Aztlan: The Courts of Heaven

by Michael Jan Friedman

  I followed the slave through the dark marble foyer, up a majestic set of stairs, and into a long, airy gallery with tall windows on either side. At the far end of the room stood a carved wooden table surrounded by six matching chairs.

  Mictlan Xochipilli was sitting at the table bent over a portable Mirror unit, his startlingly blue quetzal-feather earring dangling over the keyboard. He didn’t look up until his slave announced my presence. Then he stood, took a moment to run his hands over the rich, green fabric of his tunic, and finally met me with his eyes.

  “Colhua,” he said. “Please, join me.”

  I negotiated the length of the gallery. As I got close to Xochipilli, he extended his hand.

  I grasped it and said, “Thank you for agreeing to see me, Your Excellence.”

  “Anything to help,” said Xochipilli. Light glinted off the elaborate gold pendant on his chest. He seemed to notice the cut under my eye but he didn’t say anything about it. “It’s a bad thing, what’s happened to Coyotl.”

  “Not too bad, we hope. If you don’t mind, I would like to ask you some questions.”

  “Whatever you like,” said the nobleman. But he didn’t invite me to sit down anywhere, so I knew my conversation with him was going to be a short one.

  At first, I asked him the same questions I had asked Ichtaca and the Eagles—about Coyotl’s finances, friends, and health. Not that I expected Xochipilli to know the answers better than anyone else. After all, he and Coyotl would hardly have buzzed each other on a daily basis.

  Then I got to the questions the nobleman could answer better than others. “As far as you know,” I asked, “was Coyotl happy with his place on the Eagles?”

  “Happy?” Xochipilli echoed. “I have no reason to believe otherwise. Why do you ask?”

  I didn’t feel compelled to tell him about the Rabbit Run bag I’d found. Noblemen were notorious for talking too much, and I wanted to keep that evidence to myself for a while.

  “You have a new coach,” I said, “a new attack scheme. Sometimes star players balk at those kinds of changes.”

  He shrugged. “As far as I know, Coyotl has the utmost respect for his coach. In fact, when I mentioned to him that I was considering hiring Ichtaca, he was all for the idea.”

  It was unusual for an owner to share his plans with a player. I said as much.

  Xochipilli smiled. “Coyotl is not just any player, Investigator. I think you know that as well as I do. And I did not give him veto power over the move. I simply shared my thoughts with him.”

  “What about his contract?” I asked. “Any disappointment at all on Coyotl’s part?”

  “Coyotl’s contract reflected—and will continue to reflect—his value to the Eagles, which is considerable.” It was the kind of statement I could have gotten from the team’s fan affairs director.

  “So your relationship with Coyotl has been a good one?”

  “As good as any between owner and player.” Xochipilli’s eyes narrowed ever so slightly. “If you don’t mind my asking, what has this to do with his abduction?”

  “People do things when they’re unhappy that they wouldn’t do otherwise. They talk to people they wouldn’t normally talk to. If Coyotl was doing that, I need to identify those people and see if they can shed some light on what happened to him.”

  Xochipilli nodded. “I see.”

  “But you didn’t get the idea that Coyotl was disgruntled in any way?”

  “None.” He smiled again. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” I said. “I couldn’t have been happier when I played for your father. It’s good to see that Eagle players can still feel that way.”

  I thought I saw a shadow fall across his eyes at the mention of the elder Xochipilli. Apparently, I had probed a sore spot.

  “What else can I tell you?” asked the nobleman.

  His tone had changed. It told me that he had devoted as much time to me as he cared to.

  “Nothing else,” I assured him. “You’ve been a great help.”

  “I’m glad,” he said. “If you’re hungry, my kitchen slave can provide you with a snack for your trip back to the city.”

  “Thanks, but I ate before I left. Gods favor you, Your Excellence.”

  “And you, Colhua.”

  The words had barely escaped his mouth before he turned and went back to his Mirror unit. At that point, I might as well have been a mote of dust floating on the air as far as Xochipilli was concerned.

