Aaron Elkins: Curses!

After a while he stopped. Even with his eyes closed, he could feel the darkness blossoming and unfolding, like a flower in a slow-motion film. There was a terrific sinking sensation, not merely as if something inside him were falling, but as if the stone floor on which he lay, the entire work shed, had tipped, then plummeted over the edge of some immense pit. The crushing speed of the drop squeezed his chest until he knew his ribs were going to crack. Behind his closed and paralyzed lids the blackness expanded around him, as if he were a tiny, shrinking speck inside the starless, lightless universe of his own skull.

Is my central nervous system shutting down? he wondered with detached interest. Is this death?

Down he plunged, and down, and down, and down, and down.

Grimly, Marmolejo waited at the back of the hotel reading room for the speeches to end. The eyes of speechmakers and crew darted frequently at him. They had been uneasy since he had come to fetch Julie, and they had no doubt seen, as he had seen, how her face had whitened when he'd told her what had happened, and how she'd swayed momentarily before collecting herself and going off with the officer. And he supposed his own face was making them nervous, too, if it showed what he was feeling.

He was angry. Angry in a white-hot way that no policeman should be. Angry at himself for not understanding sooner; angry that he couldn't have headed it off before it came to this, to a good man's life hanging by a thread; angry at the cunning, clever, stupid killer behind it all; and angry, if the truth be told, that it took a semiconscious Gideon Oliver to figure it out and explain it to him.

The speaker from Mexico City sat down. Another one stood up. Who knew how long this was going to go on? The hell with it; he wasn't going to wait any longer.

He strode into the room, up to the table. The speaker's voice faded away. Everyone looked warily, expectantly up at him. Everyone except one person, with his back to Marmolejo, who kept his eyes blamelessly on the speaker. But a muscle in front of his ear worked rhythmically. Marmolejo put his hand on the thick shoulder. The man twitched.

"Senor,” Marmolejo said formally, “will you come with me, please?"

Leo Rose tried to look surprised. He forced his mouth into what Marmolejo believed was referred to as a shit-faced grin.

"Sure,” he said with empty brightness. "Bueno-bueno."

He wasn't falling anymore. He had bottomed out and was beginning to rise. No, he had been rising for a long time now, floating gently and serenely up out of the blackness. The awful pressure was gone from his chest. He could breathe again.

He was on his back, lying on something soft, his head and shoulders raised. A bed? He made an effort to open his eyes. Nothing happened. They felt as if they were stapled shut. Was he paralyzed? He tried flexing his hand. and felt fingernails touch palm. That was nice. Something worked anyway.

Slowly-he was very tired-he raised his left hand to his face. It flopped against his nose as if it were asleep. He slid it over his cheek, managed with a few wrong turns to find his left eye, and with a finger pushed up the eyelid and held it there. The light made him wince, but how strangely, charmingly familiar everything looked: sturdy wooden chairs, pottery water jug on the table, solid walls, clean-cut planes, straightforward right angles. Everything was so wonderfully real and three- dimensional. He was in their hotel room and, yes, he was in bed. He could look down the length of his body. The pale-blue sheet covering him was pristine and unwrinkled, with crisp, straight creases where it had been folded. However long he'd been there, he'd been lying like a statue. He flexed his toes and was gratified to see the corresponding lumps under the sheet move accordingly.

He tried to look to the side but his eyeballs didn't work as well as his toes. He could turn his head, however, and when he did he saw Julie in one of the wooden armchairs, staring dully at the floor, her black hair unkempt. Behind her, the rose-colored light slipping in layered streaks through the louvered door was early-morning light, no later than six-thirty. A whole day gone by? Had she been up all night with him?

His arm felt like jelly. Keeping it up was too difficult. He lowered it. The eyelid plopped shut.

"Hi,” he said. What came out was a croak.

He heard her start. “It speaks,” she said cheerfully. “It moves.” But he had seen the strain in her eyes, the pallor and fatigue in her face. He tried to tell her he was all right, but this time his tongue wouldn't work at all.

"Don't try to talk,” she said. Her cool hand was on his wrist. “Dr. Plumm says you'll be fine."

Dr. Plumm? Was he sick, then? Was that why his eyes didn't work? What was the matter with him, anyway? Like an automobile engine that had lain unused in a garage for a long time, his mind turned over, ticked, and coughed sluggishly to life.

He had gone to the site. He had stopped off at the work shed…

"Leo!” he cried. Another croak. “Julie, tell Marm-"

"Sh. Don't worry. They have him."

Have him? Who has him?

He must have said enough of it aloud to be understood. “Inspector Marmolejo arrested him,” she said. “He's in jail in Merida. The inspector says you're brilliant."

"You mean I really told Marmolejo about it? I thought I was dreaming.” That was what he tried to say, but it was too complicated to get out, and he gave it up halfway through.

"Sh,” she said again. “Rest now. We can talk about it later."

He managed to pat the back of her hand-reassuringly, he hoped-and relaxed against the pillows. How about that? All the time he'd thought he was shouting soundlessly into that roiling black vacuum, Marmolejo had really been there, listening to him. And not only that, Gideon must have been right.

"Be back at nine,” Howard had told them at the base of the pyramid. Only not quite. He'd begun to say it, all right, but he'd interrupted himself. “What time is it now?” he'd asked, and that was the missing piece Gideon had been searching for ‘without knowing it; the piece that didn't fit.

Because if Howard had asked the time, it meant that he hadn't been wearing a watch, and if he hadn't been wearing a watch, then the broken one lying under the skeleton-wrist on the stairwell couldn't very well have been his. And if it wasn't Howard's, then whose was it?

Earlier Gideon had spent a lot of time wondering what it was that he and Stan Ard had had in common. There had, after all, been attempts on only two lives: Ard's (successful) and his (close enough). Why? Why Ard and Gideon in particular, and no one else?

Once he'd realized that the watch in the stairwell wasn't Howard's, the answer had been obvious. His mind had gone back to the interview with the reporter on the veranda. Ard had asked Gideon how he'd happened to know that the stairwell ceiling had begun to give way at exactly 4:12 p.m. Gideon hadn't been able to remember at first, but then he'd recalled. He knew, he'd told Ard, because he'd noticed later that Leo Rose's watch, broken in that first shower of rocks, had stopped at 4:12 p.m.

And then, having told him, he'd called Leo over and blithely repeated it in front of him. Leo had laughed pleasantly and gone into his waterfront-flexivilla spiel, but he'd been aware from that moment that Gideon and Ard knew something he couldn't permit anybody to know-not when Howard's body was going to be turned up any day. And when it was, there was going to be a broken watch near it. And that watch was going to say 4:12 p.m.

There hadn't been any way Gideon could be certain of all this, of course, but it had been a reasonable guess: if you find a watch with a snapped band next to the body of a murdered man, and it isn't his own watch, then-as any observant cop would point out in a flash-it could very well be the murderer's, broken and pulled off in a struggle. Ordinarily, murderers took pains not to leave such things lying around. But if the victim had been knocked to the foot of a stairwell by a sledgehammer, and if that flailing hammer had then accidentally slammed into a weakened prop and dumped five or ten tons of rubble down on the body, then retrieving a watch would be a bit of a problem. As would be anything else under the debris-such as a priceless Mayan codex.