01 _ Xibalba Murders, The (18 page)

“Are you looking for something special at this site?” I asked.

“Not really. It’s just a ripping great site, that’s all.”

“What made you choose archaeology as a career in the first place?” I asked.

“Exactly the question my parents asked me when I told them my choice of studies many years ago.” He laughed, then added soberly, “We’ve been rather politely estranged since, actually. They thought the life of a Harley Street physician more suitable for their offspring, you see.

“But I grew up reading about the great British explorers and archaeologists. While my friends dreamed of being soldiers and statesmen, I devoured the stories of Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon’s discovery of King Tut’s tomb, Sir Leonard Woolley in Mesopotamia, Sir Arthur Evans at Knossos on Crete. As long as I can remember, an archaeologist was what I wanted to be.”

“Any regrets?”

“Of course. I dreamed of fame and fortune, but in reality, the big discoveries are few and far between. And I haven’t found my own Lord Carnarvon to bankroll my work. But perhaps life never works out exactly the way we want, and no occupation is as exciting as it appears when we first choose it.

“To be perfectly honest, the life of a Harley Street physician has never had any appeal for me, nor has the family’s seat in the House of Lords. That will go to my older brother when our elderly father dies, and he’s welcome to it.”

We were both silent for a few moments. I thought a little of the disappointments in my life—how I’d developed my business from scratch, nurtured it, suffered through the first tenuous years. I’d only made one mistake: I’d married my first employee, a designer by the name of Clive Swain, and given him a half interest in the business as a wedding present.

Suddenly Jonathan reached across the table and took my hand. “My only real regret is that I haven’t been able to find a woman prepared to share my peripatetic and occasionally frustrating lifestyle…

“At least not, perhaps, until now,” he said, squeezing my hand.

We went back to the hotel, and when no one was at the hotel desk for a moment, I rushed him up the staircase. Staying with friends of your parents can have its drawbacks.

At some point in the night, while we were companionably curled up together, Jonathan said, “I’ve been thinking about what you said the other day at the morgue, about the police investigation of Don Hernan’s murder.”

“Ummm.”

“I think maybe you’re right. Martinez is a bit of a weird duck, isn’t he? Maybe there is something strange about this investigation.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Did you go back to the morgue?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“Don Hernan was probably killed outside the city. He had dust on his shoes and trousers, and there were traces of forest vegetation on them.”

“Maybe you and I could do a little research on this ourselves?”

“Like what?” I said cautiously.

“Well, Don Hernan called you down here on a project. Maybe we should try to figure out what the project was.”

“I guess,” I said noncommittally.

We drifted off to sleep.

Sometime later, in the very, very early morning, he got up to leave. We were both a little embarrassed at the thought of his going out the front door, so I showed him how to exit through the bathroom window. He said it made him feel like a teenager all over again.

BEN

In one of those extraordinary coincidences that divert, if not entirely change, the course of history, Hernando Cortes managed to arrive in the New World in the year 1 Ben, which also happened to be the year that the Aztecs had prophesied that Queztalcoatl would return from the eastern sea.

Presumably the pale and bearded Spaniards, attired in their suits of armor and plumed helmets, bore some passing resemblance to the locals’ idea of a pale-skinned serpent god. One thing is certain: they came from the right direction.

The Mesoamerican equivalent of a year was eighteen times the twenty-day Tzolkin, or 360 days, plus five very unlucky days at the end to make their calendar square with their knowledge of the solar year. Solar years were named for the day on which they began. Without going into the intricacies of it all, the Tzolkin and the year, in this case 1 Ben, arrived at that same combination once every fifty-two years. Cortes was a lucky man.

The result of this convergence was that Cortes and his army were, for a time at least, considered gods and treated with the appropriate respect and fear. Cortes was able to press the psychological advantage and by 1521, just two years after his arrival, had conquered the Aztecs.

