“What do you know about her?” asked Remi.
“More than I want to. She’s one of a whole class of people who have been filling gigantic houses in Europe and North America with pilfered artifacts for over a hundred years. They used to travel to undeveloped countries in the nineteenth century and take what they wanted. In the twentieth century, they paid galleries huge prices for objects that grave robbers dug up. By buying some, they created a market for more. They couldn’t be bothered to wonder what some object really was, where it came from, or how it was obtained. As things stand today, if I were in a hurry to find the most sacred objects in existence, I wouldn’t dig for them and I wouldn’t search in museums. I’d look in the homes of people in Europe and America whose families have been wealthy for the last hundred or so years.”
“Is that the Allersbys?” asked Remi.
“They’re among the worst,” Caine said. “They’ve been at it since the British arrived in India. It wasn’t even frowned upon until about thirty years ago. Even now, if an object left its country of origin before the United Nations treaty signed in the 1970s, you can do anything you want with it — keep it, sell it, or put it in your garden as a birdbath. That loophole exists because rich people like the Allersbys exerted influence on their countries’ governments.”
“Sarah seemed pretty comfortable with the idea that we’d smuggled the codex out of Mexico for sale,” said Remi.
He shook his head. “It’s ironic. I’ve heard the British tabloids spend a lot of ink on her bad behavior in the Greek islands and the French Riviera. But what she does in Guatemala is worse and it’s serious.”
“Why?”
“Guatemala had a civil war between 1960 and 1996. Two hundred thousand people died in that war. A lot of the old Spanish landowning families sold out and moved to Europe. The ones who bought those huge stretches of land were mostly foreigners. One of them was Sarah Allersby’s father. He bought a gigantic place called the Estancia Guerrero from the last heir, who had been living high in Paris and gambling in Monaco. When Sarah turned twenty-one, her father settled a lot of property on her — buildings in several European capitals, businesses, and the Estancia Guerrero.”
“It sounds pretty routine for rich families,” said Remi.
“Well, suddenly this twenty-one-year-old girl just out of school in England became one of the most important people in Guatemala. Some people predicted that she would be a progressive force, someone who would stand up for the poor Mayan peasants. The opposite happened. She visited her holdings in Guatemala and liked the place so much she moved there. That is, she liked Guatemala just the way it was. She became part of the new oligarchy, the foreigners who own about eighty percent of the land, and an even higher proportion of everything else. They exploit the peasants as much as the old Spanish landowners they replaced.”
“That’s disappointing.”
“It was to everyone except the peasants, who can’t be surprised anymore: Meet the new boss — just like the old boss. She’s got a great hunger for Mayan artifacts but no love at all for the living Mayan people who work in her fields and her businesses for practically nothing.”
“Well,” said Sam. “Obviously, we’re not selling her anything. Where do you think we should go from here?”
“We should do something about my colleagues. I need to know who is honest and who isn’t. I’d like to tell each of the people I’ve told about the codex a different lie about what’s in the rest of it and see which lie Sarah Allersby acts on.”
“I’m afraid it’s too late for that,” said Remi. “When we asked about her sources, she wouldn’t answer. I’m sure she’ll be expecting us to try to find out.”
“What we’ve got to do is try to pursue two paths at once,” Caine said.
“What are the two paths?” Sam asked.
“The codex has to be examined, transcribed, and translated. We have to know what it says.”
“That’s hard to argue with,” said Remi.
“The other line of inquiry is a bit trickier. At some point, we’ve got to find out whether the codex is fiction or a description of the world as it was in those days. The only way to do it is to go down to Central America and verify that what it says is true and accurate.”
“You mean to visit one of the sites it describes?” asked Sam.
“I’m afraid so,” Caine said. “I had been hoping to lead a scientific expedition to one of the sites that is mentioned only in this codex. But we’re two weeks into the spring quarter, with nine more weeks to go. I can’t leave my classes now. And it takes time to get a big expedition together. With Sarah Allersby involved, time is scarce. The longer we wait, the more difficult she’ll make it. She’s capable of getting people set up to follow any expedition we organize, getting us arrested, doing anything to get us to sell the codex or make sure we can’t have access to it.”
“We’ll be the expedition,” Remi said. “Sam and me.”
“What?” said Sam. “I thought you didn’t want to travel for a while.”
“You heard him, Sam. There are two things that have to be done. Neither of us knows how to read the eight hundred sixty-one glyphs in the Mayan writing system, and we don’t know the underlying language. What’s it called?”
“Ch’olan,” said Caine.
“Right,” she said. “Ch’olan. How’s your Ch’olan?”
“I see what you mean,” Sam said. “Dave, see if you can find a site that fits the criteria — mentioned only in this codex, never explored, and small enough that we don’t need a big group that will attract attention. I’d like to slip in there, find it, and get out.”
Chapter 9
Early the next morning, Sam, Remi, and Zoltan arrived at the house above Goldfish Point before the electricians and carpenters, who were still working on the fourth floor. As they started up the walk, Selma opened the front door and came out to meet them. She put her hands on her hips. “The police just left.”
Remi said, “So we had visitors last night?”
“Yes,” said Selma. “The burglars tried the front doors but couldn’t get them to budge. Banging on them and trying to jimmy the latches caused the steel shutters on the first and second floors to come down automatically. The silent alarm from the outdoor surveillance cameras and motion sensors had already alerted the police. The cameras got only the images of two figures dressed in black with ski masks.”
“Were you hoping to see their best work?” Remi asked.
“No,” Sam said. “But I’m wondering if they might not have suspected in advance that this place wasn’t going to be easy.”
“Oh?” said Selma. “That implies that they’d been here before.”
Sam shrugged. “If I were to guess, I’d say that you probably served them tea yesterday. I don’t mean Sarah Allersby came back with a crowbar. I mean that she just may have read us wrong — thought that if someone showed us that it’s dangerous to have a valuable artifact around, then we’d jump at her offer.”
“One more thing,” said Selma. “Dave Caine left a message on the house phone last night. He wants to meet with you this morning about your next little trip.”
Two hours later, they were in the climate-controlled room with David Caine. They stood around the worktable, comparing the map in the codex with a topographic map on a computer screen. Caine placed a small arrow pointing to a spot in the jungle. “This site meets our criteria. It’s not included in any inventory of known Mayan sites. It isn’t large enough to be a major city. It has the advantage of being in an area of the Guatemalan highlands that’s sparsely populated and remote.”
“What do you think it is?” asked Remi.
“The glyphs say it’s a sacred pool. I believe it’s a cenote — a hole in the underlying limestone bedrock caused by the action of water.”
