The Mayan Secrets fa-5 Read online

  “Not to mention Bartolomé de Las Casas,” Sam said quietly. “It’s really an amazing piece of architecture.”

  “Las Casas came here to live in 1551. He rented a cell in the college. During this period, he was very influential at Emperor Charles V’s court. He died in 1566, in Madrid, but left his extensive library to the college. Our next mission is to see if we can find it.”

  On the other side of the street there was a gaggle of German tourists being led by a tall blond woman who was lecturing them on the sights. In the center of the group were the two men who had followed Sam and Remi to Spain, Russell and Ruiz. When Sam and Remi stepped into the entrance, Russell and Ruiz separated themselves from the German tourists and moved down the street to watch the chapel from a distance.

  Sam and Remi walked through the entrance and into the chapel. It was a dream of white stone, carved and polished five hundred years ago and still the same in the echoing silence as though time had only passed by outside, not in here.

  “The upper tier must be where Las Casas rented his room,” said Sam, “and where he wrote his last few books.”

  They walked through the college while Remi scanned the guidebook. “Life wasn’t all pretty here,” she said. “In 1559, the Inquisition burned twenty-seven people at the stake in Valladolid. And, at one point, an enemy denounced Las Casas to the Inquisitors too, but the accusation didn’t go anywhere. When Las Casas signed over the rights to his History of the Indies to the college, he added the condition that it not be published until forty years passed. He said that if God destroyed Spain for its sins, he wanted people in the future to know what exactly they had done wrong — they had treated the Indians with such cruelty.”

  “Let’s keep looking. If we find his library, maybe we can make an appointment to get in and take a look at it tomorrow,” said Sam. They continued to search and eventually found their way to a museum of Spanish sculpture. They approached the man at the desk near the entrance. “Here goes,” Remi whispered.

  Remi said to him in Spanish, “Sir, do you know where we should go to see the library that Bishop Bartolomé de Las Casas donated to the College of San Gregorio?”

  “Yes, I do,” replied the man. “First, you must know that it’s all part of the University of Valladolid.”

  “I suppose the books had to be moved to a modern university.”

  The man smiled. “The university was founded in 1346. But, yes, it’s modern. It’s an active institution, with thirty-one thousand students. The College of San Gregorio is a part of it but serves mainly as a museum of art and architecture now. The monks are gone. I believe what you’re looking for is quite close by in the History Library.”

  “How do we find the History Library?”

  “Go down the Calle Gondomar to the main university. Outside is the patio. There are three levels set on octagonal pillars. On the right side is the chapel and on the left is a semicircular porch. Go left. The first level houses the History Library.”

  As they walked to the library, Sam noticed that two men were on the same course, walking far behind them on Calle Gondomar. He wondered for a moment if they could be following him and Remi. He and Remi had, after all, put Sarah Allersby on notice that they weren’t going to let her rob them and forget it. But they were a long way from Guatemala City, and they’d just arrived in Valladolid. Could these men have followed them here already? They would have had to be watching them in San Diego practically from the time they’d come home from Guatemala, then caught the same plane or the one after it.

  They reached the History Library, and Remi asked in Spanish whether they could see the collection of books that Bartolomé de Las Casas had left the College of San Gregorio. They were pleasantly surprised to learn that they could sign in as visiting scholars, and a librarian would admit them, without too many intimidating formalities. They only had to prove their identities and leave Remi’s purse and their passports at the desk. When they entered a large reading room, there were already a few graduate students reading old books at tables.

  A second history librarian showed them to a rare book room, gave them gloves, and allowed them to examine the volumes in the Las Casas collection for about three hours, going from one volume to the next. All of the volumes were bound or rebound in old leather. Some were hand-copied Latin or Spanish in archaic handwriting, some were incunabula — works printed before 1500—a few in medieval Gothic script with hand-painted illumination. Most were religious works in Latin. There were commentaries on the Bible, collected sermons, multiple copies of breviaries. There was a copy of the Corpus Aristotelicum. There were also Spanish volumes written or copied in a hand that was clearly the same as the writing on the letter that had been hidden in the Mayan codex. Whenever they saw one, it excited them, but none was what they had come so far to find. The treasure they searched for would consist of Mayan pictures and glyphs, not Spanish text.

