Aaron Elkins: Curses!

"That's interesting,” she said. “And they're really so valuable?"

"They're so valuable that nobody knows what one's worth. There are only three others, and none of them is in private hands. Over a million dollars I'd guess, even on the black market. Maybe four times that if you cut it up and sold the pages separately.” He grimaced. “Perish the thought."

Customs at Merida International Airport meant being waved through by a sullen woman in an olive-drab uniform, who was sipping from a can of Dr. Pepper and looking as if she wanted to be someplace else. As they walked through the glass doors into the waiting room and the moist heat of Yucatan, Julie said: “Gideon, there's a man looking at us in a funny way. Is it someone you know?"

Gideon followed her gaze toward a display of giant Kahlua bottles in the window of the duty-free shop. In front of it a bony man with a vaguely vexed expression around the eyes, a severely trimmed but scraggly goatee, and a pinched, prunish mouth was looking at them, one hand raised and motionless, with the index finger primly and economically extended. The sandy goatee was new, but the rest was familiar. Gideon smiled and waved.

"That,” he said, “is Worthy Partridge, and he's not looking at us funny. He always looks like that."

"Is that really his name?” she asked, as they made their way toward him.

"I think the whole name is Kenneth Worthy Partridge, but he just uses the last two. He writes children's books, and he figures it looks good on the covers. You know, Mother Goose, Peter Rabbit, Worthy Partridge."

"A children's writer?” Julie asked disbelievingly. “He doesn't exactly look like a man who loves kids."

He didn't love kids, and he wasn't overly keen on grownups either. Despite Worthy's dazed and ineffectual performance on the night that Howard had disappeared with the codex, Gideon remembered him as a sharply critical man given to faultfinding and sweeping generalizations: “The Mayans were dopes.” “All lawyers are crooks.” “Children have only two motivations-selfishness and greed."

With allowances made for these sometimes startling pronouncements, Gideon had liked him, or at least enjoyed his presence. He seemed to be one of those people who had decided on a personality role early in life and then found himself typecast, unable to move on to something else. But there were occasional glimmers of a nimble intelligence, and every now and then a wry, desiccated sense of humor would peep unexpectedly out.

He was not feeling humorous this afternoon. When he was introduced to Julie he nodded without smiling, and when Gideon asked him how the dig was going, his reply was dour and terse.

"The dig,” he said, “is cursed."

Gideon very nearly laughed, but managed to cough discreetly instead. It was going to take a while to get used to Worthy Partridge again.

But this time it wasn't hyperbole. The excavation at Tlaloc had been cursed, literally and emphatically. In the sixteenth century. By the Maya.

And in case there should be any doubt about it they had left a written copy at the site. Worthy gave them the details as he started up the tan Volkswagen van that served as the dig runabout.

"We found it when we started to clear the Priest's House. There was a niche in the entryway, right next to the new skeleton, and in it was this little pamphlet wrapped in bark. A curse,” he said with a grimace, as if it had been put there as a personal affront to Worthy Partridge.

"Mm,” Gideon said, looking dreamily out the window.

For a while, when he'd been dredging up those rotten memories, he'd wondered if returning had been a mistake. But now, watching the neat, white, all-in-a-row suburbs of Merida give way to brilliant jungle and immense henequen plantations with their colonial haciendas, once grand but now weathering romantically, it didn't seem like a bad idea at all. After the muted greens of the Pacific Northwest, the colors were astonishingly bright and varied under a brassy Mexican sun, and even the warmth-sticky, but nothing like the mind-numbing heat of June-was only a minor annoyance.

"A pamphlet?” Julie said. “Do you mean a codex?"

"I don't believe so,” Worthy said uncertainly. “Dr. Goldstein said it was more like the books of Chim Bom Bom or somebody. Sis Boom Bah, Rin Tin Tin, some such absurd name."

"The Books of Chilam Balam,” Gideon said. “Post-Conquest books, written by the Maya on Spanish paper. The conquistadores taught the native scribes how to use European script to write down the Mayan language. The idea was to make it easier to teach them Christianity, but of course the Maya jumped at the chance to write all kinds of things."

"Hold on,” Julie said. “I feel an ignorant question coming on. Didn't they already know how to write? What about that codex? What about those calendars they carved?"

"Those are hieroglyphs,” Gideon explained. “Pictures, basically, or extremely simple symbols-one dot equals one, two dots equal two. A picture of a house means house. They're much more primitive than the spoken language-a kind of shorthand-and there are a lot of things they can't express. They're also harder for us to understand; we still can't read most of them. But these other books are translatable by anyone who understands old Mayan. It's fascinating, really-"

He caught himself and stopped. Unsolicited lectures were one of the professorly hazards to which he was easy prey. “What kind of curse is it?” he asked Worthy. “What does it say?"

"Oh, your basic run-of-the-mill curse,” Worthy said with a shrug. “You know, ‘He who violates this sacred temple will perish horribly.’ This Professor Garrison from Tulane has been down here working on the translation, and that's all she'd tell anybody until she got it completely finished. Scientists,” he concluded, “are prima donnas."

As usual, a Worthy Partridge dictum had a way of ending a conversation with a clunk, and Julie and Gideon settled back to watch the scenery go by. They were deep in Mayan country now: thick, scrubby jungle and tiny roadside villages with names like Xlokzodozonot, Xlacab, and Tzukmuk-collections of twenty or thirty primitive thatch-roofed houses with reed or stuccoed walls. No toilets, no running water. Most had no doors, so that the three people in the air-conditioned van could look inside as they went past and see a clay floor, a few sticks of furniture, a hammock, a naked child or two. Pigs, chickens, and skinny dogs wandered aimlessly across the highway, contemptuous of the traffic.

It was Worthy himself who resumed the discussion, but it wasn't much of an improvement. “She's already finished the translation, but we've had to sit around twiddling our thumbs waiting for you because Dr. Goldstein wanted you to be there."

Clunk.

Gideon made a try at keeping things going. “How's the writing, Worthy? Are you still doing that series on the little girl and her fish from Finland?"

"Iceland. No, I'm considering a new adventure series featuring Paco and Pablo-two little boys from ancient Mayan times. What do you think?"

"Uh…I hate to split hairs, but I know you like to be accurate, and Paco and Pablo aren't ancient Mayan names. They're Spanish."

Worthy treated him to a brief, mordant glance. “What would you suggest, ‘Zactecauh and Yxcal Chac Go to the Fiesta'? ‘Ahpop Achih and Gucumatz Find a Friend'?"

Gideon sighed and returned to the scenery.

At a sign that said "Chichen Itza, Zona Arguelogica," Worthy swung around a turkey having a leisurely peck at something in a mud puddle and turned right.

"Chichen Itza?” Julie said. “Are we going to Chichen Itza?"

"No,” Gideon explained. “We're going to the Hotel Mayaland, which is just outside the back entrance to Chichen Itza. That's where we all stay. Tlaloc is less than a mile beyond, to the north."