Sacrifice

by Farris, John

  "Sure. My brother's a West Pointer. He flew gunships in Vietnam, until he lost a leg. Kyle had me soloing when I was fifteen."

  "Are you working at Kan Petén?"

  "No, our dig's down at Dos Pilas. I'm here for a few days, then back to work until the rains set in."

  "Nice talking to you, Glen. Here's your goop."

  "You're welcome to what's left, I have more."

  I thanked him and walked over to the offices, where the overhanging roof provided a little shade. The name NILS LAGERFELD was on one of the doors. I knocked a couple of times.

  "Come," he said, sounding irritable.

  I opened the door. The room inside was filled with crude shelves piled high with broken pieces of pottery. An old air conditioner in one window dripped on the concrete floor. He was seated in his wheelchair behind a long table, red of face and sweating under high-intensity lamps, handling more pieces of pottery laid out on a shallow square of wire mesh.

  "Yes? What is it?"

  I closed the door. "May I ask you a couple of questions, Dr. Lagerfeld?"

  "Questions?"

  "It's about the man you were talking to in the cafeteria—the one who said you'd mistaken him for somebody else."

  "Oh, him. So?"

  I held out my folder with badge and photo ID. He was wearing a pair of glasses with magnifying lenses attached. He raised the glasses to the crown of his head.

  "What is this? Police?" He looked up at me. "Where do you come from?"

  "Sky Valley, Georgia. Near Atlanta."

  "Oh, yes. Georgia. 'The Peach State.' I was there once, for a lecture. At the Institute of Technology. You are interested in this man I spoke to? What has he done, that you come so far?"

  "The worst thing I can say about him is that he was a bigamist, but the wives I know of aren't alive to complain."

  Lagerfeld heard the nuances in that statement that I hoped would intrigue him.

  "What is his name?"

  "He's had several names. When he was here, nineteen years ago—" Lagerfeld's eyebrows rose slightly as I confirmed his memory for faces, "—he was using the name Frederick Sullivan."

  "Sullivan." He repeated it to himself a couple of times, and shook his head. "No, I don't remember names. But I would have made notes of our meeting, as we spent several hours together one afternoon. He was very knowledgeable about Maya culture, for someone not in the profession. Almost like a genius, a genius manqué."

  "Do you think you could identify a picture of his daughter? Her name was Bonnie."

  "Yes, I think so. You have a picture with you?"

  "No. When would it be convenient?"

  Lagerfeld shrugged. "I am here, every day. And often until late at night." He looked slowly around his workroom and office. "What we know of these marvelous people, only a fraction. What I have learned in my lifetime, a much smaller fraction. And I have lived very much longer than I was given, as a child. You see that I am in a wheelchair. 'Archeology?' they said. 'It is a profession for the able-bodied. What can you hope to contribute?' My strengths, I said. Patience, passion, scholarship, inspiration. Eh? But who knows where I would have gone, what discoveries I might have made, with a sound body."

  He fell silent, staring, not at me, but at something from the past that made him uneasy. Suddenly he snapped out of it, wheeled his chair around, came to an old steel filing cabinet, rusting away in places, and yanked open a drawer. Well-worn file folders inside, tied with black ribbons. He searched for a few moments, yanked out a file and opened it.

  "Knowledgeable," he muttered, and I barely heard him over the noise the air conditioner was making, "but a braggart. We both had too much to drink that day—still, I remember—yes, yes, this is it!"

  He read through some dog-eared, handwritten pages as if he'd forgotten I existed, twisting his lower lip between the thumb and index finger of one hand, then turned the wheelchair again with a chuckle.

  "I had forgotten some of this. His scholarship, which impressed me, and his—flights of fancy, which I remember amused me greatly. But I held my tongue. One could tell, drunk or sober, he was not a man to be ridiculed."

  "Sullivan?"

  "What name does he have now?"

  "Greg Walker."

  "You know him personally?"

  "Yes."

  "Describe him in one word."

  "Dangerous," I said, not needing to think about it.

