The Mayan Secrets Read online

  “We’ve been aware of her since she arrived in the country, of course. She’s a very visible personality on the European party scene—beautiful, rich, uninhibited, flamboyant. She’s almost a celebrity in this city. And I’d not be at all surprised if she is behind the theft of the Mayan codex. She thinks laws are local customs for the unintelligent and unimaginative. But like aristocrats everywhere, she doesn’t do the unpleasant things herself. She hires people like the impostors who took the codex. It’s highly unlikely that she would ever be charged with a crime here.” She paused. “Any crime.”

  “Really?” said Remi. “But she’s a foreigner just like us.”

  “There’s a difference.” She paused. “What I’m about to tell you is off the record. She’s been here for years, making herself socially and financially useful to lots of powerful people. She’s a huge landowner, and while you can’t buy the old owner’s social status with the land, obvious wealth is certainly a good way to get invitations. She’s always contributed to the political campaigns of potential winners—and, even more important, to the sure losers who are well connected. She can accomplish a lot with a phone call, or even a hint dropped at a party.”

  Sam said, “Can’t we at least get the Guatemalan police to take a look at the Estancia? Thousands of acres of plants in the fields and tons of buds in the drying barns are pretty hard to hide. And if they examined her operations, her offices, her houses, they couldn’t help but find—”

  “The Mayan codex?”

  “Well, that’s what we’d hope. But certainly evidence that she’s been profiting from these drug operations.”

  Amy Costa slowly shook her head. “That would be too vast an undertaking. The authorities know that in the north and the west, the cartels have been operating in the big stretches of wilderness. The police would love to stop them. But what you’re describing won’t happen. If they found every single thing you saw, they still wouldn’t arrest Sarah Allersby. Don’t you see? She would be the prime victim. They could arrest a hundred poor Mayan peasants who took jobs tending the crop. All the action—the dirty deals, the money changing hands—took place in somebody’s fancy house here in the capital. In Guatemala, if you’re rich enough to own millions of acres in the countryside, you’re too rich to live there.”

  “But you’ll pass on the information to the police?”

  “Of course,” she said. “This isn’t one crime, it’s a war. We just keep on trying. What you’ve told me may turn out to be helpful, even important, sometime. It may put somebody away.”

  Sam said, “Do you think we should go to the federal police too?”

  “You can if you want. But maybe we can do it together. Are you free for an hour or so?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Give me a minute to call ahead and then we’ll go.” She dialed a number and spoke briefly in rapid Spanish. Then she buzzed the receptionist. “Please have a car for me. We’ll leave as soon as it’s ready.” She explained to the Fargos, “It’s in zone four, a bit too far to walk.”

  They were driven to the federal police station on Avenida 3-ll. The police officer at the door recognized Amy Costa and let them in. Costa walked up the hall to an elevator, which took them to an office.

  The uniformed officer, who stood as they entered, was young and clear-eyed. “This is Commander Rueda. This is Sam and Remi Fargo. They’re two American visitors who saw some things you might wish to know about. Mr. Fargo . . . ?”

  Sam told the story, and Remi filled in details and supplied the GPS locations of the places described. Whenever the commander looked puzzled, Amy Costa translated the words into Spanish. At the end of the Fargos’ recitation, the commander said, “Thank you very much for bringing this information to our attention. I will file a report, conveying your experiences, to the central command.” He stood to terminate the visit.

  Sam remained seated. “Will anything happen? Will Sarah Allersby’s properties be searched or her bank accounts audited?”

  The commander looked sympathetic. He sat down again. “I’m sorry, but those things will not happen. The armed gang was certainly one of the groups who patrol the north to protect the ranches where drugs are grown and shipped. Marijuana is a stable, reliable crop that can be grown in any remote area by anyone. But there’s no proof of a connection with Sarah Allersby. Any piece of jungle—including national parkland—can be infiltrated by these criminals. We raid them and they turn up elsewhere. When we go away, they come back. Do they pay a landlord for the privilege? Sometimes, but not always. Your report of seeing coca trees, frankly, disturbs me most. We haven’t had coca growing here. Until now, we’ve only been a stop on the route from South America.”

