Curses! (25 page)
"Inspector, listen—” He tried to speak, to shout, to explain. But he heard nothing except a dull, growing roar, felt no vibration of sound in his throat, sensed no listening presence.
After a while he stopped. Even with his eyes closed, he could feel the darkness blossoming and unfolding, like a flower in a slow-motion film. There was a terrific sinking sensation, not merely as if something inside him were falling, but as if the stone floor on which he lay, the entire work shed, had tipped, then plummeted over the edge of some immense pit. The crushing speed of the drop squeezed his chest until he knew his ribs were going to crack. Behind his closed and paralyzed lids the blackness expanded around him, as if he were a tiny, shrinking speck inside the starless, lightless universe of his own skull.
Is my central nervous system shutting down? he wondered with detached interest. Is this death?
Down he plunged, and down, and down, and down, and down.
Grimly, Marmolejo waited at the back of the hotel reading room for the speeches to end. The eyes of speechmakers and crew darted frequently at him. They had been uneasy since he had come to fetch Julie, and they had no doubt seen, as he had seen, how her face had whitened when he'd told her what had happened, and how she'd swayed momentarily before collecting herself and going off with the officer. And he supposed his own face was making them nervous, too, if it showed what he was feeling.
He was angry. Angry in a white-hot way that no policeman should be. Angry at himself for not understanding sooner; angry that he couldn't have headed it off before it came to this, to a good man's life hanging by a thread; angry at the cunning, clever, stupid killer behind it all; and angry, if the truth be told, that it took a semiconscious Gideon Oliver to figure it out and explain it to him.
The speaker from Mexico City sat down. Another one stood up. Who knew how long this was going to go on? The hell with it; he wasn't going to wait any longer.
He strode into the room, up to the table. The speaker's voice faded away. Everyone looked warily, expectantly up at him. Everyone except one person, with his back to Marmolejo, who kept his eyes blamelessly on the speaker. But a muscle in front of his ear worked rhythmically. Marmolejo put his hand on the thick shoulder. The man twitched.
"Senor,” Marmolejo said formally, “will you come with me, please?"
Leo Rose tried to look surprised. He forced his mouth into what Marmolejo believed was referred to as a shit-faced grin.
"Sure,” he said with empty brightness.
"Bueno-bueno."
He wasn't falling anymore. He had bottomed out and was beginning to rise. No, he had been rising for a long time now, floating gently and serenely up out of the blackness. The awful pressure was gone from his chest. He could breathe again.
He was on his back, lying on something soft, his head and shoulders raised. A bed? He made an effort to open his eyes. Nothing happened. They felt as if they were stapled shut. Was he paralyzed? He tried flexing his hand. and felt fingernails touch palm. That was nice. Something worked anyway.
Slowly—he was very tired—he raised his left hand to his face. It flopped against his nose as if it were asleep. He slid it over his cheek, managed with a few wrong turns to find his left eye, and with a finger pushed up the eyelid and held it there. The light made him wince, but how strangely, charmingly familiar everything looked: sturdy wooden chairs, pottery water jug on the table, solid walls, clean-cut planes, straightforward right angles. Everything was so wonderfully real and three- dimensional. He was in their hotel room and, yes, he was in bed. He could look down the length of his body. The pale-blue sheet covering him was pristine and unwrinkled, with crisp, straight creases where it had been folded. However long he'd been there, he'd been lying like a statue. He flexed his toes and was gratified to see the corresponding lumps under the sheet move accordingly.
He tried to look to the side but his eyeballs didn't work as well as his toes. He could turn his head, however, and when he did he saw Julie in one of the wooden armchairs, staring dully at the floor, her black hair unkempt. Behind her, the rose-colored light slipping in layered streaks through the louvered door was early-morning light, no later than six-thirty. A whole day gone by? Had she been up all night with him?
His arm felt like jelly. Keeping it up was too difficult. He lowered it. The eyelid plopped shut.
"Hi,” he said. What came out was a croak.
He heard her start. “It speaks,” she said cheerfully. “It moves.” But he had seen the strain in her eyes, the pallor and fatigue in her face. He tried to tell her he was all right, but this time his tongue wouldn't work at all.