  "Ah. The trait persists, along with his remarkable, perhaps unique, youthfulness. He appears untouched by time. Apparently I misjudged him, at our first meeting. He claimed, then, to have access to some talisman of eternal life . . . it is coming back to me now. 'An elixir?' I said. Oh, we were quite drunk. But I am never too drunk, understand. To listen, observe, remember. He sat back, glowering at me. He tapped his chest with a finger. 'This heart,' he said, 'will continue beating when you are dust. This hand—' he held it over the center of the table, and made a fist, '—will never lose its strength.' Then he opened his fist and turned his hand over, palms up. 'Look,' he said. 'Each line is a lifetime; and there are more lines than you can count.' It was true. His palm was as finely meshed as the screen on this table.

  "Well, I said that he was a braggart. I played along. 'But you haven't told me to what you owe this gift of immortality.' He looked at me with a certain contempt that was gradually replaced by an expression of—forbearance. There was salt on the table in the comedor where we had whiled away the afternoon. He spread the salt across the table and wetted it with beer; then he drew in it with a fingertip. 'Can you read these glyphs?' he asked me. I could not. They were not like anything I had seen on the lintels or hieroglyphic stairs of Kan Petén or other sites in the vicinity."

  Lagerfeld handed me a sheet of paper covered with glyphs.

  "I drew these, with a ballpoint pen on the palm of my left hand, when he got up to visit the WC.

  "I cannot read them today," he admitted. "Nevertheless, I strongly believe the glyphs are part of a written language that either predates the Mayan language, or existed concurrently with it. When Sullivan saw that I was puzzled, and frustrated, he laughed and said, 'The priests have always had a language of their own. The Catholic Mass was in Latin for nearly two thousand years, wasn't it? Okay, the quatrefoil signifies an opening in the earth. That much you know, I am sure.' He was toying with me, as an adept will mock the clumsy efforts of the novitiate. Then he pointed to other glyphs . . . I don't remember which ones, but they represented, he claimed, Three Descents, the Great Star shining, the Lesser Star occluded, and the River of Blood.

  "'The River of Blood,' he said, 'is the river of eternal life.'"

  "And you don't think he was making all of this up?" I said to Lagerfeld.

  "If he was, then he was mixing fact and fiction in a rather dazzling display of virtuosity. He read texts, from photographs, the keys to which had only recently been discovered. He had a knowledge of the Dresden Codex eclipse tables that was virtually encyclopedic."

  "There are all kinds of madmen," I said. "But I guess this one is in a class by himself. Did he give you any hint that he'd been here before?"

  "No. May I see that again, please? Now that my curiosity is—"

  He took back the page of glyphs, turned it in a couple of directions, then put the paper on the table where we could both see it, and placed a finger beneath one of the glyphs.

  "This is familiar. Allowing for discrepancies from the haste with which I reproduced the glyphs, I've seen this one worn on the clothing of victims of blood sacrifice."

  "Human sacrifice? I thought only the Aztecs—"

  "No, no. The Maya routinely offered the bodies of captives to the Vision-Serpent and other gods. The usual method was through ritual decapitation, but there were other ways, as ingenious as any bloody-minded priest could conceive."

  "Why?"

  "Their purpose? Religious propitiation, to enjoy the favor of the gods. To make themselves stronger in the eyes of their peers."

  "Or with the no
tion that to take someone else's life would help them to live longer?"

  "If so, all their efforts were in vain. If we know anything about the Maya, we know that for all their privilege most of the royals had normal life spans. Often they did not live as long as the average citizen because of the exhausting rituals of self-inflicted bloodletting. Or they were unlucky enough to be taken prisoner by a rival."

  "Getting back to Sullivan. Did he say anything that would give you the impression he might have been so caught up in Maya lore and religion that he'd done some bloodletting himself?"

  Lagerfeld shook his head slowly. "No. That would be grotesque, would it not?"

  "More like fatal for someone."

  "What? Do you really believe this man may be a homicidal maniac?"

  "I hope not. Jesus, how I hope it isn't true. Because if it is, then I can be reasonably sure most of his victims have been his own children."

  Once I spoke what had been on my mind for a while, I knew the waiting game was over. Now it was time for me to do something about Greg Walker.

