The Annihilators (11 page)

“Aren’t you being a little overconfident, Sam? My father has been taking care of himself for quite a while.”

I said, “We’re not discussing army maneuvers now. Any competent professional with a few resources could take that bunch of wild-eyed amateurs he’s collected out in that Chicago suburb, like that General Grant you just mentioned took Richmond. And I’m a pro.”

Ricardo Jimenez drew a long breath. “If my family is hurt, I will undoubtedly hate you, Sam. But they did what they did, and I will not feel obliged to avenge them. Is that satisfactory?”

I nodded. “Thanks for the drink. Anything I can get you before I go?” When he shook his head, I said, “Be good.”

He grinned. “I’ve got a choice?”

Later in the day the telephone rang, catching me on my hotel bed with my shoes off pretending to myself that I was thinking deep and important thoughts involving my various duties and obligations. Actually, I was taking a nap. It hadn’t been a very restful night—in fact it had been a very pleasantly unrestful night—and it had been a moderately tense morning, and I couldn’t think of anything better to do, after my late lunch, with what was left of the afternoon. Anyway, there was a contact to be made, and I figured I might as well start making it by staying put for a little, where our man in Santa Rosalia, whoever he might be, could find me easily. If he made no move to get in touch with me here, I could try putting the body into motion and letting him intercept it at his pleasure.

When I picked up the jangling instrument, a harsh voice spoke in my ear. “Am I addressing Flashbulb Felton, boy photojournalist?”

I said, “Who the hell?… Oh, Christ, it’s Miranda!”

“It is indeed Marvelous Miranda Matson,” said the raspy female voice. “I saw your name on a press release from the
Palacio de los Gobernadores
—noted scientists and eminent camera artist to tour ancient ruins of beautiful Costa Verde—and I thought I’d see if it was the same Sam Felton. I couldn’t bear the thought that there might be two. Remember that crazy trip we took on that ancient tub of a freighter we called the
Snark
?”

Lewis Carroll, the Mexico City contact had said. One word. I said, “Yeah, that sure was a jabberwocky operation, wasn’t it? Let’s hope we don’t hit any more fouled-up stories like that one. Can I buy you a drink?”

“Cheapskate. I was hoping to get at least a free lunch out of you.”

“Gold digger,” I said. “Okay, where? You know the town better than I do.”

“Restaurante Tolteca,”
she said. “The Toltec Restaurant, on the plaza. Any cab driver knows it. I’ll meet you there. Tomorrow at one o’clock, okay?”

“Check.” I hesitated, but if there were bugs on the line, somebody already knew too much and a little more wouldn’t matter. “Miranda.”

“Yes?”

“I need everything you can get hold of on a guy called Lupe Montano.”

“So does everybody else in Santa Rosalia, including
El Presidente
himself. But you’ve come to the right girl. I’ve been doing a little research on the would-be liberator of Costa Verde; and my advice is if you ever happen to meet Mr. Lupe of the Mountain, don’t turn your back on him. That’s the trouble with these Latin American horse operas: The guys in the white hats are hard to find. I’ll put together what I’ve got and what I can find out between now and tomorrow and have it for you at lunch.”

“Miranda, you’re a jewel.”

“It took you this long to find out?”

I put the phone down; and so much for our man in Santa Rosalia. I wondered how Mac had managed to recruit Miranda Matson, a perfectly genuine news-gatherer of the old hard-drinking variety, with all the brains and guts in the world, and about as much sex appeal as a backhoe, to run our errands for us.

I’d met her under my own name in the days when I was carrying a camera for real, a hell of a long time ago; and I’d run up against her a couple of times since I’d switched to a less peaceful profession, in my boy-photographer disguise, which seemed to be about as much of a secret these days as Ronald Reagan’s former occupation. Well, maybe Miranda was hoping to get a scoop out of it; she’d been around long enough to still think in those old-fashioned Front-Page terms…

In the evening before dinner—they feed you late in that part of the world—we had an informal introductory lecture in one of the hotel’s small conference rooms on the ground floor. There was the usual confusion while everybody got drink orders in and got settled around the big table and got served and paid or signed for refreshments received. Then Frances, at the head of the table, tapped on her glass to get our attention.