  “If you were to have a reason to search the Allersby houses, banks, and businesses for one thing and found another, could you still arrest her?”

  “Yes, provided we had a good legal reason to search. This time, we don’t have a direct connection to her.” He seemed to make a decision. “I’m going to tell you something confidential. Like many rich and active businesspeople, she has been investigated from time to time. In fact, it’s happened twice that I know of in this office. We found nothing.”

  Remi said, “No money she couldn’t explain? No Mayan artifacts? She calls herself a collector, and we saw plenty in her house.”

  The commander said, “If she has money she didn’t declare here, it’s no mystery. She has interests in many countries, and a wealthy family. If there are Mayan artifacts, she could say they were part of the estate she bought from the Guerrero family or some things her workers found recently that she would have reported. There’s nothing criminal there unless she did something definite and final—sell them or take them out of the country.”

  “What would you advise us to do?” asked Remi.

  “What Miss Costa undoubtedly told you to do. Go home. If you want to, you could search the online markets for codices or parts of them. Often, things are broken up and sold. If the codex turns up, we’ll file charges and confiscate it.”

  “Thank you,” said Remi.

  Sam shook the commander’s hand. “We appreciate your willingness to listen.”

  “Thank you for your evidence. And please don’t be discouraged. Justice is sometimes slow.”

  Amy Costa had the embassy car drop them off at their hotel. Once they were in the room, they called Selma and asked her to get them a flight back to the United States. While they were waiting to hear from her, they went out to an English-language bookstore to buy books to read on the long flight home.

  Their itinerary included a stop in Houston, but the flying time was only seven hours and forty-one minutes. Sam slept through most of the flight to Houston while Remi read a book on the history of Guatemala. On the second flight, Remi slept while Sam read. When the plane lost altitude on its approach to the runway in San Diego, Remi’s eyes opened. She said, “I know what’s wrong. We’re missing our best ally in this.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Bartolomé de Las Casas.”

  SAN DIEGO

  Sam and Remi stepped out to the curb at the airport and found Selma waiting for them in the Volvo sedan. Zoltán was sitting sedately on the backseat of the car. Remi ducked into the backseat and sat beside Zoltán, who licked her face while she hugged and petted him. “Zoltán. Hianyoztal.”

  “What did you say?” Selma asked.

  “I said I missed him. I missed you too, but you aren’t a Hungarian dog.”

  “Likewise, I’m sure,” said Selma. “Hi, Sam.”

  “Hi, Selma. Thanks for coming to meet us.”

  “It’s a pleasure. Zoltán and I have been moping around the house since the robbery at the university. David Caine calls every day, but I told him you’d get in touch when you were home.”

  “That reminds me. We won’t be here long. We’re going to Spain,” said Sam. “But first we want t
o meet with you and David. We can bring one another up to date on everything and then get busy on the next step.”

  “All right. When we’re home, I’ll get going on your reservations,” said Selma. “It’s a shame you’re leaving. While you were in Guatemala, the workmen completed the painting and finish work. Your house is, well, your house again.”

  “No carpenters, painters, or electricians left?” said Remi.

  “Not one,” Selma said. “I even had a cleaning crew in to be sure there’s not a dimple of a bullet hole, a microscopic stain from a drop of blood, or a sliver of broken glass anywhere. Everything’s new.”

  “Thanks, Selma,” said Remi. “We’re grateful.”

  Sam said, “We’ll try to keep it nice by not discharging firearms in the living room.”

  Remi said, “Selma, I want you to spend some time with me before we meet with David Caine. I need to know everything you’ve got about Bartolomé de Las Casas and about the four known Mayan codices.”

