Sanibel Flats

appraise it before he tried to figure out how to peddle it. It may have been in that back room with the other stuff. Or his home. Did you find anything like that?'

There was a long silence before Cheng finally said, 'Well, yeah. I think maybe we did. I'm pretty sure we did. One of the agents showed me something like that. There was so much stuff I didn't look at any of it too closely, but I remember seeing—' 'I want it, Don. I need that book. I need it in a big way.' 'Doc, I can't do that. You know I can't. That stuff all has to be catalogued and tagged as evidence. When we're done with it, it'll be returned to the rightful country if provenance can be established. That's the way the antiquities act reads.'

'You made the bust late last night, Don. You mean to tell me your people have already catalogued all that stuff—'

'You know damn well we haven't. We didn't even get the search warrants signed until late this morning. That's why you sent me to an art auction and not a bust, isn't it? You were buying yourself time just in case this book you wanted happened to be there—'

'That's exactly what I was doing. I didn't want to have to ask you to take an article already catalogued and tagged as state's evidence. That would be against the letter of the law, Donald, and I knew what your answer would have to be. But now that manuscript—if it's the piece I need—is just sitting in a room—'

'Yeah, a room that we've legally sealed.'

'Right. But the article hasn't been catalogued so it's not yet considered evidence.'

'Ah, shit, Doc, you're really reaching. You must really want that manuscript.'

'I do. I'll tell you why later, but I need it just as soon as you can get it to me. You still owe me a big favor, Don. Do you remember why?'

'You know goddamn well I remember. I will always remember. '

'I'm calling in that favor now. But you have my word that I won't sell the manuscript for profit and that it'll be returned to the proper people in the proper country.'

'Meaning Masagua.'

'Yeah, Masagua.'

There was another long silence. Donald Piao Cheng was a man who did everything by the book, followed every letter of the law, and this wasn't coming easily. 'Well,' he said slowly, 'we've got plenty of other stuff on the guy. Like I said, there are a couple hundred pieces boxed in that room. And the really important evidence is the stuff he'd already auctioned off.'

'I appreciate it, Don. I really do.'

'But Christ, you don't want me to try and get it to you while you're out of the country?'

'I wish you could. But you can't. Not safely, anyway.'

Ford asked Cheng to describe the manuscript in more detail and then, convinced that it was the Kin Qux Cho, gave him the address in Florida to which he should have it couriered.

FIFTEEN

Men in the gutters were being peed upon.

At first dark, the Mayan men put down their copal censers and picked up bottles of aguardiente. They had been drinking all afternoon but, with the start of the festival which always concluded market day, they began to drink in earnest. The Maya were not loud and jolly drinkers, nor did they drink in violent packs. These small men in striped pantaloons were intensely alone as they drank, gulping straight from the bottle, throwing their heads way back. They drank as if it were a punishment, as if seeking oblivion. When they finally fell, their friends rolled them into the gutters for, traditionally, it was the duty of the women to rouse their sons or husbands and get them home. But the women would not bother to try until late that night or the next morning, and so now the village dogs sniffed the fallen and, with great ceremony, lifted their legs to pee.

Ford sat on a bench in the plaza watching the dogs, watching the activity while Tomlinson kept up a running commentary on the glyphs he was tracing from a stone stela. Torches illuminated the plaza but Tomlinson had to use a flashlight to decipher the nuances of etchings which had survived nine hundred or more years of weather. This was Tomlinson at his best, taking written materials and cross-referencing and crosschecking them against a memory and intellect that, considering his past, should have long since been rendered just one more warped record from the generation of Flower Children.

Tomlinson was saying 'Figuring out the date of this thing is a real bitch, man. You have no idea; no idea at all. See this?' The stone stela was about two feet taller than Tomlinson, and the main figure—a profile of some long-gone Mayan chieftain or god—was bordered by hundreds of blocks of intricately carved figures. 'These here are the calendar glyphs. You read them in blocks of four, the first glyph in the top line, the first glyph in the next line, then the second glyph in the top line, and the second glyph in the next line. So on and so on, like that. See this thing that has four petals like a flower? This was their figure for zero. Problem is, the Maya saw time as an unending march into the future. Zero can mean the beginning of something, but it can also mean the completion. But see how the flower petal is affixed to this thing here, that kind of looks like the head of a bat? In glyphs, a bat face means very tired; the end of something. Then you have these three bars and four dots. That's the number nineteen, almost like Roman numerals. So this block of glyphs is telling a kind of story: that something came to an end or began during the nineteenth katun. A tun is a three hundred sixty— day year; a katun is twenty of those years; so the nineteenth katun would be . . .' He was actually doing the math in his head. '. . . three hundred and eighty years before or after something. You following me so far?'

Ford said, 'Nope.' He was watching people in the market form a loose semicircle around the steps of the Catholic church, readying themselves to participate—as they did each week—in a dance which had become ritual in the isolated Mayan villages of Central America, the Dance of the Conquest. This was no spontaneous dance inspired by the bottles of aguardiente. It was an articulate drama, refined over hundreds of years, that depicted the coming of the conquistadors. Each village supported its own small industry dedicated to carving masks and sewing costumes, with each new generation serving its apprenticeship.

Why the villages of Masagua continued to perform the dance, Ford did not know.

There were about a dozen dancers, and he watched as they filed down the street, shaking their rattles, already lost in the identities of the masks they wore. The conquistadors had angelic faces, painted blond hair, blond mustaches, and each bore a close-lipped smile that resembled a mannequin's leer. Some of the conquistadors were strapped into cloth horses. But the masks depicting the Maya, as through some strange act of self-flagellation, were grotesque caricatures of humanity, more demon than man.

The Maya on the street showed no emotion as they parted to let the actors pass.

Ford said over his shoulder, 'You need to watch this, Tomlinson.'

Tomlinson was still concentrating on the glyphs. 'You don't see why learning to read these dates is so important, do you, Doc?'

'No, but I don't have to see it. You're the one who's going to have to convince Zacul.'

'What I'm talking about goes beyond Zacul, man. I'm talking about my work; I'm talking the Kin Qux Cho. Do you realize no one has completely figured out the Mayan calendar? Scholars know even less about the Mayan writing system— pretty amazing when you consider that the people who devised the glyphs and the language are still around. You know why I think it's so important to crack the code?'

Ford said, 'No. But you're going to tell me anyway—'

'It's because the figures carved into these stones go to the very damn heart of why these people seem . . . like such lost souls. Don't they seem that way to you? Kind of remote? Kind of lost?'

Still watching the dancers, Ford nodded.

'See, even if a group of people can provide itself with all the basic physical needs—food, fuel, and water— they still have to devise a method of dealing with the existential problems of existence before they can be properly called a civilization.'

'No lectures on existential problems, Tomlinson. I don't like it when you do that.'

'That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about why figuring out their writing system is so important. The Maya were an agrarian people. The existential events they had to deal with were floods, earthquakes, drought, and disease. Their way of making these random tragedies into an orderly pattern was to carefully record not only the success or failure of the current growing season, but also to make detailed predictions about future growing seasons. Gave everything symmetry, see? It all has to do with numbers, man; with these glyphs. They are the key