  At the end of the day, just before it was time for visitors to leave the library, the desk librarian made an announcement that readers should return books. The Fargos gave theirs up immediately, went to the desk to retrieve Remi’s bag, and left. As they emerged onto the patio outside the building, Remi whispered, “Have you seen those two men before?”

  Sam stopped, apparently to look around him at the medieval Spanish architecture but took a moment to find the men she meant. They were already walking off in another direction. “I saw a couple of men earlier on the Calle Gondomar, but I can’t tell if those are the same ones. What did they do?”

  “I could feel them staring at us.”

  Sam smiled. “You could feel them staring at you, more likely. You should be used to that.”

  That evening, Sam and Remi began their exploration of the city’s nightlife with the Plaza Mayor, right outside their hotel. They sampled the coffee in the Continental, then went for pinchos, the favorite local iteration of tapas, at Restaurante Los Zagales. They were made of morcilla sausages, red onion, and pork rind, all wrapped into a roll.

  Each day, Sam and Remi walked from the Zenit Imperial Hotel and returned to the History Library to examine the next group of five-hundred-year-old books.

  After the library closed that afternoon, Sam and Remi returned to their hotel for a nap, then got up at ten to begin their evening of exploring. That night they tried Taberna Pradera, known for the fresh calamari cracker in its own ink. The following night, they tried Fortuna 25, which served a free-range chicken stuffed with mussels and algae. Another night, it was Taberna del Zurdo. They drank Rueda, Ribera del Duero, and other fine Spanish red wines, moving from place to place as though each evening were a celebration.

  During the days, they pressed on with the Las Casas collection, making their inventory and, in the process, getting to know a little about the man who had owned these books. Most of them were books like the Rule of Saint Benedict, the work that set the tone for the monastic life, the Moralium Libri of Pope Gregory I, and others that were appropriate for a monk in the sixteenth century. They found several copies of the works of Thomas Aquinas, and a handwritten volume of commentary on them.

  It was on their eighth day in the library that Sam and Remi ran into another trove of volumes in Spanish that had been written on vellum in the hand of Bartolomé de Las Casas. They were tall, in a ledger format, all in a sequence. The first were his attempts, written in Mexico, at collecting a K’iche’ language glossary. There were also observations on the other languages of the Mayans, written in 1536. The next volume was a journal recording the daily activities that had gone on at the Dominican missions he had founded at Rabinal, Sacapulas, and Cobán. Records of expenditures and harvests were interspersed with various notes on the building of churches in the region and the names of Mayan converts who had come to live outside Rabinal. Remi read that he was opposed to mass conversions of Indians. He believed in teaching each prospective Catholic and then letting him or her make an informed decision, so the inventory of converts made sense.

  The date of the volum
e after that was October 1536, and it extended through April 1537. It began with the now-familiar columns of figures and notations on vellum that had been divided into columns by straight lines. It went on for many pages, and then, at a certain point, the quality of the vellum changed.

  The first pages were routine quality, made from the skin of an animal, treated by removing the hair, wetting, stretching, and drying the skin until it was a thin white surface for writing on both sides. But sewn in after fifty or sixty sheets was a long section of pages of a different quality vellum. These had been rubbed so thoroughly with pumice stone or a similar abrasive to make a perfectly smooth writing surface that they were translucent.

  Sam turned the first page in this section and saw a startling sight. It was an exact copy of the letter from Las Casas that had been hidden in the binding of the Mayan codex. He touched Remi’s arm, and they both stared at the familiar Spanish words:

  “A todos mis compatriotas, benediciones. Este libro y otros de los maya se refieren a su historia y sus observaciones acerca del mundo natural. No tienen nada que ver con el Diablo. Ellos deben ser preservados como una manera de entender nuestras tareas con los maya.”

