12.21 (9 page)

T
HE MASS OF PRESS CONGREGATED OUTSIDE PRESBYTERIAN HOSPITAL
made Chel even more nervous than she already was. The doctor she’d spoken to on the phone told her the case was highly confidential, which suited her perfectly. Her motives here were complicated, and the less attention drawn to them the better. Still, it was clear some big news story had broken; in the parking lot there were news crews and cameras and reporters everywhere.

She sat in her car, considering the odds that the press presence had anything to do with why she was here. If she went inside and there was a connection between the sick man and the book, she could end up in serious trouble. But if she didn’t, she might never know how it was possible that a sick indigenous man was repeating the Mayan word for
codex
a day after Gutierrez showed up with possibly the most important document in her people’s history. Her curiosity trumped her fear.

Ten minutes later, Chel stood in the patient’s room on the sixth floor of the hospital with Dr. Thane, her curiosity forgotten. They hovered over the patient’s bed, watching a man who was suffering terribly, sweating and in obvious pain. How he had ended up here, Chel didn’t know, but to die in an unfamiliar place, far from home, was the worst of all fates.

“We need to find out his name, how long he’s been in the States, and when he got sick,” Thane said. “And anything else you can tell us. Any detail could be important.”

Chel looked back at John Doe.
“Rajawxik chew …”
he mumbled in Qu’iche.

“Can we get him some water?” Chel asked Thane.

Thane motioned at his IV. “He’s more hydrated than I am right now.”

“He says he’s thirsty.”

The doctor picked up the pitcher on John Doe’s tray table, filled it in the sink, and then poured water into his cup. He grabbed it in both hands and gulped it down.

“It’s safe to get close to him?” Chel asked.

“It’s not contagious that way,” Thane told her. “The disease spreads through tainted meat. The masks are so we don’t give him another infection while his defenses are down.”

Chel adjusted the straps on her face mask and moved closer. It was unlikely the man worked in commerce; Maya who peddled their wares to tourists along the roads of Guatemala picked up some Spanish. He had no tattoos or piercings, so he wasn’t a shaman or a daykeeper. But his palms were callused, hardened across the base of each finger, with strips of cracked skin extending from the knuckle to the butt of the thumb. It was the sign of the machete, the hand tool
indígenas
used to clear land for farming. It was also what looters used to search the jungles for ruins.

Was it possible she was looking at the man who discovered the codex? Thane said, “Okay, let’s start with his name.”

“What is your family’s name, brother?” Chel asked him. “I am a Manu,” she said. “My given name is Chel. What do they call you?”

“Rapapem Volcy,” he whispered hoarsely.

Rapapem
, meaning
flight
. Volcy was a common surname. From the inflection of his vowels, Chel believed he was from somewhere in the south Petén.

“My family comes from El Petén,” she said. “Does yours?”

Volcy said nothing. Chel tried asking a few different ways, but he’d gone silent.

“What about when he came to the United States?” Thane asked.

Chel translated and got a clearer answer. “Five suns ago.”

Thane looked surprised. “Only five days ago?”

Chel looked back at Volcy. “You came across the border through Mexico?”

The man squirmed in his bed and didn’t answer. Instead, he closed his eyes.
“Vooge,”
he repeated again.

“What about that?” Thane asked. “
Vooge
, is it? What does it mean? I looked it up with every spelling I could imagine and couldn’t find anything.”

“It’s
w-u-j
,” Chel explained. “
W
is pronounced like a
v
.”

“What does it mean?”

“It’s the Qu’iche word we use to refer to the
Popol Vuh
, the holy creation epic of our people,” Chel said. “He knows he’s sick, and he probably wants the comfort the book gives him.”

“So he wants us to bring one to him?”

Chel reached into her bag, pulled out a tattered copy of the holy book, and set it on the nightstand. “Like a Christian might want a Bible.”

No
indígena
would use only the word
wuj
—what the Maya called their ancient books—for the proper name of the
Popol Vuh
. But no one would question her here.

“See if he can tell us anything about when he got sick,” Thane said. “Ask him if he remembers when he first had trouble sleeping.”