In 1697, the Itza fell to the Spaniards, the last of the Mesoamerican groups to do so, notably at the start of Katun 8 Ahau, a Katun, or twenty-year cycle, that always signaled trouble for the Itza. The Spanish generals may or may not have understood the Maya calendar by this time, but they invariably profited from it.

What armies, the prophecies of the Maya calendar, and superior weapons could not do, smallpox, influenza, measles, and the Spanish liquor
aguardiente
did. The diseases alone wiped out ninety percent of the native population within a century of the Europeans’ arrival.

But the principal agent of European culture was the church. The Spaniards brought with them their rituals, their images, and of course, their priests. The Franciscans were given an exclusive in the territory: they were the only order allowed into the Yucatan.

Knowing the power of a language, both written and spoken, many of these friars strove systematically to wipe out any traces of it. To do that they made the performance of Maya rituals and the ownership of Maya books punishable by torture and death. Maya children, when they were educated at all, were educated in Spanish and Latin only.

Diego de Landa, a Franciscan friar who later became bishop of Yucatan, was one of the worst. In the 1560s in Mani, a site near Uxmal, one of the most beautiful Maya cities, Landa held a full-blown auto-da-fe. Huge bonfires were built, onto which all the books Landa could find were thrown. Thousands of Maya were tortured, hundreds died.

To add insult to injury, one of the few eyewitness accounts we have of Maya life at the time is Landa’s own
Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan
of 1566. The book, which loosely translates as a report on things of the Yucatan, was written to the King of Spain in the defense of the friar’s outrageous behavior. It is a second-rate account, and basically chronicles a lifestyle he tried desperately to stamp out.

But the Maya are a resilient people. Denied their language and their books, they wrote down their history in secret, using the only alphabet they knew by that time, the alphabet of their conquerors. Without that stubborn tradition, the Popol Vuh of the Quiche Maya and the books of Chilam Balam of the Yucatecan Maya would not exist, and the ancient culture would be virtually lost in the mists of time.

What was lost for centuries, in fact until very recently, was glyphic literacy, the ability to read the old hieroglyphic language and many of the stories and history that went with it.

It was an unbelievable tragedy. The Maya were not as technically advanced as some civilizations. They did not use the wheel, for example, nor did they work with metals. They were no more or less warlike than their neighbors, no greater custodians of the environment.

Instead, their great achievements were those of the intellect. They invented zero and place-system numerals, something the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome never did. They had an intricate way of measuring and recording the passage of time. They measured the visible cycles of the heavens and had the ability to understand them mathematically.

But perhaps their greatest achievement was their literacy. The Inca of Peru, despite their artistic and architectural achievements, had no written language. There were other written languages in Mesoamerica certainly and the Maya were not the first to develop a writing system.

What the Maya had that many other groups did not was a fully functional written language that represented the spoken word and could be used to convey complex ideas, something that made them the most literate of all Mesoamerican civilizations.

Scribes were valued and honored members of the society, and their work recognized through glyphs that named them. Writing, whether in the folded bark-paper books now called codices, or in stone on monuments, was treasured. And while it is highly unlikely that everyone in classic Maya times could read and write, there is evidence to suggest that the elite could.

All that is left of this language, which the Maya themselves nurtured and preserved for centuries before the arrival of the Spaniards, are fragments from ruined cities, and four codices, each one a tattered window into the past.

The question for me was, was it possible there were five? And if so, where would the fifth be?

The question of whether or not there could be another was a pretty basic one. While, as Alex had told me, one codex, the Grolier, had surfaced in 1971, found somewhere in the region maybe thirty years earlier, it was in extremely bad condition. As time went on it became less and less likely that another could be found.

Under what conditions, I wondered, would one of these survive at least five centuries?

Jonathan had said we should work together on Don Hernan’s murder. And he would know the answers to my questions if anyone would. But I was afraid to ask. It required a level of trust in him and our relationship that I could not yet summon.

Who else? Lucas? That would require even more of a stretch than Jonathan.

