The Queen Jade

by Yxta Maya Murray

  “You said Von Humboldt and de la Cueva took the same route.”

  “As far as we know, yes.”

  “And she was going up there too. She mentioned the rain, like I said, and I don’t think she went with anyone else—they were probably put off by the weather.”

  “But she was not.”

  “No,” I managed to say.

  He grimaced. “And is there anyone there?”

  I had the receiver pressed to my ear. But there was still just the monotonous, maddening ringing of an unanswered phone.

  CHAPTER 9

  Five hours later, at two in the morning, I got through.

  “Hello?” came my father’s voice. There was a beeping, and a skipping connection between us. Occasional static, fits of silence. I looked up at Erik, who still sat across from me at the table, holding on to his tea mug. He had been there half the night, and showed absolutely no signs of impatience, or of leaving.

  “Hello? Dad?”

  “Lola?”

  Then, simultaneously, and in Spanish:

  “Did you get through to Mom—”

  “Did your mother call you?”

  “Dad, where is she?”

  I heard a fumbling sound, and then a few blank seconds of nothing.

  “… problems with the line, darling,” he said. “Tried to reach you for days, but I couldn’t. Things are a mess here.”

  I gripped onto the receiver with both of my hands. My mother, ever the dinosaur, carried no cell phone with her, no pager, not even a portable computer. These niceties had always been transported for her by her graduate student minions, of which none could be depended on now, as she had gone out to the rain forest alone.

  My father went on. “I didn’t go out with her because—my stress condition. My—I’m afraid of going out there, and this is why. I thought she was in Antigua.”

  “That’s what she wrote me. She was going there, and then north.”

  “But it seems she left Antigua a few days ago. I couldn’t find her. I looked. I think she might have traveled to the forest before the storm.” He had a gravelly, rasping voice; he was obviously exhausted. The phone clicked and blanked again. Then his voice returned to the line. “The police are saying she’s disappeared, dear.”

  A blinding, painful panic brightened my mind.

  “Dad, it’s all right. I’m sure they’re wrong—Mom doesn’t disappear.”

  “… not all right.”

  “She’s probably off somewhere digging things up. Too absorbed in her work to call us.”

  “It sounds good when you say it.” He made a strained sound. “Maybe that’s all it is.”

  I made the decision in the next second, without really thinking about it.

  “I’m coming out there,” I went on. “I’m flying out there—”

  “Yes, all right. I don’t think that’s a bad idea.”

  “I’m flying out tonight. Tomorrow—depending on the planes. I’m going up there.”

  “Up where?”

  “Just around Antigua. Look around. Maybe Flores. Maybe farther north. If she doesn’t turn up first. If I can. Are there planes?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “The roads are destroyed—the army’s busy with the relocations—whole villages have been washed out. I’m not going to be of much use. And everyone’s left for the mountains—all the guides—they’re finding something up there. We’re going to have to get someone to go with you.”

  “You mean—”

  “Yolanda? Perhaps. I think she’s still in the city. But there must be better people to ask. She hasn’t been feeling very … well.”

  “We can talk about guides later. I’ll get her, or someone else—” I glanced over at Erik, who listened very carefully to my side of the conversation. “To help me out.”

  “All right, Lola.”

  “All right.”

  “I love you, sweetheart.”

  “I love you too, Dad.”

  I said good-bye and put the phone back into its cradle. I felt Erik’s leg bouncing beneath the table.

  “Yes,” he said, before I even asked.

  “What?”

  He had pushed his bangs up from his head. His eyes were large and shining.

  “Yes, I’ll go with you to look for your mother,” he said.

  “You’d do that?” I asked. “Why?”

  “Why not? I know Guatemala well enough. And…” He looked uncomfortable. “It’s the least I can do for the old Dowager. To help you look.”

  “Are you sure it’s not that you want to find a maze?”

  “Hey. I’m trying to—help you out.” He appeared extremely tense, as if even he weren’t sure what he was saying. “It’s not an offer I make to everyone.” He glanced away. “And, fine—I’ve told you I had a run of dry luck. So what if I’m interested in looking for some ruins while we’re there?”

