that's all she'd tell anybody until she got it completely finished. Scientists,” he concluded, “are prima donnas.'
As usual, a Worthy Partridge dictum had a way of ending a conversation with a clunk, and Julie and Gideon settled back to watch the scenery go by. They were deep in Mayan country now: thick, scrubby jungle and tiny roadside villages with names like Xlokzodozonot, Xlacab, and Tzukmuk—collections of twenty or thirty primitive thatch-roofed houses with reed or stuccoed walls. No toilets, no running water. Most had no doors, so that the three people in the air-conditioned van could look inside as they went past and see a clay floor, a few sticks of furniture, a hammock, a naked child or two. Pigs, chickens, and skinny dogs wandered aimlessly across the highway, contemptuous of the traffic.
It was Worthy himself who resumed the discussion, but it wasn't much of an improvement. “She's already finished the translation, but we've had to sit around twiddling our thumbs waiting for
Clunk.
Gideon made a try at keeping things going. “How's the writing, Worthy? Are you still doing that series on the little girl and her fish from Finland?'
'Iceland. No, I'm considering a new adventure series featuring Paco and Pablo—two little boys from ancient Mayan times. What do you think?'
'Uh...I hate to split hairs, but I know you like to be accurate, and Paco and Pablo aren't ancient Mayan names. They're Spanish.'
Worthy treated him to a brief, mordant glance. “What would you suggest, ‘Zactecauh and Yxcal Chac Go to the Fiesta'? ‘Ahpop Achih and Gucumatz Find a Friend'?'
Gideon sighed and returned to the scenery.
At a sign that said
'Chichen Itza?” Julie said. “Are we going to Chichen Itza?'
'No,” Gideon explained. “We're going to the Hotel Mayaland, which is just outside the back entrance to Chichen Itza. That's where we all stay. Tlaloc is less than a mile beyond, to the north.'
Five minutes later they pulled up in front of the long, yellow main building of the hotel. Gideon remembered it with pleasure; a welcome oasis of cleanliness and civilization in one of Mexico's most undeveloped areas. Through the great entrance arch they could look across the elegant open lobby and down a long veranda paved with gleaming tiles and lined with pillars. Under big lanterns hanging from the veranda roof, groups of people were having cocktails at low glass tables.
'Like it?” he asked as they stepped down from the van.
Julie continued to take in the scene. Small, dark, white-jacketed waiters moved agilely among the tables, threading their way between lush potted plants. At the open-air registration desk a festive party of a dozen or so Germans was being checked in.
'Ah,” she said finally, “the jungle; the raw, brooding, primitive sense of isolation...'
* * * *
Waiting for them on the dresser in their room was a wicker basket of yellow dahlias, an ice bucket stuffed with brown bottles of Montejo, the slightly bitter local beer, another ice bucket with glasses in it, and a note from Abe: “Welcome to Yucatan, what took you so long? Relax, wash up, go sit out on the balcony, have a few beers. And save one for me. I'll stop by at 5:00.'
They followed his instructions to the letter, and at 4:45 they were in wrought-iron rocking chairs on the ample, deeply shaded balcony outside their room, their second beers at their sides. They had showered and changed to fresh clothes, and now they tipped contentedly back and forth, breathing in the thick, fragrant air and listening to the hollow chuckling of unfamiliar birds in the trees.
Their room was on the second floor, and its balcony overlooked the lush grounds of the grand old hotel—a jungle, but a jungle wrestled into submission, tamed and ordered for the pleasure of discriminating human eyes. Flagstone paths wound from the yellow, vaguely Moorish main building to the outlying bungalows, through thick stands of chicle trees, acacias, and royal palms, some of them a hundred feet high, their fronds and branches matted with trailing vines and flowers. Here and there quiet fountains were tucked away behind massed bougainvillea and frangipani. At the level of the balcony the great arms of a ceiba tree spread out before them, every crotch and hollow overflowing with plant life that had taken hold in the moist bark: spiky, flowering plants, orchids that had trunks of their own, miniature banana palms. Trees growing out of trees.
Drifting appropriately up from the veranda were the soft chords of a guitar serenading the scattered groups of people having drinks. Even the occasional muted snatches of cocktail conversation, mostly in German or English, carried a sense of civilized ease that was more than welcome after a grubby, exhausting journey that had started at 5:00 a.m. The Mayaland, of course, had been built as a hotel for hardy, well-to-do visitors to nearby Chichen ltza in the 1930s. It was mere luck that it was also close enough to the long-hidden Tlaloc to serve as headquarters.
Julie leaned back in her rocker and put her feet up on the low, glass-topped table.
'Ah,” she said, “the essential Yucatan. The jungle, the raw, primitive, elemental—'
Gideon laughed. “Don't be tedious. You have to live someplace, you know, even on a dig, and since the Mayaland is so close and there are usually a few spare rooms...'
'Yes, but before I met you I was so naive I believed genuine anthropologists slept in tents and lived off the land on snakes and toads. I didn't know they stayed in deluxe international resorts, for God's sake.'
'Yes, well, naturally Abe and I, being genuine anthropologists, would prefer bathing in a muddy cenote and eating iguanas, but of course we have to think of our amateurs, who might not be so used to roughing it.'
'Sure,” Julie said. “Right.” She felt on her left for her glass. Gideon picked it up and put it in her hand, and they sat in peaceable silence until Abe knocked on the louvered door to the room at five o'clock.
He was as lean and sprightly as ever. Maybe a little sprightlier, as if two weeks of poking among the tumbled stones of Tlaloc under the Yucatecan sun had done his arthritis good, which it no doubt had. His watery blue eyes sparkled with intelligence and humor above the rectangular glasses he'd recently taken to wearing low on his nose most of the time, and around his neck on a black cord the rest of the time. This after a quarter century of carrying
