01 _ Xibalba Murders, The (6 page)

“The very next day, a young man dies in, or in this particular case, on top of, the museum Dr. Castillo has been associated with for several years.

“Coincidence, senora? I rather think not.”

I was inclined to agree with him there, although my conclusions were quite different.

“Very interesting, I’m sure. But”—as they say in the movies, I thought—“the evidence so far is circumstantial. What facts do you have to support this contention, and how exactly does this put my life in danger? I found a body. Unfortunate though that may be, I can’t see any reason why someone would want to kill me for that reason.”

“But not for that reason alone, senora. It is because you know too much.”

Those movies again. What would the man say next?
Hasta la vista,
baby? Or perhaps we would soon be quoting dialogue directly from
High Noon.

“I know nothing. I’m as baffled by all of this as apparently you are.”

He, too, ignored the gibe.

“You knew where to find the body. Not everyone who visits our
museo
is so fascinated that they feel compelled to visit the roof!”

He had a point.

“I got lost. I was checking to see if Dr. Castillo was in his office—”

“And was he?”

“No. But I got lost in the stairwell, and saw blood on the roof. I thought someone might be hurt…” I was launched into one of my well-rehearsed answers.

“Enough of this!” He rose from his seat. “Even if you insist on telling me this nonsense, I am responsible for your safety. You will remain in the hotel here under the protection of my officers until we have found Dr. Castillo.”

So yesterday I was confined to the country, my passport confiscated. Today I was confined to the hotel. All for my personal safety, of course.

I walked with Martinez to the front door.

“You haven’t even told me who the young man on the roof was,” I said to him.

“I assumed you knew. Luis Vallespino.”

The name meant nothing to me, but it certainly appeared to mean something to Alejandro, currently staffing the front desk.

His hands shook as he retrieved a key from one of the other hotel guests and handed her her mail.

Very interesting, I thought. Do I now know two of the robbers?

I wanted to talk to Alejandro, but it was not possible while he was at the desk. And as it turned out, this was the last I would see of him for a while. Soon after his father came to relieve him at the desk, he disappeared.

I spent the rest of the day, needless to say, at the hotel, under the watchful eyes of two policemen, one at the front door, one on patrol throughout the hotel.

For all the talk of this being for my personal protection, and despite the comfort of the surroundings, it felt like house arrest to me.

I paced the floor of my room for hours, going over everything in my mind. Was there really a connection between the robbery in the Hotel Montserrat and the murder of Luis Vallespino? Was Alejandro involved? Was he in danger? Where was Hernan Castillo, and what was his involvement, if any? Who were the Children of the Talking Cross?

It was clear to me that nothing was going to be solved in this hotel room, and the inactivity was beginning to drive me crazy. I decided I had to do something.

This hotel room, as I mentioned, is my favorite. Not just because of its beautiful view of the courtyard, however. When Isa and I were growing up together, those many years ago, we used this room, when it was unoccupied, as our center of operations. After all was quiet in the hotel, we would let ourselves in with the passkey. From there we had devised a way of getting out the bathroom window, onto a ledge that led around to the back of the inn where we were able to climb onto a large ceiba tree.

For hours we would sit in the branches of that big tree, gossip about the boys in our classes—we were both attending the international school at the time—and, of course, smoke. If our parents knew about this, they were polite enough not to mention it.

Partway through the school year, we discovered it was possible to move out along one of the large branches and lower ourselves onto the wall surrounding the hotel, and thence to the street. We only did it a couple of times: smoking was about as daring as we got, but it was a great secret that we shared.

And so it was off with the lights at about eleven p.m. as if I’d turned in for the night, into dark pants and turtleneck and running shoes, then into the bathroom. I put the vanity chair into the bathtub as Isa and I had always done, and then hauled myself out through the window.

It was more difficult than I remembered. The window, regrettably, seemed to have gotten smaller over the intervening years, as had the ledge. And I was already more than a little tired of hanging out on ledges and fire escapes. But the tree was still there, its branches would still hold me, and within a few minutes I was over the wall, and moving as quickly and as quietly as I could along the darkened street.