  I placed my hands flat on the kitchen table, and tried to speak calmly, slowly. “How well do you know Guatemala?”

  “I was born there.”

  “I might have to go up to the jungle, though”—the words sounded exotic and improbable—”how well do you know it?”

  “Not as well as the cities. But I’ve been up there before, excavating.”

  I shook my head.

  “I’ll get someone to cover my classes,” he went on. “I’m ready to fly out there with you. I heard what you said to your father—you need a guide. Who else have you got?”

  “I might be able to ask a friend of mine who’s a tracker in the area—”

  “But—”

  “She kind of hates me.”

  “Ah. Who is it?”

  “Yolanda de la Rosa. Dr. De la Rosa’s daughter.”

  “What? The nutbag’s kid?”

  “She lived with us here. For five years—until 1980. Though I haven’t seen her since.”

  “That’s right—your parents knew de la Rosa. He’s dead now, of meningitis—”

  “I heard pneumonia—”

  “Anyway, I thought I’d heard some nasty stories about your father and de la Rosa and something about a quicksand pit.”

  “They weren’t friends for the past few years, it’s true,” I said.

  “He wasn’t friends with anyone. He was … obsessed. He set traps and things for other archaeologists. Foreigners, I mean. Acted very freaked out. He was a hero of sorts, sure. During the war. And a great theoretician. But afterward, he wouldn’t want the likes of you or even me looking around ‘his’ jungle. The whole U.S. issue. It’s the same with the daughter—you definitely wouldn’t want to bring her along, from what I understand. He was a loon—not only because of the booby-trapping business, but because he kept on looking for the stone, the Jade. I find it bizarre that your mother would have come around to his way of thinking.” He yanked on his bangs. “But all the same, it’s clear enough you don’t have anyone else to help you.”

  “Looks that way, Erik,” I admitted.

  He adjusted his tie. “So. Do you want to have the alarmingly impressive Dr. Gomara to help you out? Or do you just want to flail around the jungle by yourself?”

  I looked at his wild hair, his nice tie, his stocky frame; I remembered his reputation. Then I thought of my mother. I had a sudden horrid image of her alone and cold in that rain.

  “All right.”

  “Then it’s settled,” he said, and smiled, his bangs gently fluttering back onto his forehead.

  CHAPTER 10

  The next day, Erik and I arrived in the rush and chaos of a partially flooded Guatemala City. I grabbed my copies of the Rough Guide and Lonely Planet guidebooks as we exited customs, then the airport. Along with our fellow travelers, dressed up in their sunglasses and high-tech walking shoes, we moved into the crowd of merchants outside the terminal, which included black-eyed ladies with textiles balanced carefully on their heads. Men in neat slacks and plain cotton shirts sold bits of green jade—necklaces; bracelets; little replica idols carved into the shapes of
feathered serpents or dragons. Men and boys carried bags of macadamia nuts and cashews packed in plastic bags, CDs in shiny jewel cases, and cigarettes. Some folks simply stood out on the curb, offering taxi rides. And zipping up and down the street was an assortment of white and yellow cabs.

  “Let’s go,”Erik said.

  I perched on the curb along with the taxi men, and while they asked me questions about my destination, I paged through my guidebooks. Looking up from the graphs in these guides, I saw a kinetic and roving place full of obscure codes that had no clear connection to the orderly world of “good” and “bad” zones and “cheap” vs. “expensive” lodgings set forth in the Lonely Planet. I had somehow believed that being a multilingual Mexican-American who had traveled to Guatemala a few times as a young girl might prove of some use on this journey, but that little fantasy was quickly crushed to pieces.

  “Get in, get in,” Erik said, opening the door of a white cab he’d flagged down.

