Beautiful Sacrifice

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO DO THIS?” LINA ASKED Hunter after a silence lasting many miles.

“What?”

“Be here right now,” she said bluntly. “You’re used to dealing with people who are driven by money—kidnap, extortion, outright theft, that sort of thing. Jase is used to drug cartels and poor, ambitious civilians who want to find work by crossing illegally into the U.S.”

Hunter saw a flash of color against jungle. Another shrine or altar or whatever the hell was going on.

“Whoever left that blood sacrifice,” Lina said, “is different. He or she is owned by gods and a way of life you don’t understand. What you think of as good or evil doesn’t matter right here, right now.”

“And you do understand?”

“I not only know the sources of Maya religion, I feel it. I was a child in isolated villages. I understand that spirits own the night, jaguars walk with kings, and humans live on the thinnest thread of approval from capricious gods.”

“You’re a believer?” Hunter asked.

She laughed, but it wasn’t a sound of humor. “No. But I’ve felt believers. They’re different. What repels us elevates them, brings them closer to the beating heart of divinity, the very breath of the gods infusing everything. We hear wind in the jungle or the cry of birds; believers hear gods, and they act on what they hear.”

Hunter was silent, watching her, seeing both past and future in her striking profile. “So the blood and shrines aren’t new to you?”

“No. But the intensity and amount of both is new.” She tucked a piece of her unraveling hairdo behind her ear. Before she lifted her hand, the wind pouring through the open windows undid her work. “In Houston, I believed the messianic fervor around 2012 was a fad, a diversion for people who had too much money and too little life. But here…”

Hunter watched Lina’s teeth sink into her lower lip and wished they were back in bed, where needs were clear and the celebration of life was direct.

“The altar we stopped at wasn’t the product of some easy New Age belief,” Lina said after a moment. “The altar was real blood, real flesh, real death. The giving of blood and the pain that came with it, the first and oldest sacrifice.”

“So you’re saying that the blood and flowers are a recognition of the turning of the Great Wheel, baktun, the end of the Long Count, of Maya time.”

“To us, perhaps. To a believer it would be the beginning of a new world,” she said. She slowed for an old pickup truck hauling a rickety crate of frazzled chickens in back. She went around the truck with a smooth surge of speed. “If there really is a resurgence of native Maya belief around here, then any calculations you make based on New World power and drugs and money won’t be valid. Someone you expect to do one thing will do something entirely different. The past won’t be a predictor of the present.”

“Gods change. Human nature doesn’t.” Hunter’s hand stroked her tensed right arm in a slow, lingering caress. “I’m staying with you, Lina. Tomorrow night we’ll celebrate the Maya baktun together with champagne or blood, whatever gets it done. Then we’ll see who walks and who rides in the brave new Maya world.”

She flicked a glance at Hunter. His face was as hard as anything she’d ever seen carved in stone.

And as compelling.

A THIN, HIGH HAZE HAD COVERED THE SKY WHILE THE SUN came closer to dropping into the jungle. The air was unusually dry for what was technically the end of the rainy season. Not desert dry, but not ocean-and-jungle humid either.

The Museo de Antropología de Tulum was located on the northern edge of Pueblo Tulum. It was as much a compound as a pure museum. Several modest residences were situated across a courtyard garden from the museum itself. The area was walled, with ancient stelae rising among the flowers. The museum’s reception area had been designed like the anteroom to an ancient temple. Framed photos of local Maya ruins competed with colorful rubbings taken from a temple wall describing Jaguar Claw’s victory over an ancient priest-king.

A black-haired woman dressed in a long skirt and a colorful native blouse stopped tapping on an old computer when the front door opened. With the ingrained training of a woman in Mexico, she passed over Lina and asked Hunter in soft Spanish how she could help him.

“Tell Mercurio that Lina Reyes Balam is here to see him,” Lina said, stepping into a shaft of light from a high, vertical window.

The woman’s eyes widened and she stood up with what could have been a subtle bow.

