Tears of the Jaguar

by Hartley, A. J.

  Deborah snatched the phone from her bag and caught it on the last ring. It was Barry in Lancaster.

  “OK,” he said. “I have news.”

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  While James figured out how they were going to get to Uxmal, Alice announced she was going for a last swim and to take a look at the Tulum ruins. James had given her a questioning look, but he didn’t seem suspicious so much as a little wounded that she wanted to be alone, and she was used to that.

  Tulum was built much later than Ek Balam or Uxmal, thirteenth century or so, and had thrived as a port as the rest of the Mayan world disintegrated. It was a very different place from the other ruins she’d visited. The city inside the walls consisted mainly of platform buildings with fortified temples, rather than the pyramid structures she had grown accustomed to. There were some cool relief carvings of the local diving god shown upside down on the lintels above stout colonnades, but what really made the site impressive was its location, perched up there on the cliffs.

  The tourists, who were arriving in greater numbers as the day progressed, seemed lost, unsure what they were looking at and what it all meant. Alice amused herself listening in on an elderly couple who didn’t know the difference between Maya, Olmec, and Aztec, and who then remembered the Incas and got still more confused. The old lady looked quite upset when it became clear she had no idea who had built what they had traveled so far to see. Alice, wanting to help, started explaining about the limits and time frame of the Mayan world, its separateness from the Incas of Peru and the later Aztecs of the regions north of Yucatan.

  “So who are the Olmecs?” said the old woman, who was already smiling with relief.

  “Earlier,” said Alice. “Like maybe fourteen hundred BCE to about four hundred BCE. Later civilizations like the Maya and the Aztecs grew out of them. They had things that show up in those later cultures like bloodletting sacrifice and a ritual ball game.”

  “Aren’t you sweet, dear,” said the old lady. “And so clever. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” said Alice, who felt suddenly embarrassed. She turned, and there, up on one of the high cliff structures, was Dimitri, watching her.

  Finally.

  She excused herself and walked away from the couple, climbing up toward him and wishing for trees and shadows so that he couldn’t watch her all the way up. He was wearing a white button-down shirt with jeans and sunglasses, and looked sweaty but quite calm. As she got close to him she smelled his aftershave again and felt a rush of confused emotions. There was no one else around, no one to see what they might do together, or what he might do to her.

  “You’re early,” she said.

  He ignored her and sipped from a bottle of blue Powerade.

  “We’ll be leaving after lunch,” she said.

  “Travelling how?”

  “Not sure yet,” she said. “James is working on it.”

  “You have the letter?”

  She drew it carefully out of her pocket and began to unfold it, but he snatched it from her and unfolded it himself, a bead of the Powerade dropping onto the parchment.

  “Careful,” she said, but he shot her a hard, unreadable look, and she glanced away.

  “I can’t read this shit,” he pronounced after a moment, his accent thicker than usual. “What is this? English? What does it mean?”

  “It means he buried the rest of the stuff in Uxmal.”

  “Stuff?”

  “Treasure,” she said. “Gold, jewels, precious stones.”

  She said it quickly, looking out over the sun-bleached site. She had thought about the shiny yellow metal and the pale, glowing red stone all morning and had decided that she wasn’t simply going to hand them over to Dimitri.

  “Where in Uxmal?” he said.

  “I don’t know.”

  He shot her that look again, this time whipping off his sunglasses so she could see the ice in his eyes.

  “I don’t know,” she said again. “If James knows, he didn’t tell me, OK?”

  “Find out,” he said, biting off the words, his gaze returning to the parchment. “Type up a copy of this,” he said, thrusting the letter back into her hand. “Properly, so I can read it. E-mail it to me.”

  “It’s English,” she said, slightly petulant. “A bit old-fashioned and the writing is weird ‘cause the guy was using his left hand, but it’s English. You can read English, right?”

  She had gone too far. She started to apologize, but he grabbed her face with one hand, fingers and thumb on either side of her mouth, and squeezed till she felt her cheeks bleed against her teeth. Tears started in her eyes.

