Aaron Elkins: Curses!

Five minutes later they pulled up in front of the long, yellow main building of the hotel. Gideon remembered it with pleasure; a welcome oasis of cleanliness and civilization in one of Mexico's most undeveloped areas. Through the great entrance arch they could look across the elegant open lobby and down a long veranda paved with gleaming tiles and lined with pillars. Under big lanterns hanging from the veranda roof, groups of people were having cocktails at low glass tables.

"Like it?” he asked as they stepped down from the van.

Julie continued to take in the scene. Small, dark, white-jacketed waiters moved agilely among the tables, threading their way between lush potted plants. At the open-air registration desk a festive party of a dozen or so Germans was being checked in.

"Ah,” she said finally, “the jungle; the raw, brooding, primitive sense of isolation…"

Waiting for them on the dresser in their room was a wicker basket of yellow dahlias, an ice bucket stuffed with brown bottles of Montejo, the slightly bitter local beer, another ice bucket with glasses in it, and a note from Abe: “Welcome to Yucatan, what took you so long? Relax, wash up, go sit out on the balcony, have a few beers. And save one for me. I'll stop by at 5:00."

They followed his instructions to the letter, and at 4:45 they were in wrought-iron rocking chairs on the ample, deeply shaded balcony outside their room, their second beers at their sides. They had showered and changed to fresh clothes, and now they tipped contentedly back and forth, breathing in the thick, fragrant air and listening to the hollow chuckling of unfamiliar birds in the trees.

Their room was on the second floor, and its balcony overlooked the lush grounds of the grand old hotel-a jungle, but a jungle wrestled into submission, tamed and ordered for the pleasure of discriminating human eyes. Flagstone paths wound from the yellow, vaguely Moorish main building to the outlying bungalows, through thick stands of chicle trees, acacias, and royal palms, some of them a hundred feet high, their fronds and branches matted with trailing vines and flowers. Here and there quiet fountains were tucked away behind massed bougainvillea and frangipani. At the level of the balcony the great arms of a ceiba tree spread out before them, every crotch and hollow overflowing with plant life that had taken hold in the moist bark: spiky, flowering plants, orchids that had trunks of their own, miniature banana palms. Trees growing out of trees.

Drifting appropriately up from the veranda were the soft chords of a guitar serenading the scattered groups of people having drinks. Even the occasional muted snatches of cocktail conversation, mostly in German or English, carried a sense of civilized ease that was more than welcome after a grubby, exhausting journey that had started at 5:00 a.m. The Mayaland, of course, had been built as a hotel for hardy, well-to-do visitors to nearby Chichen ltza in the 1930s. It was mere luck that it was also close enough to the long-hidden Tlaloc to serve as headquarters.

Julie leaned back in her rocker and put her feet up on the low, glass-topped table.

"Ah,” she said, “the essential Yucatan. The jungle, the raw, primitive, elemental-"

Gideon laughed. “Don't be tedious. You have to live someplace, you know, even on a dig, and since the Mayaland is so close and there are usually a few spare rooms…"

"Yes, but before I met you I was so naive I believed genuine anthropologists slept in tents and lived off the land on snakes and toads. I didn't know they stayed in deluxe international resorts, for God's sake."

"Yes, well, naturally Abe and I, being genuine anthropologists, would prefer bathing in a muddy cenote and eating iguanas, but of course we have to think of our amateurs, who might not be so used to roughing it."

"Sure,” Julie said. “Right.” She felt on her left for her glass. Gideon picked it up and put it in her hand, and they sat in peaceable silence until Abe knocked on the louvered door to the room at five o'clock.

He was as lean and sprightly as ever. Maybe a little sprightlier, as if two weeks of poking among the tumbled stones of Tlaloc under the Yucatecan sun had done his arthritis good, which it no doubt had. His watery blue eyes sparkled with intelligence and humor above the rectangular glasses he'd recently taken to wearing low on his nose most of the time, and around his neck on a black cord the rest of the time. This after a quarter century of carrying his reading glasses in a pocket and rummaging for them when he needed them. It was one of the very few concessions to age Gideon had known him to make.

"So,” he said, after the preliminaries of greeting, when Gideon had poured him a glass of beer and they had resettled on the balcony, “how do you like our curse?” His exuberant sunburst of white hair, backlit by the sun, was like a frizzy halo.

"I can hardly wait for all the lousy jokes,” Gideon said. “Every time anybody breaks a pencil or misplaces a trowel it's going to be the Curse of Tlaloc. When does Garrison present her translation?"

"After dinner. Eight o'clock.” He leaned forward, holding the glass in both thin hands. “Listen, guess what. The Institute changed its mind. They're going to let us dig under the temple. I guess I convinced them after all."

"That's great! Congratulations!"

When the Institute Nacional de Antropologia e Historia had permitted Horizon to reopen Tlaloc, the Temple of the Owls, where the codex had been found (and promptly lost), was expressly excluded. It was to remain locked and off limits, a kind of shrine to iniquity. This, Gideon knew, Abe had been lobbying to have changed, spending several days in Mexico City putting forth a persuasive argument: Somewhere he had gotten hold of an almost unknown volume by the nineteenth-century French artist-explorer Jean Frederic de Waldeck, in which was sketched a ruined, looted Mayan temple-pyramid he had come upon in the Guatemalan highlands. The structure was virtually identical to the Temple of the Owls-two-level stairwell, concealed room in the landing, and all.

Moreover, de Waldeck had found a second concealed chamber at the base of the steps, also regrettably broken into and emptied. Did this mean there might be a second sealed room at Tlaloc, under the first one and now blocked by the debris of the cave-in? If there were, what might it not contain, considering the fantastic find in the one above? No one knew the answers, of course, (and the Count de Waldeck's romantic enthusiasms had been known to get the better of his fidelity to fact), but Gideon was sure that Abe's presentation to the Institute had made their mouths water.

"That's wonderful, Abe,” Julie said. “Maybe Horizon can get back in their good graces yet."

With his head tilted to one side, Abe seemed to weigh these innocuous words. “Maybe,” he said darkly, “maybe not.” He drained his beer. “If you're not too tired from your trip, how about taking a walk to the site? We can be back by dark if we get started now."

"I'd love it!” Julie said.

"Good. And you, Gideon, I want you to have a look at something."

Gideon frowned. “Is something wrong, Abe?"

"That,” Abe said, “is what I want you to tell me."

As Yucatecan ruins went, it wasn't much, not in the same league as Coba, or Chichen Itza, or Uxmal; a square ceremonial plaza about three hundred feet down each side, with six more-or-less standing structures. The largest was the one they were on, the Pyramid of the Owls, but by Mayan standards it was hardly imposing: a squat, truncated pyramid only forty-two feet high, with its broad, crumbling stairway of stone steps set at a comfortable forty-degree grade instead of the usual dizzying, near-vertical uplift.