The Xibalba Murders

OC

One death, head lord of Xibalba, sits complacently on his throne, a smile of sorts on his face.

And why should he not smile? He is surrounded by bald-headed goddesses, there to attend to his every whim. One of them kneels at his feet. Others hover around him.

For his entertainment, two jester priests are about to sacrifice a human victim, bound hand and foot below the throne.

And his arch enemies, the Hero Twins? Gone, cooked in an oven, their bones ground to dust and thrown into the underworld river.

Life, or in this case death, is unfolding as it should.

But let us look more closely at the two jester priests. Beneath their masks, do they not look familiar? Could it be that our heroes are not vanquished? The fate of our souls hangs in the balance. Is there still hope?

And who, or what, is there to record this pivotal moment in the history of the gods? Below the temple platform on which One Death presides, a scribe industriously records the story of our Hero Twins and their travels in the underworld.

Antonio Valesquez met me at the back door of the museo, as promised. His hands were shaking, whether with fear or excitement I could not tell, as he checked the door behind us and led the way to the old elevator and thence to the basement of the museo. It occurred to me that meeting me this way might be the most daring act he had ever committed.

The museo was closed, the building deserted except, I presumed, for a security guard who made casual rounds from time to time.

Like Oc, the dog that nightly leads the sun through the underworld, Valesquez led the way through the labyrinthine passageways.

He did not turn on any lights, relying instead on the faint daylight that filtered through a few small windows at ground level and on the emergency lighting in the dark hallways.

Several sections of hallway were lined with metal shelving filled with artifacts. In one hallway I paused to look at a large wooden crate, similar to the ones I had seen at Jonathan’s cave dig site.

Eventually Antonio unlocked an unmarked door, and we entered what appeared to be a conservation lab. There were a couple of ventilation chambers and hoods for use with chemicals, and rows of implements that reminded me of a dentist’s office. I noticed as well bottles of liquids marked with the universal symbol of poison, the skull and crossbones.

There were two large worktables. On one, an ancient skeleton was being pieced together, bone by bone, each one sorted from a box of dirt and bones on the floor under the table, like some life-size jigsaw puzzle.

Valesquez stopped triumphantly at the second. Here someone had been laboriously fitting together tiny pieces of a terra-cotta pot with a cream-colored background and a red rim. On it there was a scene done in very fine brushwork, and without touching it, and scarcely daring to breathe it looked so fragile, I leaned over to scan it.

The scene contained some text, which I strained to decipher, but could not. I did, however, recognize the figure of One Death, smoking a cigar, surrounded by a number of women of noble birth, who appeared to be taking very good care of him. A strange bird, part owl, part macaw, perched on the throne above him.

One Death looked toward a sacrificial scene, with two ax-wielding figures, and the victim identified by Akbal, the sign of darkness.

“Do you see it?” Valesquez asked excitedly, gesturing to a small figure below the throne.

I looked again. At the base of the temple platform sat a bewhiskered, jowly creature with big ears, a workman’s belt containing the tools of his trade around his waist. He, or it, was writing on what appeared to be a stack of paper with a rigid top and bottom cover, bound in a spotted material I assumed to be jaguar pelt. It was indeed a rabbit that writes.

I stood back and nodded.

“After you left the other day, I kept thinking about your writing rabbit,” Valesquez said.

“It was a rather unusual request after all. And if it was for Don Hernan, well, I’d do just about anything, I think,” he said simply.

“There was something in the back of my mind. Then I remembered that one of our conservators had asked me, a couple of months ago, to do some research for him. He was trying to reconstruct a painted pot from a pile of fragments found in a tomb in a temple near the border with Guatemala, and was sure he’d seen something similar somewhere—possibly in an exhibition of Maya art, or in a book on the subject.

“It depicted, he thought, a scene from the Popol Vuh in which a reluctant victim is sacrificed by the Hero Twins, then brought back to life as part of a clever trick on the Lords of Xibalba.

“I knew if I could find it, it would make his task of reconstruction much easier. I often do this kind of research for museum staff. Anyway, I looked for days, every moment I could.

“Finally I found it. The pot he was thinking of is in the collection of a U.S. university, and I found a photograph of it, in color, in an exhibition catalog.

“I didn’t look at the photograph that closely, frankly. I have so much work to do, I just brought it down here right away. But something must have stuck in my memory.

“See, here it is—the catalog.”

The book was propped up against the base of a work lamp on the table so that the conservator could look at it while he worked.

“You can see the two pots are not identical, but similar,” Valesquez continued. “The conservator commented to me how much this has helped him.”

I did see the similarity. The workmanship was different, certainly, and there were differences in detail, but both appeared to depict the same event.

I absentmindedly turned the pages of the catalog. There was an inscription in the front. To our colleague and friend, Dr. Hernan Castillo, on the occasion of his visit to the United States, June 1989. The signature was illegible.

“Don Hernan’s book?” I queried.

“Quite likely,” Valesquez replied. “He often gave items from his personal collection to the library, particularly when they were expensive or out of print.

“My collection budget is so very small,” he said, almost apologetically.