  “Just get me the copy,” he said, thrusting her head back as he released her, “and make sure I know where you are all the time.”

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I just meant...”

  “You hear what I said?”

  “Yes, I’ll tell you where we are. I’ll get you the copy.”

  “And don’t tell this James anything,” he said, standing up to leave. “Tell him, and I kill you. Both of you. And if you find the treasure and it’s not in my hands one hour later, I’ll kill you. You understand me?”

  She nodded. Had he just said the word “kill”? She tried to absorb it. She looked at his face again, appalled at how dramatically she had underestimated this man. How could she have trusted someone she knew so little about?

  He stared at her aggressively. “What? I can’t hear you.”

  “Yes, I understand,” she said, pushing her tears away and setting her face in the flinty look she’d learned to wear when the going got tough. “I understand.”

  “E-mail it to me at that Gmail address I gave you. You have a laptop, right?”

  “Yes, I do. I will.”

  “Good.” He reached for her and she flinched, but he just smiled and traced his finger around the rose tattoo on her shoulder, then up her neck and along the line of her cheek. It was a thoughtful, even tender gesture. “Then—when all this is done—maybe we go away together,” said Dimitri.

  “Yes,” she said, a tiny, hopeful smile flashing into her eyes and lips. “I’d like that.”

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Deborah phoned a taxi from her hiding place on the hill and didn’t leave that spot till the driver called to say he was parked at the foot of the stairs in the village. She had him drive her to Skipton, and en route she phoned the Malkin Tower cottages and paid her bill by credit card. She would not be picking up her belongings, she said. The landlady said that was fine, that she could send them on if necessary, and Deborah thought she sounded careful but very slightly relieved, as if someone had already inquired after her.

  Or was sitting there now, waiting for her to come back.

  “You didn’t leave a bottle of spring water for me outside the cottage door last night, did you?” she asked the landlady.

  “No, love,” said the woman. “Were you short?”

  “No,” said Deborah. “It’s fine. I’ve had a lovely stay.”

  As they sat in traffic outside the railway station in Skipton, Deborah took out the spring water bottle. It still had a few mouthfuls left. It looked clear enough, but on careful inspection she could see that the bottle had a pinprick hole just below where the cap sealed. She had been drugged, and had repeated the process by drinking from the bottle again in the churchyard. It had made her hallucinate, making real the troubling images that had been festering in her subconscious over the last two days, just as poor Professor Hargreaves had hallucinated a nineteenth-century poisoner in her wheeled chair going to execution.

  Barry had said he had “just made himself a cuppa”: tea. Someone—presumably the woman who had gone missing from the tour—had spiked it to disorient him before her attack.

  Whatever Deborah had been given, it had made her paranoid as well as delusional. Yet she was sure she had given information to someone very real who had come to the piggery to find out what she knew. It was almost funny how that same paranoia
may just have saved her life in the churchyard. The gunman, after all, was real enough. If she hadn’t been so terrified when he first appeared, she might have let her guard down for a crucial moment...

  Was it possible that the gunman was part of the hallucination? She thought not. The more she considered what had happened the previous night, the more she thought that the altered state into which the drug had pushed her had come on and passed quickly. It had been all over in perhaps twenty minutes, and that was after drinking half the bottle. This afternoon she had taken only a few sips, and her head had been clearing before the man in the suit arrived. The dog, she figured, had been real. Perhaps it was seeing that that had given her hallucinations shape, led to the image of the crone digging teeth from the ground—just as the dog had been in the barman’s story of the witches. She wrapped the bottle in a plastic bag and put it away. At some point, she would want its contents tested.

  Barry had told her that Hargreaves had been searching for anything to do with Edward Clifford, but among the items he had looked for were two unfamiliar names—George Withers and Sir Henry Mildmay. Deborah repeated his searches and turned up another bitter testimony from an unhappy seventeenth-century courtier. He referred to Mildmay, who seemed to have been a prominent official under Cromwell, as the “Knave of Diamonds.” A strange name. She wondered about coats of arms and gemstones.

