No Job for a Lady (33 page)

“Of course not. It has to be someone insane, and I’m pretty sure I know who’s behind it. There’s a woman in this area they call a witch. I’ve heard she’s trying to get the locals to return to the old ways. She’s even tried to scare off my workers. She probably got some crazies to do it.”

“Let me get my boys together and we’ll pay this witch a visit and take a look-see around for a bloody knife,” Maddox says.

“It wasn’t done by her.” I surprise myself at my blunt statement, which is based upon thin air. But I don’t think La Bruja is capable of this. The murder of the consul is too diabolical. And I had spotted something that is the clincher that the Cult of the Jaguar is alive and well. “For those of you who have come here to steal Montezuma’s treasure, this is a warning sent by its protectors to back off.”

From the looks on the faces around me, I had just fired a shot across their bows.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Thompson snaps. “Accusing us of stealing. You’ve been speaking bullshit ever since the train. You’d better learn to keep your mouth shut.”

“Or what?” Sundance says very bluntly and with a hard edge.

Thompson turns to Maddox. “You’d better remind him what side his bread is buttered on. Besides, this woman’s been making up stories and seeing things since she got on the train.”

“Did I make this up?” I jerk the cover back enough to expose Don Antonio’s chest and point out a pattern on the chest made by blood. “This isn’t a blood splatter. It was drawn there for a reason.”

One of Traven’s men draws back, scared.

“You recognize it, don’t you?”

The man shakes his head. “No, señorita, no.”

Traven rattles off something to the man in Spanish.

“
Sí,
señor.” The man looks to me and says, “Montezuma.”

“What’s he talking about?” Gebhard asks me.

“Montezuma’s name glyph. The Aztecs wrote in word pictures. Montezuma’s name wasn’t spelled out in letters, but as a drawing. I saw it at the Aztec museum in the city. These blood streaks are crude, but they get across the point.”

“You’re right: It’s the glyph,” Traven says. “I should have spotted it.”

I now have their full attention. Maddox has shut his mouth and Roger has moved closer, as if hanging on my every word.

“The message is clear. Someone is willing to protect the treasure by resorting to the old ways.”

Everyone stares at me, transfixed, waiting for the next shoe to drop.

“I guess the question is”—I pause and look from one to the other—“who’s next?”

57

Gertrude orders the body taken to Don Antonio’s tent so it can be properly wrapped for the trip to the city.

She tells me, “I will have to accompany the body back to the city. You can’t stay here. Come with me.”

“I agree. When are you leaving?”

“Best make it at first light,” Traven says. “The road is too dangerous for a four-in-hand coach at night, even without bandidos. Good chance you’ll break an axle or a horse’s leg.”

“He’s right,” Sundance says. “The road back to the city ain’t nothing to brag about even in broad daylight.” He gives me a nod and I smile my thanks for his help in putting Thompson in his place.

People fade away: Gertrude escorting the body, the cowboys heading back to the tent city on horseback, and the others walking or piling into the carriage, with the wagon carrying Don Antonio’s body bringing up the rear.

Everyone leaves but me and Roger.

“Let me guess,” he says. “You want to see the scene of the crime.”

“And you’re coming with me. I hope you have your gun. Night is falling and there are some creatures that come out around here at night that I’d prefer seeing over the barrel of a six-shooter.”

He pats a bulge in his coat.

To beat the darkness, we go up the steps as quickly as we can, leaving us both a bit breathless.

The only evidence of the terrible assault on the man are the bloodstains on the sacrificial block. But I’m glad I came anyway. We’re only a couple hundred feet above the ground, but the darkening night sky already looks different.

“Did you know that the ancients used the sky as their map?” I ask Roger. “Traven told us that.”

He grunts. “Very interesting. I listened to your dissertation about ancient evil. But I’m not convinced we don’t have a copycat—a falling-out among thieves and someone throwing the suspicion away from themselves.”

“Maybe. But I doubt it. The glyph is too … too Aztec.” At the moment, I am too fascinated by the sky to argue the point. It is astonishing. I never really looked at the sky before as something other than a black field with a shiny moon and stars, meaningless except as pretty objects. Now I see it in a different way—the way that Howard, the prospector, meant when he rambled on in a drunken state.

