Aaron Elkins: Curses!

But his hard-driving new style had taken a toll, he confessed to Gideon. Several months before, he'd gone to his doctor complaining of chronic stomach pains. A pair of incipient ulcers had been diagnosed, and he had been ordered to get away from things, to take a few weeks off from work and family pressures. Luckily, the opportunity to take part in the dig had come along at just the right time.

On Leo's other side were Preston and Emma Byers. Preston was an extraordinarily handsome man, with limpid blue eyes and a profile as chiseled and handsome as Paul Newman's. Naturally, Gideon had taken an immediate dislike to him, but it had been hard to maintain. Preston was the most self-effacing of men, mild, retiring, and sweet-natured, with a perpetual expression of gentle perplexity on his classic features; an unprofound, amiably dull man who seldom spoke unless spoken to.

At fifty, he had changed little. His attractively graying hair had receded a bit in front, but he had made up for this by letting it grow a little longer in back; not in a wild sort of way, of course, but in an unobtrusive little fill that fell neatly over his collar. He was a onetime distributor of commercial kitchen equipment who had answered a start-your-own-business advertisement in a trade magazine many years before and somehow wound up building a modest fortune from a chain of fast-food restaurants in the Midwest. (Burger Bopper? Wiener Beaner? Gideon could never remember.)

Gideon had little doubt that the easygoing Preston owed his business success to the hard-driving woman beside him. Worthy had once referred to them as a Beauty-and-the-Beast marriage in reverse, and with reason; Emma was as homely as Preston was good-looking. Muscular, coarse-haired, red-faced, and plain, she used no make up or jewelry, but made up for her lack of bodily adornment by wearing clothes as up-to-the-minute as a mannequin's. Today she had on a buttery yellow outfit of baggy pants and loose overshirt with buttons in the back, circled at the waist by a wide, drooping belt of red leather.

The effect was surely not what she intended. Emma and her outfits never seemed to go together. They were out of joint, vaguely wrong, even a little unsettling, like a cowboy wearing glasses.

And, finally, sitting on Julie's other side, near Abe, there was Worthy Partridge. Alone among the coffee drinkers, he was having tea, and engaged at the moment in neatly lifting a teabag from the cup, wrapping the string around it to extract the last of the liquid, and placing the bag in a flip-top receptacle he carried with him for the purpose. The saucer of lime wedges that had come with the tea was contemptuously ignored.

Worthy claimed he drank tea because it helped ease the chronic constipation that afflicted him. Worthy was the only American he knew-the only one he had ever heard of-who managed to remain constipated when he came to Mexico.

Leo, Harvey, Preston, Emma, Worthy. Which of them had been up nights excavating the stairwell? He couldn't realistically imagine any of them doing it. What conceivable reason could they have? They had already helped dig it out with their own hands once. Of course they all knew about Abe's idea that there might be another hidden room, but surely they understood that the notion was more sizzle than substance, that the likelihood was slim, and the chance of another treasure even slimmer. Or did they? And even if they did, might they not think that even a slim chance at a million-dollar treasure was worth a few nights’ lost sleep?

Either way, it didn't much matter anymore. Abe had engaged guards to watch over the site at night, and the official stairwell excavation was about to reopen. There would be no more secret digging. Still, Gideon would dearly have liked to know what had been going on.

He turned in his chair and gave his attention to Dr. Garrison, who had just cleared her throat meaningfully.

"Copies are now being made for each of you,” she said, “but I think we should begin without waiting further. Dr. Villanueva and I must leave for Mexico City in less than an hour. An early-morning press conference has been scheduled."

She straightened her pince-nez and folded her hands before her on the table. “I have rendered this material in as exact and literal a manner as possible, leaving interpretation to others,” she explained. “The polysynthetic Mayan characteristic of reliance on verbal nouns has necessarily been transformed into our own grammar. Beyond that, I have tried to be consistent with the historical conventions that have applied to previous works. I can assure you,” she added unnecessarily, “that I have used no poetic license."

She began to read aloud with a velvety Georgia accent curiously at odds with her precise diction.

"'The day Katun Thirteen Ahau,'” she intoned. “ Itzamna, Itzamtzab is his face during its reign.’”

Julie leaned over to Gideon and whispered: “This is a translation?"

Gideon spread his hands but said nothing. Explaining the Mayan system of dating would be hard enough with a couple of hours at his disposal. There wasn't much sense in trying to do it in an aside.

Dr. Garrison continued. “'Those who come here to this place Tlaloc to disturb our bones and the dust of our bodies, let them know that many punishments will come to them. These are the punishments that will come to them.

"'First, the bloodsucking kinkajou will come freely among them.

"'Second, the darkness will be sundered and turned to light, and the terrible voices of the gods will be heard in the air, and there will be a mighty pummeling of the soul so that the spirit languishes and faints. Their treasures will be lost and their batabobs and ahlelobs will desert them…’”

The pince-nez were plucked off. “I'm afraid I have no wholly unambiguous referents for batabobs and ahlelobs in this context."

"The batabob was the governor of the area, the big chief,” Abe said promptly. “The ahlelob, I think, was the assistant chief."

She looked at him. So did Gideon, to whom it came as a surprise that Abe knew something about the Mayan language. No, not a surprise; an item of interest, maybe. Gideon had been astonished too many times by the range of his knowledge to be surprised anymore.

Under Dr. Garrison's uncompromising stare Abe smiled and shrugged modestly. “I guess I read it somewhere?"

"Thank you.” With her index finger she found her place again.

"Maybe we can get him to play Trivial Pursuit with us,” Julie whispered to Gideon.

"Not with me,” Gideon muttered back.

"'Third, the one called Tucumbalam will turn their entrails to fire and bloody flux.’”

This caused Worthy to grimace and push the rest of his ice cream away.

"'Fourth, the one called Xecotcavach will pierce their skulls so that their brains spill onto the earth.’”

"Yuck, I'm grossing out,” Leo announced, shoveling ice cream into his mouth.

Emma leaned stiffly toward him, her face intense. “Sh!” she whispered sharply. “This isn't a joke!"

Gideon frowned. Dim memories stirred. Wasn't it Emma who had belonged to some oddball group dedicated to the otherworldly theories of Von Daniken, or Velikovsky, or someone like that? Yes, it was, he recalled. Once she had cornered him into a long, dippy discussion of how it was that a carved, five-thousand-year-old Japanese Dogu figure wore what could only have been an astronaut's helmet and goggles. ("And, as you must know, Dr. Oliver, goggles hadn't even been invented in the Stone Age!") He had spent much of his subsequent time in Yucatan trying to stay out of her way without offending her.

Leo mimed a good-natured apology and quieted.

Dr. Garrison had paused coolly at the interruption. Now she continued the litany of calamity.

"'Fifth, the beast that turns men to stone will come among them from the Underworld.