  “I’ll be delighted,” said Selma. “I’ve been hoarding information on those topics since you were in Mexico.”

  Six hours later, they were on the ground floor of the house, sitting around the conference table. In the center was a photocopy of the letter from Bartolomé de Las Casas.

  Sam said to David Caine, who had just arrived, “I think Remi would like to start.”

  “I just want to say thank you to Selma for having photographed the letter before turning it over to me,” David interjected.

  Remi began. “By the time the Dresden Codex’s existence became widely known, an Italian scholar had made a tracing of it. Before the Madrid Codex ever got to the Museo América de Madrid, a French abbot made a copy. The Paris Codex was copied by the same Italian scholar who traced the Dresden. Somebody at the Bibliothèque Nationale actually threw the original in a bin in a corner of a room, which damaged it, so it’s a good thing there was a copy.”

  “An interesting set of coincidences,” said David Caine. “Where are you going with it?”

  Remi said, “We know that this codex was at one point in the hands of Bartolomé de Las Casas. This letter proves that he touched it, that he knew it was important and thought it must be saved.”

  Selma said, “We know that he was a passionate defender of the native people’s rights and a believer in the value of their cultures and that he studied and spoke their languages.”

  David Caine slapped his hand to his forehead. “Of course! You’re saying there’s a chance that Las Casas might have made a copy.”

  “We can’t be sure,” said Remi, “but we think it’s worth checking.”

  “It’s a long shot,” said Caine. “As far as I know, there’s no mention in any of his writings of his making a copy of a Mayan book. He does mention seeing the priests burning them.”

  “That would be a good reason not to mention his copy,” said Selma. “Books weren’t the only things getting burned in those days.”

  Remi said, “After Las Casas left the mission at Rabinal, he became bishop of Chiapas, Mexico. From there, he went back to the Spanish court, where he was a very powerful adviser on issues having to do with the Indians in the colonies. And here’s the promising part. When he died in 1566, he left a very large library to the College of San Gregorio in Valladolid.”

  David Caine considered. “You know, I think your observation about human nature may be right. Everybody in Europe who saw the importance of the Mayan codices seems to have made a copy. Even I made photographic copies. It was practically the first thing I did. If only I hadn’t given them up to those fake officials.”

  Selma quickly diverted the conversation back to Las Casas. “Then we’re agreed. We know Las Casas saw it and was somebody who would have wanted a copy. If he made one, then it was almost certainly kept with his own books and papers rather than, say, submitted to the Spanish court. His books and papers are in Valladolid, Spain. If the copy existed, and if it’s been in a library in Spain all this time instead of the hot, humid Guatemalan jungle, then it will probably have survived.”

  David Caine said, “That’s a lot of ifs. But to bolster the argument a bit, we know he would not have left any susceptible or incriminating papers in the New World, where his enemies, the Franciscans or the encomiendas, could find them. He definitely would have taken them with him to Spain.”

  Remi said, “A lot of ifs, all right, but each one has a lot of arguments in its favor and not many against.”

  “Let’s call it an educated, long-shot guess,” Selma said. “It really should be checked.”

  Sam said, “Okay, Selma. Please make arrangements to get Remi and me to Valladolid. Make us a copy of the letter so we can recognize his handwriting if we see it.”

  Sarah Allersby sat in the giant office of the Empresa Guerrero in the old part of Guatemala City. It had once been the business office in the capital of the powerful and wealthy Guerrero family. They had occupied the building from colonial days, until the modern civil war bled many of its businesses and made the younger generation leave for lives of leisure in Europe. The office was near the Palacio Nacional because the big ranching families, of necessity, had been involved in the government.

