Tears of the Jaguar (14 page)

By the time the truck had reached the school, the separation of the men from the women and children had already happened, so Dimitri didn’t see much of it. Not there, anyway. He had seen it before, particularly in Potocari, and he had grown immune
to the pleading and crying. But in the dream the women and children were still there, following the truck somehow, visible in the side-view mirrors when he looked back, a column of them, somehow keeping pace with the truck no matter how fast they drove.

When they got out into the fields, they pulled over, and it was Dimitri’s job to open up the back of the truck and get the men out. Some of them were blindfolded and had to be helped down, others had their hands lashed behind their backs. Few of them had any shoes or anything else they could use as a weapon. It was weirdly quiet, and, for the most part, they all did what they were told. Mostly the men ranged from their late teens to their sixties, though there were a few old men and boys among them too. Dimitri didn’t know why and didn’t ask. Clearly they’d pissed someone off.

They had stayed quiet as they walked single file to the ditch between the field and the woods, and the air was damp and full of the scent of the wet grass and trees, and that scent filled the dream too. A hundred yards or so away were the women and children, all silent and watching, always maintaining the exact same distance and never blinking. In reality, of course, they hadn’t been there. That, like the raw and dragging horror, was just in the dream.

Then the shooting started and the men began dropping. It had been almost comically undramatic. Dimitri was a good shot and had rarely needed more than one round per person. When the truck was empty, others had come, and Dimitri had helped out with the lining up of the prisoners and the shooting. He lost track of how many times he changed the magazine in his assault rifle. And that was how it had been: methodical, businesslike.
There had been some laughter and some hysterics, but for the most part it was just a job, like carrying the crates of bottles that had been his first wage back in the crappy little Belgrade bar his uncle had owned before the war.

In the dream, he went about the shooting itself with the same focused composure he’d managed on the actual day, but there was that nagging sense of darkness and fear underneath, though he couldn’t stop what he was doing and didn’t see why he should. It came from the presence of the women and children who had no business being in the dream at all. They had started getting closer once the shooting started, and as they inched across the field to the road where the trucks were parked, he became surer that his gun wouldn’t work on them. He didn’t know why, but he was certain, so they had to finish up and get out before the women and children reached them. If they didn’t, they’d be as defenseless as the men they were routinely executing. It made no sense, but he felt a power in them that he would not be able to stand against if they reached him. He had to finish up the shooting and move on quickly.

But the job wouldn’t end. Just as they finished dealing with the contents of one truck, another would arrive, and the colonel would start handing out fresh ammunition and telling them to get on with it. Dimitri warned them about the women in the field, but it was like no one else could see them, and after a while he had tried shooting at them to drive them back. For a moment it looked like it was working, but they came on anyway, unaffected by his bullets as he had known they would be.

It was then, always then, as the children and their mothers started to hedge him about so that he could no longer aim his weapon, their eyes locked on him as he tried to find a way back to the truck, that he woke up, sweating, his heart racing.

This time his phone was ringing too.

He took the call and made some notes, then hung up. It had been a mistake not to get a room with air-conditioning. He had never experienced heat like it, not at night anyhow, and with the memory of the dream still only just under the surface, he doubted he would get back to sleep. He sat on the edge of the bed and looked through his phone messages and the notes he had made from previous calls.

People were queuing up now, and that made him smile, even if some of them were probably terrorists. To Dimitri, who had never been a religious or nationalist zealot, it was all about money. If the goods were anything like he was told, he was about to make a fortune. Even if they weren’t quite as billed, or if he sold only information rather than the items themselves, he was looking at a shitload of money by any standards. Where it came from, he didn’t care. Hell, he’d sell to the Americans if they’d pay him enough, and they might, if only to keep the goods from falling into unwanted hands.

Dimitri smirked at the thought of so many eager buyers and flipped open a folder full of data printouts: phonon and photon transmission, particle vibration measured in terms of frequency and amplitude tied to temperature increase, and, most importantly, scattering rates estimated from phonon-phonon interactions and lattice imperfections. The science meant little to him, but he knew the implications for power and cooling cycles, and it wasn’t surprising that they had piqued a lot of curiosity. Sure they might be duds, useless for the purpose he was selling, but there was enough in those sheets of paper to have the price doubling by the moment, and there was something marvelous about their recurring question:
How do we know you haven’t faked the data?
Because he could no more fake this shit than go to the fucking moon. All he had to do now was get hold of the goods before anyone else got wind of where they were, and he would get spectacularly rich. It seemed like the best way to do that was to eliminate the middleman and just help himself; no more dealing with that weasel Clements and his archaeologist pal. The archaeologist—Bowerdale, his name was—might still prove useful, but why pay someone to get what he could take for himself?

He lay back on the cheap pillow, grinning to himself, and popped out a cigarette from the pack on the nightstand. He considered trying to go back to sleep, but even imagining his massive success wouldn’t keep the dreams at bay. He opted to smoke instead, and thought about the cherry-red Enzo Ferrari that would be the first thing he’d buy when the deal went down. Then he cleaned and oiled his guns and shuffled through the TV stations till he found Bugs Bunny cartoons dubbed into Spanish. He didn’t speak much, but they were still pretty good. The voices were funny, and you could get the gist.

At dawn he would make for Ek Balam. It would be a good day.

The motorbike had done well. Better than Eustachio had expected. It was noisy and slow, but in the black Yucatan night, slow was good. There were too many potholes and the headlamp was set high so the road right in front of him was dark. One bad bump and the bike would throw him. Still, he was nearly there.