As Chel translated the doctor’s questions into Qu’iche, Volcy opened his eyes a little. “In the jungle,” he said.

Chel blinked, confused. “You were sick in the jungle?”

He nodded.

“You were sick when you came here, Volcy?”

“For three suns before I came here, I had not slept.”

“He was sick in Guatemala?” Thane asked. “You’re sure that’s what he said?”

Chel nodded. “Why? What does that mean?”

“It means I need to make some calls.”

CHEL PUT A HAND
on the crease between Volcy’s neck and shoulder. It was a technique her mother had used when Chel was a little girl, to calm her after a nightmare or a bad scrape; her grandmother had done the same for her mother. As Chel rubbed her hand back and forth, she felt the tension in Volcy’s body loosening. She didn’t know how long the doctor would be gone. This was her chance.

“Tell me, brother,” she whispered. “Why did you come from El Petén?”

Volcy spoke.
“Che’qriqa’ ali Janotha.”

Help me find Janotha
.

“Please,” he continued. “I have to get back to my wife and my daughter.”

She leaned in. “You have a daughter?”

“A newborn,” he said. “Sama. Now Janotha must care for her alone.”

Chel knew that, but for a twist of fate, she could easily have been Janotha, waiting with a newborn in a palm-thatched house for a man to come home, watching his empty hammock hanging from the roof. Somewhere in Guatemala, Janotha was pressing corn into tortillas over a hearth and promising her infant daughter that her father would return to them soon.

Volcy seemed to fade in and out, but Chel decided to press her advantage. “Do you know the ancient book, brother?”

His eyes suddenly focused on her in a way they hadn’t before.

“I have seen the wuj, brother,” Chel continued. “Can you tell me about it?”

Volcy stared at her. “I did what any man does to help his family.”

“What did you do to help your family?” she asked. “Sell the book?”

“It was broken into pieces,” he whispered. “On the floor of the temple … dried up by a hundred thousand days.”

So Chel had been right: The man lying here in front of her was the
looter. Tensions in Guatemala had left
indígenas
like Volcy—manual laborers—with little option. Yet somehow, against all odds, he’d found a temple with a book that he understood would command a fortune in America. The amazing thing was that he had managed to bring it here himself.

“Brother, you brought the book to America to sell?”

“Je’,”
Volcy said. Yes.

Chel glanced back over her shoulder to make sure she was still alone before asking, “Did you sell it to someone? Did you sell it to Hector Gutierrez?”

Volcy said nothing.

“Tell me this,” Chel said, trying a different tack. She put a finger to her cheek. “Did you sell it to a man with red ink on his cheek? Just above his beard?”

He nodded.

“Did you meet him here or in the Petén?”

He pointed down at the floor, at this foreign land he would no doubt die in. Volcy found the tomb, looted the book, made his way here, and somehow hooked up with Gutierrez. Within a week, the book was sitting in Chel’s lab at the Getty.

“Brother, where is this temple?” she asked. “There is so much good that could come to our people if you will tell me where the temple is.”

Instead of answering, Volcy whipped his body toward his side table, his arms flailing at the pitcher of water. The phone and alarm clock crashed to the ground. He grabbed the top off the pitcher and poured the rest of the water into his mouth. Chel stumbled back and her chair fell to the floor.

When Volcy finished drinking, Chel reached for the end of his blanket and dried his face. She knew she had little time to get the answers she needed. He was calm again, so she pressed on. “Can you tell me where Janotha lives?” she asked. “What village are you and Janotha from? We can send word to your family and let them know you are here.” The temple couldn’t be far from his own home.

Volcy looked confused. “Who will you send there?”

“We have many from all over Guatemala in
Fraternidad Maya
. Someone will know the way to your village, I promise.”

“Fraternidad?”

“This is our
church
,” Chel said. “Where Maya here in Los Angeles worship.”

Volcy’s eyes filled with distrust. “That is Spanish. You worship with
ladinos
?”

“No,” Chel said. “
Fraternidad
is a safe place of worship for the
indígenas.”

“I will tell
ladinos
nothing!”

