“Let me know what happens,” Chel said as she handed Vicente back their papers, “and next time don’t get involved with anyone whose face you see on bus-stop benches. That doesn’t make them famous. Not good famous, anyway. Come to me instead.”
Vicente took his wife’s hand and smiled tightly as they departed.
So it went for the next hour. Chel explained a vaccination program to a pregnant woman, weighed in on a credit-card dispute for the junior daykeeper, and dealt with a landlord complaint against an old friend of her mother’s.
Once her last visitor left, Chel leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes, thinking about a ceramic vase she’d been working on at the Getty, the inside of which contained some of the first physical residues of ancient tobacco ever discovered. No wonder it was proving so damn hard for her to quit smoking. People had been doing it for millennia.
A persistent knocking pulled her back to reality.
Chel stood up, surprised by the man she saw standing in the doorway. She hadn’t seen him in over a year, and he belonged to such a different world from the indígenas who worshipped at Fraternidad services that it startled her to see him.
“What are you doing here?” she asked as Hector Gutierrez stepped inside.
“I need to talk to you.”
The few times she’d met him, Gutierrez had seemed reasonably well put together. Now there were shadows under his eyes and a tired pinch in his stare. His head was covered with sweat, and he dabbed anxiously at it with a handkerchief. Chel had never seen him unshaven before. His beard crept up toward the port-wine stain beneath his left temple. In his hand, she noticed, was a black duffel bag.
“How did you know I was here?”
“I called your office.”
Chel reminded herself to make sure no one in her lab ever gave out that information again.
“I have something you need to see,” he continued.
She glanced down at the duffel bag, wary. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“I need your help. They found the old storage unit where I kept my inventory.”
Chel looked to the doorway to make sure no one was listening. They could mean only one thing: He’d been busted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency responsible for policing illegal antiquities smuggling.
“I’d already emptied the unit,” Gutierrez said. “But they raided it. It’s only a matter of time before they come to my house.”
Chel’s throat tightened as she thought of the turtle-shell vessel she’d bought from him more than a year ago. “And your records? Did they get those too?”
“Don’t worry. You’re protected for now. But there’s something I need you to keep for me, Dr. Manu. Just till it’s safe.”
He held out the bag.
Chel looked at the door again and said, “You know I can’t do that.”
“You have vaults at the Getty. Put it there for a few days. No one will notice.”
Chel knew she should just tell him to get rid of whatever the hell it was. She also knew that whatever was in that bag had to be of great value or he wouldn’t risk bringing it to her. Gutierrez was not a man to be trusted, but he was a nimble purveyor of antiquities, and he knew her weakness for the artifacts of her people.
Chel quickly ushered him out. “Come with me.”
A few stray worshippers glanced at them as she led him down to the church’s lower level. They pushed through the glass doors engraved with angels at the entrance and into the mausoleum, where niches in the walls contained the ashes of thousands of the city’s Catholics. Chel chose one of the sitting rooms, where stone benches lined gleaming white walls engraved with names and dates, a tidy bibliography of death.
Finally Chel sealed them inside. “Show me.”
From inside his bag, Gutierrez pulled a two-foot-square wooden box wrapped in a sheath of plastic. When he began to unwrap it, the room filled with the sharp, unmistakable odor of bat guano—the smell of something that recently came from an ancient tomb. “It needs proper preservation before it deteriorates any more,” Gutierrez said as he removed the cover of the box.
At first, Chel assumed she was staring at some kind of paper packing material, but then she leaned in and realized the paper was actually broken yellowed bark pages, floating loosely inside the box. The pages were covered with writing—words and even entire sentences in the language of her ancestors. The ancient Maya script used hieroglyphic-like symbols called “glyphs,” and here were hundreds of them inscribed on the fragments, along with detailed pictures of gods in ornate costumes.
“A codex?” Chel said. “Come on. Don’t be absurd.”
Maya codices were the written histories of her ancestors, painted by a royal scribe working for a king. Chel had heard people use the word rare to describe blue diamonds or Gutenberg Bibles, but this was what rare really meant: Only four ancient Maya books had survived into modernity. So how could Gutierrez think for a minute she would believe he had come into possession of a new one?
“There hasn’t been a new codex discovered in thirty years,” Chel told him.
The man peeled off his jacket. “Until now.”
She stared into the small box once more. As a graduate student, Chel had had the rare opportunity to see an original codex, so she knew exactly what it was supposed to look and feel like. Deep in a vault in Germany, armed guards had watched her as she turned the pages of the Dresden Codex, its images and words transporting her back a thousand years in a breathtaking flash. It was the defining experience that had inspired her to focus her graduate studies on the language and writing of her ancestors.
“Obviously it’s a fake,” she told him, resisting the urge to keep looking. These days, more than half of the artifacts she was offered by even the most legitimate dealers were forged. The bat-guano smell was even forgeable. “And, for the record, when you sold me that turtle-shell vessel, I didn’t know it was looted. You misled me with the paperwork. So don’t try to tell the police otherwise.”
The truth was more complex. In her work as the curator of Maya antiquities for the Getty Museum, every item Chel purchased had to be officially documented and traced back to its origin. All of which she’d done properly for the turtle-shell vessel Gutierrez had sold her, but, unfortunately, weeks after the purchase, she’d found a problem in the chain of possession. Chel knew the risks of not revealing her discovery to the museum but couldn’t bring herself to part with the incredible piece of history, so she’d kept it and said nothing. To her, the larger scandal was that her people’s whole heritage was for sale on the black market, and any artifacts she didn’t buy disappeared into the homes of collectors forever.
“Please,” Gutierrez said, ignoring her claim about the pottery he’d sold her. “Just keep it for me for a few days.”
Chel decided to settle this. She reached into her purse and pulled out a pair of white cotton gloves and tweezers.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Finding something that’ll prove to you that this thing was forged.”
The plastic covering was still damp from his palms, and Chel tensed at the feeling of his sweat. Gutierrez pinched the bridge of his nose, rubbing two fingers deep into his eyes. Above the bat guano she could smell his body odor. But when Chel’s fingers dipped inside the box and started handling the chipped pages of tree bark, everything else in the room fell away. Her first thought was that the glyphs were too old. Ancient Maya history was divided into two periods: the “classic,” encompassing the rise and efflorescence of the civilization, from around A.D. 200 to 900; and the “post-classic,” spanning its decline until the arrival of the Spanish around 1500. The style and the content of written Mayan language had evolved over time as a result of external influences, and writing from each period looked distinct.