12.21 (6 page)

T
HE WORN LEATHER COUCH IN CHEL’S STUDY WAS PILED HIGH WITH
old academic articles and back issues of
Journal of Mayan Linguistics
. Her drafting table and desk chair were covered with a broken PC, immigration forms, mortgage applications, and other paperwork for members of
Fraternidad
. The only space not hidden by books overflowing from the shelves was a small patch on the Oriental rug. That’s where Chel had been for the last hour, on the floor, staring at the box in front of her.

She’d gotten a glimpse of the marvels inside—the glyphs that would tell some incredible story of the ancients, the artistry used in representing the gods. Chel had devoted her career to Mayan epigraphy—the study of ancient inscriptions—and she wanted so badly to remove the plastic casing once more and to look at the glyphs again, to photograph them, to dig beyond what she’d already seen. But the image of a former colleague languishing in an Italian courtroom under the scrutiny of news cameras had been in Chel’s mind since she’d watched Gutierrez drive away from the church. The Getty’s previous curator of antiquities, who used to work just down the hall from Chel, had become embroiled in a legal battle when she was accused by Italian officials of acquiring illegally excavated artifacts for her collection.

Chel knew that both the Getty and ICE would make an even bigger example of her if they discovered what she’d done. To forge paperwork
after the fact, as she’d done with Gutierrez’s turtle shell, was one thing. A codex was different. There wasn’t a museum board in the world that would believe she hadn’t known what she was doing when she accepted it at the church.

Chel gently picked up the box again. It weighed no more than five pounds. How had it even survived? In the mid-sixteenth century, inquisitors for the Catholic Church tried to rid the Maya of pagan influences and presided over an
auto-da-fé
, a massive bonfire where thousands of sacred Maya books, artworks, and inscriptions were destroyed. Until today, Chel and everyone else in her field believed only four codices had been saved. The Grolier Fragment marked the cycles of Venus; the Madrid Codex referred to omens about crops; and the Paris Codex was a guide to rituals and New Year ceremonies. Chel’s revered Dresden Codex—oldest of the known Maya books, dating to sometime around
A.D
. 1200—contained astrology, histories of kings, and predictions of the harvest. Yet even the Dresden didn’t come from the classic era of Maya civilization. How could this volume have been preserved for so long?

The doorbell rang.

It was after eight. Could it be Gutierrez already, back to collect his treasure? Why had she not opened the box? Then again, what if it was ICE? What if the dealer had already been arrested? Had ICE been watching when he came to the church?

Chel picked up the box and hurried to the study closet. No one knew about the cubbyhole she’d discovered there, full of stacks of some previous tenant’s 1920s L.A. memorabilia. She buried the codex beneath a collection of black-and-white photographs of Wolfskill Farm—what Westwood was called before the First World War.

The doorbell rang again as she went to answer it.

Chel breathed a sigh of relief when she peeked through the window to see her mother standing in the entryway.

“Want me to stand here all night?” Ha’ana asked as Chel opened the door. She stood just over five feet tall and wore a knee-length navy cotton dress, one of many acquired from the company at which she’d been a
seamstress since they’d been in America. Even with her silver hair and several extra pounds, Ha’ana still had a radiance about her.

“Mom, what are you doing here?”

Ha’ana held canvas bags up in the air. “Cooking you dinner, remember? Now, will you make me stand out here in the cold or will you invite an old woman in?”

In the day’s turmoil, Chel had forgotten all about their dinner plans.

“This place used to be a lot cleaner,” Ha’ana said as she stepped inside and saw the state of the house. “When Patrick was here.”

Patrick. Chel had dated him for almost a year and Ha’ana wouldn’t let it go. The reasons they’d broken up were more complicated than Chel ever felt like getting into with Ha’ana. But her mother was right: Since he moved out four months ago, Chel’s house near the UCLA campus had come to feel like little more than a stopover between her offices at the university and the Getty. After exhausting days, she often came home, undressed, and fell asleep watching the Discovery Channel.

“Are you going to help me?” Ha’ana called from the kitchen.

Chel joined her and helped unload the groceries. Difficulties with her back had made physical activity more challenging for Ha’ana recently, and even though the last thing Chel wanted was to sit for a meal, she’d never been good at saying no to her mother.

