01 _ Xibalba Murders, The (9 page)

I was about to give up and go back to the hotel, fearful the dogs had been called, when the huge wrought-iron gates began to swing open.

I piloted the Mercedes along a sweeping drive, the headlights illuminating bushes of hibiscus that must have been absolutely gorgeous in the light of day.

The house itself struck me as rather odd for Merida, its architecture more English or French manor house than traditional Spanish: portico entrance, leaded glass windows, none of the tilework or heavy wood carving I would have expected.

This impression was borne out when the door was opened at my ring, and I was ushered into a spectacular mirrored black-and-white marble-tiled foyer. The maid who opened the door was also dressed in black and white, and looked rather disdainfully at my attire. At least all in black, I, too, matched the decor. I was left to cool my heels for a while.

This gave me plenty of opportunity to gawk. A huge crystal chandelier graced the entranceway, a circular staircase curved up one side of the foyer, and to my right, a door led into what I was soon to learn was a sitting room.

The walls were all mirrored, and in a decorating affectation I have never liked, pictures were hung against the mirrors, held there by thin wires from the ceiling. The paintings were nonetheless impressive. One was, I was almost certain, a real Picasso, another a Matisse. Seflor Gomez Arias was obviously doing quite nicely, thank you. And he had good taste in art.

Another door to the left opened to a dining room, complete with another crystal chandelier. Both fixtures were so large I wondered if Don Diego Maria had borrowed a couple of spares from the ballroom of his hotel.

After a few minutes I heard someone descending the stairs. It was not Don Diego, but instead a smart-looking woman of about forty who clutched the banister in one hand and a martini glass in the other.

She made her way down the stairs with some care.

She was attractive in a kind of beige way: beigy-blond hair that she wore long and pulled back, a creamy beige sweater that I could only assume was cashmere, and a beige suede skirt.

“Sheila Stratton Gomez,” she said, addressing me in Spanish. “Diego’s wife. His third wife, to be precise. And you are… ?”

“Lara McClintoch.”

“With a name like that, you must speak English, thank God. Come in,” she said, beckoning in the general direction of the door to the right. She was wearing very high heels, the kind men love but give me vertigo. I couldn’t imagine how she could walk in them, even at the best of times. And judging by the martini glass and her general unsteadiness, these were not the best of times.

“You’ll have a drink, of course,” she said when we were seated in large crushed-velvet armchairs in front of a large marble fireplace of baronial proportions. I gathered she wanted another one.

The maid reappeared, and Sheila Gomez ordered a white wine for me, another martini for herself.

While she addressed me in English and was clearly an American, she ordered the drinks in formal Castilian Spanish, a language I find exotic when spoken by a native, but from someone like Sheila, who obviously learned it later in life, it always sounds affected. Her current tipsy state only exaggerated the rather lisping quality of her speech.

“My husband is not at home. How may I help you?” she said when the drinks arrived.

“I’m looking for someone,” I said, “and I had hoped Senor Gomez Arias might be able to help me.”

“How deliciously mysterious,” she said. She had a little trouble with
deliciously.
“Tell me more.”

“I’m trying to find Senor Hernan Castillo. I came to Mexico at his request a few days ago, but he phoned the first evening to say he had been called away, and has not been heard of since.”

“Don Hernan. A lovely man. Cultured, kind. I was so sorry when he stopped coming here. He used to come for dinner quite often. We talked about New York, Boston, my hometown of Philadelphia. Don Hernan was very interested in things American, you know. A lovely man,” she repeated.

“When and why did he stop coming here?” I asked, trying to focus the conversation a little before the next martini took effect.

“About a month or so ago, I think. He and Diego had an argument of some sort—they were in Diego’s study with the door closed, so I don’t know what it was about, but it sounded unpleasant,” she said.

“Did your husband and Don Hernan have business dealings?” I asked.

“I think so. Diego is on the board of directors of the museum. Beyond that, Diego does not talk to me much about his business. I’m the trophy wife, you know. Good American family, by which I mean wealthy. I’m brought out on ceremonial occasions only,” she said bitterly.

