Curses!

Chapter 5

"And that's the whole story,” Gideon said. “Good-bye Howard, good-bye, codex.” They were on their third cup of coffee. “Nobody's seen them since. If he's really managed to sell it, he's probably in Rio living like a millionaire. Change that; if he's sold it, he is a millionaire."

"But how can you be sure he took it?” Julie asked. “Maybe the stairwell just caved in on it. It was already pretty shaky, right? Maybe the codex is still there, under all the rubble. Maybe Howard is still there-"

"No, we dug it out, or rather the police did, all the way back down to the landing. Took them two days,” Gideon remembered. “Police dig faster than archaeologists."

"And when they got there they didn't find anything?"

"Well, the chest itself was still there. He'd smashed the lid to pieces to get it off. That was a crime in its own right. It was a hell of a piece of art."

"Maybe the cave-in smashed it."

"No, it was done with the sledgehammer. He left it upstairs on the temple floor, with some of the other tools. The police matched a couple of the gouges on the lid with the head of the hammer. “ He shook his head, freshly pained at the memory. “That beautiful, beautiful carving."

Julie commiserated silently, caressing the back of his hand.

"The earrings and plates and things were still inside,” he went on, “crushed by the cave-in-or maybe by the sledge for good measure; who knows-but the codex was gone."

"And Howard just disappeared into the jungle?"

"He disappeared into the friendly skies of Aeromexico. While we were all standing around gawking at the cave-in, he must have been doubling back to the hotel. The police found the crowbar near the path. Anyway, he picked up some stuff from his room, ripped off a van from the parking lot, and took off. They found the van at the airport in Merida a few days later."

"What about the gun?"

"Never seen again."

"And now you really think he's living the high life somewhere?"

"That I'm not so sure about. We put together a committee of anthropologists from Latin America and the States-I guess I was the prime mover-to keep him from selling the codex. The Committee for Mayan Scholarship. “

Julie giggled. “Sorry, I didn't mean to laugh, but what could a committee do?"

They could do plenty. They had made it their business to see that every potential buyer of the codex they could think of-every museum, every library, every auction house and gallery, even every private collector-was informed of how it had gotten into Howard's hands. They had contacted over four thousand institutions and individuals, and gotten articles in all the relevant journals and magazines.

"And we did a lot more than that. We made it clear that whoever bought it, or a piece of it, would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law-which was maybe pushing it a little, because there isn't any enforceable international law on buying stolen archaeological material."

"And you were successful? He wasn't able to sell it?"

"Not as far as we know. It wasn't too hard to scare possible buyers, you see, because this would have been the first and only Mayan codex ever available on the open market, or any market. So anyone who bought any Mayan codex had to know that he was buying this one. No one could claim ignorance."

"I bet Howard was a little annoyed."

"I sure as hell hope so. Look, the clouds have lifted."

The plane was beginning its descent now, sliding down over the huge green bulge of Yucatan. There wasn't much to see. A virtually featureless world, neatly bisected: pure bright-blue sky above, hummocky green jungle below. Not a building in sight; no roads, no electrical towers. No rivers even, for northern Yucatan, lush as it is, has none. All the water is underground, in the enormous caverns yawning beneath the limestone crust. The only variation in the green was an occasional flat, circular gleam of olive brown, like a plastic disk stuck on a relief map to represent a pond. In a sense these were the ponds of Yucatan, the famous cenotes; sinkholes where the fragile limestone had collapsed to reveal the water table below.

"I'm still not clear about the cave-in,” Julie said. “Was it an accident or what? Why didn't Howard get caught in it himself?"

"He didn't get caught because it wasn't an accident. He purposely knocked down the props to cave it in, hoping we'd think he might be buried down there and waste a day or two digging for him instead of hunting for him. Which we did."

"But how can you possibly know that?"

"He told us."

"He…?"

"Told us. He mailed us a letter from Merida before he flew out. Two pages, very cool and offhand. Said he really hated to smash the lid, but what else could he do, and he apologized for taking somebody's van but he couldn't very well call a taxi, could he, and the van would be found unharmed in Slot Number Something at the airport. And of course he'd do everything he could to find someone who'd buy the codex whole so he wouldn't have to cut such a wonderful thing up into little pieces. Itty bitty pieces, I think he said."

