Tears of the Jaguar

by Hartley, A. J.

  “Blessed are You, Lord, our God, King of the Universe,” she thought, surprised how easily the words of the Birkhat Ha-Gomel blessing for those surviving danger came back to her, “who bestows good things on the unworthy, and has bestowed on me every goodness.”

  She thought also of Adelita, who seemed more than usually earnest, and uncharacteristically unsmiling. As the events of the night before came back to her, a dreadful sense of anticipation began to swell inside her, chilling her like the water of the underground river. She had interrupted someone, but not in time. Someone had tried to kill her, but someone else had already died—been murdered, which was different—and thinking of Adelita’s gaunt face, a part of Deborah feared she knew who it was.

  God, not Eustachio.

  They dropped a rope down to her and she lashed it round her waist with an expert bowline, then used her hands and feet to help push at the walls of the forgotten well as they pulled her up. Aguilar did most of the organizing, but the muscle came from Eustachio’s son, Juan, and another Mayan whose name she didn’t know. She thanked them, then started asking questions even as someone draped an extra cloth tarp from the wheelbarrow shed over her wet shoulders. It was only when she looked up from squeezing water from her lightweight khaki shorts that she saw the policeman hovering at the edge of the anxious circle, waiting to speak to her. She started to move to him but doubled up with a sudden cramping nausea that left her spewing water in the grass.

  The women gathered around her but she waved them away, closing her eyes against the indignity of their watching, and spat till her stomach felt clear. She had a lump on her head, but if it had bled, it had already stopped, and though it was a little tender she thought there was no concussion. She stayed where she was, crouched on the ground, feeling the sun burning her neck, until she thought she was ready. Then she stood, coughed once, and started talking as if nothing had happened, demanding to know everything. They watched her a little warily, but once it was clear she was not interested in further assistance or concern, they led her to the tomb to see what they all knew was there. She saw, then she talked to the police about what she had and had not seen the night before.

  When they were done Deborah broke from the circle of policemen, walked quickly away from the loitering huddle of archaeologists and their students, and got as far from the tomb as she could. In a few minutes she would have to climb the cell phone tower and make a series of difficult calls, but for now she had to breathe and—if she could—shut out the things she had seen.

  It was Aguilar who had reported that the tomb was no longer sealed, and he had warned her that what was inside was “very unpleasant.” That was an understatement. It had taken a moment for her to realize what she was seeing, because the tomb looked so different. She had fled without looking closely but the impression of the shining red room and the twisted, broken body at its core was burned into her mind like a bright light you still see after you close your eyes and turn away.

  The police had talked her through what they thought had happened, had mentioned a blow to the foreman’s head that had immobilized him, signs of rope burns on his arms and legs, the thirty terrible holes they had found in his flesh, the corresponding urchin spines, and the flaked obsidian knife blade. Eustachio, they said, had been tortured to death, but the technique was modeled on ancient Mayan bloodletting rituals. A rope studded with thorns had been passed through his arms, his stomach, and his genitals. Of the usual body parts targeted in Mayan sacrifice, only the tongue was untouched: presumably so he could still talk. The process, they thought, had taken as long as two hours.

  They didn’t say—and didn’t need to—that someone had assumed that Eustachio had emptied the tomb of its treasures and had tried to extract their current location from him, someone invested in the site and with knowledge of Mayan ritual practice. They didn’t say—and didn’t need to—that the archaeological team was at the top of their list of suspects. Whether the killer had gotten the information he or she wanted out of the old foreman, no one knew.

  She found Adelita sitting on Structure 2 and joined her in silence.

  “Thank you for finding me,” she said.

  “I was looking for somewhere private,” said the girl, plucking at the grass and studying it. “I heard the water moving so I looked in.”

  She said it simply, stoically, like it was of no great consequence, a duty like feeding the chickens or grinding the corn.

  “I’m sorry about your grandfather,” said Deborah. “He was a good man.”

  Adelita said nothing, but after a moment, she leaned into Deborah, who put an arm around her shoulders.

  “He was,” she said in Spanish, “the only one who knew me. Until you came. He told me to work hard in school so that I could go away, maybe to university. My father thinks I should stay home and do chores.”

  “What about your mother?”

  “She thinks I should go, but...” She hesitated. “It’s hard for her to imagine, and she needs help. Soon there will be another baby and then maybe I will never leave. I’ll be like the other girls, except that I’m not, so I’ll be unhappy.”

  Deborah felt a wash of emotions, confused and powerful as the sweep of the underground river: empathy, sadness, a paradoxical joy, and a concurrent sense of panic.

  She already has a mother, she thought. One who belongs here. You don’t.

  But then neither did the girl, and as the bright and pugnacious Adelita started to weep, Deborah sensed she knew it.

  Chapter Thirty

  Deborah climbed the cell phone tower to call Steve Powel and the American embassy, but also because she knew she could be alone at the top. Although the tower had felt rickety and precarious, she felt safer up there in the light where everyone could see her than she would in some private corner of the site. Because Deborah was thinking what she imagined they were all thinking. If Eustachio had not revealed—or not known—what the killer wanted to hear, they might all be targets of similar torture and murder.