Antonio Valesquez.

I returned to the
museo
and his dusty little library. He actually looked mildly pleased to see me.

“Antonio,” I said, “I’m exploring your idea about a book. But I keep wondering how a book would survive these many years. Even the first-edition Stephens that Don Hernan left me in his will is not in great condition. The leather is worn, the pages damaged in some cases by the damp. And it dates from 1841.

“How could something made of paper survive from before the Conquest?”

“Certainly I can find you some books on conservation, piles of them actually, since this is a museum. I think, however, there may be a faster way,” he said. “I think I owe you what you call lunch. Meet me at the Cafe Piramide. It’s in the market area.”

“I know where it is,” I said.

“I’ll be there with a colleague of mine. One-thirty all right with you?”

“See you there.” I nodded.

I had no trouble finding the cafe this time around, and was waiting at a table when Antonio approached with a young man, early twenties I would say, in white slacks and T-shirt, his ears well decorated with pierced earrings and studs. The most surprising thing about him was his hair, cut very short, and very blond, bleached to within an inch of its life, and by an amateur at that. It was quite the fashion statement.

“Meet Ernesto Diaz, one of our more talented conservators. The one who was working on the vase I was telling you about the other day.”

“Nice to meet you,” I said.

“Same here,” he said.

We ordered our meal. In Mexico, the food at this time of day is often taken from what is called the corn kitchen, a cuisine that dates back to Aztec times. In those times, corn had to be dried, then boiled with lime, then ground. Now, of course, you can buy the flour,
masa harina,
in any grocery store. Sort of takes the romance out of it, though.

We ordered an assortment of green enchiladas with coriander and green
tomatillos,
enchiladas with
mole
sauce, and tamales, Yucatan style, with spicy peppers and chicken, and a pitcher of beer to wash it all down.

We were well into the food before we finally got around to the subject at hand.

“Senora McClintoch has an interesting question for you, Ernesto, for a paper she is writing for her graduate degree in Mesoamerican studies,” Antonio began. He could lie with almost the same facility as I.

“It’s Lara, please, Ernesto,” I said as the young man turned to me with some interest.

He smiled. “And the problem?”

“I’m researching Maya codices,” I began. “The background, the provenance, of the last one, the Grolier, is rather…”

“Vague?” he offered.

“Vague,” I agreed. “I know that carbon dating has made it the oldest of the four—”

“Early 1200s,” he agreed.

“But surely that is not possible! How could something as old as that, and that kind of material survive, even in terrible condition for that long?”

“Interesting question,” he said. “Not our field, you know. Terra-cotta is what we do. We would have to think about that, wouldn’t we?”

We waited.

“They’re made of fig-bark paper, we believe. Organic. Cellulosic. But coated in gesso or something, probably mineral in origin. The worst thing in this climate is the dampness, the relative humidity. Encourages mold. That’s the real killer. That’s one of the reasons the codices in Europe are in such bad shape. Even if they were cared for once they arrived, which they probably weren’t, there was only one way to get there in those days—by ship. Nasty, damp journey!

“At least one kept here would not have to survive a sea journey. And the good news is that bark often contains a natural fungicide. That would protect it for a while. But it would still have to be somewhere where it could be kept relatively dry.

“Lots of other things to worry about; secondary, though. Paper is very susceptible to acids. But the soil here is alkaline—limestone. That’s one good thing. And paper is relatively unaffected by light, although we’re not so sure about whatever they used for inks. Colors might easily fade. Probably not a problem, though, since the fact that the Grolier only surfaced recently would indicate it was kept well hidden, presumably in a dark place. Bugs, though. Insects and bacteria. Thrive in the warm damp climate,” he mused.

“That is what we’re trying to find out, isn’t it? Where the Grolier might have been?” he observed.

I nodded. If Antonio was prepared to lie to this man, so was I.

“That would be an interesting area of study. There are lots of rumors, of course.”