Aaron Elkins: Curses!

That's what made the whole thing so irritating. Oliver was right every step of the way.

He stood and walked to the big window. Immediately below was Merida's colonial Plaza Mayor, a manicured island of greenery lapped on all four sides by the sluggish downtown traffic, most of which seemed to consist of extremely noisy, extremely smelly old trucks and buses.

After the police department clean-up, there had been a scramble for the best of the newly available offices in the Palacio de Gobierno, and to Marmolejo's surprise the heaviest fighting had been for the inside rooms, the ones overlooking the quiet courtyard with its modernistic murals chronicling the rise of the Mexican spirit. No one battled him for the colonel's roomy, old-fashioned office on the outside of the building; too much traffic noise, too much traffic stink. But Marmolejo liked the traffic. It stimulated his mind, made him alert and receptive. He'd had enough rustic peace and quiet back in Tzakol to last him for the rest of his life. He even liked the stink from the trucks, as long as it didn't get too bad.

And he could happily get along without the modernistic murals chronicling the rise of the Mexican spirit.

He walked back to the desk, put the memorandum in the to-be-filed box, pulled a fuzzily photocopied sheet out of a drawer, and stared impassively at it. The Curse of Tlaloc. He laid his finger alongside a now-familiar sentence in the middle of the page.

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

Marmolejo didn't believe in curses. Not exactly. He didn't believe that Xecotcavach had come up from the Underworld and pierced Ard's skull. No, that had been a twentieth-century human being with a twentieth-century gun. Nor did he think that it had been Tucumbalam who had personally slipped a little something into the crew's food, or some other Mayan god who'd said “ow” (with a gringo accent) when Oliver hit him in the stomach.

Perhaps Emma Byers, who was writing a book on the curse, and with whom he'd spent thirty bizarre minutes the day before, really believed all these things, but not Marmolejo. Not precisely. What Marmolejo did believe-and what he had learned to keep to himself-was that there were a lot of things in this world that nobody could explain. Not the professors, not the doctors, not the priests. And definitely not Javier Marmolejo.

He couldn't explain the Evil Eye, but he had seen it work. Oh, he had seen it work. And he couldn't explain how it was that his uncle Fano, who had been given up on by the doctors and carried home to die in Tzakol, had not died after all. The family had brought in a curer who had propitiated the winds, given Fano an amulet of wood from the tancazche tree, and called upon Ix Chel, the goddess of health, to help him. And he had recovered. That very night he had stood up on his feet for the first time in weeks, and he had lived. All right, for six or seven months only, but still…

Marmolejo had been just a child, but he had learned something valuable from it. A health official, Dr. Zuniga, had visited the family earlier, when Fano had returned home. With the best of intentions he had explained that rituals were fine in their place, but there was no hope at all for the dying man. What could ceremonies do against bacteria and viruses? The best thing the family could do was to resign themselves and make Fano's last hours comfortable. He would be dead within a very few days.

But when Fano didn't die, Dr. Zuniga's philosophy was undisturbed. Yes, the ritual had been effective, he explained patiently, but not really; not the way they supposed. It had no power of its own. It was all in the mind. Fano had thought it would work, and so it had. That was all. Where, Dr. Zuniga had asked with a smile, was the mystery in that?

Marmolejo had been much impressed. First the doctor had told the relatives that the ceremony couldn't work and why. Then afterward, without blinking an eye, he had told them exactly why it had worked. This he managed to do in a way that showed he had been right both before and after, and the family had been wrong all along. The fact that Fano had recovered, if only for a while, didn't seem to have much to do with it.

It was the young Marmolejo's introduction to the mind of the scientist, and these many years later it was still his key to how their thinking worked: Even when they were wrong they weren't wrong.

Well, Oliver was a lot better than most. And, happily, what he needed from him now was not more of his forensic expertise, but some plain old-fashioned information.

He picked up the telephone on his desk and dialed the Hotel Mayaland.

"Hola," he said to the clerk who answered. "Puedo hablar con Senor Oliver?"

In five-and-a-half years Merida had changed very little. Animated, noisy, cheerful, the city was teeming with round little people not much over five feet tall, among whom outlanders loomed here and there like isolated peaks sticking up above the clouds.

At five feet, six inches, Julie didn't often get the chance to loom, and she was obviously enjoying it. “I feel like Dorothy in Munchkinland,” she said happily to Gideon over the heads of the chattering shoppers who had bustled their way between them.

They were fighting their way out of Merida's great public market, heading for an eleven o'clock meeting with Marmolejo. The inspector's request that Gideon-and Julie, if she liked-pay a visit to his office had come at a good time; they were ready for a change of scene. Ard's death had naturally cast a pall over things, but besides that, they had been in Yucatan eleven days and had yet to get more than a mile from the Mayaland. They had caught the morning bus originating from Cancun at its Chichen Itza stop (one of Marmolejo's men had seen them off), and a two-hour ride had put them at the main Merida bus station on Calle 69 an hour before their appointment, giving them time to walk through the famous mercado.

They hadn't intended to buy anything, but had succumbed at a stall selling the celebrated local string hammocks. Yucatecan hammocks were delicate, threadlike affairs and Julie had made Gideon ask the vendor if the large size-the matrimonial especial- could really hold the weight of two people.

The vendor had drawn himself up. “I myself have no beds in my house, senor,” he had told Gideon. “Only hammocks. And I have eight children."

Twice on their walk to Marmolejo's office in the center of town, Gideon had been sidled up to by teenaged boys who recognized him as an American (he loomed more than most) and slipped business cards into his hand. Almost anywhere else they would have been invitations to the Pussy Cat Club or the Eros Massage Studio, but there wasn't much big-city nightlife in Merida, and little in the way of earnest vice. “Welcome, gentlemens and ladies,” said one card. “We have finally made handcraf scultures for your examination.” The other said, “Restaraunt T'ho inwites you to a happy dining on Typical Yucatan Cookings."

Other young men-boys, really, some no more than nine or ten-hawked walkaway snacks from hand- pushed or bicycle-powered carts at the curbside: spiral-peeled oranges; mangoes on sticks; sliced papayas and pineapples; brown-kerneled corn doused with chili sauce and eaten out of the husk.

"That's what Marmolejo did when he first came to the big city,” Gideon said.

Julie watched a sweating. skinny kid of twelve in a ragged gray T-shirt deftly pare a coconut, then whack it into a dozen wedges, all with a few quick strokes of a coa, a miniature machete with a wicked hook on the end of it.

"Then he sure has come a long way,” she said.

He sure had.

His office was like something out of Viva Zapata, an airy, dusty, once-grand space with tiled floors, high windows, cracked walls, and not enough furniture to keep it from looking like a railroad-station waiting room. What furniture there was was eighty or ninety years old, massively made of dark, heavy wood: a sort of latino -Victorian. It was far from crude, but somehow one wouldn't have been surprised to see a couple of crossed cartridge belts hooked over a chair back, or a stained sombrero tossed on the corner of the enormous desk.