“I’m just going to give you a quick historical survey of this part of Latin America,” she said. “It will give you a background for the museum exhibits you’ll see tomorrow, and the Melmec ruins from which those exhibits came, where we’ll be spending the rest of our time. I’ll start with the advent of the Spaniards and work back. The Aztecs are not really relevant to our tale, but since you saw all those beautiful exhibits in Mexico City, I might as well tell you that they were kind of an outcast tribe, banished to an island nobody else wanted in Lake Tenochtitlan, where they multiplied like rabbits for some reason and soon overran all the older civilizations around the lake. They established their own elaborate society which came to an end, pretty much, with the arrival of Mr. Cortez on his big horse. Just about the same thing happened out on the Yucatan Peninsula, where the Toltecs, another migrant tribe from the high country of Mexico, combined with the remnants of the old Maya peoples to found the civilization centered around Chichen Itza. That culture, we call it the Postclassic, was already declining when the Spaniards landed, but just as in Mexico City they gave it the coup de grace. Earlier, we had the Classic Maya civilization, as represented by the great cities of the Peten…”

I found myself watching her long slim hands as she talked to us easily. Browner than her body, since they could not so readily be shielded from the hot sun under which she often worked, they were beautiful hands, but they were not as relaxed as her voice. She was still a lady under pressure and I wondered who was exerting it and how. I’d been tempted to discuss her predicament, whatever it was, with Ricardo Jimenez, but I’d been afraid I might be giving him information he didn’t already have, to her detriment.

I found myself wishing that the lady would take a deep breath and trust me; but that’s the trouble with very bright people, particularly very bright female people who’ve fought their way up in what is still essentially a male world. They’re too damn bright to trust anybody.

Before the Mayas came the Olmecs, she said, the carvers of those great brooding heads; and before the Olmecs came the Melmecs. Somewhere in the still unraveled tangle of Melmec history had appeared the two great inventions that had placed these New World civilizations on a level with their Old World counterparts. These inventions had formerly been attributed to the Olmecs; but the Copalque discoveries had already shown that the archaeology books would have to be rewritten in this respect. Somewhere much further back in history than previously thought, the Melmecs had constructed, and so been able to pass on to subsequent civilizations in the area, a perfectly viable numerical system—something the Romans with their idiot capital letters had never accomplished—and an accurate calendar.

As a matter of fact, Frances said, it was well known that the Mayas had inherited not just one, but two, calendars from their predecessors. One had a three-hundred-sixty-day year to keep track of ordinary secular events like the planting and the harvest, with a five-day limbo period at the end to make it come out even with the astronomical year. The second calendar was a religious one with a two-hundred-sixty-day year, by which they scheduled all their religious ceremonies and festivals.

One theory that had been advanced, not altogether jokingly, she said, was that this dual system had been set up deliberately to make things so complicated that only the priests could figure out on what days which gods had to be propitiated, adding to the mystery and power of the priesthood. Naturally, the short religious year came around faster than the long secular year; but the mathematics of it insured that once every fifty-two years the two moved into synchronization briefly; and this was a very important year in the lives of these people.

The lady was good, I reflected; she had us listening to all this dull history and arithmetic as if we were watching our favorite TV shows. Perhaps it was her own enthusiasm that gripped us. When she paused and reached for her drink and sipped from it briefly, there was a stir of movement around the table as her listeners took advantage of the opportunity to change the positions they’d held while she was talking.

