Aaron Elkins: Curses!

"Did you reach the bottom, then?” Harvey asked as they trotted across the grassy plaza toward the pyramid.

No, Leo explained, huffing for breath, they hadn't found the base of the stairwell yet, although they had now dug down twenty-four steps. No, the hollow wall had been discovered on the landing that was just twelve steps down from the temple floor, at a level that had been exposed and unremarked for a year. Someone had noticed that the mortar on one of the walls was different, more crumbly, and when Howard had probed between the blocks of masonry with the point of a trowel, they had come loose.

At the foot of the pyramid Gideon nodded to the two straw-hatted Mayan laborers enjoying their break-cigars and lukewarm tea-on the bottom steps. In return he received two decorous, unsmiling nods. He jogged up the steaming, worn steps, Harvey bumping along beside him and Leo gasping behind, then entered the small building on the pyramid's flat top: the Temple of the Owls, so-called on account of the frieze that ran along its lintel. (They didn't look like owls to Gideon, but no one had much liked his “Temple of the Turkeys” suggestion.)

Inside, the structure was bare, with the look of a burned-out tenement. Ceilings, walls, and floor were coated with a limestone stucco made dismal and blotchy by centuries of intrusive plant growth, since removed, and a millennium of damp heat, still very much present. Only near the roofline were there a few faded streaks of green, blue, and red to suggest what it might have looked like in A.D. 900. The one unusual note was the square opening cut in the floor, and that, of course, led into the stairwell.

On the landing twelve steps below, most of the west wall had already been taken down, with the removed blocks neatly stacked and numbered with felt-tipped markers. The crew and another Mayan laborer were gazing mutely at the opening. Two portable lamps on the landing threw their garish yellow light into the small, astonishing room before them.

It is one of the great thrills of anthropology to look at something that was sealed up a thousand years ago, by the people of a great and vanished culture, and has lain unseen ever since. But this was something more, something out of a fairy tale…the Crystal Cave, was it? The room was a jeweled, sparkling white, made all the more dazzling by its contrast with the grimy stairwell-a fiercely glittering ice grotto in the heart of the Yucatan rain forest. But the ice was crystallized calcium carbonate, of course: stalactites on the ceiling, stalagmites on the floor, and a glistening, petrified sheen of it on the walls.

In the center was a waist-high stone chest three feet square, made of four massive slabs standing on their sides, and capped by a great, overhanging stone lid eight inches thick. The lid too was coated with crystal deposits, but through the milky veneer Gideon could see an intricately carved surface of extraordinary beauty. There were Long Count dates around the rim, and in the center a lovingly worked figure of the halach-uinic, the True Man, emerging from or disappearing into the jaws of an Underworld serpent. The red paint had faded to a pale rose. Other than that, the chest might have been finished that morning. The lid was magnificent, in itself a find of the first order. Gideon hardly dared think about what might be under it.

Howard Bennett hadn't seen him come in. Shirtless and built something like a sumo wrestler-sleekly corpulent, with thick, soapy flesh sheathing a heavily muscled frame-he was staring avidly at the lid. On his gleaming neck and shoulders, the skin twitched like a horse's. Gideon heard him laugh deep in his throat, softly and privately. The sound set off an odd shiver of apprehension at the back of Gideon's scalp.

Howard looked up to see the newcomers. “What do you think now?” he said, half exultantly, half challengingly. Gideon had not made a secret of his doubts about there being anything to find.

"It's fantastic,” he said sincerely. “I was dead wrong. Congratulations."

Under its sheen of sweat, Howard's beefy, dissipated face was deeply flushed. He wiped perspiration from his upper lip with the tip of an old paisley bandanna tied around his throat and laughed.

Howard Bennett laughed easily and often. His loose, jovial personality was an asset for his one-of-a-kind vocation: directing excavations manned by well-heeled amateurs as keen on vacationing as on digging. After a day at the site he was always game for an evening at the nearby Club Med or even a four-hour round trip to Merida, to the Maya Excelsior Bar, or La Discotheque, or the Boccacio 2000. At the Maya Excelsior, in fact, he was a Saturday-night fixture; he sat in with the small band, playing jazz clarinet, at which he was extraordinarily proficient.

He had had a brief university career; three years at three different institutions. He'd been a lackluster teacher, a less-than-responsible faculty member, and an indifferent researcher. But his formidable field methodology put him in demand as an excavation supervisor, and he was, to Gideon's knowledge, the only person who did this sort of thing for a living. He'd been on Latin American digs for over ten years now, the last two at Tlaloc. In that time he'd been back to the United States only twice, to renew his passport and visas. For more than a decade he had lived a gypsylike existence in Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize.

Gideon had briefly worked with him three years before, at a Mixtec site in Oaxaca, and had been worried about him then. Now it was worse. Howard's centerless, hard-living existence was showing: He was putting on weight, his features were getting blurry, and he was now finishing off a couple of beers at lunch in addition to his evening drinking. And he wasn't very interested in talking about archaeology with Gideon. His conversation ranged from griping about how miserably archaeologists were paid to frank envy of the way some of the rich amateurs could afford to live. For Howard, ten years of rubbing shoulders with high-living stockbrokers and businessmen had not been salutary. He was drinking more, deteriorating mentally and physically, and drifting deeper into professional obscurity.

At least he had been, until this startling find. He grinned at Gideon, blond eyebrows beetling. “What does it remind you of?"

"Palenque,” Gideon said quietly.

"Yeah,” Howard breathed. “Palenque!"

It would make anyone think of Palenque, the elegant ruin three hundred miles to the south in the even denser jungles of Chiapas. There, in 1952, in the staircase of a somewhat larger pyramid under a somewhat larger temple, Alberto Ruz Lhuillier had also found a room sealed behind a false wall, also containing a stone chest, much bigger than this one, with a finely carved lid. Inside had been one of the great finds of Meso-American archaeology. It was the skeleton of the ruler known as Pacal, lying regally on his back, swathed in the rich trappings of a Mayan lord: necklace laid upon necklace, enormous earrings, funerary mask, and diadem, all of polished jade; intricately carved rings on all ten fingers; a great pear-shaped pearl; a jade bead delicately placed between his teeth as food for his journey; a jade statue of the sun god at his feet to accompany him.

Howard stared hungrily at the chest. “What do you think is in it?” he asked Gideon and laughed again. His stiff, straw-blond hair was dark with sweat, as furrowed as if he'd been swimming. Gideon didn't like the feverish-looking red patches on his cheeks, or his vaguely reckless manner.

"Not much; the interior dimensions can't be more than two by two,” Gideon said reasonably, but Howard's excitement was practically crackling in the dank air, beginning to get to him. He felt the beginning of an ache at his temples and made himself relax his knotted jaw muscles. “If it's another royal burial I'm afraid they've scrunched him up a little to fit him in."