And frankly I think she was kind of lording her education over me at lunch. We were in Santo Domingo, a.k.a. Palenque Village, a compact town five miles from the ruin. It was a busy, friendly burg swarming with lethal taxicabs. Santo Domingo was here because of tourists and what they came to see, but the folks weren’t constantly in your face, hard-core hustling you like they’d be in Cancun, I had to admit.
“You’re cuckoo,” she said.
“That’s irrelevant and immaterial,” I said.
“Bricklin Bates, I acknowledge that you are the world’s greatest private eye.”
I bowed my head modestly.
“All right, how do you propose clearing up a hypothetical thirteen-century-old homicide?”
“You canvass the neighborhood and shake the hypotheticals out of the trees. The rain’s letting up.”
“Oh, Brick.”
“After lunch and before we head back to the ruin, we’ll do some snooping in town.” I whipped a postcard out of my pocket. “A photo of Lord Pacal’s sarcophagus lid. Look at him, surrounded by all those doodads.”
Darla sighed.
“These street vendors we’ve seen, it’s a toss-up whether this picture in one form or another or those Zapatista dolls is the hottest item.”
“Fringie types believe he’s at the controls of his spaceship.”
Actually, he looked like he was squinting into an ornate periscope, fixing to fire torpedoes. “Bat guano, huh?”
“Without question. In fact, the elaborate sculpture is quite consistent with Maya cosmology. The departed king isn’t perched on an alien booster rocket, he’s falling into the fleshless jaws of the earth monster. He’s hanging onto a two-headed serpent that represents the sky. Lord Pacal is in transition from one world to the next.”
“Oh yeah,” I said. “Any fool can see that. C’mon, let’s give it a shot.”
With Darla’s Spanish phrasebook in hand, I took the postcard along Avenida Juarez, Santo Domingo’s main drag, to anyone willing to rehash the good old days. I realized this wasn’t a scientific approach, though sometimes folklore’s passed along. At this point I was willing to settle for an unsubstantiated innuendo.
Darla wasn’t as enthusiastic as me, to put it mildly. She hung back and off to the side, like she could deny she knew me if push came to shove with the locals.
I concentrated on older shopkeepers. Showing them the postcard, I’d run a finger across my throat, make a face, and say, “Asesinato?”
The usual reaction was a shrug and that loco gringo widening of the eyes, a response with which I was not totally unfamiliar. I caught Darla a couple of times twirling a finger beside her head; that didn’t advance the investigation one little bit.
It was obvious they were stonewalling me and would do so even without Darla’s goofing. I was beginning to wonder what they had to hide. Anyway, I was getting nowhere fast, so I threw in the towel.
We went back to the cabin to change before heading out to the ruin. I was ready first and sat on the porch in a rocking chair, enjoying the scenery. The sky was breaking up into dumpling clouds, and it was warming fast. The jungle was steamy, smelling like salad.
I had to do a doubletake on what I spotted beyond the creek. This was in trees and vines and shadows right out of a Tarzan movie. The guy wasn’t much more than a silhouette, like a shape that’d pop up at the target range. I could make out only that he was short, stumpy, and naked except for a loincloth and some kind of headdress that would’ve made Carmen Miranda drool.
What got to me was his evil scowl, mostly cuz I couldn’t see it, I could just feel it. A puff cloud crossed in front of the sun. A breeze blew through a clump of bamboo next to me, making it creak like a door with rusty hinges. I, who could stare down a Ten Most Wanted fugitive and his mother-in-law, too, was getting the willies.
Darla came out in a banana-colored sundress.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
She scanned where my eyeballs were frozen. There was nothing to see. She gave me a funny look and stroked my arms to smooth out the goosebumps.
Palenque rose on artificial terraces, backstopped by lush green foothills. The buildings were stuck in the hillside, as if growing out of it. Low clouds docked against the hills. From the ground, tourists climbing the taller temples appeared to be walking into the mist.
From those higher elevations you had a wide view of the valley. I imagined that Palenque had plenty of warning prior to an attack and that their enemies had a severe ass-kicking in store for them. Darla confirmed this.
“Palenque’s architects considered danger as well as aesthetics when they designed the city,” she said. “There was no such thing as a Maya empire. During the classic period, 250 to 900 A.D., the region was a loose collection of city-states linked by trade, royal intermarriage, and warfare. Especially the last. Palenque expanded its influence considerably under Pacal’s rule.”
“How big is this place, Darla?”
“Experts say the unexcavated ruins extend as far as ten kilometers. Palenque ruled neighboring cities, too.”
“That’s a lot of real estate to inherit.”
“You’re a broken record on that subject, Bricklin.”
She was right. Again. I took the needle off the turntable for the rest of the tour. And let her do the talking. On how Palenque was abandoned in the ninth century for reasons yet unclear. How Cortes and his gold-crazed conquistadors passed within miles of it. How the site wasn’t discovered until the 1700’s. How we don’t even know what the residents called it, palenque being Spanish for “palisade.”
Very interesting, but I was ready to move on. So was Darla, chattering on the way to the exit about what fun we’d have at Uxmal. That is, until we saw that all four tires on our rental unit were flat. From her sweet lips came forth some words I hadn’t heard since I last ran down a bail skip and escorted his scuzzy rear to the county lockup.
One of the first lessons I learned in my Gumshoe Correspondence Institute of Private Detection studies was that nature abhors a coincidence. Sure enough, the air hadn’t seeped out of the pores of the tread. Each tire had an inch-long sidewall slash. There was something wedged in one of the cuts, and I went after it with a pocketknife.
The entrance area was jam-packed with park employees, tourists, and vendors. Most of the visitors today were Eurogringos who’d piled out of buses. Darla asked around, but her French and German were minimal, and the other tourists weren’t generally inclined to be friendly and helpful toward Yanks. Her Spanish was passable, but nobody saw nothing nohow. No other cars had been touched.
“What do you make of this?” I asked, showing her a shiny black rock I’d dug out. It was triangular, the size of a fingernail.
“Obsidian,” she said. “Volcanic glass. The Maya didn’t have metal. They made tools of it.”
“Like sacrificial knives?”
“Brick.”
“Okay, okay. Tell me this, do the locals still walk around with them? Seems to me they have access to metal nowadays.”
She didn’t have an answer. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d scored an intellectual point on her. If my nose hadn’t been so out of joint on account of the vandalism, I would’ve been walking on air.
We caught a cab into town. The driver was a sourpuss and a dead ringer for the guys scratched into those temple walls. He had a Miami Heat T-shirt and an attitude, but Darla’s combination of Spanish and pidgin to him got us to a tire store without a shortcut through Guatemala.