Tears of the Jaguar

by Hartley, A. J.

“Miss Miller is not here,” Bowerdale concluded.

  And she wouldn’t know what to do anyway, he added in his head.

  “We’ll have to cover the hole,” he said.

  “The entire cenote?” said James. “We’ll never do it. We don’t have the materials.”

  “Then we had better get them, hadn’t we?” said Bowerdale.

  “OK,” the kid said with a shrug, his tone suggesting that it wasn’t OK at all. “I’ll tell Eustachio.”

  “And tell him he can come down here himself next time,” said Bowerdale. “I don’t like dealing with errand boys.”

  James bridled.

  “He can’t manage the ladder safely,” he said. “His leg...”

  “Then maybe he should find a new line of work.”

  James took a breath and said, “You want me to pass that along too?”

  “Just get them to cover the hole,” said Bowerdale.

  The student didn’t speak or nod. He just turned and made his way back down the passage. In seconds, Bowerdale could hear the ladder creaking as he climbed up to the surface.

  James was right, of course. There was no way they would be able to cover the cenote in any way that would really keep people out, and he wouldn’t have insisted on it if he hadn’t started to feel so crossed. He adjusted the light he had brought down with him so he could look at the jewels and the rest of the bundle with the carved piece of tree trunk, the ring, and the gold rod with the dove. It annoyed him to admit it, but Miller was right. They just didn’t belong. He needed to find out what they were and quickly. In the right hands, he was sure they would be worth something. Possibly a great deal.

  He heard the noise of the ladder but didn’t bother turning until he realized it was her, bent almost double in the low passage.

  “You told them to cover the entire hole?” she said, without preamble.

  “We have to protect the tomb.”

  “Not like that, we don’t. That could take days, even if we had the materials, which we don’t.”

  “So what’s your solution?”

  “We set up fence posts and ropes to cordon off the cenote, for safety as much as anything else...”

  “That won’t keep people out if they want to get in.”

  “That was why I was about to propose that we stay here overnight. We can work shifts, some preparing the lab, the others watching the tomb.”

  “For how long?”

  “Until we can safely move everything out,” she said.

  “That could be weeks.”

  “It won’t be that long. It can’t be. We’ll get work lights out here so we can start shifting stuff out as soon as they have the storage space ready.”

  “Days, then,” said Bowerdale.

  “I put in a request to get the official archivist down here as soon as we made the discovery yesterday. I’m hoping we can get him tomorrow or the day after. When he gets here, we can start the cataloging process. In the meantime, we ready transit crates and we prepare the lab to receive the artifacts. OK?”

  He wanted to argue, doubly so now that he realized that James was behind her, shadowed by her great stork-like frame, listening.

  “You’re the boss,” he said.

  Chapter Fourteen

  James had volunteered to take the first watch because he knew Alice didn’t want to do it and because he thought she would be impressed by how casually he agreed to sit in a tomb in the jungle in the dark. Alice was sexy, in a grungy kind of way. She wore no makeup except black eyeliner and had a tough-looking tattoo on one shoulder. Her skin was so pale it was almost translucent, like she’d been living underground for most of her life. She had strong, sinewy arms, and her legs were made for hiking boots, but her chest and belly were soft. She had great boobs. Not real big, but shapely. Sometimes she went without a bra and you could see her wide, pink nipples through her shirt. Nice.

  He walked around the rope that circled the cenote, looking at the sky. He’d never seen so many stars in his life. James, who had been raised in Hackensack, had barely spent a day in the country in his life. His folks had taken him camping in Pennsylvania once but they had come back early when he reacted badly to a bee sting. He’d been a city kid ever since, which was perfect really, since he was the kind of out-and-proud geek most at home in front of his MacBook or PlayStation, venturing out only to go to classes, the library, or the movies. Being here in the dark, with no one around, and just the chirping of crickets and frogs, was like being on another planet.

  Alice.