  "It is a formidable difficulty, and I fear that you ask too much when you ask me to solve it. The past and present are within the field of my inquiry, but what a man may do in the future is a hard question to answer."

  My mentor again, replying to a question of Dr. Watson's in The Hound of the Baskervilles. Wishful thinking that I had even one-tenth of Sherlock Holmes's (or his author's) cleverness. I knew that I wasn't clever at all. My basic virtues were curiosity, skepticism, and thoroughness. Might as well add a fourth virtue: I was no quitter. For all the good that was going to do me, because what I was up against had me goddamned scared. No, that didn't go deep enough: I felt the kind of elemental panic a timid child feels in the dark, in an unfamiliar place. I could remember every scene of every movie that had terrified me when I was a boy, and the aftermath: the sick headaches, the queasy stomach. I had learned to be relatively fearless, as a cop in uncontrollable situations, by concentrating very hard on the results to be achieved. And by shutting down my imagination. The more vivid the imagination, the less control you have over your nerves or emotions at crunch time. Greg Walker had a certain power over me because, one, I didn't understand him, and two, I didn't know how he would react when threatened.

  At least temporarily, I had to take those advantages away from him. Establish, in his mind, my own power, even if most of it was a deception. Get him off balance and keep him there, but not to the point of desperation.

  And stay cool, Butterbaugh.

  Thanks to the miracle goop Glen Hazen had given to me, my assortment of skin irritations was diminishing. For most of the afternoon I tried to relax in my room at the Itzá Maya, having an occasional cautious nip from a quart of sour mash I'd brought with me to Guatemala. And Sharissa was alone in the bungalow a couple of hundred feet away, trying to nap. From time to time I tuned in on her while I decided how to word the message I was going to send to her father. I had already settled on the best place for us to have our meeting.

  I wanted to stun him when I played my opening card. But I didn't want him to cut and run, with Sharissa, to another, even remoter place. It encouraged me to think that probably he needed to be here, in Cobían, that for some reason he couldn't leave right now. We all seemed to be hostages to events taking shape in a calculating but seriously bent mind.

  Toward evening I napped with the headset on. Greg had been there for a while, and left. I was awakened by another voice: Veronica's.

  "It was probably a bat."

  And Sharissa:

  "Could you leave the louvers open? I like looking at the moon. It's almost full."

  "Yes, in three days. There is an eclipse this month."

  I took off the headset, yawned, got up to go to the bathroom. Then I put on pants and a shirt. It was dark now. I saw the rising moon and heard voices from the terrace; the kitchen staff was getting the nightly buffet ready. Quarter past eight. I picked up the headset again.

  "—Something else. Not only superstition—more than that, I'm sure. In three days, the eclipse. Like before, when the Marquise—I doan know how to esplain—por favor, let me go!"

  I don't know what had spooked Veronica, but she had my full attention. And Sharissa's.

  "What do you mean? What about the eclipse?"

  "My cousin ask me to be with you—few days only, he said. A favor to him."

  "I know that. Till the Randalls drive up from Usumucinta."

  "Saturday they will be coming."

  "Yes."

  "One day before the eclipse."

  "So what?"

  Veronica had nothing more to say. I heard the screen door bang shut.

  My binoculars were handy. I picked them up and went outside on the balcony, focused on bungalow nine. I saw Veronica, dressed as always like a woman soldier in a high-fashion ad, walking away fast. Then Sharissa came bounding out of the bungalow and took off after her. I lost both of them behind a huge Ceiba tree that was thickly hung with lianas.

  With everyone out of the bungalow, it seemed like an ideal time to leave my message for Greg.

  During the afternoon I had done a cut-and-paste job from headlines in a Spanish-language newspaper. Big black letters that read: I KNOW ABOUT BONNIE SULLIVAN. Then, underneath, the invitation, if he wanted to think of it as that: MEET ME TOMORROW 9 P.M. BASILICA ILUMINATA.