  “I can make out most of the words and can hardly believe it,” said Sam.

  “I can hardly breathe,” said Remi. “I’m afraid to turn the page.”

  Sam reached down and carefully turned the page. What appeared was the opening page of the Mayan codex they had found on the Mexican volcano. They turned page after page, slowly, gently. Each time the vellum turned, there was a familiar display. The four-page map was there in all its complexity. The illustrated story of the creation of the universe was there. The story of the war between the cities was there. Each small glyph was drawn with a fine-cut quill pen, its intricacies reproduced exactly.

  Sam stood up. “Excuse me.” He went to the men’s room, made sure it was empty, took out his satellite phone, and called Selma in San Diego. “Selma?”

  “Yes?”

  “We’ve found it. Turn everything on, and prepare to receive live video starting in fifteen seconds. We won’t be able to speak to you until it’s over.”

  “Got it. Making the connection to all four cameras now.”

  “Got to go.”

  Sam returned from the men’s room and whispered to Remi, “Your eyes must be getting strained. Don’t be vain. Put on your glasses.”

  Remi and Sam put on the two cameras disguised as glasses and went back to the first page. As they turned pages, Sam and Remi were sending digital video with the camera glasses. They could see that the copy Las Casas had made was done with extreme care. He had not made an attempt to reproduce the colors of the original, but everything else was the same. The pages had been scored with a straightedge to divide the space into columns, usually six but sometimes eight, as the original had been. The pages had not been given Arabic folio numbers, but Sam and Remi could tell from memory that at least the beginning thirty pages seemed to be in order. Selma’s voice came through the tiny earphones embedded in the stems of their eyeglasses. “I’m receiving everything clearly. Keep going.”

  Sam and Remi kept turning pages and filming until they reached the one hundred thirty-sixth and final page. Then they started over again at the end of the section and took still photographs of each spread of open pages, using the cameras in their wristwatches.

  When they had finished, Sam folded his glasses and put them into his jacket pocket. “I’m getting tired. Let’s go back to our hotel.”

  They returned the volume to the librarian for reshelving and then retrieved Remi’s purse and the briefcase Sam had brought. They thanked the librarian and left the building.

  As they went down the steps in the late afternoon and turned to walk along the street toward their hotel, Sam reminded Remi, “No matter what happens in the next few minutes, don’t be startled, and hold on to your glasses and wristwatch.”

  As they walked along the Calle de las Cadenas de San Gregorio to the Plaza Mayor, they were only two tourists in a large, open space with hundreds of people. When they were about halfway across the plaza, they heard a new sound — the deep, throaty sound of a motorcycle engine. The engine grew louder as the motorcycle came around a corner somewhere behind them. Remi started to turn to look over her shoulder, but Sam put his arm around her and whispered, “Don’t look or you’ll scare them off.”

  The motorcycle sped up directly behind them, and Sam turned suddenly. On the cycle were a driver and a man riding behind him. Both men were wearing helmets with tinted visors over their faces. As the motorcycle swooped in, the driver made an attempt to snatch Sam’s briefcase out of his hand, but Sam held on to it, tugging back, as the driver pulled. The power of the cycle added to the driver’s force, but Sam trotted alongside, still holding on. When the second man saw the way Sam held on, he joined the struggle, grasped the briefcase with both hands, and wrenched it away. The driver gunned the engine and accelerated, and the motorcycle roared off around the side of the Plaza, turned, and disappeared up a narrow street between tall buildings.

  Sam held up his empty hand so Remi could see it.

  “Sam! He stole your new briefcase!”

  He smiled. “A little engineering project.”

  “What are you talking about? Those men stole your briefcase! We’ve got to call the police!”

