The Xibalba Murders

AHAU

I awoke, cold and cramped, the breeze still on my face. But now I could see a hint of light through the slit in the rock, a tantalizing glimpse of a world I could not reach.

It was very clear that I could not get through the hole in the rock. I watched, like a prisoner on death row, as the light I might not live to see again, only a few feet away, grew brighter with the dawn. I clawed at the rock face in frustration until my fingers bled.

The light outside began to illuminate my little prison more and more.

I looked above me, and in the dim light it seemed there might be a way out, a trapdoor of sorts to the outer world. I climbed up a shaft, but there was a slab of rock across the top of it. I pushed with all my might, but could not budge it.

As I sat there in despair a shaft of early-morning light shot through the crevice and shone on the rock on the other side of the stream. I looked longingly toward the light, then looked back again. The sun had illuminated what seemed to be a small niche in the wall of the tunnel. I jumped across the stream to where the ray of light ended, and looked inside.

What had Ernesto said? A stone box, sealed with wax, covered with some material that would keep it dry. It was a stone box, all right, and there were remnants of some material, possibly leather or pelt on the outside.

I tried to open it, but the lid fit too tightly. Perhaps it contained Smoking Frog’s precious codex, perhaps it didn’t. What difference did it make? I wondered. I was trapped here. If I went back, I’d surely be murdered. If I stayed, I’d eventually starve to death, or maybe die of thirst. The water tasted slightly salty.

Didn’t people go mad from thirst? Maybe I’d spend my final hours trying to pry the box open. Decades from now I would be found, a skeleton with a ghastly grin on my face, my bony arms wrapped around a stone box.

Alone, I watched as the beam of sunlight continued to bring my little prison to life. I looked more closely at the rock face at the end of the tunnel. There was a carving here, too. Similar, but not identical to the one at the other end of the tunnel in the cave. This one, if I remembered correctly, was the carving that would be seen from inside the realm of Xibalba, the one that led to the world of men.

I sat watching the light catch the water of the little stream, so very clear. I was mesmerized by the interplay of blues and greens as it rippled along. I watched as tiny little silver-gray and blue fish dodged the currents and each other, and wondered where they came from.

Then a mental light dawned, too. I rolled into the water and sank beneath the surface.

I could see the brightness ahead of me, a watery pathway through the rock. The way through was several yards long, and it narrowed menacingly in places. But it was the only hope I had. I surfaced, took a deep breath, and swam as hard and as fast as I could, pulling myself through the narrow opening and then up toward the light.

I was free.

I surfaced gasping for breath into the light. I found myself in a primeval world, a lovely cenote—the clearest water I have ever seen—surrounded by forest. Long vines tumbled down toward the water from the banks several feet above me.

Towering over the cenote was a pyramid-shaped structure, which must have been at least forty or fifty feet high, judging by the fact that I could see it while floating in the waters of the cenote.

I swam to the water’s edge and pulled myself out using one of the vines, stumbled up the embankment to the forest, and looked about me.

It was not long past dawn, and the forest was still filled with mist. Faint tongues of sunlight were breaking through, breathing life into the wakening world. I looked at the azure of the cenote below me, the pinkish blue of the sky above and the fresh greens of the forest washed clean by the rains of the previous day, and I thought the world had been created again, all shiny and new, just for me.

I turned to survey the pyramid, guardian of this magic spot, custodian of the entrance to Xibalba, for that is what it must have been. It was in ruins, the steps the Maya climbed for centuries now a ramp of rubble. Two or three enormous ceiba trees, the sacred trees of the Maya, now grew out of the structure, their roots entwined about the huge stones. The temple at the top could still be distinguished, but barely, its lintels and doorway now covered in vines.

But even in this state it was magnificent, and I felt as the early explorers must have when they first set eyes upon the ruins of the great cities of the Yucatan. Even in its desolation, a sense of the magnificent civilization that once flourished here was evident, and I thought of the people who had lived here, the sculptors, warriors, and kings, the scribes and farmers, now forgotten, whose lives might yet be illuminated by the words of Smoking Frog’s codex.

There seemed to be a path of sorts leading away from the pyramid and the cenote. It snaked past other heaps of stones and other ceiba trees that appeared to mark the cornerstones of a giant plaza.

I followed the narrow footpath, which became a wider path of stone, then finally a road. I just kept walking.

The day was going to be a very warm one, I could tell. Already ahead of me I could see shimmering in the pavement, and from time to time I thought I could see people in front of me. But I was too tired to catch them and they got smaller as they moved on ahead of me.

Two little figures, however, seemed to be coming my way, and I watched them get bigger and closer with a rather strange detachment.

I recognized one of them. It was Esperanza, and with her a man dressed in the traditional guayabera of Maya men. As I approached them I could see the shock and concern on their faces, and I realized that I must look dreadful.