Like he said, the answer is in the stars.

I wondered what I would do if I had to follow the stars and planets to get somewhere. It doesn’t look easy. It’s even a little hard to tell the difference between planets and stars unless you keep staring at them. The planets, of course, are the lights that don’t sparkle.

“Did you know that planets don’t twinkle?” I ask Roger.

“Everybody knows that.”

“What would we do if we had no map and you had to get back to New York and I had to get back to Pittsburgh by following what we see in the sky? Like Christopher Columbus crossing the ocean.”

“I think you’ve gotten dizzy from the altitude.”

“No, for the first time on this trip, I’m thinking clear. You know what, Roger, it’s all in the stars. That’s the answer.”

I lean up and give him a kiss.

“What was that for?”

“For bringing me up here so I could see the stars.”

“Let’s get going down. If we manage to reach the bottom without breaking our necks, you owe me another kiss.”

Going up the steps was challenging. Going down them in the dark is a hair-raising experience. Like climbing a tree or a mountain, getting back down is the biggest challenge.

We are about a third of the way down when Roger says, “You know something.”

“I know lots of things.” I laugh at my bold statement.

“No, I mean you know something important. I’ve been thinking about your voice back there. It was like you’d had an epiphany. Spoken to God or something. Tell me what you’ve figured out.”

“Smart man. Okay. I’ll tell you if you tell me what you know about the Louisiana Purchase.”

“What? What’s the matter with you? And Gertrude. She also asked me about that.”

I pause and sit down. My heart is pounding a bit. Getting down the steps is scary. Roger sits beside me.

“Both of us wondered why a soon-to-be history professor would not know any more about the biggest land purchase in the history of our country than a schoolboy.”

“Hmm. I know we bought it from Napoléon. He was trying to conquer Europe and needed the money. Is that good enough for you?”

“Not even close. I know that much, and I’m no professor.”

“What if I told you I wasn’t a college guy?”

“I’d say you are finally telling the truth.”

He pulls something out of his pocket and then strikes a match to show me a badge.

“Oh no, not another badge. Thompson has one, too.”

“Not like mine. Thompson’s a customs inspector.”

I take a closer look at Roger’s silver badge as I get up to continue the climb down. It reads
United States Secret Service.

“What is the Secret Service—”

“Doing in Mexico—”

“Along with a customs agent,” I finish. “Is Thompson’s badge a phony?”

“His is as genuine as mine. The difference is, he’s dishonored his. He’s been running a racket with Don Antonio for years. Antonio provides Thompson with bills of sale that reflect a fraction of the true value of goods being exported from Mexico to the States, and Thompson passes them through customs, pocketing a pretty penny for doing it.”

“Like passing off expensive Thoroughbreds as workhorses?”

“Yes, but that’s chicken feed compared to say a thousand head of cattle at a time or a priceless ancient artifact.”

“So where do you fit in?”

“The Secret Service and customs are both part of the Department of the Treasury. Customs collects money and we investigate when we get suspicious that there’s monkey business.”

“So what are Thompson, Gebhard, and the rest of the cowboys up to?”

“I didn’t know when I jumped on that train out of El Paso at the last minute with a rather pretty traveling companion. We’ve been watching Thompson and Castillo. We know that Aztec and Mayan pieces have made their way across the border and through customs labeled as pottery in the past.”

“And ultimately to Gebhard?”

“Yes. So when the whole bunch of them headed out for Mexico at the same time with an outlaw gang—”

“I figured they were gunfighters.”

We finally step onto solid ground, to my relief. It’s dark, but there is a bright moon, which brings light and shadows along the Avenue of the Dead.

“You figured right. They all headed for Teo, bringing along Lily Langtry, who, I suspect, just wants to see Mexico and isn’t part of the customs fraud.”

“They gathered here because the prospector had discovered—”

“¡Señor!”

The voice comes out of the dark shadows and Roger turns to it. A man is suddenly there with an object that looks like a piece of pipe poking from his mouth. Roger steps back and reaches for his gun as the man blows dust in his face from the pipe.