  We sped through the watery streets of Guatemala City and toward the Museo de Arqueología y Etnología, where my father waited for us. Down we rushed in a tense silence through La Reforma, one of the largest streets in the city, which cleaves through the city’s twenty-one different zones. New billboards flashed by, with their images of soap-pale models, and next to us motored brightly painted school buses, the so-called chicken buses, painted like rainbows and glittering with chrome details like glued-on Mercedes emblems and decals of Jesus Christ, and the silver silhouettes of nipple-proud girls usually found on the mud flaps of eighteen-wheelers. During the hurricane a number of trees lining the avenue had crashed into the middle of the road, causing commuters to experiment with lethal driving tactics. A wave of water hit the windshield and utterly obscured our vision. Through the wipered window, a flatbed appeared, carrying a bulk of jerking acacias that threatened to leap at any moment from the van and welcome us to Guatemala in their grassy embrace. Army soldiers stood outside stores holding shiny short rifles in their hands, which did not seem an enticement to shop.

  “Are you all right?” Erik asked, frowning into my face.

  “Yes,” I said after a few moments. I was lying.

  “Maybe so, but you’re looking a little bit like Charles Manson right now.”

  “What?”

  “We’d better perk up that complexion. I think that what you need is some more sausage and chocolate.”

  “You stuffed me on the plane already. I can’t eat another bite.”

  “Hush up. Food’s the best cure for hysteria. Breakfast will be just the thing.” He dug into his pack and brought up the little baked breads and Saran-wrapped roasted meats, assorted murky cheeses, and foil-enfolded slices of chocolate cake that he had been feeding me on the flight.

  “No, no, no,” I said.

  “Oh, yes” he said, putting a chocolate cupcake to my lips.

  I ate it. Then he pinched my ear and picked up the cell phone to call my father, while I ate some of the nuts he shoved into my hand.

  “No word?” he said into the receiver. “I was hoping she might have called by now.”

  “Mom?”I asked.

  He nodded. “She’s fine. She appears to be taking it all in at the moment. … The streets are completely flooded. I know it’s worse in the north. We’ll be there in maybe an hour, Señor Alvarez. Depending on this traffic—what do you mean?” Erik paused, and widened his eyes. “What did they find up there? It’s only a rumor? But you think—”

  “Who found what?” I asked.

  Erik finished the conversation and hung up the phone.

  “Who found what?” I asked again. “What’s going on?”

  “Apparently a great deal of blue jade has been discovered in the mountains,” he said, blinking rapidly.

  “My mother mentioned something about that—which mountains?”

  “The Sierra de las Minas.”

  “Yes—right.”

  “Your father says nothing’s really clear yet—and it may not be for a long time. There was some sort of landslide, it all came tumbling out. It’s possible that there’s a mine up there, he says. There’s already a team or two racing up to the area. They’re going to have to dig—and if they find something, it might be huge.”

  “It sounds like it.” I looked out the window.

  He rubbed his face with excitement, so his eyebrows sprang out from his face. “It would raise all sorts of interesting possibilities.”

  “Like the source of the wealth of the ancient Maya, for one,” I said.

  “Uh-huh. Where they got the stone for the idols and the masks and the Stelae. And it might tell why they disappeared.”

  “It would give us a source for the stories, too.”

  “The fairy stories about the Jade. And the mazes.”

  “Exactly.”

  “If we really did find them, it would be like—I don’t know—sort of like when Charles Maclaren found the ruins of Troy. … He was this amateur archaeologist—”

  “I’ve heard of him.”

  “It’d be like that, wouldn’t it?”

  I peered out the window again to see the thin lake that was the highway, and several macadamia sellers getting very wet. In my mind, I mapped out the country. Guatemala is composed of the highlands in the south, and the lowland Peten rain forest, or jungle, in the north; the extensive mountain range known as the Sierra de las Minas extends east-west through the mideastern quadrant of the country. But an east-west direction was very much off track from Antigua, which sits directly south of highland Guatemala City—and also came nowhere near the northward city of Flores and the Peten jungle.

  “I’m not going to the Sierra,” I said. “My mother wasn’t headed in that direction.”