  He hadn’t fancied her that much when he first met her. But he’d gotten used to her scowl and the way she looked you right in the eye when she talked. And she didn’t have the same smug look as a lot of cute girls he’d seen, the look that said, Forget it, loser. Sometimes the two of them sat up late and drank tequila together, talking about the clueless undergrads and Blowhard Bowerdale. Soon, he hoped, she might sleep with him. She wouldn’t think it was a big deal. It was to him, but she didn’t need to know that. His best chance with Alice was if she thought they were just fooling around, and that it didn’t mean anything. That was partly why he liked her. She was immune to other people. He envied her that, wished he cared less about things, including her.

  He checked his watch. He had already been there an hour, sitting under the deeper shade of the ancient acropolis. He spent ten minutes at the mouth of the tunnel flicking stones into the cenote, listening for their distant splash, and then decided to check out the tomb. He could sit down there in the dark and listen to Bauhaus on his iPod: crank the whole eleven minutes of “Bella Lugosi’s Dead” down there among the bones.

  Cool.

  He got a flashlight, stepped over the rope, and eased his way off the platform and onto the aluminum ladder. They had lashed it at the top with nylon rope and pinned it into the earth below with steel pegs, but the metal had a natural spring in it, and it felt precarious. He hadn’t admitted it to anyone, but he didn’t like heights, and the prospect of falling into the cenote with its underground river and who knew what swimming in it scared the crap out of him.

  The birds had discovered the new water source before the sun had gone down, and he’d watched what he thought were swallows diving down and skimming the surface with their beaks. He thought it was one of them that whistled past his head as he began his descent, but he realized as it whirred and fluttered away that it was actually a bat. He wasn’t crazy about bats either. They had vampire bats down here too, he thought.

  Just focus on the ladder.

  With each footstep, the metal bounced and shifted under his weight, and he was glad to get a foot on the remains of the passage floor. He turned carefully, because the roof was low. Deborah had to virtually crawl just to get in. James wasn’t so sure about Deborah. He liked her OK, he guessed, but she seemed kind of hard, not with Alice’s whatever apathy, but with something else, something deep and focused. Determination, maybe. She was kind of cute, for an older chick, but she was a good four inches taller than him, and that wasn’t cool.

  Deborah had said they probably wouldn’t have work lights and a generator for at least another day. He snapped on the flashlight and the beam fell on the carved faces flanking the fanged hell mouth with the measuring rods they had set up for the pictures. He moved the beam into the opening and found the skeleton with the green death mask, its eyes and teeth made of unnaturally bright alabaster shells, and he shuddered. The place had been weird even in daylight. Now, in the dark—the kind of dark a city boy like James had never seen before—with only the yellowish circle of his flashlight, it was beyond creepy, like being miles under the earth. Every sound reverberated oddly, and he could hear the soft lapping of the water in the cenote funneled up to him like it was being amplified through some old-timey ear trumpet.

  Still, weird or not, it was also kind of cool, he told himself. He imagined what kind of mileage he’d get out of it back in the States. Any time anyone mentioned Bauhaus he’d have the best story about this one time
in Mexico when he listened to Peter Murphy chanting about the virginal brides filing past Bela Lugosi’s tomb, while he was sitting in an actual tomb with this ancient Mayan king lying exactly where he had lain for fifteen hundred years or more, with real vampire bats wheeling and swooping in the night just outside the tomb’s entrance.

  Ting.

  James looked up. It was the sound of the ladder. The sound of weight on the ladder. He listened, motionless.

  Ting.

  And something else, a shuffling, scratching sound. Someone was coming down. Someone who was moving slowly, as if they did not want to be heard.

  For a second he sat immobile, staring at the black hollow of the door, and when the sound came again, he felt his heart rising in his throat. He remembered the flashlight and spun it toward the entrance. It showed nothing but the tunnel itself and, if he bent and squinted a little, the very bottom of the ladder. Whoever was on the ladder wasn’t down yet. Perhaps the light would warn them off. He played it around the tunnel walls and then, on impulse, began to talk, naturally as he could. Not shouting, just chatting, as if there was someone in here with him.

