The Last Mayan (The Alan Graham Mysteries)

by Malcolm Shuman

  But if I was going to climb the damn thing, I might as well be professional about it and get my camera and notebook and make a few records. And my binoculars, in case the mist lifted and I could see other structures poking above the trees.

  I tiptoed back to the camp, assured myself that everyone was still sleeping, and carefully opened the car door and removed my knapsack.

  Once an archaeologist, always one.

  I scrambled up the side of the artificial hill, careful where I put my hands: The last thing I needed was to grab a sleeping fer-de-lance by mistake. It wasn’t a snake I cared to be bitten by, to say the least.

  I hauled myself over a fallen wall and a shower of stones shot out from under my feet and went rocketing down the pyramid. I hoped the sound wouldn’t wake any of the sleepers, but it was too late now. Suddenly I was twenty-five again, flush with the enthusiasm of my first visit to a land of fable and wonder and nothing mattered except climbing the top of every pyramid, visiting every temple, reveling in the sheer adrenaline rush of excitement at being here.

  When I reached the top the mist was just lifting in the east and I sat down on a block of stone, feeling inordinately proud of myself. I was panting and sweaty and felt better than I had for as long as I could remember. In the distance I could see the green carpet of jungle fading into a gray field that turned blue even as I watched and then went gold as streamers of fire from the rising sun branded the sky. I leaned back against the stone, closing my eyes against the glare. Some Mayan priest had stood here a thousand years ago, welcoming the sun god. Waiting, I reminded myself, for the bound captive whose heart he would extract with an obsidian knife. The flip side of romanticism.

  When I opened my eyes again the sun was halfway out of the Caribbean, too bright to look at, and the mist had melted into tiny wisps curled around the tops of the trees. I wondered if the others had awakened yet and found out I was gone. But I hadn’t heard any shouts. Still, I should head on down. There was no sense provoking the guard. I heaved myself up and heard the first little pop in the distance. I stared into the sun and blinked. Maybe it was light reflecting from the sea, but I thought I’d seen a flash, then another. I dug out my binoculars and slowly scanned the even green carpet of foliage until a thin strip of beach moved into view. I stopped, focused, and saw another flash, then smoke rising up to cloud my view. Here and there brown figures ran across the sand. The popping sounds were regular now and I realized it was the army’s raid, being carried out on the fishing village ten miles away.

  I watched for a few more minutes, until a pall of smoke from burning huts blotted out further images, and I lowered the binoculars. I was aware of voices below now from the clearing, calling my name. I turned to begin my descent and halted.

  There, on the mixture of loose dirt and rubble in front of me, was evidence that someone else had been here before me and not long ago. They’d stood here, maybe watching the village with binoculars as I had, and they’d smoked at least three cigarettes, because the butts were under my hand now, cheap Gauloises.

  “I’m coming,” I called and began my. sliding descent to the bottom. Why should I be surprised that teniente Tapia had posted a spy here? It was a natural lookout spot.

  “Where have you been?” our guard demanded, waving his rifle in a way that made me nervous. “You were to stay here, in sight.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I heard the firing over at the fishing village and wanted to see what was happening.”

  “You should stay here,” the soldier insisted, calmed somewhat now that he saw I hadn’t escaped. “And besides, what happens is what always happens during all the raids.”

  “Oh?”

  “We hide, we attack, and there is nobody there.” He shrugged. “Why should this time be any different?”

  The guard was right. The soldiers returned at midmorning, their Humvees announcing them half a mile away. Tapia slid out of the lead vehicle, clothes muddied and beard unshaven. Our guard snapped to attention, but the officer ignored him.

  “I apologize again for the inconvenience,” he said, offering around a pack of Mexican cigarettes and then lighting one himself. “I would advise you to stay closer to the archaeological zone in the future, however. It is dangerous to go off alone in the jungle.”

  He was red-eyed and I sensed his fatigue.

  “Your raid,” I asked. “Were you successful?”

  He stared at me, and for a moment I thought he was going to answer. Then he threw down his cigarette in disgust.

  “Return their papers to them,” he told the guard and remounted his vehicle.

  “You are all free to go.”

  FOUR

  We reached Bacalar just before noon. It was as I remembered it, a dusty, hot little town of cinder-block houses perched on the west side of a narrow lake that stretched for nearly thirty miles north and south between a strip of jungle and the Bay of Chetumal. The plaza slanted, the benches in the plaza slanted, and the streets that paralleled the lake ran at different levels depending on whether you were closer or farther from the lake itself. A bumpy blacktop ran along the waterfront, passing walled estates with frangipani flowers visible through grilled gates. A mile south of town was a picturesque motel, white with blue trim and a red-tiled roof, overlooking the rocky beach. I’d stayed there once, years ago, batting away bugs through the open louvers of the window. It was a place where you got the taste of the country, if that’s what you were looking for.

  Geraldo Gonzales Pech ran a restaurant and also rented cabañas half a mile to the south, on the beach. The amenities were rudimentary, but over the years they’d sufficed for assorted foreigners ranging from archaeologists to researchers at the bio-reserve southwest of Chetumal, and that’s where the Lubaanah project had elected to stay.