Eustachio knew he would have been missed, knew also that he would probably be arrested as soon as he returned to the village. He had known as much before he left, and that was OK. He would tell them nothing, would deny having touched the contents of the tomb, would say he couldn’t imagine where they were now and—eventually—they would have to let him go. Anyone could have taken the grave offerings. He even had a cousin near Uxmal who would swear he had spent the night with him, that he had been visiting family because there was nothing for him to do on site till the new find had been dealt with. He would say that over and over until the authorities had
to produce real evidence or release him. It might take a while, and Eustachio knew what kind of treatment he might get from the police, but that didn’t matter.

The motorbike reached the turnoff to the village; he kept going toward the site. The moon was down, which was all to the good. Eustachio got off the bike a couple of hundred yards short of the parking lot and pushed it into the underbrush, watching his feet for snakes. He had ridden barefoot all the way with no difficulties, except when he had stopped for gas outside Valladolid and stepped on a shard of glass from a beer bottle. It had bled a little, and though he had wrapped it in leaves from the
chakaj
tree, it stung when he put weight on it, and it made his gait even more shambling and tortuous than usual.

With the bike stowed, he unsheathed the machete that was strapped to the pannier, checked the stars to get his bearings, and pushed cautiously into the site. There would be no one around at this time. The police didn’t have the manpower to guard the dig, particularly if there was nothing worth guarding anymore. But he wasn’t listening for people. He wouldn’t hear a snake until it was close enough to strike, but he might hear other animals. There were peccaries in these woods—what his ancestors called
kitam
—and he didn’t like the idea of stumbling on a big one without his rifle.

Years ago he had seen a neighbor gored by one as it ran past him. Well, not so much gored as nicked with its tusks. They had cornered the animal in a tangle of
k’u’che’
trees, and it had rushed them, spotting an opening between Eustachio and Fresco. Eustachio had been a young man then, with two good legs. He had dived clear of the boar, but Fresco was slower. He had stepped aside, but the boar had turned her head as she
charged past and bitten Fresco’s thigh, opening a terrible wound. The blood sprayed far enough to splash Eustachio across his face, though he was ten feet away. Fresco had screamed, more in fear than in pain. With the boar vanished into the jungle, Eustachio had used his shirt to stop the bleeding. He had tried dragging Fresco back to the village, but it took too long, and he’d had to leave him while he ran back for help. By the time they had gotten back to him, Fresco was unconscious and had lost a lot of blood. They built a fire, heated a roasting spit in the center, and cauterized the wound, but even the searing of his flesh did not bring him round. He died an hour later.

Without a doctor or medical supplies, with the hospital miles away and only one truck in the village, there was nothing he could have done. But Eustachio still remembered the look in Fresco’s eyes after the peccary had gone, when he saw his blood on Eustachio’s face, and it still knotted his guts with a sense of failure. He remembered, and sometimes that was all you could do. The past was past, but he had learned early that it was important to remember.

He kept the machete held in front of him as he walked. Something large moved off to his left, but it was light and careful, probably a
keh
deer. Some said jaguar still lived in the jungle scrub, but Eustachio hadn’t heard or seen sign of them for almost a decade. They had been hunted into the true jungle of the highlands, which was probably just as well. The peccaries and deer were almost gone from the woods now, so there was nothing for the hunter to prey upon. It saddened Eustachio. Ek Balam was named for the jaguar, but now those creatures were gone, lost like the people who had lived here.

One more thing to enshrine in memory
, he thought.
Did the beasts of the forest feel loss?
Did the jaguar weep for its lot, its shrinking world, its steady displacement from the center of things?
He couldn’t say.

He moved easily through the brush despite his limp, emerging beside the sheds where they kept the wheelbarrows and inexpensive hand tools, and from there he was on a well-worn trail that traced its way into the central court. He passed behind Structure 2, where he had supervised the building of the cell phone tower, and around the acropolis. Even in the darkness he could see the great hell-mouth doorway of the Zac Na, and he felt sure his forefathers approved of what he was doing. He bowed in acknowledgement and moved round the back to where the new
cenote
had opened up, and the new tomb.

Eustachio took the small, inadequate flashlight from his pocket. In its small patch of light, he could see that the ground around the edge of the
cenote
had been beaten smooth with foot traffic and the ladder had been replaced by a two-stage ramp, anchored on joists driven into the earthen walls. He considered the work with a critical eye. There was a heavy metal door at the mouth of the tomb, but—and this sounded the first note of unease he had felt since the last time he had been here—it was open.

Eustachio stood there looking down at the deep shadow of the doorway for a long minute, listening to the night. The birds and bats had discovered the
cenote
and had already colonized it. By day it would be filled with their calls. Now there was only the shifting and rustling of feathers, strangely amplified by the sinkhole. He shone the flashlight on the door and the yellowish glow sparkled on the hasp where, he thought, a padlock should have been. He moved the light down, but if someone had cut
the lock off, it was as likely to have fallen into the water below. He waited one more minute, then pushed the machete through his belt and began picking his slow, ungainly passage down the ramp, glad at least that he did not have to negotiate the ladder again.

It seemed solid enough. Juan’s work, perhaps. One of the few things his son did well. Eustachio hadn’t wanted to tell him where he had hidden the grave goods, but he had no choice. Protecting the contents of the site had been passed on to Eustachio by his father, and he had given the same information to Juan. That was how it should be, even if it made him uneasy. Juan had let so many of the old ways slip. But someone had to know in case something happened to Eustachio, and such things were best kept to family.