Aaron Elkins - Curses!

Abe's narrow back was toward the stairs, blocking the newcomers’ view, but when he heard the footsteps behind him he twisted to the side so they could see.

"So,” he said, his eyes glowing. “what do you think of this?” He was as excited as Gideon had ever seen him.

With good reason. It was the codex all right, wedged in the angle between wall and step. Battered by the cave-in, crumpled at one corner, cracked at another, but basically sound. It was still open to the same place.

Gideon's burst of laughter drew startled looks from the others. Marmolejo in particular looked at him peculiarly, but how could he explain how funny it was? All that grave, dedicated work by the Committee for Mayan Scholarship, all the paper they'd generated, all that brilliant strategy to prevent Howard from selling the codex-and here it had been all the time, bruised and buried, but eminently safe under tons of rubble.

He stared at it, drinking up the sight; the ancient codex, the shadowy stone passageway, the vibrant old man. “Congratulations, Abe. What a-"

He stopped, frowning. Something had caught his eye a few feet from the codex. A small, unnoteworthy knot of gnarled, sticklike objects the color of driftwood, barely visible, protruding half an inch from the rubble that still covered the bottom steps and the base of the stairwell. “Just a minute,” he said.

He put a hand on Abe's shoulder and worked his way around him, gingerly stepping over the codex. The height of the uncleared rubble made it impossible to stand up straight. He hunkered down and brushed some dirt away with his fingers.

"Leo,” he said, “would you twist that lamp so it's focused here?"

He ran his fingertips over the sticklike objects and pulled away some more debris. The others watched him, curious and silent. No one seemed to want to ask what they were.

"It's a right elbow joint,” he said without preamble, “still mostly buried.” He pointed to the visible ends of each of the bones. “Humerus, ulna, radius."

"Articulatio cubiti," Harvey said automatically.

"Do you mean a-a human elbow joint?” Worthy stammered.

Gideon nodded.

"There's a skeleton under there?” Worthy had paled. In the lurid illumination his face looked like wax.

"I'm afraid so,” Gideon said.

"Maybe it's-well, it's probably just an old one. You know, another Mayan burial."

"No,” Gideon said, “it's only a few years old. I can-” But Worthy was already disturbed enough, and Leo and Julie didn't look too happy either. There wasn't much reason to explain that he could still smell the candle-wax odor of the drying fat in the bone marrow. And that would surely have been gone after a few years. Besides, most of the joint cartilage was still there, and even a few shreds of ligament.

"It's recent,” he said simply.

But not that recent. There was no trace of rancidity left, nor any sign of the insects and vermin that had performed the cleanup. And the cartilage was brittle and brown. The conclusion was inescapable-and self- evident, given a moment's thought. When he looked up at the faces peering down at him with sharp, puzzled concentration, it was clear that no one had failed to grasp it. He said it anyway.

"Whoever this is was killed when the tunnel caved in. Not before, not after. There can't be any doubt about it."

No one said anything for several seconds. The whirring of mental gears in the thick air was almost audible, Gideon's among them. Who was killed? Why? How? Had someone stopped Howard from stealing the codex, only to die for his efforts? Had there been a struggle? Had the weakened walls collapsed as a result, burying the codex and its defender together, so that Howard had had to slink off empty-handed, to wait for his chance to return? It was no more bizarre than some of their other theories, and it would explain a lot.

Only whose skeleton was it? Everyone was accounted for. Of the 1982 crew members, three were here on the stairway right now, two were at the hotel, and the others, those who had chosen not to return, were safe in the United States. Abe had talked to all of them by telephone when the dig started up. Then who…

It was Marmolejo who supplied the answer.

"So,” he said softly. “Avelino Canul, at last."

Avelino Canul, the doughty little Mayan foreman who had supervised the local laborers during the earlier dig. Avelino, who had disappeared the day after the cave-in. The police had tried to locate him, but only halfheartedly. Given the corrupt and incompetent Colonel Ornelas's reputation, there had been nothing extraordinary about a Mayan (or anyone else, for that matter) who chose to run off rather than stay for police interrogation, even if he was guilty of nothing. And Avelino, it turned out, had had a few scrapes with the law in the past as the result of a long-standing fondness for rum.

The general consensus had been that he had gone to ground in his village just over the Guatemalan border, and when Howard's letter had arrived to explain things-so they'd thought-they had abandoned the search for him. As the colonel had pointed out, if he wanted to stay hidden in his own village, among his own people, there was no way the police were going to find him-even a half-Mayan policeman like Marmolejo. And in Guatemala they had no authority anyway. They had left it at that, but Marmolejo had always been vaguely troubled; it had not satisfied his need for closure. More than once he had wondered aloud to Gideon about the fate of Avelino Canul.

"Mr. Partridge,” he said.

Worthy jumped. “Pardon? What?"

"Avelino and the other laborers were dismissed when the day's work ended. How do you suppose he got back here?"

"How do I suppose? What would I know about it?"

"You were here at Tlaloc, on guard."

"I-well, yes, but-it was dark. There wasn't any fence. The man was an Indian, used to the jungle. He knew the trails better than anyone. He could easily have come back without being seen."

"Yes, I suppose that's true. Well, why do you suppose he would do that? You think he wished to steal the codex himself? Perhaps they fought over it?"

"I'm sure I have no idea. Why ask me?” He swallowed hard. Marmolejo had frightened him.

"No matter, senor," the inspector said pleasantly. “I'm sure matters will become clear as we progress."

The rubble burying the bones was easy to remove, but it took an hour and a half because Marmolejo very properly insisted on exposing the skeleton bit by bit, layer by layer, with frequent photographs. The work was done by the two policemen, using their fingers as their main tools, and there was little for Gideon to do beyond observing and providing an occasional suggestion.

Meanwhile, Abe meticulously finished preparing the codex for removal and placed it with exquisite care in a padded crate supplied by the police. Simply getting it into the crate took twenty minutes. Quite a difference from the Howard Bennett approach.

When it was safely packed away, two other uniformed policemen-the entire Yucatecan State Judicial Police force seemed to be at Tlaloc-were detailed to carry it to the hotel safe to await the arrival of officials from the Institute. Abe, caught between curiosity about the skeleton and concern for the codex, opted for the codex and left with it.

Gideon and the others remained sprawled on the steps above, watching dreamily. An exhaust fan had been set up because of the celluloid-acetone fumes, and the air was now relatively cool and dustless. It was an oddly peaceful time, free-floating and slow-paced. There were still questions, but a big corner had been turned; they were now closing in on the answers instead of getting farther away. And of course there was the recovery of the great codex to be chewed over and relished.