I made sympathetic noises of some kind.

“He’s not a bad man, really. I know he has a reputation for ruthless business dealings but…” She trailed off.

We both heard someone out in the hall. A young, very attractive woman in her mid-twenties, I would say, dark hair and eyes, looked in. She seemed vaguely familiar. She glanced at the martini glass in Sheila’s hand, then briefly at me, and left without a word.

Sheila looked alarmed.

“Who’s that?”

“That’s Montserrat, Diego’s daughter by his much-loved first wife. They fight all the time, but he adores her.”

“He named the hotel after her, I take it,” I said.

“Yes.” She paused and then giggled into her martini glass. “At least I hope that’s the way it worked. It wouldn’t be very nice for a girl to be named after a hotel, now, would it?

“Actually, she is the manager of the hotel and vice-president of some other businesses Diego owns. He is very proud of her.”

“She doesn’t look like her father, does she?” I said, thinking of the rather unattractive man in the Ek Balam.

“No, she takes after her mother, Innocentia, who died when Montserrat was very young. Her mother’s picture is all over the house.” Sheila looked as if she were going to start sobbing in an alcoholic haze.

“Tell me about your husband’s businesses,” I said, trying to drag her back from the brink of self-pity. “He owns a hotel, obviously.”

“Yes. His original business, the one that made him rich, though, is water.”

“Water, as in—”

“As in the stuff they make ice for martinis out of.” She giggled again. “Well, have you seen much in the way of fresh water around here? The water for this city comes from the aquifer beneath the city.”

“The windmills!” I said, remembering this significant feature of the city when I had first come here as a young girl.

“Right. All of Merida’s water used to be brought to the surface by the windmills you saw everywhere. That’s why it was sometimes called the City of Windmills. Diego’s father died when Diego was quite young, and I guess his mother didn’t feel an education was important for the youngest in the family. Diego is essentially self-taught. He recognized that the water supply here is always a problem, so he learned all about soil mechanics, the underground rivers and everything, and invented a more efficient windmill—sort of like building a better mousetrap—and the rest, as they say, is history. When Merida switched to a city water system, Diego bought up the old windmills for a song, converted them, and sold them for a premium in the countryside.”

“How does he feel about the theft of the statue from the bar?” I asked.

“He is devastated. It was one of his favorite pieces. Actually, Diego and Don Hernan had an argument over that very statue one night at dinner.”

I waited while she took another sip of her martini.

“There is one thing you need to know about Diego to understand him. It is not enough for him to admire rare or beautiful things. He must possess them. And the rarer they are, or the harder to obtain, the more he wants them.

“You must have noticed this house. Rather different from the neighbors‘, wouldn’t you say? He saw this little manor house on a country estate in England. The owner, some English earl or something, said it had been in the family for centuries and there was no way he would sell.

“But Diego managed it—found out something about the earl—one would rather not know what—that convinced him to sell.

“Then Diego moved the building, stone by stone, to his property here, and had it reassembled. Fortunately he also owns a small shipping company!” She laughed.

“And then there’s me. We met at an official dinner at the governor’s residence back home. Diego was a guest of the governor. I was married at the time, but that didn’t stop Diego. He pursued me with an enthusiasm that was very flattering. Now I am one of his possessions.”

“And Itzamna, the statue?”

“Apparently it was really very old, and a very sacred relic for the Maya. Don Hernan had always felt objects of such antiquity belong in museums, not private collections. After several visits to U.S. museums, he was also coming around to the view that something he called comanagement—sharing ownership of and responsibility for an artifact between an institution like the
museo
and the people to whom it had originally belonged—was the way of the future.

“Anyway, Don Hernan had heard about the Itzamna and had mentioned it to Diego. Both men went after it, for the reasons I’ve told you, and Diego got to it first.

“It was the beginning of the end of the friendship, and a very sad day for me.”

Sheila looked at her empty martini glass and rang the bell for the maid. But instead of the maid, Montserrat appeared. “I believe you’ve had enough, Sheila,” she said.

