Tears of the Jaguar (28 page)

“Sure you can,” she said, sliding into his lap and letting the towel fall away. “I bet there are things I can show you.”

And then his face was buried in her neck, his body shuddering with sobs so that he couldn’t see her smile, couldn’t see in her eyes what she saw in the mirror over his shoulder: that rapid play of exhilaration, contempt, and—just flashing into her eyes for a moment—a deep and anguished self-loathing like a cry so clear, so painfully shrill that she couldn’t believe he didn’t hear it.

Porfiro Aguilar slid out of bed as silently as he could and went to the shuttered window. He had been dreaming of Mexico City, sitting in Ligaya—his favorite restaurant in Colonia Condesa—eating tequila-flamed mussels out of the shells, uncomfortably aware that all the waiters looked like Eustachio. His plate was rimmed with blood and he had woken suddenly.

As he cracked the shutter he saw what had woken him. There were two police vans in the street below, no lights or sirens, but several men wearing flack vests over their white shirts and carrying automatic weapons. They were going into the building next door: the lab.

Aguilar checked that his companion was still sleeping, dressed hurriedly in jeans and a white cotton shirt, grabbed his wallet and cell phone, and slipped quietly out of the room.

By the time he got down there, the police were already in, already disconnecting computers and hauling stuff out to the vans.

“What is going on?” he demanded, but the first cop ignored him. “You can’t take this stuff!” he exclaimed. “I need this equipment. I’m working...”

“Who are you?” said a stocky captain.

“Porfiro Aguilar,” he said, “I’m deputy field director and artifact analyst for the Ek Balam dig. I need those computers.”

“You’ll get them back,” said the captain.

“When? In what condition?”

The cop just shrugged and smiled slightly: not his problem.

“Who is in charge here?” Aguilar demanded.

The cop’s eyes flashed to the corner of the room where a white man in a gray suit was surveying the work with a clipboard in hand. Aguilar took one look at him and knew him for a
norteamericano
.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “This is a local investigation, right? Who’s he?”

“The man in charge,” shrugged the cop.

“Meaning what?” Aguilar demanded. The cop was annoying him.

“He’s the man who tells me what to do,” said the cop, and that, said his final shrug, was all he knew and more than he cared about.

Aguilar’s anger flared. He sure as hell wasn’t going to let his work be tossed into a van without a fight.

“You mind telling me on whose authority you are confiscating this equipment?” he demanded in English as he marched over to the man in gray.

The man peered at him over his clipboard for a moment then went back to what he was doing.

“You’re Porfiro Aguilar?” said the man, still not looking at him.

“That’s right.”

“And you performed the analysis of the gemstone recovered from Ek Balam?”

“Yes,” said Aguilar, uncomfortably aware that the man had still not said who he was. “It was only a few preliminary tests, little more than an examination with magnification, why?”

“And what did you determine?” said the man, meeting his gaze at last, and tipping his head back a little so that he seemed to peer down his nose. He was middle-aged and slim, but lithe, strong-looking, and he seemed unusually still and self-possessed.

“Just that it was some sort of crystal formation, perhaps a low-grade ruby,” said Porfiro. “Uncommonly pure, but of weak color.”

“Anything else?”

“We don’t have the facility to get much else,” he said. “If we hadn’t just dug it out of the ground and were pretty sure it had been there several hundred years at the very least, I’d say it was man-made.”

“Because of the purity?”

“Yes.”

“Any other reason?”

“No.”

“And you came to no other conclusions about what it was, how it came to be there, or what it might be used for?” said the suit.

“No. Nothing. I sent it to another lab for a full chemical analysis.”

“Which determined what?”

“That the stone contained ferric iron and chromium.”

“Meaning what?”

“I have no idea,” said Aguilar. “It’s an uncommon combination, I guess, but that’s all I know. What is this about?”

“And who did you share this information with?”

“Everyone at the site. It wasn’t a secret.”

“And where is the gem now?”

“In the safe,” said Porfiro, nodding toward one of the storage rooms. “The local lab sent it back to me with the results. I was going to send it to the States for analysis, but I needed Mexican government approval to do that. I wrote to them, but I haven’t heard back yet.”

“That won’t be a problem,” said the American. “Could you get it, please.”

“All artifacts found at the site are part of the patrimony of Mexico,” said Aguilar, concerned for what was about to happen next. “I can show you the stone, but it can’t leave the country without the approval of my government, and then only for a short period—for analysis or display—before returning to Mexico. It’s part of our cultural heritage.”

“Well,” said the man, with a tight smile, “that seems to be the question, doesn’t it? Can you open the safe, please?”

