Tears of the Jaguar (37 page)

“So why are you telling me all this?”

“Because you want to know what’s going on.”

“No,” she said. “You’re telling me because you think I can still be useful.”

He looked away for a moment, then nodded.

“You may have relevant information,” he said.

Now it was her turn to look away. He added hastily, “And because I value your perspective, Deborah.”

“Fine,” said Deborah. “Whatever.”

He looked like he was about to respond irritably, then took a breath and redirected the conversation.

“Why do you think Marissa Stroud came to England?” he said.

Deborah sighed.

“She is obviously looking for the crown jewels,” she said, “and knows that the stones we found in Ek Balam were part of a larger trove that is, presumably, still in Mexico somewhere. But she didn’t know where. She came to the UK because she thought that uncovering their past would somehow point to their present location. Whether she found what she was looking for, I have no idea, but I think I told her some things that may have helped.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know,” she said, studying her hands. “I was drugged. I told her what I knew about Edward Clifford, I think. I don’t think she had all that information before.”

“I see,” said Nick.

Deborah colored and clenched her fists.

“Where is she now?” she asked.

“Stroud? She boarded a flight outbound from Manchester a few hours before she was correctly identified as a person of interest in the Lancaster Castle assault.”

“Heading where?”

“Already touched down in Cancun, Mexico,” said Nick. “And you know what that means, right?”

“Time to pack my bathing suit?”

“Consider it work for an Anglo-American accord.”

It took James and Alice six hours by bus to get from Tulum to Merida, and another two to go from Merida to Uxmal. There had been no police checkpoints, no problems of any kind, but James was restless. He had read what he could find but was no nearer to determining where in Uxmal they should look for Edward’s bones and the treasure that lay with them. That was Alice’s word:
treasure
. The first few times she had said it she had seemed embarrassed by it—as she should be—but thrilled at the same time. Now there was something else going on with her that he couldn’t put his finger on, a note of panic and urgency. She had been jumpy when they got on the bus, always looking around as if expecting someone to arrest her. James had told her she was going to draw attention to them, and she had become oddly compliant. She hadn’t been sleeping well, he knew. It was just odd that the treasure hunt she had found so exciting now seemed to scare her.

James had found no records of this Edward character in any Spanish account of the conquest, nor much sign that the Spanish had even known Uxmal existed. When the Spanish got there, and certainly by the time of this mystery Edward from England, Uxmal had already been abandoned for hundreds of years. With no Spanish town close by, it remained a jungle-shrouded ruin until Waldeck, Stephens, and Catherwood got there in the 1830s and 1840s.

James and Alice booked a room they couldn’t afford at the hacienda by the ruins. Soon enough, he hoped, he’d get paid by Bowerdale and money would be less of a concern. It was a beautiful, grand old hotel that had been built for the archaeological staff working on the ruins, all tiled floors, potted palms, and old-world ceiling fans, and there was a guitar trio playing folk songs. There was a pool and a garden with towering palms, and their bathroom had a whirlpool tub and a stained-glass window of toucans and egrets. For James, who had never stayed anywhere so decadent in his life, it was glorious, a secret pleasure that made him want to dress up and drink rum cocktails served from silver shakers by waiters in white tuxedos.

In his heart, James knew they couldn’t hope to find the treasure, and he didn’t really care. He was tired of running around, tired of feeling stupid, and tired of being everyone’s whipping boy. Yes, he had to finish what he started for Bowerdale, so he would go through the motions, but he felt beyond caring about history or artifacts. All he wanted now was to stay in this wonderful place and relish what he’d originally hoped archeology would offer: a glimpse of the ancient and the exotic, something he would look back on all his life.

The following day they hid the canvas bag under the extra pillows and blankets in the wardrobe, then went to the ruins proper. They were all James had hoped for and more. Chichen Itza was more impressive in scale, sure, but it was packed with tourists and souvenir sellers, and there was much that you couldn’t get close to because the structures were roped off. He had liked the observatory with its dome-like tower and the dense ornamentation of the Nunnery and Church, but Uxmal was a different experience entirely. For one thing, it felt virtually deserted, even when the tourist buses arrived, and the fact that it received a fraction of the visitors meant that those who came were free to wander and climb where they wanted. When he scaled the great pyramid, inching up the high steep steps on all fours, he could sit up there on the top looking down on the site, and be almost completely undisturbed. The place still belonged to the jungle and its creatures.

