Lucas May? The dark, brooding one. I knew even less about him. According to Isa, he didn’t have nice shoes, and I was inclined to agree with her low opinion of his conversational skills. I had no idea where he lived or where he’d studied archaeology. I had a sense of something hidden, something deep, but it was a feeling only. He also had a nicely ironic smile, infrequently though it appeared.
For a few minutes I was lost in reverie, watching dust motes floating in a beam of light from the lamp on the table. Dr. Valesquez appeared soundlessly at my table and whispered that he was regrettably closing the library, but would reopen between four and six p.m.
I was amazed that almost three hours had passed and dismayed that I was no closer to the writing rabbit. I thanked him for his assistance, for which I received a courtly bow, and told him I would return at four.
I made my way down the back staircase, and moments later was blinking in the now unfamiliar sunlight like some lizard whose dark hiding place has suddenly been uncovered.
I did notice, however, that while one might need a key to get in, one merely pushed a bar on the door to get out. So if you were up to any skulduggery after hours, you had only to hide in the museo until closing, then let yourself out at your leisure.
I wandered rather aimlessly to pass the time until the library reopened, and soon I found myself in the market area, absorbing the sights, sounds, and smells, as always almost overwhelmed by the colors, so intense to my northern eye.
It was the time of Carnaval, Ash Wednesday fast approaching, and brightly colored masks and capes were prominently displayed. Here once again the old and new worlds coexisted. While Carnaval may have Christian beginnings, the costumes were decidedly Maya—monkey beings, creatures of a previous Maya creation, and various representations of Xibalbans with grotesque horned masks. One enterprising shopkeeper was offering for sale a Children of the Talking Cross costume, complete with black bandanna and wooden rifle.
There were stalls piled high with fruits and vegetables, some familiar, others not; the heaps of dried peppers, large and dark, intense in flavor I knew; the Mexican tomatoes, tomatillos, small green fruits with a natural brown tissuelike wrapping; the prickly nopales, cactus-type vegetables whose needles must be removed before they can be used in salads and moles; the pungent spices—epazote, achiote, or annatto seeds, cumin, chili, and saffron.
Tired of wandering, I eventually stopped at a little cafe for a Mexican sandwich, a torta, stuffed with frijoles— refried black beans—avocado, and anejo cheese, and an order of jalapeno peppers, stuffed with cheese and shrimp and lightly fried.
The air was pleasantly hot, and as I sat there I tried to sift through the patterns within patterns in this situation in which I found myself.
A very public robbery and two murders, and there seemed to be threads, however tenuous, linking all three events.
First the robbery. Alejandro was surely involved. It took place in the bar of a hotel owned by Diego Maria Gomez Arias. The object stolen is a statue that Hernan Castillo and Gomez Arias had argued about in the recent past. It is stolen by a self-defined terrorist group called the Children of the Talking Cross. But whoever heard of a terrorist group that steals statues from bars? Bank heists, skyjackings, car bombs, maybe. But theft of pre-Columbian carvings?
The murder of Luis Vallespino. Luis’s brother is a friend of Alejandro, and Montserrat, Gomez Alias’s daughter, attends the funeral. And of course, Luis is found murdered on the roof of the museo, of which Gomez Arias is on the board of directors, as is Don Hernan, who was also a staff member and important benefactor.
Don Hernan’s murder. Occurring somewhere else, perhaps, but he ends up in his office at the museo with a jade bead in his mouth, the significance of which I did not understand. He’s looking for something, which is obviously Maya, since he made it clear that whatever it was fit in with my university studies, and it was important enough for him to ask me to come to Merida.
Don Hernan used to work with Gomez Arias, but they had an argument. Gomez Arias is a compulsive collector. Could the two men have been looking for the same thing? And if so, exactly how far was Gomez Arias prepared to go to get it?
There had to be something or someone linking all of these things. Right now that appeared to be me. I’d come here at Don Hernan’s request, I’d witnessed the robbery, I’d found Luis Vallespino’s body. I was actually becoming sympathetic to Major Martinez’s interest in me.
I wandered back to the museo, pausing once again for a few moments in the small rear garden, thinking about the times I had spent with Don Hernan. I was trying very hard to remember the good times, and put the sights and smells of our farewell, in the basement of the morgue, behind me.
As I stood there I saw Antonio Valesquez let himself in at the back door, the one I’d made use of a couple of times myself. I wondered how many people had a key to that door.
I once again wandered into the building and arrived just as Valesquez, punctual as ever, opened the library doors. A new stack of books was on the table at the back.
“More rabbits,” was all he said. This dark little corner was beginning to feel like home, and soon I was attacking the books with renewed enthusiasm. While I worked, Valesquez continued his librarian tasks of bringing order to the room and discouraging visitors.
In 695 AD., I learned, 18-Rabbit succeeded Smoke-Imix-God K as king of the city state Copan in the southern Yucatan peninsula in what is now Honduras. An avid patron of the arts, 18-Rabbit spent the forty-two years of his reign, until his defeat and sacrifice at the hands of Cauac-Sky of nearby Quirigua, building some of the most glorious monuments of Maya civilization, with temple carvings and stelae unequaled elsewhere in the Maya world. His likeness can still be seen in the magnificent stone stelae around Copan, in which he had himself depicted as the reincarnation of the Hero Twins and as various other Maya gods.
Nonetheless, to be defeated by a rival king, particularly one installed on the neighboring throne some years earlier by 18-Rabbit himself, and then sacrificed, is about as ignominious an end as one could imagine. It took his great grandson Yax-Pac to rehabilitate his memory some three decades later.
After about an hour of frustrating research, I was about to call it a day when, on impulse, I asked Valesquez if he had anything on the War of the Castes and the villages of the Talking Cross.
As it turned out, Alex had been right about the miraculous Talking Crosses. In 1850, in a cave with a cenote in the town of Chan Santa Cruz, a cross carved in a tree spoke to the Maya, urging them to rise up against their oppressors, the Spanish, and defeat them once and for all. It was the first of many Talking Crosses, all carrying much the same message.
From this account I learned two interesting things. One was that the Maya had always known that the Talking Crosses were not really voices sent from the gods, but simply those of their neighbors. Some argued it was the gods, talking through their neighbors. Others were more machiavellian: they had known how to use these voices as a powerful symbol of resistance. In any event, the Maya began to build a capital of sorts in Chan Santa Cruz where the cross first presented itself.
The second item of interest was more complicated, and I wasn’t sure how relevant. I was skimming through an account of the various victories on both the Spanish and Maya sides, most particularly the advance of the Mexican army against the Maya in Chan Santa Cruz, when a name caught my eye: General Francisco May.