  “No need,” he said. “Those are the two we noticed about a week ago outside San Gregorio. I saw them watching us a few times since then. They were too interested to be nobody. So I bought the briefcase and began my project.”

  “Your briefcase is an engineering project?”

  “Didn’t I say that?”

  “Stop being mysterious and tell me what you’ve done.”

  “You know those booby-trapped bags of money that banks give to bank robbers?”

  “The ones that blow up and cover the thief with indelible ink? Oh, no. How did you even get an explosive on the plane?”

  “I didn’t use explosives. This one works with springs. Undo the latch and the first spring pops the case open wide, and that allows the second to spring upward and push a piston, like a jack-in-the-box. The cylinder is full of ink. I bought the briefcase, the springs, and the ink here.”

  “What would have happened if the librarian had inspected it?”

  “He didn’t open anything for the first two days, so why do it later?”

  “What would have happened to him?”

  “He would have a bright blue face. ‘Azul,’ as they say here.”

  “You couldn’t just watch these men and not play some dumb prank?”

  “I did watch them. I noticed they spoke English to each other, and one of them spoke Spanish to everybody else — rapid, fluent Spanish that didn’t leave anybody looking confused. I thought about who would spend several days watching us like that without doing anything. The only answer is that Sarah Allersby must have sent them.”

  “Why would she do that? She has the codex. She doesn’t need a copy.”

  “To find out what we’re doing and what we’ve accomplished.”

  “And?”

  “And now she knows. Once her men followed us to Valladolid, I’m sure she could figure out what else might be here. All I could do is make sure we know them if we see them again in the next few days.”

  They walked quickly to their hotel, downloaded the photographs from the digital cameras to Remi’s laptop computer, and then sent two versions to Selma’s computer in San Diego as a backup. While Remi waited for the transfers to be completed, she made a reservation to fly to San Diego on the red-eye leaving in four hours.

  As she and Sam finished packing, Remi’s phone rang. She said, “Hi, Selma. Are the pictures all clear? Good. We’re coming home.” There was a pause. Then she said, “Because a couple of men stole Sam’s briefcase. When they open it, they’re going to want to kill us. If they don’t succeed, we’ll see you tomorrow night.”

  Chapter 18

  VALLADOLID, SPAIN

>   Russell was in the bathroom of the hotel suite in Valladolid, dabbing at his blue face with a cotton ball soaked in acetone. The thick nail-polish-remover smell stung his sinuses. Added to the smell of the isopropyl alcohol and the turpentine he had tried first, it made the small, enclosed space unbearable. He looked in the mirror above the sink. “This isn’t working either. And it stinks.”

  “Maybe if you rub a little harder,” said Ruiz. He could see through the blue dye on Russell’s face that his chin was getting blotchy and irritated, but Ruiz didn’t feel like going out again searching Valladolid for more chemicals and solvents.

  Russell handed him the bottle and then used soap and water to wash the acetone off his face. “Get something else.”

  Ruiz said, “This stuff almost always works. We used it to wash checks years ago. It would take off the ink in a couple minutes.”

  “We’re not washing checks now,” said Russell. “This is my face. But you gave me an idea. Remember, there was a secret to washing checks. If the dye in the ink was polar, the best thing to get it off was a polar solvent, like alcohol and acetone. Well, we’ve tried those. So let’s try a nonpolar solvent like toluene.”

  “Toluene?” said Ruiz. “What’s another name for it?”

  “Methylbenzene.”

  “Where do I go for that?”

  “A paint store, the kind for artists, might have it. You go in and ask for paint thinners. Get every kind they have. Try that first. If you pass by a dry cleaner, try them too. Say you spilled ink on a couch and you’ll pay for some of the stuff they use for ink stains.”

  “I’m getting hungry,” said Ruiz.

  “Buy something to eat on the way, then. I can’t go out like this and shop for thinners, and the smells are making me sick, so I couldn’t eat anyway. Just get me something that will take the ink off. We’ve got to fix this now.”