Trying to reassure them, I opened my mouth to speak, but my tongue felt swollen, and my voice came out a croak. “I’ve had a bit of an accident,” I said. “But fortunately I’m all right now.”

And with that my new and shiny world became much too bright, then faded to darkness once again.

I came to in the back of a pickup truck, looking up at several grizzled faces. One of the men was holding a rifle. Guerrillas, I thought. But my head was reassuringly on Esperanza’s lap, her cool hands stroking my face and head.

It was very hot now. My mouth felt very dry, and I couldn’t move or open my eyes. I felt strong arms lifting me from the truck and carrying me to a bed. Darkness came again.

Later I knew the Lords of Darkness were angry with me. I had found something they did not want me to find. Their voices were all around me, their hot breath on my face, their hands, rotting from disease, reached up from the underworld to pull me back to their realm beneath the heap of stones in the forest. I tried to call out, but could not; I tried to run away, but my legs would not carry me.

I felt arms around me, and a voice I knew I would recognize if I were able to pull together threads of consciousness told me I was safe. Finally I slept.

I awoke late in the afternoon, judging from the light filtering through the cracks in the walls of the room. I was in a room I did not recognize, on a simple cot. A jug of cool water and a plate of fruit, cheese, and tortillas was on a small nightstand, and I ate and drank gratefully.

I could hear no sounds outside the room, but I got up quietly and tried the door. It was locked. I seemed to have gone from one prison to another.

I was still feeling very weak, but I knew I must get away from here. These people had seemed nice enough, but I was developing a real aversion to being trapped in small places. Furthermore, I was convinced I had to retrieve the box that I felt must contain the codex. Only then would I have some bargaining power with those who pursued me.

I opened the shutters on the window, only to find another set of shutters, these latched on the outside.

There was a crack between the two outside shutters, however, and I was reasonably sure I could lift the latch clear if I could find something that I could maneuver through the crack. I looked around the room until I found a metal coat hanger, which I pulled apart and made into a long stick.

I eased it through the crack, and slowly and as quietly as possible started inching the bolt up. The shutters opened, and I climbed out.

I found myself in back of a small thatched-roof cottage on the edge of a clearing. There were chickens in the yard, and in the distance I could see smoke rising from cornfields as the farmers went back to clearing them for next year’s planting. After all the rain, there was definitely more smoke than fire, but perhaps it would afford me some cover.

The pickup truck I must have arrived in was in a shed at the back of the house. There was a flashlight in the back of the truck that I thought might come in handy, so I grabbed it.

A road, or rather a muddy track after the rains, seemed to end at the house, so I moved into the brush at the side of the road and moved parallel to the track away from the cottage.

Eventually I came to a paved road. I looked toward the sun, now low in the sky, and thought very hard about the direction of its rays when I came out of the forest in the morning. I turned in what I hoped was that direction.

A couple of times I heard vehicles approaching, but with the brush at the side of the road so close to the pavement, it was relatively easy to step quickly out of sight.

After about a half hour of walking, I saw a path that veered off to the left, the direction I thought I should be going, so I followed it. The light was growing dimmer, but I was afraid to turn on the flashlight lest my captors see it.

By the time I reached the pyramid, it was almost dusk. I was certain that the shaft above my position in the cave would lead to the pyramid, perhaps a stone in the plaza in front of it. But it would take me a while to find it and I was reasonably sure that I could find the underwater passageway back into the cave. I was unsure how to protect the flashlight until I recalled the slit in the rock. If I could locate that, I could push the flashlight through, then swim in myself.

I lined up the pyramid the way I remembered it, and carefully climbed down to the water’s edge. Holding the flashlight above my head as I swam, I found the slit, and pushed the light as far as I could through it, then dove down and found, albeit with some difficulty in the fading light, the underwater route.

I surfaced once again in the cave and listened carefully. I could hear nothing except the ripple of water. The bats were not yet awake for the night.

I retrieved the flashlight and switched it on.

The box was where I had left it, next to the niche in which I had found it. I rested the flashlight where it would be most useful and, using two small stones, one as a little hammer, the other for leverage, worked away at the rim of the box, which, as Ernesto had predicted, had been sealed in some waxy substance, the remains of which were still visible in places.

The lid finally loosened, and holding my breath, I lifted it up.

I guess because of my intense concentration on getting the box open, and the tapping sounds I was making with my two little stones on the edge of the stone box, I did not hear them coming until it was too late.

Suddenly there was a very loud scraping sound almost directly over my head, and the large rock at the top of the shaft above me was moved aside. A dark figure slid down the shaft, followed closely by another. Both wore black hoods over their heads. The first one carried a gun and it was pointed at me.

“Thank you so much for leading us to the codex, my dear,” the English voice said.