  I didn’t hold it against him. Most noblemen were more like him than like his father.

  • • •

  When I emerged from Xochipilli’s house into the bright, early afternoon sunlight, I saw my auto-carriage waiting for me in the courtyard. But the driver wasn’t alone. Someone in a blue tunic was standing next to him, leaning on the vehicle.

  As I approached, he stood up and turned to face me.

  “Colhua,” he said.

  Acama, I thought.

  He looked every bit as powerful as when he played for Yautepec in the Sun League. And every bit as arrogant if the turd-eating grin on his face was any indication.

  The rumors I’d heard were true, then. He had been hired as Xochipilli’s new bodyguard.

  For nine cycles Tez Acama had played for Yautepec, wreaking havoc with opposing players—Xochipilli’s Eagles among them. In fact, he had played some of his bloodiest games against Aztlan.

  A fan would have remembered that and held it against him, but not a nobleman.

  “Get what you needed?” Acama asked, his grin widening.

  I wanted to wipe it off his face, but I couldn’t. Not in the courtyard of Mictlan Xochipilli. And as an Investigator for the Empire, I knew that smirking wasn’t a crime.

  “His Excellence was most helpful,” I told him.

  “How’s your knee?” he asked.

  “How are your teeth?” I replied, knowing they’d been kicked in by a vengeful center in Malinalco.

  “Better than ever,” he assured me, and tapped one of the new ones with his fingernail. It made a tik-tik-tik sound.

  I opened the door to the auto-carriage, got in, and let my driver know I was ready to go. But as we pulled out of the courtyard, I felt a familiar twinge in my knee and knew that, once again, Acama had gotten the best of me.

  Chapter Three

  Cuetz Oxhoco was Coyotl’s agent. When I buzzed him on my way back to Aztlan from Xochipilli’s estate, he said he’d meet with me any time, anywhere, as long as our conversation helped bring Coyotl back to the Eagles a little sooner. He sounded worried.

  Then again, Oxhoco took a percentage of Coyotl’s earnings. If Coyotl wasn’t playing, there were no earnings. And with Coyotl’s contract expiring at the end of the season, an even bigger payday was in jeopardy.

  So I wasn’t surprised that Oxhoco was worried. If I’d had beans riding on Coyotl, I would have been worried too.

  Like all agents, regardless of whether they represented the most highly paid ball court players or Mirror writers or jewelry designers, Oxhoco had an office in the Merchant City.

  I told him that I would meet him in half an hour. Of course, it would have been more convenient for me to see him in my own office at the City Interrogation Center. But if I had learned anything in my cycles as an Investigator, it was that people were more forthcoming when they were questioned in familiar surroundings—and I needed Oxhoco to be forthcoming.

  I had barely hung up with him when I got a call on my radio. It was Pactonal.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  He sounded like he wanted to tell me something, but all I heard was a long, drawn-out yawn.

  “Up late?” I said.

  “Sorry, I couldn’t sleep. Not after that beating we took from Yopitzinco. All I could think about was Coyotl and how much we could have used him in the corridor.”

  I doubted that he was the only one who had lost sleep over that match. Aztlan had a lot of fans.

  “Did you think of something?” I ask
ed.

  “Not yet,” he said. “But I’ll be wracking my brain, that’s for sure.”

  Great, I thought.

  While I had him on the line, I took a shot: “Tell me, did Coyotl ever give you the impression he didn’t want to play a game?”

  Pactonal laughed. “That guy wanted to play even when there wasn’t a game. He wanted to play in his sleep.”

  Just then, I heard a female voice in the background. I couldn’t make out exactly what she was saying, but I got the general idea. Apparently, Coyotl’s disappearance wasn’t the only reason Pactonal had stayed up late.

  “Got to go,” he said. “Speak to you later.”

  “No doubt,” I replied—though, truthfully, I wasn’t looking forward to it. When I’d asked him to buzz me, it was in the hope that he would actually have something to say.

  Then something occurred to me. Coyotl’s current teammates hadn’t known a lot about him. But his previous teammates, guys who knew him when he first came up . . .

