Curses!

Chapter 23

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.