Dinner was a four-cheese and spinach lasagna concoction with an excess of garlic. Growing up, Chel usually couldn’t get Ha’ana to cook Maya food—she’d been stuffed with macaroni and sandwiches on white bread. These days her mother watched the Food Network nonstop, and her continental cooking had improved. As they ate, Chel stared at her and listened to her chat about her day at the factory. But Chel’s mind was always in the other room with the codex. Ordinarily she would’ve been attentive to her mother. But not tonight.

“Are you all right?”

Chel looked up from her plate to see Ha’ana studying her. “I’m fine, Mom.” She doused her lasagna with red pepper. “So … I’m excited you’re coming to class next week.”

“Oh, I forgot to tell you. I’m not going to be able to next week. Sorry.”

“Why not?”

“I have a job too, Chel.”

Ha’ana had hardly missed a day’s work in thirty years. “If you told your boss what you were doing, they’d want you to go. I can talk to her if you want.”

“I’m working a double shift that day.”

“Look, I’ve been telling the class all about the village’s oral history, and I think it would be fascinating for them to hear from someone who actually lived in Kiaqix.”

“Yes,” Ha’ana said. “Someone must tell them all about our incredible Original Trio.” The irony in her voice was hard to miss.

Beya Kiaqix, the tiny hamlet where both women were born, was rife with myth, particularly the legend of its origins. The story went that a noble man and his two wives had fled their ancient city, under the rule of a despotic king, and had founded the village. More than fifty generations of Chel’s ancestors had since lived in the Valley of the Scarlet Macaw, in the El Petén region of Guatemala.

Chel and her mother were among the very few who’d left. By the time Chel was two years old, Guatemala was at the height of
La Revolución
, the longest and bloodiest civil war in Central American history. Afraid for her daughter’s life and for her own, Ha’ana had taken them out of Kiaqix—as the villagers called it—and never looked back. Thirty-three years ago they arrived in America, and she found a job and quickly taught herself English. By the time Chel was four, Ha’ana had her green card; soon they were both citizens.

“You lived in Kiaqix too,” Ha’ana went on as she took another bite. “You know the myths. You don’t need me.”

Since she was a child, Chel had watched her mother do everything she could to avoid talking about her past. Even if it could have been proven that every word of the oral history of their village was true, Ha’ana would find a way to ridicule it. Long ago, Chel had realized that it was her mother’s only way to escape the trauma of what had happened.

Suddenly she wanted nothing so much as to run to the closet, retrieve
the codex, and drop it in her mother’s lap. Even Ha’ana wouldn’t be able to resist its pull.

“When was the last time you read a book written in Mayan?” Chel asked.

“Why read a Mayan book when I spent all that time learning English? Besides, I haven’t heard of any good mysteries in Qu’iche lately.”

“Mom, you know I’m not talking about a modern book. I’m talking about something written during the ancient era. Like the
Popol Vuh
.”

Ha’ana rolled her eyes. “I actually saw a copy of the
Popol Vuh
at the bookstore the other day. They’re putting it with all that 12/21 nonsense. Loudmouth monkeys and flowery gods—that’s what you get in Mayan.”

Chel shook her head. “Father wrote his letters in Qu’iche, Mom.”

In 1979, two years after Chel was born, the Guatemalan army imprisoned her father for helping lead Kiaqix into rebellion. From jail, Alvar Manu secretly wrote a series of letters encouraging his village never to surrender. Ha’ana herself had smuggled out more than thirty entreaties into the hands of village leaders across El Petén, resulting in a doubling of the volunteer army in weeks. But the letters were also Chel’s father’s death warrant: When his jailers discovered him writing in his cell, he was executed without a trial.

“Why do we always talk about this?” Ha’ana asked, standing to clear the plates.

Chel felt frustrations toward her mother bubbling up. She loved her, and she would always be grateful for the opportunities Ha’ana had given her. But deep down, Chel also felt that her mother had abandoned their people, which was why Ha’ana hated to be reminded of it, and why showing her the codex in its current condition would be useless. Until Chel could figure out what it said, her mother would see the book as little more than disintegrating fragments of history she wanted to forget.

“Leave the dishes,” Chel said, standing up.