  I put in a call to one of them—a guy named Nagual who had played long enough to have been on my teams before he was on Coyotl’s. Unfortunately, I got no response. I left a message asking him to get back to me as soon as possible.

  As the Merchant City was enclosed on three sides by roadless hills, my driver had to cut back into Aztlan into order to get to Oxhoco’s place. In the auto-carriage as much as by rail, entering the Merchant City was like crossing over into a different world.

  The careful, ordered symmetry of broad streets, soaring pyramids, and splendid reflecting pools of Aztlan proper suddenly gave way to a frenzy of chaos and color. Where Aztlan was majestic, dignified, the Merchant City was a hive—each fat, bristling bee striving eagerly to crawl over all the others for the chance to suck up a little more nectar.

  I had never met Oxhoco before but I had heard a lot about him. After all, he represented not only Coyotl but a half-dozen other ball court players. From what I had heard, none of them were unhappy with his negotiations on their behalf.

  He turned out to be short and squat, with a couple of chins too many. A toad of a man. But a toad who liked expensive things, if the dramatic array of furnishings in his office was any indication.

  “What can I do to help?” he asked after we had sat down on matching ocelot-skin chairs under a painting of a sunset by an artist whose name escaped me. “Please tell me.”

  “How well do you know Coyotl?” I asked.

  He held out his pudgy hands, palms up. “I’m his agent, for the gods’ sakes.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  Just then, a woman walked into the room. She was beautiful in a girlish way, with long, dark lashes, a long, graceful neck, and long, shapely legs.

  But there was nothing girlish about her demeanor. She had that look I’d seen before in women who worked in the Merchant City—a look that said, “Beans first, everything else second.”

  “Investigator Colhua,” said Oxhoco, “this is Calli Ollin. She’s working with me for a little while, getting to know the ball court business.”

  I extended my hand to the woman. Her hand was slim but her grip was firm—a lot firmer, in fact, than Oxhoco’s had been.

  “A pleasure to meet you,” she said, her voice soft yet rough around the edges.

  “Same here,” I said.

  “I asked Ollin to join us,” said Oxhoco. “She’s been working with Coyotl pretty closely over the last half-cycle or so. I thought she might be of some value to your Investigation.”

  I nodded. “Thanks.” Then I asked Oxhoco the same question I’d asked him before: “How well do you know Coyotl?”

  This time he said, “Very well. He’s like a son to me.”

  “They’re not just business associates,” Ollin interjected. “Coyotl depends on Oxhoco for everything.”

  “What do we mean,” I asked, “by everything?”

  “Everything,” said Oxhoco. “I picked out his apartment in Tonatiuh. I bought him his clothes. I even introduced him to his friends. He doesn’t trust most people, and for good reason: Most of them want something from him. I make sure he’s surrounded by people he can trust.”

  “Including women?” I asked.

  The agent’s eyes narrowed. “What are you suggesting, Investigator? That I line up temple women for him?”

  “Temple women” was an old-fashioned way of saying “prostitutes.”

  “Do you?” I asked.

  “You don’t know Coyotl,” said Ollin, interrupting a second time. ”He doesn’t have to pay for women. They’re drawn to him the way moths are drawn to a flame.”

  I knew how that went. After all, I had played in the Sun League myself. But I had never been as big a star as Coyotl.

  “Does he have any enemies?” I asked.

  “Not one,” said Oxhoco. “People love him.”

  “Everyone has enemies,” I said.

  “Not Coyotl,” he insisted. “Even players on other teams admire him.”

  I couldn’t tell if he believed what he was saying or if it was just his agent’s brain working overtime.

  “All right,” I said, “what about his finances? To your knowledge, did he owe anybody beans?” I had already asked the question of Ichtaca and Xochipilli, but Oxhoco was in a better position to answer it than anyone else.

  “No,” he said, without a moment’s hesitation. “And before you ask, no one owed him any either. I made sure of it. I said if people take offense when you tell them no, you’re better off without them.”