  Was it possible that someone she knew could have done this?

  She tried to shrug the thought off, but she knew the police were right. Eustachio could have been killed by a neighbor or family member for some unknown personal grudge, he might even have been the victim of some psychopath who stumbled on him here, but it was considerably more likely that he had been killed for the tomb treasures, and that pointed squarely at the archaeologists.

  So now what?

  They had been due to begin the excavation work proper in a week, once the interns returned from their break back in the States. But now everything was up in the air. The new find had derailed the schedule—albeit gloriously—and they were behind on the surveying. With a full-blown murder inquiry in addition to the less intense inquiry into the child’s bones, on top of the investigations into the theft of the grave goods, the site would surely be shut down. She should just tell Powel that they had to cut their losses and close the dig indefinitely. Then she realized that even if it closed, the authorities might not let the team out of the country. Might not let her out of the country.

  God, what a mess, she thought. My mess.

  She leaned on the rail and gazed out over the site, the stone structures rising up out of the trees beautiful and awe-inspiring still, but tainted now by the pall of her failure. Her hair was tangled and thick with silt, her clothes still slightly damp. She squeezed her eyes shut, biting back the urge to shout or weep or something.

  Bowerdale would have to stay to finish the surveying—assuming the police gave him access to the site. Aguilar could return home without difficulty. Rayburn, Rylands, and Stroud could all stay, she supposed, and get some productive work done on what they had already unearthed. There were, after all, bones to be analyzed, glyphs to be read, vegetable matter traces to be processed. Even the Brit could make himself useful with his camera. It was only Deborah, it seemed, who had no clear purpose if they weren’t actually digging. But as site director, she couldn’t leave if anyone was
doing anything, even if the police let her go.

  What a goddamned mess, she thought again. Then another thought, even more familiar: You don’t belong here.

  That might have been the usual anxiety about her professional competence, but it went deeper than that. Up here on the tower, surrounded by jungle and by the structural remains of a civilization she barely understood, she wondered what she was doing here. This was not her world.

  But then what was?

  Below her a motmot lurched out of a tree and glided in a flash of turquoise and green onto a branch fifty yards away. As her eyes followed it she saw Nick, the British photographer looking up at her, watching. When he saw she was looking at him, he motioned her to come down. She shook her head and brandished her cell phone.

  “I have to make a call,” she called down.

  “What?”

  “I have to call Cornerstone,” she shouted.

  “Come down as soon as you’re done,” he yelled back. “The police want to talk to you again.”

  She closed her eyes and nodded, suddenly exhausted. When she opened them she was annoyed to see he was standing there still, waiting to escort her back. She dialed the Cornerstone number, stabbing each key in turn, then taking a long, steadying breath as it rang.

  “Steve Powel,” said the voice on the other end.

  “Hi, Steve, it’s Deborah. Listen, I’m afraid something very bad has happened.”

  She talked for two and a half minutes, and he listened. When she was done, he said, “OK. I’m going to have to make some calls. Can I reach you on this number?”

  “I only get a signal when I climb the tower,” she said. “I’ll be up here as much as I can today, but the police want to talk to me so I can’t stay forever. We could set up a video conference for later if I can get to the lab at Valladolid?”

  “Sounds good,” said Powel. “I’ll get in touch with the embassy. Anyone here you need me to call?”

  Deborah thought of her mother at home in Boston, heard her sister’s voice saying, Come pick through Dad’s things...

  “Not yet,” she said. “Let me see where this is going.”

  “OK. I’ll call back. And Deborah?”

  “Yes?”

  “Hang in there, OK?”

  “Sure,” she said, and hung up.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the English photographer starting to pace below. She turned to make it harder for him to see and dialed another number.

  “Come on,” she muttered, as it rang. Almost immediately the phone was picked up.

  “Federal Bureau of Investigations, how can I direct your call?”

  “I’m trying to reach Agent Chris Cerniga,” she said.

  She was about to add that she was an old friend of his, but decided that that wouldn’t help and wasn’t strictly true anyway. Their past interactions had been entirely professional, and in one of them she had briefly been a suspect in her mentor’s murder. There was a long, staticky silence, and then Cerniga’s voice came on the line.

  “Hi, Chris,” she said, taking a chance at familiarity. “It’s Deborah Miller.”

  “Let me guess,” he said, barely missing a beat. “International art smuggling.”

  She didn’t attempt to prevaricate. “I wish it were that simple,” she said. “I need your advice.”

  There was a long pause, perhaps while he closed an office door or sat down, then he said simply, “Go on,” and she told him everything: the find, the theft, the murder, the swarming police and their suspicions. When she was done, he blew out a long sigh, but when he spoke his voice was urgent and uncompromising.

  “You need to get out,” he said.

  “Out of town?”

  “Out of the country,” he said.

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Deborah, listen,” said Chris. “The laws in Mexico are changing, but a good deal of it still depends on the old Napoleonic code, which for a lot of people still means guilty until proven innocent. They can arrest and hold merely on suspicion, and it could be months before you get out even if they can’t build a case against you. There are a lot of good cops in Mexico, but there’s also a lot of corruption, and a lot of police testimony is extracted from arrestees under severe duress.”