“Dream dust!”
comes from me. I hold my breath, determined not to have the substance capture my mind.

More men emerge. I drop to my knees, clutching for Roger’s gun under his coat, but someone grabs my hair and jerks me back.

My screams get smothered as they grab me and gag me.

A blindfold goes over my eyes as my heart ricochets in my throat.

58

Coffin black.

I can’t see anything. It’s pitch-black, without a speck of light, not even the twinkle of a star. And it is dead still.

I’m alone.

My hands are no longer tied and the blindfold has been taken off by the men who brought me here. They disappeared like wraiths as soon as they untied me, leaving me standing alone, surrounded by dark and silence.

I’m afraid to move.

Brought from the tepid night outside to a cool place that smells like earth, I feel like I am in a cave. I’m sure of it. But I still fear taking a step because I don’t know what is around me. It’s too dark to see anything—not even my hand in front of my face. Am I at the edge of a cliff? Where would a step take me?

I feel as if I’m suspended in midair, but my feet tell me I’m on solid ground. I put my hands out to see if I can feel a wall, but I feel nothing.

All I can do is wait in a place darker than night and quieter than a crypt.

The queasy feeling I’m experiencing—my heart in my throat, my mouth dry, my breathing shallow, the strange sensation of my mind being detached from my body—is much like I had when I awoke in the culvert in Mexico City. But this time, they didn’t attack me with dream dust, and I’d only gotten a whiff of what Roger was hit with. It’s my panic that’s creating a sensation of déjà vu.

Poor Roger. I hope he is okay, that he wasn’t harmed. The fear that they might have ripped out his heart is petrifying.

While the air in Mexico City has the foul taste that only humans can create, this air smells as if it has not been stirred in an eon. Is it a cave underneath the city? Why not? The ancients built incredible edifices aboveground, so there’s no reason to believe they didn’t put tunnels under their city.

A light appears. A small light, not much more than how a match would appear dozens of feet away. Like a star. Or a planet—it’s not twinkling.

It’s something for me to move toward. Maybe it’s beckoning me.

I carefully feel around me, moving very cautiously to the side until I feel a wall. Dry earth surrounds me completely. For sure I’m in a cave.

I slowly take a step toward the light, making sure my feet are planted on solid ground, worried that the star might be luring me to something evil or deadly. I suddenly get an image of stepping into a hole and falling face-first down it, flying downward, to be impaled by spears that savages have rigged to kill big game.

Why did they leave me like this, disorientated and helpless?

“Help.” I mutter the word, not shouting it, but then clamp my mouth shut. Never show fear to a dangerous animal. Who would help me down here anyway?

A door flies open for a second and
a ball of fire flies at me.

I stumble backward as it falls and hits the dirt floor in front of me, sending off a spray of sparks. A torch. It lies there, burning and smothering. I stand frozen, staring at it, unable to move my arms and legs.

There is no more movement. No more flaming torches. Nothing. I’ve been thrown a torch. Why? What in the name of God is going on?

Gathering my courage, I bend down and pick up the torch. Raising it to chest level, I confirm in the sudden light that I am in a dirt tunnel—
and that I am not alone.

They’re present, on both sides of me—lifeless forms.

Not statues of stone, but costumed figures, as if I’m in a wax museum.
A museum of horror.
Bizarre figures that I realize I’ve seen before—they look like the wall paintings I saw at the Aztec museum and here at Teo. Not the exact ones, but drawn by ancient hands with the same technique.

Aztec gods with huge eyes, gaping jaws, ugly, twisted, even demented features stand erect and glare at me. Each one is adorned in its own tall headpiece, cloaks of bright feathers, and shields befitting Aztec warrior kings. The feathers are long and brilliantly colored: reds, greens, yellows, purples, oranges.

Only one of the inanimate creatures is not bedecked in feathers, and I stare at him, my heart racing. His back is to me, but I can still tell it is a man, not a god. He’s almost naked and has that strange gray skin that strikes me as
dead
—cold dead as gray marble, but without the shine and luster of polished stone.