“They will only take a minute,” Ha’ana said. “Otherwise they’ll pile up like everything else in the house.”

Chel took a breath. “I have to go.”

“Go where?”

“To the museum.”

“It’s nine o’clock, Chel. What kind of job is this?”

“Thank you for dinner, Mom. But I really have to go.”

“This would be an insult in Kiaqix,” Ha’ana said. “When a woman cooks for you, you don’t invite her to leave.”

Ha’ana used their customs as a religion of convenience, invoking them to her advantage when she could, ridiculing them when they got in her way.

“Well, then,” Chel said, “it’s a good thing we’re not in Kiaqix anymore.”

OVER THE PAST EIGHT YEARS
, Chel had built a state-of-the-art Mesoamerican research facility at what was once California’s most traditional museum. When she had the time after hours, she liked to stroll through the empty galleries, set spectacularly high above Los Angeles. Walking past van Gogh’s
Irises
or Pontormo’s
Portrait of a Halberdier
, she had fun imagining how John Paul Getty, the billionaire oilman who founded the museum, would have felt about exhibiting ceramic statues of kneeling Maya worshippers and Mesoamerican gods beside his beloved European artifacts.

Not tonight, though. Just after two
A.M
., Chel stood in Getty research lab 214A with Dr. Rolando Chacon, her most experienced antiquities-restoration expert, surrounded by high-def cameras, mass spectrometers, and conservation tools. Normally, every one of the long wooden tables set up in rows throughout the room was covered with lumps of jade, pottery, and ancient head masks, but now they’d cleared several in the back to make room for the codex. On the walls hung photographs from ruins, which Chel had taken during fieldwork, quiet reminders of the emotional ride that returning to her people’s ancient home always was.

She and Rolando had delicately removed the contents of Gutierrez’s box piece by piece, lifting and separating each fragment using sets of long tweezers and metal specula, then spreading them out onto glass
plates sitting atop illuminated light tables. Some were as small as a postage stamp, but even these were heavy, dense fig-bark paper weighed down even more by the dust and moisture of a tomb.

They’d been at it four hours and had gotten through only the top of page one, but, staring down at the assembled fragments, Chel was pulled back to the former glory of her ancestors. The first words, already coming together, seemed to be an invocation of rain and the stars—a prayer—a magic carpet to another world.

“So I assume we’ll have to work on this at night?” Rolando asked. Chel’s restorer was a six-foot-two, hundred-fifty-pound sliver of a man with a week’s worth of stubble.

“Sleep during the day,” she told him. “With apologies to your girlfriend.”

“I just hope she notices I’m gone. Maybe it’ll inject a little mystery into our relationship. And you? When will you sleep?”

“Whenever. There’s no one who’ll notice I’m gone.”

Rolando placed another fragment carefully onto the glass. Chel knew no one with a greater knack for handling delicate objects or with better instincts when it came to reconstructing fragile antiquities. She trusted him implicitly; he’d been a loyal member of her team longer than anyone else. She didn’t like putting him at risk, but she needed his help.

“You wish I’d called someone else?” Chel asked him.

“Hell no,” Rolando said. “I’m your one and only
ladino
, and I’m not going to let you squeeze me out of this bombshell.”

Ladino
was slang for all seven million non-indigenous descendants of the Spanish living in Guatemala. All her life Chel had listened to her mother talking about how
ladinos
supported the army-sponsored genocide of the Maya and how they used the
indígenas
as scapegoats for their economic woes. But despite the tensions that still existed between the two groups, working so closely and for so long with Rolando had shifted her perspective. During the revolution, his family protested on behalf of the indigenous people. His father had even been arrested for it once before moving the family to America.

“I don’t see how this could be from any of the major ruins,” he said, tinkering with the edges until he’d jigsawed a match.

Chel agreed. The more than sixty known sites of classic-era Maya ruins in Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Belize, and El Salvador were packed with archaeologists, tourists, and locals year-round. Not even the most sophisticated looters could operate in those conditions, so Chel believed the book had to have been taken from a newly discovered site. Every year, satellites, helicopter tourists, and loggers stumbled across long-hidden architectural features in the jungle, and she guessed that the looter—likely a professional scout—had stumbled on the site and then returned with a crew.