Abe nodded and wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Good.” He took a long last look at the letter, holding the glasses to his temples with his hands.
'You're sure it doesn't look familiar?'
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Chapter 11
* * * *
The Hotel Mayaland is situated near a small secondary entrance to Chichen Itza. It sits on a quarter-mile-long spur of pavement that is little-used except by hotel guests walking to and from the ruins. At a little before eight- thirty on most nights, thirty or forty people from the hotel wander lazily along this pleasant path into Chichen Itza for the English-language sound-and-light show.
Julie and Gideon decided to take in the show. Abe wasn't due back from Merida until ten o'clock, when they were to meet for coffee. The entrance to the grounds was a narrow opening in a chain-link fence erected across the road, guarded by a querulous, one-legged ticket-taker in a wheelchair. The fence itself was draped with tourist merchandise, mostly T-shirts with spurious Mayan motifs. In front of them the genuine Mayan vendors, three dark, round women in nightgownlike
Two slightly older boys with small palm-fiber baskets worked the incoming crowd, displaying a surprising English vocabulary.
'Hello, mister, wanna buy a snake? What kind you want? I catch one special for you. With a stick.'
'Who'd want to buy a snake?” a chubby American boy of ten asked the harried-looking woman with him. A reasonable question, Gideon thought.
'They catch them for a snake farm, Jared,” the woman told him. “They're not supposed to sell them to tourists, but they do.'
'There's no such thing as a snake farm,” the boy said with knowledgeable contempt.
'Not that kind of farm. They extract the venom to use for snakebites. Isn't that interesting?'
'You're full of baloney,” Jared said.
There were no takers for the snakes, and no one seemed to be buying T-shirts either. The Mayan women slumped passively on low stools, hardly lifting their eyes from the ground.
'Let's buy a couple,” Julie said. “T-shirts, I mean.'
Gideon nodded. “Let's.'
Julie liked one with a reproduction of a mural on it. Gideon pointed out that it was based—loosely—on one from Teotihuacan, not Chichen Itza, but she stuck with it anyway.
'What about you?” she asked. “How about the one of that man all dressed in feathers?'
'Quetzalcoatl? No, thanks, but, you know, I kind of like that one there, with that naked girl spread-eagled on the altar, ready to have her heart cut out. Very artistic.'
'You have to be joking. I hope you're joking.'
'No, I think it's very colorful. But, okay, I'll settle for the one with the picture of El Castillo.'
From the gate it was a leisurely five-minute walk to the site. There was a light bulb strung from a tree every fifty feet or so, enough—barely—to keep them from stumbling off the path and into the scrub but not so bright that they couldn't see the stars.
They had taken the path to the site several days before, but that had been in the afternoon, and the ruins had come gradually into view through the branches. Now, however, at the end of the path the central plaza of Chichen Itza opened before them with throat-catching suddenness, chalky, vast, and silent in the starlight. El Castillo, the great, temple-topped central pyramid, loomed on their right, infinitely more overwhelming than it was in the daytime, a stupendous, bleakly gleaming tower of gray ice. Beyond it, obscured by a wispy night fog, was the blood-soaked Temple of the Warriors and its Thousand Columns. Ahead of them was the immense ball court, and all around, invisible but felt, the jungle, biding its time, waiting to swallow everything up again when the cycle of time decreed.
It was enough to stop Julie in her tracks. “Oh, my,” she said quietly. “Will you look at that?'
Gideon squeezed her hand, not above a slow, rolling shiver of emotion himself.
To their left, things were on a friendlier, more human scale. There was a long double row of battered, folding metal chairs set out on the grass, starkly but ineffectively lit by a single lamp behind. At one end of the rows was a wagon where soft drinks and candy were sold. Most of the chairs were already filled by people bussed in from Merida especially for the show, and the ground was littered with food wrappers and plastic cups, some of them probably left from the Spanish-language performance at seven.
The only seats Gideon and Julie could find together were at the far end of the second row, next to Jared and the harried-looking woman.
'Don't I get any candy or anything?” the boy was complaining as they sat down. “How about a Mars Bar?'
The woman emitted a muttered groan under her breath but got up promptly.
'And a Coke or something!” the boy yelled after her. Then he turned to Gideon and Julie. “That's my mother,” he announced. I live in Puerto Vallarta when I'm with her, but I spend the summers with my dad in Connecticut. They're divorced.'