"Don't try to talk,” she said. Her cool hand was on his wrist. “Dr. Plumm says you'll be fine."
Dr. Plumm? Was he sick, then? Was that why his eyes didn't work? What was the matter with him, anyway? Like an automobile engine that had lain unused in a garage for a long time, his mind turned over, ticked, and coughed sluggishly to life.
He had gone to the site. He had stopped off at the work shed...
"Leo!” he cried. Another croak. “Julie, tell Marm—"
"Sh. Don't worry. They have him."
Have him? Who has him?
He must have said enough of it aloud to be understood. “Inspector Marmolejo arrested him,” she said. “He's in jail in Merida. The inspector says you're brilliant."
"You mean I really told Marmolejo about it? I thought I was dreaming.” That was what he tried to say, but it was too complicated to get out, and he gave it up halfway through.
"Sh,” she said again. “Rest now. We can talk about it later."
He managed to pat the back of her hand—reassuringly, he hoped—and relaxed against the pillows. How about that? All the time he'd thought he was shouting soundlessly into that roiling black vacuum, Marmolejo had really been there, listening to him. And not only that, Gideon must have been right.
"Be back at nine,” Howard had told them at the base of the pyramid. Only not quite. He'd begun to say it, all right, but he'd interrupted himself. “What time is it now?” he'd asked, and
that
was the missing piece Gideon had been searching for ‘without knowing it; the piece that didn't fit.
Because if Howard had asked the time, it meant that he hadn't been wearing a watch, and if he hadn't been wearing a watch, then the broken one lying under the skeleton-wrist on the stairwell couldn't very well have been his. And if it wasn't Howard's, then whose was it?
Earlier Gideon had spent a lot of time wondering what it was that he and Stan Ard had had in common. There had, after all, been attempts on only two lives: Ard's (successful) and his (close enough). Why? Why Ard and Gideon in particular, and no one else?
Once he'd realized that the watch in the stairwell wasn't Howard's, the answer had been obvious. His mind had gone back to the interview with the reporter on the veranda. Ard had asked Gideon how he'd happened to know that the stairwell ceiling had begun to give way at exactly 4:12 p.m. Gideon hadn't been able to remember at first, but then he'd recalled. He knew, he'd told Ard, because he'd noticed later that Leo Rose's watch, broken in that first shower of rocks, had stopped at 4:12 p.m.
And then, having told him, he'd called Leo over and blithely repeated it in front of him. Leo had laughed pleasantly and gone into his waterfront-flexivilla spiel, but he'd been aware from that moment that Gideon and Ard knew something he couldn't permit anybody to know—not when Howard's body was going to be turned up any day. And when it was, there was going to be a broken watch near it. And that watch was going to say 4:12 p.m.
There hadn't been any way Gideon could be certain of all this, of course, but it had been a reasonable guess: if you find a watch with a snapped band next to the body of a murdered man, and it isn't his own watch, then—as any observant cop would point out in a flash—it could very well be the murderer's, broken and pulled off in a struggle. Ordinarily, murderers took pains not to leave such things lying around. But if the victim had been knocked to the foot of a stairwell by a sledgehammer, and if that flailing hammer had then accidentally slammed into a weakened prop and dumped five or ten tons of rubble down on the body, then retrieving a watch would be a bit of a problem. As would be anything else under the debris—such as a priceless Mayan codex.
The codex had already been recovered. The watch had still been there, and all it would take to find out if there was an incriminating 4:12 on it would be to go and turn it over. That was what he'd been trying to tell Marmolejo, and apparently he'd succeeded.
That still left plenty of questions, but his brain was aching with the effort of thinking. Julie was right. They could talk about it later.
He turned his face blindly toward her. “Been a long night?” he asked, enunciating carefully.
"Not too bad. Abe kept me company until a couple of hours ago, but I finally made him go get some sleep.” She squeezed his hand gently. “How do you feel?"
"Pretty good, actually. But my eyes don't seem—"
"Dr. Plumm said they might be paralyzed for a while, but not to worry about it. They'll be okay. Is everything else all right?"
"I think so. I'm just a little weak. And a little surprised to be alive.” The words were coming more easily now.