“But of course. Immediately.” She hurried out through a side door.

Hunter waited until she was out of earshot. “Not royalty, huh? She didn’t bow to me.”

Lina rolled her dark eyes, but before she could think of a comeback, a handsome man rushed out of a shadowed hallway and engulfed her in a hug.

“Lina, querida, you should have told me you were coming,” Mercurio said.

His voice was as deep as his hair was black. Eyes almost as dark as his hair watched Lina with something that could only be called possessiveness. Like Lina, he was a mixture of Maya and European, an inch taller than she was and a lot stronger.

Hunter didn’t enjoy watching Mercurio hug her breathless one damn bit, but he knew better than to show any emotion. Mercurio was making a statement. Now it was up to Lina to make one of her own. Impassive, Hunter watched her struggle politely to get some distance from Mercurio without being insulting about it.

“Sorry about the lack of notice,” she said, finally managing to step back from the embrace.

“No, no.” Mercurio held on to her hand and kissed it too long for politeness. “Such a sweet surprise you are.”

Color appeared high on Lina’s cheekbones, anger or embarrassment. She wasn’t nearly as comfortable with Mercurio’s affectionate display as he was. Nor did she like the way he was ignoring Hunter. Mercurio was usually polite to a fault.

She felt like a bone being mauled by a dog.

“Dr. Mercurio ak Chan de la Poole,” Lina said crisply, “I would like to introduce Mr. Hunter Johnston. We’re both very interested in the artifacts I mentioned when I called you.”

Reluctantly Mercurio turned to Hunter with a meaningless smile. “Good to meet you.”

Hunter murmured something polite and shook hands in the gentle Mexican way.

Mercurio had been north of the border. He ground down on Hunter’s hand with enough force to establish machismo.

Hunter’s smile didn’t change. He waited patiently to be released. When he was, he slid his hand over Lina’s and laced their fingers deeply together.

“You’ve come a long way from Texas,” Mercurio said to Hunter.

“Lina knows I’ll go anywhere with her.”

She shot Hunter a look from under long, dark eyelashes, but kept her mouth shut. She didn’t want to insult Mercurio before she saw his new acquisitions.

“I would do the same,” Mercurio replied coolly, “go anywhere for her.” His dark eyes shifted to Lina, caressing her and ignoring Hunter like a buzzing fly. “What may I do for you, beautiful one? What has brought you all the way to my humble place of work?”

“Humble?” Lina’s hand gestured to the timbered vault of the ceiling, and the Maya-inspired designs carved into the hardwood that must have taken hundreds of hours of exacting work.

“One tries,” Mercurio said.

She smiled brightly. “You succeed. I know how valuable your time is, so I’ll try not to take much of it.”

“For you—”

She kept talking. Ruthlessly. “We’d really love permission to see your recent acquisitions. Perhaps you have some items that would be suitable for trade with my museum.”

“But of course, querida.” He took her arm and led her to the acquisitions room.

Lina kept hold of Hunter’s hand like a lifeline. He decided that if Mercurio called Lina querida—darling—one more time in that deep, possessive tone, there might just be an unhappy moment or three while Hunter shoved Mercurio’s grasping fingers where the sun doesn’t shine.

But only after Hunter got what he came for. He was liking better and better the idea that Mercurio was good for illegal artifact trading, attempted murder, and attempted kidnapping. At least Hunter’s emotions liked the idea. His mind wasn’t cheering quite as happily.

“Did you come down for Abuelita’s birthday?” Mercurio asked, plainly not caring if Hunter could hear.

“I’m surprised you remembered,” Lina said.

“This year, it would be difficult to forget. To have a Reyes Balam birthday on the day the wheel will turn is a magnificent thing, a source of much celebration. Some of the village people have prepared shrines.”

Lina almost missed a step. Hunter steadied her with a hand at the small of her back. Then he nearly sent her to her knees with a slow, loving caress over her backside.

“Shrines?” she asked. Then she cleared her throat and tried again. “Shrines with Abuelita’s picture?”