“I think you must be right about this,” I said. “Particularly since this book belonged to Don Hernan. And he must have been familiar with the work being done here. But what does it mean?”

“I have no idea. But you’re right. Don Hernan did spend a good deal of the time he was in the museo, which is not as much time as he did when he was executive director, of course, down here.

“In fact I think the last time I saw him, he was in what we call the fragments room. It’s just across the hall. I remember I startled him. Either that or he was quite excited about something. He barely had time to talk to me that day.”

“I don’t suppose I could see that, too. The fragments room, I mean,” I said.

“Why not?” Valesquez sighed. “You’re not supposed to be here at all. Given that you are, why should we restrict your movements in any way?”

I looked to see if he was actually making a joke. But he appeared, as usual, to be terribly serious. He carefully locked the door to the lab, then opened another across the hall.

Three walls of a very large room were lined with cabinets of what I would call map drawers, long and wide, but shallow filing drawers. Valesquez took a key from the drawer of a desk in the middle of the room and unlocked one of the cabinets.

“Pick a drawer,” he said, gesturing toward a cabinet.

I pulled out one of the drawers. In it were carefully numbered pottery shards that would eventually be pieced together like the one I had just seen in the lab.

I pulled out another. Fragments of tools, I would venture to guess.

At one end of the room were pieces too large to be filed, and I turned my attention to these. Large chunks of stone, fragments of a temple frieze, perhaps, leaned against the walls. There were broken stelae and large broken masks and figures.

I smiled at Valesquez. “Wonderful place. Thank you for showing it to me.”

“It is,” he said, then looked toward the desk with evident distaste.

I followed the direction of his gaze, and my eyes came to rest on the computer on the desk.

I understood. “Building a collection database, are they?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “I cannot believe the collection records will be safe in that thing. What if the power goes off? It often does, you know. All the records could be lost. It would be a catastrophe!”

I thought to tell him about backing up files on disk and so on. But there seemed no point. At some time in the future, the computer age would reach as far as his library.

Antonio Valesquez, no doubt, would either retire or, if he stayed on, continue to maintain his own set of records on his beloved little cards.

I thought of my neighbor, Alex, Valesquez’s senior by at least a decade or so, and wondered what it was that allowed some to embrace the future and others to cling helplessly to the past.

Be that as it may, Valesquez had been most helpful. I offered to buy him a coffee, perhaps a spot of lunch. He looked suspiciously at his watch.

“Make that almuerzo,” I said, remembering that the idea of an early meal is anathema to Mexicans. Better to make it a late breakfast than an early lunch.

Protesting that it was not necessary, he nonetheless agreed, and soon we were sitting in a little cafe nearby, enjoying vegetarian quesadillas and beer with lime. Some breakfast!

“You’ve found me a writing rabbit, Senor Valesquez,” I began after the food arrived.

“Antonio, please, senora.”

“Then it’s Lara, Antonio.” I smiled.

“An interesting name, I think. Reminds me of Dr. Zhivago” he said.

“Absolutely correct. I was born during my mother’s Russian-literature phase,” I replied.

“A mother who loves literature. How extraordinary!” he said. Clearly, his mother did not.

I told him a little about my family, then returned to the subject at hand.

“What do you think the writing rabbit means, Antonio?” I asked.

He paused. “Well, I’m a librarian. Naturally I think it’s about a book.”

“Do people kill over books? I’ve heard of academics destroying each other’s reputations over books, maybe, but not literally killing each other over one.”

“Well, I don’t know. I mean what would a Gutenberg Bible be worth, for example?” he mused. “Millions of pesos, surely. Would some people kill to have one of those, I wonder?

“Or one of the Dead Sea Scrolls. An early version of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Would people think these worth a human life? I would, I think.

“Not to actually kill someone, of course,” he added quickly, “but do you understand what I am saying?”

“I think I do,” I agreed. “Is there a Maya equivalent of the Gutenberg Bible?”

“There might be, I suppose. We never value our own culture, perhaps. But the Books of the Chilam Balam, for example. These are books in the Roman alphabet that are considered to have ritualistic importance for the Maya. One of the them, the Chilam Balam of Tusik—they’re named after the places they are located in—vanished in the 1970s. The owner/guardian is said to have died under circumstances some consider to be suspicious.”

“Interesting idea,” I said. “I’d like to research this with your help.”

He smiled. “You know our hours. I’ll help all I can.”

He suddenly looked at his watch and exclaimed, “My goodness. It’s so late. I have to attend the reading of Don Hernan’s will this afternoon!”

“So do I,” I said. “Shall we go together?”

I paid the bill, and we shared a companionable cab to the solicitor’s office. As we went we were both deep in our own thoughts. I was thinking how comfortable I felt with this nervous little man, how I’d told him things I had told no one else. Not Isa. Not even Jonathan, with whom I was reasonably sure I was heading for bed.

What did this say about my relationships? I wondered. It was a thought I was not prepared to pursue with any diligence at that moment.

We arrived at the offices of Rudolfo Alvarez a little late. The Ortiz family was already there, as was, to my surprise, Sheila Stratton Gomez. I found I was glad to see her. There were also a few people I didn’t know. Antonio whispered that one of them, a tall distinguished gentleman, was the treasurer of the museo.