  And then she stumbled on something so bizarre that her breath caught.

  Surely not?

  It couldn’t be. She had to see Hargreaves.

  She took the train to Lancaster and a cab to the Royal Infirmary.

  There was a policeman guarding Hargreaves’s door who demanded to see some form of ID. She showed him her passport and signed in while he scanned a notepad and—more discreetly—checked what looked to be a grainy black-and-white photograph. CCTV images, she guessed. The castle was a prison, after all. Cameras everywhere.

  The policeman—a young man in a black uniform sweater, tall and prematurely balding—followed her into the room and stood behind her at the door.

  “Just pretend I’m not here,” he said.

  Deborah nodded and took a seat by the bed.

  Hargreaves was unconscious. He looked old. His face was pale and waxy, and his eyes were sunken, though some of that was probably because she was unused to him not wearing his glasses. His chest and left shoulder were heavily strapped, and he was hooked up to drips and monitors that beeped periodically. On impulse she took his hand, which was large and strong but whose skin felt silky, paperish.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “This is my fault. I should never have asked you to help.”

  She glanced over her shoulder to the cop, but he was pointedly looking away as if trying to afford her some privacy. Deborah scribbled her cell phone number on a pad on the nightstand, added her name and a sincere but inevitably inadequate apology, then got up to leave. At the door she hesitated, looked at Hargreaves one more time, then stepped out into the hallway, the policeman at her heels.

  “Known him long, have you?” asked the cop.

  “No,” she said. “We just met.”

  “Good of you to visit,” he said.

  Deborah wasn’t sure if he was probing, but it seemed as good an opportunity as ever.

  “Do you have an ID on the attacker?” she said.

  He seemed taken aback, and his manner seemed to shift. He stood a little straighter and his voice stiffened as if he was reading a teleprompter.

  “No official identification of a suspect has been completed at this time,” he said. “Investigations are ongoing.”

  “Could I see those pictures?” she asked.

  “Pictures?”

  “The CCTV images that you used to see if I was a match for the possible attacker,” she said evenly.

  “Oh. Those,” he said. “Well, those are official...”

  “I think I might be able to identify one of the people in them.”

  “Actually, we have identities for most of them,” he replied, slightly affronted. “Most are castle employees, and most of the visitors on the tour paid their entrance fee by credit card, so we already have their names.”

  “Most,” said Deborah. “But not all. Not your prime suspect. The woman.”

  He raised his eyebrows, but his expression relented.

  “I spoke to the boy who works in the gift shop,” she said. “Can I see?”

  He hesitated, debating with himself, then impulsively dragged the glossy pictures out and passed them to her. They were grey and grainy, full of bright spots and deep shadows where you could see nothing useful, but just clear enough to make out the details of the faces on the huddle of people in the castle hallway: Barry, a family with a boy, a couple of teenagers, and a man in a dark, old-fashioned suit. At the back of the group was a middle-aged woman in a voluminous raincoat and a plastic headscarf. Her face was long, heavy, and unmistakable.

  Marissa Stroud.

  “Anyone look familiar?” said the policeman.

  Deborah thought quickly. If she told him what she knew now, she’d never get out of town today.

  “Afraid not,” she said. “But could I take down a contact number in case something occurs to me?”

  The policeman fished a business card from his pocket, and she thanked him, apologizing for not being more helpful. She traced her way back to the front door and took a cab to the station. Twenty minutes later she was on the train to London, but she waited ten more minutes before calling the policeman back and giving him Marissa Stroud’s name, hanging up as soon as she was sure he had it down right.

  She slept a little on the train, waking briefly in Crewe, and then again at Watford, where she watched a businessman using a laptop and realized he was getting a wireless signal provided by the railway. From there on she used her laptop to download everything she could find on George Withers and Henry Mildmay. The former, it turned out, was a poet, and the latter—the Knave of Diamonds—a public servant of sorts. Their lives were quite separate but intersected over a single extraordinary incident. Deborah’s mind raced.