"You can thank Dr. Plumm for that. He keeps a few vials of coral-snake antivenin on hand, just for times like this. Not that there are ever times like this, except when you're around. He really loaded you up with it. Had to get refills by air from Valladolid. You're also brimming with other intravenously administered goodies. You know, we very nearly had to helicopter you to the hospital in Merida for the iron lung. Dr. Plumm says you're a very lucky young man. I quote him."
"It was a coral snake that bit me? How did he know?"
"From the chew marks, I suppose."
"I thought poisonous snakes always left two fang marks."
"Nope, not Elapidae. They chew on you."
"Elapidae?"
"That's the family. Coral snakes are in the family Elapidae."
"Oh.” He could feel a gauze bandage on his left hand. “Did he have to incise the fang marks, squeeze the blood out?"
"No, there's no point in doing that after the first thirty minutes. Anyway, it doesn't do any good with
Micrurus."
"Micrurus?"
"That's the genus."
"Micrurus,"
he said again, more languidly. “You sure know the damnedest things."
It was very comfortable there, with his eyes closed and Julie holding his hand. He was relaxed and content, almost asleep. Those intravenous goodies, no doubt.
"Funny about the eyes,” he mused. “Why would only the oculomotor nerve be affected, and nothing else? No, wait a minute, the abducens must be screwed up too, because I'm not getting horizontal movement of the eyeball, which must mean involvement of the rectus lateralis. So..."
She laughed deep in her throat and lay her head on his chest. “I think I can stop worrying now,” she said, still laughing. “You're back to normal."
The low chuckling turned to slow, shuddering sobs against his chest. Her hands tightened along his sides. “Oh, Gideon, Gideon, I was so—thank God you're—"
"There, there,” he said drowsily, and lifted his hand to stroke her hair. “Everything's all right now."
And it was. He heard his own breathing become deep and regular, felt his hand slide flaccidly from her head, and seemed to observe himself descending back into the chasm, slowly this time, and peacefully, to a black and dreamless sleep.
The next two days passed in a gauzy haze, mostly quite pleasant. Abe was in and out, cheerful and comforting. A jolly and sanguine Plumm seemed to pop in every five minutes to paint Gideon's hand with gaudy green or purple tinctures, or to administer one of his arcane tests; prothrombin time, partial thromboplastin time, fibrinogen titer. Marmolejo, almost equally jolly, came twice—three times?—to talk about police matters. And always there was Julie, quiet when he wanted quiet, talkative and reassuring when that was what he needed.
On the third day, Plumm told him he was fit to travel, and a week's rest at home was probably his best way to ensure his being able to start the next quarter's courses on time. In any case, Plumm told him firmly, there was to be no thought of continuing work on the dig. Gideon's feeble protests, strictly pro forma, were brushed aside by Abe; Gideon was going home. Doctor's orders. No ifs, ands, or buts. The skeleton in the Priest's House could wait. When Gideon returned later to testify at Leo's trial, he could finish working on it if he felt up to it.
And so, five days after being bitten by a testy
Micrurus fulvius
in a Mayan ruin in the Yucatecan jungle, Gideon was on the green-and-white ferry
Yakima
as it made its silent, stately way across a misty, blessedly cool Puget Sound. The flight from Merida to Seattle, even with its airplane changes in Houston and Denver, had been mostly dozed away while Julie read, but the sight of the pearly green islands of the Sound had brought him to life, and they had begun to talk about Tlaloc again as the ferry edged out from the Edmonds dock.
"Isn't it funny?” Julie said, watching the creosote-stained pilings slip by, “We all thought the codex was at the bottom of things, but it was the watch. Just that stupid watch."
"Right,” Gideon said. “Leo knew the codex was a lost cause, what with that all-out campaign by the committee. But the watch—that was important; that could tie him to Howard's murder."
"Well, I still don't understand why he took the chance of waiting so long to do something about it. Why didn't he try to get it years ago when there wasn't any digging going on?"
"But he wasn't taking much of a chance. When the Institute shut Tlaloc down, they really shut it down. ‘For all time,’ they said, which suited Leo just fine. And even if it reopened in fifty years, what could anyone make of the watch by then? The trouble was, they changed their minds in just five years."
