Aaron Elkins - Curses!

Gideon eyed him uneasily. Now what the hell was all this about? Marmolejo was an intelligent, practical man. Surely he wouldn't give any credence to a four-hundred-year-old curse.

Or maybe not so surely. Once, over brandies, he'd told Gideon about his extraordinary past. He'd been born in his Mayan mother's village of Tzakol, which Gideon had seen-a derelict little collection of shacks near the Quintana Roo border, where curses were no doubt as common and unremarkable as the pigs that sunned themselves in the middle of the muddy streets. When he was seven, his father had taken the family to Merida. By eleven, he was one of the army of kids selling walkaway snacks of coconut slices and peeled oranges near the mercado.

Against enormous odds he had gone through school and eventually saved enough to buy his way into Yucatan's then graft-ridden police department. Now, after the cleanup, his integrity and abilities had made him a high-ranking civil servant. He had attended the University of Yucatan as an adult. He was one of the few provincial officials to have graduated from the new national police academy. He was an educated man.

But who knew how much of Tzakol he still carried with him beneath that rational, sensible surface?

He saw the way Gideon was looking at him and laughed. “Don't worry, my friend. I doubt very much if it was the gods who attacked you with a chain. If it was a chain."

"I'm glad to hear it,” Gideon said.

There was a booming splash from outside. The rain had come at last, crashing onto the surface of the swimming pool like a performing whale falling back into a tank, then setting up a tremendous thrumming on the water, the broad-leafed foliage, and the roof of the restaurant. Julie, who took pride in having grown up in the wettest micro-climate in the United States, had never seen anything like it, and watched with her mouth open.

"On the other hand,” Marmolejo said easily, reaching for his cigar, “I wouldn't go out of my way to annoy them."

With the downpour, the viscous humidity went out of the air, as if the rain had pounded it into the earth, and a luscious, blossom-scented breeze flowed into the dining room like balm onto a wound. They shifted in their chairs, bathing in it appreciatively. At Marmolejo's suggestion, they ordered coffee with their caramel custard. A few moments before, hot coffee would have been unthinkable.

"I want to show you both something,” he said. He set down his cup, and from the unoccupied seat at his right he took a paper bag and laid it on the table. Reaching inside with care he slid out an old Stanley pipe wrench, much used, its coating of red paint almost worn away.

"Do you recognize this?"

"I think so,” Julie said. “Isn't it one of the dig tools?” Gideon agreed that it was.

Marmolejo looked at Gideon. “It doesn't seem otherwise familiar?"

"Well, I think it's the same one we had in ‘82, if that's what you mean."

Marmolejo shook his head. That wasn't what he meant. He took hold of the heavy wrench carefully, not on the handle but near the loose jaws, and lifted it. He gave it a single firm shake.

Chink.

It was familiar, all right. Gideon sat up with a jerk. “That's what he tried to brain me with! Not a chain, a wrench!"

With a satisfied smile, Marmolejo carefully laid it on the table again and pointed at the head with his ballpoint pen, to a barely noticeable smear of white powder. “You can see where it hit the limestone when it missed your head."

"Where did you find it?” Julie asked a little shakily. “Below the rampart of the ball court, at the far end, toward the Temple of the Bearded Man."

Gideon nodded. “That's the direction he ran, all right. He must have tossed it off the wall. Have you gotten any fingerprints from it?"

"Not yet, and I am not hopeful of finding any. Even if we did, what then? Many people must have handled it during the excavation."

Julie stared at the big wrench, fascinated and pale. “It's heavy," she said. “My God, if that had hit you in the head, it would have-it would have…"

"Like an eggshell,” Gideon said. “Well, that just about makes it a fact; it has to be one of the crew. The tools are all kept in the work shed."

"So it would seem,” Marmolejo said. “Ah, here comes our dessert. How I love flan."

For the next few days the dig continued almost as if nothing unusual had happened. Despite Gideon's and Julie's heightened perception, the crew seemed no more menacing than ever. They saw no secretive glances, no suspicious behavior. Nobody was slinking guiltily around. Worthy was Worthy, Leo was Leo, Emma was Emma. A little odd, some of them, maybe a little more than odd, but not a discernible would-be murderer among them.

Marmolejo's protection turned out to be a soft-spoken, uniformed officer who accompanied the crew to and from Tlaloc and hung inconspicuously about the site during the workday. Others, in civilian clothes, were at the hotel in the evening. They were not only assigned to guard Gideon, but also to keep an eye on things in general, which they did quite unobtrusively. Abe had tried to put the uniformed one to work-as long as you're standing around with nothing to do"-but was politely turned down.

As quietly efficient as they seemed to be, they failed to prevent the next phase of the Curse of Tlaloc from coming to pass. This time Gideon did not bear the brunt of it alone.

At any time from 10:00 p.m. the following Monday night to 4:00 a.m. in the morning, according to their stories on Tuesday, every member of the staff was seized with acute attacks of diarrhea, some of which continued well into the morning. Several, including Julie and Abe, suffered intermittent cramps, and all were weakened and made uncomfortable, so much so that Abe called off the day's work.

It was noon before the crew began to straggle out to join their pale and weakened fellows in sipping tentatively at cups of soup or tea on the veranda, and in talking about this latest evidence of the gods’ displeasure.

For, of course, that was what Emma claimed it was, and if she didn't have her audience convinced, at least she had them passive and very nearly inert. Gideon, whose sturdy constitution had kept him from suffering too much, had gone downstairs to get a pot of manzanilla tea to bring up to Julie, who hadn't been so lucky, and while he was waiting at the bar for it he was able to overhear Emma holding forth.

They were seated at the large table the group had more or less permanently appropriated as their own, and Emma seemed to be at the summing-up of her discourse. Nearby a jowly Mexican whom Gideon knew for one of Marmolejo's men sleepily cleaned his teeth with a toothpick and stared placidly at nothing.

"Obviously,” Emma was telling the crew earnestly, “the curse is unfolding phase by phase, exactly as predicted."

It was a measure of their suffering that no one took issue with her. Even Worthy, who would surely have risen to the challenge a day earlier, sat in opaque silence, looking as if he'd been pickled in brine for a week. Harvey, as wan and lusterless as a ghost, stared distrustfully into his soup. And Leo, with all the muscle tonus of a banana slug, slumped in his chair, focusing all his concentration on getting his cup to his lips. Preston, who would hardly have taken issue in any case, sprawled with his eyes pressed closed and misery grooved on his handsome, pallid forehead.

Emma, who didn't look any better than the rest of them, continued: “First, the bloodsucking kinkajou was going to come, and it did. Second-"

But, ill as he was, this was too much for Worthy after all. “Oh, for God's sake,” he said sourly, “everybody knows that was nothing but a joke. Are you suggesting the gods hung that placard around the poor creature's neck?"