The Mayan Secrets Page 9

  Sam looked at Remi, who nodded slightly. “All right,” he said. “But we’ve got to be very careful with it. Only the first pages have been opened. We can’t open more without risking having two surfaces stick together and damaging them. These couple of pages will have to do.”

  “Agreed,” she said. “Where is it?” She looked around the large space with such eagerness that Sam felt uneasy.

  “The pot and the codex are in a climate-controlled room,” said Remi. “It’s right down here.” She and Zoltán walked to the door of the room. She unlocked it. “I’m afraid there’s only space for two of you at a time. We can take turns.”

  Sarah Allersby said, “Don’t worry. They’re not here for that. They don’t need to see it.”

  She stepped in, Sam followed, and Remi entered and closed the door. Remi put on gloves, went to the cabinet, and produced the pot.

  Miss Allersby’s eyes widened. “Incredible. I can see it’s in the classic style of Copán.” She looked up at the rows of shelves behind the glass doors like a spoiled child who had been given a gift and gotten tired of it already. “And the codex?”

  Sam and Remi exchanged a glance, a mutual question: Do we really want to do this? Sam went to the rows of cabinets, unlocked one, and took down the codex. He carried it to the table, and Sarah Allersby’s body turned toward it as though it had a magnetism that pulled her only. As Sam set it down, she leaned very close to it—too close.

  “Please be careful not to touch it,” Remi said.

  Sarah ignored her. “Open it.”

  Sam took a moment to pull the surgical gloves up his wrists so the fingers would be tighter. “Open it,” Sarah repeated.

  Sam lifted the cover to reveal the page about the jade deposits in the Motagua Valley.

  “What is that?” asked Sarah. “Is that jade?”

  “We’re pretty sure it’s a group from a jungle city going to the Motagua Valley to trade for it.”

  As they went to the next page, she showed more and more signs of excitement. “I think this is part of the Popol Vuh,” she said. “The creation myth and all that. Here are the three feathered serpents. Here are the three sky gods.”

  When Sam reached the end of that section, he stopped, closed the book, and lifted it to its place in the glass cabinet, then locked the cabinet. Sarah Allersby took a moment to collect herself, returning slowly from the world of the codex.

  They all went back to the couches in the sitting room, where Selma was serving tea and small pastries to the lawyers. As they returned, Selma served Sarah Allersby and the Fargos. Zoltán followed Remi to the couch and sat, watching the four visitors.

  “Well, that was a thrill,” Sarah said. “It’s everything I’ve heard and more. If the rest of it is blank, it’s still amazing.” She sipped her tea. “I would like to make a preemptive offer before this goes any further. Does five million dollars sound fair?”

  “We aren’t selling anything,” said Remi.

  Sarah Allersby bristled. Sam could tell that she had now used the second of her two best weapons to little effect. Her looks had already failed to impress. On rare occasions when that was the case, her family’s money almost always restored the proper awe. Remi had passed over the money without comment.

  “Why on earth not?”

  “It doesn’t belong to us, for starters. It belongs to Mexico.”

  “Surely you aren’t serious. You’ve already smuggled it all the way here. It’s in your house, in your possession. Why would you go to that trouble, risk arrest and imprisonment, if you don’t want it?”

  Sam said, “It was an emergency. We did what we could to preserve the find. What we could do was to remove what was movable away from the site before it got carried off by thieves or the earthquakes and the volcano destroyed it. We also enlisted the local people to protect the shrine. Once we’ve given the experts a chance to study and preserve the codex, it has to go back to Mexico.”

  Sarah Allersby leaned toward him as though she were about to spit. “Seven million?”

  “May I?” asked Fyffe, the British attorney. “Virtually nobody knows that you have the codex. All you have to do is sign a sale agreement and a nondisclosure agreement and the money will be wired to a bank, or collection of banks, of your choice in the next few hours.”

  “We’re not selling anything,” said Remi.

  “Careful,” said Sarah. “When I walk out that door, it will mean that we couldn’t agree. Since you’ve demonstrated that you weren’t above smuggling it out of Mexico, I have to assume that the true obstacle was that you want a higher price.”

  The Mexican lawyer Escobedo said, “I assure you, this is the best way to proceed. At some point, the Mexican government will take an interest. We can deal with them far better than you can. You’ve been in the Mexican newspapers. If you have the codex, you must have stolen it from the shrine on Tacaná. If Miss Allersby has it, she can say it came from anywhere—one of her plantations in Guatemala, perhaps. And Tacaná is on the Guatemalan border. A few yards this way or that and transporting the codex becomes perfectly legal.”

  Salazar took his turn. “If you’re worried that the codex will be locked away where it won’t be studied by scientists, don’t be. The codex will be in a museum and scientists will be able to apply for access to it just as they do all over the world. Miss Allersby simply wants to be the legal owner and is willing to protect you from any litigation or government inquiry.”

  “I’m very sorry,” Sam said, “but we can’t sell what we don’t own. The codex has to go to the Mexican government. I believe there’s information in it that might be used by grave robbers, pot hunters, and thieves to locate and destroy important sites before archaeologists could ever hope to reach them. We’re not rejecting your offer, we’re rejecting all offers.”

