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,
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 Chichen Itza. 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.”
