Tears of the Jaguar (13 page)

“Everything?”

“Not the bones or the grave goods,” she said, “but they took the jewels. And there was this bundle of bones that they say is a kid’s hand, and that was taken too, so the cops are here, but...”

She stopped talking and watched open-mouthed with surprise as he turned his back on her and walked away fast and with purpose, as if he knew exactly where he was going. He was heading for the acropolis.

So much for a hot new boy toy,
she thought. She’d never seen anyone change in manner quite as fast as the photographer had the minute he sloughed off that friendly smile.

She started trotting after him, feeling her interest mount. Alice’s first real boyfriend had been capable of transformations like that—though they usually happened right before he started hitting her. She didn’t want to end up in another relationship like that one. But there was no denying the guy was hot.

Deborah watched the plainclothes cop from Merida. He let the captain with his braided cap strut about, ordering the other uniforms around, but he was in charge of the actual investigation, and he moved with a careful, professional slowness. He spent an hour in the tomb, another in front of the video monitor studying the footage of what had been there before the break-in, and two more listening to their statements. Meanwhile, he had one officer take measurements of the tomb entrance: they were going to put up a lockable steel door.

“For how long?” Deborah had asked in Spanish.

The detective tipped his head on one side and frowned, but he wasn’t really considering the question.

“Until we know what we are investigating,” he replied in English. He was about her age, more Latino than Mayan, and crisply professional, though he wore some kind of fragrant oil in his curly black hair. “If it’s a murder, the tomb will stay closed
for some time. Weeks, perhaps. I cannot say yet. Our resources are limited. We may need your help.”

“How?”

“You have a laboratory in Valladolid. I may want to send one of my people there. Is that convenient?”

“Sure,” said Deborah. “What about the dig?”

“You can excavate in other parts of the site,” he said, shaping a slightly apologetic smile but offering no room for negotiation.

“And the stolen grave goods,” she said. “You’ll look for them?”

“Of course,” he answered, “but the homicide—if it is one—will be the priority. We can talk to—what do you call the people who sell stolen goods?”

“A fence?”

“A fence,
si
,” he said, smiling. “But...” He shrugged.

“You can’t just start a search?” she asked, knowing she sounded desperate and stupid.

“Where?” he replied, smiling not unkindly. “Look around you, Miss Miller. The Yucatan is isolated villages and small towns separated by miles of jungle. There are paths that only the local people know, and many ancient Mayan structures so remote that no one but the snakes and vultures know them. You know the city of Uxmal?”

“Of course,” said Deborah. Uxmal was the great Mayan site of the Puuc region south of Merida, a vast complex of imposing buildings, carved stonework, and colossal pyramids. According to legend, one of them, the Pyramid of the Magician, had been built overnight by the dwarf son of a witch from nearby Kabah. Deborah had hoped to see it before she left, but now, who knew what the next day would bring.

“It has been there for a thousand years,” he said. “But it was ignored by the Spanish after the conquest and forgotten by all but the locals until archaeologists ‘rediscovered’ the site a hundred and seventy years ago. It is easy to lose things here. And when they are lost, they stay lost for hundreds of years.”

“But our things haven’t been lost,” said Deborah. “They have been stolen.”

“True,” said the policeman, smiling, “but that difference may be...unhelpful. I do not know how well you know the local people, Miss Miller, but I can assure you that they know how to keep secrets to themselves, sometimes for centuries. After all, Uxmal was not truly lost either,” he said, looking down to the notebook in which he had been writing. “The Maya always knew where it was.”

The conversation over, Deborah walked up toward the acropolis figuring she could find a quiet spot somewhere in the central compound where she could think and get away from the questions and accusatory looks. She replayed the events in her head. If they’d just moved the artifacts to the lab to get them into safekeeping, none of this would have happened.

Deborah sighed. Figuring she may as well use the time, she rewatched the recording of the grave goods on her laptop. When she got to the close-up of the bundle that had turned out to be the child’s bones, she found the moment that gave her the best look at the ring and paused the playback.

She opened her editing software and transferred the image to a new window. It was digital video, so the image degeneration was minimal even when she enlarged it to fill the screen. The ring was quite clear: yellow metal and slim, like a signet ring
with what looked like a seal or crest on the boss. It was diamond shaped and intricately molded into four quadrants, the upper right and lower left marked with tiny circles, while the other two sections were scored with what looked like a checkerboard. Beneath the diamond was an elliptical shape like an eye. It didn’t look like any Mayan symbol she had ever seen. It looked, as Rylands had said, like a European coat of arms, albeit an unusual one.

An idea struck her. She ran quickly over to the structure with the cell phone tower and climbed up to the top without stopping. She activated her web browser and started looking for anything on heraldry. Commercial sites devoted to tracking family crests and selling versions of them in badges, posters, and rings came up first. There was a function to search alphabetically by family name, but she could find no provision to search by the elements of the coat of arms itself.

She tried other search terms: “coats of arms,” “family crest,” “shields,” “escutcheons.” Most of the sites that came up were similarly searchable by name only, but then she found one that showed thumbnails of the coats of arms and the names associated with them. It was divided by country. She chose Spain: perhaps the ring had belonged to someone who had come with the colonists. She suspected Rylands was right, and that the hand buried with the ring had not belonged to a Mayan child interred a thousand years ago.

