Tears of the Jaguar

by Hartley, A. J.

  “The work, yes,” Deborah concluded. “I get it.”

  “When we were in Mexico...”

  “Forget it,” she said quickly, not wanting the further humiliation of hearing him defend his flirtation with her in the name of queen and country.

  “I don’t want you to think that I was only pretending to have a good time with you. I liked you. Like you. You’re interesting. Different.”

  She gave him a sharp look.

  “In a good way,” he said. “And beautiful, though you do your best to hide it.”

  She stared at him until he looked away.

  “Great,” she said, adding, “I guess. And this CIA guy, Jones, you knew him?”

  Reese laughed ruefully.

  “Let’s just say we’ve met,” he said.

  “Which means what?”

  “He and some of his mates arranged a little party for me in a Skipton parking lot,” he said. “I suppose he wanted to ask me a few questions about your adventures in Mexico. We didn’t get off on the best foot.”

  Deborah felt annoyed. Reese seemed to have all the pieces of the puzzle but only wanted to dole them out to her bit by bit.

  “I’d like to look at what I came here to see,” she said, her tone cool.

  Reese’s voice became cautious, professional. “Yes, you should take a proper look at the cases. You’re getting a private tour, after all. We even shut off the conveyor belts, so you can have rather more than the allocated twenty-eight seconds visitors usually get. Take as long as you like. When you’re done, I’ll be sitting by the exit and we can talk.”

  “Fine,” said Deborah. “Oh, and you might want to examine this,” she added, handing him the spring water bottle from her bag. “I’m sure you military intelligence types have the very best labs.”

  “What is it?”

  “You tell me,” she said.

  Deborah walked through the deserted Jewel House exhibition in a daze. Here she was, alone, surrounded by the most dazzling display of opulence and power in the world.

  There were gold ceremonial staffs and maces—massive two-handed things—and the gold ampula shaped like an eagle, which contained the coronation oil. Of course there was the coronation spoon. There were robes and stoles, spurs and swords. There were orbs and scepters, also gold but set with pearls and precious stones and topped with crosses and doves. One looked almost exactly like the one she had glimpsed in the Mayan tomb. Another scepter was set with a massive teardrop-shaped diamond weighing, according to the display, over five hundred carats. Other cases contained gold chalices and plate, candlesticks, flagons, Christening fonts, ornate salt cellars, cisterns, ladles, and other meticulously crafted golden objects.

  Then there were the crowns: St. Edward’s crown, which was used in the coronation of the present monarch, and the crowns of the Queen Mother and Queen Mary, both trimmed with ermine and set with thousands of diamonds, many of them huge and flawless. There was the imperial crown of India and countless others, including Queen Victoria’s dainty confection of almost twelve hundred diamonds. It was overwhelming.

  What it was worth, Deborah couldn’t begin to guess. One of the minor crowns alone would be worth millions. And yes, the official story was that it was all real, that the display contained no copies, only the genuine article. The doors she had passed through were huge steel affairs so that it felt like you were stepping into a massive safe.

  She went back through the exhibit to be sure and then sat beside Nick Reese, saying nothing.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you who I was,” he said.

  “You had your reasons,” she answered, not looking at him.

  “And my orders.”

  “So now what?” said Deborah. “You want to know what I know?”

  “Yes. What you don’t know, I’ll tell you. Fair enough?”

  “Sure. And Nick? How about nothing but the truth from you from now on.”

  Nick nodded and even smiled.

  “Edward Clifford was born to a poor woman in Pendle called Janet Davis,” she said. “He was a dwarf, and very clever. He was adopted by Lady Anne Clifford of Skipton, through whom he got a good education and was trained as a court scribe and counselor. As a boy he served King Charles the First as a page and seemed to have been on the fast track to power, but something went wrong in 1634, and he fell from favor. I don’t know why.”

  “Me neither,” said Nick.

