Curses!

'If there were some human bones involved, sure. And if some other physical anthropologist wasn't already part of the team.” He shrugged. “I guess that's what I'll do.” And then he'd wait months, years maybe, before anything came to pass. Popular accounts notwithstanding, human skeletal remains didn't turn up on digs very often.

'Fine. Good. Anything else bothering you?'

'Julie, do you know how old Rupert Armstrong LeMoyne is?'

'Ah, now we're getting to it. Who's Rupert Armstrong LeMoyne?'

'The dean of faculty. He's thirty-nine years old. Two years younger than I am.'

'Gideon, would you want to be the dean of faculty?'

'Of course not. That's not the point.'

'Would you like to be soft, and white, and self-satisfied like Rupert Armstrong LeMoyne?” She pushed him back into his chair, dropped into his lap, and put her arms around his neck.

Gideon submitted happily. Married two years and still his skin tingled when she touched him. “How do you know he's soft, white, and self-satisfied?'

'Come on, with a name like Rupert Armstrong LeMoyne?” She opened the top two buttons of his shirt and slipped her hand inside. “Does Rupert Armstrong LeMoyne have a furry, warm chest?” She kissed the bridge of his nose, flattened when he'd boxed in college. “Does he have a manly and attractive schnozz? Does he have a square, sexy jaw straight out of Superman comics?” That too was kissed, and she looked into his eyes from three inches away, her eyes slightly crossed. “How am I doing? Is this cheering you up?” Her hand was still on his chest, the fingers moving in slow circles.

With his hands on her hips he shifted her, seating her more firmly on his lap, and then stroked her thigh through the twill of her National Park Service trousers. Had he really been sitting there, listless and dispirited, just a few minutes ago? “I don't know if cheering me up is exactly the way to put it,” he said, “but it's doing something. Why don't we forget about lunch and drop over to the house for an hour or two?'

'Tell me,” she persisted, “is Rupert Armstrong LeMoyne the author of the best-known book on comparative early hominid phylogeny?'

'The only book on comparative early hominid phylogeny.'

'Don't quibble. Now,” she said, and kissed his nose again, this time on the tip, “did I or did I not just get a pretty good offer on how to pass the next two hours?'

'You bet. And then let's give some thought to going someplace for a few days where it's not raining.'

The telephone rang as he began to rise with her still in his arms, and they both sank back into the chair. “This,” Gideon said confidently, “will be a very short call. You answer it. Tell them I'm on my way to an extremely important consultation.'

'Is this the way your secretary answers the phone? From your lap?'

'It'd be a thought if I had a secretary.'

She picked up the receiver. “Dr. Oliver's office...” She leaned her head back and laughed. Her hair brushed his temple and he aimed a kiss at it but missed. “Well, hello!” she said. “Yes, he is, right here.'

'Thanks a lot,” Gideon grumbled.

Julie continued to listen on the telephone. “You're kidding!” she said, turning her head to look at Gideon. “He's not going to believe it.'

She handed the telephone to him with a peculiar grin. “You're not going to believe it.'

'Hello, Gideon?'

The old man's thin voice promptly brought out a smile. Abraham Irving Goldstein, his onetime professor and continuing mentor. Avram Yitzchak Goldstein of Minsk, who had begun his career in America as a seventeen-year- old peddling ribbons from a pushcart in Brooklyn, and ended it as a distinguished scholar. Abe Goldstein, longtime friend.

'Abe, hello! Where are you calling from?'

'Where should I be calling from? Yucatan. Listen, how would you like to come down here to Tlaloc for a few weeks and give me a hand on the dig? Julie, too, if she can get some time off.'

Gideon covered the mouthpiece with his hand and looked at Julie. “I don't believe this.'

Abe, as a member of the board of directors of the Horizon Foundation for Anthropological Research, was at a Horizon-sponsored excavation about sixty miles from Merida, near Mexico's Gulf Coast. Tlaloc, a small Mayan ceremonial center, had been discovered only ten years before, and work had begun in 1980. But when a scandal had made the site notorious in 1982, the Mexican government's Institute Nacional de Antropologia e Historia had shut down the excavation. “For all time,” they had declared somewhat histrionically, “to bury the memory of this shameful hour.” Gideon had been there at the time, just finishing up work on the collection of human bones that divers had recovered from the cenote—the sacrificial well—a few hundred feet from the buildings, and he had been as shocked and disgusted as anyone else by what had happened.

Afterwards, the site had remained locked for over five years while Horizon and the Institute engaged in recriminations and negotiations. Eventually, Horizon had made handsome amends and the threat of a suit had died quietly away. Then six months ago the government had relented further, allowing Horizon to begin work again, “subject to stringent review by the Institute.” One of the express provisions was that Dr. Abraham Goldstein (who had had no part in the original dig) would personally direct the start-up, lending his impeccable reputation and expertise to an operation that had been sadly botched the first time around.

This, Gideon had no doubt, had been subtly engineered by the “retired” seventy-eight-year-old professor, who had left Sequim for Yucatan in early December to begin laying the pre-excavation groundwork. Gideon had not been asked along; the dredging of the cenote was finished, and no further burials were expected.

'What's up, Abe?” Gideon asked. “Don't tell me you turned up some skeletal stuff after all?'

'That's right. You remember the building they called the Priest's House?'