Tears of the Jaguar (3 page)

When she’d agreed to join the consortium she had done so to keep the museum alive in a culture that viewed the past as something best forgotten. With the economy not so much faltering as entering free fall, what private money was available had been diverted from the air-conditioned halls of galleries, theatres, and museums toward environmental and humanitarian debacles. She could hardly blame the struggling people of Georgia for not wanting to spend their time and money on Creek Indian artifacts and Mycenean gold, but “fiscally speaking”—a phrase constantly on her lips in board meetings—the situation was getting bleak. Worse, she had only been running the museum since her mentor had died, and the prospect of it failing completely on her watch felt like an insult to his memory. In such a mood, the consortium had looked like a godsend. The organization connected museums and galleries from all over the Southeast, anchored by a Chicago-based nonprofit called Cornerstone.

The official offer to sign on with Cornerstone had come in September, two days before Rosh Hashanah. She’d flown to Chicago and nearly broken her wrist snatching the proffered pen from Steve Powel—Cornerstone’s slightly eccentric president—getting her name down before he could change his mind. The Druid Hills museum was still being overhauled, and the money on offer would allow them to open their new galleries a year ahead of schedule. It was worth what she hoped would be a few student interns following her around and asking what they should catalogue. Even at the time, she had known the help wouldn’t come
that
cheap, but she had opted not to scrutinize this particular gift horse too closely.

So she had sat in Powel’s old-fashioned wood-paneled office in Chicago trying not to grin like a kid accidentally locked in
the ice cream parlor. The situation had been surreal, and that was without taking into account the number of bizarre and frankly creepy artifacts on display—including a necklace of skulls. Then again, given that he was in the museum world, these things were perhaps more normal than the huge number of shiny women’s figure-skating trophies that crowded his bookshelves.

“My daughter,” he explained, catching Deborah’s curious gaze, and rotated a picture of a lithe teenager in sparkly pale-blue skating costume, her cheeks pink with cold and her blue eyes bright with childish joy. “Angela.”

“My sister used to skate,” said Deborah. “Still does, a little.”

She said it casually, trying not to show that she had always been a little jealous of Rachel’s talent for all things graceful and pleasing to their parents. Deborah, by comparison, was the troublesome one, the antisocial one, the one whose teachers sent notes about her stubbornness and quickness to argue. The one called to the principal’s office because she had punched Tommy Werstein on the nose for muttering “
freak
” as she loped by.

Deborah focused on one picture of the girl, a teenager here, but still compact and elegant, whereas Deborah at about the same age had been gawky, stalking about the ice like a heron as her sister swept past, all wings. Powel’s daughter had her blonde hair tied back and a supremely confident smile. Around her neck, she wore a glittering gold necklace with a single garnet-colored pendant. This, Deborah thought to herself, is a child of privilege. Then, even though the girl looked nothing like Rachel, Deborah found her old resentment stirring. It rose suddenly, like an animal that had been curled up in a patch of sunlight suddenly obscured by cloud.

After all this time
, she thought.
You should be ashamed of yourself
.

So the contract was signed, and the first check changed hands. It was weeks before it became clear that she wouldn’t just be hosting student interns, and by that time she had already started using the money. Still, her first response to her “assignment” had been incredulity. She was cleaning out a Creek Indian display in the museum in Atlanta when the phone rang. If she was honest, she had forgotten that she had to actually
do
something to fulfill her side of the deal.

“You want me to go
where
and do
what
?”

“We want you to coordinate the Ek Balam dig,” said Powel over the phone, as if he were handing her the keys to the city. “Lead the dig then develop a mobile exhibition based on the site.”

Ek Balam? Where the hell was Ek Balam? It sounded Arabic. If he thought she was going to sit in a tent in some desert with shells whistling overhead...

“In the Yucatan,” Powel prompted, as if this were obvious.

They must have discussed it at their Chicago meeting, when she had nodded and sat there like Oliver Twist proffering his gruel bowl:
“Please, sir, may I have large amounts of money.”
She remembered little about Ek Balam, but she knew that Cornerstone had interests in Mayan sites dotted throughout Mexico, Belize, and Honduras.

“Right,” she had said, half remembering and scouring her shelves for a book on Mayan ruins. “Ek Balam. Fantastic. And what exactly will I be doing?”

What she would be doing, said Powel, was recruiting and vetting college student applicants to the program and then escorting them to the sites for a crash course in Mayan archaeology for a week. There would then be a week’s surveying of the site, after which she would serve as field director for the subsequent dig.
On its completion she would develop a dramatic, educational, and portable museum display that could be trucked around the country and set up according to blueprints she devised.

“Hello? Deborah, are you still there?” he had said.

Field director?

“Sure,” she covered. “Fantastic. When do we start?”

She was still scanning the bookshelves for something on Mayan archaeology, but her eyes were moving faster now, sweeping in great, jittery arcs that saw nothing. She was totally unqualified for the position.

Her solution, predictably, had taken the form of labor. Deborah had always met challenge with work.

“You don’t even know how to relax,” her mother had once said, and Deborah had stored the barb away as a compliment.

In the six-month gap between that phone call from Steve Powel and her touching down in Cancun, Deborah had devoured every book she could find on Mayan archaeology. She was a museum curator, not a field-worker, and she had spent a good deal more time figuring out how best to display artifacts than she had digging them up. She loved being on the ground, brush and trowel in hand, but she hadn’t done much of it, and the idea of pretending to be an expert—and on the Maya in particular—for a bunch of smart-ass college kids had terrified her.