Mercurio shrugged with a male grace that was unconscious.

Hunter considered tripping him.

“I look only at the flowers,” Mercurio said. “From a distance, they are beautiful, yes?”

“You never got close to one of the shrines?” Hunter asked.

“The peasant beliefs are not mine,” Mercurio said without looking away from Lina. “I am a civilized man educated in the civilized world.”

“Have you heard that the people are getting fanatic about their gods?” Hunter asked. “You know, baktun and all.”

“There are rumors.” The distaste in Mercurio’s voice was clear. “The villagers are very unsophisticated.”

“What kind of rumors?” Lina asked before Hunter could. “Anything that might threaten my family?”

Mercurio’s laugh was as richly masculine as his voice. “Their jungles might be short a few monkeys, but the villagers hold the Reyes Balam line in reverence. Not quite gods, but close. Priest-kings, as it were.”

“Priest-kings often came to a bloody end,” Hunter pointed out.

“That was long ago,” Mercurio said. “Like the artifacts in this museum. Beautiful reminders of a past that is no more.”

Hunter thought of the blood-drenched basement, the stone altar with the face of a god brooding over it, shots echoing in a parking garage, and Jase’s shirt with a terrifying stain of blood.

“Some people still take it seriously,” Hunter said. “Like death.”

“There are crazies in every society,” Mercurio said.

“Have you ever heard of El Maya?” Hunter asked casually.

“Superstitions, but I’ve heard something. The peasants think he is a god.”

“Yeah? Is he local?”

“He’s a god,” Mercurio said. “He’s everywhere. And nowhere.”

“I haven’t heard of him,” Lina said.

Mercurio made a dismissing motion with his hand. “El Maya is a combination of Robin Hood and the Grim Reaper. He’s a hope and a fear. Hot air, I believe you Americans say.”

“So you don’t think he’s real,” Hunter said, remembering Rodrigo’s silence.

“No,” Mercurio said, focusing on Lina as he opened the door to the acquisitions room. “You have strange friends, querida.”

Hunter wanted to show Mercurio just how strange he was—but not until Hunter was sure that he’d wrung all possible information out of the man.

Lina’s breath came in swiftly as she saw the room beyond Mercurio. Shelves and tables filled every space. Most surfaces were covered by artifacts waiting to be cataloged.

“As I said, I need more help.” Mercurio’s tone was wry, but not apologetic.

Lina didn’t take the bait.

“Good help is hard to find,” Hunter said blandly.

Mercurio kept on acting as if he were alone with Lina.

She headed for the artifacts. There was a tug at her arm before Mercurio slowly, reluctantly let go. If she hadn’t needed to look at his artifacts, she would have given him the kind of cold female shoulder that left ice burns.

Silently Hunter’s glance raked over artifact after artifact, looking for something that matched the photos in his cargo pants.

Lina was looking just as intently. “Nice incense burner.”

“Nice?” Mercurio laughed. “The censer is beautiful and you know it.”

“Of course,” she said, studying it.

The pottery’s central motif was an intricate cutout of an idealized Maya skull, mouth open. Snakes wrapped around the cranial dome, heads pointed up to the heavens. The figure was repeated three more times around the pottery. The inside was black with smoke, probably from sacred copal, the hardened but not fossilized remains of tree sap. The outside showed traces of blue that could have been painted glyphs, faded now.

There was no piece missing in the censer that would match what Hunter and Jase had found in the murdered janitor’s room. None of the glyphs had the squared, jagged lines, a sigil sacred exclusively to Kawa’il.

The blackware vases were perfect—suspiciously so to Lina, but it wasn’t her collection, so she said nothing. Their glyphs were outlined in red. Kawa’il’s sigil was absent.

Hunter absorbed each artifact in turn. The ornamental carved stones were new to him.

“What’s their purpose?” he asked aloud.

“Perhaps good luck, perhaps simple offerings flung into a sacred cenote,” Mercurio answered. “I haven’t had time to translate the glyphs, which appear to be Terminal Classic on first look.”