  “Anyway,” Deborah continued, “Edward remained loyal to the king, and when Cromwell and the Parliamentarians took over, Edward fought for the royalist cause against them. He garrisoned Skipton Castle and held out despite a long Roundhead siege.

  “But the Royalists lost,” she went on. “King Charles was imprisoned, tried, and finally executed in 1649. Cromwell was a Puritanical iconoclast who despised the pomp and ceremony of kingship. He sent a poet called George Withers to the Jewel House at the Tower of London and, with the permission of the Parliamentarian keeper of the Jewel House—Sir Henry Mildmay—had all the crown jewels impounded. They played with them, trivialized them, dressed up in them, like boys playing with a dead snake. Mildmay and his associates then broke the crowns up and sold the entire royal regalia off cheap, deliberately, I suspect, to show how little they thought of them; no wonder Mildmay’s enemies called him the Knave of Diamonds. Anyway, while a few pieces were later recovered during the Restoration of the Monarchy ten years later, the ancient crown jewels of England effectively ceased to exist.”

  She paused, but when Nick didn’t respond, she continued.

  “The present crown jewels of Britain date from the Restoration, when King Charles the Second was crowned in 1658. By then Cromwell had been dead two years and his son had been unable to keep the Protectorate alive. Parliament opted to revert to a constitutional monarchy, and the body of Cromwell was dug up, tried for treason, and “executed”: his body hung in chains and his head displayed on a pike outside Westminster Abbey. Efforts were made to recover the lost crown jewels, but apart from a twelfth-century coronation spoon—currently on display back there—no major pieces were found, and the royal regalia had to be rebuilt based on what they could remember. In terms of ancient history, everything in there,” she said, nodding back to the glittering exhibits, “is new.

  “I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the original crown jewels, items going back to before the Norman Conquest, regalia associated with Alfred the Great, Edward the Confessor, and all the medieval kings and queens of England, from Henry the Second in the twelfth century through to the Tudors, weren’t totally destroyed. I think most of their crowns, scepters, orbs, and diadems of all kinds were bought up or otherwise collected by Edward Clifford, a royalist from Pendle, and smuggled out of the country.”

  She sat there, thinking about it, feeling at last the weight of all that history, and then added, half to herself, “Somehow he wound up in Mexico, and that is about all I can tell you, except that at some point he must have sent one stone back to England, or perhaps he took it up to Lancashire himself before he left the country, and buried it at Malkin Tower Farm. Why, I couldn’t say, but it’s too much of a coincidence to say it got back to the parish where he was born by chance.”

  “A tiny portion of this huge trove of jewels was in the tomb we unearthed at Ek Balam. I’m not sure how it got there, but I think—and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who believes this—that the gems and bits of metal we found were part of the regalia of England’s ancient monarchs. How you could begin to put a price on what such a find would be worth, I don’t know.”

  “And it is the position of the British government,” said Nick, inserting himself into her monologue at last, “that they must not find their way onto the open market, that they should be returned to England to be kept as a national treasure of boundless cultural significance.”

  Deborah felt the weight of her knowledge like a tangible force pushing her into her seat.

  “As you can imagine,” Nick said, still professiona
l, “I am empowered to take extraordinary action to ensure that that happens.”

  “How nice for you,” she said.

  “This isn’t the way I wanted things to go, Deborah,” he responded, frowning.

  “Hey,” she said with a shrug. “It’s your country.”

  “Mother Britain?” he said, gesturing toward the exhibit of riches she had just left. “Hardly.”

  “Because you’re just a working-class lad from Lancashire?” she said, unsure why she was being so caustic but unable to play nice. “Or was that a lie too?”

  “Not a lie,” he said. “And yes, I have to protect the interests of Her Majesty’s government, including its cultural property. That’s my job. But no, kings and nobles and power isn’t the world I came from either.”

  “So why are you telling me all this?”

  “Because you want to know what’s going on.”