  It’s where Felicia and I had stayed during the first stages of our love affair, and it’s where I’d gone back to find her after she’d stood me up in Mérida. I wasn’t sure how I’d react to the place, but I was about to find out.

  It’s odd the way memory plays tricks: As we pulled into the palm-shaded parking area in front of don Geraldo’s restaurant, which also contained the office and his family living quarters, I looked for the little string of thatched huts. I’d remembered them as perching high on the gray rocks over the lake, like the restaurant itself, and yet now I saw that in actuality they were below us, at the base of the steps that led fifty feet downward from the restaurant patio to the gray rocks of the beach. Strange, considering how many times I—we—had descended those steps to go from our host’s home down to our cabaña, where we’d shut the door and hungrily climbed into each other’s arms in the big matrimonial hammock. How many other things was I going to misremember?

  As I got out, a gray-haired little man in a white guayabera emerged from the white-walled structure and halted, palms out.

  “Puede ser? ” he asked. “Can it be?”

  I stared. Fifteen years ago, the hair and mustache had been glossy black, the frame leaner.

  “Don Geraldo?”

  “The same. Don Alan? Can it really be you?”

  We embraced, and seconds later I saw, standing behind him in the doorway, a plump woman I knew was his wife, doña Martina.

  “When you didn’t come we were so worried,” he began.

  “I told Geraldo you may have been killed by drug smugglers,” Martina cut in. “Things are so bad these days.”

  “De veras, this is true,” the little innkeeper agreed.

  “It was almost that bad,” Hayes declared, breaking out a cigar. “The army.”

  “Por dios!” Geraldo cried. “What happened?”

  Hayes explained, Geraldo and Martina shaking their heads in sympathy.

  “And of course they didn’t catch anyone,” Martina said, shaking her head and tsking. They never do.”

  “Of course not.” Geraldo rubbed his fingers with his thumb in the universal sign for money. He wheeled and beckoned to a barefoot Mayan boy standing behind them in
the shadows. “Muchacho, get the baggage for the doctors and take it down to the cabañas.” He gave me a sideways glance. “You wanted a separate cabaña, Doctor?”

  “I’ll be staying with a friend,” I said and he nodded quickly.

  “Como no? Take their luggage, quick, these poor people have been in the jungle all night. The poor doctora.” He shook his head at Pepper. “It’s a disgrace.”

  Pepper laughed. “All I need is a bath and a few hours’ rest.”

  “Of course,” Geraldo said. “And afterwards, you and don Alan must come up to the house. There is much to talk about. And poor don Pablo …” He turned to Hayes, but the tubby little archaeologist was already climbing behind the wheel of the Neon.

  “I think I’ll just drive out to the site,” he said with a not-very-subtle wink at Pepper and me. “Let Eric know we’re okay—just in case he was worried—and that we’ll need to go back and drag the Rover out of the ruts tomorrow.”

  Pepper and I followed the boy down the winding steps to the beach. The iron rails looked the same, and the love seat at the first bend was the same one where Felicia and I had sat more than once. And at the bottom, fifty feet below, was what appeared to be the same old diving board.

  “Look familiar?” Pepper asked from just behind me.

  I nodded, staring out over the lake, with its blue water, to the far shore, where, on the horizon, someone was burning a field. Burning was usually done in the spring, but I supposed that someone was clearing away jungle growth in order to build. I sucked the fresh sea breeze into my lungs and exhaled.

  “We can take a dip in the lake as soon as we change,” she said as we reached the bottom. “The cabañas still don’t have showers.”

  We made our way across the black, lavalike rocks to the little line of thatched houses with cinder-block sides. The one Felicia and I had shared had been the second. Or had it been the third?

  “The first hut is Paul’s,” Pepper explained as we walked. “Sort of a courtesy to put him closest to the steps. Then there’s José Durán, our INAH archaelogist. And next is Minnie, our volunteer, and this one is mine.”

  She indicated the structure to our left. I looked at the rest of the huts just beyond. There were two the size of the others and on the end of the row was a larger, thatched structure with pole sides. “Who gets the big one?”

  “That’s the lab, dummy. Eric had it built. Somebody stays back here every day with a couple of locals and washes the artifacts and makes notes on them. Then they’re boxed and sent to the INAH regional center in Mérida. That way they never leave the country and the Mexicans are happy.”

  I nodded. The Mexicans were touchy about their cultural patrimony being stolen, the result of bad experiences with foreigners in the past.

  “Eric’s cabaña is the one next to the lab, and the one between his and ours belongs to April Blake, who’s supposed to be a student.”

  “Supposed?”

  “Well, she is, but she doesn’t want to be here. She’s sick half the time and tries to find excuses to stay here at the lab instead of going to the field.”

  Pepper turned to our cabaña, fished out a key, and opened the wooden door.

  “Aquí, señor?” the boy asked, looking at me.

  “Sí,” I said, and handed him five pesos, which was probably too much, but I knew he was used to dealing with gringos and it was always good to have an ally.