There were pages of Spanish crests: beautifully ornate shields adorned with castles and lions, crowns, birds, and all manner of weapons and symbols like fleurs-de-lis, pages and pages of them. Her eyes flickered as she processed the thumbnails, eight to a line, twenty lines to a page. Patiently, she scrolled through the whole website.

It was actually quick work, because nothing looked close to the design on the ring. In fifteen minutes she had seen all the Spanish emblems the site had to offer, and come up empty. She knew that the search was far from exhaustive, that there would be shields not recorded there, but it felt like progress. She began on the German coats of arms.

The German shields didn’t look—to her untrained eye—significantly different from the Spanish, and there were at least as many. She waded through them, page by page, no longer dazzled by their drama and whimsy, now seeing only that they were not what she was looking for.

“Hey!” called a voice from below.

She looked down and saw a man she didn’t recognize and Alice trailing behind him. He was well built, even athletic, and looked furious.

Deborah frowned and began the slow climb down the tower without answering. He started shouting before she reached the bottom.

“You want to tell me what the bloody hell is going on here?” he yelled.

Deborah said nothing till she reached the ground, steeling herself to remain calm.

“I’m sorry,” she said politely. “You are?”

“He’s the photographer,” Alice said. “Nick. From England.”

“OK, Nick from England,” said Deborah. “What’s your problem?”

“My problem,” he said, “is that I just flew across the Atlantic to photograph something that isn’t here, and I’d like to know what you are going to do about it.”

“Look,” she said. “I’m sorry you’ve had a wasted journey, but I’ve got a lot on my mind right now. I suggest you go get settled in at the hotel in Valladolid. We’re all going to be leaving soon anyway.”

He seemed to see her exhaustion and something of his anger drained.

“Can you just tell me what happened?” he said.

Deborah sighed, blowing out the air like a diver steeling herself on a high board.

“Walk with me,” she said.

He nodded, and Alice piped up. “I’ll come too.”

“No,” said Deborah. She caught the edge in her voice and tried to soften it, but it was too late. “They could use a hand loading the gear,” she said.

Alice pouted and shrugged in that way she had that was something between
like I care
and
up yours
. Then she snapped her playful grin on. “Bye, Nick,” she said.

“Oh. Right,” said the Brit. “Bye.”

Deborah began walking back toward the Twins.

“Seems like you’ve made a friend,” she said.

He nodded dismissively. “So,” he said. “This theft. The girl said something about a child’s hand?”

Deborah told him the story as they walked, staring straight ahead, recounting it all like it was something she had read. She never looked at him, and when she got to the end, she just kept walking in silence, as if he wasn’t there.

“Sounds like you’ve had a rough couple of days,” he said.

She wasn’t sure why he was suddenly trying to be nice, but she thought she’d take it. The last friendly word she’d gotten lately was from Adelita.

“You could say that,” she said.

“Hence my saying it,” he said. His smile was at least three parts apology. She noticed that the Brit was handsome, tall, and powerful-looking in ways archaeologists and photographers generally weren’t. She wasn’t in the least interested—her problems were just too big—but she could see why Alice had been tailing him.

She blew the air out of her lungs again, throwing her head back and shutting her eyes again. When she looked at him again, he was turned slightly away and staring into the trees, as if on alert for something.

“Sorry,” she said. “I really don’t know what happens next. It doesn’t help that this is the first real dig I’ve been in charge of, and Bowerdale—Martin Bowerdale—clearly thinks I’ve screwed everything up royally.”

“How could someone breaking in and stealing stuff be your fault?” he said.

“That’s what I said, but...I don’t know. I feel—”

She stopped herself. She didn’t know this guy. She wasn’t about to tell him what she felt.

He nodded, as if he already knew.

“I could use a drink,” he said. “I’m guessing you could too. What do you say, after we get back, you point me in the direction of some sleazy neighborhood watering hole and...?”

“I don’t think so,” said Deborah. “Thanks, but I don’t really feel like a drink tonight.”

“Then you can watch me have one,” he said, undaunted. “Come on.”

“I actually have a room in the village so I’m not even staying in town. And the others will be better company. Alice, for one...”

“Ah yes,” he said. “Miss Alice. I can tell her all about the nineteen eighties. As an archaeologist, she’ll love that.”

Deborah laughed in spite of herself.

“She probably will at that,” she said. “If she’s interested in conversation.”

“I’m sure she’s a vestal virgin,” said the Englishman, straight-faced. “So what do you say? A wee dram to welcome me to the team?”

“No, I’m sorry,” she said. “I have too much to do.”

He pulled a pained face.

“Another time, perhaps,” he said.

“Perhaps,” she replied, turning and walking quickly away before she could change her mind.

The dream was always the same. He was riding up front in a captured military truck abandoned by the Dutch UN peacekeepers outside Srebenica. Dimitri—so he now called himself—remembered the day, knew what had happened that day in Bosnia, but the dream was different, loaded with dread and a sense of impending disaster that he had not felt at the time. He had been smoking, and one of the guys had been recounting what Mladic had said to him that morning before they had gone to the school in Konjević Polje. They had been joking and sharing a flask of vodka that one of the regular army soldiers had given him. Dimitri and his men were Scorpion paramilitaries, locals called Chetniks.