The Pyramid of the Magician was unlike any other Mayan structure: a great three-story structure whose base was oval, so that the massive platforms had curved edges. It had monumental staircases up to temples on the top and loomed over a vast quadrangle of stone buildings whose intricate friezes were set with carved stone latticework, figurines, and masks of Chaak. James was used to the image of the rain god with its fearsome, bulbous eyes, wide, square leer full of teeth, and its huge, hooked nose. The images were reproduced all over the Yucatan, often in the same composite form, each portion of the face carved from a different square block so that the whole looked oddly linear, almost robotic, like a pixilated computer image, but nowhere had he seen them in such obsessive profusion. This was a city that lived
or died by rain. It was hardly surprising they worshipped Chaak so earnestly. James wondered vaguely how much human blood had been poured out, how many living hearts cut from their bodies with obsidian knives, to appease the god and bring a little rain.

He walked round to the Palace of the Governor, climbed another monumental staircase, and sauntered along the great long building, gazing up at the fretted and sculptured frieze adorned with the obligatory masks of Chaak, then stepped into a recess with the typical triangular Mayan arch. There was no one around. He could have just stumbled out of the jungle and discovered the site, the first white man to see it since that Edward guy came here to die three hundred and fifty years ago. Down below him on a platform surrounded by the close-cropped turf where the iguanas sprawled was a stone throne shaped like a saddle, each end carved into the head of a crouching jaguar. It was weathered and stained yellow with lichen, but it was the seat of a king or a high priest: a throne of power.

With sudden clarity James saw what he had to do. He would waste no more time skulking around the ruins looking vaguely—blindly—for somewhere to dig. He would get the canvas bag from the hotel room, tell Alice what he planned to do with or without her, and then he would return to the States. There he would be greeted as a cultural hero, a scientist. He would reveal his find to the world, shake off Bowerdale entirely, and return with a legitimate excavation to Uxmal where, one day, he would make a discovery still greater than what he had dug up for Bowerdale in Coba.

James stood tall, sure of his actions for the first time in weeks, maybe years, and that was when he noticed that Alice was now
in the space below him. She sat on the jaguar throne, staring up at him. He faltered, even at this distance feeling her skepticism chipping off some of his confidence. She wouldn’t like it, this new conviction of his. She had been getting steadily more and more jumpy all day. She constantly sidled up to him and said “Well?” as if he was supposed to just point at the ground and say, “Here. Get the spade.”

James made his way back to the staircase smiling to himself and walked down to where Alice sat, wearing her usual mixture of watchfulness and studied apathy. On the hulking throne, she looked small and childlike. She saw him coming and looked back over her shoulder, as if afraid someone might see them together, and James felt a rush of anger and hurt, which solidified his resolve.

No
, he thought again, with something like triumph
, She isn’t going to like this at all. And that’s just too bad.

After England, Deborah found Mexico hotter than ever. She had sat apart from Nick on the plane—an accident of getting last-minute seats that she was glad of—and they had barely spoken except for a few minutes at Gatwick when she had set her jaw and demanded that he answer her one question.

“What?” he said.

“Why are the CIA involved?” she said. “The original crime was the murder of a Mexican citizen, and the root cause seems to be about the recovery of British cultural property, so why are the CIA there at all?”

He smiled mirthlessly and looked away, as if trying to decide how much he could say, but when he looked back at her and shrugged, he seemed to be telling the truth.

“I don’t know,” he said. “The guy we caught in the Tower—Jones—didn’t talk, and we were quickly pressured to release him. It could be that the imprisonment of Bowerdale and the
involvement of Stroud, both of whom are Americans, raised their interest, but I see nothing in the case so far that would draw Intelligence interest unless, for some reason, they already had their eye on one or both of them.”

“The CIA monitoring a couple of aging archaeologists?” Deborah scoffed. “Why would they?”

“Why would the CIA try to kidnap a British officer on UK soil?” Nick replied. “I have no idea, but I have the bruises to say they did.”

“Maybe they see the jewels as some kind of bargaining chip with the British government?”

He shrugged again.

“Deborah, you’re just going to have to trust me on this: I really don’t know why they are involved. It makes no sense to me.”

“Trust you?”

“Yes,” said Nick, his face softening a little. “I said I was sorry I couldn’t explain before but—”

“I’ll see you in Mexico, Nick,” said Deborah. She had turned and walked briskly in the direction of the duty-free store.

Now, cooped up in a hot rental car speeding along the turnpike road toward Valladolid, they said nothing. Nick had asked her if she had slept on the plane, and when she responded that she had but that it had not been enough, he suggested that she put her seat back and nap while he drove. She had muttered a thank-you that was barely polite, then cranked up the AC and lain back, closing her eyes.

She didn’t sleep. It was impossible for her to get comfortable in the cramped vehicle, and Nick took several phone calls as he drove. She couldn’t help but listen in, and what she heard
kept her mind turning. The American embassy, it seemed, had kept up pressure on the Mexican police, and they were poised to release Martin Bowerdale unless harder evidence linking him to the crime emerged very soon. The sudden interest of British Intelligence seemed to have been a factor too.