  “Just down Essex Street from the medical center,” he said. “You know it?”

  He hesitated and then, without really deciding to, added a kind of grunt in a lower register, something that might sound like another voice.

  “Lived there all my life until college.”

  He added another grunt, and behind it, out in the passage, there was silence. His eyes were wide, fixed on the entrance to the tomb, his mouth shaping words that hadn’t gone through his mind, all his attention focused on what he might hear outside.

  “Anyway, I figured I’d just...”

  Ting.

  The sound stopped him. He tried to find the thread of his imaginary conversation and it came again.

  Ting.

  Whoever was on the ladder was moving quickly now, less cautiously.

  The only question was whether they were going up or down.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Martin Bowerdale moved silently down the hall from the dormitory and tried the key to the lab door. He eased it open gently, slowly. He could see no light, but Aguilar had a habit of working unpredictable hours.

  He breathed a sigh of relief. The lab was empty, the computers powered down. He closed the door behind him and locked it. He turned on Aguilar’s PC and entered his own name and password so that the system logged him on. He then accessed the ball-shaped webcam Aguilar never used, which sat on top of the monitor, angled down toward the keyboard. Bowerdale was an old-fashioned archaeologist in the field, but he had long ago conceded the value of computers and learned how to use them. When they had returned from the site that evening he had turned this machine on, set the webcam to record, and then asked Aguilar to access his data on a pot from the tomb. He now replayed the stored video, rewinding to the point where the Mexican’s hands tapped out his password on the keyboard: Nieves. His dog’s name, if Bowerdale remembered rightly.

  Isn’t that sweet.

  Bowerdale turned the camera feed off and deleted it, then hit the “switch user” button. He typed in Aguilar’s login name and the password and pulled up the folders he had created from the Ek Balam artifacts. He opened his own e-mail, addressed a message, and attached everything he could find on the red crystal in Aguilar’s files before sending it. He got an acknowledgement ninety seconds later. While he waited for his cell phone to ring, he shut the computer down.

  Bowerdale set the phone on the desk and watched it for half an hour. Then another. He checked his watch. When ten more minutes had passed with no call, he got up and began to walk around. He listened at the door, and the hallway outside was quiet, but he had begun to sweat.

  What was taking so long?

  Ten more minutes and he’d call preemptively, protocol or no protocol. He stared at the phone where it sat, mute, beside the computer.

  Finally, it buzzed, wobbling like a big black roach on the desk. He snatched it up and answered it in a thick whisper.

  “What the hell took you so long?” he demanded.

  “You need to not call me again, OK, Bowerdale?” said the Texan. “We’re done.”

  “What are you talking about?” asked the archaeologist, baffled. “Clements, you called me, remember?”

  “I mean, I don’t want to talk to you anymore,” said Clements. “You got me? No calls, no e-mails, no schemes.”

  “What about the stone?” Bowerdale demanded.

  “You aren’t listening. I said, I want out. I don’t want to see anything about those stones again. Ever. You understand me?”

  “Excuse me?” said Bowerdale. He was trying to sound cheery, upbeat, as if this was just bargaining, but he had never heard the dealer sound so scared.

  “Goodbye, Martin. Have a nice life.”

  “Wait,” he spluttered. “What’s the problem? I’ll give you good terms, just tell me what you think it’s worth.”

  “To me? Nothing,” said Clements.

  “But you said I was right,” Bowerdale hissed. “You said it was valuable.”

  “Not to me, Martin. And believe me when I say that the people who will want it are not guys you want to deal with.”

  “This is nuts,” said Bowerdale.

  “People are coming for this find, Martin. Bad people. For all I know, they may already be there. If I were you, I’d forget you ever saw that tomb and I’d get out of Mexico. Now.”