  I closed the door after me and stood facing her, my heart thumping so loudly I was sure they could hear it up on the clifftop. She smiled and came against me.

  “Long time,” she said.

  “Damned long time,” I said.

  “We’ll feel better after a swim.”

  “I’m not sure about that,” I told her. But she was already delving into the old bureau that stood in one corner on the cement floor. “I hope you brought a suit,” she said, stripping off her shirt so that her breasts bobbed free. “I’m told that don Geraldo frowns on skinny-dipping.”

  “Yeah,” I said, opening my suitcase. “That was because a bunch of us went out one night fifteen years ago and …”

  “I see.”

  I realized at once that I’d said the wrong thing. “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay.” She watched me peel off my pants. “You going to be able to wait?”

  “We’ll see,” I said, blushing.

  Felicia had always been more oblique, less willing to let her desires be known. Because Felicia was a Mexicana and the culture frowned on female sexuality except in brothels …

  “Let’s go,” she said, and I followed her out across the rocks.

  A smell of grease frying drifted down from don Geraldo’s kitchen and I knew that there would be fried fish and papadzules for lunch and tonight poc chuc and relleno negro, served with stacks of fresh corn tortillas and all the beer you could drink.

  Pepper walked to the diving board, dipped a toe into the green water, and drew it out. “Just right,” she said and, skipping to the end of the board, arced up and into the air, vanishing beneath the green surface. I waited, looking out to where the water deepened into a blue color. Where was she? My God, what if she’d come down on a rock? What if …?

  A hand reached up over the side of the board and grabbed my ankle.

  “Let’s go,” she challenged and sprayed me with cold water. I swore and danced to get away from it. “No fair.”

  “Wuss,” she accused.

  I laid my glasses beside the board, took a deep breath, and dove.

  When I broke the surface she was twenty feet away, laughing, splashing water in my direction. I lunged after her, barely catching a foot and tugging her under the surface. Then fingers grabbed me from underwater, jerking down my trunks, and I reflexively reached down to keep from losing my suit.

  “You …” I sputtered as she laughed from a few feet away. I grabbed her head, pulled her to me, and pressed my mouth against hers. We did a slow pirouette in the water, our hands roving each other’s bodies, and I heard her gasp.

  “Enough of this,” she sighed. “Let’s go back to the hut or I’m going to ravish you on the rocks, and the hell with Geraldo and Martina.”

  I followed her, dripping, out of the water, and as I mopped myself with the towel, my eyes went up to the love seat. I don’t know if I expected to see a disapproving Felicia staring down at us, but what I did see was a man with dark glasses, smoking a cigarette. As we began our trek toward the huts, I saw him stand, propel his cigarette through the air, and lean back against the railing with both arms. I had the impression he was smiling.

  But the observer didn’t stay on my mind for more than the time it took to get to our cabaña, because once there, with the door closed, Pepper was unhooking the hammock from where it hung against one wall, folded and out of the way, and I was watching her carefully slip the hook in one of its rope arms through the circular holder set in the wall and push the netting a few times to be sure it was secure. She turned slowly to face me, her blond hair plastered to her face and rivulets of water running into the cleft between her breasts.

  I watched, mesmerized, as she slipped the bra top over her head and then slid out of the bottoms. I dropped my own suit and pushed against her until we were at an angle against the hammock, the netting pressed into a band that was all that kept us from falling backward. Pepper giggled.

  “Don’t you think we’d better get into this thing?”

  She spread the webbing and got in, legs deliciously spread, and I carefully climbed in, my knees pressing down against the net. Suddenly I was inside her and her arms were around me and the hammock was swinging with our movements, and our groans mingled with the gentle creaks of the hammock as it tugged against the sides of the hut.

  I was falling, and yet I wanted to reach the bottom, to be swallowed up by the void, but the fall never seemed to stop. Then, suddenly, I gave a shudder and heard her gasping. For a long time afterward I felt her heart beating against my own and kissed the hollow of her neck. A cool
breeze licked in through the open window and cooled the perspiration on our naked bodies, and I didn’t want to move.

  “Wow,” she breathed. “I’ve never done it in a hammock.”

  I didn’t say anything because, of course, I had, and with my silence our mood was suddenly broken.

  She slid out from under me and shoved herself out of the hammock to a standing position.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Why? You didn’t say anything.”

  “I know.”

  She went to the window and stared out. I idly wondered if the man at the love seat was still there.

  “It wasn’t this cabaña, was it?” she asked.

  “No. At least, I don’t think so. It’s funny, though”—I tried to laugh—“my memory’s been playing tricks. I didn’t even remember the cabañas were at the base of the cliff.”

  “But you remember her.”

  “Yes. But that was then.” I pushed myself up and went to her, melding my front against her naked back. “It was a long time ago, another time.”

  “A better one?”

  “I used to think so. But I don’t think any time can be as good as this one.”

  She turned then and looped her arms around my neck. “I’ve thought about it a lot, you know,” she whispered. “About how you’d feel coming back to the same place. If there was some way I could have made the project change locations …