“I can, but you understand that you can’t take the stone to the States, right?”

“You’ve made your position very clear.”

“It’s not my position,” said Aguilar, his irritation getting the better of him. “It’s the law, Mexican and international. You can’t take it out of the country.”

“Just open the safe, please, sir, or I will have you removed and we will open the safe by force.”

“The artifacts in there are extremely fragile and priceless,” Aguilar spluttered. “You can’t blow the safe open without risking serious damage...”

“Then I suggest you open it,” said the other, still showing no emotion.

He looked down. It always felt like this dealing with gringos, like every play had to be a bluff because you just never had the cards. He shrugged and walked to the storeroom. He used his body to shield the dial of the safe as he laid in the combination—a futile gesture of defiance—then reached in and withdrew the single cardboard box inside.

“Open it, please,” said the man in gray.

Aguilar did so, setting it down on a workbench and unwrapping the contents gingerly, like he was performing delicate surgery on a small animal. The gem had only been small, but even so, Aguilar knew before he folded back the last flap of fabric, that it wasn’t there.

“Oh my God,” he muttered.

“Get me a list of everyone who knows the combination to the safe, and a schedule of when you know it was opened after the gem was put in,” said the American. He seemed completely unsurprised, neither angry nor upset, not even impatient with such incompetence.

“What’s going on?” Aguilar demanded.

“First thing in the morning, please,” said the other. “The list.”

Again Aguilar shrugged and nodded, defeated, feeling like some damned native outmaneuvered by foreigners with better weapons.

The man with the clipboard had already returned to it, so Aguilar—ignored—walked out, his footsteps getting heavier and faster as his frustration spilled over. He slammed the door, found
his way into the street, and then marched up to the dorm, only remembering at the last moment to be quiet when he reached the door of his room.

He eased the door open, stepped inside, and closed it carefully so that the latch made the smallest click, but the bedsheets stirred, and Krista Rayburn sat up.

“Porfiro?” she said.

He sat on the edge of the bed, and in his head he heard the American’s question again: “And you came to no other conclusions about what it was, how it came to be there, or what it might be used for?”

Used for? What did the man mean?

“You OK, hon?” Krista asked. “What is it?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I really have absolutely no idea.”

Deborah woke late and unrefreshed. Her body felt both weary and jittery, as if she had drunk too much coffee, and her eyes stung. She was exhausted, she told herself, so much so that she had fallen asleep while working at the computer and had a nightmare about Lady Anne and the Pendle witches. That was what had happened. She shrugged the dream off—though it lingered in her head, detailed and hard to the touch like no dream she had ever had—and set about her plans for the day.

She had picked up a map in the pub and now studied it while she munched on the toast she had requested from the kitchen. The memory of the dream was fresh enough that she hesitated as she reached for the laptop. Instead, she called Skipton Castle, announcing herself as a journalist working for the
New York Times
. She wanted to know all she could about what had been taken.

The man she was connected to said he was not at liberty to discuss the matter.

“Who can?” she said.

There was another silence, then he said, “Castle employees are not to express opinion or convey information on the subject.”

“Who told you not to talk? The castle owner?”

He seemed to search for the word. “The authorities. Now,” he said, as if he had already revealed too much and was keen to be out of the conversation, “if you don’t mind...”

Deborah hung up and opened the computer. She quelled a moment of uncertainty and returned to the website where she had found the painting. The story was no longer there, nor was there any image of the painting online. She tried a variety of searches, but though the links to the news stories about the theft were there, none of them worked, and she could find no accessible images of the painting itself anywhere.

Curiouser and curiouser,
she thought. Deborah definitely felt like she’d fallen down the rabbit hole.

She picked up the phone again and called Lancaster Castle. “Miss Miller,” said Hargreaves, pleased, in his gruff way, to hear from her. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m trying to track down an Edward Clifford or de Clifford,” she said. “He was the son of Lady Anne Clifford,” she added, involuntarily turning her back on the computer so as not to be reminded of what she had decided to call a dream. “But he might not have been. I’m not sure.”

She was gambling that his interest in history would make him want to help. He had, after all, revealed something of his own preoccupations, even anxieties. She remembered his face when he talked about that wheeled chair in the Drop Room,
sure that though he had left all the important details out, he had—in his way—confided in her. She wondered again what the wheeled chair meant.

“You think that coat of arms you were looking for belonged to this Clifford character?” said Hargreaves.

“Perhaps,” she said.

“Hold on.” It sounded like
Ohwed on
, that rich, broad dialect that seemed so at odds with his scholarly persona.

“I’ve got some books here,” he continued.

She waited while he muttered and thumbed through. Then he said simply, “No.”