  And before Bowerdale could think of a response, the line went dead.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The experts Deborah had hired to investigate the new find drove in from Cancun and Merida airports first thing in the morning. She waited for them at the lab in Valladolid feeling nervous, not just because there would suddenly be several new faces on site looking to Deborah for direction, but because their arrival reminded her of just how big the find under the pyramid was. It went without saying that any one of them was better qualified to lead the dig than she was. While she waited for their van to arrive, she called Steve Powel in Chicago and told him as much, but he didn’t want to hear it.

  “This is a Cornerstone project,” he said, “and you are our man on site.”

  She wasn’t certain if that “man” was a joke or some weird term of authority that she was to take as gender neutral. Maybe it was supposed to be a compliment, she thought, her heart sinking.

  “You know who is coming?” she said, refusing to be diverted. “Krista Rayburn, the environmental archaeologist from Florida U. Marissa Stroud, the epigrapher from Minnesota who wrote the closest thing to a dictionary of Mayan glyphs we have, as well as that history of world royal regalia. Not to mention Chad Rylands, from Texas A&M, who wrote the world’s most important study of Mayan bones before he was tenured.”

  “I know,” said Powel. “I suggested two of them, remember?”

  Deborah hadn’t believed they could get Stroud, but Powel had pushed her to inquire. Stroud, it was rumored, had been so obsessed by her research that she had divorced a husband years ago and given him custody of their child without so much as a fight.

  “Yes, they are top people,” said Powel. “But so are you. Orchestrating this dig is not a matter for specialists, Deborah. They lean toward the things they find most interesting. They divert resources toward their pet projects and ideas. Running the dig is about coordinating experts, getting them to work together for the good of the whole, and that—Deborah—is a job for a generalist. If you don’t think you can do it, tell me now, and I’ll replace you, but don’t mistake their expertise with bones and seeds and glyphs for the ability to run a dig.”

  “OK,” she said.

  “You have a photographer on site?” he asked.

  “One was supposed to arrive today,” she said. “A Brit. But he pulled out, and his university is sending someone else. It may take another day or two to get him here. In the meantime, Bowerdale will take charge of the pictures and video.”

  It was all g
ood, she thought. Except, of course, that it wasn’t. There was something off about the tomb. The gold, those weird gems. She suddenly wished she wasn’t there at all, that she was back at the museum where she could simply orchestrate exhibits and manage advertising and personnel—the stuff she was good at. She envied Steve Powel in his office with his family pictures and trophies.

  “How’s your daughter doing?” she asked, thinking of the blonde girl with the sparkling red pendant necklace whose image saturated his office.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The skating. Any major contests lately? I know how passionate families get about that stuff.”

  “Oh right, yes,” he said. “No, nothing major on the calendar right now. Just the usual.”

  Memories floated up, distracting Deborah for a moment. Having to sit for hours at the rink before and after school, trying to read while Ma told her instead to help stitch those loose sequins back on. Trying to shut out the blaring music as Rachel worked through routine after routine, while her coach modeled each spin, each impossible jump, until there’d been that one double axel when Rachel had twisted and fallen like a marionette with its strings cut—

  “It must be a lot of work for you,” Deborah said, snapping back into the moment. “All that driving to training and competitions.”

  “It’s what any good father would do,” he said.

  Just then, the van pulled up in front of the lab, and Deborah hurriedly finished the call. Moments later, all three of the people she’d just been discussing so reverently with Powel were coming toward her, dragging luggage and squinting at the sun. She’d suggested they stop at the hotel in Valladolid first, but all three had wanted to come directly to the lab.

  Deborah introduced herself and immediately started talking too fast. She worried that if she stopped, one of them would ask her something she couldn’t answer. Aguilar and Bowerdale emerged from the lab to shake hands. Aguilar knew Rylands, though their greeting was professional, almost brusque. Predictably, Bowerdale knew them all.