Tears of the Jaguar (17 page)

Aguilar wasn’t good with kids, particularly Mayan kids, but he had given her an encouraging smile and said Miller would turn up any moment. She responded not in the Yucatekan she used with her family but in careful and polite Spanish, which served to remind him that he was—to her and her people—almost as foreign as Miller. In her formal tone he heard how much she saw through his show of concern, maybe even glimpsed something of his contempt for her family and the village in general, and he felt as humbled as the villagers accusing Deborah Miller of plundering the site.

He excused himself and walked through the ball court and round to the acropolis, keeping his eyes open for Miller and for Krista Rayburn, the former somewhat reluctantly, the latter with a sense of anticipation he hadn’t felt since his wife left him. He trekked round to the new
cenote
and the gantry access they had built, wondering if the environmental archaeologist smiled that
way for everyone or if there was something happening between them. He had to play it carefully. He would be working in close quarters with Krista if this dig ever really got going, and any tension or awkwardness would quickly become excruciating.

The door to the tomb was open.

Miller
, he thought, his heart sinking a little.

There was something odd about the light this morning. It seemed to reach into the tomb and show more than he would have thought possible, and where the plastered structure inside had been painted that pinkish red, it seemed darker but more vivid now, the color closer to a rusting crimson.

He descended the creaking ramp but stopped before he actually got inside, though he wasn’t sure why. Something was wrong. It took him a moment to realize that he was reacting to a smell: sweet, but also somehow metallic, a familiar and dreadful scent...

Blood
.

And then he was stepping carefully inside, looking for Miller’s body, and when he saw the scarlet-daubed limbs hanging lifeless over the edge of the coffin-throne, it took another moment for him to realize that under the spattering of blood the skin was too brown. Too old.

Aguilar was clutching his stomach and running back out into the air before the remains of the face registered in his mind.

Eustachio
.

He clutched the wooden rail the old man had built and vomited into the
cenote
. And beyond the nausea, beyond the horror of what had been done to the old Mayan, beyond even the sense that being close to any death was somehow a brush with your own, Aguilar felt Adelita’s childlike and accusatory stare.

You thought him less than a complete person
, said the eyes.
A machine that would lift and carry for you, or a mule...

“No,” he whispered to himself, defiant but fearing the child was partly right.

He ran to the cell phone tower, climbed to the top, and called the police. Then he stayed there, technically still on site, but as far from the tomb, psychologically, as he could get, up there above the trees, looking down on the highest of the Ek Balam structures.

Ten minutes later, he saw Bowerdale, picking his way across from the parking lot in a cream linen suit. Aguilar watched him, wondering what he was doing there alone. He seemed to loiter as he passed the Twins, then peeled off toward Structure 3, finally doubling back toward the Oval Palace. What was he doing? Why didn’t he go to the tomb? That was surely why he was there. He wanted to look again at what was inside.

Unless...

He hadn’t completed the thought when Bowerdale seemed to look up and see him at last. The surveyor raised a hand in salute, which Aguilar returned, then Bowerdale was walking toward Structure 2 and the base of the tower, recovering his customary swagger. Aguilar, glad he had already spoken to the police, began the long climb down the ladders.

Deborah felt the cold slap of water hit her face, and her eyelids fluttered. In the same instant she felt her belly convulse and her neck twist as she voided the cold, tangy water from her stomach out of her mouth. For a second there was no air, and she thought she would black out again, but then she spewed more and her lungs filled with oxygen again. She continued to spit and retch, but she was breathing. Only then could she reconnect with her body, its contorted position, and the fact that her face was in air and mottled light, while her body from the chest down was submerged in dark, cold water.

She was lodged against a small, hard outcropping of rock, but she felt the subterranean river moving steadily around her waist and legs and it felt that if she pushed back under the ground she might float away into the darkness. She opened her eyes briefly and found herself looking skyward up a stone-rimmed tube about a yard across.

A well
.

It was one of the old Mayan water sources, drilled down to the underground river but not used for centuries. That she had surfaced unconscious here, her head and shoulders above the water while her body still hung in the slow, pulling current below, was the kind of luck Deborah generally didn’t believe in. She must have been out for hours, lodged in this spot as the horrors of the night before had played out. If the gunman or the figure in the Mayan mask had found her before she came to...well, they hadn’t. More luck.

She remembered the splash to her face that had woken her and looked up toward the blue sky again, perhaps twenty feet, to where the small brown face of Adelita Lucia del Carmen Lacantun peered down at her, a bottle of spring water poised to dump down the well if the first didn’t get enough show of life.

Deborah called the girl’s name, then coughed.

“Stay there,” said Adelita in Spanish. “I’ll bring people.”

She was gone no more than ten minutes, though it felt longer, and Deborah had time both to recover her breathing properly and to feel the dread of being pulled back into the darkness. She could understand why the ancient Maya had considered
cenotes
gateways to the underworld. After the bright, arid conditions of the surface, the world beneath felt like another planet, an opposite realm full of strangeness and danger.