  “You mean...”

  “You know what I mean, Deborah. It’s not supposed to happen, but it does, and the courts often turn a blind eye if the confession can get a conviction. US citizens are subject to Mexican law while in Mexico, but they are also targets of extortion while in police custody, either as ‘protection money’ to other inmates, or in the form of bribes and fines to the authorities themselves. US citizens have been beaten, raped, and killed in Mexican police custody. If you are arrested, it could be months before the State Department can put enough pressure on the Mexican government to get you out, and by that time who knows what you will have been through. So let me say it again, Deborah, and it’s what the embassy would tell you if they could: you need to get out of the country. Now.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Krista Rayburn couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She had told the policeman—a small man in a sweat-stained synthetic uniform who kept eyeing her breasts—all she knew, which wasn’t much. She folded her arms discreetly across her chest, but she had been polite and as open as she could be, which meant freely offering that she had no alibi for the hours in question because she was alone in bed in Valladolid. The policeman had smiled at that, but he didn’t seem unduly concerned, and when she got up to leave had simply said that he would like to speak to her again later. But now she was back with the other archaeologists and there was a brewing hysteria that caught her completely off guard.

  “You’re suggesting we should run from the police?” she said, unable to suppress a smile. “Isn’t that a little melodramatic?”

  “I’m just passing along what I’ve been told,” said Deborah Miller. “I suggest you take what action you think appropriate.”

  “You think you can flee the country and the government will invite you back in to complete the dig?” said Rylands. The sneer he always seemed to wear had grown harder since the news of the murder. “If you leave now, you’re never coming back.”

  “I can’t leave,” said Bowerdale. “I have to complete the survey in preparation for the dig for whenever things start up again. And for whoever leads it.”

  Deborah Miller gave him a thoughtful look but didn’t rise to the bait.

  “This is crazy,” said Krista. “If we hightail it out of here now, it just makes us look guilty as hell.”

  “They already think we’re guilty, Krista,” said Miller. “A man—a local man at that—has been killed, a man who probably knew the whereabouts of archaeological treasures we unearthed, things we value more than anyone else would. And he died after suffering through the kind of ancient Mayan bloodletting rituals that aren’t exactly common knowledge, and on our site. Who knows more about those practices than us? The police would be crazy not to consider us suspects.”

  Krista opened her mouth but could think of nothing to say. She looked to Aguilar, whom she’d quickly come to trust, but his face was unreadable. Stroud was exactly the same as usual, saying little, seeming hardly to listen and staring fixedly at nothing.

  “I am not leaving till my work is done,” said Bowerdale again.

  “Martin,” said Miller, quiet but urgent. “They could throw you in jail for months.”

  “I can’t leave,” he said. “I won’t. We’ve made one of the most important discoveries in Mayan archaeology and haven’t even begun the work on Structure Three that we originally came for! If I leave now, someone else will take over.”

  “This is no time to worry about who gets credit for—” Miller began, but Bowerdale cut her off.

  “It’s not about getting credit,” he spat. “It’s about being there at the moment of discovery, like Howard Carter at the tomb of Tutankamun, Leonard Woolley at the royal cemetery of Ur, Schliemann at Troy, or Ar
thur Evans at the palace of Minos in Crete. I could be Hiram Bingham, overlooking Machu Picchu. I will not give up my place in history because of a few bullying cops.”

  Krista stared at him. What had begun as a little pompous but impressive had strayed over into something that looked—for the briefest of moments—like obsession. Miller seemed to recognize it too, because she raised her hands in surrender.

  “You do what you think is best, Martin,” she said. “At least call the embassy and talk to them, and do it quickly. The police will act soon, I think. They don’t need much of a case to arrest us.”

  “You’re going to leave?” said Bowerdale to Miller. “Isn’t the captain supposed to go down with the ship?”

  Miller seemed to hesitate.

  “Maybe,” she said at last, and she seemed defeated, shrunken. “But I didn’t sign on for this. If there was a principle at stake, that would be one thing, but to go to jail and deal with Mexico’s judicial system? No. I won’t go down with the ship, Martin. I also won’t stick around to get shot at again, and I’d advise you not to either.”

  “What if we get caught?” said Krista suddenly. “Even if we jump in our cars and go, they can catch up with us or flag our passports so that we can’t get a flight.”

  “You may have some time,” said Aguilar. It was the first time he had spoken up, and everyone looked at him, expectant. “There will be several branches of law enforcement involved in this and they will not be well coordinated out here. The Federales will be involved because you are foreigners and because of the theft, but they haven’t even gotten here yet. When they do, things will tighten up. But you may have a window. The dead man is a Mayan, not some Mexico City politician. The police will take longer to get seriously involved.” He said this last with his eyes cast down, though Krista wasn’t sure if this was embarrassment or something else. Guilt, perhaps. It lasted only a moment and when he looked up, he seemed determined. “If I were you,” he said, “I’d go now.”