  Through all of the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries, a man in the Guerrero family would push out his chair from the big mahogany desk in the office, take his hat and cane from the rack near the door, light a cigar, and walk up the street to government headquarters to protect and further the interests of the Guerrero family companies. The building had an impressive but low baroque façade, a set of double doors that were so heavy that Sarah Allersby had to have an electric motor installed to help her push them open, and floors of antique tiles made and decorated by the same craftsmen who had done the Iglesia de La Merced. The ceilings were fifteen feet high, and every few feet a big lazy fan still provided the proper subtropical atmosphere even though the air it circulated was air-conditioned to seventy-two degrees.

  Sarah used a 1930s-era desk telephone with a scrambled line that was checked by her security people twice each day to detect a change in ohms of resistance that would indicate a listening device. She said, “Good morning, Russell. This line is safe so you can speak freely.”

  The man on the other end had a contract with the Estancia Guerrero, but Sarah’s family had used his services many times in the years before they had acquired the Guatemalan holdings. He was the man who had impersonated an FBI agent in San Diego. “What can I do for you, Miss Allersby?”

  “It’s more trouble over the item we picked up in San Diego. Sam and Remi Fargo have been here in Guatemala and even managed to find their way onto the Estancia. They’ve been defaming me and my company to anyone who will listen. They seem to think that the marijuana operation on the Estancia is mine, as though I were some tawdry drug dealer. They wanted the police to search my house and all of my properties, if you can imagine.”

  “Is there any chance the police will do that?”

  “Of course not,” she said. “But I can’t simply ignore them. They left for the United States yesterday. I know they won’t get anywhere with the authorities here, but I have no way of knowing what they can do there. I need to have them watched for a while.”

  “Certainly,” he said. “There are two ways to go about this kind of thing. We can simply hire some local San Diego private detectives. That would mean leaving a record that we had hired them and taking the risk that they might have to reveal who hired them in court sometime. Then there’s—”

  “The other way, please,” she said. “What we’ve already done in San Diego could generate terrible legal problems. And I worry about this Sam Fargo. He’s vindictive. He won’t be able to let this go. And if he wanted to, his wife wouldn’t let him. I think she’s developed a jealous fear that I’m a threat to her marriage. She’s got nothing going for her but her looks, and as soon as somebody prettier is around, she
knows she’s in trouble.”

  “All right,” Russell said. “The Fargos haven’t seen me. I can do this myself with one good man. We can be in San Diego in a couple of hours.”

  “Thank you, Russell. I’ll have some money sent to your company to cover the initial expenses.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Just knowing you’re personally paying attention to the problem will make me sleep better. I’m just one person, and I can’t be expected to pay attention to everybody everywhere who wants to harm me.”

  “Would you like to set a limit on how expensive this gets?”

  “No. If they leave the United States, send people wherever they go. I want to know where they are. And I never want them suddenly showing up on my doorstep again. But I don’t want to leave a record that I had them followed. I really can’t have them ruining my reputation.”

  Russell was already preparing for the trip while he listened. He took a suitcase out of his closet and set it on the bed. “I’ll let you know as soon as there’s anything to report.”

  “Thank you, Russell.”

  Next, Russell called the number of Jerry Ruiz, the man who had impersonated the Mexican Minister of Culture when they had confiscated the codex. “Hi, Jerry. This is Russ. I’d like you with me on a surveillance job.”

  “Where?”

  “It’s back in San Diego, but it could go anywhere from there. We’re to keep track of a couple, period. We can split what Sarah gives us, even.”

  “It’s for her? Okay, I’m in.”

  “I’ll pick you up in a half hour.”

  Russell hung up and returned to his suitcase. He packed the sets of clothes he used for surveillance—black jeans and navy blue nylon windbreaker and black sneakers, baseball caps in several colors, some olive drab hiking pants that unzipped into shorts, a couple of sport coats in navy and gray, some khaki pants. He and Ruiz would fly down and rent a car and after a couple of days he would turn it in and get another one. He had found over the years that even a minor change in his appearance had a dramatic effect. Just putting on a hat and a different jacket made him a new person. Alternating drivers, getting out of the car and sitting at a restaurant table, made him invisible.