In a few minutes I found myself at the Cafe Escobar. I inquired if anyone had seen Alejandro and, when the answer was negative, asked to use the telephone. I was directed to a pay phone in a dark hallway behind the bar and placed a call to my neighbor Alex Stewart.

One of the best things about the little Victorian cottage in an old Toronto neighborhood that I bought when Clive and I parted is the neighbor I acquired with it.

Alex is a dapper little man who spent thirty-some years in the merchant marine before settling into the cottage next door to mine. He lives his retirement years growing native plants—the other neighbors call them weeds—and supporting various environmental and social causes. In the first few months after I met him, he dragged me to community meetings on several subjects, serving me herbal tea on our return and telling me stories of his life at sea.

He is also, quite unexpectedly, a whiz on the Internet and spends considerable time surfing in cyberspace. I’m not sure if he adopted me or I adopted him, but he reminds me of my favorite grandfather, long deceased, and I adore him. In many ways he has provided me with an emotional lifeline through the turbulent times of the past year.

Alex is a nighthawk, and even with the two-hour time difference, which would have made it about one-thirty in the morning, I was reasonably sure he would be up. I placed a collect call.

He picked up the phone immediately and accepted the charges with enthusiasm, quite charming when you considered the hour and the fact that he lives on a pension. I felt better just hearing his voice.

We talked briefly about my cat, whom, to my surprise, I actually missed, and my little house—both were, I gathered, just fine—and then I got to the point of my call. “Alex,” I said. “You’re up on all these various causes. Have you ever heard of a group called Children of the Talking Cross?”

“Children of the Talking Cross, no. Followers of the Talking Cross, yes indeed! The history will be a little too recent for you, I expect. Last century, actually. You’re into much older stuff than this. But it’s interesting nonetheless.”

“Never mind the lecture on my lack of social conscience, Alex.” I laughed. “Tell me about the Cross.”

“I believe the miraculous Talking Cross first put in an appearance in about 1850 right in your part of the world, the Yucatan,” he began.

“That would be shortly after the War of the Castes, wouldn’t it?” I asked. “Just to prove to you that my knowledge of Mesoamerican history is not entirely restricted to the classical Maya period,” I added.

“Perhaps I have underestimated you.” He chuckled. “But, yes, you are right. As you and I have discussed from time to time, the Spanish conquest of the Maya was not in all respects successful.

“There are many reasons for this, not the least of which was the cruelty of the Spanish overlords, who subjected the Maya to forced labor and extracted the dreaded
encomienda
or tribute.

“Many Maya would not submit to the oppression. The War of the Castes—that was the European name for it of course—broke out in 1847. The Maya, driven no doubt by desperation, were stunningly successful. Soon the only part of the Yucatan peninsula that was still held by the Spanish was Merida, more or less.

“The end of the war is the stuff of legend. When the time came to plant the corn, the Maya left for their villages, their army disintegrated, and the Spanish began to regain all that they had lost.”

“Was that the end of it, then?”

“Oh no. In about 1850, in some village in the Yucatan, there was said to be a miraculous ‘Talking Cross’ that prophesied a holy war against the Spanish oppressors. Fighting continued from time to time, but the Spanish were ultimately victorious in 1901. But Talking Crosses proliferated throughout the region, and many say that they simply went underground after that. There have certainly been recorded accounts of Talking Crosses until fairly recent times.”

“Do you consider them to be superstitious claptrap, as many would no doubt call it?” I asked.

“Well, of course I don’t believe in talking inanimate objects of any kind. I’m not daft. But I do believe they were a very powerful symbol of resistance to oppression and may still be so, for all I know.

“It’s kind of interesting that it’s crosses, isn’t it? From what I’ve read, the Maya have a profound belief in ritual, which the Spanish church capitalized on in subjugating them. Now the Maya have incorporated Christian symbolism and turned it against their oppressors.”

“Sort of like being shot with your own gun, you mean?”

Alex laughed.

“Can you think of any reason why a rebel group would steal a statue of Itzamna?” I asked.