  Sarah Allersby stood and looked at her watch. “We’ve got to be going, I’m afraid.” She sighed. “I made you such a large offer because I didn’t want to wait years to buy it from some Mexican institution at auction. But if waiting is necessary, I can do that. At some point, rationality sets in, and bureaucrats realize that a whole new library is better than one old book. Thank you for the tea.”

  She turned and in a moment she was out the door. Her lawyers had to hurry to get out and down the sidewalk in time to open the car door for her.

  Remi said, “I have a feeling about her.”

  “So do I.”

  Zoltán stared out the window at the limousine and growled.

  Sam and Remi walked back to the climate-controlled room, put on surgical gloves again, took the pot and the codex and carried them out. They went through the secret door in the bookcase, down the stairs to the lower level of the new firing range. Sam opened the gun cabinet, put the codex on a shelf with the pot, closed the safe, and spun the dial of the lock.

  They went back upstairs, and Remi said to Selma, “Are all the new security systems up and running yet?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. But don’t sleep here tonight. Arm all the systems and go to your apartment. We’re going to have a break-in tonight.”

  It was only quarter to eleven, so Sam and Remi drove to the campus of the University of California, San Diego. They found a parking structure not far from the Anthropology Department, then walked there.

  As they approached David Caine’s office, they saw the door open and a male student leave his office, looking down at a paper and frowning. Caine said to the student, “Just get the bibliography and notes in shape before you hand it in.” Then he saw the Fargos. “Sam! Remi! What’s up?” He beckoned them into his office and shut the door, then moved piles of books off chairs for them. “I thought we were going to meet at your house.”

  Sam said, “We had a visit about an hour ago from a woman named Sarah Allersby.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “You know her?” a
sked Remi.

  “Only by reputation.”

  Sam said, “She’s apparently been fed information by at least one of the colleagues you spoke with. She offered us seven million dollars for the codex. She knew what was in it.”

  “Oh, no,” he said. “I only spoke with people I thought I could trust. I never took into account the sort of temptation a person like that can offer.”

  “What do you know about her?” asked Remi.

  “More than I want to. She’s one of a whole class of people who have been filling gigantic houses in Europe and North America with pilfered artifacts for over a hundred years. They used to travel to undeveloped countries in the nineteenth century and take what they wanted. In the twentieth century, they paid galleries huge prices for objects that grave robbers dug up. By buying some, they created a market for more. They couldn’t be bothered to wonder what some object really was, where it came from, or how it was obtained. As things stand today, if I were in a hurry to find the most sacred objects in existence, I wouldn’t dig for them and I wouldn’t search in museums. I’d look in the homes of people in Europe and America whose families have been wealthy for the last hundred or so years.”

  “Is that the Allersbys?” asked Remi.

  “They’re among the worst,” Caine said. “They’ve been at it since the British arrived in India. It wasn’t even frowned upon until about thirty years ago. Even now, if an object left its country of origin before the United Nations treaty signed in the 1970s, you can do anything you want with it—keep it, sell it, or put it in your garden as a birdbath. That loophole exists because rich people like the Allersbys exerted influence on their countries’ governments.”

  “Sarah seemed pretty comfortable with the idea that we’d smuggled the codex out of Mexico for sale,” said Remi.

  He shook his head. “It’s ironic. I’ve heard the British tabloids spend a lot of ink on her bad behavior in the Greek islands and the French Riviera. But what she does in Guatemala is worse and it’s serious.”

  “Why?”

  “Guatemala had a civil war between 1960 and 1996. Two hundred thousand people died in that war. A lot of the old Spanish landowning families sold out and moved to Europe. The ones who bought those huge stretches of land were mostly foreigners. One of them was Sarah Allersby’s father. He bought a gigantic place called the Estancia Guerrero from the last heir, who had been living high in Paris and gambling in Monaco. When Sarah turned twenty-one, her father settled a lot of property on her—buildings in several European capitals, businesses, and the Estancia Guerrero.”

  “It sounds pretty routine for rich families,” said Remi.

  “Well, suddenly this twenty-one-year-old girl just out of school in England became one of the most important people in Guatemala. Some people predicted that she would be a progressive force, someone who would stand up for the poor Mayan peasants. The opposite happened. She visited her holdings in Guatemala and liked the place so much she moved there. That is, she liked Guatemala just the way it was. She became part of the new oligarchy, the foreigners who own about eighty percent of the land, and an even higher proportion of everything else. They exploit the peasants as much as the old Spanish landowners they replaced.”

  “That’s disappointing.”

  “It was to everyone except the peasants, who can’t be surprised anymore: Meet the new boss—just like the old boss. She’s got a great hunger for Mayan artifacts but no love at all for the living Mayan people who work in her fields and her businesses for practically nothing.”

  “Well,” said Sam. “Obviously, we’re not selling her anything. Where do you think we should go from here?”

  “We should do something about my colleagues. I need to know who is honest and who isn’t. I’d like to tell each of the people I’ve told about the codex a different lie about what’s in the rest of it and see which lie Sarah Allersby acts on.”