Hunter switched his attention to tiny pottery faces, misshapen and broken, as though cast aside. “These?” he asked.

“Supernatural faces,” Lina said when Mercurio didn’t answer. “Some of the many, many gods of the Maya. They look like imports from the highlands. Anywhere from Classic to Late Terminal Classic. Probably cenote offerings.”

“Very good,” Mercurio said in surprise. “But then, you always had an enviable eye. Are you certain I can’t lure you to the Yucatan full-time?”

“Quite certain,” Lina said absently.

Her attention was on pots with knobby animal feet at the bottom. Again, probably made as offerings to one god or another. But it was a string of pale, carved jade beads that made her breath stop. The beads looked like a snake swallowing its own tail. Some of the beads were chipped or cracked, but it didn’t detract from the impact of the whole.

Lina had seen only one thing like the beads—a big jade medallion of a jaguar head wreathed in a feathered snake devouring its own tail. The piece probably had been part of a priest’s regalia. She had found it at one of her father’s digs.

The piece had vanished into her father’s scholarly collection. She wondered if he had ever written the article he had talked about doing on the jade. If he had, it hadn’t been published in any source she knew. And she knew all of the scholarly ones as well as some that were more shadowy.

“This is extraordinary, Mercurio. Where did you get it?” she asked

“I traded for it,” he said.

Hunter managed not to laugh out loud. He’d bet that the beads were—at best—a gray-market trophy.

Lina frowned. “Was the previous owner Mexican?”

“He had the requisite papers,” Mercurio said. “The beads came from the first dredging of Chichén Itzá. One of the worker’s descendants sold them for cash before anyone had dreamed up antiquities laws. Someone strung the beads. The result came down through the years in a Maya family. They sold it to pay for doctors for their son.”

“You’re very fortunate they came to you,” Lina said carefully.

“Yes.”

She waited, but Mercurio said no more.

Listening with a small part of his attention, Hunter had ruthlessly moved from artifact to artifact while Lina and Mercurio danced around the subject of questionable provenance. Obviously Mercurio wasn’t into the Caesar’s wife strategy of business.

“What’s that?” Hunter asked finally. “Paper?”

Instantly Lina was at his side. “Looks like it. Birch bark.”

There were fragmentary symbols on one side of the piece. She couldn’t read them. There simply wasn’t enough left.

“What is it?” Hunter asked.

“It looks like a bit torn from a Maya codex, but…” She shook her head. “All of the five surviving codices are accounted for. This could be a fragment from one of them.” Her tone said it was unlikely. “Bishop Landa and his soldiers were very thorough. If there were any books they didn’t find and burn, the climate eventually destroyed them. Five hundred years in a jungle…” She looked at Mercurio and raised one dark eyebrow. “Any comments?”

“The paper came in the same lot as the beads,” he said. “The owner said it was a fragment of an unknown codex.”

“You believed him?” Hunter asked.

“No,” Mercurio said bluntly. “That would be too much. Simply fantastic.”

“Understatement,” Lina said. “Proof of an ancient, unknown codex would rock the Maya world like a nuclear bomb. Finding a sixth surviving book is the holy grail of every Maya archaeologist.”

“Collectors, too?” Hunter asked.

“Of course,” Mercurio said.

“It could never be displayed,” Lina said at the same time. “You could have a stack of provenance going back to Bishop Landa himself, and Mexico would still scream patrimony.”

“Not all collectors would care,” Hunter said.

“But gossip goes through solid stone walls,” Lina pointed out. “A sixth Maya book is a secret that I can’t imagine being kept.”

“Okay. You see anything here that looks like the photographs?”

“No.”

“What photographs?” Mercurio asked.

Watching the other man, Hunter reached into one of the cargo pockets on his new pants. He spread the photos across an empty worktable and turned to watch Mercurio. The man came to a point, all but quivering like a bird dog as his eyes swept from photo to photo, then began again for a more leisurely look.