I could not believe my ears. My immediate reaction was that I had been found by a friend, but the tone of voice, and the presence of the gun, were at odds with that thought.

Jonathan pulled the hood off with one hand, the other holding the gun very steadily in my direction. The figure behind him remained hidden.

“You have certainly caused us a great deal of aggravation, Lara, but I believe you may also have saved us some time. I’m not sure how long it would have taken us to find this passageway, if we had not been in hot pursuit of you.”

“Who’s we?”

“I’m not sure you need to know that. We’ll be taking the box, if you please.”

“But this is your dig, Jonathan. Of course you will be given credit for the find. I’m not one of those grave robbers you get so upset about,” I said, my mind not yet grasping the significance of the gun.

“Credit? I prefer cash to credit, my dear, any day. And this should bring a significant amount of it.”

Light was beginning to dawn. “So is this what you do?” I asked incredulously. “Pretend you are on a legitimate archaeological dig, anguishing in public about how grave robbers have got there ahead of you, when in fact you’ve taken the stuff yourself?”

He merely smiled and gestured toward the box. “Hold it up where we can see the contents,” he ordered. I did so with some difficulty. The box was heavy.

The codex was there all right. For the few moments that I had had it to myself, I had seen the fragile bark paper, the beautifully rendered drawings in black and red, and the fluid hieroglyphic text. It was badly damaged, of course, but what little I could see looked legible.

At that moment I had no doubt that what I had found here were messages that would ring across the ages, that would illuminate the Maya past as never before, and ensure Maya civilization its rightful place among the truly great civilizations of the world.

And these people were going to take it, sell it for profit to someone far from Mexico, far from the people to whom it rightly belonged.

“You will be found out, you know. You can’t keep something as important as this a secret.”

“I think you are the last one, other than us, to know,” Jonathan said. I thought about Antonio, and hoped the proverbial wild horses wouldn’t drag his name out of me.

“You’ll kill me, no doubt, just as you killed Don Hernan”—and then, taking a deep breath, I added— “and Luis Vallespino.”

“Regrettably, yes.”

The figure behind him shifted in an angry movement. Then I knew who it was.

“And Montserrat,” I said. “Does she steal from her own father, or is he part of this, too?”

“Steal his beloved art? I hardly think so. Loves it too much. Prepared to go down the tubes financially, but wouldn’t sell a single one of them. Wouldn’t ask his fancy-pants wife for money either. His shipping company was useful, though, for getting the stuff out of the country. You might as well take off the balaclava, love, she’s figured out who you are,” he said, turning slightly to the figure behind him.

“Fortunately for him, and of course for me, his daughter has no such inhibitions. And she’s good at math, too. Figured out that if she stole the art, her father would collect on the insurance, and she and I could keep the proceeds from the sale. Worked out well for the whole family.”

Montserrat Gomez.

Under different circumstances, I would have found my own stupidity laughable. I had assumed that because so many trails led to the Gomez Arias household, it was he who was the guilty party. It had simply never occurred to me that what applied to him applied equally to her. If he was in trouble financially, then so was she. Wasn’t she a director of all his enterprises, vice-president of the investment company, manager of the hotel?

“Can’t she speak for herself?” I asked bitterly.

“I’m sure she can. What else would you like to know, since it’s not the amount you know, only that you know anything at all about our plans that is problematic under the circumstances?”

“Why didn’t you save yourselves a lot of time and trouble and just steal a Picasso or a Matisse?”

But I knew the answer even as I asked it. A Picasso or a Matisse is easily recognized, and possibly traced. And Jonathan and Montserrat would not have had the unwitting help of their erstwhile accomplices, the self-named and essentially self-deluded Children of the Talking Cross.

“How did she… you,” I said, addressing the retiring figure in the rear, “convince Alejandro Ortiz and Ricardo and Luis Vallespino to get involved in this?”

The figure to the rear whipped off the balaclava, dark hair tumbling across her face.

“Stupid, sentimental children! They never even knew who was directing them. Spent more time deciding on the name of their organization than they did actually accomplishing anything,” she said. “They thought they were stealing these art pieces for the cause, for the revolution. They saw the Zapatistas negotiating with the government and quarreling among themselves, and decided that it was they who were the true champions of the oppressed. But Luis wasn’t part of this.”

“So why did you kill him?”

“Ricardo was stupid enough to boast to his brother about his exploits. Luis headed right for Castillo to tell him about it. He’d heard Castillo give a lecture at the museum about how the museum and the indigenous communities could work together to preserve Maya heritage, thought this might be a better way to go. Castillo wasn’t there, of course, but there was no point in waiting for Luis to come to his senses,” she said very matter-of-factly.

“And Don Hernan? Figured it out, too, did he?”

“Not him. He just figured out about the codex, and was determined to get it before my father did. He was just a silly old man who got in the way. The fact that he knew there was a codex just complicated things for us. He might have figured out that too many things were disappearing from Jonathan’s digs.”

