I would have liked to talk to Valesquez longer, but I noticed that many of the guests had begun to drift away, so I excused myself and began helping with wraps and canes. Francesca and Santiago both looked exhausted, and Isa soon bundled them off to their quarters at the back of the hotel.
She and I cleaned up, and Manuela, her two little children racing around the kitchen, began the preparations for cena that evening while Norberto set up the dining room. In the hotel business, the work never stops, even for murders and funerals.
“About time you got down to some honest work,” the English voice said. It was Jonathan, of course.
“Maybe you could stop digging around in the dirt and do some honest work yourself,” I said, handing him a vegetable peeler and pointing at a pile of potatoes.
Good-humoredly, he pitched in, although when the young woman who assisted Francesca and Manuela in the kitchen in the evenings arrived, he was quick to hand her the peeler.
“I’ve come to make a firm date,” he said. “Dinner, a late-night swim, perhaps?”
We made a date for three days hence, and I walked him to the front steps of the inn. As I leaned over to take in the fragrance of some flowers near the steps, I felt his lips brush the back of my neck. Neither of us said anything. I simply watched as he got into the Jeep and pulled away with a brief wave of his hand.
I helped Isa and Manuela as best I could for the remainder of the evening and then shared a light supper with them in the kitchen. Isa told me that Don Hernan’s solicitor had called to say that the family was expected at the reading of the will at his offices the next afternoon, and that I, too, was invited.
Late in the evening, as I began to ascend the stairs to my room, Alejandro, who was staffing the front desk, signaled that I had a phone call.
I took the call in the little sitting room behind the front desk. It was Antonio Valesquez.
“I’ve found it! The rabbit that writes. Can you meet me at the museo tomorrow at nine a.m.? As you know, it’s closed. I’ll meet you at the back door to let you in.”
“I’ll be there,” I said, neglecting to mention that getting into the museo was no problem for me, unless someone had got smart after two murders and changed the locks.
Good old Antonio Valesquez. The nervous little man with a large debt to Don Hernan. He must have gone straight to the museo after leaving the inn, and applied his considerable research skills to the problem.
When I got into bed, I was exhausted to the bone. This time I dreamed I was chasing a rabbit, a kind of Alice-Through-the-Looking-Glass rabbit that walked on its hind legs.
I followed it through the museo. Just as I was about to catch it, a hole opened up beneath me, and once again I was falling through black space, a babble of voices around me.
I sat up, awakened by my own cry, I think. It was a while before I could get back to sleep.
As I drifted off again I found myself praying that Valesquez would stay alive long enough to show me the rabbit. Knowing about writing rabbits would appear to shorten one’s life span. Once I knew about it, I’d have to remember that myself.
OC
One death, head lord of Xibalba, sits complacently on his throne, a smile of sorts on his face.
And why should he not smile? He is surrounded by bald-headed goddesses, there to attend to his every whim. One of them kneels at his feet. Others hover around him.
For his entertainment, two jester priests are about to sacrifice a human victim, bound hand and foot below the throne.
And his arch enemies, the Hero Twins? Gone, cooked in an oven, their bones ground to dust and thrown into the underworld river.
Life, or in this case death, is unfolding as it should.
But let us look more closely at the two jester priests. Beneath their masks, do they not look familiar? Could it be that our heroes are not vanquished? The fate of our souls hangs in the balance. Is there still hope?
And who, or what, is there to record this pivotal moment in the history of the gods? Below the temple platform on which One Death presides, a scribe industriously records the story of our Hero Twins and their travels in the underworld.
Antonio Valesquez met me at the back door of the museo, as promised. His hands were shaking, whether with fear or excitement I could not tell, as he checked the door behind us and led the way to the old elevator and thence to the basement of the museo. It occurred to me that meeting me this way might be the most daring act he had ever committed.
The museo was closed, the building deserted except, I presumed, for a security guard who made casual rounds from time to time.
Like Oc, the dog that nightly leads the sun through the underworld, Valesquez led the way through the labyrinthine passageways.
He did not turn on any lights, relying instead on the faint daylight that filtered through a few small windows at ground level and on the emergency lighting in the dark hallways.
Several sections of hallway were lined with metal shelving filled with artifacts. In one hallway I paused to look at a large wooden crate, similar to the ones I had seen at Jonathan’s cave dig site.
Eventually Antonio unlocked an unmarked door, and we entered what appeared to be a conservation lab. There were a couple of ventilation chambers and hoods for use with chemicals, and rows of implements that reminded me of a dentist’s office. I noticed as well bottles of liquids marked with the universal symbol of poison, the skull and crossbones.
There were two large worktables. On one, an ancient skeleton was being pieced together, bone by bone, each one sorted from a box of dirt and bones on the floor under the table, like some life-size jigsaw puzzle.
Valesquez stopped triumphantly at the second. Here someone had been laboriously fitting together tiny pieces of a terra-cotta pot with a cream-colored background and a red rim. On it there was a scene done in very fine brushwork, and without touching it, and scarcely daring to breathe it looked so fragile, I leaned over to scan it.
The scene contained some text, which I strained to decipher, but could not. I did, however, recognize the figure of One Death, smoking a cigar, surrounded by a number of women of noble birth, who appeared to be taking very good care of him. A strange bird, part owl, part macaw, perched on the throne above him.
One Death looked toward a sacrificial scene, with two ax-wielding figures, and the victim identified by Akbal, the sign of darkness.
“Do you see it?” Valesquez asked excitedly, gesturing to a small figure below the throne.
I looked again. At the base of the temple platform sat a bewhiskered, jowly creature with big ears, a workman’s belt containing the tools of his trade around his waist. He, or it, was writing on what appeared to be a stack of paper with a rigid top and bottom cover, bound in a spotted material I assumed to be jaguar pelt. It was indeed a rabbit that writes.
I stood back and nodded.
“After you left the other day, I kept thinking about your writing rabbit,” Valesquez said.
“It was a rather unusual request after all. And if it was for Don Hernan, well, I’d do just about anything, I think,” he said simply.
“There was something in the back of my mind. Then I remembered that one of our conservators had asked me, a couple of months ago, to do some research for him. He was trying to reconstruct a painted pot from a pile of fragments found in a tomb in a temple near the border with Guatemala, and was sure he’d seen something similar somewhere—possibly in an exhibition of Maya art, or in a book on the subject.