“Well cared for,” Mercurio said. “The photographer should be fired.”

Hunter waited.

So did Lina. She didn’t need Hunter’s neutral expression to know that he wanted her quiet right now.

“Anything else?” Hunter asked when Mercurio remained silent.

“What is their provenance?” Mercurio countered.

“Zero.”

The other man didn’t look surprised.

“You missing any pieces from your digs?” Hunter asked.

“None that I know of. Certainly no artifacts of this quality. My digs share a similar style—especially with that scepter, but I’ve found nothing like that mask. Is it real or of modern manufacture?”

“I don’t know,” Lina said. “I’ve never studied the artifact itself, only the photos.”

“And you think I have?” Mercurio asked, looking at her. “You flatter me, querida. I have found some hints of Kawa’il, some sigils on goods. But I can’t prove they weren’t imported from Yucatan. In fact, anything regarding Kawa’il can’t be proved beyond academic doubt as indigenous to my Belize digs.”

“Then why is Philip…” Her voice dried up.

“So paranoid about my digs?” Mercurio’s smile was different from his earlier ones. Harder.

“Yes,” Lina said.

“Because he is not quite sane. Digs of this quality and apparent age”—Mercurio gestured to the photos—“have only been discovered on Reyes Balam land. I don’t know what your father has found since I left. Certainly he never found artifacts of this magnificence when I was with him, querida.”

“If you wanted to buy them, who would you go to?” Hunter asked, his eyes the color of winter ice. He was really tired of hearing the other man call Lina “darling.”

“To you, of course,” Mercurio said. “You’re the man with the photos.”

“These photos are as close as I can come to the real thing,” Hunter said. “Who would you try next?”

“Cecilia Reyes Balam,” Mercurio said.

“Not Simon Crutchfeldt?” Lina asked. “Or Philip?”

“If Crutchfeldt owned these, he wouldn’t keep them long enough for word to get out,” Mercurio said. “He is a businessman as much as he is a collector. Only a collector would be fool enough to keep artifacts such as those. As for Philip, if he had them, I would be the last to know. He wouldn’t spit on my grave. Vindictive bastard.” Then, quickly, “My apologies, Lina.”

“Not necessary.” Her voice, like her face, revealed no emotion.

“That takes care of the obvious suspects,” Hunter said. “Anyone else?”

“Carlos, of course,” Mercurio said. “But, assuming those artifacts are as good as they look, he wouldn’t sell them.”

“He’d give them to the museum,” Lina said.

Carlos laughed softly. “Such beautiful innocence, querida. It is one of your greatest lures.”

“I don’t find it alluring to be called naive,” she said evenly. “Are you saying Carlos would sell those artifacts on the black market?”

“No. I’m saying that the only way Carlos would let go of those artifacts is if he had better pieces in his collection.”

“We have nothing to equal them in the museum,” Lina said.

Mercurio’s smile was both gentle and amused. “You must be the only person in Mexico who doesn’t know that Carlos has a personal collection, and I’m not referring to your Houston museum.”

“So he might know about these artifacts?” Hunter asked quickly.

The quick flare of temper in Lina’s eyes had warned him that she was reaching her limit on being patronized by Mercurio ak Chan de la Poole. That was fine with Hunter, but they had more questions to be answered before he let her shred the handsome Mexican.

“Carlos?” Mercurio shrugged. “He is a man who keeps his own counsel. Lina’s abuelita might know. She and Carlos are close.”

“Why?” Hunter asked. “She’s two generations older than he is.”

“He is the only reasonably direct male descendant of the Reyes Balam line,” Mercurio said. “He is the focus of the backward villagers who see him as a conduit to the old gods.”

“He’s CEO of a cement company,” Lina said. “Not real godlike.”

“To you and me, no. He is just one more spoiled son of an old family. The villagers are more foolish. They look for anything to make their dirt-scratching lives more important.”

“Take a good look at those photos,” she said impatiently.