“So you killed him here and shipped his body back to the museo in the artifact crates, hid it in the museum until it closed, then dumped his body in his office.”

“So clever of you to figure it out,” she replied sarcastically.

I realized as she was speaking that I had made an error in thinking she was Jonathan’s assistant in all this. I could tell by the way she was speaking, and the way that he deferred to her, that she was in fact the leader. The aggressive, stubborn Gomez character gone bad.

“And Martinez?”

“Just another corrupt cop on the take. Thought he saw a pattern, got himself assigned to these robberies, and figured a couple of things out. Seemed to think that entitled him to part of the proceeds. No one will miss him, I can assure you.

“I think you’ve covered just about everybody now, Senora McClintoch. Except that Jonathan may have to have another go at smothering that Dona Josefina person if she ever comes to. Take care of her, sweetie, and do it right this time,” she said, tapping her scarlet fingernails on Jonathan’s shoulder and gesturing in my direction.

I looked at this man I was wondering forty-eight hours ago if I was in love with, and said incredulously, “Do you mean to tell me you have killed three people now over a book?”

“Four,” he said, turning to me and cocking the pistol.

I suppose no one knows what they will think in the split second before they die. Some, no doubt will worry about the quality of their underwear; others, more philosophical, will wonder if they hugged their kids enough.

I had this ludicrous image of my parents, Alex, Clive, and the Ortiz family gathered in a cemetery around a headstone that read: LARA MCCLINTOCH, THE WORLD’S WORST JUDGE OF MEN.

It was just too embarrassing!

In a fury I hurled the box and its priceless contents in the general direction of Jonathan and the stream just seconds before he fired. The shot was so loud in these close quarters that it almost deafened me, and I felt a spray of rock fragments as it hit the wall above me.

Time seemed to stand still for a moment, the three of us forming a horrified tableau as the box and the codex hurtled relentlessly toward the ground. It hit the stone floor of the cave with a crack that echoed the sound of the gun. But the box landed upright, its contents still intact. As the other two moved toward it I hurled myself into the water and swam frantically for the cenote outside.

I surfaced and started scrambling up the bank, but it was very slippery and they were faster than I was. They must have climbed up the shaft and made for the edge of the cenote immediately. I felt strong hands pushing my head back under the water and holding me there.

Then suddenly the pressure ceased, and I rose to the surface, gagging on the water in my throat and nose. I stumbled up the side of the cenote and saw, coming out of the forest, a semicircle of flashlights and torches, maybe twenty of them.

Jonathan and Montserrat had seen them, too, and were making a run for it. As the row of lights broke into the clearing around the pyramid, I could see the leader. It was Lucas.

He dropped his flashlight and started after Jonathan. I went after Montserrat. I caught up with her just as she was coming to the outer edge of the giant courtyard, and we went down, slipping and sliding in the mud.

She was smaller than I, and maybe not as strong on a good day. But she was a lot younger, and after what I had been through in the last few days, I could feel myself tiring almost immediately. She also had longer fingernails, which she used to real advantage. We sloshed around in the mud in the closest thing to women’s mud wrestling I ever hope to be involved in, and she soon had me lying on my stomach, her knees in my back, pummeling me as hard as she could.

I managed to turn my head to the side, and said in as close to a conversational tone as I could muster under the circumstances, “Did I mention to you that Dona Josefina is probably your grandmother?”

She hesitated for only a second, but it was enough. I rolled to one side and swatted her as hard as I could on the side of the head. She gasped and fell back, and I was able to get back on my feet.

Then we both froze. Jonathan, framed by the lights and followed by Lucas, was scrambling up the side of the ruined pyramid. Why he chose that route, I will never know. Maybe it was the only one left to him as the lights from the forest closed in on him.

He reached the summit, Lucas about twenty feet below him. But the rain and the winds of the previous day had made the pyramid unstable. A terrible sound, an unearthly groan, was heard as the stones of the temple on the summit gave way under his weight. Lucas scrambled quickly out of the way. Jonathan was not so lucky.

As we all watched in horror he fell, caught in the vines and stones, his body sliding down with the temple lintel and doorposts until he reached the bottom. He lay there, half-buried in mud and stone, his head at an unnatural angle.

Lucas ran to him, knelt beside him for a few seconds, then rose, shaking his head. The Lords of Xibalba had claimed one of their own.

By this time two of the other pursuers, both of whom I thought I recognized from the pickup truck earlier in the day, caught up with me, and Montserrat was led away.

I sank to my knees in the mud, too exhausted to move.

Lucas crossed the several yards between us, and also sank to his knees facing me. He put both hands on my shoulders, looked me straight in the eye, and said, “You are one tough woman to keep tabs on!”