  I inserted the message card into one of the hotel's envelopes, on which I had printed Personal–Greg Walker, and put it in a cargo pocket of my vest. Then I hurried down to the garden. I didn't know how soon Sharissa would be going back to the bungalow. It didn't matter to me if she found the message before Greg did. Probably she would obey the personal request, but regardless I knew she would be sure to show it to him.

  As usual there were a couple of guards on the perimeter of the garden; I recognized both and they knew me. Buenas noches. Buenos noches, guys. They paid no attention as I strolled on to the bungalows, past a cage of howler monkeys and another cage like a wrought-iron tower of Babel, filled with scarlet macaws, parrots, and toucans.

  I went up the steps to number nine in no particular hurry and slipped my envelope under the screen door. As I was leaving I heard Veronica's voice—¡Ay Dios!—from another part of the garden; then nothing more. But my curiosity was stimulated. It was obvious she was agitated tonight, and I thought it might be worthwhile to find out why.

  At a few minutes before nine I was back in my room, dictating everything I'd overheard in the garden—Veronica's story about the old Don and the star-crossed virgin lovers who, Veronica claimed, had been murdered for their transgressions.

  ". . . It was too late for her to find another virgin to take his place."

  I had been so involved in eavesdropping, trying to get closer and closer to the two of them without attracting their attention—although Sharissa had glanced my way once when I was on the move and, I'm sure, had seen me that with a little bad luck Greg Walker and I would've bumped into each other. But I had just moved as much into the dark and as far off the path as possible, standing very still between two small feather-duster palms. And his eyes were on Sharissa anyway, as she sat shivering on a stone bench.

  "Girl talk?"

  Veronica went by me first, close enough that I could see into the bore of her Uzi, her scarred face gleaming in the moonlight. But her eyes were fixed straight ahead. If I was a bloodhound, I probably would've been able to smell the fear streaming off her. She was followed by Greg and Sharissa, who had an arm around his waist. Her head was on his shoulder.

  ". . . Veronica was in some kind of mood. I think she must be one of those people who are affected by the full moon, you know?"

  Meaning she thought Veronica might be two bricks shy of a load. That wouldn't have surprised me, either. But I wanted to have a conversation with her myself, just to be sure. The moon was nearly full over the lake and an eclipse was due—of the moon, or the sun, I had no idea which. Eclipses seemed to have something to do with the death of v
irgins, at least in Veronica's fatalistic visions. The craziness was compounding faster than I could keep track of it. ". . . another virgin to take his place." Take his place for what? Ritual slaughter?

  Veronica might have been getting to that when Greg interrupted. It was the part of her story I needed to hear now.

  Five after nine. Dinner was now being served on the terrace. Greg and Sharissa, by themselves in the courts enclosure, were playing tennis. I watched them for a few minutes, wondering how Greg had reacted to the note I'd left in their bungalow. I was beginning to have symptoms from going without food for too long. I went back inside and called room service.

  While I waited on a chicken sandwich, fries, coffee, and crème brûlée, I made an effort to locate Veronica.

  I knew that her last name was Nespral, and that her husband had been killed in a minor skirmish involving the rebels. Nowadays she worked for her cousin Francisco. Maybe she lived in the hotel.

  The hotel telephone operator told me she didn't. I was reluctant to ask her any more questions about Veronica, because hotel operators were incorrigible gossips. There were other ways to track her down.

  A waiter came with my order. I ate my sandwich standing up at the sliding door to the balcony, watching Greg and Sharissa wind up their tennis match. He went back downhill to the bungalow, and she stood, all alone, watching him. Something about the way she looked on the brick-red court in her white shorts and sweater, a little-girl pose with hands loosely clasped below her back, leaning on her left foot—I grabbed a light meter and decided that, with a 250mm lens on my camera and ASA 2000 color negative, I'd get some interesting portraits. I put on my dark blue Braves cap and went outside on the balcony.

  I took a couple of shots; then Sharissa turned and walked out of the courts enclosure. At the same time the lights went off. She was looking up, in my direction. I didn't have enough film speed for moonlight only-4000 ASA black-and-white would have given me some grainy but interesting close-ups, that starkly pretty face, her hair swept back—but I took one more with what I already had in the Nikon, then went back inside.