  Good for you, I thought.

  “Did he have any health problems?” I asked. It was another question that I had asked before. But then, some ailments weren’t obvious even in the ball court.

  “Not one,” said the agent. “Any one of us would be happy to be as healthy as he is.”

  Agent’s hyperbole? It was hard to tell. As Coyotl’s representative, Oxhoco had every reason to present his client as the picture of health.

  I nodded. “That’s it for now. If anything else occurs to me, I’ll give you a buzz.”

  “I’ll be here,” Oxhoco assured me. He turned to Ollin. “Why don’t you show our guest to the door?”

  “Of course,” she said. She gestured. “This way.”

  I watched her unfold herself from her chair. It was by far not the most unpleasant thing I had done that day, or even that cycle. Following her down the hall was equally far from unpleasant.

  There was no question that Ollin was attractive. But I’d known lots of women who worked in the Merchant City, and I’d discovered the hard way that they weren’t my type. Too mercenary, too concerned with piling up the beans. So when we got to the door, all I said to Ollin was, “Thanks for your help.”

  I expected her to return my pleasantry with one of her own. Instead, she said, “You know, you were one of my favorite players when you were with the Eagles. I never missed one of your games on the Mirror.”

  “Really,” I said.

  “Really. In fact, I was present at the game against Yautepec—the one in which you got hurt.”

  “You were?” I asked, a little surprised.

  “Absolutely,” she confirmed, smiling a tight little smile.

  I frowned. “I didn’t mean to be rude. It’s just that—”

  “It was five cycles ago, and I don’t look twenty-five.”

  Ever since a boy of fifteen cycles was killed at a match between Yautepec and Ixtapaluca, you had to be twenty to get through the gates. “Well,” I said, “yeah.”

  “It’s all right,” she said. “I get that a lot.”

  “Where were you sitting?” I asked, hoping to get past my little gaff.

  “The corridor.”

  Corridor seats were hard to come by—even for me, and I still had some contacts. At a championship game, they were nearly impossible. With his connections, Oxhoco might have gotten his hands on them, but Ollin was too young to have been working for Oxhoco back then.

  So her family had had a few
beans.

  “You had a good view,” I said.

  “I did—of the game, and also of what happened to you.”

  I didn’t remember everything that had happened to me in the ball court, but the gods knew I remembered that. Lands of the Dead, I remembered it every day.

  “You were down a goal,” she said, as of to prove to me that she had been there, “and the Yautepec defenders had the ball right in front of me. You were trying to dig it out before time expired. It was two against one, but somehow you wrestled it away from them.”

  And set my eyes on the goal, with only the center to beat, and the seconds spinning away like leaves trapped in a flood.

  “You pretended to kick from where you were, hoping the center would move up to block you. He did. You took advantage of the fact, making a quick move around him.”

  The fans were counting down, their voices like thunder in the confines of the Arena. Six, five, four . . .

  I pulled my leg back to make the shot, but before I could bring it forward I saw someone come at me from my left. It occurred to me that he might be in time to block my shot. But I didn’t rush.

  I put all my concentration into driving the ball through the hoop.

  A fraction of a second before I made contact, I felt something hit my plant leg from the side. Not the ball, but my leg.

  And more specifically, my knee.

  “It must have hurt,” she said.

  More than you can imagine, I thought. But what I said was, “I guess. It was a long time ago.”

  She studied me for a moment. “You hungry?”

  It was the second time she had surprised me in the last couple of minutes. “Sure,” I said.

  It was almost dinner time, after all. And if anybody wanted to get me, I had my radio on.

  “I know a place,” she said. “My treat.”

  I couldn’t have asked for a better deal than that.

  I expected Ollin’s “place” to be one of the nicer restaurants along the River of Stars in District Fifteen. That was where you saw all the up-and-coming, young merchants after they left their offices in the Merchant City.

  It was a restaurant all right, but it wasn’t in District Fifteen. It was in the heart of the Merchant City, the kind of establishment where the menu had tomato stains on it and the piper in the corner was playing for tips.