Mercurio’s disdainful attitude toward poor Maya villagers was one of the major reasons she hadn’t let their relationship go beyond a few dates with him. Despite his handsome face, fit body, and love of field archaeology, Lina couldn’t see him as a potential mate.

Too bad Mercurio didn’t feel the same way.

“What do you see?” Lina pressed. “What do you think the function of the artifacts was?”

“Is that cloth really a god bundle?” Mercurio countered.

“I don’t know,” Lina said.

He looked at Hunter.

“Same here,” Hunter said. “That’s why we knocked on your door.”

“If I assume that the artifacts are as represented in the pictures,” Mercurio began.

“This isn’t a peer review,” Lina said. “You’re not being recorded or judged or asked to buy or sell. Spare me all the academic qualifiers.”

“So direct,” Mercurio said. “So American.”

About time you noticed, Hunter thought sardonically.

“I’m not the starry-eyed teenager you knew on the digs,” she said. “I’m way past that.”

“You were beautiful, a bird just learning to fly.” His voice was like a stroke, his eyes hot with memories.

“That was years ago,” she said. “The pictures are now.”

Hunter measured Mercurio like an undertaker sizing up future business.

Lina’s dark eyes watched the other man, hoping he would accept that she had long outgrown her crush on her father’s handsome assistant.

“People are dead because of those artifacts,” Hunter said. “We don’t want any more deaths on our hands.”

But his tone said he wouldn’t mind some of Mercurio’s blood on his knuckles.

Mercurio studied the photographs again, his mouth flat rather than seductive. “Were they found together?”

“At the Texas-Mexico border,” Hunter said. “Where they’d been before that is unknown.”

“I can’t tell you anything Lina can’t.” Mercurio shrugged. “They came from Reyes Balam land.”

She started to protest.

Hunter cut across her. “What is their function?”

“Religious,” Mercurio said. “Specifically, sacrificial. The quality of the knife, the scepter, the mask, the Chacmool, the incense burner—it all speaks of priest-kings communicating with gods. If there ever was a cult of Kawa’il, these goods belonged to its high priest.”

“Why couldn’t they have come from Belize?” Lina asked.

“I have several digs in Belize, most of them close to historic villages, places where traders came from the Yucatan peninsula to conduct business. Two of my digs are deeper in the jungle. Some of the sites have wall paintings. There is even one—just one—with the sigil of Kawa’il.”

Lina’s breath came in and stayed.

“The sigil is on the order of Mexico City graffiti,” Mercurio said, shrugging. “It is a crude statement that someone was there at some time with some paint. I’ve never found artifacts of high quality produced on any post–Terminal Classic site in Belize. Everything I’ve found is crude, made in the shadow of Yucatec memories by untrained people who barely survived the onslaught of the Spanish. The people who lived there were Maya, yes, but they had no greatness left in them. Like the villages today. Their gods are gone, and it shows in the poor rubble of their lives.”

“Yet you have that scrap of paper,” Hunter said. “Paper is the product of a high civilization.”

“Or the remnant of what once was,” Mercurio said. “If the scrap is from Belize, it was carried there.” He looked up from the photos, took Lina’s chin lightly in his hand, and turned her to face him.

Hunter eased forward, ready to deck the touchy-feely archaeologist.

“If I’d found artifacts as good as those in your photos,” Mercurio said, “I’d have quit my post and started my own foundation. Money to sponsor my digs would have flooded in. Madre de Dios, National Geographic would have me on speed dial! Do you understand what I’m saying yet? If real, that mask alone is better than anything the Aztecs made, and they’re considered the pinnacle. Who has those artifacts? ”

“If we knew, we wouldn’t be here,” she said, stepping away from his grasp. “Thank you for your time.” She turned to Hunter. “We’d better go. My family will be impatient to meet you.”

Mercurio finally seemed to get the message. The look he gave Hunter was as hard as a blade.

“Thanks for showing us around, Dr. de la Poole,” Hunter said, hand extended.

Mercurio grasped it angrily. “Of course.”

This time Hunter didn’t hold back his grip.