Alvarez, a dry stick of a man, began to read the will the minute Antonio and I were seated.

There was the usual stuff about being of sound mind and so on, and then we got to the heart of the matter.

Which was, if I may summarize, that the artifacts that the museo had on loan from Don Hernan were to become part of its permanent collection. This caused the shoulders of the treasurer to relax. He’d obviously been worrying about losing a good part of the museum’s collection.

There were to be exceptions. The shoulders of the treasurer rose again. Don Hernan’s collection of first editions was to become the property of Santiago Ortiz Menendez and, after his death, of Norberto Ortiz.

There was an exception to that one, too. The first editions of John Lloyd Stephens’s Incidents of Travel, some of my favorite books, were to go to Lara McClintoch, my friend and colleague, whose love of the civilization of the Maya may yet equal my own. I was quite overwhelmed by this, and even more determined to see that justice be done.

Next to the personal effects. Francesca, Isa, and Manuela Ortiz were all left lovely old pieces of jewelry that belonged to Don Hernan’s family. Sheila Gomez was left the watch that was with Don Hernan’s remains. Dona Josefina, semiconscious in the hospital, was to receive his mother’s wedding ring, a sapphire-and-diamond piece that his wife had also worn.

The bulk of the money in Don Hernan’s estate was to go to a local hospital run by the nuns, where in a sad coincidence Dona Josefina now lay. An annual stipend, however, was to go to Antonio Valesquez. Antonio looked close to tears.

One item was left. Alvarez intoned, “To my young friend Alejandro Ortiz, I leave one of my most treasured possessions, a statue of a Maya ballplayer. To play the game well is to ensure that the cycles of the earth will continue. I pray this knowledge will set his feet on the right path, and give him the peace he craves and deserves.”

Alejandro burst into tears and fled the room, leaving his family sitting in bewilderment.

That ended the reading of the last will and testament of Senor Dr. Hernan Castillo Rivas. Alvarez invited everyone for a glass of port, and then we all filed out of his office, deep in our own thoughts.

This did not appear to be a will to kill over. The bulk of the estate went to institutions, the museo and the hospital. The jewelry and books had some commercial value, certainly, but their worth, to this group at least, would be primarily sentimental. The money Antonio Valesquez was to receive would help him, but he hadn’t needed to kill to get it. Don Hernan had been helping him financially all along.

I remained totally in the dark.

i wait for night to fall, so that once again I am at ease with the light, or rather its absence. My senses, carefully tamped down by day to protect my ragged psyche, can now expand, and every action, sight, and sound has a clarity that is almost frightening. I feel as if I am in a dream, but know that I am not. Instead everything has such an immediacy that I feel compelled to do now what I have been dreading.

I leave the others at the inn, and head for the hospital where Dona Josefina lies.

I move quietly down dark and silent whitewashed corridors, the only sounds the soft whirring of fans and the distant murmurs of a late service in the chapel. Built like a Spanish cloister, the hospital has crucifixes everywhere. I wonder if Dona Josephina is religious, or if she gave up on God a long time ago.

I find her room, directed by a placid sister. I wonder if the sisters know that Dona Josefina was once a courtesan and whether or not it matters in their eyes, if not God’s.

The room is dimly lit, but I see her very well. She lies there, one eye closed, the other drooping half-shut. A useless hand is curled up in a spasm, the other clenches and unclenches, clutching at the sheet in what I imagine to be intense frustration and despair.

I go to the bedside. In a low whisper, I begin to talk to her. I tell her that I am the fair-haired woman who is a friend of the Ortiz family, and that I sat at the table next to her in the hotel several nights ago.

I tell her I am sorry we did not have a chance to speak, that I have heard something of her story from Francesca Ortiz, and that I wish we could talk about her life and mine.

I tell her how I came to Merida on the strength of a phone call from Hernan Castillo, and that now that he is dead, I am obsessed with finding what he was looking for, and for bringing to justice the evil person who killed him.

I tell her that I know there is no reason on earth that she should believe what I say, but that nonetheless I need her help.

“I don’t know whether you can hear me, or understand me, but if you can,” I say, taking her good hand, “will you try to tell me? Press one for yes, two for no.”

I feel her squeeze my hand very faintly.

One for yes.

“Did he really tell you what he was looking for?” I ask.

One for yes.

“I know you can’t tell me what it is. But is it a book?” I ask again.

One for yes.

“Is it a rare book?”

One for yes.

“One of the Chilam Balam books?” I ask, thinking of Antonio’s comments.

Two for no.

“But a book of the Maya.”

One for yes.

“Gracias,” I tell her.

The sister comes to the door.

“You must leave her,” she says. “She must rest.”

I turn to go, then turn back again.

“Don Hernan’s will was read today. He left his mother’s wedding ring to you,” I tell the almost lifeless form.

As I leave I watch a tear form in the corner of her one good eye and run slowly down her cheek. I pat her hand.

“I promise to come back,” is all I can think to say.

It is so little.