty-five thousand feet above the Gulf of Mexico. Julie thought so too, and they polished it off enthusiastically (their seatmate ate the cake and left the rest) and hailed coffee from an attendant.
"Now,” Julie said firmly, “how about filling me in on all the sordid details of the famous scandal that closed Tlaloc down in 1982?"
Gideon twisted uncomfortably in the narrow seat. “How much do you know about it?” he asked reluctantly.
"Well, I remember reading about it in
Time
. Somebody stole a Mayan codex, right?"
"That's about it.” He tore open the paper seal on a container of half-and-half and poured it into his coffee. “The director, as a matter of fact. Howard Bennett."
After ten seconds of nothing but the drone of the engines, Julie raised an exasperated eyebrow. “And that's all you're going to tell me?"
"That's all there is."
"But you were
there
. I want the
important
details. What was Howard Bennett like? Was he actually a friend of yours? Was there a woman involved? Did you ever suspect...” She stopped and frowned at him. “In fact, why haven't you told me all this long ago?"
He shrugged. “It didn't seem pertinent. It happened before we met."
"You,” she said, “are the most closemouthed person I know. You never gossip. It's disgusting. I'm going to be working on this dig now, so it's pertinent.” She settled back expectantly, both hands around her cup, and shifted sideways to look at him. “Now tell me all about it. Start from the beginning."
Gideon settled back, too, looking down at the cloud sheet, and let his mind run back. The events at Tlaloc were painful to think about professionally as well as personally. He was, though he would hardly say such a thing aloud, a dedicated anthropologist, devoted to the field and intensely protective of its standards and reputation, both of which were gratifyingly high, generally speaking.
But Howard Bennett had violated those standards in an almost unimaginable way, and since then Gideon had rarely spoken of it. Most people he knew would have been surprised to learn he had been on the scene. Still, Julie had a point. She had a right to know more about it. Anyway, judging from the determined glint in her eyes, he wasn't going to get away with keeping it to himself any longer.
He started from the beginning. “You know what I remember most when I think about it? How hot it was."
"Hot” didn't begin to describe that memorable afternoon. It had been like a steam bath, only worse because there was no way to get up and walk out. The temperature had been a hundred degrees, the relative humidity had been a hundred percent, and breathing had been like inhaling through a wad of warm, wet cotton.
The brief rain had ended twenty minutes before, one of those hot slashing torrents that fell on the jungle canopy like a waterfall and then stopped as if someone had turned off a tap. Already the half inch of water that had slicked the ancient Mayan ceremonial plaza of Tlaloc had disappeared, sucked down through the porous soil of Yucatan and into the great natural limestone caverns below. The moment the rain had stopped the sun had reappeared, enveloping the world in vapor. The dense green foliage that pressed in on the plaza from all sides, the thousand-year-old stones of the crumbling temples, the thatch-roofed archeologists’ shed—all hissed and steamed in the rain's aftermath.
Gideon was sitting on the veranda of the shed, at the rickety work table nominally under the protection of the eaves, but now mostly in the sun. Like everything else, he was, if not hissing, at least steaming. It poured from his sweaty khaki work clothes, from his curled, stained straw hat, from his very pores. He took another swig from the scarred bottle of warm grapefruit soda, grimaced, wiped his perspiring forehead with an equally wet forearm, and thought wistfully and fleetingly of Yosemite in the snow, and of the cool and windy Mendocino coast. Then he sighed and returned his attention to the brown, roughly globular object, also steaming, on the work table in front of him. It was the latest find brought up by the divers from the cloudy green depths of the sacrificial cenote: a human skull, the fourth so far.
He turned it slowly in his hands. Like most Mayan sacrifices it was young. None of the sutures had even begun to close, which meant it hadn't lived to make it out of its twenties. Nor out of its teens, he thought, running his finger over the chewing surfaces of the teeth. One of the third molars had fallen out after death, but the other one was freshly erupted, as cleanly sculpted as a dentist's model, with no wear on it. That would make eighteen or nineteen a reasonable guess at age. And guess was the right word. Third-molar eruption was wildly variable, but what else was there to go on? After the first twelve or fifteen years, the skull has precious little to reveal about age until the thirties. That left a lot of room for guesses.
"All right, Harvey,” he said to the pudgy, balding twenty-five-year-old with the studious manner who sat attentively beside him, “what would you say about age?"
Harvey Feiffer adjusted his posture alertly. “Um, eighteen to twenty?” he ventured. “The left third molar—"
"Good. What about sex?"
"Um, female?"
"Right again. How do you know?"
"Gee, lots of things. There's no supraorbital ridge, and the occipital protuberance is practically nonexistent. And those mastoid processes are just smooth little bumps."
Gideon nodded his approval. In some ways Harvey was one of his better graduate students. He worked hard and he was enthusiastic about anthropology. He had jumped at the chance to accompany Gideon to Yucatan as a research assistant.
"What else do you see when you look at it?” Gideon asked.
"Whom
do you see?"
"Um, whom?” Harvey chewed on the corner of his lip, wiped sweat from under his collar with a handkerchief, and timidly took the skull, being careful to cradle it in his palms in the approved manner. No fingers in the eye sockets. “There are a lot of interesting things, really,” he said, buying time. “It's on the small side, and definitely brachycephalic, although not as much as the cranial deformation makes it look.” He darted a glance at Gideon to see if he was on the right track and received a noncommittal nod. Then he glided his stubby, nail-chewed fingers lightly over the surface as Gideon had taught him to do. “The, uh, superior and inferior nuchal crests are poorly developed, and the temporal lines..."
Here in a nutshell was Harvey's problem; an overmeticulous concentration on minutiae, a relentless focus on detail at the expense of pattern and meaning. He had been a late convert to physical anthropology, switching as a junior after hearing Gideon give an all-university lecture on the evolution of the primate hand. Until then he had been a sociology major, and Gideon wondered if both fields hadn't been bad choices, for Harvey Feiffer had the precise and exacting soul of a good accountant.
Once, in an unusually loose moment over a couple of beers, he had said to Gideon, “You know what's so great about physical anthro? There's nothing to argue about; there are right answers. In sociology, if you say, like, familial norms determine infant behavior, the first guy you meet on the street will tell you that's wrong; his kid had a personality all his own from the minute he was born. But if you point at a bump on a bone and announce it's the anterior obturator tubercle, boy, it's great—nobody says
peep."