  “I’m not saying I’m going,” Erik said. He was bouncing his knee with an alarming force. “I—I—well, the mountains are already crawling with Harvard diggers. But we’re the only ones besides your mother who’ll be going to the rain forest now. We’ll be the ones to scout out the topography and get together our own team. And if she was right that the first maze is out there …”

  “All that can happen once we find her,” I said.

  He began to examine the lint on his slacks with great concentration. “That’s what I meant.”

  Outside, the air was a thin and watery gray. A few clouds hovered above, shot through by black power lines. The sky looked like a vast sheet of music.

  I don’t know if Erik noticed all of this as he stared out his own window. He seemed absorbed in the idea of searching for Von Humboldt’s jungle mazes without any competition.

  I hadn’t explained this to him yet, but I had decided that I had to convince Yolanda de la Rosa to guide us, should I need to go up to the forest to look for my mother. Yolanda was the only person I knew who could lead me through that wood. When she was just a girl, her father had taught her each of its paths, its secrets, the location of its bogs and fens, its burial grounds, its havens of tigers and birds. If my mother was there, Yolanda would be able to find her.

  Though I hadn’t seen her in years since she’d left Long Beach and returned to Guatemala, I was confident that her temper and her devotion to Tomas de la Rosa were just as scorching as ever. And even if she were still mad at me, I knew she also remained a fanatic for any clues that would help her track down those mazes and the Jade that her beloved father had failed to discover. She’d never turn down a chance to finish what he’d started.

  I would tell her about Mom’s e-mail, and if I had the slightest fear that she wouldn’t help us, I’d imply that my mother had sent me information that would help her find the Stone. I’d tell her anything I had to. And if I did convince Yolanda, that would mean a pretty nasty bit of rivalry for Professor Gomara.

  Whether it would be the best thing for me and my mom, though, I still didn’t know.

  CHAPTER 11

  The Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología, in the heart of the city’s Zone Thirteen, is housed in a dove-white colonial palace b
uilt to harbor nineteenth-century Spanish ladies in white gloves. Its halls were once fragrant with orchids, ornamented by purebred dogs, and made humid by crystal fountains. It does not seem, then, a natural home for the weapons and fanged idols of pre-Columbians, but as Erik and I climbed the steps leading up to the museum and entered through a doorway decorated with a brilliant mural of Maya warriors, it was just these sorts of mementos we glimpsed in the building’s corridors and inner chambers.

  We bustled toward the reception desk, which was tucked into a corner on the north side of the foyer. A woman cashier stood beside a small display of glossily bound books, coffee cups, and T-shirts, the latter bearing color photo decals of images taken from the Flores Stelae. We paid our quetzales for our entrance fee, shelved our two backpacks and suitcases behind the desk, and made our way into the galleries.

  I had been here several times as a girl. I knew the general layout of the place, which hadn’t changed so very much in the ensuing decades. I remembered precisely the location of the one treasure that I wanted to see there besides my father.

  Erik did too.

  “Come on,” he said. “You’re going to love this.”

  Steering me by the elbows, he walked as if by instinct toward a particular back room, which held the most beautiful and occult piece of art in the museum’s collection.

  My shoe heels made an echoing sound as we rushed through the first rooms of the museum. From behind the polished glass of the display cases I could see the skulls of antediluvian humans, adorned with mosaics of bright blue turquoise and leaf gold. The jeweled heads stared out at observers, grinning and luminescent. Human teeth glittered in the dioramas, too, displayed in little clay bowls or spread out on white pieces of linen. Primitive but unexpectedly luxurious dentistry was evident from these remains; the cavities of these forefathers had been drilled, then filled with what appeared to be tiny stopper stones of lapis lazuli or jade. There were startling ithyphallic sculptures as well, and basalt-stone bowls where the blood of sacrificial victims once welled. And in the far corner of the room we saw a preserved tumba, or tomb, uncovered years back in a cave in the remote Peten. Inside lay a child’s skeleton, with bones the color of vellum, and whose concave skull bore witness to a heavy blow. The curators had surrounded the body with pots containing grain and jewels, much as it had appeared when first excavated.