  “No,” she said. “You’re telling me because you think I can still be useful.”

  He looked away for a moment, then nodded.

  “You may have relevant information,” he said.

  Now it was her turn to look away. He added hastily, “And because I value your perspective, Deborah.”

  “Fine,” said Deborah. “Whatever.”

  He looked like he was about to respond irritably, then took a breath and redirected the conversation.

  “Why do you think Marissa Stroud came to England?” he said.

  Deborah sighed.

  “She is obviously looking for the crown jewels,” she said, “and knows that the stones we found in Ek Balam were part of a larger trove that is, presumably, still in Mexico somewhere. But she didn’t know where. She came to the UK because she thought that uncovering their past would somehow point to their present location. Whether she found what she was looking for, I have no idea, but I think I told her some things that may have helped.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, studying her hands. “I was drugged. I told her what I knew about Edward Clifford, I think. I don’t think she had all that information before.”

  “I see,” said Nick.

  Deborah colored and clenched her fists.

  “Where is she now?” she asked.

  “Stroud? She boarded a flight outbound from Manchester a few hours before she was correctly identified as a person of interest in the Lancaster Castle assault.”

  “Heading where?”

  “Already touched down in Cancun, Mexico,” said Nick. “And you know what that means, right?”

  “Time to pack my bathing suit?”

  “Consider it work for an Anglo-American accord.”

  PART 5

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  It took James and Alice six hours by bus to get from Tulum to Merida, and another two to go from Merida to Uxmal. There had been no police checkpoints, no problems of any kind, but James was restless. He had read what he could find but was no nearer to determining where in Uxmal they should look for Edward’s bones and the treasure that lay with them. That was Alice’s word: treasure. The first few times she had said it she had seemed embarrassed by it—as she should be—but thrilled at the same time. Now there was something else going on with her that he couldn’t put his finger on, a note of panic and urgency. She had been jumpy when they got on the bus, always looking around as if expecting someone to arrest her. James had told her she was going to draw attention to them, and she had become oddly compliant. She hadn’t been sleeping well, he knew. It was just odd that the treasure hunt she had found so exciting now seemed to scare her.

  James had found no records of this Edward character in any Spanish account of the conquest, nor much sign that the Spanish had even known Uxmal existed. When the Spanish got there, and certainly by the time of this mystery Edward from England, Uxmal had already been abandoned for hundreds of years. With no Spanish town close by, it remained a jungle-shrouded ruin until Waldeck, Stephens, and Catherwood got there in the 1830s and 1840s.

  James and Alice booked a room they couldn’t afford at the hacienda by the ruins. Soon enough, he hoped, he’d get paid by Bowerdale and money would be less of a concern. It was a beautiful, grand old hotel that had been built for the archaeological staff working on the ruins, all tiled floors, potted palms, and old-world ceiling fans, and there was a guitar trio playing folk songs. There was a pool and a garden with towering palms, and their bathroom had a whirlpool tub and a stained-glass window of toucans and egrets. For James, who had never stayed anywhere so decadent in his life, it was glorious, a secret pleasure that made him want to dress up and drink rum cocktails served from silver shakers by waiters in white tuxedos.

  In his heart, James knew they couldn’t hope to find the treasure, and he didn’t really care. He was tired of running around, tired of feeling stupid, and tired of being everyone’s whipping boy. Yes, he had to finish what he started for Bowerdale, so he would go through the motions, but he felt beyond caring about history or artifacts. All he wanted now was to stay in this wonderful place and relish what he’d originally hoped archeology would offer: a glimpse of the ancient and the exotic, something he would look back on all his life.

