“Well, thank you so much for watching over all this construction,” Remi said. “What’s at the other end?” Remi pointed at the far end of the range.
“That’s a sheet of steel set at a forty-five-degree angle to deflect rounds downward into the sand so there will never be a ricochet.”
Sam said, “Did they put in the other exit?”
“Yes. Behind the sheet of steel is a second stairway that leads up into the stand of pines near the street.”
“Great,” said Sam. “Let’s go back upstairs and see how the wiring changes for the new electronics worked out.”
“I think you’ll be pleased,” Selma said. “They’ve been working on it for months and finally finished last week. Instead of one emergency generator, there are now four, for different circuits supporting various functions. This is now a very difficult house to deprive of electricity for even a second.”
They came up to the short corridor, through the bookcase door, and back into the office. Selma said, “That’s funny, that wasn’t here before.”
Sam and Remi looked where she was pointing. It was a large cardboard box. “It’s our souvenirs from Mexico,” said Remi.
Wendy Corden was working at one of the computers in the area across the room. “That came a few minutes ago. I signed for it.”
“Thanks,” said Sam. He lifted the box up onto a worktable, giving it a gentle shake. “I didn’t hear anything broken.”
“Don’t even say that,” said Selma. “I can’t believe you shipped it that way — just mailed it home like a… a piece of crockery.”
“You had to be there to appreciate our choices. People kept trying to steal it.”
Selma produced a box cutter from a desk drawer and handed it to Sam. “Can we see it?”
Sam opened the box. He removed some of the packing peanuts, then some of the wall hangings and mats.
Selma unrolled one of them, then two others. “These are truly dreadful,” she said. “That king looks a bit like Elvis — who was, come to think of it, The King.” She unwrapped a small pot. “And look at these — sparkly paint in case this warrior gentleman isn’t fancy enough.”
Remi laughed. “I think those were the inspiration for Sam’s improvements to the real pot.”
Sam reached in and gently lifted the genuine Mayan pot. He set it upright on the table. Selma moaned. “That is horrifying. Gold and silver paint? That’s vandalism.”
“It comes off,” he said. “I read one time that a lot of great Egyptian art got to Europe disguised as cheap replicas. The trick still works.”
Sam used his cell phone to dial Dr. David Caine’s office at the university. “Dr. Caine?” he said. “The delivery I was waiting for has arrived. Would you like to take a look?”
“I’d love the chance,” Caine said. “When can I come?”
“Anytime from now on. We’ll be here until evening.” Sam recited the address.
“I’ll be there in an hour.”
Sam terminated the call and then turned to the others. “He’ll be here in an hour. I’d better wipe this sparkly paint off right away or he’ll be as horrified as Selma.”
An hour later, their guest arrived. Dr. David Caine was in his mid-forties, very fit and tanned, wearing jeans and a summer-weight sport coat over a black polo shirt. As he stepped through the doorway into the vast office space, he saw the pot on the table across the room and could barely draw his eyes away from it. He stopped and shook Sam’s hand. “You must be Sam. I’m Dave Caine.”
Remi stepped up. “I’m Remi. Come this way. I can tell you’re dying to see the pot.”
He followed her across the open hardwood floor, but when he was still six feet from the pot, he stopped and stared at it for a moment, then walked around it, looking at it from every angle. “I read the article and looked at the pictures you sent me, but seeing one of these in person is always a moment,” he said. “I always feel a bit of excitement. The pottery, the paintings, always contain a little bit of the personality of the artist. When I see a water pitcher shaped like a fat little dog, it’s like going back in time to meet the potter.”
“I know what you mean,” Remi said. “I love that too, when the actual human being is staring back at you from a thousand years ago.”
Caine came in toward the table and looked closely at the pot. “But this one is different. It’s obviously a prime piece, classic period. A day in the life of the king of Copan.” He straightened and looked at the Fargos. “You know that discoveries like this have to be reported to the government of Mexico, right?”
“Of course,” said Sam. “We were in the middle of a natural disaster and there wasn’t any reasonable, safe way to do that or any authorities who had time to deal with it. We’ll return the pot when we’ve had a chance to learn what we can about it.”
“It’s a relief that you know the rules,” he said.
Remi said, “Are you sure it’s from Copan? We found this at Tacana, north of Tapachula, Mexico. That’s at least four hundred miles from Copan.”
Caine shrugged. “Native people in the Americas sometimes covered a lot of ground on foot. There’s also trade.”
“How old is it?”
Caine cocked his head and looked. “Wait. Here we go. The king is Yax Pasaj Chan Yopaat, the sixteenth ruler of Copan. It says so here.” He pointed at a group of vertical columns with rounded designs like seals.
Sam said, “You can read those?”
“Yes. These columns each consist of one to five glyphs and each glyph is a word or phrase or an indication of a position in a sentence. You read from top left to right, but only for the first two columns, then go down a line and read the left one and the right one and so on. There are eight hundred sixty-one glyphs that we know.”
“There are over twenty Mayan languages,” said Remi. “Does this form of writing work for all of them?”
“No,” he said. “The only ones we have were written in Ch’olan, Tzeltalan, and Yucatec.”
Sam stared at the pot. “So this comes from Copan. I wonder how it got from Honduras all the way across Guatemala to the border of Mexico.”
“And when,” said Remi.
“Exactly what I was wondering,” said Caine. “We could do a carbon date on any organic material associated with the find and on the man himself. That would do it.”
“I’ll call Dr. Talamantes and Dr. Garza and see if they can arrange to have the man tested,” said Remi. “He’s in a hospital morgue in Tapachula. They signed him in, mostly on the strength of the goodwill they built up with the medical community in the area after the earthquake.”
“Are they also archaeologists?” asked Caine.
“No, just medical doctors,” said Sam.
“Then would you mind if I stepped in and got a couple of Mexican colleagues to go to work on this? They’re first-rate scientists and very well respected.”
“We’d be delighted,” said Remi.
“Then I’ll call them this afternoon and get them going on it. You’ve done a good job of keeping his location quiet since the first blast of publicity, so there hasn’t been a crush of people trying to get in and see him. But you can be sure that lots of people are waiting and listening — some scholars and scientists, and some crackpots and some charlatans as always.”
Sam said, “The publicity came from another volunteer who was up there with us. He didn’t believe in keeping the find quiet, based on his own principles: The discovery belongs to the people so the people should be told about it. We thought we’d talked him into waiting, but he went public without us. After that, we took steps to give the scientific community a chance to see things before the tourists and souvenir hunters destroyed them.”
“It’s a good thing you did. Do we have anything here we can carbon-date?”
Remi said. “Quite a bit. Our guy made himself a pair of dishes out of hollowed-out pieces of wood. There was some plant residue in one of them.”
“Perfect,” said Caine. “Anything living begins to lose carbon 14 the minute it dies.”
