Aaron Elkins: Curses!

"Thanks a lot,” Gideon grumbled.

Julie continued to listen on the telephone. “You're kidding!” she said, turning her head to look at Gideon. “He's not going to believe it."

She handed the telephone to him with a peculiar grin. “You're not going to believe it."

"Hello, Gideon?"

The old man's thin voice promptly brought out a smile. Abraham Irving Goldstein, his onetime professor and continuing mentor. Avram Yitzchak Goldstein of Minsk, who had begun his career in America as a seventeen-year-old peddling ribbons from a pushcart in Brooklyn, and ended it as a distinguished scholar. Abe Goldstein, longtime friend.

"Abe, hello! Where are you calling from?"

"Where should I be calling from? Yucatan. Listen, how would you like to come down here to Tlaloc for a few weeks and give me a hand on the dig? Julie, too, if she can get some time off."

Gideon covered the mouthpiece with his hand and looked at Julie. “I don't believe this."

Abe, as a member of the board of directors of the Horizon Foundation for Anthropological Research, was at a Horizon-sponsored excavation about sixty miles from Merida, near Mexico's Gulf Coast. Tlaloc, a small Mayan ceremonial center, had been discovered only ten years before, and work had begun in 1980. But when a scandal had made the site notorious in 1982, the Mexican government's Institute Nacional de Antropologia e Historia had shut down the excavation. “For all time,” they had declared somewhat histrionically, “to bury the memory of this shameful hour.” Gideon had been there at the time, just finishing up work on the collection of human bones that divers had recovered from the cenote-the sacrificial well-a few hundred feet from the buildings, and he had been as shocked and disgusted as anyone else by what had happened.

Afterwards, the site had remained locked for over five years while Horizon and the Institute engaged in recriminations and negotiations. Eventually, Horizon had made handsome amends and the threat of a suit had died quietly away. Then six months ago the government had relented further, allowing Horizon to begin work again, “subject to stringent review by the Institute.” One of the express provisions was that Dr. Abraham Goldstein (who had had no part in the original dig) would personally direct the start-up, lending his impeccable reputation and expertise to an operation that had been sadly botched the first time around.

This, Gideon had no doubt, had been subtly engineered by the “retired” seventy-eight-year-old professor, who had left Sequim for Yucatan in early December to begin laying the pre-excavation groundwork. Gideon had not been asked along; the dredging of the cenote was finished, and no further burials were expected.

"What's up, Abe?” Gideon asked. “Don't tell me you turned up some skeletal stuff after all?"

"That's right. You remember the building they called the Priest's House?"

"Southeast of the temple, all buried in vines? The one we hadn't worked on yet?"

"That's the one. Only now we got some of the vines cleaned off and, guess what, there's a body a couple of feet inside the entry. I made them leave it alone to wait for you. You can come?"

"What's the weather like?” Not that it made any difference. He could already feel the excitement of a dig building in his chest. But he felt that he ought to show at least a semblance of thinking it over.

"Like it always is here. Hot. Sunny. Humid. Just the way you don't like, but the dig is a pleasure."

Gideon gazed out the window at the rain streaming from the leaves of the soaked rhododendron thicket that backed against the Sciences and Humanities Building. “When did I ever say I didn't like it hot and sunny?” he asked dreamily.

Abe laughed. “Boy, you got a short memory. So, you can come or you can't come?"

"I can come.” With bells on, he could come. He squeezed Julie's leg and smiled at her. She had plenty of vacation time saved up. She could come too.

"Ah, wonderful!” Abe said. His pleasure warmed Gideon. “That's fine!"

"What's the crew like?"

"The crew…I didn't tell you?"

"Tell me what?” Gideon asked warily.

"Don't be so suspicious. They're all amateurs, that's all. Old friends of yours."

"I thought the government was insisting on professionals this time."

"When we get down to the technical stuff, yes. But for the first couple of weeks it's just clean-up and preliminaries, so we gave the ones who were here in 1982 a chance to come again if they wanted to. On us. From the original nine, five came back, including your old student Harvey Feiffer. We thought we owed it to them, considering the tsuris they had before."

Tsuris was trouble, of course. Gideon's knowledge of Yiddish had grown considerably in the last ten years, for Abraham Irving Goldstein had not forsaken the accent, let alone the vocabulary, of his pushcart-peddling days. Sometimes impenetrable, often hardly noticeable, it had never completely disappeared. Whether this was a statement of identity, a whimsical eccentricity (one among many), or a plain, honest-to-goodness accent, no one knew for sure, not even Gideon. Maybe not even Abe. If anyone had the temerity to ask how it was that a world-renowned scholar, a master of seven languages, sometimes spoke with an accent out of Abie’ s Irish Rose, Abe's response was unvarying. His eyes would grow round, his forehead furrow into a million parchmentlike wrinkles. “Accent?” he would echo, astounded. “What kind accent?"

"So?” he said. “When you'll be here? Tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow?" Gideon laughed. “We have to get our things organized, get tourist cards-"

"You can't do that this afternoon?"

"This afternoon is already taken up.” Gideon rubbed the small of Julie's back and smiled up at her. The fact that he was desperate to be on a dig hardly meant that he had lost all sense of proportion. “Besides,” he added firmly, “there's a monograph I want to finish up. We'll be there at the end of the week. Friday. How's that?"

A fractional hesitation. “Friday? You couldn't make it a little sooner?"

"Like when?"

"Like tomorrow?"

"What's the rush, Abe? The bones will still be there Friday."

"It's not just the bones. Something's bothering me here. I need your opinion."

"Well…"

"Also,” Abe said with the singsong wheedle that meant the clincher was on its way, “we turned up some new Mayan written material. Garrison from Tulane rushed down here to work on the translation, and she's almost finished. I asked her to hold off on her presentation so you could be here for it, but she has to go back the day after tomorrow. I don't have to tell you it's a historic thing, but, of course, if you can't make it, you can't make it."

Gideon was silent.

"Of course it's only a few leaves, post-Conquest,” Abe pressed on, “but still, something like this doesn't happen every day."

Or every year, or every decade. Well, Gideon could always take the monograph along. “Okay,” he said, “I'm convinced. We'll be there tomorrow."

"Good. Wonderful. There's funding to pay your fare-Julie's too, if she's willing to do a little work-and we'll put you up at the hotel. Meals too. A salary I can't come up with. I'm not getting paid, why should you?"

"No problem.” Gideon was more than satisfied. He'd have paid their own way if he'd had to. “Abe, tell me, what's bothering you there?"

"Listen, Gideon, this call's costing plenty. When you get here I'll explain. Let me know what time you'll be here and someone will pick you up at the airport in Merida."

"Okay, Abe, thanks. See you tomorrow, then. If we can get a plane."

When he hung up, Julie clasped her hands lightly about his neck, her forearms resting on his shoulders. “We're going to Yucatan?"