“Well, you saw the great Aztec calendar wheel in Mexico City,” Frances went on, “with its two concentric calendars, the ones I’ve just described. It represents the previously accepted thinking on the subject. But there have been a few clues found, a few glyphs discovered in various sites, Olmec and Maya both, that seem to indicate that these theories are, if not inaccurate, at least not quite complete. My husband, after studying these anomalies carefully, came to the conclusion that there had to be something missing, and that it might be found in the area to which we’ll be driving tomorrow. Well, I’ve told you about our discovery of the previously unsuspected Copalque site. And we’ve already uncovered there clear evidence that his tentative hypothesis was correct: The Melmecs used and passed on to the later civilizations in the area a system involving not just two calendars, but three. The third one was apparently very secret, indeed, and was known only to the very highest of the high priests. It was too secret, too sacred, too dangerous, to be shown on the ordinary calendar wheels; however, we’ve discovered a large cavern—those limestone formations are riddled with caves and
cenotes
, or water holes—in which was established a so-far unique three-calendar wheel. Apparently some very special mysteries were celebrated in this cave according to this calendar; ceremonies we’re still trying to understand.”

Her voice stopped. After a moment she gave a deprecating little laugh, as if embarrassed, and tasted her drink, and looked at us.

“I don’t suppose this seems very important to you,” she said in a lighter voice, “any more than the medieval question of how many angels could dance on the point of a pin. Two calendars or three, what’s the difference? I must admit that we archaeologists get carried away by our pretty theories; but I do think you’ll find our museum tour tomorrow morning very interesting. The bus leaves the hotel at eight-thirty sharp. Thank you.”

Leaving, I made no effort to approach her, mindful of her warning that we must not spend much time together in public; but somehow I found myself walking beside her, anyway, as we crossed the lobby toward the dining room, now open.

“Dr. Dillman?” I said, playing safe in case we had an interested audience.

“Yes?”

I put on my face the look of an eager student in search of knowledge. “That five-day limbo period, as you called it, at the end of each year of the secular calendar. What was the significance of that, besides making the year come out with three hundred and sixty-five days, as it should?”

“It was a bad-luck time,” she said. “You had to watch yourself during those five days and perform all the right religious rites, or the next year would be shot to hell.”

“And how about that fifty-two-year period? What happened when those two calendars got together every half century and a little?”

She glanced at me oddly, as if she hadn’t expected these questions from a nonarchaeological dope like me. She said carefully, “It was a time of doom, Mr. Felton; a time when the gods had to be propitiated with extreme care; a time of change and nobody knew in what direction, good or bad. But it was damn well going to be bad if you didn’t do exactly the right things, the things the priests told you to do.”

“Next question,” I said. “On this three-calendar system you and your husband discovered, what happened when all
three
calendars came into sync, once every few hundred or thousand years, or whatever?”

She drew a long breath and glanced around; but there was nobody within hearing. “Samuel,” she said softly, “I think we’re going to make an archaeologist of you yet. That
is
the question, isn’t it?” She licked her lips and spoke precisely. “Since you’re so interested, I’ll tell you that the periods between the critical times of three-calendar synchronization, as far as we can determine with our present data and our present methods of dating, coincide with reasonable accuracy with the life spans of each of the three civilizations we are considering. Interesting, don’t you think?” She shivered abruptly and said in a totally different tone, “Well, I’d better go see how Dick Anderson is making out. Until I started wrestling that damned wheelchair, I didn’t realize how many stupid, unnecessary steps people built in how many stupid, unnecessary places.”

In the morning, the bus took us to the museum, housed in a magnificent old mansion that had been beautifully restored for the purpose but was already deteriorating rapidly, since they had apparently spent money on everything except the roof. We’d been told that the rainy season down there is a real duck-drowner; and it’s just as well, since it’s otherwise a very dry country, on the surface at least. When it doesn’t rain, the only water comes from underground rivers and the
cenotes
Frances had mentioned: places where limestone caverns have collapsed to expose underground pools, very important to the ancients unable to drill for their water. The
cenotes
had largely determined the locations of the great cities.

Anyway, the walls of the fine museum were disfigured by ugly watermarks, and some of the exhibits had had to be moved out of the way of drips from above; which I suppose said something about the administration of Armando Rael, although I could think of worse things against his regime than a casual attitude toward ceiling leaks. The exhibits were not as dramatic as those of the
Museo Anthropologia
in Mexico City; nor had the Melmecs, as far as I could make out, produced any sculpture as spectacular as that of their successors, the Olmecs. However, Frances loved her Melmecs dearly; and her I-was-there account of the discovery of the various pieces was worth the price of admission.