Chel had made a mistake.
Fraternidad
meant
brotherhood
in Spanish. Living here in Los Angeles, commingling of Spanish, Mayan, and English was common. But where Volcy had come from, it was reasonable to doubt a Maya church with such a word in its name.

“
Fraternidad
cannot know,” Volcy continued. “I will never lead the
ladinos
to Janotha and Sama.… 
You are ajwaral!
”

There was no single English word for it. It meant literally,
You are a native of here
. But Volcy intended it as an indigenous slur. Even though Chel had been born in a village like his, even though she devoted her life to studying the ancients—to men like him, she would always be an outsider.

“Dr. Manu?” said a voice from behind her.

She turned and found a white-coated figure standing in the doorway.

“I’m Gabriel Stanton.”

CHEL TRAILED THE
new doctor past the masked security guard and out into the hallway. His voice was full of purpose, and his height gave him a commanding presence. How long had he been watching? Had he sensed the uncomfortable direction her conversation with Volcy had taken? Stanton turned. “So Mr. Volcy says he was sick before he got to the States?”

“That’s what he told me.”

“We have to know for sure,” Stanton told her. “We’ve been looking for a source here in L.A. If what he says is true, we need to be looking in Guatemala instead. Did he say where in the country he was from?”

“Based on his accent, I have to assume he’s from the Petén,” she told him. “It’s the largest department—the equivalent of states. But I haven’t gotten anything more about the village he’s from. And he won’t say how he got into America.”

“Either way,” Stanton said, “we could be talking about Guatemalan meat as our vector. And if he’s from some small indigenous village, then it has to be something he would have had access to. Far as I understand, thousands of acres of tropical forest have been cut to make way for cattle farms down there. That right?”

Chel nodded. His knowledge was impressive, and he was clearly a smart guy, if intimidating.

“Volcy could’ve been exposed to tainted meat from any of those cattle farms,” Stanton said. “We need to know all the meat he ate before his symptoms began. Far back as he can remember. Beef especially, but also chicken, pork—anything.”

“Villagers can eat meat from half a dozen different animals at a single meal.”

Dr. Stanton appeared to be studying her. She noticed that the doctor’s glasses were crooked and felt an unaccountable urge to fix them. He was at least a foot taller than she was, and she had to crane her neck to gaze at him.

“I need you to get him to dig as deep as he can,” Stanton said.

“I’ll do my best.”

“Did he say what he’s doing here? Did he come looking for work?”

“No,” she lied. “He didn’t say. He was fading in and out by the end and not really answering my questions.”

“People with this kind of insomnia can wax and wane by the minute. Let’s try it another way.”

Inside the room, Volcy now lay with his eyes closed, his breathing
hard and labored. Chel was afraid of how he would react when he saw her, and for a split second she considered telling Stanton the truth—coming clean about the codex and Volcy’s connection to it.

But she didn’t. She was too worried about ICE or the Getty finding out. She was too afraid of losing everything she’d worked for
and
the codex at the same time.

“We’ve learned from Alzheimer’s that patients with this kind of brain damage sometimes respond better to questions if there are triggers,” Stanton said. “The key is to go one step at a time and lead them from question to question.”

Volcy opened his eyes and looked at Stanton before turning his gaze to Chel. When they locked stares, she waited for his hostility to surface.

Nothing.

“Start with his name,” Stanton said.

“We know his name.”

“Exactly. Tell him: Your name is Volcy.”

Chel turned to the patient.
“At, Volcy ri’ ab’i’.”

When Volcy said nothing, she repeated it again.
“At, Volcy ri’ ab’i’.”

“In, Volcy ri nub’i’,”
he said finally.
My name is Volcy
. There was no hostility in his voice. It was as if he’d forgotten about their
Fraternidad
exchange.

“He understood,” Chel whispered.

“Now ask him: Did your parents call you Volcy?”

“My parents called me Daring One.”

“Keep going,” Stanton said. “Ask him why.”

So she went on, and with each back-and-forth, Chel was amazed at how Volcy’s eyes became clearer, more focused.

“Why did they call you Daring One?”

“Because I always dared to do what no boy would.”