With his forty-five making a dimple in Ibarra’s back, and the long guns in the linen bag, Herman marches Ibarra to the service elevator and pushes 8 to go down.
We drop two levels. Herman takes a quick look out. We brush by a maid on our way out of a service area and out onto the eighth floor.
Each level forms a kind of open terrace, hanging gardens of Babylon, looking over a vast atrium that forms the interior of the pyramid.
Halfway down the hall, a young couple comes breezing out of their room.
Ibarra sees the open door. His thought is nearly palpable, and for an instant I freeze, afraid he is going to run for the room and Herman will shoot him.
Herman nudges him with the gun. “Don’t even think about it.” He has a towel over the pistol, draped across his arm as if he should be carrying a finger bowl in the other hand.
As soon as we are past the couple and out of earshot, he talks to me from the corner of his mouth. “Be easier just throw the fucker off the balcony,” he says. “Score him on his swan dive in the lily pond down there.”
“Herman, we don’t know that he killed Julio. And even if he did, it’s a matter for the police.”
“I didn’t.” Ibarra waddles in front of him with the gun in his back.
“You gonna be walking with your ass on your shoulders, you don’t shut up,” says Herman.
A few doors down I find the number that matches the one penciled on the little envelope with the key card I got when I checked in downstairs.
I slide it through the lock and hear it click.
Inside with the door closed, Herman checks the bathroom and the closet, then pulls the curtains closed on the window and pushes Ibarra backward onto the bed. “Now I wanna hear you talk.”
“You have met my sons?” he says.
“Only one of them. Arturo. The other, Jaime is it? He wasn’t there.”
“You are probably lucky. Jaime has a bad temper. They have been involved in activities for which I am ashamed.”
“And I suppose they did this all by themselves?” says Herman.
“I admit at times I have done things for which I am not proud. But I didn’t want my sons to grow up this way. I have tried every way to stop them. Even gone to the authorities. But you know what Cancun can be like.”
“Here we go,” says Herman. “Fuckin’ mistakes been made. Next he be tellin’ us he got religion when he seen the light coming outta the little hole at the end of my gun.”
“Believe me. I have tried to stop my sons, but they will not listen. All they want is my money, to finance their schemes. When I refused, they found other sources.”
“Narcotics?” I ask.
“For a time. But that stopped. I was able to influence certain people.”
“Your children cuttin’ into your profits, were they?”
“I do not deal in drugs. I do not allow them on the premises of my hotel.”
“You wrote a letter to a lawyer in San Diego, a Mr. Nicholas Rush. What was that about?”
Ibarra looks at me, puzzled. “How do…”
“Never mind that. What did Mr. Rush have to do with your sons? And who or what is Mejicano Rosen?”
“Then you know about it? It is pronounced Roseton. Not Rosen.”
“What is it?” I ask.
“Roseton means Rosette in Spanish. The French under Napoleon, when they found it, they named it the stone of Rosette after the name of the village in Egypt where it was discovered. The English called it Rosetta.”
“What’s this shit?” says Herman.
“The Rosetta Stone,” I say. “It’s a fractured slab of rock found by Napoleon’s forces when they invaded Egypt. It was engraved with ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs along with a Greek translation. It allowed archeologists for the first time to understand the language of pharoahs.”
Herman has a dense look on his face. “Wait a minute. You lost me. You tellin’ me this ’bout some rock from Egypt?”
“No,” says Ibarra. “The Mejicano Roseton in your language is the Mexican Rosetta. It is the last remaining key to the ancient hieroglyphs of the Maya.”
“Do you have it?” I ask.
“Unfortunately no.”
“Where it is?”
“I cannot be sure, but I know that it exists and that it is priceless. My sons have been trying to acquire it.”
“Is that what Nick Rush was after?”
He nods. “He had been doing business through another man.”
“Gerald Metz?”
“How did you know that?”
“Never mind. Go on.”
“This man Metz had done business with my sons previously.”
“What kinda business?” says Herman.
“My boys were looting archeological sites. At first they were simply buying a few trinkets from the Indians who found things in the jungle, small figures carved in jade, sometimes trinkets in silver or gold. My sons would then sell these items to dealers in your country or in Europe. Wherever they could be paid the most. Occasionally they would find something more valuable.
“Then Arturo and Jaime began locating sites that were still covered by jungle. They are easy to spot if you know what you are looking for. In the Yucatan, the jungle floor is flat. Any rise, a small mound, what looks like a hill, is very often the remains of a Mayan structure overgrown by trees and vines. They learned how to find these. They hired laborers and destroyed sites, looking for treasure.”
“Didn’t your government try to stop them?”
“They tried. But it is impossible. There are too many locations, not enough guards. Your government demands that we control the flow of narcotics through our country. That is the priority. The sale of looted artifacts is a huge business. Thousands of items are taken every year from Mexico and Guatemala and sold on the black market. Some of these people are drug dealers. They make more selling artifacts than they do selling drugs, and there is less risk. You do not go to prison for life for stealing Mayan relics.”
“Who would buy them?” I ask.
“There are people who deal in such things. They sell the items to wealthy Americans, so their wives can have figurines made into earrings and tell their friends where they came from. The larger, more expensive items are another matter.”
“That’s what we saw at the trailer,” I tell Herman.
“What?” says Ibarra.
“It looked like a large slab of stone, like a headstone, only taller. We couldn’t see it very well. They had it covered with a blanket.”
“Tell me. Did you see white paint on it?”
“On a corner, under the blanket. It looked like whitewash.”
“A stela,” he says.
“What estella?” says Herman.
“A stela. It is a stone sign used by the Maya for historical and religious purposes. They would cover the stone in white limestone plaster. Then they would carve their hieroglyphs into this softer material. There are maybe thirty or forty of them that we know of, and most of them cannot be read. The jungle moisture has destroyed the writing. I had heard that my sons had found one.”
“So they’d sell it, right?” says Herman.
“Yes.”
“How much they get?”
“If the one they have is legible, tens of thousands, perhaps a hundred thousand U.S. dollars. If what is on it is