At least all her reading had solidly grounded her in the history of the place and the myth about the jaguars that protected it. That was even how it translated:
Ek Balam. The City of the Dark Jaguar
.

The name of the place made her job here sound exciting and mysterious, but that wasn’t entirely accurate. Her duties at this stage, in fact, were fairly simple. Each day, she drove eleven miles
south to Valladolid, the town where the students stayed, and the home of the archaeological institute, which housed the real experts and their lab. Deborah was glad to be staying instead in the tiny village closer to the site, where she didn’t have to socialize too much. It gave her time for her other duties, like assigning student reading.

She escorted the kids on tours of the surrounding area and its major sites—which meant footnoting some of the more florid accounts of the ruins coming from the local guides—and chaperoned them as they watched the Ek Balam site survey. The core of the ancient city had been excavated twenty years ago, but in preparation for the dig, the site was being carefully mapped and its features fully recorded.

Those tasks fell to other people. Her job, she had decided, was to introduce a future generation of archaeologists to fieldwork and make sure they didn’t break anything crucial in the process. Her real work would kick in when the dig was closed and she could turn her experience into building the mobile exhibit. For now her title was field director, but in real terms she was a cross between a public relations exercise and a shepherd. Hold the kiddies’ hands, get their parents and their schools excited enough to open their pocket books in the interests of history and anthropology, and Steve Powel and the board at Cornerstone would be more than happy. Find some aesthetically pleasing and preferably valuable artifacts that would look good on the museum banners, and they’d be ecstatic.

Powel’s version of archaeology smacked of an
Indiana Jones
movie. Last time she saw him in Chicago, she said as much, and he just shrugged.

“You know how much money those movies make?” he said.

He had a point. Nobody wanted to shell out for the fiddling details on which archaeologists built new theories about ancient Mayan diet and social structure, but come back with a stone sarcophagus engraved with skulls and the Druid Hills museum might actually turn a profit.

“How about I build a coffin out of plywood and egg cartons?” she said. “Spray it gold and throw in some beef ribs and say we found Tutankhamun.”

“If you find any real tombs, grave goods and such,” he said, ignoring her joke, “I’ll come down myself.”

“Why?”

“Just...” He paused and shrugged, smiling quickly as if embarrassed. “An interest of mine. To tell you the truth, I’m a little jealous. You are going to enjoy Ek Balam, Deborah.”

And he had looked so odd—wistful, like he was dreaming of exotic locales that dripped with magic and treasure—that she had agreed with him.

Now, Deborah and her dozen students had two more days of pre-excavation work, and then they got a week off, a week in which most would return to the States, to burgers and air-conditioning, traffic and hot, high-pressure showers, before coming back, pick axes and sifters at the ready. By then, Martin Bowerdale’s survey team would be done and Porfiro Aguilar, the artifact analyst, would have finished setting up the lab in Valladolid, and they would be ready to begin digging. Whether they would find anything that would excite the likes of Steve Powel, she had no idea, but her anxiety sometimes gave way to a thrill of excitement at the possibility.

As Deborah got out of the car and caught her first glimpse of the storm-tossed dig site, she realized that her students could not be allowed back because of fallen masonry and other structural damage. She would have to call Valladolid and send them to their break early. It had been one hell of a storm.

Cell phone signals were weak in the region, and impossible to get from ground level. The first thing she had authorized on accepting the details of the dig was the construction of the cell phone tower on top of Structure 2. Ordinarily, a tower like this would be set in holes blasted out of the bedrock, but since this one was built on an archaeologically significant structure, its four posts were packed into concrete that had been poured into blocks around them. A zigzagging series of ladders secured to the structure led up to a thatched platform. It was sturdy, but since it rose up from a structure that was already sixty feet high, it was unnervingly tall. At the top, her phone got three bars and
she could have as good a conversation as if she were sitting in her living room at home.

She hurried around the structure to make sure it seemed stable, then started to climb. At the top, she paused to catch her breath, looking out over the wet jungle and the pale, ancient stone structures that rose out of it. Closest was Structure 3, shaped like a pyramid—probably some kind of governor’s palace—which was to be the primary focus of their dig. She sighed with relief. The scaffolding around it looked OK.

It was quiet. Deborah had thought of jungle as being impenetrably dense and towering, alive with screaming monkeys swinging from tree to tree. But Ek Balam was in the northern lowland reaches of the Maya homeland, and the jungle here was dry tropical forest, low growing and patchy. It was nothing like as lush and dark as she had expected, and, a little disappointingly, she hadn’t seen or heard a single monkey since her arrival. As to the jaguar that gave the ancient city its name and which had been the supreme Mayan symbol of royalty, there hadn’t been regular sightings for almost a decade.

She called Porfiro Aguilar, the deputy field director and artifact analyst in Valladolid. He sounded sleepy and harassed, so after she had ordered the dismissal of the students, she told him that she would be in touch again in an hour after she had inspected the site. She was standing there, looking out over the sodden landscape of silent ruins and trying to decide whether to call Powel in Chicago, when her phone rang again.

She gave it a quizzical look, didn’t recognize the number, but answered it anyway.

“Hello?”

“Debs? That you?”

It took her a moment.

“Rachel?” she said.

It had been at least six months since she’d spoken to her sister.

“You got a minute?”

“Actually, I’m kind of swamped,” said Deborah, making the pun just for herself. She wished she could joke away the uneasiness. Her sister so rarely called. “What’s up?”