Sheila looked cowed. Montserrat nodded in my general direction and left the room again.

“Perhaps it’s time I left,” I said, stating the obvious. “Thank you for your hospitality.”

“I don’t suppose you’d come again,” she said rather wistfully.

“I’d like to,” I said, momentarily forgetting I was under house arrest.

“Where would I find you?”

“Casa de las Buganvillas.”

“Where Don Hernan lived. I’ve heard it’s lovely.”

We shook hands and I headed back down the drive and then toward the hotel. I did not have to ask why Sheila had let a total stranger into the house late at night. This was one very sad and lonely woman.

But there was something about our conversation that was nagging at me as I drove back to the hotel. I was about halfway back when I realized that she had spoken about Don Hernan in the past tense the whole time.

And I remembered where I had seen Montserrat. On television, in the crowd at Luis Vallespino’s funeral.

I parked the Mercedes on a side street, crept stealthily along the sidewalk, climbed the wall into the tree, and then slipped through the window onto the chair in the bathtub.

It was then I noticed the light shining in under the bathroom door from my room. I opened the door with real apprehension.

Isa was sitting on my bed, her eyes red from crying.

“Don Hernan is dead,” she said.

MANIK

Don Hernan had been found by the cleaning staff, seated on the floor of his little office at the
museo.
Knees drawn up, his torso and head twisted to face the doorway, and held there by the rigor of death, his body was a human caricature of the Chac Mool that guards the Temple of the Warriors at Chichen Itza.

He had been stabbed through the heart. There was very little blood in his office, and the murder weapon was not to be found.

Santiago Ortiz Menendez, as one of Don Hernan’s oldest friends, was given the unenviable task of identifying the body the next morning. Isa and I accompanied him, my presence permitted, and shall we say even encouraged, by Major Martinez himself. Francesca remained at the inn to break the sad news to the other permanent guests.

It was Manik, day of the deer, day of the hunt, and the day, to force an analogy, that it became very clear to me that Don Hernan’s search, the hunt for whatever the elusive rabbit might write, was no whimsical diversion of an elderly man, but like the game in the ball court at Chichen Itza, a deadly serious contest in which the loser paid with his life.

We took the Ortiz family van, outfitted to accommodate Don Santiago’s wheelchair, to the morgue.

Major Martinez was waiting for us when we arrived. In anticipation of just this eventuality, Don Santiago had suggested in the van that I give him—Don Santiago— ten pesos and ask to hire his services. He had trained as a lawyer before joining the diplomatic corps, and although his chosen field was international law, we all agreed that should Martinez regularly feel the need to interview me, it might be well to have Don Santiago along.

Martinez led us down sterile corridors and stairs to the basement, and then to a window marked
recepcion,
behind which sat a young man energetically eating tacos filled with pork, if my sense of smell was functioning properly in this place, which I couldn’t swear to. A reddish-brown liquid dribbled down his chin and spattered onto a sheet of wax paper on the desk. Apparently working in a morgue does not put everyone off their food.

Martinez flashed his badge, we all signed in, and the young man used a greasy finger to push a button that unlatched the door beside him. We passed into the heart of the morgue.

With Martinez leading, we came into a room with a row of body lockers against one wall. The place felt cold and clammy to me, and I could see Isa shiver. Whether or not it actually was cold, I couldn’t tell.

The drawer containing the remains of Don Hernan was pulled out by a young woman in a lab coat, and his face exposed for Don Santiago’s perusal.

I suppose all those of us confronted by this moment hope against hope that a mistake has been made, that a total stranger will be uncovered when the drawer slides out.

But it was not to be. Santiago nodded mutely, and we were led quickly away. Santiago’s hands shook as he rearranged the light blanket that covered his emaciated legs. Isa kept one hand on his shoulder as we made our way back to the young man with the tacos. He in turn looked mildly annoyed at having his meal interrupted a second time, but condescended to hand a box over to Martinez. We were then escorted to a small room with a table and a couple of chairs and asked to inspect the contents of the box.