He couldn't explain the Evil Eye, but he had seen it work. Oh, he had seen it work. And he couldn't explain how it was that his uncle Fano, who had been given up on by the doctors and carried home to die in Tzakol, had not died after all. The family had brought in a curer who had propitiated the winds, given Fano an amulet of wood from the tancazche tree, and called upon Ix Chel, the goddess of health, to help him. And he had recovered. That very night he had stood up on his feet for the first time in weeks, and he had lived. All right, for six or seven months only, but still…
Marmolejo had been just a child, but he had learned something valuable from it. A health official, Dr. Zuniga, had visited the family earlier, when Fano had returned home. With the best of intentions he had explained that rituals were fine in their place, but there was no hope at all for the dying man. What could ceremonies do against bacteria and viruses? The best thing the family could do was to resign themselves and make Fano's last hours comfortable. He would be dead within a very few days.
But when Fano didn't die, Dr. Zuniga's philosophy was undisturbed. Yes, the ritual had been effective, he explained patiently, but not really; not the way they supposed. It had no power of its own. It was all in the mind. Fano had thought it would work, and so it had. That was all. Where, Dr. Zuniga had asked with a smile, was the mystery in that?
Marmolejo had been much impressed. First the doctor had told the relatives that the ceremony couldn't work and why. Then afterward, without blinking an eye, he had told them exactly why it had worked. This he managed to do in a way that showed he had been right both before and after, and the family had been wrong all along. The fact that Fano had recovered, if only for a while, didn't seem to have much to do with it.
It was the young Marmolejo's introduction to the mind of the scientist, and these many years later it was still his key to how their thinking worked: Even when they were wrong they weren't wrong.
Well, Oliver was a lot better than most. And, happily, what he needed from him now was not more of his forensic expertise, but some plain old-fashioned information.
He picked up the telephone on his desk and dialed the Hotel Mayaland.
"Hola," he said to the clerk who answered. "Puedo hablar con Senor Oliver?"
Chapter 18
In five-and-a-half years Merida had changed very little. Animated, noisy, cheerful, the city was teeming with round little people not much over five feet tall, among whom outlanders loomed here and there like isolated peaks sticking up above the clouds.
At five feet, six inches, Julie didn't often get the chance to loom, and she was obviously enjoying it. “I feel like Dorothy in Munchkinland,” she said happily to Gideon over the heads of the chattering shoppers who had bustled their way between them.
They were fighting their way out of Merida's great public market, heading for an eleven o'clock meeting with Marmolejo. The inspector's request that Gideon-and Julie, if she liked-pay a visit to his office had come at a good time; they were ready for a change of scene. Ard's death had naturally cast a pall over things, but besides that, they had been in Yucatan eleven days and had yet to get more than a mile from the Mayaland. They had caught the morning bus originating from Cancun at its Chichen Itza stop (one of Marmolejo's men had seen them off), and a two-hour ride had put them at the main Merida bus station on Calle 69 an hour before their appointment, giving them time to walk through the famous mercado.
They hadn't intended to buy anything, but had succumbed at a stall selling the celebrated local string hammocks. Yucatecan hammocks were delicate, threadlike affairs and Julie had made Gideon ask the vendor if the large size-the matrimonial especial- could really hold the weight of two people.
The vendor had drawn himself up. “I myself have no beds in my house, senor,” he had told Gideon. “Only hammocks. And I have eight children."
Twice on their walk to Marmolejo's office in the center of town, Gideon had been sidled up to by teenaged boys who recognized him as an American (he loomed more than most) and slipped business cards into his hand. Almost anywhere else they would have been invitations to the Pussy Cat Club or the Eros Massage Studio, but there wasn't much big-city nightlife in Merida, and little in the way of earnest vice. “Welcome, gentlemens and ladies,” said one card. “We have finally made handcraf scultures for your examination.” The other said, “Restaraunt T'ho inwites you to a happy dining on Typical Yucatan Cookings."
Other young men-boys, really, some no more than nine or ten-hawked walkaway snacks from hand- pushed or bicycle-powered carts at the curbside: spiral-peeled oranges; mangoes on sticks; sliced papayas and pineapples; brown-kerneled corn doused with chili sauce and eaten out of the husk.
"That's what Marmolejo did when he first came to the big city,” Gideon said.
Julie watched a sweating. skinny kid of twelve in a ragged gray T-shirt deftly pare a coconut, then whack it into a dozen wedges, all with a few quick strokes of a coa, a miniature machete with a wicked hook on the end of it.
"Then he sure has come a long way,” she said.
He sure had.
His office was like something out of Viva Zapata, an airy, dusty, once-grand space with tiled floors, high windows, cracked walls, and not enough furniture to keep it from looking like a railroad-station waiting room. What furniture there was was eighty or ninety years old, massively made of dark, heavy wood: a sort of latino -Victorian. It was far from crude, but somehow one wouldn't have been surprised to see a couple of crossed cartridge belts hooked over a chair back, or a stained sombrero tossed on the corner of the enormous desk.
Marmolejo himself sat, erect and compact, in a richly carved chair that could have held two of him side by side. He apologized handsomely for his sharpness the day before and accepted Gideon's equally sincere apology. Amends made, they relaxed. Marmolejo asked an assistant to bring in soft drinks, then slid four photocopied typewritten pages across the desk.
"This is from Mr. Ard's room; a copy of the article he submitted to his newspaper several days ago."
Gideon looked at it and winced.
Marmolejo's eyebrows rose. “Is something the matter?"
"No, nothing."
Just that the title was “Grisly Curse of Death Stalks Jungle Excavation."
"Perhaps you would look the article over,” Marmolejo said. “I thought that as the only member of both the 1982 excavation and the current one"-he inclined his head courteously-"the only one above suspicion-you might be in a position to see if there is something in it that would throw some light on things."
Gideon had wondered where Marmolejo's cigar was, but now the inspector opened the upper right-hand drawer of the desk, revealing a white onyx ashtray. He took a two-inch stub from it, stuck it in the corner of his mouth, and settled down to wait for Gideon to read the article. The drawer was closed with the ashtray still inside.
Gideon quickly read the article. There were no secrets in it, no clues as to why Ard might have been killed. It was a predictably lurid account of the curse and its “terrifying realization.” It mentioned the mysterious appearance of a “strange, unidentified jungle animal that whispering native laborers secretly swore was a kinkajou.” (There was no mention of the placard around its neck.) It described the “night of fiery agony, when Tucumbalam's revenge was extracted…and which even the scientists have yet to satisfactorily explain.” And it gave three overwrought paragraphs to a segment that began:
On the night of January 5, Professor Oliver, who had more to fear than most (for who else was so intent on disturbing their sleeping bones?) was driven by an unnameable compulsion to climb the stony, deserted steps of Chichen Itza's ancient ceremonial ball court under a moonlit sky. It was a brave but foolhardy thing to do, for, as this is written, Dr. Oliver is still recovering from the effects of an attack by an unseen, unheard presence…