  Once in London, she took a series of tube trains and emerged into the rain, umbrella-less and weary. She walked down to the river close to Tower Bridge in sight of the HMS Belfast. It was the city as she might have imagined it, sprouting antique church steeples and postmodern glass towers, impressive, straddling time, so that even though it made her feel like a tourist, she didn’t mind so much. She bought her ticket a stone’s throw from where the infamous gallows had once stood and walked down to the sprawling urban fortress that was the Tower of London.

  Chapter Sixty

  Gloria Pickins was hungry. She reached into her desk drawer and found the packet of devil’s food cakes. They were low-fat, and the chocolate tasted waxy, but they were still an indulgence, and she ate them furtively, like a squirrel nibbling acorns before some stronger rival stole them. As she munched, she brushed the crumbs off the manila folder in front of her. Mr. Powel had been gone most of the morning but she expected him back in the office within the hour.

  She liked Mr. Powel. He was a good boss who respected her professionalism and made no unreasonable demands on her. He paid her absurdly well and gave her seasonal bonuses, though it wasn’t always clear to her what the season was that prompted the gift. Christmas, certainly, but others were scattered throughout the year, appearing without clear regularity or warning and identified with obscure names she had had to look up: Lamastide was one. Whitsun and Michaelmas. They were old English names that he borrowed whimsically, but the money was real enough. He would call her into his office and ceremonially present her with an envelope of anything from two to five thousand dollars.

  “Excellent work, Mrs. Pickins,” he would announce. “Here is your Whitsun bonus.”

  He smiled that open, avuncular smile of his, so that she was never sure if he was quite serious. He always did it when they were alone, and he always concluded the meeting with the same words: “And remember, Mrs. Pickins.
This is just between us.”

  Sometimes he winked, sometimes he just turned back to his computer and began tapping away, picking at the keys like a bird eating seed.

  And she did keep it to herself. She didn’t even tell Albert where the extra money came from, not that he would notice. Mr. Powel paid her minimal attention, which was fine by her. Gloria liked her privacy too, so it was an even exchange. It was part of why they got along so well.

  So it felt like a small violation entering his office by herself, and she knocked cautiously to make sure he hadn’t snuck in without her seeing. But he had trusted her with a key, so it was acceptable. He would understand.

  Still, she turned the knob cautiously and opened the door only partway so she had to step around it to get in, as if that made it less of a crime. She had the manila folder tucked under her arm. She was used to the office, of course, but rarely saw it without him behind the desk, and it felt different. The photographs, for one. There were so many of them.

  Angela. Smiling, skating in tournaments with her gold pendant necklace, or heading out onto the ice in practice sweats.

  She was a lovely girl, but the number of photographs struck Gloria as a little overwhelming, and it made Powel’s office feel like a shrine. Maybe because of that, it felt almost like she was barging into a sacred place when she reached for the mahogany cabinet, took a breath, and opened both double doors wide. A light came on inside so that the contents on the glass shelves seemed to flash then glow with an unearthly brilliance that made the pupils of her eyes contract. For a moment she just looked.

  There were books, old books, stained and spattered, their titles etched in obscure languages into the cracked leather binding. There were parchments in glass frames, marked with strange symbols, some abstract, some stylized images of heavenly bodies and animal heads. Some looked like ancient seals or stamps. There was a pair of glass chalices into which had been set heavy candles the color of old blood, and ancient amulets and figurines cast roughly in metal or chipped from stone. There were animal horns wound with cord and carved with obscure runic letters, and there were large mounted crystals of various colors. In the center was one more photograph of Angela, this time simply sitting beneath a tree with yellowing leaves. Beneath the photograph sat a human skull, brownish and mottled, and in goblets on either side were smaller bones soaking in some black, viscous fluid. Beside the skull was the thing she was looking for: a finely made wooden box lined with black velvet on which nestled a strange knife. Its blade was made of what looked like dark, greenish glass, the edges irregular and flaked but lethal-looking. She picked it up gingerly and considered it.