“Well, leaving aside something straightforward like monetary value—you know what a good price pre-Columbian art commands these days, what with all the controls of its export—isn’t Itzamna one of the top gods in the Maya pantheon? Perhaps your statue of Itzamna is to be the newest symbol of rebellion—the 1990s’ version of a Talking Cross. But I don’t know, really. It’s anybody’s guess.”

We chatted a little while longer. I told him I’d reimburse him later for the collect call and gave him a carefully edited version of my last few days, and I could hear the concern in his voice.

“Don’t worry, Alex, I’ll be fine,” I said. But I hung up wondering if this was indeed so.

And then it was back through the cafe, carefully watched by all the late-night customers, and along the street to the wall. Isa and I had climbed back up by pulling a loose stone out slightly to give us a leg up. I checked the wall. Reassuringly, the stone was still there, all these years later. I reversed my earlier route and climbed into bed in the dark.

CHICCHAN

Chicchan is the day of the celestial serpent, that double-headed creature that arches over the earth to create the sky. It is considered a good day in the Maya calendar, and by and large it was, an oasis of calm between the tragedy that had been and the horror that was to be.

It began well enough. It was still dark when I was awakened by a soft but persistent tapping at my door. It was Jonathan.

“You’ve been sprung,” he whispered. In my semiconscious state, I wasn’t sure what this meant.

“Santiago has got you released in Isa’s and my custody until nine p.m. tonight. So hurry up, Lara. Bring your swimsuit and a sun hat.”

I was downstairs, showered and dressed, in ten minutes. Lucas and Isa were there, both yawning, as I was. It seemed Jonathan and Lucas had come to check on me the previous evening, after I’d supposedly turned in for the night, had met Isa, and together they had hatched this plan to cheer me up. We tiptoed out the door so as not to wake the other guests, to a Jeep Cherokee outside.

Isa sat up front with Lucas, Jonathan and I in the back. As I began to doze off again I heard Isa valiantly trying to draw Lucas into some semblance of a conversation. It was not easy. I was trying not to fall asleep with my head slumped on Jonathan’s shoulder. That wasn’t easy, either.

We headed out on Highway 180, and with no traffic at this ungodly hour, Lucas covered his seventy-five miles to Chichen Itza in record time, despite the fact that we forsook the new toll road and took the old highway through myriad little towns, all characterized by speed bumps and countless mangy dogs. My favorite town was called Libre Union, free union, because, Isa told us, of the high percentage of couples living there without benefit of holy matrimony. With my less than satisfactory marital record, it sounded good to me.

By seven a.m. we were in the ruins, heading for El Castillo to catch the early-morning sun as it cleared the mist from the site. We had the place to ourselves, the site not yet open to the public. Lucas knew the gatekeeper.

Chichen Itza was once a magnificent metropolis, built over several centuries by generations of people who ruled the northern Maya. El Castillo was, and is, its most impressive structure. Also known as the Temple of Kukulcan, the four-sided pyramid rises seventy-five feet from a grassy plaza. We scrambled up one of the restored stairways to the temple on its summit.

The sun began to cast its light on the Temple of the Warriors, below us and to the east of our position. This smaller temple, a three-tiered structure with rows of columns at its base that long ago formed a colonnade, has, at the top of the steps to its entrance, a Chac Mool, an ominous-looking reclining figure that guards the space, flanked by the heads of two carved serpents that must have formed the original doorway.

For an instant the early rays of the sun backlit the sculpture, adding its fiery glow to the chilling figure, then moved on.

I walked around the top of the temple, gazing out across miles of forest broken occasionally by a green mound that would one day reveal another lost structure. To the south the sun lit the top of El Caracol, the snail, visible above the trees, an unusual round building thought to have been the observatory from which the ancients tracked the planet Venus with great accuracy.

When I had circled around to where the others were sitting, Isa reached into the large tote bag she was never without and brought out a thermos of
cafe con leche,
four plastic cups, and some biscuits. We sat in companionable silence, our backs to the temple wall, and watched as more and more of the site was revealed from the mist.