“Blessed are You, Lord, our God, King of the Universe,” she thought, surprised how easily the words of the
Birkhat Ha-Gomel
blessing for those surviving danger came back to her, “who bestows good things on the unworthy, and has bestowed on me every goodness.”

She thought also of Adelita, who seemed more than usually earnest, and uncharacteristically unsmiling. As the events of the night before came back to her, a dreadful sense of anticipation began to swell inside her, chilling her like the water of the underground river. She had interrupted someone, but not in time. Someone had tried to kill her, but someone else had already died—been murdered, which was different—and thinking of Adelita’s gaunt face, a part of Deborah feared she knew who it was.

God, not Eustachio.

They dropped a rope down to her and she lashed it round her waist with an expert bowline, then used her hands and feet to help push at the walls of the forgotten well as they pulled her up. Aguilar did most of the organizing, but the muscle came from Eustachio’s son, Juan, and another Mayan whose name she didn’t know. She thanked them, then started asking questions even as someone draped an extra cloth tarp from the wheelbarrow shed over her wet shoulders. It was only when she looked up from squeezing water from her lightweight khaki shorts that she saw the policeman hovering at the edge of the anxious circle, waiting to speak to her. She started to move to him but doubled up with a sudden cramping nausea that left her spewing water in the grass.

The women gathered around her but she waved them away, closing her eyes against the indignity of their watching, and spat till her stomach felt clear. She had a lump on her head, but if it had bled, it had already stopped, and though it was a little tender she thought there was no concussion. She stayed where she was, crouched on the ground, feeling the sun burning her neck, until
she thought she was ready. Then she stood, coughed once, and started talking as if nothing had happened, demanding to know everything. They watched her a little warily, but once it was clear she was not interested in further assistance or concern, they led her to the tomb to see what they all knew was there. She saw, then she talked to the police about what she had and had not seen the night before.

When they were done Deborah broke from the circle of policemen, walked quickly away from the loitering huddle of archaeologists and their students, and got as far from the tomb as she could. In a few minutes she would have to climb the cell phone tower and make a series of difficult calls, but for now she had to breathe and—if she could—shut out the things she had seen.

It was Aguilar who had reported that the tomb was no longer sealed, and he had warned her that what was inside was “very unpleasant.” That was an understatement. It had taken a moment for her to realize what she was seeing, because the tomb looked so different. She had fled without looking closely but the impression of the shining red room and the twisted, broken body at its core was burned into her mind like a bright light you still see after you close your eyes and turn away.

The police had talked her through what they thought had happened, had mentioned a blow to the foreman’s head that had immobilized him, signs of rope burns on his arms and legs, the thirty terrible holes they had found in his flesh, the corresponding urchin spines, and the flaked obsidian knife blade. Eustachio, they said, had been tortured to death, but the technique was modeled on ancient Mayan bloodletting rituals. A rope studded with thorns had been passed through his arms, his stomach, and his genitals. Of the usual body parts targeted in
Mayan sacrifice, only the tongue was untouched: presumably so he could still talk. The process, they thought, had taken as long as two hours.

They didn’t say—and didn’t need to—that someone had assumed that Eustachio had emptied the tomb of its treasures and had tried to extract their current location from him, someone invested in the site and with knowledge of Mayan ritual practice. They didn’t say—and didn’t need to—that the archaeological team was at the top of their list of suspects. Whether the killer had gotten the information he or she wanted out of the old foreman, no one knew.

She found Adelita sitting on Structure 2 and joined her in silence.

“Thank you for finding me,” she said.

“I was looking for somewhere private,” said the girl, plucking at the grass and studying it. “I heard the water moving so I looked in.”

She said it simply, stoically, like it was of no great consequence, a duty like feeding the chickens or grinding the corn.

“I’m sorry about your grandfather,” said Deborah. “He was a good man.”

Adelita said nothing, but after a moment, she leaned into Deborah, who put an arm around her shoulders.

“He was,” she said in Spanish, “the only one who knew me. Until you came. He told me to work hard in school so that I could go away, maybe to university. My father thinks I should stay home and do chores.”

“What about your mother?”

“She thinks I should go, but...” She hesitated. “It’s hard for her to imagine, and she needs help. Soon there will be another
baby and then maybe I will never leave. I’ll be like the other girls, except that I’m not, so I’ll be unhappy.”

Deborah felt a wash of emotions, confused and powerful as the sweep of the underground river: empathy, sadness, a paradoxical joy, and a concurrent sense of panic.

She already has a mother,
she thought.
One who belongs here. You don’t
.

But then neither did the girl, and as the bright and pugnacious Adelita started to weep, Deborah sensed she knew it.

Deborah climbed the cell phone tower to call Steve Powel and the American embassy, but also because she knew she could be alone at the top. Although the tower had felt rickety and precarious, she felt safer up there in the light where everyone could see her than she would in some private corner of the site. Because Deborah was thinking what she imagined they were all thinking. If Eustachio had not revealed—or not known—what the killer wanted to hear, they might all be targets of similar torture and murder.