  “I’m afraid it’s too late for that,” said Remi. “When we asked about her sources, she wouldn’t answer. I’m sure she’ll be expecting us to try to find out.”

  “What we’ve got to do is try to pursue two paths at once,” Caine said.

  “What are the two paths?” Sam asked.

  “The codex has to be examined, transcribed, and translated. We have to know what it says.”

  “That’s hard to argue with,” said Remi.

  “The other line of inquiry is a bit trickier. At some point, we’ve got to find out whether the codex is fiction or a description of the world as it was in those days. The only way to do it is to go down to Central America and verify that what it says is true and accurate.”

  “You mean to visit one of the sites it describes?” asked Sam.

  “I’m afraid so,” Caine said. “I had been hoping to lead a scientific expedition to one of the sites that is mentioned only in this codex. But we’re two weeks into the spring quarter, with nine more weeks to go. I can’t leave my classes now. And it takes time to get a big expedition together. With Sarah Allersby involved, time is scarce. The longer we wait, the more difficult she’ll make it. She’s capable of getting people set up to follow any expedition we organize, getting us arrested, doing anything to get us to sell the codex or make sure we can’t have access to it.”

  “We’ll be the expedition,” Remi said. “Sam and me.”

  “What?” said Sam. “I thought you didn’t want to travel for a while.”

  “You heard him, Sam. There are two things that have to be done. Neither of us knows how to read the eight hundred sixty-one glyphs in the Mayan writing system, and we don’t know the underlying language. What’s it called?”

  “Ch’olan,” said Caine.

  “Right,” she said. “Ch’olan. How’s your Ch’olan?”

  “I see what you mean,” Sam said. “Dave, see if you can find a site that fits the criteria—mentioned only in this codex, never explored, and small enough that we don’t need a big group that will attract attention. I’d like to slip in there, find it, and get out.”

  LA JOLLA

  Early the next morning, Sam, Remi, and Zoltán arrived at the house above Goldfish Point before the electricians and carpenters, who were still working on the fourth floor. As they started up the walk, Selma opened the front door and came out to meet them. She put her hands on her hips. “The police just left.”

  Remi said, “So we had visitors last night?”

  “Yes,” said Selma. “The burglars tried the front doors but couldn’t get them to budge. Banging on them and trying to jimmy the latches caused the steel shutters on the first and second floors to come down automatically. The silent alarm from the outdoor surveillance cameras and motion sensors had already alerted the police. The cameras got only the images of two figures dressed in black with ski masks.”

  “Were you hoping to see their best work?” Remi asked.

  “No,” Sam said. “But I’m wondering if they might not have suspected in advance that this place wasn’t going to be easy.”

  “Oh?” said Selma. “That implies that they’d been here before.”

  Sam shrugged. “If I were to guess, I’d say that you probably served them tea yesterday. I don’t mean Sarah Allersby came back with a crowbar. I mean that she just may have read us wrong—thought that if someone showed us that it’s dangerous to have a valuable artifact around, then we’d jump at her offer.”

  “One more thing,” said Selma. “Dave Caine left a message on the house phone last night. He wants to meet with you this morning about your next little trip.”

  Two hours later, they were in the climate-controlled room with David Caine. They stood around the worktable, comparing the map in the codex with a topographic map on a computer screen. Caine placed a small arrow pointing to a spot in the jungle. “This site meets our criteria. It’s not included in any inventory of known Mayan sites. It isn’t large enough to be a major city.
It has the advantage of being in an area of the Guatemalan highlands that’s sparsely populated and remote.”

  “What do you think it is?” asked Remi.

  “The glyphs say it’s a sacred pool. I believe it’s a cenote—a hole in the underlying limestone bedrock caused by the action of water.”

  “Like a sinkhole?”

  “Exactly. Water was an extremely precious commodity to the Mayans, and it became more so in the late classic period. You would think water would be plentiful on the floor of a jungle, but it isn’t. And after the Mayans had cut and burned miles of trees to clear fields for agriculture, the climate got hotter and drier. During the late period, many cities depended heavily on cenotes as a water source. We’ve even found man-made cisterns they dug and plastered at El Mirador that were imitation cenotes, with artificial streams leading to them for catching water.”

  Sam said, “You want us to look for a pool of water?”

  “Cenotes were more than that. They were doorways to the underworld. Chac, the god of rain and weather, lived down there, among other places. You have to understand that these were people who believed that what they did kept the universe operating correctly. If you wanted rain, you would throw sacrifices into a cenote where the gods would get them.”

  “And this is the best site?”

  “There are new cities on this map. Either they’re imaginary or lost, we don’t know which. But you can’t go down there with a huge crew and try to excavate or even map a city without months of preparation. And if you did, it would compromise the site and expose it to looters. A cenote can be hidden or overgrown, but it’s something you can verify without attracting too much attention. There. I’ve just given you all the reasons why it’s a good choice.”

  Remi said, “I sense there are reasons why it’s not.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “It’s near a vast piece of land owned by a foreign landlord. It’s called the Estancia Guerrero.”

  “Sarah Allersby?” said Remi.