  The following day they hid the canvas bag under the extra pillows and blankets in the wardrobe, then went to the ruins proper. They were all James had hoped for and more. Chichen Itza was more impressive in scale, sure, but it was packed with tourists and souvenir sellers, and there was much that you couldn’t get close to because the structures were roped off. He had liked the observatory with its dome-like tower and the dense ornamentation of the Nunnery and Church, but Uxmal was a different experience entirely. For one thing, it felt virtually deserted, even when the tourist buses arrived, and the fact that it received a fraction of the visitors meant that those who came were free to wander and climb where they wanted. When he scaled the great pyramid, inching up the high steep steps on all fours, he could sit up there on the top looking down on the site, and be almost completely undisturbed. The place still belonged to the jungle and its creatures.

  The Pyramid of the Magician was unlike any other Mayan structure: a great three-story structure whose base was oval, so that the massive platforms had curved edges. It had monumental staircases up to temples on the top and loomed over a vast quadrangle of stone buildings whose intricate friezes were set with carved stone latticework, figurines, and masks of Chaak. James was used to the image of the rain god with its fearsome, bulbous eyes, wide, square leer full of teeth, and its huge, hooked nose. The images were reproduced all over the Yucatan, often in the same composite form, each portion of the face carved from a different square block so that the whole looked oddly linear, almost robotic, like a pixilated computer image, but nowhere had he seen them in such obsessive profusion. This was a city that lived or died by rain. It was hardly surprising they worshipped Chaak so earnestly. James wondered vaguely how much human blood had been poured out, how many living hearts cut from their bodies with obsidian knives, to appease the god and bring a little rain.

  He walked round to the Palace of the Governor, climbed another monumental staircase, and sauntered along the great long building, gazing up at the fretted and sculptured frieze adorned with the obligatory masks of Chaak, then stepped into a recess with the typical triangular Mayan arch. There was no one around. He could have just stumbled out of the jungle and discovered the site, the first white man to see it since that Edward guy came here to die three hundred and fifty years ago. Down below him on a platform surrounded by the close-cropped turf where the iguanas sprawled was a stone throne shaped like a saddle, each end carved into the head of a crouching jaguar. It was weathered and stained yellow with lichen, but it was the seat of a king or a high priest: a throne of power.

  With sudden clarity James saw what he had to do. He would waste no more time skulking around the ruins looking vaguely—blindly—for somewhere to dig. He would get the canvas bag from the hotel room, tell Alice what he planned to do with or without her, and then he wou
ld return to the States. There he would be greeted as a cultural hero, a scientist. He would reveal his find to the world, shake off Bowerdale entirely, and return with a legitimate excavation to Uxmal where, one day, he would make a discovery still greater than what he had dug up for Bowerdale in Coba.

  James stood tall, sure of his actions for the first time in weeks, maybe years, and that was when he noticed that Alice was now in the space below him. She sat on the jaguar throne, staring up at him. He faltered, even at this distance feeling her skepticism chipping off some of his confidence. She wouldn’t like it, this new conviction of his. She had been getting steadily more and more jumpy all day. She constantly sidled up to him and said “Well?” as if he was supposed to just point at the ground and say, “Here. Get the spade.”

  James made his way back to the staircase smiling to himself and walked down to where Alice sat, wearing her usual mixture of watchfulness and studied apathy. On the hulking throne, she looked small and childlike. She saw him coming and looked back over her shoulder, as if afraid someone might see them together, and James felt a rush of anger and hurt, which solidified his resolve.

  No, he thought again, with something like triumph, She isn’t going to like this at all. And that’s just too bad.

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  After England, Deborah found Mexico hotter than ever. She had sat apart from Nick on the plane—an accident of getting last-minute seats that she was glad of—and they had barely spoken except for a few minutes at Gatwick when she had set her jaw and demanded that he answer her one question.

  “What?” he said.

  “Why are the CIA involved?” she said. “The original crime was the murder of a Mexican citizen, and the root cause seems to be about the recovery of British cultural property, so why are the CIA there at all?”

  He smiled mirthlessly and looked away, as if trying to decide how much he could say, but when he looked back at her and shrugged, he seemed to be telling the truth.