"Gideon, he sounds a little crazy."

"I wouldn't be surprised. Not that being crazy lets him off the hook, the bastard."

"The louse,” Julie agreed.

The landing patter had begun, muffled by the heavy thrum of the engines. “The captain has turned on the no-smoking sign. Please fasten your seat belts and return your tray tables…"

Obediently Gideon folded the table back into the seat in front of him. “Anything else you want to know?” By now he was glad he'd told her the story. She was right; he should have done it a long time ago.

"Well, I do have one question, but you're going to think it's pretty dumb.” She grinned at him. “Something tells me I'm going to have a lot of silly questions over the next couple of weeks."

Gideon smiled back at her. He loved her silly questions. “Your questions are never dumb. Merely ignorant."

"Oh, thanks, that's a relief. All right, then, just what is a codex? A manuscript? A book?"

"That's right. From the Latin caudex, meaning a split block of wood, kind of like a shingle, which the Romans coated with wax and then inscribed."

She looked at him quizzically. “You know the damnedest things."

"I,” he said with dignity, “am a full professor. My mind is replete with scholarly arcana, some of which, I can safely say, are even more useless than that."

"I know. It's ruining our social life. Nobody wants to play Trivial Pursuit with us."

He laughed. “Anyway, the term came into general use to mean anything with pages, as opposed to a continuous scroll. A Mayan codex looks pretty much like a modern book, with covers and pages that turn, except it's made out of one long strip of paper-pounded bark, rather that's folded accordian-style. You can pull it all out like a folding screen."

"That's interesting,” she said. “And they're really so valuable?"

"They're so valuable that nobody knows what one's worth. There are only three others, and none of them is in private hands. Over a million dollars I'd guess, even on the black market. Maybe four times that if you cut it up and sold the pages separately.” He grimaced. “Perish the thought."

Customs at Merida International Airport meant being waved through by a sullen woman in an olive-drab uniform, who was sipping from a can of Dr. Pepper and looking as if she wanted to be someplace else. As they walked through the glass doors into the waiting room and the moist heat of Yucatan, Julie said: “Gideon, there's a man looking at us in a funny way. Is it someone you know?"

Gideon followed her gaze toward a display of giant Kahlua bottles in the window of the duty-free shop. In front of it a bony man with a vaguely vexed expression around the eyes, a severely trimmed but scraggly goatee, and a pinched, prunish mouth was looking at them, one hand raised and motionless, with the index finger primly and economically extended. The sandy goatee was new, but the rest was familiar. Gideon smiled and waved.

"That,” he said, “is Worthy Partridge, and he's not looking at us funny. He always looks like that."

"Is that really his name?” she asked, as they made their way toward him.

"I think the whole name is Kenneth Worthy Partridge, but he just uses the last two. He writes children's books, and he figures it looks good on the covers. You know, Mother Goose, Peter Rabbit, Worthy Partridge."

"A children's writer?” Julie asked disbelievingly. “He doesn't exactly look like a man who loves kids."

He didn't love kids, and he wasn't overly keen on grownups either. Despite Worthy's dazed and ineffectual performance on the night that Howard had disappeared with the codex, Gideon remembered him as a sharply critical man given to faultfinding and sweeping generalizations: “The Mayans were dopes.” “All lawyers are crooks.” “Children have only two motivations-selfishness and greed."

With allowances made for these sometimes startling pronouncements, Gideon had liked him, or at least enjoyed his presence. He seemed to be one of those people who had decided on a personality role early in life and then found himself typecast, unable to move on to something else. But there were occasional glimmers of a nimble intelligence, and every now and then a wry, desiccated sense of humor would peep unexpectedly out.

He was not feeling humorous this afternoon. When he was introduced to Julie he nodded without smiling, and when Gideon asked him how the dig was going, his reply was dour and terse.

"The dig,” he said, “is cursed."

Gideon very nearly laughed, but managed to cough discreetly instead. It was going to take a while to get used to Worthy Partridge again.